The Earliest Compositions
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 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 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.