In the 1980s a piano student knew eleven of Schubert’s sonatas — that was how many the current editions printed. Today’s editions from Henle, Wiener Urtext and Bärenreiter list 21 to 23, and recent research counts up to 28. Many of them are fragments, long set aside as failed compositional studies. In the booklet Thomas Günther traces how the judgement shifted: from Erwin Ratz, who in 1953 rejected completions on principle, to Maurice J. E. Brown, who regarded movements breaking off after the development as complete in a certain sense, to Paul Badura-Skoda’s Henle volume of the early and unfinished sonatas and Martino Tirimo’s chronological edition of 1996. In 1992 Andreas Krause argued for attaching the following movement attacca instead of completing the torso; in 2003 Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl saw the first drafts as fully valid compositions.
The Piano Sonata No. 1 in E major D 157 of February 1815 is the first sonata the eighteen-year-old undertook; it was not published until 1888. Its opening movement begins with a fanfare across three octaves — the figure known in the eighteenth century as the Mannheim rocket — from which descending scales unfold a broadly laid-out narrative. The second movement, an Andante in E minor, turns towards the ballad with episodes in G major and in C major and finds, as some of the songs already had, an entirely personal tone. A whirling Scherzo in B major with a trio in G major follows, which Schubert, still following convention, calls a minuet. Whether the sonata needs a finale at all is an open question: Paul Badura-Skoda recalls that many of Haydn’s sonatas also end with a minuet.
The Piano Sonata No. 8 in F sharp minor is among Schubert’s least known works. Only the first movement D 571 carries the heading “Sonate” in the manuscript; the third and fourth movements D 570 are likewise dated July 1817, and since Brown’s investigations the Andante D 604 has been regarded, with some probability, as its slow movement. The first and fourth movements break off after the development and at the start of the recapitulation respectively; the three movements D 571 and D 570 were printed only in 1897, the completed Andante as early as 1887. In the recapitulations Günther kept as close as possible to the expositions, and into both codas he wove melodic motifs from the developments so that all the substance comes from what Schubert left.
The Piano Sonata No. 13 in A major D 664, finally, is among the sunniest works in the piano literature. Its dating is not entirely certain, as the autograph is lost; 1819 is now generally accepted. The song-like main theme of the first movement recalls the composer of “Die Forelle” from the same year, while the second theme rests on Schubert’s characteristic walking rhythm. The Andante is a simple, grateful meditation, the third movement a buoyant apotheosis of dance which in the development rises through a polyphonic intermezzo to an intoxication of arpeggios. Thomas Günther, professor at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen since 2007, plays the three sonatas on a historical fortepiano.