From the issue dated February 9, 2001
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Looking Beyond the Sentimental SchubertBy CHRISTOPHER H. GIBBSThe late 20th century saw the transformation of Franz Schubert's image from that of a shy, impoverished "prince of song," beloved by his merry friends, into that of a depressed, drunk, hedonistic homosexual. Of course, I exaggerate both portraits a bit. Musicians and scholars have long known that there was much more to this elusive figure than that found in countless novels, operettas, and movies. But many Schubert fans knew only the simple soul depicted in Rudolf Hans Bartsch's extremely popular Schubert novel, Schwammerl (1912), which spawned one of the most profitable works of musical theater ever written, Heinrich Berté's operetta Das Dreimäderlhaus (The House of Three Girls, 1916), which in turn was translated into many languages and recast in various film versions, including Ernst Marischka's in 1958. Revisionist examinations were long overdue, and the recent speculations concerning Schubert's excesses, neuroses, and possible homosexuality no doubt contain a good deal more truth than the past, sentimental images. The gay, as in merry, Schubert, of Berté's imagining, who innocently cavorted with fun-loving friends and tossed off songs on the backs of menus morphed in the late 20th century into a gay, as in homosexual, Schubert drinking to excess with freethinking Bohemians. And yet, as claims about the darker, more complicated Schubert threaten to become a new orthodoxy, often in the absence of sufficient historical evidence or responsible historical context, I despaired when asked to write a biography for the Musical Lives series published by Cambridge University Press. The title was preordained, The Life of Schubert, but in many respects Schubert's life is simply missing from the historical record, which is what has allowed so many people to make up so much. One Viennese obituary from 1828, when Schubert died at 31, stated that he had "lived solely for art and for a small circle of friends." There's a strong element of truth to that. But the notion may have evolved with particular force because Schubert's own surviving words are discouragingly few -- unlike those of Mozart, Schumann, or Wagner -- and along with Schubert's music, his friends' testimony is what has most endured. Fewer than a hundred of Schubert's letters exist, most of them fairly inconsequential. Aside from some scattered diary entries, several poems, and a few tantalizing pages known as "My Dream," an allegorical tale to which his older brother later affixed the title, there are no journals, memoirs, criticism, or essays. While the composer was alive, the so-called Schubert circle established a pattern of support and promotion. After his death, that pattern continued through their memorial tributes and reminiscences that appeared many years later, after "Schwammerl" (an affectionate nickname meaning "little mushroom") had become a recognized Great Composer. Schubert's intimates were mostly poets and painters -- a remarkable group of young men with substantial intellectual and artistic gifts. Leopold Kupelwieser and Moritz von Schwind were particularly distinguished artists who executed many portraits of the composer. Johann Chrysostomus Senn, Johann Mayrhofer, Eduard von Bauernfeld, and Franz von Schober were widely published writers. These and other self-described "pub crawlers" with whom Schubert, after a long day composing, would spend many hours, many nights a week, created a vibrant intellectual, cultural, and artistic atmosphere. They profoundly influenced him, suggesting what he read and set to music, and often writing poems themselves for that purpose. Few in Schubert's circle recognized the full scope of his musical achievement, which helped generate a central myth: that the public largely ignored him. Many biographers seem to have reveled in every scrap of bad news, necessary to promote the legend of Schubert's neglect. In fact, he enjoyed tremendous success with many kinds of smaller, intimate vocal, instrumental solo, and chamber pieces. And, in later years, he eagerly sought recognition with larger works. The central paradox of Schubert's career is that his considerable fame during his lifetime stemmed from small-scale compositions, such as the song "Erlkönig" ("Erl-king"), his most popular opus. Many of his more ambitious instrumental works, including his symphonies, would become known only after his death. The "Unfinished" Symphony received its premiere in 1865, decades after Schubert died, and his earlier symphonies were first performed even later. Because of the scarcity of writings from Schubert himself, and the late, often unreliable and unrepresentative portraits provided by his friends, I decided the best strategy for a brief biography would be to write, essentially, a life of Schubert's musical and professional career. I certainly did not invent the notion that Schubert's music is his most accurate reflection. Robert Schumann, an ardent Schubertian, observed that "what a diary is to others, in which their momentary emotions and so forth are recorded, so to Schubert was music paper, to which he entrusted all his moods. His thoroughly musical soul wrote notes where others used words." We wonder what sort of man would conceive such music: beautiful, sad, convivial, dark -- qualities that appear contradictory until one experiences how naturally Schubert enmeshed them. We begin to construct an image of the composer based on our responses to his work. Official documents provide most of the information about Schubert's early years. His father, a respected schoolteacher, and the father's first wife had 14 children, only five of whom survived infancy. Schubert's initial exposure to music was at home, learning from his father and older brothers, and then benefiting from a first-class musical education at a private school. His most distinguished teacher was Antonio Salieri, who guided Schubert as he tried his