A vida de Schubert é o exemplo por excelência da noção romântica do gênio

negligenciado que morreu na obscuridade. Mesmo Mozart, que provavelmente teve uma
vida mais severa e maiores obstáculos a superar, teve ao um mínimo de reconhecimento
em sua própria vida. Para Schubert, uma geração inteira teve que passar antes que suas
realizações mais substanciais viessem a luz do dia.

Franz Peter Schubert (31 de janeiro de 1797 - 19 de novembro de 1828) Um dos cinco
sobreviveram à infância, veio de uma modesta família que morava no distrito de
Lichtenthal em Viena. Seu pai, Franz Theodor, era um músico amador atento e
rapidamente detectou o talento de seu filho, dando-lhe aulas de violino enquanto o
irmão mais velho lhe ensinava piano. Depois de um curto período estudando com uma
professora particular, Franz foi aceito como um garoto de coro na capela do Tribunal,
que o admitiu automaticamente como aluno do Imperial and Royal City College. Lá, ele
se beneficiou muito com o contato com homens como Antonio Salieri e Phillip Korner,
e escreveu suas primeiras composições. Schubert conseguiu resultados satisfatórios em
todos os assuntos, mas suas habilidades musicais foram reconhecidas por todos como
excepcionais. Em 1812, sua mãe morreu: seu pai se casou novamente no ano seguinte.
Sempre perto de seu pai, Franz cresceu para amar sua madrasta Anna, que nos últimos
anos o ajudou com empréstimos de dinheiro. Enquanto no College Schubert
experimentou suas primeiras performances de ópera, e também descobriu a música de
Ludwig van Beethoven e Wolfgang Mozart. Ele manteve o último com grande
admiração: "O Mozart, imortal Mozart!" ele escreveu em 1816: "Quais inúmeras
imagens consoladoras de um mundo melhor e mais brilhante, você gravou sobre nossas
almas!"

When he left the College in 1814, Schubert taught at his father's school, though this had
little effect on his enthusiasm for composition. Indeed, that autumn his Mass #7 in F
Major was performed to great acclaim, also his first lieder masterpiece, "Gretchen am
Spinnrade" (to words from Goethe's Faust); he was just 17. The following year was
even more impressive: symphonies, operas (no less than four attempted in one year),
chamber music and nearly 150 songs spilled from his pen, all written out of a
determination to earn money from his music so that he could escape the need for
earning it through his detested teaching. Of the songs, the Goethe setting, "Der
Erlkönig", is the most remarkable and most famous. A friend sent this and 30 other
Goethe settings to the great man himself in Weimar. They were returned
unaccompanied by any offer of help; Goethe did not appreciate Schubert's attempts to
heighten the poet's words through his musical commentary.

"Der Erlkönig" was published in all the German-speaking territories and made Schubert
famous outside his native city, and this led directly to a meeting with a young law
student, Franz von Schober. Schober had come across "Erlkönig" and the song made
such a deep impression on him that he determined to meet its creator. He suggested to
Schubert that they take lodgings together at Schober's expense. With his father's
consent, the 19-year-old Franz moved in to rooms in Schober's mother's house. While
there he was introduced to the baritone Johann Michael Vogl, a successful operatic
singer, who was so excited by Schubert's songs that within a few weeks the pair were
performing concerts for Viennese society.
In 1817 Schubert branched out into piano sonatas and before the end of the year he had
also written three more of his most famous songs: "Der Tod und das Mädchen", "An die
Musik" and "Die Forelle". By then, however, he had been obliged to move back to his
family home – the Schober idyll was over and his work rate slackened noticeably when
he returned to the hated teaching. The following summer he became music master to the
children of Count Johann Esterházy in Zseliz (in Slovakia, hundreds of miles from
Vienna), and broke forever his ties with teaching. After a fitful summer at the Zseliz
residence, Schubert returned to Vienna with the Esterházy family but took up lodgings
with his poet friend Mayrhofer. He continued to teach the Esterházy children while
"living out".

