Schubert and His Work

by Herbert F. Peyser

The “Unfinished”

As for the B minor Symphony, the sweet, grief-burdened, nostalgic Unfinished, the fable has prevailed for years that it was written as a thanks offering to the Steiermärkischer Musikverein of Graz, which had elected Schubert to membership and of which Anselm Hüttenbrenner was artistic director. As a matter of fact, the date on the title page of the manuscript is October 30, 1822. But not till April 10, 1823, was Schubert proposed for membership in the society and not till September, 1823, was the composer informed of his election. He wrote a letter to Graz promising to send the Musikverein, as a token of his gratitude, the score of one of his symphonies. But it was not until a year later that, prodded by his father, who was shocked by the idea that a son of his had waited so long to thank the society “worthily,” he gave Josef Hüttenbrenner the score of the B minor Symphony to deliver to Anselm in Graz.

So much for facts! We may as well pursue the epic of the Unfinished to its close. We do not know whether Anselm ever showed the symphony to the society and there is no record that he mentioned it to a soul, though he is said to have made a piano arrangement of the symphony for his own use. Not till 1860 did Josef Hüttenbrenner speak of it to Johann Herbeck, conductor of the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music, and five more years were to elapse before Herbeck, on a visit to Graz, obtained the score from Anselm on the plea of wanting to produce some “new” works by Hüttenbrenner, Lachner and Schubert. On December 17, 1865, Vienna heard the Unfinished for the first time. The autograph shows no trace of any dedication to the Graz Music Society or to anybody else! But from the start the symphony was acclaimed an undefiled masterpiece.

The “Rosamunde” Overture

In 1823, the same year in which Schubert brought to paper the operas Die Verschworenen and Fierrabras he wrote for a romantic play called Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus, by the half-mad poetess Helmine von Chezy, a number of vocal and instrumental pieces which are perhaps the best loved samples of theatre music he ever composed. The play itself was a sorry failure, had exactly two performances (though Schubert gallantly assured the unfortunate librettist that he considered her work “excellent”) and the book was lost. The Overture we call Rosamunde today and which had been written originally for The Magic Harp was never used to preface the work whose name it has borne for generations—was, in fact, not entitled Rosamunde till later. The one with which Schubert had prefaced Helmine von Chezy’s drama was the introduction he had used for Alfonso und Estrella. There are lovely and striking things in the Rosamunde score—a soprano romanza, an ensemble for spirits and two other choruses as well as some ballet music and various entr’actes. The third interlude brings us that deathless melody which seems to have haunted Schubert’s imagination and reappears in the slow movement of the A minor Quartet and the B flat Impromptu for piano.

The Rosamunde score disappeared from view for more than forty years and the tale of its recovery belongs to the exciting legends of music. Like most legends even this one needs to be qualified. The story usually goes that the Englishmen, George Grove and Arthur Sullivan, in 1867 came upon the manuscript in a dusty cupboard at the Viennese home of Dr. Eduard Schneider, husband of Schubert’s sister, Therese. What the two British explorers found in that famous closet were the complete orchestral and vocal parts of the score, which made clear the correct sequence of the pieces and supplied certain accompaniments which had been missing. But Grove himself records that “besides the entr’actes in B minor and B flat and the ballet numbers 2 and 9, which we had already acquired in 1866, we had found at Mr. Spina’s (the publisher) an entr’acte after the second act and a Shepherd’s Melody for clarinets, bassoons and horns.... But we still required the total number of pieces and their sequence in the drama....”

For all his difficulties and privations Schubert’s health had been, up to 1823, perhaps the least of his worries. But early in that year he had been ailing and soon his illness took a serious turn. Confined to his lodgings at first he was presently taken to the General Hospital. He became darkly despondent and wrote to his friend, Leopold Kupelwieser, a mournful letter in which he alluded to himself as “a man whose health can never be right again ... whose fairest hopes have come to nothing ... who wishes when he goes to sleep never more to awaken and who joyless and friendless passes his days.” A little later he sets down in his diary the bitter reflection: “There is none who understands the pain of another and none his joy.” Nor is this by any means his only pessimistic entry.

The exact nature of Schubert’s malady has never been definitely established, even by modern medical authorities who have studied the case. We know that his hair fell out and that till it grew in again he had to wear a wig. Some have hinted at “irregularities” of one sort or another. At different times he complained of “headaches, vertigo and high blood pressure.” His condition was to improve greatly in the course of time but he was never again wholly well.

The melancholy of Schubert was surely not lessened by his dealings with publishers, who took the most despicable advantage of his woeful inexperience in business affairs. Diabelli once persuaded him to sign over for a mere 800 Gulden all his rights in a set of works. The publisher (and later his successor) made 27,000 Gulden on the Wanderer Fantasie (for piano) alone. Schubert got exactly 20 (about $10)! Another Viennese firm went so far as to ask him to sell them his compositions at the most favorable starvation rate “paid a beginner,” while publishers in Germany were, if anything, even worse! Yet when Schubert had a few dollars in his pocket he thought nothing of spending a part of it on tickets for himself and his friend Bauernfeld for a concert by Paganini, whose spectacular violin playing excited Schubert quite as much as it did the rest of Vienna.

In spite of illness and discouragement many of his works at this time rank among his very greatest. There are, first of all, the 23 songs of the Schöne Müllerin cycle—the unhappy story of the love of a youth for a miller’s daughter who jilts him for a green-clad hunter—containing such lyrics as Wohin and Ungeduld, which have virtually become folksongs; the piano sonata, Op. 143; the fabulous Octet, written for an amateur clarinetist, Count Troyer (and after a few hearings put away and forgotten till 1861); and that sweetest and most tender of Schubert’s chamber music works, the A minor Quartet, with its lovely Rosamunde melody, the indescribable lilt of its minuet and the Slavic and Hungarian influences in its finale.