Schubert wrote this elegant work toward the end of 1826; shortly after the turn of the year, he used it as an audition-piece to display his talents to one of Vienna’s important music publishers, Domenico Artaria.  Other publishers had issued a good number of his works by this time, but none of them had paid him properly. Haydn and Beethoven had been very close to Artaria, giving Schubert the hope that a business relationship between them would advance his career. One day early in 1827, he went to Artaria’s home with the two friends who were to play the Rondo. The pianist was Karl Maria von Bocklet and the Bohemian violinist was Josef Slawjk, to whom Schubert dedicated the work. The two performers were even younger than the composer, but their performance was successful in Schubert’s opinion.  In April, Artaria issued the work. It must have sold well, for in 1828, Artaria asked Schubert to write another piece, a piano duet that was published less than a month after the composer’s death. This Rondo was one of only three of Schubert’s many chamber compositions actually published during his lifetime.

Artaria gave the work its title, Rondo brillant. Schubert seems to have called the violin piece simply Rondo; Artaria added the adjective “brilliant” (in German and French, brillant), in the hope of stimulating sales. In some later editions, the important introduction is also mentioned in the title; however, the music is not at all the kind of vacant showpiece for a virtuoso violinist that was usually described in those days as “brilliant.” It is a carefully wrought, serious work that might have been part of a grand sonata, written for a pair of artists of equally matched powers.

The Andante introduction that prefaces the Allegro of the rondo is the source of several ideas that Schubert takes up in the central part of the work. The music starts earnestly with a section that is long for a prefatory passage with a Handelian sense of regality, but it is not long enough to be an entire slow movement. It resembles the kind of protracted scena (literally, “scene”) that often introduced big, dramatic opera arias. The opening bars of this introduction soon yield to a dolce theme with gently flowing arpeggios in the piano’s right-hand; the dramatic return of the beginning, now in the major mode, soon leads to a seventh chord that transitions directly into the Allegro tempo of the Rondo proper, a sparkling example of the form so popular in sonata finales. The formal procedure follows the classical models with a main theme that recurs in alternation with contrasting ideas (ABACA), with a coda based on the music of the B section. The B and C sections are longer than the refrain theme; the B music is distinguished by a military march rhythm introduced at the end of the spirited A section; the C music is characterized by its good-natured dotted rhythms. In the course of its development, Schubert also recalls material from the opening Andante.

Copyright © Susan Halpern, 2025