Barenboim on Schubert

[Guest]

A fascinating quote from Barenboim at the start of Channel 4 News: "If Schubert had lived for twenty or thirty years longer, we wouldn't have needed Bruckner or Mahler". It sounds as if he's giving a wide-ranging interview in the next hour. I'll be interested to hear more.

[P. G. Tipps]

A fascinating quote from Barenboim at the start of Channel 4 News: "If Schubert had lived for twenty or thirty years longer, we wouldn't have needed Bruckner or Mahler". It sounds as if he's giving a wide-ranging interview in the next hour. I'll be interested to hear more.

So would I!

That statement is quite strange. Every composer is unique.

The mention of Bruckner and Mahler in the same breath is also curiously outmoded.

Conductors sometimes talk as much nonsense as composers.

[VodkaDilc]

The interview was mainly concerned with political matters, as might be expected on a serious news programme. The actual Schubert quote was repeated (I mis-remembered the extra life span DB mentioned - it was actually 15 years), but Jon Snow did not challenge him further. I tend to agree with PG's last statement.

[EdgeleyRob]

Isn't there some influence of Schubert in Bruckner's music ?

When I listen to the G Major piano sonata,quintet,last string quartet and last symphony,I can hear something of what was to come in AB.
It's not just to do with length,it's also in the notes.

Not sure if there is the same connection with Mahler,certainly not to my ears.

[richardfinegold]

When Barenboim was MD here, we would get used to some odd proclamations from him...some would be uttered in the Concert Hall right before a performance.

[ardcarp]

...and will he be playing Schubert on this?

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/26/daniel-barenboim-reveals-radical-new-piano-design-ive-fallen-in-love-with-it

[P. G. Tipps]

Isn't there some influence of Schubert in Bruckner's music ?

When I listen to the G Major piano sonata,quintet,last string quartet and last symphony,I can hear something of what was to come in AB.
It's not just to do with length,it's also in the notes.

Not sure if there is the same connection with Mahler,certainly not to my ears.

You can certainly occasionally hear Schubert in Bruckner, most obviously in the Finale of No 2. You can also hear (at least I can!) Berlioz, Beethoven, Wagner and, somewhat surprisingly and quite delightfully, even Rossini in the very early symphonies! I agree maybe not so easy to detect Schubert in Mahler (possibly some of the songs?), though I'm sure those much better qualified than myself, and with a rather keener ear, might well do so.

Assuming a composer is not starting completely from scratch it is difficult to see how any could not be influenced by others whether they realise it or not. Not just music, of course, this is true of life in general as we all learn from others from our first day at school, surely?

Still, I just cannot imagine a speculatively older Franz composing any of the Mahler symphonies and, apart from clear influences in No 1 + 2, the same applies to Bruckner. The latter's Ninth in particular could only have been composed by someone with Bruckner's deep religious faith and quite original, solitary style. Whilst Mahler had a very different personality that deeply moving, unfinished powerhouse of a work clearly influenced his own Ninth (and Tenth), yet I just cannot see Bruckner composing any of the Mahler symphonies either.

Thank God we are all different and that composers are no different!

[zola]

...and will he be playing Schubert on this?

http://www.theguardian.com/music/201...n-love-with-it

He did play Schubert on that last week and the concert I attended ( 27th ) seemed much more about the piano and Barenboim than about Schubert's music.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

A fascinating quote from Barenboim at the start of Channel 4 News: "If Schubert had lived for twenty or thirty years longer, we wouldn't have needed Bruckner or Mahler".

I agree - a fascinating quotation, and one that merits consideration on its own terms regardless of what Barenboim may or may not have meant (I haven't yet listened to the interview, so cannot comment thereupon). It's that word "needed" that grabs my attention - it doesn't suggest that Schubert might have written the Music that Bruckner and Mahler later came to write, but that the harmonic, structural and rhythmic procedures and innovations most associated with those later masters are all present in embryonic form in Schubert's later works. This is clearer in the case of Bruckner - comparisons of Schubert's Ninth(/Seventh/Eighth/D944) and Bruckner's Fourth demonstrate similar structural and Tonal (which is practically a tautology) methods even when the Music of the two composers sounds very different from each other. (And the climactic chord of Schubert's second movement - that of Bruckner's Ninth isn't "twenty or thirty years" away; and the ostinati violin figures of the Schubert finale ... and don't neglect Schubert's Piano Sonatas and String Quartets from the last three years of his life ... there are suggestions there of things to come that didn't "arrive" until seventy years after Schubert's death.)

With Mahler, the connection is bothe more and less obvious - more, in that Schubert's use of folk (or folk-like) material juxtaposed with intensely "learnéd" thematic ideas, the movement into despair such as found in Winterreise clearly foreshadows characteristics that are often described as "Mahlerian" today. Less, in that Mahler's tunes and the post-Wagnerian lushness of many of his harmonic and orchestral devices sound very different from those of Schubert.

It's not so much a case of "has Barenboim lost his marbles?" as "Why did he miss out Brahms?"!

[ardcarp]

...more, in that Schubert's use of folk (or folk-like) material juxtaposed with intensely "learnéd" thematic ideas, the movement into despair such as found in Winterreise clearly foreshadows characteristics that are often described as "Mahlerian" today.

I couldn't agree more. A certain faux naivete [sorry can't do accents] seems to me an emotional tool of both. Very Viennese.

[EdgeleyRob]

Posts 7 and 9.

Thanks PGT and FHG