Piano Sonata No. 2 (Chopin)

**Piano Sonata No. 2 (Chopin)**

Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B♭ minor, Op. 35, is a four-movement work for solo piano. It was finished while Chopin was staying at George Sand’s estate in Nohant, about 250 kilometers south of Paris, and was published a year later in 1840. This is the first of Chopin’s three mature sonatas—the others being the Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58, and the Sonata for Piano and Cello in G minor, Op. 65—and it is widely regarded as one of the finest piano sonatas ever written.

The third movement is Chopin’s famous funeral march (Marche funèbre in French, Marsz żałobny in Polish). This march was composed at least two years before the rest of the sonata and remains one of Chopin’s most popular pieces on its own. The sonata contains references to music by J. S. Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven; Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 12 also uses a funeral march as its third movement. A typical performance lasts between 21 and 25 minutes, depending on whether the first movement’s exposition repeat is played.

The sonata was an immediate hit with the public, but critics were initially less sure. Robert Schumann and others argued that the work was structurally weak and that Chopin “could not quite handle sonata form”—a judgment that did not hold up over time. The piece has been recorded by many pianists and is a regular feature in concerts and piano competitions. The Marche funèbre exists in countless arrangements and has been played at funerals worldwide, including Chopin’s own, becoming a classic musical symbol of death.

**Historical background**

Chopin wrote this sonata during a period when the sonata form had lost its overwhelming dominance. Unlike Beethoven and Mozart, for whom sonatas made up a large part of their output, later composers wrote fewer: Franz Liszt composed only two sonatas among his many instrumental works, Robert Schumann seven (or eight if counting the Fantasie in C, Op. 17), and Felix Mendelssohn thirteen. Besides this sonata, Chopin wrote only three others: the Piano Sonata in C minor (Op. posth. 4), written at age eighteen; the Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor (Op. 58); and the Sonata for Piano and Cello in G minor (Op. 65).

The origins of the Piano Sonata No. 2 center on its third movement, the funeral march, which many scholars date to 1837. However, Jeffrey Kallberg argues that this dating comes from an autograph manuscript of eight bars in D♭ major marked Lento cantabile, apparently given as a gift to an unnamed recipient and dated 28 November 1837. This manuscript later became part of the trio of the Marche funèbre. Kallberg suggests it might have been intended as the start of a different slow movement, not the march itself, noting that Chopin usually gave manuscripts that either contained a complete piece or at least quoted its beginning. He also points out that a four-hand arrangement of the march by Julian Fontana may be linked to an abandoned piano sonata for four hands Chopin wrote in 1835, originally meant to be Op. 28 (later used for the 24 Preludes). This raises the possibility that the march dates from 1835 rather than 1837.

After writing the march, Chopin composed the other movements, finishing the sonata by 1839. In a letter to Fontana dated 8 August 1839, Chopin wrote: “I am writing here a Sonata in B-flat minor which will contain my March which you already know. There is an Allegro, then a Scherzo in E-flat minor, the March and a short Finale about three pages of my manuscript-paper. The left hand and the right hand gossip in unison after the March. … My father has written to say that my old sonata [in C minor, Op. 4] has been published by [Tobias Haslinger] and that the German critics praise it. Including the ones in your hands I now have six manuscripts. I'll see the publishers damned before they get them for nothing.”

Haslinger’s unauthorized release of Chopin’s early C minor sonata—he had engraved the work and let it circulate against Chopin’s wishes—may have pushed Chopin to publish a piano sonata, which could explain why he added the other movements to the funeral march to create a full sonata. The work was completed in the summer of 1839 in Nohant, France, and published in May 1840 in London, Leipzig, and Paris. It was not dedicated to anyone.

**Analysis**

The sonata has four movements:

**I. Grave – Doppio movimento** (5–7 minutes) This movement uses a modified sonata form in B♭ minor and 2/2 time. It begins with a four-bar introduction in the relative major, D♭ major, marked Grave, then shifts to Doppio movimento, changes to the tonic key, and introduces an agitated bass accompaniment. Four bars later, the main theme enters, marked agitato. A second theme follows in D♭ major, marked piano and sostenuto. In the development, all the themes from the exposition reappear. Later, a seemingly new tune appears, which is actually an inversion of part of the second theme. At the development’s climax, Chopin combines three elements at once: motifs from the Grave introduction and the main theme in the bass and treble respectively, with...