Six Moments musicaux D.780

If there is any difference between Impromptu and Moment musical it can only be that the latter title implies a shorter piece and, in consequence perhaps, one that is comparatively limited in its expressive scope. And it is true that the longest of Schubert’s Impromptus are four or five times as long as the shortest of his Moments musicaux. On the other hand, while the two Moments musicaux in F minor are scarcely more than just moments, the other four are all longer than the shortest of the Impromptus. As for the expressive scope of the Moments musicaux, while there might not be anything as profoundly beautiful as the Impromptu in G flat or as dramatic as the Impromptu in F minor, there are emotional and intellectual insights here too, above all in No. 2 in A flat and No.4 in C sharp minor.

In the first of the Moments musicaux – surely a song rather than the minuet it is regularly declared to be – Schubert seems to be imposing a limitation on himself. Certainly, the C major arpeggio presented in bare octaves as the main theme is not the most promising material for development. At a fairly early stage, however, B major harmonies effect an intriguingly peevish intrusion and later, in a poetically coloured middle section in G major, a simple change to the minor casts an unexpected shadow over the piece.

Whether Schubert found the theme of the opening section of the Andantino in A flat in Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A K.331 or in some folksong source available to both of them, his more spacious treatment of the melody, his early apprehension of the tonic minor and his modulation to a key as distant as F sharp minor for the second section of the piece – an ardent little elegy – are entirely characteristic. The dramatically abrupt modulation on the passionate second entry of the elegy is something only Schubert could have thought of.

Like the eight Impromptus, most of the Moments musicaux date from 1827. Two them were written three or four years earlier, however, as contributions to popular Christmas albums published by Sauer & Leidesdorf in Vienna. The titles given to them on their first publication,    Air russe for No.3 in F minor and Plaintes d’un troubadour for No.6 in A flat, were presumably not Schubert’s own. The delightful little Allegro moderato in F minor – which has a close but more developed relation in the Impromptu in F minor – he would surely have thought of more as a Hungarian dance than as a Russian song.

Perhaps the most ingenious of the Moments musicaux is No.4 in C sharp minor, which presents two apparently antithetical episodes – a kind of baroque prelude in C sharp minor and a gentle berceuse in D flat major – and then effects a discreetly congenial reconciliation between them. The Allegro vivace No.5, on the other hand, is an obstinately single-minded moment in F minor propelled by a rhythmic energy with something of the later Brahms in it.

The Plaintes d’un troubadour title once attached to the Allegretto in A flat was inspired, presumably, by the dying fall of its three-chord main theme. It does not take into account the most remarkable quality of the piece, which is that its mood, like its theme, is constantly developing. Long before the comparatively cheerful middle section in D flat major, the initially plaintive cadence assumes a variety of harmonic and melodic identities, most strikingly in a serene little episode in E major.