Both of Franz Schubert's two earliest surviving piano sonatas, of which the Piano Sonata in C major, D. 279 is the second, are incomplete works—something not at all uncommon among the works in his vast catalog. In the realm of keyboard music Schubert's tendency to leave works unfinished is especially pronounced—for the thirteen or so finished piano sonatas that bear his name there are well over a dozen fragmentary sonatas and single movements. In the case of the Piano Sonata No. 2 in C major, D. 279, it may be that one of these orphaned movements—an Allegretto in C minor, D. 346 (itself unfinished)—is actually the missing final movement, but no one will likely ever know for sure.

Schubert composed the Piano Sonata No. 2 during the early days of fall in 1815, just over half a year after he seems to have abandoned work on the E major First Sonata. The first three of the four usual sonata movements are in place, here marked Allegro moderato, Andante, and Allegro vivace (the minuet and trio).

Schubert has made some advance in handling sonata-allegro form since the E major Sonata, whose opening movement is decidedly mediocre. In the C major Sonata's Allegro moderato, not only are the gestures better balanced and the development somewhat less trite than those of the earlier Sonata, but Schubert also allows bravura fingerwork to play a much greater role in the movement's design. The dramatic gesture of the opening theme, played initially in stately octaves, is the kind of bare cupboard that leaves the composer countless opportunities to later fill it with textures and harmonizations. The rather stale second theme is considerably less fertile. Perhaps Schubert, too, felt this to be so, since almost before this melody has had a chance to settle, he blasts off in an entirely different direction. The development section, which on the whole is inventive, concise, and better handled than is that of the E major Sonata, opens with an astonishing four-bar sequence, whose stepwise descent and hard-edged dissonant downbeats are both quite shocking and possessed of a certain perverse humor. The end of the development is also a trifle unusual in that the recapitulation comes about not in the home key of C major but rather in F major, the subdominant—something that happens time and again in Schubert's music.

The radiant F major Andante shows how enamored Schubert was of Mozart's music. The hemiola in bars nine and ten is particularly effective. The A minor minuet is likewise from the Mozart barrel, though the way that the music of the opening is transformed into lush accompaniment in the major-mode trio section is all Schubert.

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