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Musical Courier 1928-04-12: Vol 96 Iss 15, 1928
62 lines. Read by computer on 29 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1THE REAL FRANZ SCHUBERT
2An Attempt at a Re-Characterization
3By César Saerchinger
4(Copyrighted, 1928, by The Musical Courier Company)
6FRANZ SCHUBERT is the most amazing phenomenon in musical history. An obscure schoolmaster—born in an obscure corner of a Viennese suburb of a family without musical traditions—lived, composed and died at the age of thirty-one—an age at which Beethoven had not written his third symphony nor Wagner his Lohengrin—leaving a bundle of music which ten years later is found to contain some of the world's greatest masterpieces. Year after year that mysterious bundle, officially valued at two dollars, continued to yield up treasure after treasure, until in our own day the complete works of Schubert are published in forty imposing volumes folio.
8The musical world has never fully grasped the magnitude of this miracle. Those who have, have accepted it with a natural skepticism; and many have been wise enough to "discover" that the majority of this boasted wheat was chaff.
10How could it be otherwise? Especially when we learned that the obscure Viennese schoolmaster had, aside from a few lessons with the Italian Salieri, almost no theoretical musical training, and that a few days before his death he had actually arranged to take counterpoint lessons from Sechter, the leading theoretician of the time. Indeed, we were told that he was a man of the lowest origin, of slight culture, with no interests except those of his own day-to-day existence, living the life of an indolent Bohemian, satisfied so long as he had his pipe and his beer, a parochial, untutored genius squandering divine melodies with tragic prodigality, until he died, poverty-stricken, from the results of neglect and want.
12That, in brief, is the legendary figure which has come down to us. Biographers, confronted by a paucity of facts, have supplemented them with fiction and more sentimental humbug than has ever been written about any other composer. Incidents such as the story of Hark, Hark, the Lark being written on a bill of fare, examples of Schubert's apparent casualness, and his shrinking modesty have been exaggerated into proof that he had no real appreciation of his own works, while the most of his admirers, such as Sir George Grove, have turned with bitterness upon his teachers for not teaching him counterpoint, and upon his friends, for letting him starve. The world, according to the poet Grillparzer's epitaph, mourns "a rich possession but even fairer hopes."
14Today, a hundred years after that epitaph was written, we are beginning to realize that it is unworthy of the man. For not only is his legacy far richer than a skeptical world could believe; it is so rich that to wish for more would be sheer impertinence. Today we know that "lessons" would no more have changed the master Schubert than lessons in rhetoric would have turned Walt Whitman into another Tennyson. Our theories about Schubert's lack of science are collapsing, and the sun of a new understanding is turning the "chaff" into wheat. And once again the miracle grows.
16In the meantime, too, biographical researchers have been at work, and there emerges from the shadow the outline of a personality that is far worthier of the greatest romanticist than the pathetic figure of the popular histories, the biographical novels and that slandering musical comedy which still disgraces our boards.
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19Sir George Grove asserts that Schubert was "born in the lowest ranks, . . . loving the society of his own class." How does this square with the facts? Certainly, Schubert was a man of the people, just as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were. But "low" is not the word, either for his family or his friends. Schubert's father and his grandfather before him were schoolmasters. Modest as the social degree of schoolmasters may have been under the Hapsburg monarchy, they were not less cultivated than schoolmasters are today. Schubert's father, moreover, rose to a respected position in his profession, as head of a school, as well as in the community, for he owned his house and was able to sell it in 1826 for 6000 florins.
21More important, however, he was like all Austrian schoolmasters a good musician, and initiated Franz and his two elder brothers into violin playing and other musical mysteries. One of these brothers, Ferdinand, not only continued the teaching tradition by becoming head of a Vienna normal school, but became a proficient organist and composer. The favorite pastime in Father Franz's house was quartet playing, and later the quartet expanded to a semi-amateur orchestra, of which Franz, junior, remained a member throughout its existence. The symphonies of Haydn and Mozart were almost his cradle songs.
