Music
Genius of Schubert
Robin Holloway
Earlier this year one of the most impor- tant and handsome undertakings in the century-old history of recorded music reached its not-overly-trumpeted comple- tion.
But I'll abandon circumspection and say outright that the Hyperion edition of Schu- bert's complete songs on 37 CDs, with its flotilla of distinguished singers, master- minded, extensively annotated, piano- accompanied throughout, by Graham Johnson, simply is the handsomest and most important achievement in the gramo- phone catalogue. Its value lies firmly in the calibre of its contents: performances are never less than worthy and sometimes touch great heights of interpretative skill; recordings are abso- lutely unexceptionable (i.e. you don't notice them, until with some discs so gener- ously filled the outer limits can skitter out of control). But the whole project 1s its importance upon the genius of Schubert: importance lies in the revelation of this extraordinary body of work, its handsome- ness in the intelligence and imagination with which the corpus is laid out, like a great love-feast, a loving garden, a country, a continent, a world, for its listeners grate- fully to devour, explore, populate. For despite the high standing of the two great cycles and a handful of celebrated individual songs the vast majority of Schu- bert's output in this genre still remains if
not absolutely terra incognita, largely undervalued by music lovers in general. This is partly because of the essential quiet- ness of the genre itself. Not overly trum- peted' — the art-song with piano remains intimate and special: it can never make a big noise and be hot news.
Then there is the problem of its remote- ness in sentiment and sensibility. It can seem as remote as the way of life, copiously discussed by Johnson, that gave it birth and saw it to maturity. The comparison lies with the other twin peak of nearly subter- ranean musical achievement, the 200-odd church cantatas of Bach, where the ideolo- gy, spirit, language in which the texts are couched, to which the music is bound how- ever much it transcends them, are still fur- ther removed; whose conventions, once normative, are still further lost beyond any possibility of retrieval. Perhaps both these half-lost domaines can only be rediscov- ered nowadays in ambitious recording ven- tures like Hyperion's.
Johnson's booldettes do their utmost to help. Sometimes too much: he can weary the willing reader not by his exhaustiveness so much as by his frequent self-indulgence in whimsical punning, personal interven- tions, touches of fulsomeness. Yet the sugar of enthusiasm coats a wealth of hard fact whose assiduous amassing amounts to a work of scholarship more interesting than most doctoral theses.
But Schubert is his own best interpreter. The music shines bright through foreign languages, lost conventions, alien sensibili- ties. Also, it must be said, through much fustian bombast, tacky sentimentality and naff narrative, insipid prettiness, poetic corn, didactic prosiness. Amongst all this loom lyrics and ballads by accredited mas- ters of German letters as well as transla- tions from, inter alia, Shakespeare, Pope, Scott, Byron (alongside inevitable reams of Ossian). In effect this makes little differ- ence, for it should go without saying that great poetry by no means guarantees great setting, and a polymorphous amorist like Schubert is likelier to be aroused into full bloom by verse that doesn't intimidate.
So through all this literary matter burns the compelling intensity and unlimited beauty of — I'm throwing caution to the winds! — the most original, fecund, inspired composer who has ever existed. Original because so unbeholden: no com- poser before or since has had in his gift a large admixture of absolutely new things that music can embody and express. Fecund because so frequent, with such protean vari- ety. Inspired because he is the composer closest to music's intrinsic nature; he com- bines consummate purity of grammatical usage fused with an unprecedented reliance upon total expressiveness; objective and subjective are held in such equipoise that they lose their customary polarity.
Whereas in instrumental forms the out- put, however measurable or astonishing, remains with his death at 31 understand-
ably 'unfinished', its rapid progress into post-classical durations and procedures only gradually and partially fulfilled by such successors as Brahms and Dvorak, Bruckner and Mahler, in songs he is from his mid-teens onwards the flawless master of a hitherto unsuspected realm. There were Lieder before, but the genre was minor, even puny. With Schubert it becomes, for all its brevity and the humble- ness of its performing resources and domestic circumstances, as significant as symphony, concerto, sonata, opera, orato- rio, mass. This major art with modest means: not watercolour as opposed to fres- co or oil painting, because the emotional range is so wide and so deep. 'All human life is here'; within this lyric/narrative genre any and every shade and degree of feeling can be contained, uttered with comprehen- sive psychological penetration, breakthtak- ingly direct in the physical appeal of its sheer loveliness, in its workmanship subtle and far-reaching beyond analysis or any other description. 'Size matters': the actual dimensions are subsumed in the grandeur of the real content.
Hyperion's 37 discs provide a thoroughly coherent and artistic organisation of one of the supreme treasure caves in all the annals of humanist achievement. A lifetime three times as long as its creator's will barely suf- fice to explore and know it to the uttermost resonance. But the means lie to hand!
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