Ludwig Van Beethoven
(born 1770 in Bonn; died 1827 in Vienna)

Piano Sonata No. 31 in A♭ Major, Op. 110

In 1821, Beethoven was 50 years old. Not yet an old man, he was the most revered composer in Europe; he was also a tragic figure, and a pathetic one. Functionally deaf, suffering from rheumatic fever, jaundice and gastrointestinal distress, and mired in a thoroughly ugly dispute with his brother’s family, he ended up spending a night in jail that summer through a set of circumstances both extraordinary and entirely in character: having gotten lost while on a walk and carrying no identification, he grew so hungry he started looking through the windows of private houses and was apprehended by the police, who would not believe that this hapless, unkempt man could be The Great Beethoven.

It is indeed beyond comprehension that this person, at this point in his life, could compose the Sonata in A flat Major, Op. 110. That this person who, on account of both a miserable run of luck and the core of his character, had absolutely no mastery of any aspect of his life, could produce a work of surpassing rigor and transcendent vision. That Beethoven, whose life was an encyclopedia of disappointments, could conceive of a piece of music that, in spite of moments of utter despair, retains its idealism and ends in absolute euphoria. To say that what he achieved with this work in the face of overwhelming obstacles is inspiring would be totally insufficient. Op. 110 is life-giving and life-changing.

Like so many of Beethoven’s late works, the scope of Op. 110 expands as it progresses: the sonata begins with great beauty but no hint of the grandeur to come. The opening theme is marked “sanft” — like all the best German words, it is untranslatable, but somewhere near its core is “gentleness.” This gentleness, this softness of texture immediately opens the heart but conceals the enormous ambition of the journey we have just embarked on.

Beginning a work that aims for the infinite with such modesty feels fitting, for Op. 110 is altogether a sonata of paradoxes. While it conveys great generosity and contains some of the most sheerly beautiful music Beethoven ever wrote, it is a remarkably tight construction — less than 20 minutes long, with not a note wasted. That “sanft” opening theme — a very deliberate climb, each upward step followed by a smaller downward one — is not just the first movement’s main motive: pared down, it will become the subject of the fugal finale. The notes remain practically the same, but the emotional transformation will be enormous: from amabile, to philosophical, to utterly ecstatic.

If the first movement is somewhat compact, the second is dramatically so: barely two minutes from start to finish, this scherzo (in the “wrong” meter of 2/4) has a concentrated intensity that is equal parts controlled fury and slapstick — another paradox. The source material for this music is a pair of folk songs that Beethoven might well have heard in the beer halls he frequented: “Our cat has had kittens,” and — no joke — “I am slovenly; you are slovenly.” Beethoven’s lack of refinement or social graces is imprinted on this music. The elbows-out brusqueness is a reminder that Beethoven’s music is as much about the physical as it is about the metaphysical — that while he often seems superhuman, he remains awkwardly, painfully human.

In spite of the many wonders to be found in these first two movements, they are mere prelude to the finale, one of Beethoven’s most complex and most profound achievements. Nearly double the length of the first two movements combined, it is comprised of five sections with a wide range of musical forms, and conveying an even wider range of feeling: from total desolation to the euphoria that can come only in its wake.

This movement offers yet another paradox: In one sense, the music is backward-looking. Throughout, there are hidden and not-so-hidden connections to the (equally wondrous) Sonata Op. 109, written the previous year; in this sonata’s most desperately dark moment, it quotes its predecessor literally. But Beethoven doesn’t just refer to his own previous work: the forms he uses in the finale of Op. 110 — recitative, arioso, fugue — are all borrowed from Bach.

Perhaps “borrowed” is the wrong word. As Stravinsky said, “Bad composers borrow; great composers steal.” Beethoven’s forms might belong to Bach, but the content is sublimely, startlingly his own. Bach would not, in a recitative, have repeated the same note 27 (!) times in a row — a manic, pleading cry into the void. Bach wrote a great many tragic ariosos, but they do not contain massive crescendos, building and building to a climax that never comes, followed instead by a sudden retreat to piano — a musical representation of hope, snuffed out. And Bach is likely the greatest master of the fugue of his or any time, but his fugues are ends unto themselves. They do not expand, and seek, and strive, until they evolve into something else entirely — into outpourings of pure melody (pure spirit, really) at the extreme upper end of the piano, the accompanying left hand at the extreme lower end (because the piano was never, ever enough for Beethoven; the whole world was not enough for Beethoven). Bach is the template here, but the music is nothing but Beethoven. Beethoven, looking not to the past, but to the future — a future that, the last 50 years be damned, might yet be beautiful.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2023; not to be reprinted without permission.

György Kurtág
(born 1926 in Lugoj)

Játékok

Go to YouTube and you will find, alongside the makeup tutorials and the woodworking demonstrations and the professionally enraged people screaming about all sorts of things, a curious treasure: two rather small octogenarians sit at an upright piano in Budapest, playing the music of Bach. Arms intermingled, minds and souls seemingly inextricable from one another, their concentration is absolute but serene. As they play, the last three centuries and all of life’s practical concerns fall away. Bach is there.

These are Márta and György Kurtág. Each is a profound example of what a life lived through music can be; that they found one another is a miracle. Márta, sadly, is no longer living, but György, now in his 98th year, remains one of the essential musicians of our time, and one of the great composers.

Kurtág’s ability to realize his singular musical vision should be credited in large part to two women. The first, of course, is Márta, who for the 62 years that they were married provided both infinite support and an intellectual and creative mirror. The other is the dedicatee of his String Quartet, Op. 1, the psychologist Marianne Stein. The downside of an attunement to the greatest music of the past as deep as Kurtág’s is that it can be paralyzing: by the age of 30, Kurtág was in a depression and unable to compose. Stein not only lifted him from the depression, she provided him with an aesthetic path forward. As Kurtág himself encapsulated her message to him: ”Simplicity allows for direct, personal expression.” The scope was no longer the point; the absolute truth of the idea and the precision with which it was expressed was what mattered. In the many decades since Stein helped Kurtág towards this revelation, he has produced thousands of works, most of them only minutes or even seconds long, each of them revelatory in their honesty and in their intellectual and emotional depth.