hand at nearly every musical genre. At age 17, Schubert entered the family business, teaching at the school his father ran, living at home, and writing more music than at any other time in his life. He composed his first masterpieces of song, the most important of which were set to poems by Goethe -- "Gretchen am Spinnrade" ("Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel") and "Erlkönig." Those made his name and proved decisive in elevating the lied, or German art song, to a new stature. Many compositions suggest a carefree man who must have loved to sing and make music with, and for, friends -- for instance, a favorite song like "Die Forelle" ("The Trout") or hundreds of short dances that Schubert would improvise at social gatherings and later write down for publication. Other pieces seem almost private meditations written for no particular audience. Schubert's friends found the great song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey) gloomy, but he allegedly responded, "I like these songs more than all the others, and you will come to like them too." All six of his Masses expunge the lines from the Credo that pledge fealty to the Roman Catholic Church and belief in the resurrection of the dead. That suggests resistance to formal religious dogma, whether encountered at home from his pious father, in school (religion was Schubert's one unsatisfactory grade), or in church. But there are also hints of deep spiritual feeling in a song like "Ave Maria," although that beautiful work, like so much of Schubert's music, has been transformed into kitsch through saccharine performances and disfiguring arrangements. The poems Schubert chose to set in his more than 600 songs show a lifelong obsession with death, and -- as in so much Viennese art -- dark moods often lurk beneath the gaiety. The frequent wistfulness of his music, the laughing through tears, or crying with laughter, conspire to seduce us into believing we know something of the man. We must be aware of the ways in which the iconic life story colors our hearing of Schubert's work. For generations, it has been taken for granted: He loved his friends, his health and financial situation were poor, he wrote quickly and intuitively, he died young. The popular "Unfinished" Symphony seemed a perfect analogy to the composer's unfinished life -- or it would have, except that that extraordinary work was not silenced by death; Schubert had put it aside years earlier. The sentimental image of a shy, poorly trained, natural genius who just wrote what he wanted has long led scholars to see Schubert's career as haphazard, unpremeditated, and, except perhaps for his last works, chronologically indistinguishable. A closer look, however, belies that view. He struggled in the early 1820's to make his mark and win his place in a competitive musical world. He stopped teaching, left home, and moved in with friends, and by age 24 found his music was beginning to be widely performed, published, and praised in the local and foreign press. The matter of Schubert's alleged poverty will never be entirely sorted out. No one knows how much income he received and what expenses he incurred. Even if we did, within the context of a system of exchange and of communitarian sharing among his friends, and during a time of rife inflation, even accurate income figures would be misleading. I find the frequent attempts to offer modern monetary equivalents virtually meaningless and often quite suspect -- the agenda is usually to prove that Schubert was destitute. There was also, no doubt, a certain amount of Bohemian exaggeration to the cries of pennilessness from Schubert and his friends as they struggled to produce art while former classmates went off to comfortable, undemanding positions in the civil service. Moreover, Schubert typically associated with friends and patrons from more prosperous backgrounds, and that, too, surely colored his view of his material situation. As Schubert sought ways to grow artistically and to survive as a freelance composer -- a relatively new concept at the time -- he continued to write incomparable songs, his mastery secure. Dances, part songs, and smaller keyboard works further enhanced his growing status as a popular composer. He also wrote flashy virtuoso works, such as the Violin Fantasy in C, and his liturgical pieces were performed widely in churches and sometimes published. At the same time, his attention increasingly turned to larger projects, first to the world of opera -- in which Italian works, especially Rossini's, dominated -- and, somewhat later, to the revered Beethoven's domain of instrumental music. After some modest theatrical successes in the summer of 1820 with two German Singspiele (musical plays), Die Zwillingsbrüder (The Twin Brothers) and Die Zauberharfe (The Magic Harp), and with sympathetic supporters in key positions of power, Schubert began to write ever-more-ambitious stage works -- most important, two full-scale operas, Fierabras and Alfonso und Estrella. But then Rossini-mania reached new levels, some of the leading German singers -- such as Schubert's champion Johann Michael Vogl -- left the theater, Carl Maria von Weber's Euryanthe flopped, and it became clear that German opera stood no chance. By 1825, Schubert had reformulated his hopes for subsistence and success by concentrating on keyboard and instrumental genres, and he realized that his best chances lay in venues that offered greater possibilities for performance and publication than did the theater. Beethoven, who had long been his idol, increasingly became his model, not only in specific compositional matters, but also in shaping an independent career and becoming a serious composer in Vienna. Beethoven's incomparable late string quartets, for example, were championed by Ignaz Schuppanzigh's quartet. Schuppanzigh, a masterful violinist, returned to Vienna in 1823 after a decade abroad, ushering in a glorious new age of chamber music. Beethoven gave the quartet his pieces to premiere, and