Geister Duo

Among them are the sonata that Schubert wrote in the summer of 1818, which he spent in Zselis, Count Johann Karl Esterházy’s summer residence in modern-day Slovakia, but still part of Hungary at the time. Schubert taught the piano to the count’s two young daughters, and may well have written the sonata for them. While the opening is a clear homage to Mozart, Schubert’s own voice soon emerges in the main body of the sonata.

Almost ten years later, Schubert wrote eight variations on a theme from the opera Marie, a work by the thoroughly forgotten French composer Ferdinand Hérold. By this time he had left Mozart’s idiom far behind.

Obviously, an anthology such as this is not complete without the grand Fantasia in F minor, which expert Christopher Gibbs has described as Schubert’s best and most original composition for four-handed piano, and is one of the many wonders conceived by Schubert in the last year of his life.