Schubert in the Nieuwe Kerk

What are you going to listen to?

Two musical wills in one program. Bach's unfinished Kunst der Fuge and Schubert's very last chamber music work: music through the marrow.

Bach

Die Kunst der Fuge is one of Bach's most complex and profound works, written in the Last Years of his life and published posthumously in 1751. It is a collection of fourteen fugues and four canons, all based on a single theme. The work is often considered a masterpiece of counterpoint. Each fugue and canon in Die Kunst der Fuge explores various contrapuntal techniques, with Bach demonstrating his unparalleled skill in combining melodic lines. The work is notable because it does not prescribe specific instrumentation, meaning it can be performed on a variety of instruments or ensembles including even a swinging version of Contrapunctus 9 by The Swingle Singers. Tonight, Contrapunctus 1 and 4 will be heard in the brilliant arrangement made by German cellist and composer Richard Klemm with the viola-playing director of the Ansbacher Bachwochen Carl Weymar in 1942.

Schubert

And then there is Schubert's magisterial String Quintet, which he wrote in his Last of Life, a period in which relatively few songs came into being and a remarkable amount of instrumental chamber music: three major piano sonatas, the "Fantasy in f for quatre-mains" and the String Quintet in C. An inexplicable shift in his attention or a conscious response to the philosophical discussions going on in his circle of friends? We are used to seeing Schubert as someone who followed his intuition and could barely keep up with the flow of music bubbling within him with a pen. In doing so, however, we do not do justice to his astute mind and to the level of intellectual circle in which he moved. Regularly his circle of friends, which consisted mainly of writers and poets, met together to read poetry, talk about literature, make music and discuss. Schubert in particular attached great importance to the level of the discussions and was in danger of losing interest in the gatherings if the conversations drifted into trivialities. One of the "hot items" among these early Romantics was the value of instrumental music, which was thought to be superior and far superior to the art of song. According to writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck, purely instrumental music, precisely because of its lack of words, came closest to the Romantic ideal of "the ineffable" and the "infinite" that reached out to the cosmos. Moreover, large-scale works were held in much higher esteem by these thinkers than small miniatures such as songs. In short, there is presumably a connection between the philosophical thoughts of his contemporaries and Schubert's shifting attention to instrumental music.

The String Quintet is grand, suggests infinity and is "heavenly" in the literal sense. The listener is lifted to higher regions where space has a vast expansion whose end is not in sight. The seemingly infinite has not "just flowed" from the composer's pen but has been deliberately created. For example, the work does not begin, as was customary at the time, with a striking theme, but with a C major chord that harmonically 'discolors' and colors back to C major: a light-dark-light effect that turns out to be the basic idea of the first movement. The tone is set and the same discoloration keeps recurring at crucial moments. Song-like themes also appear in the work, and the second theme of the first movement is a good example. But there, too, harmonic shifting is used to break the fixed nature of such a theme and create an atmosphere of "endlessness. The genius of Schubert is that he obliterates every trace of theory and philosophy in his music, which seems to have arisen completely spontaneously and which seems to take us to the most intimate places of his inner world. He must have strongly agreed with writer and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, whose poems he frequently used as song lyrics, who claimed that art is "the sole and eternal tool of philosophy."

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Tonight's ensemble

Gerard Spronk violin
Francisca Portugal violin
Jozefien Dumortier viola
Iedjevan Wees cello
Sven Weyens cello