The Játékok (“Games”) exemplify this. They are a compendium of characteristically tiny pieces, begun in 1973 and by now comprising ten volumes. As the name would suggest, they were conceived, at least in part, as a holistic and joyous instructional manual for young pianists. A surprising number of the great composers have written works that are explicitly for children (though, like the best children’s books and films, also richly rewarding for adults): Bach, Schumann, Bartók, just for starters. But Kurtág’s contribution to this genre is unique, both for the breadth of its imagination, and for the profundity he finds in simplicity. These works exhaust (and then expand) the encyclopedia of sonorities the piano can produce, but the sonorities themselves are never the point: they are the building blocks of poetry that is emotionally pure and wryly witty.

Kurtág dedicates many of these pieces to the memory of people no longer living – some of them friends, but more often, composers of the past. His music is in constant conversation with theirs. To listen to the Játékok is to deepen your connection not only to their author, but to the hundreds of years of a musical tradition that lives on with him.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2023; not to be reprinted without permission.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(born 1756 in Salzburg; died 1791 in Vienna)

Rondo in a minor, K. 511

Mozart is the most objective of the great composers. Neither an optimist nor a pessimist, Mozart is simply a realist — a stenographer of
emotion. If this sounds cold, the results are anything but. Mozart’s mind is so omniscient, his understanding of psychology is so sophisticated — and, of course, his mastery of his craft is so staggering — he can convey, in sound, the changeability and illogic of human feeling and the frequent stupidity of human behavior in a way that is both unnervingly precise and deeply moving. With a single harmonic shift, he can move from exhilaration to melancholy; with another, he can leave the melancholy behind, laughing or shrugging it off. His music, like our inner lives, is in a constant state of flux.

What, then, accounts for the Rondo in a minor, K. 511? For the entirety of its ten devastating minutes, it drops any hint of third-person remove, and for the great majority of them, it conveys a profound, inescapable grief. Written early in 1787, when Mozart was 31, no biographical detail helps explain its genesis. The e minor Violin Sonata, K. 304 and the a minor Piano Sonata, K. 310, are similarly uninterrupted expressions of anguish — but they come in the immediate aftermath of the unexpected and likely preventable death of Mozart’s mother, whom he adored. By contrast, the beginning of 1787 was a relatively happy and stable time in Mozart’s complicated life. The motivation for the a minor Rondo is as inexplicable as is the devastating impact it has on the listener.

The a minor Rondo is extraordinary among Mozart’s works not only for its single-mindedness, but for its extreme compression. This is a function not primarily of the density of its events, but of the notes themselves: this is surely the most chromatic work Mozart ever composed. This produces countless points of tension — the intervals that open the first and second measures of the piece are so uncomfortable, they produce a physical sensation in the body. But equally, this chromaticism conveys a difficulty in moving, the sense of being stuck, trapped. The notes are too close together; the effort in rising a mere fifth, as happens over two full measures in the first phrase, is so exhausting, the only possible response is to fall back down to where we started. It is a declaration of hopelessness, just moments into the piece.

For all the ways in which the a minor Rondo is atypical, it is vintage Mozart in that it owes so much to the world of opera. This is less a question of the vocal quality in it — achingly beautiful though it is — and more a function of how deeply attuned Mozart is to how the piece works as a narrative. As the name “Rondo” would imply, its principal material is twice interrupted by a contrasting episode. Both episodes are in the major mode, bringing, if not actual hope, then the possibility of hope; both lead back to the a minor music of the opening by way of a transitional passage even more claustrophobically chromatic than the main theme itself. These brief windows into a less bleak world make the one we come back to ever bleaker.

Bleaker still is the coda. As is so often the case with Mozart’s codas, it draws its power in part from its superfluousness; Mozart has already said everything that needs saying. But he is not finished. Incorporating suggestions of the two major-key episodes, and transforming them into music as desolate and oppressive as the rest of the piece, he then brings the opening idea back one last time. It is chromatic as ever, but shortened to a mere fragment, as if the effort required to play the phrase in its entirety is by now simply impossible. This fragment was once a beginning, an invitation to more music; it has now become an answer, a devastating confirmation that the grief will not assuaged. All that can follow it is a two-note pianissimo cadence, the ultimate expression of resignation, bringing this singular masterwork to a whispered, shattering close.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2023; not to be reprinted without permission.

Arnold Schoenberg
(born 1874 in Vienna; died 1951 in Los Angeles)

Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19

Arnold Schoenberg wrote his Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke (Six Little Piano Pieces), Op. 19 in 1911, as the world order and the tonal system – the foundation on which western classical music rested – teetered on the precipice. It took the First World War and the Russian Revolution (with an assist from the Spanish Flu) to finally topple the former; the latter was taken out by a single strike, administered by Schoenberg.

Tonality is a difficult concept to usefully define, because our experience of it is so instinctive and immersive. Wikipedia informs us that it is “the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of relations, stabilities, attractions, and directionality.” Well, terrific. Everything in that sentence is, strictly speaking, true; it is also true that the air is a mix of nitrogen and oxygen, sometimes holding non-gaseous substances called aerosols. Is that what you were thinking of the last time you said you needed air?

We feel tonality in our bones. It is the key to music’s emotional power and – relatedly – to its narrative power. It provides a sense of where home is, and by extension, tells us how close to or far from it we are at any given moment. It creates a set of expectations that feel primal, which makes the subversion of those expectations an incredible source of drama and humor. My choice of analogy was not arbitrary: tonality is the musical air we breathe.

In spite of all that, it is deeply fragile. Schoenberg did indeed bring an end to tonality – or, more precisely, in writing music that doesn’t owe its effectiveness or its meaning to it, he brought an end to its supremacy. But in truth, it had been in an increasing state of crisis for a full century. Beethoven, who was constitutionally averse to rules or to restrictions of any kind, was determined to test tonality’s limits, to see how far he could stray from its principles without destroying it outright. The results were dazzling.

But the genie was out of the bottle. Most of the greatest composers of the 19th century – Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler – continued on the path that Beethoven had set out for them: their music is gripping not because of how they use the rules of tonality, but because of how they break them. The system remains in place, but its meaning grows increasingly murky. Eventually, the harmonic destinations eventually become so obscure, the effect is not of feeling far from home – it is of no longer knowing where home is.

