Part 11: Classical Currents (Ch. XI)

Part 11 of chopin-the-man-and-his-music (Chapter XI: Classical Currents).

Question this unit answers

What happens to Chopin when he works inside inherited Classical forms — sonata, concerto, trio, variation set, fugue — rather than in the character-piece genres he invented for himself?

Works covered, in order of treatment:

• Sonatas: C minor op. 4; B flat minor op. 35 (with the Marche Funèbre); B minor op. 58; G minor op. 65 for piano and cello.
• Chamber: Trio in G minor op. 8; Grand Duo Concertant for cello and piano (with Franchomme, on themes from Robert le Diable).
• Concertos: E minor op. 11 and F minor op. 21, plus the Allegro de Concert in A op. 46 as a “truncated” concerto.
• Early virtuoso works: Rondo in C minor op. 1; Rondo à la Mazur op. 5 (in F); Concert Rondo op. 14 “Krakowiak”; Rondo op. 16; Rondo op. 73 (posthumous); Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” op. 2; Variations on Je vends des scapulaires op. 12; Variations in E (no opus); Fantaisie on Polish Airs op. 13.
• Miscellany: Bolero op. 19; Tarantella op. 43; C minor Funeral March (1829); three Écossaises op. 73 no. 3; the seventeen Polish songs op. 74; Chopin’s sixth variation in the collective Hexameron; the newly published A minor Fugue/fugato.

The F minor Fantaisie op. 49 is explicitly deferred to a later chapter.

Key terms

• Sonata form / “the sonata question” — treated not as a fixed mould but as a moving historical convention; the chapter’s central polemic.
• Organic unity — Niecks’ criterion for whether a multi-movement work coheres; applied against op. 35 and (more favorably) op. 58.
• Cyclical order — Huneker’s term for the multi-movement genres (sonata, trio, concerto).
• Spielerei — playful surface display; Huneker’s verdict on Chopin’s variation writing.
• Doppio movimento — the tempo marking that launches the op. 35 first movement proper after its Grave prologue.
• Trio (of a march/scherzo) — the contrasting middle section; repeatedly the unit of Huneker’s criticism (D flat trio of the funeral march, G flat trio of the op. 35 scherzo).
• Fioriture / ornamentation — the florid decorative surface dominating the first-period works.
• Krakowiak, Kujawiak, mazurka, polonaise — Polish dance types supplying the national material of op. 14, op. 13, op. 74.
• Tonal monotony — the recurring technical charge: too few or too close key changes across a long span.
• Klindworth / Tausig / Burmeister versions — competing re-orchestrations and cadenza additions to the concertos.
• Hummel and Field — the acknowledged models from which both concertos derive.
• First period (op. 1–op. 22) — the phase Huneker characterizes as “virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake.”

Propositions

1. There is no authoritative definition of sonata form; the history of the sonata is the history of musical evolution, so “not a sonata” is a weak charge in itself (Ch. XI).
2. Only op. 4 has “a classical complexion,” and it proves Chopin had no sympathy with the form — it is his dullest music, yet paradoxically the most coherent as a sonata (Ch. XI).
3. Op. 35 is not a sonata but a sequence of ballades and scherzi; its four movements have no common life, and tonality alone does not unify them (Ch. XI).
4. Despite that, two of its movements — the doppio movimento and the E flat minor Scherzo — are masterpieces, and the finale has no parallel in piano music (Ch. XI).
5. The funeral march is more powerful heard in isolation than in its place within the sonata (Ch. XI).
6. Op. 58 has more organic unity than op. 35 but less power and thematic interest; its finale “lacks weight” and its first movement ends like a love lyric, not a sonata (Ch. XI).
7. Chopin is a sonneteer, not an epic poet: he cannot sustain the “cool breadth and marmoreal majesty” of large architecture (Ch. XI).
8. The chamber works (op. 65, op. 8, the Grand Duo) fail chiefly because Chopin’s imagination will not ignite when he must accommodate other players (Ch. XI).
9. The concertos are secondary Chopin, kept alive by their opportunities for the soloist; both derive from Hummel and Field and are episodic in character (Ch. XI).
10. The F minor Concerto is the more human of the two: its first movement surpasses the E minor’s in breadth and passion, though it lacks a coda (supplied by Burmeister) (Ch. XI).
11. Chopin had little gift for variation as Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, or Mendelssohn understood it; his variations are true spielerei, brilliant on the surface only (Ch. XI).
12. The op. 1–op. 22 works document the beginnings of the greater Chopin but not his later subjugation of technique to poetry (Ch. XI).
13. The “national” dance pieces in foreign idioms — Bolero, Tarantella — are Polish in rhythm and northern in feeling, not Spanish or Italian (Ch. XI).
14. Chopin was not by nature the melancholic of legend: his first period shows him “gay, fairly healthy and bubbling over with a pretty malice” (Ch. XI).

Arguments

The de Maupassant analogy. Huneker opens by borrowing Maupassant’s question about the novel (“if Don Quixote is one, how can Madame Bovary be another?”) and substituting sonata for novel. If Scarlatti and the Appassionata are both sonatas, the term names a family resemblance, not a rule. Therefore the formalist attack on Chopin rests on “hypocrisy and cant”: a conservatory student can produce a correct sonata, but what distinguishes masters is precisely “the subtle eluding of hard and fast rules.” Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert each deformed the inherited shape — “and then came Chopin.”

