On Schubert's late D.946 piano pieces

This essay is a placeholder. Real writing lands in a later phase.

The second of Schubert’s late D.946 piano pieces is the one that matters to me. The first is more often played; the third more often praised. The second, in E flat minor, is the one I have spent twenty years trying to hear properly.

It does not announce itself. It begins as if mid-sentence. The melody is already underway when the listener arrives. Whatever happened before the first bar is gone, and the music does not seem interested in retrieving it.

I assembled a programme around it once, for a recital I did not give. The recital was assembled and then quietly disassembled, in the way these things happen, without anyone in particular deciding it should not happen. I still have the programme in a drawer somewhere. The second piece is in the middle of it.

Of all the things I have failed to play in public, that is the one I miss.