By the 1920s, Schoenberg had decided that this had gone too far: early in the decade, he wrote his first atonal music, saying that he had “emancipated the dissonance.” But before he became the self-proclaimed Abraham Lincoln of the notes of the chromatic scale, he was very much a part of that post-Beethoven tradition, stretching the rubber band of tonality while remaining deeply attached to it.

This is the Schoenberg of the Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19. The “kleine” or “little” of the title is no joke: most of the pieces are less than a minute long. The choice – unusual for Schoenberg – to work in miniature yields extraordinary results: shorn of the excess that one finds in many of his other early works, every interval becomes hugely meaningful. The common knock on Schoenberg is that he is cold. This is understandable, given his willingness to reject the musical language that he loved so dearly. But in works such as the Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, that love is front and center. The spaces between the notes question, and implore, and, above all, sigh. The sense of yearning in this music is nearly constant, and often overwhelming. It is the yearning one feels for a thing that is not quite lost, but that we can feel slipping away from us.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2023; not to be reprinted without permission.

Franz Schubert
(born 1797, Vienna; died 1828, Vienna)

Allegro in a minor, D. 947

Franz Schubert was blessed with one of the greatest musical gifts in human history, and little else. He lacked financial security, good physical health, emotional resiliency, and the connection to another human being that he so craved. Most of all, he lacked time. Schubert died at the age of 31: five years younger than Mozart, 34 years younger than Bach, 72 years younger than Elliot Carter. That he composed over 950 works in such a meager lifespan is more than remarkable.

Yet more remarkable is the evolution that took place in his music in the last years of his life. As Schubert’s time on earth grew shorter, his music expanded, as if in defiance of an otherwise unavoidable fate. In particular, his sonata movements took on epic proportions: their scope, ambition, emotional range, and harmonic extremity are awe-inducing and often frightening. Their willingness to wander – to make space for Schubert’s most sublime daydreams and his most upsetting nightmares before returning to their central argument – makes them unlike any music written before or since.

Among the most extraordinary of these sonata movements is the Allegro in a minor, D. 947, written in the last year of his life. Like so much of Schubert’s music for piano 4-hands, it is rarely heard in public: a terrible shame, as it achieves something different from any of his other grandest essays in sonata form. Its tragic nature is somehow heightened rather than tempered by the surreal beauty of the reveries contained within it. The solace is temporary; the pain is permanent.

The work’s tragedy is laid bare in the work’s opening gesture: not quite a theme, rather a furious a minor descent, made symphonic by virtue of the four hands covering the whole of Schubert’s keyboard. Throughout, Schubert’s exploitation of these additional hands is brilliant and unsettling: even when the music turns quiet after the initial outburst, there is rhythmic and motivic complication everywhere. The range of character is broad, but unrest is a constant.

This constant unrest, this sense of an anxiety that cannot be stilled, is what makes the arrival of the second theme such a stunning event. Everything about this theme contributes to the sense of it belonging to a faraway place. The pianississimo marking. The steady heartbeat that underpins it, so unlike the roiling rhythm of the earlier music. The tonality of A flat Major, the warmest of keys, but so out of context here that it becomes dislocating. The central fact of this whispered chorale is not its beauty, or even its profundity, but its faraway-ness. It is not another country, or another world, or even another solar system: it is unreality. It is as beautiful as music can be, but it does not bring comfort, because it does not belong to the world Schubert inhabited.

That is ultimately what the piece is about: the tension between this lonely utopia that we visit three times, and a fate that cannot be avoided. Schubert’s late instrumental music is sometimes criticized for being long-winded. It meanders; it repeats and repeats. But every one of Schubert’s meanderings serves a purpose, and so too does every repetition. In the Allegro in a minor, each reappearance of the main theme finds it altered by those glorious, unearthly digressions. It grows ever more tragic, ever more frightening: death is coming closer. By the time the piece comes to its remorseless close, it has acquired a grandeur and a terribleness that one could not have foreseen when it began. Listening to it is a profound, unsettling experience – an experience that could only come from the Schubert of 1828.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2023; not to be reprinted without permission.

Franz Schubert
(born 1797, Vienna; died 1828, Vienna)

Divertissement à la Hongroise, D. 818

All great works of music are mysterious; trying to explain why a certain combination of notes is so deeply moving when a similar one leaves you cold is an exercise in futility. If you could communicate the meaning of a piece of music in words, there would be no need to play it.

But there are different levels of mysterious. Aspects of the Beethoven piano sonatas defy description, but their forms – the ways in which expectation is created and then subverted – help us map their emotional content. Bach fugues owe their power to exquisite counterpoint, and to their composer’s genius: at least one of those two things is explicable, if not necessarily repeatable.

Virtually nothing about Schubert’s Divertissement à la Hongroise is explicable. There is no form of analysis that can help us understand why listening to it is such a peculiarly devastating experience. Its title is already deeply misleading. This massive work is not a diversion, or an entertainment: it is a portal into another world. A bleak, melancholy, and terribly lonely world that, in spite of all that, is so beautiful, visiting it is a privilege.

In the Divertissement, a brief march is flanked by two gigantic movements, both modified rondos. In each of these rondos, a recurring main theme is contrasted with a series of vignettes, the theme itself growing more tragic on each appearance. This music is achingly, unmistakably Schubertian, but it is also unique within his output: its starting point is Hungarian folk music, which he treats with the opposite of condescension. Through symphonic expansion, harmonic manipulation, and sheer genius, Schubert gives these unassuming motivic ideas not just dignity, but profundity.

What does it mean to say that this music is “unmistakably Schubertian?” Schubert’s music contains the full spectrum of human emotion, to be sure. But loneliness is never far away, and so often, it is at the center. Schubert could convey a sense of solitude like no other artist, and he does so in nearly every one of his works, either fleetingly or unremittingly. In the Divertissement à la Hongroise, it is unremitting.

There is a deep irony here, because 4-hand piano music places two musicians closer to one another than they would be playing any other form of instrumental music. Often, the primo player’s left hand will cross below the secondo player’s right; nearly as often, Schubert will ask the two pianists to do the impossible and play the same note at the same time. (This might be an oversight; I am inclined to think that it is not, but rather a reflection of the human connection for which Schubert was so starved.) For the 40 minutes it takes to play the Divertissement, two pianists discover what it means to be alone, together.

