Schubert and His Work

by Herbert F. Peyser

After writing all morning Schubert, like a true Viennese, usually went to enjoy the incomparable relaxation of a coffee house, drinking a Mélange (café au lait), eating Kipferl (crescents, if you prefer!), smoking and reading the newspapers. In the evening there was the opera and the theatre (provided one had money or somebody bought the tickets) or else the gatherings of the clans at the various “Gasthäuser,” “Stammbeisel” and taverns. The friends discussed questions of the day, literature, plays, music. They criticized each other’s work with unsparing frankness. Schubert’s uncommonly keen musical opinions were relished by everybody.

Although Schubert wished to have done with teaching as soon as possible he attempted (perhaps to placate his father) to obtain a pedagogical post in a normal school at Laibach. He was turned down in favor of some local applicant, which was no doubt just as well. Had it been otherwise the brilliant coterie of “Schubertians” might have been nipped in the bud and the term “Schubertiads,” as they called their revels and their discussions had it entered the dictionary at all, might have had another meaning.

Who were these “Schubertians,” this group of younger and older intellectuals and Bohemians held together, somehow, by the indefinable attraction of Schubert’s personality? They came and went with the years and when one or another vanished a different one would generally take his place. “Kann er was?” (“What’s he good at?”) was Franz’s usual query if a newcomer appeared—a question which earned him the nickname “Kanevas”! Virtually all who stepped into the charmed circle were good at something. Among the most prominent were Spaun, Mayrhofer, Stadler, Senn, and later Moriz von Schwind, the painter; the Kupelwieser brothers, Leopold and Josef, Josef Gahy, Karl Enderes, the poet Matthaeus Collin, the blue-stocking novelist, Karoline Pichler, Eduard von Bauernfeld, Franz von Schober—to cite only a handful that come to mind. Schober, particularly, who wrote, drew, acted and was in every sense a clever man of the world, played a considerable role in Schubert’s life—some even hint a rather nefarious one. Still, he was well-to-do, his rooms were at Franz’s disposal whenever he needed them and he introduced the composer to the great Michael Vogl.

The latter, whom Schubert had long worshipped at the opera, was not only one of the greatest baritones of his time, but a singular and romantic creature, who became a social favorite on the strength of his handsome face and figure, developed some harmless affectations yet remained a mystic at heart. He passed much of his spare time reading the Bible, Plato, Epictetus and other ancient and mediaeval poets and philosophers. He greeted Schubert in the condescending manner assumed by some popular artists when they first met aspiring beginners. He seemed unimpressed on glancing over the first song or two Schubert put before him, but after reading through Der Erlkönig he patted the composer on the back, remarking as one not wholly dissatisfied: “There’s something in you, but you’re too little of an actor or a charlatan. You squander your fine thoughts without developing them.” Yet before long he had become Schubert’s chief interpreter and propagandist, and spoke grandly of “these truly god-like inspirations, these revelations of musical clairvoyance.”

The chamber music concerts given on Sundays at the Schubert homestead in Lichtental had outgrown their strictly domestic character quite some time before Father Schubert had been transferred (late in 1817) to a new school in the neighboring Rossau district. The string quartet had expanded into a small orchestra and now performed symphonies and such in the homes of several musical acquaintances, lastly in that of a wealthy landowner, Anton Pettenkofer, who lived in the Inner Town, not far from St. Stephen’s. It was for this amateur orchestra that Schubert composed at least four of his early symphonies. The occasional absence of drums and trumpets (in the Fifth, for instance) indicates the constitution of the orchestra at different times. Schubert himself occupied a viola desk delighting, like Mozart and Bach before him, to be “in the middle of the harmony.”

Up to 1818 there had not been what one might describe as public performances of Schubert’s works other than church music. On March 1 there occurred the first of these, at a Musical-Declamatory Academy (that is to say, a miscellaneous concert) organized by a violinist, Eduard Jaell. One of Schubert’s pieces heard was a so-called Italian Overture. It was surprisingly well received by the critics and in less than three weeks other Schubert overtures were heard in Vienna, at similar entertainments. One aristocratic hearer prophesied in type (and correctly, as it proved) that Schubert’s works “would occupy an advantageous place among the productions of the present day.” Only a little earlier Franz had the satisfaction of seeing a composition of his appear for the first time in print! It was a setting of Mayrhofer’s poem Am Erlafsee and it was published in a kind of pictorial guide “For Friends of Interesting Localities in the Austrian Monarchy.”

Financially, Schubert reached in the spring of 1818 a rather desperate pass, as he was earning nothing and could not depend everlastingly on his friends. So when the father of the singer, Caroline Unger, recommended him to Count Johann Esterházy, of Galantha, as piano teacher for his two young daughters, Schubert accepted out of sheer need, much as he detested teaching of any kind. The summer estate of this branch of the Esterházy family was at Zseliz, in Hungarian-Slovakian frontier land, actually not far from Vienna but for Schubert the farthest away he had ever been. The pay was not generous but at least board and lodging were free, the country was a relief after the summer heat in Vienna, the Esterházys and their friends were not unmusical. The daughters, Maria and Caroline, were thirteen and eleven, respectively, whom Schubert found “amiable children.” He is now and then represented as having been in love with Caroline. If he really was it could only have been on his second visit to Zseliz, in 1824, when she had become a young lady of seventeen. Like Haydn, Schubert was quartered with the servants, which does not seem greatly to have irritated him, despite the boorishness of certain grooms (a pretty chambermaid, he wrote home, “sometimes kept him company”). The chief annoyance came from the cacklings of a nearby flock of geese.

Title-page of Schubert’s Fantasia for Piano and Four Hands (opus 103), dedicated by the composer to Countess Caroline Esterházy.

One man whom Schubert met at Zseliz was destined to become as inspired and outstanding an interpreter of his songs as Vogl—Karl Freiherr von Schönstein, whose singing of Schubert later drew tears of emotion from Liszt. He brought to the more lyrical songs an extraordinary artistry, sensitiveness and devotion. The Schöne Müllerin cycle in particular was to be his specialty. And Zseliz, both now and a few years afterwards, enriched Schubert still further by fertilizing his inspiration with Slavic and Hungarian folk music. “I compose and live like a god,” he wrote his brother, Ferdinand, though to Schober he speaks in a less exuberant strain. However, the Esterházys and Schönstein sang not a little of Schubert’s music and also ventured on more or less of Haydn’s Creation and Seasons as well as upon the whole of Mozart’s Requiem. Strangely enough, though he had far more time to write songs during these carefree months than he had some years earlier, he wrote appreciably fewer. His maturing genius was about to take other directions.