Schubert and Vogl at the piano.
From a drawing by M. v. Schwind
By HERBERT F. PEYSER
NEW YORK
Grosset & Dunlap
PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1946, 1950
The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York
Printed in the United States of America
A sense of helplessness and futility overcomes the writer who, in the limits of a volume as unpretending as the present one, endeavors to give the casual radio listener a slight idea of Schubert’s inundating fecundity and inspiration. Like Bach, like Haydn, like Mozart, Schubert’s capacity for creative labor staggers the imagination and, like them, he conferred upon an unworthy—or, rather, an indifferent—generation treasures beyond price and almost beyond counting. Outwardly, his life was far less spectacular than Beethoven’s or Mozart’s. His works are the mirror of what it must have been spiritually. Volumes would not exhaust the wonder of his myriad creations. If this tiny book serves to heighten even a little the reader’s interest in such songs, symphonies, piano or chamber works of Schubert as come to his attention over the air it will have achieved the most that can be asked of it.
H. F. P.
The most lovable and the shortest-lived of the great composers, Franz Seraph Peter Schubert was doubly a paradox. He was the only one of the outstanding Viennese masters (unless one chooses to include in this category the Strauss waltz kings) actually born in Vienna; and, though there has never been a composer more spiritually Viennese, Schubert inherited not a drop of Viennese blood. His ancestry had its roots in the Moravian and Austrian-Silesian soil. His grandfather, Karl Schubert, a peasant and a local magistrate, lived in one of the thirty-five towns called Neudorf in Moravian-Silesian territory and married the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, acquiring by the match a large tract of land and ten children of whom the fifth, Franz Theodor Florian, was destined to beget an immortal.
At eighteen Franz Theodor, who was born in 1763, determined to follow the example of his elder brother, Karl, and become a schoolmaster. He went to Vienna and secured a post as assistant instructor in a school where Karl had already been teaching for several years. In spite of starvation wages he married (1785) Maria Elisabeth Vietz, from Zuckmantel, in Silesia, the very town whence the Schuberts had originally emigrated to Neudorf. She was a cook, the daughter of a “master locksmith,” and she was seven years older than her husband. The couple had fourteen children, nine of whom died in infancy. The survivors were Ignaz, Ferdinand, Karl, Therese and our Franz Peter, who came twelfth in order.
A year after his marriage father Schubert was appointed schoolmaster of the parish of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, in Lichtental, one of the thirty-four Viennese suburbs (or Vorstädte), located at greater or lesser distances from the “Inner Town,” which in those days represented Vienna proper. The schoolhouse (unless it has been demolished in the late war) still stands. Franz Theodor took lodgings for himself and his family a few steps away at the House of the Red Crab (Zum rothen Krebse), Himmelpfortgrund 72, now Nussdorfer Strasse 54 and since 1912 a Schubert museum, owned by the municipality of Vienna. Here Franz Seraph Peter was born on January 31, 1797, at half past one in the afternoon.
Father Schubert’s position was far from lucrative; in fact, it offered no salary at all, nothing but a tax of one 3 gulden a month per child levied on the parents. And yet this inflexible, God-fearing pedagogue, imposed such merciless economies and Spartan discipline on himself, his family and his pupils that he not only managed to make both ends meet but, when Franz Peter was four, to buy the schoolhouse where he taught and to take up his quarters there. In modern times the little house had become a garage, though a memorial tablet placed on it in 1928 reminded the passerby that Schubert lived and taught there for several years besides composing under its roof a number of his works, among them Der Erlkönig.
Not the least remarkable thing about Father Schubert was the fact that, despite the endless grind of making a living, teaching and raising a family, he should have found time to cultivate music. Yet he was a tolerable amateur cellist and his great son’s first music teacher. After giving the boy “elementary instruction” in his fifth year and sending him to school in his sixth he taught Franz Peter at the age of eight the rudiments of violin playing and practised him so thoroughly that the boy was “soon able to play easy duets fairly well.”
The youngster was next handed over to his elder brother, Ignaz, who gave him some piano instruction. But here an uncanny thing happened! The child showed such an instinctive grasp of everything his brother tried to teach him that Ignaz, nonplussed, confessed himself hopelessly outstripped. Franz, for his part, declared he had no need of help but would go his own way in musical matters. Thereupon 4 his parents entrusted him to the choirmaster of the nearby Lichtental parish church, one Michael Holzer, who knew something about counterpoint and consumed more alcohol than was good for him. It was not long before poor Holzer was experiencing with his pupil the same difficulties as Ignaz. He had the little fellow sing and was delighted by his bright voice and his musical accuracy. He let him accompany hymns on the organ, had him improvise and modulate back and forth, taught him a little piano and violin, familiarized him with the viola clef and a few principles of thorough-bass. But in the end his labors were largely superfluous. Holzer admitted that “the lad has harmony in his little finger.” A nearby shop of a piano maker offered a more fertile field for experiments in harmony. Released from the organ loft Franz Peter hurried to this shop and spent hours there forming chords on the keyboard.
It is not impossible that Schubert may have made a few attempts at composition at this stage, though there is no actual proof. But a real turning point came on May 28, 1808. On that date there appeared in the official journal, the Wiener Zeitung, an announcement that two places among the choristers of the Imperial Chapel (the so-called Sängerknaben) had to be filled. Father Schubert saw his chance. A chorister who showed the necessary qualifications could enjoy free tuition, board and lodging at the 5 Imperial Konvikt (or Seminary); and if the boy distinguished himself “in morals and studies” he might remain even after his voice had changed. The Konvikt was a former Jesuit school reopened in 1802 by the Emperor Franz and supervised by a branch of the Jesuits called the Piarists. In addition to ten choristers there were pupils of middle and high school standing. The Konvikt occupied a long, cheerless building which in modern times looked quite as bleak as it did in Schubert’s day.
The tests took place on September 30, 1808, and the examiners consisted of Antonio Salieri, a prolific opera composer, an intimate of Gluck and Haydn, a teacher of Beethoven and an implacable enemy of Mozart; the Court Kapellmeister Eybler; and a singing teacher at the school, Philip Korner. Schubert presented himself for the examination wearing a grayish smock, which caused the other boys to jeer and call him a miller. But as millers were popularly supposed to be musical the young mockers agreed that he could not fail. They were right. Not only did he meet all the requirements but his voice and musicianship aroused the surprise and enthusiasm of the committee. Schubert was promptly accepted. In other subjects required, as well as in music, he easily surpassed the other competitors. Not in vain was he his father’s son!
So the boy shed his “miller’s” vesture and put on the fancy, gold-braided togs of the Sängerknaben. In a few days he was settled at the Konvikt. He was amenable to discipline—having learned it plentifully at home—and does 6 not appear to have suffered the tribulations of some other Konvikt scholars who were less conformable and more adventurous. The shyness which clung to him more or less throughout his life made him shun his fellow students as much as he conveniently could. The food was poor and scanty and even four years later we find him appealing pathetically to his brother Ferdinand for a few pennies a month to buy a roll or an apple as a fortifying snack between a “mediocre midday meal and a paltry supper” eight hours later! The music room at the school was left unheated, hence “gruesomely cold” (anyone who has experienced the unheated corridors of a Viennese house in winter can shudder in sympathy!). But there was plenty of music and the school orchestra, in which Schubert occupied the second desk among the violins, delighted him.
Every evening this orchestra played an entire symphony and ended up with “the noisiest possible overture.” The windows were left open in summer and crowds used to collect outside, till the police dispersed them because they obstructed traffic. The concerts were conducted by a singularly lovable old Bohemian organist, viola player and teacher, Wenzel Ruziczka, who at an early date defended and explained some of the boldest “modernisms” in Schubert’s compositions. The orchestra performed a good deal of trivial music but every now and then there would be works by Haydn, Mozart, Cherubini, Méhul and even some of the less taxing scores of Beethoven. Schubert on these occasions felt himself in heaven! He was “entranced” 7 by the slow movements of Haydn, but his god was Mozart. With a subtlety of perception almost uncanny in a boy of twelve he said that the G minor Symphony “shook him to the depths without his knowing why.” He called the overture to the Marriage of Figaro the “most beautiful in the whole world,” then quickly added “but I had almost forgotten that to the Magic Flute.” It is certain that this student orchestra was a most valuable factor in Schubert’s musical education. It was with these young players in mind that he composed his First Symphony in October, 1813, at the age of sixteen.
