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.
He was to experience more of these influences the summer of 1824, for at
that time he went once again to the Esterházys in Zseliz. The country
air and the quiet life of the place in addition to regular meals and
comfortable quarters exercised a recuperative effect. Moreover, the
Countess Caroline was now a sightly young lady of seventeen. Possibly
Schubert was not indifferent to her charms. But his letters to his
father and his brother Ferdinand make it clear that he was homesick and
often decidedly blue. Still, he wrote some admirable music at Zseliz—the
_Divertissement à l’Hongroise_, the stunning _Grand Duo_ for four hands,
the sonata for arpeggione and piano; and thoughts of a great symphony,
more imposing than any he had composed so far, began to occupy his mind.
He had heard, also, that Beethoven intended to give a concert at which
his Ninth Symphony would be produced. And he wrote to Kupelwieser: “If
God wills, I am thinking next year of giving a similar concert!”
[Illustration: Schubert at the pianoforte during a musicale at the home
of Josef R. v. Spaun]
[Illustration: A rare coffee cup of Vienna porcelain in the collection
of the Schubert Museum in Vienna. Shown are a portrait of Schubert and
a replica of the “Novalis” Hymn No. II.]
In May, 1825, Vogl invited Schubert to accompany him on an outing which
proved to be the longest trip he was ever to take. Franz brought with
him a number of compositions, finished and unfinished, among them
settings of songs from Sir Walter Scott’s _The Lady of the Lake_, of
which the _Ave Maria_ is one of the best loved things he ever wrote. The
friends revisited the haunts of their previous journey, but this time
Vogl took Schubert further—to Gmunden, on the Traunsee in the
Salzkammergut; to Salzburg; then southward as far as Bad Gastein. All
along the way there was no end of music making, charming new
acquaintances, hospitable folk who threatened to kill the travellers
with kindness. Schubert cut up all manner of musical capers on occasion
(one of his favorite pranks was to give a performance of _Der Erlkönig_
on a comb covered with paper!). He was careful not to forget his
parents. In an affectionate letter to his father he asks, chaffingly, if
his brother, Ferdinand, “has not been ill seventy-seven times again” and
surmises that he has surely imagined at least nine times that he was
going to die. “As if death were the worst thing that could befall one!”,
he suddenly exclaims, growing serious; “could Ferdinand only look on
these divine lakes and mountains which threaten to crush and overwhelm
us he would no longer love this puny human life but deem it a great
happiness to be restored for a new life to the inscrutable forces of the
earth”! It is a question how pleased Father Schubert was with this
pantheistic declaration of his son’s; when Franz was in Zseliz,
Ferdinand had warned him against discussing religious matters when
writing to his parent.
Curiously enough, Schubert passed through Salzburg without any allusion
to his idol, Mozart. In Gastein he found time to complete the great
piano sonata in D and to write several songs, one of them a setting of
Ladislaus Pyrker’s _Die Allmacht_—a grandiose musical duplication of
that statement of faith he had fearlessly written his father. At this
health resort, furthermore, Schubert is supposed to have completed that
famous _Gastein Symphony_ of which nobody has ever been able to find a
trace. All manner of theories have been advanced with respect to this
mysterious work. Some of Schubert’s intimates have insisted that the
composer worked on it in the summer of 1825 and intended it for a
benefit concert by the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music. Others
charge the Society with negligence resulting in the loss of the score,
while still other investigators have imagined that the _Grand Duo_,
composed a year earlier, might be an unorchestrated version of the
missing score; or else that Schubert had merely contemplated a revision
of the early Sixth Symphony, with which he had never been satisfied.
Whether the hypothetical _Gastein_ or the subsequent C major of 1828
represents the “great symphony” to which Schubert aspired we have no way
of knowing.
In 1826 a conductor’s post had become free and although Schubert had not
long before turned down an organ position offered him (probably because
he did not like the idea that his freedom might be curtailed) he did
apply for this conductorship, attracted by the moderate salary it
promised. It was not Schubert who got it but the popular mediocrity,
Josef Weigl. How little Schubert harbored jealousy is clear from his
satisfaction that the job had gone to “so worthy a man as Weigl.” Then a
vacancy occurred at the Kärntnertor Theatre. The candidate for a minor
conductor’s post had to submit a specially composed dramatic air for the
singer, Nanette Schechner, and of course Schubert did so. But the
Schechner, we are told, demanded changes in the music and Schubert
peremptorily refused to make them. In spite of passionate entreaties and
a spectacular fainting fit by the soprano, the composer pocketed his
score and walked off coldly announcing: “I will change nothing.” So
things remained about as they were. True, the Friends of Music in 1825
had permitted him to substitute for a viola player at some of their
concerts—after first rejecting his plea to do so on the ground that he
“made a living of music” and that professionals were ineligible! Thus
when in the summer of 1826 he would have liked to go once more to Linz
there was no money for him to go anywhere. He had to content himself
with the suburb of Währing and to aggravate matters it rained for a
month.
