Artist's Notes: George Fu reflects on the project

Solitude with Schubert began in the coronovirus lockdown while staring down months of cancelled concerts. I diverted my creativity in unusual ways: drawing a series of Instagram cartoons, piloting an online concert series, and becoming a devoted parent to a sourdough starter named 'Bredna'. I kept a steady presence at the piano, practising as much or as little as I could. Inexplicably, I found myself drawn to the music of Franz Schubert.

George Xiaoyuan Fu recording Schubert's late music

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 a 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. However, without a live performance to aim towards, there was something unfinished about this.

Then, one day, the answer came to me. I'd been working on a few film projects over the pandemic; why not film a documentary about Schubert amidst solitude? I'd just done a lockdown film proect with the fabulous mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean; I'd also been itching to play through some Schubert Lieder.

Without delay I phoned Matilda Hay, a documentary filmmaker who is also a close friend. She was completely up for the challenge of filming a musician's journey of learning and preparing a Schubert programme. With generous support from th Curtis Institute of Music, the Kirckman Concert Society, and Platoon, we began to document a journey over several years with Schubert.

As an interviewer, Matilda conducted cross-examinations about various aspects of concert life and Schubert's music; before lon, certain themes began emerging. My father died in November 2018 after a protracted battle with cancer. When the pandemic hit, I was forced to stop working and to wrestle with the feelings from his 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 limitation of language. And although playing his music offered emotional catharsis, I could still have my anonymity and maintain a safe emotional distance.

After my first recital at Aldeburgh 2022, I met Angie Lee-Foster and learned about Britten Pears Arts' Compassioante Communities Initiative. We found parallels between our projects and were connected with the St Elizabeth Hospice in Ipswich. In addition to the hospice care provided to people facing end of life, St Elizabeth Hospice also provides services to those who have lost a loved one. One such service, 'Walk On', is a weekly walking group open to any bereaved adult. Completely volunteer-led, it is a brilliant community of amazing individuals who have been brought together by a loss in their life.

Walking and chatting happily amongst this tacit, collective understanding of grief, I was moved by the sense of community and joie-de-vivre. There was a large overlap between my motivations for joining 'Walk On', and playing Schubert. It calls to mind now the worlds of Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Prometheus Unbound:

"And, hark! their sweet sad voices! 't is despair

Mingled with love and the dissolved in sound."

This is one of the most magical things about music, and the arts in general – to transmogrify thedisparate, fleeting strands of experience into beauty and meaning; and in doing so to build connections between people.

Both Schwanengesang and the D.960 sonata were written in an incredibly prolific period for Schubert. In the summer and autumn of 1828, he wrote these works as well as two other astonishing piano sonatas (D.958 in C minor and D.959 in A major); the String Quartet in C major, D.956; The Shepherd on the Rock, D.965; and the Mass in E flat major, D.950; not to mention a handful of other works. He was dead by 19 November that year, aged 31.

There is lots of discussion around the circumstances of Schubert's death. We know he was ill for many years, most likely from syphilis; and that he had expensive consultations with the eminent physician Ernst Rinna von Sarenbach in the summer of 1828, who gave him a grave prognosis and recommended he move out of the city walls of Vienna for fresh air. Some reckon that Schubert knew of his impending death, suggesting that the solemnity of his late work reflects his own coming to terms with death's inevitability. It is tempting to draw this conclusion, especially considering his 'swansong'-like burst of creativity in 1828.

The title of Schubert's final song cycle, Schwanengesang, is misleading though, as it was actually given posthumously by Schubert's publisher to help sales. Overall the historical record paints a more complicated picture. Schubert was known to have been in ill health for many years, so nothing about his state in 1828 set off alarm from his immediate circle until he took a precipitous turn for the worse on the eve of his death (the priest in fact barely arrived in time to deliver last rites). He'd attended classes and concerts as late as early November and contemporary accounts described him as relaxed and cheerful. He'd even recently written a set of 18 fugal exercises, suggesting he was still honing his craft. All of this seems contradictory to the narrative of a dying artist bidding farewell to the world.

Nevertheless, Schubert is known by many for having a 'late style'. Pertaining to this phenomenon, the American critic Edward Rothstein writes: "When the end is near, we want there to be a sign of this in the work itself, some proof of accumulated insight... A late style would reflect a life of learning, the wisdom that comes from experience, the sadness that comes from wisdom, and a mastery of craft that has nothing left to prove."

The monumental last sonata opens with a meditative chorale theme in B flat major which is interrupted by an otherworldly, ominous trill in the bass. The chasm of difference between these two elements is huge, opening a hushed world in which the extremities of experience are constantly palpable. In the first two movements Schubert plays with a sense of scale, both vertical (e.g. the range and harmonic movement of chords in the first movement) and horizontal (the hypnotic, persistent pulse of the second movement), portending time's inevitable march towards the unknowable. Lightness and darkness play against each other in the third movement, between the B-flat-major Scherzo and B-flat-minor trio sections; while the finale romps through episodes of various characters before making a mad dash to the end.

Viennese lilt. The poetry by Ludwig Rellstab is about love and communicating with a distant beloved; thematically one can find parallels to Beethoven's only song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte, which was composed in 1816 and exerted tremendous influence on Schubert, who began to compose Einsamkeit D.620 two years later.

The narrator declares immediately, "Give me my fill of solitude!" – Then, emulating Beethoven's cycle, she takes us through six emotionally varied sections which roll into one larger monodrama. Lotte selected this wonderful yet uderappreciated work admidst the forced solitude of 2020. When we finally recorded it at Wells in 2025, it was difficult not to be moved as we played out the final few stanzas of Mayrhofer's poetry which floated above Schubert's gently lilting vamp –

"Whatever he wished for, whatever he loved,

Whatever brought him joy or sorrow,

Floats past in gentle rapture,

As if in the glow of evening."