In the run-up to Schubert's birthday this Saturday, Martin spoke to me about becoming 'a major Schubert-phile' in his twenties, why he believes that the early sonatas deserve more recognition, the process of filling in the gaps which the composer often left on the page, and why the Bösendorfer piano which he's chosen for the cycle is the perfect vehicle for this music...
Did you always feel a special affinity with Schubert’s music, or was it something that came to you later in life?
I remember that we had an LP of Wilhelm Kempff playing the Impromptus when I was a child – that’s the kind of Schubert that’s easy to love and comes to you early, but it took me much longer to feel the same affection for the sonatas. It’s partly because it still wasn’t very common to play them when I was a teenager; apart from the Wanderer-Fantasie and maybe the very last sonata, they weren’t part of the core study repertoire in the same way as the Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven sonatas or the music of the Russian piano school.
My voyage of discovery came about through the Clara Haskil Competition; I took part in that when I was eighteen or nineteen, and there was a lot of obligatory Schubert on the repertoire-list. I took that as an opportunity to explore pieces I didn’t know before, and I think that coincided with something changing in me. It was incredible to get a glimpse of the incredible depths and spaces that open up in these works: I played the little early A major sonata D664 (which is on this first album) and then I slowly started to dig into the later depths and riches...
By my mid-twenties I considered myself a major Schubert-phile, and probably would have named him as one of my top three favourites composers soon afterwards. But I had another epiphany only a few years ago thanks to Paul Badura-Skoda’s writings and complete recording of all the sonatas, including the so-called unfinished ones. At that stage I’d been playing Schubert nearly all my life, including all the chamber music with piano and probably about half of the 600 songs…I felt like I knew him inside-out but somehow these early sonatas had been hiding from me in plain sight! Getting to know these earlier pieces in depth has been a very satisfying and exciting journey.
Why do you think they’ve never achieved the recognition they deserve?
They were in a separate volume in the Henle complete Schubert edition, labelled ‘early and unfinished’, so they always felt a bit off the beaten track until Badura-Skoda put them in context for me. But I think there’s also a wider question about how Schubert is perceived in general - although he’s very much part of the canon, I still think that he somehow triggers certain mechanisms that make us underestimate him, just as people did during his lifetime.
Perhaps his physical appearance played a part, but it’s also wrapped up with his incredible humility; just weeks before his death he signed up for counterpoint classes with the professor Simon Sechter and even handed in a fugue that he was working on, like a struggling student! And this was in the year when he’d written Winterreise, Schwanengesang, the String Quintet, and the three last piano sonatas…People react in a strange way to too much modesty.
Why were these early works so often left unfinished?
With the early sonatas Schubert was often working in such a rush that he had too many ideas to write them all down – there was always another deadline round the corner and his financial situation meant that he had to ration his expenditure on pencils and paper, which were expensive at the time.
So he developed this habit of writing sonata movements up to the end of the development section, ie the point in sonata form where people in the business knew what was going to come next anyway – the modulation of the recapitulation in the second theme was a job that any decent copyist could fill out. And many of these early sonatas didn’t have a coda: they just ended like the exposition did, so roughly 98% of the movement was essentially complete by the point he stopped writing.
A major factor was that he never had a publisher who really cared enough to ensure that people would get to play and hear these things – they were much more interested in the Lieder and things like the Deutsche Tänze and the four-hand music than in the sonatas, which were completely overshadowed by Beethoven’s.
I think he got to a point where he thought ‘Why bother writing the whole thing out when I don’t know if anyone will ever read and play this anyway? I know what I meant, let’s not bother writing the recap’. But that doesn’t mean that these pieces are lesser than the others: the journey of seeing someone finding his voice and developing his style and idiosyncrasies is just as exciting as with the Beethoven sonatas, but with a completely different life-story and personality.
You’ve supplied your own completions for several sonatas on this first album in the series - what sort of work was involved?