Schubert's life remained uneventful until the summer of 1819 when he joined Vogl on a
trip to the country, spending three of the happiest months of his life discovering
countryside which he thought "inconceivably lovely". This trip had a beneficial effect
on his creative juices, the wonderful Trout Quintet being conceived and begun at this
time. Inspiration remained with Schubert all through the following autumn and winter in
Vienna, compositions coming thick and fast. During his time with Mayrhofer, Schubert
would often sleep in his clothes, or leave his glasses on overnight, indulging in typical
bachelor behavior and using the time-worn excuse that "it saved time and trouble" when
asked why he was so slovenly. He certainly was not lazy when it came to composing,
commenting: "I compose every morning, and when one piece is done I begin another".
The spring of 1819 had been spent writing the music for a third-rate one-act libretto,
Die Zwillingsbruder, which was staged in 1820 with Vogl taking both twin-brother
roles. This relative failure (only five performances) led to a further commission for
music for a three-act play, Die Zauberharfe. This was no better than the one-act play
that preceded it, but Schubert's music shone out: the overture, for example, was later
reused in Rosamunde, and thus gained immortality. Schubert's reputation in Vienna was
hardly well-served by such failures, and he was never to see another presentation of his
theatrical music.

Schubert moved from Mayrhofer's rooms to the house of a new friend, the amateur
painter Moritz von Schwind, and was soon at work on one of his most striking Goethe
compositions, a setting for four tenors and four basses, with string accompaniment,
"Gesang der Geister über den Wassern" (1714), the work's mystical element holding
great significance for him. Schubert's songs were now receiving fairly regular
performances by his friends and colleagues in Vienna, and it is singular that he
consistently failed to have them accepted for publication by local publishers. Frustrated
by this intransigence, his supporters funded a sponsored publication of "Erlkönig" by
the Viennese firm Caspi et Diabelli. This and seven other sponsored publications did so
well that Caspi et Diabelli afterwards published Schubert direct and at their own risk.
Schubert also managed to raise some much needed income by dedicating these pieces to
wealthy patrons.

The ambition to compose weightier material continued to haunt him, and in August
1821 he attempted his Symphony #7 in E Major (D. 729), but this was only completed
in full score up to the 110th bar; the rest was left marked down on a single line,
accompanied by detailed annotation as to how the missing parts would be completed
later which, of course, never happened. In recent years this and the other unfinished
symphonies (Schubert only completed one of his many symphonic projects) have been
given orchestral "realizations" which enable the music-lover to hear brilliant and
exploratory works otherwise condemned to perpetual obscurity.

Schubert had returned to live at Schober's house, but was now immersed in a triangular
friendship of great intimacy with Moritz von Schwind and a young playwright, Eduard
Bauernfeld. The composer meanwhile persisted with his attempts to mount a successful
opera, and in 1822 completed Alfonso und Estrela (D. 732). It was never produced, the
libretto (by Schober) falling foul of Vogl's censure and therefore not receiving his
influential backing. Three other events made this a pivotal year in Schubert's life. In
April he met Beethoven, a meeting achieved by the presentation of his Variations on a
French Air, Op. 10 (with a fulsome dedication) to Beethoven by a mutual friend.
Accounts of the meeting are unreliable, but there is reason to believe that Beethoven
enjoyed the Variations enough to keep the music in his possession. The second event
was the writing – and abandonment – of the famous Eighth Symphony (Unfinished),
although by now Schubert had a number of unfinished symphonies to his name. The
multiplicity of reasons advanced for the abandonment of this sublime two-movement
torso tend to prove that no-one really knows why Schubert stopped writing it. What is
beyond dispute is that he presented the manuscript the following year to his friend
Anselm Huttenbrenner. The work disappeared until 1865, when Huttenbrenner allowed
it to be performed in one of the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde concerts and
published the following year. This work was a clear statement from Schubert that he
had found his own original approach to symphonic form.

The third event of 1822 was a tragic one: Schubert discovered that he had contracted
syphilis. This discovery, and the illness which accompanied its initial onset, forced
Schubert to return to the parental home. Until late spring 1823 he was too ill to leave the
house, and this frightening collapse in one so young (he was just 25) led to a near-
suicidal depression. A spell in Vienna General Hospital seems to have helped, and he
composed all through this dark period of suffering, completing the Piano Sonata in A
minor (D. 784) and another one-act opera, Die Verschworenen. During the summer he
left hospital and traveled to Linz and Steyr, beginning yet another doomed opera,
Fierrabras (D. 796), set to yet another poor libretto, and composing the first songs of the
immortal cycle, Die schöne Mullerin. His health remained precarious throughout the
year, only stabilizing as winter took hold and the Mullerin cycle was completed.

