Creative publishers gave Franz Schubert’s piano miniatures their titles: “Momens musicals” (spelled wrong!) and “Impromptus” (improvisations — Johannes Brahms would later call some of his miniatures “caprices”).

In Moment Musical No. 2, the main idea, A, is a gentle rocking figure, with a nostalgic mood characteristic of Schubert. The mood deepens when A′ is provided with a relatively long coda, which seems reluctant ever to let go. In between comes B, a sad melody in the minor mode; the piano texture changes from cloudy chords in A to plain melody with a steady moving accompaniment in B. As usual in piano miniatures, the form is simple, at least on the surface: A B A′ B′ A".

But in fact this is an excellent example of how much these schematic form diagrams can hide. After A B A′ with its coda, after four minutes, we think that the piece must be over — except, perhaps, for a hint when the piano moves to an unusually high register at the coda’s final cadence. B returns again, or rather explodes — fortissimo, in the high register, no longer sad but terribly anguished, a cry of pain. In the wake of this climax, there is a momentary switch from the minor mode to the major, a Schubert fingerprint we also noted in Listening Exercise 7 (page 34). Does this change heal the pain? By the end of A" the high register no longer hints at anything. It simply hovers at the border of hearing, a true Romantic effect, a Romantic evocation of the ineffable.