Franz Schubert - Biography
Franz Peter Schubert was born on January 31st 1797 in a suburb of Vienna and died on November 19th 1828 in Vienna. His father Ferdinand was a schoolmaster his mother Elizabeth nee Vetz. He took lessons from his father and an older brother Ignaz. In 1808 he became a member of the Imperial Court Choir a forerunner of the Vienna Boys Choir where he acquired further musical training eventually studying with the celebrated Salieri of Amadeus fame. As his voice changed he became a member of the court orchestra and stated composing in earnest at thirteen composing a Fantasy for four hand piano and his first of nearly seven hundred songs. He got his teaching certificate at sixteen and became an instructor in his father’s school .While still in his mid to late teens he composed his first five symphonies charming small scale works modeled after Mozart and Haydn. He also completed four Masses and an opera Des Teaufuls Lustschloss before the age of nineteen. Starting at seventeen his great songs started coming in rapid profusion including the great Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel and Erlkonig He in fact completed two hundred songs by the time he reached his twentieth birthday. While his instrumental, chamber, choral and dramatic work from his teens have many lovely and charming moments these songs are often masterworks. The only parallel in musical history is Mozart, but he was a famous child prodigy. Schubert in his mid teens inexplicably went from a modest adolescent musician to a full blown genius.
He formed literary friendships with young Austrian poets like Schober and Mayhofer whose lyrics he set to music. The astonishing rapidity of his songwriting which enabled him often to write two or more songs in a day was facilitated by his ability to lay out the essentials of the form and harmony of the song then lay out the song and just make minor revisions to fit the strophe of the poem. By this time he gave up his job as a school instructor which he was ill suited to by his gentle nature and his slight physical stature which made him seem to be the same age as his pupils He moved into the apartment of his poet friend Schober. When he turned twenty he made the acquaintance of the noted baritone Johann Michael Vogl for whom he wrote many famous songs including An Die Musik, Wanderer, The Die Forelle (Trout), Gaymed and Tod und das Maedchen ( Death and the Maiden). The intense friendships with many of his young male friends have lead many modern revisionist musicologists to speculate about Schubert’s sexuality. This is something that can’t be proven one way or the other and ultimately has little to with his works unless you view Schubert’s bouts of depression and occasional gloomy musical outlook as being due to an inability to fit into a the very conservative cultural atmosphere of Austria in the 1820’s.
When exploring Schubert’s catalog of works you will come across a capitol D with a number afterwards this represents the work of Otto Deutsch a musicologist who compiled and organized his nearly 1,000 works into a chronological catalogue.
The Vienna of his time his demanded from a successful composer operas Schubert wrote a Singspiel (song play) the Twin Brothers in 1820, Alfonso und Estrella (1821),Fierabras in 1823 which are loaded with fine music but are saddled with poor librettos which made them very difficult to stage. One of his stage pieces from this period has an independent life as a group of concert pieces the Incidental music from Rosamunde.
There are two great symphonic torsos from the early eighteen twenties. A symphony in E flat commonly known as number Seven Is fully drafted in four movements but only a part of the first movement is instrumentally scored (There are completions by conductor Felix Weingartner and musicologist Brain Newbold). The second torso is probably Schubert’s most famous work the “Unfinished Symphony” number Eight. The first two movements are complete. There are twenty odd bars of a third movement sketched that abruptly breaks off. Why Schubert set this masterpiece aside is one of the mysteries of music.
Schubert as a young composer still in his twenties got no public performances of his works but his friends often put together concerts in their homes or in small halls known as Schubertiads. Schubert composed dozens of Part Songs for three and four voices many for male voices others for mixed voices that would be performed during these informal concerts along with Schubert solo songs. There are many eyewitness anecdotes concerning these informal concerts including charming paintings and sketches of Schubert playing the piano.
Schubert sometime in the early 1820’s probably contracted Syphilis. Schubert had symptoms consistent with the disease along with evidence of mercury poisoning (mercury being the only way to contain the effects of the disease during the time). Schubert realizing that his time was limited in the last few years of his life accelerated his already amazing pace of great works. His choral works were capped by two masterful mass settings Number 5 in A Flat (1822) and Number 6 in E Flat (1828). During these years he composed a large body of piano works for four hands (two players) which in all probability were written for the Schubertiads. From this period we get the famed Moments Musicals and Wanderer Fantasy for piano. Schubert chamber works which prior to this period were fine works but conventional, grew in depth and time scale to rival Beethoven’s, they include an hour long Octet for Wind and Strings D 803 Quartets number 13 D 8O4 nicknamed the Rosamunde and the 14th Death and the Maiden” D 810 that uses that song as the main theme of the slow movement. Piano Sonatas like the “Relique” D 840, the D Major D 850 also expand to heroic scale and utterance.
We now come to the last two of Schubert’s thirty two years. His health is worsening his normally genial outward personality is darkening. He goes with his friends to treks in the Austrian country side for weeks at a time to revive himself. Three towering masterpieces the song cycles Die Schone Mullerin (The Beautiful Miller) and the Winterreise (Winters Journey) along with a final cycle compiled from Schubert’s last songs Schwanengesang (Swan Song) are often harrowing in their intensity.
Schubert’s last competed Symphony was the Great C Major Symphony the Ninth. Besides the tremendous scale of the work the brass instruments particularly the trombones are used in an unprecedented way that is prophetic of Brahms and Bruckner. In the 1970’s English musicologist Brian Newbold discover an amazing one movement sketch for a Symphony in D Major now known as the 10th Symphony D 936.
The instrumental works close out with two sets of Piano Impromptus and three Piano sonatas in C minor D 958, A Major D 959 and B Flat D 960.There is one final Quartet in G D 887, two great Piano Trios in B flat D 898 and E Flat D 929. Finally a work which I nominate as the most beautiful ever written the String Quintet in C D 956.
In November of 1828 Schubert in his weakened condition caught Typhoid Fever. He wrote to a friend that he could no longer hold food down and begged for some James Fennimore Cooper novels to divert him. During the final stages Schubert became delirious, in a moment of lucidity he grabbed his doctor by the hand and asked him ‘Is this my end’ turned to the wall and died November 19th 1828 thirty one years and eleven months old.
After Schubert’s death all that was known were a handful of songs and a few instrumental works. Schubert only had only one formal public concert of his works in his lifetime. Most of his works were unpublished manuscripts held by his brother Ferdinand. The young Robert Schumann was only thirteen years younger than Schubert; he became a powerful posthumous advocate for Schumann and unearthed the “Great” C Major Symphony among other works in Ferdinand’s possession. The famed English conductor and musicologist Sir George Grove didn’t discover the ‘Unfinished Symphony” until the 1860’s nearly forty years after Schubert’s death. In fact the full scope of Schubert’s greatness was not realized until the turn of the twentieth century due to musicians like Artur Schnabel, Adolf Busch, Wilhelm Kempff .Bruno Walter and above all the encyclopedic grasp of the songs by the German Baritone Dietrich Fischer-DIeskau who performed and recorded all the songs for male voice in the period from the 1950’s to the 1980’s.