AT THE BEGINNING and at the end of his creative career -through literally half his lifetime - Frederic Chopin (1810-49) was composing Nocturnes. The earliest of those that have come down to us dates from 1827 (the year of Beethoven's death, the year before Schubert's), when Chopin was still a student at the Warsaw Conservatory. The last Nocturne was written in 1846, when the now-famous composer already had withdrawn from the world he so quickly conquered because he was himself preparing to die. He never reached his fortieth birthday.

At least chronologically, then, the Nocturnes span virtually the whole of Chopin's meteoric artistic life. But it is also defensible to suggest that they define, as did each of the genres he made his own, one or more dimensions of a style so very original, so unmistakable, that it must be accounted among the handful of truly unique dialects in the so-called “universal language” of music.

Nor does it diminish this achievement to observe that Chopin came along at just the right time. For no one ever is untouched by his Zeitgeist;, presumably (even if Chopin claimed to be). Remember that it was the second quarter of the nineteenth century that saw the burgeonings - in music - of that special aesthetic known as romanticism. In terms of the tonal art that may be described as the triumph of subjective, emotional, and otherwise personal expression over the imperatives of formal structure. It has been said of this movement that it “began as gun powder, continued as magic powder, and ended as sleeping powder”. The miracle of Chopin is that he compounded all three of these elements in an infinite variety, and moreover that his formulae have lost none of their efficacy through a dozen decades.

Pondering the forces that shaped this hypercreative and complicated psyche is ever a fascination. Consider: Chopin had been born in a vanquished nation that was writhing under the heel of mighty and covetous neighbors. His mother, fiercely Polish, was lady-in-waiting to a countess. His father, an egalitarian from Lorraine, was an erstwhile snuff salesman and sometime flute teacher whose urbane ways endeared him to the nobility. Their son was to be forever torn between the environmental polarities to which he was heir-social graces and social justice.

And indeed, these polarities coexist in many of his characteristic works. Of course those who persist in regarding the music of Chopin as all lavender and lace will discern only the graces, and it is a fact that he spent much of his brief life as a chronically lovesick dandy in yellow gloves and patent leather shoes. But his vision of the world was not limited to the perfumed parlors in which he passed those years, for he never once relinquished his fantasy-role as the expatriate savior of hapless Poland. He pursued this mission mostly in letters, to be sure; and it might be argued that his patriotism was somewhat smaller than that of his countrymen under arms. But the measure of Chopin as an artist, finally, is that none of his character defects is to be inferred in his compositions. No bloody battles ever bespoke, as Chopin's music so often does, a man's tender devotion to his homeland. Here was the compleat composer-liberator manque.

The Nocturnes have little to do with Poland programmatically, as it happens - except to the extent that another Parisian emigre, the Missouri-born Virgil Thomson, once said of his years of pilgrimage that he spent them on the banks of the Seine composing music about Kansas City. That Chopin spent his Paris years in the flickering half-light of fashionable drawing rooms, his every hour circumscribed by solicitous patronesses, tells us nothing of what his music was about. We know that there were enough Heines and Hillers around to keep alive his innermost spirit, but then again the flame that burned brightest for him may have been the torch he was constantly carrying for one or another inamorata. Even in his affairs of the heart, however, there were nationalist overtones in every significant instance prior to his celebrated eight-year liaison with the novelist George Sand (less well known by her real name: the Baronne Amandine Aurore Lucie Dudevant, nee Dupin).

For example, during the winter of 1836-37 the lovelorn Chopin brought his amorous travail to the teacups of a certain Madame Lenormand, who told fortunes in a miserable hovel on the Rue Tournon. The unresponsive object of the composer's affections just then was Maria Wodzinska, a high-born young lady whose principal charms may have been, in whatever order, her inaccessibility and her fervent lip service to the cause of their common mother country: “We still regret that your name is not Chopinski,” she had written to him, “or that there is no other sign showing you are a Pole.” (This episode was more or less contemporaneous with the two Op. 32 Nocturnes.)

However, Chopin's dilemma over Maria Wodzinska was only one of a series. The biographer Casimir Wierzynski concludes that “in this weak organism there raged a violent and unsatisfied hunger, the need for love.” And Wierzynski lends credence to the spiteful estimate of La Sand: “... that he fell in love with three women every night; he would succeed in persuading each that she was the only one, and then forget all when he returned home.” Maybe so, because it had been only a very short time before his visit to the fortune teller that he bade farewell to Delpine Potocka, to whom he had dedicated his F minor Concerto. And yet this work had been inspired, professedly, by yet another young lady (Konstancja Gladkowska). And so it went. De la musique pure was not Chopin's sole preoccupation.

The clinically-minded are bound to inquire: does the pulsating passion in so much of Chopin's music represent a sublimation of sex, and/or patriotism, or what? The question remains unanswered, and perhaps it is none of our business anyhow. But the composer was a public man, and any important creative figure is fair game for such conjecture. Also, few other famous men of music, if any other, have been so full of fascinating contradictions. To this day there is relative unanimity about only the most obvious truisms-that Chopin was a wildly complex individual, and that creatively he was a true original. The rest is paradox.

Like many another neurotic genius, nevertheless, Chopin tended to be coolly realistic about professional matters. On one occasion, told that Liszt was planning an article on him and his works, he remarked confidently that the flamboyant paterfamilias would “give me a little kingdom in his empire”. What the patriarch of Weimar eventually did write, in 1852, was that Chopin “has given to all of his creations the same life, and it is his own life... They are bound together in a unity which determines at once their beauties and their defects; both are the consequence of a single order of emotion, of an exclusive way of feeling... ”

Considering the source, Chopin did receive his due. The “empire” of the mighty Liszt ranged far; he enjoyed fealty in every corner of the music world, and reveled in it. But the keyboard alone was Chopin' “little kingdom”, and no one could deny that he had multiplied its harvest incalculably-least of all the pre-eminent virtuoso-composer of the day. Indeed, an otherwise unremembered French critic once devised a witty answer for those who could not decide between Liszt and Sigismond Thalberg as to which was the ranking pianist of Europe. The rejoinder: “It is Chopin.” And perhaps it was.

The piano had been Chopin's preferred dominion from his earliest years, but a young man has to make a place for himself and the young Chopin shrewdly reasoned that he would need a couple of “big” works with which to command attention. He felt that a mere miniaturist, with no more to offer than solo pieces, hardly could hope to win the approval of Louis-Philippe's Paris. For the dilettante audiences were by then well accustomed to more ambitious fare and they demanded it in exchange for even their scrutiny. Hence the two concerti. Chopin knew what he was doing.

Still, it was always in the direction of the miniature that his truest talents lay. Chopin was suspicious of bigness in all of its manifestations, and especially in works of art. Advised that his Second Concerto had been cordially received, he could remark that “there are people enough in all countries who like to assume the air of connoisseurs.” Patently, he had no use for the larger forms. Having availed himself of the popular predilection for “vehicles” to insure his reputation, he gravitated immediately to writing for piano solo and never again deigned to walk with the Philistines. In point of fact, as intimated, he walked with no one. The euphemism of “influence” may be used freely in discussing the music of nearly anyone, but Chopin rolled his own. As much cannot be said, in my opinion, for a single other composer down to the present-day herd of nonconformists.

In French the word “nocturne” -means “night-piece”. The idea seems to have been invented by the Irish pianist and sometime composer John Field (1782-1837). Fields own nocturnes are naively idyllic. Chopin's impressed him as products of a “sickroom talent”; he had no patience with their moods and mysteries. For his part Chopin admired the older man's music, but there was nothing in it he needed to borrow. He took only the concept, and because he loved the darkness in a far different way he lent to the genre a sense of drama, of passionate mysticism, that was not Field's to give.

Like the several “standard” editions, this recorded recital comprises nineteen Nocturnes (two others have yet to gain such scholarly recognition). Millions of words have been written about these pieces, and at this late date no annotator could hope to adduce any new insights-let alone say better what has been said so well already. Pages of analysis, e.g., could not tell more of the Op. 9, No. 2, than James Gibbons Huneker's observation that “it is best heard on a gray day of soul, when times are out of joint.” And none less than Robert Schumann adjudged the Op.27 pair “the most heartfelt and transfigured creations evolved in music”; who would have the temerity to say him nay? But in fact hyperbole is the rule in evaluations of the Nocturnes: even the sober Frederick Niecks described the Op. 37 brace as “precious pearls”. Moreover, every authority has a different way of rank-ordering the works qualitatively: G. C. Ashton Johnson unhesitatingly singles our the Op. 48, No. 1, as “the grandest of all”, but the equally Chopinoid Henry T. Finck had no doubt that the Op. 62, No. 1, is the “sublimest” of the whole series. And so on and on, as if perfection were a comparative quality and nor, in the end, ineffable.

Many composers after Chopin gave us nocturnes, and in the aggregate there are extant hundreds, perhaps thousands more of them than the too few that make up his oeuvre in this (one would think) rather mono-dimensional form. But on the evidence no one ever knew more intimately, nor revealed more meaningfully, the musical secrets of the night. And appropriately so, for the twilight zone, the outer limits of expression, beckoned to him from the beginning; and it is nor even untoward to suggest that the Nocturnes alone provide at once the parameter and perimeter of Chopin's private world.