Rondeau brillant in B minor D895 (1826)

Andante – Allegro – Più mosso

Schubert wrote very little virtuoso music – no concertos and few instrumental or vocal pieces designed to show off the agility of a favourite performer. One reason, it has been suggested, is that, while he was more than competent as both a pianist and a violinist, he was not particularly brilliant on either instrument. But you don’t have to be a virtuoso to create virtuoso music, as Schubert himself once demonstrated, in a negative kind of way, when he got stuck in his own “Wanderer” Fantasia, jumped up in exasperation from the keyboard and muttered, “Let the Devil play the stuff!” The more likely reason is that Schubert was above all a melodist, to whom integrity of line was of far more important than a decorative surface.

The Rondeau brillant is not a work of the magnitude of the “Wanderer” Fantasia but it does share with it the distinction of proving that melody and bravura are not entirely incompatible. It was written in October 1826 for the young Bohemian violinist Josef Slawik – “a second Paganini” according to Chopin – who had recently settled in Vienna and had immediately been adopted by the Schubert circle. He gave the first performance six months later with Karl Maria von Bocklet, a pianist of similar virtuoso stature, in the home of Domenica Artaria who, bestowing a fancy French title on it, had just published the work.

Anyone expecting a mere salon piece from the Rondeau brillant in B minor would have been suprised from the beginning – by the dramatic gestures in the opening bars of the Adagio introduction and then by the contrastingly expressive quality of the melody presented by the violin over an operatic arpeggio accompaniment. While he allows the violin to indulge itself in an embroidery on the arpeggios, Schubert makes sure that the melody retains its profile, though now more than three octaves lower in the left hand of the piano.

The two notes held on a pause at the end of the Adagio are incorporated into the first three themes of the following Allegro – a lively violin tune, a more lyrical idea on piano, and a zesty Hugarian dance on violin – all of which make up the B minor material that will twice recur before the end of the work. Both in this triple refrain and in the scarcely ceasing hyper-activity of the two episodes that come between its repetitions, and which seem all the more reckless as they plunge from one unlikely key to another, there is no shortage of virtuosity opportunity for both instruments. A frenzied Più mosso coda secures a jubilant ending in B major.