40 minutes is a long time – comparable to the duration of any of the last piano sonatas. In particular, it is a long time to be confronted with Schubert’s unmitigated loneliness. And yet, the Divertissement à la Hongroise is not depressing. While so many of the work’s most striking details – starting with the harmonic shift in the fifth bar of piece that takes the air out of the room and drains the blood from the face – are profoundly sad, Schubert resists embitterment. 40 minutes after that quiet harmonic shock, the piece ends with one of Schubert’s signature shifts to the major mode. Achingly, infinitely lonely, but not defeated: Schubert’s heart remains open, ready to be broken anew.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2023; not to be reprinted without permission.

Franz Schubert
(born 1797, Vienna; died 1828, Vienna)

Four Impromptus, D. 935

Schubert’s genius was equally well suited to the epic scale and to the miniature. In piano sonatas and chamber music works of 40 minutes or longer, he takes existing forms and expands them, testing their natural limits and turning digression into a sublime art; in hundreds of lieder, each no more than a few minutes long, he pierces and, in some case, shatters your heart with a single change of harmony or turn of phrase.

The Four Impromptus, D. 935 occupy a middle ground. Already deeply moving when heard individually, they become something greater when experienced in their entirety. Written exactly a year before Schubert’s death at the age of 31 (consider it: 935 pieces of music written by the age of 30), the successive tonalities, forms, and moods of these four freestanding pieces suggest a grand sonata in f minor.

However, freed from the strictures of the word “sonata” and the long shadow it — and Beethoven’s 32 towering examples of the form —casts, Schubert’s imagination becomes even more uninhibited, the results even more wondrous. The first Impromptu is not a sonata form; it has no development. Instead, its expected two themes — the first tragic, the second consoling but still so full of sorrow — are supplemented by an unexpected third. Marked pianissimo appassionato, it is many seemingly contradictory things at once: fervent, mysterious, urgent, halting, haunting. Its effect is transformative: when it is followed by the return of the Impromptu’s opening idea, it has moved away from defiance and towards resignation. Acceptance is still a long way off, but the fight has been revealed to be futile.

The second piece, an Allegretto, is quintessential Schubert: evocative of a Viennese dance, perhaps a ländler, in an A flat Major that is somehow more deeply sad than the f minor music that preceded it, and so simple on its surface that any attempt to explain how profoundly moving it is would be doomed to failure. If the first Impromptu is discursive, taking the listener down a wandering and unpredictable path, this one takes a very different route to the sublime, using an unadorned A-B-A form, the simplest in all of music. Not one of its motivic or harmonic events is jarring; few of them are unexpected. In spite or because of this sense of inevitability, the music finds the core of Schubert’s vulnerability, and ours.

The third Impromptu has another kind of deceptive simplicity, its lilting B flat Major theme falling and then rising in perfect symmetry: a child’s poem. But over the course of five wide-ranging variations, it develops into something different. Even the variations which merely embellish the theme somehow deepen it in the process; Schubert is constitutionally incapable of writing meaningless music, and every appoggiatura, every neighbor tone, shades and complicates the music’s narrative. That narrative is further complicated by the journey two of the variations take away from the B flat Major home, first to b flat minor, then to G flat Major. The former is often dark and always suffused with sehnsucht — longing. (Sehnsucht is the central fact of Schubert’s existence. A line from Die Taubenpost, his final song — “Sie heißt die Sehnsucht” [“She is called longing”] — could be considered his motto.) The latter tries to be light-hearted, doesn’t quite manage, and in the process only grows more sehnsuchtsvoll: a Schubert signature. Almost every bar features a series of large upward leaps, a gesture that would be carefree in any other pair of hands. But even when Schubert yodels, he does so mit Sehnsucht.

The end of the last variation is not the end of the Impromptu; there is a partial reprise of the theme, in a lower octave and at a slower tempo. It now bears the weight of its history — a history it did not have when we first heard it, only ten minutes earlier. It has lost its innocence and grown even more beautiful.

The final Impromptu returns to f minor and is another study in surface lightness that is not, in fact, light. Marked Allegro Scherzando, its predominant characteristic is not playfulness. Eely in its misterioso middle section, featuring pianissimo scales slithering up and down the keyboard, it is otherwise steely, staring fate in the eye and showing no remorse. If the first Impromptu ended with resignation but not acceptance, the last exhibits neither: it ends with a fortississimo downward scale, spanning the entire piano and landing on a single, terrible, low f. Schubert’s extraordinary gift for lyricism and consolation is matched — balanced is not the word — by the intensity with which he confronted the pain of life and the horror of death. In these Impromptus, both qualities are given magnificent expression. But it is the horror that gets the last word.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2023; not to be reprinted without permission.

Franz Schubert
(born 1797, Vienna; died 1828, Vienna)

March in e♭ minor, D. 819 no. 5

If you know one thing and one thing only about diatonic music, it is this: major keys convey happiness, minor keys sadness. This is a vast oversimplification, but it is also not wrong, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provide hundreds of glorious cases in point. Sometimes, a single chord says everything: the a minor triad that opens the theme of the Schumann Piano Concerto is itself suffused with the sorrow that permeates the work. The A major triad that opens Brahms’s second piano quartet is a portal into a whole world of hope and possibility. Great composers play with and complicate this paradigm, but the paradigm itself is never in question.

Never, that is, except for with Schubert. For Schubert, sorrow is a constant; it never goes away. It can be more or less deep, more or less mediated, more or less overt, but it is inescapable. And therefore, the appearance of the major mode, particularly in the context of minor key music, often brings even greater pain. It is the pain that comes with an experience that ought to bring joy, but does not. It is the pain that cannot be masked, or brushed aside.

This is a phenomenon that any lover of Schubert’s music is familiar with. But one of the most moving examples of it comes in a work that is virtually unknown: the March in e flat Minor, D. 819 no. 5. Schubert’s music for piano 4-hands is an altogether neglected body of work, but these marches are particularly neglected: even most pianists are unaware of their existence. All six of them are beautiful, but the e flat minor goes far beyond beauty. A funeral march, it is as uncompromising as it is desolate, each bass note a step towards an inexorable fate. While this march is surprisingly long – it takes over fifteen minutes to play – it does not feel expansive or generous. Unlike much of Schubert’s large-scale music, it never veers from the path it establishes at its outset, and its most dramatic modulations happen with such extreme compression, they don’t strike us as modulations at all – they are more like gear shifts, coming without preparation, and thus deeply disturbing.

