Summermusic 2024, No. 2: The Complete Works for Cello & Piano by Frederic Chopin

Chopin in 1847

The second of three concerts with our Summermusic 2024 takes place Wednesday at 7:30 in the air-conditioned comfort of Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg, and explores “the passionate and nuanced world of Romanticism.” The first concert sampled the epitome of the Classical style with Mozart’s two piano quartets. One of the Great Works (Period) concludes this second concert, Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, but I’ll save that for the next post. This post will take you behind the scenes with two pieces Chopin wrote for cello and piano: the Introduction & Polonaise brillante and the Cello Sonata in G Minor.

If you’re thinking “Cello Sonata by Chopin? I never knew he wrote a cello sonata!”, you’re not alone. Chopin’s reputation rests entirely on works for solo piano – and of course the two early piano concertos he wrote before he was 20 when his dream was to become a great concert pianist of the old Traveling Virtuoso variety. Fortunately for us, living out of a suitcase turned out not to have the appeal young Frederic thought it might.

By the way, violinist Nicolo Paganini was a prominent influence around the time Chopin was writing his own piano concertos – and who, dreaming of the concert stage, could not be dazzled by Paganini and his music? While Franz Liszt would become one of the Greatest Pianists of All Time, Liszt had a great respect for young Chopin and his playing when they met in Paris in 1832. They lived a few blocks from each other and frequently performed together. Chopin dedicated his Op. 10 Etudes to Liszt not just because he was a great pianist but because he was a great friend and musical champion (Chopin once remarked to a fellow pianist how he would like to “steal” the way Liszt plays his Etudes). However, when Liszt performed one of Chopin’s nocturnes in 1843 with several improvised embellishments, Chopin (a great believer in playing what was on the page) told him “either play what is written or don’t play it at all” (ouch). That was basically the end of their friendship.

But Chopin also wrote a few pieces that included “instruments other than the piano” plus collections of songs as well, all fairly negligible in his output. The Polonaise brillante for cello and piano, his Op. 3, and a piano trio, Op. 8, were written before he turned 20. There’s also a Grand Duo Concertante for Cello and Piano, a pot-boiler fantasy on themes from Meyerbeer’s smash hit, the opera Robert le diable in 1832, written jointly with the cellist Auguste Franchomme, the same cellist he would compose his Cello Sonata for. 

Since the first half of the program will conclude with the Polonaise – it does make for a more rousing finish – let’s start there. 

To say “Chopin’s Complete Works for Cello and Piano” is a bit disingenuous, perhaps, considering he only wrote two pieces for cello and piano, but considering he also wrote very little that wasn’t for solo piano (or like the two concertos, featured the piano in a solo role), it’s a rather curious aspect of his creative output. In addition to the presence of the piano, another common denominator, though, is the Polish dance known as a polonaise (in other words, quite literally a “Polish dance”). The folk music of his native Poland was a primary thread in all of Chopin’s music. This cello piece, his Op. 3, written when he was 19, is his first statement of “national identity.” The last piece he would complete was a mazurka, one of his favorite Polish folk dances.

Chopin’s first – or at least first published – foray into national pride came at a time when Poland, usually divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria over the previous centuries, was beginning to feel a resurgence of national awareness as the now-dominant Russian government became “more arbitrary” and the idea of Poland as a nation, no longer just a memory, began to find expression in various secret societies that broke out in open rebellion in the fall of 1830, eventually leading to a crack down resulting in the bloody crushing of any hopes for independence as 6,000 Polish resistance fighters and intellectuals were exiled to France. Barely a month before this uprising began, Frederic Chopin had already left Poland, never to return, eventually settling in Paris. The memory of his homeland and his friendship with a number of ex-patriots would inspire the “sound” behind the music, even when it wasn’t making use of folk rhythms or folk-like melodies.

