How to memorize a Chopin nocturne, harmony first

A nocturne is a short list of chords under a melody you can already hear, laid out in sections you can name, and once the progression and the form are in your head you can put the notes back from any bar.

I learned the nocturnes this way, the melody over its harmony first and Chopin’s own left hand second. The edition in the steps below keeps Chopin’s right hand as he wrote it, puts one root-position chord per harmony in the left, and prints the symbol above the staff, the numeral below, and a boxed letter on each section.

The six steps

1. Know the form. Every section has a boxed letter at the bar where it starts and one line saying what it does. Op. 32 No. 1 runs A (bars 1–12, the theme), A′ (13–19, the theme varied), B (20–30, on the dominant), C (31–36, G♯ minor over a D♯ pedal) and T (37–40, a chain of dominants back to B); then B′, C′ and T′ repeat bars 20–40, and the coda (62–65) breaks off into a recitative and ends in B minor. Nine boxes, 65 bars, three of them repeats. Say that list back before you play a note.
2. Play the melody over one chord per harmony. Play the edition slowly and say each chord out loud as you land on it: B, F♯⁷, B, F♯ for the first two bars of Op. 32 No. 1. The melody goes into the hand in the first session, because nothing is fighting it yet, and every chord gets a name you will use in step 5.
3. Learn the progression away from the piano. Read the roman numerals as a sentence and say it until it comes back on its own. Op. 9 No. 2 opens I, vii°⁷, I, then V⁷/ii, vii°⁷/ii, ii, then V⁷, V⁷/vi, vi, vii°⁷/V, then V⁷, I. That is four bars, and the theme comes back three more times over nearly the same chords, so those four bars carry most of the piece.
4. Add Chopin’s left hand one section at a time, over chords the hand knows. Take the pattern from his score, block it as the chord you already play, then unroll it, and stay inside one boxed section until it holds. In Chopin the left hand is where the hard work is, and it drowns out the melody while you learn it, which is why the melody went in first.
5. Practise restarting from any bar and any section letter. Start cold at B′, name the chord you are on, then play. Then start at a bar in the middle of C and do the same.
6. The test. Play the progression as block chords from memory, start to finish, saying the letters as they come, then play the piece. A missing chord is the next thing to learn.

A slip in the middle

Learned note by note, Op. 32 No. 1’s 65 bars and Op. 55 No. 1’s 101 bars sit in the fingers alone. One slip and the only way back in is from the beginning. Read the left hand as harmony and both come down to a progression and a handful of sections.

Op. 32 No. 1

Op. 32 No. 1 is level 4 of 8 and 65 bars. The opening swings between I and V for four bars, and the left hand is simple broken chords in a small span, so step 4 is short. The ending tests step 1: bar 62 holds a German sixth, then a bare recitative runs in B minor, and the last chords are E minor and B minor, the same borrowed E minor that ends every phrase of the theme. The runners-up are in which Chopin nocturne to learn first.