At a first violin desk in front of Schubert there played another youth, some nine years older, a student of law and philosophy from Linz, Josef von Spaun, and thus began one of those Schubertian friendships that was to last for life and play an important part in Schubert’s story. Amazed by the beautiful playing he heard behind him, Spaun looked around and saw “a small boy in spectacles.” Not long afterwards he surprised the youngster in the freezing music room trying a sonata by Mozart. Franz confided to his sympathetic new friend that, much as he loved the sonata, he found Mozart “extremely difficult to play” (another acute observation!). Then, “shy and blushing,” he admitted that he “sometimes put his thoughts into notes.” However, he trembled lest his father get wind of the fact, for while Franz Theodor had no objection to music as a pastime and also had every reason to be satisfied that it paid for his son’s education and kept a roof over his head, 8 he had other plans for him in mind. The real business of the young man’s life was to be schoolmastering. No two ways about it!
So Franz Peter had need to be wary. Besides, there was another obstacle to his composing. Music paper was scarce and costly. He did, it is true, rule staves on paper himself but even ordinary brown paper was not plentiful. So the generous Spaun, though of a rather restricted budget, bought paper out of his own allowance and did not remonstrate when Schubert used up the precious commodity “by the ream.” The only difficulty, now, was that Franz composed in study hours and fell back in his school work, a fact that was not slow in coming to his father’s notice. And yet the records of the Konvikt do not show that Schubert was a poor student. At various times certificates signed by the school director, Father Innocenz Lang, pronounce him “good” or “very good” in almost everything, while in Greek he is even described as “eminent.” Somewhat later when at normal school, preparing to teach in his father’s schoolhouse, his weaker subjects were mathematics, Latin and “practical religion.”
However, not all the parental thundering could keep nature from taking its course, even if it temporarily embittered Franz’s young life. Father Schubert at one stage went so far as to forbid his son to enter his house. The lad had been in the habit of going home on Sundays and holidays and there taking part in string quartet concerts with his father and his brothers, Ignaz and Ferdinand, Schubert 9 himself occupying the viola desk and being the real director of the ensemble. He roughly scolded his brothers when they blundered, but cautiously corrected Franz Theodor’s errors with nothing more scathing than: “Herr Vater, something must be wrong here.” Now this diversion was denied him and he suffered. Not until May 28, 1812, was he permitted to return to the Lichtental roof-tree and then only because a tragic event softened the paternal heart. On that Corpus Christi day Franz’s mother died of typhus (or, as they called it then, “nerve fever”), the same malady which sixteen years later was to carry off Franz himself. In due course the chamber music sessions were resumed and in time they outgrew their humble environment.
Let us look back briefly to consider a few of Schubert’s early creative accomplishments. How many experimental efforts preceded his earliest extant compositions we can only surmise. His first surviving one is a four-hand piano Fantasie, 32 pages long, running to more than a dozen movements with frequent changes of time and key. A little later, on March 30, 1811, he began his first vocal composition, an immensely prolix affair called Hagars Klage to a discursive poem about Hagar lamenting her dying child in the desert. With its varying rhythms, its pathetic slow introduction, its elaborate Allegro and its passionate prayer, it shows the influence of the popular German ballad 10 master, Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg, who had himself composed the same text. Not only Zumsteeg but composers like Reichhardt and Goethe’s friend, Zelter, exercised moulding influences on Schubert in his formative stage. A setting of Schiller’s Leichenphantasie is carried out on much the same lines and so is a ballad, Der Vatermörder, to a text by Pfeffel. And there were other things besides long, trailing ballads—an orchestral overture in D, a so-called quartet-overture and quintet-overture, an Andante and a set of variations for piano, three string quartets “in changing keys” (Schubert wrote seven quartets in all during his Konvikt days), thirty minuets “with trio” for strings, “German dances,” some four part Kyries for the Lichtental church and other matters bearing the dates 1811 and 1812.
The good Ruziczka, finding himself unable to teach his young charge anything he did not know already, handed him over to Salieri, who began to give him lessons in counterpoint on June 18, 1812 (Schubert made a record of the date). He must have profited by Salieri’s instruction or he would hardly have remained his pupil all of five years, as he did. One circumstance may astonish us—that he briefly suffered himself to be swayed by the prejudice Salieri harbored against Beethoven. Yet when Salieri celebrated his fiftieth year of musical activities, in 1816, Schubert made a slighting entry in his diary about “certain bizarreries of modern tendencies.” That this could have been only a passing aberration is clear from the fact that Beethoven remained his divinity and his despair to his dying day. He once told his friend, Spaun: “There are times when I think something could come of me; but who is capable of anything after Beethoven?” Indeed, Beethoven remained to such a degree an obsession of his that the older Master’s name was almost the last word he ever uttered.
Franz Schubert as a youth.
From a crayon drawing by Leopold Kupelwieser
Franz Schubert in 1825
From a water-color by Wilhelm August Rieder
Franz Theodor found it inexpedient to remain long a widower. Less than a year after the loss of the quiet woman who had been his “deeply treasured wife” he married the daughter of a silk goods manufacturer, the “wertgeschätzte Jungfrau” Anna Kleyenböck, a woman of thirty, twenty years his junior. The entire Schubert family, including the black sheep from the Konvikt, was present at the wedding on April 25, 1813. Five more children were born and this time only one died. Anna Kleyenböck fitted perfectly into the Schubert ménage. Contrary to the tradition of stepmothers she idolized her stepson, Franz, and was no less adored by him in return. Later, when Father Schubert’s pecuniary position somewhat improved, Anna showed herself a model of economy and thrift, always putting what occasional savings the schoolmaster gave her into a woolen stocking! It was from this stocking that she more than once furnished a helping mite to her stepson in his days of need.
Anna Schubert, Franz’ beloved stepmother.
A pencil drawing by von Schwind
Franz’s voice changed in 1812 and logically his days at the Konvikt should have been numbered. But the authorities were by no means anxious to be rid of him and his father would probably have been pleased if he had stayed on. Even the Emperor, to whom representations were made and whose attention the boy’s talents seem to have attracted, agreed that he might remain and take advantage of the “Meerfeld scholarship”—provided he made an effort to improve his standing in mathematics. Franz himself must have realized that to return home meant to court renewed trouble with his father, not to mention the risk 13 of actual starvation. Yet he was so fed up on the Konvikt that about the end of October, 1813, he left what he called the “prison.” His last work written there (it is dated October 28, 1813) was his First Symphony. But he maintained cordial relations with the Seminary for some years, tried out some of his new compositions in the Konvikt music room and preserved his interest in the school orchestra.
This is, perhaps, as good a place as any to consider for a moment the early symphonies of Schubert. One says “early” because Schubert’s symphonic output falls sharply into two distinct halves. Six of them—two in D major, two in B flat, one in C minor and one in C major—belong to the years from 1813 through 1817. They are relatively small in scale, melodically charming, in numerous detail of harmony and color unmistakably Schubertian, yet by and large derivative. They naïvely reflect phraseology and other influences the young composer assimilated from the music he was then studying and hearing. Thus, in the Second Symphony may be heard echoes of Beethoven’s Fourth and jostling one another through the pages of the others are reminiscences (if not outright citations) of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Weber. The Fourth (in C minor) is for some not clearly defined reason entitled Tragic; the Sixth, still more inexplicably, the composer characterized as Grosse (great) Symphonie in C. 14 Perversely enough, it is probably the weakest of the six, the one which least satisfied its creator. Time has paradoxically rechristened this symphony the “little” C major to distinguish it from the great C major of 1828. The Fifth, in B flat, remains with its endearing reminders of Mozart, perhaps the loveliest and most frequently played of all this symphonic juvenilia. Most of these scores, however, are oftener heard today than they were till recent years. For all their (perhaps half-conscious) borrowings they are still palpable Schubert, even if lesser Schubert. Such a master as Dvorak was always ready to break a lance in their behalf and one of his proudest boasts was how often, as Conservatory director in New York, he used to conduct his students’ orchestra in the Fifth of the set.
