2 - Between Society and Solitude: Schubert’s Improvisations

Summary

Schubert acquired the art of improvisation from Salieri, who had trained him in the old school of a kapellmeister, a proficient keyboard improviser able to compose, in a short space of time, a mass, symphony or opera, and furnish publishers with songs, chamber music and piano repertoire. Schubert’s friends dismissed his teacher’s theoretically grounded practice of keyboard improvisation as old-fashioned, unknowingly realising that numerous treatises were lamenting its disappearance from musical pedagogy.The skills Schubert acquired were finely honed in Viennese salons. Whereas pianists of the mid nineteenth century played for a vastly expanded concert audience with a lower level of musical education, Schubert’s improvisations – unlike Liszt’s or Hummel’s – were exclusively in private, elite company, where he was immediately understood. Sonnleithner recalls Schubert’s multilevelled improvisations, where he played light waltzes for friends to dance to while others gathered around listening, as he satisfied simultaneously popular and learned tastes. Louis Schlösser remembers Schubert improvising fantasies on Hungarian tunes, which shows the pleasing, popular side of Schubert’s improvisations. One of the most distinctive elements resulting from Schubert’s ‘improvisatory’ compositional technique is his use of harmony at local and structural levels, and novel use of form whose roots are in his improvisor’s fingers.