{"id":3491,"date":"2016-04-04T08:00:58","date_gmt":"2016-04-04T06:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.henle.de\/blog\/en\/?p=3491"},"modified":"2016-04-01T10:24:02","modified_gmt":"2016-04-01T08:24:02","slug":"the-trill-of-doom-%e2%80%93-the-pianist-andras-schiff%e2%80%99s-revelatory-study-of-schubert%e2%80%99s-final-sonata","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/2016\/04\/04\/the-trill-of-doom-%e2%80%93-the-pianist-andras-schiff%e2%80%99s-revelatory-study-of-schubert%e2%80%99s-final-sonata\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trill of Doom \u2013 The pianist Andr\u00e1s Schiff\u2019s revelatory study of Schubert\u2019s final sonata"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong><\/strong>By guest author Alex Ross[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat other work is so full of silence?\u201d (Andr\u00e1s Schiff)<\/p>\n

The other day, I sat with Sir Andr\u00e1s Schiff, the Hungarian-born, British-based pianist, in a practice room at Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, contemplating a great musical mystery: the trill in the eighth measure of Schubert\u2019s Piano Sonata in B-Flat, D. 960. \u201cIt\u2019s the most extraordinary trill in the history of music,\u201d Schiff said, peering at my copy of the score. Sixty-one years old and an undisputed master of the Germanic repertory, Schiff has earned the right to make this sort of pronouncement, although he delivered the remark softly and haltingly, with a sense of wonder.<\/p>\n

Schiff had played the B-Flat Sonata at Disney the night before, as part of a multi-year series of concerts called \u201cThe Last Sonatas,\u201d in which he has explored late-period music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. The recital also included Haydn\u2019s Sonata No. 62, in E-Flat; Mozart\u2019s Sonata in D, K. 576; and Beethoven\u2019s Sonata in C Minor, Opus 111. The program was a mammoth one, lasting nearly two and a half hours. Schiff, far from exhausted at the end, offered as an encore Schumann\u2019s cryptic farewell, the \u201cGhost Variations.\u201d [\u2026]<\/p>\n

The B-Flat Sonata, which Schubert completed two months before his death, in 1828, is a work of vast dimensions and vertiginous depths. It has long struck listeners as a kind of premature communication from the beyond, and it is the trill more than anything that supplies the otherworldly atmosphere. At the outset, a theme rotates serenely in place, with lyric phrases wafting through the right hand and an eighth-note figure purring in the left. It comes to rest on an F-major chord, whereupon the trill steals in, beginning on a low F and trembling between the notes G-flat and A-flat. The flat notes darken the major-key tonality, and the sudden move into the bass is destabilizing. The trill \u2013 a gesture that formerly served a decorative function \u2013 becomes a sign of the uncanny.<\/p>\n

Listen to the opening bars of Schubert\u2019s Piano Sonata in B-Flat, D. 960.<\/p>\n

AUDIO 1<\/a> (Recording by Decca)<\/p>\n

Various metaphors come to mind for this remarkable event: shadow, tremor, shudder, groan. Schiff, contemplating the sonata\u2019s opening bars, thinks of the sea\u2014in particular, the sea depicted in Schubert\u2019s song \u201cAm Meer.\u201d There a spacious major-key theme gives way to an ominous tremolando, reflecting a contrast in the Heinrich Heine text: \u201cThe sea shimmered far and wide. \u2026 The fog rose, the water surged.\u201d Schiff imagines a similar vista in the sonata. \u201cI see a broad horizon, a calm ocean,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt\u2019s beautiful how often Schubert writes about the sea, even though he never saw it. Then the trill \u2013 a very distant murmuring, maybe of an approaching storm. Still very far, but approaching. It is not a pleasant noise, this murmuring. Maybe it is also the approach of death. And then silence. What other work is so full of silence? And then the original melody resumes. This is only speculation \u2013 I cannot say what it really means.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schiff has been performing the B-Flat Sonata for decades, and has recorded it twice: first in 1995, for the Decca label, and at the beginning of 2015, for ECM<\/a>. But he is still working through its enigmas. Lately, he has found a different way to play the trill. In 2010, he acquired an eighteen-twenties Viennese fortepiano, lighter in action and crisper in sound than a modern piano. He used it on the ECM recording. The instrument has four pedals, including a \u201cmoderator\u201d pedal that causes a piece of cloth to be inserted between the hammers and the strings. \u201cWhen I use that pedal on the trill, I get a very different sound,\u201d Schiff told me. \u201cThe notes are distinct. You can translate the effect onto a modern instrument, but only if it is very well voiced. Before, I used more sustaining pedal. Now I like it light. The pedal is actually quite damaging. You see that dot on the final eighth note?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Schubert, Piano Sonata in B-Flat D. 960, measures 1\u20139, HN 399<\/p><\/div>\n

It needs to stop quickly. It\u2019s like a word that ends with a consonant, not a vowel. Without pedal, you can cut it off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schiff gave a demonstration at the piano. First, he played the trill with the pedal, producing a low, grim blur. \u201cJust a big rumble,\u201d he said, shaking his head. \u201cI don\u2019t think that\u2019s what Schubert meant. Also, you could never do that on the fortepiano.\u201d Then he executed the trill in accordance with his current thinking. The component pitches were more perceptible, and the final F made a pinpoint sound, like a stone dropping into water. Schiff paged ahead and pointed to a reappearance of the trill at the end of the exposition, just before the repeat. \u201cHere it\u2019s marked fortissimo,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt becomes something scary, demonic. The sonata goes always between the two poles. In this of all pieces, you must take the repeat, because if not, among other things, you will lose this incredible shock.\u201d (If, as many pianists do, you skip the repeat of the exposition, you must also skip the nine preparatory bars that lead into it, ending with that trill of doom.)<\/p>\n

Listen again to Schiff, this time the final measures of the exposition played on the pianoforte.<\/p>\n

AUDIO 2<\/a> (Recording by ECM)<\/p>\n

Needless to say, Schiff had taken the repeat at his performance the previous night, at which he played a modern Hamburg Steinway. The first movement went on for almost twenty minutes, nearly assuming the proportions of a Bruckner or a Mahler movement. But Schiff is not one to emphasize the cosmic hugeness of the conception, as Sviatoslav Richter did in his notoriously \u2013 though enthrallingly \u2013 slow readings of the sonata. In the first movement, Schiff maintains an even, walking tempo, holding the eighth-note pulse steady throughout. Likewise, he keeps the slow movement flowing at a pace appropriate to Schubert\u2019s indication, \u201cAndante sostenuto.\u201d Schiff resists the current fashion, undoubtedly influenced by Richter, for recasting the Andante as a desolate Adagio.<\/p>\n

This is not to imply that Schiff\u2019s reading lacked intensity. A couple of decades ago, his Schubert performances could be elegant to a fault. These days, even as he applies lessons learned from the lighter action of the fortepiano, he makes uninhibited use of the full symphonic power of the modern grand. The fortissimo trill in the first movement ricocheted unnervingly within the hypersensitive Disney acoustics. The climactic presentation of the main theme in the recapitulation had brassy strength. In short, Schiff is eager to maximize Schubert\u2019s contrasts, which are indeed extreme.<\/p>\n

Schiff brought the same freedom to other pieces on the program. I\u2019ve recently heard some high-octane accounts of Beethoven\u2019s Opus 111 \u2013 notably, Igor Levit\u2019s precocious rendition at the Park Avenue Armory, last year \u2013 but Schiff has a particular ability to glory in Beethoven\u2019s contradictions. One moment, he was pounding out the raucous syncopations of the so-called boogie-woogie variation; in the next, crystalline chains of thirty-second notes materialized above his piano, weightless and luminous. In the Haydn, esoteric games were intercut with shivers of chromatic unease. Mozart seemed the odd man out: I wondered whether he belonged in this late-style gallery, since death came on him relatively quickly, when he was in his prime.<\/p>\n

With Schubert, of course, the spectre of death is omnipresent, and not only because of prevailing Romantic preoccupations: syphilis had marked him for an early demise. Perhaps the greatest challenge of the B-Flat Sonata is how to carry the narrative past the first two movements, both of which are poised at the edge of the abyss. Schiff rejects the conventional notion that Schubert\u2019s inspiration faltered in the brighter-toned Scherzo and Finale; rather, he sees them as further stages in a negotiation with death. His avoidance of mystical excess at the outset results in a more balanced structure. On the ECM recording, the tangy sonorities of the fortepiano make the finale a complex delight.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese last two movements are like a hallucination of a new life,\u201d Schiff told me. \u201cThey are what the dying person might experience on the threshold. The coda has a wonderful, chaotic joy in it: this rushing out, this looking for the final exit, this last flourish. Schubert is saying yes to life. There is still hope.\u201d But the trill has sounded.<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> Reprint from \u201cThe New Yorker<\/a>\u201d, November 2, 2015. Alex Ross is the music critic of The New Yorker and the author of the books \u201cThe Rest Is Noise\u201d and \u201cListen to This.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By guest author Alex Ross[1] \u201cWhat other work is so … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,319,268,3,322,527,285],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3491"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}