25/03/2025 Jonathan Biss (piano)

When Mozart was still a teenager, he wrote a series of violin concertos which are among the first of his works to have entered the repertoire and remained there. They are age appropriate, assuming one is a genius: impeccably wrought, full of imagination and charm, largely unconcerned with the great questions of life, and wholly untroubled by the specter of death.

When Schubert was eighteen years old, he wrote his first great song, the Erlkönig: a man rides through the night on horseback, holding his child but failing to protect him. Death beckons, in the form of the Erl-king; he is seductive and terrifying. Throughout the song, the pianist is asked to play lightning-fast octaves – the situation is nightmarish, the music close to unplayable. Moments from the end, the relentless motion in the piano part finally stops. Has the danger passed? No. The child has died.

This is Schubert. We forget, because the beauty of his music is so overwhelming, that his nature is morbid. Long before he had reason to suspect that his life would be short, he wrote music that fixates on death, with fascination and terror. When, at the age of just twenty-five, he began to show symptoms of the syphilis that likely killed him, this fixation grew stronger, and found increasingly personal and increasingly devastating expression in his music. This is the Schubert of the Unfinished Symphony, of Die Schöne Müllerin, works that, in their different ways, confront the horror of death, and offer consolation without offering hope.

And when, only a few years later, death was indeed imminent, Schubert reckoned with it in a way no other composer has, before or since. The astonishing final three piano sonatas, dated simply “September 1828” – he died in November – represent three different approaches to facing the inevitable. Perhaps because it was published as the last of the trilogy, the B flat major, with its extreme surface serenity, has most informed our perception of Schubert at the end of his life. He is at peace.

Listen to the Sonata in c minor, D. 958, and you will come to the opposite conclusion. Schubert is in rage, and he is in terror. The work is frightening to play and frightening to listen to; Schubert surely intended it that way. Schubert is staring death in the face and insisting that you do so as well.

Much of the c minor Sonata’s power comes from how tightly argued it is. There is a relentless focus to this music which is atypical. Schubert’s instrumental works tend to wander, sublimely; by and large, the c minor’s grim forward march leaves no room for wandering. Perhaps that is why listeners have often found this to be the most Beethovenian of Schubert’s great works. The voice is unmistakably Schubert’s, but the sense of being led, inevitably and even inexorably, down a path, is highly reminiscent of the man who had died just a year earlier, and at whose funeral Schubert had been a pallbearer.

This sense of a remorseless architecture begins immediately: the opening theme rises and rises, reaching upward with ferocious insistence, punctuated by silences which only increase the tension. This is a motive but not a melody – a striking and significant choice on the part of a man who wrote hundreds of songs, and whose lyrical gift is rightly venerated. There is plenty of beauty in this sonata, but it is not the starting point, and it will not be the ending point; it is not the point. This opening rise is extreme, as befits the piece: just twelve measures in, we are three octaves higher than where we began, and already at a fever pitch. The terms of the work have been set; the path has been laid.

This path is not one of start-to-finish fury; Schubert is far too sophisticated for that, and it is anyway not how sonata form works. But while the sonata’s second theme is deeply lyrical, it offers no consolation. It is surpassingly beautiful but also ambiguous, never quite settling into its E flat major, always feeling vaguely haunted by the music that came before it. The development represents a different sort of attempt to escape the terribleness promised by the opening, and a different sort of failure to do so. Midway through it, we are suddenly unmoored, for the first and only time in the work. The start of the sonata was solidly diatonic, reaching ever upward, moving with total forthrightness; this music is unnervingly chromatic, moving up and then down with slithering uncertainty. It is a ghoulish detour from the movement’s central argument, but joined to it through the terror it evokes.

This pervasive sense of terror makes what follows all the more deeply moving. The sonata’s second movement, an Adagio, puts a side of Schubert that had been sidelined in the first movement front and center: the tenderness in this Adagio’s main theme is almost more than one can bear. This theme, inexpressibly beautiful and already perfect in and of itself, becomes so much more powerful in context. It appears three times, interrupted twice by music with the sense of foreboding that permeates the rest of the sonata: dark, and with the harmonic ground shifting perilously underneath it. Each time the main theme returns, it grows more affecting; each time we grow more aware that the respite it provides will prove temporary.

