sonata
form alone, unless one rules that "...a sonata cannot exist except in the form fixed
for all eternity by certain older masters."
He criticises Schumann's abhorrence of the Funeral March, stating that Schumann
missed the whole point of the sonata in that the Funeral March is the central
core of the whole work. Like many other theorists in the twentieth century,
Hedley believed that it was from the March (written two years before the other
movements) that the first movement and Scherzo were derived in that it
stimulated Chopin "to embody within the framework of a sonata the emotions which
the vision of death aroused in him."
Herbert Weinstock also attacks Schumann's critique of opus
35. He maintains that "[t]he literary-minded Schumann would have been less
disturbed if Chopin had given the four separate movements coined romantic names....
Calling the B-flat minor a sonata was neither caprice nor jest: it is a sonata
by Chopin."
From a performance point of view, Weinstock believes that if the work is played
so that it sounds like four separate pieces, the fault is that of the pianist,
and not Chopin. He adds that if he "...heard it played...with the complete,
over-all, four-movement structural and aesthetic-emotional unity of a Mozart
piano concerto or Beethoven piano sonata; then the achievement was Chopin's -
and the pianists."
Unfortunately, Weinstock makes an error here in comparing the four-movement
structure of Chopin's opus 35 with the three-movement form of a Mozart piano
concerto; presumably he is attesting to the presence of the structural unity of
the sonata cycle in Chopin's opus 35. In connection with the foregoing, he
asserts that Chopin designed the other three movements to go with the Funeral
March, and that he conceived them as belonging together. The presence of
thematic interrelationships between all four movements of the sonata (as
outlined in Chapters Seven and Eight) tends to support this view.
Although he does not illustrate his observation, Weinstock
notes the close relation between the second subject of the first movement, the
melody of the più lento section of
the Scherzo, and the Trio of the Funeral March. He also highlights the
importance of the manner in which the Scherzo and the Funeral March are
connected, whereby Chopin ends the Scherzo with the melody from the più lento section. This, according
