Schubert, Franz - Life

Schubert, Franz

   

 

1. Life.

(i) Background and childhood.

Schubert's Vienna was a polyglot city, more than a fifth of whose population comprised Hungarians, Czechs, Italians, Croatians, Poles, Germans, Turks, Greeks and other nationalities. Most of Vienna's most celebrated musicians – Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Salieri, Hummel – had been born in other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or outside it. As a native Viennese, Schubert became the direct beneficiary of its musical offerings. He was born in the district of the Himmelpfortgrund just north-west of the Ring, the bustling, overcrowded centre of the capital of the empire. His paternal ancestors were Moravian farmers; his father, Franz Theodor Florian (1763–1830), moved when he was 20 to Vienna from Neudorf (Nová ves) in the Altstadt (Staré Město) district of Moravia (today part of the Czech Republic). He followed his oldest brother Karl, who had become the headmaster of the Carmelite School in the suburb of Leopoldstadt. He took up the position of schoolteacher, one that offered little social standing or financial reward; education was an enterprise supported only meagrely by the imperial government. Within a year Franz Theodor met Elisabeth Vietz (1756–1812) whose father, a locksmith and gunmaker, spent time in prison for embezzlement. Her family had also migrated to Vienna from the northern provinces. In January of 1785 Franz and Elisabeth married; one reason may have been the birth of their first child two months later. Of 14 births, nine children died in infancy – only slightly worse than the 50% infant mortality rate common in Europe before the discovery of germ theory. The survivors included Ignaz (b 1785), Ferdinand (b 1794), Karl (b 1795), Franz Peter (b 1797) and Maria Theresia (b 1801). All of the children were born in a one-room apartment in a house called ‘Zum roten Krebsen’, a surviving building now bearing the address 54 Nussdorferstrasse. Schubert's birth in the early afternoon of 31 January 1797 took place in a kitchen alcove whose fireplace provided the family's only source of heat. He was baptized the next day, with his uncle Karl Schubert named as godfather. Schubert thereby became the only one of the canonic quartet (with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) of Viennese Classical composers to be born in Vienna – although many natives of the city have been quick to point out that he was only first-generation Viennese.

Less than a year after Maria Theresia's birth, Franz Theodor moved his family to a house (‘Zum schwarzen Rössel’) in the nearby Säulengasse (today no.3) on which he had taken out a mortgage a few months earlier. The bottom floor of this two-storey structure with courtyard served as the school; the upstairs served as the family's living quarters. Here Franz Theodor, an industrious, devout Catholic, built his student population steadily until he had 40 students in 1804, peaking to 300 students in 1805. Most of the scant information we possess about Schubert's childhood comes from later reminiscences by his father and his brother Ferdinand. Six-year-old Franz became a pupil at the school in 1803 and by all accounts he was a high achiever, although in a system that, by imperial decree, depended almost entirely on rote learning. The Schubert family were great music lovers, and although musical training played no role in formal education, there was plenty of it after hours. Schubert received his first piano lessons from his older brother Ignaz, but soon left him behind, averring that he ‘would continue on his own’.

When Schubert was seven he was sent for an audition to Antonio Salieri; presumably his father made the arrangements. Salieri's reputation as a composer had peaked years before, but in his 50s he still enjoyed the power and prestige of the court music director. He was sufficiently impressed with Schubert to include him as a mezzo-soprano on a list of nine singers fit to sing for services in the imperial Hofkapelle. At the age of eight Schubert received his first violin lessons from his father. He also took lessons in counterpoint, figured bass, singing and organ from Michael Holzer, the organist at the Schuberts' parish church in Lichtental. Schubert's brother Ferdinand reported that Holzer acknowledged, with tears in his eyes, that ‘whenever I wished to impart something new to him, he always knew it already’. Ferdinand also noted that Schubert was already composing songs, string quartets and piano pieces. When vacancies in the Hofkapelle choir opened up in 1808, Schubert passed the highly competitive audition easily. Perhaps the biggest perk was his free tuition-and-board admission into the Kaiserlich-königliches Stadtkonvikt (Imperial and Royal City College), which as the principal Viennese boarding school for non-aristocrats offered Schubert his best possible opportunity for a quality education. The 130 all-male students ranged from 11 to university age and were tutored by Piarist monks whose order was founded in the 17th century to educate the poor. A few months after entering the college, Schubert cowered while Napoleon's bombardment of Vienna sent a shell through the roof of the Stadtkonvikt. Nonetheless, he was to stay at the college for five full years, receiving the kind of education usually reserved for titled Viennese.

Encouraged by its principal, Dr Innocenz Lang, music played a sizable role in the life of the college. Its student orchestra was first-rate, and Schubert was soon invited to join the second violins. Here he became acquainted at first hand with the orchestral works of Haydn, Mozart, early Beethoven and their lesser Viennese contemporaries. The orchestra's founder and leader of the second violins was a law student named Josef von Spaun. Eight years Schubert's senior, Spaun soon befriended the impressionable youth, and the friendship flourished, in spite of interruptions, until the composer's death. At the end of the school year Spaun graduated; he left Vienna in September 1809 to join the civil service at Linz. According to Spaun, Mozart's Symphony no.40 in G minor and Beethoven's Second Symphony made a particularly strong impression on Schubert. From these years come the earliest of his surviving compositions. During his first two years he received permission to take regular lessons with Salieri, who urged him to find his models in Italian opera, a directive that conflicted sharply with Schubert's enthusiasm for the music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, as well as his growing interest in the poetry of Goethe and Schiller as material for songs. By the time he was 13 Schubert seems to have interrupted his regular lessons with Salieri. Yet by the end of 1813 he had, largely under the tutelage of Spaun, seen half a dozen staged operas, including Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, Weigl's Die Schweizerfamilie and Cherubini's Médée. According to Spaun, upon attending a January 1813 performance of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, with Johann Michael Vogl and Anna Milder-Hauptmann in the leading roles, Schubert ‘was totally beside himself over the effects of this magnificent music and asserted that there could be nothing more beautiful in the world’. In spite of Schubert's heavy involvement with musical activities, his report cards from the first four years show him to have earned regular grades of ‘good’ or ‘very good’ in all his academic subjects.

Robert Winter

(ii) The adolescent composer.

We do not know whether Schubert began composing even earlier than brother Ferdinand reported. Although many of the dates assigned by scholars to his early works are speculative, Schubert's first surviving compositions appear to date from his 13th year. In the Fantasie in G for piano duet (d1; 8 April – 1 May 1810) and the song Hagars Klage (d5; 30 March 1811) Schubert seized on two marginal genres that over a lifetime he would transform into pillars of his output. A four-hand fantasy would have proved less intimidating to a precocious young composer than the more settled standards for a two-hand sonata. The Fantasie merits notice for its sheer length (more than 1000 bars) and modulatory brashness, averaging more than a new section per minute over its 20-minute duration. Its one-movement, multi-sectional plan was to spawn a chain of audacious experiments that extends over Schubert's entire career; and it is significant that both the Fantasie and Hagars Klage end in a key different from that in which they begin.

In the same month that Schubert completed what was probably his first song, his friend Spaun returned to Vienna, where he would remain in close contact with the composer for a decade. Partsongs and an overture round out the categories of finished works. The early years produced more than a dozen fragmentary works (including sketches for a symphony, several sacred vocal works, three string quartets and one complete act of a three-act Singspiel) – a pattern that was to accompany the composer throughout his career. These sketches rarely point to a compositional impasse; rather, Schubert seems either to have intended merely to dip his toe in the water or to have simply lost interest. During his school holidays from around 1811, Schubert took on the role of viola player in a family quartet that included brothers Ignaz and Ferdinand as violinists and his father on the cello. Shortly afterwards – following several earlier false starts – he composed his first string quartet (in D, d94), and then completed three more quartets (d32, 36 and 46) between September 1812 and early March 1813. The slow, chromatic opening of d46, in C major, suggests Schubert's acquaintance with Mozart's ‘Dissonance’ Quartet, k465, in the same key. Schubert was equally blessed with a symphonic laboratory at the Stadtkonvikt, and in October of 1813 he completed his first symphony (d82, in D), in which Schubert would have had the pleasure of both conducting and playing among the violins.

Yet the musical style of the early adolescent Schubert was largely an amalgam of the grammar of Haydn and Mozart sprinkled with flashes of Rossini and Bach (the latter expressed loosely in a series of student fugues and compositional exercises for piano or organ, some showing corrections in the hand of Antonio Salieri). The 16-year-old Schubert's style at the phrase level would have been scarcely distinguishable from scores of other turn-of-the-century Austrian composers. While occasional phrases are worthy of the best of Viennese Classicism, Schubert's style as it began to coalesce – especially in the instrumental works – conveyed a post-Classical looseness and freedom of structure that would set him permanently apart from his great predecessors. Indeed, one could argue that Schubert's very earliest works are less inventive, for example, than those of Mozart at a more tender age and less assured structurally than the early keyboard variations and sonatas of Beethoven.

In May 1812 Schubert's mother died at the age of 55, perhaps from a typhus infection. We have no evidence to help us gauge the impact of Elisabeth's death on the 15-year-old Schubert. Less than a year later (25 April 1813) Schubert's father married 30-year-old Anna Kleyenbock, who bore Franz Theodor five more children. Schubert seems to have enjoyed a cordial if not close relationship with his stepmother. In the summer of 1812, after a performance of a mass by Peter Winter, Schubert's voice broke, memorialized by the composer's entry on his part: ‘Schubert, Franz, crowed for the last time, 26 July 1812’. Although he could no longer sing in the choir, Schubert remained at the Stadtkonvikt for a fifth year. His increasing preoccupation with composition precipitated an inevitable decline in his academic performance, and he received warnings in both Latin and mathematics. In October 1813 Schubert was offered a scholarship for further study on the condition that he bring his academic subjects up to standard, ‘since singing and music are but a subsidiary matter … ’. Perhaps sensing that he was at a crossroads, perhaps believing that five years of serious study was sufficient, Schubert declined. Whatever paternal input he received, the decision must have been largely his.

Robert Winter

(iii) Finding a career.

Schubert's decision to return the very next month to his father's home and take up a ten-month course of study at the St Anna Normalhauptschule that would certify him as a teacher seems in conflict with his decision to leave the Stadtkonvikt. Yet both his brothers were, like their father, teachers. At this stage Schubert could not expect to make a living pursuing the activity that engaged him most – composition. A teaching position might function as a ‘day job’ that would meet his modest overheads until he was sufficiently independent to strike out on his own. At all events, it is very unlikely that he saw his teacher training as leading to a lasting career. Six days a week he travelled from the Säulengasse house into the Ring district (the inner city) to receive instruction. The explosion in his compositional output suggests that the workload at the Normalhauptschule was not as great as that at the Stadtkonvikt. Schubert also found time to resume twice-weekly composition lessons with Salieri. In August 1814 he passed the final teaching examinations with strong marks in German and arithmetic but a poor grade in religion. His father had attempted to gain another position at the ‘Scottish Monastery’, but when that effort failed he engaged his son as his sixth assistant in the prosperous Säulengasse school that Schubert himself had attended. Schubert's responsibilities were apparently for the youngest students; Kreissle reports that he was strict, somewhat irascible and prepared to enforce discipline with a slap on the head. There is also evidence that Schubert the schoolteacher harboured sympathies for the student riots protesting against the oppressive Metternich regime that had became a regular part of the Viennese landscape. One of his classmates at the Stadtkonvikt, Johann Senn, lost his scholarship after trying to free a fellow student from prison. Some six years later he and Schubert were picked up from Senn's lodgings and held for questioning. While Schubert got off with a warning, Senn was deported. In May 1814 Schubert also completed his first opera, a three-act Singspiel, Des Teufels Lustschloss. It received its première half a century after Schubert's death. Of Schubert's passionate and abiding interest in opera there can be no doubt. From 1811 until 1823 there is no year in which he was not involved in an operatic project.

By the middle of 1813 the 16-year-old Schubert already boasted an impressive compositional catalogue. Nonetheless, few of Vienna's musical elder statesmen would have predicted a major career. Beginning in the summer of 1814, Schubert's confidence and productivity took a quantum leap forward. Near the end of July he completed his first mass (in F, d105), written for the centenary of the Lichtental church he had attended since a child. Although Schubert's spirituality was never in doubt, his freedom with the text (including the omission of ‘Et in unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam’) suggests that the church as an institution was not sacrosanct to him. Musically the mass displays a deep familiarity with the masses of Haydn and Mozart, and Beethoven's Mass in C, a particular favourite of the composer's. Schubert conducted the first performance himself in October. Ten days later the mass received another performance at the Augustinerkirche in the city. The first soprano soloist at the première was Therese Grob, another offspring of a schoolmaster (Schubert's brother Ignaz eventually married into her family) and presented by numerous biographers as the great love of Schubert's life. Two years Schubert's junior, she possessed a clear and pleasing high soprano voice. In a biographical note penned 26 years after Schubert's death, the composer's friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner recalled a conversation in which he had noted that the composer ‘was so cold and unforthcoming towards the fair sex at parties’. According to Hüttenbrenner, Schubert responded by saying that ‘I loved someone very dearly and she loved me too … . For three years she hoped I would marry her; but I could not find a position which would have provided for us both’. Only meagre corroborative evidence of a romantic relationship survives. Anton Holzapfel testified that Schubert had written of Therese in a long and enthusiastic letter to him that he unfortunately lost. Grob told Schubert's first biographer, Kreissle von Hellborn, that in her father's house Schubert ‘was like an adopted son’, but offered nothing about a more intimate relationship. Kreissle himself concluded that Schubert ‘was somewhat indifferent to the charms of the fair sex’. The final Schubert song from Therese's album dates from 1816, the same year in which he wrote in a diary entry (8 September): ‘To a free man matrimony is a terrifying thought these days; he exchanges it either for melancholy or for crude sensuality …’. Although not yet 20, Schubert never spoke of marriage again.

Robert Winter

(iv) The miracle years.

In the autumn of 1814, after a promising but unspectacular adolescence, Schubert exploded into a burst of creative activity that over the next 15 months was virtually unrivalled in the history of Western music. He also introduced patterns of composition that prevailed for the rest of his life. Until 1814 Schubert had drawn on almost ten different poets for the texts of some two dozen solo songs and fragments. Beginning in the spring/summer of 1814, he devoted 13 of his next 15 songs to texts by a single poet, Friedrich von Matthisson. Throughout 1815 he set groups of between two and more than a dozen songs dominated by a single poet – Goethe, Körner, Hölty, Kosegarten, Baumberg, Ossian, Klopstock, Mayrhofer and Stoll. This intense focus on one poet at a time may help explain the composition of almost 150 songs in Schubert's 18th year – an average of more than one every three days. Schubert had encountered Goethe's Faust in the second half of 1814, and it made an indelible impression. His first Goethe song (the first of a group of four) produced the extraordinary Gretchen am Spinnrade (d118; 19 October 1814), remarkable not only for its conjuring up of a spinning wheel and its waves of crescendos but for Schubert's empathetic representation of a woman's feelings. Towards the end of the following year he returned to Goethe for Erlkönig (d328), bringing astonishingly vivid and frantic life to a father, his feverish son and the figure of Death. In the same period he made the acquaintance through Spaun of the civil servant and poet Johann Mayrhofer (1787–1836), whose Am See (d124, December 1814) Schubert may have already set at Spaun's suggestion. Schubert doubtless relished the chance to meet a German-language poet, a counterpoint to Salieri's narrow emphasis on Italian. He set another Mayrhofer poem in 1815, as many as ten more in 1816, and more than 40 over his career. Almost ten years Schubert's senior, Mayrhofer was a gifted poet, a disturbed eccentric, a misogynist and ultimately a suicide. He and Schubert enjoyed a close if intermittent relationship. Mayrhofer was a member of the Viennese branch of a Linz ‘circle of friends’ established in 1811, and his participation in this self-improvement group, or ‘Bildung Circle’, probably led to Schubert's subsequent joining. German literature and poetry were major themes of the group's meetings and doubtless helped to spur Schubert's song production. Between the autumn of 1814 and the end of 1815 Schubert also wrote two string quartets (d112 and d173, in nine and eight days respectively) and two symphonies (nos.2 and 3, d125 and d200), as well as his second and third masses (in G, d167; in B, d324). In addition, he completed no fewer than four Singspiele (Der vierjährige Posten, d190; Fernando, d220; Claudine von Villa Bella, d239, whose second and third acts were apparently burnt in 1848 by servants of Schubert's friend Josef Hüttenbrenner; and Die Freunde von Salamanka, d326). In the autumn the bassoonist, violinist and conductor Otto Hatwig took over the private concerts that had grown out of musical gatherings at the Schubert home and that had taken place briefly at the house of a merchant, Franz Frischling.

 

Franz Schubert (right) with Anslem Hüttenbrenner and Jenger: drawing by…In all of his combined categories, Schubert averaged an almost superhuman rate of at least 65 bars of new music each day, roughly half of which included an orchestra. The average may indeed have been higher, for we cannot assume that all of Schubert's works from this period have been preserved. And such figures assume that he was a full-time composer, although in fact he was a full-time, year-round teacher at his father's school. He was also taking composition lessons twice weekly with Salieri, attending numerous concerts and operas, doing a modicum of private teaching, and socializing with his friends from the Stadtkonvikt. In 1815 Schubert entered into long-term friendships with two very different kinds of men. He met the ever industrious Anselm Hüttenbrenner (1794–1868) while both were studying with Salieri. Though Hüttenbrenner was ostensibly a law student, their shared passion (fig.1) for music and composition soon brought them close.

Hüttenbrenner offered a memorable portrait of Schubert at 18: Schubert's outward appearance was anything but striking or prepossessing. He was short of stature, with a full, round face, and was rather stout. His forehead was very beautifully domed. Because of his short-sightedness he always wore spectacles, which he did not take off even during sleep. Dress was a thing in which he took no interest whatever … and listening to flattering talk about himself he found downright nauseating. Schubert inscribed his Trauerwalzer (d365, 1818) with ‘written down for my dear fellow coffee, wine and punch drinker Anselm Hüttenbrenner, the world-famous composer’. In 1821 Hüttenbrenner was forced to leave Vienna to take over his family's estate in Styria; in that same year he married and eventually fathered nine children. A respectable pianist, he also became a prolific composer who played an important, if not entirely understood, role in the saga of Schubert's ‘Unfinished’ Symphony (d759).

In the same year that he met Hüttenbrenner, Schubert was introduced by Josef von Spaun to a highly charismatic yet profligate dabbler in the arts, Franz von Schober (1797–1882). Although his father died when Schober was six, the family remained prosperous enough for him to attend private schools for the nobility (the family had been ennobled only in 1801) in both Germany and Austria. He began law studies in Vienna in 1816 but failed to complete the course. From his mother's spacious apartment in the Tuchlauben, Schober's warm hospitality cast its spell on members of a growing literary and musical circle, which soon included Schubert. In 1858 a friend from Schubert's youth, Josef Kenner, wrote unmistakably about Schober without naming him: Schubert's genius subsequently attracted … the heart of a seductively amiable and brilliant young man, endowed with the noblest talents, whose extraordinary gifts would have been so worthy of a moral foundation and would have richly repaid a stricter schooling than … the one he unfortunately had. But shunning so much effort as unworthy of genius and summarily rejecting such fetters as a form of prejudice and restriction, while at the same time arguing with brilliant and ingratiatingly persuasive power, this scintillating individuality … won a lasting and pernicious influence over Schubert's honest susceptibility. The nature of this influence cast its shadow over the rest of Schubert's life.

Although the unparalleled productivity of 1815 tapered off slightly the following year, 1816 was nonetheless a remarkable year in Schubert's creative life. He composed more than 110 songs, largely in clusters of poems by Salis-Seewis, Goethe, Ossian (in translation), Schiller, Hölty, Matthisson, Klopstock, Jacobi and Mayrhofer. For the meetings of the ‘Bildung Circle’, Schubert's friends would search through volumes of poetry and present their favourites to Schubert – some of which he would subsequently set. He also completed another mass (d452, in C), two acts of his first attempt at a three-act opera (Die Bürgschaft, d435), two symphonies (d417, in C minor, later given the somewhat misleading subtitle ‘The Tragic’ by Schubert; and in B, d485, the most popular of the youthful symphonies), a string quartet (d353, in E) and three sonatas (published as ‘sonatinas’) for violin and piano (d384, 385, 408). Still conspicuously missing are any significant works for solo piano. In mid-April Spaun sent a first volume of Schubert songs based on texts by Goethe to the ageing poet, hoping to secure his permission for dedications; Goethe returned the package unopened. In April Schubert applied for the post of music teacher at the teachers' training college in Laibach (now Ljubljana). The attractions probably included a higher salary and more time available for composition. Might he also have hoped to make himself appear more acceptable to Therese Grob's family? Not until September did Schubert learn that the post had gone to another applicant – about the same time that he made the diary entry appearing to renounce marriage. In mid-June Schubert participated in the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of Salieri's arrival in Vienna, contributing both the text and the music of a vocal quartet, aria and three-part canon (d407). Although his lessons had been intermittent, the large number of instrumental and compositional exercises from his 11th to his 19th year attest to the thorough, if ultimately limited, training he received from Salieri. On 24 July Schubert conducted his (lost) cantata Prometheus (d451) at Heinrich Josef Watteroth's house; among the participants was the lawyer Leopold von Sonnleithner (probably in the title role), the son of a music-loving family and himself an accomplished musician, whose new-found enthusiasm led him to become one of Schubert's most ardent and influential supporters.

Robert Winter

(v) Independence.

In the autumn of 1816 Schubert would have been pondering his return for a third year of teaching at his father's school. His youthful resentment of major claims on his time would have been understandable, and his failure to attain the Laibach position may have further soured his attitude to teaching. Some time that autumn Schubert refused to return to his father's school, left home and moved to the lodgings of Franz von Schober, who lived with his sister and mother in the inner Ring. He could not have left his father's household because of its hostility to his music, for the Schuberts were among his most enthusiastic supporters; and the symbolism of leaving the modest, pious household of his father for the dandified Schober and the luxurious Persian décor of the inner city must have been painful for the elder Schubert. In 1876 Schober remarked somewhat self-servingly that ‘I shall always retain the eternally uplifting feeling of having freed this immortal master from the constraint of school, and of having led him on his predestined path of independent, spiritual creation’. For the first few months after the move, Schober was himself in Sweden. He returned towards the end of the year and Schubert was to remain with him until the following August. Around the time of his move Schubert's Fifth Symphony (d485) received its first performance at one of Otto Hatwig's house concerts. It is ironic to note that the not quite 20-year-old composer of five symphonies, over 300 solo songs (more than half of the surviving total), several dozen partsongs, four Singspiele, four masses, seven string quartets and innumerable smaller works had not yet received a single public performance in Vienna, a single public notice in a newspaper, or enjoyed a single publication. Now, gradually, these circumstances would begin to change.

It was inevitable that Schubert's phenomenal rate of productivity throughout 1815–16 would prove unsustainable. About 60 solo songs, almost a third of them to texts by Mayrhofer, survive from 1817. They include some of the most popular and enduring: Der Schiffer (d536), Ganymed (d544), An die Musik (d547), Die Forelle (d550) and Gruppe aus dem Tartarus (d583). An die Musik was one of a pair of poems by Schober; together with Trost im Liede (d546), both songs and poems express the intense idealism of music as the ultimate balm for the burdens of life. They also express the most idealistic dimension of the Schubert-Schober relationship.

Another ambitious attempt at an opera, Die Bürgschaft (d435), faltered in the third and final act. In the early months of 1817 Schober presented Schubert to the highly regarded baritone Johann Michael Vogl, whom Schubert had admired in a performance of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride four years earlier (he may also have known Vogl's Pizarro in the 1814 première of Beethoven's Fidelio). Schober insisted that Vogl – who physically towered over Schubert – read some songs on the spot. The singer is said to have heard in them ‘fine ideas’ and ‘something special’. It marked the beginning of an advocacy that lasted until Schubert's death.

Schubert's short-lived independence came to an end in the autumn of 1817, when he moved abruptly back to his father's house in the Himmelpfortgrund. The reversal may well have been triggered by financial difficulties and was perhaps hastened by his unenthusiastic resumption of teaching duties at the school. Countering this sobering development was growing public recognition. On 27 September Franz Xaver Schlechta, a member of Schubert's circle who had first met the composer at the Stadtkonvikt, published a poem, An Herrn Franz Schubert (Als seine Kantate Prometheus aufgeführt ward), in the Wiener allgemeine Theaterzeitung; it marked the first time that Schubert's name was mentioned in a periodical. On 1 March 1818 one of Schubert's two overtures ‘im italienischen Stile’ (d590–91) was performed at the inn Zum römischen Kaiser. It marked the first performance of a Schubert work at a public concert. 11 days later an overture (probably the same one) was performed, in an arrangement for piano eight hands, at a private entertainment at the same inn presented by the actor Karl Friedrich Müller; Schubert was one of the four pianists. About the performance Schlechta wrote: ‘Each of his shorter or longer compositions is characterized by profound feeling, spontaneous but controlled force and appealing charm …’.

