2 “Poor Schubert”: images and legends of the composer
“Poor Schubert.” Ever since his death on November 19, 1828, this expression appears over and over again in the writings of Schubert’s friends, critics, and biographers. 1 One reason, of course, is that he died so young, at the age of thirty-one. More prosaically, the adjective refers to the composer’s precarious financial state throughout his life, although he was far from the destitute artist later sentimentalized in novels, operettas, and movies. The tag also conveys the sense that Schubert was neglected, that his gifts went largely unrecognized.
How and why did these recurring images of Schubert come about? Their outlines are remarkably consistent, from initial portrayals found in his friends’ reminiscences, to the first entries in German encyclopedias of the 1830s, to accounts in even the Encyclopaedia Britannica at the turn of the century and in college textbooks today.
One can easily pick out a few more brush strokes in the established portrait: Schubert is viewed as a natural and naïve genius who wrote incomparable songs – the Liederfürst (“Prince of Songs”). And then there are his festive friends in the background. Even if the public at large ignored him, at least he enjoyed the loyal support of his circle. Always the best man, never the groom, Schubert is seen as unlucky in love. Early death meant that his artistic mission was left unfinished. Even with so many miserable circumstances, Schubert’s music laughs through its tears, and the maudlin conflation of his life and works in myriad biographies and fictional treatments makes readers past and present weep. Poor Schubert.
Rather than rehearse once more the narrative of Schubert’s life, this chapter seeks to chart its contours in relation to pervasive images and legends that adhere to that life. The discussion does not pretend to present the “true” man and composer, but rather seeks to examine critically some of the most persistent legends, and if not to reject them all out of hand, then at least to question their appeal and resiliency. After identifying the principal verbal, visual, and musical sources that inform images of Schubert, and then touching on some of the outstanding features and events of his life, the chapter will explore some of the fundamental tropes of his mythology.
“Our Schubert”: sources of mythmaking
There is an intriguing psychological phenomenon whereby every listener constructs his or her own image of the composer. (In the language of psychoanalysis one might even refer to this process as something like the “transference” with the composer.) The affectionate expression “our Schubert,” commonly used by Schubert’s family and friends, captures a possessiveness often directed toward beloved figures, although in Schubert’s case the proprietary qualities are especially pronounced. 2 The writer Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, for example, described meeting Schubert for the first time and registered his disappointment at the composer’s ordinariness: Schubert “is absolutely not different from any other Viennese; he speaks Viennese, like every Viennese he has fine linen, a clean coat, a shiny hat and in his face, in his whole bearing, nothing that resembles my Schubert” (SMF 285; cf. 328). This remark shows that even Schubert’s contemporaries sometimes conceived of him in ways at odds with “reality,” and it points as well to the problematic nature of the factual sources for critical biography. Whom does one trust? Where does our knowledge of Schubert come from, and how should the evidence be weighed and balanced?
Information derives not only from written documents. To start with, posterity cares about Schubert because of the music he created, and that music powerfully informs images of its creator. One tries to envision what kind of artist would compose such pieces. As with Beethoven’s image – or Bach’s, Mozart’s, or Wagner’s – the art colors the perception of the man. Eduard Bauernfeld wrote in his memorial tribute to Schubert in 1829: “So far as it is possible to draw conclusions as to a man’s character and mind from his artistic products, those will not go astray who judge Schubert from his songs to have been a man full of affection and goodness of heart” (SMF3 1).
Visual representations complement Schubert’s music by supplying concrete representations of its creator and his milieu. Some portraits of the composer were executed by artists who knew him personally, 3 and many later illustrations are based on Wilhelm August Rieder’s famous watercolor, considered to be “the most like him” by Schubert’s friends. 4 Schubert’s affectionate nickname “Schwammerl” (often translated “Tubby,” literally “little mushroom”) is reinforced by the famous caricature of the diminutive composer waddling behind the towering singer Johann Michael Vogl. 5
However powerfully music and illustrations underlie perceptions, verbal documents provide the prime information about the narrative of Schubert’s life and the disposition of his character. Schubert’s own writings sound initial themes that were later varied by family and friends. The first to apply the word “poor” was Schubert himself. To end his earliest surviving letter, written while away at school in 1812, the fifteen-year-old student signed: “your loving, poor, hopeful and again poor brother Franz” (SDB 28). Schubert’s disarmingly candid letters play an essential role in defining his image, partly because of their tone, and also because of the rarity of authentic utterances. For, in contrast to the abundant letters, journals, memoirs, criticism, essays, and the like by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and many other composers, fewer than a hundred Schubert letters survive, supplemented by a few pages of diary entries from 1816 and some fragments from 1824. 6 Those letters written during particularly troubled times, or the famous final communication to Franz von Schober just one week before Schubert died, therefore gain additional significance.
If Schubert’s own words are rare, those of his family and friends are extensive and have proved indispensable for biographers. The “fun-loving friends,” so familiar from fictional depictions, helped to establish a pattern of assessing Schubert while he was alive, and then sought to perpetuate certain views of him after his death. While the intimacy of his collaborators and champions resulted in lively, detailed accounts, many chroniclers had an interest in presenting a favorable picture of their roles. Some reports date from Schubert’s lifetime, others came in memorial tributes immediately following his death, but most appeared many decades later and must be viewed especially critically. We may never know whether Erlkönig was written in a few hours one afternoon, as Josef von Spaun reports and posterity repeats (SMF 131), but this story went a long way toward establishing Schubert as a composer, like Mozart, who took divine dictation rather than as one, like Beethoven, who continually struggled over compositional problems.
As Spaun’s story demonstrates, reminiscences not only purport to impart facts about Schubert’s life, but also contain anecdotes that enliven simple facts. How much more effective – and memorable – is telling a story of Schubert writing his most famous song in a matter of hours than dispassionately reporting that he composed quickly. 7 The core Schubert stories remain all too familiar: his shyness made him avoid his hero Beethoven (SMF 66, 75, 325, 366); he wrote songs so spontaneously, on the back of menus and the like, that he would later not even recognize them (SDB 539; SMF 214, 217, 296, 302); he fell in love with Therese Grob, but she married a wealthier man (SMF 182). Repeated so often, these tales crystallize Schubert’s personality by entering into a canon of biographical representations. History progresses through anecdote to become legend.
Some Schubert legends, of course, are true; ingredients of many others rest on solid documentation. Not only accuracy, but also interpretation are at issue. That Schubert enjoyed especially rich and significant friendships, for example, is not in doubt. More pertinent is how such facts affect posterity’s views. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to discount the “aesthetic truth” of certain fictions. 8 A new anecdote about the composer often arises from, and therefore reflects, the need of a given time to create the legend in the first place. Why, for example, did it take some thirty years before anyone thought to write down the quite interesting news that Schubert visited the dying Beethoven? Probably because the incident never happened. 9 But history needed such a story by mid century. We could view this invented meeting near death as an anecdotal corollary to the exhumation of Beethoven and Schubert some decades later, and their reburial together in the “Grove of Honor” at Vienna’s Central Cemetery. As Schubert’s image, reputation, and music became increasingly cast in relation and opposition to Beethoven’s, this reception found its poetic expression in story and legend, and ultimately in a physical transferral of their bodies in a solemn ceremony. 10
Schubert’s unknown years, first fame, and illness
Unlike the careers of famous prodigies whose activities proved sufficiently interesting to warrant early testimony – most notably the phenomenon of the Wunderkind Mozart – the unfolding of Schubert’s less exceptional early career is not particularly well documented. He probably began composition in 1810, at the age of thirteen. The inception of Schubert’s public career might be variously dated from the first performance of a significant composition (the Mass in F [D105] in October 1814), the mention of his name in the press (1817; SDB 68–69), or the appearance of a work in print (Erlafsee [D586] in 1818). 11 More decisively, it started with a highly acclaimed performance of Erlkönig in 1821 and the publication of the song as Op. 1 shortly thereafter. Until this point, Schubert’s activities, opportunities, and reputation – although not his actual compositions – are commensurate more with a fine talent than an exceptional genius, and attracted minimal public notice.
Young Schubert had benefited from the best musical training available in Vienna after winning a position in the choir of the Imperial Court Chapel, whose ten choristers were provided with free education at the prestigious Stadtkonvikt. Report cards and testimonials attest to Schubert’s general musical abilities and skill as a performer: “He shows so excellent a talent for the art of music” (SDB 18); but his compositional activities go unmentioned for several more years. The best anecdote distilling Schubert’s early abilities is Michael Hölzer’s remark to Schubert’s father: “If I wanted to teach him something new, he already knew it” (SMF 212; cf. 34). The remark may never have been uttered, but it has been recounted in nearly every biography of Schubert as evidence of his God-given gifts. 12
The performance of his Mass in F, which occurred during the Congress of Vienna, provided some limited public exposure, as did semi-public performances of the lost cantata Prometheus (D451), and of a few other compositions. The critical response to these works, appearing in periodicals as well as private diaries, letters, and reminiscences, proved modestly encouraging. 13 All this, however, was provincial and preparatory. Had Schubert died before 1821, with his handful of performances and a few good reviews, but without publications, reaction would have been limited to the grief of family and friends. (The death of Mozart, Beethoven, or Liszt at a comparable age would have warranted much wider notice.) Nevertheless, during these years Schubert formed associations and friendships central to the course of his career and to the posthumous casting of his image. In addition to prominent teachers, musicians, officials, and patrons with whom Schubert came in contact, he forged close relationships with young friends who nurtured and encouraged his composing, influenced what he read and the ideas he explored, and affected his general state of well-being.
Accounts are unanimous about Schubert’s lack of career cunning. Shy, humble, and modest, he enlisted friends and advocates to take on the work of promoting his career, arranging performances, approaching publishers, and so forth. Classmates from the Stadtkonvikt, such as Johann Leopold Ebner and Albert Stadler, copied as many of his songs as they could get their hands on; some Lieder survive today only through their efforts. In 1816, Schubert’s lifelong friend Josef von Spaun wrote to Goethe in the hope of interesting him in an ambitious plan to publish eight volumes of songs (SDB 56–58). Even critics noticed his friends’ ardent support. Writing about the première of the Singspiel Die Zwillingsbrüder (D647), one remarked: “The general verdict on Schubert can only be favorable, although not to the point to which his numerous friends endeavor to force it” (SDB 138–39). Others made similar observations, which echo throughout Schubert’s life and after. Rarely does a composer’s group of friends arouse so much comment and attention, but then the make-up, actions, and legacy of Schubert’s circle are rather unusual among musicians. 14
Schubert’s career and reputation changed considerably in 1821. The first fully public performance of Erlkönig took place at an annual benefit concert organized by the Society of the Ladies of Nobility for the Promotion of the Good and the Useful on Ash Wednesday. The song, performed by Johann Michael Vogl with Anselm Hüttenbrenner accompanying, captivated the audience and had to be repeated. The public and critical acclaim for Erlkönig that evening remained unsurpassed for the rest of the composer’s life. A steady stream of publications, also beginning in 1821, attracted growing interest in Vienna and slowly began to spread Schubert’s name beyond Austria.
