Schubert's circle

With a characteristic combination of scholar, impresario, programmer, accompanist, Graham Johnson’s latest set of three CDs explores as an appendix to Hyperion’s complete Schubert songs edition some forebears, parallels, overlaps and influences, to indicate an inviting background landscape. Songs by Schubert’s Friends and Contemporaries could have been merely an exercise in context, and this would already be interesting and worthwhile. But the discs contain plenty of decent music, plentiful surprises and insights, and one or two high-water gems. And something else, surpassing what might be expected — a quality of corporate feeling, fragile, difficult to define, a lost culture and civilisation, a ‘little world of the past’, protected from the stormy blast, tender and cosy, petit bourgeois/Biedermeier for sure, often trivially pretty and pretty trivial; now and then penetrating this (while in no way relinquishing it) to reach deep true emotional expression in the spirit of the unique master around whom it centres.

Not that many famous names, and a few supreme ones, are missing; from Schubert’s youthful idols and models, via contemporaries older or junior with whom relations were more complex (admiration, emulation, emasculation, as per usual), to later-comers who idolised him in turn. From his boyhood gods Mozart is oddly absent: it’s true that he and Haydn loom most audibly in Schubert’s instrumental music, but a token appearance, however brief, would fulfil the picture. The other old master is represented, as symbolically as actually, by the four-part canon declaring his decrepitude, whose opening snatch was engraved on his visiting card by way of declining unwanted sociabilities. Thence to Beethoven, joy and terror of Schubert’s adult composing, handsomely served with An die ferne Geliebte complete (beautifully sung by Mark Padmore), suitable to its pioneering position, and also by an impressive isolated song, hymning the approach of night, thence death, which Schubert is known to have admired to the extent of making a transposed copy.