Only a few months after Schubert's return home, his father was finally transferred to a school in the Rossau district; the whole family moved there to 11 Grünetorgasse. Around this same time Schubert's Symphony no.6 (d589) received its première in a house concert at Otto Hatwig's. Nearly simultaneously, the song Erlafsee (d586) was published under the title of Am Erlaf-see in the Mahlerisches Taschenbuch für Freunde interessanter Gegenden, Natur- und Kunst-Merkwürdigkeiten der sterreichischen Monarchie (Vienna) – the very first publication of Schubert's to appear in print. On 5 March Schubert applied for membership as an accompanist in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. His catalogue now included more than 500 works and he doubtless believed that he was as qualified for membership in this prestigious amateur group as anyone in Vienna. Hence his rejection, ostensibly on the grounds that he was not an amateur, must have come as a deep disappointment – especially since the society already included professional musicians. However, to block his admission only a single member of the admissions committee would have needed to raise questions about Schubert's politics or social standing. All of the composer's resentments must have evaporated when he reapplied three years later and was accepted.

In the spring Otto Hatwig moved from the Schottenhof to the Gundelhof, where his private orchestra now met. When he fell ill the concerts were moved to the apartment of Anton von Pettenkoffer where, with Schubert frequently on the viola, it met on Thursday evenings for the next two years. Leopold von Sonnleithner reported that the informal performances came to an end when Pettenkoffer, a worker in the wholesale trade, won a lottery and moved from Vienna to his own country estate. For Schubert there was, alas, no lottery. His teaching duties at his father's school became more burdensome than ever and his relationship with his father grew increasingly strained. Works such as the Sixth Symphony or the Rondo in D (d608) seem to portray a certain stylistic indecision. Evenings spent drinking Bavarian beer at the inn Zur schwarzen Katze with friends such as Anselm Hüttenbrenner offered only temporary relief. On one of these evenings in February Hüttenbrenner claimed that Schubert, after helping empty several bottles of Hungarian red wine, ‘composed the wonderfully lovely song’ Die Forelle. But Hüttenbrenner was mistaken in claiming that Schubert had composed the work on the spot; he had set down the first version more than a year earlier. It was his frequent practice to write out multiple versions (Die Forelle exists in no fewer than five), sometimes in an effort to improve the work and other times simply to make a presentation.

Robert Winter

(vi) Travel.

In mid-1818 Schubert's gloomy spirits were lifted when he received an invitation from Count Johann Karl Esterházy of Galanta to tutor his two young daughters at his summer estate in Zseliz (today Želiezovce in Slovakia, then still in Hungary). Johann Karl Unger, a law professor at the Theresian Academy in Vienna, had suggested Schubert to his close friend Esterházy, and the composer quickly accepted. The two-day journey of more than 100 miles by stagecoach was easily the furthest the composer had ever ventured from Vienna. Schubert remained there for almost five months (July–November). He taught the piano and singing to his pupils Marie (aged 16) and Caroline (aged 12) and also provided musical entertainments for the family and their guests. Along with board and lodging he cleared some 75 florins a month. During that summer Esterházy introduced him to Baron Karl Schönstein (1797–1876), a senior official at the Hungarian ministry of finance who was also a passionate amateur singer. Although he had earlier expressed a marked preference for Italian music, upon making the acquaintance of Schubert's songs he quickly became an ardent advocate of German lieder and focussed on them almost exclusively for the rest of his career. Both Sonnleithner and Spaun praised him fulsomely, and Schönstein himself claimed that Schubert had told him on numerous occasions that he composed most of his songs with Schönstein's vocal range (‘a noble-sounding tenor-baritone voice’, according to Sonnleithner) in mind. Schubert's surviving letters to friends in Vienna portray a much more cheerful artist. Writing to a group of his friends, he exclaimed that ‘Thank God I live at last, and it was high time, else I should have become nothing but a thwarted musician’. He staked out his place in the previously minor genre of the piano duet, composing, probably for his pupils, a sizable assortment of pieces including three Marches militaires (d733). But by September the mercurial Schubert had become disillusioned with the Zseliz scene as well. He wrote to his intimate friend Schober: At Zseliz I am obliged to rely wholly on myself. I have to be composer, author, audience and heaven knows what else. Not a soul here has any feeling for true art [this remark presumably extended to the Esterházy daughters], or at most the countess now and then (unless I am wrong). So I am alone with my beloved and have to hide her in my room, in my pianoforte and in my breast. Although this often makes me sad, on the other hand it elevates me the more. Have no fear, then, that I shall stay away longer than is absolutely necessary. The merging of his art with the self-identity of an outsider was to become an ever more prominent theme.

Letters from his brother Ferdinand during the same summer show that the stultifying home atmosphere, especially where it concerned matters of religion, continued to worsen. It was hardly a surprise, then, that when Schubert returned with the Esterházys to Vienna during the third week of November he settled in with his friend Johann Mayrhofer rather than with his family. In his obituary of Schubert, Mayrhofer remarked that ‘I wrote poems, he composed what I had written’. Schubert was never to undertake formal teaching duties again. He probably continued to teach the two Esterházy daughters through the winter. It had not been a productive year – a symphony, two fragmentary piano sonatas, a few pieces for piano duet and just over a dozen songs. Although he was never to regain the sheer level of output from the miracle years of 1815–16, 1818 marked a career low point. 1819 began more propitiously. On 8 January Schubert's cantata Prometheus received another performance at Sonnleithner's apartment in the Gundelhof. On 28 February the song Schäfers Klagelied (d121) was performed by Franz Jäger in a concert at Zum römischen Kaiser – the first documented performance of a Schubert song in a public concert. During this year Schubert began the remarkable Mass in A major (d678), although he was not to complete it until 1822.

For the summer of 1819 the 22-year-old Schubert elected not to seek employment but to travel through Upper Austria in the company of Vogl, making extended stops in both Steyr and Linz. During this period he very probably composed one of his most famous chamber works, the Quintet for piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass known as ‘The Trout’ (d667). The work was apparently commissioned by a native of Styria, Sylvester Paumgartner, who was himself an amateur cellist. He is also supposed to have stipulated the unusual instrumentation and the use of Schubert's popular song Die Forelle as the basis of the theme-and-variations fourth movement. In Linz, Schubert met Anton Ottenwalt, a civil servant, dramatist and poet. Schubert had already set one of Ottenwalt's poems, Der Knabe in der Wiege (d579), in 1817. He was married to Josef von Spaun's sister Marie, and the music-making began almost immediately. Ottenwalt was described by all who knew him as a man of great industriousness, integrity and culture.

Some time during 1820 Schubert participated in a musical soirée at the apartment of Matthäus von Collin, a well-connected dramatist, poet and friend of Spaun's who introduced Schubert to, among others, Count Moritz Dietrichstein, Ignaz Franz von Mosel, Caroline Pichler, Baron Hammer-Purgstall and Johann Ladislaus Pyrker. According to Anselm Hüttenbrenner, the company heard Der Wanderer as sung by Vogel and the Eight Variations on a French Song for piano four hands (d624), played by Schubert and Hüttenbrenner. In mid-March the other side of Schubert's existence surfaced when he was present at the time his schoolfriend Johann Senn's room was searched by the police. Senn had been under suspicion since his activist days in the ‘Bildung Circle’ at the Stadtkonvikt. The assassination of the dramatist Kotzebue (a government sympathizer) by a radical student in 1819 had emboldened the oppressive police to harass suspected malcontents in even greater numbers. For his lack of contrition Senn was greeted with 14 months of detention without trial and then deportation to the Tyrol. Schubert, who somewhat disingenuously registered himself as the ‘school assistant from the Rossau’, escaped, in spite of alleged offensiveness, with a warning that was sure to have reinforced his feelings of being an outsider.

Performances continued to accumulate throughout the spring. In March an overture (probably d648) was performed at Anton von Pettenkoffer's. In April an overture (probably d648 as well) was performed at a concert in Graz – the first known public orchestral performance of a Schubert work outside Vienna. The work received a third performance in November at a Gesellschaft concert. At the beginning of April Schubert conducted a performance of Haydn's ‘Nelson Mass’ at the Alt-Lerchenfeld church. More importantly, on 14 June the première of Schubert's Singspiel Die Zwillingsbrüder took place at the Kärntnertortheater (Schubert had finished the work a year and a half earlier). Based on a French play, the tale turns around a young woman under contract from birth to marry a man (one of two identical twins, as it turns out) she does not love. In the original production Vogl played both twins, creating a challenge in the last scene, where both are on stage at the same time. Although it had six performances (more than average), Die Zwillingsbrüder received a mixed reception, and the shabbily dressed Schubert declined to acknowledge the audience's applause.

In July Schubert once again ventured outside Vienna, where he stayed as Schober's guest in the Atzenbrugg Castle, some 40 kilometres west of Vienna. So agreeable did he find it that he returned there in both of the two succeeding summers. After his return to Vienna in August the melodrama Die Zauberharfe (d644), for which Schubert supplied on commission almost 3000 bars of music, was produced at the Theater an der Wien. It received eight performances between August and November. While playwright George von Hofmann's contribution was readily dismissed, critics were again divided on Schubert's contribution. But almost all of them acknowledged that his score contained numerous flashes of originality and brilliance. November also marked the marriage of Therese Grob to a baker, Johann Bergmann. If Schubert expressed any regrets at the time concerning this turn of events, they have not come down to us. At the beginning of December August von Gymnich performed Erlkönig at Ignaz von Sonnleithner's. On 9 December the fourth version of Die Forelle was published in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst. Also in that same month Schubert set down the first movement (and fragments of a slow second movement) of a string quartet in C minor (d703, known as the ‘Quartettsatz’) that revealed an intensity and concentration only hinted at in his earlier work.

Robert Winter

(vii) The professional composer.

By the end of 1820 the stresses of sharing a single room with Mayrhofer had brought Schubert to breaking point. Early in 1821 Schubert moved to new lodgings in the same street (21 Wipplingerstrasse), although the two men remained on warm enough terms for Schubert to continue setting poems by Mayrhofer. Around this same time Schubert made the acquaintance of Moritz von Schwind, a philosophy student at the University of Vienna who had recently decided to become a painter. Intelligent, witty, good-looking and ingratiating, Schwind (nicknamed ‘Cherubin’ after the character in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro) became one of Schubert's closest confidants. He even referred to Schwind as his ‘beloved’. Unlike Spaun, Schwind became considerably enamoured of Schober and maintained a lively correspondence with him after Schober moved to Breslau in 1823. Just before Schober's return to Vienna in 1825 Bauernfeld remarked that ‘Moritz reveres him [Schober] like a god’. In February Schubert found brief employment as a répétiteur at the Hofoper, where he coached the contralto Caroline Unger in the role of Dorabella in Mozart's Così fan tutte. On a practical front, Schubert began gathering testimonials from Count Dietrichstein, Ignaz Franz von Mosel, Salieri and Josef Weigl, perhaps with the intention of seeking a post at the Hofoper or of soliciting a commission for an opera.

During 1821 performances of Schubert's vocal music increased rapidly. In January Joseph Huber wrote to his fiancée about his experience at the first documented Schubertiad:Last Friday [the 26th] I was excellently entertained; since [Fräulein] Schober was in St Pölten, Franz invited Schubert and 14 of his close acquaintances for the evening. Schubert sang and played a lot of his songs by himself, lasting until about 10 o'clock in the evening. After that we drank punch offered by one of the group, and since it was very good and plentiful the gathering, already in a happy mood, became even merrier; it was 3 o'clock in the morning before we parted.

