His creation 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... 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...
Sand is also known for the telling of the morbid visions
that haunted Chopin while he sketched out his opus 35 piano sonata in Majorca.
Little could Chopin have known of the impending impact of
this sonata. In fact, in a letter to his compatriot Julian Fontana dated
Thursday August 1839, Chopin wrote:
Here I am writing a Sonata in B Flat minor, containing the
march that you know. There is an allegro, then a Scherzo in E Flat minor, the
march and a short finale, perhaps 3 of my pages; the left hand in unison with
the right, gossiping after the march. I have a new nocturne...
The matter-of-fact manner in which Chopin writes about his
new sonata is quite astonishing. The finale lasts around seventy seconds and
concludes a work of more than twenty minutes' duration. Jeremy Siepmann
maintains that this movement, "which Chopin so casually dismisses as gossip,
may well constitute the most enigmatic movement in the entire history of the
sonata idea."
The sheer volume of critical commentary that this movement has evoked is
substantial.
Chopin's sonata opus 35 was first published in 1840 by
Breitkopf & Härtel, and was sometimes referred to as Chopin's "first
sonata" as it was the first of all his sonatas to
