Franz Schubert

Era hijo de Viena, una de las ciudades de mayor riqueza musical: una Viena que rendía culto a Beethoven, adoraba a Rossini y se estremecía con las elocuencias virtuosas de Paganini. Schubert admiró a todos ellos, y con ayuda de sus amigos que le brindaron la posibilidad de entrar en círculos de clase media entorno a las artes, logró fama con sus canciones (los lieder están considerados padre de la canción moderna) y danzas al tiempo que aspiraba al éxito con obras de mayor índole (sinfonías, óperas). Una mal comprendida figura en su época, no fue admirado hasta muerto, una vez publicadas sus obras, incluso inacabadas debido a una depresión. Se habló mal de su lado más oscuro, en sus años de madurez: la bebida, la enfermedad y la ambigüedad sexual.

Es el último de los clásicos, alumno de Salieri; y el primero de los románticos sobre todo ante el lirismo y las nuevas formas como el Lied, pero fue siempre componiendo a la sombra de Beethoven. ¿Quién iba a superar a Beethoven? Muchas veces intentó conocerlo, se dice que incluso le perseguía en algunos posibles encuentros que nunca tuvieron lugar debido a su timidez... Nunca participó de círculos aristocráticos, fue más bien un bohemio que ofrecía su arte dentro de casa, entre amigos, con las famosas "shubertiadas".

Dormía en Schubert una doble naturaleza, con la alegría vienesa entrelazada y ennoblecida por un rasgo de profunda melancolía. Murió repentinamente, a la edad de 31 años, dejando inconclusas muchas obras, una de las cuales más famosa, la sinfonía en si menor.

Fuente: "Vida de Schubert", C.Gibbs.

"Upon Seeing a Tree on a New York Street Corner"

An artist will try to capture its shape and copy it in his brain.
A naturalist will examine the birds, insects and fungi that symbiotically live with it .
A scholar of evolution will collect its DNA and find its place on the genealogical tree.
A mathematician will attempt to solve the algorithm of the division of branches versus leaves and write down the formula.
A clergyman will look to see God's design and grace in the tree.
A shaman will try to feel the tree's vibrations and will see their correspondence with the universe.
A pharmacologist will work to extract the antibacterial chemicals from the tree.
An ecologist will measure the tree's nitrogen and carbon dioxide fixation capacity.

Rather than thinking about all these things, I simply gaze at the tree in admiration

Ryuichi Sakamoto, 2001
Pianist and composer

"I am walking"

I am walking through a damp forest.
There isn't really a path.
I follow a faint trail where someone seems to have walked before.
It may not have been a human.
Bending down, I try to catch the scent.
The path through the forest changes, non-linearly.
There isn't a single straight line.
My eyes, accustomed to straight lines, have trouble recognizing all the shapes of the forest.

In every niche of the forest, there are a variety of living things.
There are hundreds of thousands of living things beneath where I tread.
There are trees of various heights.

They use all sorts of strategies to renew even a little of their energy efficiently.
Life like this has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years.

Silence fills the forest.
Nature is quiet.
We don't know that nature is quiet.
It's particularly quiet in the daytime.
Living creatures often go about at night, as a tactic of survival.
At night all their energy causes quite a commotion.

In the forest, the temperature changes step by step.
Even the temperature is non-linear.
Our hearts love simplicity and can't grasp the principle that lies beneath these changes.
Human intelligence is still in its infancy.
It wants to reduce multiplicity to simplicity.
A pack of wolves and a lone wolf are different things.
The action of a mass of molecules differs from the behavior of a single molecule.
The human race in the latter half of the 20th century
finally has come to faintly understand this.
The universe is neither geocentric nor heliocentric, but a bit of both.

2001, Ryuichi Sakamoto, I am walking.
Pianist, director and composer.