1782–1837 · Ireland, Russia · Classical
John Field (1782—1837) was an Irish pianist and composer who spent most of his life in Russia. He was a virtuoso pianist and a respected teacher, and as a composer he is regarded as the founder of the nocturne. In his nocturnes a singing melody floats over a broken-chord accompaniment; the genre was later made famous by Chopin.
John Field was born on 26 July 1782 in Dublin, the eldest son in a family of Irish Protestants. The family was a musical one: his father, Robert Field, worked as a violinist in the theatres of Dublin, and his grandfather, also named John Field, was a professional organist. The boy's musical talent was noticed early. His father and grandfather taught him the basics of music; he studied the piano first with his grandfather and then became a pupil of the Italian maestro Tommaso Giordani, who lived in Dublin. Field gave his first concert at the age of nine, on 24 March 1792, also in Dublin, and it was warmly received.
In 1793 the family moved to London, and Field began to study with Muzio Clementi. His father may have arranged the lessons through Giordani, who knew Clementi. Besides studying, Field worked in Clementi's piano workshop as a salesman and demonstrator, and helped the master to make and sell instruments. He took up the violin too, studying it with J. P. Solomon.
Field quickly became known in London: the press wrote warmly about his playing and local musicians spoke well of him. Around 1795 Haydn praised his performance of a Dussek piano concerto. In that same year, 1795, Clementi published Field's first compositions. In February 1799 Field performed with success at the Royal Theatre in London; on 7 February that year the sixteen-year-old composer himself gave the first performance of his Piano Concerto No. 1, H 27, in the city. His first official opus consisted of three piano sonatas, which Clementi brought out in 1801 and to whom they were dedicated.
In 1802 Field went to Paris with Clementi and then to Vienna. There he met Haydn and Beethoven, and Beethoven praised his playing highly. After Vienna Field found himself in Saint Petersburg; the artistic life of the city made an impression on him, and he was inclined to stay.
In Saint Petersburg Field made his debut at the home of Prince Golitsyn, and soon he was spoken of as the city's best pianist and teacher. In the end he stayed in Russia. He appeared regularly with the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic and gave tours elsewhere in the empire. In 1805 he toured the Baltic region, and a year later he played his first Moscow concert.
Field had many pupils. Dubuque was so gifted that Field taught him for nothing. Glinka, Verstovsky, Gurilev, Kontski, Charles Mayer and Maria Szymanowska also studied with Field. Wealthy music lovers came to him as well. Glinka took only a few lessons from Field, but he went on to be regarded as Russia's first notable composer.
In 1810 Field married Adelaide Percheron, a pianist and his former pupil. In 1819 their son Adrien was born; he too became a pianist.
Until 1808 nearly everything Field had in print was a reissue of older pieces. From 1808 he began to publish new music: the first pieces were variations on Russian folk songs, among them Kamarinskaya. In 1811 Field returned to Saint Petersburg and spent the next decade here, bringing out many new pieces and preparing corrected editions of older ones. He collaborated with Dalmas, who was then the leading Russian publisher, and with the house of Breitkopf & Härtel, one of the major music publishers of Europe.
The most productive period in Field's creative life was from 1815 to 1819. By 1819 he was so well off that he turned down the post of court pianist. His way of life was growing ever more extravagant.
In 1818 Field came to Moscow on business: he was working with the publisher Wenzel. From 1822 he lived in Moscow, surrounded by its musical bohemia. Here he was called Ivan Romanovich. He often visited the fashionable salons of writers and artists. In 1821 Field and his wife played a run of concerts in Moscow; after the last of them they never again played in public together. Soon afterwards Adelaide left Field and took their son Adrien with her.
Field remained in the city, still giving concerts and bringing out his music. He made the acquaintance of Johann Nepomuk Hummel in 1822, and the two played Hummel's four-hand piano sonata.
In lessons Field attached enormous importance to tone production and finger technique. He continued the keyboard school of Bach and Mozart: he did not care for Liszt's powerful playing, nor for the works of Beethoven. Field himself played with restraint, attending to the finest shades and to every single note.
Field's playing and compositions influenced many major composers: Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann and Liszt. Although little is known of Field's years in Russia, he undoubtedly gave a great deal to concert life and teaching, and helped the development of the Russian piano school.
His contemporaries knew Field first of all as a virtuoso pianist. Field Avenue, a street in Walkinstown near Dublin, belongs to the "musical roads" named after prominent Irish musicians.
From 1823 Field appeared in concert less and less often. He went to London for treatment, underwent an operation there and gave concerts in England, where he also got to know Mendelssohn and Moscheles. Clementi, Field's former teacher and friend, died in March 1832, and Field was a pallbearer at his funeral. Later Field made a long tour of Europe. The cities where he played included Milan, Lyon, Brussels, Paris and London. At Christmas 1832 he played his seventh concerto in Paris; it received a mixed reception, like his latest concerts in England.
After concerts in a number of European cities, Field lay for nine months in a hospital in Naples (1834–5); his Russian patrons came to his rescue. He then spent a short time at Carl Czerny's home in Vienna, giving three concerts there, and in 1835 he returned to Moscow, ill. He bore his illness stoically and went on performing. His final concert took place in March 1836. He died in Moscow on 23 January 1837 of pneumonia and was buried in the Vvedenskoye Cemetery.
Field created the nocturne in the modern sense of the word. Earlier, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a nocturne meant a piece for wind instruments, close to an instrumental serenade. Field was the first to give the name to a piano character piece in which a singing melody sounds over a broken-chord accompaniment. His first nocturnes brought him enormous popularity, and in all he wrote 18 nocturnes.
A melody ornamented with chromatic touches, riding over a full-sounding left hand and carefully judged pedalling, is typical of Field's manner. He liked ostinato patterns and sustained bass notes. The nocturnes do not follow a strict scheme such as sonata form, and they conjure a mood with no text or story behind it. They were admired by Chopin, who went on to make the piano nocturne famous, and by Liszt, who edited Field's nocturnes from scarce Russian sources that preserved the changes Field made late in life.
Besides the nocturnes, Field wrote seven concertos for piano and orchestra, several sonatas, variations, fantasies, rondos and fugues, as well as Kamarinskaya. Each of his seven concertos uses E flat major or C major, and the last uses both; the middle movements often resemble nocturnes. None of the sonatas, and only two of the seven concertos, has a proper slow movement. In concerts Field would put a ready-made nocturne in a related key into such places, or improvise a new one.
Field's nocturnes were among the works that shaped early Romanticism most strongly. His concertos mattered just as much to how the concerto grew in the nineteenth century. Even the earliest of them show assured orchestration and bold, original writing for the piano. These works influenced Hummel, Kalkbrenner, Mendelssohn and Moscheles. Among his lesser-known pieces the fantasies have historical importance: in them Field was one of the first to use the large-scale Romantic structure of successive episodes. For several decades Field's nocturnes and concertos remained favourite music of Russian musicians and audiences.
His contemporaries knew Field first of all as a virtuoso pianist. Only after the middle of the twentieth century did people begin to value him as a composer. Today many pianists play his nocturnes and other piano pieces. Of Field's sheet music on the site there is the Nocturne, H.37, for solo piano, at the level "Средний+" (upper intermediate).