Slowing Our Step for Chopin's Funeral March
The Backstory

Writing the dessert before the dinner

Most people know the Funeral March as a piece on its own, though it is actually the third movement of my four-movement Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35. I gave that third movement the French title Marche funèbre, which is where the popular nickname for both the movement and the whole sonata comes from. Rather than starting at the beginning like a sensible person, I wrote this third movement first in Paris in 1837 and left the rest for later. Wait two years to build the other three movements around your middle section and people might think you are working backwards, though it made complete sense to me at the time.

A broken heart and a missing engagement ring

That year of 1837 was a rough one for me, as my health was already failing and my engagement to Maria Wodzińska had just come to an end. Nobody asked me to write a funeral march and nobody was paying me a commission for it, so the music came entirely from my own mood. Some scholars suggest I was also mourning the fallen Polish patriots of the 1830 November Uprising, especially since a manuscript of the middle section is dated right before its anniversary. I never left a written note explaining a single reason for the piece, because when your lungs and your heart are both aching, you hardly need an official excuse to write sad music.

Not my first time at a funeral

People often assume this famous movement was my only attempt at such a grim genre, as if one funeral march per lifetime is the legal limit. In fact, back in 1826 and 1827, long before I ever settled in Paris, I had already written a completely separate Funeral March in C minor. That earlier piece stayed in my drawer while I was alive and was only published after my death as Op. 72, No. 2. Clearly, even as a teenager, I had a fondness for slow, solemn processions at the keyboard.

A winter getaway gone wrong

Before I could build the rest of Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 around my march, I survived a miserable winter in Majorca from 1838 to 1839 with the novelist George Sand. People go to islands for the sunshine, yet I spent the trip coughing and feeling worse than when I left France. By the summer of 1839, I was finally recovering at George Sand's peaceful country estate in Nohant. With fresh air and a quiet room, I pulled out my 1837 march and wrote the other three movements around it.

Three wild siblings for one slow march

To turn my standalone march into a full four-movement work, I opened with a movement marked Grave – Doppio movimento and followed it with a stormy Scherzo. After the slow Marche funèbre in the third spot, I closed the whole sonata with a brief, whirling Finale: Presto that rushes by like a gust of wind over graveyards. I decided not to dedicate the finished work to anyone when I wrapped it up in 1839. After all, handing a friend a gift-wrapped score with a funeral march at its center might send the wrong message about how you see their health.

A private preview before the presses rolled

In October 1839, back in Paris, I played the completed sonata privately for my fellow pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles. I preferred small rooms and close friends over large concert halls, so I rarely played my big sonatas in public. Because of my quiet habits, nobody even knows for certain when, where, or by whom the complete Op. 35 was first performed on a public stage. At least the publishers kept better records, and in May 1840 the sheet music came out in Leipzig, Paris, and London.

Four reckless children in one coat

Once those editions by Breitkopf & Härtel, Troupenas, and Wessel reached the shops, the public took to the music right away. The critics, however, raised their eyebrows at how I had put the four movements together. My fellow composer Robert Schumann remarked that I had simply tied together four of my most reckless children under a single title. I have to admit that my four movements do not behave like a polite, traditional family, though they certainly know how to hold a room's attention.

Strictly for ten fingers, no brass attached

Many listeners today picture a big brass band or a full orchestra when they hum the main tune of the Funeral March. I actually wrote every note of both the march and the complete sonata strictly for solo piano, without a single trumpet or drum in the score. I also had nothing to do with those gloomy English schoolyard words beginning with 'Pray for the dead' that children later sang to my melody. Ten fingers on a keyboard were plenty for me to create the sound of a heavy procession.

Invited to my own farewell

Even though I wrote the piece for solo piano, other musicians could not resist arranging it for larger ensembles. When I was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris in 1849, they played my own Marche funèbre at the graveside in an orchestration by Napoléon Henri Reber. There is a strange irony in writing your own farewell music twelve years in advance, though at least I knew the composer had good taste. Later on, British figures like Edward Elgar and Henry Wood also made grand orchestral versions of my humble piano piece.

The official soundtrack for state goodbyes

Over the decades, a movement I began in a Paris room in 1837 became the world's favorite way to say a formal goodbye. Whenever a head of state or a monarch passes away, military bands dust off my B-flat minor march and walk slowly down the avenue. It was played at the state funerals of John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, and Leonid Brezhnev, which is quite a varied guest list for one piece of music. Even in more recent times, it accompanied the farewells of Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II, proving that my old Paris manuscript still has plenty of work to do.