Hoping Against Hope: An Analysis of Chopin’s Opus 69 No. 1

Hoping Against Hope: An Analysis of Chopin’s Opus 69 No. 1

With exquisite mingling in sound of quiet and agitation, fluidity and interruption, with a gorgeous melody of cautious, tightly contracting circles and sudden leaps into space, Chopin, the subtle-souled psychologist, opens his waltz. How does Chopin speak through his waltz? How does the music play the listener? Minds think through forms. Form follows content. Music’s structure matters. In Chopin’s Opus 69 No.1, the AA’BA’BA’CCDCDA’ structure of reoccurring themes uncomfortably prolongs the inevitable return of the tragic first theme which the audience does not want to hear but expects to hear anyway.

Chopin opens his Waltz on a troubled, searching theme. Full of hesitancies, sudden rushes, and wavering chromaticism, the pensive tune features rhythmic and melodic fragility. With regards to rhythm, unpredictable phrasing creates rhythmic dissonance with the steady left hand waltz pattern and forces the dancers into a posture of searching in order to stay in step with the meter. With regards to melody, the introspective tune centers around a restless cycle of stressed and unstressed pairs of measures, similar to a poem in iambic octameter. During the first and more stressed measure in each pair, the melody scrambles impulsively through several chromatic notes in search of a note on which to land, almost like a game of musical chairs. Then, during the second and less stressed measure in each pair, the melody stretches out onto one or two sustained notes, almost like a sigh. As the sixteen measure melody progresses, the stressed measures become increasingly more desperate and fling the melody further and harder until finally in a climax the melody jumps 17 half steps only to...

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...ncomfortable suspicion of what must come, the stalling nonetheless, and finally the resignation in the last melancholic measure all resound expressively with piercing, soul-searching lyricism. In this way, the AA’BA’BA’CCDCDA’ structure of reoccurring themes in Chopin’s Opus 69 No.1 uncomfortably prolongs the inevitable return of tragic first theme. In a letter to a friend, Chopin wrote "inside something gnaws at me; some presentiment, anxiety, dreams - or sleeplessness - melancholy, indifference - desire for life, and the next instant, desire for death; some kind of sweet peace, some kind of numbness, absent-mindedness..." The structure of Chopin’s Opus 69 No. 1 expresses the hope against hope for something more, the restless craving for some kind of “sweet peace” and “numbness”, and at last the dreaded realization that Chopin expected and suspected all along.