This thesis discuss Schubert’s A major piano sonata (D.959) by exploding how Schubert (himself) and Schubert’s music was and is understood. This process reveals the concerns of different ages and the human minds behind the concerns.

In Schubert’s time, Vienna lacked for infrastructure and was under autocracy. This was the environment he worked in. People deemed him as a sensitive and loving genius, but didn’t recognize the full value of his works. In the second half of19th century, Schubert was known as a talented but not skillful composer. After th beginning of 20 century, the new realization of Schubert’s character and music came out; then Schubert stood in the roll of Great Composers.

Charles Rosen described the harmonic structure that can avoid the contrastive power between chords in cadence in Schubert’s works as “wave form”, and pointed out this structure makes a wondering feeling when the structure is applied to sonata form. By a similar way of understanding, the A major sonata reveals the themes about love, nature, nostalgia, wondering, bleakness, and death.

After knowing the views of different ages, I find that the human existing speaks; it determined how Schubert composed and how people see his works.