The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Franz Schubert · a sonata for solo piano in B flat major, D. 960 · four movements, the last of three sonatas written in September 1828 · about thirty-three to forty-two minutes in performance without the first movement’s repeat, thirty-eight to fifty-one with it
Mode
Solo piano sonata in the classical four-movement order, governed by song and the third-relation of keys rather than by motivic conflict
Mythos
The return: a hymn that comes back after every disturbance, quieter each time; the wanderer at the threshold evoked, not built
Phase
B flat to B flat across four movements; the slow movement in C sharp minor, ending in C sharp major; the finale opening off the tonic on a bare G
Presentation
Concert music; a sonata for one piano in four separate movements, the first with an exposition repeat whose first ending is music of its own
Register
From a pianissimo hymn and a trill in the bass to a lament over a crossing left hand, a scherzo marked con delicatezza and a Presto coda; no word anywhere
Scale
One mind and its weather; one instrument; about forty minutes
Governing Proposition
A hymn in B flat begins pianissimo over an even accompaniment, and after seven bars a trill deep in the bass interrupts it and the music stops. The wager of the work is that a sonata, a form built for conflict and resolution, can be governed instead by song, stillness and the change of light from key to key, and that a serene mind can carry inside it a disturbance it neither expels nor resolves, and go on.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The sonata begins pianissimo, in B flat major and common time, with a melody like a hymn over a slow, even accompaniment. The heading is Molto moderato, and the tempo it asks for is one at which time seems to stop moving forward without the music ever stopping. For seven bars nothing happens but the song. Then, in bar 8, deep in the bass and still pianissimo, a trill: G flat shaken against F, a semitone, under the held B flat chord. The music pauses. Nothing in the first seven bars prepared it, and nothing in the bars after explains it.
The hymn resumes, as if it had not heard. This is the method of the whole first movement, stated at once: the disturbance is not fought, developed or resolved, as a Beethoven first movement would fight its opposing material; it is admitted, and the song continues beside it. The trill comes back at the joints of the form, and each time the hymn returns after it, it returns quieter, not stronger. Of all the events in the movement, the trill is the one that cannot be removed, because it is the only thing in the opening that is not the song.
Then the first change of light. The theme is restated a major third lower, in G flat major, and the move is made not by modulation, with its tension and arrival, but by a shift of colour on a shared note, as if the same landscape were seen at another hour. The flat sixth of B flat, G flat is also the note of the trill: the key the music moves into is the shadow that interrupted it. The relation of semitone and third, heard in the first eight bars and the first modulation, is the law that will govern the work to its last page.
Movement II
The second group of themes opens in F sharp minor, which is G flat by another spelling: the music stays where it was and changes its name, and the change of name is a change of mood, from light to grief. From there the exposition turns to F major, the dominant the classical sonata expects, by a route the classical sonata does not take. The key plan runs by thirds rather than along the axis of tonic and dominant. The step from B flat to G flat is one of three major thirds that, laid end to end, divide the octave equally: a plan that moves by colour, without a home it must fight its way back to.
At the end of the exposition comes the passage on which the performance of the work most often turns. The first ending, the bars played only when the repeat is taken, is music of its own: a lead-back to the opening that carries the trill at fortissimo, the one time the shadow is heard at full strength. If the repeat is taken, the listener hears the trill raised to a shout and then the hymn begin again as if nothing had happened. If it is cut, those bars are not heard at all. Whether to take the repeat is a standing dispute among pianists, and with it the first movement runs from about fourteen minutes to about twenty-five.
The development leans on sequence, phrases restated at successive pitches, where Beethoven would have broken his material into motifs and worked it; it is the one stretch of the first movement where the music runs on rather than stands. It rises nonetheless to grandeur by stillness rather than force, and when the hymn comes home it is the sonata’s ordinary return, made strange by what has been heard under it. The movement ends in B flat, with the trill neither answered nor gone.
