The forest, as with the night, is a framework where it is possible to devise love and make it credible. When devotion only runs in one direction, only the luminous tones of the forest manage to transfer the terrible weight of indifference to the subconscious. The small moment of imagined happiness is a refuge for intimacy, until the terrible reality makes it unbearable.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) experienced an impossible love at the end of his life. The different social condition and the disinterest of the idolized lady, were combined with the assumption of the imminent end due to the disease that devastated this brilliant young thirty-one-year-old musician. The Austrian composer who best expressed the feelings of the romantic poets sits down once again in front of the score and writes the Fantasy for piano four hands in F minor D 940, the work with which he imagined the love he needed so much and never reached.
Fantasy is the forest for Schubert. It is the musical form in which he can unleash his inventiveness to capture his most intimate emotions using his enormous talent and spontaneity. In the forest there are no conventions and the four movements of the work are presented without pause between them, in the contiguous keys of F minor and F sharp minor. The dramatic existence of the musician is made clear by the sharp contrast of the two musical themes, a lyrical one that expresses Franz’s love and a more somber one that reflects the impediments to achieving it.
The theme of love in Fantasy confirms that Schubert is capable of plausibly imagining the feelings of his beloved and doing so with such natural and unbearable tenderness. As the History teacher Pedro Olivares explains, it is a song of two lovers in the form of a romantic duet surrounded by the light and colors of a beautiful forest in which the couple frolics. In this sense, the image that the artist Jorge FIN has kindly provided to illustrate this text reaffirms the complicity of the idealized couple hidden in the landscape. He encouraged them to discover it with a subtle gesture of enlarging the painting.
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Monday March 27, 7:30 p.m. Pictures with music.
Cultural Hall of the Cajamurcia Foundation in Gran Vía (Murcia) -
Lecture «Caspar David Friedrich and the romantic landscape»
Professor José María Caballero Fernández-Rufete. -
Concert: Fantasy in F minor by Schubert D.940
Alvaro Hernández González and Lucía López Vicente (piano four hands)
The second theme brings us back to reality. To Schubert’s, of course. But the composer’s music is so revealing that from the first moment it is perceived that something is not right. Fortunately the gloomy fragment full of eighth notes breaks in briefly and as Olivares explains, the problems soon dissipate. But little by little the staves of the score are sprinkled with dissonances and the notes of the four-voice fugue lead us to chromatic scales that definitively ratify the composer’s suffering before the evidence of an impossible love relationship.
The Fantasia in F minor ends with the exposition of the beautiful first theme. Indifference ends the imagined love and the melody dies with notes that weaken and fade. They are the last beats of a hopeless heart.
#imagined #love