Today’s post is another shorter piece: Schubert’s Hungarian Melody. This piece encapsulates in miniature all the things I love about Schubert: The spacious calmness of his forms, the brilliantly subtle touches in the piano writing, and the pure beauty of his melodic and harmonic genius.
I’ll be posting more Schubert over the next few weeks! Next week will feature Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s “Der Wanderer” song, and the following week there will be a longer video on Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy.
With my Schubert videos, I hope over time to argue against the view of Schubert that has relegated him to the position of a great writer of songs who struggled with writing larger works—in other words, a composer constantly in Beethoven’s shadow.
Actually, Schubert found his own way as a creator of large-scale compositions, and it is only by incorrectly comparing his methods to those of the other classicists that he suffers. In his use of long, overarching melodic material, avoidance of strict formal logic, and dreamlike way of organizing his works, he looks forward to later composers like Bruckner and Mahler.
Yes, you are right, Brendel is right. Music poured out of Schubert. That is not naive at all.