Schubert and His Work

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.