My Schubert marathon

On 10 October, the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford will host the first concert in ‘the biggest ever celebration of the life and work of Franz Schubert’. Over three weeks, all 650 songs (or thereabouts) will be performed, most of them in England’s oldest concert hall, the Holywell Music Room just around the corner from the Sheldonian.

We’re promised the greatest assembly of Schubert singers in history: they include Sir Thomas Allen, Ian Bostridge, Sarah Connolly, James Gilchrist, Robert Holl, Wolfgang Holzmair, Angelika Kirchschlager, Christopher Maltman, Mark Padmore, Christoph Prégardien — plus the cream of accompanists: Julius Drake, Graham Johnson and Roger Vignoles. There will be orchestral, chamber and piano music, too, featuring the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Doric String Quartet and Imogen Cooper, most radiant of Schubert pianists, performing the final piano sonata in B flat, D960.

There may never be another opportunity to hear all the songs in one festival. But just how much fun will that be? Schubert’s lieder, with the exception of the old favourites — ‘The Trout’, ‘Hark, Hark! The Lark’, ‘An die Musik’ — and the song cycles, are the least known of his works (apart from his operas, of which the less said the better). There are simply too many of them. Poor Schubert is in the same boat as J.S. Bach, whose stupendous choral fantasias are overlooked because people can’t be bothered to fight through the thickets of 200 church cantatas.

Knowing that the Oxford festival was coming up, I set myself the task of listening to all Schubert’s songs, of which I knew shamefully few. Luckily, I own the Hyperion complete set, in which Graham Johnson accompanies the finest singers of the 1980s and 90s. Really Johnson should have been knighted for curating this epic 18-year project.