And so it is. The third and, particularly, the fourth movements return us to the road we started out on: by the end, it will feel very much like the road to hell. The finale, a dance with death, is among the grimmest, most unremitting pieces of music ever written. Its primary material’s rhythmic drive is nonstop, its motion relentless; its secondary material, launched by a terrifying sudden shift – a modulation it isn’t – from c minor up to c sharp minor, is, if possible, even more maniacal and driven. The central episode, the movement’s only music in the major mode, while beautiful in an unearthly way, is not ultimately less frightening – this is the Erl-King, consoling us to our death.

And death does come. The sonata began with a furious rise to the top of the keyboard; it ends with a plunge all the way to the bottom. It is the culmination of an altogether harrowing work, one which gives magnificent expression to the darkest corners of Schubert’s psyche.

It was the beginning of September, 1828, and Schubert was seriously unwell. 31 years old and in the throes of the tertiary stage of syphilis, he left the discomfort of urban Vienna for the discomfort of a tiny, damp and poorly heated room in his brother’s house.

He died in that miserable room just two months later. But first, he had one of the most stunning bursts of creative activity in human history. Before his health deteriorated to the point that composition became impossible, he completed a string of the greatest works he or anyone ever produced. This list likely includes the String Quintet in C Major, Schwanengesang, and the final three piano sonatas. The qualifier of “likely” is necessary because of the paucity of reliable information about Schubert’s working life in 1828. He worked feverishly, in all senses; he lived in poverty and obscurity. None of these works were published until long after he died; many of them were entirely unknown for years.

The gulf between these wretched circumstances and the power of the music that emerged from them is impossible to overstate. More than five years removed from his first bout with syphilis, Schubert had to have known – or, at the very least, strongly suspected – that he had little time left to live. But as his life contracted, his music expanded, in length and, more so, in vision. The proportions of these last works are immense; their harmonic language is daring, sometimes even frightening. He is constantly grappling with fate; he is deeply, eternally lonely.

Each of these works is miraculous and endlessly interesting. But even in this staggering company, the Sonata in B flat Major, D. 960 stands out. It cannot be compared to the other music Schubert wrote in the last months of his life or, indeed, to any other music. The difference is not a question of quality: It is perfectly possible to prefer the String Quintet, or one of the other piano sonatas, or the Winterreise of 1827, or one of Bach’s, or Beethoven’s, or Mozart’s assorted miracles. That is a matter of taste. But Schubert’s B flat Sonata is unique because it is the ultimate musical farewell. There are moments of terror in this work, and moments of play. But its subject is leaving the world behind: the profound sadness of knowing you will never again see those you love.

To listen to Schubert’s Sonata in B flat Major is to be transported: it occupies the liminal space between life and death, and as you listen, you feel that you do as well. From the first notes, all the artifacts of the everyday are left behind; all that exists is this music. The sonata does not begin so much as emerge out of the silence that precedes it. A melody of absolute simplicity – it rises and then falls so gently, rhyming like a child’s poem – is underpinned by constant eighth notes, no fewer than 40 of them, moving with total regularity, evoking the eternal.

This is Schubert, though; for him, things are rarely as simple or as unencumbered as they first seem to be. The eighth note motion does eventually stop, and when it does, it is not at a cadence – a point of rest – but on a dominant chord. This chord is a question mark; the silence the eighth notes leave in their wake is a void, full of mystery and uncertainty.

Whatever it is that one expects to follow this heavy, destabilizing silence, it is not the thing that actually happens: a trill in the lowest reaches of the piano, played pianissimo and suggesting the minor mode. Only a few seconds long, and no louder than a murmur, this trill changes everything – not just what is to come, but the meaning of what we have already heard. The trill comes out of silence, and it leads to silence. But these silences are not mirror images: the second, in the wake of the trill, with its suggestion of menace, is ever so much fraught than the first. This second silence is followed by the resumption of the opening theme, and it has been irrevocably altered by the trill. More precisely, it has been fully revealed: we have felt the fragility and glimpsed the horror that its serenity is obscuring, barely.