Schubert benefited from the association, as their works were performed in tandem at prestigious concerts. Although Schubert and Beethoven surely met on various occasions, we know little about the nature of their relationship. No letters or reliable contemporary accounts exist, and Schubert does not personally make an appearance (he is referred to by others) in Beethoven's surviving "conversations books," the volumes used to communicate with the deaf composer after 1818. All the most familiar stories about their meetings -- the most dramatic one an alleged deathbed encounter -- evolved many decades later. It is clear, however, that Schubert studied Beethoven's music voraciously, that he dedicated his Opus 10 Variations for Piano Duo to him in 1822, and that he participated as a torchbearer at Beethoven's funeral, in 1827. I argue in the biography that Schubert was consumed with thoughts of Beethoven during the 20 months that separated their deaths and that this is evident both in the music Schubert composed and in the way he continued to mold his career. Even had he wanted to, Schubert could hardly have escaped comparison with Beethoven, since nearly every review of Schubert's keyboard and other instrumental music mentioned the master. Schubert's most important concert -- the only public one during his lifetime devoted entirely to his music -- took place in 1828 on the first anniversary of Beethoven's death. Beethoven's musicians, playing in the Red Hedgehog, the hall of the Society of the Friends of Music associated with the departed master, presented Schubert's latest compositions, two of which, the Piano Trio in E flat (Op. 100) and the song "Auf dem Strom" ("On the River"), subtly allude to the funeral march of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony. Schubert planned to give a similar concert each year, and he redoubled his efforts to get large-scale instrumental works published by important firms outside Vienna. All this ambitious professional activity came in the wake of a serious illness -- syphilis -- contracted some six years earlier and from which he feared he would never recover. Nonetheless, his death from typhoid fever in the same year as that 1828 concert took his friends by surprise. Schubert had just reached a new artistic and professional stature at the age when composers like Beethoven and Brahms achieved full artistic maturity. Schubert died without having, we might say, "middle" and "late" periods. We have only his "last" works, not "late" ones. Just as Schubert's compositions explore oppositions and contrasts, some in his circle noted a "dual nature" in the man himself. They said he possessed "a black-winged demon of sorrow and melancholy" but was also a "hedonist" who indulged in "sensual living." Whether we call this mild manic depression, as has one recent biographer, Elizabeth Norman McKay, or use the Romantic label "melancholy," stark contrasts are found also in his most significant letters, which often juxtapose laments of "misery" with buoyant talk of friends, musical life, and composing. The evidence of occasional heavy drinking comes from reliable contemprary sources, and was later amplified (or defensively and unconvincingly dismissed) in friends' memoirs. There are no documented enduring romantic relationships with women. Most of the time he was not composing he spent in the company of male friends, particularly Schober, Mayrhofer, and Josef von Spaun, a civil servant, each of whom he lived with for extended periods. Although allusions to Schubert's sensuality, hedonism, and excesses are tantalizing, they lack specificity. The wildest claims to emerge in recent years were that Schubert was a pederast, an idea propagated by The New York Times's somewhat distorted reporting on less sensationalistic articles by the musicologist Maynard Solomon, and that Schubert smoked opium, a view espoused by McKay in her 1996 biography of the composer. Those claims -- the former based on a diary entry of von Bauernfeld, the latter on a reference in a letter to a Turkish water pipe -- simply cannot be supported by the historical evidence. One can only marvel at how Schubert and his music have generated so many interpretations and accommodated such a variety of appropriations over time. He has been put to political and ideological uses before, particularly during the 19th and early 20th centuries as a symbol of Austrian nationalism. While we may be tempted only to lament the manipulation of Schubert's image then and now -- to regret that we know so little and can therefore invent so much -- we might rather celebrate the range and emotional depth of Schubert's art. There are certainly plenty of opportunities to hear it. Schubertiade concerts and festivals are held worldwide, and by the 1997 bicentennial of his birth, nearly every note he composed was available on CD in superior performances. Feast on Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's recordings of most of the lieder, the complete survey of them on the Hyperion label, András Schiff's marvelous recordings of the piano sonatas, the Emerson Quartet's of the late string works, the piano duo Tal & Groethuysen's of the miraculous four-hand music, and many fine recordings of the operas and symphonies. As you do, ask yourself whether gifts so varied and complex could really have come from the precious, parochial Schubert depicted only a generation ago, or from the insatiable, unfocused hedonist of revisionist biographers. The music and what little we do know of Schubert's life run counter to such narrow views. Christopher H. Gibbs, an assistant professor of music at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is the author of The Life of Schubert (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (Cambridge, 1997). He was also musicological director of the final three years of the Schubertiade at the 92nd Street Y, in New York City. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B13
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education