Franz Schubert: Latest Piano Works

Description

In the piano catalogue of Franz Schubert, the final creative region possesses the quality of extreme places: it appears at once familiar and remote, domestic in its sonic matter and vertiginous in its perception of time. The track listing places Sonata no. 21 in B flat major D. 960 beside the Drei Klavierstücke D. 946, setting the listener before two complementary outcomes of the same maturity. The great sonata is a landscape in which thought seems to walk rather than proceed; the three independent pieces, close to the Impromptus and the Moments musicaux, belong to a writing more enigmatic and irregular. The programme as a whole thus offers a meditation on the late style of Schubert, where the keyboard becomes a place of song without voice, a theatre of harmonic apparitions, and an instrument capable of transforming duration into destiny. Schubert reaches these works after having absorbed the Viennese tradition and the presence of Beethoven, by then newly transmuted into historical memory. His response takes its own path, founded upon lyrical dilation, repetition as experience, and modulation as inward journey. The piano page preserves the classical legacy of construction and grafts upon it a temporal logic made of returns, thresholds and sudden tonal distances. The celebrated formula of heavenly length, born in relation to the great symphony, also illumines this pianistic world, since it indicates a manner of inhabiting time without consuming it in the urgency of development. In the final sonatas, regarded by critical tradition as the summit of the relationship between Schubert and the genre, the piano speaks with a personal and introspective voice, far from salon brilliance and concertante titanism.
Sonata no. 21 in B flat major D. 960 belongs to the concluding triad of piano sonatas and constitutes its most luminous and most disquieting threshold. The opening Molto moderato immediately sets forth the poetic nucleus of the work. A plain melody, almost breathed, proceeds with solemn simplicity in the middle register, while the famous low trill on G flat introduces a subterranean presence, an alien vibration that alters from within the serenity of the theme. This single acoustic event becomes structural memory and casts upon the key of B flat major a shadow that deepens its sweetness. Sonata form assumes a contemplative dimension: the themes appear as regions of one and the same landscape, each endowed with light, breath and distance. The repetition of the exposition accentuates the ritual character of the movement, making return an act of recognition. The Andante sostenuto descends into C sharp minor, a remote key in relation to the B flat of the whole, and opens one of the loftiest meditations in the piano literature. The rocking rhythm and the almost chamber-like quality of the texture suggest a song sustained by invisible instrumental presences. The upper line proceeds with austere sweetness, while the bass marks out a regular motion, akin to a funeral barcarolle. The central section in A major unfolds a warmer choral space. When the opening theme returns, its physiognomy appears transformed. Sorrow is concentrated into an even barer limpidity. Before the close in C sharp major, a deviation towards C major produces one of those tonal apparitions that belong to Schubert alone, flashes of proximity and distance in the same instant. The movement thus becomes a prayer without words, built upon the equilibrium between abandonment and formal vigilance. After such depth, the Scherzo. Allegro vivace con delicatezza offers a rapid grace, fashioned from shifts of register, subtle harmonic displacements and an almost aerial lightness. The Trio introduces a more rustic accent, close to the memory of the Ländler, with a deliberately oblique heaviness. The final movement, Allegro ma non troppo – Presto, is born from a held G that functions as threshold and summons. The rondo advances with a dance theme of vaguely Hungarian profile, capable of approaching C minor before returning to the principal key. The form proceeds with that spacious calm which allows contrasts to appear and dissolve without rupture. Cantabile episodes, sudden almost heroic gestures, minor-mode colours and dancing returns combine in a finale of extraordinary affective ambiguity. The coda accelerates towards the Presto and delivers the sonata to a controlled brilliance, veined with an interrogative grace. In this farewell strength preserves tenderness, and tenderness itself retains its own ground of mystery.
The Drei Klavierstücke D. 946 lead into a more fragmentary and more secret zone. Their editorial history is already significant. Schubert did not see their publication; much later, Johannes Brahms presented them to the public in three separate fascicles, assuming a decisive role in their transmission. The autograph sources also show corrections and deletions, particularly in the first piece, where Brahms reinstated an excised section. This tension between manuscript, revision and reception renders the cycle eloquent. The three pieces belong to the same spiritual family as the Impromptus, yet they possess a more unstable physiognomy. They live by returns, contrasting episodes, dynamic fractures and sudden lyrical inward turnings. The short form receives a dramatic density that brings these pages close to the great works of the extreme period, from the concluding sonata to the string quintet, from the Lieder on texts by Rellstab and Heine to the late Mass.
The first piece, in E flat minor, bears the indication Allegro assai and asserts itself through a dark, almost feverish energy. The opening profile runs with urgency, articulated by an insistent rhythm and by a writing that accumulates tension. The sections in major keys open lyrical breaches, yet the principal material returns with growing authority, like a force reclaiming possession of space. The problem of the section deleted in the autograph confers upon the page a particular interpretative complexity. In the extended version, the piece appears as a great tragic rondo, traversed by pauses of memory and episodes of suspension; in the critical perception of the source, the formal economy tends towards a sterner concentration. Schubert condenses here the image of a restless motion that finds no definitive harbour, an inward race in which shadow and song pursue one another with obstinacy.
The second piece, in E flat major, Allegretto, occupies the affective centre of the triptych. The principal theme possesses an intimate, almost confidential cantability, and seems to come from the spring that nourishes the most inward Lieder. The structure, once again close to the rondo, alternates this zone of calm with two darker episodes. The first, in C minor, advances with a restrained tread, enveloped in a melancholy devoid of emphasis; the second, in A flat minor, introduces a more remote tint, of rare harmonic intensity. The return of the principal theme carries with it the memory of the regions traversed and transforms the initial simplicity into awareness. Here the great art of Schubert consists in making the mutation of time audible within an apparently unchanged melody. Every return is both recognition and loss. The page assumes the character of an inward narrative, where sweetness measures itself against shadow and receives depth from it.
The third piece, in C major, Allegro, closes the group with a keen vivacity and with a more sharply defined concision. Its motion, marked by syncopations and by an almost popular impetus, evokes a rapid, robust dance, traversed by a dry vitality. In relation to the two preceding pieces, the form appears more concentrated, yet the writing preserves the characteristic Schubertian richness of deviations and sudden changes of colour. The modulating centre introduces a more enigmatic region, in which motor continuity is fissured by harmonic displacements of great fascination. The brilliance of C major thus assumes a less ingenuous, more nervous profile, crossed by a play of expectations and delays. Within the context of the disc, this final Klavierstück has an essential function. After the immense breadth of the sonata and the first two pieces dominated by shadow and elegy, it restores to the piano a dancing gesture marked by the experience already traversed.
The succession between D. 960 and D. 946 constructs a dramaturgy of great coherence. The sonata in B flat major offers the broadest image of Schubertian thought, the one in which classical form becomes metaphysical landscape and slowness is transformed into knowledge. The three subsequent pieces gather the same spiritual matter into shorter nuclei, marked by more immediate alternations and by a greater exposure of the fragment. In both cases the piano assumes a total function. It knows how to be restrained orchestra, implicit quartet, liederistic voice, domestic instrument and visionary space. Schubert constructs the monument through the patience of return, the nobility of modulation and the depth of the inner voices. His final piano music speaks with a calm that never amounts to repose. Every theme preserves an inquietude, every dance bears a memory within itself, every key opens a distance. The programme may be heard as a great farewell without rhetoric, in which the end of life is transfigured into a higher form of listening.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2026