Sonata in F sharp minor, Op.11

In spite of his admiration for the sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert, Schumann - like Brahms - wrote three piano sonatas early in his career and then abandoned the form. An informal kind of variations construction, which allowed him considerably more freedom, proved to be more congenial to his essentially spontaneous manner of creation. Even the first movement of the First Piano Sonata has structurally more in common with variations than with sonata form. Originally a Fandango for piano, it was not intended for a sonata. The slow movement, headed Aria, was also a separate work in its original form - a song, An Anna, written as many as seven years earlier. When, in 1834 or 1835, Schumann put the Fandango and the song together as the first two movements of the sonata he devised an elaborate system of cross-reference to link them and the last two movements together.

The theme of the Fandango and that of An Anna have little in common. So he began by writing an Introduzione which is actually a variation of An Anna. Then in the middle of the Allegro vivace (as the Fandango became in its sonata version) he made a deliberate reference back to the double-dotted rhythms of the Introduzione. There is, moreover, a lyrical A major section, a vestigial second subject to this first movement, which is clearly intended to relate back to the Introduzione and at the same time to anticipate the slow movement.

The Aria is a short and lovely song in ternary form with a curiously abrupt modulation from A major to the F major of the middle section, where the melodic interest passes to the left hand. Then, having so ingeniously linked the first two movement, Schumann is careful to integrate them with the Scherzo. Although it has its own boisterous theme in F sharp minor, the first Trio in A major recalls the dancing fifths of the Fandango and the first five notes of the Aria. The second trio, headed Intermezzo, is a brilliant burlesque of the empty-headed kind of virtuoso keyboard material which, much to Schumann’s distaste, was in vogue at a time when his own more serious piano music was not.

Although the last movement - a bold and excitable rondo, plunging impetuously from one unlikely key to another - is itself in danger of falling apart, it is entrusted with the responsibility of holding the sonata together as a whole. It begins in F sharp minor with an energetic staccato version of the lyrical A major passage of the first movement, and it incorporates numerous other reminiscences in its erratic progress towards the jubilant F sharp major coda.

Gerald Larner©