Piano Sonata in B major (D.575)

UH/8 brendel

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Piano Sonata in B major (D.575)

Allegro ma non troppo

Andante

Scherzo: allegretto

Allegro giusto

Struggling to come to terms with the piano sonata, in his late teens and early twenties, Schubert tried just about everything. If he achieved the definitive breakthrough with the lovely little Sonata in A major D 664 in July 1819 - reconciling at last his essentially lyrical genius with the sonata-form dialectic - it was because in the three or four years before that he had conscientiously applied himself to more than a dozen sonata projects on a wide variety of models. The Sonata in B major is different from the others, however, in that it has no antecedent and no direct descendant either. Written in the industriously experimental year of 1817, it is both uniquely inspired and breathtakingly daring in its harmonic strategy.

The first movement of the Piano Sonata in B major is like two pieces interleaved, passages from one alternating with passages from the other, the two neatly merging in the middle and at the end. The first of those “pieces” is a march in B major characterised by it truculent dotted rhythms and its brusque changes of harmony. The second “piece,” beginning as the first falls into unexpected silence, takes an altogether more peaceable view of much the same melodic material but in a completely alien key. Wavering poetically between G minor and G major, it then modulates to a firm E major for another march, this one as playful as the other is aggressive. The two “pieces” merge in the closing theme of the exposition: a direct extension of the second, it spontaneously settles in the very key the first would have been in by this point. The development sets them apart again with a treatment of the opening march so extreme in its keyboard colouring that it anticipates similar, as yet unwritten passages in Beethoven’s last sonatas. They merge again in the final bars, after a recapitulation arranged in such a way that the closing theme ends the movement, as it began, in B major.

All rifts seem to be healed in the first section of the E major Andante where a tender song for soprano is answered by an even more eloquent melodic line in the bass. But there is an aggressively dramatic intrusion in E minor in the middle section and, although it is soon pacified, its agitated figuration persists, as an additional element in the texture, even when the first section is recalled.

The sketches for the Sonata in B major suggest that the Scherzo was originally intended to come before the Andante, which is perhaps why the third movement is not in B major, as it normally would have been, but in G, the unlikely key of the second of the interleaved “pieces” of the first movement. Although there are jolting changes of harmony here too, there is no aggression, least of all in the lyrical Ländler of the D major middle section. And if the beginning of the Allegro giusto finale, with its early change of key and corresponding change of tune, is reminiscent of the beginning of the Allegro ma non troppo, subsequent melodic events and some delightfully lugubrious harmonies indicate that nothing is to be taken too seriously here.