Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5

About the work

Brahms wrote this in 1853 at the age of twenty; it was his last piano sonata. Its five movements give it near-symphonic scale. The slow second movement carries an epigraph from a poem by Sternau describing two lovers by moonlight, and the fourth movement — headed "Rückblick", a backward glance — brings that slow-movement material back in altered form, the most unusual structural stroke in the piece.

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