Chopin – Funeral March | Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 35: III. Marche funèbre

Twelve years after he wrote it, they played this at his own funeral. Chopin died in Paris on 17 October 1849, aged thirty-nine. The funeral was held on 30 October at the Madeleine, with around three thousand people inside a church draped entirely in black, and an orchestral arrangement of this march by Napoléon Henri Reber was performed there. He was buried at Père Lachaise, the procession led by Prince Adam Czartoryski. He had asked for Mozart's Requiem to be sung. That nearly did not happen. The Archbishop of Paris refused at first, because women were not permitted to sing in the city's parish churches, and the Requiem cannot be done without them. A special dispensation was eventually granted on one condition: the women had to be invisible. Jeanne-Anaïs Castellan and Pauline Viardot sang Mozart's Requiem at Chopin's funeral from behind a black velvet curtain. (The complete Mozart Requiem is on this channel, if you want to hear what the three thousand heard.) THE MARCH CAME FIRST The strangest thing about this piece is that it is older than the work it belongs to. Chopin wrote the Funeral March around 1837 — the scholar Jeffrey Kallberg argues it may go back as far as 1835 — and only built the rest of the Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor around it afterwards, finishing in the summer of 1839 at Nohant. It was published in May 1840 in London, Leipzig and Paris. So the march is not the emotional climax of a sonata. The sonata is a house built around a room that already existed. The form is simple and merciless: the march, then a trio in D flat major — a serene, nocturne-like melody, the most tender thing Chopin ever wrote into a piece this bleak — and then the march returns, unchanged, as if the trio had never happened. That return is the whole point. SCHUMANN HATED IT Robert Schumann reviewed the sonata and was unimpressed. He said Chopin had simply bound "four of his maddest children under the same roof", and of this march, that it "has something repulsive" about it. The finale that follows — seventy-odd seconds of bare unison running in parallel octaves with no melody at all — he dismissed as something that "seems more like a mockery than any music". Anton Rubinstein is said to have called that finale the wind howling around the gravestones. SINCE THEN It has become the funeral music of the modern world, played at the funerals of John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Polish president Lech Kaczyński. ABOUT THIS RECORDING A modern studio performance, used through the YouTube Audio Library. Chopin died in 1849, so the music is in the public domain worldwide. No restoration was applied — this is a clean digital master, presented untouched. SOURCES Piano Sonata No. 2 (Chopin) — Wikipedia. Sources the 1837 (possibly 1835) date of the march against the 1839 completion, the May 1840 publication, the ternary form and D flat major trio, Schumann's "four of his maddest children" and "something repulsive", his verdict on the finale, Rubinstein on the gravestones, and the list of state funerals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_S...) Frédéric Chopin — Wikipedia, for the death on 17 October 1849: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A... Chopin's funeral music — Interlude. Sources the 30 October service at the Madeleine, the three thousand mourners, the Archbishop's refusal and the dispensation, Castellan and Viardot singing from behind a black velvet curtain, Reber's orchestration being played, and Czartoryski leading the procession: https://interlude.hk/behind-curtain-c... Score and editions — IMSLP: https://imslp.org/wiki/Piano_Sonata_N...) #Chopin #FuneralMarch #ClassicalMusic #Piano