No sooner was Schubert liberated from the Konvikt than he found himself faced with a worse menace—conscription. Service in the Austrian army was in those days no laughing matter. Its duration was fourteen years and the prospect of such a lifetime of soldiering might have appalled an even less sensitive nature than Schubert’s. There were loopholes, of course, particularly for those who had wealth and position. For those who did not, the best road of escape lay through the schoolroom. Since there was need of teachers, the government exempted them. It almost looked as if the State were conspiring with Father Schubert against his son. Poor Franz Peter had no alternative and so, barely out of the Konvikt, he enrolled in the Normal School of St. Anna for a ten months’ preparatory course to teach a 15 primary class at his father’s school, a chore which was to occupy him for the next three years.
Hateful as he found his labors he seems to have discharged them conscientiously enough. Yet if the Konvikt, where he had numerous friends, was a “prison” what was this? He was only one of many “assistants” and he had to live under his father’s roof, though he did earn forty gulden a year. Was he a good disciplinarian? He himself once confessed to his friend, Franz Lachner, that he was a “quick-tempered teacher,” who when disturbed by the little imps in his class while he composed thrashed them soundly “because they always made him lose the thread of his thought.” His sister, Therese, later told Kreissle von Hellborn (Schubert’s first biographer) that he “kept his finger in practise on the children’s ears.” Another story has it that he was finally dismissed for a particularly smart box on the ear of a particularly stupid girl. Still, when Schubert later applied for another school position Superintendent Josef Spendou commended the applicant’s “method of handling the young.”
While he was at the St. Anna School, Schubert composed among a quantity of other things his first complete mass and his first opera. The former (in F) is the more important of the two. It was written for the limited resources of the Lichtental parish church—which on October 14, 1814, celebrated its centenary—in mind. The work of the seventeen-year-old composer was heard with unconcealed pleasure. He conducted it himself, his former 16 teacher, Holzer, led the choir and the soprano soloist was Therese Grob, a year younger than Schubert and daughter of a Lichtental merchant who lived around the corner from Father Schubert’s schoolhouse. Ten days later the mass was repeated in the Church of St. Augustine, in the imperial Hofburg. This performance seems to have aroused even more enthusiasm and good will than the first. Salieri proudly pointed to the boyish composer as his own pupil and Franz Theodor, now that he knew his son safely caged in a classroom, made him a present of a five-octave piano. The Mass itself, a tenderly felt, lyrical, simple work, is sensitive and promising rather than something epoch-making, such as the composer was soon to achieve in the less pretentious province of the solo song.
A word about Therese Grob, who more or less properly figures in Schubert’s story as his first love. Her family was refined and musical and Franz Peter, who was a visitor at the Grob household, may have found there some of the same sympathy and understanding the young Beethoven did in the home of the von Breunings. Certainly, he composed a number of things for Therese and her brother, Heinrich. His friend, Holzapfel, declares that Therese was “no beauty, but shapely, rather plump, with a fresh round little face of a child.” In after years Schubert told Anselm Hüttenbrenner that he had loved her “very deeply.” She was not pretty, he said, and was pock-marked but “good to the heart.” He had “hoped to marry her” but could find no position which would insure him the means to support 17 a wife. Her mother having decided it was no use to wait for a penniless composer to become a somebody made her take a well-to-do baker instead. Poor Schubert told his friend this had greatly pained him and that he “loved her still,” but added philosophically “as a matter of fact, she was not destined for me.” Did Schubert, we may ask, really contemplate marriage? If he did how are we to understand an entry he made in his diary in 1816: “Marriage is a terrifying thought to a free man...”? Actually, Schubert’s life was devoid of what might be described as urgent affairs of the heart—outwardly, at least. One will seek vainly in his case for the periodic transports of a Beethoven or even the passing dalliances of a Mozart. Friendships rather than passionate ardors were Schubert’s specialties—and his friendships with women were quite as sincere as with men and had the same basis of sentimental conviviality. Hüttenbrenner had small reason to chaff his companion (as he once did) for being “so cold and dry in society toward the fair sex.” Certainly, the delightful Fröhlich sisters (whom we shall meet shortly) did not find him “dry.” It is so easy to mistake shyness for coldness—and if Schubert was anything he was diffident, sometimes tragically so!
Opera had exercised a strong attraction on Franz Peter even while he was a student at the Konvikt. He used to accompany Spaun to the Kärntnertor Theatre whenever holidays or the state of Spaun’s purse permitted. The friends sat in the top gallery and heard operas like Weigl’s Schweizerfamilie, Spontini’s Vestale, Cherubini’s Medea, 18 Boieldieu’s Jean de Paris and Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris. Among the great singers Schubert heard in this way were Pauline Milder and Johann Michael Vogl. Both artists were soon to become his friends—Vogl, indeed, the high priest of his songs.
What wonder, then, that Schubert planned an opera of his own? In May, 1814, while at the St. Anna School, he completed a “natural magic opera” in three acts called Des Teufels Lustschloss (“The Devil’s Pleasure Palace”). The libretto was by a popular dramatist of the time, August Kotzebue, who could hardly have attached much importance to it or he would never have permitted an unknown beginner to compose it. The piece was the first of a pageant of ugly ducklings, an operatic progeny of sorrow destined to span Schubert’s life from his schooldays to his grave. If we add up his works for the stage—completed, fragmentary, partly sketched or lost—in less than a decade and a half we shall arrive at the astonishing total of eighteen. And today there is almost nothing to show for all this heartbreaking industry because an ancient (and largely untested) tradition calls Schubert’s operas “undramatic” and otherwise “poor theatre.” Possibly they are. But how many now living can speak of a Schubert opera from actual experience?
Des Teufels Lustschloss was never performed in Schubert’s Vienna, though Prague was once on the point of staging it. The plot has to do with the adventures of an impecunious Count Oswald who, on the way to his 19 tumbled-down castle with his wife, stops at a wayside inn. There the peasantry of the neighborhood entreats the knight to free a nearby ruin from ghosts and other spooky visitants. He consents and, together with his squire (a kind of Sancho Panza), penetrates the infested premises. The spectres take him captive and subject him to grisly tests—the worst of which is a command to marry a “ghostly” but extremely substantial Amazon who suddenly appears on the scene. In despair Oswald springs into the abyss and lands—in the arms of his wife! Her wealthy uncle, it transpires, being displeased with his niece’s marriage to the penniless Count has “arranged” the whole ordeal as a test of Oswald’s fidelity, with the help of his gardener’s buxom daughter—the “Amazon”—and “machines of all kinds brought at considerable expense from foreign parts.”
It should be remembered, however, that such extravagances were habitual ingredients of innumerable “magic” plays and comedies which for generations, indeed for centuries, formed the stock-in-trade of the Viennese suburban theatre and the most sublimated outgrowth of which was Mozart’s Magic Flute. Moreover, not the effect of such a wild tale in the reading but in performance on the stage, in a theatre, before an audience is the proof of the pudding. The same with the text—a specimen of the poetry of Des Teufels Lustschloss is the ensuing of Count Oswald’s squire:
“I’m laughing, I’m crying, I’m crying, I’m laughing,
I’m laughing, ha, ha, ha,
I’m laughing, hi, hi, hi,
I’m laughing, ho, ho, ho,
I’m laughing, hu, hu, hu”...
