The first Romantic

Schubert's range of emotion draws the listener in, and Joshua Bell's choice of his work will make for a heady evening, writes Eileen Battersby

Now regarded as the first great Romantic, Franz Schubert, best described as a Romantic Classicist, lived his short life in the shadow of Beethoven, whom he revered. They knew each other - Schubert visited Beethoven as he lay dying and was one of the torchbearers at Beethoven's funeral. Yet Schubert, Viennese, by birth and inclination, is musically closer to Mozart and particularly, Haydn.

US virtuoso Joshua Bell's choice of an all-Schubert programme at the National Concert Hall is interesting for a number of reasons, not least that a virtuoso has chosen to play chamber works. Also, despite his magnificent chamber work, for many, Schubert the composer is most associated with the piano and lieder - Schubert wrote more than 600 songs. They are fragile, melodic creations, the music brilliantly matched to the poetry.

More than most songs, Schubert lieder demand fine singing and intelligent interpretation.

Schubert's chamber music forms a superlative body of work, always lyrically melodic, and in the final years, often boldly chromatic. He was the last of the great composers to concentrate on the piano sonata as a form, composing 21 sonatas - the late ones are melancholic musical soliloquies.

Schubert's fate was to be overlooked in his lifetime and virtually forgotten after his death in 1828 at the age of 31. It may now be difficult to comprehend, but it was only late in the 19th century, virtually at the close of the Romantic Era, that Schubert's legacy as a great composer was finally acknowledged. Despite his early death, he had died a mature master.

Aside from the fact that the major piano composers who followed him, such as Schumann, Chopin and Liszt, concentrated on other piano forms such as the etude and prelude, Schubert was mistakenly dismissed as a traditionalist. He also paid the price of being a Romantic who was strongly bound to the Classical. Most of all though, at a transitional period when composers no longer had patrons, Schubert, unlike Beethoven, was not a virtuoso musician and would never be a concert performer.

He could not rely on performing his work as a means of promoting either himself or it. This is turn affected his chances of attracting a publisher. None of his symphonies was performed in his lifetime; none was published until 50 years after his death.

It is also too easy to forget that Schubert's career, begun in the intimacy of family music-making, was brief, even shorter than that of Mozart. He died at an age when most composers had yet to begin their middle period. Far from being trapped by his masters, Schubert simply did not live long enough to develop the emerging original voice evident in his later chamber music.

FRANZ SCHUBERT WAS born in Liechtenthal, a suburb of Vienna, on January 31st 1787, the youngest of four surviving sons. Schubert's father was a school teacher, he taught young Franz the violin, while an older brother tutored him at piano. But the boy quickly surpassed both teachers. When he was nine years old he was sent to study music with the local church organist, Michael Holzer, who believed the child was gifted.

"If I wished to instruct him in anything fresh, the boy already knew it. So I gave him no actual tuition but merely talked to him and watched him with silent astonishment."

Holzer admitted he could teach Schubert nothing. So at 11, he became a choirboy in the imperial chapel. The art of composition, however, had already begun to possess the boy who gave little thought to anything else. It was more than personal expression, it was his reason for living.

At the age of 15, in 1812 - the year of his mother's death - he was accepted as a student by Salieri, Mozart's rival. Two years later, the student presented his teacher with a 341-page score of his fully orchestrated first opera. It was the one form that he never quite mastered. Still composing for the voice, albeit on a more intimate scale, confirmed his genius. On October 19th 1814, Schubert, aged 17, inspired by Goethe's Faust, composed his setting of Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel).

Goethe was important to Schubert, who understood the writer's sensibility and would soon be drawn to The Erlking. It is an unusual choice for Schubert as this setting would tell a story rather than evoke a mood. During the next year, Schubert was to write almost 150 songs - and that in the same year he had begun teaching. Yet he continued to find the time in which he composed.

From the family home circle of music recitals, Schubert progressed to musical evenings with like-minded friends. These gatherings became the audience for which he composed. In 1818 one of his songs was published. Having taken a year off teaching during 1816-17, he returned to the family home and resumed his role as schoolmaster. In the summer of 1818, he accepted a post as music master to the family of Count Johann Esterházy, who was related to Haydn's former patron, Prince Esterházy. By then, Schubert had already composed his First Symphony, intended for a private orchestra, it had actually evolved from a family quartet.

IN LATE 1822 Schubert, possibly already infected with the syphilis (not, as some sources maintain, typhus or typhoid fever) which would kill him, wrote his masterly Unfinished Symphony. Its profoundly poetic tone, mystery and pathos marks it not only as a major work of composition but also as a superb example of Schubert's genius for making music poetic.

There is an element of Beethoven in it, but it was no doubt influenced by the increasing darkness in Schubert's life. By 1823 he was sufficiently well known as a writer of songs to have some of them published.

He had also experienced his first bout of serious illness and written his Beautiful Maid of the Mill sequence. One of his finest, most imaginative works, the Death and the Maiden quartet, with its five variations, beginning with an improvisatory flight by the first violin which is then carried on by a cello solo, reveals the anguished vision of Schubert's emotional range. The pieces Joshua Bell will perform in Dublin, including Rondo Brilliante in B Minor, demonstrate the dark grace that so often surfaces in Schubert, underlying and contrasting with the beautiful melody.

It is his range of emotion, from gaiety to sorrow, a sadness as felt and expressed by a young man, that draws the listener to Schubert.

It is so easy, too easy, to consider him as a genius unfulfilled - he did fulfil his genius. Schubert's final three piano sonatas, composed months before his death, are comparable with those of Beethoven. In them, particularly Sonata No 20, in which the Andantino is constructed upon a melody that returns to the same single note, only to be shattered by an outburst of broken motifs, there is a sense of overwhelming pain.

As ever, Schubert the poet succeeds in making music speak, his highly visual and subtly emotional melodies are landscapes articulated in a way which often defies words.

He was the first great Romantic, whose influence often shimmers quite magnificently, in the works of the last great Romantic, Johannes Brahms.

Joshua Bell performs an all-Schubert programme at the National Concert Hall, Dublin next Saturday