Stephen Jackson was trained in Psychology, Logic and Metaphysics at St Andrews - only later as a lecturer and professional artist and general media...er, Diva?
I’ve been author or editor of a dozen books as well as a national arts journalist whose features appeared in The Independent, Time Out, Sunday Telegraph and leading national magazines. I also worked in television films, one of which won Crystal Prize at the Prague Festival; and been cited by BBC Music and Arts as “a writer of the Upper-First Division”.
But it was only in beating a bout of the Blues in the mid-1990’s that I discovered the magical potential of digital imaging to transform our preconceptions of what we imagine the world to be like… The resulting juxtapositions of my art and poetry have been described as “fascinating and amazing” by Lisette Brodey, the US novelist. Elsewhere these visuals found acclaim as “hauntingly beautiful”: the words as “tight and life-enhancing”, with a richness and texture comparable to John Donne’s.
A lot of what I explore now has to do with peeking up the wrong end of the telescope, to see in a clearer light all those walking wounded in the universal and (some might say) necessary battlefields that litter human aspirations and language. There are few outright winners here, except of the most ephemeral kind. The tiny obsessions of middle age: the games all of us sometimes have to play - these are my canvas – and my occasions for humour and optimism. The memories of my own dark period, the fresh revelations of a subsequent sort of rebirth, offer endless avenues of inquiry as well as new and welcome pleasures.
My autobiographical book of poetry and digital imagery, "Dead People on Holiday", was published in late summer 2010. See much more on about this, and my other books, at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stephen-Jackson/e/B0034Q712W/
And why not see some of my own visual art at http://www.artmajeur.com/stephenjacks58/
Amongst the artists who intrigue me are Odilon Redon, Bill Brandt: Rousseau, Rothko, Blake, Chagall, Kandinsky, Edward Burra, Bonnard, Munch, Bacon, Frida Kahlo and Tamara de Lempicka; H R Giger, Ernst Haas, Georg Grosz, Francis Bowyer and Henri Cartier Bresson.
This is a copy of the author’s manuscript. It lacks the index, acknowledgements, design and certain other features of the printed book. It also differs slightly in its organisation of chapters, which we subsumed into larger blocks for the published work. On the other hand, the text here – for Section 16 – is a little fuller.
Chapters 1 & 2…..Schubert’s Vienna and the early Years
Chapters 3 & 4…..A Reluctant Schoolmaster
Chapters 5, 6 & 7…..The Promise of Freedom
Chapter 8…..Illness and Trauma
Chapters 9 & 10…..The ‘Unfinished’ Symphony and First Song Cycle
‘Anyone who knew Schubert knows how he was made up of two natures, foreign to each other, and how powerfully the craving for pleasure dragged him down to the cesspool of slime.’
Josef Kenner’s reminiscences of Schubert, 1858
‘Close to such crushing genius as Beethoven’s, Schubert does not feel the need to deny its greatness in order somehow to endure. What self-confidence, what truly aristocratic awareness of one’s own rank, which respects the equal in the other!’
Arnold Schoenberg, centenary notes for Schubert’s birth
Schubert was born on 31 January 1797, the suburban Viennese son of a family of schoolteachers. He would die as he had lived: yet another composer struggling to be more than an amateur, whose music was outsold many times over by Hummel’s. As a creative force he left as many successors as Mozart did – which is to say, none. Rachmaninov, questioned in the early years of our century, did not know of a single piano sonata by Schubert. Fifty years before, sheer tact had salvaged the neglected manuscript of the Unfinished Symphony from oblivion. By that time its composer had been in the Währing Cemetery for decades.
Like some magical and insidious alchemy, Schubert exists outside the tradition he inherited. His influence has worked subtly on generations of composers, each of whom has stumbled on the modernity of what he has to say: seeping into our consciousness not only of music’s potential but of our human predicament. For Schubert has done as much as any artist to crystallise our sense of self, and he explored with prophetic intensity a fusion of poetry and the heightened capabilities of a singing voice that was to release the later the nineteenth’s century’s artistic interrogation of the limits of experience: of what it might be possible for us ever to say, or to know.Schubert was born on 31 January 1797, the suburban Viennese son of a family of schoolteachers. He would die as he had lived: yet another composer struggling to be more than an amateur, whose music was outsold many times over by Hummel’s. As a creative force he left as many successors as Mozart did – which is to say, none. Rachmaninov, questioned in the early years of our century, did not know of a single piano sonata by Schubert. Fifty years before, sheer tact had salvaged the neglected manuscript of the Unfinished Symphony from oblivion. By that time its composer had been in the Währing Cemetery for decades.
You never seem to hear Schubert’s music in a television advertisement. His is not a creative language which lends itself to soundbites and domesticated lifestyles. It fosters little of his predecessors’ overweening urge to explain themselves, the regulated good sense of the Enlightenment. It lacks the need to preach, it carries no burden of oratory. From the majestic clockwork of high classicism we have received (as Schubert did) a vocabulary of known formalities and unambiguous manoeuvres which we can recognize at a glance, which we can assimilate into a background where emotion is as safe as the wallpaper. Tackle Schubert, and things are no longer so certain. In his world, surface formalities – however elegant or lucid they may appear – serve as an entry-point for an act of deeper and private scrutiny, where what a composer thinks he knows is there to be subverted or expanded into a luminous perspective where meanings themselves are freshly crafted within an ever-changing context.
It is a cipher which each listener must find and make sense of for himself: and it offers apt introspection for an age weary of dogmatic statements. We find ourselves in an era as much preoccupied as the early 19th century was with the spread of sexual disease and the violation of innocence; a pre-millennial circumspection, it seems, for which Schubert’s triumph over his fate and his own meagre life seems increasingly to the point. Understood in its true light, his music comes as a revelation which stands beyond cultural history and which throws down an emotional challenge which is as new and as personal for us as it was for Brahms, Schumann, Bruckner, Mahler, Dvorak, Stravinsky, Britten, Wolf. It is music propelled by ardent intensity, by an appetite and melancholy and lacerating nostalgia, which come wholly from within.
Strange it is that Schubert, least gregariously jovial of the great Viennese composers, was the only one to be born there. It is a place he made in his own image, because the portrait we have of it comes from the traditional minuets, waltzes and Ländler which he took and changed into something new. This is the mirage Schumann fell for when he described the Ninth Symphony:
Schubert’s symphony, with the clear romantic spirit that quickens it, brings the city more vividly before my eyes today than ever before, and makes me understand once again how it is that such works come to be born in surroundings such as these…with its St Stephen’s spire, its lovely women, its public pageantry, encircled by the countless hoops ofthe Danube and stretching across the verdant plain which climbs gently towards higher and still higher mountains…
For a more accurate appraisal we must turn to Johann Pezzl’s ‘Sketch of Vienna’, which covered the years from 1786-90. Everything interested him: the overwhelming stink of unwashed crowds, the glee with which good people flocked to watch bears being baited and criminals branded before they were broken, shrieking, upon a wheel: streets filled with mistresses and those ‘of easy virtue’. As for the lovely ladies, foreign visitors noted that countesses behaved like courtesans and courtesans like countesses; the cheap and innumerable dance-halls were thinly-disguised brothels. Politically the situation worsened in Schubert’s lifetime, as the reforms of Joseph II were swept away by Prince Metternich’s autocracy. In 1820, with student societies banned, the composer found himself arrested at what one can only call the wrong sort of party. He was released as harmless – a luckier fate than befell those who were banished for life on that occasion. The public was fickle towards the arts, responsive only to sentimental fads and virtuosity of the most meretricious kind. It was something Mozart had discovered to his recent and bitter cost.
Yet Schubert was a lucky man. He was born at a remarkable time for lyric verse, and unlike Mozart or Haydn or Beethoven – all of whom had been unable to transcend the limitations of conventionally ornate song-writing – he was profoundly attuned to what was happening. He could root out a talent for poetry not only within his circle of friends, but from the remotest fringes of the German-speaking world. He discovered the early Romantics (Heine, Rückert, Platen, Uhland) and immortalised them: he followed Goethe along new paths into passion instead of rhetoric, feeling instead of either reason or bathos: he championed the world-view that led beyond music to Goya and Turner.
The origins of a tradition which comes to opulent Romantic flower in Strauss’s ‘Four Last Songs’ lie in the cheap musical browsings of Schubert’s childhood. There he found Zumsteeg, the South German composer who in 1791 had set Ossian and revealed for the first time the potential of song as a vehicle for dramatic and psychological revelation. Two North Germans composing around 1800, Reichardt and Zelter, explored in their own Lieder a new freedom of form, an expressive richness of mood. All this was anathema to the sophisticated Viennese, who trounced it into obscurity. But Schubert knew of it, and it created the live wire to which he could bring his own peculiar and incandescent charge. Rather seldom does the history of the arts have much to do with a torch being passed from one illustrious bearer to another. It lies in the tiny quirks and accidents which one individual can grasp and make into something more.
SCHUBERT’S EARLY LIFE
Franz Peter was the twelfth child of Franz Theodor Schubert, who had moved to Vienna from Neudorf in Moravia. In 1786 Franz père was appointed master to the Trivial School No 12 Himmelpfortgrund, eighteen months after he had married Maria Elizabeth Vietz, the daughter of a Silesian locksmith. She too had come to the city to seek her fortune, and was working as a cook: a gentle woman, it was said, loved and respected by everyone. Young Franz was born in the Liechtental district, on the fringe of the countryside, where poverty gave a family little chance of a quick rise in the scheme of things. It was an affectionate family even so, and Schubert got on well with his father, despite the older man’s strictness. But his special intimacy was with Maria, from whom he inherited his quiet reflective manner, his imagination, and his easy-going ways. She died in 1812.
The western world, at Franz Peter’s birth, might have seemed on the brink of a new era in political turbulence and social opportunity. Seventeen days earlier, French troops had beaten the Austrians at Aricole and Rivoli. The American War of Independence was barely over, and in 1805 Napoleon marched through Vienna: a little Corsican upstart who had robbed the Habsburgs of most of their empire. In this changing order, a teacher was no longer the ignorant, despised Baculus of the eighteenth century. He moved in higher circles and entered into the intellectual activities of the middle-class, whilst preserving a level of patriotism unknown to the garrulous nouveaux riches. His prospects for promotion were in no sense harmed by religious awe – by devotion, as was the case in the Schubert household. For this was an empire that moved at the speed of a cantering horse, and in 1797 the shadow of Napoleon was still far away. In life’s daily rhythms, an old Imperial order reigned supreme.Franz Peter was the twelfth child of Franz Theodor Schubert, who had moved to Vienna from Neudorf in Moravia. In 1786 Franz père was appointed master to the Trivial School No 12 Himmelpfortgrund, eighteen months after he had married Maria Elizabeth Vietz, the daughter of a Silesian locksmith. She too had come to the city to seek her fortune, and was working as a cook: a gentle woman, it was said, loved and respected by everyone. Young Franz was born in the Liechtental district, on the fringe of the countryside, where poverty gave a family little chance of a quick rise in the scheme of things. It was an affectionate family even so, and Schubert got on well with his father, despite the older man’s strictness. But his special intimacy was with Maria, from whom he inherited his quiet reflective manner, his imagination, and his easy-going ways. She died in 1812.
Vienna stood as the city of Gluck, Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn. It was the melting-pot of European races and culture in the prime of its greatest epoch. A schoolmaster was expected in to be competent in music, and the Schuberts’ house echoed with it. Franz had lessons in piano from his father, and his first taste of the violin from his older brother Ignaz. That he outstripped them both was plain, but Schubert wrote his first music for the family quartet. When his father’s hands fumbled on the cello Franz would smile and venture, ‘Sir, there must be a mistake somewhere!’
In his eighth year he was sent for lessons in singing and counterpoint with Michael Holzer, the local organist whose choir Schubert joined. Towards the end of his life Franz Senior remembered that Hozler had confessed to doing little more than while away time: ‘If I wanted to teach him something new – he had already mastered it. Often I stared in silent astonishment. I could not give him any real instruction, only talk with the lad and quietly admire him.’ His reward was the dedication of Schubert’s C major Mass in 1816.
Under Holzer’s care both Schubert’s violin-playing earned him a local reputation, and in 1808 he was well-placed to take advantage of an advertisement in the Vienna Gazette:
At the end of the present school year a place for soprano will become available at the Imperial College. Whoever wishes to obtain this place for his son has to satisfy the Directorate of the said College, where an examination is to be held on 1 October, that the candidate is fit to enter the first Latin class, has a good voice, and has been well-trained in singing.
Schubert’s audition was held before Antonio Salieri, a friend of Beethoven, mentor to Haydn, Mozart’s rival, now Kapellmeister to the Emperor. A week later his acceptance was announced.
The college was the principal Viennese boarding school for commoners. It was a place of iron rations and, in the winter, bitter cold. In an affectionate letter to his brothers Franz had to bring himself to write,
You’ll know from your own experience that there are times when one could certainly do with a roll and a few apples, particularly when one has to wait eight and a half hours between a moderate-sized midday meal and a wretched sort of supper. This constant longing has become more and more insistent, and the time has come when I must do something about it. The few Grotschen that Father gave me vanished into thin air in the first few days, so what am I going to do for the rest of the time? They who hope upon Thee shall not be put to shame. St Matthew, Chap 3, v, 4. How would it be, then, if you were to let me have a few Kreuzer each month? You wouldn’t notice them, and they would make me happy and contented in my cell.
The tutors were men in holy orders and their boarders, about a hundred and thirty of them, either scholars at the grammar school or students at the university. Music was a compulsory subject for choristers, but the principal, Dr Innocenz Lang, was an enthusiastic musical amateur and he encouraged all scholars to practise the art. Schubert played quartets regularly, and his latest songs were celebrated by the school as enthusiastically as any sporting achievement. Yet his tastes and talents set him apart, for as the surgeon Georg Eckel later recalled:
Schubert’s life was one of inner, spiritual thinking, and was seldom expressed in words but I would say, almost entirely in music. Even with his intimates he was shy and uncommunicative…Schubert almost always spent the leisure hours we were allowed in the music room, and generally alone. Even on the walks which pupils took together he mostly kept apart, walking thoughtfully along with lowered eyes and with hands behind his back, drumming with his fingers (as if on keys), completely absorbed in his own thought.
A young university student, Josef von Spaun, had formed a students’ orchestra which was conducted by Vaclav Ruzicka, a peripatetic master. By the time of Schubert’s arrival, its excellence was sufficient to tackle Beethoven’s first two symphonies, which were then the last word in difficulty and daring. Schubert joined the violins and Spaun, impressed by his rhythm and wholehearted surrender to the music, took Franz under his wing. Their friendship lasted for the rest of Schubert’s life. One of Spaun’s first acts, when Franz confessed that he could not afford music paper, was to provide him with all he needed.
When after two years’ absence Spaun returned, he discovered Schubert conducting the orchestra in the absence of Ruzicka, who had found himself nonplussed by the rate at which his disciple had absorbed all instruction. Their arrangement had the blessing of Salieri, whom Schubert visited twice a week for lessons in harmony and counterpoint. Salieri’s interest had been roused by the song Hagars Klage (D5). Promptly he unleashed a flood of penny-dreadful ballads from his pupil, but amongst them is a setting of Schiller’s poem Der Jünglinge am Bache that must lay claim to being the first real Schubert song: lithe and subtle in its lengths of phrase.
Schubert’s last year at the college was 1813, and his wealth of compositions attested to the quality and variety of what he had learnt: a Mozartean quartet in E flat (D87), German dances, settings of Metastasio, Hölty, Matthisson. In the autumn Spaun took him to see his first operas, and in a half-empty theatre (whilst the rest of Vienna was feting Rossini) Schubert fell under the spell of Gluck’s ‘Iphigénie and Euride’. Perhaps drawing on ‘Die Zauberflöte’ as his exemplar, he began work on his own three-act opera ‘Des Teufels Lustschloss’ (D84), taking leave from lessons until he could present its fully orchestrated score to an astonished Salieri. The master’s criticisms were heeded, for a revised version is dated five months after the first.
The highlight of 1813 is the D major First Symphony (D82), which Schubert finished on 28 October. This is music of ordered and festive abundance. And if, motifically, it struggles to be more than a pastiche of a young man’s models (Mozart in its organisation, Beethoven for its themes) the sheer sound is already and inimitably voluptuous. Nobody else, you feel, could write dialogues for woodwind quite like this. It is, as Maurice Brown has said, the consummation of absorbed years and of living contact with an orchestra: it is his justification for the future.
A RELUCTANT SCHOOLMASTER: 1814-15
‘It’s true that the children irritated me whenever I tried to create, and I lost the idea. Naturally I would beat them up.’
Schubert’s reminiscences of his time as a school assistant.
In 1813 Schubert’s future at the College hung in the balance. Devotion to music meant that his progress in Latin and mathematics had been precarious, and some way had to be found to keep him in an environment where his talents could prosper. As it happened an annual scholarship (the Meerfield Endowment) fell vacant, and it was decided to recommend Schubert for it. The judgment was up to Emperor Francis himself, and he approved the 16 year-old’s application whilst he was engaged in the campaign to drive Napoleon deep within the borders of France.
But it was the elder Schubert who decided his son’s future, and Spaun remembers violent quarrels when Franz was informed he would have to leave his composing for the evenings. In November Schubert enrolled at St Anna’s Teacher Training College, where he marked time until his father took him on for £8 a year in the autumn of 1814. It was a pittance of a salary, but sons were there to save wages; and the Liechtental school now had 300 pupils. Franz’s lot was to teach six year-olds their alphabet, and they remembered him as uncomprehending and bored.In 1813 Schubert’s future at the College hung in the balance. Devotion to music meant that his progress in Latin and mathematics had been precarious, and some way had to be found to keep him in an environment where his talents could prosper. As it happened an annual scholarship (the Meerfield Endowment) fell vacant, and it was decided to recommend Schubert for it. The judgment was up to Emperor Francis himself, and he approved the 16 year-old’s application whilst he was engaged in the campaign to drive Napoleon deep within the borders of France.
After a month’s stagnation he took up his pen with renewed zeal. He had paused, if he’d known it, on the threshold of a staggering creative breakthrough, which would produce 400 works before he left his parents’ home in two years’ time. His countrymen, euphoric at Napoleon’s exile and the Congress of Vienna (it made reliably dissolute entertainment before the country relapsed into greater despotism than before) discovered a fondness for Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’. Schubert went to see it and was gripped by a renewed mania for writing opera. He realised that there was no success to be had with ‘Der Teufels Lustschloss’, but within a fortnight during May 1815 he whipped up the breezy ‘Der vierjährige Posten’ (D190) from the tale of a soldier who falls in love with the daughter of a village judge. Over twelve days in July he drafted an epic of melodramatic banality, ‘Fernando’. Then, until the end of August, he was busy with ‘Claudine von Villa Bella’ (D239). By New Year’s Day he had finished his humorous and charming ‘Die Freunde von Salamanka’ (D326). There was more besides. A buckshot approach, but in Claudine it threw up a masterpiece. At least, so we think; for only the first act has survived. The rest, in one of those unfortunate lapses of understanding, was used by Josef Hüttenbrenner’s servants for lighting fires. Naturally it was with him for safe keeping.
Schubert found greater success in his liturgical music. The Vienna Congress coincided with the centenary celebrations of the Liechtental Church. Schubert’s Mass in F (D105) was performed in Salieri’s presence as part of the festivities in October 1814, and the soprano solos were sung by Therese Grob, a mill-owner’s daughter with a sweet lyric voice. Schubert loved her with quiet sincerity, and only abandoned his hopes of marrying her three years later when his prospects of joining the middle class were in tatters. By that time Holzapfel, his confidant, had talked him out of ‘this ridiculous infatuation’. But it is not fortuitous that his first stroke of greatness in the vocal domain, depicting the shattering of a young woman’s dreams, came ten days after her performance: ‘When he is not with me, I am as though dead’. The Mass itself is a work spun out of light: free, sure and gracefully dignified.
Schubert notes with pride, above the Allegro of his D112 Quartet: ‘Completed in four-and-a-half hours’. At its best it is a piece worthy of young Mendelssohn, but there is no greater tribute to Schubert’s new-found facility and sense of adventure than the second of his completed symphonies, the B flat (D125), which he began on 10 December 1814. Brahms loved this work for, as he said, its genuine delight. Again, allusions to Mozart are within it – the E flat and G minor symphonies – and to ‘Prometheus’ as well as Beethoven’s own Second Symphony. None of these origins prefigures a young man’s plunge into the middle of life: his new-found energy and bite. Brian Newbould understood that the B flat major is a consequence of fresh reflection and self-questioning, where the power of dissonance is harnessed to create pace and tensile strength. As Alfred Einstein notes of the Presto finale, ‘It is a piece of symphonic frivolity in sonata form, full of dynamic surprises, dropping off to sleep, as it were, and then waking up with a start.’ If the Third is the neatest of his early symphonies, the Second contains the most fertile clues to Schubert’s future.
Exasperated in the schoolroom, Schubert frequented local taverns and brought home new male friends: to the displeasure of his father, who perhaps already sensed that something about them was not right. At lodgings in the Wipplingerstrasse a meeting was arranged by Spaun between young Franz and Johann Mayrhofer, a taciturn and mysogynistic lawyer, ten years older than Schubert, whose poetry – revealing as it does the conflict between ideals of the spirit and the actualities of life – was to draw noble-minded songs from the composer for the rest of his career. In 1836 Mayrhofer’s second attempt at suicide would prove successful when he threw himself from an upper window of the building where he worked as state Censor; but he was one of Schubert’s few supporters who glimpsed the true dimensions of a genius, and he declared that none of his own verses seemed any good until Schubert set them.
Schubert was to use more of Mayrhofer’s work than of any poet except Goethe. Already he had set ‘Am See’ (D124), a wistful remembrance of heroic deeds. But then, 1814 was Schubert’s first great year of song: unleashing a Shakespearean canvas of characters, emancipating single-handed the piano as a dramatic player in the role of interlocutor, combatant, adversary, commentary, and driving force. The Lied, for Schubert, has fluidity and intimate depth, newness and courage. His awareness of movement and the possibilities of a melodic line, his master storyteller’s relish for timing and shifting nuance: these gave the Lied a potential which had been inconceivable.
In April 1814 alone he composed thirteen settings of Friedrich von Matthisson, whose collected works had been published three years before. In them Schubert found reflected his own artistic compass: country scenes set in a sentimental light, ecstatic love, emotional remembrance, the anticipation of death. Yet in one poet alone did Schubert found an intellect equal to his own, whose work he could fuse and expand into a totality greater than the sum of its parts. It was Goethe, and on 19 October Schubert plucked ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’(D118) from Faust. Gretchen, bewitched by Faust’s love, sits at her spinning-wheel and contemplates the possibility of her ruin: ‘Meine Ruh ist hin, Mein Herz ist schwer’. The piano’s churning semiquavers are more that the droning monotony of physical motion, more too than wretched perplexity. They are the distillation of the moment at which a life is thrown into relief and meets its reckoning.
‘The birth of German song’, Gretchen has been called. In the space of four minutes unfolds a drama which, if Schubert had written nothing else, would ensure his immortality.
Jagerzeile in Vienna by Franz Scheyerer, Austria 19th Century
ANNUS MIRABILIS: 1815
Schubert wrote eight other songs the day he set Gretchen, but 1815 produced even greater profusion. Otto Eric Deutsch’s catalogue of his works lists two hundred within twelve months: masses and a splendid Magnificat, a string quartet, dances, fragments of piano sonatas. Above all he wrote Lieder, one hundred and fifty of them.
The notion of Schubert as a divinely gifted clairvoyant, scribbling music in a trance, is one of many myths. He was breaking down the boundaries of song, with nobody to guide him: he knew when he had failed, and he returns to a poet – perhaps years later – until he finds a solution which covers each facet of the words, answers every challenge. The secret comes when he fixes on a melodic or rhythmic cell, which encompasses the poem’s essence, and yet which is flexible enough to adapt to a changing narrative. Gretchen’s spinning wheel is an instance. Before Schubert, songs had been strophic (that is to say, a repeated melody for verse after verse: the formula of hymns and ballads). Schubert’s first songs follow this scheme, yet increasingly he finds a some means of higher liberation which will open up something as great as theatre on a epic scale, something as private as a stream of consciousness.Schubert wrote eight other songs the day he set Gretchen, but 1815 produced even greater profusion. Otto Eric Deutsch’s catalogue of his works lists two hundred within twelve months: masses and a splendid Magnificat, a string quartet, dances, fragments of piano sonatas. Above all he wrote Lieder, one hundred and fifty of them.
Why does he set so much Goethe, following that revelatory reading of Faust? Because, as Goethe says, ‘The most original men are not original because they tell us something absolutely new, but because they tell us things in a way in which they were never told before.’ The compression of Goethe’s emotional environment – transparent, classical in form and formal restraint yet profoundly individual – draws similar truth from the composer. Goethe’s voice informs Schubert’s, whether he is setting Goethe or not. As Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau writes, ‘Schubert found everything in Goethe’s poems that he tried to express in music. Clarity of thought, unequivocal expression, deep sensitivity, imaginative language.’
Spaun tells how, one afternoon towards the end of 1815, he and Mayrhofer visited Schubert to find him glowing with excitement as he read aloud ‘Erlkönig’ (D328), Goethe’s ballad of a child abducted by the king of demons on a stormy night. Briefly Schubert paced to and fro and then down he sat, committing the setting straight to paper. Since his father had no piano, the three friends hurried to the Imperial College where it was performed a few hours later, and twice encored. After Ruzicka had approvingly played it through, Schubert accompanied Randhartinger, a fourteen year-old plucked from the audience, until its hammering octaves exhausted his hands. In triumph Schubert was presented with reams of music paper.
Here is a masterpiece of scene-painting. Instantly we are made witnesses to a dreadful and fevered hallucination, a nightmare which unfolds with the stride of galloping hooves. The Erlking’s seductive insinuations, whispered promises of golden cloth and fairy playmates, are made part of surmounting musical modulation, at whose climax one key leaps to another in a despairing frenzy. Too late the father realises what has happened, and his boy is dead.
It is the highlight of a year’s memorable achievement. Already Schubert had grappled with the poetry of Goethe’s strange novel, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, which had been published in 1795-6. Its verses are songs sung by a mysterious figure, the Harper, and by Mignon, the Italian waif who turns out to by the Harper’s daughter, offspring of incestuous love. It includes the most admired poem in German literature, the elegiac ‘Kennst du das Land?’ (‘Do you know the land where the lemon-trees blossom?’) which Schubert set as well as anyone since: ‘Mignon und der Harfner’ held Schubert in its spell for the rest of his life, and he set it five times, but his 1815 version is the best.
Better still is ‘An Mignon’ (‘Alone, my tears flow, but in company I’ll keep cheerful’): ‘Am Flusse’, set on the same day, brims with sweet pathos: ‘Meeres Stille’ is a masterly evocation of deathly calm at sea. Yet three Goethe songs from 1815 stand supreme. ‘Heidenröslein’ (D257), the story of a wild rose which stabs the lover who plucks it, has a bucolic simplicity and freshness which elevates folksong to art. ‘Rastlose Liebe‘ (D222) is a surge of pure feeling, as fine as anything in Romanticism’s liberation of painting at the same time. Above all there is ‘Nähe des Geliebten‘ (D162, Nearness of the Beloved: ‘I think of you when with the shimmer of sunlight the bright sea gleams’), where the slow palpitation of the piano’s chords summons a sense of pleasure made more boundless by its poised containment and grace.
But there were other poets to set. Friedrich Klopstock, who anticipates the Sturm und Drang (‘storm and stress’) period of German literature, had found fame with his epic ‘The Messiah‘ – and in ‘Dem Unendlichen‘ (D291) Schubert matches him in stately religious fervour. Then there was Klopstock’s pupil, Schiller. ‘Des Mädchens Klage‘ is pure pathos again, the singer’s voice rising above pulsating triplets: ‘Hektors Abschied‘ is as stately as the ‘farewell’ of a classical hero demands: ‘Des Geheimnis‘ is a love song of pristine delicacy and tenderness, anticipating Schumann. Its only concession to Schubert’s youth is that he feels he has to adapt to every verse. Later he would gain the shrewd economy of an old hand.
In the autumn Schubert was introduced to Maurice von Schwind, a dilettante poet studying law, who had heard his songs and had come to Vienna to seek their composer. He found Schubert in his schoolroom, correcting exercises. The two of them were the same age; and the cultured, worldly man urged Schubert to abandon the drudgery of teaching and devote himself to composition. In 1815, then, we see in place the personnel of the Schubertiads: those musical gatherings of friends before whom the composer could try out his latest offerings. The name is their own, and the offerings were not only his; if one of their new poems appealed to him, he might set it straight away. His friends occupy a unique place in Schubert’s life. They were his supporters, critics, a source of stimulus who, as aristocrats of a new and literate social class (many of its members educated at university) were able to introduce him to the shifting ideas and cultural currents that gave first impetus to the new Romantic age. As Spaun recalled, ‘Through Schubert we all became friends and brothers’. When Schubert did not live at home, he lived with them and they talked about him, spreading his name. Joseph Wechsberg made an astute judgment of the impression they leave in their memoirs and drawings:
A relaxed crowd, always singing and dancing, and their girls were pretty in their high-waisted long dresses. They would make excursions in the countryside or sit in wine gardens; they convey the image of a Biedermeier idyll. No wonder, since most of the paintings were made much later when the artists remembered their earlier idyllic years with a sharp sense of nostalgia.
This was the era nonetheless when, as Abraham a Sancta Clara could report, ‘music resounded from noblemen’s houses and courtyards.’ There was a piano in every cultured home and Hausmusik (chamber music) in every drawing room. The public at large enjoyed the Harmoniemusik of military bands in streets and squares, the string ensembles of Johann Strauss the Elder, harp players in the Prater, organ-grinders everywhere, and musical clocks on many buildings. After the charades and high jinks of an evening’s Schubertiad, there would be instrumental pieces to write for bands of cultured amateurs. One of their number and a friend from Imperial College days, Albert Stadler, copied out until 1817 every one of Schubert’s songs in his own hand, rescuing several for posterity. Another recruit from 1815 is Franz von Schober, a flamboyant and epicurean lawyer who later became private secretary to Liszt: again an aspiring poet, maligned by other friends, with whom Schubert nonetheless shared his most intense confidences. At the age of 60 he married a firecracking intellectual.
It is interesting to speculate what a Schubertiad of 1815 might have been like. Pudgy little Franz’s latest and hearty setting of Körner’s war-ballads, perhaps: glorious songs drawn from Hölty (‘An den Mond‘, D193) and Kosegarten (‘Die Mondnacht’, D238): Ossian’s celtic dirges, and of course Mayrhofer, who tempers Schiller’s enthusiasm for classical antiquity with Ossian’s gloom. But the compass of Schubert’s thought was expanding beyond any of it. The first two symphonies had unearthed possibilities but they were derivative and prolix: they needed geniality, suavity, polish, finesse. These Schubert was ready to provide. His Third Symphony (D200) was written between 24 May and 19 July. The dates obscure its energy of inspiration, for between them he set the manuscript aside to write ‘Fernando‘ and much else. Most of the symphony was dashed off in eight days.
We might guess as much, to judge by the overflowing spontaneity of the finale, but not from the serene confidence and craftsmanship of the conception as a whole. Its spirit is rococo, and enchanting. It’s true, the slow movement is Haydnesque; but Schubert’s voice throughout is clear and crisp in its organisation of matters-at-hand. The snapping dotted crochets of his Great C major symphony have their origin in the first movement of D200: Schubert’s buffo ‘Presto vivace’ anticipates the finale of his D minor String Quartet a decade later. It has been claimed that, if Schubert took to the Lied like a duck to water, in orchestral music he had to learn how to swim. He learnt quickly. In this second D major symphony there is a tightly integrated discourse, a level of repartee, which reveals at every stage how deftly Schubert has learnt to make a stimulus as natural as breathing into a symphony. And this is what allows the music to smile.
As for ‘Erlkönig‘, it remained a cause célèbre amongst Schubert’s friends for the rest of his life. In 1816 Spaun submitted it amongst a collection of Goethe settings to the poet himself, asking for a dedication so that the songs might be published with his blessing. It was returned without a word.
(Left:) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Right:)Schubert’s early first love, who married a baker and died childless
THE PROMISE OF FREEDOM: 1816-1818
The year following ‘Erlkönig’ was one of miserable indecision for Schubert, and by 1816 the time had come for him to leave the family home. His father, primly religious, supported Metternich’s crackdown on the arts, letters and for that matter travelling arrangements of anyone who might have been tainted by a whiff of subversion – any opponent of state or church who could be unmasked by the network of secret agents which permeated every street-corner. Arrest was arbitrary, unlimited: and Mayrhofer’s publication of a magazine for enlightened ideas, Contributions to Education for Young People, was enough to arouse suspicion. These were the circumstances under which Franz himself, out for the night with his friend Johann Senn, would in a couple of years be detained without charge. As Mayrhofer writes, ‘Schubert’s melodies will disperse the gloom which surrounds us in these difficult days’.
Goethe’s rejection of Spaun’s letter must have been a stupefying blow, and at the beginning of 1816 Schubert’s application for the post of Music Director at the College at Laibach had been turned down despite Salieri’s advocacy. In June he began to keep a diary (seldom the priority of a happy person) in which he notes his first composition for money. Other entries are desultory, fragmented, incidental. The companionship of his friends began to shine like a beacon upon an empty life, and by December he was living at Schober’s family rooms in the Landskrongrasse, on the understanding that he might contribute to his upkeep when he could afford to.The year following ‘Erlkönig’ was one of miserable indecision for Schubert, and by 1816 the time had come for him to leave the family home. His father, primly religious, supported Metternich’s crackdown on the arts, letters and for that matter travelling arrangements of anyone who might have been tainted by a whiff of subversion – any opponent of state or church who could be unmasked by the network of secret agents which permeated every street-corner. Arrest was arbitrary, unlimited: and Mayrhofer’s publication of a magazine for enlightened ideas, Contributions to Education for Young People, was enough to arouse suspicion. These were the circumstances under which Franz himself, out for the night with his friend Johann Senn, would in a couple of years be detained without charge. As Mayrhofer writes, ‘Schubert’s melodies will disperse the gloom which surrounds us in these difficult days’.
Much of Schubert’s music over the long months reflects his disorientation. It treads water inconsequentially, as the work of occasional composers is liable to do, but there are fields in which he progresses with a vengeance. Hoping to advance himself in a fashionable sphere (which, had he realised, was already on the wane) he attempted seven piano sonatas in 1817, meaning perhaps to publish them with a single opus number as older composers had done. Beethoven’s influence is tangible in the thoughtful E minor (D566) and the E flat (D568), in which coy and luscious tenderness co-exist. But Schubert is coming of age on his own terms, and he experiments freely with both form and medium. In the slow movement of the Haydnesque A flat (D557) and several lovely fragments, Schubert contrives a masterpiece within its conventions: it is, as Alfred Einstein says, music which has fallen from heaven. Schubert’s lyricism has no need of formal expositions, no need of trials and conflicts to be settled; his propositions would be destroyed if they were dissected into their thematic components. All they seek is a frame of modulation (that is, the shifts of key that give music its feeling of light and shade) within which they can find their space, surrender to their self-absorption. In these sonatas, at least, Schubert’s hope seems undimmed.
Why did hausmusik decline in popularity? Because Rossini had lately arrived in Vienna, sweeping everything before him. German opera was passé: Salieri had given up writing for the stage long ago. The censors’ suspicion of social comment meant that there was room only for pantomime, farces, and spectaculars to make the philistines goggle. Even Beethoven admitted how infectiously Italian melodies appealed to the ‘frivolous sensuality’ of the time.
Hedonistic froth provides the occasion to which Schubert rises in the Sixth Symphony (D589), his first attempt to write an ostentatious orchestral party-piece, which he began in October 1817. The ground-plan is clearly Beethoven’s First, but there’s a flamboyant theatricality to which Beethoven never aspired, through which a twenty year-old struggles to break free of his early symphonic language. It was performed by Otto Hatwig’s amateur orchestra in 1818, and sank without trace.
An Italian flavour in overtures at least gave Schubert his first public performance, when either the D major (D590) or C major (D591) was played by musicians from the Theater Wien at the Hotel Der römische Kaiser in March 1818. The Theaterzeitung reviewed the concert:
The second part began with a wonderfully lovely overture by a young composer, Herr Franz Schubert, a pupil of the famous Salieri. He has learnt already how to touch and move all hearts to emotion. Although the theme is simple enough, a wealth of the most astonishing and agreeable ideas developed from it, worked out with vigour and skill. It is to be wished that this artist will quite soon delight us with another new gift.
To Germans, Italianate style was a byword for superficiality. Schubert, always a free-thinker, revelled in its racy good humour. At this stage changing styles were for him simply new costumes in which he could wrap his own unique idiosyncrasies, with no jingoistic or moral implications. The overwrought pathos of Mediterranean opera was there to be made fun of. Schubert learnt from Rossini, using those lessons to powerful effect in the tragic F minor Fantasia, which he composed in the last year of his life. In any case, if evidence were needed of Schubert’s lofty Teutonic credentials, he had already provided it in his first commission, the cantata ‘Prometheus’ (D451). This he wrote for Leopold von Sonnleithner, a supporter of Schubertiads, who sang in the chorus and paid the 19 year-old composer forty gulden for the privilege when the music was given in the garden of Sonnleithner’s Erdberggasse house on 24 July 1816. It lasted three quarters of an hour, and impressed its listeners profoundly. Its manuscript has been lost for 150 years.
The crucial event of these years is Schubert’s meeting with the man who became his provider, his advocate and mentor, alongside whom he would give the first recitals of song as an art-form. Johann Vogl was, it was said, ‘an actor ascending to the pulpit’: an opera singer whose intervals were spent reading Marcus Aurelius and Plato. He has been described as
A huge man from whose huge mouth issued an astonishing voice, a baritone both flexible and smooth, capable of stentorian and of gentle tones. He was well over six feet tall, strong…lordly in movement, lordly in stride. Having been brought up in a Jesuit college, he never lost a tendency to self-analysis, a moral scepticism applied to himself and to the world.
He had been a star at the Vienna Opera for twenty years, singing such roles as Orestes in Gluck’s ‘Iphigenia‘ (it had been there that Schubert first heard him) and Pizarro in the revised ‘Fidelio’. Schubert expressed an urge to meet him and Schober, endlessly hectoring a world-weary man who knew well his own greatness, at last arranged an appointment at Landskrongrasse in the spring of 1817. Spaun describes Vogl’s appearance:
At the appointed hour he entered gravely, and the little insignificant-looking Schubert made him an awkward bow, thanked him for the great honour, and in his embarrassment stammered a few nonsensical phrases. Vogl lifted his eyebrows. A bad beginning! Vogl said, ‘Well, what have you here? Accompany me’, and took a sheet of music paper lying on the piano. It contained ‘Augenlied’, a pretty but not especially important song. He hummed rather than sang. ‘Not bad’ he said somewhat coldly. But then he looked at ‘Memnon’, ‘Ganymed’ and other songs; singing with a half-voice, he became friendlier. He departed without committing himself. Before he left he tapped Schubert on the shoulder. ‘You have talent’ he said, ‘but you are too little the actor, too little the charlatan. You are too prodigal with fine thoughts, without developing them.’
Schubert thought the interview had been a failure. But Vogl was more impressed than he cared to admit, and soon returned. The songs he had seen had not let him rest. An idea had come: he was now nearing fifty, an age which spelled the end of an operatic career. But here, with the work of this young man, a new possibility opened. He would become an interpreter of these extraordinary songs, which required not only singing but acting.
‘The enthusiasm with which this magnificent artist performed’ continues Spaun, ‘had the greatest effect on the young composer himself, who was overjoyed to see his long-nourished hopes fulfilled beyond all his expectations.’ Schubert and Vogl set out, performing not only in the houses of educated Viennese but in nearby Austrian towns.
However, it was not some new champion who had deepened the inward meditation of his songs from the end of 1816. It was Mayrhofer and his contacts from Prague northwards, contemplating the failure of liberalism across Europe, which helped to lead Schubert from Rossini back to Mayrhofer’s own poems, to Schiller, and finally the Goethe of ‘Wilhelm Meister’. The first of these songs are strophic; and the repetition of strophes demands a refinement in harmony, a more delicate appreciation of the music that is there to be gathered behind each poet’s words. The profundity Schubert now finds draws from him a harmonic boldness which (as one can see from his second thoughts) sometimes frightens him.
‘Gruppe aus dem Tartarus’ (D396), best of the Schiller settings, has a chromaticism which still seems audacious. Whilst travelling on a mail-coach Goethe had written An Schwager Kronos’, depicting a demon-postillion on his journey through this world as an ravenous adventurer who, having tasted life to the full, determines to drive triumphantly into hell. Schubert’s setting (D369) is recklessly superb: a staccato figure clings to the changing metre and climbs on chromatically rising modulations, as the traveller drives hard into the mountains. With the same magnificent clarity that has guided him through life, he foresees his plunge into the abyss.
Five of Schubert’s greatest songs are from March 1817, and the ink can hardly have been dry when Vogl made his entrance. Goethe’s ‘Ganymed’ (D544) summons an antique world in a hymn of rapturous sweetness: Mayrhofer’s Memnon (D541) uses a mythological parallel of unbearable melancholy. Schober’s ‘An die Musik’ (D547) becomes Schubert’s own anthem to artistic creation. Claudius’s ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ (D531) and Schubart’s ‘Die Forelle’ (The Trout, D550) were to achieve fame in very different guises, as we shall see.
By December 1817 Schubert was dejected and alone once more. At Schober’s he had become a salon celebrity, but Schober’s brother Axel returned from France, and needed his room. Schubert had long since said his goodbye to Thérèse with a keepsake book of songs, and Franz the elder would only accept him back if he became a classroom drudge again. There was no option but to accept bad luck, and tear himself away. When Schubert’s family moved to a school at Rossau, he went with them. His emotional crisis has left us only a couple of striking choruses for male voices, which are without precedent. Yet his luck was about to change, for the roots of his fame were in place.
* * *
Schubert’s songs are enriched by his grasp the operatic treatment of arias in Mozart’s operas, and by his own symphonic experiments. There is no better postlude to this period in his life than a little gem of his ripening maturity, the Fifth Symphony in B flat (D485), which he composed between September and October 1816. If it presents a nostalgic aside after his Fourth, it is also a spiritual expansion of chamber music which is both intimate and great. It is the Mozart of the Fortieth Symphony, the violin sonatas and great piano concertos, the G major quartet and G minor quintet, reappraised with Schubertean poetry and rhythmic verve. As the English musicologist Donald Tovey wrote, ‘a pearl of rare price.’
But that cannot be the emotional postlude, I think. In 1827 Hummel and his pupil Ferdinand Hiller came to hear one of Vogl and Schubert’s last recitals, which undoubtedly contained songs from these three early years. In 1871 Hiller recalled the event:
One song followed another – the givers were tireless, the recipients were tireless. Schubert had little technique, and Vogl had little voice left, but both had such life and feeling that it would have been impossible to perform these wondrous compositions with greater clarity or with greater sincerity. We thought neither of the playing, nor of the songs: it was as though the music had no need of any material sound, as though the melodies were revealing themselves to ethereal ears. I cannot speak of my emotions but my master, who after all had almost half a century of music behind him, was so deeply moved that the tears were trickling down his cheeks.
YOUNG MASTER, 1818-22: ZSELIZ, STEYR AND THE TROUT QUINTET
‘Thank God I live at last, and it was high time; otherwise I should have become nothing more than a frustrated musician.’
Schubert’s correspondence, August 1818
At the beginning of July 1818 Schubert arrived at the castle of Zseliz on the Esterházy estate. The explanation was simple: the Count needed a piano teacher for his daughters Maria and Caroline. Schubert was cheap, available, and came with the recommendation of a mutual friend, Karl Unger.
There was a room waiting for him in the servants’ outhouse:
…Forty geese set up such a cackling that one can hardly hear oneself speak. The people around me are all, without exception, very nice…The cook is something of a rake, the chambermaid thirty years old, the housemaid very pretty and often my companion, the governess a good old thing, the butler my rival. The Count is rather rough; the Countess haughty but more refined; the two little girls are nice children. So far I have been spared the ordeal of dining with the family.
When Caroline reproached him for not dedicating music to her, he replied, ‘What’s the point? It’s all dedicated to you anyway.’ Inevitably piano music stands out amongst his works at this time: duets, German dances, military marches; all those genres which a publisher could be relied upon to buy, and which our unsociable age of virtuosity-in-plastic has consigned to history. The quality of Schubert’s duets is magnificent, their quantity enormous. Were they his compensation for hearing so little of his own orchestral work? Perhaps. More to the point, his genre-pieces are poems confided to the keyboard, songs freed from the demands of sonata form.
The sonatas themselves show Schubert fighting to outstrip his models. There is a turbulent fragment in F minor (D625) in which the Beethoven of the ‘Appassionata‘ is answered by episodes of bittersweet serenity: others too, in C major and C sharp minor. The conclusion of this first period in his sonatas is the A major (D664), in which childlike enchantment disguises writing of enviable elegance, unity, symmetry. The slow movement’s resigned happiness anticipates ‘Der Unglückliche’ (D713), which Schubert wrote in 1821: the finale echoes a song already complete, ‘Hänflers Liebeswerbung’ (D552). But the A major takes us ahead of ourselves, to Josefine von Koller, the events of 1819 – and later, to the last sonata Schubert was to write, where the elysium of D664 is tinged with awe.
His disillusionment with Zseliz came quickly. ‘Here I am all alone in the depths of Hungary, without a single person with whom I can exchange an intelligent word.’ And in another letter, ‘My longing for Vienna grows daily.’ When in November 1818 the Esterházys visited his home city, Schubert came with them and did not go back. Franz the elder wrote a petition to a high church dignitary to draw his son at last into the fold, but Schubert would have none of it and moved in with Mayrhofer. Relations between the two young men were cordial, and great settings of Mayrhofer led to greater Goethe, as if personal friendship tapped the creative springs from which Goethe could draw still finer music. These were the circumstances in which Schubert was asked to write ‘Die Zwillingsbrüder’ (D647), a Singspiel (a music-drama with speech as well as songs) lifted from Georg von Hoffmann’s one-act play, as a showpiece for Vogl. It was premiered in June 1819, withdrawn after six performances, and promptly moved the management of the Theater an der Wien to commission incidental music to a three-act extravaganza, ‘Die Zauberharfe’ (D644). At least that survived eight performances.
Vogl’s habit was to spend his summer holiday in his native Steyr, an ‘inconceivably lovely’ town amongst rolling hills. In July 1819 Schubert accompanied him and for three months they basked in the admiration of local patrons. It was one of the happiest periods in Schubert’s short life. He writes roguishly to his brother Ferdinand, ‘At the house where I’m lodging there are eight girls, nearly all pretty – so you see, one’s kept busy.’ For the vivacious daughter of a local merchant, he wrote his D664 Sonata but for Sylvester Paumgartner, an iron-master and amateur cellist, there was a more famous gift, the Trout Quintet. It was Paumgartner’s suggestion, and Schubert’s first instrumental masterpiece: a set of variations for piano and strings on what was already amongst the best-loved of the songs from 1817, framed by four graceful movements – as Hummel’s Piano Quintet had been. But Schubert sails above his homely exemplar to create a shining serenade, in which music-making amongst friends is given the stamp of exuberant greatness. As Maurice Brown well says, ‘The Steyr countryside was a secret collaborator in the quintet; it is even fortunate in its nickname, with its suggestion of cool, sun-flecked water.’
By September 1818 Schubert was composing ceaselessly. Four months before he had come across the poetry of Novalis and the Nazarenes, in which the ideas of Goethe permeate a child-like love of Christ which is both confessional and mystically individual. ‘Nachthymne’ (D687) is one of the best-known settings, as are the devotional ‘Das Abendrot’ (D627) and ‘Litanei auf das Fest Allerseelen’, which bares the simple expression of faith to which Schubert’s Romantic contemporaries aspired in vain.
Until 1821, then, the songs are preoccupied with a mythic land of rapture: a paradise lost to be animated with delicate shades of harmony. Religious elation is the starting point, but its place is soon taken by the reminiscence of a chivalrous medieval age. The final outcome of Schubert’s theosophy, in fact, is neither of those things: not historical nostalgia but pantheism, the belief that God is in everything and everything is God. Its surmounting glory is ‘Gott in der Natur’ (D757: August 1822) in which the visible world becomes a manifestation of the eternal, and there is a moment of ravishing expressiveness in which the limitless breadth of Schubert’s tonal horizon rises like a symbol of infinity. ‘The dawn is but a reflection of his garment’. But who today arranges concerts for a choir of women’s voices? And so it lies in neglect.
A marginally better fate has befallen ‘Nachtstück’ (D672), which depicts a minstrel facing death in a moonlit glade, and which is filled with the ‘sacred fervour’ of the soul. It is a meditation on a cosmic scale, a longing for death. ‘Sternennächte’ ripples with the splendour of night, as does the magnificent ‘Im Walde’ (D708). ‘Die Götter Griechenlands’ (D677), a outpouring of exquisite and almost unbearable pathos, becomes a lament for the purity of a lost classical age which survives only in ‘the fairyland of song’. ‘Salve Regina’ (D676) anticipates Lohengrin in its higher simplicity; and there is Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’ (D674), a great monologue of defiance whose vehemence seems also to presage an opera composer of Wagnerian stature.
Through the Esterházys Schubert met Baron von Schönstein in 1820. With his fine baritone, Schönstein became after Vogl the most celebrated interpreter of the songs during the composer’s lifetime. Later he introduced them to Liszt. By concerts and word of mouth Schubert’s fame was spreading at last: to the Imperial courts of Vienna and Venice, and through the Fröhlich sisters to Austria’s most eminent dramatist, Grillparzer. Recitals at the Kärntnertor-Theater won their day, and the Sonnleithner family’s private publication of ‘Erlkönig’ met with an overwhelming public response. Marie Wagner, a young admirer, recalled of a Vogl concert:
We can have absolutely no idea of the effect which Schubert’s songs made at that time. For a week after this golden Thursday the whole town was talking about Schubert and his songs. People fell over each other for them, copied them all out, and soon afterwards a few books of them were published by Diabelli.
More manuscripts passed from hand to hand. The Theaterzeitung, in its Goethe review of 22 May 1821, spoke of ‘a glorious wreath of song’ and the general belief was that Schubert stood on the threshold of a brilliant career. The Sonnleithners were so heartened that they were even able to pay his shoe-maker.
New-found confidence manifested itself in a sumptuous ripeness and refinement to the piano accompaniments for Schubert’s Lieder. What happened was this: Goethe had turned his own attention to transfigured Persian verse in the hopes of courting Marianne Jung, a demoiselle half his age. Marianne responded with poetry as good as his, signing herself Suleika. The two lovers parted, never met again, and Goethe passed off all of their two hundred poems as his own.
Schubert seized upon them. To ‘Versunken’ (D715), with its teasing intimations of love-play and falling tresses of hair, he gives a fulminating erotic charge. ‘Geheimes’ (‘Secrets’, D719) has soft charm: the poet knows the meaning of a glance, it promises ‘the next sweet hour’. Brahms called ‘Suleika I’ (D720, set in March 1821) ‘the loveliest song ever written’. The throbbing agitation of the piano, with its shiver of major and minor before an exultant climax and an ending of calm acquiescence, summons the vision of incandescent hope seemingly tempered by the aching inevitability of loss. ‘Suleika II’ (D717) is buoyantly happy pastoral. Its dedicatee, the soprano Anna Milder, wrote to Schubert, ‘It is heavenly and always moves me to tears. It is indescribable: you have infused it with all possible magic.’
Then came the discovery of Friedrich Rückert, later to be adopted by Mahler, and Schubert’s settings of ‘Sei mir gegrüsst’ (D741, from early in 1822) and ‘Du bist die Ruh’’ (D776) are amongst the most marvellous of songs. And there was a masterly first movement for strings: the Quartettsatz of December 1820 (D703), in which a poignant melody is played off against a desperate tremolando. It is without precedent and represents a gathering of new strength: it anticipates the Eighth Symphony in its structure and expression of feeling; but after forty bars of the second movement, a rich and tragic Andante, the music breaks off. It was never finished.
His crowning ambition, too, still eluded him. In August 1821 he began a symphony in E (D729): sketched from beginning to end, too thinly to be reconstructed, but sufficiently to reveal itself as a tantalising link between the Sixth and Schubert’s symphonic maturity. Its guiding lights are the structural clarity of Haydn, the elegance of Rossini; yet it aligns the intimacy of chamber music with the eminence of what was to be the Great C major (D944) in its span and burnished sonority. In its command too of daring harmonic dislocations and rhythmic change, it is music which feels its way into the unknown with sureness.
In March 1845 Mendelssohn wrote to Ferdinand Schubert:
I received through Doctor Haertel the symphony sketch by your brother, of which you have made me the possessor. What pleasure you give me through so fine, so precious a gift, how deeply grateful I am for this remembrance of the deceased master. Believe me that you could have given it to no one who would have had greater joy in it. It seems to me as if, through the very incompleteness of the work – the scattered, half-finished intentions – I became at once personally acquainted with your brother more clearly and more intimately than I should have done through a finished piece. It was as though I saw him there working in his room.
Vienna’s infatuation with theatre goes back to the miracle plays. By the Baroque period opera was felt to be ‘a necessary spectacle’, promoted by the State as an endorsement for absolutism, the divine right of Emperors. To appear on stage became the highest ambition of any Viennese composer, attested by the success not only of ‘Fidelio’ but of Mozart’s ‘Die Entführing aus dem Serail’, ‘Die Zauberflöte’ and, in 1821, Weber’s winning streak with ‘Der Freischütz’.
Now, Schubert’s flair for choral and theatrical writing is evident from what he called his ‘Easter cantata’ of 1820, ‘Lazarus’. He had been interested in the problems of combining dramatic speech with song in such a way so as not to disturb the flow of the music. The traditional solution drew a sharp distinction between recitative and aria, but Schubert had already experimented with the song-like treatment of speech (arioso) and at last he saw his chance to carry the idea further. ‘Lazarus’ demands to be regarded as an opera as highly evolved as a great deal from the late 19th century. Alfred Einstein comments, ‘If we say that, from the point of view of the historical development of opera Schubert’s fragment far surpasses Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, we are not making to great a claim. [Lazarus] anticipates everything that Lysiart or Telramund have to say…it is a perfect work of art.’ Schubert left it incomplete, but he wrote more than enough to unmask the story of his rambling ineptitude.Vienna’s infatuation with theatre goes back to the miracle plays. By the Baroque period opera was felt to be ‘a necessary spectacle’, promoted by the State as an endorsement for absolutism, the divine right of Emperors. To appear on stage became the highest ambition of any Viennese composer, attested by the success not only of ‘Fidelio’ but of Mozart’s ‘Die Entführing aus dem Serail’, ‘Die Zauberflöte’ and, in 1821, Weber’s winning streak with ‘Der Freischütz’.
What went wrong for Schubert’s operas? ‘Die Zwillingsbrüder’ of 1819 had been adapted from French farce (‘Les Deux Valentins’) by the secretary of the Kärntnertor theatre, yet the management there was in no hurry to stage the piece when it became clear that would clash with the premiere of ‘Otello’. To compete with Rossini was a daunting challenge, and Schubert could not provide what the public had come to expect. As a native composer the single door open to him was German operetta, unless he could strike out into fresh ground where his contemporaries could only ape Mozart. He pinned his hopes on a resurgence of German opera, yet the Italian impresario Domenico Barbaja was about to be given a twelve-year contract to manage the Court Opera at the Kärntnertor itself. At Schubert’s first night there was a body politic of claques, as the critic from Leipzig reported: ‘That Herr Schubert has many friends who were very active in promoting him was evident at the first performance. But they may have forgotten that between fiasco and furore, as the Italians say, there is tremendous difference.’ Needless to say that whenever supporters cheered, a rival faction hissed. Between them the composer disappeared.
Vogl was censured by the Leipzig press for playing twin brothers ‘in such a way that one knew only too well it was the same actor who interpreted them.’ Schubert, ahead of the times, was criticized from all quarters for his endless modulation of keys, whilst ‘hardly any repose is to be met with in confused and supercharged instrumentation, anxiously striving after originality.’ But the crux of the problem was more deep-seated. Schubert wrote for an audience which had abandoned Gluck, and he had never learnt the hard lessons of opera buffa and opera seria, on which his peers had cut their teeth. The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung noted,
Herr Schubert is too much wedded to details of the text; he tries to express words in music instead of the nature of a whole speech by means of the character of a whole piece…The music has much originality and many interesting passages, but it is a blot on the work that the sentiments of simple country folk are interpreted too seriously, not to say heavy-handedly, for a comic subject.
Put bluntly: too many songs, too little feel for greasepaint. However, it was the last time that Schubert’s sense of occasion failed him so utterly. After seeing ‘Die Zauberharfe’ (1820) Josef Rosenbaum wrote in his diary, ‘Wretched trash, quite failed to please, the machinery gibbed and went badly, although nothing remarkable. Nobody knew his part: the prompter was always heard first.’ Several Viennese reviewers made clear that that failure of this second platitude was due to the stultified tedium of its plot and dialogue. ‘True, there is music – and real music! Many good ideas, forceful passages, cleverly managed harmonic pieces, insight and understanding.’ Such was the Theaterzeitung’s evisceration of the score that had failed to overcome ‘a flood of boredom.’ The Conversationblatt added, ‘What a pity that Schubert’s wonderfully beautiful music has not found a worthier subject.’
It would be the same fate for ‘Rosamunde, Fürsten von Zypern’ (D797), the doggerel play for which Schubert composed incidental music in 1823 as a favour to Leopold Kupelwieser, who was hot-foot in pursuit of an actress. It has been claimed that Schubert’s taste deserted him when it came to choosing texts for the theatre, but not so. He needed a stage success to secure his reputation, and he made the best of what he could get: the trite Viennese sentimentality of Kotzebue and his lame literary imitators. An A flat Mass (D678), which Schubert hoped would win fame and favours from the Imperial Court where his operas had failed, draws on its established texts to create a work of striking stature. But it was too personal, too difficult and subjective, to make headway.
In September 1821 Schubert and Schober left for the castle of Ochsenburg at St Pölten in order to complete another opera: ‘Alfonso und Estrella’, a tale of love at first sight set within two opposing noble families (D732). The libretto is another cobbled pastiche. All hopes and rumours foundered, for Barbaja turned it down. Weber, impressed by what Schober had called ‘the rich and teeming ideas’ of Schubert’s score, promised to produce the work in Berlin. Nothing came to pass, and with Vogl temporarily estranged, there was nobody else to speak on Schubert’s behalf. By the end of 1823 and ‘Fierabras’ his disillusionment with the theatrical world was complete.
‘They put on rubbish’ he writes to Anselm Hüttenbrenner, ‘which makes one’s hair stand on end.’ Or in exhaustion to Spaun, ‘I should be quite well if this wretched business of the opera were not so mortifying.’ In the wake of ‘Die Zauberharfe’ there is a contemptuous poem, ‘Der Geist der Welt’, where Schubert attacks ‘those who with wrangling fill these days.’ His friends, too, were going: Mayrhofer left Vienna, Therese Grob married a master baker, and when Spaun was transferred to Linz as a tax-inspector Schubert composed a verse, ‘Und nimmer schreibst du?’ – ‘And never do you write.’ Spaun suggested he set it to music, but the result (‘Herrn Josef Spaun, Assessor in Linz’, D749) is not the carefree parody of an Italian recitative and aria that its recipient took it to be. It is the shriek of a man who, in 1822, begins to see his life in ruins.
The story does not end there. In 1867 Sir Arthur Sullivan and Sir George Grove found the music to ‘Rosamunde’ in what Grove recalled as ‘a bundle of music books two feet high, and black with the dust of nearly a century. These were the part books of the whole of the music in Rosamunde, tied up after the second performance in December 1823, and probably never disturbed since.’
Tense with excitement at what Grove called this ‘treasure’, the eminent Victorians copied scores until two in the morning. Then, in the night air, they played a game of leapfrog.
‘There is a love story of Schubert’s which not a soul knows, as I am the only one in the secret and I have told it to nobody’.
Schober’s recollections of Schubert, 1869
‘Unfortunately Schubert’s thirst for life had lured him into byways from which there is usually no return, or at least no healthy return’.
Wilhelm von Chézy’s memories of Schubert
‘Any work of art is an uncommitted crime’
Theodore Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951)
The six little Moments Musicaux (D780), of which the earliest come from 1823, are amongst the most experimental and intimately lovely of Schubert’s piano works: the most sociable and, at the same time, the most enigmatic. They are worlds within grains of sand, microcosms complete to the last detail, which make sense within themselves. The last of them, in A flat, is worthy to stand as the minuet to an unwritten sonata; but Edward T Cone has revealed disquiet beneath its self-possessed appearance, in which promissory gestures are overwhelmed in an increasingly futile struggle. A parasitic vice appears within the harmonies of this music: at first as a novelty, then as a dangerous alternative, and lastly as a poison. All that survives its attack is the shell. From now on, as Cone put it, ‘a cold wind seems to blow through even Schubert’s sunniest music’. It is haunted by the ghost – the dread – of something else. And Cone quotes Edmund Wilson’s essay on the fiction of Oscar Wilde:
Tragic heroes are shown in the peculiar position of suffering from organic maladies without, up to a point, being forced to experience the evils entailed by them…But in the end, the horror breaks out: the afflicted one must recognize himself and be recognized by other people as the odious creature he is, whose disease or disability will kill him.
Wilde knew that he had syphilis.
Having rejected the devotion of the ‘cherubic’ artist Moritz von Schwind, with whom he had been living, Schubert moved in amongst the Persian drapes and dressing gowns of the flat in which Schober frittered away his mother’s fortune, and soon his guest’s earnings. This was in 1822. He had dedicated his seductive ‘Geheimes’ to Schober; and in a letter he writes, ‘Only you, dear Schober, I shall never forget, for what you meant to me no one else can mean, alas!’ Schober was the cause of the current rift between Schubert and Vogl, of which Anselm Hüttenbrenner reports,
To me Vogl is extremely pleasing. He told me all about his relationship to Schubert with the utmost frankness, and unfortunately I am quite unable to excuse the latter. Vogl is very much embittered against Schober, for whose sake Schubert behaved most ungratefully towards Vogl…
It may be fortuitous that Vogl (a fop and ‘odd old bachelor’, declared Edward von Bauernfeld), was known to Schubert’s coterie as ‘the Greek bird’, and that in classical Greece the gift of an adult game bird to a youth was evidence of amorous intent. Nevertheless, approached in 1858 for a Schubert biography, Joseph Kenner writes of a friendship he had broken off in 1816:
Schubert’s genius subsequently attracted, among other friends, the heart of a seductively amiable and brilliant young man…whose scintillating individuality, as I was told later, won a lasting and pernicious effect over Schubert’s honest sensibility…This intimation seemed to me indispensable to a biographer’s grasp of the subject, for it concerns an episode in Schubert’s life which only too probably caused his premature death and certainly hastened it.
Days later he is more explicit:
By Schubert’s seducer I meant Franz von Schober. Under the guise of…engaging affection, there reigned in this whole family a deep moral depravity, so that it was not to be wondered that Franz von Schober went the same way. The need for love and friendship emerged with such egotism and jealousy that to his adherents alone he was all: God himself, and apart from his oracles he was willing to tolerate no other religion, no morals, no restraint.
At this time Schubert joined a clandestine club of young men – actors, writers, opera-singers – meeting upstairs near the Kärtnertor under the guidance of their leading light Ignaz Castelli, whom they called ‘the Calif’. After drinking past midnight, there were pranks to play: pulling the doorbells of sleeping neighbours and running off.
The police became interested; and perhaps there was something else besides, for as his friend Bauenfeld confides to a diary in 1826, ‘Schubert is ailing. He need ‘young peacocks’ like Benvenuto Cellini.’ Cellini, of course, stood accused as ‘a dirty sodomite’ and a peacock, in language current since the Renaissance, was a transvestite rent-boy.
What happened to Schubert in 1822 will never be known. By the end of February 1823 he was housebound with his family in the Rossau, and in May he entered Vienna’s General Hospital for mercury treatment. The symptoms were those of secondary syphilis: nausea, giddiness, rashes, anaemia, inflammation of the glands, crippling headaches, loss of hair. In his poem A Prayer he contemplated suicide:
…See, abased in dust and mire
Scorched by agonising fire,
I in torture go my way
Nearing doom’s destructive day.
Take my life, my flesh and blood
Plunge it all in Lethe’s flood
To a stronger, purer state
Deign me, Great One, to translate.
By summer his remission was sufficient to join Vogl at Steyr, but Schubert was aware he was living out the remains of a life-sentence. To the end he was unable to control his appetite, whilst knowing full well its consequences. In 1825 Schwind urged him to conceal ‘fleshly and spiritual needs – or rather your need for pheasants and punch’ if he hoped to obtain the post of Court Organist. Schwind adds, ‘We shall have to play on our own pipes.’ This was one year after Schubert had written to Kupelwieser:
Imagine a man whose health will never be right again and who, in his despair over this, constantly makes things worse instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose brightest hopes have come to nothing, to whom the joy of love and friendship offer nothing but pain, whose enthusiasm for beauty threatens to vanish; and then ask yourself if he is not indeed a wretched unhappy creature? ‘My peace is gone, my heart is heavy, I shall never find it, nevermore’. Thus indeed I can sing every day, for each night, when I go to sleep, I hope I shall not wake again, and each morning reminds me only of yesterday’s grief.
With zeal he undertook the three hundred works of his last four summers. Music became his redemption, and he wrote most fluently when most depressed, without a trace of self-pity. Getting to grips with the significance of one artist’s truth to himself is the purpose of the rest of this book.
