Schubert and friends

The UK’s ‘”rule of six” for Covid wouldn’t have stopped Franz Schubert from enjoying himself. He liked nothing better than making music with a few of his friends. Frustrated at still living with his parents and reluctantly obliged to teach in his father’s school, young Franz composed music as if he were a man possessed. He was never happier than when he was recreating poems as songs and sharing them with his small group of intimates. These get-togethers were nicknamed “Schubertiaden”, which meant evenings of collaborative enjoyment and music-making. It was Schubert’s friends who drew out and nurtured his talent.

Schubert was a loyal friend. He stuck with those he had made as a chorister at the Hofburg Chapel and later at the prestigious Vienna Imperial grammar school, including Alfred Stadler, who until 1817 slavishly copied out all of his friend’s songs or Lieder. Others followed, including Josef von Spaun, who ran a students’ orchestra and supported Franz when he couldn’t afford music paper. Spaun became a friend for life and, in turn, introduced Schubert to Johann Mayrhofer, many of whose (often rather indifferent) poems he put to music. 

As young men, they socialised together in the coffee houses. They ate and drank liberally. Schubert spent increasing time amongst them, including in visits to their apartments. One new friend, Franz Schober, a colourful and life-enhancing young lawyer, welcomed the composer into his family home and provided him with a means of escape from the claustrophobic life of his own. These increasingly important friends were the first people with whom he shared his new compositions at their Vienna get-togethers. 

In 1815 when he was only eighteen, Schubert had much to share. In that extraordinary year, he produced Masses, a Magnificat, a string quartet and other chamber music and no fewer than 150 Lieder. Public performances of other than his religious works were still some way off, however. Indeed the vast majority of Schubert’s final tally of 600 songs, as well as many of his other compositions, were never heard in his lifetime. It was the Schubertiade evenings that offered him his first and sometimes his only audience. 

Schubert cut a distinctive figure, short (he was barely five feet tall) and portly with a mop of curly hair. He was loudly opinionated and often blunt in his expressions. Schubert resented the power of the clergy and found Prince Metternich’s rule via networks of spies, oppressive. 

Though alert to the risks of opposition, he took pleasure in the Nonsense Society, which flourished over 1816-18 and which anonymously – Schubert’s pseudonym was “Ritter Cimbal” – published newsletters filled with political satire, literary news and bawdy stories. Schubert and his friends were not just budding members of the emerging bourgeoisie; paintings and prints of the time show them all making or listening to music in elegantly furnished Biedermeier drawing rooms. Such depictions mislead if they suggest cosiness and complacency. 

They were spiky and uppity young men who pushed back against an increasingly restrictive regime and society. But Schubert had to make a living by some means or other if he was ever to escape school teaching, so he had to compromise.  

In the summer of 1818, Schubert accepted work as a music teacher to two of the daughters of a minor branch of the Esterházy family. He spent those months happily at the family’s summer house at Zseliz, a little over two hundred miles east of Vienna, in a Hungarian-speaking area of the Empire. Writing from there to Schober and his other friends soon after his arrival, he wrote:

“Dearest Friends! How could I forget you, you, who are everything to me! Spaun, Schober, Mayrhofer, Senn, how are you, are you well? I am really fine. I am living and composing like a god, as though preordained.” 

It was not to last. Schubert soon pined for Vienna:

“… as happy as I am, as healthy as I am, as good as the people here are, I am looking forward again and again to the moment when I hear: to Vienna, to Vienna! Yes, beloved Vienna, you contain the dearest and the most loved in your narrow confines, and only a reunion, a heavenly reunion will still this longing.”

Though Schubert spent occasional summers away from the city’s heat and dust, his joy in friendship was usually to be found in the central districts of Vienna. Fortunately for him, Viennese friends pointed him to new musical opportunities. It was again Schober who led him to the accomplished and well-known local baritone Johann Michael Vogl. 

Vogl was some thirty years older than the composer, but he was a celebrated figure and performances by him attracted attention. He was a godsend for Schubert, and it is not an accident that so many of the composer’s Lieder lend themselves well to the baritone voice (as recordings by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau prove). 

Schubert and Vogl performed in Vienna and nearby towns and sometimes further afield. In 1825, they toured the Austrian provinces over several months, performing together in mainly domestic venues whilst Schubert busily composed new works. But Vogl was a champion of the composer’s Lieder, not an intimate. Always Schubert was drawn back to Vienna and his friends. He was a home-bird, and apart from his visits in 1818 and briefly again in 1824 to Zseliz, he never left Austria. His music is unambiguously ‘made in’ Vienna and its Austrian hinterland.

The joys Schubert had celebrated in 1815 and 1818 were to sour in the years ahead. Though he continued to delight in his male friends, he never found true companionship with a woman, much as he sought it. In the years after 1820, when he was, at last, securing some public performances and earning some money from his compositions, his health began to weaken. 

While even in his earliest compositions (notably his wonderful settings of poems from Goethe’s ‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’ from 1814) there had lurked as much sadness as joy, and the shadows began to lengthen after 1823. Still, only in his late twenties, the symptoms of what almost certainly was syphilis (acquired most likely from a prostitute) began to affect his mental and physical health. Sadness turned to poignancy and finally to tragedy. 

This shift of mood and sense of foreboding is all too apparent in his late and great song cycles, ‘Die schöne Műllerin’ (some of the songs having been written whilst he lay in the hospital in 1823) and ‘Winterreise‘ (written in 1827). These sets of Lieder were among Schubert’s most sublime but also most dark compositions.

 Schubert never lost his friends. It was they who lost him. He died aged 31, one year after he had composed ‘Winterreise’ and a few months after a rare public concert of his music. His journey to the cemetery of Vienna came only two years after he had walked as a torch-bearer alongside the coffin carrying his musical hero, Beethoven, to the same final resting place.  

The music which he offered to his friends in those Schubertiade evenings in the early nineteenth century still enchants, possibly even more so now than then. The music that people didn’t hear whilst Schubert lived can be heard today in Schubertiade festivals of one kind or another. None, in my view, beats the annual festival held since 1976 in the Vorarlberg region of western Austria, not far from the Swiss border. 

In the small town of Hohenems in the Austrian part of the Rhine valley, but mainly now in the village of Schwarzenberg high up in the adjacent mountains, a modern version of a Schubertiade is played out each summer and autumn. The atmosphere is intimate. In Schwarzenberg, a modestly sized concert hall open to the magnificent surrounding scenery hosts all the chamber music recitals.

After a few days, the small audiences become vaguely aware of each other, and nods of acknowledgement are often exchanged. The little hotels in the village offer superior accommodation and the few restaurants provide good local food sampled by all the visitors (there is no other choice). Most important of all the musical programmes are well-chosen and the performers an excellent mix of established musicians and promising younger ones. Schubert, of course, is always the guest of honour.

The Schubertiade line-up of programmes and performers this year is as good as ever. The season starts in May and runs on and off till October. Though some early concerts have been cancelled, most are still forecast to take place. There are singers of the quality of Christoph Prégardien, Ian Bostridge, Matthias Goerne and Andrè Schuen. Pianists such as Paul Lewis and Leif Ove Andsnes. And string quartets, including the Haagen, Minetti and Elias. It is always a rare treat to hear such quality music-making alongside audiences who are there to listen rather than to be seen.

You can find out more here. And if it doesn’t work out in 2021, do consider going in 2022.