Lateness in Schubert: the Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960

Lecture-recital on Franz Schubert’s last essay in the piano sonata genre, the great B-flat Sonata. Drawing from several different sources including recordings, scholarly writings, and my own research on late Schubert, I aim to discuss issues of continuity, temporality, and expression in this extraordinary work.

My intention is to explore ideas of fragmentation and suspension of an integrated, coherent linear narrative, and their philosophical, aesthetic, and psychological implications. The sensuous qualities embedded in the musical texture seem to project an inward experience where the very coordinates of time and space often dissolve into remote abysses or are halted by abrupt instances of silence and suspension. Through musical means such as parenthetic interpolations of unrelated material, unprepared modulations, the use of hiatus and stillness, among others, Schubert generates a musical idiom which effectively interacts in a deeply personal, unique, and idiosyncratic way with our perception, and ultimately our psychological experience of the music.

The talk (about 40 minutes) will be followed by my own performance of the Sonata.