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Botnst · #1 01-13-2007, 01:53 PM

Schubert teaches us the folly of despair

By Michael Henderson
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/12/2006

To Alfred Brendel, he is "the sleepwalker". András Schiff has called him "the Holy Spirit", in concert with the Father (J S Bach) and the Son (Mozart), while Artur Schnabel, who performed his sonatas when they were played less frequently than they are today, considered him "the composer closest to God".

These famous pianists were speaking of Schubert, of course: who else?

Blessed Franz, eternal Franz, the prince of song, and the only one of the great Viennese composers who was actually born in the city where, earlier this week, on the most glorious winter's morning, icy-white and crystalline, I placed a red rose on his grave, a few paces from the final resting places of Mozart and Beethoven.

Schubert served as a pallbearer at Beethoven's funeral in 1827 and, later, in a tavern, offered a toast to the dead man, "and to the one who shall follow", meaning himself. That grim prophecy came true within a year, months during which Schubert wrote some of the most affecting music known to humankind. Even more than Mozart, Schubert is the saddest loss of all, for, unlike the older man, he had not accomplished anything like a full life's work. He was 31.

It is unwise to claim he was the greatest composer, but it is the unvarnished truth to say he is loved as no other, and for fairly obvious reasons. There is not a single false note in his music, particularly his chamber music, which ranks alongside that of his hero, Beethoven – who, oddly enough, he didn't know, even though they walked the same streets.

What you hear in Schubert is what you hear in Chekhov's plays and stories: the unfathomable mystery of existence, treated with the pitch-perfect ear of one who understands the fragility of life, and the vulnerability and yearning of each human soul. It is also important to note what you don't hear. There is no bombast, no vanity, no "leading on". The music springs naturally, fountain-like, from an open heart.

Maxim Gorky, grumpy and a tiny bit jealous of Chekhov, complained that "when you mention Anton Pavlovich, people sigh as though a baby deer had just walked into the room". That is how friends regarded Schubert, too, and how generations of music-lovers have responded to his work. Unlike Beethoven, he didn't want to change the world, and yet, in his lyrical way, he scaled the emotional peaks that Ludwig climbed more dramatically.

In Chekhov's world, sadness and gaiety are different sides of the same coin. Schubert finds a similar thread linking joy (often expressed in a minor key) and melancholy (which sometimes takes the major). Always he delights you, always he surprises you. To borrow a phrase from another great Viennese, the writer Stefan Zweig, he expresses "that mood of serene exaltation in which everything seems good and rapturous".

And, my, how we need his grace today! Schubert, who has no peer in expressing the ambivalence of human urges, had no truck with sentimentality, that gushing of bogus "feeling" defined by James Joyce as "unearned emotion". The great composers, no less than the great painters and the great poets, deal with emotional truth, and the expression of noble feelings, which is not the same thing as "letting it all hang out".

We live in a world that doesn't just tolerate the bogus. It showers the frauds and sharpies with gifts, in the form of book deals, recording contracts and films, and then relies on the PR industry to do its worst.

Newspapers are complicit in these acts of deception. Television couldn't exist without them. The "best" of this, the "worst" of that, highlights, lowlights, no lights; every day brings a torrent of slush. Ah, the tyranny of popular taste!

When you see pop stars in leather pants and sunglasses trying to save the world by banging guitars (or running newspapers for a day, to earn the editor brownie points at the Groucho Club), then you realise that it might not be such a bad idea to bring back the stocks. Round up the lot of them, at once, so we can pelt them with tomatoes, and have a good laugh while we're about it.

Compassion à la mode is the blight of our age. Hardly a week goes by without some ninny in the public eye offering the world a crash course in belligerent pity. This is not real compassion, of course, merely an exercise in vanity: "Look at me, admire my virtue – and see my film." Or take Russell Brand, a tousle-haired "comedian" who has acquired a celebrity of sorts on the back of his drug habit and sexual incontinence, endorsing Amnesty International. Off to the stocks!

Maybe it was ever thus. After all, there were folk in Mozart's Vienna who preferred Salieri, and in his brief life Schubert had only a single public concert devoted to his music. So here is another reason to be grateful to his memory: ars longa, vita brevis. However hard the road, however steep the ascent, art always wins in the end.

More than anybody, Schubert teaches us the folly of despair. Always there is ignorance, and everywhere the defilers appear to be winning, but there exists in every soul the possibility of renewal. When you listen to the A major Piano Sonata, or the B flat Piano Trio, or the G major Quartet, or Die schöne Müllerin, or the mighty Quintet in C, you hear the voice of a man who, knowing all, forgave all. Perhaps that is what Schnabel meant when he called Schubert the composer closest to the Almighty. Schubert, no Christian in any sense that theologians would recognise, was nevertheless Christ-like. His music speaks of pure love, that which moves the moon and the stars.

So I put a rose on his grave, and went back into the heart of that enchanting, unsettling city to drink a Burgenland wine in honour of this unconquerable guardian of the human spirit. As he taught us, without ever raising his voice, all the darkness in this world will never extinguish the smallest candle.

mgburg · #2 01-14-2007, 01:07 AM

Bot:

Where do you find the time to find this stuff? It's great.

I very rarely buy any music anymore.

Back in the early 70's, I coined my own phrase, "It's a C.O.A.." (C.O.A. meant "contract-obligation-album").

It was meant as a mean-spirited swipe at the quality of a second or third album from some "famous" rock/country/folk group/artist that was hitting the shelves. The album, usually, sounded sloppy, unimaginative, droll and without life.

I won't pick on anyone (OK, I will.) but The Steve Miller Band was what first got me going on that. Same riffs - percussion was predictable - cords were bland (predictable) - no fortisimo - nothing - flat. Each album after that was as predictable and schloky.

Steve's moto was, probably, "Get the requisit contract albums out of the way for the record label and I'll move on."

Unfortunely for SM, I wouldn't take one of his albums today even if there was a $20-bill paper-clipped to it.

However, give me the classics. They are like fine wines. Each time you hear them, there is something new to the ear. Some nuance that you missed before. You knew it was always there - nobody changed the music - you just grew into the melody, heard again and recognized it for the first time, again.

Bot, thanks for an uplifting post. I'm about to go out and find some proper, fine music to drive to.

dlssmith · #3 01-14-2007, 01:25 PM

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven laid the groundwork of musical expression. I don't think there is a human being with ears out there that wouldn't appreciate Schubert's music, if given the chance. And, if it's performed well. Schubert's canon is amazing.

I think Schubert was able to complete his musical ideas unlike many composers before and after him. He could consistently make a melody complete, unlike Bizet for instance, the composer of the opera 'Carmen'. In Carmen, there are many, many wonderful tunes, but few of them are really completed. Bizet might have had a little ADD. But Schubert could really flesh it all out. His powers of concentration were phenomenal especially considering his partying lifestyle.

Some of his greatest songs were set to poems by Wilhelm Müller who said:
"In truth, my [poems] lead only half a life, a paper life, black on white ... until music imparts to them the breath of life, or calls it forth and awakens it." [Letter to Bernhard Klein, 15 December 1822]