Chopin plays a private recital for Prince Antoni Radziwill and his guests, 1829

This polonaise was written between October 20th and 28th while Chopin was visiting the estate of Prince Antoni Radziwill, a prominent Polish aristocrat, the Duke of Posen (as it was then called, a province of Prussia) who dreamed of leading a renewed and independent Polish kingdom. Given his brother’s leading role in the 1830 Uprising, Radziwill lost what political potential he had and ultimately is best remembered today as a patron of the arts with palaces not only in Posen (Poznan) but also in Berlin with a summer home in west central Poland. His family also owned numerous estates in what was then Eastern Poland but is now part of Belarus. He had married the niece of King Frederick the Great of Prussia and his daughter had been engaged to the future German Emperor Wilhelm I until it was broken off in 1824. By the way, his wife opened the first Public School for Girls in Posen (Poznan) in 1830.

The prince was also an amateur cellist and guitarist and not only produced “opera concerts” in his palaces, he frequently had musical guests who performed for his other guests. In addition to Chopin in October of 1829, there was Nicolo Paganini in May, 1829. In 1815, Beethoven dedicated his “Name Day” Overture, Op.115, to the prince whom he'd met during the Congress of Vienna that reshaped Europe after the Fall of Napoleon. Since Chopin would also dedicate his Op. 8 Piano Trio to Radziwill, it can be assumed Radziwill was the intended cellist for both pieces and, judging from what Chopin composed for him, no slouch, at least as a cellist.

(By the way, pardon the aside: if the name "Radziwill" sounds vaguely familiar to readers of a certain age, Prince Antoni's great-great-grandson Stanislaw married Lee Bouvier, the younger sister of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, in 1959. Their son was, incidentally, named Anthony.)

Here’s a recording of Chopin’s Introduction and Polonaise brillante for cello and piano with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Emanuel Ax:

For those of you who can follow the score, which I’m assuming is taken from the original edition (the work was published with the addition of an Introduction, written in April, 1830), you’ll notice several discrepancies between the printed music and what the musicians are playing: in many instances, the cello part is greatly revised. Some of the more bravura passages in the piano’s right hand are transferred to the upper register of the cello; at other places, the cello is given something more interesting to do (like not counting rests) and certain passages are played an octave higher to take them out of the middle register where it would be lost in the piano’s texture, giving it more of a soloist’s prominence. One source I’ve read said “because of the simplicity of the cello part, many cellists will add revisions and embellishments of their own.” But what Ma and Ax are playing here, I suspect, is the revised version made by his new friend, Franchomme. It’s also possible other cellists will have made their own “improvements” as well, but at least Franchomme helped him understand how to “better write for the cello.”

(Incidentally, the same kind of thing happened with Tchaikovsky’s famous Rococo Variations for Cello & Orchestra when the dedicatee not only rewrote the cello part, he even rearranged the order of the variations: to hear it as Tchaikovsky initially intended, the work is by comparison a disappointment.)

The end result of Franchomme’s collaboration was less invasive and led to a life-long friendship: Chopin wrote his Cello Sonata for Franchomme fifteen years later: they premiered it in 1848. And then Franchomme played for Chopin on his deathbed in 1849.

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Like most sonatas and symphonies of the 19th Century, Chopin's Cello Sonata is in four movements, though he places the scherzo with its own Polish "sound" to it after the first movement for greater contrast, especially with the slow movement, an expansive Largo, coming between it and the finale. That sound is, to anyone familiar with Chopin’s works, unmistakably Chopin – that opening four bars in the piano! – but as the piece evolves, it tends to sound less and less like what we’d expect. I’ll get to that later – see below – but first, here’s cellist Truls Mørk and pianist Kathryn Stott in a performance (with score) of Frederic Chopin’s Cello Sonata in G Minor, Op. 68.

As a young pianist learning a few Chopin pieces he could play and listening to a lot he couldn’t (and also wanting to play the cello), I was struck how two of the preludes, Op. 28, could’ve been cello pieces. Looking at the few pieces Chopin wrote in the realm of chamber music, it surprised me the cello was the common denominator. When I first heard about the Cello Sonata, I assumed it too would be an early piece. It surprised me to discover it was in fact “a late work.” Given the fact it was his last major work, it doesn’t get much “later” than that...

