other of his compositions was designated as such (the
Funeral March in C minor from 1829), he incorporated elements of the funeral
march into several of his other works. Examples of this can be seen in the
introduction to the F Minor Fantasy Opus 49, the C Minor Prelude from Opus 28
as well as various nocturnes such as Opus 48 No 1.
In most sonatas from the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the funeral march, if used instead of an adagio, would be employed as the second movement, with the scherzo
as the third movement. In this sonata, however, those positions are reversed,
as is the case with Beethoven's piano sonata in A flat Major opus 26, one of
Chopin's favourite works. Leiken's reasoning for this is that since the first
movement of opus 26 is a relatively slow theme-and-variations, it seems only
logical to insert the scherzo before the funeral march in order to introduce
tempo contrasts between movements.
Although the first movement of Chopin's B flat Minor sonata is fast and
basically in sonata form, this did not prevent Chopin from following
Beethoven's plan. In addition, Vladimir Protopopov highlights the fact that all
of Chopin's four-part cyclic works contain a scherzo or minuet as the second
movement.
The single documented report of Chopin's own performance
of the B flat Minor Sonata around this time was when Moscheles visited Chopin
in Paris in
October 1839, shortly after the completion of the work. Moscheles was
complimentary about Chopin's work, proclaiming that only after hearing Chopin
"...did I now for the first time understand his music, and all the raptures of
the lady world become intelligible."
It is interesting to note that no record exists of Clara
Schumann playing the opus 35 sonata, in spite of the fact that she played both
Chopin's concertos and many other of his works.
Chechlinska notes that Chopin's sonatas in general were performed extremely
rarely, both in Poland and
throughout Europe.
The first complete performance of the Sonata in B minor was reported only in
1866, more than twenty
