Schubert, the traveler: this is the title of the 28th edition of this Folle Journée de Nantes dedicated to the brilliant Austrian composer. A crazy day which can be honored to have never been canceled – a delicate bet in recent years – and which will therefore strictly respect the sanitary conditions.
For those who know, the concert venues are cut in two, the Grand Auditorium on one side (2000 seats), the Cité des Congrès on the other, which brings together various halls which together reach around 1900 seats. No free concert under the big bandstand, no comings and goings, stalls, bookstores, cafes. We go in, we listen, we go out: the party will be sadder, the day will be less crazy, the main thing being that it takes place…
However, the real “victims” are schoolchildren: many places are usually reserved for them, they are postponed until June. Schubert, he will not be a victim.
We are promised the completeness of his chamber music (and in particular the quartets) and music for four hands, most of the piano, a lot of lieder (there are more than 600), the major part (although less known) of choral music. Plus four symphonies including the great 9th and theUnfinished. It is already a very important program for a composer who, in his short life, composed more than 1000 works. By far beating Mozart (if we want to compare) who lived four more years and wrote “only” 600. Schubert’s prolixity is astonishing and if all his compositions are not marked by genius, ‘among them (like Mozart) are among the most masterful, and in all genres (with the exception of the concerto, which Schubert never tackled), in the history of music.
/2022/01/25/phpvFDkqd.jpg)
To the point, it is said with force, that the Bach-Mozart-Beethoven trio (the three giants that even non-music lovers identify as the pillars of 1000 years of music) should be transformed into a Bach-Mozart-Beethoven-Schubert quartet , He who was leaving, a few weeks before his death, knocking on the door of a great Viennese teacher of counterpoint, like a young student at the Conservatory… He whose elder brother, Ferdinand, ten years after his death, welcomed Schumann, entrusts him with a large package of manuscripts which could have been destroyed: “Do you think there is anything of value there?” Schumann, bewildered, discovers marvels, including this sublime 9th symphony (“to divine lengths”, he will say) which he hastens to have created by his friend Mendelssohn in Leipzig.
Schubert, who was not completely unknown, but more like a charming musical companion, improvising for a few friends or playing his own works with them, surrounded by singers and poets, in inns, taverns, around Vienna, amiable and joyful – the famous Schubertiades. And struggling to organize his own real serious concerts. But we whispered that he had written pretty things, so charming Impromptu, beautiful melodies like The Alder King and even a successful symphony, unfortunately Unfinished.
And Schubert, for a long time, will remain this man, in the shadow of Mozart and especially of Beethoven (his god): we knew a little more lieder than the only king of the alders but, from the piano, Impromptus and Musical Moments (none of his brilliant sonatas), and a few pieces of chamber music, Trout Quintet or one Trio with piano. It was really necessary to wait for the 1960s or 70s to hear all the piano (by a Brendel. A Schnabel had tried it at the beginning of the 20th century, a little alone, and, occasionally, an Edwin Fischer, a Serkin, a Clara Haskil ) And one cannot overlook how much the use of the 2nd Trio with piano by Stanley Kubrick in Barry Lindon even better revealed Schubert to the general public.
So the Schubert enigma remains: a composer sad at not seeing his true value recognized or a bon vivant happy with his status as an artist forged by friendship? A man convinced that syphilis would not affect his creative faculties or, on the contrary, feeling that death was going to take him, throwing his last strength in the summer of 1828 into a collection of masterpieces? As if, like Mozart, the composer’s intuition touched by a supernatural grace prevailed over earthly life, his farewell to his friends and to Vienna passing through the ultimate blossoming of his genius. Musicologists will be there to “decipher” the strange state of mind of the sweet, the nice – the tormented? – Franz.
Last enigma: the title of this crazy day : Schubert, the traveler. He who never left Vienna! But obviously, reference to his Traveler’s Fantasy for piano, it is an intense inner journey, a journey of the soul, a perpetual pilgrimage that awaits us. Even beyond this Crazy day.
The 28th Folle Journée de Nantes dedicated this year to Schubert, the traveler.
From January 26 to 30 in Nantes (44000)
City of Congresses and Grand Auditorium.