Perspective on Schubert

Last night, as I was driving, I had a thought about Schubert I'd like to share.

As you will notice upon reading my profile, Schubert is right up there with Mahler in my "favorite classical composer" catagory. But while it's rather easy to pin down my close-to obsession with Mahler, my passion for Schubert's music remains a little more elusive.

Since I first heard Schubert's music, back when I knew nothing about music (I still don't think I know much about music but that's another topic), I felt that there was something there - lyrical beauty, lush romantic harmonies that anticipated in many ways the linear chromaticism of Chopin and Schumann. But there was something else too...something that honestly scared me and some years ago I finally figured it out.

What frightenes me and awes me at the same time about this man's music is that, like any great composer, there is a meaning beneath a meaning in his music. The beauty and romanticism is easy to pick up on. But more often than not, this beauty is juxtaposed and layered against an impending tragic sense, or as I worded it last night, a "fatalistic sense of sadness" culminating in one central thought in Schubert's mind: death.

The man himself was dead before he reached 32. One of the greatest musical minds this world will ever see and he was gone one year after Beethoven himself passed. Nevertheless, death obsessed him and this is clearly traceable in his output.

If you know his song, the "Erlkonig", you know what I mean. This song consists of a setting of Goethe's ballad telling of a traveling father and his (presumably) ailing son who is further being accosted by a demon-spirit of sorts called the Erlking (in English). The boy, terrified of this, informs his father of every horrifying entreaty on the part of the Erlking and the father simply rides on, attempting to simply outrun and outsmart the demon-spirit. By the time he's reached their destination, he looks down only to behold the corpse of his son. There's a whole psychology being this poem which I won't go into but I hope you get the gist - and if you heard the music, with it's almost banal, but incessant rhythmic drive complete with it's wandering and twisting harmonies, the prose of the text becomes that much more poignant. But the central point is the same - death.

Schubert wrote his setting of this poem in 1815 - he was 18 years old.

There are other works - the song cycle, "Winterreise", which relates the story of a dejected lover who wanders the countryside in winter until, what the listener can only assume, he perishes amid the cold and loneliness he suffers. There is also the great song, "Death and the Maiden" which tells of a young woman confronted with death, to whom she eventually succumbs. This song was developed in a set of astounding variations in the second movement of his famous D minor string quartet, aptly named "The Death and the Maiden".

I hope I have proved my case. And if I've not, a challenge you to listen to any mature recording of a Schubert work, especially those I have referenced. Contestors are welcome to post their opinions.

And now that we have established Schubert's preoccupation with death, even if it was on the sub-conscious level, we must figure out why he might have been this way.

And here is where we arrive at what I was thinking last night. Several things must be taken into account. First off, Schubert's lifestyle: hedonistic. He composed by day but his evenings were given to parties, drinking, smoking, women, wine, gambling and all that that entails. It all wasn't bad. Some of these parties consisted of poetry readings or premiers of Schubert's own song settings. But the fact of the matter remains that he died of a disease (syphillis) that was most likely contracted in the midst of one of these faures in Vienna.

Secondly, we know that Schubert was dissatisfied with his life on earth. He is oft quoted as saying: "Sometimes, I feel as I don't really belong to this world at all." Of one thing he was sure - he fate and destiny as a composer. But he could not escape his feeling of being different and not belonging. I don't presume to know the psyche of Schubert, but given all these facts, it is my belief that the man was searching - searching for God, searching for meaning, searching for ultimate direction (the very things Mahler pursued). In this midst of these parties and excursions, he wrote music tinged with the thought of tragedy and death, he didn't "really belong".

I think the whole Viennese scene, of which he was a part of, took its toll and he simply got tired of it eventually. But knowing he didn't belong, and considering his own quest for God, and higher meaning, I think he had death on the mind.

Mind you, Schubert's death is not the same as Mahler's concept of death. While Mahler believed fervently in the transformational, almost redeeming quality, of death, Schubert's concept was blackened by fear of the unknown. Yet somehow, he was inexplicably aware of a higher order of things.

For more reading, see Patrick Kavanaugh's book, "The Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers".