Every December, for 12 winters, I placed a red rose on the snow-capped grave of Franz Schubert. Vienna was then my city of choice, and nobody is more Viennese than Schubert. “You will never understand us,” a member of the Vienna Philharmonic told me, “unless you know his music.
” The rose-bearing, prompted by a wish to honour the composer I love most, hardened into a ritual. “Blessed Cecilia,” I would begin, quoting WH Auden’s invitation to the patroness of music, “appear in visions/To all musicians, appear and inspire.” Soon I found myself plucking random thoughts from the pages of a flawed life.
Schubert had become my confessor. First came childhood memories of hearing Fritz Reiner’s 1960s recording of his Unfinished eighth symphony, with its gravely beautiful melodies that suggested a realm of unimaginable sadness. A decade later, Bernard Levin’s essays in the Times nudged me towards the chamber music, and the importance of listening, not hearing.
Eventually it was Alfred Brendel’s performances of Schubert’s piano music which unlocked the gate to the meadow in which I have wandered, happily and unhappily, throughout adulthood. Perhaps no pianist, except Artur Schnabel, has done more to reveal Schubert as Beethoven’s equal – and what a claim that is! Schnabel “discovered” the piano music after a century of indifference. Brendel, with his middle-European compound of intellectual rigour and playfulness, put it at the centre of the repertoire.
.