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“Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars. Beethoven infuses the universe with the power of his spirit. I do not climb so high. A long time ago, I decided my universe would be the soul and heart of man.”

If you want to get “behind” the music – beyond the technical aspects of the written notes, their harmonies and formal structures, and into how someone is to make sense of them, either as a performer or a listener – this quote may help explain not only Chopin’s music but the person who wrote it. I’m not sure what the source of this quote is, or when he might have written it (or to whom, assuming it was in a letter), but it's a good reminder of the idea "Classical" Music appeals to the mind and "Romantic" Music appeals to the heart – as if one could exist without the other!

Chopin was born at the beginning of what we call The Romantic Age – I’ve already cut over 900 words out of this post trying to describe Romanticism and Classicism (lucky you) – and in many ways he exemplifies if not the Romantic Ideal, at least the Romantic Stereotype: the suffering artist (given his frail health), the short-lived artist, the tragic background, the outsider, frequently misunderstood, and, above all, a complicated man.

Perhaps Franz Liszt understood him better than most when he said to a friend, “I want you to meet a man who comes from another planet.”

Plato, in his dialogue Phaedrus, written around 370 BC, offers an image of our dual character as two horses harnessed together, one docile and one wild. If the docile horse is more pronounced, then we’re dealing with “classical” elements; if the wild horse is more pronounced, this is the “romantic” spirit, “revealed to the delight of the young, the adventurous, and the less tame spirits of society and to the public rebuke of the old, the conservative, and the domesticated.” The two different horses, according to Plato, are controlled by the charioteer who represents “reason.”

The “content” of Chopin’s music is, on the surface, emotional. He writes, for the most part, short pieces in simple forms (mostly involving three segments, a statement, a contrasting segment, and a restatement of the opening segment, diagrammed as ABA). He collects them into groups of several such pieces – 24 preludes, 8 mazurkas, whatever – but each individual “piece” is in itself complete. Given the emotional appeal of much of his music, his “wild horse” was definitely in control.

Yet to the discerning eye, there is also an innate sense of structure to his music: the balance of phrases, the sense of harmony and an adventurous tonality that can push the boundaries of the expected between the start of a phrase and its cadence. Some hear "hints of Wagner," forgetting that by the time Chopin died, Wagner, one of the most adventurous of 19th Century composers, had only recently completed Lohengrin). If anything is hinted at, the question is how much did Chopin influence Wagner? Since Wagner was a good friend of Franz Liszt early in his career, and Liszt was a champion of Chopin, this "man from another planet," chances are Wagner was well aware of what Chopin had written. But while the aspect of this surface is Romantic, the essence is, at its core, Classical, or at least classically inspired, building on the past but creating something new. Music, to his contemporaries, from another planet.

One observation would be that there is so much to attract our attention on the surface of Chopin's music, we tend to overlook what lies beneath the surface. It is not uncommon for the typical music-lover to think there is nothing important beneath the surface.

It’s true Robert Schumann (a German Romanticist more famous as a critic than as a composer in his day) described Chopin’s “Funeral March” Sonata, not published until 1840, as “an arbitrary family consisting of four of his most unruly children.” In a sense he’s not wrong but is it fair to judge another composer’s work as a failure because it’s not the way you think it should be? Considering Chopin was the young composer Schumann the Critic greeted in December, 1831, with the line, “Hats off, gentlemen – a genius!”, this later response to Chopin’s sonata must have been a disappointment. Was this still echoing in Chopin’s mind when he started to work on his Cello Sonata a few years later?

