Part 1

_Schubert_ AND HIS WORK

By HERBERT F. PEYSER

NEW YORK _Grosset & Dunlap_ PUBLISHERS

_Copyright 1946, 1950 The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York_ Printed in the United States of America

Foreword

A sense of helplessness and futility overcomes the writer who, in the limits of a volume as unpretending as the present one, endeavors to give the casual radio listener a slight idea of Schubert’s inundating fecundity and inspiration. Like Bach, like Haydn, like Mozart, Schubert’s capacity for creative labor staggers the imagination and, like them, he conferred upon an unworthy—or, rather, an indifferent—generation treasures beyond price and almost beyond counting. Outwardly, his life was far less spectacular than Beethoven’s or Mozart’s. His works are the mirror of what it must have been spiritually. Volumes would not exhaust the wonder of his myriad creations. If this tiny book serves to heighten even a little the reader’s interest in such songs, symphonies, piano or chamber works of Schubert as come to his attention over the air it will have achieved the most that can be asked of it.

H. F. P.

Schubert AND HIS WORK

The most lovable and the shortest-lived of the great composers, Franz Seraph Peter Schubert was doubly a paradox. He was the only one of the outstanding Viennese masters (unless one chooses to include in this category the Strauss waltz kings) actually born in Vienna; and, though there has never been a composer more spiritually Viennese, Schubert inherited not a drop of Viennese blood. His ancestry had its roots in the Moravian and Austrian-Silesian soil. His grandfather, Karl Schubert, a peasant and a local magistrate, lived in one of the thirty-five towns called Neudorf in Moravian-Silesian territory and married the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, acquiring by the match a large tract of land and ten children of whom the fifth, Franz Theodor Florian, was destined to beget an immortal.

At eighteen Franz Theodor, who was born in 1763, determined to follow the example of his elder brother, Karl, and become a schoolmaster. He went to Vienna and secured a post as assistant instructor in a school where Karl had already been teaching for several years. In spite of starvation wages he married (1785) Maria Elisabeth Vietz, from Zuckmantel, in Silesia, the very town whence the Schuberts had originally emigrated to Neudorf. She was a cook, the daughter of a “master locksmith,” and she was seven years older than her husband. The couple had fourteen children, nine of whom died in infancy. The survivors were Ignaz, Ferdinand, Karl, Therese and our Franz Peter, who came twelfth in order.

A year after his marriage father Schubert was appointed schoolmaster of the parish of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, in Lichtental, one of the thirty-four Viennese suburbs (or _Vorstädte_), located at greater or lesser distances from the “Inner Town,” which in those days represented Vienna proper. The schoolhouse (unless it has been demolished in the late war) still stands. Franz Theodor took lodgings for himself and his family a few steps away at the House of the Red Crab (_Zum rothen Krebse_), Himmelpfortgrund 72, now Nussdorfer Strasse 54 and since 1912 a Schubert museum, owned by the municipality of Vienna. Here Franz Seraph Peter was born on January 31, 1797, at half past one in the afternoon.

Father Schubert’s position was far from lucrative; in fact, it offered no salary at all, nothing but a tax of one gulden a month per child levied on the parents. And yet this inflexible, God-fearing pedagogue, imposed such merciless economies and Spartan discipline on himself, his family and his pupils that he not only managed to make both ends meet but, when Franz Peter was four, to buy the schoolhouse where he taught and to take up his quarters there. In modern times the little house had become a garage, though a memorial tablet placed on it in 1928 reminded the passerby that Schubert lived and taught there for several years besides composing under its roof a number of his works, among them _Der Erlkönig_.

Not the least remarkable thing about Father Schubert was the fact that, despite the endless grind of making a living, teaching and raising a family, he should have found time to cultivate music. Yet he was a tolerable amateur cellist and his great son’s first music teacher. After giving the boy “elementary instruction” in his fifth year and sending him to school in his sixth he taught Franz Peter at the age of eight the rudiments of violin playing and practised him so thoroughly that the boy was “soon able to play easy duets fairly well.”

The youngster was next handed over to his elder brother, Ignaz, who gave him some piano instruction. But here an uncanny thing happened! The child showed such an instinctive grasp of everything his brother tried to teach him that Ignaz, nonplussed, confessed himself hopelessly outstripped. Franz, for his part, declared he had no need of help but would go his own way in musical matters. Thereupon his parents entrusted him to the choirmaster of the nearby Lichtental parish church, one Michael Holzer, who knew something about counterpoint and consumed more alcohol than was good for him. It was not long before poor Holzer was experiencing with his pupil the same difficulties as Ignaz. He had the little fellow sing and was delighted by his bright voice and his musical accuracy. He let him accompany hymns on the organ, had him improvise and modulate back and forth, taught him a little piano and violin, familiarized him with the viola clef and a few principles of thorough-bass. But in the end his labors were largely superfluous. Holzer admitted that “the lad has harmony in his little finger.” A nearby shop of a piano maker offered a more fertile field for experiments in harmony. Released from the organ loft Franz Peter hurried to this shop and spent hours there forming chords on the keyboard.