In the same month Gymnich sang Der Wanderer (d489) at Ignaz von Sonnleithner's and Erlkönig at an ‘evening entertainment’ of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. In February Josef Götz sang Sehnsucht (d636) at the Gesellschaft; in March Sophie Linhart sang Gretchen am Spinnrade at Sonnleithner's. In March, too, Vogl presented the first public performance of Erlkönig at the Kärntnertortheater. The same programme included the first public performances of the quartet Das Dörfchen (d598) and the octet Gesang der Geister über den Wassern (d174). Das Dörfchen was repeated in April at a Gesellschaft concert, while Die Nachtigall (d724) received its first public performance at the Kärntnertortheater. In June, Hérold's Das Zauberglöckchen (originally La clochette) received its première at the Kärntnertortheater with two additional numbers supplied by Schubert. He also completed the two Suleika songs (d717 and 720), to texts by Goethe, and possibly the Rückert song Sei mir gegrüsst (d741). Perhaps most importantly, April saw the publication, as opp.1 and 2, of Erlkönig and Gretchen am Spinnrade, underwritten through the generous support of Leopold von Sonnleithner and other of Schubert's friends. In 1821 he also published 36 dances (d365, among them the Trauerwalzer) and ten more Goethe songs, including Der König in Thule (d367), Heidenröslein (d257), Schäfers Klagelied (d121) and Wandrers Nachtlied (d224), in addition to such songs as Der Tod und das Mädchen (d531) and Der Wanderer (d489). By November at the latest he had been accepted as a member of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Almost simultaneously he was invited to compose an opera for the Hofoper (in fact, none of his operas was ever produced there). By now Schubert was not simply a prolific composer but, in Vienna, a widely performed, published and visible one as well.

In mid-September Schubert travelled with Schober to St Pölten (some 55 kilometres west of Vienna) and to nearby Ochsenburg Castle, where they spent some of their four weeks as the guests of Schober's relative Johann Nepomuk von Dankesreither, the Bishop of St Pölten. Here they collaborated closely on a new opera, Alfonso und Estrella (d732), for which Schober served as the librettist. They finished Act 1 and began Act 2 before returning to Vienna where, on 3 November, they attended a truncated version of Weber's Berlin sensation, Der Freischütz. That same autumn Spaun was transferred to the customs office in Linz; a few months later Schubert wrote a parody of an Italian opera aria (Herrn Josef Spaun, Assessor in Linz, d749) that castigates Spaun for not writing. Schubert's visibility in Linz grew substantially during Spaun's sojourn there. At the beginning of 1822 Schubert moved in with Schober at the family home (9 Spiegelgasse), where he remained until the summer of 1823 except for a stint at his father's house from late 1822 to the spring of 1823. On 21 January 1822, after accompanying Schwind to a party presented by Professor Vincentius Weinridt, Schubert sang some of his songs to an enthusiastic reception. Present at the same party was Eduard von Bauernfeld, whose friendship with Schubert was not to blossom until three years later. The composer continued to become a more visible part of Viennese musical life. In February he made the acquaintance of the visiting Weber, around the time that both of them (along with Spontini, Weigl and Umlauf) had been invited by Italian impresario Domenico Barbaia to submit works for the 1822–3 season at the Kärntnertortheater, of which he had taken control.

Schubert and Schober hastily finished Alfonso und Estrella in February and rushed it off to Barbaia – who then failed to send them any response. Schubert's persistent efforts in Berlin, Dresden and elsewhere to get a staging all failed. In his declining years Schober described his contribution as ‘such a miserable, stillborn, bungling piece of work that even so great a genius as Schubert could not bring it to life’. Vienna had no shortage of competent and even gifted librettists, and Alfonso is perhaps one more example of Schober's hold over the composer. In mid-1822 Schubert scrawled in pencil a document that his brother Ferdinand later labelled Mein Traum. In the literary style of Romantics such as Novalis, it recounts the tale of a son who is twice expelled from his parental home and is reconciled with his father only at the graveside of a young maiden. The manuscript, which Ferdinand presented to Robert Schumann in 1839, has generally been interpreted as a ‘literary effusion’, but its very uniqueness and timing suggest that Schubert was grappling with fundamental issues of family, belonging and otherness. We should not demand direct parallels in Schubert's life in order for this document to shed light on his state of mind. Not only had Schubert become a much more visible part of Viennese musical life, he had climbed to a dramatically new level of creative expression. He completed the Mass in A (d678), begun in 1819. Nothing in his previous church music prepares us for its sweep; in the Viennese tradition perhaps only Mozart's Requiem and C minor Mass can compare in scale and intensity (Beethoven's Missa solemnis was completed around the same time, although there is no reason to believe that Schubert knew it before completing his own mass). In November he completed two movements and sketched the third of a symphony in B minor (d759), which posterity later dubbed the ‘Unfinished’. Again, the assurance, the focus and the sweep of both finished movements far exceeded anything that Schubert had previously achieved in the symphonic realm. Yet with their concentration on literature and drama, Schubert's circle of friends seem to have expressed little interest in his symphonic works. At almost the same time he put the finishing touches on the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy (d760), a work for solo piano of such unusual virtuosity and construction that it fascinated Romantics (notably Liszt) for decades to come. Schubert also completed more than a dozen solo songs and partsongs to mixed texts, including the headlong Der Musensohn (d764) and the tender Geist der Liebe (d747). In terms of Schubert's creative growth the year 1822 has to rank with the miracle year of 1815. Moreover, for his compositions Schubert was now being paid closer to what he was worth. In the years 1821–2 he earned more than 2000 gulden from the publication of his opp.1–7 and 10–12; the annual salary of a minor civil servant – the social layer from which Schubert sprang – was about 400 gulden. In today's parlance we would describe Schubert as being ‘at the top of his game’. Publications continued apace, including Eight Variations on a French Song for piano duet (d624); the vocal quartets Das Dörfchen (d598), Die Nachtigall (d724) and Geist der Liebe (d747); and the songs Der Alpenjäger (d524), Die Rose (d745), Geheimes (d719), Gesänge des Harfners from Wilhelm Meister (d478–80), Lob der Tränen (d711) and the first Suleika song (d720).

During the period of these miraculous achievements, more than one of his friends commented on Schubert's intense and potentially debilitating lifestyle. In 1820 Anselm Hüttenbrenner noted that Schubert ‘used to sit down at his writing desk every morning at 6 o'clock and compose straight through until 1 o'clock in the afternoon. Meanwhile many a pipe was smoked’. Lunch included black coffee at a coffee house and another hour or two of smoking. Leopold von Sonnleithner, one of Schubert's biggest supporters, lamented that ‘unfortunately, I must confess that I saw him in a drunken state several times’, recalling in particular a party that Sonnleithner had left at 2 a.m.: ‘Schubert remained still longer and the next day I learnt that he had to sleep there as he was incapable of going home. This happened in a house where he had not been known and where he had only been introduced a short time previously’. Accompanying these excesses were sharp changes of mood, frequent irritability and antisocial behaviour. Schober may have played an influential role in these developments; in December 1822 Schubert wrote to Spaun that ‘we hold readings at Schober's three times a week as well as a Schubertiad’. A Schubertiad at Schober's in mid-January of 1823 probably brought down the curtain on Schubert's age of innocence.

Robert Winter

(viii) Crisis.

25 years Schubert's senior, the composer and conductor Ignaz Franz von Mosel met Schubert at the dramatist Matthäus von Collin's around 1820. Spaun later recalled that, upon hearing Vogl sing some of Schubert's songs, Mosel declared Schubert to be ‘by no means just a prolific inventor of melodies, but a thorough musician’. On 28 February 1823 Schubert wrote a letter to Mosel with which he enclosed the overture and third act of his now completed opera Alfonso und Estrella. First soliciting Mosel's opinion, he then asked if Mosel might write him a letter of recommendation to Weber in Dresden, where Schubert also hoped for a performance. But dwarfing the main text of this otherwise routine letter is the opening sentence, which contains the first surviving mention of a development that altered Schubert's life permanently: ‘Kindly forgive me if I am compelled to inconvenience you with another letter so soon, but the circumstances of my health still forbid me to leave the house’. Although Schubert remained circumspect about the nature of his malady, the scattered references to its symptoms during his lifetime suggest that it was almost certainly the venereal disease syphilis. Syphilis was common in Europe throughout the 19th century; researchers have estimated that in some cities it afflicted as many as one in every five inhabitants. Those particularly unfortunate could contract syphilis through a single sexual encounter; more commonly, it gained a foothold in those practising a promiscuous lifestyle; and that such a lifestyle led to Schubert's illness is suggested by accounts from those who knew him personally. That Schubert's nature contained a strong element of sexual excess was long ignored or concealed by his biographers. Many of the relevant documents were known to biographers in the 1850s; but it was only in the late 1980s that scholars brought the contradictions in the composer's personality into the open.

References already exist in Schubert's lifetime; in a letter of 1825 from Anton Ottenwalt to Josef von Spaun, Ottenwalt wrote that ‘of Schubert I could tell you nothing that is new to you and to us; his works proclaim a genius for divine creation, unimpaired by the passions of an eagerly burning sensuality …’. When Schubert became the object of intense biographical scrutiny from the 1850s onwards, several of his friends provided reminiscences that spoke of the paradoxes in his character. In 1857 Eduard von Bauernfeld wrote to the composer's biographer Ferdinand Luib that ‘Schubert had, so to speak, a double nature, the Viennese gaiety being interwoven and ennobled by a trait of deep melancholy. Inwardly a poet and outwardly a kind of hedonist’. A dozen years later he wrote that ‘the Austrian element, uncouth and sensual, revealed itself both in his life and in his art’. Expanding on the nationalist theme, he writes that ‘the Austrian character appeared all too violently in the vigorous and pleasure-loving Schubert, there were also times when a black-winged demon of sorrow and melancholy forced itself into his vicinity’. In 1858 Josef Kenner wrote to his brother that ‘[Schubert's] body, strong as it was, succumbed to the cleavage in his – souls, I would put it, of which one pressed heavenwards and the other bathed in slime’, appending an explanation that ‘perhaps, too, it succumbed to frustration over the lack of recognition which some of his larger efforts suffered and to bitterness at the meanness of his publishers’. Schober – himself no model of virtue – attributed Schubert's illness to ‘excessively indulgent sensual living and its consequences’.

These characterizations of Schubert's lifestyle from his close friends – their probity notwithstanding – leave little doubt as to his powerful sexual appetite. What remains strongly in contention, however, is the nature of Schubert's excesses, specifically whether they were heterosexual, homosexual or perhaps bisexual. Schubert's illness offers no help; syphilis can be contracted through either heterosexual or homosexual activity. Those who argue for Schubert's orthodox, if hyperactive, heterosexuality point first to the purported love affair in 1816 between Schubert and Therese Grob. Schubert's failure to marry her is explained by Metternich's Marriage Consent Law, which forbade marriages by males in Schubert's class unless they could verify their ability to support a family. Although lost, a ‘long, enthusiastic letter’ from Schubert to his friend Anton Holzapfel was said to have described Schubert's infatuation with Therese. And in a reminiscence from 1854, Anselm Hüttenbrenner described a walk with Schubert in which the composer again declared his love for Therese. During the 1820s both Schober and Bauernfeld mention Schubert's apparently unrequited love for Princess Caroline Esterházy. In 1841 Wilhelm von Chézy wrote in his memoirs that Schubert ‘honoured women and wine’. On the other hand, it is difficult to explain away Schubert's pronounced preference throughout his life for the company of men. However congruent with contemporary practices in Viennese society, his most intimate expressions of sentiment are all directed to men. Not a single letter survives from Schubert to a woman, or to Schubert from a woman. Any homoerotic dimensions within Schubert's circle of friends would not have been openly aired but expressed through ambiguous codes known only to insiders. Even given Josef Kenner's near-puritanical uprightness, it is hard to imagine ‘bathed in slime’ as applying to orthodox heterosexuality. Hence we are left to ponder many ambiguities – for example, whether ‘Greek’ describes a homosexual or a devotee of ancient Greek culture, or whether ‘young peacocks’ refers to Schubert's need for young boys or for medicinal food. Moreover, the rigid distinction between ‘straight’ and ‘gay’, which solidified only at the end of the 19th century, would have been unknown to Schubert. It is possible that Schubert's passions encompassed a whole range of heterosexual and homosexual impulses that he was driven to fulfil.

Regardless of the direct cause, in the first stage of syphilis that followed about a month after contracting the disease Schubert would have developed genital chancres and swollen lymph nodes in the groin. Doctors urged patients in this phase to remain at home. A few months later – perhaps around the middle of April 1823 – he would have found himself covered with a pinkish rash accompanied by fever. By now Schubert, who was becoming increasingly well known in Viennese musical circles, would have had to decline social invitations. From the onset of his illness (probably no later than January 1823) until his death six years later, Schubert would live with frequent physical impairment and chronic anxiety. In Schubert's Vienna the contraction of syphilis was for all practical purposes a death sentence; the time interval between contracting the disease and entering its tertiary, and usually terminal, stage was typically three to ten years, although in some instances it might be a good deal more. Given the widespread ignorance about hygiene and disease transmission, sufferers from syphilis often succumbed to other maladies first. Just how devastated Schubert felt about his sudden misfortune can be gleaned from a rare poem that he penned in May entitled Mein Gebet. Its opening lines – ‘With a holy zeal I yearn / Life in fairer worlds to learn’ – sharpens in the third of the four stanzas: ‘See, annihilated I lay in the dust, / Scorched by agonizing fire, / My life's martyr path, / Approaching eternal oblivion’. In the last of the four stanzas he finds the promise of redemption: ‘And a pure, stronger being / Let, Almighty, it be consecrated’.

