From Innocence to Experience Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonatas
Richard Wigmore
I. Beginnings
Towards a more Romantic vision of the Classical sonata
In the autumn of 1816 Schubert made his first bid for freedom. Abandoning the drudgery of teaching at his father’s school, he moved into the, to him, luxurious family home of his friend Franz von Schober. Resisting his teacher Antonio Salieri’s efforts to turn him into a cosmopolitan Italianate composer, Schubert had produced some 250 lieder in 1815 and 1816. That this frantic pace of production slackened during 1817 was due to Schubert’s absorption in the challenge of the piano sonata. Schubert had composed two unfinished sonatas in 1815. Two years later he returned to the medium with renewed enthusiasm, doubtlessly inspired by the presence of a sixoctave piano in the Schober household. A relatively modest pianist (a friend observed that “the expression of the emotional world within him far outweighed his technique”), Schubert could not follow Mozart and Beethoven as a composer-virtuoso. But he could emulate them by publishing sonatas for the flourishing amateur market. And it was surely with the hope—vain, as it turned out—of immediate publication that he completed the sonatas in A minor, D flat (later revised in E flat) and B major, and began at least three more during 1817. While publishers were soon eager to acquire Schubert’s songs and piano miniatures, they baulked at issuing sonatas by a 20-year-old whose reputation barely penetrated beyond his circle of friends. Like so many instrumental works from the years 1817 to 1822, the three-movement Sonata in A minor D 537 shows Schubert moving towards a more Romantically subjective vision of the Classical sonata. The first movement’s fiery, almost heroic opening has a Beethovenian cut. But it is characteristic of Schubert’s fondness for picturesque modulations that he quickly spirits the music from A minor to its polar opposite, E flat major; and when the calmer 21