During his unknown years Schubert had written a staggering amount of music: hundreds of songs, many sonatas and string quartets, six symphonies, extensive theater and religious pieces, in all, nearly two-thirds of his entire output. (Schubert usually dated his manuscripts, which facilitates establishing their chronology.) No composer in his teens, with the exception of Mendelssohn, produced such mature masterpieces as Gretchen am Spinnrade or Erlkönig. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to think of pieces by other teenage composers as firmly established in the repertory as are many of Schubert’s Lieder.
The pace of Schubert’s writing had fallen off some years before his public success, and until his final two years he was far less prolific. The quantity of Lieder in particular declined dramatically, from at least 145 songs in 1815 and 112 the next year, to sixty-five in 1817, and only seventeen the following year. 15 This moderation in Schubert’s creative energies, reflecting a new discrimination perhaps, roughly coincided with his emergence in the public sphere and with cautious moves toward larger-scale compositions. After the eventful winter of 1821, Schubert wrote an unfinished Symphony in E (D729), followed by the opera Alfonso und Estrella (D732). In the fall of 1822 he composed the “Unfinished” Symphony in B Minor (D759), then wrote the Singspiel Die Verschworenen (D787), and the opera Fierrabras (D796) the next summer. No doubt discouraged by unfinished symphonies and unperformed operas, Schubert returned in 1824 to chamber music (the Octet [D803], Quartet in A Minor [D804]), and wrote the “Grand Duo” (D812) and several piano sonatas. These were serious works intended to lead to the “grand symphony” he mentions in a letter to Leopold Kupelwieser (SDB 338–40).
Schubert’s instrumental music thus shifted from amateur to professional, from compositions intended for the family string quartet (in which Schubert played with his father and brothers), school orchestras, and domestic dilettante ensembles, to works written for professional public performance. Schubert’s letters suggest that he regarded most of his earlier large-scale works as preparatory. Asked in January 1823 to deliver a promised orchestral work for a concert, he confessed to having “nothing for full orchestra which I could send out into the world with a clear conscience,” and begged forgiveness for having “accepted [the invitation] too rashly and unthinkingly” (SDB 265). And yet by this date Schubert had written all of his symphonies save the “Great” C Major Symphony (D944). 16
Soon after Schubert’s successful entry into the public arena through performance and publication in the early 1820s, there ensued a period of deep personal difficulties, precipitated by a serious health crisis. He was hospitalized in 1823, most likely with syphilis. 17 While the correspondence from this time testifies to widespread concern among his friends, Schubert’s own comments are particularly direct and disturbing. In one of his most remarkable letters, he tells Kupelwieser in March 1824:
I feel 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 over this ever 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 kind) for all things beautiful threatens to forsake, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being? (SDB 339)
In the same wrenching letter, Schubert laments the imminent dissolution of his friends’ reading circle, now taken over by a “rough chorus of beerdrinkers and sausage-eaters,” complains that he has no money, and bemoans the lack of interest in his most recent opera Fierrabras (“I seem once again to have written two operas for nothing”).
Schubert’s health troubles occurred around the same time as changes in the constituents and activities of his social circle. (As David Gramit has shown, the “circle” continually evolved; its most famous members never formed a contemporaneous group as depicted in later illustrations and narratives.) Some of his closest friends had left Vienna, while new personalities arrived. Spaun had long since moved to Linz, Schober was away for extended periods, and Kupelwieser was studying painting in Rome; they were replaced by “quite ordinary students and officials” (not to mention the sausage-eaters).
Restored to apparent health by 1824, Schubert reached a stage typical in venereal disease, and a new tone enters his letters. While away from Vienna that summer, he sounds a Wordsworthian note to his brother Ferdinand: “Do not think that I am not well or cheerful, just the contrary. True, it is no longer that happy time during which every object seems to us to be surrounded by a youthful gloriole, but a period of fateful recognition of a miserable reality, which I endeavor to beautify as far as possible by my imagination (thank God)” (SDB 363). The work he cites as proof is the magnificent “Sonata in C” for piano duet, the so-called “Grand Duo.”
The progress and pacing of Schubert’s professional career should be considered along with his health and social situation, and the friendships that largely determined where he lived and often the music he composed. A flood of publications and recognition had followed the winter of 1821. Even though many of the pieces published over the next few years had originated years earlier, only now was a larger public catching up with such works long familiar to Schubert’s intimates. Meanwhile, although distracted by health concerns and personal despair – and possibly spurred on by these difficulties – Schubert pursued new compositional paths. In a diary from 1824 (now lost) he wrote: “What I produce is due to my understanding of music and to my sorrows; that which sorrow alone has produced seems to give least pleasure to the world” (SDB 336).
Late Schubert and death
To Schubert belongs the dubious distinction of being the shortest-lived composer of his stature, a situation commented upon since the day he died. Franz Grillparzer’s epitaph, already discussed in the introduction, alludes to Schubert’s untimely passing, as do numerous obituaries, tributes, and memorial poems from 1828–29. 18 The most common phrase in reviews, memoirs, and reference works in the decade or so after Schubert’s death was a variant of the “all too young deceased composer of genius” (zu früh verblichener geniale Tonsetzer ).
