For as long as he can remember, Paul Badura-Skoda has always been intimately linked with Schubert’s music. At a time when knowledge of the composer was still very sketchy, he scrutinized the princeps editions and manuscripts in order to track down errors and to establish Urtext versions which today are referential. But beyond that, he was able to complete certain movements that Schubert had left unfinished without however introducing music foreign to the composer. In the exhaustive essay which he was keen on writing for the present recording, we can read with profit, Sonata by Sonata, the nature of the work accomplished.

The choice of period instruments responds to a quest for colours and sound ranges favouring a greater intimacy with the composer’s music, permitted by the use of only those instruments which Schubert knew, which he used and for which he actually wrote his music. However what is most striking is the kind of identification between the performer, Badura-Skoda and the composer, Schubert. In this recording of the complete piano sonatas on period instruments, which took place in Vienna between 1991 and 1996, the Viennese master delivers the work of a lifetime: Schubert’s music with his passion, his suffering and that inimitable tone which makes his native city the place so essentially and existentially identified with music.

This collection of the twenty Sonatas for period piano recorded by Paul Badura-Skoda on the instruments in his own collection has every chance of being considered by posterity as one of the most creative and most significant achievements.