Chopin and Schubert: Cello Sonatas

Schubert and Chopin—two men of genius who had much in common: ultimately tragic figures who both died in their thirties, the last few years of their lives spent under the constant shadow of death; both miraculously inventive; both masters of smaller forms, through which they transformed musical genres—in Schubert’s case that of song, in Chopin’s that of piano music; and both possessed of a gift for melody that has won them places deep in the hearts of music lovers. On the other hand, they were in so many ways utterly different: Schubert an unworldly, untidy Bohemian who never enjoyed true worldly success, was not a great performer, but mastered most musical forms; Chopin a fastidious dandy who set sartorial as well as musical fashions ablaze in Paris, was practically worshipped as a virtuoso pianist, but never even attempted to compose a work not featuring his chosen instrument. One wonders how—or if—they would have related to each other had they ever met. Well, they never did meet; but they might have done so, had Schubert not died in Vienna in late 1828, at the unpardonably early age of thirty-one. Within a year of that catastrophic event, the nineteen-year-old Chopin was taking the great city by storm, the Viennese music establishment stunned and fascinated by this exotic talent from Poland—‘a light flashing across our musical horizon like a brilliant meteor’, as one reviewer put it. Later that year, while staying at the Polish palace (a ‘paradise’, according to Chopin) of Prince Radziwill, an amateur cellist who had known Beethoven and Goethe and was to be the dedicatee of Chopin’s piano trio, Chopin wrote his Polonaise brillante for piano and cello as a gift for the Prince and his pretty pianist daughter, Princess Wanda. Chopin’s much-quoted letter to a friend, written shortly afterwards, in which he dismissed the polonaise as ‘nothing more than a brilliant drawing-room piece suitable for the ladies’ should not be taken too seriously. It is probably just a self-deprecating squib typical of the composer’s modesty; and furthermore it should be remembered that, at the time of that letter, he had not yet written the expressive introduction (which was added for a concert in Warsaw the following year)—or even, it would seem, the cello’s triumphant closing theme (track 2, 4'32) which hastens the work towards its exuberant conclusion. At any rate, since he late