Montaigne declared that “in judging the life of another, I always observe how it ended.” Remarkable circumstances surrounding death – such as suicide, murder, horrible disease, or extreme youth – typically exert an extraordinary influence on posthumous perception. The aura of incompleteness that surrounds Schubert’s fame (and Mozart’s) would not exist had they written the same amount of music over the lifespan allotted to Bach, Haydn, or Beethoven. (In fact, very roughly, these composers all wrote a comparable total amount of music.) The madness of Robert Schumann and of Hugo Wolf (the latter surely syphilitic) was likewise read retrospectively into their compositions.
Schubert’s early death, while an indisputable reality, should not blind us to its symbolic significance. In this respect, Schubert’s most popular instrumental work, the Symphony in B Minor, proves instructive on two counts. First, the première took place well over forty years after its composition. This late unveiling powerfully underscores how relatively unknown Schubert was and how unceasingly his reputation had to be reevaluated throughout the nineteenth century. Second, its nickname – the “Unfinished” Symphony – epitomizes the “unfinished” quality of Schubert’s life and art, and serves as a fitting metaphor, a recurring reminder of unfulfilled promise – the theme first sounded by Grill-parzer’s epitaph. 19
It may seem odd, even inappropriate, to discuss the “late period” of an artist who died in his early thirties; yet Schubert condensed the artistic productivity of a lifetime into his remarkably brief career, and moreover persevered in his final years with the knowledge of a mortal illness. Professionally and compositionally, Schubert entered a new stage during the final two years of his life, the period, significantly, coinciding with Beethoven’s final sickness and death twenty months before his own. Now thirty years old, and at the peak of his creative powers, Schubert surpassed even what Beethoven had accomplished at the same age. (Had Beethoven carried out the suicide he apparently contemplated around the time of the Heiligenstadt Testament [1802], in other words at the very age Schubert died, the extent of his compositional legacy would hardly match Schubert’s.)
Beethoven’s death in March 1827 may have spurred Schubert to new artistic heights and provided the impetus for him to seek wider public attention. As early as 1823 a “public Schubertiade” was contemplated, an Akademie entirely of Schubert’s music (SDB 314). Such events were infrequent, even for Beethoven. His last, in 1824, which saw the première of the Ninth Symphony, prompted Schubert to write: “God willing, I too am thinking of giving a similar concert next year” (SDB 339); but nothing came of this plan until the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death (March 26, 1828), just eight months before Schubert died.
Schubert’s sole concert proved popularly and financially successful even though it was overshadowed by Paganini’s first appearances in Vienna three days later. Publications of large-scale instrumental compositions were the essential next step in Schubert’s career. With new assertiveness, Schubert now entered into protracted negotiations with prominent foreign publishers in the hope of giving his “works greater currency abroad” (SDB 739). The Leipzig publisher Heinrich Albert Probst met Schubert during a visit to Vienna in the spring of 1827. Writing the following February, Probst praised songs and piano compositions which “convince me more and more that it would be easy to disseminate your name throughout the rest of Germany and the North, in which I will gladly lend a hand, considering your talents” (SDB 735).
The Mainz firm of B. Schott’s Söhne approached Schubert, claiming that it had known his works during the years when its energies were devoted to publishing Beethoven’s late works (SDB 737). Schubert offered the Piano Trio in E flat (D929), the String Quartets in D Minor (D810) and G Major (D887), Four Impromptus (D899), the F Minor Fantasy for piano four hands (D940), the Violin Fantasy in C (D934), as well as various Lieder and partsongs. To Schott he wrote, “This is the list of my finished compositions, excepting three operas, a Mass, and a symphony. These last compositions I mention only in order to make you acquainted with my strivings after the highest in art” (SDB 739–40). Once again there appears Schubert’s self-critical view of his earlier large-scale works. By this point he had written eight operas, five Masses, and seven (and a half) symphonies, but acknowledges far fewer compositions.
After the success of his concert, Schubert wrote with some urgency to Probst and Schott about getting works published. A letter to Schott concludes, “All I should request is publication as soon as possible” (SDB 764). A month later he registered his disappointment to Probst about the low fee offered for the Trio in E Flat Major, Op. 100, but accepted, adding that “to make a beginning at last, I would only ask for the speediest possible publication” (SDB 774). After a further delay, Probst solicited the opus number and dedication, to which Schubert responded: “The opus number of the Trio is 100. I request that the edition should be faultless and look forward to it longingly. This work is to be dedicated to nobody, save those who find pleasure in it. This is the most profitable dedication” (SDB 796). When the publication still had not arrived two months later, Schubert inquired yet again: “I beg to inquire when the Trio is to appear at last. Can it be that you do not know the opus number yet? It is Op. 100. I await its appearance with longing” (SDB 810). He probably never saw the edition, published the month he died.
Schubert’s negotiations with these north-German publishers reflect his increasing fame beyond Vienna, a situation also apparent in ever more detailed and favorable reviews given his music, especially in the influential Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. The critical reception of Schubert’s music is discussed in the third section of this book; suffice it to say here that the sheer number of reviews, as well as their length and import, grew dramatically in the late 1820s, and that Schubert was gradually recognized as more than just a song and dance composer. Had Schubert lived a decade longer, he would have directly benefited from the support of Robert Schumann and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which quickly became one of Europe’s commanding musical periodicals. By the late 1830s, Schumann’s passionate advocacy of Schubert’s cause and brilliant criticism of his music were considerably enhancing his posthumous reputation. By that time, too, Franz Liszt’s celebrated piano transcriptions spread Schubert’s name far and wide.
The neglected Schubert?