The last piece Schubert wrote before his sickness was the Wanderer Fantasy (D760) of November 1822. It was the first of his mature piano works and was dedicated to a rich amateur pianist, Emmanuel von Liebenburg. Diabelli lost no time in publishing it, for it appeared three months later.
The Fantasy takes its name from its main theme, which comes from the middle section of an 1816 song, ‘Der Wanderer’ (D489). Throughout his life Schubert was intrigued by the challenge of unifying a long continuous work of several movements, and in the Fantasy he tackles it by adapting the same music for an opening Allegro, a solemnly expressive Adagio in which the full melodic line of the song makes its entrance, a Scherzo and fugal Finale.
The notion of the wanderer has a particular meaning to the early Romantics. He is more than a vagabond, certainly; an emblem of restless alienation: a free spirit, both eager and wistfully pensive, who finds his purpose in his travels through nature. Loneliness had not acquired the menace its mention brings to modern urban man. The wanderer’s outlook was that is that of ‘Der Einsame’ (D800), with its sense of proud – almost defiant – fortitude. Seldom, then, do musical challenges and philosophical resonances coincide as fruitfully as in D760. In its lyricism, claimed Tovey, it harks back to Bach, and in its remote key relationships it looks forward to Wagner.
Schubert takes the virtuoso glitter of Hummel and gives it exhilarated wit and momentum. The focussed thinking and command of theatre which vanished from the operas are crisp in every bar, through devices which only a piano can encompass: the piano’s voicing and range of colour, its unique contrasts and variegations of texture, its means of achieving a sense of climax, tension and pace, its percussive athleticism and – in the closing Allegro of the Wanderer – sheer power.
In this one piece Schubert set an agenda for the bravura keyboard showpieces of the high Romantic period. Liszt admired the Wanderer and made a well-meaning transcription for piano and orchestra; but his lasting acknowledgement is his own B minor Sonata, which takes through-composition (that is, musical structure as a seamless development) a step further. Schumann revered it, and the Wanderer has as much claim as Beethoven’s late sonatas to be seen as inspiration for the great C major Fantasia of 1838. But it has also denied us greater music, for (doubtless scenting ready money) Schubert set aside the Scherzo of his Eighth Symphony (D759) to write it. When the time came to return, the symphony was associated with repellence and disease, and never completed.
What is there left to say about the world’s best-loved orchestral music? The Unfinished Symphony stands the world of the ‘Trout’ on its head. Joy has turned to disappointment through which the presence of genius burns in its poetry and compassion. Three movements were sketched in piano score, and two orchestrated, during October 1822. It was abandoned, found its way to Anselm Hüttenbrenner, and had its first performance in Vienna in 1865. Nothing else is known of its origins or fate, but decades of rumours of an unknown stroke of genius were confirmed.
As Paul Henry Lang wrote, the Unfinished is ‘a work every tone of which is Schubert’s own, and which can be placed next to those of Beethoven without paling. Never in the subsequent history of music did this happen again.’ It is a miracle in organisation and economy within a sense of arched space, in emotional intensity and poise. Not a note could be added or taken away. It has the command of a master who knows he will be understood, who can dare without taking risks, who can say what had previously taken pages within the measure of one bar. Its Allegro moderato is an integrated sonata movement of extraordinary tension, in the faraway key of B minor, the source of songs for Schubert filled with an unearthly magnetic charge.
Such preternatural grace is, as Alfred Einstein said, ‘fathomless; and the expression of poignant melancholy, the outbursts of despair, could be answered only by the innocence of the Ländler-like second subject’ for cellos. The symphony’s second movement, simple in form, ‘needs no melodic development, only the interplay of small or large melodic groups of magical charm and magical euphony.’ Did Schubert realise that nothing more could match it, or feel that he had simply said enough? At any rate, material from a projected finale may survive as the B minor Entr’acte in ‘Rosamunde’.
Syphilis, like the prospect of hanging, does wonders to concentrate the mind. Such adventures as the Wanderer seemed suddenly out of the question. Schubert’s first mature sonata is contemporary with his suicidal poetry: it is the A minor of February 1823 (D784), where lyricism is renounced in favour of pianism on an orchestral scale.
Not that there is any trace of the Wanderer‘s exhibitionism in this tersely tragic work, whose monumentality and dramatic violence unfold on purely instrumental terms. We are offered a darkening underworld, a place of plunging silences and sinister whispers, above which the apparition of lost bliss hovers like a phantasm. Heard after the fearful marches of an Allegro giusto (did Bruckner in his Eighth Symphony, or Mahler ever, say more than Schubert could in fourteen minutes?), the monothematic Andante has the quality of one of those flowers that open only in the night, and which might be visited by Redon’s or Fuseli’s night-creatures. If the last movement of Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ sonata can be described as ‘gossip’ then so, in desolation, is the finale here; more even than ‘An Schwager Kronos’, it is music from an abyss. It is a landmark which precedes the cosy Romanticism of Mendelssohn’s midsummer night and outstrips it by fifty years.
Convalescence meant being cut off from society, like a leper. As Beethoven’s nephew Karl remarks in their conversation book, ‘Everyone speaks very highly of Schubert, but they say he has gone into hiding.’ To pay his hospital bills he was forced into rash business deals. First he sold for a negligible lump sum his publication rights to a corpus of work. This was again to Cappi & Diabelli, with whom he instantly broke off dealings when he suspected them of sharp practice. His next publishers, Sauer and Leindesdorf, were incompetent to the point of bankruptcy – forcing him cap-in-hand back to his original arrangements. Schubert’s friends looked on in dismay; but unlike Beethoven he had no patrons, none of Hummel’s or Salieri’s favour in high places. Always he took what he could, but in financial matters (as in his personal welfare) he was prone to self-neglect.
Solace came in an outpouring of songs. In December 1822 he had composed ‘Nachtviolen’ (D752), a marvel of cryptic intimacy, luscious and delicate and supremely simple, whose significance is deeper than its surface meaning – as we shall see. There had been the ‘Der Musensohn’ (D764), which dances off through clear air to a land of immortal youth, and early in 1823 ‘Du Bist die Ruh’’ (D776) a devotional and transcendent suggestion of a satisfied lover’s peace. Collin’s ‘Der Zwerg’ (D771) is the ballad of a court dwarf who strangles on board a boat the queen with whom he is infatuated. Schubert, laughing, set it in a few minutes flat; and he invokes from a faded grotesque music whose gloom chills the heart.
But the prize of 1823 is ‘Auf dem Wasser zu Singen’ (D774), which depicts the soul departing upon water in the evening sunlight. It is the supreme evocation of Sehnsucht: the early Romantics’ longing for a mystic world of the spirit, with our temporal world as mere shimmering appearance. There is no greater instance of the haunted ambivalence which underlies all Schubert’s work that this fluttering juxtaposition of major and minor, of longing and radiant fulfilment, capturing at the same moment fervour and exalted serenity.
The origins of the story about a beautiful maid of the mill, one of whose suitors kills himself, are difficult to trace. It was the subject of Paisiello’s opera ‘L’amor contrastato’ (1788), which made a triumphant progress through Germany under the title ‘Die schöne Müllerin’. But Goethe had also written a sequence on the subject of a young man who loses his heart to a miller’s daughter, and there is a whole section in ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’, the famous anthology of folk-poetry. Paisiello was the toast of Berlin after the Napoleonic Wars; and adapted as a party-game his plot was picked up by the Wilhelm Müller, a young Romantic whose best poetry celebrated the Greek struggle for liberty, but who himself had plenty of experience of unrequited love. Müller was nagged by his circle of friends to write out his extemporised contributions, which appeared in newspapers and which, as Seventy-seven poems from the posthumous papers of a travelling horn player, were published in full during 1821.
How Schubert came across them is not clear. The story is that he pocketed them from Benedikt Randhartinger’s library and presented the astonished owner with his settings next morning. More likely he had been introduced to them by Weber in 1822. However it happened, in Schubert’s hands they became the vehicle for one of the great leaps forward in musical possibility, which kept him busy both in and out of hospital during 1823. Selecting twenty-six of the poems, he presents us with a journey of one man’s discovery: beginning with homespun images of masculinity in the open air, then the fantasy of virility, of being desired and of absolute, infatuated possession (the miller’s daughter is a tabula rasa upon which the wandering hired hand projects his self-belief), continuing through jealousy and doubt into the realisation of devastating failure.
Seven years earlier Beethoven had published his own song-sequence on the subject of love, ‘An die ferne Geliebte’. Schubert knew it, and ignored it. He created instead an evolving drama with an underlying thread: recognising that the poetry had been written under the influence of Goethe, and digging into the scenic and dramatic resources he had himself developed in setting Goethe’s work. He was stirred by the notion of overwhelming emotion mirrored in nature; and if Müller’s verses are naive, Schubert’s treatment has the sophisticated subterfuge of artlessness, fashioning something that feels as natural as folksong. He had come to terms with Schiller’s allegories, he knew the language he was looking for, the tensions and resolutions he could exploit: its iconography too, the imagery of the young Romantic world. He took the language of flowers and dragged it towards the language of Tristan, summoning a universality and force that poems alone could not approach. He creates an archetype, a myth at a new pitch of expressiveness; a variety yet cumulative wholeness which adds a new dimension of sustained drama and narrative to the song form.
Romanticism brought fresh intensity to language, but German poetry has always had Arcadian leanings. Goethe is not the intellectual in his love-poems that Shakespeare or Danté are, but someone close to nature. Schubert, above all, lacks guile: he is never courtly, never domesticated. As Richard Capell said of a composer whose outlook often seems too trusting to have known disillusionment,
He roams at will. Schubert’s Arcadia is his whole known world, from which he never conceives of an escape. There is no bitterness…for Schubert has everything to find out for himself. That is why we cannot help thinking of him as a shepherd, fluting away his young days in grassy solitude.
Not quite, for the leitmotiv of his music is the sound of flowing water, which stands for life. The suggestion of a stream runs through ‘Die schöne Müllerin’, whether overtly or as some hidden presence; and the waves seem to adumbrate the moods with astonishing psychological aptness, and become their commentary. Only in excesses of the miller’s imagination does the stream disappear: it is his source of counsel, the fountain of innocence and vitality from which he tries to break free, and in the end, the coldness that drowns him. Charles Rosen writes of the connexion between an awareness of landscape and the awareness of death:
The most signal triumphs of the Romantic portrayal of memory are not those which recall past happiness, but remembrances of those moments when future happiness still seemed possible. There is no greater pain than to remember past happiness in a time of grief – but that is the classical tradition of the tragedy of memory. Romantic memories are often those of absence, of that which never was.
In these circumstances the fragrance of a flower, an ill-wind, a sound from the past, even ‘die böse farbe’, an evil colour, brings with it a spectre taken out of place and time. As Rosen continues, ‘These memories do not cause the past to live again; they make us feel its death.’ Such emblems, to the Romantics, are more than literary conceits, more than convenient ellipsis. They are a totem as much alive as sinews and bone.
Schubert intensifies Müller by stripping him of dramatic events, even of anecdote. We are left with the trivialities of everyday life (a left ribbon, the glimpse of a reed flute) whose significance becomes that of life or death. For the first time in music, Schubert gives us a purely lyrical expression which moves towards the inevitability of physical extinction – just as ‘Winterreise’, four years later, will take the same persona (older, wiser, embittered) to show it suffer spiritual death.
It is impossible to separate these songs from their ordered place, because each establishes the emotional atmosphere for the next. Schubert opens with pastoral music: the miller’s carefree vigour, the swing of the mill-wheels and muscles of steel, are caught in the same flourish. The cycle’s emotional climax, ‘Mein!’ is followed by the ambiguous hush of ‘Pause’, after which anything might happen. ‘Die Liebe Farbe’ (‘the beloved colour’) is a quiet crescendo of heartbreak, falling apart at the tempo of a pulse, using the tonality of alienation and derangement. It has a numbness that lies beyond jealousy and despair, an uncomprehending obsession which anticipates suicide. Yet the end, when it comes, is handled with the delicacy of a lullaby.
Schubert’s control depends on the finesse of his tonal progressions, which cater for every opposition and nuance of tone and meaning. Briefly, ‘Der Müller und der Bach’ uses a language which clashes as tempestuously as any discord in Liszt’s ‘Vallée d’Obermann’. More often the listener must remember earlier songs in the cycle to make sense of fleeting harmonic subtleties. The pivotal piece is ‘Thränenregen’ (‘shower of tears’), in which the first intimation of failure is palpable: and we realise that ‘Mein!’, which follows it, is phrased in the past tense. It is the recollection of what never happened.
How far away the certainties of the classical world have receded. Rosen concludes, ‘The song cycle is the most original musical form created in the first half of the nineteenth century. It most clearly embodies the Romantic conception of experience as a gradual unfolding and illumination.’ The form of Schubert’s song cycle is no less precise than that of a Classical sonata, but its precision is only gradually comprehended as it unfolds. This is the lesson Schubert now brings to his instrumental music.
Franz Schubert by Gustav Klimt, Oil on canvas, 1899. Austria, Vienna Museum.
SCHUBERT’S HIGH SUMMER, 1824-1827
‘No one understands somebody else’s unhappiness or joy. People imagine that they can reach each other, but they only pass one another by. How sad it is for the man who realises this! What I have created is born of my understanding of music and my own sorrow: those works that were created mostly by suffering seem to please the world least of all.’
Schubert’s diary, 27 March 1824
‘Schubert is conspicuous among great composers for the insufficiency of his musical education. His extraordinary gifts and his passion for composing were from the first allowed to luxuriate untrained. He had no great talent for self-criticism, and the least possible feeling for abstract design, balance and order…’
C H H Parry: The Art of Music
Posterity’s problem in grasping the reasons why Schubert writes as he does owes a little to his status as a transitional figure between Classicism and the Romantics. It has far more to do with an idiom which is unique to itself. How true is it that, in assembling his larger musical structures, Schubert fails by the standards of his predecessors, as an architect of classical rigour? He has, after all, been called ‘degenerate’. More to the point, how much are human emotions a rigorous thing – beyond one historical period in western man’s attempts to make sense of them?
Schubert was never happy with conventional sonata form. In his earliest pieces he grapples with it like a good student: later, it seems to bore him. And it doesn’t matter, because the emotional flux of song-writing (the turbulence of a changing persona which, over the course of a song, a story-teller is able to reveal) gives him a pretext to break free from the formal straitjacket of his times. But as Martin Chusid has shown, an impatience with the orthodox tensions of classical structure tingles within him from his first steps in instrumental composing. What is classical structure? It is about contrast, and a richness of allusion which stems from the relationship of parts to the whole: an antagonism between themes which is at last resolved. But Schubert is a melodist, whose melodies are shot through with dazzling harmonic colour: that is to say, an awareness of the relationships between keys that gives known material new insight and reverberation, the changing context that enables a singing line to soar like a bird. What can he do?
Schubert’s piano sonatas are both formal and informal. Formal, because his mature essays (unlike Beethoven’s) have the same number of movements as a symphony: they are Schubert in his Sunday best, giving domestic music the status of a symphony. Informal, because Schubert writes away from the piano, and he wants his sonatas to have the apparent spontaneity of an improvisation. The slow movement of the D959 A major Sonata is a case in point. He begins with a barcarolle, which he needs to bring back with even greater pathos so as to draw the Andantino to a close. A contrast is needed, a middle section. But what a display Schubert provides! It is a storm as real as any in the ‘Annees de Pélèrinage’ two decades later, yet in a different realm: a storm of the spirit. It is a calculated attack not only on conventional form, but on the boundaries of sense itself.
When I say that Schubert is bored, I mean he seems unable to suffer any length of time in a given key without the sort of harmonic digression which is apt to burst like a firework; and his tonal iridescence cries out for a recognition which is unburdened by the proprieties of classical style. Already we have touched on the interplay between major and minor in Schubert’s songs, and it is the conjunction of the two that gives his instrumental and orchestral work its dramatic propulsion. The opening Allegro of the D887 Quartet (June 1826) is torn by such violent collisions of tonality, such audacious harmonic schemes, that the choice of G major as home key seems almost fortuitous. The smallest changes find energy to drive a whole movement. Only in his last music is this post-Classical harmony most thoroughly evolved; but the non-vocal works of 1824-27 see Schubert’s scheme of things being worked out. Through them one can witness the tragedy in a teacup of the Fourth Symphony – the almost unrelieved charm of early sonatas – being supplanted by something more flexible, diverse.
For a moment we need to step forward to the piano music of his last months, including the Piano Sonata in C minor, D958, which is one of the most formal and one of the most questioning – the most subversive – pieces he wrote. Consider the first movement. Ostensibly its guiding spirit is the ‘Pathétique’, and Beethoven would have been the first to savour the noise it made: this tolling, resonant amplitude and emotion pared back to the cutting edge, what Beethoven used to call ‘the voice from the vault.’ Its crucial tonal intervals are those of the fifth and minor sixth: expressed in different keys, but above all in a little figure of G – A flat – G which serves as a pivot, a point of reference as it emerges in different guises: sometimes in the treble, sometimes in the bass, but always differently harmonised so as to suggest (in minor keys) darkness and stress; or (in the major), tension and ambiguity. So much for the opening theme, the first subject. As it dies away in vehemence the little figure repeats more expressively, and in the second subject (a hymn-like tune of soothing warmth) its harmony is innocent, simple. This, and an echo which is shifted down a tone, means that the hymn sounds warmer still on its return, borne on a tranquil figuration in the bass.
Not for long. A dance-like variation plunges the second subject into the minor, and at the end of it, the G – A flat – G motif becomes a cry of despair. To end his exposition in a mood of proper reconciliation, Schubert’s harmonies return to the major, tinged with an edge of sorrow; so that the three notes sound more equivocal than before, and at last the plangency of the minor sixth is made to reveal its true identity. The music’s credentials seem flawless, so far.
Soon something is not right. The development section’s aggressive jostle of keys is a deliberate act of disorientation, and the coda’s reprise of its material means that we end the movement not in synthesis, but in disquiet. So much for the psychology of classical form. But what is more interesting is this first movement’s use of silence: the pauses in which a listener’s fears intensify, to be confirmed or confounded. Here, as in the Scherzo’s broken and self-interrogatory phrases, Schubert creates a climate of emotional didacticism: as if he wanted to establish a sounding-board for a state of being, for what it might be like to occupy a certain moral condition.
What, then, can be said of the slow movement’s changing masks? Its subjects tackle each other as if they were voices in an developing narrative. Such events lie a world away from the ceremonial contrasts of classicism’s ne plus ultra: the variations of Beethoven or Mozart, which achieve transcendence when other options have been exhausted. Schubert’s fascination lies not with structural but with emotional potential. His music moves like a dialogue conducted in shifting light. This is what Alfred Brendel meant when he spoke of somnambulism:
In his larger forms, Schubert is a wanderer. He likes to move at the edge of the precipice, and does so with the assurance of a sleepwalker. To wander is the Romantic condition; one yields to it enraptured (as in the finale of the A major Sonata) or driven and plagued by the terror of finding no escape (as in the C minor). More often than not, happiness is but the surface of despair. Suddenly, the mind is overcast. Nothing is more typical of Schubert than these febrile afflictions of unease and horror.
The falsehood of imagined order has been lost. Schubert’s chaos is not that of incompetence, any more than the joy with which he revolves those moments in which he was free from care. His purpose in each is to establish not a framework but a fate. Aaron Copland described best the conception of art that strikes home for us today, and it not the Enlightenment’s:
Each work brings with it an element of self-discovery. I must create in order to know myself, and since self-knowledge is a never-ending search, each new work brings only a part answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ and brings with it the need to go on to other and different part-answers.
How does any work of art operate? James Joyce spoke of ‘epiphanic moments’: the instants of revelation, he said, where all anticipation is suddenly transformed. Its equivalent, in music, is the Gestalt: a creative manipulation of the double entrendre, using all the devices at a composer’s disposal. When it comes to manipulating his listeners’ expectations, leading them on through a movement only to sweep all their preconceptions aside as deftly as a magician, Schubert is second-to-none.
I do not mean only the interlude in ‘Das Lied in Grünen’ (D917), heavenly though it is. I mean something as important as Heidegger’s conviction that poets are in the vanguard of a changed conception of being. Take the opening of D960, the last piano sonata Schubert wrote: a stream of lyricism with only three chords to hint at suspense to come. He draws back from these intimations of drama, then seizes them to press forward, changing to the minor and bringing back his glorious opening tune in a veil of ambivalence, so that it sounds more heart-rending than ever. His ‘draughtsmanship’ in these bars, as Tovey lovingly called it, is one of the greatest miracles in music.
Revolutions, including Beethovenian ones, are a rattling good idea in their place. But the crackle of cordite is not the only way in which Romanticism needs to manifest itself; and if Beethoven (conspicuously in the dusty battles of his middle period, the time he wrote the ‘Waldstein’ and ‘Appassionata’) presents us with a robust Hegelian dialectic, we should also find time for more reflective processes of evolution. The master himself was reported to have said of Schubert, ‘This one will surpass me.’ So announced the Vienna newspapers in 1819; and whilst rumours are generally groundless, one suspects Beethoven might have been the first to appreciate that, if we confine music within the limits of some implacable dogma and stringency, we deny it space to grow.
The year 1824-25 was a golden one for Schubert. Beginning in despair, it ended with new friends, fame at the Musikverein, and new intellectual horizons as the craving for a ‘grand symphony’ possessed his imagination. March 1824 was the occasion of his drunken tirade against a couple of Opera House musicians who were tactless enough to approach him for a commission:
Artists? Musical hacks is what you are, nothing else! How can anyone spend his whole life doing nothing but bite on a piece of wood with holes in it? I am an artist, I! I am Franz Schubert, whom everybody knows and recognizes. Who has written great things and beautiful things that you don’t begin to understand. And who is going to write still more beautiful things: cantatas and quartets, operas and symphonies! Because I am not just a composer of Ländler as the stupid newspapers say and stupid people repeat – I am Schubert! And don’t you forget it! You crawling, gnawing worms that ought to be crushed under my foot – the foot of the man who is reaching to the stars. To the stars, I say, whilst you poor puffing worms wriggle in the dust and with the dust are scattered and rot!
This is Schubert on the brink of his last period, more than ever intent upon winning – as he knew he had to win – his public. He wanted to become an instrumental and orchestral composer, he declared: using the piano sonata and the string quartet as stepping stones. Death was an inevitability; meanwhile you hoped and lived. There were charades to play in convivial company, good mountain air to breathe, tours with Vogl. Yet Schwind writes of a new seriousness:
Schubert is inhumanly busy. A new quartet is to be performed at Schuppanzigh’s…He has long been at work on an octet, with the greatest zeal. If you go to see him during the day he says, ‘Hullo, how are you? – Good’ – and goes on working, whereupon you depart.
The work which was absorbing his energies, the Octet for strings and wind instruments (D803), was commissioned by Ferdinand Count Troyer, an amateur clarinettist, and at Troyer’s suggestion modelled on Beethoven’s Septet, Opus 20. The number of movements is the same (six), but Schubert adds a second violin, and vibrant brilliance of tone. The wind are offered every chance to show off their cantabile, strikingly so in a series of enchanted dialogues. This is the ‘Trout’ of a man who has known wisdom and decay: its Scherzo a chase through sunlit country: the Minuet and Trio dancing with the easy rhythm of the Ländler, yet using harmonic adventures to twist euphony into artistic significance. The Theme and Variations pick up a jaunty love-duet from the early ‘Die Fremde von Salamanka’.
There is, you might say, a worm at the core of this music. The tremulous opening of its finale quotes Schiller’s ‘Schöne Welt, wo bist du?’, which to Schubert has become associated with corrupted joy. Yet its purpose is to make the following Allegro shine more brightly, and its brief return is an impressive dramatic stroke. The Octet is the old Divertimento – courtly, suave and sociable – infused occasionally with a new sense of a Romantic quest.
The first violinist in the Octet, Ignaz Schuppanzigh, served as an occasional elder mentor to Schubert: and it was Beethoven’s own quartet (Schuppanzigh, Holz, Weiss and Linke) which gave the first performance of the Quartet in A minor, D804, on 14 March 1824. ‘Rather slowly’ felt the composer, ‘but with great purity and tenderness’. The kernel of this pellucid music is its Minuet, which quotes ‘Die Götter Griechenlands’: as the Octet did (‘Lovely world, where are you? Return once more, fair and flowered age of nature!’) but in a context of infinite sorrow: levitated beyond pity into a memorial realm through two bars of bare harmony (a hushed figuration of three notes) and rhythm. The effect is to isolate the movement and raise it into music with the sense of a visitation, a moment of ordained time. The slow movement draws on the theme from the third Entr’acte to ‘Rosamunde’, which is used again in the D935 Impromptus, but never aches more than here. In the Hungarian finale the mood changes, within an eerie envelope, from geniality to anguish.
The A minor Quartet and its successor in D minor (D810, also March 1824) were planned for inclusion in Schubert’s Opus 29, and each borrows themes from his most taciturn songs. The music of the D810 Scherzo is taken from the sixth of twelve tiny German Dances (D790) but the slow movement, Andante con moto, is a series of variations drawn from his song ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’. Death here has the status it had to Mozart: ‘the truest and best friend of man.’ It no longer holds terror, it is an inevitability and a consolation; but neither can there be the triumphant conclusion of Beethoven’s Opus 95 Quartet, which was written at roughly the same time. Schubert’s hammering rhythm becomes a threat in the first movement, a funereal trudge through the second, a dance in the third and, in the finale, a momentous and deathly Tarantella. There is no question that Schubert intended this unity, and pursued it through every bar. The stylistic gropings of the Quartettsatz have become a conviction of means and goals, both of which are without precedent.
The D810 Quartet was met (reports Franz Lachner) ‘with by no means unanimous approval’ by its private audience in Vienna. The same fate befell the last of this autumnal triptych, and the last quartet Schubert wrote: the G major (D887), which was written within ten days, two years later. Nobody, it was said, could understand what Schubert might be driving at; and even in 1850, D887 was felt to be too uncompromising for general circulation. Its first movement is music of visionary intensity, spun on by electric collisions within the tightest constraints; yet pervaded too by the chill of Weber’s ‘Freischütz’. The effect is of questions and answers: a sinister interchange whose significance lies outside itself. The slow movement is a lament which manages to be both trenchant and menacing, and it casts a shadow in which any subsequent optimism can be seen as no more than empty posturing.
It seems banal to mention the virtuosity with which Schubert has mastered sonata form. The G major lives in the same season as ‘Winterreise’, and it is no surprise that material of its Andante reappears there in ‘Einsamkeit’.
Between the D minor and G major, Schubert had been busy. In 1825 he made a five-month tour of Upper Austria with Vogl. It was the longest and the most productive holiday of his life. ‘I find my compositions everywhere’ he wrote to his father. There were new sonatas to play, new songs to sing. When he stayed with Spaun’s relations in Linz, Anton Ottenwald was surprised to see him looking so well and strong, ‘so comfortably bright and genially communicative.
‘I have never seen him like this’ his host continues. ‘Serious, profound, and as though inspired. How he talked of art, of poetry, of his youth, of the relationship of ideals to life, and so on. I was more and more amazed at such a mind.’ And then Ottenwald reveals, ‘By the way, he began a symphony at Gmunden, which is to be performed in Vienna this winter.’ At last Schubert was within reach of his lifelong wish.
Long before Schubert’s birth, the symphony had outgrown its humble origins and become supreme vehicle for serving what was called ‘the new sonata style.’ The orchestra’s increasing powers of projection, its self-sufficiency and dazzling sonority, made it ideal to project a purely musical argument without recourse to either a verbal text or the concerto principle of the Baroque era. Demanding a musical idiom which had the resources to sustain itself, the orchestra turned composers towards planning on a large (eventually a gargantuan) canvas. Instrumentation, harmonic planning, tonal structure and the deployment of themes: these were the nuts and bolts of symphonic writing, and the epitome of Classical style. As an exercise in vision, scope and integration, the symphony’s possibilities seemed limitless, and it came to be seen as no less than a challenge the human spirit. In ground-breaking strides it became the yardstick of greatness against which Schubert had to measure himself. He pursued it like the Grail. It was, as he once said to the publisher Schott, ‘the highest form of musical art.’ In 1823 he’d had a trail of failures and fragments behind him: now, with indomitable music under his belt, he felt ready to tackle his mission.
For decades the 1825 symphony was thought to be lost. We know now that it is the same as the ‘Great’ C major: D944, which the composer revised in the last years of his life, or appended with a fresh date to make it easier to sell.
Gmunden, in which he and Vogl had stayed six weeks, rests idyllically on the shores of Lake Traun. From there the two moved on to Gastein, a spa town amongst mountain waterfalls. The Great C major too is an irresistible torrent of sound. It is, as Sir Thomas Beecham was the first to say, the symphony in which Schubert proves himself to be the peer of Beethoven. It is the last great Classical symphony: looking back the roots of its tradition, rediscovering Mozart’s enjoyment of sheer movement, emulating the scale of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ and Ninth Symphonies, owing next-to-nothing to any of them.
Years later, Robert Schumann appealed to the C major in his own proposal of marriage to Clara Wieck. And he wrote:
Everyone must recognize, while listening to this symphony, that it reveals to us something more than mere beauty, mere joy and sorrow. Here we find, beside the most masterly technicalities of musical composition, life in every vein; colouring down to the finest gradation; meaning everywhere, sharp expression in every detail…
And then the heavenly length of the symphony, like that of a thick novel in four volumes, perhaps by Jean Paul who also was never able to reach a conclusion, and for the best reason – to permit the reader to think it out for himself. How this refreshes, this feeling of abundance…the entirely new world that opens before us.
Now, Schumann doesn’t quite hit the nub. Schubert’s writing was never more richly variegated than here; but its bounding rhythmic spring gives a majestic cohesion, something easy and gracefully splendid, to the widest range of interludes. Once its proportions and its symmetry have been understood, it is a piece whose thinking is impeccably concise. Its appetite for life and sense of pace, the sweep with which it carries off its own weight, mean that it is not a minute too long.
The disembodied call with which two horns open the symphony has a familiar ring. It uses the rhythm Schubert used to set Goethe’s ‘Gesang der Geister über den Wassern’ and also ‘Die Allmacht’, Schubert’s song of praise to the Creator, which was written in August 1825. As John Reed observed,
The primordial hymn which announces the theme of the great C major is a hymn to the glory of the natural world…Its pages bear the imprint everywhere of his romantic feeling for natural beauty, both in its total conception and in detail. Nobody who has heard the notes of the traditional alpenhorn echoing round the mountain valleys can doubt where Schubert found the inspiration for ‘the horns of Elfland faintly blowing’ which so magically illumine the first movement.
In all its moods – serene, bucolic, or in the exhilarated perpetuum mobile of its finale – this is a symphony brought to life by song; but a song of grander breadth, sonorous power and sustained fervour than could be heard before or since.
It used to be thought that the Grand Duo in C, D812 (June 1824) was a transcription for duet of a Gmunden-Gastein symphony that had been lost. Such is the richness of Schubert’s piano music in these years. He tried his hand at four piano sonatas: ever more unified in their themes, more cogent in their manipulation of themes. The first of them, in C major (D840: April 1825), is unfinished – hence its nickname of ‘Reliquié’.
This is the first sonata to show the extraordinary spaciousness of Schubert’s later instrumental music. Confidence, a sense of striding out into nature, is as marked as in the Wanderer Fantasy, but with lyricism in place of the earlier fevered display. There is a hint of Alice through the Looking Glass as the listener is led through a series of remote keys, to a last-minute twist. The second movement is even more surprising: a cradle-song which is interrupted by explosive interludes, with quirky harmonic delights en route. After that, there are only sketches.
The overall plan and opening theme of the A minor Sonata, D845, come from the same stock; but its emotional affinities lie with the A minor work of two years before. It is as if D784 were the glacial egg from which a work of art has germinated: if by art we mean, as Henry James did, ‘a mind in dialogue with itself’ or as Schoenberg believed, the expression of significant emotional experience through an organism with an anatomy, a life of its own, a function and reason for being. In D845 the most intimate and the most massive perspectives are aligned through an act of unfolding consciousness in which optimism always fails. It is an event as private and as public as our own mortality. A trio with the naivety of a fable is pitted against a structure of brutal force: the private meditation of the slow movement’s variations – only once instance of the sonata’s stupendous capacity for transmutation – offers a fleeting glimpse of wounded innocence, the memory of something faraway which is more intense for having been violated.
If D845 has the closeness of a confession, the next sonata (D major, D850: August 1825) is Schubert at his most ceremonial. It was written as a display-piece for a virtuoso pianist, Karl Maria von Bocklet. Thematic emptiness is not a charge one can often lay against Schubert, but perhaps in the opening here. Nor is it the issue, because he uses the clash of major and minor to generate one of his most impressive structures. The benevolent slow movement shoots red blood into the Larghetto of Beethoven’s Second Symphony, but it’s in the Scherzo one becomes aware of an agenda hidden beneath the surface. Its opening bars are mock-heroic, and the final Allegro moderato trots away with angelic sweetness. No wonder Schumann was appalled by this little game. For Schumann, thinking like a child came naturally. For Schubert, it is a matter of guile.
The molto moderato e cantabile of the Sonata in G major, D894 (October 1826) has the same mysterious poise as ‘Du bist die Ruh’’ and ‘Im Abendrot’, an ethereal calmness which suggests time standing still, as it does in the opening of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. Both this and the slow movement use dramatic interventions to animate placid opening themes, which then resolve in warm affection. It is contemporary with the quartet in the same key, yet it has the relationship to Schubert’s piano music that Beethoven’s Opus 95 has to his chamber music: a transitional essay, which looks forward to Schubert’s last months whilst being a delight in itself.
The Rondo finale has the quality of bells across a meadow. This time Schumann was at his most perceptive. ‘If anyone has not the imagination to solve the riddle of the last movement, let him leave it alone.’ And of the sonata as a whole? ‘In form and spirit, it is the most perfect work.’
‘The soul of Man is like the water; from heaven it comes, to heaven it ascends…Soul of mankind, how like the water, fate of mankind, how like the wind.’
Goethe, ‘Gesang der Geister über den Wassern’
‘It is no longer that happy time during which every object seems to be surrounded by the bright splendour of youth, but rather a time of fateful recognition of a miserable reality which I try to as best I can to beautify by my imagination.’
Schubert’s letter to his brother Ferdinand, July 1824
Are Schubert’s songs for chorus no more than neglected manuscripts for a dead form of music-making? If so, the loss is ours. ‘Die Nacht’ (D983: ‘See how the clear stars move in the meadows of heaven’) evokes phosphorescent stillness within its first bar. ‘Wehmuth’ (‘Melancholy’, D825) is about the atmosphere that envelopes a mood. Then the nuances of words can look after themselves; for harmonic progression means that upon scene-painting Schubert is able to fuse a story of one individual’s loss with consistent fatalism. He summons the Romantic conception of life and death within a pastoral landscape, unified by the rhythm of a tolling bell, and no other composer could make a major key shift quite so pitiable. The dissolving musical contexts of ‘Nachthelle’ (D892) allow Schubert to depict first the earth, then the spellbound poet, and a lambent field of constellations. Within fifteen minutes, all three pieces are over. Yet each is a macrocosm: and if Mahler claimed that a symphony should be like the world, we have been made aware that for Schubert every song is a world.
As Richard Capell used to say: Schubert had eyes, he glanced rapidly, and he took in the main features of a poet’s scene as no musician before him had done. A hint of landscape, of atmosphere, or of an accompanying movement or gesture, ‘struck his fancy and started in him picturesque figures of a unique vividness.’ His song-writing represents a special agreement between music and verse, unlike any known before or since.
Above everything his songs are meditations, not meant to address a crowd, but discovering delight in new poetry and a new instrument. He was exhilarated by it, engrossed: and like Beethoven he conceived the developing piano as an orchestra. Comparisons of the keyboard writing of either man to passages for strings, brass or drums, are not fanciful. Yet the piano is an oblique instrument, a chimerical instrument. Its voice lacks colour. It veers between sensuous communication and an idea of music, an abstraction: and precisely because of that – not in spite of it – the piano calls up an imaginative potency beyond its resources. False to assume, then, that the pianist in a Schubert song is an accompanist. Singer and instrumentalist are on different planes, joined in a communion between equals, in an act of symbiosis that neither alone can more than hint at. In many of Schubert’s songs the melodic line is not self-supporting, but glows through the figures and harmonies with which it is associated, their rhythmic agitations and developing emotional suggestion. It would be as facile to dismiss him as a melodist as it is to label him a classicist.
Schubert’s songs are related to the Lieder of the past only the formalities which they negate: by their discovery of simple, indivisible, invincible dramatic movement. In ‘Im Abendrot’ or ‘Litanei’ the sheer quality of the long vocal line, shorn of virtuosity and all extraneous effect, is never in doubt. In ‘Der Atlas’ (D957) he hugs every word, but things are not as simple as that. The kernel of the song is a line well into Heine’s poem, ‘Eine Welt, die ganze Welt’ (‘A world, the whole miserable world, is my burden’) and for this key phrase Schubert has devised a welling motive, a gathering of force which his introduction must anticipate like a prophecy, and from which the remainder of the song must grow. So it does. Schubert matches metre and poetic import to achieve an embodiment of Romanticism’s Zeitgeist, its defining world-view.
In his Lieder, Schubert aligns music and Romantic literature to represent what has been called subjectivity in action. By this I mean more than an act of eager artistic engagement. The aim of a Romantic song is not to enhance the emotional force of the text, nor even to refashion its meaning by either direct or ironic means. The purpose is, as Lawrence Kramer has put it, ‘to represent the activity of a unique subject: conscious, self-conscious, and unconscious, whose experience takes place as a series of conflicts and reconciliations between inner and outer reality.’ The subject of Romantic poetry, according to Wordsworth, is a ‘mighty mind’ which ‘feeds upon infinity’. Its mission is no less than to enlarge the historical and the personal concept of self, to articulate the voice of the self. To quote The Prelude (1805), such a mind is
Ever on the watch
Willing to work and to be wrought upon…
Exalted by an underpresence
The sense of God, or whosoe’er is dim
And vast in its own being.
A voice for the self, then. But whose voice? The persona of the composer, speaking through music, but standing apart from it? No, not necessarily; nor the persona of the poet, the text. Above either of them stands something summoned up for the occasion, a personality with a life of its own which affirms itself by recasting the rhetoric, rhythm and imagery of the text on its own terms: giving it the ‘magical power’ of imagination described by Samuel Taylor-Coleridge, which ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.’ The movement of a song corresponds to this process of discovery, where the composer’s imagination encounters another thinking entity, which it might accept or repudiate. It is an meeting between the self and a kaleidoscope of other opportunities, other personified self-images, other possibilities in knowing.
Classical tonality is in the business of resolving things: making clear, making good, making simple. Not so for Schubert. His songs recurrently incorporate a conflict between Classical tonality and harmonic innovation, which never quite escapes its Classical origins, yet draws them out beyond a system, beyond a dialogue between systems. His songs are a human testament – Classicism parodied, saluted, betrayed and made uncanny. They are an arena for clashing perspectives, where what seemed natural is exposed, stripped to the bones, appropriated, or left alone. Where he leaves things well alone, his ingenuousness is not simple, but sophisticated. ‘Heidenröslein’, charming though it may be, is not the invention of an innocent. Quite as much as the D850 Piano Sonata, the Lieder are a feat of metacommunication; by which I mean, a commentary on the presumptions upon which a body of experience depends and with them, the means by which it can be expanded, recrafted, brought down.
You see this most clearly in those through-composed songs where Schubert splits the composition into disjunctive halves which, at the end, are tenuously reconciled by what Kramer calls ‘tonal circling’: a desultory process of floating through a cycle of keys in the direction of home. So ‘Einsamkeit’ (from ‘Winterreise’), begins with bleak detachment, framed in a mordant impaction of harmonies. Its second section is a jagged display of shifting dynamics. Twice the music struggles towards a climax, and the credulous tonality of the opening gains a bitter frustration. Its frame of reference has changed: truth has broken through just as at seems we were about to fall into a fool’s oblivion. This is a song about learning a lesson, about being the same but changed. What games of subtle mystification Schubert plays, and what clarity of perception they bring.
Classicism is, for Schubert, the flickering background before which he plays out his lonely dramas. Edmund Husserl, a phenomenologist, introduced the concept of ‘horizon’, by which he meant the tacitly apprehended context of lived experience. In ‘Die Stadt’ (D957), where the poet glimpses a town from his boat, classical sense represents the security of the past, and harmony threatens to collapse with the poet’s sanity: when the sun rises the light of day reveals only the pain of lost love, a neurotic re-enactment of failure. But there are none of the histrionics by which Tchaikovsky or Mahler would announce their latest bout of ostentatious self-pity. Schubert’s harmonic vacillation places him in a different league of genius; and with him we end as we began, in an impressionistic haze of existential dread.
Why are there so many songs about nature? Partly because the evaporating tone of the early piano lends itself to rapid and watery figurations, whose changing currents suit a mind of Schubert’s darting inventiveness. But no, not really. Schubert is an artist who deals in shared experience, but the experience of his fellow men as an extension of nature: nature as the gateway to the world of the spirit which for the Romantics was a higher reality, yet nature too as a force implacable in its capacity for cruelty and dissolution. Just as Schubert was a social animal enlightened and destroyed by the activities of his friends (and there is so much of their poetry in his hymns to creation), so it was to predestination that he owed everything, including his knowledge of his own appalling fate. Primeval diversity and renewal might serve as an emblem for human hope, their energy for the fact that each of us is ultimately and horribly alone; but for Schubert there was more immediate significance. It was the force with which his vital urges ebbed and flowed. Take a letter from Vienna in 1826:
I am not working at all – the weather here is truly appalling. The Almighty seems to have forsaken us altogether, for the sun refuses to shine. It is May, and we cannot sit in any garden yet. Appalling! Ghastly! And the most cruel thing on earth for me.
What more could be expected from a syphilitic, whose body was corroding as his vision became more acute, whose decay fluctuated with the cycle of seasons?
Seen in this light, a symbol of fidelity and modesty (and this is what Dame’s Violets, the flower of Aphrodite, meant to Schubert) serves too as a token of clinging through thick and thin. An image of poisoned love, as well; but that came after the composing of ‘Nachtviolen’ (D752) in 1823. Yet on any evidence, ‘Nachtviolen’ is no longer a song about a flower. It addresses a significant element in our moral predicament. It is about a land of childlike rapture, of purity and the vulnerability of innocence. And this, distilled into music, lies at the heart of its sense of balm within suspended time.
The rococo elegance of ‘Gott im Frühlinge’ (D448), fresh with the nascent energy of rising sap, is more than a pantheist’s nostalgia for an age in which emotion was apprehended more simply and clearly than it is for us. It finds Schubert’s most optimistic recognition of what could never be regained. ‘Art concealing art’, it has been said of this song: and so, inimitably, it is. No wonder the Viennese used to complain that ‘this time the popular composer has gone too far.’’ The universe of his thinking – the universality of his themes – was as far beyond their perception as the stars through which Schulze, in his poem ‘Der Liebliche Stern’ (D861) explores a decline into madness. Schubert’s significance is in the fact that his music is never contained in its form; its modernity is its intangibility, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted.
The figure of the Harper’s Songs, an outcast beneath the wandering moon, is not an isolated artistic phenomenon. The withered leaves and pathetic fallacy of ‘Die Blumen Schmerz’ (‘The flowers’ pain’, D731) and ‘Die Blumensprache’ (‘The language of flowers’, D519), the sense of transgression (‘flowers proclaim our suffering’) portend a desire for death. The rose (‘Die Rose’, D745) is a symbol of purity to mark the progress of a living being on the path to eternal cold. In ‘Nach einem Gewitter’ (D561) the felicities of natural order (embodied in harmony) shine like a string of pearls: the stars are tokens of constancy beyond a world of self-delusion, part of an immensity with which we can commune. In ‘Die Sterne’ (D176) Johann Fellinger asks, ‘You stars, so noble and so fair; What drives you on your dark course Through the blue ocean of the ether?’ And in ‘Am See’ Bruchmann speculates,
If man becomes a lake,
Stars, oh so many stars
Will fall from the gates of heaven
Into the play of waves within hissoul.
It is the pristine insight of an outsider which lifts Schubert’s music into a timelessness which the faded sentimentality of its literary sources could never attain. Listen to ‘Der Liebliche Stern’ and you realize that he has no need to follow every nuance of these words. This is because each song presents a world-view which is pervasive and compelling. Schubert gives us a portrait, not of a mood, but of what it is like to be such a person. The richness of his suggestion – the tingle of empathy between Schubert’s experience and our own – makes for artistry of a supreme calibre. But what makes it magical is its sense of contradictions assimilated and made fertile. The words of ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ (D774) might almost be his epitaph: ‘May time disappear on shimmering wings: I vanish myself from changing time.’ The half-light of ambivalence, the sense of stasis within motion, of languor within palpitating ardour: all of this, polished between Classical discipline and Romantic contemplation, adds to Schubert’s unique lucidity and stature.
The moment of dusk is a special one for Schubert. To a Romantic thinker the world apprehended through our senses was simply a hieroglyph for one beyond. The function of the artist was to lead us to the frontier between the seen and the unseen, to express that longing for the world of the spirit which the Romantics called Sehnsucht. Nature stands at this barrier as the omnipotence of truth, and its discovery as truth to oneself. As Stolberg says in ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’:
The soul, too, glides like a boat
For from the sky the setting sun
Dances upon the waves around the boat…
The soul breathes the joys of heaven,
The peace of the grove, in the reddening glow.
In the night Schubert finds release from the dictates of his age, and takes flight in diaphanous suggestibility. There, more than anywhere else, he takes the hedonism of the Viennese and makes it into a sort of utopia. Nightfall, to Schubert, is not a time of misgivings or the oppression of thickened light. It is a time of dancing brightness, for phantasy and moral reappraisal, freedom to overturn the incontrovertible truths of the day. It brings out the best in him, as it did in Yeats and Samuel Palmer: nocturnes, fables, an occasion for whispered and discovered intimacies beneath rustling leaves and the songs of birds: a chance for introspection touched with benevolent mystery. In ‘An den Mond’ (D259) the moon nourishes the night to give solace to the happy man ‘who, without hatred, shuts himself off from the world.’ In ‘Stimme der Liebe’ (D418), a moment of flaming expectancy seems to materialise in the summer night:
Come, fair Laura!
Flowers bloom at her airy footsteps
And like the music of the spheres
The sweet voice of love
Floats tremulously towards me from the roses of her lips.
Brahms said, ‘There is not one of Schubert’s songs from which you cannot learn something.’ But a musician put it less prosaically. It takes a rather good composer, he wrote, to catch the sound of starlight.
‘The standard of inspiration is past explanation. Every time I come back to it, the mystery remains.’
Benjamin Britten on Schubert’s‘Winterreise’
In February 1827 Schubert was worn out. As the year passed he came to show increasing symptoms of the old malaise, but for now something else was tapping his energies. Spaun takes up the story:
Schubert had been in a sombre mood for some time. When I asked him what was wrong, he would only say, ‘You will all soon hear and understand.’ One day he said to me, ‘Come to Schober’s today. I shall sing you a cycle of frightful songs. I’m curious to see what you will all say about them. They have taken more out of me than was ever the case before.’ He then sang us the whole Die Winterreise with great emotion. We were taken aback by their dark mood, and Schober declared that he had liked only one of them, Der Lindenbaum. To that Schubert only said: ‘I like these songs better than all the others and one day you will fall for them too.’ And he was right; we were won over by the impression made by these profound songs which Vogl sang in a masterly way.
History has tended to agree with Schober. ‘The Lime Tree’ soon gained the status of a popular ballad, its invitation to suicide discreetly underplayed; but only in the twentieth century has the cycle been recognised as the greatest inspiration of the greatest song-writer, and performed complete. Above all these are poems for winter, composed in the shadow of winter. One could call ‘Winterreise’ a musical novella about time, and be right so to do. But it is also the work of a man whose sickness and vicissitudes have left him utterly alone, who can save himself only by making his own beleaguered hopes into something better.
Both ‘Winterreise’ and ‘Die Schöne Müllerin’ are about broken love, and both correspond to critical stages in Schubert’s syphilis. The winter’s journey starts at a later point in the story: the course of a young man’s love is already behind him, and the work opens on his leaving the town where his love still lives, without seeing her again. ‘Winterreise’ is more sparse in texture than ‘Die Schöne Müllerin’. It is has fewer of those strophic songs which spread their wings expansively and come to a comforting close. ‘Winterreise’ traces a bleak trajectory towards death.
The Winter’s Journey is the story of a realist who confronts his lack of self-knowledge until the puzzle of his destiny is vouchsafed to him. This is in the final song, where he approaches a hurdy-gurdy man shivering in bare feet on the icy outskirts of a town from which he has been driven by dogs. Before that encounter the wanderer has not met a soul. He speaks to the river, a crow, the snarling dogs, the snow. But they never reply as they would in Märchen, the sentimental and supernatural tales of Schubert’s day. The objectivity is unremitting, as it must be for us to eavesdrop on the monologues of a private extinction. The wanderer’s name is not revealed, the events of his life are already past. He is an outline stumbling in a snowstorm.
Time is rarely measurable. We gather that between ‘Im Dorfe’ and ‘Der stürmischeMorgen’ a night has passed. We never know what distance the wanderer has travelled. The journey unfolds within a cocoon of private and fractured sentience whose introspection, whose corrosive interrogation of each emotion, is rooted in the wanderer’s sense of estrangement from the world and from himself. It is a glimmer of emotional, not logical, episodes. Each song depicts a stage in the lover’s experience, where a specific state of mind is reflected by the austerity of the winter landscape. Many of the songs have little if any physical movement, although the poet observes other things: a bird of carrion circling overhead, the last leaf dropping. The focus is drawn inwards to concentrate on a psychic journey, the journey of life itself whose twists and turns, whose pain and final loss, are reflected and illuminated in images of Nature. The fleeting memory of hope is a glint of iridescent water: the endless present of the final songs, with the horror of eyes that cannot close and which are condemned to live and to witness, is echoed in the grinding of a machine that ‘no one wants to hear’.
It is the panorama of organic life, organic forces, which gives this human plight its universality. To Schubert, as to all Romantics, the ardour of love (its heightened sensory awareness) allows empathy with a natural world in which feelings find their correspondence. With ‘Winterreise’ a direct parallel is drawn between external and internal nature – which Schubert underlines musically by means of texture and dissonance, by continuities and breaks in the vocal line. Schubert’s sense of context was never more eloquent than it is here. He reverses Wilhelm Müller’s order for ‘Mut’ (‘Courage’) and ‘Die Nebensonnen’ (‘The phantom suns’) so as to follow false cheer and bravado with a cryptic lament for the light that has drained from the poet’s life. This sets the stage for the meeting with a starved musician.
The country walk, and its ideology of a direct contact with Nature through physical activity pushed to the point of exhaustion, dominated German literature from the mid-18th century to the Second World War. No surprise, then, that images of walking dominate the first half of the cycle here, many of whose songs suggest its rhythm. Over this movement Schubert imposes the musical images of landscape – for ‘Mein Herz’ a frozen stream, beneath which feeling still flows. It is the symbol of the poet’s heart. Beyond exhaustion, in the second half, is the intimation of death: so that the piano figuration for the raven, which hovers above the voice, descends finally into earth.
‘Winterreise’ is unsurpassed in the art of musical representation. A signpost (‘Der Wegweiser’) is the formal announcement of death, and it induces in its rigidity of line a sense of imminent terror. As Charles Rosen put it,
Throughout Winterreise, the dynamic processes of nature are represented by musical landscape painting of extraordinary suggestion and even precision: the pivoting of the weathervane, the flowing water under ice, the rustling of leaves, the winter wind, the will-o’-the-wisp, the slowly moving clouds, the quiet village street, a stormy morning – all these receive a remarkable musical contour. As in the great landscape tradition, present sensation and memory are superimposed and confounded. Above all, it is the sense of future time that Müller and Schubert have added to the physical sense of the present and the past.
Now, Schubert flourished in the climate established by Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of YoungWerther, a warning against the consequences of excessive sensibility in which a young artist was brought down by unconsummated love. In turn ‘Winterreise’ is the forerunner of Schoenberg’s expressionist ‘Erwantung’ and its retreat from pain into the labyrinths of the self. Yet ‘Winterreise’ is unique. It begins with the door slammed in its face and no other music has quite its capacity to invest the major with the colour, the afterglow, of desolation and disillusionment.
Schubert understood the verbal extravagance of Müller’s verses and knew he had to pare his own language back to its simplest. The appearance of E major for ‘Der Lindenbaum’ brings home with painful immediacy, after the minor keys of opening songs, the happiness of the past. The melodic line of ‘Der greise Kopf’ draws a silhouette in music. The ending of the cycle brings an unemotional pause on the brink of insanity. In these final moments Schubert seems to reveal his familiarity with the maimed and staring numbness of terminal depression, its weariness and the adulterated wariness that come with recognizing the heart of darkness within a life’s landmarks, standing silent and consumed as if with the enormity of an unremembered crime.
The world, then, is a thing observed and reflected on as an extension of the wanderer’s emotional state, rather than as something which can be either objectively perceived or actively engaged. This ambiguity, a characteristic of Romantic poetry and prose, becomes an abundance for Schubert in which the rational is interpenetrated by the poetic, the present with the past; and reality by emotion, imagination, recollection. Barbara Barry has shown that the use of major keys can be understood in terms of these loops back into memory, which bring solace by replacing temporarily the present reality of alienation and winter. Major keys towards the end of ‘Winterreise’ are used to indicate how the distinction between past and present, between external and internal reality, have dissolved. The wanderer sees the landscape before him entirely through the perspective of his own melancholic perceptions.
Barry argues that ‘Winterreise’ does not take place on any single level, but on many levels of time and experience. There’s physical time, of course, marked by actions and events. There is remembered time: the sight of an object which opens the gates of memory, as in a Proustian mémoire. There is experiential time too, an ebb and flow of feeling. In the end, there is inertia only.
These levels of time correspond to various levels of the journey. A physical journey, but the psychic journey too: with its emotional swings and arbitrary associations. Then there are what Barry calls lacunae, deviations into memory which have the intensity of hallucinations. In the end, again, there is only dissolution: where death is awaited, but where it has not yet arrived.
The dream-time of ‘Winterreise’ is essential to its structure. Barbara Barry suggests that the second half takes the experiences of the first and transforms them through memory. ‘Im Dorfe’ (‘In the village’) revisits the place abandoned in ‘Gute Nacht’. The angry bite of ‘Mut’ takes the place of Frülingstraum‘s naive reminiscence. ‘Leitze Hoffnung’ (‘A last hope’) expresses the lowest ebb of grief, but at least it has the fight left in it for that: its counterpart, ‘Der Leiermann’ seems to inhabit the Ninth Circle of Danté’s hell, whose inmates lie forever in ice.
Yet the fate of the wanderer is not sealed. His final question is to the organ-grinder: ‘Strange old man, shall I go with you? Will you grind your organ to my singing?’ It is Schubert’s destiny too to be a musician, his means of survival in a hostile world. In the writing of E T A Hoffmann, fellow musicians recognize each other without words. Secret bonds (‘geheimes Beziehungen’) unite them in shared experience. For Müller too, the musician is the highest common factor of universalised human experience: master of his future, choosing his own lonely road, yet able to reach out and touch humankind.
‘It is arguable that the richest and most productive eighteen months in our musical history is the time when Beethoven had just died, when the other nineteenth-century giants, Wagner, Verdi and Brahms, had not begun; I mean the period in which Franz Schubert wrote the Winterreise, and C major Symphony, his last three Piano Sonatas, the C major String Quintet, as well as a dozen other glorious pieces.’
Benjamin Britten
Winterreise sets out the geography of Schubert’s world. It brings what was always there to new heights of expression, and has implications for everything that must follow.
Always there? From the time of ‘Erlkönig’ Schubert had juxtaposed two perspectives: the illusion of bright and beautiful desires, the reality of what was wretched, threatening, banal. In Erlkönig a supernatural being offers soft blandishments to a terrorized child, and the demon alone is given seductive music. The grate of Gretchen’s spinning wheel is a materialization of what is real to her. Rückert’s ‘Dass sie hier gewesen’ (1823), concerned as so often with tragic reminiscence, prevaricates between keys until a memory of the loved one allows it to breaks through into the major. This modulation – this spiritual as well as tonal contrast – is what helps to give Schubert’s songs their psychological depth.
But ‘Winterreise’ is something new: the product of an artistic second childhood, where superlative effect and simplicity co-exist. What ‘Winterreise’ is about is the sorrow latent in human illusions. The suggestion of physical movement in ‘Wegweiser’ (‘The signpost’) is grim reality, the procession to death: pure melody (‘Täuschung: Illusion’) is our capacity to experience joy in spite of the pain of loss.
How much this duality means to Schubert in his last months! It recurs in the stoicism of the D929 Piano Trio’s slow movement: and in the anaesthetized grief of Heine’s ‘Ihr Bild’ (‘Her picture’, one of the songs gathered after Schubert’s death into ‘Schwanengesang’, D957), where imagination is all we have to console us against the desolation brought about by time. This for Schubert is what being alive means: that residue of consciousness which registers the inconstancy of experience against its own, constant being; and its implications take us far beyond his songs.
The F minor Fantasy for four hands (D940: March 1828) is dedicated to Caroline Esterházy, the retarded aristocrat whom Schubert adored, and who was trundling her hoop round the streets of Vienna long after his death. Its opening theme suggests the rhythm and intonation of speech, a forlorn conversation. As David Lewin has shown, the overall quality is of the music is narrative, it evokes the landscape of ceaseless wandering familiar from the two Müller cycles. Illusion is shattered by a plunge into the minor, as in ‘Erlkönig’, and redeemed briefly by memory. Just as much as ‘Winterreise’, the Fantasy is haunted by a progress towards an inescapable destiny. Schubert appropriates poetic content from his songs and transforms it into absolute music for what is surely the greatest piano duet.
Lewin revealed the techniques by which the same composer, in ‘Auf dem Flusse’ (D911 No 7), could evoke a false exterior of motion and warmth, with a frozen heart within. Yet that is Schubert’s artistic guise, which he adopts as calculatedly as Wordsworth or Browning. At the same time, he was planning two of his happiest pieces. Schumann wrote in excitement of the discovery of the B flat Piano Trio (D898, 1828):
One glance at Schubert’s Trio – and the troubles of our human existence disappear and all the world is fresh and bright again. Yet ten years ago a Trio by Schubert passed across the face of the musical world like some angry meteor…The two works are essentially and fundamentally different. The first movement, which, in the E flat trio, is eloquent of extreme anger and passionate longing, is here a thing of grace, intimate and virginal; the Adagio (in the E flat trio a sigh, rising to spiritual anguish) is here a blissful dream-like state, a pulsating flow of exquisitely human emotion…To sum up: the Trio in E flat is active, masculine, dramatic, while the B flat is passive, feminine, lyrical.
If in the B flat Schumann was trying to highlight both a voluptuous and ardent vulnerability at work, how right he was. It is as fresh as most of Schubert’s music must have seemed, in a world still filled with Mozart and Beethoven. The B flat is one of Vienna’s most quicksilver apparitions, where a gossamer lightness of texture often seems charged with brilliant sonority. The gloss of eagerness and yearning: the impulsive gallops up and down the keyboard and exuberant asides: the martial rhythms and childlike confidences (often dissolving into each other) give it a quality beyond joy. What I mean is that the piece has a sort of knowing innocence, and this creates a conversation between equal of special intimacy.
The happy fusion of opposites, then, makes it deftly elusive; and this is what we, as much as Schubert’s contemporaries, boil down to the myth of ‘sociability’. Its first movement is a paraphrase of a song from 1825, ‘Des Sängers Habe’: ‘Shatter my joy in pieces, take from me all my worldly goods, yet leave me only my zither and I shall be happy and rich.’ Its final Rondo derives from the 1815 ‘Skolie’ (D306): ‘Let us, in the bright May morning, take delight in the life of the flower, before its fragrance disappears.’
The E flat Trio (D929, November 1827) certainly is more extrovert, but the theme from the Andante slow movement, when it reappears in the finale, is one of Schubert’s most gorgeous exercises in euphony. His wish to foster a sense of wholeness from the first bar to the last is clear, and its structure is one of the most adventurous he drafted. Difficult, perhaps, not to be reminded of the symphonies: the Ninth’s boisterous abundance, tempered with the melodic poignancy of the ‘Unfinished’. Perhaps the wanderer steps out a little more circumspectly this time.
But the music the public remembers most affectionately from the final twelve months are two sets of four Impromptus (D899, D935, both towards the end of 1827). They are outpourings of song-without-words, in which mercurial asides, the sense of a hairpin-bend of changing nuance and brighter possibilities, find their place in discourses of graceful inevitability. They are music whose candour is all the more moving for being heard through Schubert’s customary equivocation: emotion cooled or reflected from another surface, as Schubert’s music so often is.
It’s tempting to think of them as artless, but wrong. In their lustrous sound they show Schubert’s gift in writing for the developing Viennese pianos of his day, and they are extended essays that grow out of initial impulses, generally rhythmic gestures presented in the opening bars. The first four quietly dazzle in their daring key-relationships. The second set exists on a bigger scale, and is more varied in structure. The opening Impromptu of D935, in F minor, is an incarnation of flowing water, like ‘Liebesbotschaft’ (‘Love’s message’ – D957 No 1); the second is a moment of contemplation which takes flight. The third, in B flat, is a series of sparkling variations.
Swansong, ‘Schwanengesang’, is the sentimental title given to Schubert’s last settings of Rellstab, Heine and Seidl when they were collected after his death. They are as good as anything he wrote, but something is new: the conversational role of the piano accompaniment, which engenders new intimacy and a new, oracular depth. ‘Frühlingssehnsucht’ (‘Longing for the Spring’, No 3) and ‘Kriegers Ahnung’ (No 2) could come respectively from ‘Die Schöne Müllerin’ and Schubert’s Ossian settings of many years before, but for these extra layers of meaning, which might be peeled back like the skin of an onion. The order of the Heine settings is Schubert’s own, and beyond its cumulative effect there is also a chemistry by which each song affects its neighbours, as if we are digging further into the strata of a secret tragedy.
In ‘Der Atlas’ (No 8) the poet wipes his former love from his mind, only to see her portrait (‘Ihr Bild’) in a projection upon reality, coming to life and writing ‘its imprint in tears’. In ‘Die Stadt’ (No 11) he sees her town from the water: ‘Am Meer’ (‘By the sea’, No 12) presents past consummation as a metaphor for spiritual and physical decay: in ‘Der Doppelgänger’ (No 13) the poet stands before her house and sees only his own spectral form. The open harmonies of ‘Das Fischermädchen’ give optimism the raw brightness of a myth: the tonal compactness of ‘Am Meer’ marks the consoling sobriety of inward realisation, and the passage of time, heard after ‘Die Stadt’ with its ghostly rhythm of oars through sombre light. ‘Am Meer’ catches the poet at the moment of redefinition, between the fading hopes of ‘Das Fischermädchen’ and a cruel kiss. After this, the only outcome can be the terror of self-recognition.
The composer who could write such things was on the verge of a breakthrough of major stature within the history of music. It paves the way, in his last Piano Sonatas and the String Quintet, to music not of discovery, but of self-discovery.
By the end of 1827 Schubert was slipping into the background of Viennese life, and letters addressed to simply ‘Franz Schubert, composer’ were likely to be delivered to his namesake, a local violinist. But there was one moment when, on 26 March 1828, a large and enthusiastic audience applauded a concert of his songs and the new E Flat Trio. Encouraged, Schubert began to plan his final instrumental masterpieces.
‘Secretly, in my heart of hearts, I still hope to make something of myself, but who can do anything after Beethoven?’
Schubert to Spaun, 1815
Beethoven died in March 1827. Schubert, always too shy to introduce himself during his idol’s lifetime, was one of the pallbearers at the funeral.
According to Johann Leopold Ebner, Schubert was once on the point of excising one of his own songs because a friend had drawn his attention to a few measures that unconsciously quoted Beethoven’s ‘Coriolan’ Overture. The year was 1817, the music was ‘Die Forelle’, which the young composer had just finished. ‘Schubert saw this at once, too, and wanted to destroy the song, but we would not allow it and thus we saved that glorious piece from destruction.’
A dry joke at his comrades’ expense? A sign of artistic insecurity? If so, why had Schubert been happy to base the opening movement of his Second Symphony on Beethoven’s First? The relationship between the two composers is full of paradoxes. Beethoven was from the outset the measure of all things to Schubert: a role-model, a daunting creative block, a spur, and in the end, the yardstick against which he could assess his own stature and identity. For the truth is that, with the older man’s death, Schubert embarked upon a rivalry from which he had shrunk in the lifetime of the one whom he held in awe and reverence.
The last trilogy of Schubert’s piano sonatas (D958-60) was written in the space of one month, September 1828. Was Schubert drawn towards making some tribute? The first sonata of the three, in C minor, begins with a quotation from Beethoven’s thirty-two Variations in C minor, and its presence underlines Schubert’s assumption of a Beethovenian posture. The finale of Schubert’s last sonata of all, in B flat, has many points in common with Beethoven’s quartet in the same key (Opus 130), beyond a shared and dance-like metre. But the most intriguing parallel is still to come.
Between them Edward Cone and Charles Rosen have demonstrated that the Rondo of the A major Sonata, D959, is a homage to that of Beethoven’s piano sonata Opus 31 No 1, modelled so precisely that the act of plagiarism can only be deliberate. The opening theme has the same contour: the pianistic figuration is the same, so is the counterpoint, the rhythm, and so is the organization.
