Art, they say, involves copious amounts of perspiration and a few precious drops of inspiration - but perhaps, just occasionally, that 99 per cent/one per cent equation should be adjusted to allow for a modest quantity of inebriation as well. This month sees the appearance of the final CD in Hyperion Records' Schubert Edition, a whopping 37-CD set which features some 745 songs with a stellar cast of singers and has garnered just about every award in the classical music pantheon.
It is by any standards a jaw-dropping achievement; and it might never have come about if it hadn't been for the scholarship of the pianist Graham Johnson, the courage of Hyperion boss Ted Perry, the enthusiasm of a lady named Lucy - and a bottle of sake.
"This is 15 years ago or so," says Perry. "I had a great friend, Lucy, who was - is - a Schubert freak. I said, `you ought to meet Graham Johnson'; so the three of us met up at this Japanese restaurant in Swiss Cottage. And Graham knocked a flask of sake all over Lucy. And then he said, `well, this seems an appropriate moment to mention an idea I've had'. I said, `what's that, Graham?' He said, `how would you feel about recording all the Schubert songs?' And Lucy grabbed me by the arm and said, `Oh, please say yes; and please can I pageturn?"'
Unsurprisingly, given the circumstances, Perry agreed to take on the project - amazingly, he stuck with it when, in the cold light of day, the sheer scale of the undertaking became apparent. It was decided to launch the series with a recording by a major artist, and in 1987, Dame Janet Baker recorded a selection of songs she had chosen herself. "After that," says Graham Parsons, "one had to buckle under and really think.
It's a fault in a number of editions of complete works, that for market reasons the big cycles are issued first - which leaves you with the dregs at the end. We had to make sure every record consisted of some plums which would be known to the public; and that every singer, no matter what their celebrity, shouldered a certain number of songs that might be considered more intractable."
Among the latter are a number of fragments - such as the missing poems from the song cycle Die Schone Mullerin, spoken with impressive gravitas on volume 25 by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and a couple of oversized whoppers such as the 28-minute Adelwold und Emma, D211, which fell to the tenor Martyn Hill on volume 10.
As for the plums, Johnson recalls Perry asking anxiously who would record the big cycles. "And in 1987 I said, `well, they'll be done by people whose names you don't even know yet'." Which turned out to be the case - though the names of Matthias Goerne and Ian Bostridge, who recorded Winterreise (Vol 30) and Die Schone Mullerin (Vol 25) respectively, have subsequently become very well-known names indeed.
Parsons plays down the amount of time he has spent on the Schubert edition over the past 14 years, pointing out that he has maintained a full schedule of recording, teaching and performing all the while. His astoundingly informative sleeve commentaries, however, suggest that he has lived with Schubert and his music in a way most of us could hardly even guess at.
Does he feel, now, as if he knows the composer, or is there something essentially unknowable at the heart of Schubert's life and work? "Well, both," he says. "I do feel I know him because I've spent so much time ferreting through all the documents and all the letters, thinking very deeply about the gaps, because one's got to read between the lines in his life."
But there are two Schuberts, he says: the kindly, gentle Schubert as portrayed in the film Lilac Time, and the angry and syphilitic iconoclast vaunted by late 20th-century analysts. "We've changed our view of Schubert enormously, and acknowledged him as a highly complex man. He had to be: the music is so deep that we can't write him off as a dear little tubby person who just blinked through his glasses and produced music for his friends.
"There is a darker picture there, and we've always known that." What lies beneath the shadow, he says, will probably never be known. "Unless we find a cache of documents somewhere - which we never will, because in Schubert's Vienna people wrote down their private lives very unwillingly, as a result of being in a highly controlled police state. It was very dangerous to write down too much of your private business." Which is fine by Parsons: "that elusive quality is somehow mirrored by his use of harmony and modulation, the sublimity that isn't totally down to earth and graspable. It does live on another plane."
And so the edition comes to an end with this month's release of volume 37, Schubert: The Final Year. Like each of its predecessors, it credits as production assistant one Lucy Hayward-Warburton, for she did indeed turn the pages for every single recording, often, says Ted Perry, travelling long distances in all weathers to do so.
Fifteen years, 745 songs, 37 CDs: was there ever a time when Graham Parsons wished he had never started? "No," he says, without a second's hesitation. "No, I honestly didn't. There were moments of disappointment, moments of withdrawal, singers who said they'd come and didn't. Whole programmes had to be torn up. There were some frustrating sessions, and sessions where people lost their tempers. But in the end the task of having this music to immerse myself in was glorious. The only tragedy is that I feel now that I know enough about Schubert to begin to record the complete songs."
