Brendel Brings Schubert’s Sonatas to Light

Not long ago but at a time when prejudice about Franz Schubert still abounded, Alfred Brendel wrote a provocative essay in which he lamented the neglect of Schubert’s mature piano sonatas and addressed long-held misconceptions about them.

That was a time when people still believed that “Schubert’s style did not develop,” that “Schubert modeled his sonatas on Beethoven’s and failed,” and that “Schubert’s music is like the soft, comforting contours of the Austrian landscape.” Worst of all, Schubert’s piano writing was accused of being unpianistic.

Those dark days extended beyond the late 19th Century, when Schumann thought the late sonatas were crazy, and when Schubert was idolized primarily for his supposed naivete. They went beyond the 1928 centenary of Schubert’s death, when, Brendel reminds us, Rachmaninoff admitted that he didn’t even know Schubert had written piano music. They continued through practically another half-century, even after Schnabel and Kempff and Serkin had made profound recordings of Schubert’s piano music.

Brendel wrote that essay in 1974. But times, in part thanks to Brendel’s championship of Schubert sonatas, have finally changed.

Now, Schubert sonatas appear on all sorts of concert programs so frequently that they are pretty much taken for granted. The first work the Russian emigre pianist Vladimir Feltsman performed in the United States at his much publicized Carnegie Hall debut was a Schubert sonata. The venturesome pianist Ursula Oppens unhesitatingly programs Schubert in the company of avant-garde music. The uncompromising Maurizio Pollini proved, a few years ago, that it is possible to fill the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for a demanding program consisting of Schubert’s three valedictory sonatas.

And now, beginning tonight at the Music Center, Brendel, who is devoting his recital programs this season to Schubert exclusively, will take the next big step in his ongoing promotion of the Viennese master by offering a four-concert survey of the late sonatas, impromptus and moments musicaux.

Such a marathon would have been commercially unthinkable just a few years ago, and even Brendel, who at this point in his career could hardly have any professional worries, has a few concerns about what kind of an audience he is likely to draw in Los Angeles.

It’s the first thing he asks about when met at his Manhattan hotel, on the eve of an American tour that will find him playing his Schubert recitals around the country and performing the complete four-concert cycle in New York and Los Angeles.

Tall and lanky, his body seeming to go in every direction at once, hair a mess, the pianist has rushed into the hotel lobby. He is jet-lagged. His eyes sag even further than usual, while his eyebrows keep peeping over his glasses, giving him the look of a mad scientist. He shakes hands powerfully and for what seems like an awfully long time. It turns out to be Brendel’s way of guiding a visitor to lunch. He’s hungry.

Once seated, Brendel is almost immediately on his feet again, commanding the buffet table, exuberantly pointing out its features, as if describing the high points of a Schubert sonata. Brendel likes to perform not only when he is on the stage. He is clearly a man of passions--for food, for movies, for probably lots more and unquestionably for Schubert--and he loves to expound on them with professorial enthusiasm.

Given Brendel’s intellectual cosmopolitanism, it turns out to be no surprise that he subscribes to a revisionist view of Schubert. While Brendel spent much of his student days and the early part of his career in Vienna (he grew up on the Yugoslavian coast), he says he finds the Austrian capital impossibly stuffy. (For the last 17 years he has been based in London, where he lives with his wife and a son born 12 years ago, four days before he made his acclaimed live recording of the Beethoven “Diabelli” Variations.)

So one of the first Schubert myths that Brendel likes to discount is that of a composer associated with harmless, gentle, lyric melodies, a composer who has for so many seemed the very embodiment of smug Viennese Gemutlichkeit. The real Schubert, Brendel points out, was very different, and his music, in fact, challenged the comfortable notions of Classicism in revolutionary and actually downright scary ways.

Schubert’s music was not, Brendel says, music of the Enlightenment, the way that of Mozart, Haydn and even Beethoven was.

“With those composers, there was the feeling that the world can be explained with a bit of patience. One just gets to know more and more, so one shouldn’t believe what cannot be proven. Knowledge is what counts, and after a while the world becomes better, because we know more. The potential for this, at least, is there, because man is good, the world is good, and everything will turn out for the better. Of course, this was a myth and a dream.

