Op. 9, No. 1, Measure 73

I learned Chopin's B-flat minor Nocturne using the Schirmer edition, favorite edition of broke college students everywhere. When Deborah and I were going to work on the F-minor Nocturne (which I barely started before I had to quit), she had me get the Alfred edition. So when I decided to do a chord analysis of the whole piece (B-flat minor, I mean), I pulled out the Alfred since it wasn't covered with fingering, jotted notes, and other scribbles.

When I sat down to get the piece from memory a couple of weeks ago, I went back to Schirmer. Here's measure 73, which I'm still working on getting "just right."

So the Schirmer and the Alfred are both lying around. When I sat down to work on measure 73 today, I grabbed the version that was closest at hand: the Alfred. Here's measure 73 of the Alfred:

I have the measure 73 polyrhythms down for the most part, but I'm not confident about them. When they come together properly, it feels like more a stroke of luck than something I've consciously executed. So for today's practice, I wanted to see if I could make that "stroke of luck" be more consistent. So I looked at my Alfred edition, to remind myself of how many RH notes I'd practiced for each LH note.

And ... something was different. The Alfred edition is not like the Schirmer edition. And neither of them are the official Urtext edition, at least as far as I know.

In Schirmer, the first three triplets are 3-against-2 with the LH. After that, we have the rather-hard-to-digest 20-against-6, starting with the Bb in the right hand and a Bb2 (the Bb an octave below Middle C) in the left:

As noted above, that Bb2 is the first note of the second set in the LH, and the seventh note in the measure.

In Alfred, we have "3 against 1" for the initial three-note sets, and then the 20-note run starts on the fourth note of the measure, the Bb3:

Aaarrrggghhh.

So I did what I always do when I'm not sure about something in Chopin: Asked, "What would Artur do?"

Artur Rubinstein, 1962

So I listened. And ... it's kind of hard to tell.

I prefer the version I learned originally. I don't know if it matters that I play this many notes against that one note, or if I'm strict about anything as long as it's beautiful and comes together in the end. I'm just going to go with my instinct here. I'll continue working on having the progression of notes in both the RH and LH feel as natural as possible. This will allow me to think less about this note or that note, this beat or that beat, and just enjoy the flow of the music under my fingers.

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