The test of such a thing is not the verbiage but the composer’s treatment of it. There is no question here of a masterpiece any more than there is in the mass, or indeed, in the various orchestral or chamber works, he had produced thus far. It was different, however, with the song (Lied) which he was turning out in effortless abundance. He had made settings among other things of poems by Schiller, Fouqué, Mattheson (Adelaide, for one, though smoother, more lyrical and less varied in its mood than Beethoven’s famous song). Then, on October 19, 1814—“the birthday of the German Lied” it has been called—there comes like a bolt from the blue the epoch-making Gretchen am Spinnrade, from Goethe’s Faust. It is a simple, plaintive melody above a murmuring spinning wheel figure and a pulsing rhythmic throb, but nevertheless a marvel of jointless form and a miracle of psychology, the emotional experience of ages concentrated into one hundred bars of music of such infinite art and uncanny perfection that it almost defies analysis.
As if a gigantic dam had burst, a torrent of immortal mastersongs now begins to pour forth. Not everything, to be sure, either now or later is a deathless creation but 21 the number of those that are will probably remain baffling to the end of time. Schubert frequently made two, three or more settings of one and the same text, differing in greater or lesser degree from the earlier one though not invariably better than the preceding version. Of the more than six hundred Lieder Schubert composed almost a third are such resettings. It was nothing unusual for him to turn out four, five, six songs a day. “When I finish one I begin another,” was his carefree way of describing the incredible process. Sometimes he even forgot which songs were his own. “I say, that’s not a bad one; who wrote it?” he once asked on hearing something he had composed only a few days before. He was careless, too, about what became of some of his manuscripts and there is no telling how much posterity may have lost as a result. Once he came near ruining a page on which he had written his song Die Forelle by pouring ink instead of sand over the wet writing; being sleepy, he did not bother to notice which receptacle he had picked up.
In the year following Gretchen am Spinnrade there came into being (and once more in his father’s school in the Säulengasse) what is, in some ways perhaps, the most famous of Schubert’s songs—Der Erlkönig. Spaun, who went to visit his friend one afternoon, found him “all aglow,” a book in hand, reading Goethe’s ballad. Schubert 22 walked up and down the room several times, suddenly seated himself at a table “and in the shortest possible time the splendid ballad was on paper.” Franz having no piano, the pair hastened down to the Konvikt where the song was tried out that very evening. Several listeners objected to the sharp dissonances of the accompaniment to the child’s cry but it was none other than old Ruziczka who showed himself the best “modernist” of them all, actually championing the “cacophony,” explaining its artistic function and praising its beauty. Schubert himself had a pair of sore wrists from the unmerciful triplets of the piano 23 part! Not everywhere, one regrets to say, did Der Erlkönig create such a stir. At the insistence of his friends Schubert sent it, along with some other songs, to Goethe with an appropriate dedication. His Excellency in Weimar did not even deign to acknowledge it. Meanwhile the publishing firm of Breitkopf und Härtel, to whom Spaun also dispatched the ballad, thought that someone was playing a practical joke. Before deciding what to do with “wild stuff” they addressed themselves to a Dresden violinist who chanced also to be called Franz Schubert (he composed a trifling piece called The Bee, which some fiddlers still play) and asked his opinion. The Saxon Franz (or François) Schubert exploded, insisted he had never composed the “cantata” in question but would see who was misusing his good name for such a patchwork and promptly bring the miscreant to book!
Engraving by Franz Weigl for the second edition of Der Erlkönig.
Piano composition—Ecossaises, German Dances (“Deutsche”), variations, sonatas—a number of string quartets and other chamber music swelled the ever-increasing output. The quantity of songs mounted like a tidal wave. And although nothing had come of Des Teufels Lustschloss (part of which the composer, moved by purely artistic impulses, even went so far as to rewrite), Schubert continued the woeful job of piling up unwanted operatic scores. He wrote Der vierjährige Posten (the story of a sentry who was posted and not relieved on the departure of his regiment and who, when it returned four years later, still stood on duty); Fernando, a Singspiel; 24 Claudine von Villa Bella; Die Freunde von Salamanka and Adrast (texts by Johann Mayrhofer).
And, while we are on the operatic subject, let us look ahead into the years of Schubert’s maturity and list what other operas he wrote (it should be understood, by the way, that certain of these are more on the order of operettas than what we understand by lyric dramas). In 1819 he composed Die Zwillingsbrüder, which has a plot along Comedy of Errors lines; in 1820 a “magic and machine” comedy called Die Zauberharfe (“The Magic Harp”), the overture of which is familiar to us as the Rosamunde—though the overture which Schubert used three years later to the musical play of that name was the introduction that prefaced a full-length romantic opera, Alfonso und Estrella, dated 1821. An actual overture to Rosamunde was never written. The piece known universally by that title was not so designated till 1827, when it was published in an arrangement for piano duet. Other operatic works we may cite in passing are Die Verschworenen, a treatment of the “Lysistrata” motive; and the large-scale “heroic-romantic” opera, Fierrabras, composed in the summer of 1823. After 1823 Schubert let opera alone—at least temporarily. On his deathbed he was still planning another, a Graf von Gleichen, to a book by his boon companion, Eduard von Bauernfeld. But the project had never gotten beyond some sketches.
Mayrhofer, whom we just mentioned, had made Schubert’s acquaintance in 1814, when the composer set to music his poem Am See. A close friendship immediately 25 sprang up between them though Mayrhofer—the older of the two by ten years—was of a moody, brooding nature (he subsequently committed suicide by jumping out of a window). By 1819, Schubert, having grown heartily sick of schoolmastering some time before, went to share for a while the sombre, dilapidated quarters of Mayrhofer in the Wipplinger Strasse (the danger of the army draft was now over) and the pair, for all their temperamental differences, hit it off famously. Although Schubert composed pretty much anywhere and everywhere he accomplished a prodigious amount of creative work in Mayrhofer’s depressing room. The poet on opening his eyes in the morning used to see Franz, clad only in shirt and trousers, writing vigorously at a rickety table. His favorite working hours were from six in the morning till noon, though he was in the habit of sleeping with his spectacles on in case the lightning of inspiration should strike him the minute he awoke. If any visitor came unannounced Schubert would greet him, without looking up from his work, with the words: “Greetings! How are you? Well?”—whereupon the intruder realized it was an invitation to disappear.
After writing all morning Schubert, like a true Viennese, usually went to enjoy the incomparable relaxation of a coffee house, drinking a Mélange (café au lait), eating Kipferl (crescents, if you prefer!), smoking and reading the newspapers. In the evening there was the opera and the theatre (provided one had money or somebody bought the tickets) or else the gatherings of the clans at the various “Gasthäuser,” “Stammbeisel” and taverns. The 26 friends discussed questions of the day, literature, plays, music. They criticized each other’s work with unsparing frankness. Schubert’s uncommonly keen musical opinions were relished by everybody.
Although Schubert wished to have done with teaching as soon as possible he attempted (perhaps to placate his father) to obtain a pedagogical post in a normal school at Laibach. He was turned down in favor of some local applicant, which was no doubt just as well. Had it been otherwise the brilliant coterie of “Schubertians” might have been nipped in the bud and the term “Schubertiads,” as they called their revels and their discussions had it entered the dictionary at all, might have had another meaning.
