Schubert's 22 piano sonatas sketch a most illuminating picture of the prematurely departed composer and of his compositional path. From the first attempts of the gifted 16- to 19-year- old musician one can trace a continuous development leading to the five great sonatas which he wrote in the years 1823 and 1826, and finally to the three masterworks written shortly before his death, which place him on a level with Beethoven as a composer of sonatas.
Volume II of the three-book Henle Urtext edition contains not only the G major Sonata D 894 op. 78, with its glorious piano writing full of delicate expressiveness, but also the three great sonata masterpieces in c minor, A major and B flat major, with which Schubert looks far into the future and which have long since taken their place in the classical canon of piano sonata literature.