Piano Sonata No. 3 in B Minor

In Chopin’s final decade, his style underwent a radical change and his productivity dropped sharply as he embraced more complex or novel structural forms and toiled harder to bring works to fruition. A series of great masterpieces followed, including in 1844 the Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58. On the face of it this is a more traditional sonata than his Piano Sonata No. 2 (1839), with close-knit thematic development and a more conventional finale. Its four movements follow the same pattern, with the slow movement placed third, following the scherzo. The subtly powerful first movement points up Chopin’s close study of Baroque counterpoint in the imitative nature of much of the passagework. The emotional heart of the movement is the nocturne-like second theme, one of his loveliest inspirations, where ornamentation is used for structural rather than merely decorative purposes, a feature of Chopin’s late music. The second movement is a limpid “Scherzo” of feathered delicacy, while the “Largo” that follows is a fusion of nocturne and march. A linking passage leads to the “Finale” in the home key of B minor, a sonata rondo form of cumulative momentum and cascading runs. Chopin is adept at building considerable heads of steam until finally unleashing the fearsome coda that brings the work to a triumphant conclusion in a blaze of B major.