It is possible that Schubert felt he had overcome his affliction, but the disease had only
entered its second phase. From this time on his previously carefree and sunny
disposition became more troubled, his moods unpredictable. The year 1823 closed with
yet another theatre-music failure, this time the play Rosamunde, written by Helmina
von Chezy. It managed just two performances, then vanished into oblivion. The
orchestral music Schubert mustered for this play eventually proved to be some of his
most popular. In spring 1824 Schubert turned to chamber music: among the
masterpieces to emerge was the quartet Der Tod und das Mädchen, which used
variations on the song of the same name. The magnificent Octet in F (D. 803) followed
soon after. This, plus the publication of the first part of Die schöne Mullerin, made this
a special spring. Yet Schubert's mood was dark. He wrote to a friend at this time:
"Think of a man whose health can never be restored and who from sheer despair makes
matters worse instead of better. Think of a man…to whom love and friendship are a
torture… every night I go to sleep hoping never to wake again…".
Schubert spent much of 1824 once again with the Esterházys in Zseliz; the slow pace of
life seems to have been beneficial, although he chafed at having to teach again. The
following year was notable for the steady increase in the number of his songs being
published and the resultant spread of his reputation beyond Vienna. A summer holiday
with Vogl in the country gave him the happiness and peace of mind which had been so
conspicuously absent the previous spring. Here he began work on his Symphony #9
("The Great") in C Major, the first to be completed in more than six years. His return to
Vienna in September initiated a twelve month period of great conviviality in and around
Vienna with the famous musical evenings among his friends and admirers – known as
the Schubertiads – standing out in the memory of all who attended them. Schubert and
Schwind remained particularly close during this time, sharing lodgings, food, clothes
and money. To Schubert, Schwind was "seine Geliebte" (his beloved).

Early 1827 was memorable for Schubert's commencement of the first songs in Die
Winterreise and for the death of Beethoven. Schubert had visited the fading genius
shortly before his death, and was one of the torchbearers in his funeral procession.
Notices of Schubert's numerous lieder publications at this time continued to multiply
and spread across the German-speaking countries, yet his major instrumental
achievements were hardly known outside his circle of close friends. He completed
Winterreise by the end of 1827, the emotional profundity of the music echoing the bleak
depths of the verses being set. His health was again poor, with random headaches and
dizziness; his moods were clearly reflected in his songs. The complexities of the
Impromptus written at around this time are perhaps a prism through which his
melancholia can be glimpsed.

In March 1828 a concert was organized in one of the Vienna Gesellschaft's private
rooms, which was the first-ever Schubert-only event. It was sold-out and filled with
Schubert's friends, patrons and admirers. The program was exclusively made up of
lieder and chamber music. Schubert completed his Symphony #9 "The Great" in C
Major and for a time hoped it would receive a performance in Vienna, but this came to
nothing. In September he moved in with his brother Ferdinand. Now suffering from
regular headaches and nausea, he composed his last three Piano Sonatas, D. 958, 959 &
960, as well as the famous song "Der Hirt auf dem Felsen" (with clarinet obbligato). By
now he was close to exhaustion, and a short walking tour confined him to bed. The
syphilis was now claiming him, and on 19 November he died in his brother's bed. The
funeral was a modest affair, his coffin borne by students to St. Margaret's Church, and
from then on to Währing cemetery.

Ferdinand went to every conceivable effort to see his brother's music published (mostly
by Caspi et Diabelli Co), but it was 1835 before a visit by Robert Schumann, by then an
influential critic and budding composer, discovered the symphony manuscripts in
Ferdinand's house and wrote about Schubert's genius after reading the score of the Ninth
Symphony. He then arranged for its world premiere and a complete re-evaluation of
Schubert's achievements began that paved the way for his true musical worth to at last
reach a wider audience. A complete edition of his works appeared for the first time
between 1884 and 1897.
Schubert's relationship with the human voice was unique in his output: he was, indeed,
the fons et origo of an art form which was to rise to pre-eminence in his lifetime. And
the reasons for this were manifold. Brian Newbould, in his study of Schubert, The
Music and the Man (Gollancz: 1997), has rightly emphasized the importance to
Schubert of an existing musical lingua franca, "based on an orderly system of tonality
providing an ever-present reference point against which harmonically conceived melody
achieved clarity, coherence and musical meaning." "The underlying modus parlandi,"
he writes, "had such a logic and energy of its own that one could speak it - like one's
native verbal language - as second nature."

