Schubert and His Work

by Herbert F. Peyser

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,