Blissful days, you are eternally past!
On this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” as this year’s Marlboro Music Festival approaches its final weekend, we’ll partake of an hour of bittersweet musings, courtesy of Franz Schubert. Even at the best of times, Schubert’s emotional equilibrium could be extraordinarily sensitive to change. But the works of his final year seem especially intimate – confessional, even.
Is the melancholy traveler borne out to sea in “Auf dem Strom” (“On the River”) actually parting from life? The narrator is cut off from all human contact. He is unable to hear songs from the distant shore. His memory of his beloved is intense, even as she grows increasingly distant. The text, by Ludwig Rellstab, was originally intended for Beethoven, but Beethoven died before he could set to work on it.
We’ll hear a performance of this remarkable art song from the 1960 Marlboro Music Festival, featuring soprano Benita Valente, hornist Myron Bloom, and pianist Rudolf Serkin.
Faced with his own mortality, Schubert reacted as only Schubert could, by churning out masterpiece after masterpiece: two piano trios, three piano sonatas, the String Quintet in C, the song cycle “Schwanengesang,” and “The Shepherd on the Rock,” alongside assorted smaller works, all within the span of only six months. It’s an extraordinary act of defiance, or perhaps acceptance, of the inevitable.
The haunting second movement of his Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major was written just as he received the news that his illness was beyond cure and that the end was near. The music holds the tragic and the romantic in devastating balance.
The entire trio will be heard in a recording made in Brattleboro, VT, all the way back at the beginning, on October of 1951, featuring Marlboro cofounders, pianist Rudolf Serkin, violinist Adolf Busch, and cellist Herman Busch.
By coincidence, tomorrow, August 8, is Adolf Busch’s birthday. What better way to celebrate than to remember him making music with those he loved?
Both of these works, by the way, were presented on the only public concert devoted exclusively to Schubert’s music during the composer’s lifetime. The concert was held on the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death, March 26, 1828. Schubert himself would be dead only eight months later, at the age of 31.
For more information on the concluding weekend of this summer’s Marlboro Music Festival, and its three valedictory concerts, visit marlboromusic.org.
All good things must come to an end, on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
PHOTO: Rudi and the Busches