Schubert dub 3

Pre-echoes

I’ve lived my life alongside music, but before these two events, Schubert had not had much impact on me.

I grew up with music echoing through the house. My dad is a pianist – an amateur, but a very good one. He worked as a chemist for a large pharmaceutical company, but every evening he would practise on the Hoffman baby grand that dominated our living room (before my parents had a room built specially for it). I remember Chopin, Debussy and Dad’s beloved Beethoven; the music of these composers lies deep within my consciousness. There must have been Schubert too – the Impromptus, maybe bits from the sonatas. But if there was, it has faded from memory.

I was an oboist, rather than a pianist. My own repertory was dominated by music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – Lully, Bach, Vivaldi – along with a handful of mid-twentieth-century works by the likes of Poulenc (the quizzical, lushly upholstered Oboe Sonata) and Britten (the six endlessly inventive Metamorphoses after Ovid) that I adored for their comparative strangeness. Outside the orchestra and a few very early chamber pieces for wind ensembles (barely more than sketches), Schubert never wrote for oboe. He crossed my music stand just once, in the form of a song, ‘Auf dem Strom’, which I played as part of my A-level music assessment. It needed to be something for more than two musicians, and this was a great fit: a song, yes, but one that unusually included a part for a French horn as well as voice and piano. A classmate, a horn player herself, suggested it, and I took the voice part on my oboe. Dad accompanied, and we rehearsed together around the Hoffmann.

My only other contact was in a music history class. A-levels again. The syllabus was built around an anthology of Western music – a remarkable book that set out (with some success) to cover all the main plotlines in Western classical music from the Renaissance up to the late twentieth century in the form of short score extracts. Among them was the Quartettsatz, the first movement of a string quartet Schubert began in 1820 but never finished. He managed a few dozen bars of the second, Andante movement then either became distracted or disillusioned – no one is sure which – and gave up. It would be another four years before he tried to write for string quartet again, but that attempt brought forth Death and the Maiden.

Our teacher was somewhat scornful of what he called Schubert’s habit of note spinning, which could be found, he argued, all over the eight-minute Quartettsatz. Dressing his criticism up, he introduced my classmates and me to the term Fortspinnung – actually the perfectly respectable business of developing a musical motif, although my teacher interpreted it negatively as a lazy filling in of time. As students tend to do when introduced to an apparently easily graspable concept, we looked for examples of it in everything we studied thereafter – crying “Fortspinnung!” in hopeful enquiry every time – although apparently nothing else quite fit the bill.

As it happens, I liked the Quartettsatz. I loved its thrilling opening: the four tremolo strings piling on, one after the other, building swiftly into a tornado of noise; the equally thrilling collapse into sugar-sweet melody that follows. It had – again – a strangeness that set it apart. Even in this brief extract, it obviously sought to stake out the widest possible expressive territory without conceding anything to formal niceties.

But already my head was turned to more contemporary music, and it would be almost three decades before I thought seriously about Schubert again. That same teacher was an organist and had introduced a friend and me to the music of Olivier Messiaen, the supreme organ composer of the twentieth century. One morning before class, he had brought in the score to ‘Dieu parmi nous’, the extraordinary firework display with which Messiaen concludes his first great cycle for organ, La nativité du Seigneur (1935). I had never seen so many notes on one page. How could it be possible for one man to work out and write down such thick chords? And so many of them? Each one was shimmeringly perfect; their totality an intoxicating blaze of colour, reminiscent of the stained-glass windows of Sainte-Trinité in Paris, where Messiaen had been organist for sixty-one years. My teacher sat at one end of the schoolroom piano to play the two hands, while Dan and I went to the other end to hammer out the pedal part. I played very badly, my universe expanding faster than my fingers could keep up. Eventually, planets and solar systems would cool and cohere. For now, I had to make do with flicking forward to the last thirty or so pages of my Anthology to gaze at the twentieth-century scores presented there, trying to imagine how they sounded.