Why? Is the answer that Schubert’s finales caused him problems (many of his unfinished sonatas came to grief in them) and that he sought an easy solution? Such a casual act of appropriation – dishonesty, even – does not square easily with the protest, from Schubert’s deathbed, that he was being neglected because he did not lie near Beethoven. Neither does it account for the the systematic changes which Schubert works on his model. Schubert’s unforced melodic expansiveness stretches his second theme out of all proportion; as Cone puts it, ‘he dwells lovingly’ on each raw element that what Beethoven has offered him, creating moments of remembrance and magic. The stage is the same: the voice rebounds in a different world.
What is remarkable, declares Rosen, is the imitation’s lack of inhibition: the ease and confidence with which Schubert moves within his pre-ordained cage. His structural borrowings exist on a purely formal level, as indeed a sonnet does; they are moulds into which he can pour his own inspirations. Mahler spoke of Schubert’s ‘freedom below the surface of convention’. There is nothing slavish in Schubert, nothing docile: his innovations are not extensions of classical style but, as Rosen has shown, completely new inventions. Crowning everything is his discovery of the oscillation between two tonal levels to achieve a stasis in which time is redefined. We need to return and look at this properly; but for now it’s enough to accept that Beethoven’s aims, and Schubert’s, are as different as can be.
Sketches for these last sonatas show how scrupulously, how self-critically, Schubert proceeded. His ‘heavenly lengths’ appear obsessive only when he means them to be. But classical forms define boundaries, and the space that Schubert needs in order to move freely has little to do with classical definitions. In the first movement of the D958 Sonata he lingers on harmonic riches and then goads them into developments on a symphonic scale: apparent asides are grappled with and made part of a process of melodic evolution which anticipates Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovsky: in the finale, modulations pile on each other with a velocity that had not been conceivable before. If there is any Beethoven left in this, it is Beethoven reduced to a pathology, and steeped in the atrocities of Goya.
As Alfred Brendel argues, ‘Schubert relates to Beethoven, he reacts to him, but he follows him hardly at all. Models are concealed, transformed, surpassed.’ For Schubert classicism means music for music’s sake: empowered by its own tensions, its discipline and resources, existing for itself. In that sense, he becomes a more classical composer – not less – as he matures. But this is classicism of what might be called a quietly apocalyptic kind. Brendel continues, ‘Order, even when only an adornment through which the chaos of emotion shines, is decisive because it makes the work of art possible.’ For Schubert classical form is a shadowy life-in-death, a decorum which – like the signpost in ‘Winterreise’ – marks the direction of a solitary agenda.
Rosen suggests that, with the finale of the A major Sonata, Schubert produces a work ‘that is unquestionably greater than its model.’ I think we may be a little unfair to Beethoven, who mischievously diverted the formalities of what his audience took for granted in order to create what has been called the first neo-classical sonata. Yet it is also time for us to celebrate Schubert’s essential indeterminacy not as an intimation of weakness, but as (quite as much as in ‘Schwanengesang’) the language of music’s first truly modern artist.
The last piano sonatas stand as a family, marked off by their poetry and grandeur of conception: the first of them terse, the second a ballade-like web of sound and movement in an ethereal form, the last of the three serene and tinged with yearning. Their progression of keys too corresponds to a kind of perfect cadence, a psychological progress into resignation and light. More puzzling than the imprint of Beethoven is the profusion of self-quotations and allusions. In the A major work the theme of the finale is lifted from the Allegretto of the A minor Sonata (D537) of 1817, now given the lilting gentleness of ‘Im Frühling’ (D882). The Andantino is related to ‘Pilgerweise’ (D789) of 1823. In the C minor, the theme of the Menuetto mimics the Presto vivace of an early quartet, D18: the first movement draws material from ‘Kriegers Ahnung’ and ‘Der Atlas’ (D957), which are its contemporaries. More puzzling still is the opening of Schubert’s 1814 setting of the cathedral scene from ‘Faust’ (D126), which reappears in the bass line for the first movement development of the B flat Sonata. In the Goethe setting, Gretchen is taunted by the Devil to the strains of a Dies Irae; and the main theme of the sonata’s Molto moderato quotes a second episode in which the choir sings ‘Quid sum miser tum dicturus.’ The significance of these clandestine codes is unknown, but their presence surely contributes to the trilogy’s status as a summation of Schubert’s work.
Above all the D958 sonata serves as a quarry of material to be used throughout its successors. The little motif of a sixth and its descending scale we have already noticed: it crops up again in the B flat Sonata, and in both the Andantino and Scherzo of the A major, where it adds to a sense of family kinship, ambivalence, and ultimately bliss. Many other bonds – including a use of chromaticism more audacious and questioning even than Mozart’s – alternately pull the three together, and wrench them apart. Most memorable, for me, are the simple bass octaves of the A major and B flat: at first a call to arms, then something as fine as a delicately plucked cello, and at last (in the slow movement of D960) as the heart of music which draws us to the still point of a turning world. One realises that Schubert then has no need of harmonic movement, or dynamism of any kind. He floats like a diver through an almost silent realm: playing off tonalities to generate anticipation, making the inevitable into something for us to marvel at, as if it had been reborn.
Comparison between Schubert’s sketches and his first drafts for these sonatas reveals a change in his perception of musical space. The music begins to breathe, details start to tell, minutiae achieve the suspense and scale of immensities. The sonata becomes a work of self-realization, in which free imagining allows each impulse to find its own shape and motives. This inspired Dieter Schnebel to speak, in his Schubert essay ‘Suche nach der befreiten Zeit’, of a ‘search for liberated time’. Time is dreamlike, giving room moment by moment to wildly differing frames of reference, without the need for conclusive catharsis.
To Schubert the trilogy represented his ‘three great sonatas’, as if to disown everything that had gone before. Schumann was nonplussed by them, and especially by the last, which had been dedicated to him by Diabelli after its composer’s death. He finds it
…remarkable enough, impressive in a different way from his others, by virtue of a much greater simplicity of invention (where elsewhere he makes such high demands) and by the spinning out of certain general musical ideas, instead of linking episode to episode with new threads, as he does elsewhere. Thus it ripples along from side to side, always lyrical, never at a loss for what is to come next, as if it could never come to an end. Here and there the even flow is broken by occasional spasms of a more violent kind, which however pass quickly. If my imagination seems, in this assessment, to be coloured by the idea of his illness, I must leave the matter to calmer judgment.
Well, the D960 Sonata is to music what The Tempest is to plays. It is both the most wonderful and the most tantalizing piano piece that Schubert wrote. It is a cipher upon glass, with something of glass’s prismatic quality; a shining eloquence which seems at the same time direct, fickle and unfathomable, capable of assuming whatever significance a virtuoso might impose upon it. Its Andante sostenuto has the numinous quality of a waking dream, which is shares with the Adagio of the C major Quintet: composure within weightless stillness, as if a seamless yet infinitely mutable line of awareness were somehow able to glide through an atmosphere of suspended half-light. The mercurial Scherzo is conceived as a series of dialogues, teasing and supremely adroit: the finale measures itself against Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue. Here, and only here, is there pathos: the major key struggles to assert itself again and again, storms descend out of silence, only to disperse with the evanescence of Titania’s moonbeams. Developments spark into unexpected keys, embark on capricious journeys; at last, within the space of a page, all is made good. I cannot beat Tovey: ‘Schubert’s tonality is as wonderful as star-clusters, and a verbal description of it is as dull as astronomical tables.’ No composer was ever more intimate, or more remote, than this.
Schubert came to the sonatas fresh from his chamber masterpiece, the D956 Quintet. It is, remarked Thomas Mann, the music one should listen to on one’s deathbed; and something rich and strange. Schubert knew that with Beethoven’s death there was an inheritance to be gained, and he forges a structure of such splendour that it takes the known boundaries of a genre and shakes them apart.
The addition of an extra cello (not the customary viola) darkens its tonal palette and permits melting dialogues, confidences seemingly charged with the calm power of the night. Rarely has the key of C major, emblem for the Enlightenment of magnificent certitude, been so richly compromised or made so fertile in its overtones. A wavering opening chord is instantly questioned: it falls within a few phrases into D minor, yet for the second subject a glide of a major third (from G to E flat) opens up a new horizon of voluptuous ease. Schubert’s command of juxtaposed light and shade is at its most impressive. The quintet is a work of burgeoning vitality, where expectation and almost ruthless mastery of form are played off against each other with a daunting economy of gesture.
Its slow movement is about transfigured and luminous memory, unfolding at the pace of a human heart: a consciousness which itself lies beyond emotion, in which the fragments of remembered emotion skim past with the ephemerality of shredded cloud. At the movement’s close the vast harmonic space between its two key centres (E flat, and the F minor of an anguished inner episode) is distilled into two bars, and resolved.
The Scherzo pits a boisterous hunting theme against a phantasm which is as aloof as anything from ‘Winterreise’. In the finale the grotesque is the veil of a suave deception: for Schubert takes the affability of Viennese salon music, gives it Beethovenian cut-and-thrust, and ends with defiance in the minor. The consequence is a challenge to us which demands new meaning, as the grotesque always is; and as ever with Schubert, the illusion of sunshine is more telling because its origins lie in an awareness of the dark.
‘May this surviving work be a cherished legacy for us. However many things of beauty time may yet bring forth, it will not soon produce another Schubert.’
Robert Schumann on the B flat Piano Trio, 1836
Weeks after giving the first performance of his final piano sonatas, Schubert was dead. His old headaches had been back, but he was brimming with plans. Impressed by an edition of Handel, he decided to strengthen his grasp of counterpoint and visited a famous teacher, Simon Sechter. He was sketching a Tenth Symphony, through-composed, whose slow movement anticipates the sound-world of Mahler’s Ninth. He had no idea that anything might be amiss.
Only those things he had learnt to live with. In October he was too queasy to visit Budapest for a concert of his songs. But at the end of the month he visited his old haunt, the tavern Rotes Kreuz, and was nauseated; it was if the fish had been poisoned. On 12 November he wrote from his bed in Ferdinand’s cramped flat,
Dear Schober
I am ill. I have had nothing to eat or drink for five days now, and can only wander feebly and uncertainly between my armchair and bed. Rinna is treating me. If I take any food, I bring it up at once.
Please be so good, then, as to come to my aid in this desperate condition with something to read. I have read Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, The Pilot and The Pioneers…
It was his final letter. By the 17th he was delirious, violently so on the 18th. He was unconscious the next day until three in the afternoon, when he turned his head to the wall and whispered, ‘Here, here is my end.’
On 21 November Schubert’s body was carried to St Joseph’s Church in the Margareten. It was a respectably well-attended funeral, despite the drizzle: and it was Second Class, the best his family could afford. Sechter provided a fugue. The choir sang Schubert’s ‘Pax Vobiscum’, and the bier was carried to the Währing Cemetery where his coffin was lowered into the grave. His wish to be buried near Beethoven had been honoured.
As a man Schubert disappointed many people who sought him out in order to venerate, like the young miller, a fantasy of their own imagining. Those who knew him spoke of a modest, reticent, gently humorous nature, only truly at ease amongst friends, awkward or blunt with strangers. Mayrhofer was typically forthright: ‘His character was a mixture of tenderness and coarseness, sensuality and candour, sociability and melancholy’. Friends asked to describe his appearance compared him to a drunken cabby with tobacco-stained teeth. He died at 31, the age by which Beethoven and Mahler had finished their first symphonies. Grillparzer, asked for an epitaph, at first responded that ‘he made poetry sing and music speak.’ The inscription eventually chosen to be carved on Schubert’s tomb reads,
The Art of Music
Here Entombed a
Rich Possession
But Even Fairer Hopes.
* * *
In 1822, shortly before returning to his family home, Schubert had written an allegory entitled My Dream. The manuscript survives, and Maynard Solomon has attempted psychoanalysis:
I was the brother of many brothers and sisters. Our father and our mother were good. I was devoted to them all with a deep love. Once, my father took us to a feast. There my brothers became very merry. But I was sad. My father approached me and commanded me to enjoy the delicious food. But I could not, whereupon my father, becoming angry, banished me from his sight. I turned my steps away and, my heart full of infinite love for those who disdained it, I wandered into a distant land. For long years I felt torn between the greatest grief and the greatest love. Then news of my mother’s death reached me. I hurried to see her, and my father, softened by sorrow, did not hinder my entrance. I saw her corpse. Tears poured from my eyes. I saw her lying there as in the happy past, in which, according to the deceased’s wish, we were to live as she herself once had.
We followed her corpse in sorrow and the coffin sank down. From that time on I again stayed at home. Then my father took me once more into his favourite garden. He asked me if I liked it. But the garden was wholly repellent to me and I dared not say so. Then, flushing, he asked me a second time: did the garden please me? Trembling, I denied it. Then my father struck me and I fled. And for the second time I turned my steps away and, with a heart full of infinite love for those who had disdained it, I again wandered into a distant land. For long, long years I sang songs. When I would sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I sang of pain, it would turn to love.
Thus love and pain divided me.
And once, I had news of a pious virgin who had just died. Around her tomb formed a circle in which many youths and old men perpetually walked as though in bliss. They spoke softly, so as not to wake the virgin.
Heavenly thoughts seemed forever to be showered upon the youths from the virgin’s tomb. I too longed to walk there. But only a miracle, people said, leads into this circle. Nevertheless I went to the tomb, with slow steps and lowered gaze, filled with devotion and firm belief; and, before I was aware of it, I found myself in the circle, from which there arose a wonderfully lovely sound; and I felt as though eternal bliss were compressed into a single moment. My father, too, I was, reconciled and loving. He clasped me in his arms and wept. But not as much as I did.
With his mother’s death on 28 May 1812, Schubert’s composing came to a halt. A month later, he began the frenetic activity which lasted until the end of his life. In Freudian terms, her removal from the living delivered him from female temptation. Her death and his flight became equivalent events: the years of exile standing for social annihilation, the grave for mother’s bed, and both images woven (as in Ernest Jones’s 1951 analysis of ‘dying together’) into ‘a voyage of discovery, as a journey to a land where hidden things will be revealed.’
Schubert in his last year said, ‘It sometimes seems to me as if I did not belong to this world at all.’ Both as an artist and a man, he treasured his singularity, his creativity, his divergence from a stifling and obscurantist official culture. In November 1822, he inscribed Goethe’s words in the album of a friend:
One thing will not do for all
Let each live in his tradition
Each consider his own mission,
And who stands, beware a fall.
‘Give me your hand’ says Death in ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’. ‘I am a friend, and I do not come to punish you.’ Schubert is an inhabitant of that dim shore where, writes the poet of ‘Gruppe aus dem Tartarus’,
…neither sun nor stars shine, where no song is heard, where no friend is to be found. Oblivion breathes an air of peace that is heavy with death.
‘It seems’ proposes Einstein, ‘as if a poem of this kind was the direct result of a conversation between Schubert and his friends, and had immediately been set to music by him.’
His creative animus is, as much as his parable, penetrated by pain and love. His lifelong rebellion against the circle ‘in which youths and old men perpetually walk’ is tempered by his need for a brotherhood to whom he can belong, even submit, on the long road towards knowledge and the void beyond. Schubert was a misfit in his society, who yearned for an era when his mother was alive and emotion was clean. His music, to quote Solomon once more, is his defence of beauty against the wasting effects of reality.
Six months after the funeral, the Vienna correspondent of the London Harmonicon found space to report:
Franz Schubert, the talented and well-known composer, lately died…As proof of his industry, and of the hopes he had formed of acquiring renown in the different departments of his art, we may mention that among his papers were found twelve grand operas, five operettas, eight masses, ten symphonies, besides several sonatas, quatuors, and above two hundred songs. On the occasion of his funeral a new Requiem by Anselm Hüttenbrenner was produced, the music of which is full of striking effects: the mournful impact of the words and the livelinessof the sounds are at open war with each other.
The official inventory of Schubert’s remains was more commonplace:
3 cloth coats, 3 frock coats, 10 pairs of trousers, 9 waistcoats, 1 hat, 5 pairs of shoes, 2 pairs of boots, 4 shirts, 6 neckerchiefs and pocket handkerchiefs. 13 pairs of socks, 1 sheet, 2 blankets, 1 mattress, 1 featherbed cover, 1 counterpane.
Apart from some old music…no belongings of the deceased are to be found.
His loyal, mundane friends, dimly conscious that they had lost something greater than they could have known, began the process of elaboration that would elevate Schubert’s companionship into a fairy-tale, replete with love-stricken sighs and fanciful meetings with Beethoven. The public was harder to convince. Almost five hundred of his compositions had been published, and he’d earned from them as much as a telephonist might earn in one year today. Schubert’s lowly origins, the humiliations he had suffered from his youth, the shame of constant rejection and needy circumstances, his lack of instrumental virtuosity: these contributed to a gaucheness which inhibited him in any enterprise. He had sold Diabelli a group of compositions for 300 florins the set, only for Ignaz Sonnleithner to prove that a shrewd salesman could command 200 florins apiece on his behalf, and more. If any person’s worth is measured by the money he expects, Schubert gave Vienna the verdict it could use against him. The music of the Schubertiads had too rarely penetrated beyond a closed circle, and it was left to those who had heard it there to plead the composer’s case after his death. Already manuscripts were hopelessly scattered.
Ferdinand was indefatigable in promoting his brother’s work: advertising for lost cantatas, contacting those composers amongst whom rumours of Schubert’s gift was beginning to spread. Liszt acclaimed Schubert as ‘the most poetic musician who has lived’ and did his best to help, playing eloquent transcriptions of unknown songs to his Society audiences. The turning point for non-vocal music came on New Year’s Day 1839, when Schumann was shown the contents of a polished black chest. ‘The riches that lay here piled up made me tremble with pleasure. Where to begin, where to stop?’ Within were Schubert’s surviving manuscripts, and Schumann grasped the autograph of the D944 symphony. ‘How refreshing is this feeling of overflowing wealth! With others we always tremble for the conclusion and we are troubled lest we find ourselves disappointed.’ But this? ‘It transports us into a world where I cannot recall ever having been before.’
The violinists of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra baulked at their role as accompanists to the woodwind in the symphony’s finale, but Mendelssohn persevered and conducted its premiere, in a shortened version, on 29 March. The Vienna Philharmonic played two movements only, and in 1844 The London Philharmonic Society laughed it out of court. Elsewhere opinions were changing.
Throughout the nineteenth century Europe and New York witnessed a spate of discoveries. In 1839 The Musical World of London commented: ‘All Paris has been in a state of amazement at the posthumous diligence of the song-writer F Schubert’. As late as 1862 Brahms’s colleague Hanslick wrote in Vienna, ‘The master has been dead for thirty years, and yet it is as if he continued to work invisibly – one can hardly keep up with him.’ The Octet and several quartets were about to be performed for the first time. In 1883 a collected edition of Schubert’s music appeared, and in 1885 Brahms (having worked doggedly as editor of the symphonies) urged a young Richard Strauss to study Schubert’s dances. Sixty years later, during Metamorphosen, Strauss acknowledged a debt in his sketch book: ‘Lucky Schubert, who could compose what he wanted, whatever his genius made him do.’ It was to the word an echo of Salieri’s verdict when, in 1821, he had seen the rough draft of Gretchen.
The rest has been a matter of time. Schubert’s songs became favourites in the earliest days of the gramophone, and the vintage performances of Elizabeth Schumann – hiss, crackles, warts and all – celebrate a level of spontaneity from which glossy sopranos still have volumes to learn. Pablo Casals knew Schubert was special for him, and to celebrate the centenary in 1928 he embarked on the symphonies with his orchestra in Barcelona. In 1941 Toscanini conducted a Philadelphia performance of the Great C major which the critic Spike Hughes described as ‘legendary’ in its confidence and bubbling excitement. It was left to Artur Schnabel and Thomas Beecham to champion the piano sonatas and early symphonies through records and broadcasts. This takes us beyond the Second World War.
John Reed has described Schubert’s distinction in terms of its felicity:
Schubert himself once wrote a song called ‘Seligkeit’ (‘Happiness’, D433), a gay and unsophisticated little piece untroubled by thoughts of time and change. Felicity conveys much more than this; it is happiness muted by the sense of inevitable loss, of a harmony still within reach of our imagination, like the image of ancient rites on a Greek vase.
All this is true, yet it is in danger of reducing a robust and urgent force to nostalgia. Like Beethoven, Schubert recognized in himself ‘the most miserable of men’, and he was right to perceive his life as that of a nomad in a private domain. Yet it was a prospect that in his last year had sights set resolutely on the future.
In his own appraisal Alfred Einstein speaks of a composer who follows,
…unreservedly and without heed a single impulse – to create; and who in his music finds – partly of his own free will and partly out of sheer necessity – the only means of meeting the challenge of human existence. But he is not a typical Romantic like all the other composers who came into the world during the twenty years which followed his birth. He is without spiritual discord; he still has the courage to express the full sensuousness and richness of life. He is a Romantic Classicist and belongs in the great company of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. He left no successors. The feeling that he inspires in later ages is an infinite longing for a lost paradise of purity, spontaneity and innocence.
A comfortable tribute, and it misses the self-scrutiny that underpins this passionate conviction of a creative voice. Grasp that, and you have what makes Schubert our contemporary. If knowledge is the mirror that makes us human, if art provides the reflexiveness that makes possible our changing conception of self, the vision Schubert has for us remains compelling, far-reaching and humane.
Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961), English conductor and impresario.
SELECTED FURTHER READING
There are hundreds of books and articles on Schubert, but these are some of the best. The easiest introduction is Maurice Brown’s. Capell and Einstein are classics which have not lost their special insights over the years, whilst 19th Century Music (a scholarlyjournal, but often accessible) gives a taste of the latest thinking in Schubert research.
Maurice J E Brown, The New Grove Schubert (Macmillan, 1982)
Richard Capell,Schubert’s Songs (Gerald Duckworth, revised edition 1957)
edited Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs by his Friends (Adam and Charles Black, 1958)
Alfred Einstein, Schubert: the Man and his Music (Cassell, 1951)
edited Walter Frisch,Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies (University of Nebraska Press, 1986)
Franz Gal, Schubert and the Essence of Melody (Victor Gollancz, 1974)
George Marek, Schubert (Robert Hale, 1986)
Brian Newbould,Schubert and the Symphony: A New Perspective (Toccata Press, 1992)
Charles Osborne, Schubert and his Vienna (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1985)
Philip Radcliffe, Schubert Piano Sonatas (BBC Music Guides, 1967)
John Reed, Schubert: The Final Years (Faber and Faber, 1972)
Joseph Wechsburg, Schubert: His Life, His Time (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)
J A Westrup, Schubert Chamber Music (BBC Music Guides, 1969)
translated Richard Wigmore, Schubert: The Complete Song Texts (Victor Gollancz, 1992)
Valuable references
Alfred Brendel, Music Sounded Out (Robson Books, 1990)
Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms revised edition (W W Norton, 1988)
The Romantic Generation (Harper Collins, 1995)
D F Tovey, Essays and Lectures on Music (Oxford University Press, 1949)
University of California: 19th Century Music 1977 onwards (academic periodical and source of many articles by Solomon, Youens, Cone, Kramer and others: some of them reproduced in Frisch)
This draws on Otto Eric Deutsch’s Schubert: A Thematic Catalogue of All His Works (1951, 1979) which gave us our modern classification by Deutsch (D) numbers. Here D number is given first, followed by the name of the poet set (in the case of songs) and finally, the year of composition.
SONGS
1A Song sketch (no text) 1810
5 Hagars Klage Schückling 1811
6 Des Mädchens Klage (1) Schiller 1811
7 Leichenfantaise Schiller 1811
10 Des Vatermörder Pfeffel 1811
15 Der Geistertanz Matthisson 1812
17 Quell’ innocente figlio Metastasio 1812
23 Klaglied Rochlitz 1812
30 Der Jüngling am Bache Schiller 1812
33 Entra l’uomo allor che nasce Metastasio 1812
35 Serbate, o dei custodi (3) Metastasio 1812
39 Lebenstraum Baumberg 1810 or 1812
42 Misero Pargoletto Metastasio 1813
44 Totengräberlied Hölty 1813
50 Die Schatten Matthisson 1813
52 Sehnsucht Schiller 1813
59 Verklärung Pope 1813
73 Thekla: eine Geisterstimme Schiller 1813
76 Pensa, che questo istante Metastasio 1813
77 Der Taucher Schiller 1813-14
78 Sonfra l’onde Metastasio 1813
81 Auf den Sieg der Deutschen ?Schubert 1813
83 Zur Namensfeier des Herrn Andras Siller 1813
93 Don Gayseros de la Motte 1815
95 Adelaide Matthisson 1814
97 Trost: an Elisa Matthisson 1814
98 Errinerungen (1) Matthisson 1814
99 Andenken Matthisson 1814
100 Geisternähe Matthisson 1814
101 Errinerung Matthisson 1814
102 Die Betende Matthisson 1814
104 Die Befreier Europas in Paris Mikan 1814
107 Lied aus der Ferne Matthisson 1814
108 Der Abend Matthisson 1814
109 Lied der Liebe Matthisson 1814
111 Der Taucher Schiller 1814
113 An Emma Schiller 1814
114 Romanze Matthisson 1814
115 An Laura, als sie Klopstocks Matthisson 1814
116 Der Geistertanz Matthisson 1814
117 Das Mädchen aus der Fremde Schiller 1814
118 Gretchen am Spinnrade Goethe 1814
119 Nachtgesang Goethe 1814
120 Trost in Tränen Goethe 1814
121 Schäfers Klagelied Goethe 1814
122 Ammenlied Lubi 1814
123 Sehsnucht Goethe 1814
124 Am See Mayrhofer 1814
126 Szene aus Goethes Faust Goethe 1814
134 Ballade J Kenner 1815
138 Rastlose Liebe Goethe 1815
141 Der Mondabend Kumpf 1815
142 Geistes-Gruss Goethe 1815
143 Genügsamkeit Schober 1815
144 Romanze Stolberg 1816
149 Der Sänger Goethe 1815
150 Lodas Gespenst Ossian 1816
151 Auf einen Krichhof Schlechta 1815
152 Minona Bertrand 1815
153 Als ich sie erröten sah Ehrlich 1815
153 Das Bild 1815
159 Die Erwartung Schiller 1816
160 Am Flusse Goethe 1815
161 Am Mignon Goethe 1815
162 Nähe des Geliebten Goethe 1815
163 Sängers Morgenlied Körner 1815
164 Liebesrausch Körner 1815
165 Sängers Morgenlied Körner 1815
166 Amphiaraos Körner 1815
169 Trinklied vor der Schlacht Körner 1815
170 Schwertlied Körner 1815
172 Der Morgenstern Körner 1815
174 Das war ich Körner 1815
176 Die Sterne Fellinger 1815
177 Vergebliche Liebe Bernard 1815
179 Liebesrausch Körner 1815
180 Sehnsucht der Liebe Körner 1815
182 Die erste Liebe Fellinger 1815
183 Trinklied, with chorus Zettler 1815
186 Die Sterbende Matthisson 1815
187 Stimme der Liebe Matthisson 1815
188 Naturgenuss Matthisson 1815
189 An die Freude, with chorus Schiller 1815
191 Des Mädchens Klage Schiller 1815
192 Der Jüngling am Bache Schiller 1815
193 An den Mond Hölty 1815
194 Die Mainacht Hölty 1815
195 Amalia Schiller 1815
196 An die Nachtigall Hölty 1815
197 An die Apfelbäume Hölty 1815
198 Seufzer Hölty 1815
201 Auf den Tod einer Nachtigall Hölty 1815
204 Das Traumbild (lost) 1815
206 Liebeständelei Körner 1815
207 Der Liebende Hölty 1815
208 Die Nonne Hölty 1815
209 Der Liedler Kenner 1815
210 Die Liebe Goethe 1815
211 Adelwold und Emma Bertrand 1815
212 Die Nonne (obs. Deutsch number) Hölty 1815
213 Der Traum Hölty 1815
214 Die Laube Hölty 1815
215a Meerestille (1) Goethe 1815
216 Meerestille (2) Goethe 1815
217 Kolmas Klage Ossian 1815
218 Grablied Kenner 1815
219 Das Finden Kosegarten 1815
221 Der Abend Hölty 1815
222 Lieb Minna Stadler 1815
224 Wandrers Nachtlied Goethe 1815
225 Der Fischer Goethe 1815
226 Werster Verlust Goethe 1815
227 Idens Nachtgesgang Kosegarten 1815
228 Von Ida Kosegarten 1815
229 Die Erscheinung Kosegarten 1815
230 Der Täuschung Kosegarten 1815
231 Das Sehnen Kosegarten 1815
233 Geist derLiebe Kosegarten 1815
234 Tischlied Goethe 1815
235 Abends unter der Linde (1) Kosegarten 1815
237 Abends unter der Linde (2) Kosegarten 1815
238 Die Mondnacht Kosegarten 1815
240 Huldigung Kosegarten 1815
241 Alles um Liebe Kosegarten 1815
245 An den Frühling Schiller 1815
246 Die Bürgeschaft Schiller 1815
247 Die Spinnerin Goethe 1815
248 Lob des Tokayers Baumberg 1815
250 Das Geheimnis Schiller 1815
251 Hoffnung Schiller 1815
252 Das Mädchen aus dem Fremde Schiller 1815
253 Punschlied: im Norden zu singen Schiller 1815
254 Der Gott und der Bajadere Goethe 1815
255 Der Rattenfänger Goethe 1815
256 Der Schatzgräber Goethe 1815
257 Heinröslein Goethe 1815
258 Bundeslied Goethe 1815
259 An den Mond Goethe 1815
260 Wonne der Wehmut Goethe 1815
261 Wer kauft Liebesgötter? Goethe 1815
262 Die Fröhlichkeit Prandstetter 1815
263 Cora an die Sonne Baumberg 1815
264 Der Morgenkuss Baumberg 1815
265 Abendstänchen: An Lina Baumberg 1815
266 Morgenlied Stolberg 1815
270 an die Sonne Baumberg 1815
271 Der Weiberfreund Cowley 1815
272 An die Sonne Tiedge 1815
273 Lilla an die Morgenröte 1815
274 Tischerlied 1815
275 Totenkranz für ein Kind Matthisson 1815
276 Abendlied Stolberg 1815
278 Ossians Lied Ossian 1815
280 Das Rosenband Klopstock 1815
281 Das Mädchen von Inistore Ossian 1815
282 Cronnan Ossian 1815
283 An die Frühling Schiller 1815
284 Lied ?Schiller 1815
285 Furcht der Geliebten Klopstock 1815
286 Selma und Selmar Klopstock 1815
287 Vaterlandslied Klopstock 1815
288 An Sie Klopstock 1815
289 Die Sommernacht Klopstock 1815
290 Die frühen Gräber Klopstock 1815
291 Dem Unendlichen Klopstock 1815
292 Klage (see D371) 1815
293 Shilric und Vinvela Ossian 1815
295 Hoffnung Goethe 1815
296 An den Mond Goethe ?1816
297 Augenlied Mayrhofer ?1817
298 Liane Mayrhofer 1815
300 Der Jüngling an der Quelle Salis-Seewis 1815
301 Lambertine Stoll 1815
302 Labetrank der Liebe Stoll 1815
303 An die Geliebte Stoll 1815
304 Wiegenlied Körner 1815
305 Mein Gruss an den Mai Kumpf 1815
306 Skolie Deinhardstein 1815
307 Die Sternewelten Jarnik 1815
308 Die Macht der Liebe Kalchberg 1815
309 Das gesttörte Glück Körner 1815
310 Sehnsucht Goethe 1815
311 An den Mond 1815
312 Hektors Abschied Schiller 1815
313 Die Sterne Kosegarten 1815
314 Nachtgesang Kosegarten 1815
315 An Rosa I Kosegarten 1815
316 An Rosa II Kosegarten 1815
317 Idens Schwanenlied Kosegarten 1815
318 Schwanengesang Kosegarten 1815
319 Luisens Antwort Kosegarten 1815
320 Der Zufriedene Reissig 1815
321 Mignon Goethe 1815
322 Mignon Goethe 1815
323 Klage der Ceres Schiller 1815
325 Harfenspieler Goethe 1815
327 Lorma (I) Ossian 1815
328 Erlkönig Goethe 1815
329 Die drei Sänger Bobrik 1815
330 Das Grab Salis-Seewis 1815
342 An mein Klavier Schubart 1816
343 Am Tage aller Seelen Jacobi 1816
344 Am ersten Maimorgen Claudius 1816
350 Der Enterfernten (2) Salis-Seewis 1816
351 Fischerlied (1) Salis-Seewis 1816
352 Licht und Liebe Collin 1816
358 Die Nacht Uz 1816
359 Sehnsucht Goethe 1816
360 Lied eines Schiffers an die Dioskuren Mayrhofer 1816
361 Am Bach im Frühlinge Schober 1816
362 Zufriedenheit Claudius 1816
363 An Chloen Uz 1816
367 Der König in Thule Goethe 1816
368 Jägers Abendlied Goethe 1816
369 An Schwager Kronos Goethe 1816
371 Klage 1816
372 An die Natur Stolberg-Stolberg 1816
373 Lied Fourqué 1816
375 Der Tod Oskars Ossian 1816
376 Lorma (2) Ossian 1816
381 Morgenlied 1816
382 Abendlied 1816
388 Laura am Klavier Schiller 1816
389 Des Mädchens Klage Schiller 1816
390 Entzückung an Laura Schiller 1816
391 Die vier Weltalter Schiller 1816
392 Pfügerlied Salis-Seewis 1816
393 Die Einsiedelei (2) Salis-Seewis 1816
394 An die Harmonie Salis-Seewis 1816
395 Lebensmelodien Schlegel 1816
396 Gruppe aus dem Tartarus Schiller 1816
397 Ritter Toggenburg Schiller 1816
398 Frühlingslied Hölty 1816
399 Auf den Tod einer Nachtigall (2) Hölty 1816
400 Die Knabenzeit Hölty 1816
401 Winterlied Hölty 1816
402 Der Flüchtling Schiller 1816
403 Lied Salis-Seewis 1816
404 Die Herbstnacht Salis-Seewis 1816
405 Der Herbstabend Salis-Seewis 1816
406 Abschied von der Harfe Salis-Seewis 1816
409 Der verfehlte Stunde Schlegel 1816
410 Sprache der Liebe Schlegel 1816
411 Daphne der Bache Stolberg-Stolberg 1816
412 Stimme der Liebe Stolberg-Stolberg 1816
413 Entzückung Matthisson 1816
414 Geist der Liebe Matthisson 1816
415 Klage Matthisson 1816
416 Lied in der Abswesenheit Stolberg-Stolberg 1816
418 Stimme der Liebe Matthisson 1816
419 Julius an Theone Matthisson 1816
429 Minnelied Hölty 1816
430 Die frühe Liebe Hölty 1816
431 Blumenlied Hölty 1816
432 Der Leidende Hölty 1816
433 Seligkeit Hölty 1816
434 Ertelied Hölty 1816
436 Klage Hölty 1816
437 Klage (obsolete Deutsch number) Hölty 1816
442 Das grosse Halleluja Klopstock 1816
443 Schlachtlied Klopstock 1816
444 Die Gestirne Klopstock 1816
445 Edone Klopstock 1816
446 Die Leibesgötter Uz 1816
447 An den Schlaf 1816
448 Gott im Frülinge Uz 1816
449 Der gute Hirt Uz 1816
450 Fragment aus dem Aeschylus Aeschylus 1816
454 Grablied auf einem Soldaten Schubart 1816
455 Freunde der Kinderjahre Köpkjen 1816
456 Das Heimnweh Winkler 1816
457 An die untergehende Sonne Kosegarten 1816
458 Aus Diego Manazares Schlechta 1816
462 An Chloen Jacobi 1816
463 Hochzeit-Lied Jacobi 1816
464 In der Mitternacht Jacobi 1816
465 Trauer der Liebe Jacobi 1816
466 Die Perle Jacobi 1816
467 Pflicht und Liebe Gotter 1816
468 An dem Mond Hölty 1816
469 Mignon Goethe 1816
473 Liedesend Mayrhofer 1816
474 Lied des Orpheus Jacobi 1816
475 Abschied Mayrhofer 1816
476 Rückweg Mayrhofer 1816
477 Alte Liebe rostet nie Mayrhofer 1816
478 Harfenspieler I Goethe 1816
479 Harfenspieler II Goethe 1816
480 Harfenspieler III Goethe 1816
481 Sehnsucht Goethe 1816
482 Der Sänger am Felsen Pichler 1816
483 Lied Pichler 1816
489 Der Wanderer Schmidt von Lübeck 1816
490 Der Hirt Mayrhofer 1816
491 Geheimnis Mayrhofer 1816
492 Zum Punsche Mayrhofer 1816
493 Der Wanderer Schmidt von Lübeck 1816
495 Abendlied der Fürstein Mayrhofer 1816
496 Klage um Ali Bey Claudius 1816
497 An die Nachtigall Claudius 1816
498 Wiegenlied 1816
499 Abendlied Claudius 1816
500 Phidile Claudius 1816
501 Zufriedenheit Claudius 1816
502 Herbstlied Salis-Seewis 1816
503 Mailied Hölty 1816
504 Am Grabe Anselmos Claudius 1816
507 Skolie Matthisson 1816
508 Lebenslied Matthisson 1816
509 Leiden der Trennung Metastasio 1816
510 Vedi quanto adoro Metastasio 1816
513 Nur wer die Liebe kennt Werner 1817
514 Die abgeblühte Linde Széchényi 1817
515 Der Flug der Zeit Széchényi 1817
516 Sehsnucht Mayrhofer 1817
517 Der Schäfer und der Reiter Fouqué 1817
518 An den Tod Schubart 1817
519 Die Blumensprache Platner 1817
520 Frohsinn Castelli 1817
521 Jagdlied Werner 1817
522 Die Liebe Leon 1817
523 Trost Mayrhofer 1817
524 Der Alpenjäger Mayrhofer 1817
525 Wie Ulfru fischt Mayrhofer 1817
526 Fahrt zum Hades Matthisson 1817
527 Schlaflied Matthisson 1817
528 La pastorella al prato Goldoni 1817
530 An eine Quelle Claudius 1817
531 Der Tod und das Mädchen Claudius 1817
532 Das lied vom Eifen Claudius 1817
534 Die Nacht Ossian 1817
535 Lied (with small orchestra) 1817
536 Der Schiffer Mayrhofer 1817
539 Am Strome Mayrhofer 1817
540 Philoktet Mayrhofer 1817
543 Auf dem See Goethe 1817
544 Ganymed Goethe 1817
545 Der Jüngling und der Tod Spaun 1817
546 Trost im Liede Schober 1817
547 An die Musik Schober 1817
548 Orest auf Tauris Mayrhofer 1817
549 Mahomets Gesang Goethe 1817
550 Die Forelle Schubart 1817
551 Pax vobiscum Schober 1817
552 Hänflings Liebeswerbung Kind 1817
553 An der Donau Mayrhofer 1817
554 Uraniens Flucht Mayrhofer 1817
555 Song sketch (no text) 1817
558 Liebhaber in allen Gestalten Goethe 1817
559 Schweizerleid Goethe 1817
560 Der Goldschmiedsgewsell Goethe 1817
561 Nach einem Gewitter Mayrhofer 1817
562 Fischerlied Salis-Seewis 1817
563 Die Einsiedelei Salis-Seewis 1817
564 Gretchen im Zwinger Goethe 1817
569 Das Grab Salis-Seewis 1817
573 Iphigenia Mayrhofer 1817
577 Entzückung an Laura Schiller 1817
578 Abschied Schubert 1817
579 Der Knabe in der Wiege Ottenwalt 1817
579a Vollendung Matthisson 1817
579b Die Erde Matthisson 1817
582 Augenblicke im Elysium 1817
583 Gruppe aus dem Tartarus Schiller 1817
584 Elysium Schiller 1817
585 Atys Matthisson 1817
586 Erlafsee Matthisson 1817
587 An den Frühling Schiller 1817
588 Der Alpenjäger Schiller 1817
594 Der Kampf Schiller 1817
595 Thekla: eine Geisterstimme Schiller 1817
596 Lied eines Kindes 1817
611 Auf der Riesenkoppe Körner 1817
614 An den Mond in einer Herbstnacht Schreiber 1817
616 Grablied für die Mutter 1817
619 Vocal exercise, figured bass 1817
620 Einsamkeit Mayrhofer 1817
622 Der Bluembrief Schreiber 1817
623 Das Marienbild Schreiber 1817
626 Das Marienbild Schreiber 1817
627 Das Abendrot Schreiber 1817
628 Sonett I Petrarch 1817
629 Sonett II Petrarch 1817
630 Sonett III Petrarch 1817
631 Blanka (Das Mádchen) Schlegel 1817
632 Von Mitleiden Mariä Schlegel 1817
634 Die Berge Schlegel 1817
636 Sehsnucht Schiller 1817
637 Hoffnung Schiller 1817
638 Der Jüngling am Bache Schiller 1817
639 Widerschein Schlechta 1817
645 Abend Tieck 1817
646 Der Gebüsche Schlegel 1817
649 Der Wanderer Schlegel 1817
650 Abendbilder Silbert 1817
651 Himmelsfunken Silbert 1817
652 Das Mädchen Schlegel 1817
653 Bertas Lied in der Nacht Grillparzer 1817
654 Am die Freunde Mayrhofer 1817
658 Marie Novalis 1817
659 Hymne I Novalis 1817
660 Hymne II Novalis 1817
661 Hymne III Novalis 1817
662 Hymne IV Novalis 1817
663 Der 13 Psalm (trans Mendelssohn) 1817
669 Beim Winde Mayrhofer 1817
670 Die Sternennächte Mayrhofer 1817
671 Trost Mayrhofer 1817
672 Nachtstück Mayrhofer 1817
673 Die Liebende schreibt Goethe 1817
674 Prometheus Goethe 1817
677 Strophe aus Die Götter Griechenlands Schiller 1817
682 Überallen Auber Liebe Mayrhofer 1820
684 Die Sterne Schlegel
685 Morgenlied Werner
686 Frülingslaube Uhland
687 Nachthymne Novalis
688 Vier Canzonen Vitorelli, Metastasio, Schiller 1817
690 Abendröte Schlegel 1823
691 Die Vögel Schlegel 1820
692 Der Knabe Schlegel 1820
693 Der Fluss Schlegel 1820
694 Der Schiffer Schlegel 1820
695 Namenstagslied Stadler 1820
698 Des Fräuleins Schlechta 1820
690 Abendröte Schlegel 1820
691 Die Vögel Schlegel 1820
692 Der Knabe Schlegel 1820
693 Der Fluss Schlegel 1820
694 Der Schiffer Schlegel 1820
695 Namenstagslied Stadler 1820
698 Des Fräuleins Liebesslauschen Schlechta 1820
699 Der entsühnte Orest Mayrhofer 1820
700 Freiwilliges Versinken Mayrhofer 1820
702 Der Jüngling auf dem Hügel Hüttenbrenner 1820
707 Der zürneneden Diana Mayrhofer 1820
708 Im Walde Schlegel 1820
711 Lob der Tränen Schlegel 1818
712 Die gefangenen Sänger Schlegel 1821
713 Der Unglückliche Pichler 1821
715 Versunken Goethe 1821
716 Grenzen der Menschheit Goethe 1821
717 Suleika II Willemer (née Jung) 1821
719 Geheimes Goethe 1821
720 Suleika I Willemer (née Jung) 1821
721 Mahomets Gesang Goethe 1821
725 Linde Lüfte wehen, Mez 1821
726 Mignon I Goethe 1821
727 Mignon II Goethe 1821
728 Johanna Sebus Goethe 1821
731 Der Blumen Schmerz Maylath 1821
736 Ihr Grab Engelhardt 1822
737 An die Leier Bruchmann 1822
738 Im Haine Bruchmann 1822
741 Sei mir gegrüsst Rückert 1822
742 Der Wachtelschlag Sauter 1822
743 Selige Welt Senn 1822
744 Schwanengesang Senn 1822
745 Die Rose Schlegel 1822
746 Am See Bruchmann 1822
749 Herr Josef Spaun, Assessor in Linz Collin 1822
751 Die Liebe hat gelogen Platen-Hallermünde 1822
752 Nachtviolen Mayrhofer 1822
753 Heliopolis I Mayrhofer 1822
754 Heliopolis II Mayrhofer 1822
756 Du liebst mich nicht Platen-Hallermunde 1822
758 Todesmusik Schober 1822
761 Schatzgräbers Begehr Schober 1822
762 Schwestergruss Bruchmann 1822
764 Der Musensohn Goethe 1822
765 An die Entfernte Goethe 1822
766 Am Flusse Goethe 1822
767 Wilkommen und Abschied Goethe 1822
768 Wandrers Nachtlied Goethe 1824
770 Drang in die Ferne Leitner 1823
771 Der Zwerg Collin 1822-3
772 Wehmut Collin 1822-23
774 Auf dem Wasser zu singen Stolberg-Stolberg 1823
775 Dass sie hier gewesen Rückert 1823
776 Du bist die Ruh Rückert 1823
777 Lachen und Weinen Rückert 1823
778 Greisengesang Rückert 1823
778a Die Wallfahrt Rückert 1823
785 der zürnende Barde Bruchmann 1823
786 Viola Schober 1823
788 Lied Stolberg-Stolberg 1823
789 Pilgerweise Schober 1823
792 Vergissmeinnicht Schober 1823
793 Das Geheimnis Schiller 1823
794 Der Pilgrim Schiller 1823
795 (Nos 1-20) Die schöne Müllerin Müller 1823
797 Romanze zum Drama Rosamunde Chézy 1823
799 Im Abendrot Lappe 1824
800 Der Einsame Lappe 1825
801 Dithyrambe Schiller by June 1826
805 Der Sieg Mayrhofer 1824
806 Abenstern Mayrhofer 1824
807 Auflösung Mayrhofer 1824
822 Lied eine Kriegers 1824
827 Nacht und Träume Collin by June 1823
828 Die junge Nonne Craigher de Jachelutta 1825
829 Abschied Pratobevera 1826
830 Lied der Anne Lyle MacDonald 1825
831 Gesang der Norna Scott 1825
832 Des Sängers Habe Schlechta 1825
833 Der blinde Knabe Cibber 1825
834 Im Walde Schulze 1825
837 Ellens Gesang I Scott 1825
838 Ellens Gesang II Scott 1825
839 Ellens Gesang III Scott 1825
842 Totengräbers Heimwehe Craigher 1825
843 Liedes gefangenen Jägers Scott 1825
846 Normans Gesang Scott 1825
851 Das Heimweh Pyrker 1825
852 Die Allmacht Pyrker 1825
853 Auf der Bruck Schulze 1825
854 Fülle der Liebe Schlegel 1825
855 Wiedersehn Schlegel 1825
856 Abendlied für die Entfernte Schlegel 1825
857 Zwei Szenen aus dem Schauspiel Lacrimas Schütz 1825
860 An mein Herz Schulze 1825
861 Der Liebliche Stern Schulze 1825
862 Um Mitternacht Schulze 1826
863 An Gott Hohlfeld by 1827
864 Das Totenhemchen Bauernfield after 1824
865 Wilderspruch Seidl 1826
866 Vier Refrainlieder Seidl 1828
867 Wiegenlied Seidl 1826
868 Das Echo Castelli 1826
869 Totengräber-Weise Schlechta 1826
870 Der Wanderer an den Mond Seidl 1826
871 Das Zügenglöcklein Seidl 1826
874 O Quell, was Stömst du rasch und wild Schulze 1826
876 Im Jänner 1817 Schulze 1826
877 Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meister Goethe 1826
878 Am Fenster Seidl 1826
879 Sehsnucht Seidl 1826
880 Im Freien Seidl 1826
881 Fischerweise Schlechta 1826
882 Im Frühling Schulze 1826
883 Lebensmut Schulze 1826
884 Über Wildemann Schulze 1826
888 Trinklied Shakespeare 1826
889 Standchen (Hark, hark the lark) Shakespeare 1826
890 Hipplits Lied Gerstenberg 1826
891 Gesang (An Sylvia) Shakespeare 1826
896 Fröhliches Scheiden Leitner 1827
896a Sie in jedem Liede Leitner 1827
896b Wolke und Quelle Leitner 1827
902 Drei Gesange Metastasio 1827
904 Alinde Rochlitz 1827
905 An die Laute Rochlitz 1827
906 Der Vater mit dem Kind Bauernfeld 1827
907 Romanze des Richard Löwenherz Scott 1827
909 Jägers Liebeslied Schober 1827
910 Schiffers Scheidelied Schober 1827
911 (Nos 1-24) Winterreise Müller 1827
916a Song sketch (no text) 1827
917 Das Lied in Grünen Reil 1827
919 Frühlingslied Pollak 1827
922 Heimliches Lieben Klenke 1827
923 Eine altschottische Ballade anonymous English 1827
926 Das Weinen Leitner 1827
927 Vor meiner Wiege Leitner 1827
931 Der Wallensteiner Lanznecht beim Trunlk Leitner 1827
243 Frühlingslied (‘Die Luft ist blau’) Hölty 1815
268 Bergknappenlied 1815
269 Das Leben Wannovius 1815
277 Punschlied (‘Vier Elemente innig gesellt’) Schiller 1815
330 Das Grab (2) Salis-Seewis 1815
331 Der Entfernten (1) Salis-Seewis 1816
337 Die Einsiedelei Salis-Seewis 1816
338 An den Frühling (2) Schiller 1816
339 Amors Macht Matthisson 1816
340 Badelied Matthisson 1816
341 Sylphen Matthisson 1816
356 Trinklied (‘Funkeld im Becher’) 1816
364 Fischerlied (2) Salis-Seewis 1816
377 Das Grab (3) Salis-Seewis 1816
387 Die Schlacht (2) Schiller 1816
407 Beitrag zur Fünfzig jährigen Jubelfeier des Herrn Salieri Schubert 1816
422 Naturgenuss (2) Matthisson 1816
423 Andeken Matthisson 1816
424 Erinnerungen (‘Am Seegestad’) Matthisson 1816
425 Lebensbild 1816
426 Trinklied 1816
427 Trinklied im Mai Hölty 1816
428 Widerhall (‘Auf ewig dein’) Matthisson 1816
441 As D407, arranged for two tenors and bass
494 Der Geistertanz (4) Matthisson 1816
513 La pastorella al prato Goldoni 1817
538 Gesang der Geister über den Wassern Goethe 1817
569 Das Grab Salis-Seewis 1817
572 Lied im freien Salis-Seewis 1817
598 Das Dörfchen 1817
635 Leise, leise lasst uns singen 1819
641 Das Dörfchen (second version) 1819
656 Sehnsucht Goethe 1819
657 Ruhe, Shönstes Glück der Erde 1819
704 Gesang der Geister über den Wassern Goethe 1820
705 Gesang des Geister über den Wassern (sketch) Goethe 1820
709 Frühlingesang Schober before April 1822
710 Im Gegenwärten Vergangenes Goethe 1821
714 Gesang der Geister über den Wassern Goethe 1820
724 Die nachtingall Unger 1821
740 Frühlingsgesang Schober 1822
747 Geist der Liebe Matthisson 1822
778b Ich hab in mich gesogen Rückert 1823
809 Gondelfahrer Mayrhofer 1824
822 Lied eines Kriegers 1824
825 Wehmut Hüttenbrenner 1826
825a Ewige Liebe Schulze 1826
825b Flucht Lappe 1825
835 Bootgesang Scott 1825
847 Trinklied aus dem 16 Jahrhundert Gräffer 1825
848 Nachtmusik Seckendorff 1825
865 Widerspruch Seidl 1826
873a Nachklänge 1826
875 Mondenschein Schober 1826
892 Nachthelle Seidl 1826
893 Grab und Mond Seidl 1826
901 Wein und Liebe Haug 1827
903 Zur guten Nacht Rochlitz 1827
912 Schlachtlied Klopstock 1827
913 Nachtgesang im Walde Seidl 1827
914 Frühlingslied Pollak 1827
916 Das stille Lied Seegemund 1827
941 Hymnus an den Heiligen Geist Schmidl 1828
948 Hymnus an den Heiligen Geist (other versions) Schmidl 1828
964 Hymnus an den Heiligen Geist (other arrangement) Schmidl 1828
983 Jünglingswonne Matthisson ?1822
983a Liebe Schiller ?1822
983b Zum Rundetanz Salis-Seewis ?1822
983c Die Nacht ?Krummacher ?1822
FEMALE OR UNSPECIFIED VOICES
17 Quell’ innocente figlio, version 2 Metastasio 1812
33 Entra l’uomo allor che nasce Metastasio 1812
61 Ein jugendlicher Maienschwung Schiller 1813
69 Dreifach ist der Schritt der Zeit Schiller 1813
130 Der Schnee zerrinnt (1) Hölty 1815
131 Lacrimoso son io 1815
169 Trinklied vor der Schlacht Körner 1815
170 Schwertlied Körner 1815
183 Trinklied (‘Ihr Freunde und du gold’ner Wein’) Zettler 1815
189 An die Freunde Schiller 1815
199 Mailied (‘Grüner wird die Au’) Hölty 1815
202 Mailied (‘Der Schnee zerrinnt’) Hölty 1815
203 Der Morgenstern (2) Körner 1815
204 Jägerlied Körner 1815
205 Lützows wilde Jagd Körner 1815
244 Wilkommen, lieber schöner Mai Hölty 1815
253 Punschlied: im Norden zu singen Schiller 1815
269 Das Leben Wannovius 1815
357 Gold’ner Schein, canon Mattthisson 1816
442 Das grosse Halleluja Klopstock 1816
443 Schlachtlied (1) Klopstock 1816
521 Jagdlied Werner 1817
706 Der 23 Psalm trans M Mendelssohn 1817
757 Gott in der Natur Kleist 1822
836 Coronach (Totengesang der Frauen und Mädchen) Scott 1825
873 Canon, A minor (sketch) 1826
920 Stänchen (formerly D921) Grillparzer 1827
988 Liebe säuseln die Blätter Hölty ?1815
RELIGIOUS MUSIC
24e Mass, F, fragment ?1812
27 Salve Regina, F 1812
31 Kyrie, D minor 1812
45 Kyrie, B flat 1813
49 Kyrie, D minor 1813
56 Sanctus, B flat 1813
66 Kyrie, F 1813
71a Alleluja, F 1813
105 Mass No 1, F 1814
106 Salve Regina, B flat 1814
136 Offertory, C ?1815
167 Mass No 2, G 1815
175 Stabat mater, G minor 1815
181 Offertory, A minor 1815
184 Gradual: Benedictus, Domine 1815
185 Dona nobis pacem, F 1815
223 Salve regina, F 1815
324 Mass No 3, B flat 1815
379 Deutsches Salve regina, F 1816
386 Salve regina, B flat, 1816
452 Mass No 4, C 1816
453 Requiem, C minor 1816
460 Tantum ergo, C 1816
461 Tantum ergo, C 1816
486 Magnificat, C 1815
488 Auguste iam coelestium, G 1816
607 Evangelium Johannis VI, E 1818
621 Deutsches Requiem, G minor 1818
676 Salve regina, A 1819
678 Mass No 5, A flat 1819
696 Six antiphons for Palm Sunday 1820
730 Tantum ergo, B flat 1821
739 Tantum ergo, C 1814
750 Tantum ergo, D 1822
755 Kyrie, A minor 1822
811 Salve regina, C 1824
872 Deutsche Messe 1827
950 Mass No 6, E flat 1828
961 Benedictus, A minor (alternative movement, D452) 1828
962 Tantum ergo, E flat 1828
963 Offertory, B flat 1828
THEATRICAL
11 Der Spiegelritter Kotzebue 1811-12
84 Des Teufels Lustschloss Kotzebue 1813-15
137 Adrast Mayrhofer 1817-19
190 Der vierjährige Posten Körner 1815
220 Fernando Stadler 1815
239 Claudine von Villa Bella Goethe 1815
326 Die Freunde von Salamanka Mayrhofer 1815
435 Die Bürgschaft 1816
644 Die Zauberharfe Hofmann 1820
647 Die Zwillingsbrüder Hofmann 1819
701 Sakuntala Neumann 1820
723 Duet and aria for Hérold’s Das Zauberglöckchen Théaulon 1821
732 Alfonso und Estrella Schober 1821-22
787 Die Verschworenen Castelli 1823
791 Rüdiger ?Mosel 1823
796 Fierabras Kupelweiser 1823
797 Rosamunde, Fürsten von Zypern Chézy 1823
918 Der Graf von Gleichen Bauernfeld 1827
981 Der Minnesänger lost
SONATAS, FANTASIAS AND SHORTER WORKS FOR PIANO
2e Fantasie, C minor 1822
13 Fugue, D minor 1812
14 Overture (lost sketch) 1812
21 Six Variations, F (lost sketch) 1812
24a Fugue, C 1812
24b Fugue, G 1812
24c Fugue, D minor 1812
24d Fugue, C (fragment) 1812
29 Andante, C 1812
37a Fugal sketches, B flat 1813
41a Fugue, E minor (fragment) 1813
71b Fugue, E minor (fragment) 1813
154 Allegro, E (sketch of D157) 1815
156 Ten Variations, F 1815
157 Sonata, E (unfinished) 1815
178 Adagio, G 1815
279 Sonata, C 1815
346 Allegretto, C (fragment) 1816
347 Allegretto moderato, C (fragment) 1813
348 Andantino, C (fragment) 1816
349 Adagio, C (fragment) 1816
459 Sonata, E (fragment) 1816
459a Fünf Klavierstücke nos 3-5 1816
505 Adagio, D flat (original slow movement D625) 1816
506 Rondo, E (finale for D566?) 1817
537 Sonata, A minor 1817
557 Sonata, A flat 1817
566 Sonata, E minor 1817
567 Sonata, D flat (first version of D568) 1817
568 Sonata, E flat 1817
570 Scherzo, D 1817
571 Sonata, F sharp minor (unfinished) 1817
575 Sonata, B 1817
576 Thirteen Variations on a Theme by Hüttenbrenner 1817
593 Two Scherzi (B flat, D flat) 1817
604 Andante, A 1817
605 Fantasia, C (unfinished) 1821-3
605a Fantasy, C: ‘Grazer Fantasie’ 1818
606 March, E 1818
612 Adagio, E 1818
613 Sonata, C (unfinished) 1818
625 Sonata, F minor (unfinished) 1818
655 Sonata, C sharp minor (fragment) 1819
664 Sonata, A 1819 or 1825
718 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, C minor 1821
749a Overture to ‘Alfonso und Estrella’ 1822
760 Fantasy in C: ‘Wandererfantasie’ 1822
769a Sonata, E minor (fragment) 1823
780 Six Moments Musicaux 1823-8
784 Sonata, A minor 1823
817 Ungarische Melodie, B minor 1824
840 Sonata, C: ‘Reliquié’ (unfinished) 1825
850 Sonata, D 1825
894 Sonata, G (“Fantasie”) 1826
899 Four Impromptus: C minor, E flat, G flat, A flat 1827
900 Allegretto, C minor (fragment) after 1820
915 Allegretto, C minor 1827
916b Piano piece, C (sketch) 1827
916c Piano piece, C minor (sketch) 1827
935 Four Impromptus: F minor, A flat, B flat, F minor 1827
946 Drei Klavierstücke: E flat minor, E flat, C 1828
958 Sonata, C minor 1828
959 Sonata, A 1828
960 Sonata, B flat 1828
DANCES FOR PIANO
19b Waltzes and march (lost) 1812 or 1813
22 Twelve minuets with trios (lost) 1812
41 Thirty minuets with trios (ten of them lost) 1813
91 Two minuets (D, A) and trios 1813
128 Twelve Wiener Deutsche 1812
135 Deutscher, E, with trio 1815
139 Deutscher, C sharp, with trio 1815
145 12 Waltzes 1815-21
146 20 Waltzes (Letzte Walzer) 1815, 1823
158 Ecossaise, D minor, F 1815
277a Minuet, A minor 1815
299 Twelve Ecossaises 1815
334 Minuet, A, with trio 1815
335 Minuet, E, with 2 trios 1813
365 36 Originaltänze (Erste Walzer) 1816-21
366 17 Ländler 1816-24
378 Eight Ländler, B flat 1816
380 Three Minuets, with trios 1816
420 Twelve Deutsche 1816
421 Six Ecossaises, E flat 1816
511 Ecossaise, E flat 1817
529 Eight Ecossaises 1817
600 Minuet, C sharp minor 1814
610 Trio, E 1818
640 Two Dances (date unknown)
643 Deutscher, C sharp minor, and Ecossaise, E flat 1819
680 Two Ländler (date unknown)
681 Two Ländler (date unknown)
697 Six Ecossaises, A flat 1820
722 Deutscher, G flat 1821
734 16 Ländler and 2 Ecossaises (Wiener-Damen Ländler) 1822
735 Galop and eight Ecossaises 1822
769 Two Deutsche 1823-24
779 34 Valses Sentimentales 1823
781 Twelve Ecossaises 1823
782 Ecossaise, D 1823
783 16 Deutsche and 2 Ecossaises 1823-24
790 Twelve Deutsche (Ländler) 1823
816 Three Ecossaises 1824
820 Six Deutsche 1824
841 Two Deutsche (F, G) 1825
844 Waltz, G (Albumblatt) 1825
924 Twelve Grazer Walzer 1827
925 Grazer Galopp, C 1827
969 Twelve Walzes (Valses Nobles) 1826
970 Six Ländler (date unknown)
971 Three Deutsche (A minor, A, E) 1822
972 Three Deutsche (D flat, A flat, A) (date unknown)
973 Three Deutsche (E, E, A flat) (date unknown)
974 Two Deutsche, D flat (date unknown)
975 Deutscher, D (date unknown)
976 Cotillon, E flat 1825
977 Eight Ecossaises (date unknown)
978 Waltz, A flat 1825
979 Waltz, G 1826
980 Two Waltzes: G, B minor 1826
980d Waltz, C 1827
PIANO, FOUR HANDS
1 Fantasie, G 1810
1b Fantasie, G (fragment) 1810 or 1811
1c Sonata, F (fragment) 1810 or 1811
9 Fantasie, G minor 1813
48 Fantasie, C minor 1813
592 Overture D ‘im Italienische Stile’ (arrangement of D590) 1817
597 Overture, C ‘im Italienische Stile’ (arrangement of D591) 1817
599 Four Polonaises 1818
602 Three Marches Héroïques (B minor, C, D) 1818 or 1824
603 Introduction and Four Variations on an Original Theme 1824
608 Rondo, D (‘Notre amitié est invariable’) 1824
617 Sonata, B flat 1818
618 Deutscher, G 1818
618a Polonaise and Trio (sketch) 1818
624 Eight Variations on a French Song 1818
668 Overture, G minor 1819
675 Overture, F 1819
733 Three Marches Militaires (D, G, E flat) 1818
773 Overture to ‘Alfonso und Estrella’ 1823
798 Overture to ‘Fierabras’ 1823
812 Sonata in D: ‘Grand Duo’ 1824
818 Divertissement à l’hongroise, G minor 1824
823 Six Grandes Marches 1824
824 Six Polonaises 1826
859 Grande Marche Funèbre, C minor 1825
885 Grande Marche Héroïque, A minor 1826
886 Two Marches Caractéristiques, C 1826
908 Eight Variations on a Themefrom Hèrold’s ‘Marie’, C 1827
928 March, G: ‘Kindermarsch’ 1827
940 Fantasie, F minor 1828
947 Allegro, A minor: ‘Lebensstürme’ 1828
951 Rondo, A 1828
952 Fugue, F minor 1828
968 Allegro Moderato, C and Andante (Sonatine) 1818
CHAMBER
2c String Quartet, F (fragment) ?1811
2d Six Minuets 1811
2f Trio of a minuet, C 1811
3 String Quartet, C (fragment) 1812
8 Overture, C minor 1811
8a Arrangement of D8 1811
18 String Quartet, B flat 1810 or 1811
19 String Quartet, lost around 1811
19a String Quartet, lost around 1811
20 Overture, B flat, lost 1812
28 Trio (sonata in one movement) B flat 1812
32 String Quartet, C 1812
36 String Quartet, B flat 1813
46 String Quartet, C 1812
68 String Quartet, B flat (fragment) 1812
72 Wind Octet, F 1812
72a Allegro, F (fragment) 1812
74 String Quartet, D 1812
79 Wind Nonet, E flat minor 1812
86 Minuet, D 1812
87 String Quartet, E flat 1812
89 Five minuets and trios 1812
90 Five Deutsches and trios 1812
94 String Quartet, D 1811 or 1812
94b Five minuets and Deutsche (lost) 1813
96 Trio, G 1814
103 String Quartet, C minor (fragment) 1814
111a String Trio, B flat 1814
173 String Quartet, G minor 1815
353 String Quartet, E 1816
354 Four Komische Ländler, D 1816
355 Eight Ländler, F sharp minor 1816
370 Nine Ländler, D 1816
374 Eleven Ländler, B flat 1816
384 Sonata, D, violin and piano 1816
385 Sonata, A minor, violin and piano 1816
408 Sonata, G minor, violin and piano 1816
471 String Trio, B flat (fragment) 1816
487 Adagio and Rondo Concertante, F 1816
574 Sonata, A, violin and piano 1817
581 String Trio, B flat 1817
597a Variations, A, for solo violin (lost)
601 Overture for string quartet B flat (fragment) 1816
667 Piano Quintet, A: ‘Die Forelle’ 1819
703 String Quartet movement, C minor: ‘Quartettsatz’ 1820
802 Introduction and Variations for flute and piano 1824
803 Octet, F 1824
804 String Quartet, A minor 1824
810 String Quartet, D minor: ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ 1824
821 Sonata in A minor: ‘Arpeggione’ 1824
887 String Quartet, G 1826
895 Rondo Brillant in B minor for violin and piano 1826
898 Piano Trio in B flat 1827
929 Piano Trio in E flat 1827
934 Fantasy in C for violin and piano 1827
956 String Quintet in C 1828
ORCHESTRAL
2a Overture, D (fragment: formerly D996) ?1811
2b Symphony, D (fragment) ?1811
4 Overture, D for Albrecht’s comedy ‘Der Teufel als Hydraulicus’ ?1812
12 Overture, D 1811 or 1812
26 Overture, D 1812
39a Three minuets and trios (lost) 1813
71c Orchestral fragment, D 1813
82 Symphony No 1, D 1813
94a Orchestral fragment, B flat 1814
125 Symphony No 2, B flat 1814-15
200 Symphony No 3, D 1815
345 Concertstück in D, for violin and orchestra 1816
417 Symphony No 4 in C minor: ‘Tragic’ 1816
438 Rondo in A, for violin and orchestra 1816
470 Overture, B flat 1816
485 Symphony No 5, B flat 1816
556 Overture, D 1817
580 Polonaise in B flat for violin and orchestra 1817
589 Symphony No 6, C 1817-18
590 Overture, D, “in the Italian style” (as piano duet, D592) 1817
591 Overture, C, “in the Italian style” (as piano duet, D597) 1817
615 Symphony, D (sketches for 2 movements) 1818
648 Overture, E minor (possibly for ‘Adrast’) 1819
708a Symphony, D, sketches after 1820
729 Symphony No 7, E, sketched in score 1821
759 Symphony No 8, B minor: ‘Unfinished’ 1822
849 ‘Gmunden-Gastein’ Symphony (probably identical with D944) 1825
936a Symphony No 10, D, sketches mid 1828
944 Symphony No 9, C: ‘The Great’ 1825-?1828
BACK COVER
Old myths die hard. ‘Little mushroom’ his friends called him: a shy genius who dashed off masterpieces as if he were in a daydream, who hid from the girls he adored from afar. The hero of Lilac Time and a dozen sentimental fictions.
