At a Christmas party last week we met people who'd worked with the UN refugee agency as well as some professional and ex-professional philosophers from the University, so that the conversation was not the usual kind of small talk. Socrates and Wittgenstein were mentioned, which pleased my husband no end; he has something like 20 books about Wittgenstein on his shelves.
The party was hosted by the daughter of a friend of mine whose late husband was a Professor of Classics, an expert on Virgil's Aeneid. Having attended his memorial gathering in 2023 we recognised people we'd met on that occasion. Their reminiscences include the fun they used to have unwinding and philosophizing or comparing notes on ancient languages in a lively manner at the Royal Oak pub, most Friday evenings. We could imagine this.
My friend has three daughters, all of whose names begin with S, and one of them is a prof herself. She is a musicologist who taught at Oxford University and is now a Harvard College Professor, with expertise in the analysis of Schubert's music. Just as we were putting our boots on to leave at the end of the party we got into a distracting chat about Schubert's Lieder and one song in particular, that we didn't know, which has surprising modulations in it: Schwanengesang, Op. 23, No. 3 (nothing to do with Schubert's Schwanengesang song cycle).
Back at home Chris looked it up and found a copy online in the original key. Sure enough, the harmonies did look strange, with a welter of double flats. We took the printout to Chris' singing teacher Gavan, who didn't know it and found it intriguing. Its slow chords in the accompaniment reminded him of Der Tod und das Mädchen.
I tried sight-reading the Swan Song myself which made the chord sequence sound even slower. Chris didn't attempt the voice part because it looked too high, but wrote out the whole thing onto the computer and transposed it down to D-minor. It thus suddenly becomes more playable. The transposition had got rid of all the double accidentals.