Who were these “Schubertians,” this group of younger and older intellectuals and Bohemians held together, somehow, by the indefinable attraction of Schubert’s personality? They came and went with the years and when one or another vanished a different one would generally take his place. “Kann er was?” (“What’s he good at?”) was Franz’s usual query if a newcomer appeared—a question which earned him the nickname “Kanevas”! Virtually all who stepped into the charmed circle were good at something. Among the most prominent were Spaun, Mayrhofer, Stadler, Senn, and later Moriz von Schwind, the painter; the Kupelwieser brothers, Leopold and Josef, Josef Gahy, Karl Enderes, the poet Matthaeus Collin, the blue-stocking novelist, Karoline Pichler, Eduard von 27 Bauernfeld, Franz von Schober—to cite only a handful that come to mind. Schober, particularly, who wrote, drew, acted and was in every sense a clever man of the world, played a considerable role in Schubert’s life—some even hint a rather nefarious one. Still, he was well-to-do, his rooms were at Franz’s disposal whenever he needed them and he introduced the composer to the great Michael Vogl.
The latter, whom Schubert had long worshipped at the opera, was not only one of the greatest baritones of his time, but a singular and romantic creature, who became a social favorite on the strength of his handsome face and figure, developed some harmless affectations yet remained a mystic at heart. He passed much of his spare time reading the Bible, Plato, Epictetus and other ancient and mediaeval poets and philosophers. He greeted Schubert in the condescending manner assumed by some popular artists when they first met aspiring beginners. He seemed unimpressed on glancing over the first song or two Schubert put before him, but after reading through Der Erlkönig he patted the composer on the back, remarking as one not wholly dissatisfied: “There’s something in you, but you’re too little of an actor or a charlatan. You squander your fine thoughts without developing them.” Yet before long he had become Schubert’s chief interpreter and propagandist, and spoke grandly of “these truly god-like inspirations, these revelations of musical clairvoyance.”
The chamber music concerts given on Sundays at the 28 Schubert homestead in Lichtental had outgrown their strictly domestic character quite some time before Father Schubert had been transferred (late in 1817) to a new school in the neighboring Rossau district. The string quartet had expanded into a small orchestra and now performed symphonies and such in the homes of several musical acquaintances, lastly in that of a wealthy landowner, Anton Pettenkofer, who lived in the Inner Town, not far from St. Stephen’s. It was for this amateur orchestra that Schubert composed at least four of his early symphonies. The occasional absence of drums and trumpets (in the Fifth, for instance) indicates the constitution of the orchestra at different times. Schubert himself occupied a viola desk delighting, like Mozart and Bach before him, to be “in the middle of the harmony.”
Up to 1818 there had not been what one might describe as public performances of Schubert’s works other than church music. On March 1 there occurred the first of these, at a Musical-Declamatory Academy (that is to say, a miscellaneous concert) organized by a violinist, Eduard Jaell. One of Schubert’s pieces heard was a so-called Italian Overture. It was surprisingly well received by the critics and in less than three weeks other Schubert overtures were heard in Vienna, at similar entertainments. One aristocratic hearer prophesied in type (and correctly, as it proved) that Schubert’s works “would occupy an advantageous place among the productions of the present day.” Only a little earlier Franz had the satisfaction of 29 seeing a composition of his appear for the first time in print! It was a setting of Mayrhofer’s poem Am Erlafsee and it was published in a kind of pictorial guide “For Friends of Interesting Localities in the Austrian Monarchy.”
Financially, Schubert reached in the spring of 1818 a rather desperate pass, as he was earning nothing and could not depend everlastingly on his friends. So when the father of the singer, Caroline Unger, recommended him to Count Johann Esterházy, of Galantha, as piano teacher for his two young daughters, Schubert accepted out of sheer need, much as he detested teaching of any kind. The summer estate of this branch of the Esterházy family was at Zseliz, in Hungarian-Slovakian frontier land, actually not far from Vienna but for Schubert the farthest away he had ever been. The pay was not generous but at least board and lodging were free, the country was a relief after the summer heat in Vienna, the Esterházys and their friends were not unmusical. The daughters, Maria and Caroline, were thirteen and eleven, respectively, whom Schubert found “amiable children.” He is now and then represented as having been in love with Caroline. If he really was it could only have been on his second visit to Zseliz, in 1824, when she had become a young lady of seventeen. Like Haydn, Schubert was quartered with the servants, which does not seem greatly to have irritated him, despite the boorishness of certain grooms (a pretty chambermaid, he wrote home, “sometimes 30 kept him company”). The chief annoyance came from the cacklings of a nearby flock of geese.
Title-page of Schubert’s Fantasia for Piano and Four Hands (opus 103), dedicated by the composer to Countess Caroline Esterházy.
One man whom Schubert met at Zseliz was destined to become as inspired and outstanding an interpreter of his 31 songs as Vogl—Karl Freiherr von Schönstein, whose singing of Schubert later drew tears of emotion from Liszt. He brought to the more lyrical songs an extraordinary artistry, sensitiveness and devotion. The Schöne Müllerin cycle in particular was to be his specialty. And Zseliz, both now and a few years afterwards, enriched Schubert still further by fertilizing his inspiration with Slavic and Hungarian folk music. “I compose and live like a god,” he wrote his brother, Ferdinand, though to Schober he speaks in a less exuberant strain. However, the Esterházys and Schönstein sang not a little of Schubert’s music and also ventured on more or less of Haydn’s Creation and Seasons as well as upon the whole of Mozart’s Requiem. Strangely enough, though he had far more time to write songs during these carefree months than he had some years earlier, he wrote appreciably fewer. His maturing genius was about to take other directions.
Schubert returned to Vienna in November in a jubilant mood. This was the period when Josef Hüttenbrenner—brother of the shrewder Anselm and sometimes rather irritating to the composer by the injudiciousness of his enthusiasm (“Everything I write seems to please him,” said Schubert querulously)—made it his business to collect from near and far every manuscript of Franz he could lay his hands on. In this manner Josef recovered fully a hundred songs—a fortunate thing for posterity though at the time it buttered no bread and paid no bills. Anselm, for his part, went with Schubert (in a remote gallery 32 seat) to the first performance of the latter’s opera Die Zwillingsbrüder. The applause warranted the composer’s appearance for a curtain call, but he declined to take it because of the shabby coat he wore. Anselm wanted Franz to put on his for a moment, but Schubert declined, glad, perhaps, to escape even a brief lionizing. So he merely sat back and smiled wistfully when Vogl came forward to tell the audience that the author was “not in the house.”
One of Schubert’s most influential acquaintances about this time was Leopold Sonnleithner, a member of a noted Viennese musical family. It was through Sonnleithner that Schubert came to know the poet Heinrich von Collin and in his circle the composer met men like the so-called “music count” Dietrichstein, the poet and bishop, Ladislaus Pyrker, Patriarch of Venice, court secretary Ignaz von Mosel and others well qualified to be his patrons and helpers had he but exerted himself to gain their assistance and good will. Better still, Sonnleithner introduced him to the four enchanting Fröhlich sisters, whose father had been a merchant of considerable means. Josefine, Käthi, Barbara and Anna Fröhlich, Viennese to the core, were uncommonly musical. All four sang well, three of them taught and Barbara painted miniatures. One prominent guest of this delightful household was the poet, Franz Grillparzer, who long outlived Schubert and wrote his epitaph. Sonnleithner cleverly brought some of Schubert’s songs to the Fröhlich home before introducing the composer in person and whetted the curiosity of the sisters 33 to such a degree that the stage was ideally set for his entrance.
Käthi Fröhlich tells of Schubert’s joy when music—not necessarily his own—particularly pleased him. “He would place his hands together and against his lips and sit as if spellbound.” Once, after hearing the sisters sing, he exclaimed: “Now I know what to do” and shortly afterwards brought them a setting of the Twenty-third Psalm for four women’s voices and piano. Another time, Anna Fröhlich appealed to Schubert to set some verses of Grillparzer’s as a birthday serenade to one of her pupils, Luise Gosmar. Schubert glanced at the poem a couple of times, murmuring “how beautiful it is” and then announced: “It is done already. I have it.” A few days later he returned with the serenade “Zögernd leise” and the charming piece was sung shortly afterwards beneath Luise Gosmar’s window. Characteristically, Schubert forgot to come and he almost missed his work on a later occasion when it was sung at a concert devoted wholly to his compositions. When he finally did hear it he seemed like one transfixed. “Truly,” he murmured, “I did not think it was so beautiful!”
