Schubert : Fantasia in F minor, Four-Hands Op.103, D.940 Radu Lupu, Murray Perahia

Schubertiana  II.

The immense treeless plains of the human brain have gotten
folded and refolded tilI they are the size of a fist.
The swallow in April returns to its last year's nest under the eaves
in precisely the right barn in precisely the right township.
She flies from the Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks
over two continents, navigates toward precisely this one disap-
pearing dot in the landmass.
And the man who gathers up the signals from a whole lifetime
into a few rather ordinary chords for five string musicians
the one who got a river to flow through the eye of a needle
is a plump young man from Vienna, his friends called him "The
Mushroom," who slept with his glasses on
and every morning punctually stood at his high writing table.
When he did that the wonderful centipedes started to move on
the page.

V.

We crowd up onto the piano stool and play four-handed in
F minor, two drivers for the same carriage, it looks a little
ridiculous.
It looks as if the hands are moving weights made of sound back
and forth, as if we were moving lead weights
in an attempt to alter the big scale's frightening balance: happiness
and suffering weigh exactly the same.
Annie said, "This music is so heroic," and she is right.
But those who glance enviously at men of action, people who
despise themselves inside for not being murderers,
do not find themselves in this music.
And the people who buy and sell others, and who believe that
everyone can be bought, don't find themselves here.
Not their music. The long melody line that remains itself among
all its variations, sometimes shiny and gentle, sometimes rough
and powerful, the snail's trace and steel wire.
The stubborn humming sound that this instant is with us
upward into
the depths.