Volume 36, Number 1 · February 2, 1989
Schubert's Last Sonatas
By Alfred Brendel
To my knowledge, Artur Schnabel and Eduard Erdmann were the first pianists to play Schubert's last three sonatas in one evening. After one of my own performances of this wonderful, if strenuous, program, a Viennese newspaper pronounced that even if I, as somebody who had turned his back on Vienna, wanted to deny the fact, I must have 'experienced' these pieces while I was resident in Schubert's city. How Schubert's sonatas, his Winterreise and Heine songs, the Mass in E flat or the String Quintet, could be 'experienced' in Vienna these days was not disclosed. Not that Schubert had ever been the kind of regional musician that a cosmopolitan like Busoni chose to see in him. There is no shortage of elements in his music that came from outside the boundaries of his city: we detect a Hungarian flavor in the finale of the B flat sonata, Bohemian dances (polka and sousedská) in the third of his Posthumous Pieces, and even a tarantella in the macabre finale of the C minor sonata that relates in spirit much less to Schubert's painter friends Kupelwieser and Schwind than to the black fantasies of Goya (who, incidentally, also died in 1828).
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