Schubert: Piano Sonata in G major, D.894 (Op.78, 1826 – “Fantasie”)
Molto moderato e cantabile
Andante
Menuetto:- Allegro moderato
Allegretto
On 31st March 1824 Schubert had written to his friend, the painter Leopold Kupelwieser, to inform him that he had recently completed an octet and two string quartets. Sadly, the tone of much of that letter is uncomfortably gloomy, often despairing – and he actually quotes two lines of Goethe which he had set ten years previously in Gretchen am Spinnrade: “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy; never, never again will I find rest”. Having contracted syphilis two years earlier, he might well have felt his days to be numbered – although such speculation can be treacherous: remember that Gretchen was composed in 1814, by a lad of seventeen; whereas the gloriously sunny B flat trio appeared in 1827, right after Winterreise, when his demise was certainly all too near at hand.
In the same letter, he goes on to declare to Kupelwieser that he planned to write a third quartet (not actually realised for another two years), “and thus pave my way for a grosse Symphonie” – which indeed proved to be the Great C major. So if we wonder why works like the last quartets and piano sonatas strike us as being more symphonic in their gestures than we might have expected, we only have to recall these various statements – allied to the practical reality that the last ten years of his life presented no opportunities at all for the public performance of a new Schubert symphony. The first six had been composed at a rate of one a year, when there was an orchestra available to him either at school (the Vienna Stadtkonvikt) or at Otto Hatwig’s music salon in the Schottenhof, where the composer’s own family string quartet formed the nucleus of the band. Thereafter he completed just one more symphony (No.9), even though he attempted no fewer than six others (including the famous “Unfinished”, as well as the Tenth). No doubt, there were many more being spawned in his mind, and it might not be too fanciful to speculate that the last half dozen piano sonatas, the final two quartets, string quintet, and the two piano trios, were really all symphonies that could never expect to find an orchestra to play them.
However, the G major sonata does not entirely fall into this category; yes, it is as song-like as it is symphonic but it also respects the intimacy of the fortepiano medium to an extent that creates an impression of private musing rather than public pronouncement. That is not to say that D.894 is any less ambitious in scale and scope; it surely contains the occasional boisterous moment, not least in the so-called “menuetto” – more a scherzo, in reality. Nevertheless, this is very much a work of inner contemplation, “expansive and serene” (to quote our leading Schubert scholar, Brian Newbould) – so much so that his publisher Haslinger chose to label its “heavenly length” first movement as “Fantasie” – a name which has popularly become attached to the entire work.
Its expansiveness shouldn’t really come as a surprise, given that it was preceded in composition by two of his most vast symphonic creations: the “Great C major” itself, and his last quartet – also in G major. Indeed, it comes over as rather more “pastoral” than either of those two mighty edifices – especially so in the easy paced Allegretto finale, with its drones and generally outdoor feeling. Yet Prof Newbould warns us against “fail[ure] to observe the underlying deference to sonata-form traditions”. It is a sonata rather than a fantasy, then – yet still one that invites us to join its creator in his private dream world.
© Alan George
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