Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  Most of L.A.’s television stations sent reporters and cameras, their coverage revealing that after fifteen years the local announcers still can’t pronounce the music director’s name (“Eessa-peeka,” “Salanon”). The orchestra’s press office fielded calls from The Tonight Show and Al Jazeera. Dudamel appeared healthily detached from the attention. At the press conference, when Salonen introduced him with an uncharacteristically florid fanfare—“We are interested in the future. We are not trying to re-create the glories of the past, like so many other symphony orchestras”—Dudamel got a laugh by advancing to the microphone, pausing for a long moment, and saying, “So-o-o-o …” The art of understatement isn’t dead at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

  Afterward, Salonen sat in his office, a cool, quiet space within Disney Hall’s curving walls. He was looking for words that would express in a not too sentimental or cliched way the idea that he had decided to take the plunge, follow his dream, reject the beaten path. “I’m approaching fifty,” he told me. “And, going by the sort of ten-year chunks by which we measure our lives, even if I behave, the number of decades available is sadly limited. Bill Viola sent me an e-mail this morning saying that there is an old Bulgarian proverb: If you decide to kill yourself by drowning, don’t do it in shallow waters.”

  Several times in the preceding weeks, Salonen had touched on the theme of growing older. At his Apple Store event, he had said, “At this point, my feeling is that somebody will conduct concerts, no question, but only I can write my music, for better or worse. And we’re not getting younger, necessarily.” In a radio interview, he proposed that people in their thirties and forties might be rediscovering classical music because “you realize that your time is not unlimited, that there might be an end to all this, and that life is too short to be wasted on things that are not quality.”

  That morning, Salonen had surprised his colleagues by showing up in a cerulean sports jacket. He habitually dresses in a black T-shirt and black jeans, and no one could recall him wearing color. This was an inside joke for the orchestra, he explained to Smith. At his first rehearsal as music director, everyone had dressed in black in homage to him, and, in those shoe-gazing days, he had to have the joke pointed out.

  Salonen described what had happened that Saturday after he told the orchestra he was leaving. Drained by the experience, he sat in his office alone. (Ben Hong reported that the speech had been “really heartfelt, one of the few times he’s been emotional”) Borda stopped by, and they shared some vodka. Then she went off to attend to business. As he was preparing to leave, his assistant buzzed him, saying that a small group of the musicians were outside the door. He invited them in and chatted for a while. There was another buzz: more musicians had arrived, fortified by a trip to a nearby bar.

  “It became like a sort of mini-party,” Salonen said. “I don’t know what goes on in other orchestras, but it really felt extremely personal and extremely unique.” Well into the evening, he finally went home to his wife and children, one more free man in California.

  7

  GREAT SOUL

  SEARCHING FOR SCHUBERT

  What was he like? You hear different things. In public, Franz Schubert usually presented himself as an amiable bohemian, wearing a face suitable for the master of the art of song. But from time to time he showed a more savage side of his character. If a colorful tale is to be believed, he got drunk one night in a tavern and began verbally abusing a group of Viennese musicians who had asked him to write a piece. Suddenly, a mighty artistic imagination was venting its wrath on a mediocre world:

  You consider yourselves artists? Blowers and fiddlers is what you all are! I am an artist! I am Schubert, Franz Schubert, whom the whole world knows and talks about! Maker of great and beautiful things that you can’t begin to understand! … Cantatas and quartets, operas and symphonies! For I am not just a Landler composer, as the idiotic newspapers say and idiots repeat—I am Schubert! Franz Schubert! Don’t you know it! And when the word “art” is used, it refers to me, not to you worms and insects who long for solos that I will never write … Crawling, nibbling worms who should be squashed under my foot—the foot of a man reaching for the stars—sublimi feriam sidera vertice, translate that for them!

