Let us look back briefly to consider a few of Schubert’s early creative
accomplishments. How many experimental efforts preceded his earliest
extant compositions we can only surmise. His first surviving one is a
four-hand piano Fantasie, 32 pages long, running to more than a dozen
movements with frequent changes of time and key. A little later, on
March 30, 1811, he began his first vocal composition, an immensely
prolix affair called _Hagars Klage_ to a discursive poem about Hagar
lamenting her dying child in the desert. With its varying rhythms, its
pathetic slow introduction, its elaborate Allegro and its passionate
prayer, it shows the influence of the popular German ballad master,
Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg, who had himself composed the same text. Not
only Zumsteeg but composers like Reichhardt and Goethe’s friend, Zelter,
exercised moulding influences on Schubert in his formative stage. A
setting of Schiller’s _Leichenphantasie_ is carried out on much the same
lines and so is a ballad, _Der Vatermörder_, to a text by Pfeffel. And
there were other things besides long, trailing ballads—an orchestral
overture in D, a so-called quartet-overture and quintet-overture, an
Andante and a set of variations for piano, three string quartets “in
changing keys” (Schubert wrote seven quartets in all during his Konvikt
days), thirty minuets “with trio” for strings, “German dances,” some
four part Kyries for the Lichtental church and other matters bearing the
dates 1811 and 1812.
The good Ruziczka, finding himself unable to teach his young charge
anything he did not know already, handed him over to Salieri, who began
to give him lessons in counterpoint on June 18, 1812 (Schubert made a
record of the date). He must have profited by Salieri’s instruction or
he would hardly have remained his pupil all of five years, as he did.
One circumstance may astonish us—that he briefly suffered himself to be
swayed by the prejudice Salieri harbored against Beethoven. Yet when
Salieri celebrated his fiftieth year of musical activities, in 1816,
Schubert made a slighting entry in his diary about “certain bizarreries
of modern tendencies.” That this could have been only a passing
aberration is clear from the fact that Beethoven remained his divinity
and his despair to his dying day. He once told his friend, Spaun: “There
are times when I think something could come of me; but who is capable of
anything after Beethoven?” Indeed, Beethoven remained to such a degree
an obsession of his that the older Master’s name was almost the last
word he ever uttered.
[Illustration: Franz Schubert as a youth.
_From a crayon drawing by Leopold Kupelwieser_]
[Illustration: Franz Schubert in 1825
_From a water-color by Wilhelm August Rieder_]
Franz Theodor found it inexpedient to remain long a widower. Less than a
year after the loss of the quiet woman who had been his “deeply
treasured wife” he married the daughter of a silk goods manufacturer,
the “wertgeschätzte Jungfrau” Anna Kleyenböck, a woman of thirty, twenty
years his junior. The entire Schubert family, including the black sheep
from the Konvikt, was present at the wedding on April 25, 1813. Five
more children were born and this time only one died. Anna Kleyenböck
fitted perfectly into the Schubert _ménage_. Contrary to the tradition
of stepmothers she idolized her stepson, Franz, and was no less adored
by him in return. Later, when Father Schubert’s pecuniary position
somewhat improved, Anna showed herself a model of economy and thrift,
always putting what occasional savings the schoolmaster gave her into a
woolen stocking! It was from this stocking that she more than once
furnished a helping mite to her stepson in his days of need.
[Illustration: Anna Schubert, Franz’ beloved stepmother.
_A pencil drawing by von Schwind_]
Franz’s voice changed in 1812 and logically his days at the Konvikt
should have been numbered. But the authorities were by no means anxious
to be rid of him and his father would probably have been pleased if he
had stayed on. Even the Emperor, to whom representations were made and
whose attention the boy’s talents seem to have attracted, agreed that he
might remain and take advantage of the “Meerfeld scholarship”—provided
he made an effort to improve his standing in mathematics. Franz himself
must have realized that to return home meant to court renewed trouble
with his father, not to mention the risk of actual starvation. Yet he
was so fed up on the Konvikt that about the end of October, 1813, he
left what he called the “prison.” His last work written there (it is
dated October 28, 1813) was his First Symphony. But he maintained
cordial relations with the Seminary for some years, tried out some of
his new compositions in the Konvikt music room and preserved his
interest in the school orchestra.