Scherzo No. 1 in B Minor

The Italian word “scherzo” literally means “joke” or “jest”. Accordingly, for Austro-German Classical composers from Haydn and Beethoven onwards, the scherzo was a playful, vigorous triple-time movement, calculated to contrast with serious outer movements or emotionally searching slow movements in string quartets and symphonies. For Chopin in the early 1830s, recently exiled from his native Poland following the Warsaw Uprising, the scherzo took on a quite different aspect: with him, it became a single, self-standing movement, with piano-writing that demands a formidable keyboard technique. Chopin replaced the scherzo’s playfulness with a strain of homesickness and tempered its vigour with palpable anger. Following a two-chord call to attention, the First Scherzo’s momentum seems unstoppable, its gaunt, jagged theme like a mighty conflagration. Contrast comes only with the sustained central section, an adaptation of an old Polish Christmas song “Sleep, little Jesus”. The opening music ultimately reasserts itself, leading to a coda that comes to a head in a scale hurtling up almost the entire keyboard before the closing chords deliver a final brutal, bitter “amen”.