There is a particular kind of loneliness in the key of C minor that Schubert understood better than almost anyone who has ever put pen to manuscript paper.
The four Impromptus of Op. 90 were written in the autumn of 1827, fourteen months before Schubert died at thirty-one. He knew his health was failing. What he may not have known was that he would never hear two of these pieces performed publicly in his lifetime — the publisher Tobias Haslinger, nervous about the harmonic strangeness of the third and fourth, declined to print them until 1857. Three decades of silence for music that deserved none.
What "Impromptu" Actually Means Here
The title was almost certainly not Schubert's own coinage. It was likely suggested by his publisher, borrowing a fashionable term from the salon repertoire of the day. But these are not salon pieces in any comfortable sense.
The first, in C minor, opens like a man walking fast through rain who doesn't yet know where he's going. The pulse is relentless — a triplet figure in the left hand that never stops, dragging you forward even when the right hand wants to pause and look back. It's one of those pieces where you can't decide if the energy is propulsive or anxious. Probably both.
The second, in E-flat major, is where pianists get to show what their instrument actually sounds like. A rippling triplet figuration in the right hand, clean and even, running over harmonic changes that keep slipping sideways just when you think you know where you are. It demands absolute evenness of touch and rewards a piano with a singing midrange — the kind of thing that exposes a bad instrument immediately.
The third, in G-flat major, is the one that stopped Haslinger cold. It sits in a key with six flats, which in 1827 was considered audacious — eccentric, even. It's a song without words, essentially, one of the most heartbreaking melodies Schubert ever wrote, and he wrote dozens of the things. Slow, patient, unhurried. You have to let it breathe.
The Performer Problem
There is no definitive recording and there never will be, which is part of what keeps these pieces alive. Wilhelm Kempff played them like a man remembering something precious. Radu Lupu played them like a man who had just found something he thought he'd lost. Alfred Brendel brought forensic clarity. András Schiff found a conversational quality, as if Schubert was thinking out loud.
What all of them understood is that these pieces live in transition — the moments between themes, the surprising modulations, the silences that land differently than expected. Rush any of it and the music collapses into sentiment. Hold back too much and it turns academic.
Mitsuko Uchida's reading is perhaps the most interior, the most private. She plays the third Impromptu at a tempo that feels impossibly slow and yet somehow right, as if she's reading a letter she doesn't want to finish.
The Fourth
The last of the four, in A-flat major, begins with a theme of such simple grace that it seems almost naive. Then it goes somewhere darker in its variations — not dramatically, not with any theatrical gesture, just a gradual settling into shadow. It ends quietly.
These were written by a man who was not well, who had already composed some of the most unbearable music in the repertoire — Winterreise was finished just weeks earlier. That context is not required to love Op. 90. But it is impossible to entirely set aside.
Put the fourth Impromptu on late, after the dishes are done. Give it the quiet it's asking for.