Franz Schubert

• 1. Introduction

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  Franz Peter Schubert was born in the Himmelpfortgrund suburb of Vienna on the 31st of January 1797, the twelfth child of a parish schoolmaster and a housemaid's daughter. He was dead by the age of 31. In those three decades, he produced more than 1,500 works. That number alone raises a question worth sitting with: how does a man who spent years teaching the youngest pupils at his father's school, who was too poor to afford manuscript paper without a friend's charity, who gave exactly one public concert of his own music in his entire career - how does that man leave behind a body of work so large that scholars are still cataloguing it today?

  Part of the answer lies in what his teacher Michael Holzer, the organist and choirmaster of the local parish church in Lichtental, once said about young Franz. Holzer would assure Schubert's father, with tears in his eyes, that he had never had such a pupil. He admitted he gave the boy no real instruction because Schubert already knew anything he tried to teach. He said he could only look upon him with "astonishment and silence".

  What follows is the story of a composer who was largely unknown outside a small Viennese circle while he lived, whose manuscripts lay hidden in cabinets and file boxes for decades after he died, and who is now considered one of the greatest composers in the history of Western classical music.

• 2. A Schoolmaster's Son

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  Franz Theodor Schubert, the composer's father, came to Vienna from Zuckmantel in 1784 and was appointed schoolmaster two years later. He was the son of a Moravian peasant, and he built a school in Lichtental - in Vienna's ninth district - that had numerous students in attendance. Of the fourteen children he and his wife Elisabeth had together, nine died in infancy.

  Schubert began receiving lessons from his father at the age of five. At six he was enrolled in his father's school. His brother Ignaz started teaching him piano, but those lessons lasted only a few months before the younger brother outpaced the elder. Ignaz later recalled: "I was amazed when Franz told me, a few months after we began, that he had no need of any further instruction from me, and that for the future he would make his own way."

  At eight years old, his father gave him violin lessons. The family also played as a string quartet at home, with the two older brothers Ferdinand and Ignaz on first and second violin, the father on cello, and young Franz on viola. He wrote his earliest string quartets for that ensemble.

  Antonio Salieri, then Vienna's leading musical authority in the city, first took notice of Schubert in 1804. In November 1808, at eleven years old, Schubert entered the Stadtkonvikt through a choir scholarship. There he encountered the overtures and symphonies of Mozart, the works of Joseph Haydn and his brother Michael, and the early overtures and symphonies of Beethoven - a composer for whom he developed lasting admiration. His friend Joseph von Spaun, who had been financially well-off enough to supply the impoverished student with manuscript paper, reported that the young Schubert "wanted to modernize" the songs of Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, an important Lieder composer of the time. That restlessness - that drive to push a form further than he found it - would define his entire career.

• 3. The Schoolteacher Who Composed

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  At the end of 1813, Schubert left the Stadtkonvikt and trained to become a teacher at the St Anna Normal-hauptschule. By 1814 he was teaching the youngest pupils at his father's school. He also continued private composition lessons with Antonio Salieri, who provided him with more technical training than any of his other teachers - a relationship that lasted until 1817.

  That same year, 1814, he met Therese Grob, a young soprano and the daughter of a local silk manufacturer. He wrote several liturgical works for her voice, and she sang as a soloist in the premiere of his Mass No. 1 in September 1814. He wanted to marry her. A law passed in 1815 required a prospective bridegroom to demonstrate he could financially support a family. Schubert could not meet that bar.

  The year 1815 was one of the most productive in his life. He composed over 20,000 bars of music, more than half of it for orchestra, and wrote around 140 Lieder in that single year alone. He was also introduced to Anselm Hüttenbrenner and Franz von Schober, who would become lifelong friends. His friend Spaun, well aware that Schubert was miserable in his work as a schoolteacher, invited him to spend a few days at his new home in the Landstraße suburb in May 1816 - probably the first time Schubert had ever stayed away from home or school.

  Schober, from an affluent family, changed the situation in 1816 by inviting Schubert to lodge at his mother's house. Schubert had just failed to secure a Kapellmeister post in Laibach - now Ljubljana, Slovenia - and he resolved not to return to the schoolroom. He wrote to a friend during this period: "I compose every morning, and when one piece is done, I begin another." Much of what he produced went unpublished, but copies and manuscripts circulated among friends.

• 4. The Schubertiads and the Police

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  Johann Michael Vogl, a prominent baritone twenty years Schubert's senior, was introduced to him by Schober in early 1817. Vogl became one of Schubert's most important advocates in Viennese musical circles, performing his songs in drawing rooms and concert halls. Schubert wrote a great many songs with Vogl in mind.

  In the early 1820s, this circle of artists and students gathered regularly for evenings that became known as Schubertiads. Many took place in Ignaz von Sonnleithner's large apartment in the Gundelhof on Brandstätte 5 in Vienna. These were not public concerts but private affairs, part recital and part salon, where Schubert's music could reach ears that might otherwise never have heard it.

  In early 1820 the circle suffered a blow. Schubert and four friends were arrested by the Austrian police, who were still on alert against revolutionary activity in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. One of Schubert's friends, Johann Senn, was put on trial, imprisoned for over a year, and then permanently banned from entering Vienna. Schubert and the other three received what the authorities called a "severe reprimand" - in part for what records describe as insulting and provocative language directed at officials. Schubert never saw Senn again, though he later set two of his poems, Selige Welt and Schwanengesang, to music.

