LDV15

PHILIPPE CASSARD & CÉDRIC PESCIA 17 On 19 November, a few days before his death, he was swotting like a beginner over a fugue exercise for the counterpoint teacher Simon Sechter! Ten months earlier, his first composition of January 1828, destined to remain a fragment, was a lied on a poem by Rellstab, Lebensmut (The courage to live) – a Schubertian manifesto, as it were . . . Since the summer of 1827, this young man of thirty (the age at which Beethoven wrote his First Symphony) hadproduced a continuous streamofmasterpieces. One would rather avoid a tedious enumeration, but still, just consider: Winterreise , the two piano trios, the Fantasy for violin and piano, the eight impromptus for piano, around thirty songs, including the fourteen numbered D957 which were grouped together after his death under the title Schwanengesang . In March 1828 he prepared the fair copy of the ‘Great C major’ Symphony (largely composed in 1825/26), in tandem with the composition of Auf dem Strom , which most unusually adds the horn (such a major presence in the symphony) to the piano and the voice. There followed the great Mass in E flat, the bass line of whose Agnus Dei was to serve as a framework for the apocalyptic Der Doppelgänger from Schwanengesang , composed during the summer along with the three Klavierstücke D946: Brahms, who loved these pieces so much, published them in 1868. The String Quintet in C major was finished in September, and early in the autumn, as if to echo Beethoven’s last three sonatas, opp.109, 110, 111, we come to the triptych of sonatas D958 in Cminor, D959 in A major, and D960 in B flat major.