Frédéric Chopin (1810 – 1849): Piano Sonata no 3 in B Minor op 58
One of the principal characters in George Sand’s 1846 novel, Lucrezia Floriani, is a Polish aristocrat named Prince Karol de Roswald who becomes the heroine’s lover. But for those personally acquainted with Sand – and not least with her own romantic partner of the past eight years – there was something disturbingly familiar about de Roswald.
Such rumours were all the more tantalizing given Sand’s evidently venomous feelings towards her princely creation. “As he was extremely polite and reserved”, we are told of him,
no one was ever able to understand what was going on in his mind. The more exasperated he became, the colder his manner… He was flippant, stiff, affected and bored with everything… Everything seemed uninteresting to him. He held aloof from every opinion, every idea. When someone tried to offer him some distraction, one could be certain that he despised what was said to him, and all that could be said.
Certain friends of the couple would have known immediately whom Sand was referencing in her mind as she penned these words: Frédéric Chopin. And there were other direct parallels: the heroine Lucrezia is thirty years old when she meets Karol while he is twenty-four, the exact ages at which Sand and Chopin had met. Karol has a delicate constitution and a well-practiced but insincere charm. He becomes something of a chronic invalid and in doing so sucks all the life and love out of Lucrezia, who in turn is portrayed as something of a saintly figure (as Sand, a woman not always imbued with generous doses of humility, liked to regard herself).
As the novel was serialized in Le Courrier Français before it was published, the real identity of Karol quickly became a feverish talking point among the literary and artistic circles of Paris. Readers waited with bated breath for the next issue of Le Courrier to see what fresh bombs Sand would drop. Franz Liszt was so sure of Karol’s real identity that he quoted Sand’s novel liberally in his own biography of Chopin written some twenty years later.
Oddly enough, the only person who seemed entirely impervious to all the fuss was Chopin himself. According to Sand, Chopin would read through drafts of the work every day and stubbornly fail to recognize himself anywhere in the narrative. A few years later, after Chopin’s death, Sand went further and insisted, somewhat disingenuously, that Karol was little more than a fictional invention. “Prince Karol was not an artist”, she wrote. “He was a dreamer and nothing more. Not being a genius, he did not have the pejoratives of genius. He was therefore a character who was so far from being the portrait of a great artist that Chopin, who read the manuscript on my desk daily, had not the least inclination to see himself in it, suspicious as he was.”
But it certainly did not feel that way to anyone else. During private readings of the novel, one of Sand’s assembled guests, the celebrated Romatic painter Eugène Delacroix, would sit cringing at the non-too-subtle revelations: “I went through torment during that reading. Mme Sand felt no compunction,” the painter recalled – and yet “Chopin took unfeigned delight in the tale.”
What we can definitely say about Lucrezia is that Sand’s relationship with Chopin was on the rocks when she wrote it and had been for some time. In many ways, it was surprising that they had stayed together as long as they had. From their first disastrous winter together, spending much of it in an abandoned monastery halfway up a mountain in cold, rainy Majorca, Chopin and Sand had always looked like an odd pairing, both as human beings and as artists.
But the serious decline in Chopin’s health during these years had also had a major effect on their relationship. It limited what they could do together – while Sand still wanted to get out and enjoy the world, Chopin preferred to prioritise his dwindling energy levels on his work. The first thing to suffer was their physical intimacy, which seems to have ended, at Sand’s instigation, less than a year into their relationship. Their emotional intimacy would suffer a similar if slower disintegration.
As Chopin’s tuberculosis worsened, leaving him breathless, physically exhausted and with a permanently sore throat, he grew ever moodier and less accommodating. He liked his routines and could not bear to be pulled away from his piano when it was time for dinner. He was often at his worst when stuck on a composition (a common occurrence), at which point he could make genuinely unpleasant scenes.
As Sand was not the type to agonize over her own creative work, she could not understand why it was not the same for Chopin. According to Sand his composing was “more often his torment than his joy”: he was blessed with an abundance of ideas which he would then completely over-think:
[At first] his composing was spontaneous, miraculous. He found ideas without looking for them, without foreseeing them. They came to his piano, sudden, complete, sublime – or sang in his head while he was taking a walk, and he had to hurry and throw himself at the instrument to make himself hear them. But then began a labour more heartbreaking than I have ever seen. This was a series of efforts, of irresolution and impatience to grasp again certain details of the themes he had heard: what he had conceived as a whole he overanalyzed in putting on paper, and his retreat in not recapturing it whole (according to him) threw him into a kind of despair. He shut himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, walking about, breaking his pens, repeating or altering a measure a hundred times, writing it down and erasing it as often, and starting over the next day with a scrupulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to return to it and write it just as he had on the first draft.
