Artur Schnabel

Artur Schnabel enjoys a lasting reputation primarily for his distinguished career as a concert pianist focused on the works of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann, with the last of these representing the most contemporary composer in his repertoire. Observers might therefore conclude that his own compositions would echo classical-era models and reject modernist tendencies, yet this assumption proves unfounded.

Throughout his life Schnabel maintained strict privacy concerning his creative output, with the result that scarcely any of it reached audiences while he was alive. He described himself as an “amateur composer” and spoke of composition as a “sport”; the technical demands of most pieces kept public hearings infrequent. His Notturno of 1914, a Richard Dehmel setting for contralto and piano, waited until 1929 for its debut at festivals in Weisbaden and Amsterdam, where, like much of his catalog, it provoked irritation among the era’s conservative critics.

Schnabel’s scores display a highly individual voice and an uncompromising spirit of musical exploration that often astonishes listeners expecting post-romantic language. He held Schoenberg in esteem without ever copying his methods; although he never adopted strict atonality, numerous works carry a distinctly serial, or what was once termed “dodecaphonic,” character. His catalog encompasses a range of chamber pieces, notable piano music, three symphonies, and several brief orchestral compositions.

One of his most remarkable achievements is the Sonata for Solo Violin, written in 1919 and introduced the next year by Carl Flesch, who included the third movement in his Art of Violin Playing, Vol. 2. Lasting just under fifty minutes, the score spans forty-five pages without bar lines and incorporates verbal directives throughout. Violinist Paul Zukofsky unearthed the work and recorded it for the CP2 label in 1985, coupling it with the 1935 Sonata for Violin and Piano, a demanding composition of considerable power and brittle pointillism that features pianist Ursula Oppens.

Composed in 1925, the String Trio belongs to Schnabel’s middle period and forms a link between conventional chamber-music structures and the emerging language of atonality. Its premiere took place in Vienna a decade after completion and met with largely favorable responses. Though more tonally approachable than many of his pieces, it still bears the stamp of his inventive idiom.

Schnabel’s final work, the richly developed Duodecimet of 1950, was completed the year before his death. As its title implies, the score employs twelve instruments, each featured as a soloist within a tonally exploratory framework that advances the melodic, rhythmic, and polyphonic liberties he had long pursued. Columbia captured the Duodecimet and the String Trio in 1958 with the Monod Ensemble and the Galimir Trio respectively, issuing the performances on AML 5447. The sole works currently available on compact disc are Zukofsky’s recordings of the Sonata for Violin and Piano with Oppens and the Second Symphony, both released on CP2.