Herbert F. Peyser

“ Whatever theories may be advanced are purely speculative. Schubert left large quantities of unfinished work—chamber music, piano sonatas, operas; so why not symphonies? In some cases he may simply have forgotten certain of his creations (as he had a manner of doing) , in others he may have lost interest, for others, still, lacked time. Explanations may be plausible yet wholly wide of the mark. Is the Unfinished Symphony unfinished because it has only two movements? Are Beethoven’s two-movement sonatas in any manner “unfinished”? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Although Schubert composed pretty much anywhere and everywhere he accomplished a prodigious amount of creative work in Mayrhofer’s depressing room. The poet on opening his eyes in the morning used to see Franz, clad only in shirt and trousers, writing vigorously at a rickety table. His favorite working hours were from six in the morning till noon, though he was in the habit of sleeping with his spectacles on in case the lightning of inspiration should strike him the minute he awoke. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One will seek vainly in his case for the periodic transports of a Beethoven or even the passing dalliances of a Mozart. Friendships rather than passionate ardors were Schubert’s specialties—and his friendships with women were quite as sincere as with men and had the same basis of sentimental conviviality. ”

“ He greeted Schubert in the condescending manner assumed by some popular artists when they first met aspiring beginners. He seemed unimpressed on glancing over the first song or two Schubert put before him, but after reading through Der Erlkönig he patted the composer on the back, remarking as one not wholly dissatisfied: “There’s something in you, but you’re too little of an actor or a charlatan. You squander your fine thoughts without developing them.” ”

“ There are lovely and striking things in the Rosamunde score—a soprano romanza, an ensemble for spirits and two other choruses as well as some ballet music and various entr’actes. The third interlude brings us that deathless melody which seems to have haunted Schubert’s imagination and reappears in the slow movement of the A minor Quartet and the B flat Impromptu for piano. ”

“ The C major Symphony is without its like in the whole range of music and by one magical pen stroke Schubert made it even a greater thing than when he first conceived it. The autograph score shows that by the substitution of a D natural for a G in the theme of the first Allegro the composer transformed what was scarcely more than a rhythm into one of the great symphonic subjects of all time. ”

“ We may as well pursue the epic of the Unfinished to its close. We do not know whether Anselm ever showed the symphony to the society and there is no record that he mentioned it to a soul, though he is said to have made a piano arrangement of the symphony for his own use. Not till 1860 did Josef Hüttenbrenner speak of it to Johann Herbeck, conductor of the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music, and five more years were to elapse before Herbeck, on a visit to Graz, obtained the score from Anselm on the plea of wanting to produce some “new” works by Hüttenbrenner, Lachner and Schubert. ”

“ It is a simple, plaintive melody above a murmuring spinning wheel figure and a pulsing rhythmic throb, but nevertheless a marvel of jointless form and a miracle of psychology, the emotional experience of ages concentrated into one hundred bars of music of such infinite art and uncanny perfection that it almost defies analysis. ”

“ In the year following Gretchen am Spinnrade there came into being (and once more in his father’s school in the Säulengasse) what is, in some ways perhaps, the most famous of Schubert’s songs—Der Erlkönig. Spaun, who went to visit his friend one afternoon, found him “all aglow,” a book in hand, reading Goethe’s ballad. Schubert 22 walked up and down the room several times, suddenly seated himself at a table “and in the shortest possible time the splendid ballad was on paper.” Franz having no piano, the pair hastened down to the Konvikt where the song was tried out that very evening. ”

“ 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 9 himself occupying the viola desk and being the real director of the ensemble. ”

“ Schubert cut up all manner of musical capers on occasion (one of his favorite pranks was to give a performance of Der Erlkönig on a comb covered with paper!) . He was careful not to forget his parents. In an affectionate letter to his father he asks, chaffingly, if his brother, Ferdinand, “has not been ill seventy-seven times again” and surmises that he has surely imagined at least nine times that he was going to die. “As if death were the worst thing that could befall one!”, he suddenly exclaims, growing serious ”

“ But the Schechner, we are told, demanded changes in the music and Schubert peremptorily 45 refused to make them. In spite of passionate entreaties and a spectacular fainting fit by the soprano, the composer pocketed his score and walked off coldly announcing: “I will change nothing.” So things remained about as they were. True, the Friends of Music in 1825 had permitted him to substitute for a viola player at some of their concerts—after first rejecting his plea to do so on the ground that he “made a living of music” and that professionals were ineligible! ”