And if Schubert was born at exactly the right time for the human voice to rise from
speech to song in a glorious efflorescence, then he was also born in the right place. The
daily life of Schubert's Vienna, despite being ravaged by the winds of international
politics, and oppressed by Metternich's police state, was characterized by what Johnson
has described as "a miraculous combination of creativity and sociability which is
without parallel in the history of music". The domestic literary and musical gatherings,
and the Bildung circles which met for the purpose of self-improvement and education,
provided not only the stimulus but the emotional support and warm companionship vital
to Schubert's own creativity. His growing self-confidence was bolstered by the talents of
friends and contemporaries who included the poets Mayrhofer, Stadler, Schober and
Collin.

Across the border, the poetry of Goethe, Heine and Schiller, of Schlegel, Hölty and
Rellstab was rolling hot off the presses, bringing with it imagery from a natural world
'known' by ears which, not yet blunted by the roar of the infernal machine, were keenly
alert to the movement of wind and water; and eyes, as yet undulled by the light
pollution of electricity, which were still awed by the luminescence of moon and stars.
Tracking the body's natural rhythms, were metres in which music could, in its turn, re-
create the steady motion of human footfall, a trotting horse, a racing pulse, a rushing
millstream. What is more, Schubert's lack of success in opera - to which we shall return
– meant that all these stimuli were to be channelled into song: the only part of his
oeuvre in which he was never to know the frustration of failed performance. Almost
every song Schubert wrote was performed at least once in his lifetime.

There was, of course, life and song before Gretchen - even before Schubert's own first
song, Hagars Klage, written when he was 14. The predecessors of the romantic Lied,
the North German ballads of composers like Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Carl Friedrich
ZeIter and Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg, were good enough to stimulate the young
Schubert without being great enough to intimidate him.

Schubert's earliest songs and ballads, with their ears wide open to the melodies of Italian
opera, and with their deftly imaginative piano writing, show the nature of the alchemy
which was already at work.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's pioneering work in recording almost the entire repertoire

over a period of 15 years - for him "a story with no ending" - began to reveal what was
going on. In the Hyperion Complete Edition Graham Johnson was to reach those parts
which even Fischer-Dieskau had disdained, illuminating the unique qualities of the
shortest, most naive ditties, or the most (over-)extended ballad and melodrama.
Elly Ameling, in Vol 7, was to be charged with Minona, oder die Kunde der Dogge, and
the modest Naturgenuss, totally ignored by commentators such as Einstein and Richard
Capell. Marie McLaughlin, in Vol 13, brought Edward, Edward out of the Celtic
twilight where it had been temporarily eclipsed by Carl Loewe's setting. And Peter
Schreier, in Vol 18, was to reveal how Schubert changed the face of the simple strophic
song forever.

At the start of the Hyperion project, Johnson determined to include at least one little-
known ballad on each disc. Now, little by little, these works are beginning to make
themselves heard on the concert platform too. "In order to understand the very greatest
of Schubert's songs," Johnson told me ten years ago, "we must know and perform the
rest. Sometimes his plainer children have been neglected at the expense of his more
obviously beautiful creations. It isn't that he loves them less, or gave them less. He just
decides when melody is more important than prosody and declamation, and when it is
not. He rations out melody as something to be used with discretion. What is appropriate
for a great Goethe lyric may not be apt for a more homely one by Mayrhofer. We have
to trust Schubert."

Johnson would argue - unlike Elizabeth Norman Mackay in her biography - that
Schubert's is not the creativity of a manic-depressive. "His inspiration doesn't come and
go in waves, as it did with Hugo Wolf, for instance. No: there's a continuous creativity,
looking after the various regions of song. He admired the North German school of
Reichardt where shying away from prodigal melodic invention was considered better
form. You didn't try and upstage the words: you just set them so that they could he
heard - and hit the heart."

Not only has the Schubert song canon expanded in the last half century, but the songs
are now approached by performers and listeners alike with fewer preconceptions and
ever-changing expectations. Brigitte Fassbaender, who has made her own considerable
contribution to the growth of tbe repertoire, is thrilled that the new generation of singers
is eager "to discover the unknown Schubert. A young tenor called Lothar Odinius
recently gave a whole evening of relatively unknown strophic songs. And the public
was so enthusiastic! I sense too that there is a new type of respect for Schubert. Young
singers are working in a very self-aware way - in dialogue, as it were, with the public,
rather than treating the recital as some sort of holy event. It is for them a part of daily
life - full of life, full of love - everything Schubert wanted!"

