Daniel Barenboim - Schubert Klaviersonaten

Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonatas

Richard Wigmore

I. Beginnings

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 Towards a more Romantic vision of the Classical sonata second theme arrives, it is not in the expected C major but the more colorful F major, shadowed with minor-keyed harmonies.

The not-so-slow second movement is a rondo in Schubert’s most easygoing vein. Eleven years later he gave this beguiling theme an added breadth in the last movement of his great A major Sonata D 959. Belying its imposing unison opening, the finale of D 537 has a dancing conviviality, enlivened by some typically bold modulations.

We can only guess why Schubert revised the D flat Sonata D 567 as the Sonata in E flat D 568. Perhaps he calculated that the new key would make it more attractive to amateurs, though ironically the sonata was only published posthumously. The first movement—expanded from its D flat original— reveals the composer at his most amiably Viennese, with a whiff of sublimated café music in the second theme. In the minuet-like opening we are reminded of Schubert’s beloved Mozart, though, typically, he ranges through a wider spectrum of keys than Mozart would have permitted himself in an exposition. The plaintive Andante molto hints at the loneliness and confessional pathos of Schubert’s late slow movements. Mozart also lies behind the gracious minuet (newly composed when Schubert revised the sonata) and lolloping ländler trio, while the 6/8 finale combines a catchy waltz lilt with Schubert’s most harmonically adventurous development to date.

In the Sonata in B major D 575, the first movement’s aspirations to military swagger are constantly undercut by introspective musing and abrupt, disorienting harmonic shifts. Within the first 20 bars Schubert wrenches the music from B major, via a fortissimo C major, to G major. The beatific mood of the Andante is shattered by the orchestralstyle minor-mode middle section—a foretaste of the violent eruptions in his later slow movements. The last two movements, though, reveal Schubert at his most genial: a scherzo with some lively contrapuntal interplay and an evocation of rustic drones in the ländler trio, and another dancing finale whose almost childlike themes seem to grow inevitably from each other.

The Sonata in A major D 664 probably dates from Schubert’s holiday in the mountains of Upper Austria in the summer of 1819. A more intimate companion to the contemporary “Trout” Quintet in the same key, this delectable work comes closer than any of his sonatas to the traditional

image of Schubert the effortlessly spontaneous lyricist. The serene, songful opening sets the tone. It is typical of Schubert at his most undynamic that the skipping second theme should start in the home key before casually slipping into the expected dominant, E major. The Andante is one of Schubert’s ravishing nocturnes, whose lulling theme initially tantalizes us as to whether it is in 3/4 or 6/8 time. As elsewhere in Schubert’s sonatas, the textures often suggest a string quartet or quintet. The finale is the most obviously pianistic movement of the three, a cascading waltz full sly deflections of key and such witty touches as the sudden hold-up in the midst of the second theme.

II. Masterworks

By 1822 the omens looked good for the 25-year-old Schubert. Championed by a devoted circle of friends, he was rapidly gaining a reputation in Vienna as a young composer to watch. Then, some time at the end of 1822 or the early weeks of 1823, he became seriously ill with the symptoms of syphilis. The first music Schubert composed during his convalescence was the A minor Sonata D 784, written in February 1823, while he was being cared for by his father and stepmother. Even without knowledge of his personal circumstances, it is impossible to miss the music’s unnerving bleakness and anguish. It is typical of Schubert’s later keyboard music that the vast first movement often evokes other sound worlds: soft timpani in the deep, ominous tremolos, a full orchestra when the mysteriously bare main theme erupts fortissimo. Relief of sorts comes with the assuaging second theme, somewhere between a chant and a lullaby, whose sonority suggests a hushed brass chorale.

The solemn theme of the Andante is punctuated by an oscillating figure in octaves marked to be played in triple piano with the soft, mute pedal—an otherworldly effect. If this movement can again evoke an orchestra, the finale, opening in fretful two-part counterpoint, is wholly pianistic in conception. The second theme, hovering between major and minor, offers lyrical respite in both the exposition and recapitulation. But the opening theme, now in a rampaging fortissimo, has the last word: an aptly stark conclusion to the most tragic keyboard work that Schubert ever wrote.

By the early months of 1825, Schubert’s health and spirits were substantially restored. With his reputation continuing to grow, the year was a fruitful one both socially and artistically. During the spring and summer he composed three piano sonatas: the unfinished “Reliquie” (literally “relic”), D 840, the A minor D 845 and the D major D 850. Each is conceived on a generous scale, with something of the “heavenly length” that Schumann admired in the “Great” C major Symphony. The opening Moderato of the A minor work D 845—the first of three sonatas published in his lifetime—is as monumental as its counterpart in D 784. The spirit, though, lightens in the second theme, which transmutes a pounding military march heard earlier into dancing lyricism. The crisis comes not in the central development, much of which unfolds in a spectral pianissimo, but in a coda of mounting fury where Schubert seems to echo Beethoven’s famous exclamation, “The piano must break!” When the composer played the Andante, a set of five variations on a simple but hypnotic theme, during an impromptu concert in Kremsmünster in May 1825, his listeners were enchanted. As he recorded, they told him that “the keys became singing voices under my hands, which, if true, greatly pleases me, since I cannot stand the wretched chopping which even distinguished pianists indulge in….” The scherzo, full of rhythmic teasing, is half-agitated, halfplayful, while the moto perpetuo finale, with its luminous A major episode, is a Schubertian take on the finale of Mozart’s sonata in the same key, K. 310.

“Life…bubbles forth from the sonata in D—one thing after another, exciting and irresistible,” was Schumann’s summary of the Sonata in D major D 850, composed in the mountain resort of Bad Gastein during Schubert’s summer holiday of a lifetime. It is surely not over-fanciful to hear the exhilaration of that glorious Sommerreise in both this sonata and the “Great” C major symphony, born at the same time. With its boundless rhythmic energy and apparently casual shifts to distant keys, the first movement breathes an al fresco holiday spirit. For Schumann, the luxuriant, leisurely Andante was “so bursting with rapture that it seems unable to sing itself out.”

The ebullient scherzo draws its piquancy and swagger from a constant tug between triple and duple time. “Anyone who tried to take [the finale] seriously would only look ridiculous,” Schumann said about the fourth movement—

understandable in the face of the jaunty main theme and its ticking accompaniment (was Schubert parodying Haydn’s “Clock” Symphony?). But Schumann seems to have underestimated the second of the two episodes, which begins with a ravishing cantabile melody before developing a hitherto unsuspected sinew.

Schubert’s two major instrumental works of 1826, the String Quartet D 887 and the Sonata in G major D 894, share the same key and the same sense of infinite spaciousness. Yet in mood they could hardly be more different. While the quartet is restless and disturbed, the sonata, at least in its outer movements, is suffused with a mysterious lyrical serenity. Uniquely among Schubert’s sonatas, it contains no truly fast music. The magical opening theme, drifting in and out of a remote key, exudes a hypnotic tranquility, while the second theme is a spiritualized waltz. The whole movement seems to hover between dance and dream.

In the Andante, Schubert contrasts a gracious refrain, like a slow minuet, with episodes that veer between agitation and pathos. Though marked “Menuett,” the third movement, with its obsessive repeated-note patterns, is more countrified ländler than courtly dance. Its repeated-note pattern recurs in the main theme of the finale, where musette drones and slow-moving harmonies again evoke an idealised rusticity. True to the spirit of the whole work, the finale ends pianissimo, with a dream-echo of the main theme.

III. Swan Song

By the summer of 1828 Schubert’s often precarious health had deteriorated to the point where he was plagued by headaches and attacks of nausea. Yet he not only kept up a more or less active social life but continued to work at a feverish rate. In September he completed four visionary masterpieces that crowned his work as a composer of instrumental music: the C major String Quintet, and three sonatas, D 958, D 959 and D 960. The last of these, especially, has acquired an aura of otherworldliness, as if Schubert were already communicating from beyond the grave. Yet we should be wary of hearing these works as a protracted farewell. While Schubert realized that he was unlikely to make old bones, he had no inkling until his final illness that the autumn of 1828 would be his last. There is pathos, anguish, and a sense of evanescence in these sonatas—rage,

26 too, in the C minor and the cataclysm of the A major’s Andantino—but also exuberance, humor, and a sheer zest for life.