“ For all his difficulties and privations Schubert’s health had been, up to 1823, perhaps the least of his worries. But early in that year he had been ailing and soon his illness took a serious turn. Confined to his lodgings at first he was presently taken to the General Hospital. He became darkly despondent and wrote to his friend, Leopold Kupelwieser, a mournful letter in which he alluded to himself as “a man whose health can never be right again ... whose fairest hopes have come to nothing ... ”

“ But how many now living can speak of a Schubert opera from actual experience?
Des Teufels Lustschloss was never performed in Schubert’s Vienna, though Prague was once on the point of staging it. The plot has to do with the adventures of an impecunious Count Oswald who, on the way to his 19 tumbled-down castle with his wife, stops at a wayside inn. There the peasantry of the neighborhood entreats the knight to free a nearby ruin from ghosts and other spooky visitants. He consents and, together with his squire (a kind of Sancho Panza) , penetrates the infested premises. ”

“ And Zseliz, both now and a few years afterwards, enriched Schubert still further by fertilizing his inspiration with Slavic and Hungarian folk music. “I compose and live like a god,” he wrote his brother, Ferdinand, though to Schober he speaks in a less exuberant strain. However, the Esterházys and Schönstein sang not a little of Schubert’s music and also ventured on more or less of Haydn’s Creation and Seasons as well as upon the whole of Mozart’s Requiem. ”

“ This performance seems to have aroused even more enthusiasm and good will than the first. Salieri proudly pointed to the boyish composer as his own pupil and Franz Theodor, now that he knew his son safely caged in a classroom, made him a present of a five-octave piano. The Mass itself, a tenderly felt, lyrical, simple work, is sensitive and promising rather than something epoch-making, such as the composer was soon to achieve in the less pretentious province of the solo song.
A word about Therese Grob, who more or less properly figures in Schubert’s story as his first love. ”

“ Not everything, to be sure, either now or later is a deathless creation but 21 the number of those that are will probably remain baffling to the end of time. Schubert frequently made two, three or more settings of one and the same text, differing in greater or lesser degree from the earlier one though not invariably better than the preceding version. Of the more than six hundred Lieder Schubert composed almost a third are such resettings. It was nothing unusual for him to turn out four, five, six songs a day. ”

“ Karl Pachler, a cultured and musical lawyer, and his wife, Marie Leopoldine Koschak, an accomplished pianist whom Beethoven admired, invited Schubert to visit their home in Graz. The honored guest was to have been Beethoven but shortly after his passing 47 Marie Koschak expressed a desire to know Schubert, whose importance she fully realized. ”

“ In 1819 he composed Die Zwillingsbrüder, which has a plot along Comedy of Errors lines; in 1820 a “magic and machine” comedy called Die Zauberharfe (“The Magic Harp”) , the overture of which is familiar to us as the Rosamunde—though the overture which Schubert used three years later to the musical play of that name was the introduction that prefaced a full-length romantic opera, Alfonso und Estrella, dated 1821. An actual overture to Rosamunde was never written. The piece known universally by that title was not so designated till 1827, when it was published in an arrangement for piano duet. ”

“ He devoted himself to the E flat Mass with such intensity that Josef Hüttenbrenner described him as “living in his Mass.” The supreme Lieder—one is tempted to say the most grandiose and prophetic of all the odd 600 he wrote—are the settings of six poems from Heinrich Heine’s Buch der Lieder, which had just come to his notice. ”

“ It was a setting of Mayrhofer’s poem Am Erlafsee and it was published in a kind of pictorial guide “For Friends of Interesting Localities in the Austrian Monarchy.”
Financially, Schubert reached in the spring of 1818 a rather desperate pass, as he was earning nothing and could not depend everlastingly on his friends. So when the father of the singer, Caroline Unger, recommended him to Count Johann Esterházy, of Galantha, as piano teacher for his two young daughters, Schubert accepted out of sheer need, much as he detested teaching of any kind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Under the Direction of Bruno Walter Barber—Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 Beethoven—Concerto for Violin, Cello, Piano and Orchestra in C major (with J. Corigliano, L. Rose and W. Hendl) —LP Beethoven—Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major (“Emperor”) (with Rudolf Serkin, piano) —LP Beethoven—Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra (with Joseph Szigeti) —LP Beethoven—Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21—LP Beethoven—Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major (“Eroica”) —LP Beethoven—Symphony No. 5 in C minor—LP Beethoven—Symphony No. 8 in F major—LP Beethoven—Symphony No. ”