For all her acute observation, it may not have occurred to Sand that Chopin simply had a different method to her own, and whatever efforts it cost him, it also clearly worked for him. His beautifully crafted works stand as testimony to that, the miracle being that he never allowed himself to step on any of his beautiful themes, nor to lose the fresh, unforced-seeming spontaneity that characterizes so many of his best compositions.
To a large extent, Chopin and Sand stayed together because the arrangement suited them. Creatively speaking, it was a particularly productive time for both (though oddly they never dedicated a work to one another). Chopin would write much of his best music in the comfortable surroundings of Sands’ stately house in Nohant in central France, while Sand would turn out twelve further novels, three plays and a caustic memoir about Majorca. Although Chopin’s reputation meant he could now command generous fees from both pupils and publishers, Sand undoubtedly provided him with extra material support during their years, not least in allowing him to take long country breaks from his Paris activities and focus on his composing.
Whenever Chopin stayed at Nohant he could take things largely at his own pace. He had his own spacious room on the upper room of the house (next to Sand’s), offering beautiful views across the large garden. While Sand worked at her novels during the night, fuelling herself with cigarettes and coffee, Chopin would rise early in the morning, drink a mug of hot chocolate, and do the bulk of his composing while she slept.
In turn, Chopin was a prized asset that Sand, an ebullient host, was delighted to exhibit to her numerous visitors. According to Delacroix there was an often idyllic atmosphere at Nohant, something in no small measure enhanced by the presence of Chopin:
When you are not assembled for dinner or lunch or billiards or for walks, you can go and read in your room or sprawl on your sofa. Every now and then there wafts through your window, opening on to the garden a breath of the music of Chopin, who is at work in his room, and it mingles with the song of the nightingales and the scent of the roses.
In the evenings, Chopin would give impromptu recitals to Sand’s guests, beguiling them with his sublime improvisations. But he could keep them entertained in other less expected ways, not least with his gifts for mimicry – he would ruffle his hair, rearrange his clothes and impersonate various national caricatures (he was especially good at sending up the British). On other occasions, he would perform his own satirical one-man Italian operas (with Bellini a favourite target), playing and singing all the parts himself..
But even as Sand revelled in showing off her resident genius this way, her day-to-day relations with Chopin were becoming ever more prosaic, not least as she found herself increasingly relegated to the role of caregiver. On certain days, Chopin would feel so unwell that he struggled to walk around her garden, while he could also find the noise of some of her more boisterous guests unbearable. Sand would come to refer to him as her “invalide ordinaire” (everyday invalid) or sometimes even “Little Chip-Chip.”
It didn’t help that the doctors Sand enlisted to check out Chopin’s lungs often seemed more keen to say what she wanted to hear rather than give a reliable diagnosis. They would pronounce that Chopin had a little catarrh or inflammation that would heal itself up, that he would make a complete recovery, and that he was in any case prone to hypochondria. Sand would cruelly reference the latter diagnosis in Lucrezia, with the sickness of Chopin’s alter-ego Karol attributed just as much to a mental derangement as anything physical.
Although Chopin and Sand tended to spend long summers down at Nohant, during the winters they returned to Paris, usually taking self-contained lodgings close to one another. This was partly to maintain an element of autonomy between them, but also to protect themselves from gossip after their elopement in 1838 had caused a certain amount of scandal across Paris (as well as threats of physical violence from one of Sand’s former lovers). She and Chopin eventually moved into a little complex containing two separate apartments; living, as Sand joked, between the same walls but not under the same roof.
Whatever the lacunas of their relationship, there is no question that Chopin produced much of his best music during his years with Sand. One example was the B Flat Minor Sonata op 37 from 1839, a work built around its iconic funeral march, but also containing some of the boldest and wildest piano writing ever to spring from his imagination. Both Mendelssohn and Schumann, normally sympathetic to Chopin, disliked the work, with the latter describing it as “unruly” and struggling to see how the sonata’s four movements held together. Schumann even thought calling the work a sonata was “capricious if not downright presumptuous”. Nowadays the work is generally agreed to be one of Chopin’s masterpieces.
