An Unexpected New Source for Schubert's A-Minor Sonata, D. 845

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music. Source f or Schubert's A-MinorSonata, D. 845 DAVID GOLDBERGERAmong the masterpieces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there is a select group whose transmission has proceeded without benefit of any autographs. The most celebrated of these works is doubtless Beethoven's Piano Sonata in Bb, op. 106, the so-called "Hammerklavier." The editorial problems presented by this work are so staggering that hundreds of pages have been expended debating the identity of a single set of pitches in the first movement. All the publicity garnered by the "Hammerklavier" has overshadowed the almost equally thorny problems connected with the third and most ambitious of Schubert's A-minor sonata, D. 845, from the year 1825.The whereabouts of its autograph has not been known since the initial publication of the sonata as op. 42 by Anton Pennauer in March 1826. A premonition of the treatment that awaited this edition is contained in an otherwise highly favorable review a short time after its publication: "The engraving is fair, though not as good as it is in the case of several musical works of far smaller significance brought out recently by the same publisher."' Editors of the sonata have always pointed to the purportedly excessive number of engraver's errors as evidence that Schubert had little control over its final form, and it has been widely assumed that he could not have read proofs be-