For twenty minutes, the first movement proceeds along this path. The beauty of the music is extreme and inexplicable, but it is also haunted; the specter of a terrible void is never far away. The trill returns often enough that it should grow less unsettling, but it does not. Schubert wants to leave the world at peace, but he remains petrified.

If the first movement is poised between acceptance and terror, the second movement has a different preoccupation: the impossible task of saying goodbye. In a distant, desolate c sharp minor, its main theme is somehow stoic and anguished all at once. The rhythm of the accompanying left hand is implacable, moving deliberately, inexorably towards death. The melody itself unfolds as a series of sighs; the ache of it is overwhelming. Nothing else Schubert wrote – none of the hundreds of songs – so thoroughly communicates the sehnsucht (“longing” is as close as English comes) that was the core of his character.

A central episode in A major attempts to bring the piece back to earth: its lyricism, glorious as it is, seems to come from normal circumstances, so unlike the music that surrounds it. But its respite cannot be permanent, and inevitably, it leads back to the music of the opening, its sorrow more devastating than ever. For the first few measures, its shape is fundamentally unchanged from its first appearance. Then comes a modulation into C Major so sudden and so unexpected, to listen to it is to have the blood drain from your face.

Many a music-loving agnostic has remarked that living with Schubert has made them believe in a higher power. This C Major is Schubert’s transfiguration. The music does find its way back to its home tonality, but the man has crossed a threshold. If Schubert ever truly belonged to this earth, as of this moment, he has left it.

A third movement is not a necessity in a piano sonata. Beethoven’s final work in the genre, Opus 111, has only two movements, ending in a different sort of sublime void. Schubert himself wrote a two-movement piano sonata, either by design or on account of a loss of inspiration: the magnificent Relique in C Major. If Schubert had left the B flat Major a two-movement work, no one would think it incomplete. These two movements guide us through life’s end: what more could there be?

In fact, the Sonata in B flat Major has not one but two more movements, and they are magic. Following the unfollowable, they manage to feel both inevitable and necessary. The third movement is not precisely high-spirited – it is a dance of the spirits, Schubert using the highest register of the piano as an angelic counterpoint to the trills that so destabilized the first movement.

The last movement achieves the impossible, giving true closure to a work whose subject is life’s most mysterious experience. Each time this rondo’s main theme appears, it is heralded by an extended, accented, g. This note is not an invitation, but a challenge, nearly a threat: it is a minor third and a whole world away from the b flat that ought to launch the movement. The confrontational nature of this introductory note keeps the theme from being jovial, which it might have seemed in its absence. Much in the same way that the foreboding trill complicated the emotional world of the first movement, this note ensures that the finale remains evenly poised between light and dark.

As the rondo theme makes its final return, one last wondrous thing happens. That g, stubbornly persistent throughout the movement, loses its footing, slipping down a step to a g flat. In doing so, it transforms from a declamation to an entreaty. Up until this point, whether the music was optimistic or sinister, this movement projected confidence. With nothing more than a shift of a half-step, Schubert has re-introduced the vulnerability that makes not just this work, but the whole of his oeuvre so extremely moving.

With the next half-step shift, this time down to the dominant f, resolution feels imminent. And so it is: we are launched into the briefest of codas, back on the firm ground of B flat major, presto, and at least on the surface, not just happy but recklessly happy. Is this Schubert storming the gates of heaven? That is for each listener to decide. All I can say with certainty is that playing this sonata has changed me. The piano literature is a treasure trove – there is more music of the highest quality than one person could ever get through in a lifetime. But Schubert’s Sonata in B flat Major is unique in its impact. Its beauty is itself awe-inducing, but its unflinching honesty and total vulnerability take it to a different realm. It is almost too much to bear; playing it has been the privilege of my life.