Piano Sonata in C major D.840 (“Reliquie”)

The “Unfinished” Symphony is by no means the only major work that, for whatever reason, Schubert left incomplete. There are other unfinished symphonies, unfinished string quartets, unfinished piano sonatas… the last category including no fewer than three in C major, a key which was fruitful for Schubert in other areas, as in his last symphony and the String Quintet, but which brought him no luck in the piano sonata. The failures, however, were just as important as the finished sonatas in the composer’s long-term trial-and-error campaign to come to terms with a form to which he was not naturally suited but which he so conclusively mastered in the three great piano sonatas written in the last year of his life.

Written in Vienna in 1825, the last of Schubert’s three C major sonata projects came to light in 1839 when the late composer’s brother Ferdinand presented the manuscript score to Robert Schumann, who promptly printed the Andante in his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. In 1862 the whole thing, including the two complete movements together with a fragmentary minuet and finale, was published under the title Reliquie (Relic) with the misleading description “last sonata.” If it is a piano sonata - and the sometimes unidiomatic piano writing could suggest that it might actually be a sketch for a symphony - it is certainly not Schubert’s last.

One reason why Schubert abandoned the project could be that he felt that he could do the same thing rather better in a different way. Certainly, it has much in common with the Sonata in A minor D.845 which he completed a little later and which is much successful as piano music. The opening themes of the two works, introduced in subdued octaves in both cases, are basically of the same shape and there is a similar transition to the next main theme - which in this work makes a magical entry over a syncopated accompaniment in entirely unexpected harmonies, closely related though it is to the opening theme. Both the development and the closing sections of the movement contain highly dramatic, apparently orchestrally orientated episodes alongside passages of truly pianistic beauty. The elegiac Andante, although it presents a similar stylistic paradox in its outbursts of violence set alongside such melodiously seductive material as the second main theme, makes a more convincing impression as piano music.

While the two last movements are too fragmentary to be performed as Schubert left them, incidentally, various efforts have been made to complete them, not least by the German composer Ernst Krenek and the scholar-pianist Paul Badura Skoda.