Movement III
The slow movement stands in C sharp minor, a minor third above the tonic, which is D flat minor written in sharps. It is reached without modulation, by juxtaposition: the first movement ends in B flat and the second begins in a key the first has no road to, as a door opens on another room. The metre is 3/4. The left hand plays a rocking figure that crosses over the right, so that one hand keeps both the rhythm and the bass while the melody sings in the middle of the texture. It is a song of grief, slow, unadorned, and so placed on the keyboard that the instrument seems to sound it from inside.
The middle section is in A major, a single long breath of warmth, broader than the song around it, and it does not argue with the C sharp minor so much as forget it for a while. The return of the opening song is required by the key it left: the A major is a memory, and memory returns the mind to where it was. But the song returns changed. The ternary form, statement, contrast and return, is here the form of memory itself, in which what comes back is never what went away.
The movement ends not in C sharp minor but in C sharp major. Nothing in the movement causes the change; no argument has been won and no consolation offered. The grief does not end in comfort but in a changed key, a light without a cause, and the change is the disclosure. It is the summit of the work’s height and its clearest statement of what it knows: that serenity is not the absence of grief or dread but the form a mind takes when it carries them and goes on.
Movement IV
The Scherzo is in B flat, 3/4, marked Allegro vivace con delicatezza, and it keeps its heading: a light, quick dance of grace and wit, small and perfect. Its Trio is in B flat minor, the shadow inside the dance, and the Scherzo returns after it. It is the shortest movement, about four minutes, and the one the whole could most easily do without; it is also the clearest proof that the work’s range of feeling runs from grief to play.
The finale, Allegro ma non troppo in 2/4, begins off the tonic. Its first sound is a bare octave G, the sixth degree of B flat and the dominant of C minor, and the theme that follows sounds as if it were in C minor; only after does it find its way into B flat. The opening is the work’s law of thirds in a last form: G stands a third below the tonic, and the music circles its home before it enters. Whether the gesture is a joke, a question or an evasion has never been settled, and performers answer it differently.
The movement is a rondo, its refrain returning between episodes with an energy and humour the first two movements did not have. Here the work’s making is at its least concentrated: the figuration is at times routine, the returns mechanical, and the rondo is a container that the material fills well rather than a form that knows something the material does not. It rises to brilliance more than transport. It ends in a Presto coda in B flat, quick and emphatic, a fast close to a work whose first half stood still.
Movement V
D. 960 is the last of three piano sonatas Schubert wrote in September 1828, after the C minor, D. 958, and the A major, D. 959. He died on 19 November 1828. The sonata was written for no commission and for no public that would hear it soon. The three were published in Vienna by Diabelli a decade later, in 1838 or 1839 (the year of issue is given both ways), with a dedication by the publisher to Robert Schumann. The work is widely heard as a farewell, and the music lends itself to the hearing; but the farewell is biography, and the trill is not death because the composer was dying.
For most of the nineteenth century the sonata was little played. Its long public life begins about a century after it was written: since Schnabel in the 1930s it has been central to the piano repertory, and it changed how pianists value Schubert. Since then it has been recorded by most leading pianists, among them Kempff, Curzon, Richter, Brendel and Uchida, and their answers to its questions, the repeat, the tempo of Molto moderato, the meaning of the trill, disagree. The text was never lost or in doubt; what was missing for ninety years was an audience.
