Corinne Schneider, eminent musicologist, author of a Schubertian reflections (at Fayard) helps us to decipher the man and the musician Schubert, between enigmas and certainties
What is “my” Schubert?
My Schubert is a Schubert of intimacy. I think his music lends itself to introspection, lends to a musical time that is intimate, much less demonstrative than other composers of his time.
Still so many unknown Schubertians
The discovery of his work is truly a fascinating adventure, quite exceptional: Schubert composed over 20 years more than a thousand works. But at his death only a hundred were published and it will take more than a century to discover the rest. After his death in 1828 there is not a year when we do not discover something about him and this easily until the beginning of the 20th century. Even around 1970 when a Claudio Abbado will record his still completely unknown operas. However, the operas, there are all the same about twenty, some of which, nearly two centuries after his disappearance, have not yet been staged.
The enchanted harp for example: it’s full of magic like The Magic Flute of Mozart, the main character is mute and it is the harp that serves as his language: a magical and charming universe, to which one would not necessarily associate Schubert…
Corinne Schneider C) Christophe Abramowitz, Radio-France
Difficult operas to stage
Obviously the question of the representation of his operas arises – in negative! In fact, his music is often sublime, but the questions of the stage, of pure dramaturgy, arise, and it is because of this that he is difficult to EDIT. Take a contemporary, Weber, the creator of German opera (Freischütz, Oberon, Euryanthe): he was a conductor and a man of the theater quite early on, so he also conducts, in addition to his own works, Mozart, Beethoven and others; Schubert had absolutely no such experience.
Schubert, made for the cinema?
On the contrary, Schubert’s music works very well in the cinema, see the Barry Lyndon by Stanley Kubrick; Schubert’s time is a more contemplative time, more “landscaped”, you can freeze frames, nothing to do with Beethoven, who would undoubtedly be too frenetic, too “heroic”, for the aesthetics of cinema. Except in a movie like Clockwork Orange, another Kubrick, but where violence prevails.
The very late start of true recognition
In the 60s and even 70s, with a Kempff for the piano, a Fischer-Dieskau who recorded the 600 lieder, we began to have a global vision of the world of Schubert that we had not been able to have before. In France, the biography of Schubert by Brigitte Massin (after the Beethoven which she had signed with her husband) is also founder.
Denijs de Winter, piano tuner C) Marc Roger/ CREA
An admirer and “patron”, Franz Liszt
It was with lieder that his work had begun to blossom in the 19th century. Thanks to a man, Franz Liszt. Not only because Liszt, falling in love with this repertoire when he was in Paris in the 1830s, transcribed about sixty of them for the piano, but because he had them translated and sung by the famous tenor Adolphe Nourrit, the Pavarotti of those years, accompanying him on the piano. Thus we begin in France to know Schubert… in French, the lieder being henceforth called melodies. Better still, taking advantage of the proximity of French to Italian, Nourrit and Liszt will “export” these lieder to Italy where the famous Milanese publisher Ricordi will have them translated in turn into Italian and then into English since he has a house in London. … Obviously, if Schubert’s works had remained in German, all this would never have happened.
Schubert bad “salesman” but real personality
Liszt will go so far as to have Weimar represent the Alfonso and Estrella by Schubert. A Schubert completely incapable of defending his own works, unlike a Beethoven, a Weber, who ensured the follow-up of their contracts across Europe. On the other hand, in a city, Vienna, marked by Beethoven who died a year before him, whom Schubert admired so much, but also marked by Mozart and Haydn, almost from the same period, Schubert succeeded, faced with these giants, in writing completely different thing, the only one of his time not to be, in his musical creation, under their influence.
A turning point, syphilis
There are clear-cut stages in Schubert’s life. Everything changes when he becomes ill. Around 1822 (he was 25), he was no longer a pupil of Salieri, he began to live a little on his own, less with his father, less with his friends (he was someone who never had a piano of his own, which has always been a bit nomadic). But above all he learns that he has syphilis, a common disease at the time but which we know that those who are affected will have a short life. At the same time, something by him was published for the first time, the lied The Alder King while he has already composed 400 lieder, 6 symphonies. As if there was suddenly a gap between his notoriety which is born and what he is already in his being, deeply composer.
C) Marc Roger / CREA
Incompleteness then creative power
From there, and the disease forces him to do so, he wants to do more, show what he really is. There is then a period with unfinished or even lost scores, the 7th symphony, quartet movements, fragments of sonatas. Because he does not manage to cross this course, everywhere, in all genres, he “unfinished”. Like this famous symphony unfinished whose first two movements are as long as his earlier four-movement symphonies. New rocking in the form: he dares and finally succeeds in making “monster” works, which will go up to almost an hour -the 9th symphony or the last three piano sonatas. Or the last quartet.
Now some kind of emergency
There is obviously also, the more the disease wins, a kind of emergency. Perhaps, in this creative frenzy of recent months, recent years, he hastened his end. Beethoven’s deafness was disabling but not fatal. Schubert’s disease proved fatal. In this sense, I don’t want to fall into clichés but Schubert appears a bit, even reluctantly, like an anti-hero.
At the Folle Journée de Nantes conference by Corinne Schneider on Saturday 29 January (Franz Schubert by Franz Liszt) and Sunday 30 January (A Schubert symphony can hide another) Among other speakers (Patrick Barbier, Brigitte François-Sappey, etc.)