LDV15

19 PHILIPPE CASSARD & CÉDRIC PESCIA For instance, the finale of the Sonata D959, whose theme derives from the Allegretto of a sonata of 1817 (D537), reproduces the design of the last movement of Beethoven’s Sonata op.31 no.1. Cédric Pescia observes that the few notes presented in canon in the middle of the Trio of the Allegro vivace in the Fantasy D940 bear an uncanny resemblance to a motif from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – in the Trio of the latter’s Scherzo. The first movement of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony and that of the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata influenced Schubert’s Lebensstürme D947, which, in its perfectly controlled monumental dimensions, the motoric power of its pulse, and the spectacular symphonic expansion of the sound material, in its turn foreshadows Bruckner and Mahler. The Largo of the Fantasy, with its dotted rhythms and its trills, recalls the opening Maestoso of the Sonata op.111. Similarly, the grandiose fugue that concludes the Fantasy refers back to the fugues of Beethoven’s late quartets, his Sonatas opp.101, 102 no.2 (for cello and piano), 106, and 110, and the Diabelli Variations op.120. Schubert adds to this a darkness, an unremitting despair that are not to be found in his illustrious elder. The atmosphere of Winterreise had left its mark here. But at this moment of his life as a composer, he wanted to follow the example of Beethoven, who worked out in several pieces simultaneously the substance of a single rhythmic or motivic cell, while at the same time giving it a different aspect each time. The vigorous rhythm drummed out at the start of Schubert’s Sonata D959? Identical to the one that appears – in much more dramatic garb – at the beginning of the preceding sonata, D958. The same rhythm, now pianissimo , accompanies the lugubrious melody of theAndante sostenuto of the Sonata D960, and we encounter it once more as the principal motif of the Klavierstück D946 no.1. All of this had its origin, a fewweeks previously, in the shattering left-hand figuration of Der Atlas , the first of the six songs on poems by Heine.