Why Listen to Schubert?

just a quick announcement that this July I'm putting on an online summer music course with some leading professionals from different areas of the music industry if you or someone you know might be interested then stick around to the end of this video we don't normally put Schubert in the same ranks as Bach Mozart and Beethoven but then again he was so young when he died he died in 1828 of typhoid or syphilis aged only 31 years old maybe had he reached the ripe old age of Mozart at 35 years old he would be counted as one of the giants after all who knows what masterpieces we were deprived of due to his early death in a musical career that lasted perhaps 18 years Schubert produced over 1,000 works of music music of incredible quality so why is he sometimes overlooked as one of the greats the thing is his late symphonies are good enough to rival Beethoven's particularly his unfinished 8th symphony and the astoundingly original ninth symphony known as the great symphony and remember Schubert completed his 9th when he was only 29 years old when beethoven was 29 he had only just started his fifth Schubert string quartets can stand beside Haydn's and Mozart's he was the string player in his family quartet and he wrote around 11 quartets when he was only a teenager for classic examples of his chamber music listen to say the last quartet in G major or his quintet in C major his trout quintet or his death and the maiden quartet and his piano music certainly paved the way for later romantic composers such as Schumann and Chopin take his impromptu z' is almost impressionistic moments Musical or his sonatas particularly his late sonatas but today Schubert is most famous for his leader which is German for song he wrote around 600 songs which remain at the heart of the classical canon of songs at 17 years old he was writing on average two songs a day and this led ultimately to his two major song cycles discernable uhrin and Deventer Iser both parables expressing the pains of adolescence love loss loneliness jealousy the feeling of a loss of hope and a reconciliation with the place around him these song cycles perhaps solidified song as a serious art form and they remain pillars of Western musical history then why has Schubert taken a bit of a backseat compared to the other so-called Viennese masters well there might be several reasons one is that Schubert was overshadowed throughout his lifetime by Beethoven that giant of a composer both were centred around Vienna and Beethoven died only a year before Schubert Schubert was once recorded as saying to a friend I hope to be able to make something out of myself but who can do anything after Beethoven in fact it was after Beethoven's death that Schubert completed his groundbreaking ninth symphony the great perhaps Schubert finally felt freed from the pressure that Beethoven symphonies placed upon every composers shoulders because of this overshadowing very little of Schubert's work was published in his lifetime it wasn't until the late 1800s that breitkopf & härtel published critical editions of his works edited by Brahms no less another reason why he might not have the universal acclaim of Beethoven is perhaps because of the sheer length of many of his works Schubert often composes on a different scale taking much more time allowing himself to draw things slowly this is not due to lack of craft but because he uses different kinds of processes and tools as the pianist Alfred Brendel said in Beethoven's music we never lose our bearings we always know where we are Schubert on the other hand puts us into a dream Beethoven composes like an architect Schubert like a sleepwalker but a major reason I think is that much of his best music was written not for the concert hall but for the home his chamber music piano music and song cycles were written to be performed at homes for intimate small audiences as I speak these words musicians all around the world are being asked to stay at home and while for some of us this may feel like imprisonment many of us may slowly discover a new reconciliation with the idea of home home not only as the place where we live but the people we live with our family our neighbors our community and also the way in which we live our routines habits rituals and the ways in which we make ourselves feel at home it was Roger Scruton who said Schubert is the poet of home and the loss of home and as we recapture a sense of what it means to be truly at home we might have a stronger understanding of Schubert's music and what it's trying to say to us and we might also rediscover the joy of playing music alone or in the company of a small pocket of loved ones Schubert's music teetered on the edge between the classical and the romantic he would seemingly master the forms laid out by Mozart hide in an bark and yet also explore new regions of harmony and tonal relationships new styles of writing which would pave the way for later romantic composers we might love him for his melody the melodious nosov his final be flat piano sonata or the timeless melody of dubis thiru or for his sense of capturing inward intimate expression which feels honest and free of sentimentality or for his probing into the deaths the apparent fascination with the shadow of death in his late works there are too many different shades of Schubert to count or to cover in a book let alone a video so I want to focus on one piece of music a song he wrote when he was just 17 years old Gretchen and spin rod or Gretchen and the spinning wheel written around a year before his more famous song L Koenig it might be Schubert's first masterpiece it may be no small stretch to say that this song changed the way the composers thought about