Born in Vienna, January 31, 1797, Schubert began the study of music when still a child, under the direction of his father, a school-teacher by profession, and his two brothers. While in his teens the boy began playing the viola pans in the family string quartet. His brothers took the violin parts, and his father played the 'cello: not always impeccably, it is to be feared, for we read how little Franz, looking doubtless very solemn and gnomelike in the spectacles he already wore, would from time to time, without stopping to look at the score, comment on the wrong notes the paternal fingers were sounding. This informal quartet was the nucleus of an orchestra, known as the Orchestral Society of Amateurs, which flourished at a somewhat later period, and served to make Schubert acquainted with the works of Krommer, Romberg, Cherubini, Spontini, Câtel, Mehul, Boïeldieu, Weigl, Winter, and others of that category, as well as with some Haydn and Mozart, and the first two symphonies of Beethoven. There was also an orchestra in the government school for the Emperor's choir, known as the "Convict" (from convivo, not convinco), which the boy, thanks to his clear soprano voice, attended from his eleventh to his sixteenth year; and of this he was not only a member, but for some time a conductor. One can readily imagine that with all this music-making there was little time for general schooling. Indeed, from the moment he left the Convict, in 1813, he seems to have given little thought to any but a technical education; and though he attended a normal school for a while, and later even tried teaching under his father for three years, his main interests were his lessons with the famous opera composer, Salieri, and his first essays in composition.
For the instinct of imitation had started him composing at an age when most boys nowadays are learning arithmetic. At thirteen he broke the ice with a four-hand piano fantasia, and from that moment swam contentedly through a sea of manuscripts. His teeming fecundity and his carelessness for the children of his brain once they were hatched showed themselves from the first. When he mislaid thirty minuets written at the Convict, he would not trouble to recopy them; what he enjoyed was the activity, not its product; and it was dull to bottle old water while the spring was flowing so cool and fresh. The figure of a spring does scant justice to Schubert's inexhaustible fancy; it was more like one of those magic knapsacks in the fairy stories—the more he took out of it, the more remained behind. By 1815 his fertility had become almost uncanny, especially when we remember that he had for music only the leisure hours of a young schoolmaster of eighteen. In March he wrote the Mass in G; between March 25 and April 1 a string quartet in G-minor; in May a symphony (his third) in D-major; in June an entire operetta; during six days in July another operetta, of which the libretto fills forty-two closely printed pages; on October 15 seven songs; on the 19th four more; and in the interstices of time, another symphony, four other operettas, two piano sonatas, and one hundred and thirty-five songs, headed by "The Erl-King." One rubs one's eyes. Compared with Schubert's pen, Aladdin's lamp seems a poor affair.
The natural result, in worldly matters, of this imaginative preoccupation was abject poverty. Never did Apollo turn his back on Admetus with a more sublime indifference than in the avatar of this otherwise modest musician. It is true that he gave some scattering music lessons, and that for a time he acted as music-master in that same Esterhazy family which so long patronized Haydn; but of any lasting patronage, any remunerative appointment, or any systematic teaching, we hear nothing. Even his compositions brought him but a farcical revenue. He published nothing until 1821, when the first batch of songs, including "The Erl-King," was printed by subscription. Later, the publishers being still unwilling to take risks on a virtually unknown composer, twenty more songs were similarly issued. Only when popular favor had become manifest could he use the regular channels of publication; and then he had to content himself with the merest pittances. Diabelli, who in forty years is said to have gained over ten thousand dollars on "The Wanderer," paid Schubert for the plates and copyright of that and nineteen other songs only three hundred and fifty dollars. Haslinger, in the composer's last year, when his reputation was made and his work practically done, paid him one dollar and a quarter for half a dozen of his finest songs. That he was himself largely to blame for this pecuniary misfortune, through his aversion to drudgery and his carelessness in the conduct of business affairs, hardly reconciles us to the fact of his constant and often extreme poverty, but for which he might have lived longer and wrought to even better purpose.
