Schubert and His Work

by Herbert F. Peyser

He was to experience more of these influences the summer of 1824, for at that time he went once again to the Esterházys in Zseliz. The country air and the quiet life of the place in addition to regular meals and comfortable quarters exercised a recuperative effect. Moreover, the Countess Caroline was now a sightly young lady of seventeen. Possibly Schubert was not indifferent to her charms. But his letters to his father and his brother Ferdinand make it clear that he was homesick and often decidedly blue. Still, he wrote some admirable music at Zseliz—the Divertissement à l’Hongroise, the stunning Grand Duo for four hands, the sonata for arpeggione and piano; and thoughts of a great symphony, more imposing than any he had composed so far, began to occupy his mind. He had heard, also, that Beethoven intended to give a concert at which his Ninth Symphony would be produced. And he wrote to Kupelwieser: “If God wills, I am thinking next year of giving a similar concert!”

Schubert at the pianoforte during a musicale at the home of Josef R. v. Spaun

A rare coffee cup of Vienna porcelain in the collection of the Schubert Museum in Vienna. Shown are a portrait of Schubert and a replica of the “Novalis” Hymn No. II.

In May, 1825, Vogl invited Schubert to accompany him on an outing which proved to be the longest trip he was ever to take. Franz brought with him a number of compositions, finished and unfinished, among them settings of songs from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, of which the Ave Maria is one of the best loved things he ever wrote. The friends revisited the haunts of their previous journey, but this time Vogl took Schubert further—to Gmunden, on the Traunsee in the Salzkammergut; to Salzburg; then southward as far as Bad Gastein. All along the way there was no end of music making, charming new acquaintances, hospitable folk who threatened to kill the travellers with kindness. Schubert cut up all manner of musical capers on occasion (one of his favorite pranks was to give a performance of Der Erlkönig on a comb covered with paper!). He was careful not to forget his parents. In an affectionate letter to his father he asks, chaffingly, if his brother, Ferdinand, “has not been ill seventy-seven times again” and surmises that he has surely imagined at least nine times that he was going to die. “As if death were the worst thing that could befall one!”, he suddenly exclaims, growing serious; “could Ferdinand only look on these divine lakes and mountains which threaten to crush and overwhelm us he would no longer love this puny human life but deem it a great happiness to be restored for a new life to the inscrutable forces of the earth”! It is a question how pleased Father Schubert was with this pantheistic declaration of his son’s; when Franz was in Zseliz, Ferdinand had warned him against discussing religious matters when writing to his parent.

Curiously enough, Schubert passed through Salzburg without any allusion to his idol, Mozart. In Gastein he found time to complete the great piano sonata in D and to write several songs, one of them a setting of Ladislaus Pyrker’s Die Allmacht—a grandiose musical duplication of that statement of faith he had fearlessly written his father. At this health resort, furthermore, Schubert is supposed to have completed that famous Gastein Symphony of which nobody has ever been able to find a trace. All manner of theories have been advanced with respect to this mysterious work. Some of Schubert’s intimates have insisted that the composer worked on it in the summer of 1825 and intended it for a benefit concert by the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music. Others charge the Society with negligence resulting in the loss of the score, while still other investigators have imagined that the Grand Duo, composed a year earlier, might be an unorchestrated version of the missing score; or else that Schubert had merely contemplated a revision of the early Sixth Symphony, with which he had never been satisfied. Whether the hypothetical Gastein or the subsequent C major of 1828 represents the “great symphony” to which Schubert aspired we have no way of knowing.

In 1826 a conductor’s post had become free and although Schubert had not long before turned down an organ position offered him (probably because he did not like the idea that his freedom might be curtailed) he did apply for this conductorship, attracted by the moderate salary it promised. It was not Schubert who got it but the popular mediocrity, Josef Weigl. How little Schubert harbored jealousy is clear from his satisfaction that the job had gone to “so worthy a man as Weigl.” Then a vacancy occurred at the Kärntnertor Theatre. The candidate for a minor conductor’s post had to submit a specially composed dramatic air for the singer, Nanette Schechner, and of course Schubert did so. But the Schechner, we are told, demanded changes in the music and Schubert peremptorily refused to make them. In spite of passionate entreaties and a spectacular fainting fit by the soprano, the composer pocketed his score and walked off coldly announcing: “I will change nothing.” So things remained about as they were. True, the Friends of Music in 1825 had permitted him to substitute for a viola player at some of their concerts—after first rejecting his plea to do so on the ground that he “made a living of music” and that professionals were ineligible! Thus when in the summer of 1826 he would have liked to go once more to Linz there was no money for him to go anywhere. He had to content himself with the suburb of Währing and to aggravate matters it rained for a month.

All the same, 1826 was a year of significant works. In June Schubert composed within ten days his last string quartet, the vast and almost orchestrally colored one in G major. During the preceding winter he had written what is undoubtedly the most familiar of his quartets, the D minor, the slow movement of which consists of those variations on his song Death and the Maiden which are among the supreme variations of musical literature. Further, there were the melodically blooming B flat Trio for piano, violin and cello, the lovely G major piano sonata, the “Rondo Brilliant,” for violin and piano and numerous songs, among them the two Shakespearean settings Hark, hark, the Lark and Who is Sylvia? Almost everybody who has ever interested himself in Schubert is familiar with the fable about the origin of Hark, hark, the Lark—how one day Schubert picked up a volume of Shakespeare in a Währing beer garden and how, after skimming through Cymbeline, he suddenly exclaimed: “A lovely melody has come into my head—if only I had some music paper!”; whereupon a friend drew some staves on the back of a bill of fare and the song was instantly written. Unfortunately for legend, the song was written originally not on a bill of fare but in a small note book including a number of other compositions—one of them on the reverse side of the very page containing Hark, hark, the Lark. What seems a likelier story is that Schubert wrote it in Schwind’s room, while the latter was trying to draw his picture.

March, 1827, was the date of Beethoven’s death. Schubert was one of the torchbearers at the funeral. Back from the Währing cemetery he went with some friends to a coffee house in the “Inner Town.” The gathering was in a solemn yet exalted mood. Schubert lifted his glass and drank a toast “To him we have just buried,” then another “To him who will be next.” Did that strange clairvoyance in which Michael Vogl once said he composed his music show him in mystic vision that his own sands had just twenty months more to run?