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Updated: May 25, 2025
It is certain that he spent more time on it, and gave it a larger share of his attention than was devoted to any other of his works. For several years prior to this, Beethoven's muse had been silent for the most part. No important work since the completion of the Eighth Symphony had been achieved, with the exception of the sonatas mentioned in a previous chapter.
They say to the pupil: 'You play badly, you must play better'; but they do not tell the pupil how to play better. They give doses of études, sonatas and pieces, yet never get at the heart of the matter at all. It is even worse than the fake singing teachers; I feel like saying it is damnable!" It was my privilege to be present at some of Mr. Matthay's private lessons, given at the Royal Academy.
The few sonatas which Chopin wrote do not deviate essentially from the orthodox structure, but one feels constantly that he was hampered in his movements by the artificial structure. Though they are full of genius, like everything he composed, he did not write them con amore. Concentration is one of Chopin's principal characteristics, and the sonata favors diffuseness.
James Huneker has not extravagantly called "the most marked contribution to solo sonata literature since Brahms' F-minor piano sonata"; yet it is not so fine a work as any one of the three sonatas which MacDowell afterward wrote.
Similarly on the supply side: if the baker insisted on bringing round bad epics instead of bread and the grocer bad sonatas instead of sugar, the supply, however good it might seem to the baker and the grocer, and however much satisfaction they might personally have derived from their work, would not be an economic supply: for the housekeeper, acting on behalf of the household, would not take it in.
For orchestra he wrote the "Indian" suite music of superb vigour, fantastically and deeply imaginative, wholly personal in quality; for the piano he wrote four sonatas of heroic and passionate content indisputable masterworks and various shorter pieces, free in form and poetic in inspiration; and he wrote many songs, some of them quite flawless in their loveliness and their emotional veracity.
Most exquisite of sonatas would not to them make up for a game of billiards! They cannot help it: they are made so"? I answer, It is true no one can by an effort of the will care for this or that; but where a man cares for nothing that is worth caring for, the fault must lie, not in the nature God made, but in the character the man himself has made and is making.
Women's fancy-work is of this sort often only prison work, done because there was no other exercising-ground for their poor little thoughts and fingers; and hence these wonderful pincushions are executed, these counterpanes woven, these sonatas learned. What hours, and weeks, nay, preparatory years of study, has that infernal jig cost them! It is the condition of the young lady's existence.
After a long while I began to like some of the slow movements and then some entire sonatas, several of which I could play once fairly well without notes. I used also to play Bach and Mendelssohn's Songs without Words and thought them lovely, but I always liked Handel best.
This output did not contain his most mature and characteristic works those were to come later, during the last six years of his creative activity; yet the product was in many ways a notable one, and some of it the two sonatas, the "Indian" suite, the songs of op. 47, the "Woodland Sketches" was, if not consistently of his very best, markedly fine and characteristic in quality.
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