Other highlights from this period include the F Minor Fantaisie op 49, an expansive, dark-hued reverie, shaped around another funereal march before unfurling itself into passages of enormous power and passion. A special mention should also be made of the C Sharp Minor Scherzo op 39, the Polonaise-Fantaisie in A Flat Major op 61 and the mighty ‘Cello Sonata in G Minor op 65, containing dialogue of unprecedented sophistication and virtuosity between the two solo instruments.
The B Minor Piano Sonata op 58 comes towards the end of this majestic creative surge. Written in 1844, just five years after his previous sonata, it vividly demonstrates how far Chopin’s technique had developed even in that time. Although grander in conception than its predecessor, and built along more classical lines, it is no less potent. Its tonic key – B Minor – alone makes it a statement. Almost no-one had written a piano sonata in B Minor before Chopin – not Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Hummel, Dussek, Mendelssohn or Schumann. Beethoven even regarded B Minor as a very dark tonality and best left well alone – not that Chopin was ever much bothered by what Beethoven thought.
But in terms of its large-scale classical forms, understated virtuosity and emotional depth, the B Minor sonata was also the closest that Chopin ever came to Beethoven. Indeed, the work seems to mark a new phase in his creativity, with his old translucent brilliance now combining with an ever-more intricate and contrapuntal form of keyboard writing – the latter influenced in no small part by JS Bach, whose Preludes and Fugues Chopin would play on the piano most days of the week. In addition, the endlessly subtle mood-shifts throughout the work lend it a psychological depth that rewards repeated listening. For many, the Sonata represents one of the highest summits of Chopin’s art. According to the 20th century Polish writer and poet, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, “in the B Minor sonata, Chopin’s music reaches its culmination.”
The first movement (Allegro Maestoso) is a standard sonata form, though with a few structural subversions that arise naturally from the organic ebb and flow of the music. The work opens with a somewhat ceremonial, chordal theme, whose melodic outline is then repeated in a myriad of guises throughout the movement. A second, much more reflective theme in D Major, very much in the style of one of Chopin’s nocturnes, provides some relief from the otherwise tense mood.
The second movement (Scherzo) is the lightest of the four. While its playfully manic outer sections recalls Chopin’s Minute Waltz (also written at around this time), a much more serene middle section evokes the calmly lilting rhythms of a Barcarolle.
Just as in the previous sonata, much of the emotional weight of the B Minor is carried in the third, slow movement (Largo). Another beautiful Nocturne-style theme, heard near the outset, eventually moves into a long reflective section full of drifting arpeggios and gently dissonant harmonies which never quite fully resolve into common major or minor chords.
The last movement (Presto ma non tanto) is a fairly brisk Tarantella, allowing for some showy virtuosity for the first time in the work. And where the B Flat Minor Sonata had concluded very darkly, the ending here moves into a distinctly cheerful (and crowd-pleasing) B Major, finishing with a flurry of fast semi-quavers.
Still only thirty-four years old when he wrote this Sonata, Chopin appeared well on the way to his creative zenith. Sadly, the harsh realities of his life were also catching up with him: although few would have noticed it at the time, every year his energy levels were dwindling just a little more and every year his output was dropping accordingly.
It made him ever more irascible with Sand, who was by now beginning to tire of him. A rot had set into their relationship long before she would come to write her damning pen-portrait of his antics. Even the couple’s respective servants had started to fight with each other*. Although the actual break would come about in 1847, through a misunderstanding involving Chopin offering support to Sand’s unruly daughter Solange and her unsavoury new husband, shortly after they had physically abused Sand during a violent argument and been thrown out of her house (of which Chopin, 200 miles away at the time, initially knew nothing), the separation had been inevitable for some time.
*Sand’s maidservant Suzanne had taken to laughing at Chopin’s manservant, Jan, for the latter’s thick Polish accent and mispronunciation of simple French words. The latter responded with unsophisticated taunts, accusing Suzanne of having a face like a horse’s backside, while sufficiently annoying Sand with his over-ostentatious way of ringing the dinner bell, that she threatened to empty a bucket of water over his head unless he stopped. Much to his chagrin, Chopin eventually had to let his feisty manservant go.
