Schubert's 22 piano sonatas sketch a very illuminating pciture of the prematurely departed composer's compositional path. From the first essays of the gifted young 16- to 19-year old, 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.