The Early Symphonies
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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.