Coming from any other pen, the E flat major chord that brings the march proper to an end would be a relief; the trio that emerges from it, expanding on that chord and on the major mode, would offer respite. But this is Schubert’s pen, and Schubert’s soul: there will be no respite and no relief. This trio is moving in the extreme: it cannot find its way to joy, but it offers such solace. It lays bare the harsh, heartbreaking realities of Schubert’s existence, and the role music played in making it bearable. Life is lonely, and death is inescapable. All there is, in the end, are e flat minor and e flat major. The former giving voice to the pain Schubert knew, the latter to the pain of what he longed to know. His capacity to communicate these pains – so personal and yet somehow also universal – is among his greatest gifts to us.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2023; not to be reprinted without permission.

Franz Schubert
(born 1797, Vienna; died 1828, Vienna)

Rondo in A Major, D. 951

The breadth of Schubert’s achievement is dizzying. The quite literally inexplicable volume of music he produced is one thing; the content is another altogether. His final three piano sonatas expand the form and take it to places – both nightmarish and transcendent – no one had gone to previously; Winterreise is a singular piece of music, without precedent and unrepeatable, a 70 minute tour of desolation in all of its guises; the E flat Major Piano Trio is somehow both grander and more intimate than any other work in the genre; the E flat Major Mass converts Schubert’s profound and profoundly ambivalent Catholicism into pure sound. And this is merely the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

And yet, for all that, Schubert’s most indelible achievement might also be his most unassuming: he wrote melodies that are more beautiful than can be believed, and far more beautiful than can be expressed in words. Melodies that take the breath away even when heard out of context, melodies that do not rely on a large-scale structure for their emotional power. Schubert wrote hundreds if not thousands of such melodies; they sound as if they came to him fully formed – perfect versions of themselves, with no intervention required. There might be great complexity lurking beneath the surface, but the surfaces themselves are odes to the power of simplicity. They come from the heart, and speak directly to the heart, as Beethoven said music should.

This is the world of the Rondo in A Major, D. 951. Contemporaneous with the Allegro in a minor, and possibly intended as a companion piece to it, their natures are fundamentally different. The Allegro’s power comes from its volatility, alternately wrestling with fate and seeking refuge from it by retreating into an imagined world; the Rondo, by contrast, is 12 minutes of nearly uninterrupted consolation. It is not devoid of complication: The sheer beauty of the music and Schubert’s preference in it for consonance over dissonance mask the intricacy of the counterpoint, and a sudden modulation in the central episode takes the breath away. But from its first notes, the listener is disarmed by the serenity and directness with which the music seems to have flowed from its author.

That author being Schubert, things are not quite so simple: alongside that serenity and directness, there is an enormous fragility. Loneliness was central to Schubert’s existence, and longing – sehnsucht – was at the core of his character. And years before he wrote this Rondo, he already knew death was coming: even in the relatively placid works of his later period, horrifying visions frequently intrude.

The A Major Rondo is a work by Schubert without horror; this time, he manages to keep it at bay. There is melancholy, inevitably, but in episode after episode, his warm-heartedness wins out. The generosity of this music is deeply moving of its own accord; when one considers the hurt and the terror that defined his later life, that made their way into so much of his later music, and that remain just suppressed here, that generosity becomes overwhelming. Schubert’s soul was as beautiful as his gift was great.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2023; not to be reprinted without permission.

Franz Schubert
(born 1797, Vienna; died 1828, Vienna)

Sonata in c minor, D. 958
When Mozart was still a teenager, he wrote a series of violin concertos which are among the first of his works to have entered the repertoire and remained there. They are age appropriate, assuming one is a genius: impeccably wrought, full of imagination and charm, largely unconcerned with the great questions of life, and wholly untroubled by the specter of death.

When Schubert was eighteen years old, he wrote his first great song, the Erlkönig: a man rides through the night on horseback, holding his child but failing to protect him. Death beckons, in the form of the Erl-king; he is seductive and terrifying. Throughout the song, the pianist is asked to play lightning-fast octaves – the situation is nightmarish, the music close to unplayable. Moments from the end, the relentless motion in the piano part finally stops. Has the danger passed? No. The child has died.

This is Schubert. We forget, because the beauty of his music is so overwhelming, that his nature is morbid. Long before he had reason to suspect that his life would be short, he wrote music that fixates on death, with fascination and terror. When, at the age of just twenty-five, he began to show symptoms of the syphilis that likely killed him, this fixation grew stronger, and found increasingly personal and increasingly devastating expression in his music. This is the Schubert of the Unfinished Symphony, of Die Schöne Müllerin, works that, in their different ways, confront the horror of death, and offer consolation without offering hope.

And when, only a few years later, death was indeed imminent, Schubert reckoned with it in a way no other composer has, before or since. The astonishing final three piano sonatas, dated simply “September 1828” – he died in November – represent three different approaches to facing the inevitable. Perhaps because it was published as the last of the trilogy, the B flat major, with its extreme surface serenity, has most informed our perception of Schubert at the end of his life. He is at peace.

Listen to the Sonata in c minor, D. 958, and you will come to the opposite conclusion. Schubert is in rage, and he is in terror. The work is frightening to play and frightening to listen to; Schubert surely intended it that way. Schubert is staring death in the face and insisting that you do so as well.

Much of the c minor Sonata’s power comes from how tightly argued it is. There is a relentless focus to this music which is atypical. Schubert’s instrumental works tend to wander, sublimely; by and large, the c minor’s grim forward march leaves no room for wandering. Perhaps that is why listeners have often found this to be the most Beethovenian of Schubert’s great works. The voice is unmistakably Schubert’s, but the sense of being led, inevitably and even inexorably, down a path, is highly reminiscent of the man who had died just a year earlier, and at whose funeral Schubert had been a pallbearer.