All the same, 1826 was a year of significant works. In June Schubert
composed within ten days his last string quartet, the vast and almost
orchestrally colored one in G major. During the preceding winter he had
written what is undoubtedly the most familiar of his quartets, the D
minor, the slow movement of which consists of those variations on his
song _Death and the Maiden_ which are among the supreme variations of
musical literature. Further, there were the melodically blooming B flat
Trio for piano, violin and cello, the lovely G major piano sonata, the
“Rondo Brilliant,” for violin and piano and numerous songs, among them
the two Shakespearean settings _Hark, hark, the Lark_ and _Who is
Sylvia?_ Almost everybody who has ever interested himself in Schubert is
familiar with the fable about the origin of _Hark, hark, the Lark_—how
one day Schubert picked up a volume of Shakespeare in a Währing beer
garden and how, after skimming through _Cymbeline_, he suddenly
exclaimed: “A lovely melody has come into my head—if only I had some
music paper!”; whereupon a friend drew some staves on the back of a bill
of fare and the song was instantly written. Unfortunately for legend,
the song was written originally _not_ on a bill of fare but in a small
note book including a number of other compositions—one of them on the
reverse side of the very page containing _Hark, hark, the Lark_. What
seems a likelier story is that Schubert wrote it in Schwind’s room,
while the latter was trying to draw his picture.
March, 1827, was the date of Beethoven’s death. Schubert was one of the
torchbearers at the funeral. Back from the Währing cemetery he went with
some friends to a coffee house in the “Inner Town.” The gathering was in
a solemn yet exalted mood. Schubert lifted his glass and drank a toast
“To him we have just buried,” then another “To him who will be next.”
Did that strange clairvoyance in which Michael Vogl once said he
composed his music show him in mystic vision that his own sands had just
twenty months more to run?
But before this he still had a little worldly journey to make—and a
pleasant one. Karl Pachler, a cultured and musical lawyer, and his wife,
Marie Leopoldine Koschak, an accomplished pianist whom Beethoven
admired, invited Schubert to visit their home in Graz. The honored guest
was to have been Beethoven but shortly after his passing Marie Koschak
expressed a desire to know Schubert, whose importance she fully
realized. So accompanied by his friend Jenger (who some years earlier
had brought him his notice of membership in the Styrian Musical
Association) he went in September, 1827, to Graz. In the home of the
Pachlers, Schubert passed a happy, carefree, inspiring time. There was
no end of sociability, music, picnics, excursions. He was even
introduced to a local celebrity named Franz Schubert, who had a
reputation as a folksong singer and who rendered Styrian folk melodies
for his Viennese namesake. The Music Society gave a concert in honor of
its visiting member, who also went to the theatre with Anselm
Hüttenbrenner to hear an early opera of Meyerbeer’s—though after the
first act he protested: “I can’t stand it any longer, let’s get out into
the air.” He played his own _Alfonso und Estrella_ to an operatic
conductor, who made wry faces over its “difficulties” so that Schubert
ended by leaving the score with Pachler, who kept it till 1841. Several
songs were composed at Graz, also a quantity of waltzes and galops.
Franz left Graz promising to come back another year—which was never to
dawn.
[Illustration: Title-page for _Variations on a French Song_ (opus 10),
“dedicated to Mr. Ludwig von Beethoven by his admirer Franz Schubert.”]
It is probably unlikely that, at the gathering of the Schubertians on
New Year’s Eve, Schubert realized as poignantly as some may imagine that
he was standing on the threshold of his last year on earth. But the
winter was hard, there was little or no money and it seems likely that
the good stepmother up in the Rossau schoolhouse had to help out with
occasional pennies from the household stocking. To be sure, a little
earlier the Friends of Music had elected Schubert a member of the
Representative Body of the Society and the composer felt much honored.
But such “honor” would not buy a meal. Even when half starved Schubert
contrived to work. Between January and November, 1828, he turned out
some of the most incomparable songs he ever composed (yes, even though
planning to give up such trifling matters as _Lieder_!) issued
posthumously under the collective title _Schwanengesang_; the _Great
Symphony_ in C major “of the heavenly length” (the score is dated March,
1828); a cantata, the three wonderful piano sonatas in A, C minor and B
flat; that towering monument of chamber music, the C major String
Quintet; the Mass in E flat (he had written a so-called _Missa Solemnis_
in A flat as far back as 1820 besides a quantity of smaller masses) and
much else. He devoted himself to the E flat Mass with such intensity
that Josef Hüttenbrenner described him as “living in his Mass.” The
supreme Lieder—one is tempted to say the most grandiose and prophetic of
all the odd 600 he wrote—are the settings of six poems from Heinrich
Heine’s _Buch der Lieder_, which had just come to his notice. They are
_Am Meer_, _Der Doppelgänger_, _Die Stadt_, _Der Atlas_ and _Ihr Bild_,
anticipations of the whole song technic of the nineteenth century!