Robert Winter

(ix) Despair and resolve.

It is unclear to what extent medical care dominated Schubert's life over the next six years. Several friends refer to hospitalization (presumably at the Vienna general hospital) in 1823, which may have occurred in April/May or perhaps in the summer months of June/July, when red, pea-sized papules may have covered much of Schubert's body. Hospital conditions were unsanitary and often posed more threat to the patient than home care. In April Schubert was probably well enough to pass a few weeks with Schober and Josef Kupelwieser at the Bruchmann family's summer residence in Hütteldorf. By the end of July he was able to travel with Vogl on their annual trip to Steyr and Linz. Schubert wrote to Schober that he was ‘constantly in touch’ with his physician, Dr August von Schaeffer. During the stay at Steyr, however, Schubert apparently took ill; the liberal politician Anton Doblhoff wrote to Schober some months later that he ‘found him [Schubert] seriously ill at the time’. Schubert's illness, and possibly his lifestyle, led to reclusiveness. During this summer Beethoven's nephew Karl, visiting his uncle in Baden where the composer was engrossed in his Ninth Symphony, wrote in a conversation book that ‘they greatly praise Schubert, but it is said that he hides himself’. By the end of July Schubert was feeling well enough to perform with Vogl some of his songs for the Hartmann family in Linz. He and Vogl returned to Steyr for most of August. But his anxiety and foreboding persisted. In a letter to Schober from 14 August, Schubert wrote that ‘I correspond busily with Schaeffer and am fairly well. Whether I shall ever quite recover I am inclined to doubt’. In that same month Schober left Vienna for Breslau in the apparent hope of succeeding as an actor; he did not return to Vienna for two years. Returning once again to Linz at the end of August, Schubert and Vogl were both inducted as honorary members of the Linz Musical Society, complementing the Diploma of Honour that Schubert had received from the Styrian Music Society in December of 1822. When he returned to Vienna in September he took up lodgings with Josef Huber, a civil servant known as ‘tall Huber’. By now he was apparently suffering the symptoms of secondary syphilis, most visible from a papular rash that required him to shave his head. Now under the care of Dr Josef Bernhardt, his treatment (possibly again in hospital) was probably little more than a strict diet. Unlike Schaeffer, Bernhardt grew close to the Schubert circle; he and Schwind agreed to use the intimate Du form of address, and it may have extended to Schubert as well. By the year's end Schubert's health had rebounded once again; he was able, for example, to participate in a Schubertiad at Bruchmann's on 11 November. Two days earlier, Schwind wrote to Schober that ‘Schubert is better, and it will not be long before he goes about with his own hair again, which had to be shorn owing to the rash. He wears a very cosy wig’. At this same time the reading parties, suspended since Schober's departure, resumed at the painter Ludwig Mohn's.

Perhaps most remarkable about this year is that in spite of life-threatening crises, Schubert's productivity maintained the pace and quality of previous years. Indeed, it could be argued that a sharpened sense of his own mortality would spur Schubert to even greater achievements. In March and April he completed his eighth opera, the Singspiel Die Verschworenen, based on a libretto by Ignaz Castelli. In his preface Castelli could not resist a boast: ‘The German composer's complaint is usually this: “Indeed, we should gladly set operas to music, if only you would supply us with the librettos!” Here is one, gentlemen!’. Although it has proved to be Schubert's most frequently staged opera, the composer could not persuade the management of the Kärntnertortheater to perform it. The censors' suspicion that the title signalled seditious intentions led to a name change, Der häusliche Krieg. But the first, makeshift performance, with only piano accompaniment, did not take place until two years after Schubert's death. Between May and October the composer completed an even more ambitious project, Fierrabras, based on a libretto by Schubert's friend Josef Kupelwieser. Between 1821 and 1823 Kupelwieser was the secretary to the Kärntnertortheater, a circumstance that Schubert believed would facilitate the work's performance. But even with director Barbaia's purported interest in staging German operas, Fierrabras fared no better than Der häusliche Krieg. When Weber's Euryanthe, a heroic German opera commissioned by Barbaia, flopped, Schubert wrote on 30 November to Schober: ‘Weber's Euryanthe turned out wretchedly and its bad reception was quite justified, in my opinion. These circumstances … leave me scarcely any hope for my own opera’. Schubert may even have shared his reservations with Weber himself, leading to a greatly cooled relationship between the two composers. In spite of these discouragements, the two operas did not exhaust Schubert's dramatic output for the year. Around the beginning of December he was persuaded by Kupelwieser to provide incidental music to Helmina von Chézy's play Rosamunde, Fürstin von Zypern (d797), to be presented as a benefit for the actress Emilie Neumann, with whom Kupelwieser was in love. The première on 20 December suggests that Schubert had only a few weeks to complete his work; one confirmation of his tight schedule is his use in several numbers of previously composed music. Remarkably, Rosamunde proved to be one of his most unified dramatic works. In the two months before he composed Rosamunde Schubert was hard at work on the pathbreaking song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin, assembled from poems by Wilhelm Müller. During at least some of this time Schubert was probably hospitalized (and his head shaved); he may have indeed composed part of the tragic cycle while in hospital. Müller's cycle had its origins in an 1815–16 Berlin Liederspiel, a kind of party game in which group members take on different parts; Müller's narrative thread may include autobiographical elements. In addition to the protagonists, the dramatic role of the mill stream is reflected especially in Schubert's highly original accompaniments. To portray the full scope of feelings that climax in the young miller's drowning, Schubert employs everything from the folklike strophic form of the opening of Das Wandern to the through-composed mania of Eifersucht und Stolz. How Schubert became acquainted with the work of the Prussian poet Müller is unknown, but he found him congenial enough to return to him in 1827 for the poems for his next, and arguably greatest, song cycle, Winterreise. In February Schubert completed the Piano Sonata in A minor, d784, whose compact structure encompasses an explosive emotional range and novel keyboard techniques. 1823 also witnessed the publication of the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy (d760) and more than a dozen important songs, including Auf dem Wasser zu singen (d774), Frühlingsglaube (d686), Gruppe aus dem Tartarus (d583) and Sei mir gegrüsst (d741). As he approached the first anniversary of his illness, Schubert had grappled repeatedly with depression and despair but maintained extraordinary resolve.

The year 1824 confirmed many changes in Schubert's life. Many of his best friends – among them Spaun, Stadler, Kenner, Schober and Kupelwieser – were now absent from Vienna either temporarily or permanently. Regular contact with Franz von Bruchmann, a troubled son of nobility, and with Schwind filled only part of the void. Bruchmann, who latter described the years 1823–6 as the most difficult of his life, shared with Schober a restless, often undisciplined, search for identity. He was drawn to the early Romantic outpourings of the Schlegel brothers, August and Friedrich. Schubert's relationship to Bruchmann may have extended back to the Stadkonvikt years; Bruchmann was also educated at a Piarist school and was associated with the unfortunate Johann Senn. Free of financial worries, he never trained for a profession, becoming a Redemptorist in 1826. The Bruchmann family hosted several Schubertiads between 1822 and 1824. But Schubert's strained friendship with Bruchmann ended abruptly around March 1825 when Bruchmann discovered his sister Justina's secret engagement with Schober. Bruchmann seems to have intervened in efforts that led to the breaking off of the engagement. Schwind, who had acted as an intermediary, and Schubert both turned against him, and there is no evidence that they ever had contact again. Regarding the talented Schwind, Schubert wrote to Kupelwieser in March that ‘thus, joyless and friendless, I should pass my days, did not Schwind visit me now and again and turn on me a ray of those sweet days of the past’. In spite of Schwind's impressive credentials, he and Schubert were not enough to sustain the reading parties and Schubertiads that had migrated recently to Ludwig Mohn's. After a Schubertiad on 19 January, all activities were discontinued by April. In the same letter to Kupelwieser, Schubert writes that ‘our society [reading circle], as you probably know already, has done itself to death because of an infusion of that rough chorus of beer drinkers and sausage eaters, for its dissolution is due in a couple of days, though I had hardly attended myself since your departure’.

Not all of Schubert's works from these months, however, were in a tragic vein. In February he had been commissioned by Count Ferdinand Troyer, a fine amateur clarinettist, to compose a chamber work incorporating the clarinet. Possibly in consultation with Troyer, Schubert modelled his work after Beethoven's equally youthful Septet, adding only another violin to create an ensemble of string quartet, double bass, clarinet, horn and bassoon. The sunny tone of the six-movement Octet in F major (d803) carries scarcely a whiff of despair. In the spring première at Count Troyer's, the count played the clarinet part himself. The particular ensemble can be seen as a chamber orchestra; in his same March letter to Kupelwieser, Schubert confided his compositional plans: ‘I seem once again to have composed two operas for nothing [Die Verschworenen and Fierrabras]. … Of songs I have not written many new ones, but I have tried my hand at several instrumental works, for I wrote two quartets … and an octet, and I want to write another quartet; in fact I intend to pave my way towards a grand symphony in this manner’. Schubert had finally given up on any possibility of making it as an opera composer. Although instrumental music enjoyed a prestige below that of opera, Schubert may have been further stimulated in this direction by his attendance at the première on 7 May 1824 of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. To be sure, much of the programme was choral, including three movements from the Missa solemnis and the choral finale of the symphony itself. But it was both Vienna's and Schubert's first opportunity to hear a new Beethoven symphony in more than a decade, and Schubert cannot have failed to be moved by the sight of the ageing composer having to be turned around for a bow. Beethoven's means of creation, which generally involved starting with a modest idea (this can be said of the ‘Joy’ theme itself) that is raised by stages to sublimity, would have intrigued Schubert but not provided a model he could emulate.

After his 27th birthday at the end of January 1824, Schubert's health once again took a turn for the worse. Even though in February Schwind reported to Schober that Schubert had discarded his wig, the composer was confined to Huber's house as more symptoms of secondary syphilis descended on him in the form of ‘lesions of the mouth and throat’, aching bones, and, later, pains in his left arm that prevented him from playing the piano. Some time in February Dr Bernhardt introduced a new treatment, which in Schubert's time simply meant a new (and medically benign) diet. This one consisted of alternating days of pork cutlets and a dish called panada that combined flour, water, breadcrumbs and milk. Generous portions of tea and frequent baths completed the regimen. Taking advantage on the last day of March of the opportunity to ‘wholly pour out my soul to someone’, Schubert wrote to Kupelwieser: I find myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair continually makes things worse and worse instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom the felicity of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain at best, whom enthusiasm (at least of the stimulating variety) for all things beautiful threatens to forsake, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being? ‘My peace is gone, my heart is sore, I shall find it nevermore’. I might as well sing every day now, for upon retiring to bed each night I hope that I may not wake again, and each morning only recalls yesterday's grief.

In response to his despair he kept an occasional journal; writing in March he appealed to the one thing whose loss would be even more devastating than his physical afflictions: ‘O imagination! thou greatest treasure of man, thou inexhaustible wellspring from which artists as well as savants drink! O remain with us still, by however few thou are acknowledged and revered …’. Schubert can only have drawn great comfort from the circumstance that his imagination had not deserted him, for in the months from January to March 1824 he completed the Variations on Trockne Blumen for flute and piano (d802); the String Quartet in A minor (d804); the String Quarter in D minor (d810), ‘Death and the Maiden’ – the latter two among the greatest works in the chamber music repertory – and several songs to texts by Mayrhofer. Both of the quartets are marked by such a degree of pathos and poignancy that it is impossible not to presume a direct connection between Schubert's life and this music. In a highly unusual notebook entry from March Schubert seems to make the connection himself: ‘What I produce is due to my understanding of music and to my sorrows’. One can only imagine the pleasure bordering on awe with which the Schuppanzigh Quartet (led by Vienna's most celebrated violinist) gave the first performance of the A minor Quartet on 14 March at the Musikverein.

