Schubert's Last Sonatas - Performance Issues

Performance Issues

Several key issues are routinely raised by musicians and music scholars, when discussing the performance of Schubert's compositions for piano. These discussions also concern the last piano sonatas. For most of these issues, no general agreement has been reached; for example, to what extent should the sustain pedal be used, how to combine triplets with dotted rhythms, whether to allow tempo fluctuations within the course of a single movement, and whether to observe each repeat sign meticulously.

The issue of repeat signs has been debated particularly in the context of the opening movements of the two last sonatas. Here, as in many of Schubert's sonata form movements, a repeat sign is written for an exceedingly long exposition, while the material of the exposition is repeated a third time in the recapitulation with little alteration. This has led some musicians to omit the exposition repeat when performing these movements. In the last two sonatas, however, unlike other movements, the first ending of the exposition contains several additional bars of music, leading back to the movement's opening. When performing the movement without the repeat, the music in these bars is totally omitted from the performance, as it does not appear in the second ending. Furthermore, in the B-flat sonata, these added bars contain strikingly novel material, which does not appear anywhere else in the piece, and is radically different from the second ending. Pianist András Schiff has described the omission of the repeat in these two movements as "the amputation of a limb". Brendel, on the other hand, considers the additional bars as unimportant and prefers to omit the repeats; with regard to the B-flat sonata, he further claims that the transitional bars are too unconnected to the rest of the movement, and believes that their omission actually contributes to the coherence of the piece.

Another performance issue pertains to the choice of tempi, which is of special relevance in Schubert's major instrumental works, particularly in the opening movements. Schubert often notated his opening movements with moderate tempo indications, the extreme case being the Molto moderato of the B-flat piano sonata. The latter movement in particular, has been interpreted in vastly different speeds. Ever since the famous performances by Sviatoslav Richter, taking the opening movement at an extremely slow pace, similar tempo interpretations for this movement have been frequent. However, the majority of Schubert scholars tend to dismiss such an interpretation, arguing instead for a more flowing pace, a measured allegro.

Some Schubert performers tend to play the entire trilogy of the last sonatas in a single recital, thereby stressing their interrelatedness, and suggesting that they form a single, complete cycle. However, since each of these sonatas is rather long (as compared, for instance, with most of Mozart's or Beethoven's sonatas), such a program may prove exhausting to some listeners. One of the solutions to this problem is to shorten the program by omitting repeats, mainly those of the opening movements' expositions (however, this practice is highly disputed, as noted above). The pioneers of the Schubert sonata performance, Schnabel and Erdmann, are known to have played the entire trilogy in one evening; more recently, so did Alfred Brendel, Maurizio Pollini, Mitsuko Uchida, and Paul Lewis.