Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9 No. 2

Composer

Chopin

Work

Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9 No. 2

Key

E-flat major

Composed

[Composition Date Missing]

Movements

1 movements
I. Andante (E-flat major)

Instrumentation

[Instrumentation Missing]

Premiere

1833
Paris

You have heard this melody before. If you haven’t — you think you have. It shows up in commercials, films, ringtones, elevator music. In Taipei, it plays as trains arrive at the station. Frédéric Chopin wrote it at age 21, in a rented apartment in Paris, homesick and broke. Two hundred years later, it’s part of the global sonic wallpaper.

Here’s the thing: for all its ubiquity, this piece rewards actual listening more than almost anything in the piano repertoire. It’s four minutes long. It has 34 measures. The melody returns four times. And every single time, it sounds different.

That’s not an accident.

The Exile Who Wrote a Nocturne

Chopin arrived in Paris in September 1831. He was 21. The timing, in retrospect, was everything — not because of what Paris offered him, but because of what he had just lost.

He had left Warsaw in November 1830, weeks before Poland’s November Uprising began. The rebellion against Russian rule lasted nine months before being crushed. Chopin, already traveling west, never went back. He spent the remaining 18 years of his life in exile, dying in Paris at 39.

In those first months in Paris, Chopin was nobody. He needed patrons, connections, an entry point into the city’s salon culture. He found it through the piano manufacturer Camille Pleyel, whose instruments Chopin would love for the rest of his life. Pleyel became a supporter. His wife, Marie Pleyel, became the dedicatee of the Op. 9 nocturnes.

Marie Pleyel — born Marie Moke — had her own dramatic backstory. She had been engaged to the composer Hector Berlioz, who was obsessed with her to a degree that alarmed people. She broke off the engagement and married Camille Pleyel in 1831. Berlioz channeled the heartbreak into his Symphonie fantastique — the nightmare-fueled symphony about obsession and rejection. When Chopin met her in Paris, he knew all of this. Whether that context influenced the dedication of Op. 9 to her, no one knows. Chopin never said.

Op. 9 was published in 1832, when Chopin was 22. Three nocturnes in the set, and this one — No. 2 in E-flat major — has outlasted the other two in public memory by a wide margin.

The Genre Chopin Borrowed (and Transformed)

A quick clarification that surprises most people: Chopin did not invent the nocturne.

The form was pioneered by the Irish composer John Field (1782–1837) — lyrical solo piano pieces evoking night moods. Field was famous across Europe during Chopin’s lifetime. The story goes that when Field heard Chopin play, he said something like: “Talented, but smells of the sickroom.” Compliment or insult, it acknowledged the illness Chopin carried. (He had tuberculosis. He always had tuberculosis.)

What Chopin did was take Field’s form and graft onto it something Field never had: the ornamental language of Italian bel canto opera. Chopin adored Bellini. He studied the way operatic singers would breathe through a phrase, delay a note, stretch a cadence. He wanted the piano’s right hand to sing the way a soprano sings — with that elastic pull between breathing and rhythm. That elasticity has a name: rubato.

Field made the nocturne peaceful. Chopin made it interior.

The Melody That Returns Four Times

The structure of Op. 9 No. 2 is simple to describe and inexhaustible to experience. Rondo form: A–A–B–A–B–A, plus coda. 34 measures, 12/8 time, waltz-like accompaniment in the left hand.

The first A section introduces the melody with almost no ornamentation. E-flat major, piano, legato. It’s an opening statement — conversational, unhurried. “Hello.”

By the second A, things change. Ornaments appear. Single notes split into two, then four, then more. Here is where different pianists start to diverge sharply. How much do you decorate? How much do you hold back? Rubinstein and Pollini play the same 34 measures and sound like they’re in different centuries.

The B section shifts mood — the melody becomes more vocal, more searching, with greater rhythmic freedom. The left hand keeps time like a quiet metronome while the right hand floats above it, stretching and contracting. That’s rubato working properly: not the pianist playing fast-and-slow at will, but the left hand anchoring the pulse while the right hand breathes within it.

