Roads Taken and Retaken: Foreground Ambiguity in Chopin's Prelude in A-flat Op. 28, No. 17

Abstract

To anyone over the age of say. thirty-five, it is an increasingly poignant condition of existence to be able to look back over the course of one's life and to marvel at the eventual significance of decisions taken long ago which at the time seemed to he of relatively little importance. Cumulatively, these decisions, often made in hasie. determine the ultimate shape of one's life, a process of unfolding as compelling as it remains mysterious. It is the question of life's choices, of the necessity and consequence of one's choices, that the poet Robert Frost treats in his well-known poem Road Not Taken. which contains the familiar words: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. And sorry I could not travel hoih And be one traveler... And both thui morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh. I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to wuy, I doubted if I should ever come back. (Frost 1970: 26) The central metaphor of the poem is. of course, the parallelism between the road we travel by foot and the path of life. But the special force and immediacy of the poem stems not so much from the basic image itself than from the use of this image to underline and to bring into focus one uf life's essential truisms: that decisions made cannot be unmade, and that the taking of one fork in the road of life usually means that the other musl remain forever unexplored-a feature of our common human existence that must ultimately be accepted and reconciled with our most personal dreams. It is perhaps fortunate that in this respect art does not necessarily mirror life. For the matter of a return to a point previously arrived at and the opportunity for a look-to make changes along the path in light of experience-are essential to the properties of both balance and variety found in many pieces of music. The recapitulation in a sonata-form movement, the ornamented repeal of a da capo aria, the varied return of the A section of a ternary form piano piece are only some of the more obvious instances of opportunities regained; and it is often in the comparing of such expositions with their recapitulations that we discover much that is important to the ultimate understanding of a given work. These second chances sometimes involve a re-thinking of a musical point that initially contained, explicitly or potentially, some measure of ambiguity either in harmonic implication or some other aspect of musical syntax. The clarifying or exploiting of such ambiguous puinls later in a work can have a profound effect upon its underlying structure and, ultimately, upon its meanings as a work of art. A familiar instance is the renegade C-sharp that occurs in the opening measures of the first movement of Beethoven's Eroica symphony. Initially an unexplained cloud on the harmonic horizon and a temptation to taste forbidden modulatory fruit, it is first rejected in a swift return to the tonic key. Only in the recapitulation, when the forbidden fruit is plucked in the form of an implied enharmonic change from C-sharp to D-flat-a reinterpretation that initiates the ensuing modulation to F major-is the initial ambiguity finally resolved in a more complex, musically enriched synthesis that embraces both syntactical interpretations.1 (Epstein 1979: 120-21) Frequently these moments of ambiguity are explored us points of humour, rather like a musical pun. An instance of this can be seen, for example, in the minuet movement of Haydn's String Quartet in B minor, Op. 33. No. 1 (see Example 1). Here measure eight forms the climax of four preceding measures in which the F-sharp in the first violin is hammered out. insistently and unambiguously, us the dominant of B minor. No hint of syntactical ambiguity, no potential fork in the grammatical road, can be anticipated here. In fact, it is the overwhelming grammatical clarity of this moment that imbues the ensuing events with humour and makes them a genuine surprise to the unsuspecting listener. …