Much of the time I appear to get way with it but once in a while it becomes alarmingly apparent that I'm an impostor among the music professionals. Yes, yes, Mozart, Shostakovich. Op. 57, K.545. But, no, I've no idea what B flat minor is.
Thus, it was all going well after the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata and then I said I never found Schubert 'down-hearted' and the whole thing fell apart. He's the most approachable, kindly and helpful musician you could wish to meet but the look on his face was one of horror, disbelief, bewilderment or all three. I should have quit while I was ahead.
Hamlet is melancholy. Most artists, with the possible exception of Haydn, can express it but beyond the general premise that a certain sort of creative artist must be touched by some of it sometimes, I'm not sure how many are outright melancholics in their work.
It is a 'Romantic' trait, surely. It's Keats, Goethe and Baudelaire. Schubert, for me, is where Classical moves into Romantic, if we need to deal in these vague terms. The C20th organ music of Vierne is devastatingly dark - what I've heard of it- and Shostakovich can be bleak. Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman are melancholy personalities in their work but musicians rarely so thoroughgoingly so, it seems to me. I've been giving it plenty of thought.
I don't know if there are right or wrong answers or if my melancholy threshold is higher than average. Neither Larkin or Sean O'Brien seem melancholy to me although Larkin at least has been called 'miserabilist'. What did we expect from this life ? So yesterday I played 3 discs of Schubert- sonatas, quartets and the Quintet, D. 956, to investigate. Not even the intensity and stillness at the centre of that was what I'd call 'melancholic', so do we use adjectives in slightly different ways in the same way that we can see colours differently.
D. 956 is where Schubert 'goes beyond', like Beethoven in the Grosse Fuge - is it- Bach in that particular Cello Suite and Shostakovich in the Viola Sonata. By then we have transcended the contingencies of transient feelings.
But without writing whole essays or dissertations on an artist, one thinks of them summed up in more of a snapshot and Schubert remains for me more notable for his lightness of touch, a delicacy that maybe even Beethoven doesn't always have. Premier League among composers because the Premier League consists of twenty names.
I could still be wrong, of course, but as Prof. Bill Murray said of the dissertation I provided on Andrew Marvell in 1981, he didn't agree with a word of it but he had to admire the argument and give it a respectable mark.
A biography of Schubert has gone onto the 'to do' list. To read one, not to write one. It was said on the wireless yesterday that he was 4ft. 11. I know he contracted dubious diseases and was possibly disappointed in love as per Beethoven, Brahms and perhaps quite a few of us. Saturday's little chat might have been worth the trauma it put me through if a better understanding of him is the result of it. And I can survive to write about music another day, as Robbie Williams sang in Angels,
whether I'm right or wrong.