Although Schubert’s biographers often comment that his life was “unexceptional,” even “boring,” that has not stopped – perhaps it has even encouraged – the mythmaking process. For example, while the true extent of his romantic relationships with women remains unclear and contested, fictional accounts delight in inventing passionate love affairs. Rather than attempt to sort out such biographical puzzles, I shall concentrate on three central tropes in the Schubert mythology: first on his putative neglect, then on his “naturalness,” and finally on the air of nostalgia that permeated his life and later reception.
The idea of the unrecognized artistic genius, the artist who valiantly struggles for acceptance and yet is inexplicably ignored by the world until after his death, continues to hold a popular attraction. 20 Among nineteenth-century composers, Schubert is the only one who actually embodies (in some respects) this quintessential Romantic prototype. Unfair disregard at the hands of an ignorant public and unfailing support from a small circle of friends are central components of Schubert’s popular image. Was his music indeed so neglected during his lifetime? What were the opportunities available to Schubert, the extent of his public recognition, and the standing of his fame at the time of his death?
If Schubert’s early death complicated his legacy, so the unusual course of Schubert’s career complicated his fame while he was alive and his posthumous fame. In his classic history of Viennese concert life (1869), Eduard Hanslick offers the following concise assessment of Schubert’s position in the 1820s: “There is, of course, nothing favorable to report concerning Schubert’s artistic career in Vienna. Its significance was discovered only after his death.” But he urges his readers to remember “two important mitigating circumstances”:
The time-span of Schubert’s public career was extremely short – it lasted from the appearance of his first works (1821) to his death (1828) – not more than seven years. The young composer was even on his way to winning a large public for himself in Vienna, after he had pleased and won such favor among family circles, when death snatched him in the first bloom of manhood. Second, it should not be forgotten that Schubert began his career and achieved his best work in a musical genre which at that time had still not been taken up in public concert life: the Lied. 21
As Hanslick rightly notes, Schubert’s initial fame was limited primarily to the still relatively insignificant genre of the Lied, to which one might add other genres that did even less to enhance his stature: partsongs, dances, and short piano pieces. With this intimate music, mainly for voice and/or piano, Schubert was one of the most widely performed and published composers in Vienna during the 1820s. 22 His instrumental music-symphonic, chamber, and keyboard – that predominates in modern concert halls, recording studios, and radio programs was unknown beyond Vienna. Such a dramatic dichotomy between a composer’s lifetime fame and his later stature is unusual. True, only a few of Mozart’s symphonies and concertos, and comparatively little of his chamber, dramatic, and religious music, were readily available and regularly performed before the first collected edition of his works. But Mozart was widely regarded as a genius who excelled in all these areas, whereas the reception of Schubert in his own time, and for decades to follow, was far less balanced and well informed. Long after Schubert’s death, his compositions continued to be discovered, then performed, published, and discussed for the first time. Only with the publication of a complete thematic catalogue of his works (1874) and the first collected edition (1884–97) did the entire scope of Schubert’s oeuvre become known and his scores become available. 23
Reading standard accounts of Schubert’s life gives one the sense that many biographers emphasize the negative aspects. The quantity of Schubert’s music published during his lifetime is extremely large, but his difficulties with publishers receive far more attention. The same phenomenon recurs with Schubert’s critical reception: most reviews of his music were supportive, often enthusiastic, but more often biographers emphasize the exceptional unfavorable review. Schubert himself sometimes complained of not getting certain compositions published, broke off relations with Anton Diabelli for some years, grumbled about critics, and expressed disappointment that his dramatic and symphonic music went unperformed. Yet he does not seem to have viewed himself as “neglected.” Perhaps “struggling” would more appropriately describe Schubert’s situation in the 1820s, as he tried to establish a freelance career in a time of widespread inflation, censorship, and rampant trivial music. (Even Beethoven, twenty-seven years Schubert’s senior and recognized as the greatest living composer, encountered trouble with Viennese cultural and political forces during the same years.) According to Spaun, one of Schubert’s most reliable chroniclers, all the “unfavorable circumstances which surrounded Schubert’s life, were utterly unable to break his spirit … great as was the discrepancy between achievement and recognition and reward, he was, nevertheless, far removed from all bitterness” (SMF 24–25).
It is precisely reminiscences like this, however, that have been read to make Schubert out to be more neglected and financially impoverished than he actually was. Schubert’s level of income in his maturity far exceeded what would be expected given his humble family origins. (It is another matter that Schubert, like Mozart, could be irresponsible spending his money.) Publications, performances, dedications, teaching, and occasional patronage yielded a respectable level of income. Although the publications earned far more for the publishers than for Schubert, the quantity of works issued is large. This availability, together with the large number of public performances of his works, mainly Lieder and part-songs, belies the notion of crushing neglect.
Schubert’s slow achievement of public awareness can be partly explained by his not being a virtuoso performer, by the intimate genres he cultivated, and by the limited opportunities Vienna’s concert life afforded, specifically the absence of a public concert hall before the 1830s and the lack of professional orchestras beyond those associated with theaters. 24 Yet in just seven years the quantity of publications is most impressive for a young composer who was by all accounts shy and reluctant to promote himself. The list of the composer’s compositions published during his lifetime points concretely to the paradox of Schubert’s coexisting fame and neglect: although Schubert was widely performed and published, recognition came only in certain areas. For the rest of his music, much of which won Schubert’s posthumous immortality, “neglected” is not the best word; the better term is “undiscovered.”
