Fryderyk Chopin by Dr. Alan Walker

Author:Dr. Alan Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Yet the March was never played at any burial service during Chopin’s lifetime. There is some irony in the fact that the first occasion it was enlisted in the service of the dead was at Chopin’s own funeral, in the Madeleine Church, on October 30, 1849, in an orchestral arrangement by Henri Reber. When Chopin put the finishing touches to the Funeral March, in 1837, and set the manuscript aside for a time before finding a permanent home for it, he had no idea that he had just penned music that would be used to mark his own passing from this vale of tears. An inspection of the only remaining autograph fragment of the Trio reveals that Chopin placed the date November 28, 1837, beneath the closing bars, and then signed it.20 It was the eve of the anniversary of the November Uprising, the date on which the Polish diaspora in Paris marked this national catastrophe. We join with the Polish scholar Mieczysław Tomaszewski in saying that the Funeral March was originally a lament for Chopin’s homeland, a connection that was lost after the movement was incorporated into the wider context of the Sonata. The movement has meanwhile become as famous in its way as the Funeral March from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. It is difficult to understand why Schumann described it as “largely repulsive,” and then went on to say that an incomparably better effect would have been achieved had Chopin composed an Adagio, “perhaps in the key of D-flat major,”21 a remark that reveals Schumann to have been an occasional prisoner of the past. He is referring, of course, to the fact that all four movements are in a minor key, an unusual occurrence in classical sonatas, and one that Chopin never adopts elsewhere. Yet the Funeral March is the central pillar of the Sonata, one that defines the composition. All the other movements lead up to or away from it. Nor is it simply the sepulchral mood of the March that casts its shadow across the rest of the composition. There are thematic connections at work as well, which not only link this movement to the others but may even have helped to generate them.22 Far from being “unruly children,” we have come to understand that they were always members of a united family.

The Finale, marked Presto, ranks among the most extraordinary movements that Chopin composed. Consisting of a mere seventy-five bars of music, it generally lasts no longer than the same number of seconds in performance. The continuous whirl of unison octaves, which follow so hard on the heels of the Funeral March’s closing chords, reminded Anton Rubinstein of “night winds sweeping across churchyard graves,” an image that has become firmly attached to this music. Schumann did not regard the Finale as music at all, dismissing it as a “mockery,” while Mendelssohn is said to have abhorred it.23 The dichotomy between sight and sound, between what we hear and what we see on the printed page, makes

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