LDV93

22 An equally striking feature of Schubert’s output, which is relevant to the Sonata in C major, is the notion of incompletion. You don’t play the version completed by Ernst Krenek. How do you ‘interpret’ the fact that Schubert broke off in the middle of the piece? In Schubert’s case, incompletion is not a sign of impotence. It’s a deliberate gesture, because he has already said the essential, revealed the suffering of the moment. That’s how I see the martellato octaves of the Andante, which make way for a few brighter spells, for mingled memories of childhood, of a feigned naivety, until those octaves return and invade the entire sound space. The Sonata in B flat major is a culmination, the completion of a life. The famous lied Der Wanderer D489/93 (the original poem is sometimes entitled Der Unglückliche , ‘The unhappy one’), from which Schubert draws some of the thematic material, speaks to us, in its terrible words, of paradise lost: ‘The land where my roses bloom, / Where my friends walk, / Where my dead rise again’; ‘The sun seems so cold to me here / . . . I am a stranger everywhere’. Certain passages in the first movement of the sonata are among the highpoints of the whole nineteenth-century musical literature. Then there are the moments bathed in an immaterial atmosphere, when the Wanderer calmly accepts death in the C major modulation at the end of the second movement, the Andante sostenuto. This imposes a feeling of stillness, a sensation of eternity, and I transpose these phrases into images (you know my passion for the Seventh Art!) from the world of Yasujirō Ozu and from sequences in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar . That film seems to me like the synopsis of Schubert’s life. SCHUBERT ∙ PIANO SONATAS D840 & D960