Klaus Döring's Classical Music/Klaus Döring's Klassische Musik

  by  Desiree Ho    October 7th, 2011 “I am the most unhappy and miserable person in this world… my health will never improve, and in such despair, things will only become worse instead of better…”  – Franz Schubert Austrian Composer  Franz Schubert  (1797-1828) is enshrined as the pillar of Romantic Western Classical Music who follows after  Beethoven *. He had completed a tremendous collection of hundreds of lieder , symphonies , operas , and a large body of chamber and piano music that adds up to over 1000 works during his career. This was prolific for a man who only lived for 31 years.  Franz Liszt  described him as  “the most poetic musician who ever lived.”  On his deathbed, Beethoven is said to have looked into some of the younger man’s works and exclaimed,  “Truly, the spark of divine genius resides in this Schubert!” Yet, a number of Schubert’s musical works such as  ‘Winter Journey’ ,  ‘the Unfinished...

by Georg Predota , Interlude It might come as a surprise, but   Franz Schubert   wrote almost as much   piano music for four hands   as for two. His thirty-four compositions in this medium range from his earliest surviving music, the Fantasie D. 48, to his Rondo in A Major finished in the summer of 1828. A scholar writes, “no composer ever approached the piano duet with the seriousness Schubert did, and his corpus of four-hand pieces stands as the apex of the genre.” Franz Schubert Throughout the 19th century, piano music for four hands played an important role in the home. Since larger ensembles could only be afforded by the upper classes and the aristocracy, salons everywhere sounded with music for four hands, be it arrangements of works written for larger ensembles, the operatic stage, or original compositions. For Schubert, the four-hand set-up seemed ideally suited to his temperament as “it was a congenial form of music-making that was emblematic in Biedermeier ...