Franz Schubert is known to music history sometimes as the fourth master of Viennese classical music, sometimes as a composer of the Romantic era. One thing is certin: in his Lieder, he created an entirely new kind of unity between music and lyrics, while his settings of verse to music grasp the words with far greater expressive power than his illustrious Viennese predecessors Haydn and Beethoven. A general characteristic of Schubert’s endlessly diverse output of songs is that the text gains its true meaning through the music with which it co-exists as one. A century later, Ernst Toch took a different approach, exploring the musical possibilities inherent in speech with his “spoken choruses”, in which it is not music that enhances the meaning of the words, but the text itself which becomes music through its rhythm, emphasis, intonation and dynamics. The two composers are thus linked not merely by dint of having both lived and written in the city of Vienna, but also because of the extraordinary importance they attached to the connection between music and words, and between music and speech. Presented by: Palace of Arts

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