The op. 4 control case. Having deflated the formalists, Huneker concedes their empirical point by a different route. Op. 4 is the one work where Chopin tried strict scholastic form, and it is the worst thing he wrote — wheezing first movement, irritating five-four larghetto, technical difficulty without reward. Yet it holds together as a sonata better than op. 35 or op. 58. The conclusion is not that Chopin failed at form but that form and Chopin’s essence are inversely correlated: “there is much Chopin, while little of his precious essence is to be tasted in the first sonata.”

Movement-by-movement over whole-work. Because unity is unattainable, Huneker’s evaluative unit becomes the individual movement, and he defends this openly (Hadow “groans at the last pair, though they are admirable when considered separately”). Hence the analysis of op. 35 proceeds as four separate verdicts, including the observation that the first subject never returns and that the working-out is “more pianistic than intellectually musical.”

The physiological/temperamental explanation. The chapter’s causal claim is imported from Ehlert and then endorsed as the chapter’s thesis: Chopin wrote “the unavoidable piano concerto” out of professional obligation (noblesse oblige), and “his lungs were too weak for the pace in seven league boots” a score demands. Huneker seizes the phrase “He must touch the keys by himself” as the whole explanation — “His was the lonely soul.” The chamber works and concertos fail for the same reason: they require attending to other players.

Correcting George Sand. Sand’s tribute (an instrument speaking “the language of the infinite,” no saxophone or ophicleide needed) is quoted approvingly and then punctured twice: Beethoven also managed without saxophones, and Sand’s prophecy that Chopin’s music would be orchestrated without changing the piano score is “disaster-breeding nonsense.” Her technical innocence is the evidence that even sympathetic contemporaries misread where Chopin’s genius was located.

Against the myth of the fully formed genius. The final section argues from musical evolution: Schumann himself dismissed his early work as “dreary stuff,” and Chopin’s ancestry is traceable — “as Poe had his Holley Chivers, Chopin had his Field.” The early works are explained by their historical moment, when piano music was “well nigh strangled by excess of ornament, when acrobats were kings” and Bach and Beethoven lay neglected. Chopin’s originality is that he outstripped the virtuosi at their own game while carrying his own banner.

Evidence

• Datings and publication facts used to settle chronology: op. 4 composed 1828, published July 1851; op. 35 published May 1840; op. 58 published June 1845 (ded. Comtesse E. de Perthuis); op. 8 published March 1833 (ded. Prince Anton Radziwill); F minor Concerto published April 1836 though composed before the E minor (published September 1833) — the source of the opus-number confusion; op. 46 published November 1841; op. 19 published 1834, four years before Chopin’s Spain visit; op. 74 songs composed 1824–1844.
• Chopin’s own testimony: “As a pupil I dedicated it to Elsner” (op. 4); the finale of op. 35 as gossip after the march; his admission to a pupil that he would revise the Trio and would have preferred viola to violin; his 1841 letter to Fontana calling the Allegro de Concert a concerto; the 1830 Vienna letter about a projected two-piano concerto with Nidecki.
• Critical dossier on the funeral march assembled to show interpretive divergence: Schumann (“much that is repulsive”), Liszt (rhapsodic), Karasowski (“pain and grief of an entire nation”), Ehlert (renown owed to two triads; the trio mocked as “white lingerie” after “black crepe”), Niecks (“a rapturous gaze into the beatific regions of a beyond”), Newman (Chopin’s imagination “vaguer and more diffused” than Wagner’s).
• Images for the op. 35 finale from multiple hands: “Night winds sweeping over the churchyard graves” (Rubinstein or Tausig), Schumann’s “sphinx with a mocking smile,” Barbadette’s Lazarus scratching at his tomb, Mendelssohn’s abhorrence.
• Performance-practice observations as evidence of the music’s demands: Rubinstein alone gets the second bar of the scherzo’s crescendo explosive enough; Kullak’s marking of the opening B flat octave; Rosenthal playing the older E minor orchestration but inconsistently using the Tausig octaves (“hideously cacaphonic”); Paderewski playing Burmeister’s cadenza; Nicodé’s orchestration of op. 46 premiered in New York by Marie Geselschap under Anton Seidl; Emil Sauer making the Bolero effective; Rosenthal as the only modern virtuoso playing the Hexameron.
• Biographical anchor: the F minor Concerto’s larghetto composed during Chopin’s passion for Constantia Gladowska — “the ideal” of the letters — while the work is dedicated to Comtesse Delphine Potocka, which Huneker reads as evidence of Polish fickleness.
• Kleczynski’s reading of op. 13 quoted at length as counter-evidence to the sad-Chopin cliché, with the Polish proverb “A fig for misery” and the formula “Elevated beauty, not sepulchral gayety.”
• Rellstab on op. 2: the composer “runs down the theme with roulades, and throttles and hangs it with chains of shakes.”
• Textual-critical suspicion about the A minor Fugue: the editorial note permitting omission of the coda’s octave pedal-point and trills suggests Janotha reconstructed a whole piece “Cuvier-like” from a fragment.
• A caught error: Willeby says the Bolero is in C major; it is in A minor with a coda ending in A major.
• Practical bibliography: Kleczynski’s two books; Isidor Philipp’s Exercices Quotidiens (Hamelle, Paris, prefaced by Georges Mathias); Mertke on ornaments in Edition Steingräber no. 179.

