Schubertiade: ‘Du holde Kunst, ich danke Dir’

Some retrospective observations: a great deal of ‘night music’ has sneaked into this selection – hardly surprising, really, because Schubert was fond of composing at night. Curiously enough, I also realised that tenor songs are missing, whereas Schubert (himself a tenor) composed most of his songs for that voice type!

In his experience as a singer, in my opinion, lies one of Schubert’s secrets as a composer of Lieder: his training as a choirboy at the Konvikt in Vienna crystallised in a style of writing that is ideally tailored for the human voice. In addition, the dramaturgical structure of his songs is phenomenal. The piano acts like a stage director: it sets the mood and anticipates the setting of the text – an age-old theatrical principle that Schubert handled brilliantly. A hearing of Der Zwerg with the words of the song in hand illustrates the point with brio!

That dramatic power is just one of the Schubertian qualities that so fascinate me. I also find his music very ‘pure’, to the point. Schubert never paid any attention to what others thought: he went his own way, with an original body of work as the result. His compositional trajectory, too, seems to me to be exceptional: he wrote Erlkönig before he was twenty, and at the end of his life he started studying counterpoint! Finally, some of Schubert’s quotes are close to my heart. One of the most beautiful makes the perfect peroration to this note: O Imagination! Thou greatest treasure of humanity, thou inexhaustible source from which both artists and scholars drink! Oh stay with us still, though recognised and venerated by only a few, to preserve us from that so-called enlightenment, that hideous skeleton devoid of flesh and blood!

Jos van Immerseel 12