Radio 3 has had a whole week of playing nothing but Schubert. They are calling it \u201cThe Spirit of Schubert\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although I\u2019m familiar with a few of his pieces, an awful lot of stuff seems to have been composed for personal consumption. One string quartet, for example, they reckoned was composed for members of the talented Schubert family to play and it was never performed again until the 1860s, more than 30 years after Schubert died. It\u2019s very odd to think that Schubert was born when Beethoven was 27 and died a year after Beethoven did, that they lived in the same city as one another for all that time, but there is no record of them having met.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of his music is wonderful \u2013 something like the Trout Quintet is right up there with the best music ever composed \u2013 but quite a lot of it is really odd. It\u2019s almost the musical equivalent of a \u201cmagic eye\u201d picture. Your brain takes a while to sort out the chaos until suddenly something or other becomes abundantly clear. There are lots of odd fragments of works which were never finished: one assumes that had there been a commercial imperative that they would have been completed and performed. He seems to have written most of his stuff for the fun of it. I\u2019ve played nothing more than a couple of his Impromptus<\/em>, which are beautiful, liquid pieces. I tried one of his sonatas once but I couldn\u2019t get into it \u2013 I think it was the weirdness again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When my son was doing A level music he had a piece of Schubert to study as a set work \u2013 I think the F Major octet. I know he was completely gobsmacked by the sheer beauty \u2013 and weirdness \u2013 of the music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Radio 3 has had a whole week of playing nothing but Schubert. They are calling it \u201cThe Spirit of Schubert\u201d. Although I\u2019m familiar with a few of his pieces, an awful lot of stuff seems to have been composed for personal consumption. One string quartet, for example, they reckoned was composed for members of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=523"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":525,"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions\/525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}