The best part of the next nocturne,—­B major, op. 32, No.  I, dedicated to Madame de Billing—­is the coda.  It is in the minor and is like the drum-beat of tragedy.  The entire ending, a stormy recitative, is in stern contrast to the dreamy beginning.  Kullak in the first bar of the last line uses a G; Fontana, F sharp, and Klindworth the same as Kullak.  The nocturne that follows in A flat is a reversion to the Field type, the opening recalling that master’s B flat Nocturne.  The F minor section of Chopin’s broadens out to dramatic reaches, but as an entirety this opus is a little tiresome.  Nor do I admire inordinately the Nocturne in G minor, op. 37, No. 1.  It has a complaining tone, and the choral is not noteworthy.  This particular part, so Chopin’s pupil Gutmann declared, is taken too slowly, the composer having forgotten to mark the increased tempo.  But the Nocturne in G, op. 37, No. 2, is charming.  Painted with Chopin’s most ethereal brush, without the cloying splendors of the one in D flat, the double sixths, fourths and thirds are magically euphonious.  The second subject, I agree with Karasowski, is the most beautiful melody Chopin ever wrote.  It is in true barcarolle vein; and most subtle are the shifting harmonic hues.  Pianists usually take the first part too fast, the second too slowly, transforming this poetic composition into an etude.  As Schumann wrote of this opus: 

“The two nocturnes differ from his earlier ones chiefly through greater simplicity of decoration and more quiet grace.  We know Chopin’s fondness in general for spangles, gold trinkets and pearls.  He has already changed and grown older; decoration he still loves, but it is of a more judicious kind, behind which the nobility of the poetry shimmers through with all the more loveliness:  indeed, taste, the finest, must be granted him.”

Both numbers of this opus are without dedication.  They are the offspring of the trip to Majorca.

Niecks, writing of the G major Nocturne, adjures us “not to tarry too long in the treacherous atmosphere of this Capua—­it bewitches and unmans.”  Kleczynski calls the one in G minor “homesickness,” while the celebrated Nocturne in C minor “is the tale of a still greater grief told in an agitated recitando; celestial harps”—­ah!  I hear the squeak of the old romantic machinery—­“come to bring one ray of hope, which is powerless in its endeavor to calm the wounded soul, which...sends forth to heaven a cry of deepest anguish.”  It doubtless has its despairing movement, this same Nocturne in C minor, op. 48, No.  I, but Karasowski is nearer right when he calls it “broad and most imposing with its powerful intermediate movement, a thorough departure from the nocturne style.”  Willeby finds it “sickly and labored,” and even Niecks does not think it should occupy a foremost place among its companions.  The ineluctable fact remains that this is the noblest nocturne of them all.  Biggest in conception it seems a miniature