It was Schubert's custom, from an early age, to have quartet parties at his father's house on Sunday afternoons. When at the Convict he used to go home on Sundays for this purpose. As first arranged, the elder Schubert used to play the 'cello, Ferdinand first violin, Ignaz second, and Franz the viola. In those early days, if a wrong note was heard from the 'cello, young Franz would modestly say, "Father, there must be a mistake somewhere," and the hint was always well received. These Sunday quartets were often joined by friends and neighbors. By degrees the number of violins was increased, a double-bass and sundry wind instruments were added, and the affair grew into an orchestra which could perform Haydn's and Mozart's symphonies. Presently it became necessary to have the performances in a larger house, and in this way two or three moves were made, and the Orchestral Society of Amateurs was organized. Overtures by Cherubini, Spontini, Boieldieu, and Méhul, and the first and second symphonies of Beethoven were performed. It was for this Society that Schubert wrote his fourth and fifth symphonies and other orchestral works. In the autumn of 1820 the society broke down, as such societies are apt to do, under its own weight. It became necessary to have a large public hall for the meetings, and the expense thus entailed put an end to the pleasant and instructive enterprise. There can be little doubt that it was of much use to Schubert in giving him a chance to hear his own instrumental works performed and criticised. To a young man of his extremely modest and retiring disposition, moreover, the friendships thus formed were of much value.
Schubert was a man to whom friends became devotedly attached. He was faithful and true, a man of thoroughly sound character, disinterested and unselfish, without a particle of envy or jealousy about him. He won affection without demanding it or seeming to need it. He was one of those men whom one naturally and instinctively loves. Among his special friends we have already mentioned Spaun. Toward the end of 1814 he became acquainted with the poet Johann Mayrhofer, about ten years his senior, and the acquaintance ripened into a life-long intimacy. Mayrhofer was a man of eccentric nature, with a tinge of melancholy, possibly an incipient symptom of the insanity which many years afterward drove him to suicide. Perhaps the most interesting feature of his intimacy with Schubert was the powerful influence which the latter's music exercised upon the development of his poetical genius. It was under the spell of Schubert's charm that Mayrhofer's best poems came to blossom; and many of them were set to music by Schubert, among which "Erlasse," "Sehnsucht," "Nachtstück," "Die zürnende Diana," "Der Alpenjäger," "Der Schiffer," "Am Strome," and "Schlummerlied" deserve especial mention.
Another of Schubert's friends, and the one who probably exerted the most influence upon him, was Franz von Schober. Their acquaintance began at a critical moment. After three years of faithful and conscientious work in school-teaching, Schubert began to find the drudgery of his position intolerable, and in 1816, as a public school of music was about to be opened as an appendage to the normal school at Laybach, near Trieste, he applied for the post of director. To appreciate the situation, we must not fail to note the amount of the director's salary, five hundred Viennese florins, or about one hundred dollars, a year! Such was the coveted income to which the alternative seemed to be for Schubert, in Herr Kreissle's phrase, "an impecunious future." From Salieri and from Spendon recommendations were obtained, such as they were. There was nothing cordial in them, nothing to indicate that Schubert was a person of greater calibre than a certain commonplace Jacob Schaufl who obtained the appointment instead of him. Perhaps, however, they may only have doubted Schubert's capacity for a position of executive responsibility. It was at this juncture that young Schober came upon the scene, a student in comfortable circumstances, about eighteen years of age, who came to Vienna to continue his studies. He had fallen in with some of Schubert's songs a year or two before, and had conceived an enthusiastic admiration for the composer. When he found that the wonderful genius was a boy of about his own age, wearing out his nerves in a school room, and yet turning off divine music by the ream, he made up his mind to interpose. He could at least offer a home, and he persuaded Schubert to come and occupy his rooms with him. There Schubert began to give music lessons, but his earnings do not seem to have been considerable or constant. With Schober he remained a chum for some time, until the need of room for Schober's brother, a captain of hussars, led to a temporary change. From 1819 to 1821 Schubert had rooms with his friend Mayrhofer. After 1821 he lived nearly all the time with Schober until within a few weeks of his death. Their acquaintances were in the main a set of fine, cultivated young men who felt strong affection and respect for the inspired musician. Among Schubert's songs we find several set to Schober's words, among which we may mention "Pax vobiscum" and "Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden."
