Schubert Re-Assessed

January 1997

Imogen Cooper

‘The numerous fallacies about Schubert, many of which lurk to this day, were almost impossible to avoid in the fifties and sixties when I was a child. Schubert the pretty songwriter, Schubert the miniaturist, Schubert compared with Beethoven and found wanting. These misapprehensions were universal, whether explicitly voiced or by implication, ensuring that the best of his music was absent from the pool into which a talented musical child might dip. It was not therefore surprising that my first conscious experience of Schubert was via "Heidenröslein" sung by my mother, who possessed a beautiful silvery soprano voice.

Next probably came the 'little' A major sonata D664 (but known as op. l20 then), or rather the parts of it possible for a ten-year-old, namely the first two movements. My only memories of it, despite my being in the caring and wonderfully musical hands of Kathleen Long, were worries as to whether I could manage the first movement development octaves (I couldn't), and of playing the opening of the second movement in 6/8 and not 3/4 – a danger that I have noted can persist beyond childhood. Later in my Paris Conservatoire years there followed the last movement (the first two being considered too easy); plenty of "jeu perlé", far too fast and full of hideous down-beat accents. I have a 45 rpm shellac record of my efforts to prove it. I was thirteen at the time and was to hear no Schubert piano music again during my remaining five years in Paris.

Yet somehow the other Schubert was already seeping into my being. Another memory is of "Der Tod und das Mädchen", me an over-weight and over-serious little girl accompanying my mother, and singing "Tod" to her "Mädchen". I still get goose-pimples at the memory of my first experience of Death's "Gib deine Hand". The sheer terror of it could not have hit me more if Fischer-Dieskau had been singing. It was many years before I understood that Schubert, as a true Viennese, could regard Death as a friend extending the hand of welcome.

Again in Paris when I was fifteen, I was lent an old portable gramophone and some records, among which was the C major string quintet. This was a revelation, and I would sit for hours in the hostel dining room in the dark, listening again and again to this major discovery and wondering what had hit me, and why. It was therefore a natural choice, a few years later, when I went to Vienna to work for six weeks with Alfred Brendel, to pick one of the great sonatas for my first lesson, and I chose the A minor D784. This marked the real start of my long-standing relationship with Schubert. It also marked a new maturity in my attitude to my work, since Brendel taught me in that first lesson to listen to myself in a completely different way. We spent, for example, twenty minutes on the first chord of the Andante, a simple F major four-part chord which nevertheless elicited the most intense scrutiny of balance of sound, colour, and atmosphere. All were required at the highest level, after which, so help me, the rest of the phrase had to follow. The only comment the triplet last movement provoked was "well, it is very impressive to be able to play it so fast, but...".

This, combined with my rapidly growing awareness of Schubert's sense of mystery, of light and dark, engineered an instant switch of perception in me, a realisation that my efficient post-Parisian fingers and natural good sound, of both of which I was quite proud, were but a start. They were a visiting-card, which said nothing of interest about me, and, more importantly, not a lot about the music I was playing. Brendel, having presumably noted that my visiting-card was respectable but as yet uninformative, made absolutely no concessions to my age or lack of concert experience. He stretched my ears and imagination to extremes, and the A minor sonata, from its stark opening to its terrifyingly relentless close, seemed the ideal breeding-ground for such a growth of imagination. In it was to be found an introduction to most of the prerequisites necessary for good Schubert-playing.

So what are those prerequisites? To know them is to know what one is attempting to convey, and that in itself is fed by some knowledge of Schubert's temperament and background.

Franz Schubert was born in Vienna on 3l January 1797, of humble parentage. His father was a schoolmaster, his mother in domestic service, and his ancestors had been Moravian peasant farmers. Schubert went to choir school, where he learnt to play the violin, viola and piano. Later at college he was supervised by Salieri, which fittingly continued a specific chain. Salieri had been a friend of Haydn, a rival of Mozart, a pupil of Gluck and a tutor to Beethoven. Schubert was the last of the First Viennese School.  He was also the only one to have lived in Vienna all his life. Indeed, his excursions from there were mostly summer ones, either to teach the two daughters of Count Esterházy at Zseliz in Hungary or to walk with his friends in the Vorarlberg. He was therefore unique among the four great Viennese masters (the other ones being Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) to have travelled so little and to have stayed most of his life within the confines of his native city. He died there on 19 November 1828, aged 31.

Schubert was not born in the most auspicious period for public recognition and commercial success. Beethoven was alive and in Vienna, and Schubert was very aware of his presence, and indeed had the greatest love and respect for him. He was to be a torch-bearer at Beethoven's funeral the year before his own death. Beethoven was considered the great master of both the large symphonic form and the sonata form and Schubert was to suffer, posthumously, from comparisons with Beethoven in this field for the rest of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. On the lighter side, the rage in Vienna at the time was for Rossini and the opera – a medium in which Schubert was ill at ease, despite every effort of his own. There was as yet no tradition of the piano recital and anyway, Schubert himself would probably have been an insufficiently persuasive exponent of his own music, needing as it does considerable pianistic skill if it is to yield all its secrets. Financially Schubert was probably never secure. He did not know about money and was by nature unassertive, no doubt with publishers too. Furthermore, neither the opera house nor the church (both potential sources of income in the early nineteenth century) were his natural musical habitat.

However, where Schubert did gain recognition, albeit insuffïcient, was in a field very close to his heart, that of the Lied. He instigated the "Schubertiade", evenings of informal music making with a few friends, and it was here that so much of his vast and incomparable output of lieder was born. Playing a large part in the birth was the Court singer Michael Vogl, who after a slow start ("there is something in you but you are too little a comedian, too little of a charlatan; you squander your thoughts without making the best of them...") became a firm advocate of Schubert's, and regularly sang his songs at the Schubertiade and elsewhere.

Neverthless it would seem that despite the loving enthusiasm of his friends for his songs, Schubert's depth, and his dark genius, upset them. He told them after composing "Die Winterreise", for instance, that he had some awe-inspiring songs to play to them, yet in the event they seem at first only to have liked "Der Lindenbaum", at a primitive level the most accessible of the cycle.  The dark undercurrents of "Die Winterreise", the particularly depressed state of mind that is already there in the first song "Gute Nacht", were probably beyond the power of his friends to understand fully and to accept, as they proved strangely unacceptable or inaccessible to so many others after his death.

The need to look for a possible explanation for this darkness and depression is a measure of how much it is still taken for granted, or even desired, that Schubert's genial side should always have the upper hand. This is surely an idealistic over-simplification to be avoided in the face of such rich genius. There has also been much speculation as to the likely psychological effects of syphilis having been diagnosed late in 1822, but I feel one should beware of any amateur analysis. Syphilis tends to affect the nervous system in its later stages, which Schubert possibly did not reach in the six remaining years of his life (he was to die not of syphilis but of typhoid fever). But his skin and his looks were certainly affected, and if, in his alleged spell in hospital, he was treated with mercury, a common practice at the time, that in itself would have been harmful and probably hallucinatory. Furthermore, we may reasonably speculate that to someone of Schubert's sensitivity, the presence of the disease would have increased the sense of isolation that any great artist harbours – that particular sense of apartness and aloneness. Witness his heart-rending letter to Leopold Kupelwieser, written on 3l March 1824 –

‘In a word, I feel that I am the unhappiest, most miserable person in the entire world. Imagine someone whose health will never improve, and who, in despair over this, makes things worse instead of better, whose brightest hopes have come to naught, to whom the joy of love and friendship can offer nothing but pain at the most, who is in danger of losing his enthusiasm (at least the sort that inspires) for beauty, and ask yourself if that is not a miserable unhappy wretch? I spend my days joyless and friendless, and only Schwind visits me sometimes and brings a ray of those sweet days long gone...’

And so, in spite of the early existence of Schubert's dark side (think of ‘Erlkönig', written in 1815) his ill-health must have further contributed to the unique feeling of oppressive terror that sometimes creeps, and at other times bursts, into his works, alongside the most searingly simple and powerfully human feelings ever portrayed in music.

It is precisely the close proximity of these two worlds that makes Schubert so great, and which takes us back to the prerequisites vital for the interpreter of his music. She or he must have, first, the innate capacity to switch rapidly between terror and lyricism, often from one bar to the next. This will involve drawing on all their reserves of power and colour. Secondly, and just as important, one must have staying power, particularly mental. For Schubert's spans are long – not by accident as his uncomprehending detractors would have it, but by design. His inner world was the expanded one of a dreamer, the sleep-walker, as Alfred Brendel suggests, to Beethoven's architect, and the dreamer cannot be hurried. He operates within his own time span. It is therefore vital for the performer to entice the listener into this time span from the first note, a formidable task in this era of constant high pressure.

Dreamers and sleep-walkers have hearts and pulses, however, and here we come to the next most vital quality, that of rhythm. Schubert loved to walk ("wandern”) and within these long spans, his sense of rhythm is constant, and woe betide those who take liberties with it. This does not imply the need for a permanently ticking metronome, or indeed a lack of flexibility, but there should always be an awareness of pulse, the logic of giving back time where one has taken it, the subtle relationship between marginally modified tempi.

This is far from the drawing-room version of "Heidenröslein", with all its charm.  My hope is to convey the enormous scope of Schubert's world, and to alert the interpreter and listener to the extremes of expression to be found therein, to the need to think in long lines, and to be aware of the end at the beginning, even – indeed especially – at the start of a forty-minute sonata. Within this long, taut line, the interpreter should have the capacity to slacken the rope without ever letting go, the ability to let what will be happen, without disturbing or distorting it. The timeless dreaming and violent outbursts are their own disturbances and distortions and need no clever intervention from us, if the spirit behind them has been fully understood, and incorporated into the player’s emotional psyche.’

© Copyright Imogen Cooper 1997

Written by Imogen Cooper
Originally published in BBC Music Magazine, January 1997