Graham Johnson, too , picks up on "a new sense of deference to the score - and a real
sense of awe. Young singers are asking what they can do for this music, rather than
what it can do for them. Even in gigantic performing personalities, with huge fantasy,
like Matthias Gorne, there's a sense of modesty." Johnson is acutely aware, too, of the
often subconscious influence, over the last 30 years, of the early music movement.

"Singers of Fischer-Dieskau's generation knew a Viennese Schubert. The distance

between him and Brahms was perhaps not as great for them as we feel it to be now. We
hear tempos that are faster, articulation which is cleaner. Even in the playing of Gerald
Moore, we hear less and less pedal. And then we get to Charles Rosen who states
unequivocally in The Romantic Generation (HarperCollins: 1995) that, until 1830, the
pedal was used entirely for colour and atmosphere - not to connect the movement of the
fingers". Johnson, of course, rejects the dogma of authenticity-solely-through-the-
fortepiano. 'That belonged to 20 years ago." But he acknowledges the assimilation, as if
by osmosis, of its particular timbre and strength. He plays increasingly with the lid up,
"to create more clarity and more brilliance..."

Nowhere are the shifts in performance practise more sharply focused than in the song-
cycles. The sophisticated stylization behind the simplicity of Wilhelm Müller's verse in
Die schöne Müllerin stimulated Schubert to compose what Johnson has called a
"highly-wrought parable". After more than 37 recordings, the cycle continues to drive a
mill-race of commentary and criticism.

As early as 1979, Johnson and his Songmakers had reinstated into one of their live
performances the poems by Muller which Schubert had not set - if only for the
opportunity this afforded for some respite in a cycle even more exhausting to perform
than Winterreise. Fassbaender's was the first recording to include a reading of the unset
poems in between the songs. The practice, later taken up in the Hyperion Edition when
Fischer-Dieskau read and Ian Bostridge sang, was important to Fassbaender in helping
her find the right tone.

"When you look closely at the spoken Prologue and Epilogue, you realize the sense of
irony in the work. You begin to understand that it is playful too." The establishing of a
tone, a register, was particularly necessary for Fassbaender as the first woman to have
performed the cycle complete. "Of course it is meant for a tenor, and the rapid
fluctuations in mood which belong to an adolescent male. It is hard for a woman to
identify with that world. This was the greatest challenge of all to me: greater than either
Schwanengesang or Winterreise.

"Winterreise's themes of love and death, after all, have the same meaning for a woman
and for a man. Though it takes everything from you; and if you're not prepared to give
everything, then you shouldn't sing it. As a woman, I always start with a certain sense of
distance, of abstraction from the persona of Winterreise. But it doesn't last. After the
fifth song, I'm deeply involved. And for me, this is not the experience of a young man.
It seems to me the desperation of a mature person. I can 't understand how young
singers start so early with Winterreise..."

Christa Ludwig was one of the first women to sing Winterreise in its entirety, after
Lotte Lehmann, and after extracts recorded by Elena Gerhardt, Maria Ivogün, Elisabeth
Schumann and Kathleen Ferrier. Ludwig chose Winterreise for a remarkable farewell
recital at the Wigmore Hall in October 1993 and, within a still perfectly controlled
contour of line and tone, conveyed the torture of ever-present pain within a sense of
existence outside time. Earlier she had told me: "You grow into Winterreise, passing
through its different stations in a search for tranquillity. When we reach 'Der Leiermann'
at the end, we are faced with the Wheel of Life, turning on and on with no end. The
question 'Shall I go with you?' expresses the same desire as in Mahler's 'Ich bin der Welt
abhanden gekommen'. We are into Nirvana, into a space where nothing counts any
more. There is no question of woman or man."

Even within the male experience of Winterreise, more than 60 years of recording have
revealed an extraordinary range of responses. As distances and levels of recession shift
between performer, persona, and those resonant emblems of the weathervane, the crow,
the charcoal burner, the organ-grinder, so there has been a journey through the attitudes
of romantic heroism, psychopathological intensity, and on to stoicism and ironic
distance. Ian Bostridge is preoccupied with precisely this dilemma of distance.

"It's very difficult to sort out to what extent the singer becomes the persona, or is a
commentator. Each time I find one's integration with the text changes. At the moment I
feel there's a sort of Heine-like protagonist. When Schubert responds to Müller's
deliberately ludicrous imagery, he emphasizes the fact that it is used self-consciously -
in 'Der Krahe', for instance. The recognition of self-deception is very important. This
persona is self-knowing. And in singing Winterreise, you're mimicking the process the
protagonist himself is going through. You're being self-obsessed in performing the
cycle! I remember something Fischer-Dieskau wrote in one of his record notes. He
asked whether this was a cycle we really ought, morally, to perform in public at all..."

Winterreise certainly continues to provoke extreme reactions. In 1983 David Wilson-

Johnson and David Owen Norris decided that we had really got it all wrong:
Winterreise should exist as a cycle of songs sung in the poet's own ordering, not that in
which the songs were finally published. Wilhelm Müller published his first 12 poems in
1823, and Schubert set what he thought to be a complete cycle. He then discovered that
Müller had later published 12 more poems, some of which were interspersed between
the lyrics he had already set. If Schubert had wished his first part to correlate with
Müller's, he would have had to interpolate four new poems: ("Die Post", "Der greise
Kopf', "Die Krahe" and "Letzte Hoffnung"). And he would have had to shift four songs
already composed into the (as yet uncomposed) second half. Schubert did not make
such a last-minute revision; and Graham Johnson argues cogently, in The Songmakers'
Almanac: Reflections and Commentaries (Thames Publishing: 1996), why it was that
Schubert did not "retrace his steps, pick up the baggage of which he has already
divested himself, and transport it to new realms, where it had no place". Schubert
instead began his second part with the unset poems, and went on to the end, omitting the
poems he had already composed.

Wilson-Johnson, though, feels that Müller's order reveals a stronger, more consistent
story line, a significantly changed character. "This is a man very much in control of his
fate. He's afraid of commitment. He likes the open-air life, the force of the elements.
He's never so happy as when there's a storm brewing. He's aware of his own image and,
in songs like 'Letzte Hoffnung', pokes fun at it. This character is firmly established in
the first 12 songs, and Müller rearranged the complete cycle to reinforce it. The
publisher then made nonsense of the arrangement. If, for instance, you move from the
exhilaration in the storm in 'Einsamkeit' straight on to 'Mut' you have an astonishing
juxtaposition. There is a more aware, assertive, aggressive character..."

Wilson-Johnson's wanderings seem only gently aberrant in the light of Hans Zender's
peregrination. In the autumn of 1994 in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall (and a year later
on disc: RCA, 9/95), Zender presented a "composed interpretation" of Winterreise: a re-
creation which, he claimed, did no more than take a characteristic set of responses - in
matters of tempo, transposition, nuancing - to their 'logical conclusion.

In grafting on to Winterreise an introduction and bridge passages, and in transforming

Schubert's "sound ciphers" into overt sound effects in the throats and instruments of
Ensemble Modern, Zender's recomposition ranged from an act of virtuoso imagination
to the banal. He flashed back to the Biedermeier and fast-forwarded to Bruckner, Wolf
and Mahler - and all in order "to reinvigorate the initial impulse, the existential force of
Schubert's original".

It had to be only a matter of time before Winterreise was fully staged. A year later Hans
Peter Cloos brought his Opera Comique 'production' of Winterreise to London, and
Martyn Hill, with a little help from an installation by Christian Boltanski and the
ghostly choreographed presence of a pair of Polish twins, set out on his journey - along
a particularly sinister stretch of German railway track...As Benjamin Britten said, on the
occasion of receiving the Aspen Award, "Every time I come back to Winterreise, I am
amazed not only by the extraordinary mastery of it...but by the renewal of the magic:
each time the mystery remains... "

The Doppelgänger installation cannot be far away. Curiosity in the cryptic significance
of Schubert's most chilling Schwanengesang has been kindled by observations in
Werner Aderhold's notes to the recording of Schubert's Masses by Bruno Weil (Sony
Classical, 5/97). He points out that Schubert reused what he sees as the cruciform C-B-
E nat-D motif from "Der Doppelganger" in the Agnus Dei of the E flat Mass - for "a
man stands there too and stares aloft, and wrings his hands in an excess of grief..."

Brigitte Fassbaender is intrigued but bewildered by the 'cross' reference. "I feel the
motif was simply there in Schubert's subconscious. He often wrote in a trance - we
know that - and afterwards he could barely recognize what he had written. I don't
honestly feel it matters from the point of view of interpretation. 'Der Doppelgänger'
comes from a schizophrenic mind, and is one of Schubert's most modern songs. For me,
Schubert has never been a romantic composer: I would call him a 'classic expressionist'.
His music points out far into the music of our century. And I always wanted to perform
him in such a way that we can understand him with our feelings."

