In his lectures about three musical geniuses—Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert—Dietrich von Hildebrand shows how the integration of music with spiritual and philosophic insight can enrich our musical understanding. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, by Dietrich von Hildebrand, trans. John Henry Crosby (109 pages, Hildebrand Project, 2025) When a distinguished Catholic philosopher discourses on three distinguished composers of [...]
Great music pierces the soul… and can sometimes terrify it. Over the centuries, composers, like nearly all artists of every variety, have been fascinated by the subject of death and by the supernatural—the world of witches, goblins, ghosts, and demons. Composers have given us Dances of the Dead, frightful tone poems and songs, scary opera [...]
Franz Schubert composed his “Death and the Maiden” quartet—one of the most compelling, soulful, profound, irresistible pieces of classical music—while battling syphilis and depression. It’s not just the maiden that Death is after in the music. It’s Schubert. I don’t consider myself to be someone easily seduced, much less by Death, but Franz Schubert’s “Death [...]
Franz Schubert’s music is the music of Paradise lost. It is the songful lament of the wanderer who has been banished, yet who must find the difficult way back through suffering and death. It is music of the journey in exile. In terms of his achievement there is only one other composer to whom Franz [...]
In addition to melody, great and beautiful classical symphonies must display a mastery of structure and orchestration, a command of tone color and harmony, and an expertise in developing musical ideas. Here are the ten most beautiful symphonies ever composed. “Imagination creates reality.” —Richard Wagner Though beauty is an absolute reality, we human beings [...]
Oh, the emotional images Schubert stirs within me. A whiff of my childhood, dusk on a wintery Sunday, when the younger, chilled me has gone inside and Mom’s got a roast cooking in the oven, filling the air with an intoxicating aroma and a sense of security. Tell me if this has ever happened to [...]
In truth, much of my favourite music is not sacred but profane, insofar as it is not overtly religious or in the least liturgical; and yet these profane favourites are certainly sublime, reflecting the goodness, truth and beauty of Creation, the harmony of the cosmos and the music of the spheres… Several months ago I [...]
Franz Schubert wrote "Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen" in 1816 after a text by Johann Georg Jacobi, which is reproduced below in English translation. Three recordings of this exquisite piece—arranged for soprano and piano, for chorus and piano, and for cello and piano—are provided at the bottom of the text. Litany for the Feast [...]