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If I were to identify the distinctive emotion that pervades Schubert’s music, I would say that it is a tragic but reconciled love: love not only for people in all their many predicaments, but also love for music, and especially for the music that was brought to him by his muse….When I think of Schubert’s death, and lament that he did not live to the age of Mozart, I think of the love that he longed for and never obtained, and wonder yet more at a musical legacy that contains more consolation for our loneliness than any other human creation. – Sir Roger Scruton
Unlike some other great composers – Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms – Schubert died young, at age 31, in 1828, before he had much of an audience outside Biedermeier Vienna.
At the time of his death, he was principally known for having set hundreds of Germany’s most beautiful and brilliant poems to music, thereby raising the German song or lied to an artistic level that never has been surpassed.
Many of Schubert’s finest works, unpublished and never performed, languished in trunks and cupboards, for years after his death, unknown even to family and friends.
It’s why, unlike many of his contemporaries, Schubert seldom traveled and left behind few letters, a few diary pages, no essays or critical writings, compounding the evidentiary difficulty. As a result, popular conceptions of Schubert the man and composer were constructed long after his death from scattered recollections by friends who denied or discounted many of his less attractive qualities.
For nearly two centuries, the life and character of Franz Schubert, one of the most brilliant, accomplished and popular of the European classical composers, have been variously sketched in treacle and brimstone by one biographer after another.
The Schubert that emerged is a bundle of contradictions. This short, squat, bespeckled genius of melody is variously reported to have been charming, depressive, jolly, morbid, hard-working, dissolute, lonely, surrounded by friends, heterosexual, homosexual, asexual – in short, history seems to have manufactured a Franz Schubert for every taste.
There comes a time in all our lives, if we are very lucky, when we begin to understand more fully what it means to be truly “great.” As Pulitzer-winning historian Barbara Tuchman once put it: I “know” greatness when I hear it; I don’t have to explain it.”
In Woody Allen’s 1989 existential drama Crimes and Misdemeanors, the great filmmaker carefully chose his soundtrack used in the scenes leading up to Dolores’s death, and Judah’s discovery of her body. He chose parts of the Allegro molto moderato (including the dotted rhythms of the opening) from Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15. Though Schubert had only four instruments to work with, the music is almost terrifying in its intensity. Woody Allen understood. This was Schubert’s last quartet, and the composer’s declamation of love lost, the inevitability of death, and the terror of loneliness. It speaks profoundly to us all, or at least I think it should. – via blackswaneuroparedux.tumblr.com
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Dispatches from the Asylum 