What the work brought into the open holds without the biography. A sonata, the form in which instrumental music had learned to argue, can be made to stand still, and the stillness is not emptiness but a mind attending to itself. A disturbance can enter that mind and stay, unanswered, and the mind can go on singing beside it, and the light can change without a cause. The work’s range is narrow, one consciousness on one instrument, and its myth is evoked rather than built; inside that range it is exact, and the trill in bar 8 is still heard as it was written, pianissimo, in the bass, under a held chord, not answered.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance in the first movement’s frame and in the Andante. The trill cannot go: it is the only event in seven bars of stillness, and it returns at the structural joints. The first-ending bars are the clearest case of necessity in the work: music written only to lead back into the repeat, carrying the trill at fortissimo, so that to cut the repeat is to cut music that exists nowhere else. The Andante is tight, and its return is required by the C sharp minor it left. The give is real elsewhere: the development’s sequences run on, the finale’s refrain returns more often than its argument needs, and the Scherzo, perfect and small, could be exchanged for another without the whole knowing it. Length is not charged; redundancy is.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a serene consciousness carries within it a disturbance it cannot expel or resolve, and serenity is the form it takes in knowing this. The trill is not answered; it is lived with. The first movement keeps returning to its hymn after each intrusion, and the return is quieter, not stronger. The Andante discloses grief that ends not in consolation but in a changed key, C sharp major, a light without a cause. This is close to meaning, not only mood. What holds the axis below the gate is the line between them: with no words, the statement is the listener’s, and what the work most surely gives is a state, suspended time and resignation, more than an articulated condition. Level with the Goldberg Variations at 8.4.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Height is reached often in the first two movements. The opening hymn over its accompaniment, and then the trill, is among the best known moments of quiet terror in the piano literature; the first movement rises to grandeur by stillness rather than force. The Andante is the summit: the rocking left hand crossing over, the C sharp minor song, the breadth of the middle section in A major, and the close in C sharp major, which is beauty past grief. Held below Op. 131 and Winterreise on frequency and by design: the Scherzo is grace and wit, delicatezza by its own heading, and the finale, for all its energy, rises to brilliance and humour more than transport. Half the work’s time is sublime; the other half is beautiful.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The rubric does not adjust for a form’s limits. A pattern is present and partly bears weight: the wanderer at the threshold, the stranger of Schubert’s songs, heard in the trill as something from outside that the hymn must admit. The work is widely heard as a farewell written in the composer’s last weeks, and the music lends itself to that hearing. But the farewell is biography, and the wanderer is supplied from Winterreise and Der Wanderer, not built here. What the score builds is a return, the hymn coming back after every disturbance, and a journey through distant keys that comes home: the sonata’s ordinary return, made strange by the trill. Myth evoked, strongly; not constructed. This is the work’s lowest axis but one, and the particular stays vivid.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inherited form is the Beethoven sonata, which Schubert in 1828 faced directly. The departures are real: a first movement whose principle is song and stillness, not motivic conflict, at a tempo that suspends time; a key plan moving by thirds, B flat to G flat and F sharp minor, instead of along the tonic and dominant; a slow movement placed a minor third away by juxtaposition, without transition; a finale that starts outside its key. It is a second way of writing a large sonata beside Beethoven’s. The stake is what holds it down. The work was written for no commission and no public that would hear it soon, The frame is Beethoven’s four-movement plan, kept. The swerve is in the harmony and the time, not the architecture.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. What it knows is that time can stand still inside a form built for motion. The sonata is a form of conflict and resolution; Schubert fills it with a song that does not develop so much as recur, and the length of the first movement, which the repeat doubles, is the instrument of the stillness. A shorter or faster form would make the trill an incident; this one makes it a condition. The third-related keys are form too: they shift the light without the tension of modulation, so the music moves by change of colour. The Andante’s ternary form is the form of memory returning changed. Held below the top in the finale, where the rondo is a container the material fills well.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The work keeps yielding, and the evidence is mostly of the last century. The questions stay open: whether to take the repeat, and what the first-ending bars mean if it is cut; what the trill is, threat, death, memory or the uncanny; whether the finale’s off-tonic opening is a joke, a question or an evasion; how slow Molto moderato is, with recorded first movements running from under fourteen minutes to about twenty-five. The performances of Schnabel, Kempff, Curzon, Richter, Brendel, Uchida and many after them are answers that disagree. Held below the Goldberg Variations, at 9.4, because the work was little studied before about 1900, and its literature is a century deep, not two.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Scored in the field of Viennese keyboard and instrumental music of the 1820s and what followed. The force is high: a real reorganisation of possibility within the sonata, proof that the largest instrumental form could be governed by song, stillness and colour rather than by Beethovenian dialectic, and a working demonstration of third-related keys at the scale of a whole movement. