Schubert Songs

Many of Schubert’s six hundred songs were composed quickly and often in the midst of of a gathering of friends loudly revelling or performing other music. Sometimes that remarkable facility would be exercised while walking in company through the woods round Vienna. John Watson has composed a sequence of scenes from this prodigious working life – sometimes in Schubert’s own voice sometimes in the voices of critics or friends. Here are glimpses – forming a song cycle as it were – depicting Schubert at work or between songs until the final fortnight’s struggle when he leaves them behind.