Franz Schubert and His World

by Gibbs, Christopher H. , Solvik, Morten

  One can only try to imagine what Schubert might have thought as he heard the words of his literary friend proclaimed in honor of his musical hero. What did he make of this challenge about who would emerge as Beethoven’s successor, a question so many others would also ask in the years to come? Some quarter-century later Schumann declared that he had found the answer in the young Johannes Brahms. Brahms himself would later contradict his mentor when he observed that “Schubert, not Mendelssohn or Schumann, is Beethoven’s true successor.”18 It is not unreasonable to think this is the position that Schubert himself took as he assumed Beethoven’s mantle.

  Schubert had recently turned thirty, but had been in poor health for more than four years, since he contracted what was most likely syphilis in 1822. Letters suggest that he viewed himself as a marked man. A comment to his close friend Franz von Schober is typical: “I am fairly well. Whether I shall ever again be completely healthy I am inclined to doubt.”19 Schubert faced the death of Europe’s preeminent composer knowing that his own health was precarious. His identification with Beethoven therefore concerned not only artistic stature, but also the fragility of life in the face of mortal illness. Schubert’s lifelong friend Josef von Spaun recalled that Beethoven’s “death shocked him very deeply. Did he, perhaps, have a premonition of how soon he would follow him and rest at his side?” (SMF, 137).

  Schubert died barely twenty months later, on 19 November 1828.20 Two days afterward Ferdinand wrote to their father saying that “very many people have expressed the wish that the body of our good Franz be buried in the sacred ground of Währing Cemetery. I am amongst these, because I believe Franz made this request to me.” Ferdinand related that the delirious Schubert, shortly before he died, did not know where he was and said, “This is not where Beethoven lies.” Ferdinand went on to ask his father, “Is this not an indication of his last wish to be buried beside Beethoven, whom he so revered?”21 Schubert was buried just a few feet away from Beethoven.22 Memorial concerts and publications were initiated as part of a fundraising effort to pay for a grave monument and a castiron bust of Schubert, completed in July 1830 (see Figure 1). Grillparzer’s epitaph on the monument was the spark of a long controversy:

  THE ART OF MUSIC HERE ENTOMBED A RICH POSSESSION, BUT EVEN FAR FAIRER HOPES.

  FRANZ SCHUBERT LIES HERE.

  BORN ON XXXI JANUARY MDCCXCVII DIED ON XIX NOVEMBER MDCCCXXVIII XXXI YEARS OF AGE

  Schubert’s early death elicited considerable commentary and fueled much speculation as people marveled at the “riches” he had created during his brief career and wondered about the “far fairer hopes” that might have come given more time.23 The nickname of his most beloved instrumental work—the “Unfinished” Symphony (1822)—captures his “unfinished” life.24 Equally significant is that for more than forty years that magnificent composition lay buried in the Graz home of his good friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, waiting to be discovered and finally premiered in December 1865. Most of Schubert’s other mature instrumental works—piano sonatas, chamber music, and all of his symphonies—were released only gradually in the decades after his death, alongside the continuing publication of ever more vocal music. In 1862, Vienna’s preeminent music critic Eduard Hanslick observed: “If Schubert’s contemporaries rightly gazed astonished at his creative power, what shall we, who come after him, say, as we incessantly discover new works of his? For thirty years the master has been dead, and in spite of this it seems as if he goes on working invisibly—it is impossible to follow him.”25

  Schubert’s grave monument, with its epitaph suggesting a not fully realized creative potential, became integral to his posthumous reception. His entire life was retrospectively interpreted through this early demise. Further, his achievement was consistently evaluated in counterpoint to the older master who lay nearby. In this constellation of dying, funerals, burials, memorials, and monuments, Schubert and Beethoven meet in fascinating and consequential ways: an alleged encounter at Beethoven’s deathbed and the events soon to follow at his funeral; memorial poems, compositions, and concerts; the circumstances of Schubert’s own illness, death, and burial; joint exhumations of their remains in 1863 and 1888; and a long critical and analytical tradition that has repeatedly compared and contrasted their music. Thus over the course of the nineteenth century, as Schubert’s physical body was twice exhumed from its original resting place near Beethoven, so too his figurative body of musical work was gradually being exhumed from oblivion, made public, and continually causing his stature to be reassessed.

