Arts
Shy Schubert
Hans Keller
In a forthcoming Schubert symposium edited hy Yehudi Menuhin (more leading practising musicians ought to be in charge of literary ventures!), I am trying to grasp that side of Schubert's creative character which made him almost unique amongst composers of great chamber music. Almost, but not quite: his brother-in-law was Haydn, in one single respect — and I don't mean Vienna either, where, again almost uniquely amongst the 'Viennese' composers, Schubert was actually born; most of the others were about as Viennese as I'm a cockney.
What I mean is a delightful deficiency which Haydn and Schubert had in common — a shortcoming which, as they matured, developed into a lasting long-coming: they were not performers, either as composers or indeed as performers. Where they showed things, they didn't show off; I'm not sure that they did much more than show you the way in. As players, and as distinct from the 'Viennese' between them, Mozart and Beethoven, they did not grow into virtuoso performers, preferring private intercourse to demonstration. And so, in their creative capacity as performers by proxy, they came to be, with respect, a bit of a wash-out: neither wrote a great concerto or a great opera or a great concertante piece of any kind, vocal or instrumental, while on the other hand, both of them achieved a degree of continual intimacy in their 'house music' (as they called it) which the remaining great A ustro-Germans, classical or modern, never strove for in the first place: for them, intimacy, strictly private discourse, was a matter of contrast rather than continuity, and they were not loth to introduce into chamber music's holy of holies, the string quartet, instrumental virtuosity and brilliance such as would satisfy the mere listener as much as the listening player.
Admittedly, in his forty-five great string quartets, Haydn did very occasionally allow himself instrumental display — and, on one occasion, even a downright virtuoso piece, or what is intended to sound like a virtuoso piece, for it sounds far more difficult than it is: the last movement of 'The Lark', Op.64, No.5, with its continuous, conceriante semiquavers on the — 'solo violin', I almost said, with scant respect of Haydn's quartet texture, which never degenerates to mere accompaniment. But such isolated moments apart, Haydn kept his quartets well out of the world of concert music, well within that of concerted music.
Schubert was exactly the same, only more so, more convincedly so: he had the courage of his shyness, the conviction of restraint,
deeply aware why he couldn't divulge his secrets to the outside world, to any audience proper — because if he had put them on display, brandished them as it were, they would have lost their communicativeness to the few without making the many any the wiser. Only twice in his career as a quartet composer — it produced no more than three masterpieces, all of which will, of course, be played in the Chilingirian Quartet's three forthcoming Schubert recitals at the Wigmore Hall in London — did the virtuoso spirit take him, and not really by the scruff of the neck. The first was, plausibly enough, a late adolescent occasion: it is in adolescence that we expect a bit of creative streaking. In the early E major Quartet, to be included in the Chilingirians' second recital (26 June), there is a distinct stress on virtuosity — which, even while it lasts, presages its own extinction: against the background of Schubert's emerging personality, it feels a little false; and if this is wisdom after the event, it is all the more substantial for that, since Schubert's later aversion to any type of exhibitionism became more natural the stronger it grew, and the more it helped him not only to concentrate on, but to confine himself to the new truths he had to communicate, however confidentially.
Only once again, in the solitary quartet movement in C minor (which, functionally enough, the Chilingirian have included in the same concert), did he squint at virtuosity — and, significantly in the context of my argument, he left the work unfinished, without any extraneous reason: all we have is another forty-one bars of an andante in A flat. In fact, wisdom during the event of experiencing this movement convinces us that Schubert was right to abandon the project: the piece uneasily falls between a whole row of stools, few of them Schubert's own — and, in my own opinion, should not, perhaps, be performed in public at all, although Brahms cherished its private possession, which is where it belongs.
The fact that otherwise, Schubert had, as a chamber musician, turned his back on virtuosity does not, of course, mean that he had decided to do without technical difficulties, individual and collective. The opposite is true: in proportion as instrumental brilliance ceased to interest him, he dropped his inhibitions about expressing himself in a way that produced instrumental and ensemble difficulties likely to make performances precarious and problematic: his late and last string quartet, the one in G major (21 June), in many definable respects his ultimate chamber-musical masterpiece, is so difficult to play and bring off that each of us remembers only very few occasions when an interpretation of the work wholly succeeded; in the rich history of great string quartets I can, from my wide coaching experience with distinguished quartets, recall only a single work which confronts one with comparable complications — Schoenberg's official First (not No. 0!). The crucial question arises what precisely it is that Schubert is able to tell us 'between ourselves', what he has to be secretive and undemonstrative about, what he couldn't have said otherwise. One's spontaneous wrong answer might be that a poet rather than a musical analyst would be needed to verbalize that which is beyond an ordinary mortal's words — wrong because poets tend to project their own preoccupations on to music, whereas analysts are at least supposed to keep their problems to themselves.
There is the story, allegedly authentic, of a girl approaching Schubert at a party: 'Play us something jolly, Mr Schubert.' My dear lady, there is no jolly music. All music is sad.' He did, one might add, understand the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth at least as well as you and I do — which is why he knew that the inevitable sadness of its joy could not be expressed to 'ye millions' in the concert hall, but only to ye four or five, plus an eavesdropper or two, or perhaps ye two who do the WinterreLse, with your eavesdroppers. Joy can be massed; quiet sadness can't — and sunny sadness, Schubert's sadness, least of all.
The ultimate goal of life is death. You might think that this observation comes from Freud — from one of his party-political broadcasts in aid of Thanatos, his death instinct theory. But no, it's Mozart who said it, in his twenties — and so excited did a classical, second-generation psychoanalyst, Edward Glover, become about the remark when I drew his attention to it that he asked my permission to quote it, forgetting that the copyright was Mozart's rather than mine.
Now, Mozart did not proceed to make death an essential part of musical life. Schubert did — and the result was that sunny, serene sadness which is so rare, so realistic, so complex, so philosophical an emotion that it had to be condemned to the privacy of the last three quartets and the C major Quintet (30 June) — not, incidentally, 'The Trout' (21 June), whatever its entertaining delights and, therefore, its concerthall popularity, its mass appeal.
We do not depend on such things as the incidental verbal evidence of 'Death and the Maiden' (26 June); as a matter of fact, we need not even devote our exclusive attention to the overpowering internal evidence of this D minor Quartet, which develops the distinguished and tragic tradition of that key begun by Mozart in his second D minor Quartet, the piano concerto beloved by Beethoven, and the Requiem; and continued by Beethoven himself, at the other, joyless end of the Ninth Symphony. The clinching evidence is, of course, the consummation of Schubert's major-minor ambiguity in the G major Quartet; but in the aforementioned symposium, Norbert Brainin has a profound passage on Death and the Development (my words) in the opening movement of the A minor Quartet (30 June), which throws more light on the quintessential Schubert than do musicological volumes. Whereas death in public is for the battle-field.
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