Franz Schubert wrote the Sonata in A minor Op. 143 D 784 in 1823, after a break of several years from the piano sonata that the literature often calls his “crisis years”. In January, shortly before composing it, he noted: “Perhaps I might indeed succeed in inventing a new form.” In the same year he presented the results of his struggle with sonata form in the Fantasy in C major, the so-called “Wanderer Fantasy”, and in this sonata. For a long time Schubert was accused of being unable to cope adequately with form, and in this, as Mechthild von Schoenebeck writes in the booklet, he was deeply misunderstood: he was not concerned with refilling the classical pattern — “who is capable of following on from Beethoven?” he once asked — but with approaches to the inherited form that left room for his desire to express himself.
The discursive structure that arises from the confrontation of two opposing themes does not govern Schubert’s sonata-form movements; his method is associative — looking for, touching on, dropping and picking up motifs, restless roaming in harmonic space. Most characteristic is his new treatment of space and time: he lets his motifs appear in constantly changing light, above all through harmonic alteration, and often interrupts the continuity to the point of complete standstill. In the three-movement Sonata in A minor Op. 143 D 784 all the essential elements of the first theme become form-building forces: the unison passages, the fifth circled by minor seconds, the descending third, the rest, the shifting between major and minor. The third also shapes the key scheme, for Schubert prefers keys related by a third, the mediants in every form. The first motif of the opening Allegro giusto stands in bare unison, its harmonic foundation at first uncertain; two abrupt general pauses before the development bring time to a halt. In the Andante the fifth is circled by its neighbouring notes, and in the finale major and minor sound simultaneously, the eruptive first theme set against a songlike, barcarole-like second.
Schubert completed the Sonata in B flat major Op. posth. D 960 on 26 September 1828, barely two months before his death. Many performers therefore read it as a legacy steeped in presentiments of death; von Schoenebeck disagrees. Compared with the two other works of the trilogy of 1828, in C minor D 958 and in A major D 959, it is of an almost serene composure, as balanced in its emotional range as no other Schubert sonata. At the time of composition he was full of plans, at work on a symphony and enrolling for counterpoint lessons with Simon Sechter. His art of building large melodic and harmonic contexts from a minimum of motivic material is especially striking here: the first themes of all four movements are formed from the same elements and all begin with a descending step of a second. Alfred Brendel spoke of Schubert’s “vocal and orchestral conceptions”, Adorno of the “landscape character” of this music.
The opening Molto moderato has the three-key exposition typical of Schubert’s late works; the lyrical first theme begins pianissimo over sustained bass notes, halts after eight bars and dies away in a bass trill. The ternary Andante sostenuto sets outer sections in C sharp minor against a middle section in A major and lives from its extraordinary harmonic richness and from two ostinato notes that are still fading when the theme has long since died away. The Scherzo has the character of a Ländler; its Trio in B flat minor displaces the metrical accents into hemiolas and so remains suspended. In the finale, Allegro, ma non troppo, Schubert combines rondo and sonata form and leaves the listener long in doubt about the governing key: nine times the first theme enters as if from outside, in C minor, and only the fifteen bars of the extended final cadence confirm the tonic without reservation.
After studying the piano at the Musikhochschule in Düsseldorf, Bernd F. Marseille continued his training with Rudolf Buchbinder in Basel and later with Yvonne Lefébure in Paris. He was already concertising widely during his studies, appearing among other places at the Philharmonie in Berlin and at the Carinthischer Sommer festival; a series of radio productions documents his particularly intensive engagement with the piano music of German Romanticism. The recording was made from 5 to 7 September 1995 in the Erholungshaus of Bayer AG in Leverkusen.