But if he was poor, he had at least the temperament and tastes suitable to poverty. Not even Mozart, whose character and destiny had much in common with Schubert's, was more light-hearted and easy-going. "Perfect freedom of action," says his biographer, "was the element in which he by preference moved, and for which he was content to make every sacrifice." To drink his mug of beer and eat his sausage, to flirt with pretty servant-maids and peasant girls, to discourse youthful philosophy and play practical jokes with convivial poets, painters, and students, above all to fill reams of music paper with the melodies that were always flooding his brain—this was his conception of sufficing happiness. It is curious to read of his daily routine—how, rising early, he would proceed, often before dressing, to improvise until breakfast; how, after a morning spent in composition, he would dine at the Gasthaus for a Zwanziger (ten cents); how he would divide the rest of the day between walking in the suburbs, calling on the ladies of his acquaintance, and discussing beer and friendship in Bogner's coffee-house, or the "Zur Ungarischen Krone," or the "Zum rothen Kreuz,"—sometimes, in these latter haunts, jotting down immortal melodies on the backs of wine cards in the midst of the tavern pandemonium. When he was in high spirits he would challenge a friend to a mock duel with walking-sticks, or sing the "Erl-King," in parody, through the teeth of a comb. And then there were the Schubertiaden, or Schubert evenings, held by his friends of both sexes in some one of the Vienna suburbs, at which the diversions consisted of dancing, lieder-singing, and theatricals, all to the accompaniment of the flowing bowl. "When the juice of the grape flowed in his veins," says one of his biographers, "he became a laughing tyrant, and would destroy everything he could, without making a noise,—glasses, plates, and cups,—and sit simpering and screwing up his eyes into the smallest possible compass." Altogether we get the picture of a Bohemian, irresponsible, bachelor life, innocent enough, but not troubled with embarrassing refinements. Schubert was not at his ease in highly cultivated circles. In his first letter from Zelész, the seat of the Esterhazys, he describes the servants in detail before giving a word to their princely employers. Physically Schubert was a short, stout man, with round shoulders, thick, blunt fingers, low forehead, projecting lips, stumpy nose, and short curly hair. Very near-sighted, he wore spectacles from boyhood. His friends' somewhat boorish wit compared him to a negro, a cabman, and even a tallow-candle, and afflicted him with the nickname of "Schwammerl," or "The Sponge"—whether in reference to his fondness for beer or to his superfluous flesh does not transpire.
The noteworthy fact toward which all these bits of otherwise insignificant personal detail point, the thesis in support of which they are here cited, is that Schubert was an unusually pure case of the sentimental temperament. All the external evidence—his contentedly ambling, unbuttoned existence, his combination of sweetness and a sort of involuntary nobility of aim, with an utter lack of intellectual distinction, his gullibility in business matters and practical affairs, his devotion to day-dream and revery, even his indolence and resulting sponginess of physique—points in the one direction. And these matters of ordinary observation are reinforced by the internal evidence of his music, as for example the preference for short pieces, each vividly expressive of a single mood; the pervasive tone of tender sadness, frequently irradiated by charming fancy, but seldom swept aside by tumultuous passion and energy; the fondness for minor keys, delicious modulations, and persistent hypnotizing rhythms; the incapacity for complex structure and sustained imagination. Here, obviously, is no hero of abstract thought, like Bach, or of intellectual and emotional passion, like Beethoven, but a gracious sentimentalist, a man of feeling, a sort of Burns or Heine of music.
The natural medium of musical expression for such a temperament is the brief lyric, the song for single voice with piano accompaniment; and it was inevitable that Schubert, constituted as he was, should become "the father of the song." Before his time, this had been a form not favored by the great composers; Mozart's and Beethoven's songs, as Mr. Hadow has remarked, were merely the chips thrown off in a great workshop; for them the norm of expression was the symphony. But Schubert, as a new sort of man among composers, treated the song with a new kind of earnestness, and with an unprecedented spontaneity. Each of his best songs is an unsophisticated utterance of simple sentiment, a wondrously vivid presentment of a single isolated feeling, a "moment's monument," as Rossetti said the sonnet should be. And this was precisely what the artistic situation required. As in a short story of the kind that Kipling, Stevenson, and others have made familiar to us we do not demand that evolution of character, that complex nodation of plot, that subtle action and reaction of motive, which every great novel must have, but simply vividness, brilliant depiction of a single person, idea, or situation, so in a song we desire no symphonic grandeur of scope and wealth of ordered detail, but rather perfect utterance of a single highly specialized emotion.
Schubert's best songs fulfil this requirement in an almost inimitable degree. Simple in style and design, wonderfully direct and sincere, conceived as idealizations of the beautiful old German Volkslieder, and carried out with all the artistic perfection and appropriateness of detail that good craftsmanship could give, they are among the few things in music that are absolutely achieved. Especially remarkable is the art-concealing art by which Schubert, through some perfectly simple and unobtrusive feature of rhythm, melody, or harmony, knows how to suggest exactly the spirit and atmosphere of his text. In the well-known "Serenade," for example, the deftly managed mixture of minor and major harmonies (a favorite device, by the way, with Schubert) strikes just the right emotional note of loverly solicitude and tenderness. In "Am Meer" four chords at the beginning, and again at the end, bring the sombre, majestic ocean visibly before us, while the sudden dissonances introduced with the line "Fielen die Thränen nieder" bring home to us with a terrible poignancy the human tragedy which the poet has so vividly outlined against this stern natural background. And then turn to "Hark! Hark! the Lark," perhaps the most purely lovely, in a musical sense, of all the songs, and note the adorable elasticity of the rhythm, the lambent grace of the tune, the idyllic change of key at the words, "And winking Mary-buds begin to ope their golden eyes," and the poising flight of the melody at the final, "Arise—arise—arise":—truly Elizabethan this music, in its graciousness and childlike joy. In short, Schubert strikes at once, and in each case, in such songs as "Hark, hark! the Lark," "Who is Sylvia?" "Am Meer," "Du bist die Ruh," "Die Forelle," "Heidenröslein," and perhaps a dozen others, the exact tone and style needed to transfigure the particular feeling with all the magic of music, and throughout the song maintains the mood perfectly, with no mixture or clouding. And this, too, with the greatest actual diversity of mood in the different songs, to which his art flexibly responds. This group of his fifteen or twenty best songs is not only the crown of his own work, but one of the brightest jewels in the crown of romanticism.
In critical justice it is necessary to add, however, that in another group of his songs, even more popular than this supreme one, Schubert's romanticism inspired him less happily. Whenever, giving free rein to his passion for detailed expression, he directed his effort less towards reproducing an emotional mood than towards illustrating actual incidents, whenever, that is, he allowed dramatic rather than musical considerations to sway him, he produced a type of song which, in spite of its popularity, is intrinsically inferior, and hence likely to lose favor as musical taste develops. The most famous examples of this type are "The Erl-King" and "The Wanderer"; others scarcely less known are "Der Atlas," "Die Doppelgänger," "Die Junge Nonne," "Die Allmacht," "Kolma's Klage," and "Hagar's Klage." To hear the music of some of the songs of this class, unhappily large, after reading the commentaries of their admirers, is almost as cruel a disillusion as to eat the food at a cheap restaurant after a perusal of the pretentious and highly decorated bill of fare. Of "Die Allmacht," for example, Mr. A. B. Bach, in his book on "The Art Ballad," writes as follows:—
"This composition I would call a great tone-picture; it is a hymn of praise, stately and full of splendor. We seem to hear some prophet, who, with a voice of thunder, speaks to the people of the power and glory of the Almighty. The greatness of God in nature is first proclaimed. The tone-painting is full of grandeur and majesty. Not with the delicate, charming pencil of Fra Angelico, but with the strong, energetic, and powerful brush of Michael Angelo, does Schubert paint the raging of the storm, the forest's boisterous violence, the thunder and the lightning. The painting is softer, milder, sweeter, only when he comes to the beautiful and calming words that the power of God is high above all, and greater when man feels it in his inmost heart.... Then follows a great crescendo, ending with the powerful and mighty exclamation, 'Great is Jehovah, the Lord!' which produces an overpowering effect. In this composition, as scarcely in any other, Schubert, usually so charming, is very dramatic, and shows command of the loftiest expression."
Turning, with expectation keyed high, from this rhapsody to the music of "Die Allmacht," what do we find? An annoyingly loud thumping of the piano, in its muddy lower register, for four pages on end, with no rhythmic relief; a vocal part more like a second-rate operatic recitative than one of those divine tunes of which Schubert had the secret; and to fill the cup of boredom, three rumbles of conventional musical "thunder," as threadbare and outworn as the antiquated theatrical properties described by Steele in the "Tatler." It is hard to understand how any true lover of music can turn from "Hark, hark! the Lark," or "Who is Sylvia?" or "Du bist die Ruh," to such songs as these, with their physically exciting tremolos, crashing diminished-seventh chords, chromatic climaxes, mysterious staccato octaves, pianissimo, in the bass, and other such claptrap effects, better suited to accompany the drowning of the heroine of melodrama than to edify the sense of musical beauty. They reveal pitilessly the seamy side of romanticism, and make us wish that Schubert's fecund imagination had been controlled by a more fastidious taste.