SCHUBERT Four Impromptus, D.935, Op. 142 - Jonathan Biss

Schubert’s genius was equally well suited to the epic scale and to the miniature. In piano sonatas and chamber music works of 40 minutes or longer, he takes existing forms and expands them, testing their natural limits and turning digression into a sublime art; in hundreds of lieder, each no more than a few minutes long, he pierces and, in some case, shatters your heart with a single change of harmony or turn of phrase.
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1979 - 1828)
Four Impromptus, D.935, Op. 142
No. 1 in F minor
No. 2 in A-flat major
No. 3 in B-flat major
No. 4 in F minor
The Four Impromptus, D. 935 occupy a middle ground. Already deeply moving when heard individually, they become something greater when experienced in their entirety. Written exactly a year before Schubert’s death at the age of 31 (consider it: 935 pieces of music written by the age of 30), the successive tonalities, forms, and moods of these four freestanding pieces suggest a grand sonata in f minor.
However, freed from the strictures of the word “sonata” and the long shadow it - and Beethoven’s 32 towering examples of the form -casts, Schubert’s imagination becomes even more uninhibited, the results even more wondrous. The first Impromptu is not a sonata form; it has no development. Instead, its expected two themes - the first tragic, the second consoling but still so full of sorrow - are supplemented by an unexpected third. Marked pianissimo appassionato, it is many seemingly contradictory things at once: fervent, mysterious, urgent, halting, haunting. Its effect is transformative: when it is followed by the return of the Impromptu’s opening idea, it has moved away from defiance and towards resignation. Acceptance is still a long way off, but the fight has been revealed to be futile.
The second piece, an Allegretto, is quintessential Schubert: evocative of a Viennese dance, perhaps a ländler, in an A-flat major that is somehow more deeply sad than the f minor music that preceded it, and so simple on its surface that any attempt to explain how profoundly moving it is would be doomed to failure. If the first Impromptu is discursive, taking the listener down a wandering and unpredictable path, this one takes a very different route to the sublime, using an unadorned A-B-A form, the simplest in all of music. Not one of its motivic or harmonic events is jarring; few of them are unexpected. In spite or because of this sense of inevitability, the music finds the core of Schubert’s vulnerability, and ours.
The third Impromptu has another kind of deceptive simplicity, its lilting B-flat major theme falling and then rising in perfect symmetry: a child’s poem. But over the course of five wide-ranging variations, it develops into something different. Even the variations which merely embellish the theme somehow deepen it in the process; Schubert is constitutionally incapable of writing meaningless music, and every appoggiatura, every neighbor tone, shades and complicates the music’s narrative. That narrative is further complicated by the journey two of the variations take away from the B-flat major home, first to b flat minor, then to G-flat major. The former is often dark and always suffused with sehnsucht - longing. (Sehnsucht is the central fact of Schubert’s existence. A line from Die Taubenpost, his final song - “Sie heißt die Sehnsucht” [“She is called longing”] - could be considered his motto.) The latter tries to be light-hearted, doesn’t quite manage, and in the process only grows more sehnsuchtsvoll: a Schubert signature.
The end of the last variation is not the end of the Impromptu; there is a partial reprise of the theme, in a lower octave and at a slower tempo. It now bears the weight of its history - a history it did not have when we first heard it, only ten minutes earlier. It has lost its innocence and grown even more beautiful.
The final Impromptu returns to F minor and is another study in surface lightness that is not, in fact, light. Eely in its misterioso middle section, featuring pianissimo scales slithering up and down the keyboard, it is otherwise steely, staring fate in the eye and showing no remorse. If the first Impromptu ended with resignation but not acceptance, the last exhibits neither: it ends with a fortississimo downward scale, spanning the entire piano and landing on a single, terrible, low F. Schubert’s extraordinary gift for lyricism and consolation is matched - balanced is not the word - by the intensity with which he confronted the pain of life and the horror of death. In these Impromptus, both qualities are given magnificent expression. But it is the horror that gets the last word. (Jonathan Biss)
Recorded live at the Victoria Concert Hall, Singapore, on 10 June 2023.
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Jonathan Biss.