Eric Himy: Chopin and one of his most beautiful works...

Chopin Barcarolle in F-sharp major, Op. 60, was composed between autumn of 1845 and summer 1846, three years before his death. Chopin never visited Venice. He had but a fleeting encounter with Italian landscapes and atmosphere on a boat trip from Marseilles to Genoa. A storm at sea was perhaps more likely to have impressed itself onto his memory of that fatiguing expedition than any image of the city. The barcarolle genre was becoming increasingly popular in 18th-century vocal and pianistic works. We know that Chopin gave his pupils Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words to play. One of them is called Venetian boat song and could have inspired. However, in Chopin’s Barcarolle, there are no references to either the historical tradition of the songs of the Venetian gondoliers (as do appear in Liszt’s ‘Venezia e Napoli’) or the opera-salon barcarolle of the day, popularized with the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman In Chopin’s Barcarolle, beneath the cloak of the generic convention, we find music that encapsulates his supreme pianistic experience and the musical maturity that he had attained during this rather reflective phase, and at the same time music that echoes his experience of the whole Mediterranean south of Europe: the Italian songs of Lina Freppa, Bellini’s bel canto Opera, the passionate Spanish songs of Pauline Viardot, which Chopin listened to in great rapture. Vocally inspired there is one peculiar, extraordinary moment that comes at the point in which Chopin uses the words dolce sfogato. It is preceded with a lead-in filled with hushed mystery. And then a rapturous melody unfolds over a very large range. This word comes from the world of the coloratura singer and conveys the notion of the melodic line being "let loose" or "freed up" with air. In his book Notes on Chopin, André Gide commented: "Sfogato, has any other musician other than Chopin ever used this word, would he have ever had the desire, the need, to indicate the airing, the breath of breeze, which, interrupting the rhythm, contrary to all hope, comes freshening and perfuming the middle of his barcarolle?"