In his bestseller of the same name, British journalist Oliver Burkeman calculates that the average person in industrialized nations today has around "4.000 weeks". The handy figure is intended to make it clear how quickly life on earth passes by - and how important it is to make sensible use of the shockingly short lifespan. Burkeman's advice is as simple as it is difficult to implement: Only if we manage to break out of the optimization trap of "more in less time" will we even have the chance to set the really important priorities.

Wanting less, doing less. Omit, do without. This is what matters, after all, there are immense tasks ahead of us. And not just in the private sphere - keyword climate change, keyword social cohesion. "Liberated Time" is the theme of the Heidelberger Frühling Musikfestival because we want to stage musical events that make the stretching of time a particularly impressive experience. And ideally give you a taste of what consciously letting go might feel like. There can only be one person at the center of the programmes: The composer who, when mentioned in the past, was usually accompanied by a quote from Goethe: "That you cannot end, that makes you great."

A piano trio lasting 45 minutes? A symphonic finale comprising more than 1200 bars? Franz Schubert's "Heavenly Length", which Robert Schumann raved about so much when he discovered his older colleague's "great" C major Symphony in Vienna in 1839, is a fascinating phenomenon. The generous time management of the Viennese seems to invite you to relax your muscles for once and let go of the rush and deadline pressure of everyday life. At least in the short term, it promises freedom from to-do lists and "fear-of-missing-out" anxiety. As expansive, enjoyable and often almost anti-dynamic as Schubert unfolds long stretches of time, he represents a complete contrast to the listening habits of our media present.

Humanities scholars and social scientists have long been talking about the crazy acceleration of social processes and their effects on the human psyche. Only in recent years, however, has it become clear how drastically the concentration of events has affected musical creativity. With streaming market leader Spotify, a song is considered listened to after 30 seconds. If you click away earlier, you don't generate any income, so it doesn't count at all: time is money. Everything depends on the very first impression; viral content à la TikTok is only half a minute long at most. The tracks have to get straight to the point and pack as much appeal as possible into the first few seconds, while the instrumental intro almost disappears. In general, the trend is towards ever shorter songs. Because they are played more often - and bring in more in total. And Schubert? Aren't some of his best-known songs particularly short? "The trout"? Not even two minutes! "The son of a muse"? Hardly longer. Even "An die Musik", the leisurely progressing hymn to the "fair art" of sound, doesn't even last three minutes. Some of the epochal early songs such as the Goethe settings "Der Erlkönig" or "Gretchen am Spinnrade" not only tell entire stories, they also contain a maximum of rapid movement. So is the supposedly cozy Schubert not at all suitable as the guarantor of a sometimes faltering, sometimes stagnant, often even spatialized time? It's a little more complicated. In his Freundeskreis and for almost the entire 19th century, this contemporary of the early Romantic period was regarded as the "Liederfürst": a genius of lyricism who intuitively knew how to translate poetry into music. In contrast, the piano sonatas, for example, of which a dozen completed works have survived, have hardly been noticed. Schubert was categorized as a miniaturist of the Biedermeier period, as an emphatically approachable musician of sociable and entertaining togetherness. This is why his "Impromptus" and "Moments musicaux", which are suitable for playing at home, were much more in line with expectations than the large, cyclical works.

Composers such as Schumann and Brahms, although critical, at least engaged with Schubert's instrumental works. But it was not until the late 1920s that Eduard Erdmann and Artur Schnabel seriously discussed the sonatas on the podium. In 1974, Alfred Brendel considered it appropriate to remove a whole heap of prejudice against the sonata composer Schubert in a profound essay. Only a few years earlier, at the end of the 1960s, the composer Dieter Schnebel had published his Schubert essay "In Search of Liberated Time", which alluded to Proust. Schnebel analyzed the complex temporal structures of his great predecessor with the eye of a skeptical avant-gardist. Whereas Karlheinz Stockhausen & Co. had attempted to control the durations and temporal relationships of their music precisely, Schnebel was astonished to observe the opposite process in Schubert's music: in some of Schubert's passages, time drifts along "completely naturally" - which makes its passing almost forgotten. This kind of time, according to Schnebel, "works so much as an unfolding of itself that compositional will seems to have been absorbed into the vegetative essence itself. The composer releases the sound, leaves it to its driving forces, at most sporadically and carefully directing them, and the time thus released begins to flow."

As quietly, almost tentatively, Schnebel had formulated this, as pointedly he expressed his criticism of the compositional practice of his own time - recognizably playing across the board. A contradiction against the willful suppression of tonal "driving forces", a "no" to the adherence to strict construction schemes that had produced such complexly determined works of art in the first post-war years. The heyday of serialism, i.e. numerically controlled composition, was long gone by then. But of course it was about more than just music. Around 1970, Schubert's "Heavenly Length", his letting go of time, seemed to amount to an alternative "world relationship" that was more closely connected to nature, to a willing acceptance of what is out there and beyond our willful control, to paraphrase the sociologist Hartmut Rosa.

The world is no longer a resource to be exploited, but an entity in its own right to be listened to: Schnebel's fifty-year-old train of thought is surprisingly topical. A whole series of those Schubert works and movements whose original time arrangements are examined in Schnebel's essay on "Liberated Time" will be heard in our concerts: from the late E flat major Piano Trio on 23 March at the Schubert Day Matinee to the last String Quartet in G major on 26 March with the Signum Quartet, the posthumously published Piano Sonata in B flat major on 20 March with Lukas Sternath or the famous String Quintet on 3 April with the Cuarteto Casals and Eckart Runge, to the magnificent Octet on 6 April with Veronika Eberle and friends and the aforementioned C major Symphony on 13 April in the Festival Finale.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that Schubert's attitude to life in Vienna during the Metternich era, the years following Napoleon's abdication, in which any hope of a rapid democratization of the German-speaking states was nipped in the bud, found so much new resonance around 1970. This was an era in which the Club of Rome, after years of unbridled optimism about progress, suddenly identified the "limits to growth", in which nuclear and ecological threats became concrete and the first outlines of "sustainable" thinking began to emerge in Western nations. The second focus composer of this festival edition found his unmistakable methods of processual time organization precisely in these years: Steve Reich, the now 88-year-old American who studied traditional drum music in Ghana in 1970 and received important inspiration from Balinese gamelan music, thus becoming a co-founder of minimal music. Two of Reich's main works can be experienced at "Frühling", alongside a number of smaller works: The epochal "Drumming" from 1971 in a complete performance with Salzburg percussionist Christoph Sietzen and his ensemble as part of a "Minimal Night" on 11 April and "Different Trains" for string quartet and additional band with the London Manchester Collective on 28 March, in which the horror of the Holocaust finds its musical expression.

Few things are better than being completely immersed in the music. After all, that's what a festival is for. For this reason, there will be complete performances of several groups of works. In addition to Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concertos, the String Quintets by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are particularly noteworthy. The six quintets are among his most exquisite works and yet are hardly ever heard as a cycle. Get involved in "Frühling" - three weeks out of perhaps four thousand weeks. One thing is certain: free time is quality time!