By the third and fourth A sections, the ornamentation has multiplied further. And then, just before the coda, Chopin writes a single instruction: senza tempo. Without tempo. He gives the pianist permission — more than permission, a directive — to stop counting beats entirely.

Different pianists treat this moment differently. Some dispatch it in two seconds. Others stretch it toward ten. The notes are written; the time is not. It’s the most honest moment in the piece: Chopin telling you that music is not mathematics.

For First-Time Listeners

Three things to track as you listen:

First, watch what happens to the main melody. The first time it appears, notice how simple it sounds — a clear, unadorned line. Each time it returns, more notes cluster around it. By the end, the same melody is wearing something like formal dress. Same person, different outfit.

Second, notice the left-hand accompaniment. It doesn’t change much. That stability is intentional. The left hand is the clock; the right hand is how time actually feels. The contrast between them is where the tension lives.

Third, find the senza tempo moment. You’ll know it when you hear it — the music seems to stop breathing. That moment belongs to whoever is playing.

The piece runs four to five minutes, depending on the pianist. It leaves you feeling like you heard something longer.

Pollini, Rubinstein, Pires — Who’s Right?

Three very different approaches to the same piece.

Maurizio Pollini plays it with precision and control. No sentimentality, no emotional overreach. Every ornament is placed exactly. Some listeners find this cold. Others argue it’s the most faithful to Chopin’s documented preference — he reportedly disliked exaggerated expressivity and told students to play with restraint. If Pollini’s version sounds clinical to you, that might say something about your expectations rather than his interpretation.

Arthur Rubinstein plays it the way a good storyteller tells a familiar story — naturally, without calling attention to the telling. His 1965 recording has been the reference point for generations. Not flashy, not austere. Just right, in a way that’s hard to explain.

Maria João Pires plays it like she’s listening to it herself. Quieter than you’d expect, focused on the spaces between notes, not just the notes. The first time you hear her version, you might think: is this too soft? Give it three minutes. You’ll stop thinking that.

None of them is definitively correct. Chopin told his students never to play a piece the same way twice. He meant it literally. His own salon performances reportedly varied significantly from what he’d written down.

Why a Four-Minute Piano Piece Is Still Everywhere

Taipei’s MRT adopted the melody as the arrival signal for trains on the Songshan–Xindian line in 2009, the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth. It still plays there. That might be the strangest afterlife any nocturne has had.

It’s also a piano teacher’s paradox. The notes are accessible — serious students can learn it in weeks. Playing it well, however, takes years. The gap between playing the notes and making them sound like music is enormous. That gap is precisely why the piece stays in the repertoire at every level, from beginner recital to Carnegie Hall.

Chopin never returned to Poland. When he died in Paris in 1849, his heart was removed and sent to Warsaw, where it remains in a pillar of the Holy Cross Church. His body stayed in France. A piece of him made it home.

The nocturne was written in 1831, the year he arrived in Paris. He was 21. He had recently left a country that would be occupied for another century. He didn’t know yet that he would die in exile. The melody he wrote in that first year is now the arrival signal for subway trains in Taiwan, background music in supermarkets, and the first Chopin piece millions of people ever hear.

Whatever he was feeling when he wrote it, it translated.

Listening with the Score

If you want to follow along with the score, you can see exactly how the ornamentation builds from the first A to the fourth — same melody, increasing complexity.

The full score is freely available at IMSLP.

→ View the score on IMSLP

Recommended Recordings

Arthur Rubinstein (RCA Victor, 1965)

The reference recording for most people who grew up with this piece. Natural, unforced, nothing called attention to itself. If you’re listening to Op. 9 No. 2 for the first time, start here.

Maria João Pires (Deutsche Grammophon, 1996)

More internal than Rubinstein. Quieter, more focused on the architecture of the melody rather than its emotional surface. Needs more than one listen to fully reveal itself. Worth every one.

Valentina Lisitsa (Decca, 2012)

More ornamented, more dramatically shaped than the other two. Controversial in some circles; the counterargument is that Chopin himself played this way in salons, improvising additional ornamentation each time. There’s historical evidence for that.

Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Further Reading

• Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58
• Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23
• Beethoven’s Für Elise, WoO 59
• Bach’s Cantata No. 147 ‘Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben’, BWV 147
• Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007