He Joins the “Sängerknaben”

It is not impossible that Schubert may have made a few attempts at composition at this stage, though there is no actual proof. But a real turning point came on May 28, 1808. On that date there appeared in the official journal, the _Wiener Zeitung_, an announcement that two places among the choristers of the Imperial Chapel (the so-called Sängerknaben) had to be filled. Father Schubert saw his chance. A chorister who showed the necessary qualifications could enjoy free tuition, board and lodging at the Imperial Konvikt (or Seminary); and if the boy distinguished himself “in morals and studies” he might remain even after his voice had changed. The Konvikt was a former Jesuit school reopened in 1802 by the Emperor Franz and supervised by a branch of the Jesuits called the Piarists. In addition to ten choristers there were pupils of middle and high school standing. The Konvikt occupied a long, cheerless building which in modern times looked quite as bleak as it did in Schubert’s day.

The tests took place on September 30, 1808, and the examiners consisted of Antonio Salieri, a prolific opera composer, an intimate of Gluck and Haydn, a teacher of Beethoven and an implacable enemy of Mozart; the Court Kapellmeister Eybler; and a singing teacher at the school, Philip Korner. Schubert presented himself for the examination wearing a grayish smock, which caused the other boys to jeer and call him a miller. But as millers were popularly supposed to be musical the young mockers agreed that he could not fail. They were right. Not only did he meet all the requirements but his voice and musicianship aroused the surprise and enthusiasm of the committee. Schubert was promptly accepted. In other subjects required, as well as in music, he easily surpassed the other competitors. Not in vain was he his father’s son!

So the boy shed his “miller’s” vesture and put on the fancy, gold-braided togs of the Sängerknaben. In a few days he was settled at the Konvikt. He was amenable to discipline—having learned it plentifully at home—and does not appear to have suffered the tribulations of some other Konvikt scholars who were less conformable and more adventurous. The shyness which clung to him more or less throughout his life made him shun his fellow students as much as he conveniently could. The food was poor and scanty and even four years later we find him appealing pathetically to his brother Ferdinand for a few pennies a month to buy a roll or an apple as a fortifying snack between a “mediocre midday meal and a paltry supper” eight hours later! The music room at the school was left unheated, hence “gruesomely cold” (anyone who has experienced the unheated corridors of a Viennese house in winter can shudder in sympathy!). But there was plenty of music and the school orchestra, in which Schubert occupied the second desk among the violins, delighted him.

Every evening this orchestra played an entire symphony and ended up with “the noisiest possible overture.” The windows were left open in summer and crowds used to collect outside, till the police dispersed them because they obstructed traffic. The concerts were conducted by a singularly lovable old Bohemian organist, viola player and teacher, Wenzel Ruziczka, who at an early date defended and explained some of the boldest “modernisms” in Schubert’s compositions. The orchestra performed a good deal of trivial music but every now and then there would be works by Haydn, Mozart, Cherubini, Méhul and even some of the less taxing scores of Beethoven. Schubert on these occasions felt himself in heaven! He was “entranced” by the slow movements of Haydn, but his god was Mozart. With a subtlety of perception almost uncanny in a boy of twelve he said that the G minor Symphony “shook him to the depths without his knowing why.” He called the overture to the _Marriage of Figaro_ the “most beautiful in the whole world,” then quickly added “but I had almost forgotten that to the _Magic Flute_.” It is certain that this student orchestra was a most valuable factor in Schubert’s musical education. It was with these young players in mind that he composed his First Symphony in October, 1813, at the age of sixteen.

At a first violin desk in front of Schubert there played another youth, some nine years older, a student of law and philosophy from Linz, Josef von Spaun, and thus began one of those Schubertian friendships that was to last for life and play an important part in Schubert’s story. Amazed by the beautiful playing he heard behind him, Spaun looked around and saw “a small boy in spectacles.” Not long afterwards he surprised the youngster in the freezing music room trying a sonata by Mozart. Franz confided to his sympathetic new friend that, much as he loved the sonata, he found Mozart “extremely difficult to play” (another acute observation!). Then, “shy and blushing,” he admitted that he “sometimes put his thoughts into notes.” However, he trembled lest his father get wind of the fact, for while Franz Theodor had no objection to music as a pastime and also had every reason to be satisfied that it paid for his son’s education and kept a roof over his head, he had other plans for him in mind. The real business of the young man’s life was to be schoolmastering. No two ways about it!

