Schubert

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781848318038
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music. Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.In his short life of not quite 32 years – the briefest span of any first-rank composer – Schubert composed over 600 songs, showing a talent for word-setting which for many has never been equalled. However, while his songs gained gradual fame while he was alive, many of the works for which he is renowned were never performed in his lifetime, not even his Eighth Symphony, the Unfinished, or the Ninth Symphony, The Great C Major, which are so ubiquitous now. He was not lionised for the String Quintet in C, whose second movement Adagio remains one of the most requested pieces on Desert Island Discs. Nor did his exquisite quartets and piano music receive much recognition at the time.Michael Steen evokes Schubert's youth as the son of an impoverished schoolteacher and his life among a boisterous, arty set of friends living it up in the dazzling gaiety of early 19th-century Vienna. Their evening gatherings for an intoxicating mix of politics, conversation and music became known as Schubertiads. At 25 Schubert contracted syphilis and was to suffer ill health for the rest of his life, falling into the depression that is so heart-rendingly expressed in some of his works. Schubert died only a year and a half after Beethoven, having been a torch-bearer at his funeral. Even so, he remained prodigiously productive and those last years bequeathed some of his finest works.

SCHUBERT

‘MUSIC HAS HERE entombed a rich treasure, but much fairer hopes’, was Franz Grillparzer’s epitaph to Schubert.¹ The poet was referring to the composer’s premature death, aged only 31. Little did he realise the size of the hoard, which was gradually unearthed through the 19th century. Few had any inkling of how much Schubert had achieved in those few years, composing symphonies, quartets, quintets and masses, and the wonderful piano music.

We shall always associate Schubert with glorious melody, particularly with the Lied, the accompanied German song. Many composers at the time wrote songs.* A ready market for them was provided by the growing middle class, in whose houses there was often a piano to be found, and who considered that an ability to make music was a sign of social advancement. 3 Schubert’s songs are not just ‘settings’ of poems by prominent contemporary poets, such as Goethe and Schiller. Rather, he used each poem to create an entirely new and balanced composition. It is almost as if the poem was the landscape, whereas the song was the landscape painting, the work of art. Leading composers of Lieder, such as Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Richard Strauss, would look back primarily to Schubert for inspiration and as an example to follow.

Even Schubert’s instrumental music is ‘bursting to be sung’.⁴ The listener emerging from a performance of the Great C major Symphony will have its melodies ringing in his ears. For earlier composers, melody had been mainly a means of providing contrast. For his contemporary Weber, the object of melody was to provide colour. With Schubert, melody, pure lyricism, has become an ‘end in itself ’.⁵

Schubert’s short life was spent almost wholly in his birthplace, Vienna, although he took occasional summer trips to Hungary or into the Austrian mountains. He was precocious: by the time he turned nineteen, he had already composed his Third Symphony and over 200 songs, including the two for which he used Goethe’s poems ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ and ‘Erlkönig’.⁶ Much of Schubert’s subsequent energy was wasted in a fruitless effort to write an opera, then seen as the crock-of-gold for all composers; he completed seven of them.⁷ His final years were astonishingly creative. It is all the more incredible that some of his greatest works were produced when suffering from the symptoms of his fatal disease, chronic headaches and giddiness, for example.

Schubert died only around a year and a half after Beethoven, who, stone-deaf, slovenly and sodden in alcohol, had long been out of tune with life in the Habsburg capital. Vienna was a dazzling place, with lots of dancing, several theatres and much gaiety. Schubert himself provided a focus for a small circle of ‘bohemian’ friends whose main interests, music, drink and sex, were not particularly exceptional, other than in extent. The traditional picture of Schubert is, however, of a man who was unassuming and self-effacing. A story is told how, in the salon of Princess Kinsky, the audience applauded the singer but ignored the accompanist. The princess felt she should commiserate; however, Schubert, peering through his spectacles, said that he preferred being unnoticed, ‘for it made him feel less embarrassed’. 8 One friend said: ‘He disliked bowing and scraping, and listening to flattering talk about himself he found down-right nauseating.’⁹

