MusiLLection

The dark, dramatic atmosphere of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony finds a visual echo in this romantic landscape painted by his brother, Ferdinand Schubert. Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor stands as one of the great enigmas in the history of music—an acknowledged masterpiece whose incompletion remains unexplained. By October 1822, Schubert had completed the first two movements and had made substantial progress on a third movement, a Scherzo , which survives in sketch form. At that point, he abandoned the symphony and turned his attention to other works, among them the Wanderer Fantasy . In 1823, Schubert sent the unfinished manuscript to his friend Josef Hüttenbrenner , who later passed it on to his brother Anselm , in whose possession the score remained undiscovered for more than forty years. It was not until 1865 that Johann Ritter von Herbeck, conductor of the Vienna Court Opera, persuaded Hüttenbrenner to release the manuscript. The symphony received its first performance i...

Rarely can a man be driven out of fate as far as Franz Peter Schubert . He was born on January 31, 1797, one of his family's 14 children, in the kitchenette of his humble family home in Vienna. His father was a poor teacher - he used his house as a school - who fought his whole life to make ends meet. The gods who give away beauty ignored Franz Peter. He was short, fat and congenitally short-sighted. He had a low forehead, short plump fingers and walked with a strange, apologetic, restrained step. He was also - apparently not unnecessarily - overly shy. This is where Schubert was born. The cramped house that his father turned into a school, struggling to survive as a teacher. He was certainly a musical genius, and his talent appeared very early when he began composing for his family. At 10, he composed music for the local church, where he was also a choir director. When Schubert was 11 years old, he won a scholarship to the Choir of the Royal Chapel at the Imperial and Royal School...

A contemporary of Schubert's drawing shows him ridiculously tiny in front of his best friend, the famous Austrian baritone singer and composer Johann Michael Vogl. It was during the happy holiday of 1819, at his friend's cottage in Steyr, where Schubert began writing the famous Piano Quintet of "Trout". Franz Schubert , in the summer of 1819, went on vacation to Steyr with his opera singer fried Johann Michael Vogl. Revitalized by the rocky mountain scenery, he spent a lot of time playing music with friends. When the local music community asked him to compose music for them, cellist Sylvester Paumgartner recommended that Schubert could use a song he had written two years ago, called Die Forelle. Schubert duly honored the music community with this wonderful Trout Quintet , adding an additional part that included various variations on the theme of "Trout" . Schubert completed the project on his return to Vienna, He sent the score to Steyr's musicians, who ...

In his brief passage from earth, Franz Schubert marked the beginning of a great era. The evolution of romance would certainly be different without the testimony of the Vienné composer. He first managed to essentially connect music with poetry and achieve the absolute sign identification of musical expression with speech. He thus emerges as a true poet of sounds. But Schubert was first a man and then a poet. He felt deeply the human suffering, which is why he managed to transform it with touching sincerity into music. The subtle melancholy that is detected even in the brightest moments of his music becomes a guide to diving into the sanctuaries of the human soul and a catalyst in the effort to explore human emotion. All his works are dominated by the gentle agony of the futile search for personal happiness. The form of the trekker exists everywhere, dominant and distant; even in the compositions of pure music, where each phrase is equivalent to a wonderful song without words, proving t...