So Franz Peter had need to be wary. Besides, there was another obstacle to his composing. Music paper was scarce and costly. He did, it is true, rule staves on paper himself but even ordinary brown paper was not plentiful. So the generous Spaun, though of a rather restricted budget, bought paper out of his own allowance and did not remonstrate when Schubert used up the precious commodity “by the ream.” The only difficulty, now, was that Franz composed in study hours and fell back in his school work, a fact that was not slow in coming to his father’s notice. And yet the records of the Konvikt do not show that Schubert was a poor student. At various times certificates signed by the school director, Father Innocenz Lang, pronounce him “good” or “very good” in almost everything, while in Greek he is even described as “eminent.” Somewhat later when at normal school, preparing to teach in his father’s schoolhouse, his weaker subjects were mathematics, Latin and “practical religion.”

However, not all the parental thundering could keep nature from taking its course, even if it temporarily embittered Franz’s young life. Father Schubert at one stage went so far as to forbid his son to enter his house. The lad had been in the habit of going home on Sundays and holidays and there taking part in string quartet concerts with his father and his brothers, Ignaz and Ferdinand, Schubert himself occupying the viola desk and being the real director of the ensemble. He roughly scolded his brothers when they blundered, but cautiously corrected Franz Theodor’s errors with nothing more scathing than: “Herr Vater, something must be wrong here.” Now this diversion was denied him and he suffered. Not until May 28, 1812, was he permitted to return to the Lichtental roof-tree and then only because a tragic event softened the paternal heart. On that Corpus Christi day Franz’s mother died of typhus (or, as they called it then, “nerve fever”), the same malady which sixteen years later was to carry off Franz himself. In due course the chamber music sessions were resumed and in time they outgrew their humble environment.

The Earliest Compositions

Let us look back briefly to consider a few of Schubert’s early creative accomplishments. How many experimental efforts preceded his earliest extant compositions we can only surmise. His first surviving one is a four-hand piano Fantasie, 32 pages long, running to more than a dozen movements with frequent changes of time and key. A little later, on March 30, 1811, he began his first vocal composition, an immensely prolix affair called _Hagars Klage_ to a discursive poem about Hagar lamenting her dying child in the desert. With its varying rhythms, its pathetic slow introduction, its elaborate Allegro and its passionate prayer, it shows the influence of the popular German ballad master, Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg, who had himself composed the same text. Not only Zumsteeg but composers like Reichhardt and Goethe’s friend, Zelter, exercised moulding influences on Schubert in his formative stage. A setting of Schiller’s _Leichenphantasie_ is carried out on much the same lines and so is a ballad, _Der Vatermörder_, to a text by Pfeffel. And there were other things besides long, trailing ballads—an orchestral overture in D, a so-called quartet-overture and quintet-overture, an Andante and a set of variations for piano, three string quartets “in changing keys” (Schubert wrote seven quartets in all during his Konvikt days), thirty minuets “with trio” for strings, “German dances,” some four part Kyries for the Lichtental church and other matters bearing the dates 1811 and 1812.

The good Ruziczka, finding himself unable to teach his young charge anything he did not know already, handed him over to Salieri, who began to give him lessons in counterpoint on June 18, 1812 (Schubert made a record of the date). He must have profited by Salieri’s instruction or he would hardly have remained his pupil all of five years, as he did. One circumstance may astonish us—that he briefly suffered himself to be swayed by the prejudice Salieri harbored against Beethoven. Yet when Salieri celebrated his fiftieth year of musical activities, in 1816, Schubert made a slighting entry in his diary about “certain bizarreries of modern tendencies.” That this could have been only a passing aberration is clear from the fact that Beethoven remained his divinity and his despair to his dying day. He once told his friend, Spaun: “There are times when I think something could come of me; but who is capable of anything after Beethoven?” Indeed, Beethoven remained to such a degree an obsession of his that the older Master’s name was almost the last word he ever uttered.

Franz Theodor found it inexpedient to remain long a widower. Less than a year after the loss of the quiet woman who had been his “deeply treasured wife” he married the daughter of a silk goods manufacturer, the “wertgeschätzte Jungfrau” Anna Kleyenböck, a woman of thirty, twenty years his junior. The entire Schubert family, including the black sheep from the Konvikt, was present at the wedding on April 25, 1813. Five more children were born and this time only one died. Anna Kleyenböck fitted perfectly into the Schubert _ménage_. Contrary to the tradition of stepmothers she idolized her stepson, Franz, and was no less adored by him in return. Later, when Father Schubert’s pecuniary position somewhat improved, Anna showed herself a model of economy and thrift, always putting what occasional savings the schoolmaster gave her into a woolen stocking! It was from this stocking that she more than once furnished a helping mite to her stepson in his days of need.