  Figure 1. Schubert’s grave in Währing Cemetery.

  Schubert’s “immortal Trio,” as Schumann called it, is the crucial composition in this nexus of death, dying, and commemoration. Together with the 26 March 1828 concert at which it premiered, the work offers Schubert’s most public engagement with the challenge Grillparzer posed in his funeral oration for Beethoven as well as an ultimately joyous declaration of the “far fairer hopes” of which his contemporaries, including close friends, were not fully aware.

  “We talked of nothing but Beethoven”: The Master and Schubert

  Except for a diary entry the teenage Schubert wrote in 1816 that has been interpreted as offering oblique criticism of the unnamed Beethoven, all the evidence points to a lifelong and passionate reverence on the younger composer’s part.26 Schubert declared it most publicly in the 1822 dedication of his Opus 10 piano variations: to Beethoven from “his worshipper and admirer Franz Schubert.” There are plentiful accounts of his extraordinary devotion reported by family and friends, supplemented by a few documents from the composer himself.27 Nicholas Temperley begins a widely cited article by proposing that “Beethoven’s influence on Schubert was profound and pervasive, more so, perhaps, than in any other case of two composers of the first rank.”28 The many connections to Beethoven’s music in his compositions is a well-studied area of inquiry that I will not explore in this essay except as reflected in the works Schubert presented at his concert on the exact first anniversary of Beethoven’s death.

  The nature and extent of any personal contact between the two composers has long been in dispute. There were ample opportunities for them to meet in the relatively self-contained city of Vienna, where various spheres of musical life and patronage overlapped. Beethoven is said, for example, to have held court for some years several mornings a week at S. A. Steiner & Company, a local publisher, and Anselm Hüttenbrenner, known as an acquaintance of Beethoven, states that “Schubert often used to accompany me there.”29 Yet the documentary evidence of a possible relationship is limited and contradictory. Two well-informed sources offered opposed accounts. Ferdinand Schubert stated: “Beethoven, whom [my brother] held sacred and who often expressed himself with great appreciation, especially about his songs, he met frequently, although he could not for that reason be called Beethoven’s pupil, as has often been done” (SMF, 37). On the other hand, Spaun recounted that his friend “often lamented, especially at the time of Beethoven’s death, how much he regretted that the latter had been so inaccessible and that he had never spoken to Beethoven” (SMF, 366).

  There are likewise contradicting stories concerning interplay between the composers regarding the Variations on a French Theme for Piano Four-Hands, Op. 10 (D624), the work that carries Schubert’s effusive dedication. (According to the law at the time Beethoven would have had to grant permission for the dedication.) Beethoven’s erstwhile assistant and later biographer, the none-too-reliable Anton Schindler, claims that Schubert’s shyness incapacitated him in Beethoven’s presence, and that he “completely lost control of himself” when the senior composer gently pointed out a mistake in the harmony.30 On the other hand, Josef Hüttenbrenner (Anselm’s younger brother) related that Beethoven was not at home when Schubert attempted to deliver the piece. Nevertheless, he asserts that the variations “received Beethoven’s full approval” and that he “played them almost every day with his nephew for a period of months” (SMF, 75). Although Hüttenbrenner’s acco
unt dates from some three decades after Schubert’s death, in 1822 Hüttenbrenner was actively involved in helping his friend with his business affairs. In August of that year, not long after the publication of Opus 10, he contacted the Leipzig publisher Karl Friedrich Peters saying, “Among the newer local composers Vienna once again possesses a talent that has already attracted general attention and enjoyed the public’s favor—in short, and without exaggeration, we may speak of a ‘second Beethoven.’ Indeed that immortal man says of him: ‘This one will surpass me.’”31 Maynard Solomon rightly observes that such praise would have been unusual for Beethoven to offer concerning any young contemporary. Schubert’s name is mentioned a few times in Beethoven’s conversation books, but he makes no personal appearance.32 In any case, the conflicting accounts about their relationship should remind us that so much of what we know (or think we know) about Schubert’s biography comes from the distant memories of friends and family rather than from contemporaneous documents.33