The “Schubertiads” were not invariably indoor affairs. In spring and summer they took the shape of longer or shorter excursions, jaunts into the suburbs or even farther out into the country, with picnicking, dancing, ball-playing, 34 charades and what not. If music of one sort or another was needed, Schubert was always ready to provide it. One of the most charming sites of these frolics (which sometimes lasted several days) was the hamlet of Atzenbrugg, an hour or so from Vienna, and it was here that Schubert produced a delightful set of dances, the Atzenbrugger Deutsche. It may have been at Atzenbrugg, as well, that Schubert composed in August, 1821, a symphony in four movements, sketched out but never completed. This is not, of course, the two-movement torso which the world calls the Unfinished. The Sketch Symphony in E major (with a slow introduction in E minor), is unfinished in a different sense. The first 110 measures are complete in every detail. The rest of the work is carried out only melodically, though with bar lines drawn, tempi and instrumentation indicated, harmonies, accompaniment figures and basses inserted and each subject given in full. The autograph remained at Schubert’s death in the keeping of his brother Ferdinand who later gave it to Mendelssohn, whose brother, Paul, presented it to Sir George Grove. He, in turn, permitted his friend, the English composer, John Francis Barnett, to complete the work and in this form it was first produced in London, in 1883. Only a little over ten years ago the late Felix Weingartner finished it according to his own lights but in a style far less Schubertian than Barnett’s conscientious piety.
We have no means of knowing why Schubert never bothered to carry out in full so elaborately projected a 35 work. Nor have we of his failure to complete the immortal Unfinished. Whatever theories may be advanced are purely speculative. Schubert left large quantities of unfinished work—chamber music, piano sonatas, operas; so why not symphonies? In some cases he may simply have forgotten certain of his creations (as he had a manner of doing), in others he may have lost interest, for others, still, lacked time. Explanations may be plausible yet wholly wide of the mark. Is the Unfinished Symphony unfinished because it has only two movements? Are Beethoven’s two-movement sonatas in any manner “unfinished”? That a 130-bar fragment of a scherzo exists does not mean we have a right to decide it would have been “inferior”—we have no way whatever of knowing what Schubert would have done with a partial sketch. For that matter, piano sketches of the first and second movements of the Unfinished Symphony have actually come down to us. Could we, from an examination of them, tell what the final product would be like if we were not familiar with it?
From what we can judge of the Sketch Symphony its style proves it a bridge between the six early symphonies of Schubert and the two later ones. We say two—were there, peradventure, three? Yes, if there was indeed a Gastein Symphony, of which nobody has ever found a trace though some serious Schubert students have believed and still believe in it. Many have been confused by the manner that has prevailed for years of numbering the last two of Schubert’s symphonies—the Unfinished and the 36 great C major of the “heavenly length.” Why is the C major sometimes called the Seventh, sometimes the Ninth, the Unfinished now the Eighth, now the Seventh?
Title-page of a collection of dances arranged for the piano by leading composers of the period. Included were three of Schubert’s early pieces.
In reality, the answer is simple. In order of composition the Sketch Symphony is the Seventh, the Unfinished the Eighth, the C major of 1828, the Ninth. In order of publication 37 the great C major is the Seventh, the Unfinished (which was not discovered till 1865), the Eighth, the Sketch Symphony (not published till 1883), the Ninth. The consequence of leaving the Sketch Symphony out of one’s calculations is obvious. However, if we maintain that Schubert did write a Gastein Symphony in 1825, we find ourselves obliged to number that legendary opus Nine, whereupon the C major becomes Number Ten!
As for the B minor Symphony, the sweet, grief-burdened, nostalgic Unfinished, the fable has prevailed for years that it was written as a thanks offering to the Steiermärkischer Musikverein of Graz, which had elected Schubert to membership and of which Anselm Hüttenbrenner was artistic director. As a matter of fact, the date on the title page of the manuscript is October 30, 1822. But not till April 10, 1823, was Schubert proposed for membership in the society and not till September, 1823, was the composer informed of his election. He wrote a letter to Graz promising to send the Musikverein, as a token of his gratitude, the score of one of his symphonies. But it was not until a year later that, prodded by his father, who was shocked by the idea that a son of his had waited so long to thank the society “worthily,” he gave Josef Hüttenbrenner the score of the B minor Symphony to deliver to Anselm in Graz.
So much for facts! We may as well pursue the epic of the Unfinished to its close. We do not know whether Anselm ever showed the symphony to the society and there is no record that he mentioned it to a soul, though he is said to have made a piano arrangement of the symphony for his own use. Not till 1860 did Josef Hüttenbrenner speak of it to Johann Herbeck, conductor of the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music, and five more years were to elapse before Herbeck, on a visit to Graz, obtained the score from Anselm on the plea of wanting to produce some “new” works by Hüttenbrenner, Lachner and Schubert. On December 17, 1865, Vienna heard the Unfinished for the first time. The autograph shows no trace of any dedication to the Graz Music Society or to anybody else! But from the start the symphony was acclaimed an undefiled masterpiece.
In 1823, the same year in which Schubert brought to paper the operas Die Verschworenen and Fierrabras he wrote for a romantic play called Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus, by the half-mad poetess Helmine von Chezy, a number of vocal and instrumental pieces which are perhaps the best loved samples of theatre music he ever composed. The play itself was a sorry failure, had exactly two performances (though Schubert gallantly assured the unfortunate librettist that he considered her work “excellent”) 39 and the book was lost. The Overture we call Rosamunde today and which had been written originally for The Magic Harp was never used to preface the work whose name it has borne for generations—was, in fact, not entitled Rosamunde till later. The one with which Schubert had prefaced Helmine von Chezy’s drama was the introduction he had used for Alfonso und Estrella. There are lovely and striking things in the Rosamunde score—a soprano romanza, an ensemble for spirits and two other choruses as well as some ballet music and various entr’actes. The third interlude brings us that deathless melody which seems to have haunted Schubert’s imagination and reappears in the slow movement of the A minor Quartet and the B flat Impromptu for piano.
The Rosamunde score disappeared from view for more than forty years and the tale of its recovery belongs to the exciting legends of music. Like most legends even this one needs to be qualified. The story usually goes that the Englishmen, George Grove and Arthur Sullivan, in 1867 came upon the manuscript in a dusty cupboard at the Viennese home of Dr. Eduard Schneider, husband of Schubert’s sister, Therese. What the two British explorers found in that famous closet were the complete orchestral and vocal parts of the score, which made clear the correct sequence of the pieces and supplied certain accompaniments which had been missing. But Grove himself records that “besides the entr’actes in B minor and B flat and the ballet numbers 2 and 9, which we had already acquired in 40 1866, we had found at Mr. Spina’s (the publisher) an entr’acte after the second act and a Shepherd’s Melody for clarinets, bassoons and horns.... But we still required the total number of pieces and their sequence in the drama....”
For all his difficulties and privations Schubert’s health had been, up to 1823, perhaps the least of his worries. But early in that year he had been ailing and soon his illness took a serious turn. Confined to his lodgings at first he was presently taken to the General Hospital. He became darkly despondent and wrote to his friend, Leopold Kupelwieser, a mournful letter in which he alluded to himself as “a man whose health can never be right again ... whose fairest hopes have come to nothing ... who wishes when he goes to sleep never more to awaken and who joyless and friendless passes his days.” A little later he sets down in his diary the bitter reflection: “There is none who understands the pain of another and none his joy.” Nor is this by any means his only pessimistic entry.
The exact nature of Schubert’s malady has never been definitely established, even by modern medical authorities who have studied the case. We know that his hair fell out and that till it grew in again he had to wear a wig. Some have hinted at “irregularities” of one sort or another. At different times he complained of “headaches, vertigo and high blood pressure.” His condition was to improve greatly in the course of time but he was never again wholly well.