In Lucrezia, Sand had imagined Lucrezia and Karol finally going their separate ways after ten years of being “chained” to each other, after which Lucrezia would die from exhaustion while Karol was left lost and alone. If the latter was a premonition, then Sand, who would live another thirty years, would be proved wrong on one important detail.
Lucrezia and Karol’s alter-egos could probably have repaired their rift had there been more time. About a year later, Chopin and Sand bumped into one another on the staircase of a Parisian apartment and exchanged pleasantries, but then walked away before either had plucked up the courage to offer an olive branch.
It is notable that Chopin wrote almost no further music after separating from Sand, although his dreadful health was also partly a factor in that. But he did manage to rouse himself to give one final, momentous recital in Paris in February 1848, even as it required a monumental effort to do so. Having watched the ashen-faced, emaciated looking composer struggling to walk onto the stage at the Salle Pleyel, there was a sense among the audience that they needed to make the most of something special while they still had it.
In the event, no-one who heard Chopin’s performance that night ever forgot it. All the reviewers were unanimous in extolling the composer’s almost unique appeal and his near-miraculous way of playing music of genuine power and technical virtuosity with such delicacy and intimacy. “We said at the outset that we would not attempt to describe the infinite number of nuances of an exceptional genius who has such a technique at his disposal”, wrote one reviewer. “We will only say that the charm never ceased for one moment to hold his audience entranced, and that the effect lingered long after the concert was over.”
Another reviewer talked of the “the mysteries of a performance that has no parallel in our divine sphere”. Perhaps Chopin’s old friend, the Marquis de Custine, summed it up best when he said “you have transformed a public into a circle of friends. One is alone with you in the midst of a crowd; it is not a piano that speaks but a soul…”
But the recital had cost Chopin so much physical and mental energy that he needed to lie in bed for a week afterwards.
After the Paris Revolution in the spring of 1848 had seen the old monarchy driven out of office for the final time and France once more declared a republic, Chopin decided to get out of the city for a while: one of his admiring, aristocratic pupils, a Scottish lady named Jane Stirling, had promised to fix him up with a lucrative concert tour of Britain.
Chopin ruined what was left of his health during his seven months across the English Channel but gave Britain itself memories that are treasured to this day. His performances ranged from London (where he played in front of Queen Victoria), to Manchester, and to several venues in Scotland.
He was treated like royalty throughout. When taking a train from London to Edinburgh, he was presented with three first class seats – one for himself, one for his servant and a third to rest his feet on.
But all the receptions, social soirrées and performances got him down, and nor could he always easily retreat to a warm room to play or compose or write letters. His natural reserve made it hard for him to form intimate new friendships, while the endless attentions of Jane Stirling and her equally attentive sister sometimes drove him mad – “they suffocate me out of politeness, and out of politeness I let them,” he complained wryly. In all, he lamented, “I am out of my rut – I am like a donkey at a fancy dress ball – a violin E string on a double bass.”
He gave performances in Edinburgh (well received) and Glasgow (less so). Stirling marched him off to just about every wealthy relative she had in Scotland, taking him well into the Highlands. Although clearly in love with the composer, Chopin could not return her feelings. When rumours spread of a possible engagement between them, Chopin commented, “I am nearer to a coffin than a bridal bed.”
He was often so weak that he had to be carried up flights of stairs, whether at concert halls or in apartments. When performing in Manchester, the Guardian observed of him, “he is very spare in frame, and there is an almost painful air of feebleness in his appearance and gait. This vanishes when he seats himself at the instrument…”
The tour earned Chopin enough money to be able to return to France for what he hoped would be a long rest. But when he finally got back to Paris, he quickly realized that he had pushed his ravaged body past the point of no return. He spent most of 1849 slowly dying, even as he held out occasional hopes of a cure. He still gave the odd lesson and even occasionally played, while taking genuine pleasure from the constant visits of well-wishing friends. The end finally came in October 1849, some five months short of his fortieth birthday.
Alongside his near contemporaries, Franz Schubert and Carl Maria von Weber, Frédéric Chopin still gives us a heartbreaking sense of a creative spirit cut short while only just reaching its prime. He had much, much more to write. But it’s also fortunate that he left us as much as he did.