Schubert F# minor Sonata D.571 mvt 1

In today’s post we are looking at what I consider to be the greatest among Schubert’s unfinished piano Sonatas. He wrote this piece in 1817, at the tender age of 20, and it is one of the first pieces that he wrote in this genre that seems to be looking forward to the impressively visionary final sonatas, from a decade later.

How unfortunate that he did not complete this piece! The first movement is easily one of the most inspired that Schubert ever wrote—and luckily enough, he did at least write up to the end of the development, making it fairly simple (in theory) to supply the missing recapitulation, based on the exposition material. After all, in most classical sonatas, the recapitulation is a pretty close repeat of the earlier exposition material, just transposed to the home key.

That still leaves the question of what to do for a coda—there are many different attempts to complete this movement, some of them wacky, some of them sober and appropriate, but none of them can match the ending supplied by fortepianist Malcom Bilson, who comes as close as is possible to Schubert’s spirit.

This ending is not published anywhere that I know of, so I had to take it by ear from Mr. Bilson’s recording. I will be posting the other movements from this sonata in weeks to come, so stay tuned for that as well!