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: late and diffuse. The sonata was published a decade after it was written and little played in the nineteenth century. Its harmonic practice reached later composers through Schubert’s music as a whole, not through this work alone. Its reach is chiefly in performance: since Schnabel in the 1930s it has been central to the repertory. Delay credited and discounted.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, over a span of 198 years. Form: the text is whole, and nothing in it is in doubt but performance choices, the repeat first among them. Presence: the charge is the nineteenth century, when the work was published late and played rarely; its long public life begins about a century after it was written. Since then its presence is among the widest in the solo piano repertory: recorded by most leading pianists, standard in recital and competition. Fabric: no instrument has been lost, and the work sits on the modern piano without strain. The wide presence of the last century lifts the axis; the early silence keeps it from the top of its band. The work’s one gated axis that clears the bar.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The making bears weight throughout. The trill is placed deep in the bass under a sustained chord, so that the instrument’s own resonance makes it ominous; the even accompaniment keeps the first theme’s pulse alive at a slow tempo; in the Andante the left hand crosses over to keep a rhythm and a bass in one hand while the melody sings in the middle. The moves by a third are made with complete control, a single common tone carrying the music from one light to another. The costs are small and real: the finale’s figuration is at times routine and its returns mechanical, and the first movement’s development leans on sequence where Beethoven would have worked the material. The work’s highest axis, held a step below the Goldberg Variations at 9.7.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the hymn and trill of the first movement and the finale’s off-tonic, mercurial rondo. One law governs them, and it has two terms, the semitone and the third. The trill is G flat against F, a semitone; G flat is the first foreign key, a major third below the tonic; the Andante stands a minor third above it, in C sharp minor; the finale’s first note, G, is the sixth degree, a third below the tonic, and its pull towards C minor is the music circling home before it enters. Held below the top because the law binds keys more than themes: the finale’s material is less audibly bound to the first movement’s than its keys are.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The rubric does not adjust for a form’s limits. A wordless solo sonata holds few orders, and holds them together: consciousness, in serenity, dread, grief and play; mortality and time, in the suspended tempo and the trill; the sacred, faintly, in the hymn of the opening; the social, in the dance of the Scherzo and the Viennese song inflection of the themes; the natural order, by figure only, in a form often heard as landscape. The family, labour, the state and history do not appear. One mind and its weather. This is what holds the axis lowest: the instrument and the form hold one consciousness. Held below Op. 131, at 7.3, whose four voices make a society in miniature that a single piano does not, and below Winterreise, at 7.7.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, then The Imperishable at 9.1, and The Sublime, The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 9.0. A piano writing that bears weight from the trill in the bass to the crossing left hand of the Andante; a text whole for two centuries and, after ninety years of near silence, among the widest presences in the solo repertory; height reached often in the first two movements; questions of repeat, tempo and meaning still open; and one law of the semitone and the third governing the keys from the first page to the last.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: a wordless solo sonata holds consciousness, mortality and time, the sacred faintly, the social in the dance and the natural order by figure only; the family, labour, the state and history do not appear. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, where the wanderer and the farewell are evoked and supplied from outside the score, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, where the force is high but the reach was late and is shared with Schubert’s music as a whole.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Swerve at 8.4 fall short by a tenth, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 by three tenths, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 by half a point. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. The aggregate, 8.6, stands below 9.0 in any case, and would hold the work below the summit even if the gate were met.
Basis · the score of the Piano Sonata in B flat major, D. 960, in its standard performing version, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and the running times are ranges across the recorded tradition, not measurements. The four movements as Schubert left them are scored as one work, for solo piano, with the first movement’s exposition repeat and its first-ending lead-back as written: the repeat is part of the text, whether or not a given pianist takes it. No performance is the object; the performing tradition is evidence for the axes of making, return and survival only. There are no words. Schubert’s headings and markings are given as he wrote them, and no other words are quoted. The intervals of the key plan were counted by script. Figures that could not be verified are not given, among them the bar counts of every passage but the trill in bar 8, the exact date of the fair copy, the length of the first ending, the keys passed through in the development, the Scherzo and the finale’s returns, the work’s dedicatee as Schubert intended, the first critical notices, and the claims of particular pianists’ practice with the repeat. The finale’s resemblance to a finale of Beethoven’s is a commentators’ inference and is not relied on. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.