MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Schubert: The Last Three Piano Sonatas D958, 959, 960

"I find when I listen to this recording, you have to believe that Schubert was really one of the outstanding composers of the 19th century. [Murray] Perahia's playing is just really that persuasive." -- Pierre Ruhe, Atlanta Journal Constitution

"There've been great recordings of all three Sonatas, but one of the key qualities in Perahia's readings is his ability almost to remove himself from the equation. You might perhaps pick up Pollini's fabulous recordings of D.958 and 959 to hear Pollini, or Richter's extraordinary D.960 to hear Richter. You'll pick up Perahia to hear Schubert, and I promise you there's no lack of passion or emotional depth here, despite Perahia's relatively understated approach when compared to the titanic recordings I've just mentioned."
-- Andrew McGregor, presenter of Radio 3's CD Review

The thirty-year-old Schubert lived for only another year after completing Winterreise, his second song cycle, in the fall of 1827. That year, however, was not only his most productive, but possibly his most innovative, in the composition of instrumental music. Between November of 1827 and his death the following November, Schubert produced his last three piano sonatas, his first - and last - complete piano trios, his only string quintet, and his only chamber fantasies, as well as adding a second set of piano impromptus to the first, composed only a few months before.

Unlike the other works of his final year, the last three piano sonatas belong to a genre that he had explored throughout his life, and of which he had published three of comparable scope in 1825-26. But now the piano sonata, too, took on characteristics not nearly so apparent in Schubert's music before Winterreise. A subtle kind of cyclic organization - the linking of the four separate movements of a work through shared melodic, rhythmic and harmonic constellations - became more all-pervasive and multivalent than before. This subliminal but profound way of linking separate movements enables them all to take part in a single compositional process - as it were, a single line of musical narrative. The Winterreise-haunted slow movements of these last sonatas (weightier and more somber than in any of the earlier sonatas) are only one manifestation of the broadened range of affect and gesture afforded by such a cyclic conception. Perhaps most strikingly, the beginnings of all three sonatas are marked by unmediated juxtapositions of tonally and gesturally contrasting material, disjunctions that suggest a divided tonal world or even an existentially threatened protagonist. Invariably, these disjunctions play a definitive role in shaping the musical events that ensue from them, which thus might be understood metaphorically as stages in the evolving inner life of that protagonist.

It is tempting to link this persona to the lonely, alienated wanderer of Winterreise. Many aspects of Schubert's life suggest that he might indeed have felt identified with that wanderer, and thus drawn to setting the twenty-four poems that tell of his lonely and unfulfilled longing for death in the aftermath of unrequited love. Schubert's life, far more focused on the somewhat unstable allegiances of friendship than on those of family, never fully established an independent home for itself, left no record of any fulfilled love relationship, and, after he contracted syphilis in 1822, was consigned to recurring illness and untimely death. In "Der Leiermann," the final song of Winterreise, the wanderer describes an old beggar, as much an outcast as himself, endlessly turning the handle of a hurdy gurdy. But at the end he addresses the old beggar, his benumbed double: "Strange old man," he asks, "shall I go with you? Will you turn your hurdy gurdy to my songs?" It is again tempting to think that in his last music Schubert sought - even if only unconsciously - to revive this Leiermann as a companion for the lonely wanderer within himself, to engender for that wanderer the inner sense of place so absent from the Winterreise poems, and thus to prepare himself for the early death that he must, on some level of awareness, have expected. The last sonatas contain highly profiled passages that resonate specifically both with the songs of Winterreise and with such others as "Der Wanderer" and "Pilgerweise," whose texts deal with wandering, alienation and the quest for inner peace. Each of these sonatas, in the course of its four movements, suggests in its own way a progression from self-doubt or inner conflict toward fuller self-acceptance, a sense of coming home to oneself.
Scholars have speculated about the influence of Beethoven on all three of Schubert's last sonatas. Nowhere is that influence more apparent than in the opening theme of the C Minor Sonata, a virtual quotation of the theme of Beethoven's 32 Variations in the same key. But after only a few measures, where Beethoven's single-phrased theme reaches a cadence, a downward-rushing A-flat-major scale tears Schubert's music wide open, momentarily stalling momentum through this disjunctive gesture in order to introduce a contrasting motive of his own invention. This new motive anticipates the theme and key of the following Adagio, a movement full of allusions to the songs of Winterreise. Since the development of the first movement has already evoked an atmosphere of eerie, death-like calm in the wake of winter turbulence, the echoes in this slow movement's theme of "Das Wirtshaus" (in which the wanderer longs for death) invite association with the song's text. The menuetto is again somber and ghostly, and the finale, like that of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" Quartet, is a darkly obsessive tarantella. Distinctive elements of a hesitant, questioning progression from the Adagio return to this finale, first to proclaim the arrival of its defiant, C-sharp-minor second theme, later as flashes of memory in the drive to the movement's central climax.

The opening phrase of the A Major Sonata is inscrutably abstract; the second phrase follows disjunctively, contrasting with the first in almost every conceivable way, as if quietly to question it. These two phrases hold the motivic nuclei - rhythmic, melodic, and even harmonic - of all four of the Sonata's movements. Each of the first two movements harbors at its core music unlike any heard before. In the first, a concluding embellishment of the second theme gives rise, like a hypnotic spark, to the static, dream-like oscillation of the development. In the Andantino, a nightmarish episode of seeming chaos wells up from the silence after the cadence of the plaintive opening theme. Through sudden changes of key and texture, the scherzo is jolted into sudden recollections of both of these extraordinary episodes, thus preparing for the more integrated return of their memory in the concluding rondo, whose theme marks a final transformation into song the Sonata's inscrutable opening phrase.

In the B-flat Major Sonata, the sense of a divided tonal world finds its most succinct expression in the mysterious G-flat trill that emerges from beneath the cadence of the opening phrase. This trill becomes the talisman that opens the way into the enchantments of the remote G-flat- and D-flat-major regions, but that soon also raises the specter of their harrowing transformation into the minor (as F-sharp minor and C-sharp minor). In a development that specifically recalls the opening motive of "Der Wanderer," the searching, journeying music eventually falls into a lonely stasis, to which the trill and the opening theme return as if in a distant, epiphanic vision. Schubert's story "My Dream," found in his papers after his death, tells of his banishment to a distant country by his father. In his second exile he begins to sing songs: "But when I wished to sing of love," he writes, "it turned to sorrow, and when I wanted to sing of sorrow it was transformed for me into love." The Andante sostenuto, its remote key of C-sharp minor foreshadowed by the tonal drama of the first movement, exemplifies these emotional trajectories from Schubert's story with special poignancy: the same succession of three melodic phrases comes twice, but in antipodal harmonizations, the first group moving from minor to major, the second from major back to minor. The hymn-like middle section recalls the theme of the first movement, as does the scherzo, which gently parodies that theme at double speed and then moves on to parody the slow movement in its middle section. Although not at all obviously for the listener, the theme of the finale derives in almost every way - melodically, harmonically, and texturally - from the second phrase of the first movement. Moreover, the finale's second theme is a jubilant transformation of a melody from the end of the slow movement. Even though not marked for recognition, these motivic relationships impart to these themes a special resonance with their surroundings, a resonance perhaps sensed even though its sources go unrecognized.
- Charles Fisk