Schubert in Paradise

“With Schubert’s music, the tear pours from the eye without first consulting the soul,” acknowledges Theodor W. Adorno. “Schubert is a miracle!” asserts Marc Chagall. And when someone asks Igor Stravinsky whether the longueurs in Schubert’s music lull him to sleep, he replies: “What does it matter, since upon waking I consider myself to be in paradise?”

Franz Schubert, born in 1797, began composing at the age of just thirteen. A highly idiosyncratic personality, he was an adventurous, versatile artist. In his music, classical formal principles and Romantic ideas entered into a new and unprecedented synthesis. A restless melancholic, a man poised on the verge of irrationality, for a time he was a member of the Viennese ‘Nonsense Society’. And yet, his compositions are filled with a passionate and meticulous rigour. Schubert remained largely unknown during his lifetime. By his own account “come into the world for nothing but composing”, in his short life – he died at the age of 31 – he created over a thousand musical works, including some 600 songs alone, and each one a universe unto itself.

What a bold and captivating endeavour: a dramatic concert that transports Schubert’s songs into a contemporary sensibility. Loud and vulnerable, performed by three extraordinary female actors and singers: the gently rebellious idiosyncrasy of Schubert’s music meets idiosyncrasy multiplied by three – in search of a liveable paradise.

“Where are you, my beloved land? Sought, anticipated, yet never known? The land, the land so green with hope, the land where my roses bloom.” – from “Der Wanderer” (The Wayfarer) by Franz Schubert