Notes for: August 1, 2017
For Schubert scholars and biographers, this is a mystery piece. No one knows when the piece was written and for what purpose. We know only a few facts about its publication, and these are less than enlightening.
The musical world first learned of the work’s existence in 1845 when it was published by the Viennese firm of A. Diabelli & Co. Schubert had labeled the manuscript, now in the Austrian National Library, simply as “Adagio,” and Diabelli, on his own, captioned it in the first printed edition “Nottorno, Op. 148.” The collected edition of Schubert’s works, published in the late 1880s, continued the “Nottorno” title. In 1950, Otto Deutsch, in his authoritative catalog of Schubert’s works, arbitrarily assigned the work No. 897.
The scholarly speculation today is that Schubert had intended the work as the slow movement for his Piano Trio in B Flat Major, D. 898, composed in 1827, but had rejected it in favor of the movement eventually published with that Trio. Meanwhile, following Schubert’s death in 1828, his brother Ferdinand discovered the rejected MS among Schubert’s pile of unpublished papers. Over the years Ferdinand repeatedly delivered to publishers unpublished material from this treasure trove, and that may have been what happened in this case.
The piece is now frequently heard in concert halls and recordings as a self-contained work for piano, violin and cello. While the opus number has been dropped, the work has become know under either title – Adagio or Nottorno – and with Deutsch’s catalog number.
Whatever its title, D. 897 is an 11-minute demonstration of what an imaginative composer can do with the simplest of melodic materials. The music is cast in A-B-A-B-A form. The A section begins with the piano playing a series of subdued measures, each with three chords, marked appassionato. Over this accompaniment the strings play the melody – a sequence of measures each consisting of a long three-beat note followed by four 16ths. The piano then takes over the melodic pattern while the strings play the chords pizzicato.
The B section is equally epigrammatic. Shifting into a triple rhythm and marked fortissimo, the melody consists of a repeated cell in a dotted-note rhythm played by the strings over running 16th note triplets in the piano. The cells of both sections are subjected to endless harmonic and dynamic variations, and both sections are repeated at length with further variation.
Today the Nottorno is overshadowed by Schubert’s two four-movement piano trios, D. 898 and D. 929, each taking about 40 minutes. But taking the Nottorno on its own terms – as a one-movement stand-alone composition – its overall impact is magical.