Schubert

Franz Schubert died at 31, but he left behind an almost unbelievable amount of music — and no two performances of it sounded quite the same, even a century ago. This week we dig into three very different acoustic-era recordings that show just how far his music could stretch: an unfinished symphony movement so large it had to be split across multiple 78s, a spine-chilling four-character ballad sung by legendary contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink, and a tiny two-minute piano miniature blown up into a full orchestral showpiece by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Along the way, we talk about what happens when a composer’s music becomes raw material for the people recording it — and why “faithful to Schubert” meant something different to every engineer, arranger, and performer who touched it.