The “natural” Schubert and the “mighty” Beethoven
The legend of Schubert’s neglect points to a putative marginality and vulnerability that emerge in other ways as well, as in the idea of Schubert the “natural” artist. Even some of his friends and champions helped to establish Schubert as a vessel of the muses; as an inspired young composer, mainly of Lieder, who wrote remarkably quickly; as one who was undervalued by publishers and the general public alike, and yet who enjoyed the constant support of devoted friends. The underlying message, that Schubert’s music, however brilliant, is still somehow artistically flawed, endorses a fault-finding that is another consistent feature of Schubert’s image. 25
Patronizing remarks about Schubert’s music already surfaced in reviews during his lifetime. For instance, an otherwise sympathetic critic in the Frankfurt Allgemeiner musikalischer Anzeiger chided Schubert’s notational spelling mistakes and “other inconveniences” in the Op. 52 Lieder (SDB 538; cf. 513). The poet Johann Mayrhofer, with whom Schubert lived for some years, wrote: “Devoid of a more profound knowledge of texture and thorough-bass, he truly remained a natural artist” (SDB 861; SMF 13). Josef von Spaun concurred: “For all the admiration I have given the dear departed for years, I still feel that we shall never make a Mozart or a Haydn of him in instrumental and church composition, whereas in song he is unsurpassed…. I think, therefore, that Schubert should be treated as a song composer by his biographers” (SMF 30). And such was Schubert’s fate for decades to come.
The emphasis on Schubert’s “natural” talent often implies or explicitly invokes a lack of formal training and discipline. Johann Friedrich Rochlitz, former editor of the AmZ, confessed in a letter to Ignaz von Mosel that “several new compositions by your Schubert have won my interest and affection,” but opined that the “highly gifted artist needs only a scientifically trained friend to enlighten him gently about himself” (SDB 523). Such comments come even from Schubert’s staunchest supporters. Leopold von Sonnleithner, in his biographical obituary that amounts to the “official” view of Schubert in 1829, regretted that Schubert never had an appropriate mentor to guide his early artistic development, 26 and he identified another concern: his friends were, by training and inclination, more literary and artistic than musical; their preoccupation was with Lieder, and some of them little appreciated Schubert’s larger and more purely musical accomplishments.
The notion of Schubert as a “natural artist,” drawing strength from Schubert’s friends, circulated widely in criticism, lexicons, histories, and biographies. The first entries about Schubert in encylopedias of the 1830s, for example, where one turns in the hope of finding more objective information, presented the following:
Unfortunately [Schubert’s] studies remained unregulated in that he did not study the basics with a master of the art, but made his way more through his own experiments and through the imitation of his predecessors. 27
And:
This splendid young composer provides further proof that a profound natural talent can overcome all the hindrances of trouble and need, and can obtain perfection even without instruction, but also that this great and continuous effort kills the corporeal existence too soon. 28
The anecdotal trace of Schubert’s “natural” artistic gifts, unencumbered by learning, is found in his decision shortly before he died to undertake counterpoint lessons with the prominent theorist Simon Sechter (SMF 106). Their sole lesson together later received far more attention than warranted (both Sonnleithner and Mayrhofer mentioned the instruction in their 1829 memorials). 29 A mid-century article in the popular press shows the consequences of presenting Schubert as an untutored natural: “History is unanimous that, apart from his classic songs, Schubert neither did, nor could, achieve anything outstanding, whether in the field of dramatic, oratorio or chamber music, for he was a natural composer; he himself was only too well aware of this and even in the last years of his life endeavored to acquire the knowledge he lacked in the theory of composition” (SMF 424–25). This passage is remarkable for its conflation of legends and clichés: Schubert as the natural composer, not adept in large-scale forms, but gifted in song, who recognized his own limitations and wisely sought academic counsel shortly before his death.
Schubert may himself be responsible for some of these reactions, partly because of his humility, and because he highlighted the speed with which he composed. He documented sometimes writing seven or eight songs in a single day, and occasionally indicated how many hours it took to compose a piece. But I think there is more to the perception of Schubert as a “natural” composer, and here Beethoven enters the picture.
Much of Schubert’s image was created in counterpoint to Beethoven’s. While in the literature on Beethoven, Schubert is usually referred to only in passing, or goes entirely unmentioned, there is no biographical study of Schubert in which Beethoven does not play a role. The two are opposed in terms of a supposed “work ethic” and characteristic genres (Lied versus symphony), as well as in fame, personality, lifespan, and so on. Schubert’s effortless spinning forth of immortal melodic miniatures is contrasted with Beethoven’s endless scribbling of sketches for monumental instrumental masterpieces.
By the mid nineteenth century, a shy, natural, feminine Schubert was increasingly being cast against a mighty, solitary, and masculine Beethoven. One should not underestimate how even some of Schubert’s closest friends and supporters helped to establish his fame as an inspired composer who tossed off lyrical gems without heroic Beethovenian struggles. The leading Schubert singer of the day, Johann Michael Vogl, referred to Schubert’s compositions as coming “into existence during a state of clairvoyance or somnambulism, without any conscious action on the part of the composer, but inevitably, by an act of providence and inspiration,” and described a “second way of composing through will-power, reflection, effort, knowledge,” a clear allusion to Beethoven. 30 The Lied is the genre ideally suited for a natural genius because of its small scope, intimacy, and more obvious melodic, rather than structural, character. A Lied can be dashed off on the back of a menu perhaps, but a symphony cannot.
