The Unfinished Piano Sonatas of Franz Schubert Javier ... - Ethesis

1815
However, these forms pose musical difficulties of another nature. For
composers (and by extension for performers as well), one of the key challenges of long-
scale works – sonatas included – is how to achieve an entirety with musical coherence.
This was one of the crucial factors that Schubert had been obliged to struggle with in the
extended piano fantasies, in the sonata-form string quartets, and in the large-scale
dramatic scenas and ballads: how to provide musical continuity and maintain
momentum, how to sustain, vary and develop the musical interest over long spans,
connecting the many discrete units into a convincing whole. To a certain extent, the
form of a song is often determined by its text. Instrumental music lacks the explicit
structure that words provide, and this would precisely become one of Schubert’s main
challenges in his early piano sonatas.
Schubert’s early instrumental works tend to be based on the Classical models of
Haydn and Mozart. That is clear in his first Fantasy in C minor (D2a, probably written
in 1811), in which the inspiration seems to be Mozart’s own C minor Fantasy (KV475). 5
Beethoven’s creative presence is also palpable in the early works, though it will not be
until 1817 that the older composer’s innovations and influence will more clearly find a
fertile ground in Schubert’s own experiments. In addition to these three great
composers, we should also mention other strong influences on the young Schubert: for
example, Gluck, as well as more contemporary figures like Hummel, Rossini and Weber.
One can find echoes of these composers in Schubert’s output throughout the years.
As mentioned before, it was not until he had experimented with other genres
and written many bars of music for the piano that Schubert turned his attention to the
piano sonata. During the creatively packed year of 1815, Schubert would write his first
two sonatas for the pianoforte. The surviving documents from this time show a young
man for whom his work is the air he breathes, someone outwardly static, but inwardly
charged by an overriding passion. At this time, it seems that Schubert needed nothing
else than music. His attitude towards life can well be summed up by Goethe’s ballad Der
Sänger (The Singer) from his Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship). At the point when the king, pleased by the minstrel’s song, sends for a
golden chair to honour him, he receives the following reply from the minstrel:
Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt,
Der in den Zweigen wohnet;
Das Lied, das aus der Kehle dringt,
Ist Lohn, der reichlich lohnet.
I sing as does the bird
that lives in the branches;
this song that bursts from my throat
is a reward – that is rich enough.
Schubert set this poem to music in February (D149), precisely at the time he
was writing his first piano sonata. Significantly for this study, Schubert’s Der Sänger
also exhibits a very compressed sonata structure at the moment when the minstrel’s
song sounds on the piano (bars 54-84). 6
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