There may be people who attend the annual Schubertiade festival in southwest Austria just for the music, and they will not be disappointed. Schwarzenberg may be a tiny village in the Vorarlberg region, but many of the world’s greatest performers have made the pilgrimage to play there over the past 45 or so years.
In the space of four days this year I heard an exquisite Winterreise, two outstanding piano recitals and a Schubert string quartet that will linger long in the memory. But the music has strong competition from the captivating beauty of the Bregenzerwald countryside all around.
Try this: after breakfast take the cable car from the little town of Bezau to the Baumgarten mountain top—and an elevation of around 1,600 metres. Strike out along a ridge that amazes you with panoramic vistas of mountains, woods, fields, open skies—all to the soundtrack of gently tinkling cowbells. You are on top of the world—or so it feels. The memory of that moment will linger—whisper it—as long as the Schubert string quartet.
Over the course of the next two and a half hours you make your way down from the mountain top—sometimes striding along well-worn paths, sometimes scrabbling over shale and rocks. You stop for lunch at the tiny Wildmoos café where you graze on cheese in the company of the goats who have generously provided it.
By the time you get back to your hotel you’re ready for a swim in the foothills of the mountains. And then an early dinner. If your preconceptions about Austrian food are that it tends to the heavy and the meaty you will be delightfully surprised. Do not linger too long over your first three courses, though, for the festival bus will arrive on the dot of ten past seven to whisk you through the evening sunlit meadows to the concert hall.
So, by the time the concert starts at eight you will already have feasted most of your senses and will be feeling more than relaxedly prepared for the music. Tonight it is the Slovakian tenor Pavol Breslik and accompanist William Youn in Winterreise. Maybe, like me, you brace yourself when a big operatic voice steps onto a platform to perform lieder, but Breslik adapted wonderfully both to the music and the relative intimacy of the wooden Schwarzenberg hall. Youn—who is 40 but doesn’t (from row 10) look a day over 14—was so good he almost stole the show from his singer.
At the end the bus is there to return you to the hotel, where a further two courses await. The diners compare notes on what they’ve just heard. Consensus: not at all bad. And these are connoisseurs with, together, dozens of Winterreises behind them.
The days pass. A walk in the hills around nearby Hittisau followed by Marc-André Hamelin playing (from a score) the late Schubert sonata D 958. This was a contained, almost introverted reading—very different from the Hammerklavier sonata by Beethoven which followed in the second half. Here, the Canadian pianist explored the sheer scale and mad, tormented contrast of music that is, as occasionally noted, more respected than loved.
The next day, a hike through more Bregenzerwald mountains and down through buttercup meadows, before the French Modigliani quartet and the performance of Death and the Maiden which refused to leave the brain for days afterwards. The audience, usually quite reserved in this part of Europe, greeted the end with a spontaneous whoop, a storm of foot-stamping and eventually a standing ovation.
The final concert—after yet another walk past lakes, through forests and isolated hamlets—was the German conductor and pianist Christian Zacharias, with a delicate rendering of Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons and a constantly fascinating performance of the Schubert D 894 sonata. Zacharias gives the impression of utterly inhabiting this music and was so lost in concentration that, as the final chord faded, he seemed slightly surprised to realise the audience was still there.
The festival has no governmental support and it was a slight miracle—after two difficult pandemic-strewn years—to find it in such good shape, with virtually full houses (50 per cent German, around 8 per cent British) every night. The same man, Gerd Nachbauer, has been quietly in charge for the best part of 50 years and it is difficult to imagine the formula changing very much while he’s still running the show. I hope it doesn’t.
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