Cello Sonata in G Minor

Chopin wrote so much outstanding music for solo piano that it’s easy to overlook the Cello Sonata he completed late in his life, in 1847. A certain mystery hangs over the Sonata’s opening movement, which Chopin omitted when he premiered the work with the cellist Auguste Franchomme in Paris. Its introductory measures echo “Gute Nacht”, the opening song of Schubert’s lovelorn cycle Winterreise (1827), and it’s possible that the plaintively introspective mood of the movement reflects the breakdown of Chopin’s relationship with the writer George Sand. The second movement is a vigorous “Scherzo”, whose leaping Polish dance rhythms harbour a certain air of bold defiance. The slow movement is, by contrast, a small oasis of becalmed beauty, the cello and piano together weaving a melodic line akin to those in Chopin’s famous nocturnes for piano. The Sonata’s finale mirrors the turbulence found in the opening movement, before pivoting in its final pages toward an ostensibly upbeat conclusion. The tinge of underlying desperation lingers, however, and the Cello Sonata as a whole remains one of Chopin’s most personal statements. Just days before his death in 1849, it was among the last pieces he requested to listen to.