Which Composer Wrote Over 600 Art Songs and Used Text Painting in His Accompaniments

Schubert'due south life seems to follow, tragically, the cliché of the Romantic artist: a suffering composer who languishes in obscurity, his genius only appreciated later his untimely expiry. While Schubert did enjoy the respect of a close circle of friends, his music was not widely received during his lifetime. Though nosotros study him in our Romantic module, Schubert does not fit neatly into the Romantic catamenia. Like Beethoven, Schubert is a transitional figure. Some of his music—specially his earlier instrumental compositions—tends toward a more classical approach. Yet, the melodic and harmonic innovation in his art songs and afterward instrumental works sit more firmly in the Romantic tradition. Because his art songs are and so clearly Romantic in their inception, and because art songs make upwards the majority of his compositions, nosotros report him as part of the Romantic era.

Introduction

Figure 1. Oil painting of Franz Schubert by Wilhelm Baronial Rieder (1875), fabricated from his own 1825 watercolor portrait.

Franz Peter Schubert (31 January 1797 – 19 Nov 1828) was an Austrian composer.

Schubert died at 31 only was extremely prolific during his lifetime. His output consists of over six hundred secular song works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a big torso of bedroom and piano music. Appreciation of his music while he was live was limited to a relatively small circumvolve of admirers in Vienna, but involvement in his piece of work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers of the late Classical era and early on Romantic era and is ane of the virtually frequently performed composers of the early nineteenth century.

Music

Schubert was remarkably prolific, writing over ane,500 works in his brusk career. The largest number of these are songs for solo voice and pianoforte (over 600). He likewise equanimous a considerable number of secular works for ii or more voices, namely part songs, choruses and cantatas. He completed viii orchestral overtures and 7 complete symphonies, in improver to fragments of 6 others. While he composed no concertos, he did write three concertante works for violin and orchestra. In that location is a large torso of music for solo piano, including fourteen complete sonatas, numerous miscellaneous works and many brusque dances. There is too a relatively big set of works for pianoforte duet. There are over fifty sleeping accommodation works, including some fragmentary works. His sacred output includes seven masses, 1 oratorio and one requiem, among other mass movements and numerous smaller compositions. He completed just eleven of his 20 stage works.

Fashion and Reception

Effigy 2. Franz Schubert Memorial past Carl Kundmann in Vienna'south Stadtpark

In July 1947 the 20th-century composer Ernst Krenek discussed Schubert'southward style, abashedly admitting that he had at first "shared the wide-spread opinion that Schubert was a lucky inventor of pleasing tunes … defective the dramatic ability and searching intelligence which distinguished such 'existent' masters as J.S. Bach or Beethoven." Krenek wrote that he reached a completely different assessment after close report of Schubert's pieces at the urging of friend and fellow composer Eduard Erdmann. Krenek pointed to the piano sonatas as giving "ample evidence that [Schubert] was much more than an easy-going melody-smith who did non know, and did not care, near the craft of limerick." Each sonata then in print, co-ordinate to Krenek, exhibited "a great wealth of technical finesse" and revealed Schubert equally "far from satisfied with pouring his charming ideas into conventional molds; on the contrary he was a thinking artist with a keen appetite for experimentation."

That "appetite for experimentation" manifests itself repeatedly in Schubert'south output in a wide diverseness of forms and genres, including opera, liturgical music, chamber and solo piano music, and symphonic works. Perhaps most familiarly, his adventurousness manifests itself as a notably original sense of modulation, equally in the second movement of the String Quintet (D 956), where he modulates from Eastward major, through F minor, to accomplish the tonic key of East major. It also appears in unusual choices of instrumentation, equally in the Sonata in A minor for arpeggione and piano (D 821), or the anarchistic scoring of the Trout Quintet (D 667).

While he was clearly influenced past the Classical sonata forms of Beethoven and Mozart (his early works, among them notably the 5th Symphony, are particularly Mozartean), his formal structures and his developments tend to give the impression more of melodic development than of harmonic drama. This combination of Classical form and long-breathed Romantic tune sometimes lends them a discursive style: his Corking C majorSymphony was described past Robert Schumann as running to "heavenly lengths." His harmonic innovations include movements in which the first section ends in the key of the subdominant rather than the ascendant (as in the final move of the Trout Quintet). Schubert's practice here was a precursor of the common Romantic technique of relaxing, rather than raising, tension in the middle of a motion, with final resolution postponed to the very cease.

