The Scotch have a proverb:  “She wove her shroud, and wore it in her lifetime.”  In the nocturnes the shroud is not far away.  Chopin wove his to the day of his death, and he wore it sometimes but not always, as many think.

One of the most elegiac of his nocturnes is the first in B flat minor.  It is one of three, op. 9, dedicated to Mme. Camille Pleyel.  Of far more significance than its two companions, it is, for some reason, neglected.  While I am far from agreeing with those who hold that in the early Chopin all his genius was completely revealed, yet this nocturne is as striking as the last, for it is at once sensuous and dramatic, melancholy and lovely.  Emphatically a mood, it is best heard on a gray day of the soul, when the times are out of joint; its silken tones will bring a triste content as they pour out upon one’s hearing.  The second section in octaves is of exceeding charm.  As a melody it has all the lurking voluptuousness and mystic crooning of its composer.  There is flux and reflux throughout, passion peeping out in the coda.

The E flat nocturne is graceful, shallow of content, but if it is played with purity of touch and freedom from sentimentality it is not nearly so banal as it usually seems.  It is Field-like, therefore play it as did Rubinstein, in a Field-like fashion.

Hadow calls attention to the “remote and recondite modulations” in the twelfth bar, the chromatic double notes.  For him they only are one real modulation, “the rest of the passage is an iridescent play of color, an effect of superficies, not an effect of substance.”  It was the E flat nocturne that unloosed Rellstab’s critical wrath in the “Iris.”  Of it he wrote:  “Where Field smiles, Chopin makes a grinning grimace; where Field sighs, Chopin groans; where Field shrugs his shoulders, Chopin twists his whole body; where Field puts some seasoning into the food, Chopin empties a handful of cayenne pepper.  In short, if one holds Field’s charming romances before a distorting, concave mirror, so that every delicate impression becomes a coarse one, one gets Chopin’s work.  We implore Mr. Chopin to return to nature.”

Rellstab might have added that while Field was often commonplace, Chopin never was.  Rather is to be preferred the sound judgment of J. W. Davison, the English critic and husband of the pianist, Arabella Goddard.  Of the early works he wrote: 

Commonplace is instinctively avoided in all the works of Chopin—­a stale cadence or a trite progression—­a hum-drum subject or a worn-out passage—­a vulgar twist of the melody or a hackneyed sequence—­a meagre harmony or an unskilful counterpoint—­may in vain be looked for throughout the entire range of his compositions, the prevailing characteristics of which are a feeling as uncommon as beautiful; a treatment as original as felicitous; a melody and a harmony as new, fresh, vigorous and striking as they are utterly unexpected and out of the original