Given Schubert's questionable health throughout the early months of the year, it is surprising that he agreed, after a six-year absence, to another lengthy summer sojourn in Zseliz as the music tutor to the two daughters of Count Johann Esterházy. He left Vienna for Zseliz on 25 May, less than three weeks after attending the première of Beethoven's Ninth. Aged 16 and 12 during Schubert's first tour, Marie von Esterházy was now 22 and Caroline 18. The second stay does not seem to have proved nearly as gratifying to Schubert as the first. He wrote in September to Schober, ‘Now I sit here alone in the depths of the Hungarian countryside, to which I unfortunately allowed myself to be enticed a second time, without having a single person with whom I could speak a sensible word’. It is a challenge to reconcile these words with testimony from two of Schubert's friends and acquaintances concerning his interest in Caroline. Baron Schönstein, who visited Zseliz again for two weeks that summer, remarked in 1857 about the ‘poetic flame that sprang up in [Schubert's] heart … for that he loved her [Caroline] must have been clear from a remark of Schubert's – his only declaration in words. Once, namely, when she reproached Schubert in fun for having dedicated no composition to her, he replied “What is the point? Everything is dedicated to you anyway”’. In an 1869 reminiscence the not always reliable Eduard von Bauernfeld wrote that Schubert was ‘head over heels in love with one of his pupils, a young Countess Esterházy’. In a letter to Schwind of August 1824 Schubert himself remarked that ‘I often long damnably for Vienna, in spite of the certain, attractive star’. As is the case with Therese Grob, nothing more specific can be traced directly to Schubert.

Perhaps as a homage to the high level of musicianship exhibited by his two pupils (who, according to Schönstein, needed coaching more than teaching), Schubert took up where he had left off in 1818, creating a trio of undisputed masterpieces for piano duet: the Sonata in C (d812; dubbed the ‘Grand Duo’ by its publisher Diabelli), the Variations in A on an original theme (d813), and most of the six Grandes marches (d819). In Schubert's time music for piano four hands was not simply a convenient vehicle for arrangements of orchestral works and opera overtures (although Schubert arranged four of his own overtures in just this way). Rather, it was a form of music-making of considerable social significance that permitted its executants a semi-public form of physical and emotional intimacy unequalled by any other form of social intercourse. Two generations earlier Mozart had succeeded in raising music for piano duet to a level above most domestic forms; but it was Schubert who took it to a level where it stood shoulder to shoulder with the prestigious genres of the sonata, string quartet and symphony. If Schubert performed any of the Zseliz works with either of the Esterházy daughters then they must have been accomplished keyboard players, for both the primo and the secondo parts are equally demanding. The rapidity with which Schubert could compose a multi-voice work with ten individually set stanzas and piano accompaniment is related by Schönstein: ‘One morning in September 1824 … Countess Esterházy invited Meister Schubert during breakfast … to set to music for our four voices a poem of which she was particularly fond … Gebet [‘Prayer’, by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué]. Schubert read it, smiled inwardly … took the book and retired immediately in order to compose. In the evening of the same day we were already trying through the finished song at the piano from the manuscript’. In this same month, however, Schubert felt sufficiently alienated from the goings on at Zseliz (and, according to Schönstein, feared that he had taken poison) to entreat Schönstein to accompany him back to Vienna a full two months before the Esterházys' return. It is again difficult to reconcile his abrupt and premature departure with the posthumous reports of his deeply held love for Caroline. On his return to Vienna Schubert moved briefly – probably for financial reasons – for one last time into the Schubert family home in the Rossau. To be sure, it was the only place he ever lived in that contained a piano; Schubert never bought, leased or borrowed a piano of his own.

The only composition of any note during the remainder of 1824 was the Sonata for arpeggione and piano (d821); the arpeggione, a kind of bowed guitar, was invented in Vienna in 1814. It enjoyed only a brief vogue; and when the sonata was published in 1871 it already included an alternative cello part. How Schubert came into contact with the inventor Stauffer or his instrument is not known, but it shows the composer to have been friendly to new sounds. A compelling performance on an arpeggione today, although rare, shows that Schubert grasped immediately the instrument's plaintive, speaking quality. The soprano Anna Milder-Hauptman wrote at the end of the year offering to advance Schubert's operatic cause in Berlin. But when Schubert sent Alfonso und Estrella she rejected it, averring that she preferred a role for ‘a queen, a mother or a peasant’. Nonetheless, in June 1825 she performed Erlkönig and the second Suleika song (d717) in a public concert in Berlin, and Schubert later dedicated Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (d965) to her. The publications of 1824, although not voluminous, are substantial. They include the String Quartet in A minor, the only one of Schubert's string quartets to be published in his lifetime; the vocal quartet Gondelfahrer (d809); the song An den Tod (d518), Axa's Romanze from Rosamunde (d797/3b); and the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, which was issued in three parts (February, March and August). He also contributed, as he had in 1822, to a collection of shorter piano pieces published for the holidays by Sauer & Leidesdorf. These later became nos.3 and 6 from his popular collection of Moments musicaux (d780). Schubert may have spent part of January 1825 in hospital, presumably undergoing treatment once again for secondary-stage manifestations of syphilis.

Robert Winter

(x) Respite: the summer of 1825.

In the first two years of his illness Schubert had suffered symptoms that were intermittent and variable but occurred at relatively close intervals. Hence the symptom-free period from roughly February 1825 until the first half of 1826 was one for which the composer must have been extraordinarily grateful. He may have even concluded that he was cured (spontaneous cures were rare but not unheard of). The absence of both Schober and Kupelwieser may have stimulated new friendships in Vienna. In February Schwind took Schubert to a marathon visit with Bauernfeld, who remarked with satisfaction in his diary that previously he had been only ‘distantly acquainted’ with the composer. The three soon became a threesome. Late that same month Sophie Müller, a 22-year-old principal singer at the Burgtheater, invited Vogl, Schubert and Johann Baptist Jenger to lunch. When Schubert visited her alone on 20 April she sang at least three of his songs with the composer accompanying. Anselm Hüttenbrenner later remarked that she performed Schubert's songs ‘most movingly’. They continued their pleasurable musical visits throughout 1825 and 1826. Schwind also introduced Schubert to his on-again, off-again flame Anna Hönig, the artistically untalented but well-educated and endearing daughter of a lawyer; in Schubert's circle she became known as ‘die süsse Anne Page’, an allusion to Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor.

In February Schubert moved to 9 Technikerstrasse, the house next door to Schwind and adjacent to the Karlskirche. Not too far away in the Wieden district, in the house where the composer Gluck had died, lived the painter Wilhelm August Rieder. Rieder had met Schubert around the time he fell ill at the end of 1822, and their friendship now grew closer. Rieder possessed a fine piano made by Anton Walter and encouraged Schubert to use it whenever he did not need quiet. According to an anonymous memoir of 1897, Schubert would walk frequently to Rieder's apartment looking for open curtains in pre-arranged window; if they were closed the chagrined composer returned home. In early May Rieder painted a three-quarter length watercolour portrait of Schubert that both Sonnleithner and Spaun praised as an extremely good likeness. Perhaps encouraged by the accessibility of Rieder's piano, Schubert worked during the spring on two ambitious piano sonatas. He completed the one in A minor (d845) but the C major Sonata (d840), dubbed ‘Reliquie’ by its publisher Whistling on the mistaken assumption that it was Schubert's last, broke off after three impressive movements (of which the third, a minuet, is almost complete) and 272 bars of an ineffectual finale.

Hence by the time Schubert left Vienna around 20 May for what was to be the most extended ‘holiday’ of his lifetime (four and a half months), he was in a compositionally expansive mood. His health had not been this robust for two and a half years. He and Vogl (who had preceded Schubert) met in Steyr, as they had in 1819. Together they then visited Linz, St Florian and Steyregg. On 6 June they reached the scenic lakeside town of Gmunden, where they tarried for six weeks. As guests of the merchant and music patron Ferdinand Traweger, Schubert had easy access to Traweger's ‘splendid piano’ and lived ‘like one of the family’. They were doubtless also captivated by the romantic rock cliffs that rim the swan-inhabited lake and seem to conjure up a distant horn call. It was indeed here that Schubert began the realization of what he had alluded to in his 1824 letter to Kupelwieser as ‘grand symphony’. What became the ‘Great’ C major Symphony (d944, perhaps only serendipitously in the same key as the previously abandoned piano sonata) opens with a sustained solo horn passage that would have wafted effortlessly across the lake. Anton Ottenwalt later reported that Schubert ‘had worked on a symphony at Gmunden’. A speculative reading of the date on its autograph led scholars to place the genesis of the ‘Great’ C major in 1828, necessitating a lost symphony from the summer of 1825. However, the paper used for the ‘Great’ C major and the works from that summer dated explicitly by Schubert makes clear that the ‘Great’ is the symphony from the summer of 1825.

From Gmunden, Schubert and Vogl made return visits to Linz and Steyr, taking in Kremsmunster and Salzburg as well. Even in the early 19th century the western portions of present-day Austria had long been known throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire as enviable ‘cure’ destinations. On 10 August Schubert and Vogl arrived in the more remote, cliffside town of Bad Gastein, famous for its vertical drops and waterfalls. Here Schubert not only worked further on the ‘Great’ C major Symphony but also composed the Piano Sonata in D major (d850), a work of torrential energy in its first and third movements and of symphonic scope in its slow movement. The technical demands on a fully professional pianist such as its dedicatee Karl Maria von Bocklet were substantial. While at Bad Gastein Schubert also composed Die Allmacht (d852), an epochal hymn of praise to a deity described by the poet Johann Ladislaus Pyrker (whom he met there) in a series of powerful nature metaphors. Schubert himself described the environs of Gmunden as ‘truly heavenly’; of Salzburg and Bad Gastein, whose ‘mountains rise higher and higher’, he wrote that ‘the country surpasses the wildest imagination’. He was equally impressed with man-made triumphs, such as Salzburg Cathedral. Virtually everywhere that he and Vogl went they performed recent songs such as Ave Maria!, the third of the three Ellen songs on texts from the Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott (d839); Schubert and Vogl both regularly performed songs specified for women. About their collaboration Schubert remarked to his brother Ferdinand: ‘The manner in which Vogl sings and the way I accompany, as though we were one at such a moment, is something quite new and unheard-of for these people’. When Schubert finally returned to Vienna in early October he learnt that the month before he had been elected a representative (Ersatzmann) of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. The publications of 1825 numbered more than half a dozen songs, including Die junge Nonne (d828), composed at the beginning of the year; two works for piano duet; and the Mass in C major (d452) – the only mass of his published in his lifetime.

Robert Winter

(xi) Return to reality.

Schubert's lengthy summer sojourn of 1825 marked the happiest period of his brief life. Over the next three years his fortune, his finances and his health would wane steadily, yet during this time he would produce a string of works demonstrating his idiosyncratic mastery of instrumental as well as vocal music. In July 1825 Schober had returned from his two-year sojourn in Breslau; during much of 1826 Schubert was to live with Schober at two locations in the suburb of Währing and one in Vienna (6 Bäckerstrasse), moves necessitated by his family's loss of their luxury apartment in the Tuchlauben. Schober's financial situation deteriorated to the point where he had to take the previously unthinkable step of seeking employment. The Swiss publisher Nägeli approached Schubert about contributing a piano sonata to an anthology, but could not agree to the confident composer's healthy fee. In late January the Schuppanzigh Quartet rehearsed the D minor Quartet in Schubert's presence and then gave a private performance on 1 February in the rooms of the tenor Josef Barth. According to Franz Lachner, who hosted the rehearsal, Schuppanzigh, a keen advocate of new music, told Schubert: ‘My dear fellow, this is no good, leave it alone; you stick to your songs!’. Schubert seems to have been little fazed; in June he began work on, and quickly completed, his last string quartet (in G major, d887), a work of striking originality. Throughout much of the year Schubert continued to expand and revise his C major Symphony with the hope of securing a performance by the Gesellschaft orchestra. In October he formally presented the work to the Gesellschaft with the idealistic dedication: ‘Persuaded of the Austrian Musical Society's noble intention to support any artistic endeavour as far as possible, I venture, as a native artist, to dedicate to them this, my symphony, and to commend it most politely to their protection’. As a ‘token of obligation’ the Gesellschaft steering committee sent Schubert 100 florins and arranged for the copying of the parts. But they did not commit to what he longed for most – a performance. Performances of Schubert's smaller works continued at infrequent Schubertiads: one on 31 May at the apartment of Spaun's friend Karl Enderes, and a mammoth one at Spaun's on 15 December, at which Schubert played piano duets with Josef von Gahy and Vogl sang ‘almost 30 splendid songs’. This is the event believed to be memorialized in the thickly populated sepia drawing of 1868 by Moritz von Schwind. The 58-year-old Vogl had returned from Italy in April and announced his engagement to Kunigunde Rosa, the daughter of a curator of the Belvedere Art Gallery and 27 years his junior. Leopold Kupelwieser finally married his sweetheart Johanna Lutz, and both men were therefore less closely affiliated with Schubert's inner circle. In February Schubert heard performances of Beethoven's Second Symphony and Overture to Egmont, the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah and chamber music by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven performed by the Schuppanzigh Quartet – all on the same day.