If the solo Lied was never to be the same again - and Bostridge feels that, in the very act
of composing his cycle, Schubert was making a statement about the new pre-eminence
of song - then neither, indeed, was the partsong, in its metamorphosis from sentimental
homespun, or rumbustious tavern-song, to an artefact of extraordinary sentience and
sophistication. No one is more acutely aware of this than Graham Johnson who has
done so much to reactivate, against all odds, the creative spirit of Schubert's own time.

The part-song grew from the Lieder-Tafel of late 16th- and 17th-century Germany, in
which camaraderie and alcohol would mingle in taverns and coffee-houses. "By
Schubert's time," says Johnson, "it was far less of a spontaneous activity. But there was
a craze for four-part songs in Vienna, and he was asked to write them again and again.
He got sick and tired of it: he knew there was a limit to the medium. But he poured
himself into them - as he did with everything he wrote. There are no short cuts in
Schubert."

The Hyperion Complete Edition is rowdy with the patriotic songs and choruses which
are Schubert's tribute to his poet-friend Theodor Körner who died at 22 on the
battlefield of Gadesbusch in North Germany, fighting with the Lutzow volunteers. "The
aggressive soldier-boy of the Leyer und Schwert ('Lyre and Sword') settings", wrote
Johnson, "is Schubert himself as an adolescent Walter Mitty." And Vol 22 bubbles with
the early Trinklied, Punschlied and Lob des Tokayers, the latter written in August 1815,
a musical evocation of that fragrant late-summer glow which can still be experienced in
the small, vine-garlanded border villages of the Neusiedlersee.

And then, suddenly, the exquisite Das Leben ist ein Traum, D269, one of two three-part
choral settings with piano, each voice drifting in and out of the consciousness of the
other. And the five virtually unknown settings of Das Grab, one of the poems which
meant most to Schubert, and which he set for male quartet, unison male chorus and four
unaccompanied parts. The starry cover of Hyperion's Vol 26, with its 1826 Schubertiad,
encloses the haunting Seidl chorale, Grab und Mond (D893), prefiguring the dark
ambivalence of the late solo Heine settings. And then the Nachthelle (D892) which
tracks the stars in their courses, as a high, silvery tenor who haunts so many of the
partsongs (and was undoubtedly Schubert's friend Ludwig Tietze) rises above a gently
echoing chorus. Listening to Nachthelle, reflects Johnson, "is like watching a young god
at play, rearranging the constellations for pure pleasure".

More wonders are to be disclosed in Hyperion Vol 28, released as an 1821-2

Schubertiad. For Johnson made an exciting discovery of his own. "Let me show you
something!" He crosses his study and returns with a long, slim album of heavy, fragrant
paper, exquisitely bound. "This is the music-book of Johann Karl Unger, professor in
the history of law at the Theresien-Academy in Vienna. He recommended Schubert as a
tutor for the Esterházys in Zseliz. His daughter, Karoline, was the first mezzo in
Beethoven's Ninth, and Schubert taught her the role of Dorabella. Nice old boy - and
something of a poet and composer too. What an indication of the culture of Vienna at
that time: that someone who was not a professional musician should have taken such
pride in making his own musicbook!" Johnson turns the crisp pages to a song called Die
Nachtigall, its dactylic rhythms dancing over the pages and issuing in a black stream of
trilling notes. "Well, Schubert saw the poem in this very book, and made his own setting
of it for male quartet. I'll play it for you..."

It was precisely the Schubert of the Schubertiad - the convivial musician, loyal
companion, warm and often naive friend - who was to be at odds with Schubert the
opera composer. Although it was undoubtedly his visits to the opera which inspired him
to start writing Lieder at all, and although it was his dearest ambition to be recognized
as an opera composer, Schubert surely lacked the entrepreneurial steel, the pragmatism,
the energetic drive for self-promotion, vital then as now in making a career in the
theatre. At the premiere of his one-act farce Die Zwillingsbrüder (D647), the only one
of his operas he ever saw staged, Schubert, embarrassed by the loud support of his
friends, refused to take a bow, and his baritone friend Johann Michael Vogl had to
announce from the stage that the composer was absent. When the opera fell out of the
repertoire after six performances, Schubert, typically, made no attempt to revise the
score or to raise further interest in the work.

