One of the most breathtaking piano composers of the early classical period, Franz Schubert, displays a beautiful, octave-driven piano sonata in C minor. It is an allegro so you can expect the tempo on the octaves to be a bit quick. It has this stately nature about it that is very astute in its rendering. It sounds almost pompous in quality. It has the usual harmonic structures that you would expect to come from the late-baroque or early classical period. The structure has at least one very fancy glissando ending on an A-flat. The texture soon ascends back up to C minor.
The next movement has a very serious and demanding nature about it. The forte octaves alone command attention. There is this spinning sort of feel in the music as if he is spinning out of control. It is a tumbler of a piece in seeming 6/8 time that keeps the audiences wondering what will happen next. Will this ball roll down a hill and into a pit? Who knows. The triumphant opening starts with a stark C minor chord and proceeds to spin into different harmonies as though it were in a spiral. That is a hallmark in much of Schubert’s piano and other works. It has been said that this spinning nature of the music equates to extreme anxiety or psychosis. This tells you that an artist’s mind is very fragile at times and must be nurtured and when a cure is not found in the world, the composer writes it out in whatever fashion he feels. The spinning nature is what fashions most of the adagio.
Later in the Menuetto Allegro movement, the C minor tonality seems to return in a much faster and more frantic fashion with brief spots of E-flat major (typical in sonata form movements). The Allegro-tendencies go on into the next movement with an even more fanatical spot in E-flat minor (as the Kurrent Music example demonstrates). Schubert brings it all back home with triumphant ringing C Minor chords and a pedal C. There are many fast movements in this piece which suggest that the hurry of life is on. There are brief moments of happiness throughout the work and frolicking with joy, but it all returns to C Minor in the very end (typical again of sonata form). All this being said, it would surely be a blast to play and it is one that is in the trilogy of his last piano sonatas. He did live a short life, so maybe that is the reason why a lot of his repertoire was in the Allegro sort of format. These sonatas and this one included are nonetheless, spectacular in form.
