Han Finckel Setzer Trio's "Schubert addicts" revel in the composer's profound emotion in Friends of Chamber Music concert
Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major and the Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major are artistic mirror images: one full of springtime joy, the other brooding and internal
Han Finckel Setzer Trio. Photo by Daniel Ashworth
Friends of Chamber Music presents the Han Finckel Setzer Trio at the Vancouver Playhouse on February 6 at 7:30 pm
ALTHOUGH THE CAUSE OF Ludwig van Beethoven’s death is still disputed, the circumstances were well documented by those at his bedside. There’s ample reportage on the great composer’s funeral, too, including the full text of the eulogy written by his friend, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer.
“The last master of resounding song, the gracious mouth by which music spoke, the man who inherited and increased the immortal fame of Handel and Bach, of Haydn and Mozart, has ceased to be; and we stand weeping over the broken strings of an instrument now stilled,” Grillparzer wrote. ”An instrument now stilled. Let me call him that! For he was an artist, and what he was, he was only through art.
“He was an artist, and who shall stand beside him?”
One in the crowd had an answer for Grillparzer’s question, at least according to David Finckel.
“There’s a wonderful biography of Schubert by a man called Christopher H. Gibbs, and Christopher postulates that when those words were read….Schubert knew that he was the one who was being called to stand,” the acclaimed cellist explains in a telephone interview from Palm Beach, Florida. “He knew that he could do it.”
The circumstantial evidence tends to support Gibbs’s conjecture, which Finckel heartily endorses. We know that Schubert was in the crowd at the Alsergrund church where Beethoven was buried; he had been a torch-bearer in the funeral procession. We know, too, that despite his success as a composer of art songs and instrumental miniatures, Schubert was itching to begin work on larger structures, and had been stymied in his desire to move beyond lieder.
“He tried his hand at operas, but the problem was that just at that time in Vienna, Italian opera became all the rage instead of German opera,” Finckel says. “Rossini was the king in Vienna, and the opera houses just didn’t want German operas any more. So he got very frustrated with that, and instead turned his sights towards becoming a composer of large, significant works.”
Weighing even more heavily on the young composer’s mind was the knowledge that he had only a limited time in which to make his reputation. Schubert had contracted syphilis, which in that pre-antibiotic era was effectively a death sentence. It would kill him in 1828, just a year and a half after Beethoven’s demise.
“I have another theory about somebody like that—and it also worked a little bit that way with Beethoven—which is that they sensed that the end was coming and they forced themselves into a kind of maturity that was beyond their physical years,” Finckel contends. “Now, that’s just my hoopla, but I really kind of believe it, because for a 30-year-old composer to get to the kind of depths—emotional depths—that Schubert did, it just hardly ever happens. It’s very strange. And it’s a miracle that he managed to produce works of such strength and joy and optimism alongside darker works that reflected the reality of his situation.”
Both sides of Schubert’s nature can be heard in the two scores that Finckel offers in support of his theory—and that he, alongside his wife Wu Han on piano and their life-long friend Philip Setzer on violin, will perform at a Friends of Chamber Music concert on February 6. The Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major and the Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major are artistic mirror images: one outdoorsy and full of springtime joy, the other brooding and internal. It’s also no coincidence, the cellist adds, that the B-flat trio is in the same key as Beethoven’s final work for that instrumental combination, the Piano Trio in B-flat major.
“It’s like Schubert picked this up and thought ‘Okay, I’m going to take this to the next level.’
“The B-flat trio, which we’re going to start with, is very, very instrumental in profile—and by instrumental, I mean that it uses the instruments’ capacities to the fullest,” he continues. “It exploits the three instruments absolutely beautifully, and in an incredibly challenging way. And the second trio does the same, but it takes another kind of a turn. To me, the second trio reminds me much more of Schubert’s song cycles—and I’m speaking definitively of Winterreise. It’s all about the ‘wanderer’ concept, the person who no matter where he goes is a stranger. That’s the way the cycle starts, and this sort of trudging-in-the-snow accompaniment of Winterreise is very much akin to the trudging accompaniment of the slow movement of the E-flat trio, which begins with a cello solo, like the slow movement of the B-flat trio. But the slow movement of the B-flat trio is definitely not trudging through the snow….It’s much more like strolling through a spring pasture.”
When teaching the Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major to his students, Finckel has some pointed advice. “To really know what this music is about,” he tells them, “eventually you’re going to have to go to Vienna, sit in a cafe and eat the pastries and drink the coffee, and then walk in the hills and hear the yodelling and the cowbells.” To gain more insight into Schubert’s psychology, he enthusiastically recommends the Gibbs biography, The Life of Schubert. Undoubtedly, however, the easiest way to immerse oneself in the world of Beethoven’s successor would be to hear the cellist and his colleagues in concert.
“I’ve played Schubert with a lot of people, but there’s hardly anyone who plays Schubert like Philip Setzer,” Finckel notes. “He has the most natural, instinctive sensitivity and feel for this music of anybody I’ve ever encountered. And with Wu Han, the big attraction to her, from the very beginning, was her incredibly instinctive musicality, which of course lends itself to Schubert. She has been a Schubert fanatic since before I knew her; she tells me of playing the late Schubert piano sonatas and being moved to tears every time, and she’s still pretty much that way. So you’ve got three Schubert addicts coming to Vancouver, and we’re going to have a great time.”
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