Listen: Sonata

Please mind to Sonata in A minor for arpeggione and piano, D 821 performed by Hans Goldstein (cello) and Clinton Adams (pianoforte)

I. Allegro Moderato

2. Adagio and III. Allegretto

It was in the genre of the Lied, however, that Schubert fabricated his most indelible mark. Leon Plantinga remarks, "In his more than six hundred Lieder he explored and expanded the potentialities of the genre as no composer before him." Prior to Schubert's influence, Lieder tended toward a strophic, syllabic treatment of text, evoking the folksong qualities engendered by the stirrings ofRomantic nationalism. Among Schubert'south treatments of the poetry of Goethe, his settings of "Gretchen am Spinnrade" (D 118) and "Der Erlkönig" (D 328) are particularly hitting for their dramatic content, forward-looking uses of harmony, and their utilise of eloquent pictorial keyboard figurations, such as the depiction of the spinning wheel and treadle in the piano in "Gretchen" and the furious and ceaseless gallop in "Erlkönig." He composed music using the poems of a myriad of poets, with Goethe, Mayrhofer and Schiller being the pinnacle three most frequent, and others like Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Rückert and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff among many others. Also of particular notation are his two song cycles on the poems of Wilhelm Müller, "Die schöne Müllerin" and "Winterreise," which helped to plant the genre and its potential for musical, poetic, and most operatic dramatic narrative. His final song cycle published in 1828 after his expiry, "Schwanengesang," is also an innovative contribution to German lieder literature, as it features poems past different poets, namely Ludwig Rellstab, Heine, and Johann Gabriel Seidl. The Wiener Theaterzeitung, writing most "Winterreise" at the time, commented that information technology was a work that "none tin can sing or hear without being securely moved." Antonín Dvořák wrote in 1894 that Schubert, whom he considered 1 of the truly great composers, was conspicuously influential on shorter works, especially Lieder and shorter pianoforte works: "The tendency of the romantic school has been toward short forms, and although Weber helped to show the way, to Schubert belongs the chief credit of originating the short models of piano forte pieces which the romantic school has preferably cultivated. […] Schubert created a new epoch with the Lied. […] All other songwriters have followed in his footsteps."

Schubert's compositional style progressed apace throughout his short life. A feeling of regret for the loss of potential masterpieces caused by his early expiry at age 31 was expressed in the epitaph on his large tombstone written past his friend the poet Franz Grillparzer: "Here music has cached a treasure, but even fairer hopes." Some take disagreed with this early view, arguing that Schubert in his lifetime did produce enough masterpieces not to be limited to the image of an unfulfilled hope. This is in item the stance of pianists, including Alfred Brendel, who dryly billed the Grillparzer epitaph as "inappropriate."

Schubert'due south chamber music continues to be popular. In a poll, the results of which were announced in October 2008, the ABC in Commonwealth of australia found that Schubert'due south chamber works dominated the field, with the Trout Quintet coming starting time, followed by two of his other works.

The New York Times music critic, Anthony Tommasini, who ranked Schubert equally the quaternary greatest composer, wrote of him:

You have to dear the guy, who died at 31, sick, impoverished and neglected except by a circle of friends who were in awe of his genius. For his hundreds of songs alone – including the haunting wheel "Winterreise," which will never release its tenacious hold on singers and audiences – Schubert is central to our concert life…. Schubert'southward beginning few symphonies may be works in progress. Only the Unfinished and especially the Great C major Symphony are astonishing. The latter ane paves the mode for Bruckner and prefigures Mahler.

If you'd like in a deeper understanding of the life experiences of Franz Schubert, you lot can read the entirety of the Wikipedia article on him from which this has been fatigued.

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-musicapp-medieval-modern/chapter/franz-schubert/#:~:text=Schubert%20was%20remarkably%20prolific%2C%20writing,and%20piano%20(over%20600).

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