At some point, we'll get back to actual underrated musicians, but a pandemic began shortly after I started this page, and this is clearly not an era for adventure. So tonight, a post about a composer who needs no post except to suggest that (only) perhaps he should be rated over even Bach and Beethoven, however short his duration.
I read an article toward the beginning of social distance that Schubert is the ideal composer for the pandemic. He is most certainly the ultimate composer of isolation and loneliness, but he is also the ultimate composer of sociability and intimacy. He's obviously best known for his songs, but as Clive James once pointed out, the insipidness of Schubert's texts can occasionally interfere with the sublimity, but when it's just instrumental melody, there's nothing to interfere between you and music. I would take Schubert's piano music over either Beethoven's or Chopin's, and Liszt? Oy...
But the ideal music for right now is not Schubert's songs, nor is it his piano pieces, it's not even his ordinary chamber music. It's those pieces for instrumental combinations which only Schubert ever wrote for, because Schubert wrote them for whatever instruments his friends played. Listening to them reminds us of what conversation was like, not gathering in huge crowds, but conversation among people you like at small get-togethers over dinner or dessert, cup of coffee or a bottle of wine, among people with whom interaction always means something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O52r9_bXWBw&fbclid=IwAR0cSuwfXFaFYEExuKlnT3cGmcbhOmxJanuLGa7xqI5BoSF2D7PNDSr2TAY
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