  Schubert stood 1.52 metres tall and was nicknamed "Schwammerl" by his friends - a word that translates roughly as "Tubby" or "Little Mushroom" in the Austrian and Bavarian dialects. The biographer Christopher Gibbs, who documented the nickname, also noted that references to Schubert's heavy drinking appear not just in later accounts but in documents from his own lifetime.

• 5. The Lieder Revolution

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  More than six hundred of Schubert's compositions are songs for solo voice and piano. Leon Plantinga wrote that "in his more than six hundred Lieder he explored and expanded the potentialities of the genre, as no composer before him." Before Schubert, Lieder tended toward strophic, syllabic settings that echoed the folksong tradition.

  Among his settings of poetry by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, two stand apart. "Gretchen am Spinnrade" (D 118) uses the piano to depict the mechanical whir of a spinning wheel as the character sings of uneasy passion. The writer Alex Ross described the accompaniment as "an archetypal feat of tone painting." "Der Erlkönig" (D 328) drives through with what Ross called a "furious and ceaseless gallop" in the piano. Vogl's performance of "Erlkönig" at a concert in March 1821 was extremely well received and helped push Schubert's reputation forward in a way his earlier, hesitant publishing deals with Anton Diabelli had not.

  His two song cycles on the poems of Wilhelm Müller - Die schöne Müllerin (D 795) in 1823 and Winterreise (D 911) in 1827 - are widely considered among the pinnacles of the genre. The Wiener Theaterzeitung wrote of Winterreise that it was a work "none can sing or hear without being deeply moved." His final collection, Schwanengesang (D 957), gathered posthumously from settings of poems by Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine, and Johann Gabriel Seidl, extends the Lieder tradition further still, though Schubert himself may not have intended it as a unified cycle.

  Antonín Dvořák, writing in 1894, credited Schubert directly with creating a new era in song: "Schubert created a new epoch with the Lied. All other songwriters have followed in his footsteps." Franz Liszt, who transcribed and arranged several of Schubert's works from the 1830s through the 1870s, called him "the most poetic musician who ever lived."

• 6. The Final Creative Surge

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  Beethoven died in March 1827, and Schubert had served as a torchbearer at the funeral. The death affected him deeply, and may have pushed him toward new artistic peaks in his final year. On the 26th of March 1828 - the anniversary of Beethoven's death - Schubert gave the only public concert of his own music in his entire career. It was a financial and popular success. It was also quickly overshadowed by Niccolò Paganini's first appearances in Vienna shortly afterward.

  In 1828 alone, Schubert completed the Mass in E major (D 950), the String Quintet in C major (D 956), the three final piano sonatas (D 958, D 959, and D 960), and Schwanengesang. He also began sketching movements for a new Symphony in D major (D 936A), a work in which scholars hear anticipations of Gustav Mahler's use of folksong-like harmonics and bare soundscapes. The symphony he had dedicated to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the Great C major (D 944), was read through at a rehearsal by their orchestra but never scheduled for public performance - possibly because of its difficulty.

  The second movement of the String Quintet moves from E major to a central section in the distant key of F minor - a harmonic distance that reflects what the critic Harold Schonberg described as Schubert's "magic in modulation." The pianist Radu Lupu said of Schubert: "Just before he died, when he wrote his beautiful two-cello String Quintet in C, he said very modestly that he was trying to learn a little more about counterpoint, and he was perfectly right."

  Schubert had made appointments for counterpoint lessons with Simon Sechter, the recognized master of that discipline. He wanted to keep going.

• 7. Death and Its Aftermath

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  In the late summer of 1828, Schubert saw a physician named Ernst Rinna, who appears to have confirmed what Schubert had begun to fear: that he was ill beyond cure. Symptoms of syphilis had first appeared in 1823, and mercury - then a common treatment for syphilis - may have played a role in what followed, since some of his symptoms matched those of mercury poisoning.

  At the start of November he fell ill with headaches, fever, swollen joints, and vomiting. He could not keep solid food down. Five days before his death, the violinist Karl Holz brought his string quartet to play for him. The last music Schubert asked to hear was Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14. Holz remarked: "The King of Harmony has sent the King of Song a friendly bidding to the crossing."

  Schubert died on the 19th of November 1828 at the apartment of his brother Ferdinand, aged 31. The official cause was typhoid fever, though the debate has never fully closed. The physician Robert L. Rold argued that whatever Schubert's earlier illness may have been, the fatal episode was gastrointestinal - consistent with salmonella or typhoid - noting that his friend Schober avoided visiting him out of fear of contagion, unusual behavior given that Schober had never stayed away during earlier bouts of illness. The researcher Eva M. Cybulska has argued that syphilis itself is a conjecture, pointing out that many of its tell-tale signs were absent, and that the diagnosis originated with Schubert's biographer Otto Deutsch in 1907 and was repeated without critical scrutiny ever since.

  At his own request, Schubert was buried near Beethoven in the village cemetery of Währing. His epitaph, composed by his friend the poet Franz Grillparzer, reads in German: Die Tonkunst begrub hier einen reichen Besitz, aber noch viel schönere Hoffnungen - "The art of music has here interred a precious treasure, but yet far fairer hopes."

  In 1838, Robert Schumann visited Vienna and found the dusty manuscript of the Great C major Symphony in a cabinet. He brought it to Leipzig, where Felix Mendelssohn conducted its first performance - in an abridged version - in 1839. The musicologist George Grove and the composer Arthur Sullivan made a journey to Vienna in October 1867 and unearthed manuscripts of six symphonies, parts of the Rosamunde incidental music, and several operas. What had been hidden in the file boxes of family and friends began, slowly, to reach the world.