The identification of Beethoven with symphonic masterpieces and of Schubert with intimate genres of modest proportions further promotes the image of Schubert the “natural” through associations with women, nature, and the home. 31 The poet Nikolaus Lenau remarked in 1839 that “Schubert’s compositions are wearing thin. There is a certain coquetry, an effeminate weakness about them” (SMF 248). Robert Schumann had been more specific about the gendered opposition between a masculine Beethoven and feminine Schubert the year before in his review of Schubert’s “Grand Duo”:
Compared with Beethoven, Schubert is a feminine character, much more voluble, softer and broader; or a guileless child romping among giants. Such is the relationship of these symphonic movements to those of Beethoven. Their intimacy is purely Schubertian. They have their robust moments, to be sure, and marshal formidable forces. But Schubert conducts himself as wife to husband, the one giving orders, the other relying upon pleas and persuasion. 32
One of the most remarkably gendered comparisons came in 1863 with the first exhumation of Schubert’s and Beethoven’s bodies from Vienna’s Währing Cemetery. 33 Gerhard von Breuning, who had known both composers, observed the event and remarked, “it was extremely interesting physiologically to compare the compact thickness of Beethoven’s skull and the fine, almost feminine thinness of Schubert’s, and to relate them, almost directly, to the character of their music.” 34 This comparison became well known because of its inclusion in the first substantial biography of Schubert, which appeared in 1865, written by Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn. Confronting Schubert’s well-preserved skull, the “doctors and hospital attendants who were present were astonished at its delicate, almost womanly organization.” 35
Kreissle’s book served as the basis for writings about Schubert for the latter half of the nineteenth century, despite its many weaknesses and its recourse to hearsay and gossip. At one point Kreissle, too, weighs in with a comparison between Beethoven and Schubert. While more coded, the feminine and masculine traits of the childlike Schubert and powerful, intellectual Beethoven – heart versus brain – are still clearly in evidence:
Their two natures were essentially distinct and different. If Schubert’s easy disposition, his childish naïveté, his guilelessness in the ordinary dealings of life, his delight in a glass of wine and sociable habits, his sincerity, and a good mixture of Viennese geniality, remind one of Mozart’s character, these very qualities essentially contrasted with and distinguished him from the somewhat capricious, mistrustful, sarcastic, and haughty Beethoven, whose depth of intellect and greatness of soul, coupled with his vast Classical range and versatility of power, enabled him to tower, in many respects, above both Mozart and Schubert. 36
The comparisons to Beethoven, both the musician and the man, continue to this day and have taken a somewhat different turn with recent investigations of Schubert’s possible homosexuality and the implications for musical analysis. In some ways these contemporary dialogues resound long-standing themes. Beethoven is still crucial to the discussions – even when he goes unmentioned – because he continues to serve significantly as Schubert’s “Other.”
Nostalgia
The theme of nostalgia also has its origins in the composer’s own time, which is somewhat surprising given that it would seem to require some temporal mediation. The nostalgia that colors Schubert’s posthumous reception – references to lost youth and to a golden past – already begins to punctuate the letters and journals of Schubert’s closest friends in the early 1820s (e.g. SDB 351, 405, 476), and reappears for the rest of his life. (Given Schubert’s precarious medical condition, his own laments may also represent a “hymn to lost health” [e.g. SDB 374].) Bauernfeld captured this nostalgia in his diary after a reunion with Schubert, Schwind, and Schober during the summer of 1826: “According to the old custom, we all spent the night together, and how much we had to tell! Poetry is over, the prose of life begins anew” (SDB 545).
The air of nostalgia comes not only from verbal accounts but maybe even more strongly from visual images, from Schubert’s own wistful music, and especially from later arrangements of it. Visually, depictions of joyous music-making and carefree socializing are central to posterity’s conception of Schubert and his environment. 37 The most famous scene, A Schubert Evening at Josef von Spaun’s, dates from the 1860s; its creator was one of the composer’s closest friends, Moritz von Schwind (1804–71), an important artist whose images of Schubert span many decades. 38 Remembering the brief time they lived together Schwind reportedly told composer Ferdinand Hiller: “There could be no happier existence. Each morning he composed something beautiful and each evening he found the most enthusiastic admirers. We gathered in his room – he played and sang to us – we were enthusiastic and afterwards we went to the tavern. We hadn’t a penny but were blissfully happy” (SMF 283; cf. 213). Nearly forty years after leaving Vienna, Schwind created the Schubert Evening at Spaun’s and wrote to the poet Eduard Mörike: “I have begun to work at something which I feel I owe the intellectual part of Germany – my admirable friend Schubert at the piano, surrounded by his circle of listeners. I know all the people by heart.” 39
Schwind portrays the Schubertiade as a sanctuary and haven – a charmed place where Schubert might accompany Vogl singing that ode to their art, An die Musik (D547), which sets Franz von Schober’s sentimental words. 40 Despite Schwind’s immersion in this milieu during the 1820s, the captivating image he created decades later may distort as well as enlighten; as with lively anecdotes, compelling illustrations enshrine pervasive legends. Schwind offers a Vienna devoid of disease, political repression, and the hardships of everyday life. Such a cozy picture of Schubert’s circumstances, a nostalgia for an “Alt Wien” that had long passed – and that in any case never quite existed as later imagined – found complementary musical expression in the countless reworkings of Schubert’s melodies. Franz Liszt’s popular Soirées de Vienne evokes just such an idealized past. In word, image, and music, the Schubert circle increasingly came to represent a carefree bygone Vienna, in which – despite Metternich’s repressive regime, limited professional opportunities, and a rapidly declining standard of living – good, simple, and happy times still prevailed. (Leon Botstein explores some of these issues in the preceding chapter.)