The C minor and A major sonatas seem to confirm the notion that Schubert was determined to establish himself as Beethoven’s successor after the master’s death in March 1827. Behind the opening of the Sonata in C minor D 958 lie Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor; there are halfechoes of the “Pathétique” and “Pastorale” sonatas in the Adagio, while the finale distantly recalls the “galloping” finales of the “Kreutzer” Sonata and the Piano Sonata Op. 31 No. 3. As ever, though, the music is utterly Schubertian. Where Beethoven’s variation theme is classically rounded, Schubert extends its “hammer blows” in a fevered ascending sequence before a precipitate scale suddenly hurtles the music into the depths. This opening has been well described by Alfred Brendel: “The leading character in this tragedy is being chased and cornered, and looks in vain for a way to escape.” The solemn calm of the Adagio is ruffled by two widely modulating episodes whose restlessness can grow febrile. The third movement is marked “Menuett” but closer in spirit to the Romantic intermezzo than the courtly Classical minuet. As in the “Death and the Maiden” and G major string quartets, Schubert’s vast finale is a frantic nocturnal ride, using the tarantella rhythms beloved of Italian opera composers with grim, even nightmarish obsessiveness.

Schubert modelled the finale of the Sonata in A major D 959 on the last movement of Beethoven’s Sonata in G major, Op. 31 No. 1, right down to the fragmentation of the theme in the coda and the whirlwind send-off. But where Beethoven is terse, Schubert is typically expansive in his lyricism. In an unprecedented ploy, the movement ends with an allusion to the work’s opening bars—the kind of unifying cyclic device later favored by Liszt, Schumann, and others.

In the opening movement, the orchestrally inspired opening theme generates some trenchant motivic argument à la Beethoven. Yet Schubert’s leisurely time-scale and sensuous harmonic shifts are entirely his own; and there is nothing Beethovenian about the central development, where Schubert uses a whimsical fragment, first heard at the end of the exposition, as the basis for calm lyric sequences. The Andantino opens as a melancholy barcarolle, harmonized first in F sharp minor and then, with magical

effect, in A major. Key and meter are undermined in a deceptively whimsical recitative-cum-cadenza. The keyboard then morphs into a grotesque orchestra for a seismic fantasia that pushes the music to the brink of incoherence. Alfred Brendel, once again, has well described this terrifying central episode as the musical equivalent of a nervous breakdown: a world away from the familiar, gemütlich Schubert, but a searing expression of an equally crucial aspect of his creative persona and, dare one say, of the despair that intermittently raged within the man himself.

In the famous Sonata in B flat D 960, the Beethovenian influence is at best oblique: a distant recollection of the “Archduke” Trio, perhaps, in the serene opening theme; and, in the way the finale approaches B flat via C minor, an echo of Beethoven’s last work, the new finale for his B flat Quartet, Op. 130. Again, though, the spirit is utterly unBeethovenian. The profound contemplative ecstasy of the first two movements is, with the G major Sonata D 894 and parts of the String Quintet, the consummation of a quintessential Schubertian experience first glimpsed in his 1815 setting of Goethe’s Wandrers Nachtlied. The ethereal tranquillity of the opening movement deepens in the Andante sostenuto, a nocturnal barcarolle in C-sharp minor. The texture of the opening theme uncannily evokes the Adagio of the String Quintet: second violin and viola intoning the floating melody against delicate pizzicatos from the other strings. With its nonchalant shifts of register and harmonic sideslips, the scherzo forms a mercurial interlude between the Andante’s timeless meditation and the more corporeal world of the finale, opening “off-key” with a Hungarian-tinged dance tune. Although he could hardly have known that this would be his last music for piano, Schubert, like Beethoven in the Op. 130 finale, bowed out with mingled robustness, lyrical tenderness, and wry, quizzical grace.

Richard Wigmore is a writer, broadcaster, and lecturer specializing in Romantic and Classical chamber music and lieder. He writes for Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, and other journals, and has taught classes in the history and interpretation of lieder at Birkbeck College, the Royal Academy of Music, and the Guildhall. His publications include Schubert: The Complete Song Texts and The Faber Pocket Guide to Haydn.