Franz Schubert: Piano Sonata I

Schubert, Vienna and the piano. Vienna at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a multilingual, vibrant capital where Italian opera and German lieder, ecclesiastical polyphony and salon music existed side by side. Unlike Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven – who all came to Vienna from elsewhere – Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was born in Vienna. He grew up in the family of a schoolmaster in the Himmelpfortgrund and received his education at the Imperial City College. As a choir boy at the Hofkapelle, he studied with Salieri, absorbed Mozart and Haydn through the college orchestra and moved in a circle of educated, music-mad friends. That mix of cosmopolitan influence and local custom left a characteristic mark: a composer who thought lyrically but composed with structural boldness; a born Viennese for whom lieder, theatre and the piano were natural, almost inseparable, idioms. Although he first learned to play the violin, the piano formed the pivot of Schubert's creative life – from the teenage fantasy for piano duet (D. 1) to the three sonatas of September 1828 (D. 958-960). His sketchbooks reveal a mind that composed as if sitting at the piano: harmonies that sing, inner voices that take the form of counter-melodies, textures that are 'orchestrated' across registers. He could draw colour from the instrument with an imaginative power that matched Beethoven's, even when the pianos at his disposal did not have the latest bass extensions. The cliché that his compositions are 'moderately difficult' is only partly true: alongside pages of clear, melodious music stand demands on stamina and control – and interpretative challenges in the areas of range, tonal perspective and silence. Crucial is that Schubert did not see himself as a travelling virtuoso. He was, by his own account, first and foremost a composer, who turned to the piano pragmatically: as an accompanist for lieder, as a partner in four-hand pieces during Schubertiaden, as a supplier of dances, and even as an assistant at musical events when needed. Salieri's training in the improvisational art of the kapellmeister – contrapuntal, form-conscious and rigorous – was rooted in a closed, intellectual milieu. Eyewitnesses recall improvisations on multiple levels: light waltzes danced for dancers, while others around the piano listened to subtle inner processes; fantasies on Hungarian melodies that pleased popular taste and at the same time satisfied learned ears. This habit was more than a salon ornament: it became a compositional method. Locally and structurally, Schubert's harmony behaves like the hand of an improviser – gliding along mediant and submediant, opening doors to distant realms with disarming naturalness – while his larger compositions often combine the discursiveness of a sonata with the memory of a variation. Development often takes place here through varied repetition at different levels, so that what returns never merely repeats, but also remembers. His audience and instruments also mattered. Post-Napoleonic Vienna cherished its piano culture; contemporary treatises, read alongside the scores, shed light on Schubert's often restrained notations of articulation and pedal use. Meanwhile, Viennese pianos (c. 1810-1830) increased in size and weight, but retained a clear attack and quick decay; the mechanism allowed for finely nuanced sound, and the una corda could change the tone colour by switching from three strings to one. Where Beethoven often used such contrasts to articulate architecture, Schubert uses them rather to nuance atmosphere and time – to conceal and reveal, to let harmony bloom or fade as if the instrument itself were breathing. Against the cult of public bravura of that era, Schubert's semi-public profile might seem a disadvantage. In practice, however, it directed his ambition in a different direction. The sonatas and shorter pieces are less instruments for display than essays in a time-bound form: paragraphs rather than aphorisms, in which dance becomes argument and lied becomes thought. Above all, they enlarge the space in which they are played – music asks us not to express admiration for virtuosity, but invites us to dwell in sound, harmony and silent revelation. DV