Soon after Schubert’s death, Spaun, Sonnleithner, Bauernfeld, Mayrhofer, Ferdinand Schubert, and others published tributes, reminiscences, and writings that are the foundation of all later biographical work. 41 Unlike their unfortunate friend, many of his acquaintances lived long lives, continuing to reminisce (nostalgically) in old age. The popular image of Schubert, distilled from their writings, spread widely in sentimental biographies and novels, 42 in theater pieces, 43 and eventually in films. 44 Centenaries in 1897 and 1928 saw an extraordinary flood of such materials, the nostalgia now expressed not by those who had known Schubert personally, but by later generations that yearned for simpler times. If biographers had complained that Schubert’s actual life was uneventful, more creative adapters evidently found attractive raw material in it to fire their fantasies.
The most influential force in Schubert’s popularization was Heinrich Berté’s phenomenally successful operetta Das Dreimäderlhaus, which premiered at Vienna’s Raimundtheater on January 15, 1916. It proved one of the most profitable works of musical theater ever written. 45 Derived from Rudolf Hans Bartsch’s extremely popular Schubert novel Schwammerl (1912), the plot tells of the hopes and dreams of Schubert and his friends Schober, Schwind, Vogl, and Kupelwieser. Terribly shy, Schubert courts Hannerl, the youngest of three sisters (Haiderl, Hederl, and Hannerl); through a series of confusions, Hannerl ends up with “the poet” Schober, while Schubert, unrequited in love, is left alone with his music. The score consists solely of adaptations of Schubert’s music, mostly drawn from dance and keyboard compositions. In popularizing a composer’s life on stage or screen, a potentially powerful ingredient is the use of his own art as subliminal accompaniment. Schubert’s music becomes the soundtrack for mythological narratives of his life. As listeners have become less musically literate, extramusical crutches, often biographical rather than hermeneutic, provide the point of entry to the music and give it meaning.
What might be called the “SchuBerté phenomenon” would seem to mark the nadir of the representation of Schubert’s life and music. In Berté’s operetta, Schubert’s music is fragmented, melodies are fetishized, and his personality, friendships, lovelife, and daily circumstances distorted. The personal nostalgia of Schubert and his friends devolves into sentimental kitsch. And yet Berte captures a side of Schubert – his music as unsurpassed melody and popular entertainment – that had gradually become overshadowed in the nineteenth century as his more substantial works – and structures – gained recognition. Paradoxically, even as Berte trivialized Schubert’s life and work, he resurrected the Biedermeier composer whose small-scale songs and dances first delighted Viennese audiences of the 1820s.
Schubert today
As the twentieth century is drawing to a close, Schubert’s image is once again changing, most noticeably between the 1978 sesquicentennial of his death and the 1997 bicentennial of his birth. The canon of Schubert’s most highly valued compositions continues to shift, so that Winterreise (D911), for example, with its existential despair, now eclipses the less disturbing Die schöne Müllerin (D795).
An example of the evolving image of Schubert is a painting acquired in 1991 by Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. It is a handsome portrait, unsigned, of a young man seated at a piano; a pencil on the instrument suggests a composer. In a recent monograph on the work, Rita Steblin argues that it depicts Schubert around the age of seventeen and was perhaps commissioned after his first success with the Mass in F in 1814. 46 Both the identification of Schubert and the attribution to the Viennese painter Josef Abel have been questioned, 47 but the image is being disseminated all the same, appearing on record covers, in program books, and in the popular press. 48
Fritz Lehner’s gripping film Mit meinen heissen Tränen (1986) introduced a darker Schubert – not simply suffering, but alienated, ill, and isolated even among family and friends. 49 While Lehner’s film was creating a considerable stir in Europe, Maynard Solomon’s investigations of Schubert’s “possible homosexual orientation” and “compulsive hedonism” preoccupied the attention of English-speaking countries. 50 The exceptionally intense reactions his articles provoked, responses and counter-responses that often carry not so hidden personal and political agendas, further underscore the “transferential” relations that are possible with “our Schubert.” 51
As with other components of Schubert’s legacy, one hopes further documentation will someday appear and help to clarify the truth. But truth is left behind once an image – Schubert and his merry friends cavorting in Berté’s operetta, a beguiling painting of a young composer, a challenging biographical conception of Schubert as womanizer, homosexual, or hedonist – enters the popular imagination. Incontrovertible facts, untrustworthy legends, symbolic anecdotes, and simple mistakes all affect perceptions of Schubert and prove difficult, sometimes impossible, to dispel. Although the popular image of Schubert rests largely on anecdotes, most colorfully promoted in novels, operettas, and films, more sober and objective studies often project essentially the same view. Scholarly discussions of Schubert’s casual compositional methods or loose formal structures merely put a scientific spin on popular anecdotes that have Schubert composing songs on any scrap of paper and then forgetting about them.
The image of Schubert changes in response to the culture that perceives him. The Biedermeier Schubert, the Romantic Schubert, and now a Postmodern Schubert are creations of periods that approach historical documents and musical compositions with changing expectations, seeking new information, and asking different questions. We must resist the nostalgic fallacy that the past understood Schubert best because of a closer proximity to him, just as we must resist the danger of thinking that present-day views penetrate deepest simply because they draw upon a wider range of documentation and music. The sentimental distortions of Schubert’s life and music on stage and screen at least reflect something of the playfulness and Biedermeier conviviality that have increasingly been displaced, in the Postmodern era, by a more complex image of a suffering and neurotic “poor” Schubert.