This sense of a remorseless architecture begins immediately: the opening theme rises and rises, reaching upward with ferocious insistence, punctuated by silences which only increase the tension. This is a motive but not a melody – a striking and significant choice on the part of a man who wrote hundreds of songs, and whose lyrical gift is rightly venerated. There is plenty of beauty in this sonata, but it is not the starting point, and it will not be the ending point; it is not the point. This opening rise is extreme, as befits the piece: just twelve measures in, we are three octaves higher than where we began, and already at a fever pitch. The terms of the work have been set; the path has been laid.

This path is not one of start-to-finish fury; Schubert is far too sophisticated for that, and it is anyway not how sonata form works. But while the sonata’s second theme is deeply lyrical, it offers no consolation. It is surpassingly beautiful but also ambiguous, never quite settling into its E flat major, always feeling vaguely haunted by the music that came before it. The development represents a different sort of attempt to escape the terribleness promised by the opening, and a different sort of failure to do so. Midway through it, we are suddenly unmoored, for the first and only time in the work. The start of the sonata was solidly diatonic, reaching ever upward, moving with total forthrightness; this music is unnervingly chromatic, moving up and then down with slithering uncertainty. It is a ghoulish detour from the movement’s central argument, but joined to it through the terror it evokes.

This pervasive sense of terror makes what follows all the more deeply moving. The sonata’s second movement, an Adagio, puts a side of Schubert that had been sidelined in the first movement front and center: the tenderness in this Adagio’s main theme is almost more than one can bear. This theme, inexpressibly beautiful and already perfect in and of itself, becomes so much more powerful in context. It appears three times, interrupted twice by music with the sense of foreboding that permeates the rest of the sonata: dark, and with the harmonic ground shifting perilously underneath it. Each time the main theme returns, it grows more affecting; each time we grow more aware that the respite it provides will prove temporary.

And so it is. The third and, particularly, the fourth movements return us to the road we started out on: by the end, it will feel very much like the road to hell. The finale, a dance with death, is among the grimmest, most unremitting pieces of music ever written. Its primary material’s rhythmic drive is nonstop, its motion relentless; its secondary material, launched by a terrifying sudden shift – a modulation it isn’t – from c minor up to c sharp minor, is, if possible, even more maniacal and driven. The central episode, the movement’s only music in the major mode, while beautiful in an unearthly way, is not ultimately less frightening – this is the Erl-King, consoling us to our death.

And death does come. The sonata began with a furious rise to the top of the keyboard; it ends with a plunge all the way to the bottom. It is the culmination of an altogether harrowing work, one which gives magnificent expression to the darkest corners of Schubert’s psyche.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2023; not to be reprinted without permission.

Franz Schubert
(born 1797, Vienna; died 1828, Vienna)

Sonata in A Major, D. 959

What comes between anger and acceptance?

Per Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, first bargaining, then depression. But with apologies to the doctor, when grappling with that greatest of mysteries – the passage from life to death – I look not to the sciences, but to the place I most often go looking for meaning, for spirituality, for comfort. I look to music. Above all, I look to Schubert.

Between anger and acceptance comes grandeur, ambivalence, fever, heart-stopping tenderness, defiance, longing: Schubert’s Sonata in A Major, D. 959. A complicated, unsettling miracle of a work.

The “anger” that precedes it is the Sonata in c minor, D. 958. “Anger” is an insufficient word, really: the sonata is an extended essay in incredulity. Death is coming, but it cannot be coming. Schubert has too much life to live, love to give, music to write. His fury is palpable, uncontainable, and frightening.

The “acceptance” comes in the form of the heaven-facing Sonata in B flat Major, D. 960, and here too, the word diminishes the work, flattening it into a becalmed thing, papering over its tragedy, the unbearable sorrow of saying goodbye. Still, however constricting these labels might be, they are not fundamentally wrong. The c minor sonata is an expression of anger; the B flat major sonata is an expression of acceptance.

Between these two towering works comes the A Major sonata; boiling it down to a single word essence would be not just limiting but impossible. Its greatness and its power are a function of its ambiguity, which is expressed in so many ways – in its huge range of character, its structural complexity and breadth, its constant transformation of its material. The A Major Sonata is a work that tells you what the truth is, then suggests that truth itself is an illusion.

While it does not take quite as long to play as the B flat Sonata, the A Major is in spirit the truest manifestation of what Schumann referred to as Schubert’s “heavenly length.” A look at the extensive surviving sketches for the work is fascinating and revealing: Schubert’s editing process here was not one of paring dawn, but rather of expansion, of opening outward. In the final version of the work, almost every thematic area is longer than it was initially. These expansions are revelatory. Often, they put the material through a distorting lens; sometimes they accommodate strangely moving (or just strange) digressions; in one extraordinary case, the music devolves into a terrifying hallucination. Meanwhile, certain ideas appear again and again, reminding us that however unpredictable the path, Schubert has never lost sight of it.

The most tenacious of these ideas is the one that opens the sonata. A two note salvo, it will recur throughout the sonata in countless guises – atypically for a work of its time, it features in each of the four movements, persisting until the very end and dominating the work’s last phrase. In its initial appearance, it is a supporting voice, the main event being a chordal sequence which launches the piece with terrific confidence, even pride.

This confidence holds for all of six measures. What seems certain, at its outset, to be a declarative statement, ends up being a question, irregular in length and resisting an immediate answer. One entreating phrase, then another, tries and fails to provide resolution; when resolution eventually comes and the music of the opening returns, it has turned lyrical and lost its brio. A pattern has been established: nothing is precisely one thing or another, nothing is as simple as it initially seems.

A full accounting of all this movement’s twists and turns – all its complications – would be impossible, not to mention exhausting. But the breadth of character and feeling is vast, as is the amount of harmonic territory covered. No one’s mind wanders more beautifully than Schubert’s, and never did his mind wander more beautifully than in this movement.

It is when he allows himself one final wander, in the first movement’s coda, that the sonata enters a new plane altogether. In a sonata movement, a coda is in itself a kind of digression: it is not essential to the form. So, when a composer decides to include a coda, its emotional meaning is connected to its superfluity: it is not a structural necessity but an inner one. It is there because the composer is deeply attached to it being there.

This coda is dominated by the two note motive that launches and permeates the work. The notes and their rhythm are unchanged, but their meaning has undergone a radical transformation. Turned inward, this motive is now an expression of utter vulnerability. Its building blocks may come from the work’s past, but it presents as an anxious daydream about an unknowable future.