The truth is another world. Schubert knew he was living out a life sentence, imposed upon himself when he caught syphilis under astonishing circumstances. He was a man whose life is only now yielding up its secrets; and they cast a tragic light on his artistry. Its scope ranges from the contemplation of suicide to the best-loved classical music in the world.
Schubert knew that he was the successor to Beethoven, yet often he was too poor to pay his shoemaker. He has cast a spell over generations, but his triumph over himself – like his music – seems uniquely and compellingly relevant to us today.
Stephen Jackson trained as a psychologist. He now works as a writer and film-maker on the arts and classical
music. A researcher for Christopher Nupen’s documentary The Greatest Love, The Greatest Sorrow (which won the Crystal Award at the 1994 Prague Festival), he has acted as a consultant on Schubert for many projects.
Shostakovich – communist, dissident, martyr or fool?
A grotesque commentary on a dehumanized age
The formative years: political turbulence, artistic crisis
Influence of Mahler: music as code
Pop Art, that fifteen-minute wonder, first alerted us to the media’s ravening maw. Each gesture with our remote control brings us another swarm of ephemera from the television tube, an electronic landscape of filtered data, in which knowledge has been nagged to death and ground down to pap. We find ourselves cloyed by a surfeit of easy cultural icons: a montage gone stale, in which every frame and context has been identified, listed and impaled upon wire.
Games entice us, in this world which is known because it is predictable. We find ourselves disarmed – and it suits us. Suddenly there is the allure of discovery beyond the commonplace, of a higher and secret language. Gone are the days when truth was self-evident in the black ink between staves, when a composer’s motivation was simply beside the point. The media age brings us celebrity, our complicity with the star of the show’s innermost thoughts, the intimacy and exclusivity of the confessional. So what can it have been like to survive in the travesty of a culture that inspired Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: a clapped-out theme park where none of the rides worked and one could be excommunicated for not wanting a go on the dodgems: where secret police reigned supreme, where a citizen’s benevolent grin of endorsement for the latest Five Year Plan could not in fear for his children be allowed for an instant to slip: where one man could sign twelve thousand death-warrants in a single day, where the greatest symphonist of the mid-twentieth century had to sleep with bags packed beside his bed, in case the military wanted to drag him away to an unmarked grave sanctioned by the people, prepared for him in their name – simply because he wrote ‘formalist’ music?
Of Soviet Russia’s death-toll, as Nikita Krushchev later admitted, ‘no-one was keeping count’. We have a victim’s account of Josef Stalin on the prowl, capricious and cruel and expedient, about to act: ‘the pale yellow stare of a predator. He foamed at the mouth and raged.’ We have records of Stalin’s most ignominious stunt, which he inflicted with relish on his cultural commissar, Tikhon Khrennikov, as indeed on so many:
As head of the Composers’ Union, Khrennikov had to submit the composer candidates to Stalin for the annual Stalin Prize. Stalin had the final say and it was he who chose the names from the list. This took place in his office. Stalin was working – or pretending to work. In any case, he was writing. Khrennikov mumbled names from the list in an optimistic tone. Stalin didn’t look up and went on writing. Khrennikov finished reading. Silence.
Suddenly Stalin raised his head and peered at Khrennikov. As people say, ‘He put his eye on him’. They say that Stalin had worked out this tactic very well. Anyway, the hereditary shop assistant felt a warmth deep from the bowels of the earth, which scared him even more. He jumped up and backed towards the door, muttering something. ‘Our administrator’ backed all the way to the reception area where he was grabbed by two hearty male nurses, who were specially trained and knew what to do. They dragged Khrennikov off to a special room, where they undressed him, cleaned him up and put him down on a cot to get his breath. They scrubbed his trousers in the meanwhile. After all, he was a bureaucrat. It was a routine operation. Stalin’s opinion on the candidates for the Stalin Prize was conveyed to him later. As we see, heroes do not emerge very well…To crap your pants in front of the leader and teacher is not something that everyone achieves: it’s a kind of honour, a higher delight and a higher degree of adulation.
Stalin liked hearing these things about himself. He liked to know that he inspired such fear in his intelligentsia, his artists. After all, they were directors, writers, composers, the builders of a new world, a new man. What did Stalin call them? Engineers of human souls.
What was it that the poetess, Anna Akhmatova, called Leningrad’s railway sidings during the great purges of the 1930’s? ‘The asylums of the mad.’
The plight of Dmitri Shostakovich (dragged as he was through newsreels, vilified in the pages of Pravda) shows us a society where propaganda was the highest aspiration of art, a technology of exploitation the goal of science: where every utterance was false, every move part of a puppet-show of brinkmanship and betrayal. No Soviet composer was the stylistic voyeur that Igor Stravinsky could afford to be – now that he was out of harm’s way. For California’s prime adopted son, alienation was chic: machine-music an amusing conceit to negate the paraphernalia of emotion. But for Shostakovich, the rattle of treadmills is a way of hinting at what is otherwise unthinkable.
Now, propaganda is the half-silvered looking-glass through which each of us convinces himself that he touches reality. It is not the dead generations, which to Marx weighed like a nightmare on the imagination of the living; but the mental furniture, the symbols of solidarity and worth, by which peoples across the industrialized world reassure ourselves that we own truth itself. It is an iconography of delusion. And it has never been a characteristic of dreams to admit self-scrutiny, let alone realism, let alone wit. Dreams are a phosphorescent wash of platitudes, or else instant and still-born fossils; and they lay bare an undercurrent of jingoistic self-regard like nothing else. Yet freedom means the freedom to make mistakes, and for an artist who needs to cultivate an outlook of his own, propaganda offers only private extinction. It is not art, and it comes close only when it acknowledges at least the possibility of despair. That option, more than anything, is the reason for the greatness of this century’s Soviet music, in spite of all odds; and for the collapse of the ideology that gave it birth.
When I call Shostakovich a grotesque composer, I mean it as the highest praise. The grating incongruity of one view of our world, pitted against another, has always thrown up the most troublesome and fertile artistic enigmas – from Antony and Cleopatra and Cosi fan tutte, to Kafka with his half-light of ambivalence, where dissonance forces new scrutiny, new understanding. It establishes the conditions for a filter which can make sense of experience: it engenders a portrait of crisis with the power to create meaning afresh. An ability to generate new language is art’s central, crucial feature – and with it, a capacity to forge an architecture which sweeps aside our old imagination. To do this, artists calculate and confront themselves. They see their work as an outsider does. When such a thing happens, a trade in options and meanings is on the cards, where the flawless logic of the absurd contributes to the act of summoning change from a personal or social malaise. The grotesque, the irreconcilable, is what forces us to make up our minds.
In Shostakovich’s case, the role-model was Gustav Mahler – ‘Dostoevsky retold by Chaplin’ as the young composer’s mentor, Ivan Sollertinsky, used to say. Like Mahler, Shostakovich became the master of a creative impulse in which the perception of an outsider could be earthed and mobilized through the manipulation of symphonic forms: a purveyor of apocalyptic frescoes, set in our time by their mortal and stylistic introspection. Mahler lived in the same world as painters such as Schiele and Klimt: Schiele with his biting candour and acid pungency of line, Klimt with the tremulously overblown and shimmering decoration which he applied to pornography. Mahler too was fascinated by the decay of aspirations, and he was redeemed by the remorseless lucidity and intelligence with which all parts of his creative vision were pursued and refined. Style sets the agenda for the substance: its voluptuous colour, its sinuous twists of reference and idiom as a great musical tradition is celebrated, caricatured, probed. A Mahler symphony is a game: a display into which peacock’s tail of stylistic genres has been subsumed, a commentary underpinned by the grotesque in its most sardonic form.
For Shostakovich, torn between turgid duties and his inner needs, this offered the only viable way ahead. Chameleons, said Shelley, feed on light and air. Shostakovich’s own music is a dialogue between external circumstances and the needs of his own mercurially complex personality (that ‘box of false bottoms’, as a youthful confidante called it) which left to itself could generate enough shades of naïve enchantment, moral equivocation and anguish to last a lifetime. It is the solitary game of an oppressed and unhappy man, played as much on himself as with his perception of the world outside.
It exists as code, a performance in a double sense, the product of a court-jester whose private phantoms had to be processed through the wringer of mock-heroic sublimation. In the Second Cello Concerto, and increasingly as his life runs out, he sets himself on a gothic stage complete with tambourines, fanfares and whirring clocks. You hear insect stridulations which seem to inhabit the same world as Bartók or Schoenberg; but they frame scenes of desolation which make their dispassion all the more sinister. The musical doodlings with which the Eighth or the Fifteenth Symphonies die away are not carefree. They hint at the crawling embarrassment, the hopelessness and estrangement, that follow an offence.
His final works open a Chinese box of acrostic and allusion. Flippant music, sometimes; in which chaos is drummed down by a sort of automaton of fatuous martial rhythms. These are the rituals which neurotics use to ward off panic, and for a few spinning moments all pretence of control is lost. ‘I think this is tragic’ ventured the conductor Kurt Sanderling, at the premiere of the last symphony, as yet another brittle quotation from the William Tell Overture bolted past. ‘You’re not wrong’, the composer replied. What he did not add was that the germ of the music was his childhood recollection of a toy shop, when hopes were still clean, and had yet to be disappointed.
Where can the disappointment have come from? Shostakovich’s obituary in Pravda hailed him as a citizen-artist, ‘a faithful son of the communist party’ who ‘devoted his entire life to reaffirming…the ideals of socialist humanism and internationalism’. His funeral was broadcast live across the Warsaw Pact – as befitted a winner of Stalin Prizes (now expediently forgotten with the dictator’s fall from grace), Honoured Artist of the Russian Federal Socialist Republic, People’s artist of the USSR, three times recipient of the Order of Lenin, Hero of Socialist Labour, Deputy of the Supreme Soviet, and more. Western classical music radio played the Fifth Symphony (a work so studiously accessible that their listeners might manage not to switch off) and commiserated with the empire of the bear on its loss.
But the story was not quite over. Four years later, in 1979, either Shostakovich or an imposter claiming a privileged audience with him in his last years, sprung upon the world Testimony. Claimed to be the composer’s memoirs as dictated to his amanuensis, the music journalist Solomon Volkov, it was published when Volkov gained freedom in New York. ‘I never tried to flatter the authorities with my music,’ the new Shostakovich pronounced. ‘One man has no significance in a totalitarian state. A mechanism needs only cogs. Stalin used all of us as cogs. One cog does not differ from another, and cogs can replace one another so easily. You can pick one out and say, “From today you will be a genius cog” and everyone else will consider it a genius. It doesn’t matter whether it is or not. Anyone can become a genius on the orders of the leader.’
Naturally, this was an instant succès de scandale. Khrennikov’s visceral embarrassments, the torture of the too-brilliant theatre Director Meyerhold (and his wife stabbed in her eyes, screaming her last moments away as pedestrians scurried by) despite Shostakovich’s entreaties for their lives: a withering denunciation of Lenin himself, the description of how Stalin had shot in pique his rocketry experts, leaving Leningrad next to defenceless. ‘You had to take a guest into the toilet to tell him a joke. You turned on the water full blast and then whispered the gag. You even laughed, quietly, into your fist. A marvellous tradition.’ It delivered the goods which, if true, made for the best autobiography since Berlioz’s.
But was it true? There were no taped interviews: Shostakovich found a microphone as terrifying as a snake, said Volkov; you’d picked up what you could with shorthand. Circumspect westerners found inaccuracies and, alongside them, revelations that seemed unavailable elsewhere. There were murmurs from expatriates of how much in Testimony was genuine, despite all the official trophies that Shostakovich had accepted, the hack-commemorations that he had so eagerly penned. Volkov had meant to write a biography, their theory went; he might have dressed it up as autobiography for publicity and gain, but the crux of what he said was right.
Before the end of the year a response had appeared in Moscow’s Literary Gazette. It was endorsed by several dozen former colleagues and entitled ‘Pitiful Forgery – concerning the so-called Memoirs of D D Shostakovich’. Its most damning signatory was the composer’s third wife, Irina, who appeared on television to say how little Volkov had known her husband, and how he had not visited the family enough to gain what he claimed. Laurel Fay, an American musicologist, discovered passages in Shostakovich’s old speeches which Volkov had rehashed as if they had been written years later: these, and these alone, were what Shostakovich had been duped into signing away as authentic. And when Shostakovich’s son Maxim defected to the west in 1981, he dismissed Testimony as a patchwork of gossip magicked from nowhere.
Yet the story’s twists were not over. Gerald Abraham, a leading British authority on Soviet music, had known Shostakovich and his friends: Testimony was absolutely consistent, he declared, with his own understanding. Just arrived in the west were the two conductors who had premiered several of his most courageous symphonies. Kirill Kondrashin braved the Babi Yar debacle in 1962, whilst Rudolf Barshai (who’d arranged for orchestra Shostakovich’s own memorial ‘to the victims of Fascism’) confessed to the Sunday Times of Volkov’s account, ‘It’s all true.’ Shostakovich’s former pupil, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, explained that the symphonies were a secret and coded dissident’s critique of his nation’s history; and Rostislav Dubinsky – Shostakovich’s friend, leader of the Borodin Quartet – affirmed that they were a portrait of the Soviets’ destruction of Russian culture. Dubinsky’s autobiography, Stormy Applause, chronicling thirty years of musical browbeating, describes how it was necessary to play the Fourth Quartet in two ways: often with florid smiles, only daring occasionally to bare its bitter subtext of disillusionment. One hears a canon as sweet as a nursery-rhyme, which opens seemingly illimitable possibilities – all of them observed askance, as if through a peeling mirror. Its finale, rhythmically speaking, pre-empts A Career in the Babi Yar Symphony of thirteen years later: and perhaps shares with it the wearied sense of triumphant subtlety and reason. But then, Shostakovich’s music was always the stuff of codification and ambiguity.
By now biographies had appeared thick and fast. Rostropovich’s wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, drew on her years as the composer’s intimate professional friend (‘If art can be called anti-communist, Shostakovich’s music should be known by that name’). Vladimir Ashkenazy described the composer’s misery when he had been forced to join the Communist Party. Most dramatic was Maxim Shostakovich’s about-face. His defection and its aftermath had been a nightmare, with KGB harassment at 1.30 in the morning (‘I knew: it was now or never’) and the pressure on him to vilify Volkov had been unendurable. It seemed an old tyranny had lost none of its teeth.
*
Marx grasped what the Jesuits had only glimpsed: that the social being of men determines their consciousness. The great philosopher envisioned the system that made Maxim’s father, as well as breaking him. Dmitri agreed, ‘Without the revolution, I should probably never have been a composer.’ He was born in the city of the 1905 Uprising, months after the event; and one his first scores, drafted when he was ten, was The Soldier. ‘Here the soldier fires’ he writes at one point, somewhere in page upon harried page that leaves nothing to the imagination. His Second Symphony depicts the shooting of a Cossack boy for stealing an apple during the riots of 1917, which Shostakovich saw for himself. ‘I didn’t forget that boy’ he said of his trauma. ‘And I never will.’
‘Insurrection is an art,’ said Trotsky, ‘and like all arts, it has its laws.’ Briefly, in the years following the 1917 revolution, the Soviet Union was in the vanguard of the world’s avant-garde. The poet Mayaskovsky wrote of ‘spitting out the past, like a bone in our throats’ and Lenin was keen to foster artistic freedom, provided it served the goals of agitprop. An educated, westernized sensibility brought fresh sophistication to the ripe opulence of Russian folk traditions, whilst the pioneers of Suprematicism and Constructivism sought to hone their hard new aesthetic with a discipline and scrutiny which could encompass the horizons of a machine age: Kandinsky, Rodchenko, Malevich amongst visual artists, the films of Eisenstein, the incandescent futurism of the novelist Mayaskovsky. Before the revolution, Shostakovich’s own city of St Petersburg had been the home of Rimsky Korsakov, and it was there, in 1908, that Rimsky’s pupil Stravinsky had unleashed his First Symphony. There too, music from the west’s cutting edge was performed: Reger, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Les Six. Amongst the cultural traffic between St Petersburg and the west was a festival of Russian music in Paris, organized by a young entrepreneur, Sergei Diaghilev. Following the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, Bartók was feted when he came to Leningrad, as it should shortly be called, to play. Shostakovich had the appetite and the ears to absorb everything he heard, and as he completed his musical studies he embraced Bolshevik iconoclasm with zeal. He flirted with Constructivism, which drew its inspiration and materials from modern industry; and the sculptor Tatlin’s revolutionary spiral design became the tacit emblem of Shostakovich’s own works in their raucous evocations of factory life. The old conception of art, as a commodity and diversion for the privileged few, was under assault. As Rodchenko explained, ‘The art of the future will not be the cosy decoration of family homes. It will be as indispensible as the 48-storey skyscrapers, mighty bridges, wireless, aeronautics and submarines which will themselves be transformed into it.’ Whatever else he renounced, Shostakovich never lost faith in an artistic imperative which was biting in relevance and immediacy, as important as breathing.
Stalin became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1922, and with Lenin’s death 1924, he set about creating ‘socialism in one country’. Two years later the NKVD, his secret police, were in place. For a couple of years his apparatchiks had their work cut out on the economy, but then they were free to turn to everyday life. ‘Art without content…technically skilful in form, but expressing in content the ideology of decadent bourgeoisie’, was pilloried. In its place was Socialist Realism: national self-expression with a purpose (in effect, a sentimental idolatry of the proletariat) in which the symphony could regain a historical mission which, with capitalism, it had lost. In all this, the figure of Beethoven had a mighty significance. As Shostakovich wrote, ‘Only Beethoven was a forerunner to the revolutionary movement. If you read his letters you will see how often he wrote to his friends that he wished to give new ideas to the public and rouse it to revolt against its masters.’ But there was a deeper import for the Soviet musicologists of Shostakovich’s youth. Beethoven alone had upheld ‘the brotherhood of man’ which the bourgeoisie had later subverted: his symphonies were the clarion-calls for an era in their monumentality and aspiration. If there was felt a need for a symphonist in Beethoven’s mould to arise in the new order, it was a challenge which Shostakovich was uniquely equipped to meet.
‘Cities are the only source of inspiration for a truly modern art’ wrote his contemporary, Boris Pasternak. ‘The living language of our time is urban.’ Shostakovich was born with the sounds of St Petersburg in his ears. He served the city throughout its siege, and he was as battered as any member of Soviet society by forces beyond reason. Yet like the narrator of his Thirteenth Symphony, Shostakovich surmounts his life in a feat of creative and personal triumph. His themes don’t often soar. More likely they are impacted and crabby, but what a compensating intensity they have. His music, filled with the sounds from the streets he knew, is as contemporary and as unflinching as the photojournalism of Weegee in New York, as sharply etched as Soviet cinema: yet the necessities of his times force open the gate to an unutterable world of the profoundest emotions. He listens to his contemporaries (his compatriots, Stravinsky and Hindemith, later Schoenberg, his friend Benjamin Britten and many others) and he learns from them. Above all, as Eric Roseberry argued, he attends diligently to his Marxist-Leninist role, using music as a simile for political evolution:
In his ‘heroic’ symphonies Shostakovich, striving to express the new consciousness, applied the socio-historical principles of Hegel and Marx. Beginning with the Fourth, these works embody philosophical ideas such as the identity of opposites and the dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. At the same time, his music was never cold and abstract, but strove to express life in all its contradictory aspects. Man remained at the centre.
The theoreticians of taste must have felt sure of his allegiance. In truth, the darkness of the Second World War mirrored the ambivalent twilight of the grotesque, and the need to write war music allowed the euphoric lies of Soviet life at last to crumble. From Mahler, Shostakovich knew how to juxtapose conflicting passages so that it was left to the listener to determine what was real. War then serves as a metaphor for a state of being in which optimism is the irony of failure, in which infinite variety can find a voice within implacable fatalism: and it lets free a language beyond self-affirmation, beyond rhetoric. Never do we see his current of raw and febrile ardour, the energy of a despairing dance or of uncauterized pain, more directly than in these six years.
When the war was over, Shostakovich had to find a new guise if he was to survive on the tightrope between official praise and savage public denunciation, according to how his latest work might be perceived. The paradoxical fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear was one of his favourite characters, and he’d set verses with delight for a production of the play in 1941. It was the shattering of Lear’s illusions, he recalled, that mattered. Shostakovich’s affection was also evident for Mussorgsky, and he began to see himself as Mussorgsky’s heir – perhaps even to the extent of escaping internal contradictions by playing the moralizing fool, as for self-defence his predecessor had so often done. Solomon Volkov proposes,
Whether consciously or not, Shostakovich became the second great yurodivy composer. The yurodivy is a Russian religious phenomenon…a national trait. There is no word in any other language that can precisely convey the meaning, with its many historical and cultural overtones. The yurodivy has the gift to see and hear what others know nothing about. But he tells the world about his insights in an intentionally paradoxical way, a code. He plays the fool, while actually being a persistent exposer of evil and injustice. The yurodivy is an anarchist and individualist, who in his public role breaks he commonly held ‘moral’ laws of behaviour and flouts conventions. But he sets strict limitations, rules and taboos for himself. The origins of yurodstvo go back to the fifteenth century…During all that time, the yurodivye could expose injustice and remain in relative safety. The authorities recognized the right of yurodivye to criticize and be eccentric – within limits. Their influence was immense.
What evidence is there that this applies to Shostakovich? A passing comment by his one-time champion, the conductor Evgeni Mravinsky, and the early example set by Shostakovich’s friends amongst Oberiu, the Leningrad Dadaists – no more. Even if we accept Testimony at face value, Shostakovich seems as much prone to retrospective self-justification as the rest of us. Under the spotlight he was no hero, nor even a holy fool, merely another frightened little man.
Yet as a key to opening up the music, Volkov’s metaphor is perhaps more apt. He writes of Shostakovich’s generation, ‘New ideals could be affirmed only in reverse…through a screen of mockery, sarcasm and foolishness…But these words did not carry a simple meaning; they had double or triple implications. In their works, street language grimaced and clowned, taking on mocking nuances. A joke was transformed into a parable, a child’s ditty into a terrifying examination of the human condition.’
Hang on to your irony, the composer himself said. It was your safeguard and your future, the most precious gift you had. Like the murdered Trotsky, Shostakovich understood the mediocrity of evil. With the death of Mahler and Sibelius, he is the only twentieth century composer whose symphonies rise to the Beethoven’s broad humanity: out of them all, he comes closest to Beethoven’s fusion of compassion and the rigour of a master craftsman, in whose epic and sweeping compass not a note is without significance. The reason for Shostakovich’s enduring fame is simple. He is the only composer of our time who squares the realities and necessities of that age with the highest ideals of the past.
Shostakovich wrote to his friend Isaac Glikman, ‘If my hands were cut off, I would continue to write music with the pen between my teeth.’ The sullen inner fires that drive an individual to make order out of chaos, against all odds, take on many forms. In Stalin and Shostakovich two men possessed were ready to collide: one of them a bullish puritan preoccupied with social control and the crushing of originality (‘he worked into the night, like a thief’ noted Shostakovich), the other an ascetic terrified of death and death’s counterfeit, inertia. For Shostakovich the need to make sense was as necessary as breathing; a making good of debts, an act of atonement (for what?) endlessly to be repaid. His compulsiveness never manifests itself in magpie wit or meticulous ceremony, as it did for Stravinsky, although both men were shrewd enough to know the potency of creative pastiche. Instead he is a figure from a Sartre novel, nauseated by the dread of imprisonment within his own frame, compelled as much as Albert Camus’ Sisyphus to be a hero in dogged frustration and futility, for whom to do (endlessly, and that alone) was sufficient to be. Shostakovich is almost by himself in facing the traumas of the twentieth century, as well as the challenges that the devastation of its musical language must raise. Through him enlightenment shines, and he has made us aware of the chasm of unreason at our feet, through which sense threatens to vanish. As each of us contemplates the long night of our times, this frigid sensibility – born out of supreme awareness of creative idiom and of the dead weight of our century’s unique capacity to appal – resonates in the mind after lighter gossip has ceased to speak.
The 18-year-old Shostakovich, photographed June 28, 1925, two days before he completed his Symphony No. 1.
CHAPTER 2
A PETROGRAD CHILDHOOD, 1906-25
1905 Uprising, 1917 Revolution
Shostakovich’s upbringing and personality
He enters the Conservatoire
Poverty and sickness
St Petersburg is a spectral edifice, built upon swamps. ‘The Venice of the Russias’, travel-writers call it. Its canals and noble silhouettes, its lime trees and exquisite boulevards…those who have lived there perceive it differently. ‘This rotten, slimy city should rise in smoke and disappear in smoke’ wrote Dostoevsky. ‘The white mists of the Neva were blackened by the fog of factory chimneys,’ recalled Alexander Werth, aware of the midsummer reek of hot tar and cursing carters, the ‘cadaverous yellow water, the yellow snow’ of icebound winters. ‘An ochre city’ remembered Stravinsky, of Italian architecture and teeming islands – blue and gold: stucco, marble, and ‘purple-painted prostitutes, crying, “Men, give us cigarettes”’. Akhmatova called it ‘a sombre town on a menacing current, quiet, beclouded, austere.’ It was the grandiloquent conception of a despot, Peter the Great, who envisaged at a stroke his window on the west at any cost, in money or in the ruination of human hopes. In the sinking of its great oak piles into slime, it was said that every brick, every stone, marked the life of a worker.
No matter, for a tax on everyone who worked there would recoup the cost of its megalomaniac vision. It was also the place where seven Shostakovich symphonies, two operas, three ballets and most of his quartets would have their premiere; and it fed his imagination from the earliest age with its shadows and fantasy, its midsummer nights bloated with light, its Silver Age of literature, its unfathomable and mercurial water. Shostakovich’s first surviving music, filled with the nocturnal resonances of Rachmaninov and Medtner, Gogol and Pushkin, prefigures his lifelong identification with the tragic figures of the past.
Russians understood well the mirage, caught between public ostentation and the financial depredation of millions of lives and of an empire, which their capital city embodied. Between 1900 and 1917 an old order slumped into catastrophe. Amongst artists, Symbolists looked to the future with foreboding, whilst Futurists advocated cultural anarchy. Scriabin, the craze of Petrograd (for Shostakovich’s city would change its name twice within a couple of decades) revelled in decadence and mystic introspection. Other events cut closer to the bone. Widespread violence culminated in the St Petersburg Palace Place massacre of 9 January 1905, ‘Bloody Sunday’, in which Tsar Nicholas II’s troops slaughtered peaceful demonstrators. As the bourgeoisie clung to the remnants of their life (and Rimsky Korsakov’s opera, Kaschei the Immortal, had its first performance) so, to world revulsion, battalions of workers were lined up and shot. Shostakovich’s aunt Nadejda remembered,
They erected clumsy barricades and defended themselves with revolvers against the machine guns that had been hoisted on the belfries of cathedrals…The orders from highauthorities – ‘Take no prisoners, act without mercy’ – were carried out to the letter.
Shostakovich’s first dissenting piece, a Funeral March to the Victims of Revolution, was for a memorial service in January 1918. But it was his Eleventh Symphony of 1957 that commemorates the 1905 apocalypse: a jostle of proletarian songs and military fanfares, scanning the frostbitten expanse shattered by bloodshed in what Pasternak called ‘a notorious trollop of dawn…that mirror of waters.’
‘I didn’t spend my life as an onlooker’ said Shostakovich to Volkov, ‘but as a proletarian.’ He was born on 12 September 1906, and his father hurried back from work with delicacies for the christening. ‘Why don’t you call him Dmitri?’ asked the priest. It’s a good Russian name, and his father’s name too.’ ‘But’, said his mother Sophia, ‘Jaroslav Dmitrievich sounds much better than Dmitri Dmitievich.’ The priest waved aside her objections. ‘Dmitri’s a good name.’ So Dmitri it was.
His early life, the crabby old Shostakovich told Volkov, was insignificant. His parents had come from Siberia to St Petersburg, where in 1902 Dmitri père began work with the great chemist Mendeleyev. Little Dmitri remembered creeping across corridors to eavesdrop on a neighbour’s string quartet. Sophia, daughter of an enlightened mine-manager, was a fine amateur pianist and her husband sang well enough to tackle Lensky in Eugene Onegin. Then came a child’s revelation of hearing the same work at the opera-house. ‘I was amazed. A new world of orchestral music was unfolded before me, a world of new colours…’ And young Dmitri loved gypsy ballads: ‘magical music, which helped me a great deal later when I belted away on the piano in cinemas. At least I’m not a snob.’
Volkov’s ageing composer had reasons to discredit the revolutionary fervour of his youth, to issue his own belated counter-propaganda. His family, in fact, consisted of Polish radicals with several generations of subversion and exile behind it. Dmitri Boleslavich knew from his childhood the boisterous nature of the peasants, whose innate goodness alone, he believed, could save their nation. The Shostakoviches were narodniks, radical democrats like the rest of St Petersburg’s intelligentsia, but by this time no more than that. Almost blandly their relatives campaigned from the family home, until a memorable visit from the Tsarist secret police.
The atmosphere then was, as the poet Alexander Blok put it, charged with sickness, alarm, catastrophe, and disruption. An upheaval in the heart of every citizen, remembered Boris Pasternak; and Petrograd was at the centre of the unrest. This was where Lenin chose to return from exile in 1917, calling for land, bread and an end to war. Shostakovich recalled the story of how, in 1905, the Tsarists ‘were carting around a mound of murdered children on a sleigh. The boys had been sitting in the trees, looking at the soldiers, and the soldiers shot them – just for fun. The dead children were smiling. They had been killed so suddenly that they hadn’t had time to be frightened.’ It came back to him, he said, in his Eleventh Symphony: ‘It’s about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.’
Dmitri was a sickly child, frightened of outstretched hands and fire ‘and corpses’. He was too weak to crush himself into the heaving trams, so he walked everywhere. His family was affluent and content, and he wandered on their estate. It was not until the age of nine that Sophia decided to give him piano lessons. Within days he was playing duets with her, and by eleven he had mastered Bach’s Forty Eight, and began composing for himself. He changed at the piano, his parents realized: commanding and concentrated like a man twice his age, unable to concentrate on his mathematics because his head was ‘full of sounds.’ Nadejda remembers him reciting whole operas by ear, improvising themes about ‘a snow-covered village, far away’. A couple of years later, this was how he came to meet the crippled painter Kustodiev, wheezing over his voluptuous nudes. For him Dmitri would weave extemporized dances. From him Dmitri gained his awareness of contemporary developments across the arts, the subtle eroticism of The Nose, as well as the fortitude to work during his own terminal disease:
One of Mitya’s schoolfellows was the daughter of a Petrograd painter. One day she told her father that there was a boy in their class who was ‘absolutely fab’ on the piano; could she invite him home? He came to tea and was duly asked to play, which he did: Chopin, Beethoven etcetera, until the girl interrupted him, asking why did he play that old classical stuff, and begging him to play a fox trot. Papa rebuked her, and said to young Shostakovich, ‘Mitya, don’t pay any attention to her. Play what you want to play.’ And he continued with his sketch.
Zoya, Mitya’s sister, remembered him as a reserved boy, absent-minded, yet given to mischievous high-spirits ‘until they started beating the fun out of him’. In 1915 he was enrolled in Mariya Shidlovskaya’s Private Commercial School, where he remained until a move to the Gymnasium No 13 in 1918. He was a disciplined student, hard-working, who learnt how to use his tongue with caustic effect against bullies. His friend Boris Lossky thought that he resembled ‘a small sparrow. He sat at the window looking blank-faced through his spectacles while his schoolmates played and amused themselves. Probably his introspection was due to his inner hearing. At the time he seemed out of place and helpless amongst the other children.’ Shostakovich remembered that he’d learnt to assess his peers quickly, and to live with the disillusionment.
The First World War had brought many privations, and in 1922 the family’s gentle, indefatigable breadwinner was dead. But the direst event had been the Bolshevik uprising of 1917, where under Lenin’s masterly direction the Red Guards had by night seized Petrograd’s Winter Palace, and forced the surrender of the Kerensky government. At first the fatalities were limited, but violence grew on both sides until giant common graves could alone accommodate the bodies. This was the Civil War of 1918-21. Volkov’s Shostakovich claimed hardly to remember the funerals; but others recalled his fright and his long, quiet threnody at the piano in a darkening room. The lists of ‘liquidated enemies’ were stuck up on theatrical billboards. Both Shostakovich’s Second and Twelfth Symphonies describe the murder of a Cossack boy: and the third movement of the Twelfth is entitled ‘Aurora’, after the cruiser whose guns had signalled the Winter Palace attack, birth of the Soviet Union.
After spending some time refusing to visit the pedagogue Ignatiy Gliasser (‘his lectures already seemed ridiculous to me’) Shostakovich’s gifts as a composer and a pianist were noticed by Alexander Glazunov, Rimsky’s successor as Director of the Petrograd Conservatoire. Shostakovich’s father had agreed to get him illicit alcohol from the State reserves, and Mitya was the go-between. Often, said Shostakovich, Glazunov’s tutorials would become more indistinct as the great man, his mouth clamped at the nipple, would subside into a torpor. In return Glazunov became a second father, and Shostakovich’s lifelong respect for an impeccable symphonic craftsman is clear. ‘Glazunov spent all his time thinking about music and therefore, when he spoke about it, you remembered for life’ Shostakovich observed, fifty years after the event. ‘He re-established the value of the simple word…and we did our best to re-create his mental processes.’
Shostakovich was harder on his memories of himself. ‘I was harsh and intolerant. And I liked to be treated with respect.’ But these were cruel times. The highlight of the Conservatoire day, in the hardness of a winter, was the arrival of pickled cabbage. ‘The cold piano keys’ said Leo Arnshtam, ‘singed your fingers.’ When Dmitri joined in 1919, he could afford to study only part-time: the rest was taken up earning money for his family. He became a piano-player at the Bright Reel Theatre, run by Akim Volynsky for his ‘little harem’ of pretty dancing girls. When Shostakovich asked for wages, Volynsky stared down from a dirty collar. ‘Young man, do you love Art? Great, lofty, immortal Art? The how can you talk to me about this filthy lucre?’ Shostakovich repeated his anecdote at Volynsky’s memorial gala, to conspicuous effect.
Hack-work, and the onset of tuberculosis, frustrated time and again progress on the work he planned for his graduation: a symphony, which he began in the spring of 1923. Through grinding toil he completed it by July of 1925. Yet its debut marked it out as the most remarkable piece of its kind ever to be composed by a man of less than 20 years. In triumph it would be introduced by Glazunov to the world.
CHAPTER 3
1924-36: A RUSSIAN ROSSINI
First Symphony: international triumph
First betrayals – a victim of in-fighting
The hesitant lover
Stage music and ‘Lady Macbeth’
Mikhail Druskin, the Leningrad pianist, was close to Shostakovich in these years. A complex man, Druskin decided, nervously agile yet youthfully charming: with an eye for the ridiculous, zestful and daring, ‘yet deeply arcane’. The First Symphony embodied these contrasts and collisions, Druskin felt. ‘It was Shostakovich’s vocation to realize the concept of tragedy, for this was how he perceived the world.’ One could draw a parallel with Dostoevsky – particularly in the work which would spell Shostakovich’s downfall: his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which was written under the influence of The House of the Dead. Meanwhile ‘life seethed around the young composer’, continues Druskin,
‘sucking him onto its vortex. Anyone who did not experience those years together with Shostakovich must find it difficult to imagine the intensity of this whirlpool, which threw up an explosion of creative energy and provided the strongest impulse to artistic endeavour and innovation. The fresh wind of the Revolution revitalized the whole pattern of life, thrown up as it was on the open spaces of streets and squares. Youth, driven by the force of its tempestuous gales, avidly reached out for all that was new.
A Symphony-Grotesque, Shostakovich once called the First. It was performed on 12 May 1926 by the Leningrad Philharmonic under its chief Conductor, Nikolai Malko, in a programme made up of new music. But the orchestra soon lost its world-weariness with student pieces when it came to this assured and fastidious manuscript. Malko protested the finale was unplayably fast and Shostakovich, long feeling patronized by his former teachers, took pleasure in proving him wrong. He did Malko an injustice, for the conductor recalled,
I was amazed both by the symphony and his playing…vibrant, individual, and the striking work of a composer with an original approach. The style was unusual; the orchestration sometimes suggested chamber music in its sound and its instrumental economy.
Despite the griping of other Conservatoire pedagogues, ‘I decided immediately to perform it.’ Mitya, so nervous that he could neither eat nor sleep, was given his first ovation by the musicians: the Scherzo was encored, the audience was tumultuous. In Moscow it would be necessary to fight off the crush of students – only the symphony’s dedicatee, Kvadri, got through. Malko presented the score to Bruno Walter, who brought it to the attention of the west.
It is a tremendous debut: clean and deft, tightly integrated and structured. Imagine that the spirit to be celebrated ten years later in Peter and the Wolf had been whisked off into some mischievous sedition of a ballet, as crisply timed as Petruschka, in which laconic imaginings float up and dissipate like bubbles. The facility, the assurance and musical craftiness, are all astonishing. It has the quality of a conjuring routine, decorous and capricious, with many of the resources that would serve Shostakovich well in later life, not least a natural symphonist’s manipulation of interludes and anticlimax. It is the work of a composer looking back on the Indian summer of Romanticism, and forward to a brave new world in which any adventure is safe, every juxtaposition calculable: every incongruity, even, potentially a thing of grace.
Nadejda confided that much of the score was lifted from Dmitri’s juvenilia. The first movement was from a fable called The Dragonfly and the Ant, the last from a setting of Hans Andersen. A fairytale quixoticism is preserved, but so too are wit, nostalgia, honesty and confidence, balance and restraint, contemplation, spontaneity and introverted lyricism, bristling sarcasm too – not to mention the pathos of Charlie Chaplin, which Shostakovich would have known and relished. A resemblance to Stravinsky is not fortuitous; for in him Shostakovich found reflected his own childhood observations of men as marionettes, the harried, behaviourist hero-victims of Wozzeck and Pierrot Lunaire. Tchaikovsky’s lyrical ardour is in there, and the Prokofiev of the Classical Symphony or Scythian Suite: Schumann, Brahms and the commedia dell’arte theatricality of Vsevolod Meyerhold. Shostakovich’s individualism surmounts them all, with its climaxes that consistently and deliberately break too soon, with the nervy ambivalence beneath its mask of often relentless optimism. Its best movement, a splendid opening, is perhaps the least indicative of what was to come, for the rest in Shostakovich’s future in embryo. The disruptions of the Allegretto are those of whimsical impatience, but the finale is (as Roy Blokker has shown) about energy in the face of impending collapse.
Shostakovich had better luck here than he could find as a professional pianist. In January 1927 he entered the Chopin competition in Warsaw, and disappeared amongst the finalists despite the public calling out his name. It was a bitter blow, which manifests itself in his few subsequent works for the keyboard. ‘I had to decide whether to be a pianist or a composer’ he shrugged, thirty years later. ‘With hindsight I should have been both, but…’ His Chopin was rigid and laconic, picked apart as if by a vulture. His jokes as a cinema pianist were so raucous that the viewers would complain he must be drunk. Not the stuff of which careers are made; but the portents for his own music, had he the sense to see them, were also ominous. The proletarianization of the arts was now in force, ostensibly for the purposes of Socialist Realism, but as a first line for the class warfare through which Stalin could increasingly manipulate and terrorize the factions of Soviet society. Both the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) and its rival, the avant-garde Association of Contemporary Musicians (ACM), attacked the First Symphony for its allegiance to Tchaikovsky, a dated ‘bourgeois individualist’. The result was a stylistic impasse, the first crisis of Shostakovich’s creative life.
This was the cultural rout in which Glinka’s Ivan Susanin was rehashed as Hammer and Sickle, and in which capitalism was personified dramatically as ‘a monstrous blood sucking creature. Repulsive, vast and bloated, Capitalism holds mankind enslaved in its gigantic, blood-stainedclutches.’ Lenin had abolished the Proletkult in 1920, but in the drive to collectivization it suited the propaganda wing of Stalin’s Central Committee, and RAPM was reborn as a clique of untrained and semi-literate zealots who demanded that everything written before 1917 should be destroyed. Glazunov, seeing what was up, escaped to France. It was precisely the sterile nightmare that George Orwell’s 1949 satire would delineate so chillingly. As a young man Shostakovich was arrogant, but he sensed he was not beyond attack. Already there had been moves to expel him from the Conservatoire because of Glazunov’s patronage. His next project, a mockery of the New Economic Policy, was doomed to disaster.
Lenin inaugurated the NEP in 1921, as a means of rebuilding a shattered economy through limited free trade, and as a sop to the peasants who had been antagonized by his political coup. The boorish poet Mayakovsky, who wrote The Bedbug, saw the Policy as a betrayal of communist ideals. As Meyerhold, his play’s director, said, ‘That’ll blow the cobwebs out of our brains!’ and Mayakovsky announced, ‘Our duty is to blare like brass-throated horns in the fogs of bourgeois vulgarity.’ Shostakovich’s incidental music to this poster-paint assault on middle-class rapprochement was characteristic of his early style: brazen, monumental, but oddly agile with it. Although the farce’s message was expediently filleted to what seemed to be the political flavours of the moment, in the strident confusion of 1929 it was bound to come to no good. Shostakovich’s own family was offended by it. But then, neither composer nor director thought they were doing their job unless they antagonized as many people as possible.
And liberalism was at an end. There was a joke about ‘doorbell fever’: you heard a knock, they said there was a telegram, so you picked up your little suitcase. As The Bedbug had its premiere, Stalin began his liquidation of the kulaks across the Ukraine, of ‘class-enemies’ across the Union. Amidst the deportation of millions and the establishment of Gulags, ‘capitalist elements’ would be picked on and ruined (for this was the admitted term) ‘sometimes’. Volkov’s Shostakovich laughs at the way the censors banned the ghost from Hamlet, but the question must be asked of how staunch a communist he was himself at this time. He seemed ‘embarrassed’ in interviews with western journalists, but his modernism was impeccable for an age of brutalized scientific materialism and acts of cynical, unfettered love. The show-trials of browbeaten intelligentsia were starting up; it was said that freedom, conscience and the sanctity of life were fictions. You had to be sharp or to die.
This establishes the language of the Second Symphony of 1927, and the Third of 1929. ‘Errors of my youth’ Shostakovich called them, and so they are; even if following the First must have seemed an impossible task. The Second was a welcome diversion from that challenge, a propaganda commission for the revolution’s tenth anniversary, and ideal material for a starving composer. It is sixteen minutes of mercilessly voguish scene-painting, its climaxes reflecting not emotion but the angular cadences of declaimed speech, and opening with the glowering effects Shostakovich was to put to better use in the Sixth. Shostakovich said that he wanted to write a symphony in which no idea was used again: and this is a crisp sales-pitch in orchestration from a composer who has no idea or inclination to string two ideas together. Witheringly quirky and (as Prokofiev used to say of life in general) ‘amusing’, it inhabits the same world as that older Conservatoire colleague, and as such never escapes the predestinate grooves of a chimpanzee’s tea-party. In the end a choir arrives for a rescue worthy of the Fifth Cavalry, all other options exhausted: ‘Oh Lenin! You hammered resolve out of our misery, forged strength into our worn-worn hands. You taught us, Lenin, that our destiny has but a single name: Struggle!’ The half-hour Third is more characteristically Russian. It is an efficient and cheery storm in a propaganda teacup, best seen as a necessary orchestral rehearsal for the Fourth, for never again was Shostakovich to sound so lackadaisically smug. Once again, a choir pops up to give a rousing finish where otherwise there could only be a damp squib – or rather, a stylistic cul-de-sac banged up for a committee.
But the sense of tragedy incipient in much more of Shostakovich’s work was as dangerous as his experimentalism. His opera The Nose of 1928 – anarchic, darkly frivolous and based on Gogol – is an amoral satire on humanity itself in which a bureaucrat’s detached nose, taking on a life of its own, is hunted down by frenzied townspeople. Both the nose, and its now-impotent owner (for Shostakovich develops the sexual implications with voyeuristic glee) are misunderstood and uncomprehending individuals, ripe for exploitation, pitted helplessly against the police and mass-psychosis. More to the point, the opera is a pungent critique of 1920’s society: its petty officials, its intimidated press and false incriminations. Shostakovich explained innocently:
One has only to read this story to see that The Nose, as a satire on the reign of Nicholas I, is more powerful than any of Gogol’s other stories. Secondly, it seemed to me that, not being a professional literary man myself, I could recast the story as an opera more easily than Dead Souls. Thirdly, the colourful language of The Nose, more expressive than Gogol’s other ‘St Petersburg Tales’, presented more interesting problems of ‘musicalizing’ the text. Fourthly, it offers many interesting theatrical possibilities.
But the reason we remember The Nose today is that, as Geoffrey Norris argued, ‘it contained so many manifestations of an extraordinarily potent creative gift that immediately put it on a higher plane than anything else being composed in Russia at the time.’ It has no precedent in his earlier music, and shows how far he has come. As Norris continued, ‘He allowed the pace and character of the text to dictate the pace and character of the vocal line, adapting it to his own experimental idiom of the moment those principles of musical realism, of recitative closely allied to verbal inflection, that had been a familiar facet of Russian opera (particularly Mussorgsky’s) ever since Dargomyzhsky had first mooted the idea in the 1860’s with his Kamennyi gost – ‘The Stone Guest’. Dissonant, squawking, complex and spikily animated, it has been called by Sergei Slonimsky ‘brilliantly eccentric’.
Ivan Sollertinsky defended The Nose from its critics:
Shostakovich has finished with the old form of opera…he has shown opera composers the need for creating a new musical language, instead of drawing on the clichés of those imitators of Tchaikovsky and Korsakov…he has offered the most interesting musical experiments, based on rhythm and timbre alone. He is perhaps the first among Russian opera composers to make his heroes speak not in conventional arias and cantilenas but in living language, setting everyday speech to music…The opera theatre is at the crossroads. The birth of Soviet opera is not far off.
These were also the reasons why an early demise for The Nose was guaranteed: irrepressible energy, caustic parody and ‘formalism’. In June 1929 an All-Russian Musical Conference in Leningrad resulted in outrage, with RAPM delegates denouncing its composer for his ‘anti-Soviet escapism.’ As Stalin liked to say, ‘The cadrés decide everything.’ So Shostakovich’s score was lost in a bomb shelter until the late 1950’s.
A year later, as The Nose opened at the Leningrad Maly Opera to unprecedented success, Mayakovsky shot himself. The Bedbug was under attack by the Proletkult for its form and by the Komosomol for its content. As colleagues recanted, Shostakovich disappeared quietly with his commission money to a Black Sea resort. By now all the literary individualists he’d associated with had been wiped out. With modernism excised and art as a ‘class-weapon’, with the death-camps opening their doors, everybody’s business was to smile. This was the age of informers and charlatans, of denunciations and doctrinaire barbarism that The Bedbug had foreseen. In The Last Toast of 1934 Anna Akhmatova wrote,
I drink to the ruined house
To the evil of my life
To our shared loneliness
And I drink to you –
To the lie of lips that betrayed me,
And to the dead-cold eyes
To the coarse, brutal world, the fact
That God has not saved us.
Shostakovich had become a recluse, revealing nothing even when he had been given drink all night. His sole confidante was Sollertinsky, the critic and scholar, whom he had met when both suffered a test on Marxist-Leninism. This meant more than Shostakovich’s introduction to pub-crawls and poker. There was unknown musical territory: the symphonies of Mahler, which Sollertinsky challenged him to play back by ear. Reawakened, Shostakovich released a flood of ideas. In 1932 Sollertinsky urged all Soviets to study Mahler, for he was ‘closer to us than Debussy or Stravinsky, Richard Strauss or Hindemith’ in his ‘attempt to reach a human collective’, unhindered by sensationalism or dogma. The Fourth Symphony would be Shostakovich’s response to one man – a friend – to another – an exemplar: his farewell to the avant-garde, and first fruit of his maturity.
Shostakovich’s first love was Tatyana Glivenko, a girl he had met whilst he was recuperating from tuberculosis in a Crimean sanatorium. That was in 1923, and she was two weeks younger than he was. In response to his mother’s caution (she’d heard bad reports from his sister Mariya) he wrote,
Pure animal love is so vile that one doesn’t need to begin to speak about it…But now, supposing that a wife ceases to love her husband and gives herself to another, and that they start living together openly, despite the censorious opinions of society. There us nothing wrong in that. On the contrary, it’s a good thing, as Love is truly free…Love cannot last for long…And Mamochka, let me warn you, that if…I do marry, and if my wife loves another, then I won’t say a word; and if she wants a divorce, I’ll give it to her…
An ideology which was asking to be tested, yet Tatyana remembered, ‘It was a love that endured throughout our lives’. But Shostakovich’s moods fluctuated so much, and he found it so difficult to commit himself, that in February 1929 she married someone else. Shostakovich’s face fell at the news. He came to Moscow to see her, and begged her to leave her husband. ‘Only when I became pregnant with my first child did he accept that the relationship was over. For two months Mitya and I corresponded, and I wrote telling him that, yes, I was about to take the decision to leave my husband and to be with him. Then Mitya would answer, “But you probably love your husband more…” And so it continued until he informed me one day that he had got married himself – in secret. (He wrote saying, “Of course, she’s real fool, but I’ve committed myself”.) He was trying to call my bluff, and to provoke me to leave by giving me a fright. Maybe this is conceit on my part, but his marriage to Nina Varzar in 1932 was connected with the birth of my first child…’
Sophia Shostakovich was, by all accounts, over-solicitous and interfering throughout her son’s life. Maternal jealousy had ruined his chances with Tatyana, and when Sophia spotted Dmitri and Nina together before their wedding, she wept all night. Nina was a physicist from a wealthy family, who having given Mitya the children he craved for, spent much of her time living with another man. His response was that ‘Shostakovich will never abandon his children’ and in time, the loose ties permitted him to carry on sexual adventures of his own.But the marriage stayed warm, and affable enough until Nina’s death from cancer in 1954.
Shostakovich’s ballet suites show the same contempt for the bourgeoisie as his writing for Meyerhold’s Young Workers’ Theatre did. The Age of Gold (1929-32, with its first performance in October 1930) is sturdily efficient, as if Prokofiev could be hoisted on athletic supports, and intermittently playful. Its cribs from Petrushka are shameless, but its finales – and here the music is glorious – are tense, bold. In the Soviet ballets of the 1920’s and early 30’s, there is a fusion of old traditions and the shock of the new, as the choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov introduced acrobatic elements. This muscularity, as much as populist dogma, was behind the profusion of ballets dedicated to sport and factory life. Oransky’s The Football Player had opened in Moscow, and Shostakovich revelled in the anarchy and outrageous inventiveness which he was able to unleash on a music-hall world. The Age of Gold is a ballet after Jean Cocteau, a near-plotless parade of conflicts and stereotypes. A Soviet football team arrives in a western city at the time as an industrial exhibition, only to find its hearty endeavours thwarted by vampish prima donnas, unscrupulous police and wrongful arrests, decadent capitalists and (with a memorable sense of anticlimax) hostile hotel staff. In his programme essay Shostakovich coughs up the party line:
Throwing into contrast the two cultures was my main aim in the ballet. I approached this task in the following way: the west European dances breathe the spirit of depraved eroticism characteristic of contemporary bourgeois culture, but I tried to imbue the Soviet dances with the wholesome elements of sport and physical culture. I cannot imagine Soviet dances developing along any other line. I strove to write music that was not only easy to dance to, but that was dramatically tense and underwent symphonic development.
But no, it was not easy to dance to; and lashing out for its failure, Shostakovich complained, ‘the choreographers completely ignored the specific requirements of the ballet’. Needless to say, the depraved numbers were the best: if only there had been more depravity. Yet there is more to The Golden Age than meets the eye. David Nice noted, ‘To hear it is to note a precedent for the bizarre scenes of the Fourth Symphony…In Act Three we hear not only the model for the desultory chain of short dances into which the symphony’s finale deliberately lapses, but also the prototype of the astonishing first-movement explosion in which strings tear up the earth in frantic, fuguing semiquavers.’ It says much for the pliability of Shostakovich’s hyperactive idiom that it seems equally at home in the Fourth Symphony and his next ballet, The Bolt of 1931. This is surely the most stupefyingly futile plot ever committed to the stage: a sacked drunkard wrecks an industrial machine, and confesses after a young communist has been falsely arrested. There is a celebratory concert. If Shostakovich felt he had no alternative but to lend his support to this project, during a national hysteria in which sedition was suspected round every street corner (‘We demand that saboteurs be shot!’ screamed The Worker), his irreverence ended in disaster. The press complained that ‘the military dance shows a complete ignorance of military matters’ and concluded that Shostakovich should consider this ‘a last warning. He should think very carefully about this conclusion.’
Now Shostakovich’s score is, with its pseudo-anthems and bravura gallops, as happy and accessible as anything written in our century. How could such wit, such innocuous cheek, have enraged the arbiters of musical life? Well, he had learnt his lessons better when, in the Thirteenth Symphony of 1962, he quotes Yevtushenko:
Tsars, kings, emperors,
rulers of all the world,
have commanded parades
but they couldn’t command humour.
…They’ve wanted to buy humour,
but he just wouldn’t be bought!
They’ve wanted to kill humour,
but humour gave them the finger.
Fighting him’s a tough job.
They’ve never stopped executing him.
His chopped-off head
was stuck on a soldier’s pike…
Irony is inimical to social control. It is not the stuff of the imperative mood. It cannot be served up on parade or secreted for later denunciations. Now that The Bolt had been knocked out of the way, there was the rebel’s fondness for jazz and the fox trot to deal with. Shostakovich, for a bet with the conductor Nikolai Malko, once orchestrated Youens’ Tea for Two in forty-five minutes flat. Malko, delighted with the dry fizz of a little winner, took to playing it as an encore. But the fox trot had been tainted with capitalism’s decadence, said the People’s Commissar of Education:
The bourgeoisie would like man to live not so much by his head as by his sexual organs. The fundamental element of the fox trot derives from mechanization, suppressed eroticism and a desire to deaden feeling through drugs…
Another cringing recrimination by Shostakovich, this time in ‘The Proletarian Musician’:
I consider it a political mistake on my art to have granted Conductor Malko permission to arrange my orchestration of ‘Tahiti Trot’ since ‘Tahiti Trot’, when performed without an appropriate setting, might create the impression that I am an advocate of the light genre. A proper injunction was sent by me to Conductor Malko about three months ago.
Levity was also the charge brought against Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto, Opus 35 (1933), which he composed for himself in a virtuoso display with the Leningrad Philharmonic. Beethoven’s Hammerklavier had long been in his repertoire, and the concerto begins with a distant parody of the Appassionata. The finale has an uproarious quotation from the Rage over a Lost Penny as well as Haydn’s D major Piano Sonata. Both of Shostakovich’s piano concertos are supremely Russian, for they inherit a far older tradition than Socialist Realism, and his flair for his favourite instrument shines through every bar. The First is surely his most carefree piece, with a relish for fireworks and circus. Yet I suspect that its jollified bathos and mock-heroics come from his stint at the Piccadilly Cinema. The first movement is a bouncy pastiche through which a trumpet solo announces, in stentorian tones, numerous changes of tack. The Lento is a playfully lugubrious graceful waltz which is much like Prokofiev as anything Shostakovich wrote. The opening of the finale foreshadows the knowing innocence of the Opus 87 Preludes but mayhem soon wins the day, in a gleeful flurry which is quite as witty as Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. There are darker resonances too, for Shostakovich quotes the Austrian folk-song Ach du lieber Augustin – Augustin being a mythological character whose fondness for alcohol bears him through any catastrophe.
There are affinities between the concerto and the first, second and sixth of his Preludes Opus 34, which he had finished four days earlier. The ghosts of Scriabin and Rachmaninov are still in the background of these tiny but luxuriously quirky pieces, which are often dreamy, and always reveal the perceptive pleasure Shostakovich took in exploring the piano’s lucent sonorities. In this, and in their rhythmic buoyancy, their intimate concentration and eloquent recitatives, they anticipate the greater essays of Opus 87. But often the Opus 34 set is as fine and as understated as a pastel sketch. A schism between Shostakovich’s public and private face was beginning to emerge, as he kept his head down and planned his next major project: the first instalment in a projected cycle of four operas about women’s lives, suggested to him by Boris Asafiev.
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the fruit oftwenty-six months’ labour, is a work of courage and necessity. Shostakovich’s own commentaries reveal how profoundly he empathized with Katerina Ismailova, its tragic heroine, who was ‘on a much higher plane than those around her…surrounded by monsters’. As Shostakovich’s friend Galina Serbryakova remembered, ‘Dmitri was thirsting to recreate the theme of love in a new way, a love that knew no boundaries, that was willing to perpetrate crimes inspired by the devil himself, as in Goethe’s Faust. Lady Macbeth attracted him because of the fierce intensity and the fascination of Katerina’s imagination.’ His old Narodnik feminism was not in doubt; but he found more tangible identification with the woman who was betrayed by all those around her. To Volkov, Shostakovich described Katerina’s family as ‘a quiet Russian family, who beat and poison each other…just a modest picture drawn from nature.’ Ian MacDonald suggests that his mind might have been ‘seething’ with the recent case of Pavlik Morozov, a twelve year-old boy declared a national hero for denouncing his family. This was an opera, said Shostakovich, about ‘how love could have been if the world weren’t full of vile things: the laws and properties and financial worries, and the police state.’ He knew, as Katerina did, how boredom could corrode a mind as effectively as repression. In the event Katerina’s destroyers, insinuating themselves cheaply and hypocritically upon a passionate innocent, offer us a microcosm of Stalin’s empire between 1930 and 1932. As his Five Year Plan collapsed, Socialist Realism reached new excesses of hectoring euphoria. The Proletkult had invented the mass-song, a crude setting of verse apostrophizing the leader and the motherland, which could be rattled off by farm-workers; and this was the age of the ‘Five-Year-Plan novel’, whose typical subject would be the construction of a power plant. Such was the subtlety of cultural life: a life in which the individual had been declared not only obsolete, but counter-revolutionary.
Lady Macbeth reinterpreted the 1865 novella by Nikolai Lestov, and it made an apt successor to The Nose in its lurid amorality. As Shostakovich suggested to Volkov, ‘a turn of events is possible in which murder is not a crime’. Katerina has been trapped into marrying the foolish son of a brute, and is condemned to drag out her days amongst witless country bumpkins. As MacDonald rightly saw it, ‘Longing for life-validating love, in which subject Shostakovich rates her a genius, she can realize her dream only by slaughtering her male oppressors.’
The soprano Nadejda Welter remembered her rehearsals. ‘We saw for the first time that Shostakovich’s restraint was only a superficial skin, and that a passionate spring of energy and dynamic creative force was bubbling underneath….My heart literally stopped beating, so gripped was I by my impassioned desire to take the role of Katerina.’
The plot piles one indignity for women upon another: Katerina, wife of a rich merchant in a loveless, childless marriage, witnesses her fat cook Aksinya being molested by the farm-hands who have shoved her in a barrel. Coming to Aksinya’s defence, Katerina grapples with Sergei, a famed seducer, who comes to her bedroom that night and possesses her. Unable to sleep, her father-in-law Boris sees what is happening. Katerina poisons him with mushrooms and hides his body in the cellar. She marries Sergei, but the corpse is discovered during a rummage for vodka. Katerina and Sergei are deported to Siberia: Sergei falls for a beautiful convict and the two taunt Katerina, who leaps into a lake carrying the new rival, Sonyetka, with her.
At first, thought Shostakovich, everything went well. When Lady Macbeth opened at the beginning of 1934, sold-out simultaneously in Moscow and Leningrad, it was acclaimed as the finest opera in depth and magnitude since Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame. It was unveiled to extravagant praise in New York. ‘Socialism at the Met’, proclaimed the headlines: and from London Benjamin Britten wrote, ‘There is a consistency of style and method throughout. The satire is biting and brilliant. It is never boring for a second.’ But then, in 1936, Stalin came to a performance.
Volkov suggests that the Leader recognized himself in the corrupt police sergeant. That is, I think, too pat. Neither can we be sure how shocked party zealots might have been the sensuous tenderness with which Shostakovich depicts forbidden love. Stalin was right to be perturbed at something more subtle, more insidious. On a purely rhythmic level, think how unsettling this music is: how often imminent and cataclysmic collapse is offset only by some transient and fated struggle against circumstances, by the self-delusion of order and sense, by the imposition of corrupted force. We know that we have been undermined by something more profound than Shostakovich’s frenzied depiction of physical sadism – the brooding calm of its aftermath amongst those who have carried out sadism: the choking, revulsed exhaustion of those who were forced to watch: the lingering contemplation of the ones who know their fate is sealed, the nightmare of the moment of extinction itself. All of these things, too, are there. It is an opera of darkening blood and the heavy aroma of blood, made more deadly by its momentum and eerie alienation, its blend of irony and grimness. If there is fulminating rhetoric, it is spared for those moments of reckoning where commentary and memory confront us. Events themselves, and the subterfuge with which they are planned, are often presented often with sinister poise and to that extent (whether consciously or by the accident of brute events which rebounded in his consciousness), Shostakovich provides the epitaph for an era.
How powerfully Lady Macbeth sets out the agenda not only for the Fourth Symphony – with which it shares a metalline, frantic vitality – but for Shostakovich’s career. The tramp of marching policemen reappears for the arrest of Anne Frank in the Babi Yar Symphony: both Fears and In the Store, from that same work, recall the labour camp scenes of Lady Macbeth (‘Road, where the chains have been dragging, Where the bones of the dead are still lying…’) The Eighth Quartet, dedicated to the victims of Fascism, quotes Katerina’s entreaty to Sergei in Act IV: ‘Seryozha! My dearest!’ Truly Lady Macbeth bears the imprint, not only of Shostakovich’s life-long identification with the victims of oppression, but of his perception of himself as underdog. As Katerina says, ‘It’s hard after endearments and caresses To feel the whip on your back.’ In that sense, Stalin was right to see himself as the gatecrasher at a feast about which he understood nothing. He is the spectre at the feast – and a vengeful one – for two decades of Shostakovich’s life.
Now, the similarities between stage works and didactic symphonies are often overlooked. I mean the ability to paint a picture in strokes of orchestration, to think in terms of long lines and climaxes, and (like a story-teller) to wrong-foot an audience’s expectations at the crucial moment. If the result of Politburo bullying is that with Shostakovich’s defection we have lost one of our century’s most exuberant writers for the stage, that loss is the symphony’s gain. But first, we need to look more closely at the debacle which marked the turning-point in Shostakovich’s wretched vocation.
Recently H G Wells had interviewed Stalin, and in a prophetic radio-broadcast he warned that, without the toleration of criticism, Russia was bound to atrophy. ‘She will slacken and stagnate again: she will breed a robot people.’ What Stalin had in mind was far worse than that.
CHAPTER 4
1936-45: THE GREAT PURGES
Shostakovich is made ‘an Enemy of the People’
The extermination of millions
A ‘great patriotic’ war
Chamber music, Symphonies Nos 4-8
By 1936, contact with the west had been all but cut off. A stretch of Soviet territory with forty million inhabitants lay like a vast Belsen, a quarter of its people dead or dying, the rest too starved to bury their families, shamed that they were still alive. Squads of police and party officials, as well-fed as pigs from Animal Farm, supervised the victims. Their method had been simple: to decimate Ukrainian and Cossack national life, to set grain quotas so high that they could not be satisfied, to remove every handful of food and prevent external help from arriving. Who needed death-squads?
On 28 January, a couple of days after Stalin had been to see Lady Macbeth, a three-column leader appeared in Pravda. Entitled Chaos instead of Music, it continued:
From the first moment, the listener is shocked by a deliberately dissonant, confused stream of sound. Fragments of melody, embryonic phrases appear – only to disappear again in the din, the grinding, the screaming of petty-bourgeois innovations. This music is built on the basis of rejecting opera, ‘Leftist’ confusion instead of natural, human music…All this is coarse, primitive and vulgar. The music quacks, growls and suffocates itself. All this could end very badly. The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear.
It hit Shostakovich like an axe. Returning from a lavish official trip to Turkey, he became an overnight pariah, an expedient scapegoat waiting for shipment to the arctic circle, or death. A friend wrote to Stalin, begging him to forgive the composer’s degenerate aberration. But instead the Leader went to Shostakovich’s ballet The Bright Steam, and another attack followed ten days later. ‘Now everyone knew for sure that I would be destroyed’ Shostakovich remembered: the anonymous hate-mail, the abuse across streets, the newspaper announcement, ‘Today there is a concert by Enemy of the People Shostakovich.’ Sollertinsky alone stood by him, until a unanimous declaration of censure by the Leningrad Composers’ Union scared him off. Vissarion Shebalin, attending an official denunciation at the Moscow House of Writers, declared, ‘I consider that Shostakovich is the greatest genius amongst composers of this epoch.’ His own music was dropped instantly, so he starved. Contemplating suicide, Shostakovich destroyed his papers and camped by the lift each night so that his family might be spared the commotion of his arrest. In anguish he visited his protégé, the Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who promised to intercede with Stalin – unaware that his own execution was only a matter of time. But Shostakovich was reassured enough to attempt a little more work: the completion of his Fourth Symphony.
Ian Macdonald, taking his cue from Volkov, suggests that Stalin never meant to kill Shostakovich. The master had the mentality of a peasant, Macdonald observes, scanning files into the night to identify those people ‘for whom the charisma of inspiration wove a tangible magnetism’, and of whom he was in superstitious awe. No, not so. Venyamin Basner remembered that Shostakovich was drawn into the investigation of Tukachevsky’s imagined plot against Stalin, and ordered by his interrogator to reappear after the weekend. He did so, bag packed, waiting for the end. ‘Who have you come to see?’ demanded a soldier. ‘Zanchevsky.’ ‘He’s not coming in today, so there’s nobody to receive you.’ Zanchevsky had himself been imprisoned the day before. To that accident we owe the existence of the Fourth Symphony, and everything else.
The Fourth, reconstructed from orchestral parts, had its first performance in 1961. Rehearsals were advanced when, in December 1936, Shostakovich was told by the Director of the Leningrad Philharmonic that its performance must be cancelled. The atmosphere had been electric with fear and tension at this ‘formalist’ adventure; and with his wife and a baby daughter to support, Shostakovich had no choice but to withdraw it for good.
That was not before its qualities had been appreciated by Otto Klemperer. In May 1936 the great German conductor turned up at Shostakovich’s house, having slipped away from the Leningrad Opera. At dinner, after he’d been played the work in a piano reduction, he spoke with passion: declaring that heaven itself had granted him a marvellous gift – the chance to conduct this music on his South American tour. After a triumphant Beethoven concert the following evening, Klemperer announced that congratulations did not belong to him, but to Shostakovich and his new symphony.
Shostakovich believed that symphonic form was ‘a perfect place profoundly to express different aspects of present-day life and man’s attitude to it.’ The Fourth was, he said, music about man and the world, about internal and external reality. It was his first fusion of monumentalism and an overriding philosophical concept. The consequence is a work at once abstract, concrete and realistic, with its marches and waltzes and Russian gallops. And in its new-found humanism, seeking to appeal to intrinsic aspects of our human condition, it is the foundation stone of the symphonies to follow. As the Soviet writer Sabinina put it,
It would be incorrect…to look for links between Shostakovich and Mahler only in their language…the sudden and seemingly similar contrasts representing the gulf between the internal world of the artist and the aggressive banality of his surroundings. The ‘Mahlerian’, in the deepest sense of the word, lies in his approach to the problem of ‘the individual in his surrounding world’, his attempts to expose fully the contradictions in life which torment him.
Mahler led Shostakovich to question his modernist symphonic style, adopting instead a majestic scale which would allow him to create music which functioned on two levels: as a testimony of experience and as a structure which was satisfying in its own right. Finding the balance had been the bugbear of nineteenth century Russian symphonists, but in Tchaikovsky Shostakovich discovered a composer whose finales had the form of an emotional apotheosis. It was a lesson worth remembering. The Fourth is, in fact, a calculated reappraisal of the increasingly giant structures of Mahler and Bruckner: a little central interlude framed by two immense episodes, each of them less a formal development of arguments, more an onslaught of ideas: a stream of consciousness which is both theatrical and richly experimental, an austere and unstoppable melodic continuum.
None of this does justice to the symphony’s spirit. ‘Grandiosomania’ Shostakovich later called it – a comment which acknowledges its creative exuberance, but scarcely the balance of its craftsmanship. Automatism, the metaphor of a brute machine which might run haywire at any moment, allows a composer to play off the tension between relentless causality and anarchic indeterminism, between control and the negation of control – between rhetoric and shivering fright. You sense the audacity and excitement as Shostakovich reins in and gives form to music which threatens to fly off with a life of its own. The Fourth is dance-music in which parody and burlesque have been elevated into a mighty agent of change, with bucolic and savage elements fighting it out for supremacy over the themes that have found a foothold. Its opening movement, an Allegro poco moderato, has been dismissed as a shambles. But Richard Longman has shown better, revealing how shrewdly Shostakovich creates a sense of displacement and alienation. The finale opens with a funeral march only to twist the optimism of Mahler’s Fourth on its head, ending in the collapse of meaning, the gaping chasms of the grotesque. Shostakovich saves the triumph of this music for its final coda; and it seems apt that, after an outburst as frenzied as a heart-attack, his exploration of the limits of a style relapses, not into a whimper, but into an interrogation of silence.
The Fourth is the missing link between early experiments and the symphony of 1937 upon which Shostakovich had to pin everything, if he were to salvage his future. The interplay of brutalization and reconciliation, which he had picked up from the Fourth, would be there: so too its snapping rhythms, a theme or two, and the facility with which those themes undergo magical transformation. There should be the daring leaps of the Third Symphony, the textures and rhythms of the Opus 40 Cello Sonata. In no sense, then, is Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony the break with his past that it is claimed to be – and we remember that its obsequious subtitle, ‘A Soviet Artist’s Creative Reply to Just Criticism’, was coined not by the composer but a journalist.
Yet something would be new: a Beethovenian striving and clarity of intent. Seldom has an act of expedience – least of all, desperate expedience – drawn such sincerity and transparent eloquence from those forced to carry it out, as in this meltingly compassionate work. Its surging forward movement derives from its aphoristic intensity and its bold, sweeping lines: through them both, an opening of ominous moral neutralization unfolds into a drama on a genuinely heroic scale. The Fifth Symphony’s structure gives a narrative cohesion to Shostakovich’s language which is accessible and uncompromised, graceful, even. The conclusion to its first movement, emotion as if witnessed by twilight, might well have come from the coda to the Fourth. But here it is the afterword to a statement, not of irony, but of almost scarifying candour. The Fifth is the most openly Mahlerian symphony of Shostakovich’s in the voluptuous melancholy and welling, ineffable growth of its Largo – with its forlorn and pendant suspensions, its sense of levitated grief. But Mahler’s voice informs more than that. Listen no further than the tremulous dialogues of second movement, or the bittersweet Ländler of the Scherzo, to see how much it lies behind the music’s command of expectations, the context within which disparate episodes work to compelling effect. The Fifth is music both private and universalized: and it is made human – compared to Shostakovich’s earlier symphonies – by its formal discipline and by its sense of profound disappointment. You feel them in the tightness of its phrases, the quality of its proportions. The ending has to work through the motions of a breakthrough into sunshine; or rather, into the cracker-motto optimism of a brave new world so beloved of the People’s cultural hygienists. Shostakovich wondered what might have happened if he had finished in the pianissimo minor, as in the Fourth. Yet now, in his duties, he does not waver. He paces his long transition so well, and with such dignity, that the finale seems nearly inevitable. We might almost be forgiven for disputing Rostropovich’s verdict: ‘Stretched on the wrack of the inquisition the victim still tries to smile in his pain. Anybody who thinks the finale is glorification, is an idiot.’ But no, played at the composer’s intended tempo, it is anything but glorification; and brashness triumphs over the nobility of the Largo, which had quoted the panikhida, the Eternal Remembrance of the Orthodox funeral. Evgeni Mravinsky, its first interpreter, was convinced that Shostakovich had tried to write an exultant finale – and baulked at it. The joy of this music lies in its ripe rhetorical ambiguities; but as Richard Taruskin has proved, a tragic sub-text was recognized soon after the appearance of a symphony which stared an unspeakable epoch in the face.
‘The people recognized themselves’ said Sof’ya Khentova. At its premiere they were in tears: as the last note died, the hall exploded into a forty-minute ovation, the likes of which had not been witnessed since Tchaikovsky had conducted his Pathétique. A group of Party activists mounted the stage and proposed that a telegram of greeting should be sent to the composer from his audience. Higher bureaucrats were unimpressed, claiming that the audience had been hand-picked. At last, the Fifth was grudgingly auditioned by the District Party Committee and with condescension, Shostakovich was rehabilitated.
It wasn’t wise for him to try and gain more favour by claiming that he was working on a Lenin Symphony. The Sixth (1939) is nothing of the sort, but a piece as finely crafted as it is has always been underrated. It is an act not of retrenchment but of consolidation: thinking on the same long lines as the Fifth, exploring with gritty strength the epic potential of Mahlerian lament; essaying symphonic form as a medium for organic structural growth, examining ambivalence and neutral emotional coloration without their becoming inert, yet somehow filling every bar with life. The first movement, which hovers like some sinister bird, is masterly in its command of pacing and atmosphere: the second is a scherzo which seems to swoop out of grey cloud, with the pummelling energy of industrialization on a superhuman scale. The finale, salvaging comedy from disarray, contemplates Rossini’s William Tell Overture as tartly as the Fifteenth Symphony was to do. A buffoon-like interlude might represent the fluster that passes as meaning in futile lives and dead societies. It is, on its inscrutable surface, as jolly as the film-cartoons of 1940’s Italian fascists, and a torch-song for the civil servants of any era. More to the point, the Sixth Symphony’s fantasy and exploration of controlled time makes possible the Seventh and Eighth. It was condoned for its genuineness, and received with utter disappointment.
Shostakovich’s mind had turned to private utterances, and that most inwardly personal of genres: the string quartet. The First Quartet is a rigorously crafted exercise du style, buoyant and filled with idyllic yearning, as if the spirit of Borodin had found its way into a neoclassical lattice-work. It is fluent, untroubled and often seems unrecognizable as music by Shostakovich. But we need to look closer. Its evolving contrasts over four movements are as elegant as anything he had managed; and it quotes St Anthony and the Fishes, as the Fifth Symphony did.
His income, meanwhile, was sustained by an choking diet of film-commissions, for which he received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. But in 1940 there was the chance to rekindle his fame with chamber music on a Homeric scale: the Piano Quintet in G minor. It is incandescent in its memorial hope and melancholy, but impressive, above all, for its propulsive force – as if in its opening Prelude Bach had been given a searing edge for a new century. Its second movement is music cut back to bare sinews, from which the piano is all but absent. This variety – given the keyboard’s muscular contribution to the first – contributes something to the Quintet’s overwhelming gravitas; its unfolding panorama of long and supple lines spun out of reflected suffering. The Intermezzo is an endless trudge. The finale exploits the open diatonic intervals through which Mahler used to envelop music in buoyant euphoria. But for Shostakovich the emotions soon become more complex than that, as if optimistic resignation were the best one could hope for: ‘the platitudes of credulous self-deception’, as an over-eager westerner has claimed. When Shostakovich appeared in the Hall of the Conservatoire to give its first performance with the Beethoven Quartet, his audience rose to its feet; and their final ovation had the fervour of a political demonstration. Here was a piece that spoke to a nation on the brink of war.
Shostakovich volunteered for military service, but was turned down. Instead he joined the Leningrad fire brigade, and threw himself into the task of organizing concerts and writing war-songs, for the benefit of troops at the front and the people at home. Late in 1941 Leningrad’s composers were evacuated and friends saw him washing crockery in the wet snow beside a railway carriage, distraught at the loss of his things. Someone gave him a shirt. He ended up camped outside Kuibyshev, dragging urns of water across a courtyard. But at last he became relaxed and homely, and as a treat he invited colleagues to hear his latest symphony on the piano.
‘The position of this symphony on the musical map of the future’ smirked the English critic Ernest Newman, ‘will be located between so many degrees longitude and so many degrees platitude.’ Its tub-thumping credentials seemed impeccable, for as Shostakovich explained to his friend Rabinovich,
In the peaceful development of the first movement war breaks suddenly into the peaceful life. The recapitulation is a funeral march, a deeply tragic episode, a mass requiem – the ordinary people honour the memory of their heroes…Then comes a still more tragic episode: the common sorrow is followed by personal sorrow, of a mother perhaps. It is sorrow so deep that no tears are left. Further, there is another lyrical fragment expressing the apotheosis of life, sunshine…the end of this movement is bright and lyrical, the intimate love of man for others like himself…
But this is not the interpretation of the older Shostakovich, if we accept Volkov: the symphony was a requiem, the composer stated, for the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed, and the Nazis finished off. Whatever you believe, the Seventh is for me a circus of the grotesque on an epic, a cinematic scale; and occasion for some of Shostakovich’s blackest satire. It is a musical feat as flippant as Ravel’s Bolero – something with which the rattling crescendo of its first movement shares an perplexing number of features, not least in the unctuously uncharacteristic orchestration. If the Fifth Symphony hinted at some genuine and surmounting act (whether a triumph over bad faith, over innocence, or whatever) the Leningrad is music whose premises are repeatedly and consciously overwhelmed by the leviathan pretensions of turgid, uncomprehending force. Its Allegretto crescendo is an act of studied disenchantment by means of the repetition of doggerel: if one instrument says it, the rest all have to tow the line. It is a travesty of a dialogue, the assembled wailings of a thousand troglodytes, scuttling about their vapid business with the simulated conviction of all those (like Parsons in Ninety Eighty-Four) who are impotent.
If this is meant to be propaganda music, its craftsmanship and clashing spheres of discourse are themselves an indictment of propaganda. How else can we make sense of the quotation from the Fifth Symphony, now muddied in frenetic bathos, or the episode of cryptic musical inertia which lies immediately before that conclusion of agitprop banality, and enough bunting to sink a Five Year Plan? Beyond its expedient labels, seized after the embattlement of one city by people who knew nothing of Shostakovich’s circumstances or his creative process, the Leningrad’s aims are entirely abstract. At no point can the symphony’s imagined programme do justice to the music’s abiding subtlety and terraced layers of meaning. It makes more sense to say that Shostakovich brings Mahler’s wit (passion and incongruity and crispness of effect) to a feat of construction-work which at its best is as terse and as saturnine as anything by Hindemith. Throughout its opening, Shostakovich’s robust humour gives a unifying and tensile mesh to music which seems as broad in its scope and measure as a landscape. The second movement is a funeral march (quizzical, jaunty, macabre) through which a sinister undertone worms its way like a parasite: the third unfolds as a recitative for strings, huge and passionate, in which more agile effects for woodwind are played off to create a consciousness, successively, of rapport and alienation.
Time and again one is struck by how lithe this music is: far more than the Sixth, where different episodes collided fortuitously and we were left to make – of any accumulated significance – whatever we could. The Leningrad’s effects are, for such a large orchestra, glitteringly sharp. It is another chance for Shostakovich to flex muscles in his developing mastery of symphonic context and tempo. If he had been writing music for a film, not one movement would have the structure we hear today – and not one bar can be taken at face value. This is what Bartók grasped which he acknowledged the Leningrad in his own Concerto for Orchestra. It might not surprise us that after the end of the war, it felt into neglect. The Leningrad was a wordless narrative of mood-painting, suggested Blokker and Dearling before Volkov ever opened his mouth: of beauty and disillusionment, earthbound and heavy-hearted, resolute yet crushed inside.
But for a while it hit a nerve across the free world. Shostakovich completed his piano performance exhausted, elated. Its audience in Moscow continued in their ovation despite an air-raid. In Leningrad soldiers fresh from the front-line stood, recalled a witness, as if staggered by their experience of the music. The score was sent on microfilm to New York, where it was conducted by Toscanini.
Later, when Shostakovich came to trust Flora Litvinova, he confided that the symphony was about Fascism, as the Fifth had been; but not only in the guise of National Socialism. Fascism was about his own country, he said, ‘or any form of totalitarian regime.’ No wonder, perhaps, that at the Leningrad’s premiere, its composer shuffled on the platform as if he were about to be hanged.
There could be no such success for his Eighth Symphony of 1943, for there the emotions of a ruined country are naked. It has the quality of clear water. The sparse scoring, depending for much of its effect on strings alone, creates a sombre lucidity, as it did for Sibelius: an opening of luminously magnified chamber music in which the chaos of war finds its testimony in intimate and haunted reminiscence, which only later gathers up apocalyptic momentum. Shostakovich’s command of pace and tension allows him to play off the disparate voices of war in an almost seamless whole: the entreaties and catatonic exhaustion of those who succumb, the horror that seems to sweep out of clean air, the frantic automatism of those fighting to save their own lives – as Wilfred Owen had said, ‘an ecstasy of fumbling’ – and with it all, the concatenation of bombast and pageantry which is somehow supposed to make the rest anything other than grimly futile. The clarity of Shostakovich’s orchestral thinking adds a new and chilling dimension of poignancy, and his testimony ends in the counterpoint of human and musical rituals, torpid and curiously serene, that mark out a life finally and inexorably drained of meaning. The Eighth is a victim’s outcry, a victim’s bewilderment and shivering circumlocutions, the most nihilist music that war can draw forth: war in its fluent anachronisms of morality and scale. As Stalin had noted, the death of one person is a tragedy, and the death of one million is a statistic. But war is an ideal vehicle for a grotesque composer who is also a misfit; for in it incontrovertibly, the supposed consensus of reality shatters into splinters. Never are irreconcilable worlds of meaning more violently juxtaposed, never do protagonists justify themselves more methodically and duplicitously (to themselves as much as to others) than they do then.
Shostakovich’s language is aptly convulsive, monomaniacal. The clash of major and minor has been used since early Romanticism to generate tension, but Shostakovich uses it more explicitly than in any of his other symphonies to suggest something beyond tragedy. The result is one of his most complex and intensely satisfying structures, rich on every level, its long implacable climaxes culminating invariably in some act of evasion, or else in the dark labyrinths of futile and coercive experience that make up the panorama of conflict.
Danil Zhitomirsky, a music journalist, remembers the Party’s anger at the courageous and unpredictable individualist whom plainly they could not control, and who was feted abroad. Positive reviews were suppressed and, after an abusive Composers’ Plenum, the Eighth was ‘not recommended’ for performance.
Nonetheless, Shostakovich was made Professor of Composition at the Moscow Conservatoire, Leningrad’s historic rival. There the death of Sollertinsky in 1944 spurred him to write one of music’s noblest memorials, the Second Piano Trio. It is as scant and unearthly as the music of his late period, which it seems to pre-empt: a pastiche of styles and references whose outbursts, whilst creating momentum, only seem to add to its emotional obliqueness and disorientation. And yet its cumulative effect – as so often – is a sense of tragedy, of dismay observed by a laconic witness. As Beaumarchais said, one should weep if one did not laugh. The threnodic slow movement, opening with piano chords which seem to have been slashed out of granite, speaks most directly; and its echo in the closing bars of the piece adds a wry inevitability to its sorrows. The finale itself is a joke from Gogol, or of one compelled to roll a boulder to the top of a cliff each day for the rest of his life, and watch it tumble down. It unfolds at the level of corrosive whispers, and quotes the Jewish song of death. Someone had told Shostakovich that the Nazis used to make their victims dance on their graves before execution.
The threat of having to write a Ninth Symphony weighed him down. Zhitomirsky remembers Shostakovich’s arrival each morning in the little garden at the composers’ House of Creativity. Hearing the news from Hiroshima, Zhitomirsky started to give voice to his despondency. ‘Dmitri, his eyes fixed on some point overhead, quickly cut short my lamentations: “Our job is to rejoice!”
‘I have remembered this reply all my life. It conveyed a certain fatalism, but also a spark of protest. Shostakovich had developed a fatalistic attitude towards what was demanded of him, which often had an oppressing effect. But actually, in his work on the Ninth Symphony, he could no longer subjugate himself to this oppression.’ Certainly some heroic feat was attempted; musicians heard its victorious phrases. Yet this is not what was revealed in November 1945. Instead there was a twenty-five minute sinfonietta of considered frivolity and dispassion, elegant to the point of exasperation, with just enough dissonance to hint at the sabotage going on beneath. Often it seems scarcely more challenging than Prokofiev’s First until an apocalyptic finale, charged with the same darkness-made-visible as the Passacaglia of the First Violin Concerto. Mravinsky told his players, ‘I need to hear the trampling of steel-shod boots’. In its cumulative effects this is the most grotesque fancy that the most sardonic of composers ever entertained.
Now the official response was one of rage. Volkov reports Shostakovich’s account of what happened when he failed to write an adoration of the Leader, complete with chorus. ‘The absurdity is that Stalin watched dedications much more closely than affairs of state. Alexander Dovzhenko…made a documentary film during the war and somehow overlooked Stalin in some way. Stalin was livid. He called Dovzhenko in, and Beria shouted to Dovzhenko in front of Stalin, “You couldn’t spare ten metres of film for our leader? Well, now you’ll die like a dog!”
‘But I couldn’t write an apotheosis to Stalin, I simply couldn’t. I knew what I was in for.’ It was time for a final showdown.
Yet Shostakovich had the last word on Pravda through Pravda, when in 1974 he commented, ‘The desire to avoid, at any cost, everything controversial can transform young composers into young old men’. If friends are to be believed, his private reflections were more forthright:
Illusions die gradually – even when it seems that it happened suddenly, instantaneously: that you wake up one fine day and you have no more illusions. It isn’t like that at all. The withering away of illusions is a long and dreary process, like a toothache. But you can pull out a tooth. Illusions, dead, continue to rot within us. And stink. And you can’t escape them. I carry mine around with me all the time.
As Stravinsky used to say, Soviet composers could not afford the luxury of integrity. As Pushkin used to say, ‘Kiss but spit.’
CHAPTER 5
1946-53: PUBLIC FACE, PRIVATE ISOLATION
Ninth Symphony: the final showdown, the last betrayals
A suppressed masterpiece – the First Violin Concerto
Preludes and Fugues: critics and defenders
‘From Jewish Folk Poetry’ – a secret outcry
With the return of peace, it was time for the Party to re-establish its moral high ground, and crush the national introspection which the war had made possible. Akhmatova was humiliated in public for her displays of private emotion, which it was suggested were part of a plot to corrupt the young. A middle-aged satirist, who had suggested that life in a zoo was preferable to Leningrad, was also purged.
The architect of Stalin’s assault on the intelligentsia was his right-hand man, Andrei Zhdanov – the same ideologue who had decided, during the recent siege of Leningrad, to let civilians starve so that his troops could be fed. Zhdanov was, in the words of Eric Roseberry, ‘an articulate spokesman in framing his chosen victims, formulating policy and presiding over its implementation. He could manipulate the cultural bureaucracy with cunning and display an extremely plausible knowledge of what was going on.’ With the beginnings of the Cold War, and in 1947 the thirtieth anniversary of the revolution for which there had been no adequate musical commemoration, there was an ideology to be kept up. More to the point, there was a pretext for renewed repression. And so came the Zhdanovschina, which lasted until Stalin’s death.
This is how pettily it turned against Shostakovich. Murandeli, a second-rate composer, had written an opera called The Great Friendship, just to please Stalin. The plot had ideology, it had native dances and Caucasians. The trouble was that Murandeli had confused Stalin’s ethnic group: he was an Ossetian, and the hero on stage was a man he had driven to suicide. Rage. But the fault was Shostakovich’s really, for writing the tuneless Lady Macbeth, which had served as exemplar for a now lost generation of composers. Murandeli recanted, and said as much by turning on the composer who had taught him his wretched formalist ways.
In February 1948 there was convened a three-day composers’ Plenum in which Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khatchaturian were ripped to shreds. Speech followed speech, and the Eighth Symphony was singled out as ‘repulsive…an injury…a musical gas chamber.’ This time Shostakovich was made to crawl. The conference would not adjourn until he had been rooted out from hiding and spoken of ‘my many failures, even though, throughout my composer’s career, I have always thought of the People, of my listeners, of those who reared me…’ In private he wrote the cantata Rayok, a parody of his accusers’ illiterate pronunciation.
‘I read,’ he remembered in habitual self-disgust, ‘like the most paltry wretch, a parasite, a puppet, a cut-out paper doll on a string!’ His wife saw him close to suicide but again, new work gave him the will to live. From now he divided his music into three categories: serious pieces ‘for the desk drawer’, where they should be safe from censure, occasional music such as his oratorio The Song of the Forests, which would one day rehabilitate him as a socialist composer; and lastly the film scores which might keep his family from starvation as his honours and opportunities were stripped away. Friends remembered him begging for spoonfuls of jam, and hack-work exhausted him. ‘I feel like throwing up’ he said, after he’d finished Meeting on the Elbe. But in 1947 Shostakovich had met the violinist David Oistrakh in Prague, and there was the finale of Oistrakh’s commission to finish.
Shostakovich’s First is one of the great violin concertos of any century: shimmering and haunted music in which not a note is too much, not one effect is less than ideally calculated. It is to his concertos what the Tenth is to his symphonies – pellucid in its thinking and planning, as bleak as survival in a frozen landscape, gripping in its command of dramatic inevitability. It is, I think, proof that the grotesque can achieve beauty; although the point might be made that Shostakovich’s language in the two slow movements is so self-contained that his need to enlarge it elsewhere for virtuoso convention could be nothing other than grotesque in its consequences – a necessity that the composer twists to satisfying effect in a diabolical perpetuum mobile of a finale, filled with the cavernous (and ambivalent) medieval resonances of a tonal Fifth. But at the heart of this concerto is a magnificent and passionate passacaglia (that is to say, a series of variations on a throbbing orchestral bass-line) which swells in its possessed intensity from gloom to anguish and remembrance. It is an emotional transition whose compactness and depth are almost worthy of Mozart’s G minor Quintet. Oistrakh asked for mercy. ‘Dmitri Dmitrievich, please consider letting the orchestra take over the first eight bars of the finale and give me a break. Then at least I can wipe the sweat off my brow.’
After the 1947 Plenum Oistrakh dropped the concerto as if it had stung him, so away it went to the desk-drawer. A Third Quartet slipped into performance for the Beethoven Quartet in 1946, before Zhdanov’s act of attrition, and it had been more innocuous anyway. From its mischievous opening, which seems as innocent as a child spinning a top, it plunges us deep into Shostakovich’s world: probing, mordant and elegantly counterpointed. It is an act of transgression accomplished through increasing rhythmic complexity – in which the Allegro non troppo third movement anticipates the frenetic Dies Irae of the Tenth Symphony. The Quartet’s tonal intervals, too, open up from their tight cocoon to dimensions which seem conceived on an orchestral scale, through which envelopes of childlike simplicity recur as a prelude to moments of crisis. In the end, everything is resolved with a wry smile.
The careerists amongst Shostakovich’s Conservatoire students took to denouncing him, but soon he was removed from their attention, and from his post. His music almost vanished, but a few colleagues stood by him. Sviatoslav Richter was one. Another was Tatyana Nikolayeva, whom Shostakovich had heard playing the Well-Tempered Clavier at a Leipzig piano competition. For her he composed his Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues, Opus 87: one a day, beginning in October 1950. The cycle was, she recalled, ‘a work of great depth, of unsurpassed mastery and greatness…a new word in polyphony.’ As the party zealots sneered at his ‘irrelevance’ throughout its Leningrad premiere Mariya Yudina, another pianist, declared it worthy to stand alongside Bach himself.
But the Preludes are more than an act of homage by one master craftsman for another. They are Bach reconsidered for the great keyboards of the twentieth century, whose sonorities, whose amplitude and colour, Bach could not conceive. Their moods change from melting compassion (D flat major) to grandeur (D minor) and self-parody (D flat major), grief and drama (E flat minor), a cumulative oratory as powerful as Bach’s (B minor, the F sharp minor Fugue), a formidable passacaglia (G sharp major): wistfulness (F sharp minor, F minor) and a phantasmal undertone; almost unbearable tenderness (B flat minor, E minor, F major), idyllic simplicity (F sharp major, D major) and music which can only be described as having the brightness, the evanescence and transparency, of spring rain (A minor, A major, B flat major). This is writing of heroic strength and harmonic sophistication, which summons too Baroque fragility and purity of tone to fire the memory of sadness into this strange noctilucent intensity: to advance humour to a new level, a fused totality of expression. It is music which surmounts emotion, although it leaves an abiding sense of melancholy. Just as the genesis of Schubert’s great quartet movements can be found in his songs and German dances, so here is the microcosm of Shostakovich’s world: the Tenth Symphony’s transfiguration into light, the penumbral shivers of the last chamber music. Through its overlapping strands and volatile shifts of nuance, the most secret and immense musical circumstances are aligned.
As Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva has testified, the Zhdanovshchina made possible the virtual destruction of Soviet Jewish culture. The capitulation of Russian music to Zhdanov came a day after the murder of a Jewish actor, Salomon Mikhoels, on Stalin’s orders. Returning from his conference, Shostakovich told Mikhoels’ gathering relatives, ‘I wish I were in his place.’ This was the moment, at which any identification with the Jewish community was fraught with peril, that Shostakovich began his Opus 79 song cycle, From Jewish Folk Poetry. In 1963, fresh from the Babi Yar Symphony, he would rearrange it for soloists and the Gorky Philharmonic. The wailing of a large orchestra and of voices together, certainly, generates music of more desperate sensuality than a piano accompaniment can. The motivation stays the same: for the wiping out of a racial tradition serves as a metaphor for the extinction of individuality. Yet Jewish cultural identity means more than that to Shostakovich, really. A spiritual legacy becomes a source of liberation, and it offers a variety of personas which allow him to say what cannot otherwise be said: a coded language of dissent, richly equivocal. By the time the cycle was finished even the compilers of its songs were under arrest, and disillusionment had turned to panic.
Joachim Braun has done much to reveal what lay behind Shostakovich’s choices as he set these overwhelmingly tragic poems, with their dead infants and deserted fathers, life’s poverty and loneliness. They speak in the hints and ironies of Yiddish, with their innuendoes about Siberia and ‘the Star’ (of David, and as used by both Nazis and Stalin), however optimistic the language in which such references are veiled. From Mussorgsky Shostakovich had discovered the Yiddish tradition of ‘musicalized speech’ and his settings alienate even the happiest songs, hinting at grief behind. The cry, ‘Drive out the old Jew!’ is set to a waltz, and evil is summoned through scorn and parody. Shostakovich was aware of what Braun calls the Eastern European Jewish ‘extrapolation of mood’, where gaiety changes into an ecstatic and self-obsessed automatism (listen to Numbers 4 and 7), lyricism into an act of catharsis bordering on tragedy (1 and 8), advice concludes in deliriously whispered warning (as in the fifth song) At last Shostakovich’s tonal instability reminds us how ephemeral joy must be.
There was no chance of publishing the cycle, and even at its first performance in 1955 a shiver of excitement and fear ran through the hall. Meanwhile there had been a new role for the supreme parodist: he was sent abroad as a cultural ambassador to deliver Soviet propaganda, in a state of misery which was palpable to all who met him. These were the occasions of his visits to the USA (1949), Warsaw (1950) and Vienna (1952). The good news was that the American trip forced the reinstatement of his music in Russia. When Stalin rang him, Shostakovich pointed out that all his symphonies were played in the west, whereas at home they were proscribed by order of the State Commission for Repertoire. How was he to behave. ‘Banned by whom?’ Stalin asked. ‘We didn’t give that order.’ And so it was revoked.
Mstislav Rostropovich was there to witness the limbo that endured until Stalin’s death. ‘For Shostakovich it was a calamity that the people for whom he had written his works with his very blood, to whom he had exposed his very soul, did not understand him. Each person who remained near to him and still openly demonstrated affection towards him was as precious as a diamond.’ His friends remember his speaking out for victims of injustice, begging for their rehabilitation, yet urging those who knew him to defend their own interests rather than his. Isaak Schwartz recalls being ticked off by Shostakovich when Schwartz threatened to leave the Conservatoire rather than denounce the man who was his teacher. ‘“I am most displeased by your behaviour. You had no right to act like that. You have a family, a wife, small children. You should think about them, and not about me. If I am criticized, then let them criticize me – that’s my affair.” But I saw in Shostakovich’s eyes such a penetrating look of sympathy and affection for me, and such compassion!’
CHAPTER 6
1953-66: THE PHONEY THAW
Death of Stalin
Symphonies 10-13: ‘sunrise on the future’
A lonely, helpless man
A communist Composer Laureate
On 5 March 1953, as the Supreme Soviet’s announcement put it, Comrade Stalin’s heart ceased to beat. His stroke had come four days before, but the minions were so frightened that they left him to stew. ‘Stalin’s name is boundlessly dear to our party, to the Soviet people and to the workers of the whole world’ the statement continued. In fact, his death was so well-timed that an assassination was suspected. Even in 1952 Pravda had appealed for an end to an empire’s stagnation: there were still too many relics of the capitalists for boundless euphoria. ‘We need not fear showing up our shortcomings and difficulties. We need Gogols and Schedrins.’ With the execution of Stalin’s Chief of Police in December 1953 (by such irony did life in the Union proceed), an era of liberalization was certain.
Shostakovich had a sanguine attitude to thaws. Enjoy them while they last, he said to Flora Litvinova, for there are always hard winters to follow. For now, nine Jewish doctors accused of plotting to poison the Kremlin had been released, and the press demanded individuality from creative artists. ‘Everyone started singing’ wrote Edward Crankshaw. ‘At first tentatively, then in a rush, a full dawn chorus.’ Hastily Shostakovich published his Fifth Quartet, which prefigures the mightiest, most universal of his orchestral works – and that too was on its way.
By 1954 and the emergence of Krushchev, the permafrost was back. But during that brief renaissance had come the first performance of the Tenth Symphony. Its first movement had been started, with the Preludes and Fugues, in 1951. As Roy Blokker says, ‘Here is the heart of Shostakovich. He opens his soul to the world, revealing its tragedy and profundity, but also its resilience and strength.’ The composer explained, ‘I wanted to portray human emotions and passions’. He does more than that. The Tenth is the least psychological of his mature symphonies, and because of that, the most psychologically satisfying of them all. In it the suave domain of the First is spun on its head, and lost for good. The craving for self-expression, pent up for years, the long gestation of a symphony in which every gesture has been balanced and moulded to perfection, engenders more than the climax to one of the most satisfying trilogies in the symphonic literature of any age. The Tenth is the summation of the war and post-war epoch on the emotional plane of one individual, which then surmounts the vision of that period. It is, as Shostakovich’s colleague Kabalevsky recognized, ‘the sunrise on the future’. The dark orchestral colouring is nothing to be surprised at, nor are the sentiments which the Tenth seems to explore. What is new is the expressive control and self-sufficiency: trauma distanced, proportioned, crafted. The brute immediacy of emotional sensation (a form of propaganda, if not for the State, then for oneself) has been replaced by the immediacy of an artistic occasion, a need to sum up and make sense, whose richness depends on its synthesis of living and remembered elements. You might say that the Tenth is in part about shock tactics, about the echoes of lost meaning within an overwhelming sense of grief; and at last one mind’s triumphant imprimatur, ‘I alone make sense of this.’ Yet the music is too deep, too lean and compact, too richly integrated for a programmatic interpretation to be more than a sideline, almost an insult. How marvellously the rolling wave of its first movement opens out. Rhythmically the opening is hesitant, so that the clarinet’s first subject comes as a resolution of uncertainties, which is then pressed into alarming new dimensions. This foreshadowing creates the symphony’s sense of adventure within fatalistic inevitability. The weight of uncertainty lies heavily upon it, yet so too does the awareness of pre-ordination by a higher power. As if they were shifting veils, possibilities are opened and closed – only to be wrenched apart in an act of cataclysmic fright; and Shostakovich’s skill serves as a meticulous and contemptuous metaphor for the arbitrary wastage of a nation.
Or does it? His challenge to audiences was the same as Chopin’s: ‘Let them listen and guess for themselves’. If you wonder whether Shostakovich might have been a closet Bolshevik, recall his comments to Litvinova about a Spanish contemporary: ‘Picasso, that bastard, hails Soviet power and our communist system at a time when his followers here are persecuted, hounded, and not allowed to work. All right, I’m a bastard too: a coward and all the rest, but I’m living in a prison with my children to be frightened for.’ No, there is no shortage of quasi-musical interpretations for the Tenth. Its demonic Allegro is a portrait of Stalin, claims Volkov, and Galina Vishnevskaya has called this symphony ‘a composer’s testament of misery, forever damning the tyrant’. Perhaps it is; yet we have to be aware of a process of mythologizing on behalf of an artist who cannot answer back, and it is just as crass as anything from the Soviet era. Shostakovich was a complex man, a troubled and guilty man; but as a composer he is too great to need the notoriety of those who could only find fame as dissidents. Something of the greatness of the Tenth, as Robert Dearling has shown, lies in the way it holds its power in reserve, its magnificent ambiguities. He writes of the first movement’s crisis, ‘the climactic peak is maintained with miraculous feats of scoring over nearly a hundred bars of moderate tempo. It illustrates yet again the composer’s ability to think in terms of immense, cogently-organized paragraphs over vast time-scales.’
One enigmastands beyond the rest. It involves the monogram which appears when we transcribe the initials DSCH into German musical notation: D, E flat, C and B. It sounds a threat, suggests Dearling, heard even in isolation: a pathos and ambivalence which seem to embody the nature of so much in Shostakovich’s music. It is the signature which appears in the Tenth, and in the crucial moments of piece after piece thereafter; placing Shostakovich in the cryptographic tradition of Bach, Berg and Schumann’s march against the Philistines. But what can it mean? Come to think of the Tenth, what are we to make of the Allegretto’s toy shop incongruities, which his friend Marina Sabinina interpreted as the cringing of one who sees himself as a puppet on string? And if this is the truth behind the third movement, what do we make of its remonstrative horn-calls – summoned as if from The Song of the Earth, which themselves form the letters of Elmira Nazirova’s first name? What have we to say about the Moderato’s allusions to both the embattled Eighth Symphony and Liszt’s Faust?
That Stalinesque scherzo, as David Fanning has revealed, is key to the rest. It unlocks the secrets of the finale, where the DSCH monogram appears in moments of a white heat of defiance. But there too rhythms from the scherzo re-emerge, as does its last firework glissando, shooting up at vital stages and undermining the apparent good cheer of Soviet man at peace with himself. The first of these markers occurs halfway through the last movement, when Shostakovich veers away from one kind of structure (an untroubled sonata rondo) to a crisis-orientated sonata-form, and we suspect that something is gravely amiss. At the end of the symphony, to clinch a rousing coda which has already driven it home, the DSCH musical signature echoes over and over again. A victory is up for grabs, but on whose terms? Is the triumph one over decades of abomination, or over oneself: the retreat into the moribund quiescence described in Nineteen Eighty-Four? Rumours cannot enlighten us here. The point is that the finale is complex – more so than its bemused Soviet critics ever grasped. The incursions of the Scherzo are not externally imposed conflicts, brought in to heighten the drama or salvage a scrap of unity, but an inevitable result of the finale’s suppressing of its profound introduction by a flippant main theme. If you like, these quotations highlight the suspense which has arisen from a strategically-placed flouting of symphonic decorum: of one rule after another by which an epic piece of music is supposed to be written. We sense the hand of a master, whose command of form and formality is sufficient to fight them on their terms, and burn provincial Socialist Realism up in the friction.
Thousands of words have been written on the first movement, that great engine in which an episode of terror is let loose and the warnings revisited, to create a winding-down that is both subtle and sinister in its iron command. The consequence is a musical structure which rears up like two great arches – whose substance is as tightly woven, and as gripping, as barbed wire. It re-invents sonata form by taking every potential weakness of long symphonic writing and turning it into strength.
No wonder we leave the symphony feeling as if we have been witnesses to an offence as big as human experience. Fanning concludes: ‘The Tenth dares to expand the first movement’s terms of reference by including externalized depiction in the scherzo, graphic self-assertion in the third movement, and ambivalent self-denial in the finale. Such expansion may endanger unity, such expansion may question universality; but it is precisely this endangering – this questioning and penetration to the far side of our assumptions about the symphonic medium – which seals the greatness of this work.’ Eric Roseberry agrees. He implies that Shostakovich’s symphonies are acts of transformation, battered by repetition and idées fixes, in which the rational and the ardently human, the collective outlook and the individual consciousness, take arms in the same arena. Shostakovich becomes ‘the equal of Sibelius (whose concision he could rival) and Mahler (whose expansiveness without loss of tension he could command).’ Hegel might have found it difficult to conceive what he had made possible,
‘It seems’, observed Boris Yarusotvsky at the time, ‘as if the hero of this symphony has to meet the forces of evil alone’. A black mark there. In Moscow there was a three-day conference on the Tenth, in which friends and faintly-praising rivals fought it out; Khrennikov, inevitably, preferred The Song of the Forests. Abroad the symphony became a cause célèbre, one of the glories of the age. At any rate, its author was made ‘People’s Artist of the Soviet Union’ in the summer of 1954. An immense apartment was arranged in which he could be interviewed by New York journalists, as if it belonged to him.
Nina died on 4 December. ‘If only you knew’ said Shostakovich, ‘how hard my life is now’. He left his son and daughter’s upbringing to the maid, Marya, concerned that his lonely distress should rub off on them. Each evening he drowned his sorrows in vodka, and found himself unable to compose. The flat was in chaos. He confided to Flora Litvinova, ‘You know, by nature I’m incapable of frivolous liaisons with a woman. I need a wife, to live with me and be at my side.’ In 1956 he found a Party member, Margarita Kainova, hovering over him, and settled on her – ignorant as she was of art, ‘unattractive and uncharming’, unloved by Dmitri and unable to understand him, but perhaps able to bring two adolescent step-children into line. The marriage collapsed in 1959. He found happiness in 1962 with Irina Suprinskaya, a lively and intelligent literary editor who was young enough to be his granddaughter, and who nursed him through his final illness.
A morbid, clinging love for his children was his way of making sense in the intervening years. He lived in constant fear that some misfortune would befall them, and he spent his time feeding them up with cakes, getting them new cars and homes, pulling strings to win them careers that others whispered were beyond their talent. His memorial to Nina was his Seventh Quartet, a meditation of six years later on the events of a life and a death, which we must consider for its impact on the music of Opus 110, that most famous of all his chamber works. During his sickness after Nina’s death – and his mother’s, a double blow – he had written a Sixth Quartet in 1956. Apart from an ethereal slow movement it is strangely carefree and non-committal, but the Seventh was one of his favourites.
He gained some solace from Oistrakh’s triumphant advocacy of the Violin Concerto in 1955. Oistrakh said that he lived for this music. In Carnegie Hall the conductor, Mitropoulos, held up the score ‘towards the audience, as if to let the new work share in the ovation accorded to a masterful performance’. In Leningrad, following a delirious reception, Shostakovich treated his friends to a feast of stale pies (which he had bought on the street and which were as hard as stones), inedible green apples, and vodka served from plastic mugs which someone had found in the bathroom. He paced up and down: toasting the ladies, tripping over his carpet, and muttering again and again, ‘I am so glad, so happy. I’m so utterly, utterly happy.’ Suddenly he collapsed onto the bed in the alcove. In a childishly helpless, plaintive voice he said, ‘And now all of you please go away. I am terribly tired. I want to sleep, to sleep.’ It turned out that Oistrakh had arranged a near-banquet, but Shostakovich was too drained to get up.
By the late fifties he was, in effect, the Soviet Union’s composer laureate: tacitly acknowledged as its greatest creative artist. He knew the fragility of pedestals. Lady Macbeth was in disgrace until an unpublicized performance in 1963 swept its opponents away, and much else was untouchable. In the last days of Stalin a sociologist had been dispatched to Shostakovich’s flat, to give him a crash-course in Marxist-Leninism. A miracle, contemplated the scientist, that our great leader, who controlled half the world, found time to ring a mere composer. Did this composer know what he was, by Stalin’s side? ‘A worm, a mere worm!’ wailed Shostakovich, in ironic self-abasement. ‘That’s right’ the half-wit concluded. ‘A worm is what you are. But at least you know your place.’
Teaching, film-scores and jobbing propaganda-pieces continued to pay the bills. Why must we condemn such things? If we are not prepared to censure Samuel Wesley for his hymns, or Parry for writing Jerusalem (a song he wanted to destroy, however we revere it now), why are the west’s cosy custodians of value ready to dismiss Shostakovich for his official duties, which in a secular State had the same function? ‘In this situation,’ as Russians say, ‘genius and mediocrity are equally helpless.’ Every composer has had to write his fair share of doggerel: to honour debts, to curry favour from those who controlled his future, to create the miscalculations and experiments from which he could learn. If only westerners’ aberrations were as well-crafted as Shostakovich’s, which were written in half the time and probably with half the conviction. And if fifty bars in a major key are the price of food and an audience for the three movements that have gone before, is that really so bad? At least cinema music has brought us The Gadfly of 1955, which depicts the struggles of the Italian people under Austrian occupation. Shostakovich’s idiom is nostalgically sumptuous, reminiscent of Resphighi and above all Tchaikovsky, so that the graceful Romance deserves its fame.
This finesse shines through the second of Shostakovich’s piano concertos, which he wrote in 1957 as a birthday present for his son Maxim. It works on many more levels than the First did; but again, Shostakovich seems to be as happy in his music-making as he ever was. He sees the piano as a percussive instrument, lending itself to contrapuntalism, as well it might in a concerto of such neoclassical panache. This time there are no worthy Soviet histrionics, for all that survives from Shostakovich’s cultural background is that indispensable, bravura motive force. Beyond it, the prevailing sense is of quirky wit, the spontaneous lightness of touch that breathes life into Bartók’s and Ravel’s late concertos, yet touched in its slow movement by the melting plangency of Rachmaninov. It tends to be sanitized horribly today, but in the composer’s own recording the piano in the first movement at least comes up like a tiger – and we are reminded of what a whack round the ears his music could be. Later Dmitri dismissed the Second as being ‘without merit’.
Briefly, it seemed a good time to be alive. On 25 February 1956 Krushchev, now Party Leader, delivered to the Twentieth Conference a historic denunciation of Stalin. It turned out that between 1937-38 seventy percent of Central Committee members had been shot, that anyone differing from Stalin was ‘doomed to removal and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation’. Krushchev spoke of the ‘accumulation of immense and unlimited power in the hands of one person’, the tortures and false confessions, the liquidation of experts that had almost cost Russia the war. No wonder his speech was only fit for a closed session. But over the next two years several million political prisoners would be released, and the Shostakovich flat became like a small hotel for those on their way back home.
In spring air, the incandescence of early revolutionary days was often recalled. There was a revival of ‘revolutionary romanticism’ and these were the circumstances in which Shostakovich wrote his Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies. The first of them is dedicated to the abortive revolution of 1905. To western ears it is an hour’s worth of musical knitting: atmospheric perhaps, but as an individual statement nowhere approaching the league of the Tenth. The trouble is that the devil always had the best tunes, at least for Shostakovich he did; and in the prolix first movement (‘The Palace Square’) what we seem to catch is a composer stuck under a spotlight, chafed by his starched collar, doing dutiful worship at the shrine.
Yet our notion of the artist standing alone above society, rather than being at one with his people, is a modern intellectual conceit. The origins of art lie in the humanity of common experience. The carnage of 1905 Shostakovich had seen with his own eyes, and his need to communicate his testimony in accessible terms was sincere. At its best the symphony draws from him the most idiomatically Russian music he could write: rolling like a great wave in the Allegro (‘January the Ninth’), which has been aptly compared to a mighty tracking-shot. For if the Eleventh is a poster rather than an essay, it is a poster for a feat of gargantuan cinema too big for images, superior in some ways to the famous Leningrad, paving the way for the scale and the musical world of Babi Yar. The third movement quotes a popular song, ‘You fell as victims’, in an evocation of eternal remembrance as poignant as Mussorgsky. It may be that we, with our liberal sensibilities, prefer Babi Yar’s final appeal to personal freedom to the Eleventh Symphony’s Tocsin, where the souls of the dead rise up to accuse – but we do so thanks to our own ideological preconceptions, for each has its zeal and its message.
An eminent politician on a trip to Moscow described the premiere. ‘The whole of a huge crowded hall was seething with excitement. Whether he wanted to or not, the composer of this magnificent revolutionary work had to go on stage and accept the applause. But the Soviet people honoured him justly as a man who had enriched their culture and the culture of mankind with an undying work of art.’ If only its real significance had been known. Lev Lebedinsky, aware that the symphony was composed in the aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising, draws attention to the quotations from revolutionary songs, which ‘refer unequivocally to the tyrant’s black conscience and the horrors of prison.’ ‘Papa, what if they hang you for this?’ asked Maxim at a rehearsal. The Eleventh is the statement of a modern Aesop who had said of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, ‘It’s reality varnished over. The truth was ten times worse than that.’
The First Cello Concerto too has a crafty line in quotations, including one from Stalin’s favourite song, Suliko. It was inspired by Rostropovich’s performance of the Prokofiev Symphony-Concertante. Rostropovich received his dedication on the evening of 2 August 1959, and learnt it in four days.
Both of Shostakovich’s cello concertos put to use a certain weight of crumbling rhetoric, and chart its decay through nagging obsessionality to extinction. The First is music which dances as if in the face of suffering. Its opening is ascetic yet possessed of vehement pace: the Moderato slow movement is lithe and breathlessly poised, using the cello’s colours and harmonics to create an effect as disembodied as a crime heard in the night. A long cadenza soars above its sombre horizon and – as in the First Violin Concerto – a soloist’s private world is pulled to shreds by the orchestra’s febrile disorder. In this way, just as before, an individual is swept up in collective hysteria for the finale. A final self-quotation lets us glimpse the composer’s sardonic mask, as if he were saying, ‘I told you, all this was bound to happen.’
The first movement’s tension derives from the contrast between the speed of a true sonata allegro, and the repetition of its material. It is as static as a treadmill. Self-mocking but serious, sparse yet ripely expressive, pessimistic and vital, this is one of Shostakovich’s boldest and most idiosyncratic creations. Like Gogol, he stands self-absorbed in front of a mirror, reciting his own name in alienation and disgust.
In 1960 Shostakovich was re-appointed to the post of First Secretary to the RSFSR Composers’ Union, a position which required membership of the Communist Party. Why did he acquiesce? Out of fear for his children, Litvinova suggests. ‘Once he spoke about the despair he experienced after his father’s death, when he found himself alone in a hostile world. Besides, he was incapable of resisting any form of force and boorishness. When pressure was exerted on him, he was ready to compromise himself, read out or sign anything, so long as he was left alone.’ What followed was typical of his personality: anguish at what he was doing and the fawning from on high he received for it, scrupulous attention to his official duties, however trite or wretched; a shrug of resignation over the friends his decision had cost him. Before Lev Lebedinsky he wept. ‘I’m scared to death of them. From childhood I’ve been doing things that I wanted not to do…I’m a wretched alcoholic…I’ve been a whore, I am and always will be a whore.’
Lebedinsky understood what he called ‘the mask’, and knew that the truth was in the music. In 1960 Shostakovich visited Dresden, where a Mosfilm unit was making a documentary about the rescue of art treasures. ‘And this devastated city reminded me of our own devastated cities that I’d been in, and of the human victims, the many lives taken away by the war that Hitler’s fascism unleashed. All this made such a profound impression on me that in three days I had a quartet completely finished.’
So much for the public rationale. A quotation from Lady Macbeth marks out the Eighth Quartet as a piece we might expect to be as secret and intensely individual as the Eighth Symphony. So it is: heart-rending music, as simple as plainchant, as eloquent as a denunciation, its opening as bare as a dirge. The DSCH motto and a quotation from the Song of Death identify its victims – the Jewish people, the composer himself; and the variations he works on two motifs create a consummate fusion of musical and human needs: the drama of brutalization, the tragedy and futility of tenderness amongst its ruins. A suppliant hand stretches out from Bomber Harris’s rubble, and we forget the weightless mastery of counterpoint, of pace and theatre, that has made irony into a cry of anguish. The Eighth Quartet condenses the Symphony’s agenda, makes it explicit; and it is capricious with a sense of awful possibility. It ends with the moan, ‘Tormented by Grievous Bondage’, which can also be translated, ‘He Died a Slave’. Impossible to misinterpret, but Soviet critics did so; and they announced boisterously that ‘in the finale, the composer quotes Lenin’s favourite song’.
Inspirations rarely drop out of the blue, and the Eighth draws on vocabulary developed in its predecessor, which had been performed earlier in the year. The Seventh is a thirteen-minute, cyclic transmutation of material through despair to resignation. Its opening is a lone, almost furtive remembrance of Nina’s intimacy and confidences: the Lento is a desolation as if leached by acid, through whose dust the need to make sense inches its way.
Lebedinsky asked why Shostakovich as a child had gone to the Finland Station in St Petersburg to see a famous homcoming. ‘I wanted to hear Lenin’s speech’ was the reply. ‘I knew a dictator was on his way.’ But as a Party member, the prodigal son was compelled to write a Lenin symphony. This was in 1961, and the Twelfth was simply entitled ‘1917’. It was written at breakneck speed, but scarcely from conviction. The original plan had been to do a satire of Bolshevism, whose meaning would be clear to those who, said Shostakovich, ‘had ears to hear.’ Friends warned him it was too dangerous. Then Lebedinsky had a panic-stricken telephone call. ‘I wrote the symphony’ Shostakovich explained, ‘and I realized you’d been right. They’d crucify me for it because my conception was an obvious caricature of Lenin. So I sat down and wrote another one in three or four days. And it’s terrible!’ With his insane technique, Lebedinsky adds, he could do anything. The television crews went away happy.
There was dynamite to come, on 18 December 1962. This was the occasion of the first performance of a Thirteenth Symphony for bass soloist, chorus and orchestra, to texts by the young poet Yevgeny Yevtuschenko – and a message so explosive that Shostakovich returned home to find KBG agents posted outside his apartment, in case he tried to defect.
Yevtuschenko’s poems had been published, to official disapproval. It was Shostakovich’s choice amongst them that was devastating. Babi Yar, a denunciation of anti-semitism in memory of the steep ravine where a race was put to death: Humour, a song in praise of non-conformity; In the Store, an expression of the suffering of millions of ordinary men and women in a police state: Fears (‘Fears slithered everywhere, like shadows…they taught us to keep silent when we should have screamed’). And then its finale, A Career, in honour of Galileo and Tolstoy, who had not been afraid to speak out: ‘A certain scientist, Galileo’s contemporary, was no more stupid than Galileo. He knew that the earth revolved, but he had a family’.
Krushchev demanded a ban. The square of Moscow’s Conservatory Hall was sealed off by police cordons, the city buzzed with rumours, the singer fled. Mravinsky, such a monster in front of his orchestra, backed out in sheer panic. Boris Schwarz remembers the concert, conducted by Kirill Kondrashin:
The tension was unbearable. The first movement, Babi Yar, was greeted with a burst of spontaneous applause. At the end of the hour-long work, there was an ovation rarely witnessed. On the stage was Shostakovich, shy and awkward, bowing stiffly. He was joined by Yetvushenko, moving with the ease of a born actor. Two great artists – a generation apart – fighting for the same cause – freedom of the human spirit. Seeing the pair together, the audience went wild; the rhythmic clapping redoubled in intensity, the cadenced shouts ‘Bra-vo Shos-ta-ko-vich!’and ‘Bra-vo Yev-tu-shen-ko!’ filled the air.
Babi Yar is Shostakovich’s choral masterpiece, held together by one compelling narrative voice. It brings a humanist’s passion to the trudge of fear and hopelessness, the inertia of apathy, the throb of vacant calm between moments of horror, the rapturous tremor of possible salvation. Its swirling success lies in its juxtapositions of scale, for what it captures is as intimate as horror, as intimidating as the suffering of millions. It makes misery noble without ever losing its indignation that such things can be. Its prancing second movement, Humour, unearths Shostakovich’s most defiant sarcasm in an attack from all angles, a dance as predatory as Salome’s, spiked by brashly snapping percussion. There squalling soprano winds (the little man, whining like Job) fight against the full torrent of an orchestra. The fourth movement, Fears, is a requiem for those unlucky enough still to be alive. Never have the dark wings of our slender mortality been made more palpable than in the sombre lustre of Shostakovich’s orchestration: a black, guttural subsidence almost below the threshold of hearing, as if risen from catacombs. After all of that, A Career opens with a susurrus of birdsong – and at last the quiet voices of reason (embodied in counterpoint) and courage surmount everything. With a passing motif from Humour, now tinkling not on a bell but a glockenspiel, the symphony dies away in knowing forgiveness.
The Thirteenth Symphony was to be last of the wedding cakes in Cinemascope. His lean Second Cello Concerto of 1966 was dedicated to Rostropovich, as the First had been, and was performed on Shostakovich’s sixtieth birthday. It begins with a soliloquy and ends in a joke, a deceptive false climax in which its scherzo theme returns as a cruel memento mori. Throughout this music an act of meditation is placed centre-stage, and the sense of nocturnal visitation is more profound than in 1959: the brooding artist and his audience are bound together through an organic cohesion which levitates in a space far removed from the limitations of orthodox concerto structure. The sense of dialogue, of both reconciliation and adventure where once there could be only clamorous dialectic or browbeating, reflects Shostakovich’s calm maturity. This is the secure face as an artist who knows that at last his untrammelled stream of thought will be made sense of and valued, who can be public in his loneliness. In the short space between cello concertos he has moved to the composure and synthesis of his final period – and no other composer could create an underworld of sound as compelling as he does here. In any case, with unmistakable signs of the debilitating illness that was to finish Shostakovich off, with Krushchev deposed by Brezhnev’s old guard, it was time for something new.
CHAPTER 7
ASSERTION, 1966-75:
LAST PERIOD AND DEATH
A new, lean idiom
Shostakovich and Britten
Honours and the contemplation of death
The final masterworks
The fate of composers is either to re-invent themselves, or to atrophy. In 1963 Shostakovich had struck up a friendship with Benjamin Britten, and by 1966 the two composers’ styles had begun to converge with a new energy, astringent and macabre. In Shostakovich’s case too there had been a heart-attack, a presentiment of the shortness of life; and with it a hypnotic, a self-ironic study of life’s constants: morality, time, love, betrayal, death. This is the language of the Second Cello Concerto, and of the Eleventh Quartet from the same year. The Eleventh opens with the quality of a fable, deliberately coy and bare. It is a typically wily move that a theme not for the violins but the cello – and one intimated almost incidentally – provides the material for its development. The Eleventh is one of Shostakovich’s essays in an orthodoxy which is eaten away from the inside: setting out its case in circuitous phrases which slump back obsessively, falling as if to earth in a curiously Russian gesture of stoic helplessness. By the third movement, a Recitative marked by explosive dissonance, the process by which accepted meaning has been corroded, is complete. In the remainder of the piece, pent-up energy discharges like an overwound clock; and there is nothing fortuitous about the calculation, the sense of mechanization, with which Shostakovich reveals experience re-appraised in the hard light of day, worked and exhausted to the point of moral anaesthesia.
On his sixtieth birthday there seemed a desperate urge by the Soviet authorities to make amends for what Shostakovich had suffered in the past. They smothered him with decorations – Hero of Socialist Labour, The Gold Hammer and Sickle, the Order of Lenin – whilst countries abroad outbid each other in honours and invitations. The composer himself was depressed. Journalists noted the wretchedly pallid stare and nervous, twitching fingers; ‘the inscrutable face with its strange tremor’ of a man prone to silent misery or a jabbering spate of words. His doctors had banned cigarettes and alcohol, and the result was a composer’s block which it took smuggled brandy to cure. The consequence, after three days’ slog and a rare interlude of contentment, was the exquisite yet achingly depressive Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok.
In September 1968 audiences heard his last optimistic finale, that of the Twelfth Quartet. He summons there the Beethovenian world of ‘high ideals’, in conflict with what he called ‘the agonizing impossibility of solving the contradictions of life.’ In the Twelfth, something of Schoenberg’s serialist technique finds its way into a music which evolves with burnished symphonic breadth. ‘Splendid’, Shostakovich called it. Others heard ‘the tread of death itself…the ultimate examination of the performers’ interpretative powers.’ It was Beethoven who remained Shostakovich’s musical hero, and it is apt that each man’s final and surmounting testimony is in the form of a quartet series. It has been said that quartets thread through Shostakovich’s creative life like some inner odyssey, and inhabit terrain of increasing spiritual desolation, as private and profound as Winterreise. The last four of them enter a world of human isolation, the contemplation of life’s shortness, and scarified despair. Each was written for a different member of the Beethoven Quartet of Moscow, itself a national institution. The Thirteenth was dedicated to the violist, Vadim Borisovsky: a one-movement span, steeped in an awareness of mortality. It is, as Borisovsky’s pupil Fyodor Druzhinin has observed, ‘a hymn to the viola’, with a stratospheric and resinous tessitura inspired by the Beethovens’ performances of Bach. It is a forlorn association of ideas, rearing from a brooding Adagio to a grisly march and down again, in which fragments crystallize and overlap with immeasurable subtlety. The violist Alan George, who knew Shostakovich and his intentions, has compared it to a grey landscape upon which compulsion collapses into silence.
And well it might be. For Shostakovich was falling to bits, with what was tentatively diagnosed as a sort of poliomyelitis. From Garvriil Ilizarov’s orthopaedic clinic in the Urals he announced the rewards of a strict regime: ‘I can use my right hand to shave, do up my buttons. I don’t miss my mouth with a spoon.’ To Flora Litvinova he confided, ‘I don’t want to die yet. I still have a lot of music to write.’ Another coronary meant an end to Ilizarov’s exercises, and Shostakovich trained himself to write with his left hand, for when the right gave out. He watched with distaste as bones snapped.
The Fourteenth Symphony of 1969 is a confrontation with the prosaic ugliness of death – a drab and universal truth that lies as if in wait, the prospect it presents to those who foresee it. ‘The devil take it,’ said Shostakovich at rehearsals, carried away like a small boy in his excitement. ‘I never knew it would sound so good.’ He wanted a recording made instantly, convinced he was about to die. The idea of setting a cycle of poems on such a theme had come to him in 1962, when he’d orchestrated Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. The gestation, then, was longer than that of the Tenth Symphony; and it shows in the Fourteenth’s enormity of thought and tight concentration, its chilling restraint and beauty, in which the only humour is one bitter laugh, and comfort is as ephemeral as mist. There are newer acknowledgments too: not least of the creative rapport with Britten, as Shostakovich speaks of the immortality of art and friendship. This is the redemption to which Shostakovich returns in the Suite on the Poems of Michelangelo, which he set five years later:
Here fate has sent me eternal sleep
But I am not dead.
Though buried in the earth
I live in you,
Whose lamentations I listen to,
Since friend is reflected in friend…
That means I am not dust
And mortal decay does not touch me.
The use of percussion in these last symphonies establishes them as a trilogy. He chooses a bell sound, as Mahler had in The Song of the Earth, to establish a prescient gloom and fatalism. The death of Lorelei in the Fourteeth, the tolling of Babi Yar, the eerie tinkles of the Fifteenth – all of them engender immense effect through minimal resources. This is because percussion instruments are both illustrative and laconic. Each time ‘the blonde witch’ Lorelei thinks of death, we hear her agitation in the crack of xylophones and a temple block. As Tatyana Kazakova explains, ‘She cannot cope with her catastrophic thought of committing suicide, but at the same time her future is predestined: Lorelei is doomed to die. Increasingly the persistent beats reflect her growing determination.’ The culmination of this movement is no less than a savage lashing of sound.
The purpose of the Fourteenth Symphony, then, is to appraise the razed anatomy of human fate, the dissolution of enfeebled flesh. Its basis has affinities with the sardonic language of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, enlarged so as to encompass the imagery of sacrifice and betrayal, fatal infatuation, incestuous love, suicide (‘three tall lilies powdered with gold that the wind scares’). Above them all stands the tyrannous omnipotence and overwhelming presence of death: the depths and landscapes of a dying face ‘like a fruit rotting in the air.’ Shostakovich’s conclusion quotes Rilke:
Death is great,
we belong to it
with its laughing mouth.
When we think we are in the midst of life
death dares to weep
within us.
This is something tart and eerie – dark, rank, voluptuous – but charged too with the overwrought vibrancy of Benjamin Britten, so that in Malaguena and Lorelei the music, unable to contain itself, bursts out on a dizzy career of its own. ‘The smell of salt and blood’ says Lorca, and this is what Shostakovich contemplates. His dissection of circumstances is as sharp as a surgeon’s, his pity as relentlessly unsentimental as an etching by Egon Schiele, as sorry and as arid as a bell heard through air scorched with dust. The furtive interlude of In the Santé is as near to silence as music can be:
In a pit like a bear
Each morning I walk
Let’s go around and around for ever
The sky is blue like a chain
…The noise of my chained chair
Have pity on my tearless eyes, on my pallor
…Have pity above all on my faltering mind
And this despair overcoming it.
The Fourteenth was dedicated to Britten, who conducted the western premiere, picking up the score after its performance to kiss it. Roy Blokker aptly concludes, ‘It forms a bridge between life and death, between total abandon and the often inaccessible philosophical confrontation with the spectre of dying. If Shostakovich is to be remembered for only one work, this symphony may well be that work.’
There is an afterword concerning the first Moscow performance. Shostakovich had spoken to his audience about the need to die with a clear conscience, ‘so that one need not be ashamed of oneself.’ In the fifth movement there was a commotion as a man leapt up and fled. It was the last of his old Stalinist tormentors, Pavel Apostolov, who was found lifeless outside the building from a heart-attack.
The last quartets share a funeral march rhythm. The Fourteenth intermingles innocence and experience, the childlike and sophisticated, in measures of tenderness, nostalgia, humour and inscrutability: a private farewell as life and its riches slip away. The composer Alfred Schnittke has drawn attention to the links between this quartet and Shostakovich’s final symphony, which were completed twenty-two months apart. ‘They are the most original landmarks in time, where the past enters into new relations with the present, invades musical reality – like the ghost of Hamlet’s father – and reshapes it.’
The Fifteenth Symphony had its first performance in January 1972. As Maxim Shostakovich has affirmed, it has connections not only with the pantomime of the Ninth Symphony, but above all – in its instrumentation and structure – the Fourth. Casting our minds back to 1936 shows us how far Shostakovich has come. For both are works impelled by the threat not only of dehumanization, but of chaos. In the final symphony the apocalyptic flamboyance of the Fourth has been supplanted by subtler wit and terse, almost sinister, composure. The Fourth mapped exuberantly the horizon of a young composer who saw the Pacific stretch out before him, as Cortez had done. It was a balletic exhibition for a stage that could never be; whereas the final symphony is the introspection of a man whose vital sinews might at any moment break, who has learnt to balance his mastery on a spider’s web: who proceeds in his meditations with the deliberate stealth of a spider, knowing that he is eavesdropped upon by the world. And what a weight of craftsmanship he has gained: a frigid compactness of texture and timing, its heroics withered into pathos to bear a structure which is at once sly, obstinate and refractory.
Yet the emotional tenor of these symphonies is the same. They share an interplay of emotionalism and alienation, automatism and a quixotic sense of discovery, playfulness and deadly irony. In the Fifteenth both the control and the dispossession are more complete: for if the Fourth was driven by the foreboding of some dreadful inevitability which must end beyond despair, the Fifteenth is emotionally indeterminate. Harmonic and tonal incongruity play their part in that, and both help to create the impression of expanded and far-flung space beneath which morose and disparate elements intrude upon some state of absolute musical impaction. Yet the principal undermining mechanism is the rigidity of tempo. Each movement seems trapped in its own temporal frame – whether flippancy so dogged that it verges on the tragic, or the ritual trudge of a wake – and throughout, there is an allusive and calculated obliqueness of gesture. If the Fourth clamoured for attention, the Fifteenth not once looks us in the eye. The sense of disorientation is as complete, and as infallible, as the logic.
Mention of logic is appropriate, for if each of Shostakovich’s symphonic trilogies ends with a return to well-balanced classical writing and apparent good humour, his last is no exception. Yet if the Fifteenth is simply about a cloudless sky, as Shostakovich claimed in his Collected Edition, what are we to make of its references to the funeral music in Wagner’s Siegfried, the Fate motif of TheRing, the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, the quotations from the Leningrad Symphony? It would be truer to say that Shostakovich adopts the mantle of Kovrin in Chekhov’s The Black Monk, a member of God’s elect who reveals truths to his benighted fellows in an age stripped of heroes. Again, Maxim has confirmed the views of Soviet musicologists, that his father’s symphony is about the cyclic nature of human life – from a child’s naïvety to the sober gaze of one who has learnt to accept a realism which at least allows us to create our own moments of beauty.
Yet it had always been the shock of newly-discovered pain that kept Dmitri going. His final quartet of 1974 is great, courageous music: sparse in its gestures, and in texture as dry as a bone. Shostakovich has been called a Schubert for our times, and the spiritual affinities are nowhere clearer than here. The Fifteenth Quartet is an arch-structure of six unbroken movements, as if summoned from extinction before ever they came to be; and unfolding at the tempo of some nocturnal march into a morose psychological conflict which relapses into spectral trills. It is music informed, made uncanny, by an awareness of existence passing into the infinity of oblivion. It is an act of progressive self-transfiguration, the considered innocence of a second and higher artistic childhood: for it contains the clarity and vulnerability of pristine perception, the burden of disillusionment. We are confronted, seemingly, with the phosphorescent trace of some secret illusion to which the composer has uncompromised fidelity: a sparse melodic line above which harmonies elide and evaporate like mist. Within its span a life’s influences (Mahlerian Ländler, polyphony and the cavernous modalities of church music: the dislocations, the rhythmic treadmills and sporadic eruptions of drama which a lifetime’s mastery of musical stagecraft and timing allow) are drawn into a seamless and private conception whose organic tensions lie beyond irony, beyond any guile at all. In its self-preoccupation it is both masterful and oddly helpless. One recognizes that, to the end of his life, Shostakovich was just as much a disappointed innocent as Schubert had been.
You could tell when another heart-attack was creeping up, he said, because you got no pleasure from vodka. Shostakovich succumbed to the last of them, in Moscow, on 9 August 1975. Five days later, as windy speeches rolled over a tarted-up corpse and a military band butchered its way through the Chopin Funeral March, the lid of his coffin was hammered down at the Novodevichi Cemetery. A professor from the Central Music School muttered, ‘This is the end of the road. Full stop.’ It began to drizzle.
In the Fourteenth Symphony Shostakovich quotes Küchelbecker. ‘What consolation is there in talent amidst rogues and fools?’ Yet from Apollinaire he has already found his answer:
Daylight disappears and now a lamp
Burns in the prison.
We are alone in my cell
Lovely brightness, Beloved reason
The Soviet composer, Sofiya Gubaidulina, remembered her old teacher with infinite gratitude. ‘He sensed my pain. Shostakovich’s sensitivity to a musical phenomenon which lay outside his own sphere stemmed from his own vulnerability… Despite his outward irony, his manner of expressing himself in paradoxes, he felt and understood the suffering that Russians are doomed to endure, and the manner in which it defines their behaviour and their relationships. His influence was all-important to us, and it formulated our attitude to life. He was the person from whom young people hoped to receive the answers.’
Alfred Schnittke, spiritual heir to this music, appraised it best in the year of his mentor’s death. ‘It is now fifty years that music has been under the influence of Shostakovich. In the twentieth century only Stravinsky was endowed with this same magic ability to subordinate everything coming into his field of vision for himself… When in Shostakovich the images of his own musical past meet up in collages with images from the history of music an astonishing effect of objectification occurs, of introducing the individual to the universal; and it is in this way that the greatest challenge in the life of the artist is solved: to influence the world through confluence with the world.’
‘When man is happy,’ declared a Soviet film-maker, ‘eternal themes rarely interest him’. One of the functions of writing, certainly, is to make new our sense of loss: to regain, as Anna Akhmatova put it, ‘a gift we’ve lost…to weep’. At the end of his reminiscences – and of his life – Shostakovich confessed,
There were no particularly happy moments in my life, no great joys. It was drab and dull and it makes me sad to think about it. Man feels joy when he’s healthy and happy. I was often ill. I’m ill now, and my illness deprives me of the opportunity to take pleasure in ordinary things. It’s hard for me to walk. I’m teaching myself to write with my left hand in case my right one gives out completely. I am utterly in the hands of the doctors, and I take all the medicine they prescribe, even if it sickens me. Now all they talk about is courage.
But I don’t feel like a superman yet, super-courageous. I’m a weak man, and no treatment seems to help…When I’m in Moscow, I feel worst of all. I keep thinking that I’ll fall and break a leg. I’m afraid to go out. I’m terrified of being seen, I feel so fragile, breakable.
No, every new day of my life brings me no joy. I thought I would find distraction reminiscing about my old friends and acquaintances. Some of these people played an important role in my life, and I felt it was my duty to tell what I still remembered about them. Yet even this undertaking has turned out to be a sad one. I thought my life was replete with sorrow, that it would be hard to find a more miserable man. But when I started going over the stories of my friends and acquaintances, I was horrified. Not one of them had an easy or a happy life. Some came to a dreadful end, some died in suffering, and the life of many of them could easily be described as more miserable than mine.
That made me even sadder. I was remembering my friends, and all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses. And the picture filled me with horrible depression. I’m sad, I’m grieving all the time…
I went on. I forced myself and went on remembering…I reasoned this way: I’ve seen many unpleasant and tragic events, as well as several sinister and repulsive figures. My relations with them brought me much sorrow and suffering. And I thought, perhaps my experience could be of some use to people younger than I? Perhaps they wouldn’t have the terrible disillusionment that I had to face, and perhaps they would go through life better prepared, more hardened, than I was. Perhaps their lives would be free from the bitterness that has coloured my life grey.
Andrei Tarkovsky was to say in Solaris thatshame is the feeling that saves mankind. This is Shostakovich’s legacy for our century, and for any era in which people are degraded and robbed of their humanity. He is our compassion, our need to fight on against hopeless adversity, our irrepressible and courageous humour – but best of all, he is our sense of shame.
Scherzo in F sharp minor for Orchestra, Opus 1 (1919)
Eight Preludes for Piano, Opus 2 (1919-20)
Five Preludes for Piano (1920-21)
Theme with Variations in B minor for Orchestra, Opus 3 (1921-22)
Two Fables of Krilov (for mezzo-soprano and orchestra) Opus 4 (1922)
Three Fantastic Dances for Piano, Opus 5 (1922)
Suite in F sharp minor for Two Pianos, Opus 6 (1922)
Scherzo in E flat for Orchestra, Opus 7 (1924)
Trio No 1, Opus 8 (1923)
Three Pieces for Cello and Piano, Opus 9 (1923-24: lost)
Symphony No 1 in F minor, Opus 10 (1924-25)
Two Pieces (Prelude and Scherzo) for String Octet, Opus 11 (1924-25)
Sonata No 1 for Piano, Opus 12 (1926)
Aphorisms for Piano, Opus 13 (1927)
Symphony No 2 in B for Orchestra and Chorus, ‘October’: Opus 14 (1927)
The Nose (opera in three acts), Opus 15 (1927-8)
Suite from ‘The Nose’, Opus 15a (1927-28)
Tahiti Trot (‘Tea for Two’, arranged for orchestra), Opus 16 (1928)
Two Scarlatti Pieces (transcription for wind orchestra) Opus 17 (1928)
Film music: ‘New Babylon’ Opus 18 (1928)
The Bedbug (incidental music to Mayakovsky’s play), Opus 19 (1919)
Symphony No 3 in E flat for Orchestra with Chorus, ‘The First of May’: Opus 20 (1929)
Six Romances on words by Japanese Poets (for tenor and orchestra) Opus 21 (1928-32)
The Age of Gold (ballet in three acts), Opus 22 (1927-30)
Suite from ‘The Age of Gold’ for Orchestra, Opus 22a (1929-32)
Polka from ‘The Age of Gold’ for Piano (1935, duet version 1962)
Two Pieces for an Opera ‘Columbus’, Opus 23 (1929: lost)
The Gunshot (incidental music to Bezymensky’s play), Opus 24 (1929: lost)
Virgin Soil (incidental music to Gorbenko and Lyov’s play), Opus 25 (1929: lost)
Film-music: ‘Alone’, Opus 2 (1930-31)
The Bolt (choreographic spectacle in three acts), Opus 27 (1930-31)
Suite for Orchestra from ‘The Bolt’ (Ballet Suite no 5), Opus 27a (1931)
Rule Britannia! (incidental music to Pyotrovsky’s play), Opus 28 (1931)
Opera: ‘Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’, Opus 29 (1930-32)
Film-music: ‘Golden Mountains’, Opus 30 (1931: lost)
Suite for Orchestra from ‘Golden Mountains’, Opus 30a (1931)
Conditional Death (music for a music-hall review), Opus 31 (1931)
Hamlet (music for Shakespeare’s tragedy), Opus 32 (1931-32)
‘Hamlet’: Suite for Small Orchestra from the Theatre Music Opus 32a (1932)
From Karl Marx to our own Days (symphonic poem for orchestra and chorus) (1932)
Film-music: ‘Encounter’, Opus 33 (1932)
We meet this Morning (song for voice and piano from ‘Encounter’: 1932)
Twenty-four Preludes for Piano, Opus 34 (1932-3)
Concerto No 1 in C minor for Piano, Strings and Trumpet: Opus 35 (1933)
Music for a cartoon-film: ‘The Tale of the Priest and his worker Balda’, Opus 36 (1936)
The Human Comedy (incidental music to Balzac’s play), Opus 37 (1933-34)
Suite No 1 for Jazz Orchestra (1934)
Film-music: ‘Love and Hate’, Opus 38 (1934)
Bright Stream (comedy-ballet in three acts), Opus 39 (1934-35)
Sonata in D minor for Cello and Piano, Opus 40 (1934)
Film-music: ‘Maxim’s Youth (The Bolshevik)’, Opus 41 (i) (1934-35)
Film-music: ‘Girl Companions’, Opus 41 (ii) (1934-35)
Five Fragments for Small Orchestra, Opus 42 (1935)
Symphony No 4 in C minor, Opus 43 (1935-36)
Salute to Spain (incidental music to Afinogenov’s play), Opus 44 (1936)
Film-music: ‘Maxim’s Return’, Opus 45 (1936-37)
Four Romances on verses of Pushkin (for bass and piano), Opus 46 (1936)
Symphony No 5 in D minor, Opus 47 (1937)
Film-music: ‘Volochayevska Days’, Opus 48 (1936-37)
String Quartet No 1 in C, Opus 49 (1938)
Suite No 2 for Jazz Orchestra (1938)
Film-music: ‘Vybvorg District’, Opus 50 (1938)
Fragments from the ‘Maxim’ film-trilogy, Opus 50a (1938)
(assembled from Opp 41i, 45, 50) (1938)
Film-music: ‘Friends’, Opus 51 (1938)
Film-music: ‘The Great Citizen’ (Part I), Opus 52 (1938)
Film-music: ‘Man at Arms’ (also called ‘November’), Opus 53 (1938)
Symphony No 6 in B minor, Opus 54 (1939)
Film-music: ‘The Great Citizen’ (Part II), Opus 55 (1939)
Music for a cartoon film: ‘Stupid Little Mouse’, Opus 56 (1939: lost)
Piano Quintet in G minor, Opus 57 (1940)
Boris Godunov (re-orchestration of Mussorgsky’s opera),
Opus 58 (1939-40)
Three Pieces for Violin (originally Op 59; apparently withdrawn: 1940)
King Lear (incidental music to Shakespeare’s tragedy), Opus 58a (1940)
Film-music: ‘Korzinka’s Adventure’, Opus 59 (1940: lost)
Symphony No 7 in C: ‘Leningrad’, Opus 60 (1941)
Sonata No 2 in B minor for Piano, Opus 61 (1942)
Six Romances on verses of English Poets (for bass and piano), Opus 62 (1942)
Suite for theatre-show: ‘Native Leningrad’, Opus 63 (1942)
The Gamblers (unfinished opera after Gogol, originally Opus 63 (1941)
The Vow of the People’s Commissar (song for bass, chorus and orchestra) (1942)
Symphony No 8 in C minor, Opus 65 (1943)
Film-music: ‘Zoya’, Opus 64 (1944)
Suite for dancing: ‘Russian River’, Opus 6 (1944)
Eight English and American Folksongs (for low voice and orchestra) (1944)
Piano Trio No 2 in E minor, Opus 67 (1944)
String Quartet No 2 in A, Opus 68 (1944)
Children’s Notebook: Six Pieces for Piano, Opus 69 (1944-45)
Symphony No 9 in E flat, Opus 70 (1945)
Film-music: ‘Simple Folk’, Opus 71 (1945)
Two Songs for Voice and Piano, Opus 72 (1945)
String Quartet No 3 in F, Opus 73 (1946)
Cantata: ‘Poem of the Motherland’, Opus 74 (1947)
Film-music: ‘Young Guards’, Opus 75 (1947-48)
Suite from the music to ‘Young Guards’, Opus 75a (1948)
Film-music: ‘Pirogov’, Opus 76 (1947)
Suite from the music to ‘Pirogov’, Opus 76a (1947)
Violin Concerto No 1 in A minor, Opus 77 (1947-48)
Film-music: ‘Michurin’, Opus 78 (1948)
Suite from the music to ‘Michurin’, Opus 78a (1948)
Film-music: ‘Meeting on the Elbe’, Opus 80 (1948)
Homesickness (from ‘Meeting on the Elbe’) for Voice and Piano (1956)
Suite from the music to ‘Meeting on the Elbe’, Opus 80a (?1948)
From Jewish Folk-Poetry (1948)
(cycle for soprano, contralto and tenor with piano), Opus 79 (1948)
The Song of the Forests (oratorio), Opus 81 (1949)
Chorus: ‘In the Fields stand the Collective Farms’(from ‘The song of the Forests’, arranged probably in 1960)
A Walk into the Future (song from ‘The song of the Forests’, arranged probably in 1962)
Film-music: ‘The Fall of Berlin’, Opus 82 (1949)
Song: ‘Beautiful Day’ (from ‘The Fall of Berlin’, arranged in 1950)
Suite from ‘The Fall of Berlin’, 82a (assembled 1950)
Ballet Suite No 1, for Orchestra (1949)
String Quartet No 4 in D, Opus 83 (1949)
Two Romances on verses by Mikhail Lermontov, for male voice and piano, Opus 84 (1950)
Film-music: ‘Byelinsky’, Opus 85 (1950)
Suite for Chorus and Orchestra from ‘Byelinsky’, Opus 85a (1950)
Four Songs to Words by Dolmatovsky, Opus 86 (1951)
Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues for Piano, Opus 87 (1950-51)
Ten Poems on texts by Revolutionary Poets (for soloists and chorus a cappella), Opus 88 (1951)
Ballet Suite No 2, for Orchestra (1951)
Film-music: ‘The Memorable Year 1919’, Opus 89 (1951)
Fragments for Orchestra from the Music to ‘The Memorable Year 1919’, Opus 89a (1951)
Cantata: ‘The Sun shines over our Motherland’, Opus 90 (1952)
Four Monologues on verses of Pushkin, for bass and piano: Opus 91 (1952)
Ballet Suite No 3, for Orchestra (1952)
String Quartet No 5 in B flat, Opus 92 ( 1952)
Ballet Suite No 4, for Orchestra (1953)
Symphony No 10 in E minor, Opus 93 (1953)
Concertino for two pianos, Opus 94 (1953)
Film-music: ‘Song of a Great River’, Opus 95 (1954)
Festival Overture, Opus 96 (1954)
Film-music: ‘The Gadfly’, Opus 97 (1955)
Tarantella from ‘The Gadfly’, for two pianos (?1963)
Fragments for Orchestra from the music for ‘The Gadly’, Opus 97a (1955)
Five Romances (Songs of Our Days) for bass and piano, Opus 98 (1954)
Film-music: ‘The First Echelon’, Opus 99 (1956)
Fragments for Chorus and Orchestra from ‘The First Echelon’, Opus 99a (1956)
Six Spanish Songs for Soprano and Orchestra, Opus 100 (1956)
String Quartet No 6 in G, Opus 101 (1956)
Piano Concerto No 2 in F, 102 (1957)
Symphony No 12 in G minor: ‘The Year 1905’, Opus 103 (1957)
Two Russian Folksong Adaptations, for Soloists and a cappella Chorus, Opus 104 (1957)
Musical comedy: ‘Moscow, Cheremushki’, Opus 105 (1956)
Khovanschina (orchestration of Mussorgsky’s opera), Opus 106 (1959)
Cello Concerto No 1 in E flat, Opus 107 (1959)
String Quartet No 7 in F sharp minor, Opus 108 (1960)
Satires (‘Pictures of the Past’: five romances for soprano and piano), Opus 109 (1960)
String Quartet No 8 in C minor, Opus 110 (1960)
Novorossiysk Chimes (‘The Fire of Eternal Glory’) for orchestra (1960)
Film-music: ‘Five Days – Five Nights’, Opus 111 (1960)
Suite from the music for ‘Five Days – Five Nights’, Opus 111a (1960)
Symphony No 12 in D minor: ‘1917’, Opus 112 (1961)
Dances of the Dolls: Suite for Piano (1952-62)
Film-music: ‘Cheremushki’ (based on the musical show) (1962)
Songs and Dances of Death (orchestration of Mussorgsky) (1962)
Symphony No 13 in B flat: ‘Babi Yar’, Opus 113 (1962)
Katerina Ismailova (revision of opera, Opus 29), Opus 114 (1956)
Suite in Five Scenes for Orchestra, from Katerina Ismailova (1956)
From Jewish Folk-Poetry (orchestration of Opus 79) (1963)
Overture on Russian and Kirghiz Folk Themes, Opus 115 (1963)
Film-music: ‘Hamlet’, Opus 116 (1963-4)
Suite for Orchestra from the music to ‘Hamlet’, Opus 116a (1964)
String Quartet No 9 in E flat, Opus 117 (1964)
String Quartet No 10 in A flat, Opus 118 (1964)
Cantata for Bass, Chorus and Orchestra:‘The Execution of Stepan Rapin’, Op 119 (1964)
Film-music: ‘A Year in the Life’, Opus 120 (1965)
Five Romances on texts from ‘Krokodil’ magazine (for bass and piano), Opus 121( 1965)
String Quartet No 11 in F minor, Opus 122 (1966)
Preface to the Complete Collection of my Works, and Brief Reflections apropos this Preface (for bass and piano), Opus 123 (1966)
Two Choruses after Davidenko, Opus 124 (1962)
Cello Concerto in A minor (by Schumann: re-orchestrated by Shostakovich for Rostropovich), Opus 125 (1963)
Cello Concerto No 2 in G, Opus 126 (1966)
Seven Romances for Soprano and Piano Trio on Poems of Alexander Blok, Op 127 (1967)
Spring, Spring (for bass and piano: Opus 129) (1967)
Funeral-Triumphant Prelude for Orchestra, Opus 130 (1967)
Symphonic Poem for Orchestra: ‘October’, Opus 131 (1967)
Film-music: ‘Sofya Perovoskaya’, Opus 132 (1967)
String Quartet No 12 in D flat, Opus 133 (1968)
Sonata for Violin and Piano, Opus 134 (1968)
Symphony No 14 for Bass, Strings and Percussion, Opus 135 (1969)
Eight Ballads for Male Chorus: ‘Loyalty’, Opus 136 (1970)
Film-music: ‘King Lear’, Opus 137 (1970)
String Quartet No 13 in B flat minor, Opus 138 (1970)
March of the Soviet Militia (for wind orchestra, Opus 139) (1970)
Six Romances on Verses of English Poets (orchestration of Opus 62), Opus 140 (1971)
Symphony No 15 in A, Opus 141 (also as arrangement for two pianos) (1971)
String Quartet No 14 in F sharp minor, Opus 142 (1972-3)
Suite for Contralto and Piano: ‘Six poems of Marina Tsvetaeva’, Opus 143 (1973)
Six poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (version for contralto and small orchestra), Opus 143a (1973)
String Quartet No 15 in E flat minor, Opus 144 (1974)
Suite for Bass and Piano on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti, Opus 145 (1974)
Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1974)
(version for bass and orchestra), Opus 145a (1974)
Four Verses of Capitan Lebjadkin (for bass and piano) Opus 146 (1974)
Sonata for Viola and Piano, Opus 147 (1975)
Ballet in Four Acts: ‘The Dreamers’ (1975)
(Largely drawn from the music of The Bolt and The Age of Gold, with some new material.)
Symphony No 16 (?) Reports were circulating in the West shortly before Shostakovich’s death that he had completed two movements of a Sixteenth Symphony. But the Russian authorities could not confirm the existence of this work.
RECOMMENDED RECORDINGS OF DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
Works are listed first, followed by details of the artists and the disc number. All serial numbers apply to compact disc but some recordings can also be bought on tape cassette.
Shostakovich, like other Twentieth Century composers, has been a particular victim of the recession said to be sweeping the record industry: and the dated analogue recordings of his great Soviet interpreters have been hit worst of all. Where there are doubts over whether a disc is still available, or whether some listeners might tolerate its technical roughness, a digital alternative has been given where this of sufficient merit to offer real choice. The dispiriting thing about preparing this list has been to witness how, as our command of sound technology advances, so an insight into interpretations which the composer himself might recognize and endorse is beginning to recede into the past. Not always, but too often.Works are listed first, followed by details of the artists and the disc number. All serial numbers apply to compact disc but some recordings can also be bought on tape cassette.
The good news is that BMG has gained the rights to the Melodiya archive, including those performances currently being withdrawn by Olympia and Praga . Already a remastering of Kirill Kondrashin’s authentic set of symphonies is promised for 1997, and one hopes that other treasures will find their way back to the prominence they deserve.
Chamber and Instrumental Music
Twenty Four Preludes for Piano, Opus 34
(with Three Fantastic Dances and Piano Sonata No 2) Nikolayeva: Hyperion CDA 66620
Also commended (with Alkan Opus 31 Préludes): Mustonen, Decca 433 055-2DH
Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues for Piano, Opus 87
Nikolayeva, BMG/Melodiya 74321198492 (3 CDs)
Also recommended: Nikolayeva, Hyperion CDA66441/3 (3 CDs)
Quartet No 8 in C minor, Opus 110
(with Quartets Nos 6 and 9) The Shostakovich Quartet, Olympia OCD 533
Quartet No 15 in E flat minor, Opus 144
(with Quartets Nos 10 and 11) The Shostakovich Quartet, Olympia OCD 534
(with Quartets Nos 7 and 8) The Beethoven Quartet, Consonance 81-3006
Also recommended:
Quartets Nos 1, 2, 4: The Shostakovich Quartet, Olympia OCD 531
(with Britten: Lachrymae and Stravinsky: Elégie, 1944) Zimmermann (vla): Höll (pf), EMI CDC 754394-2
Symphonic and Orchestral Works
Symphonies 1-15
Moscow PO: Kondrashin BMG/Melodiya 74321199522 (10 CD set, oas)
Symphony No 1 in F minor, Opus 10
(with Symphony No 6) SNO: Järvi, Chandos CHAN 8411
Symphonies No 2 in B, Opus 14 (‘To October’): No 3 in E flat, Opus 20 (‘The First of May’)
London SO: Rostropovich, Teldec 4509-90853-2
Symphony No 4 in C minor, Opus 43
Moscow PO: Kondrashin, BMG/Melodiya 74321198402
Digital recommendation: SNO: Järvi, Chandos CHAN 8640
Symphony No 5 in D minor, Opus 47
Mravinsky, Leningrad PO. Various recordings:
(alone, at medium price) Erato 2292-45752-2
(with Kosler’s interpretation of Symphony No 9) Praga PR 250 085 (if available)
(bargain price, and a recent recording) Leningrad Masters LM 1311
(with Salamonov’s Symphony No 2) Russian Disc RD CD 11 023
Digital recommendation: SNO: Järvi, Chandos CHAN 8650 (with Ballet Suite No 5 from TheBolt)
Symphony No 6 in B minor, Opus 54
SNO: Jarvi, Chandos CHAN 8411 (with Symphony No 1)
Also commended: Concertgebouw: Haitink, Decca 425 067-2DM (with Symphony No 12)
Symphony No 7 in C, Opus 60: ‘Leningrad’
SNO: Järvi, Chandos CHAN 8623
Symphony No 8 in C minor, Opus 65
Leningrad PO: Mravinsky, Philips 422 442-2PH
Leningrad PO: Mravinsky, Russian Disc RD CD 10 917
Digital recommendation: SNO: Järvi, Chandos CHAN 8757
Symphony No 10 in E minor, Opus 93
BPO: Karajan, DG 439 036-2
Also commended: SNO, Jarvi (with Ballet Suite No 4) Chandos CHAN 8630
At a bargain price, Mravinsky’s interpretation on Leningrad Masters LM 1322 offers inimitable insights. Alas, the recording is dire even by Russian standards.
Symphony No 11 in G minor, Opus 103: ‘The Year 1905’
Symphony No 12 in D minor, Opus 112: ‘The Year 1917‘
Leningrad PO, Mravinsky: Erato 2292-45754-2
Also commended (with Symphony No 6): Concertgebouw: Haitink, Decca 425 067-2DM
Symphony No 13 in B flat minor, Opus 113: ‘Babi Yar’
Kondrashin, Moscow PO, Eisen (bass), Choir of the Russian Republic: BMG Melodiya 74321198422
Digital recommendation: New York PO: Leiferkus (bass), Yevtushenko, New York Choral Artists, Masur: Teldec 4509-90848-2
Symphony No 14 Opus 135, for Soprano, Bass and Orchestra
Vishnevskaya, Reshetin, MCO: Barshai, Russian Disc RD CD 11 192 (with Oistrakh’s old but lively performance of Symphony No 9)
Kasrashubili, Safiulin, USSR MoC SO: Rozhdestvensky, Olympia OCD 182 (coupled with Serov’s recording of King Lear)
Symphony No 15 in A, Opus 141
(with orchestral version of the cycle ‘From Jewish Folk Poetry’, Opus 79) London PO: Haitink, Decca 425-069-2
Piano Concerto No 1 in C, Opus 35: Piano Concerto No 2 in F, Opus 102
(with Three Fantastic Dances, Opus 5: Preludes and Fugues, Opus 87 Nos 1, 4, 5, 23, 24) The composer (pf), Vaillant (tpt)/ONRF: Cluytens EMI mono CDC 7 54606-2
Digital recommendation: (with ‘The Assault on Beautiful Gorky’ from the Suite ‘TheUnforgettable Year 1905’, Opus 89)
Alexeev (pf), Jones (tpt)/ECO: Maksymiuk EMI CD-CFP 4547
Violin Concerto No 1 in A minor, Opus 77 ( issued as Opus 99)
(with Prokofiev, Violin Concerto No 1) Vengerov (vln)/London SO: Rostropovich, Teldec 4509-92256-2
Violin Concerto No 2 in C sharp minor, Opus 129
(with Shostakovich, Violin Concerto No 1) Mordkovitch (vln)/SNO: Järvi Chandos CHAN 8820
Cello Concerto No 1 in E flat, Opus 107; Cello Concerto No 2, Opus 126
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (complete – 2 CDs)
Vishnevskaya, Gedda, Petrov; Ambrosian Opera Chorus, London PO/ Rostropovich EMI CDS 7 49955-2
Orchestral version of the cycle ‘From Jewish Folk Poetry’, Opus 79
Söderström, Wenkel, Karczykowski, London PO: Haitink, Decca 425-069-2 (with Symphony No 15 )
Mussorgsky, orchestrated Shostakovich: Songs and Dances of Death
Lloyd (bass): Philadelphia Orch: Janssons EMI CDC 5 55232-2 (with Shostakovich, Symphony No 10)
Suites for Film and Stage: The Gadfly, King Lear, Hamlet
KRS SO: Jordana, Koch 3-7274-2H1
Five Ballet Suites, Suite from Katerina Ismailova, Festive Overture (2 CDs)
SNO: Järvi, Chandos CHAN 7000/1
ABBREVIATIONS
BPO = Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
DG = Deutsche Grammophon
MCO = Moscow Chamber Orchestra
MoC SO = USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra
oas = otherwise available separately
ONRF = Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française
pf = piano
PO = Philharmonic Orchestra
RSPO = Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra
SNO = Scottish National Orchestra (also called RSNO)
SO = Symphony Orchestra
STB = Stockholm Transport Band
tpt = trumpet
vla = viola
vln = violin
vlc = cello
RECOMMENDED READING
The revolution that has taken place over recent years in our understanding of Shostakovich, following Testimony, has created a demand for answers that a handful of books have successfully addressed. Doubts over the veracity of Testimony itself where quick to emerge, despite later evidence that it seems true to at least the spirit of Shostakovich: it is, perhaps, the strip-cartoon portrait of his life. Ian MacDonald’s biography was an attempt to make sense of this debate by returning to the evidence of music. It is still commendable, despite charges that it inferred too much from limited analysis. Eric Roseberry’s study, inclined to underplay the bitterness of Shostakovich’s era as well as his private struggle, is a good illustrated introduction to the times. The best appraisal of Shostakovich the man that we are ever likely to have is Elizabeth Wilson’s magnificent A Life Remembered, simply because it gathers the accounts of scores of the people who knew him.
Roy Blokker with Robert Dearling The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich – The Symphonies (Associated University Presses, 1979)
Robert Conquest The Great Terror (Hutchinson, 1990)
Edited by David Fanning Shostakovich Studies (Cambridge University Press,1995)
Ian MacDonald The New Shostakovich (Oxford University Press, 1991)
Edited by Christopher Norris Shostakovich: The man and his Music (Lawrence and Wishart, 1982)
Robert Ottaway Shostakovich Symphonies (BBC Music Guides, 1978)
Eric Roseberry Shostakovich (Omnibus Press, 1981, 1986)
As related to Solomon Volkov Testimony: The memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich(Hamish Hamilton, 1979)
Elizabeth Wilson Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Faber and Faber, 1994)
For those who take their Shostakovich very seriously:
David Fanning The Breadth of the Symphonist (Royal Musical Association, London, 1988)
Richard M Longman Expression and Structure: Processes of Integration in the Large-Scale Instrumental Music of Dmitri Shostakovich (Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989)
Tatyana Kazakova Orchestral Style Development in the Symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich (MA dissertation, California State University, 1983)
Eric Roseberry Ideology, Style, Content, and Thematic Process in the Symphonies, Cello Concertos & String Quartets of Shostakovich (Garland Publishing, 1989)
BACK COVER COPY
‘The effect of Stalin on Shostakovich’ claimed a Russian musician in 1995, ‘was like a volcano on carbon. It made him into diamond.’ The pressure was high enough to do so, with the composer camped on his staircase until four each morning, bags packed, in case the secret police came for him.
This was what life meant for a Soviet artist, as Shostakovich came to the peak of his career. It meant suppressing entire symphonies in the wake of hostile newspaper reviews, or rewriting them in four days flat if their satirical subtext became too clear. As the hoardings put it, ‘Today is a concert by Enemy of the People Shostakovich.’
The man who could survive such terror wrote a music which lies beyond fear, beyond irony. It is littered with secret codes, but what endures is a testament whose humanity communicates today to a wider public than any composer since Mahler, and which has established Shostakovich as the greatest symphonist since Sibelius. Here, through his own works and his own suppressed words, is a portrait of a complex and frightened hero, who chronicled – with brutal honesty, with compassion and sometimes with irrepressible humour – our 20th century’s unique capacity to appal.
Stephen Jackson is already a contributor to the Classic fM Lifelines series with a biography of Schubert – one of many Schubert projects he has been involved in, including The Greatest Joy, The Greatest Sorrow, which won the Crystal Prize at the 1994 Prague Television Festival. He is also a notable journalist and author across the field of classical music, having contributed to most of Britain’s newspapers and magazines.
A little thing of my own…
I wish I felt happier with this book. When I’d written the SCHUBERT, a great voice echoed down from on high: “It was too upmarket. Write something the farmers of the Mid-West can understand”.
I remember, as a little boy, reading a novella for children by W M Thackeray. The story was great fun but at the back there was a list of the “long words” he’d used, so that the kiddies could stretch their minds and learn them for the future. In the same spirit, like the Soviet factory workers who flocked to hear Shostakovich’s wartime concerts, I’d had my own vision, experience and knowledge enlarged by something astounding and new.
Anyway, like Oscar Wilde’s pianist, I did my best.
Feature published in “The Sunday Telegraph” and “The European”
Riga is the colour of the Eastern bloc, like nougat kicked around in a gutter. Beyond the river lies a scabby horizon of cranes and dockyards and peeling high-rise, yet the centre is an old town of faded elegance: all stucco and trams, promenades of frozen trees and their drab imprint of impacted shadow. Paris between the wars, perhaps. A clamour of bells is incessant, as if the city is in some perpetual funeral; and religious services have kept their entreating, East European fervour. The faces here retain the transparency and innocent animation of Eastern faces, their candour and vulnerability; these people know nothing, yet, of guile.
This cannot be the place to launch the most extravagant marketing assault of 1995. Yet the voice of a nation – silenced, occupied and dispossessed for centuries – is about to speak to the world. Peteris Vasks, an unassuming man born 49 years ago in a Latvian village, seems set to capture the imagination of the west with a momentum which eluded even his friend, Henryk Gorecki. In the month of the Berlin premiere of his Cello Concerto, British critics have acclaimed the music of his first compact disc, MESSAGE, for its “passionate energy: emotional and spiritual, intense and ethereal; joyous and, above all, beautiful to the ear.”
That Vasks was discovered at all is a fluke. It is due to a young British conductor and film-maker, Kriss Rusmanis, who has since become something of the composer’s champion. “I went to Riga in 1986” Rusmanis recalls. “It was the most depressing part of the Soviet era: you were followed everywhere, and there were endless queues outside abandoned restaurants. But there was a thaw of sorts. They wanted to promote culture rather than risking nationalist dissent and so these invitations appeared on the desks of western publishers for a Festival of Contemporary Music – the first thing of its kind in forty years. I found more than 35 composers, but Vasks was staggering. I heard his Musica Dolorosa, which commemorated both the death of his sister Maria and what he saw as the political burial of his homeland. It was richly experimental, yet accessible too; with a taut structure and a driving force which verged on sexual intensity. It became my ambition to gain a hearing for his music in the west.”
Their first encounter wasn’t what Rusmanis expected. “I found this quiet, intense man who often seemed close to tears when his music was performed, it was so intimate for him.” Meet the composer yourself and he seems a bit of a dreamer; gestures expansively benevolent but the speech hesitant, with a habitual clearing of the throat as he reflects. This is an ascetic personality, consumed by what is clearly its vocation, and lifted by compassionate good humour – rather as his music is spared from obsession by its humanising if dark vein of lyricism. He lives in a small city flat with his wife (a film-maker) and five children.
No surprise that he sees his work in other-wordly terms, but it was a grim series of events that sharpened his musical acuity. Rusmanis remembers, “In January 1991 came the storming of the of the Latvian Internal Ministry by Soviet troops. It happened a week after tanks had entered Lithuania and captured the television centre. I rushed out to Riga as soon as the Black Berets passed the Latvian border. My father was Latvian and already I’d conducted the Riga orchestra; they were my friends. I had to be there. I went and I found a barricaded city.
“The streets were jammed with farm trucks and heavy blocks and the population was camped round fires – mostly outside the TV station, of course. I’d been with Juris Podnieks, the film director, for four nights: waiting, circling the city with our video cameras until dawn.
“We heard over the phone that the Ministry was being taken, so out we ran. The shooting was concentrated round the Kronvalda park, which has a river running through the middle. It was an incredible moment. If the gunfire didn’t stop we thought the tanks would move in. Bullets flew past us and I froze with fear in front of a bridge. Podnieks ran across but somebody pulled me back. Through what was becoming a snow storm I climbed a little mound and crouched behind a wall. The next minute, two of our cameramen died a couple of yards in front of me.”
As Vasks puts it, “If you have whatever you could wish for, what is there left to write about? People from affluent countries have everything but indifference flows from their music. Our perception of life is very different. Our roots are full of sadness and suffering; but in artistic terms our tragic history has given us a terrific impulse to be creative.”
Last night was the anniversary of the killing. A Vivaldi concerto accompanied the church commemoration of children the Soviets shot, and it was played with the intensity of weeping. There were flowers and candles where Andris Slapin’s lifeless body had four years ago emptied blood like a lake of ink under mercury streetlights. But less than a hundred people gathered round the flag in Central Square; and for today’s children, watching with their elegant almond eyes the braziers flickering against an icebound landscape, it was just another bonfire.
Vasks spreads his hands dismissively. “What can I say? Old news. The media have been interviewing everybody: ‘What were you doing in 1991?’ Well, I was out on the streets, every day; and in those moments a nation was made, and I came of age as a composer. It was foreign news crews that shifted the balance of power. We’d no idea what outrage the pictures would cause, when they were shown throughout the world. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised, though. There was something of universal significance going on. After 900 years’ subjugation we found out who we were and you asked yourself, what does it mean to be a nation? What does it mean to be a composer? I look back and I know it was our new beginning. Now we have to live with the consequences. The situation has changed; and what can you expect but disillusionment?
“I’ve never lost my fear of the composer’s lonely life, and that was the week I learnt I belonged to a greater family. Amongst the bloodshed, ideals became real. As Latvians say, ‘Brute force against the force of spirit.’ I made my contribution then, and I have to make it now: finding a compromise between action and interpretation, between doing and offering a some creative inspiration to others.”
His tone-poem Vestijums (from which the CD takes its title) explores a timeless conflict. It is, like much of Vasks, a coldly voluptuous shimmer of sound, never quickening beyond the pace of a human heart at rest: the music of a survivor, clinging to remembered sense in the face of chance, and the fortuitous erosion of meaning out of which human dissolution and private tragedy arise. Rusmanis explains: “Peteris talks about forces of good and evil battling but his feeling is that good ultimately triumphs. He believes not in God, perhaps, but in a benign spiritual force to dominate our lives.” Vasks says, “Shostakovich’s music depicted Stalinism so effectively that it’s done. You can’t say more. Now the challenge is to set an example: to show how good can surmount the struggle. I want to write ….not wallpaper music, not pieces to prettify or gloss over things; but something more in the nature of catharsis, with a sense of ecstasy at the natural environment.”
There are centuries of music in Latvia, fostered by the German aristocracy who ruled the country since the 13th Century. Bruno Walter spent his youth at the Riga Opera House, and Wagner composed Rienzi there. Native composers were trained by Rimsky-Korsakov in St Petersburg, and Stravinsky remembered his own Latvian teacher, Vitols, with warmth and admiration. Yet the indigenous tradition is one of folk music: over a million songs, and summer festivals with choirs of 25,000 voices. Vasks’ own output once comprised choral music, but not any more. “I don’t use words because they fix meaning too precisely. There is a richness in music which is poised in a certain ambivalence, taking flight on its own terms. And music alone captures the beauty of the land, even for a brief moment.
“My Cantabile for string orchestra uses simply the white notes of the piano to create a song of praise, an idealization of the world’s inner harmony. More than anything, my inspiration is in Latvian rivers and birdsong and our miles of forest. But no, this isn’t nature as innocence; things aren’t as simple as that. We need to think not of Arcadia, but to envisage a horizon and a presence of boundless size. My motivation is to go and see how far the horizon stretches. Nature isn’t something created for us. It is about itself, just as music is. What interests me, I suppose, is what I can only call the unfinished journey of a singing voice; the infinite detail and subtlety music opens up, yet the sense that nothing you do can ever be right or complete.”
He calls himself a sad optimist and his upbringing, Rusmanis admits, was complex. Perhaps he had an Arcadian childhood in Aizpute, deep in the sticks? Vasks laughs. “Well, my older brother wanted to drown me. Now he’s a priest. Yes, we were content and self-contained – each family with its cow and its allotment. I was quite a little shepherd, not that I ever liked that much.” Vasks is more circumspect when it comes to remembering the daily rigours and hardships. “My father was so good at his job, the Soviets wouldn’t let him do it. He was a priest too, forbidden to practise; and the authorities harassed us all. They denied my brother the right to become a lawyer, and when I left music High School I was refused permission to study in the west.”
His most intense relationship seems always to have been with his sister, a magical confidante in daydreams since their early childhood. She accompanied his violin from the piano. Peteris played several instruments. “Improvising at the keyboard was my secret passion, but I didn’t dare tell anyone. My first song – aged 9 – was based on children’s tales. My earliest setting of Rainis, our major poet, came at 13. That time I was dutifully patriotic. At 18 I fell for Lohengrin and wrote half an opera.
“Under communism we lived simple lives: the carrots and the sticks were so clearly laid out for us. You watch events at Chechyn and you know the Russian bear has changed only in name, but now there is a corrosive cynicism at work with the invasion of consumer culture. We’re running headlong into a Latvia where America has much to answer for; and it’s as though we’re being crushed between two rocks. The west’s solutions are not ours. We have to find our own way here. You think about the loss of ideals, about the future for our arts, and you can only hope.”
“We’re no good at taking risks” reminisced one of the city’s administrators over his honeyed beer – adding cryptically, “unlike German Jews. We prefer a fair day’s pay for our work. Most of the investment here is from expatriate Russians, who see our economy as more secure.”
And sure enough, there they are on street corners, fresh from the black market: buying retail businesses out of a suitcase full of cash. “Latvians aren’t aggressive” affirmed the British Telecom engineer, sent to resurrect a 30 year-old Soviet telephone system. “When the Russians left they took the infrastructure with them. The people here must rebuild its economy from scratch.”
Briefly things are flourishing, like one of those flowers that blossom before extinction. Last year the banks offered investors a return of 70%; they can’t afford that now. Everybody lives on tick, on borrowed time, taking second and third jobs to pay the rent and heating that in the old Socialist Republic came almost free. It is a cash-in-hand society, sailing on its downward spiral into an abyss of Soviet dimensions. If you pay a customs man £13 per week, you can’t blame him for a certain susceptibility to bribes. The Lat, an artificially inflated currency, makes things impossible to sell; and apart from chipboard mashed up from those interminable trees, Latvia has nothing worth buying.
The climate is one in which a composer must succeed to survive, and in Germany Vasks’ Cello Concerto was booed. Rusmanis remembers, “Its openness was resented by an avant-garde clique in the audience, and the orchestra hadn’t rehearsed properly. Peteris stood on stage with the David Geringas, the soloist, and took four bows. After two bows the orchestra deserted them but Geringas, determined to play more Vasks, shoved his way through. He chose a solo piece from Gramata, an astonishingly strong work which you whistle as well as bow. It brought the house down, and what might have been a disaster became an emotional experience for everyone there.” But the reception for two-and-a-half years’ effort privately bruised a man of such moral introspection. Vasks declares, “The vital thing is for an artist to be the voice of opposition to whatever regime is in power, whether it’s liberal or totalitarian. Your inner voice is vital; the capacity to challenge, to keep conscience alive. Even now, when national pride is rife and they wave flags in all directions.”
Stravinsky used to say that good music had no need of labels. Imagination, in a musician, is where inevitability and surprise come together; a level of choice where logical rightness and individuality coincide. “A masterpiece” wrote Nicholas Harnoncourt, “is like a mirror that is held up in front of us and shows us our own reflection. We walk over it like ants, able to see only a small area that we find important. If only we could see the whole.” There is an all-subsuming richness to a great composer’s vision, which transcends a need to preach. It makes music into art; for propaganda remains indoctrination and something threadbare, even when it acknowledges the possibility of despair. To engage sympathy, for an artist, cannot be enough. And so to perhaps a brutal question: whether the new orchestral wave from the Iron Curtain is more than a gloss of sophisticated sentimentality – coffee-table music with angst, or the unremitting sound-track to a post-Socialist Realist film that nobody will ever want to make?
Rusmanis defends Vasks’ view that music without feeling is inert. “Many Soviet artists went through their avant-garde period and in one of his early works Peteris has the soloist dismantle his clarinet until he plays with the mouthpiece alone. Now is the time to go back to his musical roots, finding a voice which is simple and direct. It’s easy to write music which is so inaccessible that no-one knows whether they’ve understood it or not. It’s an old trick. To bare yourself, in the hope you might speak to people, is a composer’s greatest challenge; and when you have managed it, you have found your own identity.”
Vasks’ antecedents are clear, amongst them Kancheli, Lutoslawski, Pärt, Mahler, Messiaen, Penderecki. The problem now is of whether his private idiom might advance or ossify. Rusmanis continues, “He has a great chance of growing in stature – in a significant direction – unlike the contemporary composers who barely communicate. For too long we were entrenched in a musical world that imparted, on an emotional plane, next to nothing: a place of dessicated factions which connoisseurs could sign up for. At last archaic barriers are breaking down, and Vasks can be heard.”
The mid-1980’s marked only the beginning of the thaw amongst a European establishment inimical to melodic music, and they were hard graft for Vasks. In 1989 he won a commission from the New York Philharmonic for a cor anglais concerto, when its principal Thomas Stacy heard Musica Dolorosa. The result was acknowledged as a significant addition to the repertoire. Then the Baltic uprisings made Latvian culture a curiosity, and Rusmanis was approached by Radio 3 for a series. Three years since have been spent by Conifer Records, negotiating corruption and demands for backhanders, to get a recording made on Vasks’ home territory. Now western cinema wants the Musica for soundtracks.
What would be Rusmanis’s assessment? “Structural strength is vital to Vasks and he creates an arc-form which is thoroughly satisfying. He has no need for multiple movements: he prefers one continuous development in different sections, which works very well. He has a great sense of form, in fact. He’s no wish to write opera because, in Riga, it won’t be performed. His string quartets are written for local musicians (the soloists he admires) and his pieces are short because it’s the time-span in which his sound-world works best.”
Stephen Johnson, a British critic, compared the Cor Anglais Concerto to an English rural tradition of Vaughan-Williams. The analogy says little for a sense of chaos which seems as implacable as Shostakovich’s. Vasks’ strings offer a threnodic drone, and as in Sibelius, his sonorities are rooted in almost subterranean reverberation and percussive effect. The origins of his melancholy, too, lie as much in the glacial orchestration of Sibelius, or the finesse of Ravel, as in any succession to Bartók and East European tradition. His creative candour never succumbs to Mahler’s brittle or frenetic posturing, no matter how firmly the texture of sound places his music in the aftermath of late Romantic opulence and creative reflexivity.
The difference, I think, is one of outlook: the composers of the early Twentieth Century emphasizing ambivalence and nostalgia in the wake of what their parents had thought certain, Vasks as the inheritor to a tradition for which the recent past is a trauma as much to be cauterised as refashioned according to new, expedient tenets of humanity and reason. Inevitably his idiom lacks roots, the references and variegation which a long cultural history makes possible. As such, it does not allow the levels of meaning that true self-awareness permits; for it is the capacity to see oneself from the outside that creates irony, or any of the effects of what Henry James called “a mind in dialogue with itself.” But the potential is there for more than pastiche. All he needs is time, and access to viewpoints and artforms beyond his homeland which Vasks knows he has been denied.
Latvians aren’t inclined to speculation. “I don’t think about the future. It’s tough enough for me to make each composition as good as I can. The epitaph I want is to be remembered as a musician who did his best. I’d like to die able to say, ‘Remember that piece? I wrote it. All you have to do is listen.’
What will he do when Conifer have plugged him as the new Gorecki: famous from New York to Japan, his bank account siphoning up royalties? He is intrigued that Karajan found it necessary to fly a private jet. You sense he doesn’t give a damn, and then he quotes Kant. “‘The starry heaven above me, the moral law within me’. Yes, I’ve heard of the Bahamas; they don’t appeal, and neither does the prospect of a fast car. I don’t have a driver’s licence, you see. I’d like somewhere bigger to live, but there are many more deserving charities. I expect I’ll give the money away.”
Rusmanis confirms it. “All Peteris wants is to put Latvians on the map. He is aware that there are only two million of them, and it’s a miracle that their country has managed to hold on for so long.” Yet his music has a wider resonance. It offers the language not of compromise, but the authentic conscience of the century we live in. As Vasks writes, “To my mind, every honest composer searches for a way out of the crises of his time – towards affirmation, towards faith. He shows how humanity can overcome the passion for self-annihilation that flares up from time to time. And if I can find this way out, this reason for hope, the outline of a perspective: then I offer it as my model.”
Beyond the window, a corrugated bus the colour of linoleum propels the faithful from the Southern Fried Chicken to MacDonalds, all at London prices. The shops are filling with goods and a bubble of euphoria. Around the city outskirts beggars complete their daily crawl but in the centre (granted enough capital) you can still buy a house on your interest from the bank. At a middling hotel I buy Vasks and his daughter a meal costing as much as a Riga Philharmonic violinist earns in a month.
Across the tables, a group of luxuriant call-girls is manoeuvring itself into place for the night-shift. Maybe, like property speculation, it seems more prudent than gathering rosebuds.
The Virtuoso Johann Strauss: Paraphrases and Arrangements of Favourite Strauss Melodies by Rosenthal, Tausky, Godowsky and Schulz-Evler
LABE (piano)
(Dorian Discovery DIS 80102)
TT: 73.31 (DDD)
Full price
* * (*)
Godowsky was the one who used to play two Chopin études simultaneously, just to make them sound harder. A difficult feat; and one would have hoped it was impossible. The transcriptions here share the same tigerish bravura, and if you recall the old cartoon of Liszt, in a monsoon of fingers stripping the keys off a piano, you might be able to appreciate the wars of calculated attrition that virtuosi used to embark on with their fists.
This is what the pianism of a lost age was all about. When Moriz Rosenthal quipped that Schnabel failed his Austrian Army medical because he had no fingers, he referred not to the fumblings of later years but to the young man’s seamless, glistening fluidity of passagework. With Rosenthal too, the notes used to run together like butter.
The loss is ours. Notions of vulgarity and superfluity are the labels we bring to what has fallen flat: and the trick of the great showmen was to aerate their confections with the brio and wit that gives all art its vitality. If there is a soberness about life today that resists such music, look no further than Shura Cherkassky (last representative of a generation) to realise the perceptiveness and animating strength of the musicianship that has gone.
Labé begins with a Rosenthal transcription, and immediately it settles his credentials with the right juxtaposition of gushing expansiveness, mock-bashfulness (we must not forget the significance of cultural melodrama and obliquity in the rutting season of fin-de-siecle Viennese), sparky insinuations and tumbling octaves. The plan is always the same – an obtuse introduction, and contrasting sections which are then whipped into a delirium of spun sugar – and I could only wonder at the technique with which Labé has mastered both their torrential outbursts and pearly web of sound.
A strong personality needs to hold this stage; and one or twice I found myself wondering whether Mr Labé had quite the presence I needed. High spirits, affirmation and self-surmounting parody coalesce and separate so rapidly that it takes guile and strategy to impose a fresh identity on them. The other side of the coin is Labé’s alacrity in grasping the different demands of the music. This matters in teasing out the colours of what is, after all, a pastiche of a pastiche: for every piece is based on operatic transcriptions using the techniques developed in Annees de Pélèrinage. In Tausig’s Wahlstimmen Labé’s ticklish, almost feathery lightness of touch reveals the post-Lisztian chromaticism, the sophisticated modulation and structural cogency of the genre. You may reject it as much as the perfumed delinquencies Ludwig of Bavaria tried on Wagner (and what the Mad King did for castles in the air these pieces do for sound) but only Godowsky dragged them into the mud. In his Metamorphosis of Wine, Women and Song the argument gets waylaid in the gush of notes, and briefly I noted a lack of incision and sparkle: Labé’s lack of irreverence, of flair as well as overt, winning charm. Elsewhere there’s resplendent crispness and a sort of fey hedonism that come close to ideal.
No matter that these pieces work as the derivations of better composers than their creators ever were, so that with the least of them what seems left is the paper-thin smirk of Liszt at his most trite, or clapped-out formulae at their most threadbare. No matter if by the end of this disc you think you’ve taken enough of it all to sink the October Revolution. Try Schulz-Evler’s Arabesques on the Blue Danube for the most blistering pianism I’ve heard this year, conjured from an entranced shimmer of sound. If I say I was reminded of canon-balls made of sorbet, I mean it as the highest compliment. The recording, too, is top-flight.
MESSIAEN
Piano Music: Visions de l’Amen (1943), Petites Esquisses d’oiseaux (1985); Piece pour le Tombeau de Paul Dukas, Fantaisie Burlesque, Rondeau (1943)
DDD
79′ 04″
Unicorn Kanchana DKP (CD) 9144
PETER HILL (piano) with (for Visions de l’Amen) BENJAMIN FRITH (piano)
Full (three star * * *) recommendation
There are tough penalties for a musical pioneer. The effort to forge a new creative language has always involved what you can only call self-interrogation – punctuated by exhaustion, the limbo where lack of creative ideas has to be trans-substantiated by any sort of faith one can lay hands on: the trudge through commissions for test-pieces, and a dead mass of academic duty. Messiaen saw it all, and it must have been gruelling for someone who owed so much to chimerical inspiration.
This present disc is the last in a survey which has encompassed all the scars and experiments of his mountainous career. It gives you pieces from the beginning and the end, and makes clear a struggle to sail clear of pastiche which can only be described as heroic. Fascinating too, as Messiaen pares his techniques to the bone, to watch the germs of ideas develop into major influences on the 20th century.
The 1936 Piece pour le Tombeau de Paul Dukas is typical of his early style. The Debussy of Voiles and General Lavine is clear, shading into Ravel, but already there’s the profusion of massive splintered light, the spade-like chords, which could only be Messiaen. The Fantaisie of 1932 presents a dolly’s cake-walk of a burlesque, framing an interlude which tries to float on air like a diaphanous veil, yet which is stifled in its own protracted length. Soviet Socialist Realism itself never showed more elephantine self-regard than this: and if Les Six are in there too, it’s their endless capacity for tastelessness. Over and over you go, like an engine that refuses so start, chewing away at its own dry gears. The gem here is a busy Rondeau, bubbling up with easy insouciance, and Hill’s refusal to overplay his hand reduces the scale ideally for pieces whose strength is an intimacy stripped clean of romantic posturing.
The Petites esquisses come from end of Messiaen’s life, with the extraneous labels of early works long gone. Apparitions of the spirit of birdsong, these; and sharing its sense of liquidity. Not that you’ll find any old birds. He presents metaphors for creation, which shimmer in their glistening and fickle invention, in a musical idiom where recitative and improvisation have been integrated into something entirely personal which is so polished, yet pliable for creative developments. Seldom has spontaneity sounded so cohesive or so wise. It is played by Hill with gossamer agility, and is just as quirky and obsessive as birds are. I began to glimpse what kept Messiaen going: his status as naive visionary. It’s a tradition matched oddly by the English mysticism of John Clare and Samuel Palmer, and it shares with them a horizon of boundless air. Yet the music celebrates a classical economy of means. The skylark, aptly, is a clamorous toccata.
Visions de l’Amen has a crucial place between the first and the later pieces. Depicting the formation of the universe, it is a primeval egg itself, consuming and transcending influences: and in its way, a prodigious feat of motifs and rhythm tautly and resolutely meshed. I think it was Breton (Messiaen’s contemporary) who said that beauty had to be convulsive; and if the tolling momentum of this music reminds you of the motion of continents, so too the fusion of gamelans and western liturgy culminate in a final and ringing euphoria which seems to boil and yet remains lustrously serene. Mr Hill’s performance matches grace and finesse with playing of tensile agility: inevitably – almost mesmerically – right.
For anyone who values Twentieth Century music (and for those who don’t) this is a major issue. It is as well recorded as you could ever hope to hear.
BEETHOVEN
Piano Sonata No 30 in E major, Op 109. No 31 in A flat, Op 110. No 32 in C minor, Op 111
ASHKENAZY (piano)
(Decca 436 076-2)
TT: 65:08 (DDD)
Full price
* * *
Ashkenazy has had several versions of the Beethoven sonatas, and they’ve been amongst the best recordings he has made. Like anyone else, he sees Beethoven through the filter of later composers: in lighter movements, with the impressionism and intimacy of Chopin; elsewhere, with Schumann’s muscular dramatic force. Nothing wrong in either of them.
First movements fare especially well. It has been said that Opus 109 is one of the profoundest things in music, that you should play it as though you’ve known and possessed it for a lifetime. And so Ashkenazy does. Throughout this sonata, he finds the ideal middle ground between Gilels’ compelling meditation and Pollini’s fidelity to the printed page. For Pollini, structural strength comes at the expense of self-expression; but with Ashkenazy it isn’t so. His manner is unaffected, creating recitatives where phrases answer each other with a twist of nuance that leave a listener’s understanding transformed.
If there are traces too of the complications and laborious force that Ashkenazy is prone to, he fails only by high historical standards. I have to say that hearing Schnabel here is to enter another world: a thread of miraculous imagination unfolding at the pulse of a human heart. By comparision, all modern pianists give us a certain amount of amiable gristle.
Ashkenazy’s rare miscalculations have to do with the role that movements or variations play. The Prestissimo of Opus 109 becomes a glutinous inter-ruption, every effect strained to the limit. Compare it to Schnabel’s genuine foil: those nebulous possibilities, made striking and searching by being understated. Schnabel has a visionary quality; tension played off against introspection, each sounding inevitable, his playing uniquely acute. In the Scherzo of Opus 110, Pollini revels in the spiky humour of an superior parody which Ashkenazy drags down.
More often, amongst recent pianists, Ashkenazy has the field to himself – and for one reason. So much of this writing seems to be transfigured candour; a confessional that he catches in mid-flight, through which inessentials are purified and stripped clean. In the last movement of Opus 110, Gilels and Pollini stand for different ways of missing the point. Much though I admire Pollini’s contrast of fugal and development sections, the playing is too fluent, the speed almost perfunctory: and the struggle which seems crucial to Beethoven’s notion of transcendence has been dissipated. Gilels, aiming for poetic withdrawal, slows the tempo to a level of prissiness.
It’s Ashkenazy who affirms here an incandescence and monumental scale. For Opus 111 too he gauges ideally the weight of the music, in an account which is at once spacious, impulsive, terse and opulently massive. Even the closing bars of the first movement seem to smoulder penumbrally, without any of the customary hysterics.
But this is also the work in which (amongst modern readings) Ashkenazy is most effectively challenged and perhaps outshone. Pollini recorded it later than the other sonatas: and both his recording and inspiration are in a new league. The Maestoso gets the magnificent athleticism of irresistible force, batting clear once-immovable objects in all directions. Rhetoric and momentum are used together in an argument of lean concision where everything fits, everything works: pedalling, shading, and a razor-sharp way with sotto voces.
In the Arietta, predictably, Schnabel is like nobody else: timelessly natural, formidably simple in its concentration, but seeming to float with something of the luminous intensity of dreams. Yet Pollini recreates much of this stature, its unforced eloquence and microscopic discernment of gradations: reducing it finally to a shimmering whisper, the haunted intensity of the last trill eloquent in its control of motion within stasis. The playing is masterly in its control of spans: spanned time, and an evolving musical dialectic.
The important thing, Pollini has said, is to understand the necessity of the notes; and in Opus 111 he plays as well as he has ever done. But just where you think Ashkenazy is beginning to meander, his mercurial insight and control of colour create a poignant acknowledgment of reminiscence and growing revelation. Elsewhere in these works, he can be uniquely satisfying.
PORTRAITS OF FREEDOM
COPLAND: Fanfare for the Common Man, Lincoln Portrait; Canticle of Freedom; An Outdoor Overture. HARRIS: American Creed, When Johnny Comes Marching Home.
JONES (speaker), SEATTLE SO/SCHWARZ
(Delos DE 3140)
TT: 61:30 (DDD)
Full price
* * *
Propaganda is the half-silvered mirror through which each of us deludes himself that he touches reality. Not the dead generations, which to Marx weighed like a nightmare on the imagination of the living; but the mental furniture, the symbols of solidarity and worth, by which people in the developed world reassure ourselves that we own truth itself.
Now, this is a disc about the iconography of a nation’s dreams. And it has never been a characteristic of dreams to admit self-scrutiny, let alone realism, let alone wit. Dreams are a phosphorescent wash of platitudes. Yet dreams remembered reveal undercurrents of obsession like nothing else, and that too is very much what the disc is about.
Schwarz’s performance of the Fanfare for the Common Man makes clear his talent for wiping clean a legacy of candyfloss. It is graceful, considered and inevitable. The composer’s own eager version (Sony) kept brashness in its place. For Schwarz a mist of long farewells has begun to settle: but his contemplation brings greater range, and it is splendidly played.
Much of the music is about the simulated orgasms of the impotent, for Copland’s petrified philanthropy, with its overlit and limited orchestration, is endlessly the same. The Outdoor Overture brings more flying trumpet arpeggios. If you think Rimsky had the capacity to tread water without saying anything, here’s a scum as thin as oil borne down on ozone and Mental Hygiene, convulsively overwrought or gelatinously smooth. Take away the zeal with which it crashes at you and it sags to a torpor – and this is what Schwarz, crushed already under a weight of mythology, gives us. It’s a moot point, for he picks up bounding pace later, and the central interlude glides more elegantly than the composer’s own. But no. It took Copland’s audacity to bring a potboiler across. You can’t rarify the leftovers. You go for the jugular or nothing.
The Lincoln Portrait (and this is Copland at his finest) still relies on the Gettysburg Address to haul its parts together. Formal rigour, you recall, has never featured amongst freedom’s priorities. I like the advocacy with which Schwarz shapes fulminating chords towards an eruption of sorts, and a keenness that makes Copland’s own opening seem stiff. Like many composers playing their own music, he took too much for granted. Perhaps structural lines emerged more cleanly then, and Henry Fonda’s deadpan delivery kept the narrative’s effusive flush (“He was six feet four inches tall!”) firmly throttled in the corner.
For this is a magniloquent balloon of words. James Earl Jones is a good artist, but he has to pound every line into such significance that dignity and heroism fall flat in their bid to outpace each other. Be warned: if these performances establish a trend, the next one will come in a flurry of lilac bubbles and echo-effects.
*
Aspirations across the world are as quirky and provincial as dialects; and nothing is easier to drag down than sincerity – even if there is more authentic America in five minutes of Bernard Herrmann than in an hour of this Sunday School regalia. Yet Copland too is music for an unmade film epic the world has forgotten: couched in an idiom on which composers for the movies (now fashioning their bonsai reincarnations of L’Apres Midi) have turned their backs. All one can say is that the playing on the Delos issue is as good as you could ever wish to hear.
A big sense of open air is what I’ll remember: more so than the theme-park dissonances of Canticle of Freedom, like Janacek with all the blood leached out of him. The campfire spirit has always been dismal for expressing angst or private emotion: any inner struggle that gives the arts their chance to evolve. Instead it creates mercilessly, horribly public music, like a stuck smile.
One piece alone breaks the mould. Roy Harris’s When Johnny Comes Marching Home, a series of reckless and brilliant transformations, offers something very clever, sophisticated: fully the equal of Shostakovich’s public hack-work. And this glimpse of what might lie beyond brings an interesting comparison.
Soviet artists, on their own assembly-line for interminable festivities, had the drilling to keep their craftsmanship, their similacrum of emotion, in working order. Portraits of Freedom brings us the language of the perpetual imperative mood, like an advertiser riding a nervous breakdown. Perhaps it is a characteristic of marketing cultures that they degrade human lyricism into a scream. Beneath them there is no substance other than a vacant cloud, packaged in strategic complicity.
But think of Alexander Nevsky. Propaganda may not be art, yet it comes closest when it acknowledges at least the possibility of despair. This, more than anything, is the reason for the greatness of Soviet music; and for the collapse of the culture that gave it birth. True freedom must be the freedom to make mistakes.
SCHUBERT
The Hyperion Schubert Edition, Volume 19: Schubert in full flower
SONGS: Nachtviolen, Gott im Frülinge, Im Haine, Der Blumen Schmerz, Die Blumensprache, Die Rose, Vergissmeinnicht, Der Liebliche Stern, Am See, Die Sterne, Die Sternennächte, Nach einem Gewitter, Beim Winde, Auf dem Wasser zu singen, Abendlied, Auf dem See, Suleika I, Suleika II.
DDD
69′ 34″
Hyperion CDJ33019
FELICITY LOTT (soprano), accompanied by GRAHAM JOHNSON (piano)
Full (three star * * *) recommendation
Graham Johnson’s thematic survey of Schubert’s songs has itself become a minor masterpiece, intelligent and uniquely revealing. To approach the lieder through the images and emotions they portray isn’t new, of course: think of Fischer-Dieskau, or Ely Ameling. Yet the encyclopaedic zeal of Hyperion’s project sets it apart as a landmark in recording.
There’s a reason too why it is indispensable to a grasp of something as basic as Schubert’s thinking. Schubert’s motivation is surely never to do with musical argument. It is about human experience; but the experience of man as an extension of nature – nature as gateway to a world of the spirit which for Romantics was a higher reality, yet nature as something implacable in its capacity for cruel dissolution. Just as the composer was enlightened and ultimately destroyed by his friends (and there’s so much of their poetry here) so it was to predestination that Schubert owed everything, including his knowledge of his own appalling fate. The diversity of creation might serve as a cipher for human hope, its power for the fact that each of us is ultimately and horribly alone; but for Schubert it had more immediate significance. It was the force with which his daily inspiration and state of health ebbed and flowed. Take a letter from 1826:
I am not working at all – the weather here is truly appalling. The Almighty seems to have forsaken us altogether, for the sun refuses to shine. It is May, and we cannot sit in any garden yet. Appalling! Ghastly! And the most cruel thing on earth for me.
So much is understandable for a syphilitic, whose body was corroding as his inner vision became more acute, and whose decay fluctuated with the seasons much as an AIDS victim suffers today.
Now, seen in this light, symbols of fidelity and modesty (Dame’s violets, the flower of Aphrodite) are also those of “clinging through thick and thin”, as Johnson himself puts it. An image of poisoned love, as well; but that was after the composing of Nachtviolen in 1822. Yet on any evidence, Nachtviolen is no longer a song about a flower. It addresses a significant element in our moral condition. It is about a land of childlike rapture, of purity and the lacerating vulnerability of innocence. And this, distilled into music, lies at the heart of its sense of balm within haunted and suspended time.
The rococo elegance of Gott im Frülinge is more than a pantheist’s nostagia for an age in which emotion was apprehended more simply and clearly than it is for us. It finds Schubert’s most optimistic expression of a profound melancholy for what had been lost, and could never be regained. “Art concealing art” says Johnson; and so – miraculously, inimitably – it is. No wonder the Viennese used to say that “this time the popular composer has gone too far.” The universe of his thinking – the universality of his themes – was as far beyond their perception as the stars through which Schulze, in his poem Der liebliche Stern, explores a decline into self-delusion and madness. Schubert’s significance is in the fact that his music is never contained in its form; its modernity is in its fervour and elusiveness. No wonder the persona of the Harper’s Songs was that of the outsider, cast out and wandering under the moon. That again is another story; but the withered leaves and pathetic fallacy of the songs here, their sense of violation (“flowers proclaim our suffering”), are more than a portent.
It is the pristine insight of an outsider that lifts his music into a timelessness which the faded and sentimental iconography of its literary inspiration could never attain. Listen to Der liebliche Stern, a little masterpiece of ambiguity here almost perfectly sung, and you realise that Schubert has no need to follow every nuance of these words. This is because each song presents a world-view which is pervasive and compelling. He gives us a portrait, not of a mood, but of what it is like to be such a person. The richness of his suggestion – the resonance between Schubert’s experience and our own – is what lifts it into supreme artistic experience. But what makes it magical is its sense of contradictions assimilated and made fertile. The words of Auf dem Wasser zu singen might almost be his epitaph: “May time disappear on shimmering wings: I vanish myself from changing time.” The half-light of ambivalence, the sense of stasis within motion, of languor within palpitating ardour: all of this, poised between classical discipline and romantic introspection, adds to Schubert’s unique lucidity and stature.
It’s during the same song that you remember how tough competition for the repertoire has become. Felicity Lott brings crisp didacticism and dramatic range. As previously in her partnership with Johnson, there is an attempt to create an unfolding narrative within each lied. Illuminating stuff, at its best; yet elsewhere it throws out the baby with the bathwater. Here, the piano part has to be coloured and over-romanticised in an effort to counterbalance a sense of urgency and unrelieved momentum. With Elizabeth Schwarzkopf there was more of Schubert’s infinite subtlety, his entranced and seamless concentration. Because Schwarzkopf pointed the notes selectively, she brought across its sense of dance-like motion and, in a luminous simplicity of conception, the ephemerality of hope. There was a level of discrimination at work which makes today’s singers hint at sentimentality, overcoloured and overblown. In Nachtviolen, the sluggish pace on Hyperion reduces Einstein’s “masterpiece of mysterious intimacy” to something for which no phrase is left unturned. Very much a performance in its prime, but Schubert’s evanescence seems to demand that discovery is more than something left in the rehearsal-room.
With Ms Lott, Die Blumensprache is a model of creamy ardour. For Ely Ameling it was about knowing naivety, but Ms Lott is a knowing performer in a riper sense. She is second to none in her power and voluptuous intelligence – and like Mr Johnson, she’s a splendidly alert and perceptive artist.
BRAHMS
3 Intermezzi, Op 117, 6 Klavierstücke, Op 118; 4 Klavierstücke, Op 119
AFANASSIEV (piano)
(Denon CO-75090)
TT: 69.20 (DDD)
Full price
(*)
These last piano works were written for Clara Schumann, whose dwindling strength brought the need for intimate music rather than strenuous force. “It’s wonderful” wrote Clara, “how he combines passion and tenderness in the smallest of spaces.” If many of these pieces are saturated with a sense of decayed and forfeited mortality, their world leads as easily to autumnal fulfilment and glancing good humour. Often the simplest idea – an inversion or widened tonal interval – forms an entry-point to a lifetime’s experience, distilled into moments. Yet it can all stay intractable: dour and hesitant, desultory, saturnine: its meaning so easily lost in unleavened tedium or inflated heroics. Brahms isn’t about either.
The most interesting comparison here is between Emmanuel Ax and Stephen Kovacevich. In Opus 117, much though I admire Ax’s orchestral scope, I am troubled by his tendency to overplay a hand – melodrama which distorts Brahms’s logic and exhausts resources, leaving not enough left to say. It’s tough competition that prevents my recommending him; but I was struck by Kovacevich’s capacity to say more within a sparser tonal palette: a sense of both evanescence and cohesion, of shifting light. In No 2 Ax reveals his deft sense of fleeting effects, but No 3 is full of fortuitous little stabs and distortions. I was reminded of Brahms’s relation to Schumann: and both composers bring to their closing bars a sense of summation or fading memory. With Ax, you need a little more of that.
Opus 118 is different. Ax is the performance to go for if you like your Brahms spacious and granitic. There’s a magisterial strength which is at the same time alive to the music’s adventure and imperative force: a new agility and aptness to the thinking, keenly sensitive to moving currents. Number 2 brings passion tempered by sharp nostalgia, even if for me Kovacevich still knaws more leanly at what the music is about. In Number 4 Ax creates an interplay of suggestions and recollections which builds its way towards what he sees as a towering climax, but which from Kovacevich’s standpoint might subside into a grandiloquent clutter. Yet Ax feels his way into these pieces more palpably than anyone else. It is a performance for those who like to hear a musician thinking.
There is a lack of self-indulgence to both pianists that makes you feel you are eavesdropping on a private confessional. Ax’s range is bigger: diffident or lucid insinuations, all with this silky tone; and in Number 5, a sense of balm and unfolding wonder which makes Kovacevich sound abrupt. But there is a proportioned passion about Kovacevich which makes him more direct on every level. He brings both animation and longing to even the most wraith-like apparitions, and better than anyone else he lays bare the inevitability of it all.
Where does Afanassiev fit? Absolutely nowhere. This is playing that couldn’t give you a scale of C major without reading The Flying Dutchman into it. Opus 117 brings mountainous labour to the task of missing every point: an obstacle course of battles to be won for no other reason than portentous novelty. Opus 119 is a campaign at half-speed to find spurious voices and tolling bells in place of Brahms’s own, wonderfully subtle sonority.
When every gesture is a gasping mannerism, the most basic elements of music are eroded to nothing. This is a sermon on pieces which speak for themselves.
If you want all these works on one disc, Radu Lupu gives a performance in which any trite option is turned aside and almost every page says something new. The sound may be a little dated, and Lupu now plays these pieces with an even sharper fidelity. But after Afanassiev, the musicianship is in a different league.
PAGANINI
Violin Concerto No 1, Op 6; SARASATE: Carmen Fantasy, Op 25
PERLMAN (violin), RPO/FOSTER
(EMI Classics CDC 7 47101 2)
TT: 45:51 (ADD)
Medium price
* * *
One day, somebody will have to write about the way rhetoric shapes (or more often, stifles at birth) musical creativity. After all, how would you describe Beethoven in the Hammerklavier? A sort of tortoise gawping at heaven, I suppose. Then there’s this piece by Paganini. It’s a twenty-one gun salute done in rubber-bands: a confection of endless manic pirouettes and curlicues and stage-whispers through a megaphone, where passages of gasping bathos are apt to explode into bubbles. The second movement, like the preamble for a cadenza that never comes, has the significance of a starling squawking in an empty bucket. Or so I’d thought.
But Perlman is master of this repertoire. This is the music he lifts into something superb. Conjuring tricks, in music as anything else, have to do with special sensibilities. You lay out so clearly what people reasonably expect, and turn it upside down with a flick of the wrist. There’s a capricious quality which makes sudden sense as brighter possibilities reveal themselves: all part of the same game-plan, carried out with sly ease, the same neatness of step.
And so the famous performance has resurfaced continually since its issue in 1972. Rightly so, for everything about it preens itself. Beecham said you should only regard bars as the boxes into which music is packed: and here it soars above them into exuberant, mellifluous life. When they say that you can’t play something better than it is, don’t you believe it. Perlman has found the heart of this work and given it an iridescence you never believed it possessed. He has the quality of a supreme actor for whom every effect is planned, yet comes as naturally as breathing. In the first movement the strut and flourish nearly bursts seams, yet it is held in place by a showman’s command of the hand-on-heart gesture and throwaway line.
If this has the quality of the best silent film in the world, that’s how it should be; yet everything is exactly judged. It is the skill of a virtuoso to take everything within a whisker of where it might run into parody, and never to slip over the edge. The bravura runs, which in other hands sound like stratospherically drilled teeth, have a dazzling fire and zest: in the Adagio he finds more depth than anyone else; it holds together marvellously. The Rondo, tripping vitality, exhausts superlatives: the scales more pert, the cantabile more seductively sweet, the pianissimos wittier….in the end I burst out laughing as much from incredulity as delight.
For the Sarasate the recording is better still, and Perlman matches it with a dark, throaty tone. Whether he captures Carmen’s sultriness or her forlorn hope, the playing is passionately terse. I was going to say that he out-sings singers; for he makes the opera sound like pastiche, not the other way round. Whilst the pace is exhilarating (as Perlman never allows himself to be distracted by mawkish side-issues) he is capable too of lacerating nostalgia, where the line almost throbs in its luxurious, sinuous enchantment. Elsewhere, of course, notes fly like bullets. Listen for a week and you may still not be sure how he pulls off every effect, or appreciate the discernment of each choice he makes. What I do know is that this is a disc you must hear.
WALTON
Façade; STRAVINSKY: L’Histoire du Soldat
WARFIELD (narrator), SINFONIA DA CAMERA/HOBSON
(Arabesque Z6644)
TT: 74.55 (DDD)
* (*)
Igor Glebov, notable enemy of Shostakovich, blew the gaff on the poisonous dog-biscuit of latterday Stravinsky. “He is the last representative of a superior refined civilization, but a civilization tired of itself, used up. There is no future in music whose force resides in its own weakness.”
If you detect Uncle Joe Stalin’s marzipan-covered icepick behind that appraisal (and you would be right to do so, jabbed firmly around the third vertebra) try this one from Beecham: “I see, behind his façade of ingenious notes, no evidence that Stravinsky has arrived at wisdom, even yet.”
The habits of fastidious obsession, the scalpels and rubbers laid like dissecting tools on his composing table: all of it hints at a magpie for whom moral neutralisation was chic. The cracks in the persona of an upright composer are exactly where Stravinsky’s final greatness is to be found: an idiom cauterised past bleeding or irony, and alienation as ripe as Brecht’s.
The splendid Nimbus issue of The Soldier’s Tale shows how clearly it inhabits the same baying and foggy wasteland as the Rite, the sybarite orientalism of Firebird; now fused into sharper, leaner form. As narrator, Christopher Lee brings the gravitas and sardonic resonance – not to mention a vocal agility – to make every role striking.
This new Arabesque version too comes up well. Hobson as conductor has an astringency that Hobson the pianist lacks; it suits the snap and mechanisation of such music well. The trouble is that William Warfield sounds like a radio play. He lacks Lee’s grip on withering cadences: desultory gaps and silences that engulf more and more as the suite, with compelling and sinuous concentration, struts and minces and spits its way to the inevitable conclusion. Lee’s soldier is tired, worldly-wise; but Warfield’s merely squabbles. And if Warfield’s Devil sounds like the child who found its pile of pennies knocked over, Lee’s insinuates himself like a tapeworm.
Everything about the Nimbus is artfully planned. The music’s power to undercut itself, fanfares which taper into emptiness, the sense of voluptuary crumbling into acrid dust. But I think there’s a reason why the new account sounds like the matinee recital of a conventional fairy-tale. Moral points have to be laid in spades when there is only half an hour to make them; and abridging the suite means that its shadows are lost.
It becomes a trot through the spring fashions of 1918. If this were all there was to the music, we should have to agree with Glebov. Yet there is so much more.
The tumbling word-plays of Façade also hint at deeper sedition. It has the quality of a particularly lugubrious half-hour’s debauchery, held in a drain. It ought to leave the impression of a snake (gorged on children scrubbed pink and dowagers in emeralds and leathery skin) moulting an opera-jacket – all virulence and melancholy, congealed through the moral anaesthesia of the deadpan and absurd. Glassy affectation may be very much part of this masque, but it is never effete.
What makes it irresistible? Frustrated sensuality, I think: a blend of what is lascivious, svelte and desiccated: the dry percussion clattering like a mantis. Pears and Sitwell, in their ideal Decca issue, know the world of Evelyn Waugh and Chelsea surrealists, and they know when to let go. Because they are authentic, they can afford to take themselves seriously: and their pithy automatism is like nothing else. Anthony Collins, their conductor, creates effects which are as sharp as they are understated. But Hobson reduces everything to a sort of fey caricature, and since Façade is above all an experiment in rhythm, overplaying it destroys everything.
Mr Warfield, floundering in its quicksand of shifting effects, tries manfully. It’s as alien as medieval Chinese. For if Stravinsky is timeless, Walton (like Mr Bellacre) is the navy-blue ghost of the Twenties. As with Sunset Boulevard, it was the pictures that got small. No wonder the mildewed new world of the homely, post-war era left him with little to say.
J S BACH
English Suites No 1 in A major, BWV 806; No 3 in G minor, BWV 808
RICHTER (piano)
(Stradivarius STR 33333)
TT: 52:08 (DDD)
Full price
* * *
Now that Leonhardt’s set has gone, piano versions of the Suites are the only ones available. Schnabel said that Mozart was too easy for children and too tough for virtuosos; and with Bach the challenge is greater still. His works loom in the abstract, lacking even tempo markings, ready to be plundered by an instrument charged with a ravenous expressive capacity their composer never imagined. The risk – for a pianist – involves making the writing into something it never was: sentimentality or bland, uncomprehending routine.
Now, if the stakes in a piano performance are heightened, so are rewards. Andras Schiff brings to these pieces the freshness of an improvisation, balanced between imaginative discovery and impeccable regard for the printed page. All his trademarks are there: rising cantabile lines shaded into gestures and asides; rhythmic buoyancy, with a floating accompaniment and a melting way with cadences. Never one to overstate a case, he is one of the few pianists who can still lift the expected into a surprise.
If Schiff risks just a hint of sounding coy, Glenn Gould’s battles lie elsewhere: working through texture rather than colour, digging out internal symmetries and inversions. The eccentricities are legendary but it’s glib to mention them here, for his perceptiveness is never in doubt. The problem is that Gould’s concentration dissolves into capricious quirks, which make a too-easy counterfeit for vitality. There’s something hamstrung about an approach in which intelligence is crushed through a wringer to the point of perversity: and the more I listened, so the more what at first was mesmerising, crumbled into Higher Spoof.
But Richter gives you the best of both worlds. He lacks Schiff’s overt emotional gloss, and rivals Gould’s discernment in matters of parts and voicing. Like Gould, he knows how accented motifs spur the music along; yet he matches Schiff in fine inflection. I liked his vibrant energy and analytic rigour: an animating concentration which is probing, individual and entirely right.
Credit has to be divided between Richter and Schiff. The BWV 806 Gigue and its finale show Schiff both more inventive and technically controlled. Richter’s Bourree I (BWV 806) is at a higher voltage, and uses the fullest expressive range. He is inimitable in the BWV 808 Sarabande, lending it an elegiac suspension between motion and numbed, wounded lassitude. Perhaps he sees this movement as the core of the piece; yet in the Gavottes he manages a brightness, an appreciation of development and variety, that leaves other recordings standing.
For a spontaneous and wonderfully resilient account of all six Suites, look no further than Schiff. Go to Richter for a lifetime’s experience of pacing an unfolding structure, a series of mutually enhancing contrasts whose occasional deliberation is offset by a master pianist’s command of resources. Listen to Gould for a commentary – tantalizing, exasperating, bludgeoning – on modern Bach performance, which it itself a commentary.
You might conclude that Gould’s fast movements, which brim with a spirit of dancing, fare best. Otherwise, if the embalmed Lenin could reach a keyboard with all his latterly-presumed dialectic and wisdom: it would sound like this.
THE ENGLISH ANTHEM Volume 3
Church Music of Attwood, Elgar, Harris, Harwood, Holst, Parry, Saxton, Stanford, Tavener, Walton, Wesley, Wood
CHOIR OF ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL/SCOTT
(Hyperion CDA 66618)
TT: 66:15 (DDD)
* * (*)
A state of awe, as emotions go, is a limiting commodity; and it makes a tundra out of everyday living. Yet it’s the hallmark of English choral life. Think of the milkiness Fauré brought to church music, and you can see what the English tradition gained. Think of Monteverdi’s Vespers or even Rachmaninov’s, and you realise how immeasurably more we have lost. You have to come prepared for fluent mediocrity, the bland expertise of Walton’s Set Me a Seal. Perhaps it is a matter of changing fashion that Elgar’s Give unto the Lord begins to sound like the school song of an Edwardian borstal; less so that, in a palpitating echo, its rapid fire of oratory just doesn’t work.
But there’s more to the story than shock-waves of new and great music finding their reverberations in a provincial puddle. Craftsmanship has always been the ability to make something more than it is; and what the English tradition wrung from its limitations was aching, crepuscular intensity. “The valley of the shadow of death” repeats Stanford; and nostalgia is at the core of this music: not in its modern sense of sentimentality with a bank-balance, but in the remembrance of a lost and golden age which strikes the heart in its transfigured desire. If sorrow, said Dorothy Parker, is tranquillity remembered in emotion, nostalgia is a sublimation of what was worthwhile and then, through conflict, lost. The image of this music is of summer evenings dwindling into twilight, and the twilight of an era caught in haunted, suspended time – a longing compounded of surrender and despair, lifted by noble regret for the passing of what had never been.
And this is quintessentially English. If Stanford’s The Lord is my Shepherd rises from a pang of melancholy and relapses into valediction, it is worthy too to take its place amongst the Romantic lieder from which its lessons came. Not the Shepherd on the Rock, perhaps: but it was from Wagner that Stanford learnt to write a score where every part is equal in a whole; and everything glows together.
John Taverner emerges as well as anyone. Lavish in its dissonances, revelling in a welter of sound as canonic parts throb together – modern, yet in the same tradition as Wood’s liquescent Expectans Expectavi and Harris’s Faire is the Heaven, which follow it. It’s the consistency of this thread of development that proves fascinating, as different influences worked their effects: the music of the First World War clearly the same stuff from which Walton’s orchestral works were to come. There is a strong and muscular vein of curiously English ardour and English craftsmanship.
But you have to wait for the Victorian Renaissance to find anything worthwhile. Attwood’s Come, Holy Ghost is everyday Georgian unctuous-ness; his thirty-two operas are something you would have to be nailed to the floor to endure. Wesley’s In Exitu Israel is a mole’s conception of bliss, tangled in counterpoint. Disappointments are inevitable in a disc as adventurous as this. I wish I sensed a trace less English tweeness and mustiness in Saxton’s hand-me-down Berio, which at last breaks free from its origins into something more like Milton’s adamantine fire. The best composers are those who play to the acoustic. Parry’s There is an Old Belief bursts into fanfares, polychromatic splinters dissolving on silence yet changed within their last seconds.
Arthur Hutchings used to say this music lay under the mange of revulsion. It still does. Only Hyperion’s issues of the Worcester Cathedral Choir offer any of the same pieces, and they do reveal Scott’s tendency to gush on a line. Where in the Elgar St Paul’s protests too much, Worcester gives it elegiac space, its transitions luminously composed. St Paul’s is strikingly disciplined, and registers are more secure; but there is a metallic hardness to the trebles that does little for the sense of rest which is this music’s enduring state. Significantly, though, Scott eases the Stanford down better than anyone; and it’s in pianissimos that his imagination seems to have freest rein. The result is music-making which is limpid with fugitive, glistening effects.
Even to those of us for whom their beliefs have crumbled into a cipher, the anthems leave like nothing else the vision of resonant air and boundless, limitless, numinous peace.
MOZART
Piano Sonatas in G major, K283; in D major, K284; in C major, K330
MARIA JOAO PIRES (piano)
DDD
72′ 38″
Deutsche Grammophon 437 791-2
Full (three stars * * *) recommendation
Through the new clichés of each age, we reappraise the past. Mozart’s piano concertos? A known quantity: dialogues between equals, they’re supposed to be; so never tip the balance too far for your soloist. But the sonatas? They might as well live on the moon. If only they did. They have a leanness and attack that symphonies and concertos can only hint at.
Well, sometimes they do. But in K283 Ms Pires finds a lightness of touch that seems absolutely apt for music which, said Schnabel, was too easy for children and too difficult for virtuosi. Her stance is one of lucid affection and ease, supple in its passagework, with enough clarity to allow voices to float eloquently on melodic lines. What more could there be?
Elegance too, in K284, but it was here I found my first doubts. You see, these early sonatas may well be influenced by J C Bach, but I can’t believe in a level of finish that denies us any access to the moment of creation, and makes it sound stillborn. I watched the dynamic contrasts, sanitised until their proportions were out of true. I wondered about the cut-and-thrust (whether dramatic or contrapuntal) that animates the operas and quintets alike, and I tried to recall Alan Blyth’s comment about Mozart’s level of incision, about it being his capacity to disturb that was amongst his most enduring characteristics.
My difficulties stem not from Ms Pires, but from the tradition her playing represents. She inherits a modernism left bruised and bewildered by its encounter with authenticity, conscious to a fault of the limitations that must be forced upon a modern instrument if Mozart is to be reined back to his proper place and time. You contemplate the stifling indistinctions of an age reduced to a temperance party in the dark by its puritans. I grappled with memories of the incandescence – the verve and pungent discipline of means, a brusqueness verging on anger – that Richter brought to the sonatas, and I thought back to the fading trace of Arrau’s distinction and gravitas.
The K330 sonata highlights this conflict of direction. Ms Pires is fatter in tone than the old performances, yet her playing is impeccably judged. Today’s decorous gauze of pedalling is there, but everything stays springy when the music depends on it. “Mould the phrases” we were told as children: and so – as if with a rolling pin – she does. In the finale she matches, for agility of thinking and illumination, any account I can remember.
But now let’s compare Horowitz’s (DG) seductive distinction, from his first bar to the last. It is to hear music revealed in its fleeting transitions and dazzling liquidity of effects. Horowitz’s emancipation of rhythm and sonority, his variegation of colour and weight, create what I can only call iridescent eloquence. He has a superior wit and poise for which Mozart is as much a delight as a source of discovery, a game of gesture and surprise: a personal contact to be explored and recrafted. Mice must feel like this, whilst being toyed with by the cat; and it makes today’s playing sound not so much virginal as downright impotent. Seldom has refinement in musicianship sounded so animated and spikily resilient as it did for him. Ms Pires is second to none only so long as Mozart must never astonish us.
The decay of any composer persists after him. But then, we seem to present Mozart as music about which there is nothing left to be discovered. In the end, I wonder if we even know who he was.
SCHUBERT
Songs for Male Chorus
Robert Shaw Chamber Singers, conducted Robert Shaw
Telarc CD 80340
Total time: 62:22 (DDD)
Full (three star * * *) recommendation
“The standard of inspiration” wrote Benjamin Britten of Winterreise, “is past explanation. Every time I come back to it, the mystery remains.” Little wonder that Gute Nacht came to mean more in Britten’s performance than anything else. For both composers, night and nature allow a retreat from the brittle realities of their time into a a half-lit ambivalence and dreamlike suggestibility. There, more than anywhere else, Schubert takes the hedonism of the Viennese and lifts it into a sort of rapture.
The songs for chorus are neglected music for a dead form of music-making. It doesn’t matter that Schubert’s command of harmony and shifting key allows him truly to find a world in a grain of sand. Die Nacht (“See how the clear stars move in the heaven’s meadows”) creates phosphorescent stillness within bars, and Shaw recreates perfectly its entranced ebb and flow. Wehmuth is about the atmosphere that envelopes a mood. Then the nuances of words can look after themselves; yet this mercurial tonality means that within scene-painting Schubert is able to fuse a story of individual human loss. It’s the Romantic world-view of life and death within a pastoral landscape, unifed by the rhythm of a tolling bell, and you realize that only one composer could make the major sound quite so poignant.
There are other ways to sing these pieces. In Standchen Sarah Walker (Hyperion’s Collected Edition, Volume 8) creates a delicate animation that makes more compelling sense of a song which, after all, is poised on tiptoe. The repeated motif “leise”, the prancing spring of Graham Johnson’s accompaniment, capture both the immediacy of experience and the quality of a fable. With Shaw you have altogether smoother, flatter progress, and if Martha Hart has a luscious voice, she’s also a little more inclined to rush fences. Nachthelle, for Shaw, flows like a fast wave: and throughout his disc transitions are – no, not underplayed, but taken for granted. Now, if you feel modulation is Schubert’s masterstroke, then something has been lost. Yet I wonder whether Shaw isn’t the one who’s right.
Laying on expression is a modern habit, and unsubtle dramatics are something that seems to have made Schubert himself wince. Shaw has always been a choral conductor in a high flight, and he surrounds himself with singers whose precision and ensemble are superlative. Time and again he matches the dancing brightness of a composer whose vision is the least sentimental of any Romantic. Sentimentality is predictable, and in his breadth of imagination Schubert outpaces our expectations as effortlessly as he outshone the resources of his own audiences. Widerspruch, the story of a wanderer confronting nature’s vastness, spins the certainty of the Marche Militaire on its head – and how well Shaw catches a serpentine change of phrasing at the moment of realisation.
But there are so many episodes worthy of Winterreise or Schwanengesang here. The frozen episode within Grab und Mond, perhaps, which fore-shadows IhrBild: the vacillation between major and minor in Die Einsiedelei, with a moral ambiguity that leaves the words behind: or the dissolving musical contexts of Nachthelle which allow Schubert to depict first the earth, then the poet’s motivation, and finally the sky. Repeatedly the poems describe the lightness of night, and if an evocation in music of Samuel Palmer’s glimmering world is for you, this collection is a discovery and a delight.
ROSSINI
Six Quartets for Flute, Clarinet, Horn and Bassoon
ENSEMBLE WIEN-BERLIN
(Sony SK 52 524)
TT: 72:54 (DDD)
Full price
* * *
The classical era is about the whirrings of a majestic clockwork, whose every motion seemed certain. Beyond lay a world of subtle and illimitable expressive potential: a superior intimacy whose distinctions became possible because every formality lay in place. Never before or since has ritual permitted such eloquent gestures.
These quartets are the string sonatas which Rossini wrote when he was 12, but rearranged by Friedrich Berr. Rossini, now with the sheen of a lifetime’s experience, chose to change nothing. Rightly so: for the sonatas were always more than charm and festive innocence. If they take their formal cue from Haydn, their stylistic verve is straight from Mozart.
You will never hear that better than on this Sony issue. It isn’t playing for those who expect a raucous operatic banter. But beneath a serene surface its animation comes from almost microscopic discernment and melting civility. Seldom has diplomacy sounded so eloquent or so satisfying. In the First Quartet it is not melodrama but the cleanness of the pointing, the lithe technique and coolly tapered phrases, that get to the nub of what Rossini is about. Excellent though the Serenata of London (ASV) are, their creaminess is inclined to overweigh itself and drag at those moments where it ought to soar; and the sense of expectancy at the heart of the music begins to pall. It’s then you begin to realise what lies beneath the Ensemble Wien-Berlin’s urbane face: their precision and attack: the variegation and suppleness of their inflection and narrative sense, their almost epigrammatic crispness of timing.
Occasionally I needed something else. The Serenata bring warm affection which can leave the Ensemble Wien-Berlin sounding diffident, pallid. But you need more than a sort of mellifluous fluency. The refined laughter of the La Tempesta wants an exuberance that the graceful Serenata miss. Listen now to the Ensemble Wien-Berlin: light and transparent, and you won’t hear the dynamics of pulse or changing tension thought through better than this. It is music-making on a refined and cogent plane, revealing Rossini not as a the pygmy virtuoso of high notes we have made him today, but the archetype of craftsmanship and grace perceived as the rival to Beethoven.
The Ensemble catch the fragility and spring-like innocence which underpins this precocious, breathtaking facility of form. This is the music of childhood, reappraised and lifted through the filter of adult sensibilities whilst losing nothing of its pristine clarity of intention. The Ensemble’s command of resources is formidable, and it allows freedom and fidelity of a very special kind. There is the simplicity that comes from a conception in which coarse gesture has been assimilated into a higher and more perceptive whole: music which seems to play itself, and which – in its spring and darting intelligence – is a microcosm of the best that the mature composer was to become. In the Ensemble Wien-Berlin’s hands, the Quartet No 6 in F (unobtainable on the other versions), gains much from Mozart: his sense of inquiry raised into burnished and radiant summation.
Perhaps their closest rivals are the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (Hyperion) in a performance which crackles with stylish and spiky invention. But if this is authentic playing to remind you that we perceive music purely as the sound it makes, the gloss of the Ensemble’s effects eludes them: as so often in authenticity, it’s a case of jabbing contrasts rather than convincing transitions. “Music through an open window”, Alfred Einstein said of Haydn; and so too the Fourth Sonata is in the Ensemble Wien-Berlin’s hands. Where the Orchestra reveal the limits of their sustaining power and articulation, the Ensemble’s liquidity is supreme: and with it, a bird-like airiness and sense of fresh sight.
FANTASIAS, PAVANS AND GALLIARDS
English music for keyboard by Byrd, Johnson, Philips, Morley, Bull, Randall, Farnaby, Gibbons, Tomkins.
GUSTAV LEONHARDT (harpsichord and virginals)
DDD
59′ 47″
Philips 428 153-2
Full (three * * * star) recommendation
Think back to a different world, where music drew its strength from a community of song and dancing, and the modern prima donna was unknown: where art was defined by brightness and vigour. To us the keyboard works of the Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries may suffer the stigma of early music, but to its contemporaries it was the currency of a sophisticated and bustling culture; with the devices of later composers – counterpoint, chromaticism – in place ready to be picked up for whatever purpose its successors might happen to favour.
These are works which are uniquely English in their secular and businesslike manner, in crispness and candour alike. True, the Pavan was described by Morley as “a kind of staid musicke, ordained for grave dancing” and almost all the pieces are what we should now call four-square. But listen now to Peter Philips’ Passamezzo (a form in which common chord sequences were used as grounds for variations in the form of a fast pavan) with its volatile runs and strident fanfares – and acknowledge a muscularity to the construction, which is every bit as virtuosic in its imagination as it is in its demands from the performer. Philips, one of so many Catholic whipping-boys, was imprisoned following a conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth I; and the brutality of that time (Tregion died in prison: others were exiled for their “immorality”) adds a gloss to the tart sentiments expressed in its musicianship.
But listen again to Orlando Gibbons’ miniatures, with something of the quality of sculpted seashell, and you’ll realise why Glenn Gould admired so much yet another composer we’ve shunted off to the backwaters. The titles of the pieces – toyes, fancies, fantasias – hint at the inventive freedom concealed within an apparently sober idiom: a sense of fantastic and exuberant convolution through which the thinking is always clear, as if constraints themselves defied the writing to press ahead and say more. Philips and his command of resources might surprise you; but hear the Galliards and Almans of John Bull, and prepare to be disarmed by charm.
Leonhardt brings none of the assault and battery that lesser harpsichordists apply to this era. His rubato and rhythmic inflexion is of the subtlest kind, and it informs the driving power and natural sweep of a conception in which a First Division musician gains the most by playing music just as it was written.
We need to value works of this eager appetite for life. Never again would England have such an impact on composers across Europe.
SALUT D’AMOUR
“Old sweet songs” by Novello, Ketelbey, Gilbert and Sullivan, Elgar etc.
THE LONDON CONCERT ARTISTS
(ASV White Line CD WHL 2070)
TT: 72.18 (ADD/DDD)
Full price
* * (*)
“Pink bon-bons with snow in the middle” said Debussy, with characteristically generous spirit, of Grieg. It’s a phrase that might seem alarmingly apt for this collection from The London Concert Artists: one false move, we surmise, and we are prone to find ourselves deep amongst the faded annals of the Twee. When Gilbert and Sullivan remind you that “its merriment is slow, alas” your heart sinks at the prospect of an endless recital of the dirges Bertie Wooster used to sing in the bath.
How wrong you would be, given the musicianship one finds here. The disc takes its title from Elgar and Jennifer Partridge manages a melting intimacy in her piano arrangement of the gorgeous piece, lilting affectionately, just a mite inclined to stress the obvious. Alan Schiller aims for the same enraptured quality when he tackles Rubinstein’s Melody in F, and pulls it off as well as I can remember. In Dear Little Café, Julia Meadows brings luxurious ardour to Noel Coward’s surprisingly astute awareness of key-relationships. It’s a winner, this one.
The parlour music of the Nineteenth Century reveals its usual crisis of style: aiming at the shifting light and eager capacity to surprise of Schubert’s Moments Musicaux, yet always falling back earthbound. Like all the best pop songs, Home Sweet Home runs out of steam within the first line. Facing its banalities, either you should opt for a sort of laconic knowing, or affect enough gusto to carry buffalo before it. If you have to be tawdry, the worst thing in the world is to be modest with it. True, an alternative is the searching and luminous revelation Andras Schiff gave us in his Decca recording of the Songs without Words; but Mendelssohn was good enough to take such scrutiny, and most of the pieces here are not.
It is a performance of Mendelssohn’s I would that my love which hints at the only flaw in the London Concert Artists’ music-making. There’s an earnestness, a want of spontaneity and forward impulse. How much does their calculated poise (that of studious dignity) get in the way? In trying to sell every bar for more than it might be worth, one can fail to appreciate real inventiveness. A lack of jauntiness afflicts Novello’s Ascot Gavotte: the witty swoops are undercharacterised, the crescendi need more mischief to them. Contemplating this lack of a spring in the step, you realise how little humour dates; by its side, religiosity and patriotism, pall.
An agreeable frisson of kitsch still twinkles through. Excelsior (belted out here with exactly the right conviction) is “Erlkonig” festooned with chintz: Richards’ Warblings at Eve is a Song without Words arrested in its growth and crawling like a fly through chewing-gum. But then, half the fascination of this disc lies in its music’s tiny incarnations of what was going on between greater composers at the time. Alan Schiller salvages notable poignancy from amongst the twittering birds and lugubrious pathos of the Monastery Garden. Our flurry of handkerchiefs stopped in its tracks, we notice that, with its resonant bass, here is a performing flea’s reminiscence of Debussyesque orientalism and Cathedrals under the Sea. The massive, soaring chords in the treble are from Schumann; caught in mid-flight between Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. No man, you remind yourself, is an island.
The record stands as chronicle of an era now as shadowy as a sepia portrait, its ephemeral weaknesses and lost strengths. It is real fun. And some of the melodies are rather good, aren’t they?
SCHOENBERG
Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, 1933 (after Handel’s Concerto Grosso Opus 6 No 7)*; String Trio, Op 45 (1946)
LENOX QUARTET (members), with *LSO/FABERMAN
(Phoenix PHCD 121)
TT: 41:09 (ADD)
Full price [No recommendation]
I remember seeing a cartoon once for which the punchline read, “The fool! He’s on the piano!” And sure enough, escaped from a bowl perched on a suburban upright, there was a goldfish in a two-inch diving suit filled with water, tottering over the keys.
Questin Crisp said that wit lodged between form and content. Not only wit – and its devices of anticlimax, the plundered and flawless logic of the absurd – but everything that makes art into meaning. Art (like science) is a filter for making sense of experience: a portrait with the power to create meaning afresh. An ability to generate new logic, new language, is its central, crucial feature – and with it, a capacity to forge an architecture which sweeps aside our old imagination. To do this, creative artists calculate and confront themselves: they see their work as an outsider does. When this happens, a trade in options and meanings is on the cards: a dialogue propelled by its own rationality and self-justification. I think this is what makes art as important as breathing, and gives artists their passionate urge to speak.
The painter Paul Klee used to talk about going for a walk with a line. All arts are a game of gestures and possibilities: strategies through which a listener’s imaginings of what is about to happen are raised, dissipated, redefined. You enter an artist’s vision, and step back to see how much it has changed your own. James Joyce spoke of epiphanic moments, those instants of revelation where all expectation is suddenly transformed. One realises then that imagination takes more than the free and uncluttered sight that children have. It is a marshalling of resources which take flight on their own terms, a superbly purposive and logical spontaneity.
Since Pulcinella, the stakes in Neoclassicism are high, and mediocrity is a crusade into a land where all the eggs have been sucked. But why is it that Stravinsky’s pastiches work so well? Why can you identify the Soldier’s Tale as inverted burlesque, a parody which has ceased to be parody: which has risen into its own sound-world? The stratagems and aplomb with which he reveals his incongruities have something to do with it: the composer as conjurer, taking what decent souls in the rain reasonably assume, and flicking it on its head. The quality of creation is the quality of its choices: and for a virtuoso with a world of technique at his command, there are as many meanings to be explored as there are skins on an onion – an adventure through Chinese boxes and illusion.
But if the pillaging of old music pits modern resources and fresh thinking against abandoned world-views, Schoenberg’s ability runs the gamut from A to A. Here we have one of those discs where brittle and splenetic ineptitude coalesces at every level. “This”, as advertisers used to say, “is something to cherish”. Rarely do you find anything that aspires to vigorous opera buffa, and achieves a baleful sludge of inadequacy. Handel’s original is about pace, resilience, dialogue, and disciplined economy of means. None of this survives its transition into the grotesque: not the half-light of ambivalence – as in Kafka or Mahler, where dissonance forces new scrutiny or understanding – but a grotesque unrelieved by purpose, control or insight.
It was the spark and grace of the Baroque and early Classical age that Stravinsky grasped so well. In this Concerto Grosso, what are almost echo-effects create (more than anything by Beethoven) Wagner’s ‘apotheosis of the dance’, for there’s an instinct at work by which elements arise as part of a unity which is both homophonic and contrapuntal. Schoenberg’s turgid orchestration unbalances its symmetry, and reduces a sense of miraculous unfolding to stale inertia. His intentions in doing so remain plodding and opaque.
It’s disappointing to watch music as rich as tapestries subside into an understain. I left with the memory of a florid mass of redundancy, flagging and reinventing itself to avoid collapse. Its interest lies in the sentimentality with which the 1930’s saw past eras: for Schoenberg provides a euphonious kitsch as though the Busch Quartet had been recast in saccharin, with a wave of piano arpeggios for good measure. Fortuitous too, because the use of the same clichés at radically different moments undermines any sense of context.
“Art,” said D H Lawrence, “must contain the essential criticism of the morality to which it adheres.” In Schoenberg’s Handel there can be no criticism, because nothing of the essentials has been understood. It offers imagination without form, ritual without discernment – at best, sterility: at worst, chaos. Neither holds much prospect for the future.
The recording is primitive and the performance sounds like a first take. Both improve for the Opus 45 Trio, which as authentic composition has more of the quality of a coiled spring. But where classical sonatas transform themselves in recapitulation, Schoenberg gives us no more than dead repeats. This is another case of the technique that failed to grow and was left behind, of fame that became more of a withered irrelevance. Any great composer rises above his imitators. Schoenberg never did.
PROKOFIEV
Peter and the Wolf: Symphony No 7; Summer Day; Winter Bonfire
The question was always the same: how to deal with Stalin? An endless need for enigma and circumlocution drew forth some of music’s fragrant oozlum-birds, alongside its emptiest and most corrosively bitter utterances. Yet Prokofiev, said Rostropovich, was childlike in many ways. A love of fairy-tales and enchantment, where the tartness of his natural idiom could be crisply fringed in icing and a dazzling swirl of taffeta, proved safe haven for the man to whom (reports Shostakovich) it was all so incessantly “amusing”.
For there is little here of of Schumann’s almost painfully sharp rapport with childhood; but the work of an outsider who is well aware of when he is meant to sound gauche. The charm, the tenderness and vulgarity alike, can be devastating.
The Seventh Symphony has something of this crocodile rictus in its coy and euphoric glut of sound. No whirring tumbrils, with their shards of burnt and flaking metal. Prokofiev is never happier with the nightmare of Soviet Realist ritual than when it means a universe of cuckoo-clocks, a holiday brochure for a vegetarian heaven. No wonder he wrote birthday presents for Stalin. But aspiring dictators have always loved “terrors that did not terrify”, and Prokofiev could have been the little darling to any of them. He is the perfect embodiment of that joyless mirth that is the defining crust of dogma at its most stale and paternalistically stolid.
No, this is too harsh; even if the Seventh is a tiger which cannot decide whether it is meant to be paper or not. A long-limbed work, you might call it, like very superior Khatchaturian; where muscular heroism is circumscribed by pussy-footing nostalgia. Its saving grace (and grace features strongly) is easy, swirling motion.
It is this sweetness and lithe, springy elegance that Jarvi (on Chandos) captures so well. He understands the music’s needs for precision and almost creamily sleek understatement, its need to breathe. Ms Grossmann’s small orchestra sounds undernourished, unbalanced: and it does little for fluency or a sense of culmination. In the Moderato, Jarvi’s sense of fleetness through clear water is inimitable, whereas Ms Grossmann gives us splinters. Of course, episodic conceptions work where different elements take flight on their own terms. But here, it fails to happen.
The rest of Grossmann’s performance has much to commend it. For the Allegretto there’s a sparky agility – refreshing lightness, too, in the third movement. This is playing of intelligence rather than instinct, by a conductor who knows how to draw spiky characterisation from limited resources. I just wish she’d let herself go: do more to match Jarvi’s sense of burlesque or his final, hushed farewell. We need to be swept up in Prokofiev’s vision with its fresh, tripping sense of the brightness of things. Ms Grossmann is a bystander.
In Peter and the Wolf, the most relevant comparison is with Phillip Schofield’s new issue on EMI. Both narrators affect the demeanour of one struck by a stuffed eel, but which with children passes for awe. Mr Schofield, apart from being the motive force that sets a million tiny hearts fluttering, reminds you less of the favourite aunt from whose cavernous lap and iron grip you once struggled vainly to escape. The EMI reading is altogether more mischievous, with bags of good humour, and conducting too which is deftly and freshly pointed.
Perhaps this is not the point in the CBC account. It seems intended as an introduction to music for young children; so that Peter emerges out of a summer dream, and the symphony from a winter’s journey, complete with sound effects. However Ms Forrester’s exclamations of “Yum, Yum!” might be received in the Dress Circle of the Royal Festival Hall, I expect five year-olds will find it magical.
For those of us whom age withered long ago, Gielgud’s Peter (EMI) remains first choice. The urbanity of its opening creates sharper contrasts with a climax which explodes in vibrant sound. The range, the judgment and splendid spirits of this Virgin CD make it shine; for (alone amongst these issues) it has charm. It comes with a first-rate version of Carnival of the Animals, whereas Mr Schofield is cobbled together with two old recordings which have feet of suet.
SCHUBERT: A RECITAL
Simon Keenlyside (baritone): Malcolm Martineau (piano)
EMI Eminence CD-EMX 2224
TT: 71:04 (DDD)
* * (*)
Schubert, as Alfred Einstein used to remind people, had nothing to do with the florid emotionalism of the Romantic era. His music is always about an atmosphere that redefines itself as it develops, and this as much as any ambivalence gives it the vitality and suppleness of endless self-inquiry. Even the simplest songs shift their ground through means which are as diverse as they are subtle; and by the end we (just as much as the composer, as much as the poet) have always learnt something new. This quality of reflexivity – of introspection, if you like; at any rate, a process by which every word comes to mean more, every phrase is a fresh option – accounts for the stature of music which is as transparent as the thinking of children, yet as daunting to musical strategists as it ever was.
Not by any stretch of imagination, the sort of thing you’d use to call cattle home across the Sands of Dee. Mr Keenlyside has magnificent vocal equipment, but sometimes music gets in the way. Still, time is all he needs. If there are moments here which are not so much beefy as the sort of thing a rottweiler could chew to feel the nourishment, your impression is of the unleashing of perhaps a major talent, which already has much to say that is formidably right.
It’s a pity that the opening song, Der Einsame, is his weakest. Fischer-Dieskau for Philips brought a laconic edge and bouncing rhythm – an element too of quizzical interrogation to Alfred Brendel’s accompaniment – which makes this new version sound like a trudge, confusing inertia for weight. Getting contexts right is the problem, and the slowness of Standchen means that imaginative touches are already consigned to a lost cause. Listen to Elizabeth Schumann in this music, and you’ll hear how more than the appropriate register has been lost. As much as anything, An Silvia demonstrates the resources that vintage performances bring to this challenge of a meaning which evolves through each successive verse. Schwarzkopf was hypnotically slow, of course; but both Fischer-Dieskau and Gerard Souzay changed their resonance and intonation to create a narrative structure. Mr Keenlyside just offers repeats.
He’s best at sustaining a mood. Der Jungling an der Quelle reveals the smoothness of this golden voice as it catches Schubert’s essential levitation, his ability to create motion within stillness. A couple of songs come from Schubert’s period of pantheistic mysticism, which was filled with nostalgia for the purity of ancient Greece. Lied eines Schiffers is one of them, in which Mr Keenlyside’s dramatic awareness animates what must always be more than a simple evocation of calm waters. A tough test, and he passes it well. Die Götter Griechenlands is another, disarmingly well done; and the singer understands its sense of forlorn inquiry which subsides at last to a whisper. Prometheus commemorates the embitterment against fate (in mythological guise) of a composer fighting for his life and here (as in Waldesnacht) Keenlyside’s power and control, pushed beyond anybody’s reasonable limit, are memorable. Yet Der Wanderer an den Mond, like Einsame, needs more of Fischer-Dieskau’s clipped intensity. As in a fidgetty Heidenroslein, it’s the ability to let go that seems elusive.
Auf der Bruck, more Schubertian defiance, is perhaps best thing on the disc. Keenlyside attacks it with an eagerness that makes even Souzay seem pale, although the older man’s expertise in slicing and squeezing vocal lines whipped up a palpitating energy. Yet Nachtviolen is magically seamless, and the EMI partnership has mastered its sense of almost imperceptible growth. No-one summoned as well as Schubert the co-existence of fragile reminiscence and lacerating immediacy. How well Mr Keenlyside grasps it.
MENDELSSOHN
Symphonies Nos 3 and 4
LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA/WELSER-MOST
(EMI Classics CDC 7 54263 2)
TT: 66:27 (DDD)
Medium price
* (*)
The Fourth Symphony has been used for climbing practice as much as anything else in the repertoire. Yet at his death, Mendelssohn’s dissatisfaction is known with a work which, after five exhilarating minutes, can seem to evaporate into a great fog of vacuity. The apparent sameness of pace within each movement, their seeming lack of contrast or development, relapse into meaninglessness for a conductor who only grasps the thinking behind A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I doubt this is what troubled Mendelssohn. The real challenge is that he is a Romantic, like Chopin, for whom Bach and Mozart mean more than Beethoven: his melodic lines lucid and springy, his inner structures vital and crisply, fastidiously wrought. There is, too, a hidden agenda to this symphony which no cliché of Italian sunshine can illuminate. Mackerras makes the shadows that run through it palpable: the slow movement plaintive and self-consumed, the finale chilling, sinking to the poisoned whispers Chopin delivers at the end of the Funeral March Sonata. I wish Mackerras were as persuasive elsewhere. But his opening seems brusque and the scherzo has an odd pallor to it. Norrington too, after a cracker of an opening, lets his middle movements become strangely itchy.
This is tough competition, and Welser-Most is as good as anyone in the scherzo. His Allegro vivace opens well too: the string line gets squeezed and bounced along effusively, nothing hurried. Yet there’s a hint of what is to come in its clutter of over-fed, cloyed lines. Washy recording is much of the problem; yet for whatever reason, the second and final movements are dead weight, their few effects superficial and flaccid. Everything is so well-mannered. But we need to hear more than a tepid Wagnerian gush of sound.
The question is one of resources. Peter Maag digs into his, creating episodes and internal dialogues that draw, from the weakest orchestra here, a reading of considered elegance, perhaps the subtlest of them all. Heard after Welser-Most, its clarity of focus puts it in a different world.
Winner by a nose is Abbado; for a performance which keeps its wit, style and natural animation from the first bar to the last. Welser-Most is for those who like their Mendelssohn overstated and unthreatening: an endless surfeit of milky breakfasts. As your old Mum used to say, “I’ve left the lumps in”.
The field for the Third Symphony is less crowded; but it’s here you realise why the prospects that Welser-Most sets up so promisingly, often disappoint. His is a disc built up from a multitude of small effects, which fail to gel.
It works best over short stretches, where the music’s label or his own instincts allow him to forfeit this miniature, tunnel-vision. There’s an almost vocal quality in the first movement’s opening: seductively ripe strings in the scherzo as well, answering the woodwind with a brightness that almost matches Norrington’s excitement and feeling of mischief. Both conductors summon joyfully what I can only call a sense of satisfied yearning.
Still, music is about expectations; and in order to speculate, you have to accumulate. When parts dictate wholes, the sweep of a performance is lost. When there is no reflexivity between details and the whole, they become isolated, fortuitous, lacking proportion. In the first movement, Welser-Most’s slow speed backs him into a sort of heroic blandness, with no room for the organic tempo changes by which Norrington’s bravura surge gains its flexibility, its detail and urgency. Who was it said that dullness is full of mean little inaccuracies?
There’s a splendid cohesion to Norrington’s reading. He creates arch-structures, each part with different effects, in which later sections answer and are given context by earlier ones: scarified glissandi in the first movement, a lustrous freshness elsewhere. Worthy though Welser-Most is, he cannot match the pliancy and variation by which Norrington gives the music this passion, its sense of apt adventure.
POULENC
Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra; Stravinsky: Dumbarton Oaks Concerto;Milhaud: Scaramouche; Matton: Concerto for Two Pianos (1964)
ANAGNOSON, KINTON (piano duo), KITCHENER-WATERLOO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA: ARMENIAN
CBC SMCD 5120
TT: 70.09 (DDD)
Full-price
* * (*)
At the time when Mahler was saying that a symphony should be like the world, Frenchmen by birth or spirit were discovering what it was the bilious Teutonic sound-world never dreamt of. Poulenc’s concerto was written when the revolt into style was well underway, and has so much more cunning than the fanatic conjunction of Bach, Mozart and Balinese gamelan music that we suspect. Parodies of sacred cows fly past quicker than you can count them; but it takes something else to account for the stamp this work has left on concertos from Ravel to Britten.
A pummelling of ideas has much to do with it; for this is music with the energy of a mastodon on pistons, having woken up to find that someone has inflicted a blue-rinse on it during the night. And then there’s the logic of the absurd: impeccable, innovative and deadly serious. So well he uses incongruity to control colour and pace, with waves of kitsch liable to descend at any moment of crucial transition. A viscous puddle of Romanticism gets swept into the last raucous showdown, for whilst Poulenc may not be the magician that his heroes were, he’s a rattling good juggler. Not a bar is superfluous, and nothing is as you expect – except for the ethereal glaze of windchimes in to which his arch-structures always dissolve. Whilst Schoenberg was labouring on his impacted little fossils, Poulenc was revealing his aplomb in making three centuries his own.
I say this because different performances leave you with impression of a radically changed work: and the question has to be whether to seek out what the piece might try to be, or to play for known strengths. Its score appeals for precision throughout, and Duchable and Collard (Erato) – irreverent, rigorous, caustically sharp – make you more aware than anyone of the music’s disciplined lineage. But listen now to Anagonoson and Kinton in the Larghetto: much more of the enchanted world, and the Finale too is airy and delicately etched. Ingenuous, perhaps; and in the Allegro given to romanticised heroics, yet rationally consonant throughout. How much of a brisk straight line is the concerto supposed to be?
What troubled me a little was the Canadian team’s fondness for rubato and acceleration. Throughout this disc there is a hint of artifice or deliberation, a lack of natural dash, that never quite convinced me. EMI, in their Composers in Person series, have just released Milhaud himself playing Scaramouche. It sounds marvellous: whether in the clipped, boiling energy of the Braziliera, or in the lilting tenderness he brings to the second movement, even through the fog of old shellac. With Anagono-son and Kinton, the finale shows a trace of the professional duettists’ mechanised sheen, always counting in their heads. It is at their more introspect, again, that they show their best.
Dumbarton Oaks is Stravinsky’s knotty homage to Bach, where the 18th century whips into shape music which more and more pursues a labyrinthine and mischievous life of its own. In piano arrangement it inevitably gets slowed down and sanitized, its strands reined in by sounding the same. Less of stylistic abduction, and more a milky affability; yet Anagonoson and Kinton’s friable, laconic snap draws as much from it as you can.
Roger Matton’s 1964 Concerto makes an apt conclusion to it all, not least in highlighting the difficulties that patchwork must face in sustaining long arguments. Here is the Far East for a later generation, woven into the textures of Bartok and Stravinsky at their most lustrous, or Poulenc himself in its sonorous interludes. If you can imagine Les Six reared on fudge and served at a post-modernist subscription concert, this is it: not disagreeable, especially when set alongside Magyar night music transplanted to the monastery garden. Pastiche works better when (as with Stravinsky) it confronts itself. And yet – written whilst other composers were trying to mount an eggshell in a spider’s web – here’s a disc filled with music which is festive, bustling and humane.
SCHUBERT
Trio for No 1 for Piano, Cello and Violin in B flat, D898: Notturno for Piano, Violin and Cello in E flat, D897
Trio ex Aequo
Discover DICD 920110
Total time: 55:46 (DDD)
Two star (* *) recommendation
There’s Schumann’s assessment of the Trios: one lyrically feminine, he said, the second an angry meteor. Emotionally the lyrical one is more complex; and if Schumann was trying to highlight both a voluptuous and ardent vulnerability at work, how right he was.
All this is as strange as most of Schubert’s music must have seemed, to a world still filled with Mozart and Beethoven. The B flat is one of Vienna’s most quicksilver apparitions, where a gossamer lightness of texture often seems charged with almost orchestral sonority. The gloss of eagerness and yearning: the impulsive gallops up and down the keyboard and exuberant asides: the martial rhythms and childlike confidences (often dissolving into each other) give it a quality which transcends joy. What I mean is that the piece has a sort of knowing innocence, and this creates a conversation between equals of special intimacy. Yet it is the rare and happy fusion of opposites that makes it so deftly elusive. This is what we, as much as Schubert’s contemporaries, boil down into the myth of “sociability”.
The sweet-toned but grey account from the Trio ex Aequo enters a cruelly competitive market, even at its modest price. The newest contender (from Philips Classics in a double-disc overview of the Trios) is the first and briskest of the Beaux Arts’ shots at the piece, and it is an unfolding delight: its interplays just as eloquently mischievous as the Borodin Trio on Chandos, but with a cohesion which the Borodin’s floundering exchange of confidences never finds. Charm is there in spades, a boisterous incisiveness too, but without ever losing sight of both overall scale and the proportions each episode needs to bring it to vibrant life. Freshness and instinct aptly considered – not the depth of the Beaux Arts’ later performances, perhaps; but not their sense of formidable digestion either. In the Andante it is the quality of phrasing that gives a sense of daydreams skimming and evaporating. The rest presents a model of effervescence (flightiness, almost) through poised understatement. In these moments, Schubert creates a simultaneous existence of emotional palpability and levitation which places him in an unmistakeable expressive tradition. In the visual arts, it ran between Odilon Redon and Bonnard. Of course, Schubert is equal to either of them.
Unfortunate, then, that first movement of the Trio ex Aequo’s conception is the weakest. It shows you Cleopatra’s barge gliding serenely through the drains: a lugubrious juggernaut of style which substitutes mannerism for diction, reverence for insight, and awe for a capacity to seize the moment and make sense. Where the Beaux Arts brought revelation one is here reminded of a cow which has caught sight of heaven, transfixed perhaps by the sheer occasion of watching Sarah Bernhardt flounce through the meadows on her wooden leg.
The broad strokes of the Notturno suit the Trio ex Aequo best, and they play very well indeed. The slow movement of D898, revealing a violinist of major talent, hints at the same warmth and suppleness. It is a lack of context and crucial transition which lets their good ideas down, which makes worthiness into dullness: the sheer space they have to make for themselves to say anything worthwhile. Where the Trio ex Aequo offer us the coagulated mire of endless sincerity the Beaux Arts, and the sense of liberation they bring to every bar, bring home this music’s capacity for infinite hope.
PROKOFIEV
Sviatoslav Richter (piano): “Live in Japan”
Volume 1: Piano Sonata No 6 in A, Opus 82 (1940): Piano Sonata No 9 in C, Opus 103 (1951): Piano Pieces from the ballet Cinderella. Total time: 66′ 31″ (AAD). Memoria 991-001
Volume 2: From Visions Fugitives, Opus 22 (1915-17): Légende, Opus 12 No 6: Danza, Op 32 No 1: Valse, Op 32 No 4: Pensées, Op 62 No 3; Sonatine Pastorale, Op 59 No 2: Paysage, Op 59 No 2: Rondo Op 52 No 2, from Le Fils Prodigue: Valse Op 96 No 1, from War and Peace: Suggestion Diabolique, Op 4 No 4. Total time: 46′ 03″ (AAD). Memoria 991-002
* * *
The surprising thing about Soviet Realism, like the dog on its hind legs, is that it worked at all – let alone so well. With the Nineteenth Century clapped out, with composers denied the right to strike into fresh musical language, all that was left for them was heroic and incestuous pastiche.
Yet pastiche allowed an Indian summer of musicianship: and it is one to which Richter’s serious, almost austere analytic insight is well attuned. Nobody listens to him for a debutante’s idea of small-talk, but for enough strength and rigour to make the competition go limp at the knees. Playing in the grand manner, certainly; yet tempered by the discernment that lies behind that flat old phrase, “letting music speak for itself”. Dullness, it’s said, is full of mean little inaccuracies; and you will not hear Prokofiev made more scrupulous or captivating than it is here. Where other pianists try to lose themselves in a dusting of notes, Richter leaves an indelible stamp on whatever he plays, and makes it entirely his own.
What a portrait these discs provide. The finale of the Sixth Sonata brings a characteristic fusion of electrified energy and poise: Number 9 is about elegant and sophisticated clarity of diction, and the rest reveals a master tactician’s control in spinning melodic lines.
It’s not the first good performance of these pieces, of course. In one of the supreme recordings of the 1980’s, Ivo Pogorelich got to the burlesque behind what often seems like the endless, laboriously transfigured banality of the Sixth. He managed to give it the dreaminess and fleetness of an improvisation. Richter is more deliberate. Like Prokofiev, he thinks in rhythms and sonorities; and this is ideal discipline for a composer who seems to flounder if you allow the music too much free rein. Now Opus 82 is presented as a bony, intractable form, leached clean of Romantic affectation, and inevitable in its cyclic structure. You see at last the purpose gripping beneath the surface.
The domestic Prokofiev of the Ninth Sonata suits Richter like nobody else. John Lill (ASV) brings greater warmth, but he lacks such a sense of unfolding possibilities. These later works were inspired by Beethoven and it’s Richter, the dedicatee here, who finds inner meditation and imposing growth: an essential renewal in the first subject’s final appearance. He thinks of phrases as movement – often slower than his rivals, but how buoyant he is. The reason? It has to do, I think, with awareness of symmetries and developing cadences: contrasts seamlessly controlled, the thinking eloquent and proportioned throughout.
Visions Fugitives are astringent in a way that reminds you of Beethoven’s Bagatelles, but with something too of the crepuscular glow of Scriabin or Debussy. Ephemeral, springy, always compact and fresh, they have a quirk of storytelling and reminiscence: a narrator’s sense of summation and illuminating afterthoughts. In No 3, Nikolai Demidenko (Conifer) proves more agile, and this gives him better control in a miniature set of variations whose whole point lies in a dissipated flourish of force. But Richter brings more than a hard knot of concentration. There is, again, that subtle weighting and inflection; a range of colour or voices that recalls Richter’s flair for impressionist music. No 18 trickles as hypnotically as Satie, yet it’s better than Satie ever was: and Richter’s pathos is made more intense – not less – by its restraint.
A waltz from the Cinderella suite has a quality of charmed revelation, helped by a lifetime’s grasp of timing and articulation. The recording, salvaged from an amateur cassette, is better than you’d think. Well, a bit.
BEETHOVEN
Piano Concertos Nos 1-5: Bagatelles Op 33, Op 119, Op 126, WoO 52 and 56
LILL (piano), CBSO/WELLER
(Chandos CHAN 9084-86)
TT: 78.44, 79:23, 77:42 (DDD)
Full price
* * (*)
If you saw John Lill a decade ago, and concluded he was one of those British worthies who were never bland enough to find themselves wafted onto the South Bank Show, you need to listen again and hear how a formidable musical personality has come of age.
He presents the First Concerto neither as a last wilting glance at the galante era, nor as the exercise in horseplay that has become customary since Michelangeli. It falls naturally in the cycle, overlapping the worlds of Haydn and a Third Concerto that foreshadows Brahms: new sections opening with an ease that comes not from extraneous labels, but from their inner role. I was reminded briefly of Solomon’s command of immense dynamics and his sense of civilized, uncrowded space.
It is the sense of homogeneity across the set – of disciplined, unadorned growth – that is so impressive. The playing has the rugged sobriety is always had, but the dogged nagging at long passages has gone. In its place is a new self-possession and mettle: a sophistication and convergence of means. The Second Concerto, immaculately phrased, is a search for all sorts of subtle pleasures.
What prevents me from recommending Lill as a first choice is the release of Murray Perahia at mid-price. The difference is that Perahia’s are accounts in which every detail is proportioned and thought through, whereas Lill keeps the impulsiveness of a big, multi-faceted personality: overt warmth in which emotionalism is always held in place by searching fidelity. There is much to be said for both; but I was won over by Perahia with his miniaturist’s power of concentration on a grand and wholly satisfying scale. He has a discrimination that makes even the Chandos issue sound crass and breathless, as if its perception were clogged by issues of a lower order. Listening to Perahia in the Third, you remind yourself that virtuosity consists not only in what you can do, but in what you can afford to leave for granted.
The real problem is that Haitink is much more shrewd an accompanist than Walter Weller is. He produces creative intervention, a dialogue between equals in which Perahia’s gestures are answered with other possibilities, other options. His Third is spiky and intense, with a tensile spring that makes Weller sound perfunctory and undernourished – a plodder, despite faster tempi. Lill’s playing has tremendous dynamism, but there is a certain fatness and restlessness to it; the orchestra needs to be sharper to give it the balance it deserves. And Perahia’s Fourth, with its luminous sense of discovery, exists on a different level. Easy to make it sound heartfelt, perhaps; but the Andante, like all pathos, pulls two ways: towards a feeling of flux and also of dead, chilled inertia.
The Emperor sums up this difference in tack. For Lill it has monumental, visceral strength – but a bloated scale too which destroys perspectives, for every part has to be distorted to retain proportion. It’s a tribute to his magnetic intensity that, heard by itself (and I wouldn’t advise you to listen to Kempff at the same sitting) it so nearly works.
But to Lill, the meaning of the music is fixed. Perahia, a master strategist, gives it the impression of being endlessly re-affirmed and recrafted. The Rondo has rarely been faster, and rarely has it sounded less forced in splendid fluency and lack of strain. The slow movement makes no attempt at romanticised awe. Its gracefulness is unimpeded by the decaying wedding-cake of oratory that Wagner and Liszt tried to force upon Beethoven, and which Beethoven never knew.
