Debussy Iberia Program Notes
Franz Schubert Piano Sonata in A Major D 664 The salubrious effects of country air on the mind and spirits of the vacationing composer are well known. Witness Schubert’s wonderfully relaxed and lyrical Sonata in A Major D 664 composed in 1819 during a summer sojourn in Steyr, a riverside provincial town set amid the rolling hills of Upper Austria some hundred miles or so west of Vienna. Lacking a minuet or scherzo, this three-movement work is the shortest of Schubert’s completed piano sonatas. It comprises three moderately paced movements, each of which breathes an air of untroubled songfulness.
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The extremely wide range of the keyboard over which it is scored, however, shows it to be distinctly pianistic, rather than vocal, in conception. The leisurely opening theme of the Allegro moderato first movement is a carefree melody that one could easily imagine being whistled on a woodland walk, unfolding innocently over a rich carpet of rolling left-hand harmonies that ripple over the space of several octaves. A slightly more insistent second theme arrives before long, marked by the dactylic rhythm (TAH-tuh-tuh, TAH-tuh-tuh) that Schubert favoured in so many of his works (a homage, perhaps, to the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony). More muscular pianistic writing comes to the fore in the development, with its rising scales in octaves traded between the hands, but musical con ict and argument nd little place to grow in this most congenial of sonata movements. Worthy of note is the indication for both the exposition and development to be repeated, which by the early 19th century had become an archaism in the classical sonata. Contrasting with the expansive lyricism of the first movement is a second movement Andante of the utmost discretion and intimacy, scored within a relatively small range around the middle of the keyboard.
Motivated by a single rhythmic idea (a long note followed by four short notes), it proceeds within a narrow dynamic range from p to pp. The closing Allegro is a sonata-form movement of considerable charm, with a modest and unassuming opening theme and a more high-profile second theme of an overtly dance-like character that occasionally breaks out into a full-on oom-pah-pah rhythm.