  A possible late connection between Beethoven and Schubert concerns the transmission of some poems that Beethoven was considering setting but were eventually passed on to Schubert. According to Schindler, Beethoven studied Schubert’s Lieder during his final months and “with delighted enthusiasm he called out repeatedly ‘Truly, in Schubert there dwells a divine spark!’” (SMF, 307; see also 66). Asking to see more, he “often spoke of Schubert and prophesied ‘that he will still make a great stir in the world’” (SMF, 308). Spaun related similar information: “It certainly made him [Schubert] extremely happy when he learned that, during his last days, Beethoven had derived great pleasure from his songs” (SMF, 366). Although such benedictions, perpetuating a lineage of great composers, are the stuff of legends, there does seem to have been a practical consequence relevant to our story here: Schindler reports that in the summer of 1827, he gave Schubert poems from Beethoven’s estate that had been sent by the critic and poet Ludwig Rellstab, some of which Beethoven had “earmarked” to compose (SMF, 319). Schubert eventually set ten of them—seven in Schwanengesang (D957), as well as two others, and Auf dem Strom (D943), which contains important musical connections to Beethoven that we will consider later.34 In his memoirs Rellstab basically corroborates Schindler’s account, stating that Beethoven had indicated the poems “he liked best and the ones that he had given Schubert to compose at that time, because he himself felt too unwell.”35 The discrepancies in these accounts, as Rufus Hallmark has observed, are “inessential to the simple, central point that Schubert became acquainted with Rellstab’s poetry in a way that caused him to associate the poet with Beethoven.”36

  The most tantalizing tale of a meeting surrounds Beethoven’s death. Anselm Hüttenbrenner stated that he knew “as an absolute fact, that Professor Schindler, Schubert and I visited Beethoven at his sickbed about a week before he died” (SMF, 66). Josef enlarged the cast: “When Beethoven was dying, Schindler invited me to take along my brother Anselm, Schubert, and the painter [Josef] Teltscher.”37 Schindler, however, recorded no such meeting, nor did anyone else, and the Hüttenbrenners’ accounts are among the many that appeared decades later.38 Another familiar anecdote concerns Schubert’s activities following Beethoven’s funeral: he allegedly went with his friends Franz Lachner and Benedikt Randhartinger to a local inn, where he filled two wine glasses. With the first, he toasted the memory of Beethoven, and with the second, whoever among the three of them was destined to die next (SDB, 623). Fritz von Hartmann’s diary offers a less dramatic report actually written later that day: “Went to the Castle of Eisenstadt [a tavern], where I remained with Schober, Schubert, and Schwind until almost 1 AM. Needless to say, we talked of nothing but Beethoven, his works and the well-merited honors paid to his memory today” (SDB, 623).

  Even if the deathbed encounter between Beethoven and Schubert never occurred, Schubert’s participation in the funeral must have made a profound impression, as Spaun recalled Beethoven’s death already had. In summary, however unclear the nature of their personal relationship, Beethoven’s powerful legacy as man and musician had significant consequences for the remaining twenty months of Schubert’s life, and beyond that vast implications for his posthumous reputation.

  “Pave the way toward a grand symphony”: Schubert’s Career Strategy in the Mid-1820s

  Schubert wanted to present a concert devoted entirely to his music—an Akademie, as such events were often called—at least as early as 1823, when his friend Moritz von Schwind mentioned in a letter to Schober hopes for “a musical academy” or “public Schubertiade” (SDB, 314). Schubert expressed this desire in what may be deemed the most revealing of the limited quantity of his surviving letters, sent in March 1824 to the artist Leopold Kupelwieser. At this crucial juncture in his life Schubert lamented his sorry state:

  I feel myself 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 happiness of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain, at best, whose enthusiasm (at least of the stimulating kind) for all things beautiful threatens to disappear, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being? (31 March 1824; SDB, 339–40)

