Category Archives: Program Notes

Sonata in A major D959

Schubert’s penultimate piano sonata was one of three written in the summer of 1828, just months before his death. This is a pianistically challenging work of unusually wide emotional range. Its moods run the gamut from the heroic to the playful, featuring outbursts of musical vehemence that alternate with moments of poetic reflection. This span of emotional states is at its widest in the slow movement which constitutes the dramatic centrepiece of the sonata.

The Allegro opens with an assertive theme featuring a climbing bass pattern beneath an immovable treble, musically emblematic of firm resolve and inner strength of character. No sooner has this theme been stated than Schubert begins to vary it, giving in to a penchant for immediate development that will dominate the exposition of this movement. His second theme is a simple, soothing melody that also finds itself wandering into developmental territory, thanks to a chromatically rising bass line figure with fugal aspirations that keeps interrupting the proceedings. The real development section, by contrast, is a chiming music box of steadily pulsing harmony chords shadowing the lyrical second theme as it wanders through an enchanted forest of harmonic modulations. The recapitulation is unremarkable except for its thoughtful coda and the poetic washes of harmonic colour with which it ends.

The Andantino second movement begins as a sad little barcarolle rocking mournfully on the waters of its own interior reflections. Its shockingly spare texture and fretful obsession with the same few notes gives a hypnotic quality to its melodic self-absorption. After some 70 bars of harmonic stasis in the key of F-sharp minor it drifts into a fantasy world, as rhythmically free and melodically wide-ranging as the opening section was monotonously repetitive and claustrophobically contained in scope. Musical violence, of a sort unprecedented in Schubert’s previous piano works, then rages forth to create the image of a terrifying hallucination, or a bad drug trip. Calm returns when the sad opening tune reappears, shadowed now with a pathetic echo in the treble above.

The following scherzo, Allegro vivace, is an acrobatic tour de force of register hops that mixes the dancelike character and graceful charm of a Chopin waltz with a mischievous sense of fun most evident in the cascading runs that unexpectedly interrupt the proceedings at regular intervals. The trio, however, is, on its best behaviour, the soul of harmonic stability. But perhaps this civility is only tongue-in-cheek, its gentle hand-crossings a witty parody of the register hops of the main section of the scherzo.

The opening theme of the fourth movement sonata rondo sounds like a solemn processional hymn from a previous age, and indeed in harmonic layout and dignity of tone it echoes the well-known St. Anthony Chorale attributed to Haydn. In this context, its subsequent elaboration in florid counterpoint, with the melody in the tenor, comes as no surprise. The second theme, however, is a songful pianistic creation that delights in the rhythmic bounce of its repeated notes. Schubert’s inventiveness in creating ear-tickling piano textures is extraordinary in this movement. Extraordinary as well is the dramatic series of chords that echo the harmonies of the first movement’s opening bars.

Schwanengesang D957

Schwanengesang (Swan Song) is not a song cycle, as it lacks a narrative thread, but rather a song collection, composed by Schubert just before his death in 1828 and put on sale under this name the following year by his publisher, Thomas Haslinger, who thought it would sell well if marketed as Schubert’s “last farewell to song.”

The collection comprises 14 songs by three contemporary German poets. The first seven songs are to poems by Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860), the multitalented littérateur and arch-conservative music critic famous for giving Beethoven’s Op. 27 No. 2 sonata its title “Moonlight”. The following six are settings of poems by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), a cosmopolitan poet of humour and irony who combined a light touch with an aphoristic density of thought. The final, encore song sets the words of the Austrian imperial bureaucrat Johann Gabriel Seidl (1804-1875).

Themes of lost love and communion with nature dominate the Rellstab songs. Liebesbotschaft (Message of love) is typical, with the piano playing the role of rippling brook to the singer’s bright-eyed swain-in-love. Kriegers Ahnung (Warrior’s foreboding) is much less upbeat. Its piano accompaniment follows the beating of the soldier-lover’s racing heartbeat, but the opening and closing passages that frame the story, so evocative of the halting steps of a funeral march, give an undertone of worrying fatefulness to the singer’s words.

Frühlingssehnsucht (Spring longing) paints the breathless enthusiasm of the love-besotted singer who pauses, almost comically, at the end of each verse to ask himself a question. Ständchen (Serenade) is one of Schubert’s best-known melodies, evocative of the stillness of the night and the lover’s heightened awareness of the sounds of nature that surround him. The throbbing piano pulses of Aufenthalt (Resting place) paint the natural world as less distant, more a participant in the lover’s sufferings.

