This is, perhaps, as good a place as any to consider for a moment the
early symphonies of Schubert. One says “early” because Schubert’s
symphonic output falls sharply into two distinct halves. Six of them—two
in D major, two in B flat, one in C minor and one in C major—belong to
the years from 1813 through 1817. They are relatively small in scale,
melodically charming, in numerous detail of harmony and color
unmistakably Schubertian, yet by and large derivative. They naïvely
reflect phraseology and other influences the young composer assimilated
from the music he was then studying and hearing. Thus, in the Second
Symphony may be heard echoes of Beethoven’s Fourth and jostling one
another through the pages of the others are reminiscences (if not
outright citations) of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Weber. The
Fourth (in C minor) is for some not clearly defined reason entitled
_Tragic_; the Sixth, still more inexplicably, the composer characterized
as _Grosse_ (great) _Symphonie in C_. Perversely enough, it is probably
the weakest of the six, the one which least satisfied its creator. Time
has paradoxically rechristened this symphony the “little” C major to
distinguish it from the great C major of 1828. The Fifth, in B flat,
remains with its endearing reminders of Mozart, perhaps the loveliest
and most frequently played of all this symphonic juvenilia. Most of
these scores, however, are oftener heard today than they were till
recent years. For all their (perhaps half-conscious) borrowings they are
still palpable Schubert, even if lesser Schubert. Such a master as
Dvorak was always ready to break a lance in their behalf and one of his
proudest boasts was how often, as Conservatory director in New York, he
used to conduct his students’ orchestra in the Fifth of the set.
No sooner was Schubert liberated from the Konvikt than he found himself
faced with a worse menace—conscription. Service in the Austrian army was
in those days no laughing matter. Its duration was fourteen years and
the prospect of such a lifetime of soldiering might have appalled an
even less sensitive nature than Schubert’s. There were loopholes, of
course, particularly for those who had wealth and position. For those
who did not, the best road of escape lay through the schoolroom. Since
there was need of teachers, the government exempted them. It almost
looked as if the State were conspiring with Father Schubert against his
son. Poor Franz Peter had no alternative and so, barely out of the
Konvikt, he enrolled in the Normal School of St. Anna for a ten months’
preparatory course to teach a primary class at his father’s school, a
chore which was to occupy him for the next three years.
Hateful as he found his labors he seems to have discharged them
conscientiously enough. Yet if the Konvikt, where he had numerous
friends, was a “prison” what was this? He was only one of many
“assistants” and he had to live under his father’s roof, though he _did_
earn forty gulden a year. Was he a good disciplinarian? He himself once
confessed to his friend, Franz Lachner, that he was a “quick-tempered
teacher,” who when disturbed by the little imps in his class while he
composed thrashed them soundly “because they always made him lose the
thread of his thought.” His sister, Therese, later told Kreissle von
Hellborn (Schubert’s first biographer) that he “kept his finger in
practise on the children’s ears.” Another story has it that he was
finally dismissed for a particularly smart box on the ear of a
particularly stupid girl. Still, when Schubert later applied for another
school position Superintendent Josef Spendou commended the applicant’s
“method of handling the young.”
While he was at the St. Anna School, Schubert composed among a quantity
of other things his first complete mass and his first opera. The former
(in F) is the more important of the two. It was written for the limited
resources of the Lichtental parish church—which on October 14, 1814,
celebrated its centenary—in mind. The work of the seventeen-year-old
composer was heard with unconcealed pleasure. He conducted it himself,
his former teacher, Holzer, led the choir and the soprano soloist was
Therese Grob, a year younger than Schubert and daughter of a Lichtental
merchant who lived around the corner from Father Schubert’s schoolhouse.
Ten days later the mass was repeated in the Church of St. Augustine, in
the imperial Hofburg. This performance seems to have aroused even more
enthusiasm and good will than the first. Salieri proudly pointed to the
boyish composer as his own pupil and Franz Theodor, now that he knew his
son safely caged in a classroom, made him a present of a five-octave
piano. The Mass itself, a tenderly felt, lyrical, simple work, is
sensitive and promising rather than something epoch-making, such as the
composer was soon to achieve in the less pretentious province of the
solo song.
A word about Therese Grob, who more or less properly figures in
Schubert’s story as his first love. Her family was refined and musical
and Franz Peter, who was a visitor at the Grob household, may have found
there some of the same sympathy and understanding the young Beethoven
did in the home of the von Breunings. Certainly, he composed a number of
things for Therese and her brother, Heinrich. His friend, Holzapfel,
declares that Therese was “no beauty, but shapely, rather plump, with a
fresh round little face of a child.” In after years Schubert told Anselm
Hüttenbrenner that he had loved her “very deeply.” She was not pretty,
he said, and was pock-marked but “good to the heart.” He had “hoped to
marry her” but could find no position which would insure him the means
to support a wife. Her mother having decided it was no use to wait for a
penniless composer to become a somebody made her take a well-to-do baker
instead. Poor Schubert told his friend this had greatly pained him and
that he “loved her still,” but added philosophically “as a matter of
fact, she was not destined for me.” Did Schubert, we may ask, really
contemplate marriage? If he did how are we to understand an entry he
made in his diary in 1816: “Marriage is a terrifying thought to a free
man...”? Actually, Schubert’s life was devoid of what might be described
as urgent affairs of the heart—outwardly, at least. One will seek vainly
in his case for the periodic transports of a Beethoven or even the
passing dalliances of a Mozart. Friendships rather than passionate
ardors were Schubert’s specialties—and his friendships with women were
quite as sincere as with men and had the same basis of sentimental
conviviality. Hüttenbrenner had small reason to chaff his companion (as
he once did) for being “so cold and dry in society toward the fair sex.”
