This piano sonata, one of Schubert’s final three sonatas, is one of the most beautiful pieces ever written for the piano. It was published posthumously. For a detailed description of the structure of the last three sonatas, I would refer you to the Wikipedia page Schubert’s last sonatas.
Many pianists have recorded this piece. I have chosen Leon Fleisher for several reasons. His playing is marvelous. It was not long after recording this piece that he developed a disorder in his right hand that prevented him from playing with both hands for 30 years. I wanted you to hear what he sounded like in his prime.
Like many of Schubert’s works, these compositions were not held in high esteem by critics and academicians in the early part of the 20th century. Artur Schnabel, the famous pianist and teacher, rehabilitated Schubert’s reputation in the early part of the 20th century, and it seems almost inconceivable now that Schubert’s works, and especially the last three sonatas, could be held in anything but the highest regard.
Leon Fleisher
July 23, 1928 – August 2, 2020
Leon Fleisher was born in San Francisco on July 23, 1928, to Isidore and Bertha Fleisher. His parents, Jewish immigrants — his father was from Odessa, then in Russia, now in Ukraine; his mother was from Poland — each managed one of the family’s two hat shops.
Leon was drawn to the piano from an early age. Though he showed little interest when an older brother, Raymond, was given piano lessons, Leon would go to the piano when Raymond went out to play after his lessons and repeat, by ear, everything he had heard. He was 4 years old.
So devoted was his mother to Leon’s musical training that after two weeks of kindergarten, during which he objected strenuously to nap time, she withdrew him from public school and hired tutors so that he could devote his time to practicing the piano. She also found ways of bringing him to the attention of two San Francisco conductors, Pierre Monteux and Alfred Hertz, who in turn persuaded the pianist Artur Schnabel to take Leon on as a student in 1938, when he was 9, despite Schnabel’s policy of not teaching children.
In 1945, at the Ravinia summer festival in Illinois, Mr. Fleisher played the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor — it became one of his signature pieces — as well as the Liszt Concerto No. 2 in A, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The next summer at Ravinia, he performed four concertos under the direction of William Steinberg and Szell, who soon engaged Mr. Fleisher to perform with the Cleveland Orchestra, which Szell took over later that year.
By 1949, however, though he had played with many of the major American orchestras and had given recitals across the country, engagements began to dry up for Mr. Fleisher. The next year he moved to Paris and remained in Europe until 1958, relocating first to the Netherlands and then to Italy.
As an expatriate, Mr. Fleisher became the first American to win the gold medal at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, in 1952. The victory led to a long list of engagements in Europe and revived interest in him among American orchestras, managers and concert promoters.
When Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra were signed to a new recording contract with the Epic label in 1954, he invited Mr. Fleisher to be his main soloist for recordings of the great piano concertos.
It was shortly after his return to the United States, in the late 1950s, that Mr. Fleisher accepted an offer to teach at the Peabody Conservatory, though he continued to pursue a heavy performing and recording schedule.
During the winter of 1963, he noticed what he described as laziness in his right index finger, as well as “a creeping numbness” in his right hand. By the summer, the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand had begun to curl toward his palm.
The timing was disastrous. He had planned to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his New York debut with a busy season that included 20 performances in New York alone and a spring 1965 tour of the Soviet Union, in which he was to be the soloist in Mozart’s Concerto No. 25 in C (K. 503) with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. This was the beginning of a career-altering malady – focal dystonia, presumably caused by over-practicing, seven or eight hours a day.
“The initial problem was a very stupid kind of overwork,” Mr. Fleisher said in 1996, cautioning young pianists against following his path. “I see kids still falling into this, and there are many reasons for it. The perfection that they’re bombarded with from recordings. The kind of sound a Horowitz produced, which is wonderful, but people don’t realize that he had his technician work very hard on the piano, so the piano itself helped. So when kids go to an acoustically dead hall, and get a dead piano, and try to make these Horowitz kinds of sounds, they end up brutalizing themselves.”
Early in his career as a pianist Mr. Fleisher produced a warm, sharply etched and thoughtfully contoured sound that was ideally suited to 19th-century Viennese classics — Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert, most notably — but that also yielded illuminating readings of Rachmaninoff, Debussy and Liszt and of contemporary American composers like Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland.
In 1991, Mr. Fleisher found a doctor who was experimenting with Botox injections for injuries like his. At first he found that the injections loosened up his still-cramped fourth and fifth fingers, to the point where he could play. But the injections wore off, and he was still looking for a permanent cure.
Having tried Rolfing in the 1970s, he decided to try again in 1994. This time he found that a regimen of Rolfing and Botox injections was enough to keep him in playing trim.
Mr. Fleisher cautiously reclaimed the repertoire he had been unable to play for more than 30 years, building his recital programs with both two-hand and left-hand works and playing programs of piano four-hand works with his wife.
