Piano Sonata No. 19 in C Minor

By the time Schubert began work on his Piano Sonata D. 958 in the spring of 1828, the syphilitic fits of giddiness that had plagued him since the early 1820s were gathering in intensity and his general health was deteriorating fast. With only six months remaining to him, Schubert embarked on a helter-skelter emotional journey in his hero Beethoven’s favourite minor key of C, lurching from deeply unsettling, half-whispered confidences to visceral outbursts of lacerating pain and anguish, climaxing in a hell-for-leather finale. Occasionally, the storm clouds part, allowing shafts of sunlight to gently warm the music’s craggy surfaces, yet any respite is ultimately smothered by its remorseless exploration of the dark side. The sonata’s opening movement offsets music of searing minor-key intensity against passages of yearning lyricism. This is counterbalanced by one of the few true slow movements in Schubert’s piano sonatas, a heartfelt Adagio whose tender phrases are rarely allowed to flow unimpeded. There follows a lively Menuetto and Ländler (folk dance)-style trio, whose unsettling rhythmic and dynamic fluctuations (including a bar’s complete silence) spill over into the driving forward momentum of the tarantella dance-style finale. The rate at which Schubert restlessly modulates through different key centres is astonishing even by his standards, culminating in a final page of inconsolable angst.