My Schubert cruise was a transport of delight

‘Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions to all musicians, appear and inspire…’ Auden wrote his words for the young Benjamin Britten, who was born on St Cecilia’s Day, and who set them to music, but his poem would also be a tribute to the composer that Britten admired above all others except Mozart. Franz Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797, and died there 31 years later.

‘Let us honour the memory of a great man,’ he said, raising a glass after attending Beethoven’s funeral in March 1827, ‘and drink to the man who shall be next.’ Schubert died in November the following year, having heard only one concert in his lifetime dedicated to his own work. It is the greatest loss in the history of music, yet what riches he left behind! Remarkably, he composed much of his finest music in that final year, stricken by syphilis, before he was carried away by typhoid fever.

For music lovers, then, a journey along the Danube in Schubert’s company is like bathing in honey. From Passau to Bratislava and back we travelled, breathing in music that matched the views. The stretch along the Wachau, that castle-strewn, vine-clad landscape between Linz and Vienna, was particularly striking. Schubert’s music came unbidden to all with ears to hear as we swept by the handsome villages that hug the river.

And what music it is! ‘The still, sad music of humanity’, Wordsworth’s famous words apply more to Schubert than to any other great composer.Wagner inspires more devotion. Bach and Beethoven compel veneration. But nobody, not even Mozart, inspires more affection than Schubert. His emotional kinsman is Anton Chekhov, the only man whose blending of joy and melancholy was comparable.

Our cruise, organised by Martin Randall Travel, stopped first at Grein, where we heard the Bennewitz Quartet perform the magnificent G major quartet — the 887 as Schubertians know it.