years after its completion. Chopin was known to have
played the opus 35 sonata once in his final fourteen concerts beginning in Paris in 1839, that being in the Gentlemen's Concert Hall,
Manchester, on
August 28 1848.
In the decades following its publication, however, most renowned pianists
included opus 35 in their concert repertoire, including Liszt, Tausig, Busoni,
Anton Rubinstein, and Pachmann.
The basic compositional background of Chopin's second
piano sonata having been presented, the initial public reaction to this work
will be examined in Chapter Three, with a view to providing a context for
twentieth-century analyses which attempt to dispel negative comments about the
work.
