Sonata No.1 in C minor, Op.4

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Sonata No.1 in C minor, Op.4

Allegro maestoso

Menuetto

Larghetto

Finale

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.

Sonata No.2 in B flat minor, Op.35

Grave - doppio movimento

Scherzo

Marche funèbre: lento

Presto

When Chopin wrote his First Piano Sonata in C minor he was no beginner: he had already written polonaises, mazurkas, waltzes and several sets of variations, including the Variations on Là ci darem la mano which were so famously to move Schumann to proclaim the young composer a genius. Eleven years later, on the other hand, when he came to write his Second Piano Sonata in B flat minor he had completed the two Piano Concertos, the Studies Op.10 and Op.25, the Preludes Op.28, three of the four Scherzos and two of the four Ballades. He was now a composer at the height of his powers, as a comparison of the Second Sonata with the by no means negligible First would conclusively demonstrate.

The main theme of the opening movement of the Sonata in B flat minor seems to share something of the obsessive quality of the equivalent theme in the Sonata in C minor but, at its hard-pressed tempo and in its breathless articulation, the later inspiration is emotionally so much more meaningful. By now, moreover, Chopin has the confidence to introduce a second subject which is not only clearly defined but also, in its D flat major tonality and its sostenuto treatment, such a complete contrast to the first that it could endanger the coherence of the movement. Structural considerations are not ignored - the thematically pregnant first four bars (marked Grave) are proof of that - but the poetic impulse is fully liberated. The recall of the second subject in B flat major at the beginning of the recapitulation, securing an ending in which the anxieties of the first subject are all but quelled, is a beautiful illusion.

Like the Menuetto in the C minor Sonata, the Scherzo of Sonata in B flat minor is presented as the second of the four movements. But that is all the two pieces have in common: this later Scherzo in E flat minor is clearly related to the dramatic version of the form Chopin had in the meantime so successfully developed in the Scherzos in B minor, B flat minor and C sharp minor. As in the first movement, there is a contrastingly tranquil section in the relative major but the ending, which recalls the lyrical material in the relative major again rather than in the tonic major, is uneasy. So now the way is prepared for the Marche funèbre in B flat minor which Chopin had written two years earlier - to mark, it is said, the anniversary of the Warsaw uprising - and which he evidently considered strong enough to have a whole sonata built round it. In this case even the contrasting material in the D flat major middle section is sorrowful.

After that there is no escape. The unbroken flight of unharmonised sotto voce triplets in the Presto finale is surely not intended to represent “wind blowing over the grave,” as legend has it: Chopin himself described it as nothing more than “a short finale of about three pages…the left hand chattering unisono with the right hand.” But as soon as the descending seventh of the Grave opening of the first movement is incorporated in the Presto opening of the last - in the very first bar in fact - the fate of the sonata, like its construction, is sealed.

Ballade No.1 in G minor, Op.23

Ballade No.2 in F major, Op.38

Ballade No.3 in A flat major, Op.47

Ballade No.4 in F minor, Op.52

According to Liszt, it was the success of Chopin’s Polish contemporary and fellow exile, Adam Mickiewicz, in the classical forms of poetry which inspired Chopin to take up their equivalent in music - resulting in piano sonatas less successful in Liszt’s opinion than Mickiewicz’s Grazyna and Wallenrod. It is not a convincing theory. It is true, on the other hand, that Mickiewicz’s Ballady I romanse had considerable influence on Chopin’s creation of a form new in instrumental music, the ballade.

Although it is very unlikely that any of the four Chopin Ballades was inspired in detail by any one of the Mickiewicz Ballady, each one is a sort of narrative poem with the narrator almost as prominent as the main protagonists of the story. His presence is particularly obvious in the first of the Ballades in G minor, Op.23. It begins with a short harp-like prelude which establishes the bardic personality destined to reappear in the other Ballades. The narrator introduces the first thematic character, the melancholy but excitable first subject, in G minor. The second subject is happier and more relaxed in E flat major. The latter is compelled to change its mood during the course of the development, goaded by the first theme into full-scale eloquence in A major and, at the end of a scherzando episode based on the narrator’s theme, it is urgently rapped out in E flat major. The first subject reappears in the tonic but not the second subject: all conventional expectations are swept away in a presto con fuoco coda. The narrator adds a dramatically expressive epilogue.

When Schumann heard Chopin play that work in 1836 (a year after its completion) he declared it “the best of all his works.” Chopin agreed with him. In 1839, when he had finished the second Ballade in F major, he dedicated the new work to Robert Schumann (crossing out the description, “my friend,” incidentally, and spelling the dedicatee’s name wrong in his instructions to his publisher). This work quickly became a favourite too. Chopin performed it frequently but never, apparently, in its entirety. He is said to have played only the first part, in an extended version. Obviously, this is the most attractive part, and it is particularly inspired in the way its gentle pastoral theme grows so naturally out of the repeated harp notes in the first few bars. The parts Chopin did not play are the two stormy presto con fuoco episodes, with the narrator’s voice from the first Ballade rising in an impassioned cry in the left hand. The idyll is definitively drowned by the second episode, which leads not into F major again but to an agitato coda ending in a desolate A minor.

The third Ballade was completed two years after the second and is already more subtle in construction than the its predecessors. It is impossible to say for certain whether the first section, which is so elusive and so changeable in colour, is introduction or exposition. The opening bars return, are converted into a low echo of the narrator’s theme from the first Ballade and pause on a chord of A flat major. A delightful new theme enters, preceded by an outline of its lilting rhythm in the right hand. This could be a second subject or it could easily be the first main theme. Whatever it is, it is closely related to the earlier material. It dominates the piece from this point on in an apparently spontaneous series of variations, passing dramatically through C sharp minor and into a climax of keyboard brilliance and acoustic magnitude.

The ballade conventions - the 6/8 metre, the narrative style, the bardic prelude - are retained in the fourth and last in the set, written in 1842. The F minor Ballade is, however, even more liberated in form than the A flat major and is on a larger scale. One of Chopin’s greatest works, it is a structural masterpiece and, like all the best examples of story-telling, never predictable. The main theme, introduced after the short prelude with the characteristic repeated notes, sounds like a fragile stray from one of the nocturnes. It gives no hint of the epic trials it is about to withstand. It proves, however, to be an adaptable melody, capable of carrying a weight of passionate expression, before it is relieved by the entry of a happier, less complicated theme in B flat major. The burden of the main climax is borne by this more robust second subject, now in D flat major. But the brilliant coda, beginning after the slow and quiet chords which bring the music temporarily to rest on C major, is yet another transformation of the mercurial main theme.

Gerald Larner©