LDV93

21 If Schubert’s biography can offer us some keys to understanding his music, how would you characterise his sound aesthetic, which lies at the heart of Viennese Romanticism? The Schubertian universe seems to me to be placed between two pillars: Joseph Haydn and Anton Bruckner. Take the ‘Reliquie’ Sonata in C major. The second movement prolongs the Variations in F minor of Haydn, whose learned writing often seems to me to be richer than Mozart’s, at least in the solo piano repertory. An interplay of opposing variations, in the minor and major modes, an atmosphere of appalling sadness and, by contrast, an angelic luminosity are deployed in this Schubert sonata. If we now listen to the slow movement of the Sonata in B flat major of 1828, we find ourselves confronted with a funeral march, suddenly frozen in prayer. To my mind, in the Andantino of the Sonata D959 Schubert went even ‘further’ than Chopin did in the quasi-atonal finale of his Sonata in B flat minor, written a decade later. Not just in terms of language, but in terms of expressive violence. Did Chopin know any of the Viennese composer’s piano music? I asked Paul Badura-Skoda once. There is no certainty on the subject. JEAN-MARC LUISADA