BIRTH AND YOUTH

Franz Schubert was born on 31 January 1797, in the Himmelpfortgrund, a slum area which the authorities had allowed to develop well back from the walls of central Vienna. The Schuberts lived in Nussdorferstrasse in a building which housed around 70 people in 16 tiny ‘apartments’. From the small courtyard with its pump, a stone staircase leads up to the 25-square-metre tenement. Franz was the twelfth of fourteen children, of whom only four boys and a girl survived into childhood. Older than him were Ignaz, who was a hunchback, Ferdinand and Karl; Maria Theresa was born four years later.¹⁰

Franz’s uncle had come to Vienna from Moravia to teach at the Carmelite School in Leopoldstadt, which is just behind the Prater amusement park and some distance from the birthplace. As so frequently happened then, he married the widow of his predecessor and became headmaster. The standard fee per child was very modest, but, because the school had a poor reputation when he took over, he sometimes received less than the standard rate.¹¹

Franz’s father joined his brother as his assistant in about 1783 and later had his own school in the Himmelpfortgrund. Franz’s mother, Elizabeth, was in domestic service and her brother was a weaver. Her father had been fortunate to escape to Vienna from Silesia after he had been accused of embezzlement, a crime for which he could easily have been executed.¹²

It is often suggested that the first music which Schubert heard was the military music when, on Easter Day 1797, the troops went forth to face Napoleon. News that the French were marching on Vienna probably had little effect on the Schubert family: there was nothing they could do, unlike the court which was ‘packing enormous trunks into carriages preparing to flee before the French advance’.¹³ Franz’s mother, who presumably had experienced the effects of the devastating wars in Silesia, must have been apprehensive for her newborn child. The deprivations arising from the Napoleonic wars, and which Beethoven lived through, must have made her task particularly difficult.

As he grew up, Franz was taught the violin by his father and the piano by Ignaz. He also studied with the organist at the parish church, who observed: ‘If I wished to instruct him in anything fresh, he already knew it. Consequently I gave him no actual tuition but merely conversed with him and watched with silent astonishment.’¹⁴

When he was eleven, he was entered, in response to an advertisement, for a choral scholarship at the Imperial and Royal City College. One of the two examiners was the great Antonio Salieri himself. The scene reminds one of little Haydn: on the one hand, the smooth, international, highly successful courtier; on the other, the tiny boy accompanied by the humble father. So much was at stake.

The school, next to St Stephen’s Cathedral, was run by Piarists, religious brothers dedicated to education. Although it was called unprepossessingly ‘the Konvikt’,* it was a prominent boarding school for commoners.¹⁶ It had about 130 boarders, divided into 7 houses. Beethoven would later resist an attempt to get his nephew transferred there, because he thought that the supervision was inadequate.¹⁷ But, for a boy with Franz’s background, the school could provide a considerable leap forward: there, he would meet the sons of nobles, army officers and officials. The school uniform was a dark brown coat with a small gilt epaulet on the left shoulder, a white neck-cloth, knickerbockers, buckled shoes and a low three-cornered hat. Imagine the pride, the joy, the hopes, when little Franz won his scholarship! One wonders how the family could afford the clothes.

Soon after Franz joined the school, another attack by Napoleon caused some excitement. Several of the boys attempted to enrol in the army and were called back. Then, during the bombardment of Vienna, around the time that Haydn was dying, the school buildings were hit by a grenade, which exploded in the prefects’ room; the little boys were dis appointed that the prefects were not in the room at the time.¹⁸

Schubert was given good reports. His studies were ‘good’, his morals were ‘very good’, and he had ‘a musical talent’.¹⁹ He was taught by the court organist and by Salieri. It was not long before he was being commended. He became leader of the school orchestra, which was run by a young university student, Josef von Spaun, who was eight years older. Spaun obtained some manuscript paper for Schubert who was too poor to buy it himself. And he took him to the opera, where the boy was moved to tears by Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride. Spaun, an official in lottery administration, became a lifelong friend, and was crucial in introducing Schubert to his widening circle of friends. In particular, he brought him in touch with the bureaucrats, intellectuals, doctors and so forth, the middle class of the time.**

Nevertheless, at this stage Schubert was a bit of a loner: ‘He was silent and uncommunicative’, wrote one of his friends. ‘Even on the walks which the pupils took together, he mostly kept apart, walking pensively along with lowered eyes and with his hands behind his back, playing with his fingers (as though on keys), completely lost in his own thoughts.’²¹

During the school holidays, the Schubert family, which by then had moved to larger quarters not far from Franz’s birthplace, formed their own string ensemble. Schubert wrote his early quartets for this. In later years, this family group became a mini-orchestra capable of playing Haydn symphonies.

When Schubert was thirteen, his musical creativity took off. His first complete work was a fantasie for four hands. He then wrote the Six Minuets for wind instruments and the song ‘Hagar’s Klage’. But this period was a sad one. When he was fifteen, his mother died of ‘nervous fever’. His father remarried and fortunately Schubert acquired a stepmother who was sufficiently kind to lend him money in later years.²²

Around the time of his mother’s death, Schubert’s voice broke and, after the performance of a mass, he scribbled on his part, ‘Schubert, Franz, crowed for the last time, July 26th, 1812’.²³ In the following year, his future came up for review. The emperor, who has been described as ‘one of the most influential mediocrities of modern times’,²⁴ took a close interest in school matters. This possibly explains why Salieri wisely took a keen interest as well. In the week before the battle of Leipzig, and in the field, the Emperor of Austria, who was notoriously bad at delegating, and known to have as many as 2,000 reports piling up on his desk at any one time,²⁵ was dealing with endowments involving Schubert and three others. Then, a couple of days after the battle, still in the field, the emperor stipulated the terms on which Schubert could continue; he emphasised the primary importance of general studies, and observed that ‘singing and music are a subsidiary matter’.²⁶

But Schubert did not want to take the necessary examination in general studies, so he left the Konvikt in October 1813, and went to a teacher training school also near the cathedral. When, a year later, he passed the exam to qualify as a primary school teacher, he took over the responsibility for the infants’ class in his father’s school. This earned him 80 florins a year, which represented less than a fifth of the 450 fl salary typically earned by a fully qualified teacher or junior civil servant.*²⁷ The fact that Franz had joined the school no doubt in some ways pleased his father, of whom he was very fond. Teaching in the small schools was a family affair; Ignaz took over from his father as headmaster, eventually.²⁸

Meanwhile, lessons were continued with Salieri. They stopped when Schubert was nineteen, because Salieri disliked Schubert’s growing interest in the poetry of the German Romantics. However, Schubert must have felt that he owed a lot to Salieri, because for his 50th jubilee in 1816, Schubert’s contribution included the words, ‘kindness and wisdom flow from thee, as God’s own image thou’rt to me’.²⁹

TOWARDS THE MIDDLE YEARS

Schubert lived quietly at home in the schoolhouse. As a schoolmaster, he could avoid compulsory military service, which could last fourteen years and was applied to men aged from 18 to 45. Also, he was too short: he was only about five feet tall, and had poor sight.³⁰ Indeed, his spectacles, which are now in his birthplace museum, are notably small, and indicate that he had a small head as well.

Schubert’s school duties probably left him with much spare time. He had enormous energy and his output of music in the next three years was astonishing.³¹ Nearly half the works listed in the thematic catalogue of his works drawn up by Otto Deutsch belong to those years.³² In his eighteenth year, he composed two symphonies, four operas, two masses and other liturgical works, several piano works, a...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION
• BIRTH AND YOUTH
• NOTES
• Other Books in the Series