When we think of the music of Schubert’s final year, what comes across most strikingly, perhaps, is the complexity of feeling. Sensitively modulated light and shadow – the unpredictable contrasts of major and minor, agitation and calm, ecstasy and depression – create a sensation not unlike that experienced when wisps of cloud sweep across the sun on a mild autumn day. We find it in the late piano sonatas; we find it in the transcendent String Quintet in C major. It’s a beauty so intense that it actually kind of hurts.
Every rule has its exception, of course, and on this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” we catch Schubert in a comparatively light-hearted mood – which I think appropriate on the occasion of his birthday – with his Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major, D. 898. While the trio does venture into remote keys and has its share of turbulence, the overarching spirit is very, very far from the eerie resignation of “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man.” In fact, it’s a pretty happy piece. We’ll hear it performed at the 2008 Marlboro Music Festival by pianist Jonathan Biss, violinist David Bowlin, and cellist Marcy Rosen.
Then we’ll round out the hour with what might possibly have been the final music Schubert ever wrote. “The Shepherd on the Rock,” D. 965, on a text by Wilhelm Müller and Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, was composed barely a month before the composer’s death at the age of 31. The multi-sectional “lied” traverses a wide range of moods, as a shepherd listens to echoes from the valley below, grapples with his feeling of loneliness, and finds hope in the prospect of Spring and rebirth.
Marlboro veterans, soprano Benita Valente, clarinetist Harold Wright, and pianist Rudolf Serkin, set down a classic – indeed legendary – recording of the work in 1960. This live performance was captured at Marlboro nine years later. In the words of Rudolf Serkin, “An artistic achievement cannot and should not be repeated. Isn’t it a miracle that a performance never is the same?”
Get ready to share his wonder. It’s an all-Schubert hour, on this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page