I was born listening to Schubert.
 

That is no exaggeration: my Mum chose to play on repeat the opening movement of the Piano Sonata in B Flat, a piece she knew and loved, to help distract her from the pain of delivery. As origin myths go, mine is far from exciting – yet I can’t help feeling that the choice of natal accompaniment was deeply prescient, and that this extraordinary music has become quietly entangled with the course of my life.

Though I’ve long loved classical music, I didn’t know this piece well until two years ago when, half-remembering Mum’s story, it brought me to the brink of tears in a library. Its depths are immediately evident: the movement’s opening theme – somewhere between chorale and lullaby – belies a sinister undertow, which surfaces with a rumbling trill in the bass and resonates in the following silence. The rest of the music is shaped by this aberration, the injection of primordial otherness into a world of serenity. The central development section in particular thrusts the familiar into strange light, culminating in a notoriously spellbinding passage in which the initial theme is circled again and again, first in the minor mode and then, miraculously, in the original major, made fragile and alien by the temporary gravity of the minor and the repeated trill. The effect of this, for me, is like standing in icy wilderness and seeing fleetingly the imprint of a loved one’s footsteps, or descending some katabatic fissure and encountering the dusty replica of a childhood home. Such emotional alchemy is typical of Schubert: throughout the movement, the eternal binaries – joy and sorrow, memory and hope, grief and cherishing – are all placed into aching proximity.

As I came to know the music more intimately, I acquired a language to make sense of it. This language flowed from the many musicians, scholars, and philosophers who have been similarly arrested by Schubert’s final sonata in the nearly two centuries since its creation. There was the theorists’ jargon of enharmonic seams and hexatonic cycles, which collided with metaphors of star clusters and purple patches. There were recordings and essays which were visceral and exacting, like the titanic all-consuming slowness of pianist Sviatoslav Richter’s performances or the vivid musical philoso-poetry of a young Theodor Adorno. There were readings of narratives and images which had resonance in my own life: landscape, alienation, home, sexuality, even at times the figure of the wanderer who treads lost and unconsoled through much of Schubert’s music and its accompanying literature. Yet I gained comfort too from the ease with which these words were shrugged off by the raw event of sound – the familiar hollow glow of the piano, the eddies of musical time, the pleasure of pure motion. Here was an honest place, somewhere to explore without self-consciousness or performative profundity, which showed me unknown aspects of the world and myself.

I do not know what music I will die to. Perhaps the universe will send me off to Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) or a single bar of Edgard Varèse’s Hyperprism stretched over five hours in an underground prison camp. But if many years hence I am lucky enough to choose my departing soundtrack, the choice for now seems clear:

I will die listening to Schubert.