November 19, 1828

Composer John Harbison, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, achieved success early. After winning a prestigious composition prize at age 16, he went on to Harvard, studying with Walter Piston, and eventually Princeton, working there with Roger Sessions. He is currently Professor of Music at MIT. Asked in 1990 about his artistic creed, Harbison replied that he tries “to make each piece different from the others, to find clear, fresh large designs, to reinvent traditions.” In that spirit he has composed for nearly every genre of chamber, symphonic, and vocal music, though he is perhaps best known for opera and, in particular, The Great Gatsby (1999). The work was commissioned and premiered by the Metropolitan Opera.
One day Harbison found himself perusing the books in a friend’s library when he came upon Theory and Practice by Alfred Mann, noted music historian and biographer of Mozart. Mann’s book includes an account of Schubert’s sole counterpoint lesson with Vienna theorist and composer Simon Sechter, which took place in 1828 as Schubert’s death was fast upon him. Sketches of what occurred during that lesson have been preserved, including Schubert’s work on a fugue subject assigned him by Sechter. The following description of the individual movements of November 19, 1828 comes from Harbison himself:

I. The trumpets of death are heard three times. Schubert begins his journey haunted by sounds which are not his music, but pertain to his music in disturbing ways.
II. In the hall of mirrors music sounds in a manner previously unknown to Schubert—everything is played back immediately upside down.
III. Emblematic of a storehouse of ideas which are still to be explored, perhaps even in future times, the short fragment which begins this Rondo is the only one in this piece composed by Schubert in his first life.

IV. Shortly before his death, Schubert went to the theorist Sechter to work on a very specific problem pertaining to the tonal answer of the fugue subject, important to Schubert in the composition of his masses. Sechter, well aware that he was teaching the most extraordinary student who ever came for a lesson, concluded by assigning a fugue subject on his own name. Schubert was unable to undertake the task; he died about a week later, on November 19, 1828.

(c) Jason Stell