The Sunday Listen: 'Piano Sonata No.20' (2nd movement) by Schubert
This week on the Sunday Listen, we’re going back to classical with the second part of one of Schubert’s last sonatas.
Suffering from tertiary syphilis and the effects of highly toxic mercury treatment, Schubert passed away on 19 November 1828. Premonitions of death consistently haunted Schubert following his diagnosis, and he wrote to a close friend, “I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, a man whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain, whose enthusiasm for all things beautiful is gone, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being?”
So far, so Romantic…
With our modern ears, it’s quite hard to conceive how radical this particular movement is today. After the consoling opening theme (or perhaps it’s more of a slow, sickly dance of death), we’re then treated to some of the strangest piano music written in the 19th century, an almost schizophrenic outburst of notes and rhythms flaring up into a frightening climax that spares no detail regarding Schubert’s mental and physical health at the time of writing. You can practically feel the composer’s psyche screaming down your neck.
And after the storm… the calm. Everything dies down to the same forlorn, opening theme once again, dreamily trailing off into… well, wherever it is any of us will end up one way or another.
The scale of Schubert’s late sonatas are extraordinary: individual movements of a single sonata can take 20-25 minutes to play, around the length of an entire Beethoven sonata (comprising of three or four moments each). Playing them is a feat of endurance - quite how Schubert managed to achieve them in his dying days is beyond comprehension. They are some of the longest piano works in the literature, each displaying a lifetime’s worth of hopes, joys, sorrows, anger and resolve.
It’s the way Schubert makes the song build up and then dissipate to and from such heightened emotional states that feels so incredibly real to the listener, carrying the flesh and blood intensity of those intrusive emotions that we all experience as human beings. I also like to look at them as almost a self made musical eulogy, a final stand raging against the dying of the light. Schubert knew his number was up, and it didn’t want to leave anything behind. Use it up, he seems to tell us. Use it all up.