Franz Schubert composed three towering piano sonatas in 1828, the last year of his life. However, they were published eleven years later and are therefore given the rather ominous looking opus posthumous designation. They progress from the tragic and brooding C minor (D. 958) to the emotionally wide-ranging A major (D. 959) and to the meditative and peaceful B-flat (D. 960). Schubert worked on all three at the same time, sketching, revising, composing hurriedly in ink on different sizes of manuscript paper, clearly in a feverish state of mental exhilaration. Although sketches for the sonatas exist from early in 1828, Schubert would have mentally contemplated the material over much of the year, completing all the writing in a remarkably short period of time, in September 1828.

What drove Schubert into this intensely creative and innovative period? Performers and publishers were ignoring his music. He was in the tertiary stage of syphilis. His circle of friends was growing smaller. Being unskilled in business matters, his financial position had become desperate. For the final three months of his life, he moved into the Viennese residence of his brother Ferdinand, at Kettenbrückengasse 6. In this apartment, with its piano standing in a corner then, as it does to this day, Schubert wrote these magnificent piano sonatas, evidently knowing that death was not far away. Beethoven had died one year earlier, in the same city; Schubert had been a pallbearer at his funeral. Unlike Brahms, Schubert was not inhibited by Beethoven’s legacy. He was able to take inspiration from Beethoven’s rhetoric and from his dialectic way of composing, replacing Beethoven’s affirmative statements with more open-ended questioning and contradictions. The scale of Schubert’s music is spacious and contemplative. Beneath the tragedy and unrest, lies a clear feeling of logic and reverence for the sonata-form tradition. His final trilogy of sonatas is one of the most remarkable accomplishments in the entire piano repertoire.