The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: This Friday night will see a FREE “Schubertiade” salon held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to celebrate Franz Schubert’s 217th birthday with the kind of friendly and informal musicale that the composer himself participated in.

By Jacob Stockinger

How do you celebrate the birthday of a famous composer?

In the case of the early 19th-century Austrian Romantic composer Franz Schubert (below, 1797-1828), you re-create a MUST-HEAR “Schubertiade” – without the drinking and dancing but with the stage looking more like a living room, with carpet and a lamp, than as a concert hall.

That was the informal salon gathering (depicted below in a painting by Julius Schmid with Schubert seated at the piano) that the composer and his friends regularly participated in. It is the occasion where Schubert premiered many of his newly composed works, which invariably had a more intimate, social and congenial nature than the works of his mentor and model, Ludwig van Beethoven.

This Friday night at 8 pm. in Mills Hall, just such an event – with FREE admission — will be recreated by a group of UW faculty members and students.

The program is a varied one. UW collaborative pianist Martha Fischer and her pianist-husband Bill Lutes (both below) will play Schubert’s sublimely haunting Fantaisie in F minor for piano, four-hands.

Fischer will also be joined by UW cellist Parry Karp (below top) and UW student violinist Alice Bartsch (below bottom) in the beautiful “Notturno” (Nocturne),” the original slow movement of Schubert’s lovely and dramatic Piano Trio in B-Flat. Op. 99.

In addition there will be many songs and various vocal ensembles, fitting for the man who is considered the Father of the Art Song and who is known his many beautiful songs cycles, especially “Winterreise” (Winter Journey), “Die Schoene Muellerin” (The Beautiful Miller’s Daughter) and “Schwanengesang” (Swansong).

Performers include UW-Madison tenor James Doing (below top) and UW baritone Paul Rowe (below bottom).

At the higher end of the vocal range, there will be UW soprano Mimmi Fulmer (below top, in a photo by Katrin Talbot) and visiting UW-Madison teacher mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Hagedorn, a Wisconsin native whose has built a distinguished opera career in Europe and whose family lives in Vienna.

The Ear doesn’t know if the song “To Music” (An die Musik) is on the program, but it should be because it summarizes and embodies what makes Schubert so beautiful and heartbreaking. So here is a YouTube video of the song as sung on the BBC in 1961 by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and introduced by the acclaimed piano accompanist Gerald Moore: