When Stanley Kubrick selected music to his films, he listened for days and days to classical music. According to him, there was no need for new music to be composed for him. The music was out there, he just had to find it.

Tickets SCHUBERTIADE March 31, 4pm

Tickets SCHUBERTIADE March 31, 7pm

This makes him the master of classical music in film, the most famous example probably being Also sprach Zarathustra in 2001, a Space Odyssey.

In one of his most beautiful films (even with his standards this film is exceptionally beautiful), Barry Lyndon, the slow movement of Schubert’s Piano Trio Op. 100 is used, which we will play at ChamberFest’s Schubertiade concert on March 31.

It happens to be the scene where he used only candle lights for lighting, together with very fast camera lenses, originally developed for NASA to photograph the dark side of the moon. It is stunning to watch, as Barry Lyndon sits by the card table, facing his future wife, and we do believe that Schubert would agree that his music can be used here, right?

It is amazing, isn’t it, how music written by a man almost 200 years ago, can play a role in a film made with camera lenses from NASA. The music is sad, romantic, and immensely dignified. And yet, why it works so well is an artistic mystery, which is wonderful in itself.

The Trio Op. 100 is one of Schuber’s last works, and it is a work that was being performed during his lifetime, unlike so many other masterpieces he wrote and never heard. The theme of the famous slow movement is based on a Swedish song, Se Solen Sjunker, which Schubert probably heard in Vienna when its author, Isak Berg, visited.

Se Solen Sjunker translates as The Sun is Setting, and indeed the sun was setting on Schubert\s life. as syphilis would take his life only a year after he finished the trio. The solemn dignity in his music is even more present, if possible, in the slow movement of his last piano sonata, D.960, here in the version from the concert in the series on February 17 this season: