Of the great composers associated with Vienna — the others
being Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven - Schubert was the only one
born in the city, and the only one who failed to achieve
international fame in his lifetime. His shyness and lack of
instrumental virtuosity contributed to the hardships he endured,
but he was responsible for a magnificent body of work that is
still appraised and appreciated today.
Born in the suburb of Lichtental, he was the fourth son of a
schoolmaster. From his family he learnt the piano and violin, soon
outstripping everyone else in the household. At 11 his serious
musical education began when he won a choral scholarship to the Konvikt, Vienna's Imperial College. Under Salieri's tutelage he
wrote an opera and a series of quartets by the age of 15. He left
the college in 1813 to train as a teacher before returning home to
work in his father's school. Over the next five years alone, in an inexhaustible surge of
creativity, he wrote five symphonies, six operas, and 300 songs
(Lieder).
It was through song that Schubert's genius was first
recognized. In 1814 he discovered Goethe's Faust, which led
to his first
masterpiece, Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning
Wheel). Erlkonig, depicting a terrorized child whose soul
is swept away during a ride through a stormy night, followed the
next year. The sensibility Goethe had awakened swiftly led
Schubert to explore all the great poets of his time and unleashed
what has been called "'a Shakespearean canvas of characters." His
sense of melody and movement, his unique awareness of changing key
and the interplay possible between singer and pianist, his master
storyteller's sense of timing and shifting nuance: all these gave
the Lied a power that nobody had imagined. "There's not one
of Schubert's songs", wrote Brahms, "from which you cannot learn
something."
Schubert was fortunate to be born into a Vienna alive with
cultural activity and debate. His music seized upon the image of the Romantic hero promulgated in literature and painting.
Schubert's artistic world was the land of night and dreams —
of Sehnsucht, a longing for the mystic world of the
spirit, with the visible everyday world as a mere mirage. The
hero, discovering incandescent love before bitter rejection,
wanders alone through nature and there finds his solace and
strength. These Romantic ideals underlie much of Schubert's work,
such as the song Auf dem Waisser zu singen, whose
fluttering juxtaposition of major and minor captures a mood of
fervour and serenity; or the poetry Schubert prefaced to his
symphonies, sonatas, and chamber music.
By 1816 the drudgery of the schoolroom had become unbearable.
Schubert abandoned teaching to live in Vienna with Franz von
Schober, a friend who worked to spread the composer's reputation
and open his eyes to cultural trends. A meeting with leading
baritone J.M. Vogl was crucial. He championed many of Schubert's songs, and a visit in 1819 to Vogl's birthplace in the
mountains at Steyr liberated in the composer a powerful, happy
impulse. There he began the Trout quintet, marking his
coming of age in instrumental music. Scored for violin, viola,
cello, double-bass, an piano, the quintet takes its name from his
earlier song Die Forelle (The Trout), which is the basis of
a set of variations in the fourth movement of the quintet.
This is the radiant Schubert everybody thinks they know. Yet
our notion of a fat, jolly amateur, leaving his coffeehouse only
to dash off another carefree masterpiece, is myth. In reality
Schubert died prematurely of a disfiguring disease, his mind
poisoned by the idea of the fate that inevitably awaited him.
Schubert contracted syphilis in 1823. It transformed his entire
outlook, and while many reasons are put forward for his failure to
complete his Eighth symphony, begun the year before his
illness, it may be that it marked a period in his life which came
to repel him. Nevertheless, he returned to the symphonic form soon
afterwards to compose the Symphony No. 9 in С (The Great), a work
grander and more profound than any of Schubert's other symphonies.
Some of the stings for his first song-cycle, Die schone
Mullerin (The Fair Maid of the Mill), were written while in
hospital in 1823. The cycle depicts the ill-fated love of a young
man for a miller's daughter. Although it contains much joyful
music, its sad ending anticipates the tone of his tragic second
cycle, Winterreise (Winter Journey), written in 1827 after
four years of illness. In the latter cycle, where the hero has
lost his love before the cycle's
