8. At Evening

This piece by Schytte was a very difficult song to memorise, and I recall struggling not with the technique, but with the repetitive nature of the text itself. I know I've said this before, but I feel as though in this song, the confusion was the worst it's ever been. I guess it afforded some reading practice since I was constantly looking at the text during those several days. Yet even so, of all the songs I've learned by heart, I think the text of this nocturne is the least easily navigable.

Yes, this is my first nocturne, and its actual title At Evening is a subtler rendering of the cruder English translation "night song."J. T. regards it as "fine preparation" for Chopin's nocturnes to come—and recognises that composer as having developed the genre (?) "to its highest point, perhaps." I can hardly imagine ever being able to treat Chopin's works with the delicacy they deserve, at least not with the technical level I've achieved at this point. But I shouldn't be self-deprecating, and I should trust the process. The opening sets a rhythmic pattern that is pretty much held throughout. J. T. points out the melody in "the upper voices," which is reflected in those conspicuous notes hanging from their beams at the top of the treble clef. I seem to recall the melody doing a similar thing in The Skaters.  The discipline the hands learn in this opening bar is how to span a number of notes and then do a variety of actions within that territory. This is especially true in the right hand. So often you'll find that your first and fifth fingers act first, and then the ones between work on the intervening notes. Arpeggios are a big part of this. The left hand moves back and forth a lot. 

This section (above left) is kind of a calm before the storm. It's the first half of a repeat, so the slowing helps to lend a contrast to the intensity that its successor phrase will show. It is almost as harmonically interesting as the variation, too. It actually began with the leap in the left hand of a tenth (minor 11th) up from A to C#, and the right hand figures are triangular—wide non-committal dyads that eventually settle down to a particular chord when their middles. I remember best the switch from Cdim (2nd inversion) to C. See the broken triads, one on each side of the middle bar line. The "storm" follows (above right), and is a variation on this, but one that makes a upward progression that crescendos in the middle and then slows poco a poco as it leads toward the closing phrases.

In this second section the left hand exactly repeats the accompaniment the opening, but the right hand's doing something different. This is pictured to the left. It leads to an interesting section (right) that I like to call the coda, even though it isn't labelled such. This "coda" is a variation on the opening melody, but one that feels like it's taking the motif in a new direction. Toward the ending, I guess. And here's that ending. 

It's a G-chord shared between the hands and which travels up three-to-four octaves. Finally, the low G punctuates the final phrase.

Alan Chan's rendition