Schubert’s unique inaction and repetition

“Repetitio est mater studiorum” (repetition is the mother of learning), so goes the Latin adage. Repetition in music, however, is a horse of a different color. Repeated phrases, even entire sections, are common and have special significance. Schubert was certainly no stranger to repetition, and Beethoven was known for stating everything three times. But in Schubert’s little Hungarian Melody, it is not sections or phrases that are repeated but single notes — a different matter altogether.

Diabelli according to Schubert

The words “Diabelli Variations” immediately bring to mind is Beethoven’s set of 33 variations. One tends to forget the other contributors to Diabelli’s project, who were all solicited to write one variation on the simple waltz. Among the 51 who responded were Hummel, Czerny, the young Liszt, Moscheles, and of course, Schubert. His input to the anthology was a dainty and elegant variation in C minor (as opposed to Diabelli’s waltz which is in C major, as is Beethoven’s work), which however brief, has several points of correspondence with Beethoven’s monumental opus.

The gloomy undercurrents of Schubert’s Moments Musicaux

The last three pieces of Schubert’s Moments Musicaux are fraught with gloom, pessimism, and ambiguity. The brief moments of respite are undercut by menacing tones in the minor key and premonitions of doom. And yet, in the last moment, Schubert chooses to end the piece in an open octave, providing a closure of sorts, but no resolution of the many tensions, letting the listener choose between an optimistic and a pessimistic conclusion.

Schubert’s Moments Musicaux and the natural creation of a genre

Schubert seems to have invented a new genre with the Moments Musicaux cycle of seemingly unconnected pieces. Its closest relative may be found in literature, in picaresque novels, like Don Quixote, relating sundry scenes of different moods, held together by a common hero but otherwise unrelated. In the case of the Moments, that hero would be none other than Schubert himself.

The exceptional and the common in Schubert’s A minor sonata, D. 845

You know that something is amiss with the scherzo if the humor is dry and the dance lame. The scherzo of Schubert’s sonata in A minor seems to have been written for a clod with no sense of humor and feet of lead. So where is the tender, lyrical Schubert we have come to love? He’s still there, hiding between the rough edges of the scherzo, but this is the first of the six late sonatas, and in this unlikely scherzo and the torment in the final movement, the atmosphere has changed a lot from the time of the Valses Sentimentales and the Moments.

Music of judgment and consolation in Schubert’s A minor sonata, D. 845

It’s Judgment Day. Whom do you have to plead for you? I for one, would take Schubert. Any slow movement of one of his late 4-part works would do: the ninth symphony, the G major string quartet. The sonata in A minor, D845 is a case in point, were Schubert goes from dies irae to lacrimosa to amen in the breathtaking variations of the Andante movement of this sonata.

A sonata in distress: Schubert’s A minor sonata, D. 845

The first of Schubert’s last six sonatas, D. 845, may be considered as a continuation of Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Op. 111. Like Op. 111, D. 845 begins without a key or a theme. And similarly to Beethoven, Shubert opens the space between the two hands more and more wide. At the end of the movement, the hands end up in the two ends of the keyboard. But Schubert eventually follows his own path. Unlike in Beethoven, where the void acquies a sense of wholesomeness, here it remains unredeemed, sounding wrong — as it should.