Certainly, the delightful Fröhlich sisters (whom we shall meet shortly)
did not find him “dry.” It is so easy to mistake shyness for
coldness—and if Schubert was anything he was diffident, sometimes
tragically so!
Opera had exercised a strong attraction on Franz Peter even while he was
a student at the Konvikt. He used to accompany Spaun to the Kärntnertor
Theatre whenever holidays or the state of Spaun’s purse permitted. The
friends sat in the top gallery and heard operas like Weigl’s
_Schweizerfamilie_, Spontini’s _Vestale_, Cherubini’s _Medea_,
Boieldieu’s _Jean de Paris_ and Gluck’s _Iphigenia in Tauris_. Among the
great singers Schubert heard in this way were Pauline Milder and Johann
Michael Vogl. Both artists were soon to become his friends—Vogl, indeed,
the high priest of his songs.
What wonder, then, that Schubert planned an opera of his own? In May,
1814, while at the St. Anna School, he completed a “natural magic opera”
in three acts called _Des Teufels Lustschloss_ (“The Devil’s Pleasure
Palace”). The libretto was by a popular dramatist of the time, August
Kotzebue, who could hardly have attached much importance to it or he
would never have permitted an unknown beginner to compose it. The piece
was the first of a pageant of ugly ducklings, an operatic progeny of
sorrow destined to span Schubert’s life from his schooldays to his
grave. If we add up his works for the stage—completed, fragmentary,
partly sketched or lost—in less than a decade and a half we shall arrive
at the astonishing total of eighteen. And today there is almost nothing
to show for all this heartbreaking industry because an ancient (and
largely untested) tradition calls Schubert’s operas “undramatic” and
otherwise “poor theatre.” Possibly they are. But how many now living can
speak of a Schubert opera from actual experience?
_Des Teufels Lustschloss_ was never performed in Schubert’s Vienna,
though Prague was once on the point of staging it. The plot has to do
with the adventures of an impecunious Count Oswald who, on the way to
his tumbled-down castle with his wife, stops at a wayside inn. There the
peasantry of the neighborhood entreats the knight to free a nearby ruin
from ghosts and other spooky visitants. He consents and, together with
his squire (a kind of Sancho Panza), penetrates the infested premises.
The spectres take him captive and subject him to grisly tests—the worst
of which is a command to marry a “ghostly” but extremely substantial
Amazon who suddenly appears on the scene. In despair Oswald springs into
the abyss and lands—in the arms of his wife! Her wealthy uncle, it
transpires, being displeased with his niece’s marriage to the penniless
Count has “arranged” the whole ordeal as a test of Oswald’s fidelity,
with the help of his gardener’s buxom daughter—the “Amazon”—and
“machines of all kinds brought at considerable expense from foreign
parts.”
It should be remembered, however, that such extravagances were habitual
ingredients of innumerable “magic” plays and comedies which for
generations, indeed for centuries, formed the stock-in-trade of the
Viennese suburban theatre and the most sublimated outgrowth of which was
Mozart’s _Magic Flute_. Moreover, not the effect of such a wild tale in
the _reading_ but in _performance on the stage, in a theatre, before an
audience_ is the proof of the pudding. The same with the text—a specimen
of the poetry of _Des Teufels Lustschloss_ is the ensuing of Count
Oswald’s squire:
_“I’m laughing, I’m crying, I’m crying, I’m laughing,_
_I’m laughing, ha, ha, ha,_
_I’m laughing, hi, hi, hi,_
_I’m laughing, ho, ho, ho,_
_I’m laughing, hu, hu, hu”..._
The test of such a thing is not the verbiage but the composer’s
treatment of it. There is no question here of a masterpiece any more
than there is in the mass, or indeed, in the various orchestral or
chamber works, he had produced thus far. It was different, however, with
the song (_Lied_) which he was turning out in effortless abundance. He
had made settings among other things of poems by Schiller, Fouqué,
Mattheson (_Adelaide_, for one, though smoother, more lyrical and less
varied in its mood than Beethoven’s famous song). Then, on October 19,
1814—“the birthday of the German Lied” it has been called—there comes
like a bolt from the blue the epoch-making _Gretchen am Spinnrade_, from
Goethe’s _Faust_. It is a simple, plaintive melody above a murmuring
spinning wheel figure and a pulsing rhythmic throb, but nevertheless a
marvel of jointless form and a miracle of psychology, the emotional
experience of ages concentrated into one hundred bars of music of such
infinite art and uncanny perfection that it almost defies analysis.
As if a gigantic dam had burst, a torrent of immortal mastersongs now
begins to pour forth. Not everything, to be sure, either now or later is
a deathless creation but the number of those that are will probably
remain baffling to the end of time. Schubert frequently made two, three
or more settings of one and the same text, differing in greater or
lesser degree from the earlier one though not invariably better than the
preceding version. Of the more than six hundred Lieder Schubert composed
almost a third are such resettings. It was nothing unusual for him to
turn out four, five, six songs a day. “When I finish one I begin
another,” was his carefree way of describing the incredible process.
Sometimes he even forgot which songs were his own. “I say, that’s not a
bad one; who wrote it?” he once asked on hearing something he had
composed only a few days before. He was careless, too, about what became
of some of his manuscripts and there is no telling how much posterity
may have lost as a result. Once he came near ruining a page on which he
had written his song _Die Forelle_ by pouring ink instead of sand over
the wet writing; being sleepy, he did not bother to notice which
receptacle he had picked up.