On Performing Chopin’s Barcarolle

[1] Frederic Chopin's masterful Barcarolle, op. 60, a late work from 1846, poses particular challenges to the performer.(1) Despite its many musical virtues, it presents a sprawling, idiosyncratic formal plan, a certain uniformity of texture and melody for roughly the first two-thirds of the piece, and a succession of short but dense, powerfully expressive subsections toward the end, all culminating in similarly strong cadential arrivals. In my own practice and performance of the piece, I felt certain shortcomings and the need for ideas to address them. Since I had not done so before, for the purposes of this study I set about analyzing the music to see what ideas might emerge. From the viewpoint of performance strategy, such an exercise could potentially address nagging trouble spots-the "problem-solving" mode identified by Jonathan Dunsby (1989, 8) and John Rink (2002, 39)-but it could also suggest fresh approaches to passages that had not seemed particularly problematic beforehand. Moreover, from my particular stance as a theorist of mid-nineteenth century chromatic harmony, a secondary interest in this exercise was to see if my conception of "common-tone tonality" might be relevant in some way.(2) In fact, all three types of outcomes materialized.[2] Any inquiry of this type must necessarily engage with the issues raised by the relevant literature of the last few decades on the relationship of analysis to performance. The classic pitfalls are well-documented: the prioritization of the analyst's way of thinking over the performer's, with a certain disdain for the latter; the related dependence on analytic notions of musical structure foreign to typical performance lingo; and the tendency toward highly prescriptive conclusions dictating one preferred way of performing a passage, all epitomized in publications by Wallace Berry (1989) and Eugene Narmour (1988). Tempering this attitude was the prior claim by Janet Schmalfeldt that "there is no single, one-and-only performance decision that can be dictated by an analytic observation" (1985, 28).[3] One can trace two broad and related lines of response to the analysis-informs-performance attitude of superiority. The first of these preserves one of its basic assertions, the existence of what John Rink has called "the vast terminological gulf between analysts and performers" (1990, 323), but draws different conclusions: rather than being inferior in musical understanding to academic analysts, performers have their own equally valid and highly developed means of conceiving and analyzing music, since after all they have been performing it convincingly for generations, and they, not the analysts, are the experts in this domain. From this viewpoint, performance has perhaps the greater potential to inform analysis than analysis does performance. Beyond this, the focus of inquiry has shifted toward discovering how performers think, act, and interact musically, in their own terms, while the abstract evidence of the score is supplemented by the concrete evidence of live and recorded performances, resulting in a fruitful and wide-ranging interdisciplinary outpouring of research.[4] The second line of response takes a different and perhaps less radical tack, focusing less on the terminological gulf and the great divide it perpetuates, and instead viewing analysis and performance as having the potential to inform each other in limited but genuine ways, as complementary expressions of thinking and acting musically that can be embodied in collaboration or in the same individual. Joel Lester (1995, 198), Jonathan Dunsby (1989, 14), and Nicholas Cook have argued along these lines, with Cook noting a "new emphasis on the mutuality of the analyst/performer relationship" (1999, 245). With this shift, the more traditional piece-based performance-and-analysis study-less concerned with prescriptive recommendations for demonstrating structure-oriented analytical findings through performance, less bound by what Cook has called the theorist's "paradigm of representation" (1999, 256), and mindful of the many other factors influencing the act of performance-remains viable. …