Sonata in G minor for piano and cello op. 65 is one of Chopin's final works and, at the same time, one of the most equivocal in his entire output. It contains many a novel and prophetic idea, but it is equally full of subtle reminiscences from the past. In the case of the latter, one can speak of playing with the convention of the era, conducted at the highest level of musical self-knowledge. This work, once so rejected and disdained, now attracts a new interest of Chopin scholars; when seen in the context of the great composer’s late style, it assumes a particular significance. Three great pieces of Chopin’s final phase: Fantasia, Barcarolle and the above-mentioned Sonata, together with the concise – almost aphoristic – song Melody, are all not so much his last will and recapitulation as proof of his artistic openness to the new and the unknown. Yet the originality of Sonata op. 65 does not consist in the choice of specific means of composing technique – for it can hardly match the novelty of Piano Sonata in B flat minor or of certain Preludes. This piece is seemingly objectivised, even conservative; here, Chopin treads along the safe path of classical form, doing nothing to distort it the way it was distorted first by Beethoven and then by Liszt. However, deeper insight reveals the highly original poetics of the work and a different kind of musical gesture, a different flow of musical narration, type of phrase and expression. The semantic field of this work, relatively recently discovered by Maria Piotrowska and associated, among others, with the poetry of fellow Polish Romantic Zygmunt Krasiński, leads to the late-Romantic works by Brahms and Franck. This only proves that the composer, had he lived a little longer, could have expressed himself with equal ease both in Liszt’s “New German” idiom and in the language of Hanslick’s “pure form.”
• The most interesting feature of the first movement (Allegro), with its highly melancholy gesture recalling the past ((brillante piano runs), consists in the peculiar symbiosis of both instruments and, at the same time, their structural differentiation – since cadenzas closing their musical ideas do not coincide. This creates a uniform and unbroken structure, a continuum, one in fact once described as Chopin’s undendliche Melodie. In this formally-developed three-theme Allegro, Chopin omits the first theme in the recapitulation – just as he did in his earlier Sonatas op. 35 and 58. The chord texture of the piano, with frequent runs of parallel sixths, imparts on this movement an expression of “concentrated melancholy”, soon to be so magnificently developed and deepened by young Brahms.
• Scherzo is an agitated dance, creatively modifying and “making absolute” the idiom of the mazurka; its middle section is a quasi-waltz, with an enchantingly sweet cantilena of the cello as an astonishing premonition of Tchaikovsky.
• The concise Largo of only 27 bars ushers in the sphere of “naive simplicity,” despite the fact that Maria Piotrowska hears “a voice of illusion-shattering Romantic irony” in the uncommon chromatic shift from B flat major to A flat major.
• The finale, resolved in the rhythm of a tarantella, is a blend of the rondo idea with the gradual form already used in the finale of Sonata in B minor; the final brightening effect is of unmistakably Beethovenian provenience.
Marcin Gmys