23Young Franz, besides being the most gifted in the family, possessed a beautiful soprano voice, and was the only one deemed worthy of belonging to his Imperial Majesty's court choir. So we get our first glimpse of him as a little fellow of twelve, already wearing spectacles, and also a gray tunic which seems to have aroused the merriment of the other boys, as he stood in line for the examinations of the Imperial Choir School. This was the famous "Convict" to which only musically talented sons of respectable families were admitted. How he triumphed over all competitors is well known, and also how he astonished his music masters, both before and after entering the Convict, by his miraculous ability in singing, playing and composition, so that they generally gave up teaching him because there was nothing he did not seem to know by instinct.
25What is generally overlooked, however, is the fact that by virtue of his position in the Imperial Choir he had the benefit of a general education which otherwise fell only to the sons of the well-to-do. In the Academic Gymnasium, where the choirboys as well as other, paying, pupils were instructed, he had a classical course, including Latin, Greek, mathematics, history, geography and natural science, and his reports mostly show the figure 1 (meaning "excellent") and sometimes 2 (meaning "good") in all these subjects. When he was sixteen Schubert was one of three Imperial choirboys selected, "by virtue of having distinguished themselves in studies and morals," for the so-called Meerveld scholarship, which would have permitted him to finish his higher education after his voice changed, and to enter the university.
27But his father, evidently, decided that he couldn't afford to support his growing family (there were five children surviving out of fourteen) any longer than necessary and wanted Franz to help out by becoming his assistant teacher in the school, which incidentally would remove the dread of fifteen years' (!) military service. The youth passed the examination at the Normal School after a few months' preparation, giving satisfaction in every subject except Scripture, though two years before he evidently knew enough to quote the gospel according to St. Matthew in that pathetic letter in which he begs his elder brother for a few kreuzers to supplement the scanty supply of provisions at the school. That Franz profited by his classical education we can see from one of his letters in later life, in which he quotes Cicero, also from a humorous Latin dedication to his friend, Ignaz Assmayer, and from various attempts at verse which sometimes rise to poetic eloquence. It is obvious, from all this, that Schubert, far from being the half-educated Musi-
29kant as he is often pictured, had a better all-around education than either Mozart or Beethoven.
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32For three years—from seventeen to twenty—young Schubert was actually the obscure schoolteacher, drumming the A-B-C's into the unwilling heads of the parish school—years of real drudgery in which he must have become conscious of his true mission in life: for not only did he write masses for the parish church and symphonies (his first three) for the family orchestra, but he did his first epoch-making deed: he perfected the romantic German Lied, composing such masterpieces as The Erlking and Gretchen am Spinnrade at the age of seventeen.
34At the end of this period of drudgery Schubert threw off the yoke once and for ever. Little is known of the struggle between father and son which this brought about. But we now have a touching evidence of this crisis in the young artist's life, namely, in a literary composition from his own pen—an allegorical story of his own life, which, incidentally, proves that he was able to express himself in words as well as in tones. This composition is entitled "My Dream" and is printed on this page.
36Except for the periodic employment as private music teacher in the family of Count Johann Esterhazy which allowed him to spend two summers on the Count's Hungarian estate, Schubert never held another post in his life. He was the first great composer to break completely away from the system of aristocratic patronage from which his predecessors, including Beethoven, and even Weber, very largely lived.
38This is important, for it accounts in a large measure for those distinctly Bohemian habits of life which have been set down to shiftlessness, and also for the comparative obscurity in which he lived. Schubert, in fact, was the first great "free-lance" among composers, writing his music and selling it to publishers as opportunity afforded.
40Schubert's alleged lack of culture is easily disproved when we examine the circumstances of his life. Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart, it is true, became men of the world by mingling with the nobility, but their only point of contact with their noble patrons was music. Schubert lived his life as the center of a little band of artists, littérateurs and idealistic dreamers, and of a wider circle of bourgeois amateurs, a new and typically German class, rising on the crest of the social upheaval created by the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The interests of these people—essentially gentlefolk, as we understand the term today—were certainly broader and more various than those of either the professional musicians or the aristocratic gentry with whom Beethoven associated. As for the Bohemian intimates of Schubert, notwithstanding the impecuniousness of some of them, they certainly fostered his knowledge of the sister arts, of philosophy, and his interest in the questions of the day.
