By Lucy Caplan
Lucy Caplan is Assistant Professor of Music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She is the author of Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera, published by Harvard University Press.
Upon first hearing Franz Schubert’s “Great” Symphony No. 7, fellow composer Robert Schumann offered effusive praise for the work’s “heavenly length,” its ability to luxuriate in its own unhurried beauty. But Schumann also connected the piece to more earthly concerns: “On hearing Schubert’s symphony and its bright, flowery, romantic life,” he wrote, “the city [of Vienna] crystallizes before me, and I realize how such works could be born in these very surroundings.” Generations of scholars since have dug deep into the connection between music and place in Schubert’s music, attending to how landscape and nature inspire and shape his compositional language. Vienna’s Schubert Research Centre even hosted an international conference on the topic in 2024.
In this evening’s program, two beloved works by Schubert anchor other explorations of the relationship between music and the natural world. Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, a celebrated portrayal of a British pastoral landscape, is inspired by poet George Meredith’s poem of the same name, which portrays the bird’s “singing till his heaven fills.” John Luther Adams’ Horizon is a new work that, according to its composer, takes as its theme the “circle that encompasses all of us and everything around us, no matter where we may be.” There is an echo of Schumann’s “heavenly length” in these descriptors, which emphasize this music’s the transcendent, even divine beauty. Yet both works might also be understood not simply as representing natural beauty but also commenting on its increasingly elusive status: Vaughan Williams’s piece dates from the world-shifting moment of the Second Industrial Revolution, while Adams’ work is intimately tied to the contemporary climate crisis. Taken together, they remind us that the beauty of the environment that so inspired Schubert cannot be taken for granted and is worthy of our continued care and protection.
John Luther Adams, Horizon (2026)
In 2006, John Luther Adams told the music critic Alex Ross that is music was “going inexorably from being about place to becoming place.” His comments referred to a 2006 art installation, “The Place,” which sonified information about the climate and landscape of Alaska—Adams’ longtime home—in order to transform up-to-the-moment seismological and meteorological data into musical sound. Throughout his career, Adams has paired this capacious approach to the compositional process with an investment in environmental activism, both within and beyond the context of his musical work. His best-known composition may be the Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean (2013), which evokes the waters of the Pacific Northwest and the apocalyptic threat of climate change through massive, scarily powerful sonorities.
In 2024, Adams moved to Australia, citing the contemporary political and cultural climate of the United States as his reason for seeking what he called a “new refuge.” Horizon speaks to his new surroundings. In a recent essay published in conjunction with the work’s premiere, Adams connected the work to the Schubert compositions with which it shares space on this program, noting that although Schubert’s music “seems to me to breathe, to flow, to twist and turn as naturally and inexorably as a mountain stream running to the sea,” he also has “never felt that Schubert inhabited the same world as me.” Yet this work is perhaps more Schubertian in its approach than some of his earlier compositions, evoking the landscape rather than attempting to inhabit it. The composer writes: “Surrounded by ocean and with sprawling open spaces at its heart, Australia is a continent where the visible horizon is often the true horizon. I began composing ‘True Horizon’ in the middle of the Pacific, en route to Australia. I worked on ‘Visible Horizon’ in the tropical savanna of northern Australia and in the great red desert of central Australia. I continued my work scanning the horizon from the shore of the Tasman Sea. And I completed the full score in the forested hills and grasslands of the southern mainland.”
Franz Schubert, Quartettsatz in C Minor, D. 703 (1820)
Schubert is best known for his lieder, which number more than six hundred in total. Each is like an exquisite postcard, evoking a whole world in miniature through text, melody, and textured interplay between piano and voice. Yet he also experimented with larger scales, especially as he matured. Longer works, especially those written for chamber and orchestral ensembles, afforded him more creative space in which to craft ever more complex emotional scenarios. The Quartettsatz acts as a sort of hinge between these two parts of Schubert’s musical world. Composed in 1820, it marks a transition in his writing for string quartet: whereas his early works for the ensemble had been relatively simple, his new style was characterized by formal complexity, vast emotional range, and adventurous harmonic approaches rife with delicious key changes. Yet although he eventually composed several “mature” string quartets, here he wrote just one movement of what was intended to be a longer work.
The beginning of the Quartettsatz buzzes with agitation. Repeated sixteenth notes and triplet patterns evoke a hushed, brewing discontent. But soon a gorgeous melody materializes in the first violin, shooing away any worries by virtue of its pure beauty. Neither side seems willing to give up: both moods recur throughout the movement, which proceeds in a sonata form marked by surprising detours into unexpected keys. Listeners are left with a feeling of emotional irresolution, which seems appropriate for a work that remains so tantalizingly unfinished.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, arr. Adam Johnson, The Lark Ascending (1914-1920; arr. 2019)
Critics often link Vaughan Williams’s quintessential Englishness to his evocations of the English landscape. One of his first biographers, Hubert Foss, wrote that “English landscape pervades his music, which tells us more of men and places, speech and song and the sky and the trees, than of fashions or wars, scientific developments, or revolutions, or the latest philosophies.” Although recent scholars have complicated this notion by emphasizing the diversity and breadth of Vaughan Williams’s environmentally inspired compositions, some of his most enduring works are also his most pastoral.
The Lark Ascending is a case in point. It was inspired by a lyric poem by George Meredith, which Vaughan Williams quoted in part at the top of the score; Meredith celebrates the bird’s “silver chain of sound,” his “ever winging up and up,” the “love of earth” that his song inspires. The music beautifully evokes this ethereal conceit. It was originally scored for a solo violin accompanied by either a group of birdlike woodwinds or a top-heavy chamber orchestra, with more violins than lower strings and more woodwinds than brass. (The arrangement on this evening’s program is by the British composer Adam Johnson.) The violin’s line feels almost ceaseless. Beautiful filigree, much of it comprised of wide-open whole steps and swooping arpeggios, gives a sense of both delicacy and ascent. These improvisatory tendrils coexist with a gentle, folksong-inspired melody in lilting 6/8, as if the lark is flying above a bucolic village scene.
Franz Schubert, String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, D. 810 “Death and the Maiden” (1824)
Just four years after writing the “Quartettsatz” which opened this program, Schubert once again turned to the genre of the string quartet. In a burst of creativity, he composed two of his most celebrated quartets—No. 13, nicknamed “Rosamunde,” and No. 14—in the span of just a few months in early 1824. By this time, he was no stranger to despair. Although only 27 years old, he suffered from severe illness and was forced to confront his own mortality. For this quartet, Schubert turned to a song he had written years earlier: “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” on a text by Matthias Claudius. This melody, by turns wistful and fervent, became the basis for the quartet’s second movement. No doubt Schubert saw something of his own predicament reflected in this text and music.
After a dramatic first movement—characterized by a sense of deep foreboding, broken up by moments of real tenderness—there is an expansive set of variations on the song. Whereas the original poem detailed Death’s dance with a number of different partners, Schubert narrows his focus to the Maiden, who is told, “Give me your hand, you lovely, tender creature. I am a friend and come not to punish. Be of good courage, I am not cruel; you shall sleep softly in my arms.” The song is heard first in a somber, chorale-like setting. The first variation rustles with agitation; next, the melody moves to the cello, whose singing tone floats atop a ghostly accompaniment. Further variations offer a cycle of moods—rage, fear, peaceful acceptance—declining to suggest any singular response to Death’s presence. In the Scherzo that follows, Schubert begins in a sardonic, accent-laden mode before moving to a warmly imaginative trio. The final movement rushes to the brink, only increasing in speed and intensity as it reaches the end.
