Schubert: Essential Works for Beginners
Erlkönig (The Elf-King) D. 328 (Lied/Song)
Der Wanderer D. 489 (Lied/Song)
“Wander” Fantasy in C major for Piano D. 760
Die Forelle (The Trout) D. 550 (Lied/Song)
Quintet in A major “Trout Quintet” D. 667
Symphony No. 5 D. 485
Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden) D. 531 (Lied/Song)
String Quartet No. 14 in D minor “Death and the Maiden” D.810
Symphony No. 8 “Unfinished” D. 759
String Quintet in C major D. 956
Thank you. Your feel for what’s important and great in music is extraordinary. I’ve loved Schubert all my life, sung many of his songs and played some of his keyboard music, and still learned a lot from your talk which was 20 min of total pleasure.
Not only for beginners! Am an ancient musician who enjoyed every second of the way Dave did this. Thank you!
Excellent presentation. I wish you were able to add musical excerpts from recordings. I hope that those who are new to Schubert will be as excited about your descriptions of the music as I was ( and I have been familiar with these works for years). Great work! Thank you!
Glad to see you leading with songs. The multitude of recordings by a bevy of great singers provides everything needed to dive into Schubert. Of course, he was pretty fair with instrumental stuff, too. Your list is a terrific primer.
Maybe not beginner but love music from Rosamund
3:02. Reference the old Dick van Dyke Show….every time something comically dramatic comes up, Buddy Sorrell sings “Doodle-y, doodle-y, doo, doo, dooo.” Straight from the Erlking. I grew up with that TV show, but never got the reference until I finally heard the Schubert song when in college. It’s amazing how many musical references you can find in our pop culture….even far past “What’s Opera Doc” and dancing trees in early Disney shorts. By the way, Dave…you and I are roughly the same age, so we grew up with the same pop culture…..Though, I think you probably had the benefit of more real culture in your home as a kid.
Apart from Marian Anderson, Elisabeth Söderström did also a great interpretation of Erlkönig with a full differentiation of the 4 voices : remarkable performance for a soprano !
See, you don't have a "Lieder Problem" Dave! Great chat! I listened to the C Major quintet just the other day.
Thanks for saying that Schubert can be difficult to characterize. I sometimes think he died under the weight of the Vienna school composers that preceded him, just as he was beginning to emerge from their influence. In any case, it is amazing to me that he wrote so much and got better and better without benefit of hearing his work performed. It is a quintessential creativity as its own reward story. Fascinating!
Apt description of Schubert as a creative agent. He was someone absolutely brimming over with music, composing more because of an inner need to do so than to cultivate a career. He's an excellent example of an artist who can be nothing else, the art inside demanding outer expression.
Schubert is one of my favourite composers. Maybe not for beginners, but I find the late piano sonatas just extraordinary, though perhaps best appreciated when walking to reduce fidgeting! Can you please make a video like this for Dvořák? I don't know his works, apart from the two last symphonies, nearly as well as I should.
In the works!
Your video is the perfect introduction to Schubert's incomparable music. The American violinist, Albert Spalding, in his autobiography, Rise to Follow, writes: "...Ossip Gabrilowitsch [pianist and conductor] once told me that he had an innate suspicion of people who do not love Schubert."
Great idea to associate lieder with corresponding instrumental works ! Also his works for 4 hands piano are of particular interest : of course the fantasy D 940, but also the rondo D 951, not so well known, one of his last works, is a wonderful piece to discover.
I assume you have (and enjoy) the Tal and Groethuysen set. But on repeated listening I wonder why so many marches?
@@jeffheller642 Thanks. I appreciate also Cassard and Pescia.
@@jeffheller642 Marches - because they were popular, which would guarantee him at least some income, and - they were generally easier to play, so during his "wanderings" (or should we call them tours of the countryside?) whenever performing Schubert could ask a local OK player join him at the keyboard taking the easier part, and thus earning extra attention. Among his letters, one can find remarks about such recitals. [Btw, what a treasure trove this multitude of letters from centuries past are for biographers! Now that the letter as a "genre" is quite dead, replaced by sms and video calls, I wonder what the researchers from 100 years later will have to go on while reconstructing the lives of today's luminaries??]
Just to support your mentioning of the Fantasy D940 - such a emotionally powerful piece! It seems it constantly shifts between desperation and hope, life and death - and ends in darkness. Beauty and inevitability. After all is said and done, this would probably be my pick for the single work by Schubert everyone has to hear.
It was Schubert's Erlkönig that immediately came to mind when I first saw THE SHINING and heard, "Hello, Danny. Come and play with us."
Excellent list as usual! I love the emphasis on his standalone songs. As much as I enjoy it now, my one mistake with Schubert was starting with Winterreise. For a long time, I loved his instrumental works, but I never truly appreciated the Lieder until I sat down with a few of those "___ sings Schubert" albums, read along with the librettos, and became enchanted by the kaleidoscopic variety and by Schubert's genius setting such a wide range of texts to song.
Those D numbers become crucial when you're navigating through his song catalog. Often, two or more Schubert songs have the same title. He set a poem by Lubeck called "Der Wanderer" twice, as D489 and D493. He set a different poem called "Der Wanderer" by Schlegel, as D649, and a poem by Seidl called "Der Wanderer an den Mond" as D870. The Wanderer Fantasy is based on only one of those four. Because I was only familiar with the D649 song, I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out where the melody from that song was hiding in the piano fantasy.
This Schlegel "Wanderer" is an amazing song indeed, and is almost unknown.
@@c.iuliusbalbus4399 D489 and D493 are the same song.
@@Fafner888 I know. I'm talking about the song based on a Schlegel poem, D 649: "Wie deutlich des Mondes Licht zu mir spricht..."
@@c.iuliusbalbus4399 I meant you said he set the same poem twice but it's actually the same setting that for some reason got two different catalogue numbers.
@@Fafner888 It wasn't me who said that. I was commenting a previous commentary...
I love these sampler videos you do, I could’ve done with them 40 years ago, when I was starting to listen to classical music. I agree with you that Schubert is a difficult composer to access at least at the beginning; he was for me anyway. Modern audiences are very lucky to have your guidance.
I think Schubert is very easy to access if you start with the symphonies. The symphonies are all tuneful and engaging, and give you some idea of what to expect from him in other forms.
@@ThreadBomb my eventual entry points into Schubert were his Impromptus and the Trout Quintet
Berlioz orchestrated the Erlkonig and its been recorded with three singers participating.
Not being as well versed as your commenters, my only contribution can come from what i know best: rock music. Robert Fripp once said that a good tune can survive anything a musician may want to do with it. He was talking about the oboe parts in King Crimson's Lizard. What do you think about that? I certainly find it somewhat similar to the oboe part in Brahms' second movement of his first symphony. Thanks for your content!
I apologize for what follows, but.... Ages ago I saw a Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon. In it, Casper meets the Ghost of Franz Schubert, who regrets never completing that symphony. Casper helps out his fellow specter in ways that would only bore you, BUT what sticks in my memory is "Schubert's" appearance! He looked nothing like the portraits. In my memory, he looked like a man from the Seventeenth, like Rameau or Vivaldi, at least by the hair. I wasn't into Classical then, so the disconnect didn't happen immediately. And Casper cartoons seem to have disappeared from TV, so I can't confirm if I just hallucinated the experience.. Again, I apologize.
I've never seen the Casper cartoon, but Schubert did appear in an episode of "Peabody's Improbable History" in which Mr. Peabody and Sherman used their Wayback Machine to visit Franz.
@@richardsandmeyer4431what was Mr. Peabody's purpose? You're got me curious!
@@brianthomas2434 I haven't seen it in years, but I think it was to help Schubert finish the "Unfinished".
The Casper cartoon was called "Boo Bop", and is on youtube.
@@ThreadBombthank you, just watched it. My memory of "Schubert 's" appearance, particularly the hair, was WAY off. Just goes to show fifty years plus takes its toll on the memory. He is depicted....Well, with dark hair and spectacles, and it's accurate if you take into account the limited animation, showing this was made in the Fifties or Sixties. Anyway, as Gilda Radner (as Emily Litella) said on SNL " Never mind. "
Dear Dave, have you ever realised that the theme of the Erlkönig talking to the child has pretty much the exact same notes as the second theme of the unfinished symphony? Some experts think, that this could be an intentional link.
Do you have a Schubert survey for the best complete Schubert string quartet recordings?
No.
Don't laugh. My introduction to ''Schubert'' was a record of ''Lilac Time'' that my mother had bought to hear a particular song she was learning. I was only 10 but was immediately attracted to the melodies. It was several years later I bought my first Schubert record- Munch's 9th recording. I do love his Lieder though I must say the German poets that attracted Schubert's attention appear to have been mostly obsessed with unrequited love and death, themes which didn't resonate with me until middle age. I know many people have said they wish to die listening to the slow movement of his String Quintet. It really is other worldly, though it requires tremendous concentration by the performers to effect its ethereal quality and in this respect some recordings are much more successful than others.
My introduction to Schubert consisted of the theme taken from the second movement of the Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major, D. 929, as incorporated in Stanley Kubrick's 1975 film 'Barry Lyndon', to which my parents took me to see upon its original theatrical release. That music fits that period drama perfectly, even though it was composed some fifty years later than the timeline of the story.
Schubert died in 1828 one year after Beethoven’s death.
Correct, and at the age of thirty-one.
God bless Franz Schubert! One of the greatest melodists in the classical music canon. It always shames me that he wasn’t known during his lifetime because there was a deaf and psychotic man who lived a few blocks away from him.
Beethoven was only one of many composers who was more famous than Schubert during his lifetime. Schubert just didn't get the breaks that even the most talented person needs to get noticed.
@@ThreadBomb Well yeah, Weber and Rossini were also popular at the time but I was talking about Vienna specifically.
@@loganfruchtman953 I agree it is a shame Schubert got dealt such a tough hand in life. I would not just put it at the door of Beethoven (who also seems to have been quite approving of the younger man when they actually met). Beethoven was young Franz's idol throughout his life, too. Even in Vienna Schubert was "on the fringes" of the contemporaneous mainstream in his lifetime, adored by a bunch of people who knew him more closely, but never breaking through to the court and the noble patrons, or to the concert platform. His self-consciousness of himself as a performer might have been partly responsible for the second, his lack of connections - for the first. There were lots of musicians who were popular names at the time, while none objectively as deserving as Beethoven, some were quite good, and - just had better luck! Hummel, Czerny, even Salieri, who was still around, come to mind. Admittedly, there were others, whose fame has not held, and rightly so. Still at the time, their works were enthusiastically performed, as they had good backing and access to financial support.