This sonata’s immediate future turns out to be one not of daydreams, but of nightmares; the middle of the second movement is quite possibly the most frightening, even unhinged, passage of music written in the 19th century. This movement begins where the previous one left off – literally, with the same note, but also emotionally. This is the world of song – a world Schubert so often lives in – and the sorrow it expresses is deep but contained. This vocal lament unfolds with a reassuring predictability: for forty measures, the rhythm never changes. Bar after bar, the bass rises quickly, then falls slowly: a gentle defiance of gravity. In the final measures, deliberation becomes stasis: first the bass line, and then melody, ceases to move. Sleep comes.

And then, all hell breaks loose. Analysis of this music is not possible: this is the expression of a terrifying and terrified id. For several minutes, the motion becomes simultaneously more aimless and more hysterical until, with a shriek, it stops.

The silences in music have tremendous power. Their character is dependent on the music that precedes them: they can question, or console, or menace. This silence is a paralysis: the stillness of a person who is desperate to escape but knows there is nowhere to escape to. It is a dream most people have had, translated into sound by perhaps the only person capable of doing so.

This movement is so shattering, logic would suggest that nothing could follow it. That the two ensuing movements not only work, but transform the sonata into something yet more powerful and more moving is the clearest possible demonstration of Schubert’s genius. On the surface, it seems that the horror has simply been left behind: overall, these movements are exceptionally generous and open-hearted. But what Schubert has not left behind is ambivalence and complexity: those are the work’s currency. There is one literal reminiscence of the slow movement, but more significant is the ever-present emotional instability. The theme of the finale has the simplicity of a song, but behind this simplicity lies a whole universe of fragility and doubt. Moments before the sonata’s triumphant ending (ambivalently triumphant – a clenched-teeth triumph) comes the moment that lingers longest in the memory – longer even than the slow movement’s primal scream. The song-theme breaks down, mid-sentence, no less than four times. Each time it resumes, it is more deeply marked, even scarred, by the preceding silence. These resumptions take effort; they take courage. They represent the desire to live, and the dawning comprehension that life is nearing an end. They are what come between anger and acceptance.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2024; not to be reprinted without permission.

Franz Schubert
(born 1797, Vienna; died 1828, Vienna)

Sonata in B♭ Major, D. 960

It was the beginning of September, 1828, and Schubert was seriously unwell. 31 years old and in the throes of the tertiary stage of syphilis, he left the discomfort of urban Vienna for the discomfort of a tiny, damp and poorly heated room in his brother’s house.

He died in that miserable room just two months later. But first, he had one of the most stunning bursts of creative activity in human history. Before his health deteriorated to the point that composition became impossible, he completed a string of the greatest works he or anyone ever produced. This list likely includes the String Quintet in C Major, Schwanengesang, and the final three piano sonatas. The qualifier of “likely” is necessary because of the paucity of reliable information about Schubert’s working life in 1828. He worked feverishly, in all senses; he lived in poverty and obscurity. None of these works were published until long after he died; many of them were entirely unknown for years.

The gulf between these wretched circumstances and the power of the music that emerged from them is impossible to overstate. More than five years removed from his first bout with syphilis, Schubert had to have known – or, at the very least, strongly suspected – that he had little time left to live. But as his life contracted, his music expanded, in length and, more so, in vision. The proportions of these last works are immense; their harmonic language is daring, sometimes even frightening. He is constantly grappling with fate; he is deeply, eternally lonely.

Each of these works is miraculous and endlessly interesting. But even in this staggering company, the Sonata in B flat Major, D. 960 stands out. It cannot be compared to the other music Schubert wrote in the last months of his life or, indeed, to any other music. The difference is not a question of quality: It is perfectly possible to prefer the String Quintet, or one of the other piano sonatas, or the Winterreise of 1827, or one of Bach’s, or Beethoven’s, or Mozart’s assorted miracles. That is a matter of taste. But Schubert’s B flat Sonata is unique because it is the ultimate musical farewell. There are moments of terror in this work, and moments of play. But its subject is leaving the world behind: the profound sadness of knowing you will never again see those you love.

To listen to Schubert’s Sonata in B flat Major is to be transported: it occupies the liminal space between life and death, and as you listen, you feel that you do as well. From the first notes, all the artifacts of the everyday are left behind; all that exists is this music. The sonata does not begin so much as emerge out of the silence that precedes it. A melody of absolute simplicity – it rises and then falls so gently, rhyming like a child’s poem – is underpinned by constant eighth notes, no fewer than 40 of them, moving with total regularity, evoking the eternal.

This is Schubert, though; for him, things are rarely as simple or as unencumbered as they first seem to be. The eighth note motion does eventually stop, and when it does, it is not at a cadence – a point of rest – but on a dominant chord. This chord is a question mark; the silence the eighth notes leave in their wake is a void, full of mystery and uncertainty.

Whatever it is that one expects to follow this heavy, destabilizing silence, it is not the thing that actually happens: a trill in the lowest reaches of the piano, played pianissimo and suggesting the minor mode. Only a few seconds long, and no louder than a murmur, this trill changes everything – not just what is to come, but the meaning of what we have already heard. The trill comes out of silence, and it leads to silence. But these silences are not mirror images: the second, in the wake of the trill, with its suggestion of menace, is ever so much fraught than the first. This second silence is followed by the resumption of the opening theme, and it has been irrevocably altered by the trill. More precisely, it has been fully revealed: we have felt the fragility and glimpsed the horror that its serenity is obscuring, barely.

For twenty minutes, the first movement proceeds along this path. The beauty of the music is extreme and inexplicable, but it is also haunted; the specter of a terrible void is never far away. The trill returns often enough that it should grow less unsettling, but it does not. Schubert wants to leave the world at peace, but he remains petrified.

If the first movement is poised between acceptance and terror, the second movement has a different preoccupation: the impossible task of saying goodbye. In a distant, desolate c sharp minor, its main theme is somehow stoic and anguished all at once. The rhythm of the accompanying left hand is implacable, moving deliberately, inexorably towards death. The melody itself unfolds as a series of sighs; the ache of it is overwhelming. Nothing else Schubert wrote – none of the hundreds of songs – so thoroughly communicates the sehnsucht (“longing” is as close as English comes) that was the core of his character.