‘Completion’ is probably the right term…Sometimes people call it a reconstruction, but I play this down as much as possible because it’s technical rather than creative work – a little asterisk in the booklet is fine! I find it so unimportant in the grand scheme of things, because the different completions come to almost the same conclusion – there is another one in the Wiener Urtext edition which is very good and there is Badura-Skoda’s.
There’s very little scope for creativity: the only question-marks concern things like octavation (do you use more mid register or treble? etc), then you might feel free to invent a little coda of four to eight bars, as I did at the end of the first and fourth moment of the F sharp minor sonata. Sometimes he bothers with codas and sometimes he doesn’t, but the ones which he did write out are often very beautiful things, like under the looking glass emotional summary of the material that’s gone before.
How did you decide which works to group together on each album?
For bigger cycles like this I personally find that it’s psychologically and emotionally more satisfying to mix things up rather than doing them in strictly chronological order. I’ve done the same with cyclic concerts of the six Bach partitas, and I would do the same for the Beethoven sonatas but that’s not planned yet…
For Schubert I find it particularly interesting to take this approach because so much of the DNA of what becomes very prominent later on is already there in the earlier sonatas. It’s quite a different case from Beethoven, where you see a kind of development that clearly moves through perceivable stages: it’s easy to speak about early, mid and late Beethoven, whereas with Schubert it’s more about many different branches of ideas.
These include things like using extremes of dynamics and registers, and this very idiosyncratic idea of letting the music just stop and run out into silence, which we already see two pages into the first sonata: it’s very simple almost minimalist material rather than a profusion of ideas, but on that second page these scales just run out of steam into a pianissimo and fermata. That’s such a Schubertian hallmark: it’s as if the voice gets muffled or suffocated, like when you don’t know what you’re trying to say anymore and can’t end your sentence. It’s a very poignant effect, and it’s already there at the beginning, in material that sounds much more like Haydn or a study rather than the very confident Opus 1 which we see from Beethoven.
Some ideas which he explores in the early sonatas become very personal and prominent later on, but there are others which he tries out and doesn’t pursue. This was very much the age of the virtuoso, when people like Hummel and FX Mozart (a good friend of Schubert) were experimenting with all sorts of new pianistic techniques. Schubert tries that out on occasion - for instance in the C major sonata D613 with its wild exploration of the entire keyboard - but he evidently decided he didn’t want to go any further down that particular path.
Were the recordings made live or in the studio?
It’s a semi-live hybrid situation! We used about 95% of a live performance with a little bit of patching, which is my favourite way to record because I thrive off that energetic reaction you get from an audience. I also like to capture an interpretation at the end of a run of live concerts rather than making an album in the studio and then touring to promote it, which I find very stressful!
The recordings took place in the wonderful German town of Kronberg, which hosts the most exciting academy for young musicians in the world – OK, maybe I’m biased! A few years ago they built a new concert-hall with fantastic acoustics and a wonderful Bösendorfer, which is a match made in heaven for this music.
Tell me a little more about why they are so well-suited to Schubert…
The first quality we associate with Bösendorfers is the lyrical character of the overall sound, but I find that they’re also ideal for embracing the extremes of dynamics which Schubert explores so much. He writes a lot of triple fortissimi and sforzandi, and it’s nice to have a piano which gives you the freedom to really punch and let the off-noises ring. I’ve been playing period instruments much more lately and got very influenced by the aesthetics, so I loved having the opportunity to throw caution to the wind in a way that would probably sound anachronistic on a very strong modern Steinway. I do also love an upright piano in Schubert: Rudolf Buchbinder has recorded Schubert dances and Ländler on one, which I think is a wonderful idea because it’s so close to how Schubert will have heard his pieces performed.
This Bösendorfer is also a perfect match with the size of the hall, and the reverb you get is very natural. It shuts down so much of the mental chatter that we often have going on as performers: there are long stretches where I can completely forget about how to play for this specific situation and just enjoy the music, like a singer would with their own voice. It’s a rare treat for that to happen.
Martin Helmchen (piano)
Available Formats: 2 CDs, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