GERSHWIN
Rhapsody in Blue (jazz band version): Michael Finnissy arrangements: The Gershwin Songbook: Piano Concerto in F
MACGREGOR (piano), LSO/DAVIS
(Collins Classics 13622)
TT: 76.09 (DDD)
Medium price
* (*)
What is authenticity? Something deeper than the Hallelujah Chorus not being sung by a cast of thousands, all reared on black pudding. It has to do with any music finding its right voice.
“Being true to yourself” is a recent stigma for creative people to be lumbered with. The reality is likelier to be Telemann writing background music for his employer’s meals, or Gershwin hoarding melodies against frantic deadlines. But in the Twentieth Century, the prestige of that sterile label, Composer and Serious Artist, carries ever more irresistible magic. For Gershwin, begging lessons from Ravel, it must have been near the end of the rainbow.
The one dire passage on this disc is when you come to Michael Finnissy’s arrangements of songs, transplanted to a strange inert world, its aspirations beyond Debussy and Rachmaninov, without the innovation or vitality that made either feasible. Finnissey acknowledges that Gershwin’s genius was to catch a changing moment; so here is a gummy amber in which passing insects can be trapped for ever in durable form. You can’t make a fossil out of spontaneity. The more the music wilts, the more messages are thrown out with the medium. I was reminded of the apparitions that used to afflict Bram Stoker after a surfeit of crabs. It’s times like this that cause you to slump under your headphones, and contemplate the long dark tea-time of the soul.
But Gershwin’s own improvisations, crushed too under their Sunday best of modish chromaticism, have a range that makes tunnel vision read like a panorama. Shura Cherkassky could make it all sound fabulous. It takes very special talent to beguile you in song after song: voluptuary flair, agile and volatile, with its quiet retrospections and special timing: knowing when to play for sincerity or race for burlesque. You need to sound like someone going on a spree between satin sheets.
Now, this is just what Carl Davis has; and he makes you feel the Rhapsody must be the music that made New Yorkers glad to be alive. Real tabasco, as P G Wodehouse would say: calculating the right dusty haze of lasciviousness and ennui. But so much is ripely characterized, so much happens in the orchestra that the soloist won’t take up, that the tail wags the dog. Modesty suits Ms MacGregor’s style well, but she is polite where there should be the dash that with Gwyneth Pryor – playing these works on Pickwick – makes them dazzle.
It is interesting that where Gershwin lampoons other genres (Strike Up the Band, Clap Yo’ Hands) he lifts satire into an artform beyond itself; it crackles. Ms MacGregor’s cadences have the right dying fall to them, sly and velvety. Do It Again sounds the way young love should, and the Piano Concerto suits her well: crisp, elegant technique aligned to the needs of a work less flighty than the Rhapsody, where perhaps she feels more in control. But there’s no joyous gasp of air in S’Marvellous: none of the effervescent sweep its words demand; one wonders if the pianist knows them. The texture stays flat and uniform, for where there ought to be as many glints of wit as there are steps in an Astaire tap routine, this disc has feet of clay. No champagne here so much as the nourishing mug of Bovril a concert pianist takes when she has resolved she Needs to Have Fun.
It’s about being able to see a genre from the outside, and calculate effect: a chameleon-like sensitivity to changing mood and movement. But lack of awareness is the Achilles heel for both Ms MacGregor and Gershwin, when each becomes self-conscious. You see them collide, both going in the wrong directions. Still, this Collins issue offers as many belting tunes as it is possible to cram on a disc; and the sound is spectacularly good.
BEETHOVEN
Piano Sonatas Opus 2 Nos 1 in F minor, 2 in A major, 3 in C major
HOBSON (piano)
(Arabesque Z6637)
TT: 78:26 (DDD)
Full price
* One star recommendation
I think it was Tovey who compared Beethoven’s sense of humour to a dog’s; and these early pieces are full of the surprise, the brio, the gallops up and down keyboards, that make the thinking behind his verdict clear. But more besides: a hint of monolithic growth that anticipates the Hammerklavier, of the mesmeric control of timespans that makes the last sonatas uniquely challenging. There is also something to Opus 2 more insidious than either distinction – charm. A fine performance needs the quality of laughter to it; and an eager, tensile spring.
This is not a way to ease yourself into Beethoven by halves.
I remember hearing Brendel play the second of these sonatas at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, almost a decade ago; and I was struck by the surge he brought to its first movement, using pivotal phrases to link the widest range of expressive techniques. The Largo was all about luminous transitions, and you could only admire the refinement with which every effect was given its context – the proportions and range of a performance which seemed at once spontaneous and created from inner meditation. These are also the hallmarks of Schnabel in EMI’s Collected Edition: a sense of experiment and glowing rightness, something which is at the same time skittish and as eloquent as a recitative.
Now, Ian Hobson gives us playing so wholesome you could send it to collect Grandmother from the clinic. In the A major work the staccatos are pedal-led almost primly, with a neatness I would give my thumbs for. Yet motion is lost, and since it’s pace that holds this music together, what survives is a residue of clotted overpreparation. His Largo is an attempt to make a statue out of a movement which, in that process, loses its true grandeur. When insight shrinks from the relationship between parts, the cut-and-thrust is forfeited that makes Beethoven work. You end up with an undis-cerning millwheel of sound, from which repeats protract themselves towards the infinite. This is the sort of length for which one is not grateful.
The impression is of a table with no food on it, although you love the way Mr Hobson has ironed the napkins. In the end I identified with the hostess who said, “Why don’t you go away and write all of this down?” Jenö Jandó’s disc (Naxos) has these same sonatas; and whilst it too is unrelieved by sensibility into the inner subtleties that make the first two of them live, it has sharper instincts.
For Brendel, the first movement of Opus 2 No 3 was a sort of joyful collision between suavity and momentum; although I noticed how cleverly he made space for his effects to take flight. Actually, cracked heads are what this music is about; it is the repercussions of making irreconcilables work together that set a stamp on the first truly Beethovenian sonata. In Brendel’s hands it might almost have been an unfolding narrative. But you need to listen to Schnabel to hear how strikingly the finale can soar.
Not that you’d glean too much from Mr Hobson. At last the straitjacket comes free, but it’s a case of playing which is palatable rather than revelatory: a perfunctory feel for timing which reveals too little sense of wider implications. The Adagio is overcooked to the point where all that’s left is grey and limp; and it is the fact he tries so hard in the the Scherzo that makes contrasts fall together into the thresher of (oh dear, I hate to say this) stifling indistinction.
Music so tightly meshed has to sound inevitable, or it means nothing. And Jando again, however bruising his occasional bouts on the megaphone, is really more interesting than this.
SCHUBERT
String Quartet in E flat, D87; String Trios in B flat, D471: in B flat, D581
L’Archibudelli
Sony Classical Vivarte SK 53982
Total time: 63:51 (DDD)
Full three star (* * *) recommendation
A fascinating disc, this, taking you from Schubert’s first worthwhile quartet (he was 16) and ending with his farewell to the music-making he could expect from his family. He was then under twenty: 1815 and a crop of great songs were behind him, yet still he was preparing for his future as assistant schoolmaster. Music “of filigree and rococo delicacy”, someone called these chamber pieces; but they’re more than that, with growing harmonic complexity and sense of adventure. Beneath the decorous veneer there lurks something odd and tantalizing, which within a decade would open into the visionary horizons of the last great works.
The straightest performance on this excellent authentic disc from L’Archibudelli is of D87. They make it sound the work of an older composer than we’re used to (Einstein observed a lack of ‘vigilance’ in its construction), with none of the gallumphing jollity modern performances wallow in: straight, forthright, intelligently sober until a cracking finale, which is as crisp as spring air. Yet throughout, these are performances of eloquent grace and stature – D581 edgily alert, bouncy and immaculately phrased, with a dark vein of fantasy in its second movement brought out as by no-one else. Its capacity for drama and ambivalence, too, comes as a revelation. In D471 the witty accents and mirrored inflexions are etched with perfect clarity in Sony’s excellent recording.
Fascinating too, to compare L’Archibudelli’s playing of the trios with the vintage Grumiaux performances reissued by Philips (438700-2) on a DUO double-disc. Dated sound there, of course; and swooning portamentos alongside the urbanity and animation – the domesticated modesty, I’m tempted to say – that to our ears set early Schubert properly in his era. Perhaps we’ve been indoctrinated; but there’s something about performance with modern instruments that brings out the curiously innocent ardour that seems at the heart of the music. For L’Archibudelli, the hollow resonances of timbre make this sort of interpretation inconceivable. With the varnish-stripping all the coyness goes, but with it, Grumiaux’s capacity to underplay and surprise. Where thematic development for L’Archibudelli comes in the form of a perfunctory spurt of tempo, Grumiaux’s greater articulatory range – the colours and textures available to a modern quartet – allow an unfolding structure to be fashioned more overtly.
What’s gone with authenticity is any temptation to sentimentalise, or make things cloy. What replaces it is modern research. An Andante sostenuto has turned up for D471, with a poise and chromaticism worthy of early Mozart, as well as the hymnal compactness of line and harmony Schubert probably learnt from Haydn’s baryton trios. He’d yet to gain the flicker of major and minor modalities that makes his mature music elusory, or to grasp the candour of raw emotion rather than the artifice of studious deliberation.
But did the composer to whom there was no truly happy music, ever learn exuberance? To Grumiaux, I think he did; or at least, in D581, a burnished elegance that leaves L’Archibudelli seeming penny-plain. But then, in the Andante, it’s the cleanness of authenticity that grabs you and makes you listen afresh: with darting suggestions and a fragility of timbre that make Grumiaux sound unctuous, overfed. In the Menuetto, both teams find melancholy sweetness, directness that disarms us, earnest remembrance and courageous gaiety: a bittersweet world already lifted beyond emotion into higher purity. Brisker L’Archibudelli may be, yet each group catches the sense of longing behind this mercuriality and strangely precocious wisdom.
EIGHT FAVOURITE OVERTURES
Handel: Arrival of the Queen of Sheba; Beethoven: Leonora No 3; Mendelssohn: The Hebrides; Brahms: Academic Festival Overture; Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro; Schubert: Rosamunde; Rossini: The Thieving Magpie; Berlioz: Le Carnaval Romain
ROYAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA/BATIZ
(ASV Quicksilva CD QS 6076)
TT: 69.52 (DDD)
Mid-price
* * (*)
Every favourite overture? Well, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and William Tell are missing; but the rest are present and correct.
The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba lacks the effervescence of authentic instruments, of course. The oboes’ articulation keeps perky and crisp, but a modern orchestra’s range and tone is something which promotes sleek refinement. Yet it’s not just beside John Eliot Gardiner that Batiz seems glossy. The brio of Beecham’s famous gallops up and down the scale have gone as well. In their place there is urbane and fastidious smoothness, whose allure is considerable.
The growls at the opening of Leonora No 3 are a bit of a paper tiger – but Batiz knows how to hang on to a note, letting it take its time, whilst tension gradually screws itself up. Halfway through the Beethoven you realise what to expect of this disc: balanced between sophisticated diction and winning intelligence in seizing musical opportunities, with an occasional excess of civility. If the mountainous growth of the Beethoven is somehow underplayed, it ends with a proper headlong exultation, only lacking that bluff, abrasive edge.
These are the features that make Batiz’s Brahms so natural. Its opening bars are given an ideal fusion of gravitas and forward impulse. Klemperer may have stressed the monumentality of the Academic Festival Overture, of inexorable growth towards the last climax. In its place, Batiz offers a breath of fresh air.
I began to be troubled by a sameness in orchestral balance: predictable and muddled, the woodwind well forward. This is sound which contributes to a pervasive sense of undercharacterisation. Transitional sections seem underpowered. Batiz is not one of those conductors whose musicianship is so diverse that he sounds like different interpreters in different works. There is a performance of The Hebrides by Peter Maag (an underrated Mendelssohnian) in which the central episode slows to a shivering torpor. You won’t find imagination as individual as that here, despite eloquence which never ceases to be satisfying. At the finale of the Berlioz there is none of the burnishing that Maazel brings to orchestral showdowns; instead, a sort of flabby geniality. The Thieving Magpie lacks swagger and wit: it needs more insouciance than this. Rossini Rockets sound best when they start from demure beginnings. It pays to hold back on the starting blocks, rather like the little girl with the curl in the middle of a sulk.
This is too harsh, but it’s in the less bravura pieces that Batiz is most distinguished. With Rosamunde, the crepuscular quality of Schubert’s music – the heavy wistfulness and infinite longing of Romantic sehnsucht, dripped through Goethe and Heine – aches; and how well Batiz grasps the fragile quality of Schubert’s idiom (its use of telling silences, its asides and subtle agitations), caught seemingly between ardent hope and the inevitability of failure. It is a performance to set well ahead of the field. The Marriage of Figaro too is as enjoyable as I’ve heard: lithe, electric energy almost free of freneticism.
There’s more to music than the fizzy bits. But if this is one of those discs which Classic FM plays before its ping-pong results, Favourite Overtures surmounts its purpose through craftsmanship. You can’t ask more than that.
NED ROREM
Day Music: Night Music
Day Music: LAREDO (violin), LAREDO (piano)
Night Music: CARLYSS (violin), SCHEIN (piano)
(Phoenix PHCD 123)
TT: 45.08 (ADD)
Full price
* *
Ned Rorem is a novelist besides a Pullitzer Prize-winning composer, although whether he does invisible mending as well is not divulged. At any rate, Day Music was a 1971 commission from Iowa State University, and Night Music followed on its heels.
Despite their ventures into atonalism, I was reminded of the obsessive circuitousness of Cesar Franck’s chamber music. The same flighty obliqueness and nagging weight are there; that same sense of stale, churning air. Yet here is a composer who knows exactly his resources, and puts them to telling use. In the desiccated stasis of Day Music’s third movement, Extreme Leisure, there is no doubting the sophisticated modulation and solid craftmanship he has invested in something akin to a languid, deliberate nervous tic. The inspiration, Rorem admits, is Le Gibet: and whilst it lacks Ravel’s haunted intensity of ritual, it too evokes a flat horizon of catatonic numbness and exhaustion: the staring lucidity that follows a journey of terminal waste, the eyes that cannot close.
Messiaen is an influence, with Bats sharing the rhythmic motifs and sonorities of Catalogue D’Oiseaux, shorn of opulence and transplanted to this pithy, powdery terrain: now something mutable, hermetic, and scarified. He matches Messiaen’s fondness for convulsive asides and flecks of soured, glancing light. If I say I was reminded too of Dali’s early landscapes, there’s a hint of Dali’s predisposition to kitsch: the trills and augmented fourths follow just so; for there is still an anonymity to this music, which has yet to outgrow its influences.
It works best where it returns to febrile self-corrosion and torpor. But scabrous mutilations make a sad substitute for a living range of idiom. Mosquitoes and Earthworms resorts to the virtuosic scrubbing which was fine in Sarasate’s day, yet the mention of insects and night-music reminds you of Twentieth Century music’s earlier pioneers – and beside them, Rorem’s passing effects are consistently more impressive than his sense of growth.
Another Ground, significantly, is an ostinato. If you might be deterred by Rorem’s limitations, consider too the combination of trickling ephemerality and throbbing pace that underlies his self-consumed world: difficult to see how this implosive music could develop, perhaps; but there is much about it that remains compulsive, both dizzy and sinister. I don’t know whether you’ve seen Odilon Redon’s lithograph of the spider: but if you can imagine it pinned out on a white tile under an arc-lamp, here it is.
Both performances are first-rate, but the recording is better for Day Music – which is also the more richly inventive of these two suites.
HAYDN
Symphonies Numbers 97 and 98
LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/SOLTI
(Decca 433 396-2)
TT: 49.47 (DDD)
Full price
* *
Solti spent his youth bursting musical fuses; and nowadays, even if his idiom has mellowed into something more pliant and introspective, he keeps that vital bounce which should make sense of music as festive as this. Writing of these symphonies, H C Robbins Landon notes both their boisterous command of form and endless innovation.
And the trouble is that, with marvellous collections available at mid-price, the competition is too tough for Solti to revert to bad old days. Listen to the opening Allegro of No 97 for a summary of what goes wrong: its Bar 76 subject reduced to so much pecking. With this latest recording, we have a case of more effort achieving less. There’s a brusqueness which misses Haydn’s essential ebullience and good humour; the sheer ease and fluency, the range of voices that others summon effortlessly, are nowhere to be found.
Simply a difference in taste? I think not. This movement works by an interplay of contrasts – not of form, but of tension, texture and phrasing – which give each strand its life and flavour. For Solti babies get thrown out in a frenzied displacement of bathwater. The spring and snap, the internal dialogue: both disappear.
Of course there are good things. The Adagio non troppo, nowadays prone to become a laborious wallow, is restored to its authentic pace. And the LSO shines in its tonal precision and finesse. But there’s little sense of surprise in the minor variation; the metronome simply ticks away. In Haydn, rests and pauses – however brief – have a vital function. They are the packaging within which different motifs and episodes are placed, the basis of Haydn’s rhetoric. For Solti they are invariably snatched. Throughout this symphony, there is a superficial moulding which confines itself to what goes on inside each phrase. There’s a fuzziness towards overall proportions, a loss of dynamic light and shade and therefore – however big the orchestra – a loss of scale.
The minuet and finale fare best, with much of the poise we might have heard from the beginning. But however plausible they are, the spirit is oddly uninfectious. There could be more point and suavity to the running strings; when Davis is silkily insinuating in his presence and charm, Sir Georg seems prosaic.
Number 98 works more perceptively because, I think, it sets Solti a more obvious challenge. The Allegro’s ambiguity and darker colours demand organic directness rather than a relapse into threadbare didactic mannerism: and in the opening he achieves operatic eloquence throughout its declamatory gestures. Perhaps Jochum managed what I can only call greater humanity, within music-making just as robust as this. But with Solti a sense of menace bubbles away beneath a surface that Jochum never hinted at. There’s a feeling of motion, too, that makes Szell’s venerable set seem gritty and four-square.
At a concert you’d say these were admirable performances. Yet where Solti is at his best, Davis and Dorati are better still. Elsewhere he can be graceless, styleless. The sheer sound of a modern big band lacks agility beyond a narrow range of tempi. It lumbers. Now, speed – informed by style – can generate verve; conductors from Toscanini to Norrington remind one of that. Not so here.
Culminations of a lifetime’s adventure, these last Haydn symphonies are quintessentially works of discovery. Not a moment need be routine.
SCHUMANN
Davidsbündlertänze, Op 6; Fantasiestücke, Op 12
FRITH (piano)
(Naxos 8.550493)
TT: 62:34 (DDD)
Bargain price
* (*)
Naxos have found a healthy place for themselves in the bargain basement of the market, with performances which are always good or better, and recording which often knocks the opposition for six.
The competition for these Schumann works is less cut-throat than you’d think. They have a frankness about them, which means that veteran pianists who weigh them down with meanings Schumann never intended, are heading straight for the elephants’ graveyard. But what a coupling they make: the Fantasiestücke all about art concealing art, the Davidsbündlertänze full of the meaty assertiveness that swept piano writing to the end of the century.
Not that anyone could accuse Mr Frith of overplaying. The Fantasiestücke get a nice, small-scale reading which tends to box itself in. The sincerity of feeling is never in doubt, yet the lack of inner tension or expectancy mean that only a slightly flaccid rubato is left to develop much expressive strength. Warum? is an old test of the techniques you use to create a seemingly artless sense of dissolving, misty possibilities, its last bars almost a curtain opening up on a noctilucent world of memory. Frith is on to something of the sort, but he hasn’t built the piece up enough for it do do more than falter.
You need to be adept at a kind of very superior afterthought, and the whole that sparks into more than the sum of its parts, to master this radiant profusion of ideas that seem to tumble over one other. Here, Ende vom Lied is really a little dull. There is a pallor to playing which has to find its way as carefully as this, a calculation that gets in the way of effect. Listen to Rubinstein (eventually to be reissued at mid-price) for the electric charge that needs to lie over these pieces: compounded of voluptuous innocence, darting intuition, and (as with so much early Schumann) the brightness of undimmed hope.
The Davidsbündlertänze suit Frith much more: bullishly straight in the fireworks and better still in moments of reverie, which have disarming simplicity and easy motion. Yet beyond them he gives you a flat, even surface. If Carnival was a mask, said Schumann, here was the face beneath; and here too is a game of capricious innovations that leaves Frith behind. Perhaps Ashkenazy is better at catching the enigmatic and complex vulnerability that lies behind its voracious, soaring reach and aching desires; and whilst his account of the Fantasiestûcke is not the most subtle thing he has done, it carries more weight than this Naxos issue.
A case of less reserve and greater reserves, you might say. But for the money, Mr Frith gets three cheers.
HAYDN
The Creation (sung in English)
UPSHAW, HUMPHREY, CHEEK, MURPHY, McGUIRE: Atlanta SO/SHAW
(Telarc CD-80298)
TT: 106:58 (DDD)
Full price
* *
I’ll say it: however much we British ignore the fact, The Creation is the pinnacle not only of Haydn’s work but of the musical Enlightenment. It aligns Handel’s zest with something Handel could never imagine, for Haydn reconciles the needs of theatre (often with explosive force) and his most personal expression, beginning with a gauzy veil of harmonies whose innovation seems to prefigure Wagner.
It is this blend of visionary concentration and assurance that Robert Shaw, at his best, summons so well. Listen to Chaos (inspired by Herschel’s theory of planetary formation from swirling gas): an awed intensity of imperceptible growth, the strings lifting as if from nothing: the clarinet given sinewy, flexuous weight: the orchestral chords broken, plangent, friable. It’s as if Simon Rattle’s version has both a violence and a superficial certitude that rides over the music’s real strength and negates the triumphant, famous burst into light. The Atlanta Chamber Chorus, a choir well into the First Division, makes the CBSO ensemble sound distinctly rough in Despairing cursing rage. And Rattle rushes his fences in The heavens are telling, ending in an indiscriminate scramble which seems tasteless beside the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra at its most elated.
If only the rest of Shaw’s recording were as good. The notes tell us of a labour of love; and it sounds like an old performance in both its attention to detail and lack of surprise. With Shaw you find summery affection, and authentic robustness, which can make Rattle sound impulsive and fitful. But it’s Rattle who brings across the the joy of the work; and there is a clarity, a lightness, an elasticity and range to his conception that won me over more often. If he hints as a performance caught too early in its development (so that it overstrains its form) it is testament to playing which make the glories of this piece surprise you as if for the first time. He has an appetite and sense of happy discovery which still allows his singers the space in which to give their best.
The main problem lies with some of Shaw’s soloists. Jon Humphrey as Uriel brings a sense of tepid routine to a crucial narrative role. At In splen-dour bright Shaw sets up a subterranean shudder of sound for him, only for a display of limpness which elsewhere struggles for extremes of pitch.
Not everyone is affected. John Cheek as Raphael has a mettle and richness which demands more bite from the orchestra during Haydn’s syncopated jokes about the ponderous beasts. Whilst both sopranos have an occasional tendency to squawk, Dawn Upshaw as Gabriel brings sleek pointing to her aria, Now robed in cool refreshing green: lusciousness which outshines even Rattle’s Arleen Auger, although Auger is technically assured. Ms Upshaw was a welcome find for me, but Philip Langridge as Rattle’s Uriel is a winner.
If you prefer Haydn on period instruments, go for Hogwood. Those won over by Rattle will find it po-faced; but if you suspect the CBSO version might be as much about its conductor as the composer, Hogwood is a good alternative. Shaw too is high on a less-than-ideal list, but he offers gentility rather than enlightenment: a hint of monochrome which, however fine its parts, doesn’t flare into life quite as often as it ought.
SCHUBERT: Fantasia in F minor for piano duet, D940
Murray Perahia, Radu Lupu (piano) CBS MK 39511
The Penguin Guide tells us of “each of these highly individual artists challenging the other.” Yet I think that misses the point, in a performance which marks such a symbiotic fusion of thinking as we find here. Having manfully cast my sleeve-notes out of reach, I soon gave up guessing which half of the mirror image was which.
Of course, given the fruitful stratagem of the partnership, you can’t resist speculating on the origin of various ideas as Perahia’s spontaneity, glittering and crystalline, is given new depth by Lupu’s dark-toned introspection. Perahia’s recent version of the Schubert Impromptus revealed his remarkable imagination in wrongfooting the listener’s expectations to reveal new vistas of possibility; and now Lupu seems no less innovative in turning aside the wrath of rival versions (this is striking in the Fantasia) with answers based on the urge to assess each phrase afresh.
Mozart’s chromaticism, and his avoidance of diatonic rhetoric, allows an infinite ambiguity: a buoyant and airy suspension, which opens new worlds of fluid and subtly illimitable expressive potential. It doesn’t do to be accosted with a trowel; and here the Authentic movement is quietly knocked for six by the modern instrument’s capacity for fine nuance – at least, when pressed to provide the light and muted tonal colourings of a performance as fresh as it is deftly elegant. It is to Perahia, I suspect, that we owe the frisky flick-in-the tail in the Allegro con spirito’s upward scales; and to Lupu the hushed diffidence of its second subject. A finesse in matters of contrast sets each off. The stances merge in the descending arabesques, deadpan and pendent, of the Andante’s final bars. Alfred Brendel noted that humour is something we associate with metrical composers, such as Beethoven and Haydn. That’s true; but with Mozart the mastery and transcendence of classical artifice allows this pointed and superior refinement of gesture, this insouciant detachment. So much is custom with the best Mozart violinists (Arthur Grumiaux, perhaps, or Mayumi Fujikawa), but on the piano you won’t hear it better done than here. The soft chimes of the Andante proceed with a sort of laconic and enraptured poise, like a musical clock chipped out of melting sugar; the finale, succinct and marvellously sprung, has its fun on a plane that needs no recourse to the lumbering slapstick of later composers’ breaking china. Here the china stays luminously intact.
The Schubert shows this same fluidity of line. Lupu takes the primo part, and the piece itself makes a perfect foil. Yet how easily the playing adapts: tapered cadences creating what is now a melting wistfulness, the sparse interjections above the line clearly from the same source as the clipped phrases in the Mozart finale. Both pianists, of course, are adept at skating the thin ice between calculation and mannerism; but if in this Fantasia the ice leaves little space for fresh discovery or happy accidents, the playing is redeemed by its searching and scrupulous concentration. (I liked the interplays between episodes of quiet stillness and a gradual easing or quickening of tempo – each paving the way for the other.)
And I think that, in a piece which is generally reduced to a leaden polyphonic clutter of tub-thumping and counted time, this lightening clarity has to give us the best recording we have. Its last climax tells all the more by growing from an ominous understatement, the energy of final attack given grim impetus by acceleration and jabbing staccato scales. All this is underpinned by sterling imagination for variations of texture, used to sharpen or soften the impact of what other pianists muddle through as a lurching series of disparate episodes. Not so here. Here cohesion comes through compelling discretion, so responsive is this playing of half-shades: half-shades in pedalwork (the pedalling is a model of its kind) and in its subtle agitations of dampened accents. The sheer care with detail shows in its mastery of what I can only call the telling silence, timed just right. It shows in the shrewd sense of unfolding dramatic structure. In all very superior performances, you will find a level of higher and sophisticated diction: and so it is with Lupu and Perahia.
It may be that any creative impulse involves the clear and free and uncluttered sight that children have. But artistic invention draws on the discernment, the awareness of fresh viewpoints and relationships, that only experience can make into useable space. To align the two involves a reflexive dialogue of possibilities that vindicates itself: a gathering of resources which then find their own logic and language. This is what real imagination means.
The recording, warm and clear, is a Maltings natural: the audience, apart from discreet sputtering in the Schubert, seems to have been suitably throttled. I was tickled pink by this disc. No wonder it won its award.
SHOSTAKOVICH: TWENTY FOUR PRELUDES AND FUGUES, OPUS 87
Tatiana Nikoleyeva, piano (Hyperion CDA66441/3)
Conventional Western wisdom wrote off the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues as a mere Bach pastiche. How wrong their detractors were. Technically Opus 87 is a tour de force (we tend to forget Shostakovich’s academic brilliance, the model student of the Petrograd Conservatoire); yet one’s overwhelmed impression is of a human document: the life-encompassing, life-affirming compassion of a composer reaching the peak of his intellectual strength. Gone are the broad, lumpenproletariat parodies and jokes. In their place, a language as massive as Brahms and Busoni. Or it can be as sparing as late Beethoven, pared of superfluity to its essential dialectic and forward movement; and the D flat major Fugue, like the Diabelli Variations, reveals humour advanced to a new level, a fused totality of expression. Elsewhere the harmonic sophistication rivals late Debussy at his most refined. There might be some memory of sadness, fired up to this strange noctilucent intensity, as in Janácek; or a truly Twentieth Century incarnation of Baroque fragility and purity of tone: by turns wistful, wry, plaintive, confessional. Written whilst Bernstein and Copland were strutting out their tawdry syncopations, here is music that surmounts emotion, although it leaves an abiding sense of melancholy. Just as the genesis of Schubert’s great quartet movements can be found in his songs and German Dances, so here is a microcosm of Shostakovich’s world: the Tenth Symphony’s transfiguration into light, the penumbral shivers of the last chamber music.
The performance is as good as you are ever likely to hear. Tatiana Nikoleyeva was the dedicatee of this mountainous yet essentially private work (Shostakovich wrote it in 1951, after hearing her win a Leipzig piano competition) and she has mastered entirely its diverse ranges of time and scale. This is playing which never flags and never trivialises: and if it is plain in the very best sense, there is – behind its strict good faith to the score that Nikoleyeva herself helped to create – musicianship of endless imagination. You hear it at work throughout long stretches of what she depicts as a unity of proportioned thought: a concentration too deep to accommodate ostentation or what critics like to call poetry, which draws one in long after showmanship or party-tricks would have palled. The years have let her focus beyond the point where a notion as trite or flighty as “inspiration” can be said to apply. The fierce oratory of the G sharp minor Fugue shrinks so naturally to an undertone: the tragic drama of the E flat minor Prelude comes from within, not by imposition.
Where other interpreters leave the text intractable, this power of analysis becomes most evident. The F sharp minor Fugue, a skeletal construction whose every phrase relapses into the interval of a terse second, is now given an arch-structure of overlapping strands, striking in their variegation of tonal shading. Eminent in her fluent intensity, Nikoleyeva seems to have inexhaustible resources when it comes to inflecting voices: those volatile changes of nuance and pulse and resonance which give cadences their power of enchantment, and through which the most intimate and immense musical circumstances are aligned. Both extremes are memorable: the appetite behind her fortissimos, the lightness and clear colour of the passagework. And how fresh the judgement has stayed – essentially so, in music which, like Janácek’s, flows as naturally as speech.
I was about to say that this might almost be a composer thinking; but I would have been wrong. It is the composer thinking.
There has to be something behind that predatory energy and precision, with which she dances over mountains of notes. Perhaps it’s due to the toy violin upon which – with hands as small as a doll’s, and the need to manoeuvre in as little space – she played and made 20,000 jaws drop at the Hollywood Bowl.
That was a couple of years ago. Now she appears in a fuschia-pink party dress and fluffy slippers. But then you remember how Solomon, Britain’s great musician, was let loose on stage with a tricycle. Like him, Sarah Chang (fresh from her thirteenth birthday and the best thing to happen to her instrument in fifty years) seems headed for a lifetime of progressively greater achievement.
Today her voice is almost inaudible, and she’s been wheeled into the sunlight for a flying tour of photocalls. Gruelling enough for an adult, to smile at endless grey men with motordrives (they’re beginning to hover downstairs); and when I ask her what she thinks of the London tube, she’s never heard of it. If it’s Wednesday, this must be Europe. An artist’s life is supposed to be a serene levitation, of being wafted from place to place. In truth, it shares the dignity of being ejected from a shopping trolley.
Already a trooper, she pulls herself together and surmounts it all with spontaneous charm. Her laughter is natural, and part of a survival-sense which needs to be wise beyond its years in a girl who is happiest with her school-friends, yet who has to fax homework from an airliner. The Barbie dolls were packed away last year, but she plays a mean game of Nintendo: “I started three years ago so I’m quite an expert – two or three hours a day.” She winces at the expense. Her conductors include Levine, Sawallisch and Kurt Masur; her tours take her from Symphony Hall in Chicago to the NHK Orchestra in Japan. She is Newcomer of the Year in the International Classical Music awards, and Yehudi Menuhin called her “the most wonderful, perfect, ideal violinist that I have ever heard.”
So who was behind the incident with the mustard? “Well, slumber parties are sleepovers. My friends and I get together at night and watch movies. The person who goes to sleep first gets mustard or ketchup over their toes because the whole point is not to doze off and….they get their face painted too.”
Her manager says, “Anyone who thinks a prodigy is a hot-house iris has never met Sarah.”
Still, her story is typical: a few happy accidents before the unshakeable momentum of unleashed talent, under the tutelage of musical parents. Genetics? Possibly. Her brother Michael, having been prevailed upon not to experiment with the effect of a tumble-dryer on metronomes, tackles the piano. Sarah cannot remember a time when she couldn’t play. “My family tells me that when I was two I used to watch Tom and Jerry and then rush to the piano to tap out the tunes. But my father’s a violinist.” Dr Min Soo Chang was Principal with the National Symphony Orchestra of Korea, having himself discovered a fiddle at a cousin’s house at the age of four. Sarah continues, “Before I was three I was trying to play his violin, but it’s very expensive and he didn’t want me breaking it. So he got me my own: something to play with, one thirty-second size. First it was just a hobby.”
Audiences rated it differently. The Leader of the local orchestra (it happened to be the Philadelphia) heard her play and she gave her first public performance with them, aged five. Three years later she arrived in New York with Paganini’s First Concerto, that confection of manic pirouettes and curlicues and bravura runs, which with other hands sound like stratospherically drilled teeth, yet in which she found dazzling fire and zest. “I met Zubin Mehta forty-eight hours before and auditioned. He called me in next day, so we gave the concert without any rehearsal. It went very well.”
Hearing of her Carnegie Hall debut in October 1995, I mention the thing that terrorised Rubinstein and Horowitz: the longest walk in the world across its podium. She responds, “In New York I felt, really, immense excitement. I’ve never had stage-fright and that’s good. It’s because I enjoy myself. You know, it’s fun seeing 3,000 people and in some festivals seven times that – it’s great. My first time at Hollywood?” Her voice trails off dreamily, as it often does. “I stood on stage and I was in awe. I’d never seen so many faces, and my fingers worked.”
For many, life is a process of learning how to fail. That for Sarah it has meant nothing but success reveals both the advocacy and protection of Dorothy DeLay, her mentor at the Juilliard school since Sarah was six. “My only and my favourite teacher. I owe her everything.”
The protection, reading between lines, extends to some viperish cliques and claques. “The Juilliard mothers are amazingly aggressive” Sarah is said to have said. “My friends there are so edgy and catty towards each other.” Yet the relationship between two women, sixty-four years apart, is deeper than that. It extended to a search across the world for an adequate instrument. “I love my quarter-size still” says Sarah. “It meant my debut. But in the end Ms DeLay found the three-quarter size in her attic, where it had been lying for for 45 years.” Now there’s a queue. “Offers from Chicago, New York, London, everywhere. People have been very kind to me. At one point in our house we had five del Gesus and the amount of money that adds up to is mind-boggling, scary. I’ve kept them all, except the ones we needed to return, and they have a room of their own. Violins are like a friend you have and you can’t bear to part. But more special than a friend, because you spend so much time with them, and it’s thanks to them that music happens.”
Her recording a couple of months ago of Tchaikovsky’s concerto was her first on full-size (“The Guaneri’s worth millions. I can’t say more.”) You’d think she had played the piece for a lifetime. Yet her appetite and poise, in music-making and living alike, reveal nothing of reclusive tunnel-vision. A shopaholic, she admits it; and after two hours’ homework she’s out with her friends from Junior High. “Volleyball, soccer and roller-blading: more dangerous than a rollerskate, a blade with wheels, and more fun.” The sponsors descended after she announced her love of skating on the Tonight Show, and an offer of free access at Los Angeles’ biggest rink is one she has accepted.
Yet one fears for any prodigy coming of age. I remembered Laurie Lee’s words about a toddler caught in tiger-stripes of sunshine through long grass: the vibrant, iridescent world of children, that direct and painful intimacy which for adults is only a faded cipher. For us, arts themselves are a way of rekindling lost levels of feeling; and DeLay knows from past experience the death of what she calls “the cauldron of emotions” that sets in at puberty, the straitjacket of numbed routines. Sarah’s first television appearance was as a gymnast, but sport is forbidden territory as her hands become more valuable. “The violin is a very good life, but it can’t be everything” she says. “I value most my friends and the chance to be with them. Does anybody get enough social life? But there are the parties I can’t join, and I have a tutor to catch up with everyone – just for paperwork. The people at Juilliard who go to special school for two hours and then practise, practise: it’s not good, not healthy.”
Recreation seems likelier to be in the role of Little Miss, performing centre-stage for the grown-ups. “The dinner-parties I’m required to go to. They can be fun. I meet very interesting people and in that sense I’m luckier than my friends because I get two worlds.” But she is least likely to escape when she can find someone her own age. She yearns to try a motorbike – the bigger the better – “but Mom and Dad are really not for that.”
“I’d just like to keep Father going” says her manager, with a smile. You wonder how he coexists with Sarah’s own convictions: meeting Placido Domingo in Brazil at Concert for the Planet Earth, or her appearance for Save the Children in April 1994. Arrangements have a glow of paternal benevolence about them; yet the imminent balance of studies and boyfriends, the existing choice of concert-wear, are very much in parental hands.
Where she can follow her own lights is in music-making. “If you don’t want to practise, there’s no point. The last two years I’ve had important dates coming up. I feel responsible and if anybody pushes myself, it’s me.” It is the intelligence that underlies both her absorption and wealth of resources that makes her a complete musician: her spectacular command of colour and theatrical effect, whether in the sinuous ardour she brought to the Carmen Fantasy, or the pristine artlessness of her Tchaikovsky. Critics have noted her supple changes of mood, but that’s the easy bit. Aligned to this capacity to seize each moment is the sophisticated diction and finish of it all, an almost aristocratic poise which reminds you of Oscar Shumsky. Technical refinement is not the end here, only the beginning; and whilst the notes fly past like bullets when they need to, her maturity lies in the intensity she can bring to absolute repose as much as the cohesion and sense of discovery she finds in everything she does. In a word: she lets it breathe.
I noted her fondness for Elgar, its world of antimacassars and stuffed birds in bottles so different from today. Does she consciously adapt? “Music has its own style. It comes naturally; that’s the best way. Sometimes I’m not sure when I’m starting afresh and then I listen to records. Milstein and Heifetz opened my eyes more than anyone: pure and simple, the way music should be. They’re my role-models. Some artists these days, they don’t use music to get popular. They use punk or whatever, and being a musician isn’t really about that. Elgar has to come from inside. It’s so individual, and you can express your whole personality.”
I remark upon the stream of CD’s from young virtuosos, each of whose machine-guns fires twice as fast as the one before. Where her own richness of vision comes from is perhaps a mystery, if not from the instinct of one for whom music is truly the first language. “Anybody can become technically perfect, if they work hard. But being musical? That’s going to be the problem of the next ten years, because you can never learn too much. Miss DeLay shows me so many things but she’s always told me that, when you go on stage, play as your heart tells you.”
What about the risk of burning out? What happens when, aged forty, she’s played the concertos, won all the awards? “Well, I might find time to take the day off.”
And what is it like to be labelled a genius? The question was one rumoured to draw a steely assurance of her faith in her own abilities. Of course, it does nothing of the sort. “I don’t think I am. Everybody has a gift but I worked at the violin. Even at the top you can always develop: you play with different orchestras, different conductors, and you learn from them all. Maybe in twenty years that won’t be enough but for now, I’m happy.”
I enclose this clip out of nostalgia of the happiest kind. For the INDEPENDENT – and my first interview with an artist. Apparently this was the piece that introduced Sarah to Britain.
Again, just a few “representative samples” for (I hope) your delectation and delight. Click each one to read and enlarge.
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Schumann, a middle-class boy from the provinces, occupies one of the key positions in German music. The first Romantic with a deep knowledge of literature and philosophy, he saw it as his mission to fuse the arts, including traditional and modern composition. As a youth he wrote letters (“unsent”, as he admitted) to Schubert: he died a failure in his own eyes, yet he paved the way for a new generation of composers and established the style piano-writing would follow until the end of the 19th Century.
He was born in Zwickau, Saxony, in 1810. His father, a bookseller and novelist, died in 1826 whereupon Robert’s sister committed suicide, an event from which he never recovered. He enrolled in Leipzig University to study law, enjoyed the good life and the customary Grand Tour, and was told by his Professor that he had no talent whatever.
But he continued with his musical studies under Friedrich Wieck, a notable teacher in whose house he took lodgings. There he met Wieck’s daughter Clara, a nine year-old who was already showing signs of extraordinary ability as a pianist. Robert’s own hopes of becoming a virtuoso were soon dispelled by the crippling of his left hand – ostensibly the result of a machine designed to strengthen his fourth finger, but more likely due to poisoning by the mercury Schumann took when he realized he had a sexual disease (“My whole house is like a chemist’s shop” he told his mother). Fortunately he had already begun to show talent as a composer, and his knowledge of the piano liberated a richly imaginative idiom.
His Opus 1 Variations take as their motto the surname of Meta Abegg, an early love. He would use such codes to invent thematic fragments, which Schumann developed by harmonic progression; and this in turn affects the melodic line – a dialogue through evanescent changes of spirit and tonal modulation, which he felt reflected the ambivalence of his own nature. Despite his awe at classical forms, Schumann was quick to break away from them, creating instead music which reads like the pages of a diary: fragmented, condensed, profuse in musical invention: delicate portraits of a state of mind, based on literary allusion. His piano writing is entirely individual, using the sustaining pedal and mid-range of the instrument to make sound of sensuous brilliance. There’s also his quest to find new technical procedures (“a labour of Hercules”), which manifests itself in the Etudes Symphoniques. But then, almost all the piano music of the 1830’s is masterly: beginning with Papillons (1832), written as a suite of 12 waltzes inspired by Jean-Paul’s novel Die Flegejahre, ‘Years of indiscretion’. Carnaval followed in 1835, and brings to life the characters of Schumann’s secret world: Pierrot, Harlequin, Chopin and Paganini; alongside incarnations of Robert’s own baffling varieties and swings of mood.
From Die Flegeljahre he knew two personae, Walt and Vult, which personified human introversion and extroversion, those two facets which held man’s nature in balance. From these Schumann christened his own creative demons, Florestan and Eusebius, whose names recur in his work “in order to express contrasting points of view about art” as the composer explained, since he perceived music as having the theatrical cut-and-thrust of Hegelian dialectic. Then the were the Davidsbund, the band of David, a fictitious band of musicians at war against artistic philistines. The Davidsbund’s enigmatic signatures peopled the pages of Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, an iconoclastic musical journal of which Schumann was made editor.
If reading Heine and Hoffmann exacerbated Schumann’s tendency to melancholy, there was a more pressing reason for despair. His attempts to marry Clara, with whom he was now in love, were blocked by Wieck. There were reasons: Clara’s blossoming career (unquestionably sacrificed in later years by the hopeless demands of life with Schumann): the frivolities of a young man who showed little sign of being able to establish a serious musical vocation. In 1840 Schumann won legal action to overturn Wieck’s veto and the couple were married one day before Clara’s 21st birthday.
1840 was Schumann’s year of song, in which he composed two great cycles: Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und -leben. Both relate to his feelings for Clara, yet the sheer quality of their piano preludes and postludes adds a new dimension to the possibilities of lied. There was also the First Symphony. In 1842 Schumann’s study of Haydn inspired chamber music, including a masterly Piano Quinet: in 1843 Mendelssohn offered him piano professorship at the new Leipzig Conservatory. But Schumann’s lifelong manic-depression was now taking the form of increasing bleakness of vision and creative sterility, which manifested itself through serious breakdowns. He resigned and moved to Dresden but Clara’s tours, triumphs for herself as a concert-artist, only emphasized how widespread indifference to her husband’s music had become. He lacked the training to dash off musical money-spinners: operas, festival cantatas, frothy salon-pieces à la Spohr. His spell as conductor in Leipzig, beginning 1850, ended in recriminations and disaster. In 1854 he attempted suicide by throwing himself in the Rhine and he was committed to a private asylum near Bonn. There he died in July 1856 with the final ravages of tertiary syphilis, having starved himself through depression.
“The essence of romanticism” said Walter Pater, “is the blending of strangeness with the beautiful.” The young Clara knew Schumann as a “moonstruck maker of charades” and as he wrote to her, “I am affected by everything extraordinary that goes on in the world and think it over in my own way…then I long to express my feelings and find an outlet for them in my music: a poem, something infinitely more spiritual, the result of poetical consciousness.” In this way his music came to be the confessional for his inner life, a haven of mystical suggestibility, of all things unattainable and undefinable.
Wrong to ignore Schumann’s chamber music: wrong too to dismiss his symphonies. But it is the early piano works which have this enigmatic elusiveness, an aching incandescence which cannot be taken for either charm or rhetoric, although the illusions of those things are amongst many ciphers and traces that this most cryptic of composers leaves for his unsuspecting listeners. The truth, perhaps, involves something which transcends passion or nostalgia, compounded instead of vulnerability and the brightness of undimmed hope.
The quality of Schumann’s music – this transparent candour – does seem best served by recordings which reflect the most deeply individual commitment. Too many of those are now unavailable. Rubinstein’s 1960’s interpretations of Carnaval and the Fantasiestücke are promised re-release sometime at medium-price by BMG; no such luck, probably, for Murray Perahia’s 1970’s versions of Papillons and the Etudes Symphoniques (both CD 76635), which come only in an 11-disc set.
We have Horowitz’s vintage accounts from the Sixties in refurbished sound, although as one large boxed set. Several volumes are singled out for praise here, and others include performances of the Arabeske, Blumenstück, Toccata and Schumann’s self-portrait, Kreisleriana, which are surely as good as you will ever hear.
Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 54
“So eminently beautiful from beginning to end” said Tovey. “So free, spacious and balanced in form, and so rich in ideas.” In 1841 Schumann composed one of half-a-dozen Konzertstücke: a single-movement, self-contained piece for piano and orchestra “something between a symphony, a concerto and a large sonata.” Rejected by the publishers, he decided to transform it into a full-length concerto but it was not until 1845 that he completed its intermezzo and finale. Liszt called it “a concerto without piano” and, anticipating its rejection, Schumann had declared he was unable to write a display piece. No matter. Supremely eloquent, the A minor at last triumphed as a vehicle for intimate dialogue and lyricism. Its antecedents are Beethoven’s concertos, particularly his Fourth. The motifs for both added movements are borrowed from the woodwinds’ opening theme.
Bishop-Kovacevich, BBC Symphony Orchestra; Davis. Philips 412923-2 with Grieg Piano Concerto (Price code 3)
Perahia, Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks; Davis. Sony SK 44 899 with Grieg Piano Concerto (Price code 3)
Two performances which stand out for their clarity of thinking, and each in its own way gets to the heart of the music. Perahia brings his sense of remembered and magical impulsiveness, and with his bright tone creates what you might call a sharp, crystalline surface. Kovacevich (less extrovert, less tangible, but with no less flair) is a version which is more about musical digging; and – in a concerto which often is made to fall apart – he gels with absolute conviction. With Kovacevich the music is about rapport, a mirrored and developing quality of line between soloist and orchestra that comes as naturally as breathing. The cadenza has a sense of revelation, fluidity of pulse that builds naturally from introspection without ever substituting force for the perception of how each phrase must work. For Perahia Davis’s phrasing has become edgy, to echo the soloist’s surging forward movement and bigger personality. Yet Perahia keeps it all in place by sudden and quixotic understatements, his power to take you by surprise with a winning aside. A sense of constant qualification, this; of building effects and redefining them: a searching intelligence which informs bubbly spontaneity. In the end Kovacevich has acuity of a deeper kind – responsiveness and easy grace that have not been bettered. Yet Perahia’s wit, his range and sense of adventure, are a delight. Sony’s recording too is 17 years newer and better.
Carnaval, Opus 9
Never did spontaneity, invention and superlative instrumental technique coexist more vividly for Schumann than here. Written in September 1834, Carnaval is a series of tableaux, a masked ball in which one character after another takes centre-stage.
It might also be seen as a set of quasi-variations, where Schumann proclaims his love for Ernestine von Fricken. The letters ASCH, which spell his own name in German musical notation (E flat, C, A flat and B) as well as Ernestine’s birthplace, litter the score – not only in the enigmatic Sphinx, that fabled setter of riddles. No, they generate too the themes for Promenade, Arlequin, Florestan, Chiarina, Estrella, Reconnaisance and Lettres Dansantes. So Florestan and Eusebius turn up as well; and in the inevitable March of the Davidsbündler they put the Philistines triumphantly to flight.
Cortot (GEMM CD 9931: price-code 3)
If Davidsbündlerstänze was the face beneath, said the composer, Carnaval was the mask. Nobody has understood its theatrical exuberance better than Cortot, and his 1928 performance sweeps away our current veneer of mawkish primness. This is Schumann grabbed by the throat, to remind you of Clara’s observation that her husband’s music contained no passagework. Very much historical sound, and the excerpts from Kreisleriana, Fantasiestücke and Davidsbündlerstänze themselves are all tantalisingly incomplete. An invaluable postcript – more, in this main piece – to Schumann interpretation almost 70 years later.
An excellent deal from DG’s Resonance series (431 167-2), where Daniel Barenboim plays not only Carnaval but a sensitive Kinderszenen and the sadly under-rated Faschingsschwank aus Wien. The pianist’s habitual and airless didacticism is reduced to only a hint here, for there are always fresh insights alongside the essential momentum. Not the subtlest presentation, nor the most charming; but a big personality at work and at modest price a perceptive introduction to this composer.
If you’re bargain-hunting Carnaval on a higher budget, Kempff on his 4-disc Schumann survey (DG 435 045-2: medium price) finds, alongside hints of agreeable idiosyncracy, an extra dimension of space and freedom.
Kinderszenen, Opus 15
Written in February 1838, Scenes from Childhood were suggested by Clara’s comment that Schumann sometimes seemed to her like a child. These tiny and exquisite genre pieces are very much the recollection of an adult, yet one whose rapport with childhood – the capacity of an innocent to discover both delight and injury – was painfully acute. Amongst them are Schumann’s evocations of emotions in their purest state (and this had a mystical significance to him) to create by juxtaposition a framework of unity, variety and balance. The set opens with “Of Strange Lands and People” (the storyteller’s “once upon a time”) and only at the end does an adult step forward: “The Poet Speaks.” But titles suggested themselves after the music was written, and it is the music’s sense of trancelike inevitability and levitation that gives its enchantment: the floating syncopations of “Almost Too Serious”, perhaps; the phrase with which “Entreating Child” both opens and closes (speaking technically, on a dominant seventh) so that the piece ends as it began, and hangs quizzically in space. A child’s conception of play, grandeur, fright, happiness and peace.
Horowitz (Sony Collected Edition – not available separately)
If the quality of any musician lies in the quality of choices he makes, then Horowitz’s insight and resource in this repertoire is without equals. The early Sixties caught his interpretation at its freshest. “An easy elegance” Rubinstein remembered of him, “a magic which defied description.” But one can try. Apparent simplicity was part of the formula, Horowitz knew that; but with it a quality of revelation, of expectations transformed through his sense of the piano as a singing voice. Kinderszenen is artless music, and artlessness is where naïvety and experience coincide. To conjure it up you need to be a master not of musical argument, but of fleeting effects to shine in their liquidity and colour. This Horowitz brings; but also a higher cohesion, and with it a luminous presence of remembrance.
Horszowski too, in a memorable three-disc recital (Elektra Nonesuch 7559-7961-2) offers a intensely personal account, but Horowitz’s clean technique gave him an edge. On a single disc, Martha Argerich (DG 410 653-2, with a distonguished Kreisleriana) is straightforward yet deeply astute. For those on a tight budget, Idil Biret’s childhood anthology (Naxos 8.550885) will do well enough.
Etudes Symphoniques, Opus 13
The dogged gestation of these studies, between 1834 and 1852, befits one of the cornerstones of Romantic piano literature. They began life simply, as variations on a theme written by Ernestine’s father the Baron von Fricken. Florestan and Eusebius, conspicuous in early drafts, soon take backstage to the “symphonic” possibilities of the instrument for blending, contrasting, superimposing timbres. Bold technical experiment is there, that exuberant discovery of what the piano alone could do: clarifying dense planes of polyphony, presenting themes against a background of tonal reverberation in a way that anticipates Debussy, controlling a development of ideas in which imaginative freedom and musical logic fuse into one. But there is something less obvious about the fifth of the posthumous etudes here. Worthy of the Impressionists, it commemorates the special point in Schumann’s researches at which he came to recognise what Piero Rattalino calls “an almost elemental vibration of the keyboard at the threshold between sound and silence.”
Sviatoslav Richter (piano) Olympia OCD 339 (price code 3)
For Richter the opening is grave and spacious, the variations aligning private meditation with a burning urgency whose momentum never flags, and which catches the leanness and ardour of Schumann in his prime. Richter as no-one else thinks through the dialectic, the interludes and organic structure of this music in playing of orchestral richness and power. A performance which rethinks as it moves and reminds us of the music’s infinite capacity to be discovered afresh.
This is Richter in his grandest manner. For those who resist such driving imperative force, Pollini has a performance of similar analytic rigour within a less imposing personal idiom. Pollini’s range of tone is second to none, and because of a lack of obtrusive rhetoric, here far more than in most interpretations is a sense of dance-like inevitability. He couples it with a touching account of that little miracle of considered innocence, the Arabeske (DG 410 916-2).
Phantasiestücke, Opus 12
The Phantasiestücke were composed between May and July 1837, shortly after Clara had returned all Schumann’s letters. And Opus 12 is dedicated to a Scottish pianist, Roberta Laidlow.
Schumann recognized the fragility of inspiration, which he felt sprang from hidden depths to vanish as consciousness was reached. The titles of the Phantasiestücke evoke what to Romantics was a higher reality: the world of night, twilight and dreams. Never are these chimerical mood-pictures more poetic, or more sensitively treated. Warum (“why?”) is the subject of momentary dialogue rather than formal development: Des Abends, however serene its surface, moves into unexpected keys to create a sense of revelation within absolute stasis. Grillen and Auschwung (“Soaring”) spin passing fancies into miniature sonata-rondos.
“The Last Recital for Israel” Rubinstein (piano) RCA 09026 61160 2 (with Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy: price code 3)
The celebrated octogenarian was recorded live. His command of the ebb and flow of musical phrases was as alluring – the refinement of diction and sonority as sophisticated – as ever: his capacity to charge the emotional atmosphere on a single note seemed as striking as it always had been. A noisy audience you can just about tolerate; slips of finger too, given playing of such finesse as this. Less acceptable is the wall of hiss and analogue tape distortion at climaxes. But if this is a special event to savour more in its video form than on disc, it reveals playing which takes for granted more musicianship than many of the names littering today’s catalogue prosaically in this repertoire, ever knew. A fair enough stopgap pending Rubinstein’s studio version of the decade before, or a single-disc issue from Perahia.
Fantasia in C, Opus 17
In 1838 Schumann wrote to Clara: “I have just finished a fantasy in three movements that I sketched in all but the detail in June 1836. The first movement is, I think, the most passionate thing I have ever composed – a deep lament for you.” Possibly so (again, there are internal codes) but the work’s origins lie in an attempt to raise funds for a monument to Beethoven. Schumann thought he could contribute best with a commemorative sonata, and the original titles of its movements are ‘Ruins’, ‘Triumphal Arch’ and ‘Wreath of Stars’. The Fantasia is the most successful of Schumann’s music in this form; it has Beethovenian drive and verve. But a quotation from An die ferne Geliebte links Schumann to Clara as well; and if the Fantasia’s march (“it makes me hot and cold all over” Clara wrote) is worthy of Beethoven’s Opus 101 piano sonata, its finale (as ardent and as tender as anything Schumann ever wrote) seemed to Adorno to “open upon an undefined vastness.” Magnificent piano writing shows Schumann at his most advanced: chromaticism, cross-rhythms, syncopation, arpeggiation, counter-melodic chords – all helping to envelope supreme lucidity in what Gerald Abraham called “a rich, diffused, Romantic light.” The composer himself quotes Schiller: “Through all sounds in the coloured earthly dream resounds a quiet sound drawn for him, who secretly listens.”
Horowitz Collected Edition Vol I (Sony Classics S2K 53457)
Pollini (DG 423 134-2, with Schumann: Opus 11 Sonata. Price code 3)
Horowitz’s recording is a document of one of the major concerts of the 1960’s, his return to the platform after years of fearful introspection. Forget the odd fluffs of finger and what opens up is a testimony to human courage as much as towering musicianship, yet one for which no allowance has to be made. The first movement reveals mercuriality harnessed to a massive and dynamic musical intelligence, with the left hand (a mannerism in later years) providing surging motive force. The finale demonstrates the discretion and resonance he brought to articulation, creating a weightless shimmer of sound, a melting freedom and fluidity of pulse. This was Horowitz at his best: heard over long melodic lines, where his sense of movement was inimitable, and even at a whisper – especially at a whisper – his special composure; the intimacy and space and seemingly enraptured concentration that almost flawless technical reserves make possible.
But there is a major account which is available on a single issue. With 1973 sound, with the benefits of studio takes, Pollini’s judgment is impeccable; and a performance of real distinction and freshness is coupled with our recommendation for the First Sonata. An irresistible disc, this; even if amongst digital recordings, Murray Perahia’s (Sony MK 42124, with Schubert Wanderer Fantasy) shows the capacity to think afresh, to mould cadences, which has consistently marked him out as one of the finest pianists of his generation. There is, it seems, a deliberate attempt to broaden his range of tone, heard after which Pollini might more simply be felt to get to the point.
Piano Sonatas
The first of three sonatas was written between 1832-5. Schumann struggled with its organisation yet its slow and best movement, all changes of key, catches something of his delight in the strangeness of everyday experience. The Second Sonata, from between 1832 and 1838, is more assured in its process of thematic transformation: remoulding its motifs through recitatives, conflicts, glittering figurations. A handful, no doubt; but also one of the masterly achievements of romantic pianism. ‘Possession’ is a word that comes to mind, as if what Chopin called the gossip of the Funeral March Sonata could be whipped into a frenzy and silenced by strange, numinous poise.
No 1 in F sharp minor, Opus 11
Pollini (DG 423 134-2: with Schumann Fantasie. Price code 3)
With a stream of fugitive ideas rather than formal development, this is Schumann at his most Romantic and his hardest to bring across. Pollini’s command of articulation and voicing means that, in playing whose momentum never flags, he is able to combine impetuousness with an almost Mendessohnian fleetness of touch. The aphoristic whispers of the Aria are captured hauntingly but so too, in gaining a proper proportion and context for each of so many effects, this is playing unlikely to be surpassed.
No 2 in G minor, Opus 22
Argerich DG Galleria 437 252-2 with Liszt Sonata in B minor, Brahms Opus 79 Rhapsodies (medium price)
Superlative pianism from Martha Argerich. So fearless is her virtuosity that whole passages of notes, whilst retaining perfect transparence, seem to dissolve into colour. There’s a sense of improvisation about this, so that the Andantino is sketched so diaphanously it might be a moving veil, yet supremely composed. One of too few discs from a very special artist.
Much better recording for Murray Perahia (Sony MK 44569, with Schubert’s D959 Sonata), who presents the sonata as something heavier. Proto-Brahms, you might say: some very tender episodes, but after Argerich he does seem to plod.
Papillons, Opus 2
Schumann once referred to himself as a chrysalis, and he spoke of the germs of many of his works as “papillons”: motifs which could appear or disappear, fly forward or backwards, assume infinite shapes and colours. The papillon that ascends at the opening of Opus 2 fades past vanishing point at its end – in just the same way, Eric Sams suggests, as the hero of Flegeljahre. If between this lies the most volatile and spontaneous music Schumann wrote, so much is a case of art concealing three years’ effort, the final distillation of countless sketches and rearrangements.
This is a trenchant performance of Schumann’s most charmingly capricious apparitions. Ashkenazy finds their lightness as well as resilience through playing where subtlety and vigour are well-matched. Not quite an interpretation to match Perahia, for those who can afford Sony’s boxed set; but excellent in its own right and coupled with a good, meaty version of the Etudes Symphoniques.
Davidsbündlertänze, Opus 6
Written in 1837, the Davidsbündlertänze begin with a musical motto composed by Clara, and most of the dances use its interval of a falling second as their starting-point. Eighteen mood-pieces, capturing supremely the range and shades of Schumann’s art, and amongst their titles: “Rather cockeyed…wild and merry…as if from afar…with this Florestan closed, and his lips twitched sadly.” Schumann quotes a traditional poem as the motto: “In all and every time, pleasure and pain are linked.” Songs-without-words and refractory humour and alternate with the sinewy writing that provided a model for piano composition to the end of Schumann’s century.
Kempff DG 435 045-2 (in a four-disc collection: medium price)
Throughout his Schumann survey Kempff played with classical refinement and customary intelligence, crisply urbane. If there’s a vein of fantasy to the music – quixotic, intractable – that was made earthbound (sober, but never prosaic) there seemed far more a compensating wisdom to bring tangibility rather than labour; a level of illumination offering, just as much as Cortot, a corrective to the turgid dramatics of today.
On a single disc in good digital sound, Ashkenazy’s reading (Decca) is fervent and brightly characterised. With it comes a version of the Opus 12 Phantasiestücke which, whilst not the most polished thing Ashkenazy has done, is as good as most in the catalogue.
Dichterliebe, Opus 48
Dichterliebe takes its poems from Heine and introduces to German song a new mingling of sentiment and irony, much as the text had done for German verse: a weary world of disillusionment in which nature acts not as a deciding influence, as for Schubert, but as an adjunct, a coloration and reflection, to a bittersweet love-story. Dichterliebe takes the lied to a new level of evolution: the piano becomes more than even for Schubert an active partner, combatant, commentary. It assumes a metaphysical dimension, for its long postlude suggests how the realms of poetry may open for the writer once the real world has failed.
Alfred Brendel has said the songs are a continuation of Schumann’s character-pieces for piano. But they are more besides. In addition to their second layer of tone-colour, the lyrical element has been set free and its emotional content made precise. As the composer put it, “a deeper insight into my inner musical workings.”
Fischer-Dieskau (baritone) with Brendel. Philips 416 352-2, with Schumann Liederkreis (price code 3)
Wunderlich (tenor) with Giesen. DG Dokumente 429 933-2 with Schubert and Beethoven recital (Medium price)
If you could combine Wunderlich’s vocal resources with Fischer-Dieskau’s insight, what a disc you’d have. “Melt in the mouth” someone said of one of this century’s finest tenors, who made his recording in 1966 before an early death. The singing is richer than Fischer-Dieskau’s, smoother too; although Ich grolle nicht is eager in a way that Fischer-Dieskau can only hint at. There’s the yearning of Wunderlich’s Ich will meine Seele tauchen compared to the crusty inertia of a baritone voice past its prime, but the merits are not all on one side. Fischer-Dieskau has a perception of dramatic narrative that leaves Wunderlich behind, as when Wenn ich in deine Augen sei’ subsides to a whisper; and Brendel is his creative partner rather than accompanist in music whose valedictory power and anger are only with Fischer-Dieskau brought out. If you want the marvellous Liederkreis, first choice is clear. Otherwise these songs might have been written for a voice of Wunderlich’s youth and freshness.
Symphonies
Schumann had tinkered with sketches for a major orchestral work, but like Brahms lacked the courage to pursue them further. The discovery of Schubert’s Ninth gave him the encouragement to try again, and in 1841 the Spring Symphony was published. It was inspired by Alfred Böttger’s poem, and the movements were originally entitled ‘Spring’s awakening’, ‘Evening’, ‘Merry Playmates’ and ‘Full Spring’.
The rest were written during Schumann’s collapsing career: the Second (Opus 61) in 1845, the Rhenish (Opus 97, so-called because its stateliness recalls a ceremony at Cologne Cathedral) in 1851. The Third’s opening anticipates Brahms’s Third Symphony (scarcely fortuitous) and its last movement was described by Sir Donald Tovey as “one of the finest pieces of ecclesiastical polyphony since Bach”. The Fourth Symphony (Opus 120, with an expansive climax to prefigure Wagner) was written between 1841 and 1852.
If these are symphonies which need to be driven – made to come alive, rather than expected to leap off the page – that is no more than can be said of their great Schubertian inspiration. The Fourth won Tovey’s admiration in that it is through-composed as one seamless development of revolutionary originality.
What they lack is Schubert’s clarity of instrumentation and thinking. External compromise seems to be the reason, since if Schumann’s efforts to reorchestrate his first throughts invariably make them more opaque than before, they do make inner parts louder and easier to play when attempted by inept orchestras and conductors. He had experience of both. Mahler reorchestrated the cycle, domesticating it and failing to restore a declining reputation. Yet there is a great deal here to do away with the myth of Schumann’s final years being those of unmitigated decline.
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra; Karajan DG 429 672-2 (two discs: medium price)
Honours are divided between these two, for Sawallisch’s pace and Karajan’s characterisation of episodes each brings rewards. Unfortunate that the BPO’s interpretation of the first and most famous symphony is so eclipsed by Sawallisch’s euphoric vitality, for Karajan gives No 2 a reading of real stature, a breadth and grip that makes you wonder at the work’s neglect and creates a slow movement worthy of Bruckner. In the Fourth Sawallisch moves like a fast wave, whilst Karajan gathers paced resources towards an inexorable climax. In the end Sawallisch’s sweeping imagination is irresistible – and if the recording sounds like something held in a cavernous bathroom, it comes up cleanly enough.
Stephen Jackson's Music 