Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner D.960

because the whole sonata has a 'tired, valedictory, used-up' character...

it's Schubert's last word in instrumental music, it's out of this world, it's a forced happy-ending, it's a formula, it's a forced point to the last sentence.

...it seemed to be a good idea to let loose some thoughts on the forum here and to many collegues/friends all over the place to discuss whatever might trigger your/their opinions about it, that's all, so far the results here are rather slight, let's see what might pop up, but I like the pace it goes in: molto moderato.

No intention to slight or insult you. (That would be silly of me.) I was just putting out a rather controversial opinion, fully realizing that.

But here is a question for you: do you take the exposition repeat in the first movement? Tell us what you think!

The exposition repeat is important, but it requires the performer not to play in a soporific manner. Molto moderato it is; Largo or Grave it is not.

Yes, I agree.

I agree also, even if Brendel felt differently, and I would not want to argue the point with him.

Still, one must wonder what Richter was up to with his recording. He drags the movement out to Wagnerian proportions -a whole new spin on the heavenly lengths concept- but unlike Wagner, there seems little sense of dramatic timing, more a private meditation, but this is never the case with Wagner, as his slowest moments (cf Wotan's monologue in Walkure) will often push the action far faster than his more kinetic scenes.

Of course who am I to argue with Richter either, yet his D960 comes off as a sonata with two slow movements, hardly -I should think- what Schubert might have intended.

about the repeat:
1) the easy reason: Schubert wrote it, so we have to play it.
2) the more elaborate and musical reason: the musical substance of the extra bars to reintroduce the exposition is, according to some highbrow pianists of the former generation, of a slight nature, slight enough to be skipped in order to keep the movement going on.. My (and of course not only my) opinion is that in those few bars the g-flat trill becomes so utterly dramatic and all important, that it quasi overtakes the psychology of the whole movement, and becomes all the more sinister whenever one hears it again, in the distance, so when one doesn't play the repeat and misses the all important Æ’Æ’ trill, one keeps happily at the surface of what eventually should become a 'dramatic' movement instead of a 'placid' one, quite a change of directions, and as I might add: a crucial one.
No repeat is no sonata, this applies to all of Schuberts music, even the 2nd trio, that so many ensembles find hard to do justice to by just respecting all the repeats..
Bruckner, the champion of 'long' music (and musical heir of Schubert) f.e. may sound in his substantial (and long) symphonies even longer when cut and he said it so simply and beautifully: 'meine Symfonien sind nicht zu lange, sie sind zu kurz!' He was right.

You know what he said when he listened to his own D. 894 - "I feel nothing." That's how I feel about all of Richter's Schubert. It's beautiful pools of empty sound.