The first concert in our 2020 Virtual MahlerFest will be a performance by Festival Artist, David Korevaar, of Franz Schubert’s valedictory Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, filmed in his own music room in Longmont, Colorado for the occasion.
Festival Artist and Pianist, David Korevaar
More information of David’s performance is available here.
Below, we share an essay written by MahlerFest Artistic Director Kenneth Woods on Schubert’s late sonatas, written for a collection of live recordings celebrating the career of the great American pianist, Howard Karp.
“I recall a talk on Schubert given by Benjamin Britten, later published in the Saturday Review in August 1964,” says Howard Karp. “Britten said, “It is arguable that the richest and most productive 18 months in music history was the time when Beethoven had just died, when the 19th century giants Wagner, Verdi and Brahms had not yet begun; I mean the period in which Schubert wrote “Die Winterreise,” the great C Major Symphony, his last three piano sonatas, the C Major String Quintet, as well as at least a dozen other glorious pieces. The very creation of these works in that space of time hardly seems credible, but the standard of inspiration, of magic, is miraculous and past all explanation.”
Schubert’s last three sonatas were written between the spring of 1928 and September, during which time he also completed the String Quintet in C major and his Schwanengesang song cycle. In the early months of that year, Schubert had enjoyed some of the first significant public acclaim for his music, and had had a number of works published. Around the time he completed the last three piano sonatas in September, his health fell into crisis, and he died on November 31st, 1828. Debate has raged for years over the extent to which Schubert’s last works represent a confrontation with the hard fact of his approaching mortality, or simply a brave step forward for an artist whose career seemed, at last, to be making rapid progress. It is possible it was both— it seems that in the few months since Beethoven’s death in March of 1827, Schubert had already begun to be recognized as possibly Vienna’s greatest living composer, and it certainly seems likely that he saw himself as Beethoven’s successor. In any case, the “brave step forward” was certainly a reality. One of the many miraculous features of the music of Schubert’s last 18 months is the extent to which the major works share a sense of oneness, of unity, and yet are constantly seeking out new and uncharted territory, both music and spiritual.
Schubert was a great admirer of Beethoven, yet even from his own early sonatas, quartets and symphonies, Schubert always sought his own path with regard to form and structure. Schubert’s music never aspires to the linearity and dramatic directness one encounters in Beethoven, but evolves towards its own, more meditative, ideal. In Schubert we encounter forms that seem to take the listener both forward and backward in time, through longing and reminiscence, where magic is found in the examination of the power of moments, rather than in the cumulative power of music that moves toward a specific goal. In the months after Beethoven’s death, Schubert’s unique way with four-movement form reaches perfection, and yet the influence of Beethoven remains hugely important in Schubert’s music. Take, for instance, the opening theme of the Sonata in c minor, D. 958, which uses almost the exact same pitches as the opening of Beethoven’s 32 Variations on an Original Theme in c minor. Musicologists have catalogued a number of other thematic similarities and possible references to Beethoven in Schubert’s final sonatas, some of which remain the subject of lively debate. What is telling, however, is the way in which Schubert uses these references to engage with Beethoven— to respond, to comment and to stake out his own territory. The first 26 bars of D. 958 could well have been written by Beethoven himself, but then, with the first pianissimo in the piece, Schubert slips nimbly from the darkness of c minor to the ephemeral light of A-flat major and opens the door to a world that is uniquely his.
Written in Schubert’s favored A-B-A-B-A form, the Adagio which follows opens in that same light of A-flat major, but falls quickly into darkness as it approaches the first “B” section— tunnelling through the depths of d-flat minor and e minor, and later, after a return of the music of the opening, to even-darker e-flat minor, before finally returning “home” in the final “A” section. The journey has left us transformed, yet one senses these cycles of light and darkness are destined to continue, and ending in light only points to future darkness ahead.
The Menuet that follows begins more in the mode of a lied, and continues in a dramatic vein; one could be forgiven for not realizing it is a dance movement until the Trio’s gentle Ländler rhythm clarifies matters. The tarantella rhythms of the Finale are present in Schubert’s music from much earlier in his career, and become a particular feature of finales of several late works including this one and the String Quartets in d minor (“Death and the Maiden”) and G major. What continues to shock across all these movements is the sudden, jarringly extreme shifts of mood that come with Schubert’s trademark shifts of mode from major to minor and back. Where Beethoven’s music so often takes us on purposeful journeys from darkness to light, Schubert’s reminds us that these extremes of experience exist around us simultaneously, and that our fortunes can always change in an instant, however strong our will.
Schubert seems to have worked on all three of these last sonatas simultaneously over the summer of 1828, so his decision to make Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960, the final of the set is probably no mere accident of compositional chronology— it does seem to stand as the crowning achievement of his life’s work as a composer for the piano. The opening Molto moderato is one of his most moving and original movements, one interesting feature of which is the way in which extended spans of music explore not only a given theme or key area, but a single rhythmic unit. The long opening theme unfolds over a steady stream of even eighth notes, before subsiding into silence via a mysterious low trill, a pattern that repeats before leading into the next episode, a gentle variation on the opening theme, now spun over constant sixteenth notes. When the opening theme returns in seemingly triumphant fashion soon after, it is over a constant stream of triplets. So unfolds the entire movement, with Schubert exploring these tightly organized rhythmic realms with an astounding balance of originality, poetry and rigor, all in service of some of the most haunting and personal music ever written.
Schubert explores the expressive possibility of extremely tight rhythmic organization even more intently in the Andante Sostenuto which follows: the entire, long “A” section of the movement takes place over an unyielding three-note left-hand ostinato, and the B-section unfolds over alternating duple and triplet sixteenth notes. Finally, in the return of the “A” section, Schubert allows himself one small change to the ostinato, which then proceeds implacably until the last two bars of the movement. Schubert had no-doubt fully grasped the expressive power of Beethoven’s focus on tiny motivic cells as a unifying force for large forms. In these two remarkable movements, we see Schubert finding his own version of a kind of discipline just as extreme as that of Beethoven, but one which allowed his melodies to breathe and unfold as he knew they must.
The third movement of the D. 960 is marked Scherzo, unlike the Menuet of D. 958, and, for the first time in the work, there seems to be a genuine return of Schubert’s puckish humor. The Finale is in some ways cut from the same cloth as Schubert’s two famous quintets— the great C major Cello Quintet and the earlier Trout Quintet. In both cases, as here, Schubert makes much of an opening gesture that never seems to go away. Again, Schubert is rigorous in his exploration of the possibilities of isolated rhythmic units— the first page and a half of the score again shows the music unfolding in eighth notes, with a single attempt to interject some triplets in the right hand quickly interrupted by a return of the opening gesture. The second theme is accompanied only by sixteenths, and the third only by triplets.
“It was in the fall of 1943 that I fell under the spell of Schubert’s late Sonatas, as played in a memorable recital by Artur Schnabel,” recalls Howard Karp. Schnabel’s program was limited to four sonatas—two by Schubert, c minor and B-flat Major, with two Mozart sonatas separating them. I was overwhelmed by Schnabel’s playing and the power of Schubert, and have remained so to this day. There is no composer whom I revere more.” Karp’s reverence for Schubert’s music has led him to include Schubert’s music in many of the more momentous performances of his career, including his 1962 debut at the University of Illinois, from which comes the elegant performance of the Impromptu opus 142 No. 4 which concludes this disc.
