Chopin, Étude in C minor, Op. 25 No. 12

The twelfth and last of the Op. 25 études was published in 1837, in French, German, and English editions, and dedicated to the Comtesse Marie d’Agoult. Chopin called it nothing more than an étude. Both of his étude sets happen to close on a C minor étude numbered 12, built around sweeping arpeggios — easy to confuse with Op. 10 No. 12, the “Revolutionary” étude, supposedly written in anger at the fall of Warsaw, though that story has no real evidence behind it and this is a different piece entirely. The nickname “Ocean” for this one came later, from a publisher or an editor fond of titles; fittingly enough, since a 1916 Schirmer edition already found the name questionable, noting dryly that ocean waves do not always run mountain-high. The name stuck anyway, probably because nothing else about the piece suggests it: for four minutes, both hands run continuous sixteenth-note arpeggios across wide spans of the keyboard, rising and falling, while a melody surfaces from the first note of each figure. It is the only étude in the set where both hands carry the figuration at once, rather than one hand playing the technical work while the other carries the tune. The music works through a long series of keys before the climax resolves, unexpectedly, into C major.

A personal note

I first took this étude up as a teenager and set it down unfinished. I came back to it in my late forties, and that time I kept at it until I could play it start to finish. Measure by measure, here is what I notice in it now.

Measure by measure

Measures 1–8 — The main theme, stated at the very opening, marked Allegro molto e con fuoco (♩ = 80).

Measure 12 — Note the difference from the opening statement: you are now playing a natural on the E, making it C major in the theme.

Measure 36 — Marked ff (double forte). The left hand is doing something unique at this point in the piece, playing the low F and an octave F above it — breaking the usual cycle.

Measure 42 — The right hand here is the only place in the whole étude where the line comes down differently than it went up: the C, then the B coming down, is the tricky part.

Measures 47–54 — The opening theme returns, essentially unchanged.

Measure 57 — The theme starts again, but this time it skips the C–F / D–A transition that was there the first two times.

Measure 59 — The natural E shows up again, sooner than last time — note how measures 58 and 59 skip the C/F arpeggio.

Further listening and reading

In his Édition de travail of the Op. 25 études, Alfred Cortot notes the legend that Chopin wrote this étude, along with the “Revolutionary” (Op. 10 No. 12), in anguish over the fall of Warsaw to the Russians — a story he’s careful to call unproven, while still crediting it with giving the piece “a particularly pathetic significance” and explaining its “sublime ardour.”

Jan Leontsky’s study of the Op. 25 études is also in my library and worth consulting on this one.

The score is in the public domain. A reasonably clean digitized copy of the Breitkopf & Härtel edition is at IMSLP.