Notes for: August 1, 2017
Schubert died on November 19, 1828. In this ingenious homage, John Harbison imagines him on a musical journey into the afterlife on the day of his death. Harbison – the eminent and prolific American composer of everything from jazz to symphonies to opera – incorporates elements of Schubert’s style throughout the four-movement work, including, in the third movement, a direct quotation from one of Schubert’s compositions. What is striking about “November 19, 1828” is how seamlessly Schubert’s harmonies blend with Harbison’s dissonances. In Harbison’s words, “The piece asserts Schubert’s relevance to our present rather than any nostalgia for the past.”
Throughout the work, Harbison imagines Schubert listening to sounds that are both familiar and strange. The quartet begins with a fanfare from the strings, described by Harbison as “the trumpets of death,” heard three times. Harbison’s note for this movement perfectly captures the flavor of the entire piece: “Schubert begins his journey haunted by sounds which are not his music, but pertain to his music in disturbing ways.” In the second movement Harbison continues to lead Schubert into unfamiliar territory. Harbison presents five character sketches – a very Schubertian concept – but then treats them “in a manner previously unknown to Schubert – everything is played back immediately upside down.”
The third-movement Rondo begins with an unfinished Schubert Allegretto from 1816. As Harbison notes, “Emblematic of a storehouse of ideas which are still to be explored, perhaps even in future times, the short fragment which begins this Rondo is the only one in this piece composed by Schubert in his first life.” Straightforward in its first appearance, the fragment is repeated two more times, each time more extensively altered by Harbison. In between these recurrences are three harmonic and rhythmic transformations that take the rondo into territory Schubert only could have dreamed of.
Harbison’s inspiration for the last movement is intriguing. As he describes it, “Shortly before his death, Schubert went to the theorist Sechter to work on a very specific problem pertaining to the tonal answer of the fugue subject, important to Schubert in the composition of his masses. Sechter, well aware that he was teaching the most extraordinary student who ever came for a lesson, concluded by assigning Schubert a fugue subject on his own name. Schubert was unable to undertake the task; he died about a week later, on November 19, 1828.” So Harbison completes the assignment for him, with not one, but two fugues. It’s a fitting ending to this imaginative appreciation. As Harbison wrote, “The only reason to make a tombeau for Schubert is his continuing fertility, his immediacy for the 21st century, his light shining in the future.”