In Conversation with David Fulmer about Schubert Spinning Chains
(These comments are condensed and edited from a public talk sponsored by Hunter College in March 2021.)
Your piece is the culmination of a long collaboration, and many discussions about Schubert, a composer who both of us have loved for a long time. Our first discussion of the commission was six years ago already, wasn’t it, when we had that wonderful conversation at City Sandwich, in Hell’s Kitchen? In commissioning you, I realized that it’s unique that you're a composer-performer who performs standard repertoire as well as contemporary music. There actually aren't too many of those!
***
I’ve known and played the Schubert pieces for more than half my life. The Ländler are on a miniature scale, of course, and the sonata is very large, like all of the later Schubert sonatas. I first heard the sonata in a performance at McCarter Theater in Princeton by Richard Goode, whom I idolize—I think this was 1991. It was then that I was really awakened to Schubert’s depth and his daring. I hadn’t heard any of the big Schubert works before, I had only heard small pieces and played some of the piano impromptus. I was attracted to the cyclical aspects of the sonata, very clear motives that are reused through the piece, and that clued me in to the grand ambition of the sonata. It’s a big, brilliant form, and no one manages large forms with such control, while also taking so many risks, like Schubert. Another late piece that is also cyclical, which I know you and I both love, is the G major string quartet. I think we wouldn’t hear that kind of large-scale control again until the romantic symphonists—Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler. And I was also drawn to the sonata’s boldness and its variety, from the martial opening theme to the thunderstorm episode in the second movement.
***
One thing that we talked about in early discussions of the commission was that Schubert is rarely a muse for contemporary composers, the way that his contemporaries like Beethoven and Schumann were. I'd like to speak a little about how I hear Schubert as a modernist and as a distinctive, pathbreaking figure—within the style that he embraced.
What I say to people is that Schubert was not a modernist every day of the week. But he’s a composer of very extreme contrasts, and the extreme intimacy of the writing is always daring—it’s unsurpassed in that sense. He also experiments a lot, in many areas—being spontaneous not just with melody, but with instrumental texture, with dynamics, with form, and above all with harmony. He takes tons of big and small compositional risks, which ultimately show his mastery of large forms that contain all those choices.
Schubert’s music has mostly soft-edged surfaces—not always, but mostly—which I believe are a kind of cover for hard ideas. Uncompromised ideas. And those ideas have to do with character and with an urgent intention. That, to me, is an interesting duality, and a very modern aesthetic—a subtle disjunct that speaks to my modernist side. Always sensing something bubbling under the surface which is so stubbornly driven, even in the gentlest music.
He’s also inscrutable and elusive, even as he’s highly expressive. Sometimes the contrasts in the writing are also downright bizarre, and surreal.
***
I do want to talk about the disc's title, Schubert Spinning Chains. It’s an extension of the title of your piece, David, Chain by Chain, and it also alludes to other aspects of Schubert’s life and work. The A major sonata, the big piece on the disc, was written during this completely astonishing period at the very end of Schubert’s life. And remember, Schubert was only 31 when he died; he should have been in the prime of his life. The last three piano sonatas were written in blindingly quick succession, essentially all in one month, September 1828, even though he was working from sketches he had made earlier that year. It’s likely that Schubert contracted syphilis as early as 1823, the year he wrote the set of Ländler, but the devastating effects of the illness really fell within his last year.
He was living in Vienna at his brother’s home, in self-enforced solitude, and away from his circle of sophisticate Viennese friends. So he was in isolation, but in a fevered creative state—it’s a particular kind of captivity that I can only imagine. To be so amazingly productive, just turning out one masterpiece after the next, in those conditions, it’s a high-water mark of musical creativity and of heroism. And I think the A major sonata, more than the others of the last three sonatas, really is about heroism, as a subject, and the shapes that heroism takes, as extroverted and introverted expressions. So in that sense he’s making light of his bondage, with strength and humor—spinning the chains that bind him. And also, thinking about isolation and illness, for me, locates the music squarely in the middle of this pandemic. It’s had deep resonance for me this year. Also, obtusely, the disc title is also a reference to "Gretchen am Spinnrade," Gretchen at the Spinning-Wheel, one of his best-known songs that has a text by Goethe.
***
On a technical level, of course the modern piano isn’t incompatible with Schubert’s music, but my approach is informed by occasionally having played fortepiano, and adjusting its sense of intimacy, and scale of volume, to the modern instrument. With Schubert’s extreme dynamics, you can’t play a Schubert triple forte on a modern Steinway as a Shostakovich triple forte. You have to apply a sense of scale, on the softer end as well—there are some triple pianos. I think with your piece, David, I’m able to broaden that range a little, while still striving for what I idealize in Schubert’s music—a singing tone, and the full spectrum of resonant sound color.
***
In your program note for the piece, you mention that Schubert "spins intricate chains of song,” and I know you wanted to capture that quality in your work. Can I tell you about the way that I view your piece? I see your work as a kind of constantly refocusing camera lens on Schubert’s melodic style. You zoom out to see big, florid gestures of melody, like at the beginning and end of the piece, where you take in a lot of the piano’s high-low range. And then the piece also zooms in, like an extreme close-up, to concentrate on single-note melodies moving very slowly, which happens around the four-minute mark. You also described the piece to me as a meditation on voices, as in a Schubert song, and I take that to mean a single voice and also choirs of voices, which are captured by the resonant pedaling you call for.
Another thing I think that your piece captures is a sense of improvisation and experimentation that is always there in Schubert—as you know, harmonically speaking, he’s a sleepwalker. This happens everywhere in both the Schubert pieces I include on the disc. He always goes to very unexpected areas with harmonic modulations. It’s always fascinating how he finds his way back from those remote places, and what’s transformed in the process. The music is always changing that way.
***
You’re familiar with some of my solo discs, and you know that I think a lot about curation, because context influences everything that we hear. One thing I’ve been doing during the pandemic, actually, is listening to a lot of freeform radio and college radio, because I have some background in radio, and trying to get a sense of curation strategies that juggle very different musical genres—for instance, going from rockabilly music to eighties synth-pop. It’s less of a stretch, of course, to go from Schubert to your piece, but I placed your piece at the end of this disc because I wanted your work to be heard as an echo and an outgrowth of the principles that Schubert holds dear—and as I said, as a study of different ways to view the music from up close and from afar. And more generally, as a meditation on Schubert’s piano writing, which you and I agree was as adventurous as Beethoven’s.
Ultimately any curatorial choice about ordering is personal and a little bit arbitrary. But I think that points of reference, whatever they may be, have to stay in our consciousness as we move from old to new music, whether that has to do with musical texture, character, mood, harmony, gesture, any number of things. For instance, I have a disc that juxtaposes pieces by Debussy with Second Viennese School music, and my aim was to draw attention to the sensual possibilities of both sides of that programming.
***
Like you, I care deeply about the relevance that music has to our daily life—how it enriches our lives but also how it reflects things that happen to us, in this era, every day. Including modern sounds on a disc with classic repertoire is an obvious way to bridge that gap. But I was particularly very curious about a contemporary approach to listening to Schubert that could be reflected in a new work. I really didn’t know what that would be, and you gave me one satisfactory answer.