birthday of the German Lied” it has been called—there comes like a bolt from the blue the epoch-making Gretchen am Spinnrade, from Goethe’s Faust. It is a simple, plaintive melody above a murmuring spinning wheel figure and a pulsing rhythmic throb, but nevertheless a marvel of jointless form and a miracle of psychology, the emotional experience of ages concentrated into one hundred bars of music of such infinite art and uncanny perfection that it almost defies analysis.

As if a gigantic dam had burst, a torrent of immortal mastersongs now begins to pour forth. Not everything, to be sure, either now or later is a deathless creation but the number of those that are will probably remain baffling to the end of time. Schubert frequently made two, three or more settings of one and the same text, differing in greater or lesser degree from the earlier one though not invariably better than the preceding version. Of the more than six hundred Lieder Schubert composed almost a third are such resettings. It was nothing unusual for him to turn out four, five, six songs a day. “When I finish one I begin another,” was his carefree way of describing the incredible process. Sometimes he even forgot which songs were his own. “I say, that’s not a bad one; who wrote it?” he once asked on hearing something he had composed only a few days before. He was careless, too, about what became of some of his manuscripts and there is no telling how much posterity may have lost as a result. Once he came near ruining a page on which he had written his song Die Forelle by pouring ink instead of sand over the wet writing; being sleepy, he did not bother to notice which receptacle he had picked up.

Der Erlkönig

In the year following Gretchen am Spinnrade there came into being (and once more in his father’s school in the Säulengasse) what is, in some ways perhaps, the most famous of Schubert’s songs—Der Erlkönig. Spaun, who went to visit his friend one afternoon, found him “all aglow,” a book in hand, reading Goethe’s ballad. Schubert walked up and down the room several times, suddenly seated himself at a table “and in the shortest possible time the splendid ballad was on paper.” Franz having no piano, the pair hastened down to the Konvikt where the song was tried out that very evening. Several listeners objected to the sharp dissonances of the accompaniment to the child’s cry but it was none other than old Ruziczka who showed himself the best “modernist” of them all, actually championing the “cacophony,” explaining its artistic function and praising its beauty. Schubert himself had a pair of sore wrists from the unmerciful triplets of the piano part! Not everywhere, one regrets to say, did Der Erlkönig create such a stir. At the insistence of his friends Schubert sent it, along with some other songs, to Goethe with an appropriate dedication. His Excellency in Weimar did not even deign to acknowledge it. Meanwhile the publishing firm of Breitkopf und Härtel, to whom Spaun also dispatched the ballad, thought that someone was playing a practical joke. Before deciding what to do with “wild stuff” they addressed themselves to a Dresden violinist who chanced also to be called Franz Schubert (he composed a trifling piece called The Bee, which some fiddlers still play) and asked his opinion. The Saxon Franz (or François) Schubert exploded, insisted he had never composed the “cantata” in question but would see who was misusing his good name for such a patchwork and promptly bring the miscreant to book!

Engraving by Franz Weigl for the second edition of Der Erlkönig.

Piano composition—Ecossaises, German Dances (“Deutsche”), variations, sonatas—a number of string quartets and other chamber music swelled the ever-increasing output. The quantity of songs mounted like a tidal wave. And although nothing had come of Des Teufels Lustschloss (part of which the composer, moved by purely artistic impulses, even went so far as to rewrite), Schubert continued the woeful job of piling up unwanted operatic scores. He wrote Der vierjährige Posten (the story of a sentry who was posted and not relieved on the departure of his regiment and who, when it returned four years later, still stood on duty); Fernando, a Singspiel; Claudine von Villa Bella; Die Freunde von Salamanka and Adrast (texts by Johann Mayrhofer).

And, while we are on the operatic subject, let us look ahead into the years of Schubert’s maturity and list what other operas he wrote (it should be understood, by the way, that certain of these are more on the order of operettas than what we understand by lyric dramas). In 1819 he composed Die Zwillingsbrüder, which has a plot along Comedy of Errors lines; in 1820 a “magic and machine” comedy called Die Zauberharfe (“The Magic Harp”), the overture of which is familiar to us as the Rosamunde—though the overture which Schubert used three years later to the musical play of that name was the introduction that prefaced a full-length romantic opera, Alfonso und Estrella, dated 1821. An actual overture to Rosamunde was never written. The piece known universally by that title was not so designated till 1827, when it was published in an arrangement for piano duet. Other operatic works we may cite in passing are Die Verschworenen, a treatment of the “Lysistrata” motive; and the large-scale “heroic-romantic” opera, Fierrabras, composed in the summer of 1823. After 1823 Schubert let opera alone—at least temporarily. On his deathbed he was still planning another, a Graf von Gleichen, to a book by his boon companion, Eduard von Bauernfeld. But the project had never gotten beyond some sketches.

Mayrhofer, whom we just mentioned, had made Schubert’s acquaintance in 1814, when the composer set to music his poem Am See. A close friendship immediately sprang up between them though Mayrhofer—the older of the two by ten years—was of a moody, brooding nature (he subsequently committed suicide by jumping out of a window). By 1819, Schubert, having grown heartily sick of schoolmastering some time before, went to share for a while the sombre, dilapidated quarters of Mayrhofer in the Wipplinger Strasse (the danger of the army draft was now over) and the pair, for all their temperamental differences, hit it off famously. Although Schubert composed pretty much anywhere and everywhere he accomplished a prodigious amount of creative work in Mayrhofer’s depressing room. The poet on opening his eyes in the morning used to see Franz, clad only in shirt and trousers, writing vigorously at a rickety table. His favorite working hours were from six in the morning till noon, though he was in the habit of sleeping with his spectacles on in case the lightning of inspiration should strike him the minute he awoke. If any visitor came unannounced Schubert would greet him, without looking up from his work, with the words: “Greetings! How are you? Well?”—whereupon the intruder realized it was an invitation to disappear.

After writing all morning Schubert, like a true Viennese, usually went to enjoy the incomparable relaxation of a coffee house, drinking a Mélange (café au lait), eating Kipferl (crescents, if you prefer!), smoking and reading the newspapers. In the evening there was the opera and the theatre (provided one had money or somebody bought the tickets) or else the gatherings of the clans