Spring of 1825 found Schubert working, along with a number of smaller projects, on two groundbreaking sonatas for pianoforte—one eventually completed and the other abandoned mid-stride. The finished member of that pair is the now-famous Sonata in A minor, D. 845; the unfinished work, the Piano Sonata in C major, D. 840, begun and abandoned in April, has survived in its incomplete form and is now sometimes known as the "Relique" (the name is of course not Schubert's). Had this been a work of Brahms, the remains would surely be lost to posterity; Schubert, however, was considerably less conscious of posterity and not at all interested in "cleaning up" his musical workshop; what exists of the "Reliquie" was eventually collected and published some 30 years after his death.

Two panels of the "Relique" are complete: the first movement (Moderato) and the slow movement (Andante); the minuet and finale remain only half-baked. The first movement is striking, unconventional, and even visionary, but in the end it is not always successful; it may be that after this on-again, off-again movement the rest of the Sonata was doomed to incompletion. Spacious gestures are set up by steady, repeating rhythms, and the kind of shocking modulations that we expect from Schubert are in full effect (he allows himself just a single jarring chromatic shift to move from the dominant of C to the dominant of B for the start of the second subject!). There is at times, however, a certain ungainliness to the music—an occasional collapse of rhythmic stride—that hinders some of the beautiful moments, and one suspects that Schubert never really got the kind of handle on the music that he might have liked.

The C minor Andante is both languid and stormy. There is a great torrent of octaves in the last ten bars that, in the end, cannot sustain its fury and subsides into an uncertain pianissimo. The minuet in A flat major is, as mentioned, incomplete, but Schubert did skip ahead to put its G sharp minor trio section to paper in full. What there is of the minuet is ridden with unusual harmonic twists and turns, and Schubert seems to have become utterly disoriented at the very point where he abandoned the movement. The finale breaks away after about 270 bars.

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