Schubert – Piano Sonata in B flat, D960

This is Schubert’s last piano sonata, and given the reputation of his late piano work I don’t know why it took so long for me to listen to it. But it hasn’t been a good time for me to listen to something like this (too much distraction and angst), so I haven’t come away with much more than the obviously banal conclusion that it is great music, and I need to listen to it again soon.
Great it is, though, because in a very stressful week it has at least made me feel human again.


I found myself wondering how I could tell that this was Schubert and not Beethoven, since they inhabit roughly similar sound worlds. My answer (banal again) is something like this. Schubert says “it is like this, but I very much wish it were different” (yearning, Sehnsucht if you want to be pretentious). Beethoven just says “it is like this”. (I wrote this, and then I remembered the “es muss sein” rubric from Beethoven’s last quartet, so I might be less wrong than I thought).