Notes for: July 12, 2005
When Schubert was a teenager, the Grob family were the Schuberts’ closest friends. Schubert’s father, Franz, was a schoolmaster. Heinrich Grob, an immigrant from Switzerland, ran a small silk factory; he died young, and his wife took over the business. The Schuberts and the Grobs spent holidays together, were godparents to each other’s children, and performed together in their homes and at the neighborhood church.
Young Franz fell in love with young Therese, describing her in a letter as “not by any means a beauty, but well shaped, fairly buxom with a fresh, childlike little round face.” According to his friends, he might well have married her if he had been able to support her. As things turned out, in 1820 she married a master baker; Schubert never married.
Therese had “a fine soprano voice” and her brother, Heinrich, was an accomplished cellist and pianist and later a church choir director. For Therese, Schubert wrote some of his early songs, including the masterpiece “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel,” and he gave her a collection of autograph songs which she kept until her death. For Heinrich, Schubert, in 1816, wrote this Adagio and Rondo Concertante, and when Therese died childless, his descendants inherited the song collection, and it is still in their possession.
As its title suggests, the Adagio and Rondo Concertante is really a miniature piano concerto, with the piano given an attention-getting role. Further, Schubert matured more slowly in his instrumental music than in his songs, and this work, written at the age of 19, is marked more by Schubert’s gift for melody than for the emotional depths that were to come later.
The work is in two movements, played without a break. The Adagio is an introduction, designed to build up suspense and anticipation through the use of fanfare-like phrases and attention-getting chords. The Rondo is the main attraction – fast and with four contrasting themes in various keys. The themes don’t alternate as they do in a typical rondo. Rather they are strung out in a series, then followed by a short development, and then repeated in their entirety.