Schubert and His Work

by Herbert F. Peyser

So the boy shed his “miller’s” vesture and put on the fancy, gold-braided togs of the Sängerknaben. In a few days he was settled at the Konvikt. He was amenable to discipline—having learned it plentifully at home—and does not appear to have suffered the tribulations of some other Konvikt scholars who were less conformable and more adventurous. The shyness which clung to him more or less throughout his life made him shun his fellow students as much as he conveniently could. The food was poor and scanty and even four years later we find him appealing pathetically to his brother Ferdinand for a few pennies a month to buy a roll or an apple as a fortifying snack between a “mediocre midday meal and a paltry supper” eight hours later! The music room at the school was left unheated, hence “gruesomely cold” (anyone who has experienced the unheated corridors of a Viennese house in winter can shudder in sympathy!). But there was plenty of music and the school orchestra, in which Schubert occupied the second desk among the violins, delighted him.

Every evening this orchestra played an entire symphony and ended up with “the noisiest possible overture.” The windows were left open in summer and crowds used to collect outside, till the police dispersed them because they obstructed traffic. The concerts were conducted by a singularly lovable old Bohemian organist, viola player and teacher, Wenzel Ruziczka, who at an early date defended and explained some of the boldest “modernisms” in Schubert’s compositions. The orchestra performed a good deal of trivial music but every now and then there would be works by Haydn, Mozart, Cherubini, Méhul and even some of the less taxing scores of Beethoven. Schubert on these occasions felt himself in heaven! He was “entranced” by the slow movements of Haydn, but his god was Mozart. With a subtlety of perception almost uncanny in a boy of twelve he said that the G minor Symphony “shook him to the depths without his knowing why.” He called the overture to the Marriage of Figaro the “most beautiful in the whole world,” then quickly added “but I had almost forgotten that to the Magic Flute.” It is certain that this student orchestra was a most valuable factor in Schubert’s musical education. It was with these young players in mind that he composed his First Symphony in October, 1813, at the age of sixteen.

At a first violin desk in front of Schubert there played another youth, some nine years older, a student of law and philosophy from Linz, Josef von Spaun, and thus began one of those Schubertian friendships that was to last for life and play an important part in Schubert’s story. Amazed by the beautiful playing he heard behind him, Spaun looked around and saw “a small boy in spectacles.” Not long afterwards he surprised the youngster in the freezing music room trying a sonata by Mozart. Franz confided to his sympathetic new friend that, much as he loved the sonata, he found Mozart “extremely difficult to play” (another acute observation!). Then, “shy and blushing,” he admitted that he “sometimes put his thoughts into notes.” However, he trembled lest his father get wind of the fact, for while Franz Theodor had no objection to music as a pastime and also had every reason to be satisfied that it paid for his son’s education and kept a roof over his head, he had other plans for him in mind. The real business of the young man’s life was to be schoolmastering. No two ways about it!

So Franz Peter had need to be wary. Besides, there was another obstacle to his composing. Music paper was scarce and costly. He did, it is true, rule staves on paper himself but even ordinary brown paper was not plentiful. So the generous Spaun, though of a rather restricted budget, bought paper out of his own allowance and did not remonstrate when Schubert used up the precious commodity “by the ream.” The only difficulty, now, was that Franz composed in study hours and fell back in his school work, a fact that was not slow in coming to his father’s notice. And yet the records of the Konvikt do not show that Schubert was a poor student. At various times certificates signed by the school director, Father Innocenz Lang, pronounce him “good” or “very good” in almost everything, while in Greek he is even described as “eminent.” Somewhat later when at normal school, preparing to teach in his father’s schoolhouse, his weaker subjects were mathematics, Latin and “practical religion.”

However, not all the parental thundering could keep nature from taking its course, even if it temporarily embittered Franz’s young life. Father Schubert at one stage went so far as to forbid his son to enter his house. The lad had been in the habit of going home on Sundays and holidays and there taking part in string quartet concerts with his father and his brothers, Ignaz and Ferdinand, Schubert himself occupying the viola desk and being the real director of the ensemble. He roughly scolded his brothers when they blundered, but cautiously corrected Franz Theodor’s errors with nothing more scathing than: “Herr Vater, something must be wrong here.” Now this diversion was denied him and he suffered. Not until May 28, 1812, was he permitted to return to the Lichtental roof-tree and then only because a tragic event softened the paternal heart. On that Corpus Christi day Franz’s mother died of typhus (or, as they called it then, “nerve fever”), the same malady which sixteen years later was to carry off Franz himself. In due course the chamber music sessions were resumed and in time they outgrew their humble environment.

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