songwriting the subject of the song comes from goethe's faust a story where Faust sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a great life a girl comes with that life Gretchen and there's a point where Gretchen is alone in her room spinning yarn and she starts to freak out about her relationship with Faust this seen her in her room with a spinning wheel worrying about her relationship is what Schubert sets to music the text shows the psychological torment that she's going through with stanzas like my piece is gone my heart is heavy I shall never ever find peace again or my poor head is crazed by poor mind shattered so this song starts in D minor and we actually hear the spinning wheel and the piano the spinning in the right hand and the click-clacking of pedals in the left hand then she sings my piece has gone by heart heavy the music immediately begins to spin itself through different Keys reflecting her Restless anxiety there's a middle section where she remembers his proud bearing his noble form the smile on his lips and the power of his eyes and the attention turns away from her and onto him the spinning wheel stops or at least the foot pedals stop as she begins to think of him for music builds in this accelerated excitement as she remembers him until the almost primal cry of ah his kiss [Music] [Laughter] [Music] and she remembers her sadducees heart-stopping gesture of a kiss then after a pause this restarts only now it's incomplete the wheel isn't fully turning yet slowly bit by bit the wheel begins to spin back into motion and we are back into Gretchen's introspection but now everything has changed and this isn't a simple recapitulation of the first section she starts building an excitement again she sings my bosom yearns for him ah if I could clasp if I could hold him and if you thought that the memory of the kiss was a climax well there's another one coming where she now wishes that finally she could perish in his kisses this is the dynamic climax of the song where everything has been leading to in her confusion of love and despair [Music] [Applause] but whereas the poem ends there with her wanting to perish Schubert adds one more line he repeats the first line of the poem again my piece is gone my heart is heavy [Music] on a purely musical level this acts as a sort of coda a moment to affirm the final key of D minor and to wind the music down and play that spinning wheel music just once more but it also gives an extraordinary psychological dramatic effect that after all her wild passion she sinks once more into exhaustion and despair and we feel how much has changed the spinning wheel is musically exactly the same notes as the beginning only now our understanding of the whole situation has transformed Schubert isn't just imitating the sound of a spinning wheel that in itself isn't really that's interesting what makes it aesthetically powerful is when we've realized the spinning wheel has become a kind of musical metaphorical representation of the uneasy restlessness of her mind after the first half of the song the idea of an actual spinning wheel fades into the background and we become more and more aware of the subjective representation of Gretchen's mind the spinning anxiety within it and what I haven't mentioned is that all this while Schubert has moved seamlessly through every single key in the d minor scale and some extra all helping to represent her spinning mind and so what makes this song a masterpiece is the way that Schubert is so powerfully able to enter into the female psyche and dramatically express it through music but it's also the way in which narrative drama harmony rhythm and melody all moved together in a single thread towards this conclusion and the way that Schubert maintains his unbroken melodic line with the singer all while constantly modulating and changing key Schubert is showing a mastery of dramatic form and of musical fall and all of this at the age of 17 I hope you enjoyed this video from the 20th to the 31st of July I'm putting on an online summer music course with some friends and colleagues from around the world this is for young students 13 to 19 years old who want to get access to top teachers from around the world as well as daily sessions from industry leaders in different areas of the music world the faculty includes Ben Perry ex director of the world renowned Swingle Singers who's been involved with innumerable film scores including the Harry Potter films The Hobbit The Avengers Shrek and so on Kelly Mathison who plays Christine day in the London production of The Phantom of the Opera Matilda Lloyd the rising trumpet star and BBC young musician of the year brass winner and many other graduates of Julliard Cambridge Yale and other top music institutions this is an opportunity for you to learn so much more about the music world and to have your own skills honed and improved in smaller groups with a large choice of electives taught by top people if you're interested in this then visit virtual music academy.com to learn more if you booked before the beginning of July then there's $100 discount if you'd like to support my work or buy me a coffee to say thank you you can do so on patreon by visiting patreon.com forward slash inside the score I really appreciate all the support this channel gets it definitely helps me to continue making these videos and if you're a musician who's stuck at home why not go and play some Schubert thank you for watching please do subscribe if you want to see more content like this and I'll see you soon

Channel: Inside the Score

Views: 492,501

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Id: y2ikvX9UB-Q

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2020