42This set of young intellectual men about town, we may be sure, were constantly arguing about art and literature, law and politics, and that whole new complex of social and ethical thought sweeping over Europe in the wake of revolution, Sturm und Drang, and the romantic movement. Among them were Mayrhofer and Bauernfeld, poets; Schwind and Kupelwieser, artists; Hüttlenbrenner and Lachner, composers; and Spaun and Schober, young gentlemen—sons of well-to-do families with a hankering after art. Schober, a typical product of the time, for a time emulated Goethe's hero, Wilhelm Meister, by becoming an actor, later settling down in Vienna as a man of affairs. All of them loved music and most of them practised it; nearly all of them wrote poetry as a matter of course.
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45What Schubert meant to this genial circle of idealists we gather from several letters from and to him, which breathe a romantic conception of friendship that nowadays would be regarded as sentimental and absurd. They were like schoolboys who never grew up. They wept real tears over each other's absence; they comforted each other in their miseries; they shared this world's goods as a matter of course. Sometimes they shared each other's lodgings, as Schubert did with the poet Mayrhofer for two years; they met every day at the café which happened to be for the moment their club; they foregathered in the same homes of art-loving burghers, and usually saw the night out at another café. Often, to save going home separately, they slept at each other's rooms. Yet every morning they were at work, each at his easel or his writing desk—as jolly a company of Bohemians as Murger could ever have imagined. And when they were separated they wrote sentimental, gos-
47My Dream
48Allegorical Autobiography Written by Franz Schubert on July 3, 1822
50I WAS a brother among many brothers and sisters. Our father and our mother were good people. I was bound to them all by deepest love. Once upon a time our father led us to a banquet, and this gave the brothers great joy. I alone was sad. Then my father came to me and bade me partake of the precious delicacies. But I could not, wherefore my father, angered, banished me from his sight. I turned my steps away, with a heart full of limitless love for those who despised it, and wandered into a distant land. Years passed whilst the greatest pain and the greatest love divided my soul. Then came news of my mother's death. I hastened to her side, and my father, softened by his sorrow, did not bar my way. There I saw her body. Tears flowed from my eyes. Like the dear old past, in which she bade us live as she had lived, I saw her lie.
52And we followed her body in mourning and the bier sank into the earth. From this time on I stayed at home again. Then, once again, my father led me into his favorite garden. He asked me if it pleased me. But the garden was repugnant to me and I dared not speak. Angered, he asked me a second time whether the garden pleased me? I said no, shaking with fear. Then my father beat me and I fled. And for the second time I turned my steps away, with a heart full of limitless love for those who disdained it. I wandered once again into distant climes. Songs I sang then, for long, long years. When I wanted to sing of love, it turned to pain. And when I wanted to sing of pain, it turned to love.
54And so love and pain divided my soul.
56And once I received news of a pious maiden who had just died. A ring was drawn about her grave, in which many youths and old men walked in eternity, as if blessed. They spoke softly, not to wake the maiden. Heavenly thoughts seemed always to burst from the maiden's grave, like bright sparks which caused a soft murmur. I too longed to walk with them. Only a miracle, said the people, led into the circle. But with measured step, deep meditation and steadfast faith, with my eyes lowered, I walked into the circle, which vibrated with a wondrous, lovely sound; and I felt the blessedness of eternity as though it were compressed into one single moment. My father too I saw, reconciled and loving. He closed me in his arms and wept. But I wept even more.
58(Translated by C. S.)
60Commemorating Schubert
61In this issue the MUSICAL COURIER starts its contribution to the memory of Franz Schubert, the one hundredth anniversary of whose death is being commemorated in tone, word and picture the world over. The first section of the pictorial biography of the "world's greatest melodist" will be followed by two more in subsequent issues. The essays by Cesar Saerchinger, C. Geisler-Schubert and Clarence Lucas, on various phases of Schubert's personality, life and works, will be supplemented in the later issues by further contributions from other well-known musicians and writers on musical subjects. They will include articles by Louis Bailly, Artur Schnabel, Artur Bodanzky, Hugo Leichtentritt, Frank Patterson, Elena Gerhardt, James Liebling, and Joseph Szigeti. The pictorial and literary material which has been pouring in for many months is so voluminous that it proved impossible to utilize all of it within the compass of a single number.
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