Auguste Franchomme

Uncharacteristically, Chopin also spent a lot more time and sweat on this piece than he did his earlier works, “writing,” as he told his sister, “a little and crossing out a lot,” leaving behind large amounts of material. Collaborating with his friend, the cellist Auguste Franchomme – the manuscript bears this marking, “Cello part of the sonata for piano and cello by Chopin written under his guidance by me Franchomme” – Chopin felt the need to keep the piano part in check because balancing the two instruments was an old issue, partly explained by the lack of repertoire for the cello. Beethoven wrote five sonatas (the famous A Major Sonata dates from 1808, but Brahms’ first cello sonata didn’t come about until 1865). Johann Nepomuck Hummel, a pianist and composer whose style and playing technique influenced the young Chopin had written a cello sonata in the mid-1820s and it’s quite likely both Chopin and Franchomme would have known it.  

A more likely model might have been Felix Mendelssohn’s two sonatas – and Franchomme was a close friend of Mendelssohn’s as well – written in 1838 and 1842 (particularly the scherzo of the 2nd which begins at 7:48). In fact, since more than one commentator (other than me) has heard a prominent reflection of Mendelssohn in a work that is not always typical of Chopin’s own voice, chances are pretty good...

Most sources say Chopin wrote his sonata “in 1846-1847” (two different sources mention he began work on it in 1845) and that it was finished in the summer of 1847, printed in October, 1847, and premiered at least in part in February, 1848, in what became his last public performance in Paris. It was also to be his last major work: he would die in October of 1849 at the age of 39.

Franchomme and Chopin met shortly after Chopin established himself in Paris in early-1832, having left Warsaw for Italy (he’d previously found Vienna not to his liking) before intending to only pass through Paris on his way to London (Italy having turned out not to be to his liking, either). Instead, he decided to stay and spent the rest of his life in Paris.

When Franchomme and Chopin premiered the new Cello Sonata in Paris in 1848 – not including the first movement, for some reason – this recital which was well received has sometimes been called Chopin’s last public performance. That’s not entirely accurate. As fine a pianist as Chopin was and despite his initial dream of becoming a virtuoso concert pianist, he was not comfortable in a large hall. Some critics said his tone was “too small” for such places. Instead, he performed in salons around the city, small rooms to small crowds. That didn’t seem to affect his fame. 

Regardless, when the “February Revolution” broke out in Paris six days after the Cello Sonata's premiere, Chopin left for London on the invitation of a former student of his, Jane Stirling, a wealthy amateur pianist who arranged a place for him to stay and took him on a tour of England and Scotland. While he again performed mostly in private homes, people attending these recitals included the likes of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as well as the famous singer Jenny Lind and writers like Thackeray and Thomas Carlyle.

Delacroix's portrait (1838)

Chopin’s health had always been precarious: he’d nearly died of tuberculosis while visiting Majorca with George Sand in 1838. But while in Edinburgh in October of 1848, his health deteriorated once again, and he wrote his last will and testament, intending to return home to Paris but not before he played a badly planned public concert in London in November. They’d meant well, raising funds for Polish refugees from the revolution there in 1848, but unfortunately the audience was more interested in the refreshments and dancing than in Chopin’s playing – and that sad experience which exhausted him even further did turn out to be last public performance.

The rest is even sadder reading which I won’t go into here. With no income, Chopin was reliant on friends who covered his rent and other expenses. During this time, he composed a few short pieces, including the Mazurka in F Minor with its amazingly slippery harmonic sequences, published posthumously as Op. 68 No. 4, harnessed to three other unpublished works from the late-1820s. (Here’s a recording by Artur Rubinstein)

During this protracted final illness that stretched out for almost a year, Chopin was visited by many friends and fans – Pauline Viardot, the famous singer, complained “all the grand Parisian ladies considered it de rigueur to faint in his room” – and several came to play music for him from an adjacent room, including Auguste Franchomme. When the end finally came, not long after he completed that F Minor Mazurka, Franchomme and the artist Delacroix who’d painted Chopin’s most famous portrait (see above) were among the pall-bearers. At the funeral, they performed the Mozart Requiem (Viardot was one of the soloists) and at the graveside, there was an instrumental version of, naturally enough, the famous Funeral March from his Second Piano Sonata.

– Dick Strawser