There are plenty of frequently rehearsed reasons for Schubert's lack of success in opera:
a paucity of good librettists, a court theatre in dire financial and artistic straits; and, as
Brian Newbould has shrewdly observed, the fact that Schubert was moving consistently
towards an ever more epigrammatic means of expression in his writing as a whole.
Drama was being distilled into song: András Schiff has famously commented that for
him there is more drama in Die junge Nonne than in the whole of The Ring. By 1828
Schubert's stage was Auf dem Strom; his theatre was the landscape of The Shepherd on
the Rock. In short, Schubert did not need opera.
Yet, as Elizabeth Norman Mackay points out, his operatic scores reveal that he was in
the very forefront of the development of music theatre, way ahead of his
contemporaries, "creating forms and orchestral sounds which anticipated the musical
world of Wagner". Fischer-Dieskau went as far as to say that Wagner actually came too
early. Were it not for him, Schubert would have had a much more profound influence
on the 19th century.

Schubert's vocal writing constantly erupts with operas-manques - from the melodramas
of Ossian, to the dramatic scenae from Faust, to the Heine settings of Schwanengesang,
and on to Der Hirt auf dem Felsen and Auf dem Strom. The finest example of Schubert's
innovative drama-in-music, though, is surely Lazarus. Such is the visionary quality of
its musical invention that Brian Newbould, puzzling like many before him on the
significance of its unfinished state, was moved to ask, "how does one play the game
through to a successful conclusion when the goalposts have just been moved?"

Schubert's Lazarus knows no resurrection. For the three-act poem by Niemayer on the
death, burial and resurrection of Lazarus, Schubert provides only a first act and part of
the second - all in an extraordinarily pliable and expressive arioso which points far
ahead to the through-composed operas of the late-19th century. Einstein claimed that
Lazarus surpassed both Tannhaüser and Lohengrin as music drama. Edison Denisov's
completion of Lazarus at Helmut Rilling's suggestion (Hanssler Classic, 4/97) makes no
attempt at stylistic continuity. In RW's words this is Schubert "refracted through a 20th-
century prism": the light spectrum radiates in the shifting colours of post-Mahlerian
expressionism, 12-tone writing, and bold rhythms and orchestration.

Above all, Lazarus has taunted scholars with teasing metaphysical questions as to the
possible reasons for Schubert's abandoning the work. Was he, perhaps, unconvinced - or
daunted - by the concept of resurrection itself? Aha, they cry; and no resurrectionem
mortuorum at the end of the Credo in Schubert's Masses either! Scholars have been
muttering for years about Schubert's excision of certain liturgical Father/Son
relationships, and references to one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. The
arguments about whether Schubert was acting as pragmatist, practical musician,
wounded son, amateur theologian or esoteric mystic turn and turn again. But for
Wolfgang Sawallisch, who has recorded all the church music, one thing is sure. The
Masses, he believes, show a harmonic depth and sense of experiment unique in
Schubert's oeuvre, and comparable to the visionary daring within the sacred works of
Beethoven and Bruckner.

Schubert's church works, though, should not be confused with his sacred works. "I have
never," wrote Schubert, "forced devotion in myself." When it comes over him unawares
then, he knows, "it is usually the right and true devotion". And , of course, it is
constantly, continuously, coming over him unawares. Die Götter Griechenlands
provided Schubert with yet another Pantheon. And the countryside which spread out
around him, and resonated in his soul through the neo-Platonic Romanticism of
contemporary poets, created for him a theology of immanence. Das Lied im Grünen was
written during Schubert's last period of bucolic refreshment; Die AIlmacht emanates the
fragrance of his Steyr holiday of 1825. In Ganymed spiritual ecstasy reaches its
apotheosis.
Those with ears to hear will surely sense in the last lines of Die schöne Müllerin and
Der Hirt auf dem Felsen - that broad blue sky. and that renewal of the soul's wandering
in another ever-renewing spring - the reverberations of another resounding soul and
soul-mate who, similarly, fears no more the heat o' the sun. Graham Johnson has the last
word. "What I didn't know, when I began the Hyperion Edition - and I do know now - is
that Schubert is as great a songwriter as Shakespeare is a playwright. Because, of all the
Lieder composers, he is the one who is infinitely adaptable in performance to every
different human being. Just as Shakespeare is infinitely flexible in the type of
productions he can receive. All the singers I have ever worked with have a Schubert
which is true to each one of them. His music contains multitudes... "