Even more desolate is the mood of In der Ferne (In the distance), with its theme of exile conveyed through a sparseness of texture and the obsessive repetition of melodic phrases. The Rellstab set concludes with Abschied (Farewell), an upbeat evocation of trotting away from town on horseback, the prancing hoof-steps of the lover’s mount picturesquely painted in the staccato articulations of the piano accompaniment.

The poems of Heinrich Heine, many of them concerned with the theme of alienation, are much more compact, and pack a bigger poetic punch. Der Atlas (Atlas) receives the heavy treatment its theme deserves. The lament of the god-man who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders is admirably conveyed by the pervasive use of dotted rhythms and by setting the piano accompaniment in the low range of the keyboard. Much more spare in texture is Ihr Bild (Her picture), in which the concentrated gaze of the lover upon his beloved’s portrait is evoked in unison passages between voice and piano.

Schubert`s little sea-shanty setting of Das Fischermädchen captures well the irony of the role-reversal inherent in the scene, in which it is the “sensitive New Age guy” who sits dreamily on the shore, trying to entice the strong, capable girl out earning a living on the waves to come be with him. A much more seriously poetic watery scene is summoned up in Die Stadt (The town), with its shimmering depiction of the morning sun glinting off the waves, a counterpoint to the dark distant outlines of the town where the singer’s pain originated.

The mood turns spooky in Am Meer (By the sea), a description of the debilitating effects of love, with tears as the deadly poison that rots away the lover from the inside. Despite the hymn-like reverence of the peaceful seaside scene where the tale begins, much deeper currents of emotion emerge, urged into the open by melodramatic tremolos in the piano that tell a different story. Scariest of all is Der Doppelganger (The ghostly double), a night scene in which a man stands before the house where his love once lived and recognizes a spectral shape equally absorbed in sad remembrance: an image of himself. The impassive, slow-moving chords in the piano give no comfort at all to the lonely voice of the singer as he realizes he is descending into madness. This is a song without a melody, symbolic of a situation without hope.

This song collection ends on a note of optimism, however, with Die Taubenpost (The carrier pigeon), a song with a gentle Viennese lilt that merrily praises the contributions of aviary postal delivery to the cause of true love.

Donald G. Gíslason

Fantasie in F minor for piano four hands D940

Schubert’s Fantasie in F minor for piano duet, composed in 1828, is similar in structure to the composer’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy of 1822. Both are laid out in one continuous movement of four sonata-like sections played without interruption, comprising an opening Allegro, a slow movement, a scherzo and a finale containing a fugue. And both embrace the cyclical principle of reprising the first movement’s themes in their final movement.

But while the Wanderer stands out for its emphatic musical rhetoric and unabashedly muscular keyboard writing, the F Minor Fantasie entices its listeners with an inverse appeal in long passages at dynamic levels of pp, or even ppp, and a more reflective tone overall.

Nowhere is this reflective tone more strikingly evident than in the first movement Allegro molto moderato, in which a timidly pleading, almost whimpering first theme, obsessing over a number of small melodic intervals, emerges out of a hushed murmur of harmonic support. Juxtaposed with this delicate flower of a melody is a stern, implacable second theme that soon arrives to challenge it, advancing gravely and ponderously in great granitic blocks of sound. As is so typical of Schubert, the two themes in this section are presented in ‘stereo’, modally speaking – in both their major- and minor-mode variants.

The Largo second movement presents a similar juxtaposition of opposing musical personalities. Beginning with a jarring series of trills, this movement alternates between the defiant gestures of a double-dotted, French-overturelike first theme and a ‘tra-la-la’ second theme of a distinctly Italianate melodic stamp that roams blissfully carefree over an oom-pah-pah accompaniment.

The scherzo Allegro vivace provides much needed relief from all this drama with its dancelike verve and general spirit of bonhomie as the two players coyly echo each other’s phrases. Schubert’s quicksilver changes of mode, often alternating between major and minor in successive phrases, give this movement an intriguing tonal sparkle that is maddeningly hard to define.

The Allegro molto moderato finale brings us full circle to the poetic opening bars of the work. But at the entrance of the imposing second theme, a browknitting fugal argument breaks out leading to a sustained bout of contrapuntal navel-gazing which only the opening theme, returning yet again, can quell. The uncompromisingly bleak tone of the closing bars is exceptional in the works of Schubert.

Sonata in B flat major D960

Schubert’s last piano sonata, written in 1828 a scant few months before his death, exemplifies in one single work the full range of his gifts as lyric melodist, serious musical dramatist, and refined exponent of the light, dance-besotted musical style of Vienna.