Schubert's old teacher Salieri had died in May 1825 and his deputy Josef Eybler was eventually named to replace him. Hence in April 1826 Schubert applied for the vacant position of second court Kapellmeister. Not until January the following year did he learn that the position had been abolished and a court organist appointed instead. It is entirely possible that Schubert's lifestyle, politics and unreliability in keeping appointments prevented his obtaining this or any other regular post during his lifetime. Nor did Schubert's almost two-year respite from the symptoms of secondary syphilis continue. When Bauernfeld returned from Gmunden in July he found ‘Schubert ailing (he needs “young peacocks”, like Benvenuto Cellini), Schwind morose, Schober idle, as usual’. If the ‘young peacocks’ refer to adolescent boys rather than a dietetic antidote to syphilis, Schubert's friends would have been no more explicit. Bauernfeld had invited Schubert to join him in Gmunden, but the composer replied in characteristic fashion: ‘I cannot possibly get to Gmunden or anywhere else, for I have no money at all, and altogether things go very badly with me. I do not fret about it, and am cheerful’. A final chapter in the history of Schubert's frustrated attempts to succeed in opera was played out in 1826. Early in the year Bauernfeld persuaded the composer to tackle Der Graf von Gleichen, the tale of a medieval count on a crusade who falls in love with a Saracen princess, Suleika, and then brings her into his home as a ménage à trois with his wife. It is almost inconceivable that both men could not have foreseen troubles with the censor, but Schubert charged ahead anyway. When the censor predictably banned the libretto in October, Schubert continued to work on it through parts of 1827, drafting almost 3000 bars in short score for the first two acts. His encounters with opera were finally over. Nor was he very successful in obtaining broader publication of his instrumental music. Breitkopf & Härtel – who eventually published the ‘Great’ C major Symphony and 39 volumes of his complete works – did not even answer Schubert's proposal. The publisher Heinrich Probst in Leipzig wrote back to Schubert that ‘the public does not yet sufficiently and generally understand the peculiar, often ingenious, but perhaps now and then somewhat curious procedures of your mind's creations’. Nonetheless, 1826 saw the publication of two piano sonatas (in A minor, d845, and D major, d850), four works for piano duet and almost a dozen songs, including Du bist die Ruh (d776) and Lachen und Weinen (d777). In addition to the G major String Quartet, Schubert completed the spacious and meditative Piano Sonata in G major (d894), three exquisite Shakespeare settings (d888, 889, 891) and the four Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meister of Goethe (d877). In October he also responded to the fresh presence in Vienna of the violin virtuoso Josef Slavík with the energetic Rondo for violin and piano in B minor (d895).

For the first few months of 1827 Schubert lived alone near the Karolinentor (opposite the present Stadtpark). The diary of the Hartmann brothers testifies to frequent parties as well as after-hour celebrations at Zum grünen Anker, a popular restaurant and tavern. In March Schubert moved in with Schober for the last time, remaining, except for a two-month holiday, at the new house on the Tuchlauben (where he had his own music room) until his final move to his brother Ferdinand's in August 1828. Early in the year at Artaria's Schubert heard the première of his splendid Rondo, written for and performed by Slavík and Bocklet. The most dramatic event in the first months of the year was the death of Beethoven on 26 March. He had contracted pneumonia in December of the previous year and by mid-January a failing liver and a stomach disorder had sealed his fate. The often fanciful Anton Schindler claimed to have set out in February to distract Beethoven from his fate by bringing to the composer, largely in manuscript, some 60 songs and vocal works. Beethoven expressed amazement that Schubert had already composed over 500 songs by the age of 30 and was even more astonished at the content of those he perused (they included Die junge Nonne and Viola). Beethoven, reported Schindler, cried out the oft-cited line: ‘Truly in Schubert there dwells a divine spark’. Did he also predict that Schubert would yet ‘make a great stir in the world’? Schindler's virtually wholesale forgeries in Beethoven's conversation books leaves us little choice but to be sceptical, yet the broad outlines of his story sound at least plausible. And what might Beethoven have thought if he had seen some of the mature piano sonatas, string quartets or the ‘Great’ C major Symphony? While it is tempting to imagine a face-to-face meeting between Vienna's two most distinguished composers, their combined reclusiveness would have made such a meeting extremely unlikely – a view reinforced by Spaun. Schubert was among the thousands who attended Beethoven's funeral a few weeks later, and his growing status was symbolized by his serving as a torchbearer. Following the ceremony, which culminated in an oration by Franz Grillparzer, Schubert, Schober, Schwind and Franz von Hartmann retired to the castle of Eisenstadt, where they reflected on Beethoven's achievements and passing until 1 a.m. A fellow torchbearer at the funeral was the German composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, whose fame easily surpassed that of Schubert. While still in Vienna, Hummel, his precocious 16-year-old student Ferdinand Hiller, Schubert and Vogl were invited to dinner by Katharina Lászny, a former Viennese opera singer married, following several high-society liaisons, to a wealthy Hungarian nobleman. More than 50 years later Hiller recalled the magic of the evening: ‘One song was followed by another … Schubert had but little technique, Vogl had but little voice, but they both had so much life and feeling, and were so completely absorbed in their performances, that the wonderful compositions could not have been interpreted with greater clarity and, at the same time, with greater vision’. So impressed was Schubert by Hummel that he dedicated his last three piano sonatas to him; by the time they were published in 1839, Hummel was dead, prompting Artaria to change the dedication to Schumann.

After his frustrating experience with Probst, Schubert had considerably more success with Tobias Haslinger, who published 12 Valses nobles (d969) for piano in January, the G major Piano Sonata in April, and three Seidl settings in May. The proceeds from the sale may have facilitated Schubert's leaving for a two-month working holiday in Dornbach (probably often in Schober's company), a village a few kilometres north-west of Vienna. His principal creative activity was work on the unfinished opera Der Graf von Gleichen. While on holiday Schubert was also elected – at the age of only 30 – to full membership of the steering committee of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde; he responded in writing that ‘I declare my gratification at the honour accorded to me by this election, and my entire readiness to fulfil all duties connected with the same’. In mid-April Schubert attended at the Musikverein the first public performance by an augmented Schuppanzigh Quartet of the Octet in F major. On 21 April Spaun presented a Schubertiad that, according to Franz von Hartmann's diary, enjoyed ‘an enormous attendance’. Hartmann also wrote that ‘at 12 o’clock we left … and a larger party went to Bogner's, where however for that very reason it was no longer particularly jolly, and the glorious impressions of the Schubertiad were lessened’. Another cause may have been Schubert's state of mind, which Bauernfeld noted in early June as depressed. Schubert must have realized that his respite from syphilitic symptoms could end at any time. In early September he accepted an invitation arranged by Johann Jenger, a fine pianist, to visit Marie Pachler (another pianist, commended by Beethoven) in Graz. They stayed for three weeks, sandwiching in a side visit to Wildbach Castle and attending a charity concert of the Styrian Music Society that included three of Schubert's vocal works. Upon his return to Vienna he wrote to Frau Pachler that ‘my usual headaches [a classic symptom of secondary syphilis] are assailing me again’; indeed, while enjoying the Pachler family's hospitality in Graz, Schubert had cancelled an appointment with a music lover, probably for the ‘usual’ reason. Hartmann's diary made the blanket observation about the autumn of 1827 that ‘every Wednesday and Saturday evening we go to the alehouse, where Enk, Schober, Schubert and Spaun can be found’.

Since February Schubert had been preoccupied with a melancholy cycle of poems by Wilhelm Müller, Die Winterreise. Its deeply interior, two-part tale of a young man unlucky in love who wanders across the frozen landscape had obvious parallels with Die schöne Müllerin of four years earlier, but Müller's new poems elicited even greater pathos from Schubert's pen. He apparently did not discover part 2 until October, probably completing the full 24-poem cycle before the end of the year. Spaun wrote that ‘we were quite dumbfounded by the gloomy mood of these songs …. To which Schubert replied, “I like these songs more than all the others and you will get to like them too”. They did, especially in Vogl's dramatic renditions. Spaun added that the songs of Winterreise ‘were his real swansong. From then on he was a sick man, although his outward condition gave no immediate cause for alarm’. Gone for the most part are the spontaneous, arching melodies of Die schöne Müllerin, replaced by declamatory lines in a narrow range and repetitive rhythms that underscore the bleak landscape. Two thirds of the songs are in minor, and those in major, such as the subdominant-inflected Die Nebensonnen, are often heartbreakingly sad. Yet Schubert's personal gloom did not produce uniformly gloomy music. A flood of works were begun or completed in the autumn. Throughout much of 1827 he worked in spurts on the spacious and elated Piano Trio in B major (d898). In November he began work on its equally convivial sibling, the Piano Trio in E major (d929). One of them (probably d898) was performed at the Musikverein at the end of December. Both sets of the wide-ranging impromptus for piano (d899, d935) were completed by the end of the year. If we also take into account the Eight Variations on a theme from Hérold's opera Marie for piano duet (d908) of February, the Fantasia in C major for violin and piano (d934) of December, songs on texts by Leitner, Metastasio, Rochlitz and Schober, and the publication of almost 30 works, 1827 was an auspicious year.

Robert Winter

(xii) Beginnings and the end (1828).

Schubert began his final year with the familiar celebrations at Schober's. Along with friends such as Schober, Spaun, Schwind, Bauernfeld and the von Hartmann brothers, he made his way at 2 a.m. to Bogner's coffee house to celebrate and ponder the future. It seemed most promising. The reading sessions that had been suspended since 1824 were now revived at Schober's. On 20 January Slavík and Bocklet gave the première of the Fantasy for violin and piano at Slavík's private concert. On 15 January Spaun – Schubert's friend of longest standing – announced his long-awaited engagement. Schubert, although disappointed at the prospect of having to share his old friend, proposed a musical evening in honour of Spaun and his fiancée, Franziska von Ehrenwerth. On 28 January Bocklet, Schuppanzigh and Linke played one of the piano trios, after which Schubert and Bocklet played piano duets (including the magnificent A Variations) so brilliantly that, Spaun recalled, ‘everyone was enchanted and the highly delighted Bocklet embraced his friend [Schubert]’. It was not only the last Schubertiad at Spaun's, but the last one altogether. In the same month Schubert had begun work on the Fantasy in F minor for piano duet (d940), his most cathartic and structurally integrated work in that medium. The dedication to Caroline Esterházy testifies to the esteem in which he held her, although it stops short of being a clear-cut declaration of love. When two German publishers, Schott in Mainz and Probst in Leipzig, contacted Schubert about potential works, he replied with a varied list of largely instrumental compositions. Schott at first offered to take the second set of impromptus, but withdrew when his Paris office advised that they were ‘too difficult for trifles’. Probst accepted and published the E Piano Trio, including cuts in the finale that Schubert's friends had apparently urged.

For the first time in his career, Schubert felt emboldened to present a public concert devoted entirely to his own music. The Gesellschaft placed its concert hall in the Tuchlauben at his disposal. First planned for 21 March, it was changed to 26 March, the first anniversary of Beethoven's death. If the even-numbered verses of the one work composed especially for this evening, Auf dem Strom for tenor, horn and piano (d943), were meant to recall the Funeral March of Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ Symphony, then Schubert's homage could not have been more complete. Along with a group of songs (some recent, others as much as 12 years old), the Schuppanzigh Quartet played the first movement of the G major Quartet, and its members joined Bocklet in a performance of the E Piano Trio. Those who commented on the evening all state that the hall was full to capacity; in the end Schubert netted the healthy sum of 800 florins – enough to sustain a civil servant for many months. Money, however, always slipped quickly through Schubert's fingers. Of their group finances, Bauernfeld wrote: ‘Whoever was flush at the moment paid … for the others … among the three of us [Bauernfeld, Schwind and Schubert] it was Schubert who played the part of a Croesus and who, off and on, found himself swimming in money’. Schubert insisted on paying for tickets to hear Paganini, who gave several concerts in Vienna in 1828. After the concert Schubert treated him and Bauernfeld to several bottles of wine before moving on to the inn zur Schnecke for more celebrations with Franz von Hartmann.

