LDV93

20 What do you mean by ‘suffering’? Schubert was, in a way, a victim of Vienna, a city that throughout its history has known how to feed off the geniuses who have frequented it. Aside from his relationship with a few very close friends – Franz Schober and Johann Michael Vogl, who offered him occasional opportunities to meet well-educated people and enthusiastic amateur music-lovers – Schubert lived in a state of suffering: family, emotional and professional suffering. I am firmly convinced that his music conveys subliminal messages that are confessions to his own existence. The obsessive rhythms, the harmonic ambiguities, the interplay of modulations, the crucial importance of silences, but also the great abundance of unisons . . . All these elements plunge the interpreter into a prodigious, terrifying solitude. This music is like razor blades slicing into the heart. I feel a sense of annihilation every time I play it. SCHUBERT ∙ PIANO SONATAS D840 & D960