I am often attracted to certain composers based on their uncompromising nature. Beethoven, Schumann and Boulez, for instance, fascinate me for those reasons. I am impelled as a pianist to shape my ears, heart and hands around their sense of an absolute ideal; playing their music requires me to summon the will to extend past myself in order to reach a higher musical summit.
The music of Franz Schubert, however, is something else entirely. As my teacher Jonathan Biss writes: “Beethoven grabs you by the collar; Schubert leads you by the hand.” Schubert is not concerned with inciting revolutions upon a soapbox, and he rejects the hierarchy that elevates those onstage over those offstage. He instead speaks privately, from one musician to another, and he enjoys spinning a long story that meanders. He earnestly exults in the joy of singing a beautiful melody or stepping a lilting dance; between these moments he will also pause to dwell upon the ponderous questions of life and death.
That digressive nature of this music means there is constantly the sense of searching and wandering; though any moment might seem light and pleasant there is always darkness lurking around the corner. That chiaroscuro quality makes his music at once tuneful and philosophical, all the while maintaining a social register as if Franz himself had passed me these notes on scratch paper. (Pictured below: George Fu recording 'Solitude with Schubert' with Lotte Betts-Dean)
Schubert’s music has given me solace throughout various difficult phases in my life. But though this may seem a benign sentiment, I feel much resistance in describing my feelings about this music with the language of comfort – particularly music as tuneful and beautiful on the face of it as Schubert’s – as I fear mischaracterising it as a bourgeois frippery whose sole purpose is to distract us from the difficult realities of the world.
The solace I speak of is instead something more challenging, one which requires much confrontation and a constant search for meaning within the self. I am reminded of the work of 20th-century psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl, who developed a type of existentialist therapeutic practice called logotherapy. The principal aim is to help patients find a meaning to life, which helps them to fully live even in the face of unavoidable suffering.
Frankl’s family was murdered during the Holocaust, and he himself spent three years in various concentration camps. Having endured the most unimaginable horrors, he observed that the freedom to find meaning could not be taken away even in the most dire of conditions. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he observed about his fellow survivors in the camps: “The way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away -that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”
It was this will towards meaning which helped these individuals to survive and transcend their horrific circumstances. While almost none of us living in the west in the 21st century have lived through anything as extreme as that, the point of drawing in Frankl’s work is not to diminish our present struggles in comparison to his, but instead to illustrate our capacity for resilience and creativity in the midst of adversity.
So then when I describe Schubert’s music - or any music, really - as something providing solace, I am thinking more along the lines of Frankl’s work: far from being an opiate that numbs, music has a tremendous capacity to serve as a type of therapeutic space, and a thing which can empower us by offering an inner call to action. Particularly with instrumental music that contains no words, I find it extremely useful at providing a sort of inner confrontation with the most intense experiences and feelings without the need for more logical structures such as words and concepts.
My own experience with this came in the wake of my father’s death in 2018. Around that time, I had a fairly serious repetitive strain injury from hours of obsessive practicing, which left my right side prone to muscle spasms and made my right hand freeze up. I worked hard to rehabilitate from this injury. But just as I re-emerged from this and could play well again, the pandemic then suddenly shuttered months of concerts.
It was then, in 2020, when I began to work in earnest on the last three Schubert sonatas, works which he wrote in an astonishingly prolific final year of his life. Though I’d played Schubert before this point, I was inexplicably drawn to his music in a new way. And given the solitude imposed upon me in the pandemic – combined with the grief I’d finally been forced to reckon with – the music took on a new power. I was now struck by its capacity to carry many of the unnameable feelings I’d been feeling about losing my father.
Furthermore, Schubert’s music offered the feeling of real companionship. Most of his oeuvre was published posthumously, as new works were often distributed informally amongst his friends and admirers. So each day I practised Schubert, it felt like sidling up onto his piano bench and reading some notes in a folio left for me by a dear friend. He shared these works at informal gatherings called Schubertiades, which could range in attendance from a handful to over a hundred. The painter Moritz von Schwind, a friend of Schubert’s (whose 1868 memory of one of these events is pictured above), recalled the atmosphere of these Schubertiades: “Each morning he composed something beautiful and each evening he found the most enthusiastic admirers. We gathered in his room – he played and sang to us – we were enthusiastic and afterwards we went to the tavern. We hadn’t a penny but were blissfully happy.” In the subsequent years I’ve played Schubert’s music in concerts, recorded it in a studio album, and worked on a documentary around grief and Schubert. But though it holds this personal significance to me, I would never want to impose this sole narrative about my experience upon Schubert’s music. Music like this is too big for that. It instead acts as a total world in and of itself; its inner contents contain ‘resonance points’ which ring when they come in contact with our own experiences.
When I attempt to conjure this musical world by playing it in concert, I am struck by how we can all submerge within the same music all the while having our own disparate experiences within it. This is one of the most magical things about music: to transmogrify the disparate, fleeting strands of experience into beauty and meaning, and in doing so building connections between people.