The C major Symphony is without its like in the whole range of music and
by one magical pen stroke Schubert made it even a greater thing than
when he first conceived it. The autograph score shows that by the
substitution of a D natural for a G in the theme of the first Allegro
the composer transformed what was scarcely more than a rhythm into one
of the great symphonic subjects of all time. But he was never to hear
the work. It came to a rehearsal by the Friends of Music, was found too
difficult and “overloaded” and on the composer’s own advice, dropped in
favor of the Sixth—the “little” C major. And yet it was the one symphony
of its time which could have endured the sunlight of Beethoven
undiminished and unashamed.
Exactly a year after Beethoven’s death Schubert at last gave the concert
of his own works that he meant “if God wills” to give some day. It was
the urging of Bauernfeld and other friends which finally caused things
to materialize. The idea was that if all went well Schubert might offer
his private concert annually and the rascally publishers would at long
last be singing a different tune. His friends rallied nobly to his aid.
Vogl sang, Josefine Fröhlich’s pupils gave Luise Gosmar’s birthday
serenade, there was chamber music and a male chorus. The Musikverein
hall was packed, encores were innumerable, the applause would not end
and, best of all, there was a clear profit of more than half a hundred
dollars. The only fly in the ointment was that no critics came, though
several foreign publications carried flattering accounts.
But the little wealth quickly ebbed away. Again there were futile
bickerings with publishers. Schubert would have liked to go to Graz once
more but Baden and excursions to nearby Grinzing and Sievering were as
much as he could allow himself. Headaches and other symptoms of a year
before troubled him alarmingly. His doctor advised him to leave the
stuffy center of town for some place where he could have plenty of fresh
country air. So in September he moved to a house in the Neue Wieden
section, where his brother Ferdinand had taken rooms. The building was
new, still damp and unhealthy. Aside from a pilgrimage to Haydn’s tomb
at Eisenstadt and some annoyances with the publisher, Schott, both
September and October were uneventful. Suddenly, while at dinner one day
in the Lichtental neighborhood of his birth, he threw down his fork,
shouted that the food tasted like poison and refused to eat further.
Probably nobody suspected a serious illness, let alone a fatal one. At
that Schubert did not immediately take to bed. He dragged himself a few
days later to hear a Requiem by his brother, shortly before which he had
been fearfully agitated by a first hearing of Beethoven’s C sharp minor
Quartet. Yet so little does his condition appear to have worried him
that he went to the theorist Simon Sechter to arrange for instruction in
counterpoint—his intimates and a study of Handel’s oratorios having
supposedly persuaded him of his deficiencies in that branch of technic.
Nothing came of the project. By November 12 he wrote Schober that “he is
sick, has eaten nothing in eleven days and can do no more than crawl
from his bed to a chair.” And he implores his friend to procure him
reading matter, preferably Fenimore Cooper. The sickness made rapid
inroads, though he continued to toy with the operatic scheme of the
_Count of Gleichen_, and carefully corrected the proofs of his
_Winterreise cycle_. Soon he became delirious and the doctors held a
consultation. The diagnosis was “nerve fever,” or typhus, the same
sickness which had carried off his mother. Pathetically he begged his
brother not to leave him “in this corner under ground”; and when the
anguished Ferdinand assured him he was in his own room he insisted: “No,
that’s not true, Beethoven is not here!” A little later he turned his
face to the wall and murmured, we are told, “Here, here is my end!” “The
days of affliction,” wrote Father Schubert to Ferdinand, “lie heavy upon
us”; and he presently made in the old list of births and deaths in the
Schubert family the entry with the mortuary cross: “Franz Peter,
Wednesday, Nov. 19, 1828, at three o’clock in the afternoon, of nerve
fever, buried Saturday, Nov. 22, 1828.”
It was Ferdinand who decided that his brother should, in death, be
brought closer to Beethoven than ever he had been in life. And since
“Beethoven was not there,” where Schubert would ordinarily have been
buried, Ferdinand saw to it that Franz should rest as close to his
divinity as an intervening grave or two permitted. They were destined in
the process of time to lie closer still. For three score years later the
two masters were exhumed and placed side by side in two of those “graves
of glory” in Vienna’s great Central Cemetery.
[Illustration: Program for the première of Schubert’s opera,
_Fierrabras_, performed in Karlsruhe on the hundredth anniversary
of Schubert’s birth.]
“Music has buried here a rich treasure, but fairer hopes,” read the
epitaph which Grillparzer set on the original tomb in the Währing
cemetery. “Fairer hopes,” indeed! How could Grillparzer know what even
the wisest musical heads of his day did not know? Eleven years after
Schubert died “all Paris” was said to be astounded at the “posthumous
diligence of a song writer who, while one might think his ashes repose
in Vienna, is still making eternal new songs”! It took decades to reveal
the incalculable richness of this “treasure” and even now the world is
not finally aware of its fullness. Another deathless master, Robert
Schumann, gave the world Schubert’s C major Symphony, redeeming it from
Ferdinand’s heaped but silent hoard of unprinted, nay, unsuspected
scores. “Who can do anything after Beethoven?” the half-starved Konvikt
student had wistfully asked. Here was at least one triumphant answer,
made by Schubert himself, at a distance of only eight months from his
early tomb!
COMPLETE LIST OF RECORDINGS
BY THE
PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK