(A. S. — I was so happy to learn that you love this sonata, too.)

The materials of the exposition are too simple. Bare octaves and block chords, and beautiful tunes. Why do I hear wind, and feel snow, and see the vault of night? The same paradox applies to his Winterreise.

Maybe, as N. K. once told me, “It’s all about the white space.” Subtract the fifth from a triad, and someone without any musical training will still feel the difference. The interval of the fifth is both insulation and scaffold. Take it away, and the chord is at once hollowed and destabilized. At least part of the dislocation that we feel, during the modulation between the two themes, is caused this way. The remainder is caused by a dislocation of syntax, which fixates suddenly on the interval of the third, magnified through obsessive repetition until it can no longer be contained, clanging thunderously up and down the piano. Schubert so often gives the feeling of a painful stutter. Germs of words are caught in the throat, and emerge only with violence.

In the first thematic region, the fifths of certain emphatic chords are subtly displaced, so that while the elements of the triad are all present, they do not fulfill all of their roles. Other triads are placed unusually low, so that rather than sounding rich and full, they sound dense and muddy. The relief that we anticipate, after the angular discomfort of the opening bare octaves, is thus subverted.

So when the second theme appears, in the relative major key, over stable, repeated fifths, how reassuring it feels: How warm, and how strangely intimate. The contour of the opening melody returns, transfigured. The wavering, high minor seconds become the rocking major seconds of a lullaby, now at the pitch of a woman’s voice.

But the most astonishing thing is how Schubert develops this lullaby. The pitch range lifts to that of the opening, high and thin, but the open triads persist below in the accompaniment, bracing the melody, completing it, as though the cold and the warm had been alloyed together. This is essentially its only transformation in the rest of the exposition. There is something terribly delicate — and significant — to how Schubert arranges this coupling of warmth and cold, fullness and hollowness, weight and weightlessness, rest and restlessness, softness and brutality, tenderness and pain. 

“The two of us together, and each one alone.”