Mr. Fleisher was made a commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 2006 and received a Kennedy Center Honor the next year. A film about his struggle with focal dystonia, “Two Hands,” directed by Nathaniel Kahn, was nominated for an Academy Award for best short documentary in 2006.
Franz Schubert
January 31, 1797 – November 19, 1828
This is a very abridged description of Schubert’s life.
Franz Schubert was an Austrian composer who bridged the worlds of Classical and Romantic music, noted for the melody and harmony in his songs (lieder) and chamber music.
Early life and career
Schubert’s father, Franz Theodor Schubert, was a schoolmaster; his mother, Elisabeth, whose maiden name was Vietz, was in domestic service at the time of her marriage. Franz was their fourth surviving son. His elder brothers were Ignaz, Karl, and Ferdinand, and there was a younger sister, Maria Theresa. The elder Franz Schubert was a man of character who had established a flourishing school. The family was musical and cultivated string quartet playing in the home, the boy Franz playing the viola. He received the foundations of his music education from his father and his brother Ignaz, continuing later with organ playing and music theory under the instruction of the parish church organist. In 1808 he won a scholarship that earned him a place in the imperial court chapel choir and an education at the Stadtkonvikt, the principal boarding school for commoners in Vienna, where his tutors were Wenzel Ruzicka, the imperial court organist, and, later, the composer Antonio Salieri, then at the height of his fame. Schubert played the violin in the students’ orchestra, was quickly promoted to leader, and in Ruzicka’s absence conducted. He also attended choir practice and, with his fellow pupils, cultivated chamber music and piano playing.
The many unfinished fragments and sketches of songs left by Schubert provide some insight into the working of his creative mind. Clearly, the primary stimulus was melodic. The words of a poem engendered a tune. Harmony (chordal structure of a composition) and modulation (change of key) were then suggested by the contours of the melody. But the external details of the poet’s scene—natural, domestic, or mythical—prompted such wonderfully graphic images in the accompaniments as the spinning wheel, the ripple of water, or the “shimmering robe” of spring. These features were fully present in the songs of 1815.
Maturity of Franz Schubert
In Vienna the popularity of Schubert’s songs and dance music became so great that concert parties were entirely devoted to them. These parties, called Schubertiaden, were given in the homes of
The early months of 1824 were unhappy. Schubert was ill, penniless, and plagued by a sense of failure. Yet during these months he composed three masterly chamber works: the String Quartet in A Minor, a second string quartet in D Minor containing variations on his song “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (“Death and the Maiden”), and the Octet in F Major for strings and wind instruments. His dejection is manifest in a letter of March 31, 1824, to the painter Leopold Kupelwieser in which he speaks of himself as “the most unfortunate, the most miserable being in the world.” In desperate need of money, he returned in the summer to his teaching post with the Esterházy family and in May 1824 went again to Zseliz. Once more his health and spirits revived. The period was marked by some magnificent piano duets, the Piano Sonata in C Major (Grand Duo), the Variations on an Original Theme in A-flat Major, and the Divertissement à la hongroise (Hungarian Divertissement).
Although his operas remained unperformed, there were frequent public performances of his songs and part-songs in Vienna during these and the following years. Publication proceeded rapidly, and his financial position, though still strained, was at any rate eased.
Last years of Franz Schubert
The resignation of Salieri as imperial Kapellmeister (musical director) in 1824 had led to the promotion of his deputy, Josef Eybler. In 1826 Schubert applied for the vacant post of deputy Kapellmeister, but in spite of strong support by several influential people he was unsuccessful. From then until his death two years later he seems to have let matters drift. Neither by application for professional posts nor submission of operatic work did he seek to establish himself. It can hardly be believed that Schubert was unaware of his exceptional powers; yet, together with an awareness of genius and the realization that it opened doors into cultivated society went the knowledge of his humble birth and upbringing and also of his somewhat uncouth bearing. This self-consciousness made him diffident, reserved, and hesitant. His life was almost entirely devoted to composition, and he derived his livelihood from publishers’ fees and occasional teaching.
The only public concert Schubert gave took place on March 26, 1828. It was both artistically and financially a success, and the impecunious composer was at last able to buy himself a piano. At the end of August he moved into lodgings with his brother Ferdinand. Schubert’s health, broken by the illness of 1823, had deteriorated, and his ceaseless work had exhausted him. In October he developed typhoid fever as a result of drinking tainted water. His last days were spent in the company of his brother and several close friends.
It is said that Schubert’s place in the history of music is equivocal, for he stands between the worlds of Classical and Romantic music. He can, however, be considered as the last of the great Classical composers. His music, subjectively emotional in the Romantic manner, poetically conceived, and revolutionary in language, is nevertheless cast in the formal molds of the Classical school—with the result that it has become increasingly apparent that Schubert more truly belongs to the age of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart than to that of Schumann, Chopin, and Wagner.