Sonata No.1 in C minor, Op.4

Although he wrote three masterful sonatas - the two celebrated ones for piano and a less familiar but no less inspired example for cello and piano - Chopin was unhappy with sonata form as such. The first movements of all four of his sonatas show that, while he could accept most of the conventions, he resisted the basic requirement that the first subject should reappear in the tonic at the beginning of the recapitulation. In both the mature Piano Sonatas and the Cello Sonata he opens the recapitulation with the more lyrical second subject and gives no formal attention to the first. In the Piano Sonata in C minor, which he wrote as a student at the Warsaw Conservatoire in 1828, he reintroduces the first subject at the conventional point but in the far from conventional key of B flat minor.

Chopin’s First Piano Sonata is, in fact, a remarkably radical and accomplished work, not at all the student exercise one might have expected from a composer of eighteen. It is an indication of the quality of the teaching at the Warsaw Conservatoire that its principal, Joseph Elsner - to whom the Sonata in C minor is dedicated and who might well have condemned it for its provocative failure to observe the academic rules - promptly sent it off to a publisher in Vienna. Haslinger made no immediate effort to publish it but he was clever enough to keep the manuscript and eleven years later, when Chopin scores were at a premium, to have it engraved - although, presumably because of the composer’s opposition to the project, its actual publication was delayed until 1851, two years after his death.

The other extraordinary quality of the first movement of the Sonata in C minor, apart from its tonally dislocated recapitulation, is its domination by a four-note rising theme derived from the very first bar. There is a second subject of sorts but the Allegro maestoso is basically an improvisation, spontaneous and obsessive, on that not very ingratiating opening motif. Conventional virtuoso gestures mix with keyboard figuration clearly prophetic of the mature composer and with harmonic audacities which, though they clearly did not disturb Elsner, would have dismayed any ordinary professor of composition of the day.

The Menuetto in E flat major - more like a Schubert German dance than a minuet - is not particularly individual until, in the sonorously scored middle section, it briefly assumes the character of a mazurka. The A flat major Larghetto, on the other hand, is remarkable for its daring adoption of a quintuple-time metre, for the varied and always fluent solutions to the rhythmic problems arising from that and for the nocturnal decorations so lavishly applied to the melodic line. As for the Presto finale, while Elsner might usefully have had a word with his pupil about its over-extended construction, he would have noted too that its rhythmic energy - stimulated perhaps by Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasia - is such that dramatic interest is sustained to the end.