The melancholy of Schubert was surely not lessened by 41 his dealings with publishers, who took the most despicable advantage of his woeful inexperience in business affairs. Diabelli once persuaded him to sign over for a mere 800 Gulden all his rights in a set of works. The publisher (and later his successor) made 27,000 Gulden on the Wanderer Fantasie (for piano) alone. Schubert got exactly 20 (about $10)! Another Viennese firm went so far as to ask him to sell them his compositions at the most favorable starvation rate “paid a beginner,” while publishers in Germany were, if anything, even worse! Yet when Schubert had a few dollars in his pocket he thought nothing of spending a part of it on tickets for himself and his friend Bauernfeld for a concert by Paganini, whose spectacular violin playing excited Schubert quite as much as it did the rest of Vienna.
In spite of illness and discouragement many of his works at this time rank among his very greatest. There are, first of all, the 23 songs of the Schöne Müllerin cycle—the unhappy story of the love of a youth for a miller’s daughter who jilts him for a green-clad hunter—containing such lyrics as Wohin and Ungeduld, which have virtually become folksongs; the piano sonata, Op. 143; the fabulous Octet, written for an amateur clarinetist, Count Troyer (and after a few hearings put away and forgotten till 1861); and that sweetest and most tender of Schubert’s chamber music works, the A minor Quartet, with its lovely Rosamunde melody, the indescribable lilt of its minuet and the Slavic and Hungarian influences in its finale.
He was to experience more of these influences the summer 42 of 1824, for at that time he went once again to the Esterházys in Zseliz. The country air and the quiet life of the place in addition to regular meals and comfortable quarters exercised a recuperative effect. Moreover, the Countess Caroline was now a sightly young lady of seventeen. Possibly Schubert was not indifferent to her charms. But his letters to his father and his brother Ferdinand make it clear that he was homesick and often decidedly blue. Still, he wrote some admirable music at Zseliz—the Divertissement à l’Hongroise, the stunning Grand Duo for four hands, the sonata for arpeggione and piano; and thoughts of a great symphony, more imposing than any he had composed so far, began to occupy his mind. He had heard, also, that Beethoven intended to give a concert at which his Ninth Symphony would be produced. And he wrote to Kupelwieser: “If God wills, I am thinking next year of giving a similar concert!”
Schubert at the pianoforte during a musicale at the home of Josef R. v. Spaun
A rare coffee cup of Vienna porcelain in the collection of the Schubert Museum in Vienna. Shown are a portrait of Schubert and a replica of the “Novalis” Hymn No. II.
In May, 1825, Vogl invited Schubert to accompany him on an outing which proved to be the longest trip he was ever to take. Franz brought with him a number of compositions, finished and unfinished, among them settings of songs from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, of which the Ave Maria is one of the best loved things he ever wrote. The friends revisited the haunts of their previous journey, but this time Vogl took Schubert further—to Gmunden, on the Traunsee in the Salzkammergut; to Salzburg; then southward as far as Bad Gastein. All along the way there was no end of music making, charming new acquaintances, hospitable folk who threatened to kill the travellers with kindness. Schubert cut up all manner of musical capers on occasion (one of his favorite pranks was to give a performance of Der Erlkönig on a comb covered with paper!). He was careful not to forget his parents. In an affectionate letter to his father he asks, chaffingly, if his brother, Ferdinand, “has not been ill seventy-seven times again” and surmises that he has surely imagined at least nine times that he was going to die. “As if death were the worst thing that could befall one!”, he suddenly exclaims, growing serious; “could Ferdinand only look on these divine lakes and mountains which threaten to crush and overwhelm us he would no longer love this puny human life but deem it a great happiness to be restored for a new life to the inscrutable forces of the earth”! It is a question how pleased Father Schubert was with this pantheistic declaration of his son’s; when Franz was in Zseliz, Ferdinand had warned him against discussing religious matters when writing to his parent.
Curiously enough, Schubert passed through Salzburg without any allusion to his idol, Mozart. In Gastein he found time to complete the great piano sonata in D and to write several songs, one of them a setting of Ladislaus Pyrker’s Die Allmacht—a grandiose musical duplication of that statement of faith he had fearlessly written his father. At this health resort, furthermore, Schubert is supposed to have completed that famous Gastein Symphony of which nobody has ever been able to find a trace. All manner of 44 theories have been advanced with respect to this mysterious work. Some of Schubert’s intimates have insisted that the composer worked on it in the summer of 1825 and intended it for a benefit concert by the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music. Others charge the Society with negligence resulting in the loss of the score, while still other investigators have imagined that the Grand Duo, composed a year earlier, might be an unorchestrated version of the missing score; or else that Schubert had merely contemplated a revision of the early Sixth Symphony, with which he had never been satisfied. Whether the hypothetical Gastein or the subsequent C major of 1828 represents the “great symphony” to which Schubert aspired we have no way of knowing.
In 1826 a conductor’s post had become free and although Schubert had not long before turned down an organ position offered him (probably because he did not like the idea that his freedom might be curtailed) he did apply for this conductorship, attracted by the moderate salary it promised. It was not Schubert who got it but the popular mediocrity, Josef Weigl. How little Schubert harbored jealousy is clear from his satisfaction that the job had gone to “so worthy a man as Weigl.” Then a vacancy occurred at the Kärntnertor Theatre. The candidate for a minor conductor’s post had to submit a specially composed dramatic air for the singer, Nanette Schechner, and of course Schubert did so. But the Schechner, we are told, demanded changes in the music and Schubert peremptorily 45 refused to make them. In spite of passionate entreaties and a spectacular fainting fit by the soprano, the composer pocketed his score and walked off coldly announcing: “I will change nothing.” So things remained about as they were. True, the Friends of Music in 1825 had permitted him to substitute for a viola player at some of their concerts—after first rejecting his plea to do so on the ground that he “made a living of music” and that professionals were ineligible! Thus when in the summer of 1826 he would have liked to go once more to Linz there was no money for him to go anywhere. He had to content himself with the suburb of Währing and to aggravate matters it rained for a month.
All the same, 1826 was a year of significant works. In June Schubert composed within ten days his last string quartet, the vast and almost orchestrally colored one in G major. During the preceding winter he had written what is undoubtedly the most familiar of his quartets, the D minor, the slow movement of which consists of those variations on his song Death and the Maiden which are among the supreme variations of musical literature. Further, there were the melodically blooming B flat Trio for piano, violin and cello, the lovely G major piano sonata, the “Rondo Brilliant,” for violin and piano and numerous songs, among them the two Shakespearean settings Hark, hark, the Lark and Who is Sylvia? Almost everybody who has ever interested himself in Schubert is familiar with the fable about the origin of Hark, hark, the Lark—how one day 46 Schubert picked up a volume of Shakespeare in a Währing beer garden and how, after skimming through Cymbeline, he suddenly exclaimed: “A lovely melody has come into my head—if only I had some music paper!”; whereupon a friend drew some staves on the back of a bill of fare and the song was instantly written. Unfortunately for legend, the song was written originally not on a bill of fare but in a small note book including a number of other compositions—one of them on the reverse side of the very page containing Hark, hark, the Lark. What seems a likelier story is that Schubert wrote it in Schwind’s room, while the latter was trying to draw his picture.
March, 1827, was the date of Beethoven’s death. Schubert was one of the torchbearers at the funeral. Back from the Währing cemetery he went with some friends to a coffee house in the “Inner Town.” The gathering was in a solemn yet exalted mood. Schubert lifted his glass and drank a toast “To him we have just buried,” then another “To him who will be next.” Did that strange clairvoyance in which Michael Vogl once said he composed his music show him in mystic vision that his own sands had just twenty months more to run?
