In the second place, the Chopin sonatas owe not a little of their unique appearance to the composer’s great gift of harmony. The foundation of the classical sonata form was harmonic, and, be it said with due regard to exceptions, was rigid. Nothing was more characteristic of it, both in the early and late stages of its use, than the harmonic clearness of what one may call the approach to themes, episodes, or sections, and the sharp definition of these sections by what were fundamentally conventional cadences. Chopin in his sonatas obliterated at least one of these sectional lines. It is impossible to decide in the first movements where the middle section ends and the last section begins. It is not only that the first theme fails to make its reappearance. The harmonies surge on from the development section into the last section with no trace of break in their current. Even the cadences at the end of the first sections are incomplete, and the modulations by which they progress sudden and remote. Such procedures foretell unmistakably the endless harmonies of Wagner. So does the treatment of the development section in both sonatas, with the scattering of motives over never-ending progressions of chords. No sonatas, not even those of Beethoven, present such radical variations from the accepted form; and naturally the question arises whether such movements as these of Chopin’s are properly in sonata form at all. One can only answer that Chopin named them sonatas, and that they represent at least what he felt a sonata should be. Mr. Shedlock has said of Beethoven that in aiming at a higher organization, he actually became a disorganizer. One cannot attribute such a conscious aim to Chopin; yet it is plain that his instinct led him to the complete demolition of one or two of the conventional restrictions of the sonata form. Before leaving the sonatas there is a word to be said of Chopin’s comprehension of the group of four movements as a whole. It is such a comprehension on the part of a Beethoven that makes many of his later sonatas and a few of his earlier ones indisputably grand. In his case the successive dependence of the various movements on each other is often made plain either by the actual merging of one into the other, or by the employment of the same or cognate thematic materials in all. Of such structural unity there is no trace in the two great sonatas of Chopin. The separate movements are formally complete in themselves, and not materially related. Any other union between the separate movements of suite, sonata, or symphony, if, indeed, it is not a matter of familiarity with the whole work, or of respect for the composer, exists only in the mind of the hearer according to his or her sensibilities. Of the Chopin sonatas that in B-flat minor will probably impress most people as an impassioned and powerful whole; that in B minor as less unified.