  He proceeded to complain to Kupelwieser, who was living in Italy at the time, about the dissolution of their social circle—“Thus, joyless and friendless, I should pass my days, were it not that Schwind visits me now and again and shines on me a ray of those sweet days of the past”—and concluded with an update on his career and professional plans. His failure to get any operas produced (he mentions Fierabras and Die Verschworenen) meant that he seems “once again to have composed two operas for nothing.” The quantity of Lieder had declined in favor of a new direction: “I have not written many new ones, but I have tried my hand at several instrumental works, for I wrote two string quartets and an octet, and I want to write another quartet; in fact, I intend to pave the way toward a grand symphony in that manner.”

  Schubert’s letter reveals a determined career strategy, one that casts him in a quite different light from his prevalent image as a clueless clair-voyant effortlessly tossing off masterpieces who cared little what happened to them afterward. Of the two completed quartets he mentions, the A Minor (D804) and D Minor (D810), only the former was released during his lifetime, the first of “Trois Quatuors,” Op. 29. Apparently Schubert intended to have his friend and publisher Maximilian Leidesdorf issue a set of three, which would inevitably have invited comparison with Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” Quartets, Op. 59.39 He dedicated the A-Minor Quartet to “son ami I. Schupanzigh [sic] membre de la chapelle de S. M. L’Empereur d’Autriche.” Schuppanzigh’s quartet premiered it at the Musikverein on 14 March 1824, the last concert of the violinist’s first season back in Vienna after living abroad. The other work on that program was Beethoven’s Septet, Op. 20, which clearly provided the model for Schubert’s Octet (D803) that Schuppanzigh premiered on 16 April 1827, less than a month after Beethoven’s death. This was another concert in which Beethoven was the only other composer featured (FSD, No. 476).

  Schubert informed Kupelwieser that these ambitious chamber compositions were intended to lead to a “grosse Sinfonie.”40 And at this point in the letter, as if free associating immediately after discussing his own pieces and plans, Schubert informs his friend that “the latest in Vienna is that Beethoven is to give a concert at which he is to produce his new symphony, three movements from the new Mass, and a new overture. God willing, I too am thinking of giving a similar concert next year.” He is referring to Beethoven’s 7 May 1824 concert that featured the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, the first Viennese performances of the Kyrie, Credo, and Agnus Dei from the Missa solemnis, and the overture to The Consecration of the House. Schubert knew many of the musicians involved with this concert, which Schuppanzigh led.41

  After his recent disappointments getting theatrical works
produced, it made sense for Schubert to concentrate on large-scale chamber music and keyboard compositions.42 Not only did such pieces stand a much better chance of being played and published, but they were the type most likely to be taken up by Beethoven’s own performers and publishers, the group with which Schubert now sought closer contact. Schuppanzigh, the principal proponent of Beethoven’s music in Vienna, played a key role.43 The violinist’s association with Beethoven went back decades and over the years he premiered many of his string quartets and piano trios. After an all-Beethoven farewell concert on 11 February 1816, Schuppanzigh spent nearly seven years abroad, primarily in Russia. His return to Vienna in 1823 offered new opportunities for both Beethoven and Schubert. Schuppanzigh formed a quartet with Beethoven’s assistant Karl Holz, violist Franz Weiss, and cellist Josef Linke that offered either eighteen or twenty-four subscription concerts each season, most of which featured a quartet each by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.44

  During some concerts Schuppanzigh presented other composers and genres and enlisted additional performers, occasions that gave Schubert an unusually prestigious forum for his works. The participating instrumentalists included leading musicians in Vienna, such as pianists Carl Czerny and Karl Maria von Bocklet. The only prominent performer associated with Schubert’s early career was the singer Johann Michael Vogl.45 We tend to think of Schubert’s supporters as primarily amateurs—family, friends, and musical dilettantes, a word that carried different, more positive connotations at the time—but the late promotion of his instrumental music by Vienna’s outstanding professional musicians, largely Beethoven’s, pointed in new directions and provided promising career opportunities. While Schubert’s social life continued to revolve around the “Schobert” circle,46 his professional ties expanded considerably in his final years.