[HN Gopher] A lost paradise of purity: the late masterpieces of ...
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A lost paradise of purity: the late masterpieces of Schubert
Author : wyndham
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-01-14 05:07 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (standpointmag.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (standpointmag.co.uk)
| mitchelldeacon9 wrote:
| > the Andantino of D959 is on a different plane of alienation. It
| is all the more aberrant in a work which is generally so warm-
| hearted and affirmatory... "desolate grace behind which madness
| lies."
|
| Schubert's Sonata D959 Andantino was also featured in a
| remarkable film, "La Pianiste" (2001), which explores many of the
| same themes described in the article:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Piano_Teacher_(film)
| bjoli wrote:
| His best works are written in what I have always imagined as some
| sort of feverish spurts when the syphilis was in remission to
| just get them out of him for the afterworld. The late symphonies,
| the septet, Winterreise. All amazing works.
|
| I listen to a lot of music, but some works I go back to more than
| others. The big C major quintet (the string quartet with an extra
| cello one) is in my opinion the greatest piece of chamber music
| ever written, and I don't even like string music.
|
| The recording with the Emerson quartet and Rostropovich is
| probably my favourite.
|
| Another work I always return to are Petterssons 7th symphony,
| preferably the recording with the orchestra I work in.
| Norrkopings Symphony orchestra together with Leif Segerstam. Way
| before my time, but wow what a symphony. I never understood why
| Pettersson is never mentioned among other Scandinavian composers
| such as Nielsen or Sibelius. His seventh symphony deserves to be
| played world wide.
| zaroth wrote:
| This one?
|
| https://youtu.be/r1CTu1HOgWg
| yCombLinks wrote:
| D. 956 if anyone is looking for the the quintet
| tome wrote:
| > The big C major quintet (the string quartet with an extra
| cello one) is in my opinion the greatest piece of chamber music
| ever written, and I don't even like string music.
|
| > The recording with the Emerson quartet and Rostropovich is
| probably my favourite.
|
| Wow, I know "me too!" is not approved of on Hacker News, but
| I'm very glad to share this opinion with some otherwise unknown
| to me internet commenter :D
| siglesias wrote:
| The lyricism and agony of Death and the Maiden (D810),
| particularly in the Andante, gut me every time. Personally my
| favorite chamber work.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0Y3gHKywTQ
| eth0up wrote:
| If you have friends whom you intend sharing this with, be
| sure to do so before they're exposed to Polanski's 'Death and
| the Maiden', which may indelibly alter their interpretation.
| Thankfully he didn't use andantino.
| j7ake wrote:
| My favorite Schubert piece is his late piano Sonata No 21 first
| movement in B flat major (D960). Especially the opening theme.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOUNRRAFozA&ab_channel=Murra...
|
| His three late Sonatas are extremely long though, almost 45
| minutes each. I haven't had the time to actually listen to all
| three in one go.
| Sam_Harris wrote:
| Please stop reposting this.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| It is interesting that the author here has to describe what
| emotional effect Schubert might have intended with his use of
| keys; when writers today do this, to me it suggests that
| contemporary readers might not hear this angst themselves. Not
| only did later Romanticism and Debussy stretch tonality to a
| point where listeners became more comfortable with hitherto
| dissonant keys, and so they do not hear things the way Schubert's
| listeners would have, but modern pop music is very constrained in
| its use of modulation so society has lost much of the grammar of
| Baroque, Classical and Romantic music.
| telesilla wrote:
| Pianos actually sounded differently back then, different keys
| were genuinely distinct.
|
| https://wmich.edu/mus-theo/courses/keys.html
|
| "When equal temperament became the dominant tuning after 1917,
| the aural quality of every key became the same, and therefore
| these affective characteristics are mostly lost to us"
| wirrbel wrote:
| Some of the stuff that is nowadays attributed to temperament
| is actually related to certain instrumentation being
| preferably set in specific keys that were easy to play with
| the available instruments.
|
| Also competing tunings on various instruments mean that the
| situation was never a "fix" target.
