The healing power of Schubert

It was one of those walks through the countryside which required a bit of clambering, on a sunny October morning with a slight bite in the air. “Mind your head,” said Dennis, holding up a low branch as I and a group of walkers ducked underneath. 

 

Even though I had just met them less than an hour ago, I was in the flow of chatting with a group from Walk On, a walking group for bereaved people. Organized by volunteers Dennis and his wife Sarah for St Elizabeth Hospice, a charity providing free palliative and end-of-life care for the community in Suffolk, we were a few dozen marchers strong, treading through mucky terrain and fallen branches in the fields adjoining Suffolk Food Hall in Ipswich. 

 

It was not a spontaneous decision of mine to drive two hours up the A12 from London for a romp in the fields with a bunch of strangers. I am a concert pianist and I was taking part in a documentary project by filmmakers Matilda Hay and Rachel Clara Reed, which began documenting my own journey studying and playing the music of Franz Schubert in 2020. The original intention for the documentary was to shadow me while I explored Schubert’s music against the solitude imposed by the pandemic, with an eye towards performing it in concerts and recording an album once the pandemic had ended. 

 

 

Schubert during lockdown

 

Schubert was an exceedingly good companion during lockdown. That his music is often performed in great, hallowed halls around the world belies the fact that he was a composer who exclusively worked on an intimate, personal level: he wrote for himself and his friends, gathering informally in Vienna at Schubertiades which would also include drinking, poetry readings, charades and dancing. During a disorienting time of lockdowns, Zoom meetings and social distancing, I received vicarious companionship from playing his music. 
 

But the filmmakers sensed there was more going on than that. In fact, my father passed away in autumn 2018 after a long illness. There is no impermeable membrane which separates life from the music that one plays. Matilda, ever the probing interviewer, had correctly diagnosed that working on Schubert was something that was helping me deal with the grief surrounding me. 
 

Listen to George Xiaoyuan Fu play the hauntingly beautiful Hungarian Melody D817:

 

 

Schubert the 'wanderer'

 

Schubert’s music is digressive by nature. He often passes a simple melody through various episodes, turning that idea over and over by taking it through distant keys and major/minor modes. As a result there's a constant sense of wandering and searching: though any moment might seem light and pleasant, there is always darkness lurking around the corner. That chiaroscuro quality makes his music at once tuneful and philosophical, all the while maintaining a social register as if Franz himself had passed me these notes on scratch paper. (In fact he often composed music on the backs of letters: paper scraps and manuscripts continued to be unearthed by his friends decades after he died, resulting in the majority of his oeuvre being published posthumously.)

 

Without the clarion call of an imminent concert during lockdown, I finally had to face everything that had transpired. Schubert’s music became a place of inner confrontation with the most intense experiences and feelings, without the need for logical structures or language. The inherent qualities of the music resonated deeply with the grief I was experiencing, and it helped unlock a type of solace which was only possible by becoming comfortable around death and loss.

 

Grief is a phenomenon that’s difficult to understand. We don’t live in a culture in which people are readily open to converse about grief even though losing a loved one is one of the most universal human experiences. I found a place for these intense experiences in Schubert’s music: because I didn’t have to put these complex feelings into words, they were allowed to exist without the limitations of language. I simply choose to sidle up to Schubert’s piano in the evening, reading the page before me with the same faithfulness and tenderness that I might feel toward a dear friend.

 

Schubert’s music is often described as a smile with a frown inside. Many passages consist of a single beautiful melody wandering through cycles of keys, often seesawing on a pivot between major and minor modes. As a result, there is bleakness and despair, which is bewilderingly followed by sunniness and hope. This juxtaposition of light and dark is strangely affecting; and amidst the intense isolation in the pandemic, I found a completely new perspective to his work.

 

Fu in repertoire completely different! Rzewski's hypnotic Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues: 

 

 

Smallest things matter

 

The idea of joining this particular walking group came about after my solo recital at the 2023 Aldeburgh Festival, when we discovered Britten Pears Arts’ collaborations with St Elizabeth Hospice by bringing music to bereavement groups throughout Suffolk. When Matilda and Rachel proposed filming me taking part in Walk On, and then playing an informal Schubertiade at the Red House Museum (the home of Benjamin Britten) for the charity, it felt like a meaningful way to marry these convergent strands.

 

Though we all knew that the walk was being filmed, we soon forgot about Matilda and Rachel, who were darting around the fields trying to set up good shots. The physical labour of walking pumped warm blood through our bodies and loosened up any sense of self-consciousness. 

 

We spoke about the weather, as is typical in England, which was in our favour today; about music, which was so important to many people, and which had been the center of my life for as long as I could remember; about Suffolk, with its beautiful marshlands and flatness which I had grown incredibly fond of after several visits here. 

 

In the spaces between topics, grief emerged in the shadows. I heard stories about their loved ones and how difficult it was when they passed. One woman mentioned how it was the small things which were difficult to accept, like how she now only got one mug out while making tea in the morning. Another man, a frequent fixture at these walks, lamented how conversations with other men around topics like caretaking and grief often ended up being about football. 

 

In a sense, there is nothing to say. How could any of us speak about this absence in our lives which none of us had ever wanted? But being amongst a group who had a tacit understanding of it, who lived through and even dared to thrive against the backdrop of grief – there was quiet dignity to this kind of resilience. 

 

Clambering through the muddy terrain while chatting was invigorating. But then we entered a calmer, paved section which took us through a maze-like road snaking through many fields; then, rounding a corner, down a path which had a breathtaking view of the Orwell Bridge about a mile away, towering over the River Orwell. With the endpoint of Suffolk Food Hall in sight, I looked forward to a piping hot coffee and scone with jam. 

 

Fu teams up with Lotte Betts-Dean in Schubert's heartfelt Liebesbotschaft: 

 

 

 

Music: a universal language

 

I played a Schubertiade to this group a month later in Benjamin Britten’s library music room. Here, sitting two meters away from Britten’s Steinway, were a handful of people whose names and stories I knew. Absent a literal stage, there was no hierarchy which elevated the performer above the listener. 

 

In the years after the pandemic I had performed this repertoire, often to an imagined public which felt faceless; to be on equal footing, as one might have felt at a Schubertiade nearly two centuries ago, revealed a completely different side to this repertoire that I had studied for such a long time.

 

I thought to myself how marvellous it was that Schubert had somehow taken me here, playing to a group of people whom I’d grown so fond of over the course of an hour. It took me back to the oft-made claim that classical music is a ‘universal language.’ I am easily annoyed when I hear this as it’s often done with a facile, banner-waving loftiness that elides over the art form’s persistent exclusionary problems, not to mention how at odds it is with how visceral, challenging and gritty classical music feels to me.

 

But maybe there was something here about music and community, which thrived even in a world as fractured as ours currently is. All of our stories and backgrounds were so disparate, but some things like death, grief, and resilience, were simply universal. 

How much warmth and camaraderie I had received simply by being amongst the tacit understanding of loss, and how interesting it was to be able to exist in a world where that sort of unsettling darkness was a constant, familiar fixture in life – a bit like Schubert’s music, actually. If there was a spirit in which I could happily claim that music was universal, I found it there amongst these strangers in Ipswich.

 

The product of this wandering is my new album Solitude with Schubert, inspired by the composer’s song cycle on loneliness Einsamkeit.  After two days alone in Wells Cathedral School recording the late Sonata No.19, Lotte Betts-Dean joined me to record Einsamkeit bringing a welcome tonic of companionship.  

 

Solitude with Schubert is out now on Platoon (Catalogue Nu PLAT31197)

 

Main image: © Raphael Neal