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 it 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 schoolarship
to the Konvikt, Vienna's Imperia 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 a 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 Wasser 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 school-room had become unbearable. Schubert abandoned
teaching to live in Vienna with Franz von Schober, a friend who worked to spread
the composer's reputation an( open his eyes to cultural trends. A meeting with
leading baritone J.M. Vogl was crucial. He championed many of Schubert' songs,
and a visit in 1819 to Vogl's birth- place 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 and 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.
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 C (The Great), a work grander and more profound than any of Schubert's
other symphonies.
Some of the songs 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 beginning, the songs create
an unrelenting portrait of gloom set in the frozen landscape of death. Yet
Schubert was still able to put his morbidity aside, albeit temporarily; 1827
is also the date of several lighter pieces for piano - the
Impromptus and the Moments Musicaux - which
form the ideal introduction to his instrumental music and anticipate the Ballades of Chopin and Brahms, while revealing a greater emotional
range than either.
Some of Schubert's finest compositions were written during the last year of his life,
including his masterly trio of Piano
Sonatas in C minor, A major and B flat. But the fullest portrait of
Schubert's musical personality is the great String Quintet in C. Its opening movement is one of the great
masterpieces of classical organization; the slow movement alternates between a
theme of sublime calmness in E major and a furiously anguished section in F minor; the scherzo
(a generally jaunty movement which may take the place of the minuet in a sonata
or symphony) has little in common with those of Haydn or Beethoven, but pits a
boisterous hunting theme against an apparition as chillingly remote as any-
thing from Winterreise; and the finale
ends ambiguously in neither major nor minor. As always in mature Schubert, the
sunshine is more intense for being inseparable from an awareness of the dark.
Soon after completing the Quintet Schubert entered the final phase of his
illness, and in December 1828 died at the age of 31.
Schubert - Die Schone Mullerin
Ave Maria (also includes works from Schubert, Mozart, Faure et al)
Crooks - Schubert, Arias & Songs
Die Winterreise, D911
String Quartet No. 14 "Death and the Maiden"
Impromptus, D899 & D935
Piano Sonatas in A, D959 & B flat, D960
Schubert - Fantasies