There is a silence near the end of the first movement of Schubert’s B-flat major Sonata — a low trill in the bass, barely a murmur, like something heard through a wall — and every great pianist who has recorded this piece has had to decide what to do with it. Some let it pass. Some lean into it until the room goes cold.
The Last Thing He Wrote
Schubert composed D. 960 in September 1828. He was thirty-one years old and had maybe two months left to live. He didn’t know that, exactly, though he was sick enough to feel the narrowing. What’s remarkable is that there is nothing desperate in the music. No clawing. The opening melody arrives like it has always existed and Schubert has simply remembered it at last.
The sonata is enormous — forty-five minutes when played with full repeats — and unhurried in a way that troubled critics for a generation after his death. Schumann called it “heavenly length,” which sounds like a compliment but wasn’t entirely meant as one. The Viennese public barely noticed. Schubert had submitted the manuscript to a publisher who sat on it for eleven years.
The Performers Who Defined It
The recording most people come back to is Sviatoslav Richter’s 1972 live performance from Schloss Ludwigsburg, released on Deutsche Grammophon. No studio cleanup, no retakes — just Richter in a hall, in a single sitting, taking the first movement at a pace so deliberate it borders on stillness. The Hungarian Radio tape of his 1979 Moscow performance is another one, though it circulates in versions of variable provenance.
Then there’s Radu Lupu’s 1984 recording for Decca, made in Kingsway Hall, London, before that building was converted and lost forever to the listening world. Engineer Michael Mailes captured Lupu’s Bösendorfer with a weight and warmth that matched the music almost unfairly well. Lupu plays the second movement — the Andante sostenuto in C-sharp minor — as if grief could be a form of politeness. It remains one of the most beautiful things in the piano catalog, full stop.
András Schiff recorded it for ECM in 2004 on a Bösendorfer 290, and his liner essay alone is worth tracking down. He argues that D. 960 is not a farewell — that reading too much biography into the music flattens it. He’s right, but you’ll still hear the end of something every time you listen.
Mitsuko Uchida’s 1997 Philips recording is the one I reach for most consistently now. Something in her timing at the repeat of the opening theme — she takes it a shade slower the second time, a fraction more private — catches me every time.
After the Kid Is in Bed
This is not background music. That sounds obvious, but it needs saying because the first movement is so slow and so quiet that it can seem to disappear if you’re not paying attention. Pay attention. The third movement Scherzo will remind you the composer could be playful, wry, almost mischievous. But then the finale arrives and spreads out, unhurried, certain of itself in a way that very little music is.
The trill in the bass. That moment. Whatever pianist you’re listening to — notice what they do. Notice if the rest of the room falls away.
It does, eventually. That’s the point.