Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky
Sonatas

About Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky's Sonatas

Of Tchaikovsky's two piano sonatas, only the Grande Sonate in G major, Op. 37, was published during his lifetime. Following the composer’s sudden death at the end of 1893, Sergei Taneyev took on the task of seeing through the press a number of Tchaikovsky's unpublished scores. Among those was the early C sharp minor Sonata, which accounts for the misleadingly high opus number 80.

There is also an unfinished single-movement work possibly intended as the first movement of a sonata, dating from 1863-4, a year before the four-movement C sharp minor Sonata of 1865. This fragment has twice been completed and published under the title Sonata, by K. K. Kalinenko (1980) and Leslie Howard (1995) respectively.