Frederick Chopin: Berceuse, Andante, Op. 57, 1843.

The melody is very similar to the other two Chopin D flat pieces included here, as if to say that a sentence contains multiple anagrams, and no one strainer catches the river's only gold. The simple melody, essentially a theme and variations, is increasingly embroidered with jeu perlé, or pearly play, the filigreed necklace of ascending thirds, descending triplets, and broken sixths which get more and more frenetic until suddenly subsiding into the simple theme again, as Chopin uses his various techniques to impress, but more to cleanse, to assuage: the assuages of sin. In six years he would be dead, at 39.

    I've resisted the temptation to shove the increasingly frenetic trellis of the treble into the party-guest drone of the drab bass, thus choking off the lush cataract of its cascades and flutters: keeping the bass steady involves either slowing it down so the fleeting treble is allowed to radiate while turning the slower passages into lifeless monologues, or speeding up the slower parts until the trembling treble leaves turn into a train wreck. The constant struggle between steady bass and a high melody which adds more and more notes which you have to fit in begs for rubato.

    Rubato was Chopin's notion that you could take any liberties of tempo with the right hand as long as the left hand was steady, as long as everyone met at the end (see the section, "Huberman On Structure"). This "pulling" of the melody is also a feature of Viennese music and is used to great satiric effect by Richard Strauss in mocking the mindless waltzes of his uncle, Johann.

    But in Chopin's day, rubato was perhaps the most effective technique to let music speak as people spoke, that is, to vary the speed based on audience feedback, the mood of the night. As a pianist, you can feel the crowd, and you know intuitively how to surprise it, or lull it. Without this freedom, music is like a tightly-built house, brittle and infested with germs. Music, like houses, needs to breathe, to let in the world and the night.

    The human heartbeat, that great arbiter of tempo, dictates that the slow beginning shouldn't be too slow, nor the lyric tremolo sixths lose their shimmer to excess speed - that lingering glimpse of the fluttering curtain just before sleep should be thick and sparkling, like lethargy, not a thin-lipped, gated, fated rush of adrenalin, which would be the antithesis of somnolence. Marcel in Combray does not gallop to sleep, but slips drowsily into the syrup of prolix silence.

    After a while the simple melody comes back again, and then a strange note is introduced, almost alien to the calm of the piece. While not quite Mozart's subdominate note, which Mozart used to signal the coming of the end, the effect is the same, Chopin's creative homage to Mozart. And so the lullaby subsides into silence.

    The second to last note is held a long time to give the pianist time to follow Chopin's instructions, which are to let that chord fade away into the last chord. In order to do this, you simply lift up the pedal slowly, which fades the sound gradually, always risking that too quick a foot will let the note disappear completely at a time when it would ruin the calm you've worked towards, an example of how important pedaling is to the music, and how important structure is.

    I try to keep the simple 6-note accompaniment from getting lost underneath all of Chopin's luxuriate treble inventions, and here at the end the notes of the accompaniment and the melody itself merge into one chord, the third note from the end, and then, together at last, slide into night.