But before this he still had a little worldly journey to make—and a pleasant one. Karl Pachler, a cultured and musical lawyer, and his wife, Marie Leopoldine Koschak, an accomplished pianist whom Beethoven admired, invited Schubert to visit their home in Graz. The honored guest was to have been Beethoven but shortly after his passing 47 Marie Koschak expressed a desire to know Schubert, whose importance she fully realized. So accompanied by his friend Jenger (who some years earlier had brought him his notice of membership in the Styrian Musical Association) he went in September, 1827, to Graz. In the home of the Pachlers, Schubert passed a happy, carefree, inspiring time. There was no end of sociability, music, picnics, excursions. He was even introduced to a local celebrity named Franz Schubert, who had a reputation as a folksong singer and who rendered Styrian folk melodies for his Viennese namesake. The Music Society gave a concert in honor of its visiting member, who also went to the theatre with Anselm Hüttenbrenner to hear an early opera of Meyerbeer’s—though after the first act he protested: “I can’t stand it any longer, let’s get out into the air.” He played his own Alfonso und Estrella to an operatic conductor, who made wry faces over its “difficulties” so that Schubert ended by leaving the score with Pachler, who kept it till 1841. Several songs were composed at Graz, also a quantity of waltzes and galops. Franz left Graz promising to come back another year—which was never to dawn.
Title-page for Variations on a French Song (opus 10), “dedicated to Mr. Ludwig von Beethoven by his admirer Franz Schubert.”
It is probably unlikely that, at the gathering of the Schubertians on New Year’s Eve, Schubert realized as poignantly as some may imagine that he was standing on the threshold of his last year on earth. But the winter was hard, there was little or no money and it seems likely that the good stepmother up in the Rossau schoolhouse had to help out with occasional pennies from the household stocking. To be sure, a little earlier the Friends of Music had elected Schubert a member of the Representative Body of the Society and the composer felt much honored. But such “honor” would not buy a meal. Even when half starved Schubert contrived to work. Between January and November, 1828, he turned out some of the most incomparable 49 songs he ever composed (yes, even though planning to give up such trifling matters as Lieder!) issued posthumously under the collective title Schwanengesang; the Great Symphony in C major “of the heavenly length” (the score is dated March, 1828); a cantata, the three wonderful piano sonatas in A, C minor and B flat; that towering monument of chamber music, the C major String Quintet; the Mass in E flat (he had written a so-called Missa Solemnis in A flat as far back as 1820 besides a quantity of smaller masses) and much else. He devoted himself to the E flat Mass with such intensity that Josef Hüttenbrenner described him as “living in his Mass.” The supreme Lieder—one is tempted to say the most grandiose and prophetic of all the odd 600 he wrote—are the settings of six poems from Heinrich Heine’s Buch der Lieder, which had just come to his notice. They are Am Meer, Der Doppelgänger, Die Stadt, Der Atlas and Ihr Bild, anticipations of the whole song technic of the nineteenth century!
The C major Symphony is without its like in the whole range of music and by one magical pen stroke Schubert made it even a greater thing than when he first conceived it. The autograph score shows that by the substitution of a D natural for a G in the theme of the first Allegro the composer transformed what was scarcely more than a rhythm into one of the great symphonic subjects of all time. But he was never to hear the work. It came to a rehearsal by the Friends of Music, was found too difficult and “overloaded” and on the composer’s own advice, 50 dropped in favor of the Sixth—the “little” C major. And yet it was the one symphony of its time which could have endured the sunlight of Beethoven undiminished and unashamed.
Exactly a year after Beethoven’s death Schubert at last gave the concert of his own works that he meant “if God wills” to give some day. It was the urging of Bauernfeld and other friends which finally caused things to materialize. The idea was that if all went well Schubert might offer his private concert annually and the rascally publishers would at long last be singing a different tune. His friends rallied nobly to his aid. Vogl sang, Josefine Fröhlich’s pupils gave Luise Gosmar’s birthday serenade, there was chamber music and a male chorus. The Musikverein hall was packed, encores were innumerable, the applause would not end and, best of all, there was a clear profit of more than half a hundred dollars. The only fly in the ointment was that no critics came, though several foreign publications carried flattering accounts.
But the little wealth quickly ebbed away. Again there were futile bickerings with publishers. Schubert would have liked to go to Graz once more but Baden and excursions to nearby Grinzing and Sievering were as much as he could allow himself. Headaches and other symptoms of a year before troubled him alarmingly. His doctor advised him to leave the stuffy center of town for some place where he could have plenty of fresh country air. So in September he moved to a house in the Neue Wieden section, 51 where his brother Ferdinand had taken rooms. The building was new, still damp and unhealthy. Aside from a pilgrimage to Haydn’s tomb at Eisenstadt and some annoyances with the publisher, Schott, both September and October were uneventful. Suddenly, while at dinner one day in the Lichtental neighborhood of his birth, he threw down his fork, shouted that the food tasted like poison and refused to eat further.
Probably nobody suspected a serious illness, let alone a fatal one. At that Schubert did not immediately take to bed. He dragged himself a few days later to hear a Requiem by his brother, shortly before which he had been fearfully agitated by a first hearing of Beethoven’s C sharp minor Quartet. Yet so little does his condition appear to have worried him that he went to the theorist Simon Sechter to arrange for instruction in counterpoint—his intimates and a study of Handel’s oratorios having supposedly persuaded him of his deficiencies in that branch of technic. Nothing came of the project. By November 12 he wrote Schober that “he is sick, has eaten nothing in eleven days and can do no more than crawl from his bed to a chair.” And he implores his friend to procure him reading matter, preferably Fenimore Cooper. The sickness made rapid inroads, though he continued to toy with the operatic scheme of the Count of Gleichen, and carefully corrected the proofs of his Winterreise cycle. Soon he became delirious and the doctors held a consultation. The diagnosis was “nerve fever,” or typhus, the same sickness which had 52 carried off his mother. Pathetically he begged his brother not to leave him “in this corner under ground”; and when the anguished Ferdinand assured him he was in his own room he insisted: “No, that’s not true, Beethoven is not here!” A little later he turned his face to the wall and murmured, we are told, “Here, here is my end!” “The days of affliction,” wrote Father Schubert to Ferdinand, “lie heavy upon us”; and he presently made in the old list of births and deaths in the Schubert family the entry with the mortuary cross: “Franz Peter, Wednesday, Nov. 19, 1828, at three o’clock in the afternoon, of nerve fever, buried Saturday, Nov. 22, 1828.”
It was Ferdinand who decided that his brother should, in death, be brought closer to Beethoven than ever he had been in life. And since “Beethoven was not there,” where Schubert would ordinarily have been buried, Ferdinand saw to it that Franz should rest as close to his divinity as an intervening grave or two permitted. They were destined in the process of time to lie closer still. For three score years later the two masters were exhumed and placed side by side in two of those “graves of glory” in Vienna’s great Central Cemetery.
Program for the première of Schubert’s opera, Fierrabras, performed in Karlsruhe on the hundredth anniversary of Schubert’s birth.
“Music has buried here a rich treasure, but fairer hopes,” read the epitaph which Grillparzer set on the original tomb in the Währing cemetery. “Fairer hopes,” indeed! How could Grillparzer know what even the wisest musical heads of his day did not know? Eleven years after Schubert died “all Paris” was said to be astounded at the “posthumous diligence of a song writer who, while one might think his ashes repose in Vienna, is still making eternal new songs”! It took decades to reveal the incalculable richness of this “treasure” and even now the world is not finally aware of its fullness. Another deathless master, Robert Schumann, gave the world Schubert’s C major Symphony, redeeming it from Ferdinand’s heaped but silent hoard of unprinted, nay, unsuspected scores. “Who can do anything after Beethoven?” the half-starved Konvikt student had wistfully asked. Here was at least one triumphant answer, made by Schubert himself, at a distance of only eight months from his early tomb!
LP—Also available on Long Playing Microgroove Recordings as well as on the conventional Columbia Masterworks.