|
| I am not saying tunings don't play a role, in fact you can
| hear that John Frusciante sometimes has played with slightly
| detuned guitar strings for effect. But it its also not so
| simple as such compilations of key - and - purpose might make
| you want to believe.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| I don't even understand the article's claim to dissonance - is
| it the dissonance you'd hear from e.g playing on B on a just
| intonation C piano? Or is it a 'dissonance' in the sense of a
| modulation to a non-diatonic key? Or is it just some
| expectation that the audience associates moods with different
| keys? (So assuming the audience can be expected to have at
| least subconscious absolute pitch, seems unlikely)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| None of the above. It's dissonance _as a language_ -
| traditional expectations of how the harmony develops being
| stretched, subverted, warped, and so on. For emotional
| effect.
|
| There isn't really a modern equivalent, which is more or less
| the point. Not even jazz, which is distantly related.
|
| But you can get a remote sense from something like Damien
| Hirst's Verity Statue, which starts from some familiar
| expectations of public sculpture and subverts and undermines
| them.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jrvX2ZrDvk
|
| The difference is Hirst evokes horror and a Capitalist Gothic
| aesthetic.
|
| Schubert is superficially more reassuring _now_. But at the
| time he was influenced by what used to be called the Sublime
| - which doesn 't just mean excellent as it does today, but
| used to mean a complex state of emotion and experience that
| was so intense and rich it was overwhelming.
|
| That's what's buried in Schubert's use of harmony and
| dissonance.
| jancsika wrote:
| > but modern pop music is very constrained in its use of
| modulation so society has lost much of the grammar of Baroque,
| Classical and Romantic music.
|
| Just to give a sense of context, try this exercise:
|
| 1. Pick any modern pop song.
|
| 2. Write down _every_ seemingly superficial aspect of the song
| you hear: vocoder overuse, why an cheesy electric guitar sound
| accompanies a certain lyric, whether a given sound is employed
| for irony 's sake, which sounds or lyrics are allusions to
| other songs, etc.
|
| 3. Continue until you literally cannot think of anything else
| significant in the music.
|
| If you're exhaustive you should come up with dozens of bullet
| points for even a short song.
|
| Now realize that wrt Schubert, you've mentioned a _single_ such
| bullet.
|
| That is to say-- we're all missing most of the grammar of those
| bygone eras.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I read this a few times and can't parse out what you're
| saying. Pop music has a lot of gimmicks? ok sure, but what is
| the bullet for schubert? What is the grammar?
| gHeadphone wrote:
| Incredible to think he died at 31, and composed more than 1,500
| works, many of which are adored today. He makes me want to work
| harder every day.
| copperwater69 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Franz_...
|
| Woah Man on a mission
| billfruit wrote:
| I have not listened very much of Schubert, but I cant help notice
| the ebullient joyful, playful exuberance of much of it, even his
| "Tragic" symphony, considering his life was sadly shortened due
| to disease.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Undoubtedly Schubert's illness had some effect on his mood, if
| not on his productivity. Whatever it was that led his writing to
| mature beyond his earlier work, it certainly did that.
|
| I don't plan to start looking for more agony in his later works
| than his earlier ones. The 'Unfinished', written in the fall of
| 1822 (he moved into his parent's home, unable to leave until the
| following spring) has none. Similarly for the _Rosamunde_ music,
| written before the Dec. 1823 premiere.
|
| Then there's the Great Symphony, written 1825-26. Everywhere
| countless ideas and themes; In 1840 Schumann said of it "this
| work reveals life in every fiber, color down to the finest
| shading, significance everywhere, the most acute expression of
| individual detail ..." To what should we attribute the frightful
| 'battle' in the Andante? This isn't _program music_.
|
| In the late chamber works, yes, I feel some deep regret - and
| anger. A great tragedy - but - his disease certainly _was not_
| his master.
| steve76 wrote:
| When you're dying in antiquity, just stay drunk off of laudanum
| all the time.
|
| "Here lies that famous Raphael by whom Nature feared to be
| conquered while he lived, and when he was dying, feared herself
| to die."
| tonystride wrote:
| I just purchased spiral bound Henle edition of his Impromptus.
| Not sure how I've gone this long without doing a Schubert deep
| dive but I'm certainly looking forward to it!
| dang wrote:
| There was a great thread going when this article was posted a few
| days ago, which was strangled by inappropriate flags. I'm going
| to move those comments here to give them a second chance.
|
| Flaggers: please don't flag submissions that don't break the site
| guidelines! This article is obviously on-topic (see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If it isn't
| your cup of tea, there are plenty of other things to read. If you
| run out, the 'past' link at the top will take you to arbitrary
| amounts of reading material that you missed.
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