The year 1818 witnessed the beginning of an episode in Schubert's life, quite different in many respects from what had preceded. He was engaged by Count Esterhazy to teach music in his family. There were two daughters, Marie, aged thirteen, and Caroline, aged eleven, and a son aged five. All were musically gifted, and their friend, Baron von Schönstein, was a very accomplished singer. The engagement took Schubert to the Count's country home in Hungary for the summer, while the winter season was passed in Vienna. Schubert's intercourse with this amiable and cultivated family was very pleasant, and in the course of it seems to have occurred the nearest approach to a love affair that can be detected in his life. Little Caroline Esterhazy was at the outset not at an age likely to evoke the tender passion. But as time elapsed and she came to be seventeen or eighteen years of age, it has been supposed that Schubert manifested symptoms of having fallen in love with her. The evidence is slight, as evidence is apt to be in such matters, in the absence of anything like an overt declaration. The nearest that Schubert seems ever to have come to such a declaration was once when Caroline in an innocent moment of girlish coquetry asked him why, when he was dedicating so many delightful works to other persons, he had never dedicated anything to her. Schubert is said to have replied, "Why should I? Is not everything that I have ever done dedicated to you already?" This anecdote does not go far as proof. Question and answer might alike have been merely pleasant jesting. Contemporary rumor, in the case of a man so shy and reserved on all matters of deep feeling as Schubert, cannot be expected to tell us much. The general impression about him was that he was almost insensible to the charms of fair women. If this impression is to be taken as true, an interesting question is suggested. How could a man who was never in love have written that immortal Serenade in which all that is sweetest and most sacred in the love of man for woman comes forth like a fresh breath from heaven? Never was voice of love so passionate and so pure. Nowhere has human art ever found more consummate and faultless expression than in this song of songs. It could no more have come from a soul insensible to the passion of love than figs can grow upon thistles. Probably therefore the general impression about Schubert was due in the main to his reticence. We have also to bear in mind that such a nature as his can find in artistic creation a vent for emotional excitement strong enough to craze the ordinary mind. We know how it was with Goethe, how the worst pains of life were healed for him by being thrown off in passionate poetry. This is quite intelligible. It is a special illustration of Shakespeare's injunction:—
"Give sorrow words; the grief that cannot speak
Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break."
This need for expression, felt by every human creature, appears in men of profound and intense interior life as a creative impulse; it is so not only with artists and poets, but in many cases with scholars, philosophers, and scientific discoverers; the relief is found in giving objective form to the thoughts that come welling up from the depths of the spirit. But it is in art that creative expression most becomes in itself an overmastering end, and especially in the two arts that give swiftest and readiest outlet to emotion, in poetry and in music. Hence one of the noblest functions of art, to be the consoler of the troubled soul, to sink its individual sorrows in the contemplation of eternal beauty, to bring weary and doubting humanity into restful communion with the divine source of all its yearnings, in the faith that they have not been given us for naught. If there ever was a soul thus sustained and comforted, it was the pure and earnest soul of Schubert; the stream of song that flowed from him was like the ecstatic but soothing and strengthening prayer of the mediæval saint. One can see that this shy and sensitive young man, somewhat inclined withal to self-depreciation, would not be quick to avow a love which social conditions at any rate scarcely favored. He was son of a peasant, Caroline Esterhazy was daughter of a count. Such a passion was likely to seek relief in strains of music, as Dante's worship of Beatrice found expression in verse. As the thought of Beatrice was in all that Dante wrote, so the story of Schubert's momentary confession to Caroline that all that he had sung was dedicated to her is in nowise improbable in itself. There is a circumstance which invests it with a considerable degree of probability. Shortly after Schubert's death his beautiful Fantasia in F minor, Op. 103, was published with the inscription, "Dedicated to the Countess Caroline Esterhazy by Franz Schubert," and Sir George Grove rightly infers that the publishers would hardly have ventured upon such a step "unless the manuscript—probably handed to them before his death—had been so inscribed by himself." This is perhaps all that is known concerning the question as to Schubert's love.
At the Esterhazy country-house Schubert seems at first to have felt more at home in the kitchen than in the drawing-room. A letter to Schober, written in September, 1818, says:—"The cook is a pleasant fellow; the ladies' maid is thirty; the housemaid very pretty, and often pays me a visit; the nurse is somewhat ancient; the butler is my rival; the two grooms get on better with the horses than with us. The Count is a little rough; the Countess proud, but not without heart; the young ladies good children." It was not long before Schubert found himself a great favorite with the whole household, from the count down to the grooms. From this time until his death he was always welcome whenever he chose to come, Baron von Schönstein, the singer already mentioned, had hitherto sung nothing but Italian music, but he was now converted to the German Lied, and for the rest of his life devoted himself to Schubert's songs, until for his magnificent rendering of them he acquired a fame scarcely second to Vogl.
