Gábor Csalog Sundays – Dialogues with (the) Music | Schubert and the Beauty

Featuring:
Oszkár Varga – violin
István Varga – cello
Gábor Csalog – piano
Gergely Fazekas, musicologist

“These are no longer the happy times when we see the glories of youth around every object, but the fatal realisation of a miserable reality which I try to embellish as much as I can with my imagination (thank God for it).” Franz Schubert wrote these lines in 1824 to his brother Ferdinand. That beauty was central to Schubert's compositional thinking hardly needs to be proved to anyone who have heard even a few minutes of Schubert's music in their lifetime. But it was precisely at the beginning of the 19th century that the concept of “sublime” began to take over the place of “beauty” in musical aesthetics, so the ineffable, unearthly beauty of Schubert's melodies was thus an imprint of an earlier era, that of Mozart and Haydn. The Piano Trio in B flat major (B. 898), which Schubert began to compose in 1827 but only completed next year before his death, offers numerous examples of the musical representation of both the concept of “beauty” and the “sublime”. Before playing the piece, Gábor Csalog, his musician friends and music historian Gergely Fazekas will discuss the change in musical aesthetics and show other examples of Schubert’s concept of beauty. The language of the conversation is Hungarian.