Quotes

• “The Chopin sonata has caused almost as much warfare as the Wagner music drama.” (Ch. XI)
• “The history of the sonata is the history of musical evolution.” (Ch. XI)
• Schumann says Chopin here “bound together four of his maddest children.” (Ch. XI)
• “The left hand unisono with the right hand are gossiping after the march.” (Ch. XI)
• “it is Chopin mounted for action and in the thick of the fight” (Ch. XI)
• “the scherzo floats in mid-air—Flaubert’s ideal of a miraculous style” (Ch. XI)
• “it is an aubade, a nocturne of the morn” (Ch. XI)
• “He sonnets to perfection, but the epical air does not fill his nostrils.” (Ch. XI)
• “Chopin’s imagination refuses to become excited when working in the open spaces of the sonata form.” (Ch. XI)
• “He must touch the keys by himself!” — “His was the lonely soul.” (Ch. XI)
• “Chopin plays with his themes prettily, but it is all surface display, all heat lightning.” (Ch. XI)
• “from op. 1 to opus 22 virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake is very evident” (Ch. XI)
• “as Poe had his Holley Chivers, Chopin had his Field” (Ch. XI)
• “Chopin was gay, fairly healthy and bubbling over with a pretty malice.” (Ch. XI)

Tensions and links

• Formal relativism vs. formal verdicts. The chapter opens by denying any “final court of appeal in the matter of musical form,” then spends its length convicting Chopin of formal failure (“these sonatas of Chopin are not sonatas at all”). Huneker resolves it pragmatically — “would we forego the sensations that two of them evoke?” — but the theoretical opening and the practical judgments never fully reconcile.
• Unity as a value. Op. 35 is judged incoherent yet great; op. 58 is judged more unified yet lesser. This inverts the criterion the chapter otherwise invokes, and suggests unity is being used as a rhetorical instrument rather than a standard.
• The isolated funeral march. Conceding that the march is more effective extracted than in place is a concession that Chopin’s real unit of composition is the piece, not the cycle — an argument for the character-piece genres treated in the neighboring chapters (ballades, scherzi, nocturnes, polonaises).
• Physiology as criticism. Ehlert’s “his lungs were too weak” fuses medical fact with aesthetic judgment; the chapter adopts it without interrogating whether respiratory illness plausibly explains a preference for small forms. Compare the biographical chapters’ treatment of Chopin’s health.
• The op. 46 puzzle. Huneker allows that the Allegro de Concert has “the potentialities of a powerful and more manly composition than either of the two concertos” — which sits awkwardly beside the claim that Chopin’s imagination cannot function in concerto dimensions.
• The F minor Fantaisie op. 49 is deliberately withheld from this chapter on the grounds of quality and opus number, an admission that Chopin did eventually build a large, non-schematic single-movement structure successfully. Follow that thread into the later chapter.
• Sand vs. Huneker on orchestration. Sand’s prophecy of orchestral Chopin is dismissed, yet the chapter itself catalogues re-orchestrations (Klindworth, Tausig, Burmeister, Nicodé) and concedes some are admirable — the boundary between legitimate arrangement and “disaster-breeding nonsense” is never drawn.
• Cross-link candidates: sonata form as a historical convention; the concerto as a professional obligation for touring virtuosos; the theme-and-variations tradition (Beethoven, Brahms) as a foil; Field and Hummel as Chopin’s models; Polish dance forms (krakowiak, kujawiak, mazurka) as compositional material; the nineteenth-century editing and re-orchestration culture.

Open questions

• Is op. 4’s relative coherence genuinely evidence that form and Chopin’s individuality are inversely related, or simply evidence that a student exercise follows its model closely?
• Would the tonal-monotony charge against op. 8, op. 65, and the E minor Concerto’s first movement survive analysis, or is it a period taste preferring frequent remote modulation?
• Was op. 46 in fact a discarded concerto (Schumann’s belief), a fragment of the two-piano concerto Chopin mentioned in December 1830 (Niecks’ conjecture), or something else? What does Chopin’s own use of the word “concerto” in the 1841 Fontana letter settle?
• How much of the A minor Fugue is Chopin’s and how much Janotha’s reconstruction?
• Is the seventeen-song set really as mediocre as claimed, given that Huneker singles out Poland’s Dirge, Horsemen Before the Battle, and Maiden’s Wish — and given that some songs were reportedly lost or never written down?
• Does the Chopin/Franchomme division of labor in the Grand Duo Concertant match Schumann’s guess that “Franchomme said ‘Yes’ to everything”?
• If the original orchestration of the concertos suits the piano part (Kelly’s contention), on what basis does Huneker still admire the Tausig version?