Marin Alsop, conductorĮasily my favourite piece is his last chamber work, the String Quintet in C major, featuring two cellos. If I could have only one note, I'd pick that first chord. Schubert always has a real intimacy and tenderness, but there is something very personal about this – even that first chord.
The first movement took 35 minutes, the tempo was so slow. The first time I heard it was in 1989 at the Royal Festival Hall I came down from Manchester to hear Sviatoslav Richter play. He wrote a great deal of dark music, particularly during the last two years of his life, and although there's always some hope and light, this is unusual: it's more optimistic, lighter than the other works written in that period. Just one? If you put a gun to my head I'd probably go for the G major Piano Sonata. We asked musicians and enthusiasts which work they couldn't live without. (Radio is a peculiarly Schubertian medium, the most intimate way of connecting a composer and listener.) There is a whole life revealed in his music, and if you really listen to him, Schubert will change yours, too. A new Radio 3 season starting this Friday, The Spirit of Schubert, will give us that chance. Yet the more we know about his music, the more there is to explore. It was decades before his achievement was recognised the "Unfinished" Symphony premiered in 1865, 37 years after his death. Yet there was only one public concert of his music in his lifetime. He wrote more than 600 songs, more than a dozen string quartets and 21 piano sonatas he completed seven symphonies, with many more left unfinished he wrote operas, masses, piano trios and duets.
Living almost entirely in his home town of Vienna, he was a loyal but occasionally cantankerous and drunk friend to a tight-knit groups of artists, poets and writers. The simple facts of Franz Schubert's life shed little light on the enormous emotional range of his music, and the seismic effect his work has had.
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