Schubert's exploration of novel keyboard styles continued in May with the Drei Klavierstücke (d946); he may have expected the publisher to add fanciful titles. Around the same time he completed the passionate Allegro in A minor and the Rondo in A major, both for piano four hands. These two polarized works completed Schubert's extraordinary exploration of music for piano duet. An unrelated exception occurred the next month, when Schubert and his composer friend Lachner set off on a two-day excursion to Heiligenkreuz, where they hoped to hear the fine organ in the Cistercian monastery. In Baden, where they spent the night, Schubert proposed that each of them compose a fugue to be played at the monastery. By midnight, according to Lachner, they were finished, and at 6 o’clock the next morning they commenced the last leg of their journey. Both fugues were played in the presence of several monks, whose reactions are unrecorded. Diabelli's publication of Schubert's Fugue in E minor (d952) – saturated with pre-Wagnerian chromaticism – as a piano duet probably stemmed from his desire to make it more saleable. Meanwhile, Schubert continued to collect accolades, both in private correspondence (as from the University of Breslau music lecturer J.T. Mosewius on both Müller song cycles) and in print, as in a review in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst praising part 1 of Winterreise and the Rondo in B minor for violin and piano. In June Schubert turned, without any apparent external stimulus, for the last time to the mass. The Mass in E major (d950), while in some respects more restrained than the A Mass begun almost a decade before, shows Schubert's mastery of a wide range of choral textures.

As summer approached Schubert investigated the possibilities of another holiday in Graz with Jenger at the Pachlers, or in Gmunden. The exact reasons for delays are not known, but it may be that Schubert already felt unwell enough to be wary of straying too far from Vienna. In July, perhaps commissioned by the cantor Salomon Sulzer, he set Psalm xcii (d953) for soloists and chorus. In August Schubert's physical distress was great enough for him to consult the court physician, Dr Ernst Rinna, who made the ultimately fatal recommendation that Schubert move in with his brother Ferdinand in the Viennese suburb of Wieden. On 1 September Schubert joined his brother in a new building on Kettenbrückengasse 6, whose cleaner air on the outside was unfortunately complemented by very damp air on the inside. Schubert's symptoms, which may have included giddiness and headaches, were not enough to deter him from composing or completing a rich array of ambitious works that included the songs posthumously published as Schwanengesang (d957, August and October), the last three piano sonatas (d958–60, September), the String Quintet in C major (d956, September–October) and Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (d965, October) for voice, clarinet and piano. The seven poems each by Rellstab and Heine that make up the posthumously titled Schwanengesang were probably intended for separate publication. From the rippling demisemiquavers of Liebesbotschat to the languid triplets of Ständcher, from the ebullience of Abschied to the sprawling gloom of In der Ferne, the emotional range of the Rellstab settings is staggering. Five of the seven Heine poems are deeply tragic, and with a remakable economy Schubert plumbs the essence of images such as Ihr Bild and Der Doppelgänger. Even if we assume that Schwanengesang was begun earlier, the sheer quantity and quality of productivity in Schubert's last months point to a man who has by sheer force of will resolved not to acknowledge his failing body. But it could just as easily describe a man who knows that his time is almost up – or a man who, in his creative prime and, having survived worse bouts of illness, had no expectation of dying. Whatever the explanation, his productivity remains nothing short of miraculous. The rate of publication remained equally healthy, including the E Piano Trio, some 20 songs to texts by Goethe, Leitner, Schulze, Scott, Seidl and Shakespeare, and part 1 of Winterreise.

It may have been Schubert's deeper study of the music of Handel (especially Messiah), or his attendance at the frequent colossal performances in Vienna of Handel oratorios that spurred him to seek counterpoint lessons with Simon Sechter, Vienna's most prominent music theorist and a strict advocate of the Fuxian tradition. It is hard to imagine why the composer of the E major Mass or the Fantasy in F minor felt it necessary to study counterpoint, but on 4 November, accompanied by the violinist and composer Josef Lanz (who apparently made the arrangements for both of them), Schubert took his one and only lesson with Sechter. On 31 October Schubert had dined at the tavern zum roten Kreuz often frequented by the composer and his family. His reaction to the fish that he ate was to feel ill. According to Bauernfeld, he had felt this way ‘from time to time and we attached no importance to it’. Around this time Schubert began sketches for a symphony in D major (referred to incongruously as ‘Symphony no.10’). Each of its three movements open new paths for exploration; the B minor Largo, especially, projects an almost Mahlerian sense of foreboding alternating with salvation. Schubert very likely worked on the symphony until he became too delirious to write.

On 3 November he felt well enough to attend the performance of a Requiem by his brother Ferdinand, followed by a three-hour walk with Schubert family friend Josef Mayssen. A few days later Spaun visited Schubert to have him check a copy of a psalm setting he had prepared at Schubert's request for the Ladies Choral Society in Lemberg. The composer was in bed but protested that there was nothing wrong with him, ‘only I am so exhausted that I feel as if I were going to fall through the bed’. His fate was now sealed, and his 13-year-old half-sister Josefa and Ferdinand's wife Anna prepared to care for him for the duration. On 12 November Schubert wrote an alarming letter to Schober, declaring that ‘I am ill. I have eaten nothing for 11 days and drunk nothing, and I totter feebly and shakily from my bed and back again. Rinna is treating me. If I try to take anything, it comes right back up’. The same letter requests more novels by James Fennimore Cooper, the American author of, among others, The Last of the Mohicans and The Spy. One unconfirmed report states that on 14 November Beethoven's String Quartet in C minor op.131 was performed at Schubert's bedside. Rinna now took ill himself, and Josef von Vering was called in. A bedside conference between Vering and another physician, Johann Wisgrill, led to a new course of treatment. We can only guess at the prescribed medications that Schubert imbibed at regular intervals using his stopwatch. Spaun, who visited Schubert during his last days, reported periods of delirium in which Schubert ‘sang ceaselessly’, alternating with periods of lucidity during which he corrected the proofs for part 2 of Winterreise. But on 18 November Schubert had to be restrained in his bed; by 3 o’clock the next afternoon he was dead.

 

 

Schubert’s death mask, in the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia
The Curtis Institute of Music

The death certificate ascribed Schubert's death to Nervenfieber (nervous fever). For Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert's great chronicler, this meant either typhus or typhoid fever. But later writers such as Eric Sams argue that the most probable cause was tertiary syphilis. Some of the symptoms, such as giddiness and headaches, could have been caused by mercury, the standard medication in Schubert's time for those afflicted with syphilis. Narrowing of the arteries in the brain – another symptom of tertiary syphilis – could have caused a stroke that led to Schubert's fever and delirium. With the stigma already attached to venereal disease in Schubert's time, it is easy to understand why his physicians and family would have wished to gloss over the true cause of death. Still others have posited malnutrition, the effects of alcoholism, and deterioration of the immune system. The imprecision of medical practice and the poor understanding of causality in Biedermeier Vienna will always preclude a definitive account. What is certain is that, even by the standards of his day, Schubert died far younger than the vast majority of his less gifted friends. Two days after Schubert's death a funeral service was held at the Josephskirche in the Margareten suburb. A semi-delirious conversation Schubert had with Ferdinand the evening before he died led the brother to believe that Franz wished to be buried near Beethoven. There in Währing cemetery, in blustery November weather, Schubert, having not quite reached his 32nd birthday, was laid to rest. A heavily attended memorial service was held at the Augustinerkirche on 23 December, followed by a bittersweet Schubert concert at Spaun's. In January and March of 1829 Anna Fröhlich organized two private memorial concerts at the Musikverein, with half of the receipts going towards the erection of a funeral monument. Not until the summer of 1830 was Ludwig Forster's monument with the bust by Josef Dialer placed at Schubert's grave; it was inscribed with the celebrated epitaph by Grillparzer: ‘The art of music has entombed here a rich treasure but even fairer hopes’. Immortal as these words are, they also suggest that even Schubert's most ardent supporters had little idea what he had accomplished in his brief time on earth.

Robert Winter

(xiii) Schubert's character and the reception of his works.

In the decades following Schubert's premature death, his character – or at least the character that his friends and biographers constructed – was unavoidably linked to the reception of his music. Less than a week after Schubert's death, Josef von Zedlitz wrote in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst that ‘his private life was absolutely honourable and worthy, as is always the case with every true artist’. In the wake of Metternich's Europe, artists remained perhaps the one class that society could still idealize. Although less naive, the obituaries published by Sonnleithner, Spaun and Bauernfeld glossed over aspects of Schubert's life with which they must have been acquainted. Only Mayrhofer acknowledged in his notice that Schubert ‘had long been seriously ill, had gone through disheartening experiences, and life for him had shed its rosy colour’. Three decades later one might have thought that a balanced assessment was possible – although not where Anton Schindler was concerned. Waging a rearguard action, Schindler wrote in 1857 ‘does not the inheritance left by our young master declare clearly and distinctly how matters stood in his case with regard to his mode of life and consequently with regard to his use of every hour of his time? And yet the false idea has spread and taken firm root that Schubert led a disorderly life, was addicted to drink and suchlike’. Heinrich Kreissle, Schubert's first biographer, presented a composite picture of Schubert in 1861 (with a much expanded second edition in 1865) as ‘a good son, fondly attached to all his family, a firm friend, always ready to do a good turn for any he loved, free from all envy and hatred, high-minded …’. In 1873 the American Schubert biographer George Lowell Austin went one better than Kreissle: ‘The evenness of his disposition, which bore a resemblance to the smooth surface of a mirror, was rarely ruffled by exterior matters, and there existed a perfect harmony between his spirit and action …. The important elements of Schubert's character were a love of truth, and a marked hatred of jealousy, tenderness with firmness, sincerity and affection…’.

The centenary of Schubert's death in 1928 prompted a spate of books that continued to reinforce the Schubertbild. In the English-speaking world Newman Flower's Franz Schubert: the Man and his Circle boasted of its grounding in the scholarship of Otto Erich Deutsch. Flower did not look kindly on those who threatened to tarnish his portrait of Schubert: ‘[Anselm] Hüttenbrenner later declared that Schubert had “an overruling antipathy to the daughters of Eve”. But this is scarcely correct. That his love for Therese Grob was the great passion is beyond question’. More than a decade earlier Rudolf Bartsch's 1912 novel Schwammerl and Willner and Reichardt's 1916 Singspiel Das Dreimäderlhaus (English version, 1923, as Lilac Time) had spread the sentimentalized view of Schubert to every corner of the music world. With its brief span, remarkable productivity and lack of obvious turning-points, Schubert's biography facilitated just the kind of rewriting practised by biographers and novelists alike.

Between 1821 and Schubert's death in 1828 more than 100 opuses of his music had been published (or at least proofed by the composer), most by Viennese firms. This was a rate unequalled by any of Schubert's Viennese contemporaries. In terms of the sheer number of opuses, it almost doubles the total for Beethoven over the same period. The differences lay in the emphasis. In this period Beethoven saw seven symphonies and half a dozen overtures published; Schubert saw not one note of his orchestral music published. Schott published Beethoven's Missa solemnis shortly after its completion; Schubert could get only a handful of youthful sacred works into print. Almost two-thirds of Schubert's published opuses in his lifetime were devoted to lieder (more than 175 songs). The 50 Nachlass opuses published between 1830 and 1850 by Anton Diabelli were devoted entirely to 137 more lieder. More than 30 other Schubert opuses were divided equally between music for piano and piano duet. Of his greatest chamber works only the A minor Quartet and the E Piano Trio appeared in his lifetime. At the time of Beethoven's death, virtually all of the music on which his posthumous reputation would rest had been published. Less than a quarter of Schubert's music had appeared in print when he died, and publication was heavily skewed towards the least prestigious genres.

Facilitated by Schubert's brother Ferdinand, Robert Schumann's Viennese encounter with the ‘Great’ C major Symphony led to Mendelssohn's celebrated Leipzig performance on 21 March 1839 and a publication of the parts the next year. Schumann’s and Mendelssohn's roles were pivotal; previous attempts to mount performances in Vienna and Paris had failed because the musicians found the work too long and too difficult. But the publicity garnered by the symphony failed to have a major impact on the firms of Artaria, Diabelli, Leidesdorf, Schweiger and Spina, who continued to favour songs, partsongs and piano music. By 1865 only a single overture (d591) had been added to the orchestral list. Chamber music fared better, with the publication of the ‘Trout’ Quintet, the G major String Quartet, the Octet in F and the B Piano Trio. Yet almost four decades after his death still less than half of Schubert's music was in print. In 1865 Anselm and Josef Hüttenbrenner were finally persuaded to go public with the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, their legacy from Schubert's honorary 1822 diploma the Styrian Music Society in Graz. The first public performance of the symphony under Johann Herbeck finally put Schubert on the international map, leading quickly to performances in Germany, England, France and North America.

Robert Winter

 

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