This is a piano piece that Schnabel composed again after a 13-year hiatus following his Piano Sonata. The first three movements were already completed by September 1936, with the composition of the remaining four movements and the overall revision taking place in 1937. Schnabel's letters reveal his own high regard for this work. Although Schnabel rarely performed his own compositions in public, there are accounts that he frequently played this particular piece for friends and colleagues.

The simple first movement, characterized by three-voice polyphony, is followed by an agile and resolute second movement, where rapidly shifting meters, accents that camouflage the underlying meter, and hemiola-like rhythmic patterns intersect. In the third movement, centered on arpeggiated figures, pedal usage and non-usage are clearly indicated, ensuring that a diverse range of sonorities from intricate note clusters can be achieved as a performance effect. The fourth movement, based on a contrapuntal texture, holds a central significance among all seven movements, both in terms of its placement and its length. In the middle section, bar lines serve no substantial function, and frequent changes in meter contrast with the acoustically prominent outer sections. The fifth movement is a rapid triple-meter dance piece, replete with metrical tricks. The sixth movement, the first slow movement in this work, marks a departure from the preceding movements full of leaps, characterized by creeping, crawling movements in all voices. In the latter half, after a cadenza with small note values and brief rapid sections, it descends once more into a meditative world enveloped by long trills. In the seventh movement, motives and rhythms from the first movement are presented explicitly, yet with variations, bringing the entire work to a close within a cyclical connection.