The third of the friends whose names are inseparably associated with Schubert was not one of the circle of young men just referred to, but a much older person. Johann Michael Vogl was nearly thirty years older than Schubert. In his youth he had had some monastic training and had afterward studied law and practised at the bar, but his rich baritone voice and his love for music led him in time to become a public singer, and for eight-and-twenty years he was a member of the German Opera Company. In an epoch notable for its great dramatic singers he was rated high, not so much for his vocal method as for the native quality of his voice and his intelligent and sympathetic rendering of his parts. He was a learned man, widely read in philosophy and theology, with a deeply religious nature and an intense feeling for music,—not a bad sort of man to sing Schubert's songs. It was in 1817 that Vogl first became aware of these treasures. Schober pestered him to come and see his wonderful friend and try some of his songs, but it was not the first time that this veteran had heard of wonderful young men, and he did not want to be bored. After a while, however, he called one evening, hummed through half a dozen songs—among them "Ganymed" and "Des Schäfer's Klage"—and became more and more interested. "Well, young man," he observed, on taking his leave, "there is stuff in you, but you squander your fine thoughts instead of making the most of them." But the more Vogl thought about the songs the more they loomed up in his memory as strangely and wondrously beautiful. He called again at the young composer's room, uninvited, found more and more music which riveted his attention, and it was not long before that house became one of his haunts. It was this intelligent and highly cultivated singer who first made Schubert known beyond the limited circle of his early friends and school-mates. People in the fashionable society of Vienna made their first acquaintance with the Wanderer and the Erl King as sung by Vogl's rich voice and in his noble style, with Schubert himself at the piano. Presently this furnished a new career for Vogl. In 1821 circumstances led to the discontinuance of his work at the Opera House, and he then began giving concerts, in which German Lieder were sung, and those of Schubert occupied a foremost place. In 1825 the two friends made a little concert tour together in the Salzburg country and Upper Austria. By that time the new songs were becoming famous, though one serious obstacle to the wide diffusion of their popularity was the want of singers able to grapple with their technical difficulties and to express their poetical sentiment in an artistic manner. Operatic quips and cranks and wanton flourishes would by no means answer the purpose. Old conventional methods were of no use. A passage from Vogl's diary is worth quoting in this connection for the glimpse it gives us of his fine artistic intelligence:—"Nothing shows so plainly the want of a good school of singing as Schubert's songs. Otherwise, what an enormous and universal effect must have been produced throughout the world, wherever the German language is understood, by these truly divine inspirations, these utterances of a musical clairvoyance! How many would have comprehended, probably for the first time, the meaning of such expressions as 'speech and poetry in music,' 'words in harmony,' 'ideas clothed in music,' etc., and would have learned that the finest poems of our greatest poets may be enhanced and even transcended when translated into musical language! Numberless examples may be named, but I will mention only the Erl King, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Schwager Kronos, the Mignon and Harper's songs, Schiller's Sehnsucht, Der Pilgrim, and Die Bürgschaft."
Bauernfeld. Schubert. Kupelwieser. Beethoven. Betty Fröhlich. Mayrhofer. Schwind. Spaun. Vogl. Grillparzer.
Josephine Fröhlich. Kathi Fröhlich.
SCHUBERT AND HIS FRIENDS.
Reproduced from photograph of painting which does not represent any historical scene, as Beethoven and Schubert never met amid such surroundings.
This grouping of Schubert's friends is made by poetical license.
No subsequent year of Schubert's life witnessed so great a number of compositions as 1816. For the next year eighty-six compositions are given in Sir George Grove's list. Of these fifty-two are songs, including many of those set to Mayrhofer's words. The two songs to Schober's words, above mentioned, came in this year. Special mention should also be made of the "Gruppe aus dem Tartarus," to Schiller's words, and of "Lob der Thränen" and "Die Forelle." "The Pilgrim" and "Ganymede" also belong to this time. Of large compositions for piano there were the sonatas in E minor; B, Op. 147; A minor, Op. 164; F minor; and A flat; besides the sonata in A, Op. 162, for piano and violin. There were also the variations for piano on a theme of Hüttenbrenner's; an adagio and rondo; two scherzos, and seventeen dances for piano; a set of polonaises for violin; and a string trio. The sixth symphony, in C, was written or finished in November, 1817, and performed by the amateur orchestral company above described. There were also three overtures, of which two, written in the Italian style, remind us that 1817 was the year in which Rossini's operas, newly introduced to Vienna, were received with wild enthusiasm. Schubert was altogether too far above Rossini's plane of thought to feel such interest in his work as he felt for the masterpieces of polyphonic composition. But he appreciated highly the Italian's gift of melody, and with the assimilative power which is wont to characterize great genius, he took hints from him which are apparent not only in the two Italian overtures, but perhaps also in the sixth symphony. Or in other words, as all creative work is influenced by its environment, there was a discernible Rossini tinge in the atmosphere which Schubert was for the moment breathing, and it has left its slight traces upon a few of his compositions for that year, as upon the work of less potent creators it left many and deep impressions.