But before this he still had a little worldly journey to make—and a pleasant one. Karl Pachler, a cultured and musical lawyer, and his wife, Marie Leopoldine Koschak, an accomplished pianist whom Beethoven admired, invited Schubert to visit their home in Graz. The honored guest was to have been Beethoven but shortly after his passing Marie Koschak expressed a desire to know Schubert, whose importance she fully realized. So accompanied by his friend Jenger (who some years earlier had brought him his notice of membership in the Styrian Musical Association) he went in September, 1827, to Graz. In the home of the Pachlers, Schubert passed a happy, carefree, inspiring time. There was no end of sociability, music, picnics, excursions. He was even introduced to a local celebrity named Franz Schubert, who had a reputation as a folksong singer and who rendered Styrian folk melodies for his Viennese namesake. The Music Society gave a concert in honor of its visiting member, who also went to the theatre with Anselm Hüttenbrenner to hear an early opera of Meyerbeer’s—though after the first act he protested: “I can’t stand it any longer, let’s get out into the air.” He played his own Alfonso und Estrella to an operatic conductor, who made wry faces over its “difficulties” so that Schubert ended by leaving the score with Pachler, who kept it till 1841. Several songs were composed at Graz, also a quantity of waltzes and galops. Franz left Graz promising to come back another year—which was never to dawn.
Title-page for Variations on a French Song (opus 10), “dedicated to Mr. Ludwig von Beethoven by his admirer Franz Schubert.”
It is probably unlikely that, at the gathering of the Schubertians on New Year’s Eve, Schubert realized as poignantly as some may imagine that he was standing on the threshold of his last year on earth. But the winter was hard, there was little or no money and it seems likely that the good stepmother up in the Rossau schoolhouse had to help out with occasional pennies from the household stocking. To be sure, a little earlier the Friends of Music had elected Schubert a member of the Representative Body of the Society and the composer felt much honored. But such “honor” would not buy a meal. Even when half starved Schubert contrived to work. Between January and November, 1828, he turned out some of the most incomparable songs he ever composed (yes, even though planning to give up such trifling matters as Lieder!) issued posthumously under the collective title Schwanengesang; the Great Symphony in C major “of the heavenly length” (the score is dated March, 1828); a cantata, the three wonderful piano sonatas in A, C minor and B flat; that towering monument of chamber music, the C major String Quintet; the Mass in E flat (he had written a so-called Missa Solemnis in A flat as far back as 1820 besides a quantity of smaller masses) and much else. He devoted himself to the E flat Mass with such intensity that Josef Hüttenbrenner described him as “living in his Mass.” The supreme Lieder—one is tempted to say the most grandiose and prophetic of all the odd 600 he wrote—are the settings of six poems from Heinrich Heine’s Buch der Lieder, which had just come to his notice. They are Am Meer, Der Doppelgänger, Die Stadt, Der Atlas and Ihr Bild, anticipations of the whole song technic of the nineteenth century!
The C major Symphony is without its like in the whole range of music and by one magical pen stroke Schubert made it even a greater thing than when he first conceived it. The autograph score shows that by the substitution of a D natural for a G in the theme of the first Allegro the composer transformed what was scarcely more than a rhythm into one of the great symphonic subjects of all time. But he was never to hear the work. It came to a rehearsal by the Friends of Music, was found too difficult and “overloaded” and on the composer’s own advice, dropped in favor of the Sixth—the “little” C major. And yet it was the one symphony of its time which could have endured the sunlight of Beethoven undiminished and unashamed.
Exactly a year after Beethoven’s death Schubert at last gave the concert of his own works that he meant “if God wills” to give some day. It was the urging of Bauernfeld and other friends which finally caused things to materialize. The idea was that if all went well Schubert might offer his private concert annually and the rascally publishers would at long last be singing a different tune. His friends rallied nobly to his aid. Vogl sang, Josefine Fröhlich’s pupils gave Luise Gosmar’s birthday serenade, there was chamber music and a male chorus. The Musikverein hall was packed, encores were innumerable, the applause would not end and, best of all, there was a clear profit of more than half a hundred dollars. The only fly in the ointment was that no critics came, though several foreign publications carried flattering accounts.
But the little wealth quickly ebbed away. Again there were futile bickerings with publishers. Schubert would have liked to go to Graz once more but Baden and excursions to nearby Grinzing and Sievering were as much as he could allow himself. Headaches and other symptoms of a year before troubled him alarmingly. His doctor advised him to leave the stuffy center of town for some place where he could have plenty of fresh country air. So in September he moved to a house in the Neue Wieden section, where his brother Ferdinand had taken rooms. The building was new, still damp and unhealthy. Aside from a pilgrimage to Haydn’s tomb at Eisenstadt and some annoyances with the publisher, Schott, both September and October were uneventful. Suddenly, while at dinner one day in the Lichtental neighborhood of his birth, he threw down his fork, shouted that the food tasted like poison and refused to eat further.
Probably nobody suspected a serious illness, let alone a fatal one. At that Schubert did not immediately take to bed. He dragged himself a few days later to hear a Requiem by his brother, shortly before which he had been fearfully agitated by a first hearing of Beethoven’s C sharp minor Quartet. Yet so little does his condition appear to have worried him that he went to the theorist Simon Sechter to arrange for instruction in counterpoint—his intimates and a study of Handel’s oratorios having supposedly persuaded him of his deficiencies in that branch of technic. Nothing came of the project. By November 12 he wrote Schober that “he is sick, has eaten nothing in eleven days and can do no more than crawl from his bed to a chair.” And he implores his friend to procure him reading matter, preferably Fenimore Cooper. The sickness made rapid inroads, though he continued to toy with the operatic scheme of the Count of Gleichen, and carefully corrected the proofs of his Winterreise cycle. Soon he became delirious and the doctors held a consultation. The diagnosis was “nerve fever,” or typhus, the same sickness which had carried off his mother. Pathetically he begged his brother not to leave him “in this corner under ground”; and when the anguished Ferdinand assured him he was in his own room he insisted: “No, that’s not true, Beethoven is not here!” A little later he turned his face to the wall and murmured, we are told, “Here, here is my end!” “The days of affliction,” wrote Father Schubert to Ferdinand, “lie heavy upon us”; and he presently made in the old list of births and deaths in the Schubert family the entry with the mortuary cross: “Franz Peter, Wednesday, Nov. 19, 1828, at three o’clock in the afternoon, of nerve fever, buried Saturday, Nov. 22, 1828.”
It was Ferdinand who decided that his brother should, in death, be brought closer to Beethoven than ever he had been in life. And since “Beethoven was not there,” where Schubert would ordinarily have been buried, Ferdinand saw to it that Franz should rest as close to his divinity as an intervening grave or two permitted. They were destined in the process of time to lie closer still. For three score years later the two masters were exhumed and placed side by side in two of those “graves of glory” in Vienna’s great Central Cemetery.
