Our Schubert: His Enduring Legacy
By David Schroeder
* Publisher: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
* Number Of Pages: 332
* Publication Date: 2009-08-28
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0810869268
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780810869264
Preface
MUSICOLOGISTS SHOULD BE ABLE TO WRITE dispassionately about their
subjects, but this does not always happen. Of course we write about
the composers we select because we feel passionately about them, and
I have certainly done that in the past with Haydn, Mozart, and Berg.
Schubert, though, can have a mysterious effect on those who play or
listen to his music, whether professionals or amateurs, taking us far
beyond the normal response of excitement or love one may have for
a composer’s works. For me this started when, as a teenager in the
early 1960s, a novice taking singing lessons, one of the first pieces
I performed publicly was Schubert’s “Standchen” from Schwanengesang.
I was hooked, and it has lasted a lifetime. His appeal has not
diminished at any stage of my life, and in fact, as something of a late
bloomer, I could not have attempted a book about him until reaching
almost twice the age he was when he died.
The strongest way to embrace Schubert, as the pages that follow
make clear, is by singing or playing his music, and many listeners at
recitals and concerts can respond fervently because they have had
some experience of playing his music and can have the listening experience
transformed into something much more intimate, which comes
through performance. This can be a solitary experience at the piano
or a shared one with other players, and the intimacy comes from the
fact that Schubert himself played his own music, sharing with his
friends not only the songs and chamber music but the larger orchestral
works as well. As a singer, I have had the pleasure of sharing this with
many outstanding pianists, a number of them genuine Schubertians,
sometimes in public performances, but most often in the privacy of
a studio or a living room, just for the love of reading these wonderful
songs. Some of these people need to be acknowledged in special ways,
along with a few of the other Schubert fanatics I have had the good
fortune to know.
I have had no more willing accomplice than Bruce Vogt, starting
when we were fellow undergraduates and continuing ever since.
While both of us lived in England in the mid-1970s, we set out to
read through all the songs, and we came fairly close to getting there.
When we ran out of written transpositions for my baritone voice, we
alternated between Bruce transposing at sight and me shifting octaves.
Another great Schubertian is my mother-in-law, Hilda Jonas, who
studied with, among others, some of the great Schubert performers of
the twentieth century, including Rudolf Serkin and Artur Schnabel.
We live on opposite sides of the continent, but that has not prevented
us from reading Schubert lieder for hours on end at least two or three
times a year since 1975.
During my years in England I read with some extraordinarily fine
pianists, including my fellow graduate student Roy Howat, whose
marvelous performance of the Sonata in C minor (D958) in Canada
I was able to arrange; Howard Ferguson, a leading chamber music
performer who had just retired to Cambridge when I arrived there and
was then preparing his editions of the keyboard music; Philip Radcliffe,
whose playing was as sensitive as his written observations, one
of which I cite in chapter 6; and an undergraduate at King’s College,
Cambridge, whose name I no longer recall, with whom I read through
Winterreise. On a warm summer evening while I lived in Cambridge,
I once heard the accompaniment of “Liedesbotschaft” wafting across
the street, and on knocking at the door to see who was playing, I met
Nick Toller, with whom I then read this song and many others.
On the other side of the Atlantic, in both Canada and the U.S., I
have read lieder with Marlene Nepstad (with whom I gave a full recital),
Mary Ann Unruh, Edward Laufer, Penelope Mark, and Michelle Fillion.
My singing career has long since ended and has been replaced by reading
Schubert at the piano. Being very much an amateur, I can attest to the
pleasure that rank amateurs can receive, and I can say with some honesty
that I do not play the piano—I play Schubert.
Contents
List of Photographs vii
Preface ix
Introduction xiii
Part 1: His Lifetime
1. Speaking in the First Person 3
2. The Performer 36
3. The Good Life 74
4. Covert Opera 91
5. Songs, Symphonies, and Beethoven’s Long Shadow 112
6. Descent into Darkness 136
Part 2: His Legacy
7. Musicians 163
8. Turn-of-the-Century Vienna 189
9. Writers 216
10. Film 242
Selected Bibliography 284
Selected Discography 289
Index 293
About the Author 303
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