Late Schubert

When my daughter’s choir toured central Europe five years ago, one of our group’s stops was Schubert’s home in Vienna. Since moving to St. Louis, my wife Beth and I have heard the eighth and ninth symphonies performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. After all this, however, it was Schubert’s 1816 fifth symphony, frequently played on my Sirius-XM station, that made me pay more attention to the young Austrian composer.  So---on my ongoing journey of teaching myself about classical music---I enjoyed an article by Richard Wigmore in last month’s Gramophone magazine (March 2012) in which he discusses the music of Schubert’s final months, between the completion of Winterreise in the autumn of 1827 until Schubert’s death in November 1828.

The article discusses several of Schubert’s late works, like the Mass in E flat. Wigmore writes, “The apocalyptic, harmonically visionary Sanctus is a musical counterpart of the molten canvases of Turner and late Goya, while the ‘Domine Deus’ and the Agnus Dei are unprecedented in their violent intensity” (p 28). There is the song cycle posthumously titled Schwanengesang.  There are also the piano sonatas in C minor, A major, and B flat major (D 958, 959, and 960), and the C major string quintet.  Schubert also began to sketch a D major symphony which, according to one pianist interviewed by Wigmore, looks ahead to Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. 

Another pianist, Alfred Brendel, is quoted, “Mozart lived his life and arrived at a kind of late style. Schubert, on the contrary, was in the middle of a tremendous development when he died.” Wigmore continues, “with theose visionary late works in mind it is hard---far harder than with Mozart, as Brendel implies---to escape an aching sense of what might have been” (p. 33).