“There is a parallel, in a way, to such a notion in musical forms. Classical forms give you security. They are forms with borderlines that you can overstep if you want to be funny or menacing, as Haydn did in some of his works. He made mischief. He did not adhere to the order, but later on in the piece he would correct that, as if by saying, ‘Aha, I beg your pardon. I was mischievous. I made a mistake.’

“Or sometimes he simply left the mischief as it was, but you could notice it, because people were used to borders and to a certain sense of order. Romantic music is not funny anymore because there are not those borders and the exception became the rule.”

Schubert was until recently usually thought of as one of those composers who lived snuggly within the common borders of the Classical period. In fact the image of Schubert that any traveler to Vienna sees over and over again, especially in old paintings and post cards, is of a cherubic Schubert, seated at the piano in a Biedermeier drawing room, cozily playing at a musicale, often surrounded by rosy-cheeked young ladies.

But Schubert had his dark side. The latest theory about why the “Unfinished” Symphony never got completed, for instance, is that the symphony was written in the midst of a love affair--the one from which he contracted the venereal disease that a few years later killed him. Schubert apparently associated the two completed movements with the affair, and when it was broken off, he found the memory too painful to continue the work.

“Yes, there is this side in Schubert,” Brendel says. “It is not only Schubert himself, there is a strain in the Romantic movement, the macabre side of Romanticism, showing the dark sides of humanity, which the classical art did not want to stress.

“It was Schubert’s interest from the beginning on--you see it in his song ‘Der Erlkonig,’ composed at 18, and in several other texts that he chose. It became more and more pronounced at the end of his life, and one has the feeling that here is somebody who can produce his depression more immediately than any other composer had ever done before.”

The most striking instance of this comes in the middle section of the slow movement of Schubert’s penultimate sonata, his big A-major Sonata, where the most idyllically songful lyricism is broken by a shockingly ferocious outburst.

“Schubert used musical forms in an entirely personal way to suggest certain deformations of one’s conscious,” Brendel explains.

“That’s what happened in the A-major Sonata. It’s really like somebody who is taken by a bout of fever or madness. The music, in a way, disintegrates. Form disintegrates. It’s something very new, and something that has never been done, in some ways, more radically.”

Then, not missing a beat: “Shall we have some dessert?” Brendel is on his feet again, heading straight for a raspberry torte that he insists is almost as good as those in Vienna and must be sampled.

Brendel’s sweet tooth affords the pianist the opportunity to again express his irrepressible sense of humor and, more than that, to demonstrate that one shouldn’t take this revisionist view of Schubert too one-sidedly.

“I think a pianist shouldn’t be too depressive,” he cautions, “otherwise the music really could wear him down. There is a strong depressive side to Schubert, but one shouldn’t make the mistake to see it as absolute.”

Brendel describes a recent Viennese television biography in which Schubert is portrayed “simply as a syphilitic depressive and nothing else. It is mind-boggling.” This, for Brendel, is just as bad as “the harmless amiable fool, the ‘Lilac-Time’ Tauber impersonation” of the old days.

What is needed, instead, is a realistic approach to a Schubert performance. Brendel sees Schubert very much as a composer for our time. In his essay, he called Beethoven a musical architect and Schubert, by contrast, a sleepwalker. Schubert, Brendel feels, is in some ways actually closer to Mahler than to the Classical period composers, and he doesn’t think it a coincidence that the serious Schubert revival began about the same time as the Mahler one did.

“As in Mahler,” Brendel contends, “the large forms do not justify themselves all the time. They could have gone in another direction. It’s a bit like wandering and meandering.

“I think that is similar to our feelings in our time. We are surrounded by problems that are bigger than we are, that cannot be solved, that are at least potentially very dangerous. Schubert doesn’t give you a false sense of security.

“If you look at Schubert’s notation, it is evident that he wanted extremes, and not that sort of pleasant middle road that Schubert is supposed to be.

“Even in his songs, if somebody like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau really does what is indicated in the score, then people faint and fall off their seats and think that he does violence to the music. He does not. He’s actually more faithful to the character of the songs than other singers are. He takes much greater risks.”

In order to discover those greater extremes, Brendel, in preparation for his year’s immersion into Schubert, spent three months restudying the scores, scores he has played for many years and recorded, going back to original manuscripts and finding that all the printed editions obscure certain accent markings.

“As Schumann once said of Chopin, ‘There are cannons buried under the flowers.’ ”