Chopin’s Barcarolle can be heard as a compelling narrative. Its intricate ‘story’ might be mapped onto any number of different events in our lives. It could, for example, be related to a conversation, a journey, a dance or a romance. My analysis, instead of pursuing any one of these mappings, will focus on how its coda ties up some of the specifically musical ‘storylines’ of the piece. In particular, I will show how pairs of notes imply specific arrival goals (to a certain octave or sixth in a particular register), how Chopin manipulates our expectation for those arrivals, how the coda finally finds and celebrates the achievement of those goals, and how the interpretations of selected performances (by Arrau, Lipatti, Rubinstein and Perahia) may be heard as reflecting the ‘storylines’ I describe. ¹