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laxes after a serious first movement, giving way
to idyllic or playful music. it is not like however
with this Sonata in A minor: the spring song
of the second movement, an intimate melody in F
Major, is constantly interrupted by a lugubrious
motif played ppp, like the glacial breath of death.
Thus we quickly arrive at some strange harmony,
above all a ninth chord, characteristic of Brahms,
which returns in an obsessive way, a harmony
that Schubert never used again afterwards. After
a hymn full of fervour comes the “spring melody”
in the instrument’s low register – and as if sung
by a men chorus – a melody over which soars “the
voice of a violin suggesting the idealised song of
a bird. After the brief idyll the psychological surroundings
darken: the trills of a nightingale come
to impose themselves upon the lugubrious ninth
chord; then, for the last time, we hear the melodic
theme as if coming from afar. Resignation…
The third movement again plunges us into the
sombre mood of the beginning of the Sonata: a
motif of melancholy triplets treated in canonic
imitation – an idea that Smetana was to take up
almost “literally” in his symphonic poem Vltava
(Moldau) – provides a delicate introduction to the
movement. it is as if snowdrops were falling on a
springtime landscape burying the flowers (Edwin
Fischer). Just as in the first movement, we hear a
grand orchestral intensification, but no longer a
spirited hymn, no longer consolation…The melodic
theme made up of a series of rests accompanied
by a kind of Chopinesque dance, has appropriately
been described as the “Lullaby of Death”.
in one of the works of his youth, the Sonata
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in A minor, D 537, Schubert had written a similar
melancholy second subject: what is characteristic is
the use of the minor sixth associated with the perfect
major chord – a kind of “minor-major” oscillation,
expressing profound resignation, which is to
return again on two occasions. However the triplets
from the beginning, which return at the end of the
movement fortissimo, have the last word: the gentle
snowflakes are transformed into a hurricane.
What a bold wager this self portrait is: “the
dwarf shows himself to be a giant”. it is amazing
to see that, like Schubert most “spiritual giants”
– like Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, Kant,
Brahms, Bruckner and Ravel, were short in
stature. Everything seems to suggest that their
brains had in some way absorbed their ability to
develop physically. A “bare” work, this Sonata
is in no way deprived in any artistic sense, quite
the contrary: it was in fact the most concentrated
of Schubert’s sonatas in its form, which has no
sense of boredom and which is elaborated in a
most accomplished way right down to the smallest
detail. Beethoven had already done the same
thing. it is as if the work in a way constituted the
means of escaping from depression. We know
Schubert’s tragic destiny: already at a young age
(around 19) he had contracted syphilis, a disease
that was very widespread at the period. Like
Aids today, this disease meant a death sentence,
even if the process was slower and allowed for
periodic remission and relapses, it led to death
through mental decline. in our own century
even, Hugo Wolf, as well as the great chess-player,
Harry Nelson Pillsbury, were victims of this