  This tirade was written down long after the fact by Eduard von Bauernfeld, a friend given to suspiciously detailed anecdotes. It may be partly or entirely fictional: such are the problems for anyone trying to grasp the poorly documented, excruciatingly short-lived phenomenon that was Schubert. Yet something here rings true, despite the melodramatic flourishes. It is the tone of confidence, of youthful certainty, that Schubert sustained right up to his early death. You can also hear it in a little rhyme by the playwright Franz Grillparzer, seemingly written as a kind of memento of the composer’s personality:

  I am Schubert, Schubert’s my name,

  Can’t prevent it, can’t complain.

  If you like the path I took,

  Very well then, do the same!

  The same peremptory voice crops up in Schubert’s infrequent personal writings. “Their world-system is human / Mine I know to be divine,” he proclaims in one poem. In another, he seeks to become a “pure, powerful being.” Once, in the middle of the night, he scrawled in a notebook, “Enviable Nero, you who had the courage to destroy a loathsome people with strings and song!!”

  As with the protean Mozart, impressions of Schubert’s character have varied widely over time. Many of the composer’s friends were intent on remembering him as a lovable tippler who scribbled in a somnambulistic trance. This is the image that became standard in the nineteenth century, particularly in Victorian Britain. Even Robert Schumann, who promoted Schubert’s greatness, liked to picture him as a “guileless child romping among giants”—the kind of metaphor so often applied to Mozart in the same period. The twentieth century, inevitably, has been preoccupied instead with disclosing Schubert’s darkness and complexity. In recent decades there has been talk of the syphilitic Schubert, the hedonistic Schubert, the dissident Schubert, the homosexual Schubert. You can measure the change in the composer’s image by listening to movie soundtracks. Where Richard Tauber once sang ditsy operetta arrangements of Schubert in Blossom Time, Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors used the vacillating harmonies of the String Quartet in G Major to symbolize the moral slide of a doctor who arranges the murder of his mistress, and Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden employed the Schubert quartet of that title as accompaniment to torture.

  In part, the image of Schubert has proved unstable simply because the historical record is so weak. We know a fair amount about his movements and activities in any given year, much less about his private life and inner world. Most extant arrangements of the biographical material seem to leave out something essential. Proponents of the cutesy Schubert (there are still some, especially in Austria) have trouble explaining his propensity for texts like “Freiwilliges Versinken” (“Voluntary Oblivion”) and “Ich schleiche bang und still herum” (“I Creep Around, Anxious and Silent”). Fans of the dark side don’t know what to do with documents incontrovertibly demonstrating that he had a jolly time in coffeehouses. In short, a lot of the ambivalence emanates from Schubert himself. I have been making my way through dozens of books and articles about Schubert, and I still have difficulty in imagining who this man was.

  The man is not quite there; the music is another thing altogether. Its presence—its immediacy—is tremendous. It often inspires a kind of unsafe love in its listeners. I am certainly one of the victims. I remember my first encounters with Schubert’s works like teenage crushes. Most of all, I remember playing through the first movement of the great Piano Sonata in B-flat and physically trembling as the main theme stole back onto the page, one octave higher, like a handsome ghost of itself. The ferment in Schubert biography and scholarship has come about because people love the music so, even if the cryptic data of his life have led biographers to radically different conclusions. And it has also come about because t
he music, so rich in its understanding of emotion, sends out profoundly mixed messages. Schubert indeed wrote melodies of unaffected beauty, childlike in their innocence. He was also capable of rhythmic and harmonic violence that would not be equaled until Wagner. And he could play the entire gamut of emotion as one ambiguous chord, dissolving differences between agony and joy.

  What was he like? It’s safe to hazard a few guesses. He was friendly, up to a point; rude, when pressed; very shy or very arrogant, or probably both at once. He was colossally ambitious. He made a career and religion of music; he was a voracious reader who constantly tested the musical capability of texts. He could not grovel in front of potential patrons, yet he worked tolerably hard at self-promotion. His leisure hours were often drunkenly aimless. He formed intense friendships with men; he worshipped women, but from afar. He theorized love more than he experienced it. He was prone both to euphoria and to paralyzing melancholy, but he steadied himself with work. He was more a watcher of life than a participant in it: he had little time for anything unrelated to his art. There were no limits whatsoever to his musical imagination.