A central episode in A major attempts to bring the piece back to earth: its lyricism, glorious as it is, seems to come from normal circumstances, so unlike the music that surrounds it. But its respite cannot be permanent, and inevitably, it leads back to the music of the opening, its sorrow more devastating than ever. For the first few measures, its shape is fundamentally unchanged from its first appearance. Then comes a modulation into C Major so sudden and so unexpected, to listen to it is to have the blood drain from your face.

Many a music-loving agnostic has remarked that living with Schubert has made them believe in a higher power. This C Major is Schubert’s transfiguration. The music does find its way back to its home tonality, but the man has crossed a threshold. If Schubert ever truly belonged to this earth, as of this moment, he has left it.

A third movement is not a necessity in a piano sonata. Beethoven’s final work in the genre, Opus 111, has only two movements, ending in a different sort of sublime void. Schubert himself wrote a two-movement piano sonata, either by design or on account of a loss of inspiration: the magnificent Relique in C Major. If Schubert had left the B flat Major a two-movement work, no one would think it incomplete. These two movements guide us through life’s end: what more could there be?

In fact, the Sonata in B flat Major has not one but two more movements, and they are magic. Following the unfollowable, they manage to feel both inevitable and necessary. The third movement is not precisely high-spirited – it is a dance of the spirits, Schubert using the highest register of the piano as an angelic counterpoint to the trills that so destabilized the first movement.

The last movement achieves the impossible, giving true closure to a work whose subject is life’s most mysterious experience. Each time this rondo’s main theme appears, it is heralded by an extended, accented, g. This note is not an invitation, but a challenge, nearly a threat: it is a minor third and a whole world away from the b flat that ought to launch the movement. The confrontational nature of this introductory note keeps the theme from being jovial, which it might have seemed in its absence. Much in the same way that the foreboding trill complicated the emotional world of the first movement, this note ensures that the finale remains evenly poised between light and dark.

As the rondo theme makes its final return, one last wondrous thing happens. That g, stubbornly persistent throughout the movement, loses its footing, slipping down a step to a g flat. In doing so, it transforms from a declamation to an entreaty. Up until this point, whether the music was optimistic or sinister, this movement projected confidence. With nothing more than a shift of a half-step, Schubert has re-introduced the vulnerability that makes not just this work, but the whole of his oeuvre so extremely moving.

With the next half-step shift, this time down to the dominant f, resolution feels imminent. And so it is: we are launched into the briefest of codas, back on the firm ground of B flat major, presto, and at least on the surface, not just happy but recklessly happy. Is this Schubert storming the gates of heaven? That is for each listener to decide. All I can say with certainty is that playing this sonata has changed me. The piano literature is a treasure trove – there is more music of the highest quality than one person could ever get through in a lifetime. But Schubert’s Sonata in B flat Major is unique in its impact. Its beauty is itself awe-inducing, but its unflinching honesty and total vulnerability take it to a different realm. It is almost too much to bear; playing it has been the privilege of my life.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2024; not to be reprinted without permission.

Robert Schumann
(born 1810 in Zwickau; died 1856 in Bonn)

Geistervariationen

In the early hours of February 17th, 1854, Schumann composed a theme in E flat Major; by the 23rd, he had written five variations on it. On the 27th, he made revisions and wrote out a clean copy of the work.

On the 26th, he threw himself into the Rhine.

He survived, obviously. But within days he was moved to an asylum where he spent the last two terrible years of his life. The relationship between Schumann’s creativity and his mental illness is a difficult subject: necessarily and maddeningly speculative at best, voyeuristic and demeaning at worst. The only thing that is clear is that the Variations in E flat Major — often called Geistervariationen, or Ghost Variations — are an astonishingly moving product of a life’s waning edge. Schumann’s inspiration — genius, if you prefer, and in this case, I do — is intact; it is the vitality that has been drained from him. With certain of Schumann’s qualities no longer present, some of his greatest and most distinctive ones — his inwardness, his poetry, his ability to access and express his most private self — are heightened. If you give yourself over to the piece, without judgment for what it is not — brilliant, certainly, or even much interested in its listener — the experience is profound and profoundly unsettling. We do not normally visit these places.

In the period in which Schumann wrote these variations, he believed that angels and demons were playing music for him. This particular theme, he said, came from Schubert — the most angelic of the angels. Schumann must have loved it very much — a reimagined version became the main theme of the equally moving slow movement of his violin concerto. It is Schubert through the lens of Schumann: more fragile, less sure-footed. Often, it lingers, finding a particular note or suspension difficult to let go of; even when it does not, not much happens. It is less an expression of simplicity (of which Schubert was perhaps the supreme master), more an expression of intimacy. Its many upward intervals reach for something that remains unreachable.

The variations, too, have journeys but not destinations, desires but not fulfillments. Often, they are little more than the theme itself — presented in cannon, one voice trailing after another, or encircled by moving notes that try to give the theme a liveliness that is not in its nature. But this paucity of events has the effect of heightening the meaning of everything that does happen. Each altered interval, each suspension makes us hold our breath: we feel that the effort is costing Schumann lifeblood.

Schubert and Schumann are our two greatest poets of solitude; to hear their music is to know what it means to be alone. But the aloneness of Schubert and of Schumann are different things. Schubert’s is the aloneness of a person who never truly shared his life with another person. Schumann, by contrast, did share his life with another person — and what a person! But in spite of this, in spite of his extraordinary bond with Clara Wieck, in spite of her willingness to marry and share her life with him, and in doing so, to make her talent and creativity and ambition subservient to his needs — the needs of his fragile mental state and compositional genius and male ego — he remained alone. Schumann’s aloneness is the aloneness that will not be assuaged. The aloneness of a person who wants to be known, but is terribly frightened of it.

Clara, too, was frightened at the prospect of Schumann being known. Frightened for herself, surely, but also frightened for him. After he dedicated the Geistervariationen to her, she suppressed its publication: she was so afraid that it would reveal his weakness, she could not hear how it revealed his essence. Finally published in 1939, we need not make the same mistake. A window this deep into the soul of a great artist is a rare gift; we should accept it with gratitude, and go with him into the darkness and the light.

Notes © Jonathan Biss, 2023; not to be reprinted without permission.