Tradition and Innovation Piano Works by Schubert, Schoenberg, and Webern
Richard Wigmore
Towards the end of 1816, the 19-year-old Schubert made his first bid for freedom. Abandoning the drudgery of teaching at his father’s school, he moved into the luxurious home of his sybaritic friend Franz von Schober. Shortly afterwards he gave up his studies with Antonio Salieri, irked by the venerable Italian’s insistence that he should give “the barbarous German language” a wide berth. Resisting his teacher’s efforts to turn him into a cosmopolitan Italianate composer, Schubert had produced some 250 lieder during his miraculous song years of 1815 and 1816. That this frantic pace slackened in 1817 was due at least in part to Schubert’s absorption in the challenge of the piano sonata. Schubert had begun two sonatas in 1815 but failed to finish either. Now he returned to the medium with renewed enthusiasm, inspired, no doubt, by the presence of a stateof-the art six-octave piano in the Schober family apartment. Another factor behind this spate of sonata composition was his desire to establish himself as a composer in the serious instrumental genres. A sensitive but relatively modest pianist (one of his friends observed that “the expression of the emotional world within him far outweighed his technical development”), Schubert could not follow Mozart and Beethoven as a composer-virtuoso. But he could emulate them by publishing sonatas for the flourishing amateur market. It was surely with the hope—vain, as it turned out—of immediate publication that he composed three sonatas, and began at least three more, during 1817. While publishers were soon eager to acquire Schubert’s songs and piano dances, they baulked at issuing sonatas by a relatively unknown 20-year-old. 13
