Artur Schnabel: Piano Sonata

This page has been set up for the pianists studying the printed score available from Peermusic as prepublication¹ who wish to consult the best source available, the copy made by Therese Schnabel, wife of Artur Schnabel.  George McGuire signs for the new engraving, see here for a view of the first pages.

The whole front page presented here has been written by Artur Schnabel himself who added the English heading at a later date, likely after emigrating to the USA.  This latter addition is viewed as acknowledgment by Schnabel that this copy is the valid version of the sonata.  The performance indications on p. 1 are primarily in Schnabel's handwriting with few additions by Eduard Erdmann; on p. 2 performance indications are primarily inserted by Erdmann with few additions by Schnabel.  The fingering and added performance indications on the remainder of the manuscript have been inserted by Erdman(*).  Erdmann played the world premiere of the sonata in September 1925 in Venice, Italy, at the Chamber Music Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music.  The original manuscript written by Artur Schnabel has been lost.

All 31 pages of the manuscript are accessible in high resolution.  Note that each page has a size of about 350 kB, thus downloading may be slow.

The MS has been scanned by Kerstin Brümmer of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, where the original is located. 

(*) Information provided by Dr. Werner Grünzweig, head curator of the Music Archives at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

¹ Peermusic Classical Item # 62146-501