Schubert and Me: A Fateful Afternoon in Chapel Hill

The Schubert Listening Challenge, week one

I was a good student in high school but not a great one. I was intelligent and easily bored, an avid reader who was indifferent to studying things that were assigned to me. I could do well enough to get by without trying too hard. I was, however, heavily involved in music—with the school choir (which was exceptionally good for a public school in North Carolina), and through private lessons in voice, piano, and guitar. I dabbled in composition and studied music theory independently.

When it came time to apply to colleges, I was, like most students, anxious. I attended a “magnet school,” which brought in gifted students from throughout the county, so while I benefited from excellent teachers and a robust arts program, I was not as near the top of my class as I might have been at another school. This was a problem, because I had my heart set on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which was not only highly selective but also would accept only a limited number of applicants from any given school in the state, and there were a lot of good students at my school who were applying. I had a chance, but I was not confident. I was hoping that my musical activities would give me a boost.

I had a history with UNC-CH going back to the eighth grade, when I was one of two winners in a statewide playwriting competition sponsored by the university and had my play performed by their drama department. I visited the campus for the performance, and I immediately knew that I wanted to be there, amidst the blooming dogwoods and the neoclassical architecture and the basketball. Many of my classmates aspired to even more elite schools (and many were accepted), but for me, Chapel Hill was the pinnacle of my ambition.

In the early spring of 1988, when applications had been submitted, and everyone was awaiting the decisions of admissions committees, my voice teacher/choir director suggested that I enter a contest through UNC's music department. I don't remember the specifics, but I think that it was held in stages at the county level and then at the state level on campus, and it welcomed all sorts of musicians. Though I played guitar and piano, my strongest instrument was my voice, and my teacher had recently introduced me to Schubert's magnificent song cycle, Die Schöne Müllerin, "The Fair Maid of the Mill."

Hill Hall, the home of the Music Department at UNC-CH

Schubert was 26 in 1823 when he composed the cycle, in which he set a selection of poems by Wilhelm Müller, and it is certainly a young man's work (though the composer would die only five years later and so would never reach middle age)—with moments of joyful abandon punctuated by the sorrows of unrequited love. It culminates, like Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (a novel that had certainly inspired Müller‘s poems), with the young man drowning himself as the brook sings a lullaby to him.

From the first song in the cycle, "Das Wandern" ("Wandering"), that brook is the young man's companion, as he speaks to it and complains to it, and the piano, with its rolling ostinatos, imitates the sound of the flowing stream. The song is strophic, with five verses on the same melody, and requires the singer to expectorate huge mouthfuls of German fairly quickly.

This was the song that I chose to perform.

In "Das Wandern," the young man has not yet met the girl of the mill who will enrapture him; his only desire is to wander, following the example of the stream itself, the movement of mill wheel, and even the millstones, heavy as the are, which "join in the merry dance." And, indeed, the piano's repetitive figure reflects this turning of the wheel, this movement of the water and stones. It was the perfect song for a young man who was about to leave home, about to embark on the next phase of life.

And I could ham it up with the best of them, much in the way of Konstantin Krimmel in this performance (though, of course, I did not have as majestic a voice):

Anyway, I won the competition in the voice category, though I am convinced that it my ability to remember and pronounce all of that German rather than my musicianship that sealed the deal. The faculty of the music department judged the contest, and a week later (not, I think, a coincidence) I received an acceptance letter from Chapel Hill, along with a music scholarship.

I'll never know for sure whether or not I would have been accepted without my music, but the scholarship at least was certainly thanks to Schubert (and my voice teacher).

I don't know what course my life would have followed if not for that musical afternoon in Chapel Hill, but it probably would have been quite different. And so I have an intensely personal connection with our composer for this listening challenge, and for the next several weeks we will explore some of his body of work, not just the song cycles, but also the chamber music, the piano repertoire, the choral works, and the symphonies.

Along the way, we will discuss the context of his music. The lieder ("songs"), the piano music, and the chamber music were composed mostly for the drawing room, for evenings of entertainment among friends. The solo professional recital would not become a thing until the rise of Paganini, who was just gaining fame as Schubert was dying in 1828, and then Liszt a few years later. This, therefore, is the sort of music that we can imagine might be played in the evenings in Jane Austen's novels, the kind of music that Emma Woodhouse might play indifferently on the fortepiano and Jane Fairfax more virtuosically. Of course, since Austen died in 1817, most of the music that she heard and played would have been composed a generation earlier, by the likes of Mozart, Haydn, and their more obscure English contemporaries.

We will start, therefore, in private rooms, with eight songs and two pieces of chamber music.

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A year or so after that fateful day in Chapel Hill, I performed a selection of seven songs from the same cycle—the first seven, which takes the young man up to his strident declaration of his love ("Dein ist mein Herz!"). I never quite made it to the point in the cycle where I would throw myself into the brook. And we will, therefore, begin with these seven songs, performed here by baritone Konstantin Krimmel and pianist Daniel Heide.

Next we will move on to chamber music, with two quintets, beginning with the so-called "Trout" Quintet in A Major. The piece gets its name from the theme and variations in the fourth movement, a melody borrowed from Schubert's own song, "Die Forelle" ("The Trout"), which I also include here as a preface to the quintet. The piece is unusual in its instrumentation—two violins, viola, double-bass, and piano. Most quintets featuring strings and piano are scored for a typical string quartet plus a piano, but Schubert here employs a double-bass in place of the more usual cello. The result is, at some points, an almost jazz-like texture (though the tonality is different), with pizzicato bass lines providing a jaunty foundation to the music, which is full of what the Germans call Gemütlichkeit ("geniality, good feeling"). The quintet has the feeling of a group of friends coming together to make music, which typifies Schubert's work and the context in which much of it was performed. “Die Forelle” is performed here by mezzo soprano Monica Groop and pianist Rudolf Jansen. The quintet is performed by Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin), Daniil Trifonov (piano), Roman Patkoló (double bass), Hwayoon Lee (viola), and Maximilian Hornung (cello).

Finally, we conclude this week with a very different kind of quintet, the late "Cello Quintet" in C Major, so called because it employs a string quartet plus an extra cello. Unlike the Trout Quintet, this piece is brooding and profoundly sad, at times calling to mind the pathos of Beethoven's late quartets, though in a more lyrical vein. Schubert composed it as he was dying—his final statement in the chamber-music mode. Our recording here is by the Takács Quartet, with Ralph Kirshbaum playing the additional cello.

Links to the Schubert Listening Challenge playlist:

The Schubert Listening Challenge on Apple Music

The Schubert Listening Challenge on Spotify

I hope that you enjoy the music. Let me know what you think in the comments. Next week we will move on to compositions on a larger scale, which Schubert never heard performed, at least not in a professional setting. And, of course, on Wednesday, we will begin our reading of Jane Austen's Emma. Please join us! Here is the reading schedule.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet fortepiano to yours.

Photo by Enzo Lo Presti on Unsplash