Posted on 03/23/2015 4:53:40 PM PDT by mojito
“Truly,” Beethoven remarked in 1827, “in Schubert there dwells a divine spark.” Franz Schubert himself worshiped the older composer and was a torchbearer at his funeral. In the following year, he asked for one of Beethoven’s string quartets to be played at his own sickbed, days, if not hours, before he died at the age of thirty-one. Many of Schubert’s works contain homages to Beethoven: the Fate theme of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the animating motif of Schubert’s terrifying song “Der Zwerg” (The Dwarf). His “Auf dem Strom” (On the River, for voice, piano, and horn) takes up the theme of the Eroica’s death march. And the unusual tempo marking of the first song of the Winterreise cycle (Mässig, in gehender Bewegung, moderate, at walking pace), written in the year of Beethoven’s death, might be seen as a valedictory reference to the latter’s piano sonata “Les Adieux” of 1809–1810.
For Schubert’s contemporaries, Beethoven was the colossus, a figure whose titanic energy and sublime originality went on to define the cult of the hero-musician in the nineteenth century. His deafness added a strain of tragedy. And Beethoven could look the part, his image in paint, print, and sculpture portraying the rugged aesthetic adventurer. Schubert, on the other hand, was under five feet tall, bespectacled, and pudgy, “looking not like a god of music but like a harried Viennese clerk with a head-cold....”
(Excerpt) Read more at nybooks.com ...
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Schubert, on the other hand, was under five feet tall, bespectacled, and pudgy, “looking not like a god of music but like a harried Viennese clerk with a head-cold....”
...
George Costanza.
I know I`ve heard some of his works but not being good with names, do you have any links?
I got an A+, BTW. :-)
I could go on for days. I've been studying his songs since 1987.
Another "Gute Nacht" -
I won't compare Fischer-Dieskau to Schreier . . . two great talents.
Bookmark.
To be accompanied with paintings by Goya.
But Mahler could not have composed the "Wunderhorn" without Schubert laying the groundwork. It's all there - just darker - but splendid . . . what was it somebody said about reading by flashes of lightning? . . . had to look it up, Coleridge on Edmund Kean's acting.
Although there's a sort of darkness in Schuber too, but listening to Winterreise or even der Zwerg - I just have an impression of theatricality - like Dowland's "Lachrimae", the singer is revelling in his sorrow, staring at graveyards - the drummer boy is going to be dead shortly, for real, no excuses and no reprieve (Mahler is more honest than Bert Brecht!)
Our choirmaster says that when he does music survey courses over at the high school, the most requested thing is the Dowland. The kids LOVE it. He calls it "Renaissance Emo."
He saves the theme for the end, which is a reversal of the usual order of theme-and-variations.
One of the great cries of madness. When Randall Scarlatta did a Schubert set in 2002 with the Seattle Chamber Music Society, he wasn't sure that this was a good song with which to end the set. I told him it was perfect because it so clearly points the way to Wagner. Had Schubert lived long enough to hear "Tristan", I don't think he would have been all that shocked.
Like Mozart and Chopin, one can only wonder what they would have added to the volume of classical music had they lived longer. My favorite is his “Unfinished” Symphony.
Classical Music Ping List ping!
As a result of their journey to see the ageing Goethe in 1831, Schubert and Vogl were able to, at last, perform for the old Lion of Weimar. The enthusiastic reception of the songs prompted a return to that poet's texts and a preoccupation with the second part of Faust, leading to the great work for various voices and orchestra which is counted as the greatest of all musical monuments to the poet.
Having dabbled in Scott and Shakespeare in his twenties, Schubert followed Schumann in an attempt to encompass world literature in song with settings of translations of Burns, Byron, Moore, Hans Christian Anderson, and even Hugo and Gautier. The composer's friendship with Thackeray and his later acquaintance with Dickens played a part in this world-view. He became friendly with a number of Austrian poets -- successors to Seidl and Bauernfeld -- who would have remained unknown to music lovers and missed out on immortality if it had not been for Schubert's avuncular interest in their work. His only successful opera made the name Adalbert Stifter as famous in musical circles in the 1850's as the name Wilhelm Müller had been in the 1820's. The early masterpieces "Winterreise" and the connected Heine and Rellstab cycles were stepping stones to the later glories of the song repertoire: the immortal Tieck and Uhland cycles.
It was these later pieces, as well as several meetings between the two composers, that so influenced the early songs of Brahms, dedicated to Schubert, who bemoaned the unfortunate early deaths of his younger contemporaries Mendelssohn and Chopin. Can one imagine a world without the late Schubert Nocturnes for piano, dedicated to Chopin's memory, and written for Clara Schumann? Above all, he mourned the loss of his younger friend and admirer Robert Schumann whose "Papillons", "Carnaval" and "Dichterliebe" had so influenced his song- and piano-writing in his early forties.
Schubert needed to be persuaded to travel abroad in the first instance and then acquired a taste for it. He relished his jaunts to Germany to visit the Schumanns and to see his publishers, to England where his fame was taking root, and to Italy for holidays in the more prosperous circumstances of his later life.
His last work, his swan-song if you like, was a group of epigrammatic settings of Paul Heyse's "Italianisches Liederbuch", translations from Tuscan originals which appeared in 1860. These songs were of such perfection that no other composer dared to set them again.
Bookmark
Das Zügenglöcklein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUU437F_r-A
Der Erlkönig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XP5RP6OEJI
Heidenröslein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaX01whd7NI
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