Schubert and Vogl at the piano.
From a drawing by M. v. Schwind

Schubert
AND HIS WORK

By HERBERT F. PEYSER

NEW YORK
Grosset & Dunlap
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1946, 1950
The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York
Printed in the United States of America

Foreword

A sense of helplessness and futility overcomes the writer who, in the limits of a volume as unpretending as the present one, endeavors to give the casual radio listener a slight idea of Schubert’s inundating fecundity and inspiration. Like Bach, like Haydn, like Mozart, Schubert’s capacity for creative labor staggers the imagination and, like them, he conferred upon an unworthy—or, rather, an indifferent—generation treasures beyond price and almost beyond counting. Outwardly, his life was far less spectacular than Beethoven’s or Mozart’s. His works are the mirror of what it must have been spiritually. Volumes would not exhaust the wonder of his myriad creations. If this tiny book serves to heighten even a little the reader’s interest in such songs, symphonies, piano or chamber works of Schubert as come to his attention over the air it will have achieved the most that can be asked of it.

H. F. P.

Schubert
AND HIS WORK

The most lovable and the shortest-lived of the great composers, Franz Seraph Peter Schubert was doubly a paradox. He was the only one of the outstanding Viennese masters (unless one chooses to include in this category the Strauss waltz kings) actually born in Vienna; and, though there has never been a composer more spiritually Viennese, Schubert inherited not a drop of Viennese blood. His ancestry had its roots in the Moravian and Austrian-Silesian soil. His grandfather, Karl Schubert, a peasant and a local magistrate, lived in one of the thirty-five towns called Neudorf in Moravian-Silesian territory and married the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, acquiring by the match a large tract of land and ten children of whom the fifth, Franz Theodor Florian, was destined to beget an immortal.

At eighteen Franz Theodor, who was born in 1763, determined to follow the example of his elder brother, Karl, and become a schoolmaster. He went to Vienna and secured a post as assistant instructor in a school where Karl had already been teaching for several years. In spite of starvation wages he married (1785) Maria Elisabeth Vietz, from Zuckmantel, in Silesia, the very town whence the Schuberts had originally emigrated to Neudorf. She was a cook, the daughter of a “master locksmith,” and she was seven years older than her husband. The couple had fourteen children, nine of whom died in infancy. The survivors were Ignaz, Ferdinand, Karl, Therese and our Franz Peter, who came twelfth in order.

A year after his marriage father Schubert was appointed schoolmaster of the parish of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, in Lichtental, one of the thirty-four Viennese suburbs (or Vorstädte), located at greater or lesser distances from the “Inner Town,” which in those days represented Vienna proper. The schoolhouse (unless it has been demolished in the late war) still stands. Franz Theodor took lodgings for himself and his family a few steps away at the House of the Red Crab (Zum rothen Krebse), Himmelpfortgrund 72, now Nussdorfer Strasse 54 and since 1912 a Schubert museum, owned by the municipality of Vienna. Here Franz Seraph Peter was born on January 31, 1797, at half past one in the afternoon.

Father Schubert’s position was far from lucrative; in fact, it offered no salary at all, nothing but a tax of one gulden a month per child levied on the parents. And yet this inflexible, God-fearing pedagogue, imposed such merciless economies and Spartan discipline on himself, his family and his pupils that he not only managed to make both ends meet but, when Franz Peter was four, to buy the schoolhouse where he taught and to take up his quarters there. In modern times the little house had become a garage, though a memorial tablet placed on it in 1928 reminded the passerby that Schubert lived and taught there for several years besides composing under its roof a number of his works, among them Der Erlkönig.

Not the least remarkable thing about Father Schubert was the fact that, despite the endless grind of making a living, teaching and raising a family, he should have found time to cultivate music. Yet he was a tolerable amateur cellist and his great son’s first music teacher. After giving the boy “elementary instruction” in his fifth year and sending him to school in his sixth he taught Franz Peter at the age of eight the rudiments of violin playing and practised him so thoroughly that the boy was “soon able to play easy duets fairly well.”

The youngster was next handed over to his elder brother, Ignaz, who gave him some piano instruction. But here an uncanny thing happened! The child showed such an instinctive grasp of everything his brother tried to teach him that Ignaz, nonplussed, confessed himself hopelessly outstripped. Franz, for his part, declared he had no need of help but would go his own way in musical matters. Thereupon his parents entrusted him to the choirmaster of the nearby Lichtental parish church, one Michael Holzer, who knew something about counterpoint and consumed more alcohol than was good for him. It was not long before poor Holzer was experiencing with his pupil the same difficulties as Ignaz. He had the little fellow sing and was delighted by his bright voice and his musical accuracy. He let him accompany hymns on the organ, had him improvise and modulate back and forth, taught him a little piano and violin, familiarized him with the viola clef and a few principles of thorough-bass. But in the end his labors were largely superfluous. Holzer admitted that “the lad has harmony in his little finger.” A nearby shop of a piano maker offered a more fertile field for experiments in harmony. Released from the organ loft Franz Peter hurried to this shop and spent hours there forming chords on the keyboard.

He Joins the “Sängerknaben”

It is not impossible that Schubert may have made a few attempts at composition at this stage, though there is no actual proof. But a real turning point came on May 28, 1808. On that date there appeared in the official journal, the Wiener Zeitung, an announcement that two places among the choristers of the Imperial Chapel (the so-called Sängerknaben) had to be filled. Father Schubert saw his chance. A chorister who showed the necessary qualifications could enjoy free tuition, board and lodging at the Imperial Konvikt (or Seminary); and if the boy distinguished himself “in morals and studies” he might remain even after his voice had changed. The Konvikt was a former Jesuit school reopened in 1802 by the Emperor Franz and supervised by a branch of the Jesuits called the Piarists. In addition to ten choristers there were pupils of middle and high school standing. The Konvikt occupied a long, cheerless