Franz’s voice changed in 1812 and logically his days at the Konvikt should have been numbered. But the authorities were by no means anxious to be rid of him and his father would probably have been pleased if he had stayed on. Even the Emperor, to whom representations were made and whose attention the boy’s talents seem to have attracted, agreed that he might remain and take advantage of the “Meerfeld scholarship”—provided he made an effort to improve his standing in mathematics. Franz himself must have realized that to return home meant to court renewed trouble with his father, not to mention the risk of actual starvation. Yet he was so fed up on the Konvikt that about the end of October, 1813, he left what he called the “prison.” His last work written there (it is dated October 28, 1813) was his First Symphony. But he maintained cordial relations with the Seminary for some years, tried out some of his new compositions in the Konvikt music room and preserved his interest in the school orchestra.

The Early Symphonies

This is, perhaps, as good a place as any to consider for a moment the early symphonies of Schubert. One says “early” because Schubert’s symphonic output falls sharply into two distinct halves. Six of them—two in D major, two in B flat, one in C minor and one in C major—belong to the years from 1813 through 1817. They are relatively small in scale, melodically charming, in numerous detail of harmony and color unmistakably Schubertian, yet by and large derivative. They naïvely reflect phraseology and other influences the young composer assimilated from the music he was then studying and hearing. Thus, in the Second Symphony may be heard echoes of Beethoven’s Fourth and jostling one another through the pages of the others are reminiscences (if not outright citations) of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Weber. The Fourth (in C minor) is for some not clearly defined reason entitled _Tragic_; the Sixth, still more inexplicably, the composer characterized as _Grosse_ (great) _Symphonie in C_. Perversely enough, it is probably the weakest of the six, the one which least satisfied its creator. Time has paradoxically rechristened this symphony the “little” C major to distinguish it from the great C major of 1828. The Fifth, in B flat, remains with its endearing reminders of Mozart, perhaps the loveliest and most frequently played of all this symphonic juvenilia. Most of these scores, however, are oftener heard today than they were till recent years. For all their (perhaps half-conscious) borrowings they are still palpable Schubert, even if lesser Schubert. Such a master as Dvorak was always ready to break a lance in their behalf and one of his proudest boasts was how often, as Conservatory director in New York, he used to conduct his students’ orchestra in the Fifth of the set.

No sooner was Schubert liberated from the Konvikt than he found himself faced with a worse menace—conscription. Service in the Austrian army was in those days no laughing matter. Its duration was fourteen years and the prospect of such a lifetime of soldiering might have appalled an even less sensitive nature than Schubert’s. There were loopholes, of course, particularly for those who had wealth and position. For those who did not, the best road of escape lay through the schoolroom. Since there was need of teachers, the government exempted them. It almost looked as if the State were conspiring with Father Schubert against his son. Poor Franz Peter had no alternative and so, barely out of the Konvikt, he enrolled in the Normal School of St. Anna for a ten months’ preparatory course to teach a primary class at his father’s school, a chore which was to occupy him for the next three years.

Hateful as he found his labors he seems to have discharged them conscientiously enough. Yet if the Konvikt, where he had numerous friends, was a “prison” what was this? He was only one of many “assistants” and he had to live under his father’s roof, though he _did_ earn forty gulden a year. Was he a good disciplinarian? He himself once confessed to his friend, Franz Lachner, that he was a “quick-tempered teacher,” who when disturbed by the little imps in his class while he composed thrashed them soundly “because they always made him lose the thread of his thought.” His sister, Therese, later told Kreissle von Hellborn (Schubert’s first biographer) that he “kept his finger in practise on the children’s ears.” Another story has it that he was finally dismissed for a particularly smart box on the ear of a particularly stupid girl. Still, when Schubert later applied for another school position Superintendent Josef Spendou commended the applicant’s “method of handling the young.”

While he was at the St. Anna School, Schubert composed among a quantity of other things his first complete mass and his first opera. The former (in F) is the more important of the two. It was written for the limited resources of the Lichtental parish church—which on October 14, 1814, celebrated its centenary—in mind. The work of the seventeen-year-old composer was heard with unconcealed pleasure. He conducted it himself, his former teacher, Holzer, led the choir and the soprano soloist was Therese Grob, a year younger than Schubert and daughter of a Lichtental merchant who lived around the corner from Father Schubert’s schoolhouse. Ten days later the mass was repeated in the Church of St. Augustine, in the imperial Hofburg. This performance seems to have aroused even more enthusiasm and good will than the first. Salieri proudly pointed to the boyish composer as his own pupil and Franz Theodor, now that he knew his son safely caged in a classroom, made him a present of a five-octave piano. The Mass itself, a tenderly felt, lyrical, simple work, is sensitive and promising rather than something epoch-making, such as the composer was soon to achieve in the less pretentious province of the solo song.