During the winter seasons in Vienna, Schubert continued to give music lessons in the Esterhazy family, but his home was apt to be in the humble room with Mayrhofer, or afterwards again with Schober. He was as regular with his work of composing music as Anthony Trollope with his novel-writing or Sainte-Beuve with his "Causeries du Lundi." When Ferdinand Hiller was about sixteen years old he made a visit to Vienna and called upon Schubert. "Do you write much?" asked Hiller,—a question which now sounds odd enough, and shows how little knowledge of the great composer there was outside of his own town. "I write every morning," said Schubert, "and as soon as I have finished one thing I begin another." This regularity was simply an outcome of the fact that the fount of inspiration was never dry. It was not because it was work done for much needed money, for the larger part of Schubert's work never brought him any money. It was primarily because singing was as spontaneous with him on first awaking as with a bird; sometimes he could not wait to get up and dress, but seized a sheet of music paper and jotted down his first exuberant thoughts while still in bed. After a piece was finished, he sometimes heard it sung or played, and sometimes did not; in either case it was apt soon to be tucked away in a cupboard drawer and forgotten; there are several anecdotes of his listening to old songs of his own without recognizing them.
After working till two o'clock in the afternoon, Schubert used to dine, and then visit friends, or take a walk, or sit in a café over his schoppen of wine or beer. At such times, as we have seen, the sight of a poem, or perhaps some interesting incident, would call forth a sudden outburst of song. Some of his noblest masterpieces came from the beer garden. He does not seem to have been in the habit of drinking anything stronger than beer and wine. Of these light beverages he was very fond, and as his head was easily affected, an opinion has found currency that this appetite was a weakness with Schubert,—perhaps his only assignable weakness. The fact, however, that he was always up early and quite fresh for the morning's work, is clear proof that it could not have been a serious weakness. Among friends with whom he was well acquainted he was genial and jovial, and liked to sit and talk; but he habitually entertained a due respect for to-morrow morning.
The compositions for the three years 1818-20 were about a hundred in number. There were some noble church works, the fourth mass in C and the fifth in A flat, a Salve Regina for soprano voice with string orchestra, four hymns by Novalis, the twenty-third Psalm to Moses Mendelssohn's version, and the Easter cantata "Lazarus"; also the operetta "Die Zwillingsbrüder" and the fragment of an unfinished opera, "Sakuntala"; an overture for orchestra, quartetts, quintets, canzoni, many dances for piano, and many songs.
The year 1821 marked a new era with Schubert; in that year some of his compositions were first published. Some of his friends were determined to have a group of his songs engraved, among them the Erl King which had now often been heard in private concerts. They applied to two or three of the most enterprising music publishers in Vienna, but without success. There was no profit in such publications, said the sagacious men of business. The composer was so obscure that his name would carry no weight; and as for the songs, they were strange affairs, the melodies too difficult for anybody to sing, and the piano accompaniments quite impossible for any one to play! As the publishers thus proved unmanageable, some of Schubert's friends had the Erl King engraved and printed by subscription, and about the same time the song was first heard at Vienna in a public concert, with the accompaniment played by the composer himself. It was in this year, as already observed, that Vogl began giving concerts in which these songs took a prominent place. In the course of a few months seven groups of Schubert's songs were published on commission, and their success was such that publishers were afterward ready to go on at their own risk. Of new compositions this year saw the completion of the beautiful "Gesang der Geister über den Wassern" for four tenors and four basses, with accompaniment of two violas, two 'cellos, and double-bass. There was also the seventh symphony, for the most part a sketch, but so full of clues that it would not be difficult to complete it according to the original intention. It looks as if the composer had some other work upon his mind at the same time, perhaps the Alfonso and Estrella presently to be mentioned, and could not for the moment wait to fill out all parts of the score, but made very complete indications so as to be sure of recovering his former thoughts on returning to it. Among this year's songs are some that rank very high, as the two Suleikas and the "Geheimes" to Goethe's words, the "Lob der Thränen" and "Sey mir gegrüsst." All these are outdone, however, by the "Frühlingsglaube," written in 1822, to Uhland's words, a song which for artistic perfection is absolutely unsurpassed.
The rapid development of Schubert's maturity in 1822 is exhibited in the two movements of his eighth symphony in B-minor, now commonly called the Unfinished Symphony. It was written for the Musikverein at Gratz, which had lately elected him an honorary member. Why it was presented to the society while still half-finished does not clearly appear. The first two movements were completed and the scherzo partly sketched. It is now more often played and better known than any of his other symphonies except the great tenth, in C major, presently to be mentioned. There is greater conciseness of expression, and in the opinion of some critics, even more grandeur and beauty in the Unfinished Symphony than in the Tenth. Here for the first time in an orchestral work Schubert appears as a completely independent master. In his earlier symphonies, as in Beethoven's first and second, one always feels the dominant influence of Haydn and Mozart. In his sixth symphony, composed in 1817, we begin to see the influence of Beethoven, for whom he was already coming to feel the love and adoration that never ceased to occupy his mind even upon his death-bed. In the Unfinished Symphony he takes a new departure, as Beethoven did in his third or Eroica; but this new departure, while it profits by Beethoven, is peculiarly Schubertian; the composer's individuality is as completely expressed in it as in his songs.