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Preface to the Piano Sonatas of Schubert Paul Badura Skoda
More than a century was to elapse before the musical world began to recognize what an enormous
treasure was hidden in the piano Sonatas of Schubert. The delay in their discovery is closely linked
to their profundity, their novelty and their originality. The piano Sonatas of C. Maria von Weber, for
example, were much more quickly appreciated by the public. However, despite the brilliant style and
the partly Schubertian beauty found in the Sonata in A-flat major these works have today fallen into
almost total oblivion. The same thing has happened to the works of Hummel which are not without
importance in this area, while their author was almost as appreciated as Beethoven during his lifetime.
Schubert surpassed these masters, and others too, in the substance, the elevation and the humanity of
what he had to say and in his quest for structural perfection, for unity between form and content which,
besides their differences in character, may not readily be compared on an artistic basis with Beethoven.
We cannot easily avoid comparing Beethoven with Schubert: not only because they were contemporaries
(Schubert died one year after Beethoven) but because both of them expressed in their piano
Sonatas – even more than in their Symphonies – what were their most intimate thoughts and because
they both left a collection of sonatas approximately the same size and importance. The Beethoven
Sonatas were not an immediate success. Apart from the three or four most popular ones the others did
not become part of the European musical heritage until about fifty years after his death, thanks largely
to Hans von Bülow, who called these Sonatas the “New Testament of pianists” (their Old Testament
being the Well-tempered Clavier of Bach). But even the greatest musicians (Chopin for example) came
up against their roughness, indeed occasionally a banality from which even a Beethoven was not safe.
Ravel often spoke in a pejorative manner of the “Great deaf one” and would not hear talk of a monument
to Beethoven before one had been erected for Mozart. No doubt he would have more readily accepted
Schubert, if only because sound in Schubert was an elemental structure and because his pianistic style
often conveys an almost prophetic sense of timbral beauty.
This delay in the discovery of Schubert’s Sonatas – such as had not been the case with his Lieder
– may partly be explained by one particular phenomenon, that of the history of their publication and
of their revelation to the public at large. During Schubert’s lifetime only three of his twenty So-natas
(or twenty-two according to the way they are counted) were printed: Opus 42, 53 and 78. All three
of them, if must be said, were masterpieces of imposing proportions, whose genius contemporaries
had to some extent already recognized (see the contemporary criticism quoted in my detailed commentary
on Sonata in A flat major Opus 42, D 845). it was only after the death of Schubert that
the other Sonatas appeared, sometimes at long intervals and for the last Sonatas not until 1897 (!) in
the Supplement to the Complete Edition, which remained moreover almost inaccessible. in the pe-
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