Franz Schubert

Austrian composer

• Born: January 31, 1797
• Birthplace: Himmelpfortgrund, near Vienna, Austria
• Died: November 19, 1828
• Place of death: Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Austria)

Schubert created the Lied (art song) and set models for subsequent ones in his more than six hundred Lieder. His larger instrumental works, in their freedom of form and enhanced key relationships, became models for the lyrical Romantic sonatas and symphonies of the later nineteenth century. The expressively songful character of his shorter piano pieces was equally influential.

Early Life

Franz Schubert (SHEW-bert) was one of the five of fourteen children of a schoolmaster to survive infancy. Though the Schubert family was in humble circumstances, its members were highly musical, and Franz as a child learned violin from his father, piano from his older brother Ignaz, and singing and basic music theory from Michael Holzer, choirmaster of the parish church of Liechtenthal. At the age of nine, Franz was engaged as a boy soprano in the Imperial Chapel and was enrolled in its school, the Imperial and Royal Stadt-Konvikt (boarding school), where he was also a violinist in the student orchestra.

Schubert’s earliest surviving compositions date from 1810. In 1811, he began keyboard studies with the court organist, Wenzel Ruzicka, and in the following year began studies in composition with Antonio Salieri, who had been Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s rival and one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s teachers. This year was critical in other ways for Schubert: His voice changed, thus preventing him from continuing in the chapel choir as a boy soprano, and his mother died. His father remarried in the following year.

Though Schubert’s voice had changed, he remained a scholarship student at the Imperial and Royal Stadt-Konvikt. In 1813, he renounced his scholarship, probably because he would be required to devote his time to academic studies rather than to music, and instead entered the teacher training program at the St. Anna Normal School in 1814. He continued to participate in the Imperial and Royal Stadt-Konvikt’s musical life and played in its orchestra, for which his first three symphonies were written. In 1814, he wrote string quartets for his family ensemble, in which he played viola, and his first major compositions. He set to music the poem “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (Gretchen at the spinning wheel) from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie (1808; The Tragedy of Faust, 1823). He also wrote the Mass in F Major for the parish church in Liechtenthal.

After passing the examination for teacher certification in 1814, Schubert was a part-time assistant in his father’s school, preferring to devote most of his time to composition. He was exempted from military service because he was barely five feet tall (thus below the army’s minimum height requirement); his friends called him Schwammerl (little mushroom) because of his stocky build and short stature.

Schubert met Therese Grob, a skilled amateur soprano, in 1814 and fell in love with her. In 1816, the relationship was ended, because Schubert could not afford to marry her after he was rejected for a post as music teacher at the Normal School in Laibach (modern Ljubljana, in Slovenia). From then on he was indifferent to women, seeking rather the company of congenial friends, many of whom he had known since his days at the Imperial and Royal Stadt-Konvikt and who were extremely helpful in getting his music performed or in writing texts that he set as songs. From the year 1816 come the fourth and fifth symphonies, a string quartet, the Mass in C Major, and more than one hundred songs. The following two years were relatively fallow.

Life’s Work

Two works from 1819 mark Schubert’s full musical maturity: the Piano Quintet in A Major (called Trout because the fourth movement is a set of variations on his song “Die Forelle,” which means “trout”) and a remarkably concise three-movement Piano Sonata in A Major. He also finished the first of his operas, Die Zwillingsbrüder (the twin brothers), which received six performances in the following year. Schubert made several ventures into opera during the following four years, all of which were unsuccessful because of the lack of dramatic interest in the librettos.

The year 1823 was critical for Schubert in other respects. He became seriously ill; most writers consider the ailment to have been syphilis, from which he recovered, although the secondary symptoms, especially headaches and gastritis, plagued him through the remainder of his life. However, he completed Die Schöne Müllerin (the fair maid of the mill), his first song cycle, so called because he set to music a group of poems by the same author, Wilhelm Müller, which were written around the central theme of a miller’s apprentice who falls in love with his employer’s daughter when she prefers a huntsman.

Schubert next concentrated on writing chamber music and songs. His main chamber works of this period are two great string quartets, in A minor and D minor; an octet for clarinet, bassoon, French horn, string quartet, and string bass in six movements; and several piano duets, written for the daughters of the Esterházy family when he spent the summer as a music teacher on their country estate of Zselis in Hungary (he had been there earlier in 1818). Schubert’s immediately succeeding works include the Symphony in C Major, finished in 1826; a large-scale String Quartet in G Major, also completed in that year; and a large-scale Concert Rondo in B Minor for violin and piano.

The year 1827 saw two piano trios and the gloomy song cycle Winterreise (winter journey), in which Schubert again used poems by Müller. In Winterreise, a young man, rejected by his beloved, undertakes a journey on foot in midwinter in a vain effort to forget her and risks losing his sanity. From this cycle comes one of Schubert’s best-loved songs, “Der Lindenbaum” (the linden tree), which is virtually a folksong in German-speaking countries. The central theme of isolation and alienation displayed in this song cycle was a favorite one in Romantic literature.

The year 1828 saw Schubert’s greatest achievement. Foreign journals were reviewing his music favorably, and foreign publishers were interested in his music. His public concert devoted entirely to his music was a great success. Many of his best compositions—the Fantasy in F Minor for piano duet, the String Quintet in C Major, the last three piano sonatas, the Mass in E-flat Major, and the group of songs published after his death as Schwanengesang (swan song)—stem from this, his final, year. He had even begun lessons in counterpoint with Simon Sechter, later to be the teacher of Anton Bruckner. In November, his health suddenly deteriorated; in slightly more than a week, he lapsed into a coma and died. His illness was diagnosed by his doctors as “nervous fever”; most modern scholars consider his fatal illness to have been typhoid fever, brought on by the unsanitary conditions of the suburb of Vienna where he was then living.

Many legends that have evolved about Schubert have been demolished by subsequent research. He was a prolific composer, but his supposed spontaneity was the result of much forethought and revision. For example, one of his most famous early songs, “Erlkönig” (the elf king), with a text by Goethe, was supposed to have been written in a single afternoon in 1815 and performed that evening. Schubert, however, revised “Erlkönig” six times before its publication as his Opus 1 in 1821. One of the tragedies of music is Schubert’s abandonment of several major compositions before their completion. The most famous of these incomplete works is the “Unfinished” Symphony in B Minor (1822), in which Schubert wrote two outstanding symphonic movements and sketched a third movement as a scherzo, but not even sketches have survived for a finale.

Schubert’s life of poverty has also been misunderstood. He rejected positions with regular hours, seeking one that would enable him to devote full time to composing. Such positions were bestowed on those with many years of musical achievement, and Schubert was passed over in favor of much older and more experienced men. He was relatively well paid by his publishers, but he spent money lavishly when he had it, not so much on himself as on the circle of friends with whom he lived and whom he accompanied on summer vacations in the mountains, where he did much of his composing.

By Schubert’s time, social conditions had changed: The nobility, ruined by the Napoleonic Wars, could not support a composer in the manner that Joseph Haydn or Ludwig van Beethoven had been aided, and the middle-class public could not provide a steady income. Schubert’s main audience consisted of the friends who attended the so-called Schubertiads—evenings when Schubert and others played the piano and sang for a mostly male audience, who did much drinking and stayed as late as 3:00 a.m. He was beginning to achieve a wide reputation as a composer of merit during the last year of his life.

Significance

Only a small amount of Franz Schubert’s music was published during his lifetime—several songs and piano duets, but only one string quartet, four piano sonatas, and no orchestral music. His music was aimed more toward the middle-class drawing room than the concert hall, and Schubert himself was not a charismatic virtuoso performer such as Niccolò Paganini or Franz Liszt, who were able to attract well-paying crowds.

Schubert changed the course of music in many ways. Before him, composers who wrote songs undertook to provide a simple setting for a poem, with an almost rudimentary piano accompaniment that often was intended to be played by the singer, rather than to create an independent musical composition that would utilize the full resources of the piano and all the techniques of harmonic color and melodic expression in the way that Schubert did. In the sphere of the large instrumental work, Schubert provided an alternative to Beethoven, writing movements that were lyric and epic rather than heroic and dramatic. Schubert used the possibilities inherent in the widening of the tonal spectrum to expand the forms of his movements. The short, spontaneous piano piece was not original with Schubert, but he set the standard for subsequent works in this genre.

Schubert’s influence on subsequent composers was not immediate but was especially strong on those who played major roles in making his music known throughout the nineteenth century: Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms. The full range of Schubert’s genius has become appreciated only in modern times with the performance and recording of many of his large-scale works.

Bibliography

Brown, Maurice J. E. “Schubert.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan, 1980. Brown’s critical studies of Schubert’s music are distilled in this comprehensive article embracing both the composer’s life and music.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Schubert: A Critical Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958. The standard scholarly study of Schubert’s work, with the focus on his music. Written for the person with musical understanding.

Deutsch, Otto Erich, ed. Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends. Translated by Rosamond Ley and John Nowell. London: A. & C. Black, 1958. Contains many firsthand accounts by those who knew Schubert personally and intimately.

Deutsch, Otto Erich, with Donald R. Wakeling. The Schubert Reader: A Life of Franz Schubert in Letters and Documents. New York: W. W. Norton, 1947. This documentary biography consists of English translations of the documents directly pertaining to Schubert, thus providing direct insight into the composer’s life and the circumstances surrounding his work.

Einstein, Alfred. Schubert: A Musical Portrait. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951. This sensitive appreciation of Schubert’s music by one of the giants of early twentieth century musical scholarship is well worth reading because of its valuable and penetrating insights into Schubert’s music.

Gibbs, Christopher H. The Life of Schubert. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Informative biography describing the relationship of Schubert’s music to his life. Gibbs examines, and in some cases destroys, misconceptions about the composer.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Schubert. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Collection of essays examining Schubert’s life and music. Some of the essays analyze the various genres of his music, including operas, songs, and piano and chamber music; other essays describe his music in performance and the reception of his music in nineteenth century Europe.

Osborne, Charles. Schubert and His Vienna. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. A book for the general reader, with the emphasis on Schubert’s life and environment rather than on his music. Provides a very readable introduction to Schubert, though the musical information is mostly praise rather than critical analysis.

Reed, John. Schubert. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1987. Provides excellent discussion of Schubert’s life, with the music important though subordinate. Written in a style suited more for the general music lover than for the specialist scholar. Some musical background is necessary for a full appreciation of this volume.