As stated in Chapter Four, one of the first comprehensive
analyses of the works of Chopin was that of Hugo Leichtentritt in 1921. The
significance of a German musicologist undertaking a project of such a scale has
already been mentioned in Chapter Four. Leichtentritt's analysis of the B flat
Minor Sonata is quite significant in that it is almost always referred to in
subsequent analyses of the work by other analysts. Many of his opinions and
analytical discoveries were used to great advantage as a basis for further
investigation in later writings. Alan Walker views Leichtentritt's analyses as
extremely important for their time in that when it was still "fashionable to
regard Chopin as a mere dreamer, a loose musical thinker," Leichtentritt
revealed Chopin's structural mastery to "a generation who had not yet heard the
news."
A significant portion of Leichtentritt's analysis of the
opus 35 sonata deals with Chopin's harmonic idiom. His preoccupation with
harmonic analysis can in some cases be seen as superfluous, in the sense that
any musically educated reader would be able to discern Chopin's underlying
harmony for themselves. The issues dealt with by Leichtentritt in his analysis
will be examined only inasmuch as they contribute counter-arguments to the
negative reception of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. A
comprehensive survey of his analysis will thus not be undertaken.
Leichtentritt's understanding of the function of the
introductory four bars of the first movement of opus 35 is that of delaying the
entry of the first subject in order to create tension, the degree of which is
intensified by the metrical and harmonic irregularity of these bars. Furthermore, he believes that the work begins
on the fifth bar of an eight-bar phrase. Right from the start, then,
Leichtentritt highlights the importance of the