  Schubert was born in 1797, in Vienna, and died in that city in 1828. Over a period of about seventeen years he wrote a thousand works. No other composer in history managed to do quite so much in so short a span. A favorite means of measuring Schubert’s achievement is to imagine how his fellow giants of the repertory might be remembered if they, too, had died at the age of thirty-one. Verdi, composer of Nabucco? Beethoven, composer of numerous piano sonatas and one Symphony in C? Johann Sebastian Bach, the distinguished writer of organ music? Mozart would remain Mozart, even without The Magic Flute. But Schubert could have died at the age of eighteen, after writing “Der Erlkönig” and two hundred other lieder, and he would still have left intact his reputation as an epoch-making composer of song.

  Vienna now celebrates Schubert as its most faithful child. Although composers flocked to the imperial capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Schubert was the only major one before Schoenberg to be native to the city. Yet he had a hard time making his name, because, ironically, his devotion to Viennese Classical tradition made him a somewhat unfashionable figure. Around 1820, sonatas, quartets, and symphonies in the manner of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were no longer in high demand; the rage was for dance tunes, Italian opera (not always the most artful kind), and the virtuosity of Paganini. Biedermeier kitsch was coming to the fore. Schubert’s first song publication came, unpromisingly, in the Pictorial Pocket-Book for Friends of Interesting Regional, Natural, and Artistic Curiosities of the Austrian Monarchy.

  He was picked to sing in the Court Chapel choir, now the Vienna Boys’ Choir, and several years later began studying with none other than Antonio Salieri, who, more than twenty years after Mozart’s death, retained the position of Kapellmeister. Salieri drilled his student in the older Italian styles and apparently tried to discourage a growing interest in Beethoven and other Germanic repertory. While Schubert might have found that regimen frustrating, he grew fond of his teacher, who, notwithstanding the portrait offered in Amadeus, was exceptionally generous to his charges. And the grounding in Italian style is apparent in everything Schubert wrote, especially in his sunnier moods: limpid melodies, buoyant rhythms, and sparkling modulations provide a welcome contrast to the bouts of anxious creeping. The old-fashioned schooling also evidently prompted a taste for arcane musical games. The scholar Brian Newbould has discovered a perfect musical palindrome—nineteen bars repeated in mirror formation—in Schubert’s melodrama Die Zauberharfe.

  Schubert found his mature musical personality at the age of seventeen—specifically, in the last months of 1814. His most celebrated breakthrough was the song “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” from Goethe’s Faust. The propulsive, repetitive piano accompaniment, an archetypal feat of tone painting, depicts the mechanical whirl of Gretchen’s spinning-wheel as she sings of her jittery passion. The wavelike rise and fall of the vocal line points ahead to the mournful climax of the “Unfinished” Symphony. “Nachtgesang,” a second major Goethe setting, reveals Schubert’s ability to muse upon simple harmonies and transform them into painterly objects. Songs dominated this period, but September of 1814 also brought his first characteristic instrumental work—the String Quartet in B-flat, with its telltale blend of melting melody and errant harmony. In such passages Schubert seems to speak the language of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, which remained popular for decades after its publication in 1774. When Werther complains of an “inner, unfathomable turmoil that threatens to burst the confines of my breast and choke me,” he does not throw himself into some world-changing crusade. Instead, he finds temporary solace in a winter walk: “I wander about in the dread nocturnal setting of this unfriendly season.”

  The years 1816 to 1822 were a time of exploration. In his songwriting, Schubert was sometimes self-consciously classical, sometimes boldly experimental. When Rossini conquered Vienna, in 1816, Schubert joined the admiring crowds and appropriated some of Rossini’s trademark devices, adding a contemporary flair to the Italianate side of his personality. Seeking a fortune in the mainstream market, he made various attempts at opera, most of them undermined by idiotic librettos and theatrical inexperience. Instrumental forms regained importance from 1822 to 1828: Schubert wrote his two mature symphonies and embarked on a tour de force of chamber and piano music, with Beethoven as his model. He also invented an entirely new form: the epic song cycle. Die schöne Müllerin tells of a young man’s desperate love for a beautiful miller girl, and Winterreise is the winter journey of an even more battered soul. A further cycle, on poems of Heinrich Heine, got under way in 1828. (The so-called Schwanengesang cycle, which includes the six Heine songs, is a publisher’s creation.)

