We all have very different ideas of who Schubert is. Put another way, he's malleable enough that we can make him our own. There's such a range of emotions within his output - particularly his songs - that we can find music for almost any mood. Yesterday, Hanno Müller-Brachmann sang the Heine settings from Schwanengesang and other compositions using his verse (by Brahms and Schumann) at Wigmore Hall. You can listen to the concert again via the iPlayer by clicking here. Boulezian's Mark Berry wrote the following in his review:

Müller-Brachmann’s voice here and in 'Am Meer' sounded properly Wagnerian in its musico-dramatic response, a reminder of his Amfortas and his Rheingold Wotan. A slight roughness of tone on the final line may have been deliberate: the woman has poisoned him with her tears.

Some readers, including those I know to have a great knowledge of Lieder felt that Müller-Brachmann's big voice approach felt 'like an elephant tip-toeing round bone china'. It's a feeling I know well, having been unimpressed by Jonas Kaufmann's hefty rendering of Die schöne Müllerin at the same address last year. But it's a version that we need to hear to challenge our own fixed views on how we want (being the operatic word) to hear this music.

Just before that lunchtime concert kicked off, Jessica Duchen posted a Schubert story on her blog in which she suggests that in our world of mayhem, 'Schubert brings us back to purity, truth and tenderness'. Both the reviews of the review and Jessica's open response to the E flat major piano trio have real truths, but they are only half of the story. Like all truly great composers (yawn at that phrase though we may), Schubert offers to us the whole gamut of human experience. We want 'purity' and we go to The Shepherd on the Rock. If we want truth, we might turn to 'Der Doppelgänger'. Finally, we seek tenderness and we listen to the second movement of the String Quintet. In all my responses, I've deliberately chosen works from Schubert's last months. They do not offer the same picture. And they may not chime with the versions of 'purity, truth and tenderness' that Jessica seeks. But there's a bipolarity to the music. Every silver lining has a cloud (and, of course, vice versa).

While there's bound to be a backlash to the sex, drugs, rock and roll version of Schubert - the depressive, the opium smoker, the syphilitic homosexual - we should be equally wary about 'cleaning up' his image in order to find comfort in his music. Many try and limit Schubert, by squeezing him into the box we've created marked with his name. But he offers solace whoever he is. The Amfortas or Wotan Schubert is just part of that. Like those characters, he mirrors humanity's strengths and, more often than not, failings and, if we want to listen to Schubert's music, we should be prepared to be confronted by that less attractive Doppelgänger too.