The first movement, Allegro moderato, is typically generous in its bounty of themes. It opens with a softly whispered melody, humbly small in range and accompanied by a repeated pedal tone in the left hand, like a pulsing human heartbeat. This opening theme has a sweet yearning quality that gives it an ineffable, almost nostalgic charm, urging it to burst more fully into song, which it soon does. A second theme introduces a tentative note of worry, but Schubert’s constant harmonic wavering between the major and minor modes prevents the emotional tone from becoming downcast. A third theme of a triadic stamp scampers over the full range of the keyboard, in both hands, to re-establish a more directly buoyant emotional tone, disturbed only by a recurring low trill in the left hand that acts as a sectional marker within the movement. The development is where all the drama lies, as Schubert passes his melodic material through a harmonic colour wheel, building to an intense climax that acts as a rare moment of sonic emphasis in the centre of what is, essentially, a movement of delicate shades of nuance.

Much more starkly dramatic is the Andante sostenuto slow movement which features an introspective melody in the mid-range of the keyboard, surrounded by sonic echoes, both above and below, implying that this lonely plaintive voice is pleading its mournful case in a vast, but empty enclosure. It is hard not to think of the more militant middle section as an attempt to take heart, an attempt that inevitably fails as the opening mood returns to conclude the movement.

The third movement scherzo, Allegro vivace con delicatezza, is indeed ‘delicate’ if judged by the standards of Beethoven’s rough-house humour. More typically Viennese in its subtlety, it generates good-natured humour from its frequent changes of register and twinkling grace notes. A steady interchange of material between the hands creates the impression of a dialogue between two real musical ‘characters’. The contrasting trio in the minor mode is much more sedate, sitting put in the middle of the keyboard and shifting its weight around in gentle syncopations.

Still in a humorous frame of mind, Schubert begins his rondo finale, Allegro ma non troppo, with a mock ‘mistake’. Starting off in the minor mode, he then ‘remembers’ that he wants to be in a major key and makes a mid-course correction at the end of the first phrase. This joke of changing dramatic masks from the serious to the comedic is played out frequently during the movement, with intervening episodes of songful respite in between. This is a finale filled with congenial joking of the most sophisticated kind, created by a true Viennese pianistic ‘sit-down comic’.

Trio in B flat major for piano, violin and cello D898

The popular image of Schubert as the composer of cheerful lyrical melodies, spontaneously extending out to heavenly length, is given ample confirmation in his B flat Trio D898. Despite being completed in the last year of Schubert’s life, this large-scale work displays none of the dark, foreboding tone of other works of this period in which the approach of death can be intuited on the horizon. Rather, it radiates a healthy emotional flow of musical sentiments, passing from an alert and fully engaged first movement through a serenely voluptuous second movement, and ending in a pair of movements smitten with the spirit of the dance.

The opening Allegro moderato presents us with a triadic fanfare theme in the strings over a pulsing cushion of harmonic support in the piano, ushering in the mood of spirited resolve and bright-eyed optimism that will dominate the movement as a whole. Pert punctuations of dotted rhythm and jolly figurations of triplets add a bouncing quality to this theme, summoning up the image of a bracing walk in the park on a pleasant spring morning. The generous, widearching intervals of the songful second theme, introduced by the cello, only add to the feeling that all’s right with the world and a hot cup of tea awaits at home. The development section takes its job seriously, chewing over important phrases from both themes with a sense of dramatic import but always arriving at a happy resolution of its thematic concerns.

The heavy lifting of the work thus completed, Schubert gives us a bit of naptime in a Brahmsian lullaby of a slow movement, Andante un poco mosso. The cello takes on major melodic duties in this movement, cooing with its fellow turtle-dove, the violin, in a cheek-to-cheek duet of mutual admiration that a more florid central episode only serves to intensify.

Schubert’s third movement scherzo lies halfway between the sedateness of the minuet from which this genre developed and the mischievous joke that it became. Its quick, but still danceable, repeated notes harken back more to the folk dancing idiom of the Austrian Ländler than to the stiff reserve of the courtly minuet. There is no doubt about the trio, however. It is a straight-up waltz (and seemingly a forerunner to Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Waltz) with the piano’s echoing “pah-pah” in support of a reliable one-to-a-bar “oom” in the strings.

The last movement rondo, Allegro vivace, is even more dancelike, glinting with numerous stylistic influences from Viennese popular music. It features a delicately skipping principal theme opposed by a mock-serious thematic challenger in strong unisons, with lots of frolicsome scampering in dotted rhythms and joyous triplets filling in the landscape in between. Adding to the light tone of this movement is Schubert’s practice of treating the piano largely as a single-line instrument, chuckling merrily away in unisons or octaves up in the high register alongside the violin.

Donald G. Gíslason