Our Winter journey together completed, Schubert bids us – and practically everything else – a fond, last farewell: Abschied (Farewell) D.957/7 Farewell! You jolly, you cheerful town, goodbye! My horse paws the ground now with light-hearted hoof, Now receive my final, my parting salute You’ve never seen me downcast before, And it can’t happen now at […]
Category Archives: Song
The end of Wilhelm Müller’s Die Winterreise has a strangeness that never fails to touch and mystify. The image of the ancient, penniless hurdy-gurdy man making his music, unmoved by the passing world, is inexplicably potent – it calls to us. Who is he? Death? Madness? A salvation of some sort? And then there’s Schubert’s setting: the simple hurdy-gurdy/bagpipe […]
The String Quintet in C, D.956 is surely one of the finest of Schubert’s works. The drama and lyricism of the first movement; the mystic, sublime calm surrounding a perfect emotional storm that is the slow movement; the celebration of the scherzo with the mystery of the trio; and, finally, a dance that reminds us […]
or, to move it into a more easily readable range: This is what happens near the opening of the Schubert B-flat Sonata D. 960; firstly, the opening melody – beautiful, serene – comes to rest on a chord of F when suddenly, from the bottom left hand of the keyboard, comes a long grumbling growl (see […]
Schubert’s late Mass in E-flat – the date on the score is 1828, the last year of the composer’s life – is his sixth essay in the setting of the liturgical text. It’s a large and fascinating work with moments of ravishing Schubertian beauty. Take this, for example, from the opening of the Sanctus: Schubert: Mass […]
Schubert’s last symphony – like much of the composer’s later work – has a darkness at its heart. As in the Adagio of his Octet, this emotional crisis occurs during the sonata-like reprise of the symphony’s second movement (Andante con moto). A fff outburst is followed by a shocked and traumatised total silence. The strings – still […]
Apart from it being a rather useful (trite but it works?) internal rhyme, Cole Porter wasn’t exactly wrong about the deep emotional effect of the juxtaposition of majors and minors; it’s just that it’s a bit more complicated than that. Have a listen… recognise them? The simple act of flattening one note in a chord, like […]
