THE KEY TO EVERYTHING

A dashing scherzo, a bittersweet waltz, a smouldering study, a flirtatious mazurka and, among his most difficult works, a sonata that ranges across the emotional spectrum. These works by Chopin couldn’t be more different from each other; remarkably, however, they share the same key: B minor.

‘Remarkably’ because it’s thought, at least by some people, that each of music’s 24 keys has a particular quality that composers tap into when wishing to express a particular mood or feeling. As early as the late 17th century people were writing about the effects of keys, but it was a composer and journalist called Christian Schubart (1739-1791) who took the bold step of defining the characters of all 24 of them in his book Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst, loosely translated as Ideas for an Aesthetic of the Art of Music. Regarding B minor, he described it as ‘the key of patience, of calm awaiting one’s fate and of submission to divine dispensation.’

That hardly describes the tone of the first movement of Chopin’s Sonata No 2 and certainly not its finale. The one movement that does suggest ‘calm awaiting one’s fate’ is the third, but