We live in an age of isolation. Its dangerous effects are becoming ever clearer: online radicalization, increasingly poisonous politics, evidence that more and more people consider themselves functionally friendless. This crisis is particularly acute during the holidays.
But 200 years before the term “loneliness epidemic” entered the lexicon — before the scholarly articles and the surgeon general’s warnings and the World Health Organization reports and the think pieces and the hand-wringing and the finger-pointing — there was Franz Schubert.
Schubert, one of the greatest composers, understood solitude better than most mortals and made poetry of it. While 21st-century technologies are conspiring to distance us from one another, his music speaks to something timeless: the longing for connection, and the pain at not finding it. He gives voice, and then consolation, to that part of us that feels alone in the world even when surrounded by people who care for us. A colleague of mine refers to him as “the musician’s best friend.”
In recent years, he indeed has been mine. When the pandemic hit and for the first time in decades I had no concerts to practice for, instinct led me to Schubert’s final three piano sonatas. Living alone and peering at an anxious future, I felt those pieces spoke to me like no others. In the nearly five years since, hardly a day has gone by when I haven’t worked on at least one of them; in that time I’ve performed these sonatas scores of times, as recently as this month during a tour in Asia. Immersion in these works has been among the greatest gifts of my life.
Before the pandemic, I had immersed myself in the world of Beethoven. The difference between the two is profound. Beethoven grabs you by the collar; Schubert leads you by the hand. Even when Beethoven’s music is lyrical or (more often) spiritual, those qualities are communicated with epic intensity. But while Schubert’s narrative arcs can be monumental or harrowing — frequently they are both — he always feels fully human. His vision is grand, but his fragility is palpable.
Schubert was 31 when he wrote these piano sonatas, in September 1828; two months later, he was dead. He was living in his brother’s house in suburban Vienna, in a dank, poorly heated room barely large enough to hold a desk and a bed. The mattress he died on and a few items of clothing formed the entirety of his estate.
The gulf between these pitiable circumstances and the music that emerged from them is impossible to overstate. Taken together, these sonatas require a good two hours to play. The music confronts mortality, with incredulity in the first sonata, a flash of terror in the second and something resembling acceptance in the third. When you play or listen to them, the sense of leave-taking and the sorrow that accompanies it becomes an almost physical presence in the room. Scholars have debated whether Schubert knew he was so near to death when he wrote these works. To my ear, it is unthinkable that they could spring from the imagination of a person anticipating a future.
As Schubert writes his way through the phases of grief, loneliness lies at the music’s emotional center, whatever is happening on the surface.
The C minor Sonata, the first of the three, is rageful and terrifying: it stares death in the face and demands that you do the same. For the most part, it unfolds with a remorseless momentum — atypically for Schubert, there is little digression. This music has no time for tenderness.
Until, suddenly, it does. The slow movement arrives, and all the music’s hard edges soften. The principal theme is pure consolation. It begins by encircling a single note, regarding it from below and then from above with affection. This theme, with simplicity and honesty, reveals Schubert’s essence in all its generosity and all its loneliness. Each time it reappears, its longing is heightened, reflecting a need that will not be met.
Often, it is not the notes themselves but the spaces between them that are most revelatory. In the A major Sonata, the center of the trilogy, a work as fantastically ambiguous as the C minor is single-minded, these silences take on different meanings. The second movement contains a stretch of music that is nightmarish, unhinged: a terrified id rendered in sound. It loses its harmonic bearings and grows simultaneously more aimless and more hysterical until, with a shriek, it suddenly stops. Silences in music carry tremendous power, and their character depends on the music that precedes them: they can question, or cajole, or menace. This time, silence is a paralysis, the stillness of a person who is desperate to escape from the abyss but knows there is nowhere to escape to.
The silences in the last movement could hardly be more different. This movement’s main theme is one of Schubert’s greatest lyrical inspirations — as achingly beautiful and openhearted as any of the more than 600 songs he wrote. But when it makes one final appearance, moments before the end of the sonata, it begins to break down. It trails off, midstream, the resultant silence an anxious question mark. When it resumes, it is newly guarded, its disarming simplicity unrecoverable. It stops and restarts no fewer than four times, each time growing more enigmatic. These silences are wondrous and moving in the extreme: they contain a whole universe of vulnerable feeling, stripping the ballast from the music that surrounds them.
The final sonata, in B flat major, is, to me, classical music’s most shattering farewell. It does not so much begin as emerge from the silence that precedes it. Its first moments, featuring a melody of absolute simplicity — rising, then falling, so gently, rhyming like a child’s poem — suggest that this piece will be an expression of serenity. But as it proceeds, its truth is revealed to be more complicated. A premonitory trill in the lowest register of the piano is answered by yet another silence, a heavy one, fraught with uncertainty. When the melody returns, making no concession to this soundless interruption, we understand: It is not serene, but haunted. Haunted with regret about a life that has been filled with loneliness and that Schubert is nonetheless bereft to be leaving behind.
Loneliness is universal; paradoxically it is a shared part of the human experience. Schubert knew this, and had the gift to convey it in sound, sometimes with profound sadness, but never with bitterness. Schubert’s heart remains open, ready to be broken anew. If you feel alone — because of holiday anxiety, or political uncertainty, or life circumstances, or simply because you are a person — I implore you: Listen to Schubert. He offers his soul to the listener, without armor or guile. He is our best friend.
The post Lonely? Schubert Knows You Best. appeared first on New York Times.