  Beethoven died in 1827. In the close confines of Vienna, Schubert and Beethoven had had almost no contact. The older biographies portray Schubert as a terrified admirer, fleeing rooms to avoid confronting his hero. More likely, he was too proud to show the obsequiousness that his admiration would have demanded. John Reed suggests that Schubert saw Beethoven’s death as an opening: music’s throne was empty, and he was the “legitimate heir.” He scheduled his first and only public concert on the anniversary of Beethoven’s death; he produced songs on poems Beethoven had intended to set; he wrote his C-Major String Quintet in fulfillment of another Beethoven project; he prepared an edition of three piano sonatas, a favorite grouping of Beethoven’s youth. And, at the end, he began a D-major symphony that scholars have identified as a sort of Tombeau de Beethoven, complete with a central elegy in B minor. (There have been several attempts to complete the work; Peter Gülke’s version of the slow movement—austere, archaic, yet devastating—is notably successful.) Even when he realized he wouldn’t make it, he kept to the program. “Beethoven does not lie here,” he mumbled on his deathbed, apparently requesting that he be buried near the Master. So he was.

  There is, of course, more to the story than this. Schubert was the last of the Viennese Classical masters, but he was also in many ways the first Romantic, subjecting music to what Charles Rosen calls, in The Romantic Generation, the “disorder of experience.” Both as man and musician, Schubert was prey to storms of emotion. Moodiness is inherent in his style: certain of his earliest works, notably the Fantasia in G Minor (1811), show a nervous motion from one tonality to another, a habit of incessant modulation that would remain one of his principal signatures. And his urge to picture torrents of feeling led him to an obsessive study of poetry: he was—and remains—among the most literary of composers. The poetry and the poets who were part of his life in turn raise some fiendishly difficult questions about aesthetics, politics, psychology, and sexuality. Some of the most important research of recent years—that by Susan Youens, Richard Kramer, and David Gramit—has focused on the relationship between Schubert and the poets who furnished texts for his more than six hundred songs.

  Schubert lived in an uneasy, transitional time. As he came to matur
ity, the egalitarian hopes of the Napoleonic period had faded, and monarchies across Europe celebrated Restoration with repression. Prince Metternich’s regime in Austria was nothing short of a police state. Some members of artistic circles still agitated for revolution, but most accepted the decorous conservatism of the Biedermeier period. Schubert had arrived on the scene just after the high Romantic period in literature—the age of Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, and Holderlin. Music had yet to unleash the full Romantic welter of feeling, although Beethoven certainly made a start. So Schubert was caught in what turned out to be a productive paradox: he helped inaugurate musical Romanticism yet joined a literary scene that was moving on to other concerns.

  From the start, Schubert sought a seamless integration of poetry and music. In 1816, with his friend Josef Spaun, he drew up a plan for eight volumes of songs inspired by major poets, beginning with Goethe. Unfortunately, the plan relied on the hope that Goethe himself would promote it. Spaun mailed off a collection of Schubert songs; Goethe, whose multifarious genius grew curiously feeble when it approached the realm of music, did not respond. Despite that setback, Schubert pushed toward his greatest innovation, the song cycle. He was probably heartened by—but by no means dependent on—the example of Beethoven’s interrelated Distant Beloved songs. Richard Kramer, in his book Distant Cycles, argues that the song-cycle category should include not only the famous Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise but also a cycle on poems by the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel. And the pianist Graham Johnson, the mastermind of a complete edition of Schubert songs on the Hyperion label, proposes a cycle for the semi-deranged erotomanic poet Ernst Schulze. (Volumes 18 and 27 of the Hyperion edition, sung by Peter Schreier and Matthias Goerne, give gripping hints of what these might have been like.) Months before his death, Schubert began setting Heine, who was well reviewed but not yet renowned: the composer’s literary instincts had become razor-sharp.