Schubert, a life in the shadow of Beethoven

All his life, Schubert lived in the cult of Beethoven. Five days before his death, he asked his friend Karl Holz, who was visiting him with his orchestra, to play him Quartet no. 14. Schubert's admiration for Beethoven may seem surprising at first, as the two characters seem so different.

Whereas Beethoven's music is tormented, Schubert's is spontaneous, easy-going, joyful, limpid... Some passages are almost Mozart-like. Whereas Beethoven had a shady temperament, Schubert, from an early age, had the gift of attracting people older and more «important» than himself. He regularly hosted get-togethers, usually in the apartment of one of them: the famous Schubertiades.

While Beethoven enjoyed a comfortable financial situation, Schubert «ate» his piano three times over, i.e. he spent the money he'd intended to buy one. While Beethoven took center stage, Schubert remained a second-rate composer. On his deathbed, Beethoven exclaimed on seeing some of his works: «There really is in this Schubert the divine spark of genius!» And yet, when he met Schubert five years earlier, the two men had not hit it off. The same was true of Goethe, to whom Schubert had sent three of his works. lieder.

Read also: Beethoven: the triumph of happiness and brotherhood

Beethoven's death affects Schubert deeply. He agreed to give a public concert, the only one he had ever given, on the first anniversary of Beethoven's death. It was a success, both popularly and financially, but a success quickly forgotten because of Paganini's arrival in Vienna... and, in any case, he died eight months later. Fame had definitely shunned him to the end.  

It has to be said that Schubert was hardly concerned with his own fame: he loved composing, but showed less interest in having his works published or performed. At the time of his death, he had one hundred opuses to his credit, having written some fifteen hundred works, divided into 998 opuses! Fame came later, notably with the discovery of his eighth and ninth symphonies. 

Apart from his genius, friendship was his only source of wealth. He often stayed with friends. How could the Vienna of the time have been so blind? One really had to be obtuse not to notice such brilliant, accessible, melodious and evocative music. Schubert was like a shooting star, appreciated only by a small circle of admirers. A shooting star first and foremost because of the brevity of his life: thirty-one years. This is a record among the great composers, beaten only by Pergolesi, at twenty-six. 

He was also a shooting star because of his taste for freedom and his need for independence. He soon gave up his job as a schoolteacher to devote himself exclusively to composition, at the risk of becoming penniless. In his German Mass, He refused to adapt the text to the Catholic liturgy, and thus renounced remuneration from the Archdiocese of Vienna. This independence was also evident in his desire to pursue his dreams in spite of everything: he persisted in writing twenty operas, all of which were failures.

A shooting star in his own right, his musical maturity dates back to his early teens. For proof of this, listen to’allegretto in C minor, composed when Schubert was only seventeen. Joseph von Spaun, who, like Schubert, was a pupil at the Imperial Chapel and was to remain his great friend, was undoubtedly the first to hear his music, for Schubert was composing in secret and one day agreed to reveal this secret to him. Joseph testifies:

«It was as if an angel had caressed me with his wing... As he played, I ascended to heaven... Poor mortal me had no access to such heights... This was a genius being born before me.»

A shooting star, he is still a shooting star in terms of the spontaneity of his style. He is unencumbered by musical canons. Many of his compositions show a strong desire for experimentation and novelty. This enabled him to be ahead of his time - an undeniable sign of genius - in his later works. His Ninth Symphony, for example, already foreshadows the music of Bruckner and Mahler. Schubert's spontaneity can also be explained by his lack of training: he had planned to take lessons in counterpoint and harmony, and fourteen days before his death enrolled with Sechter to study fugue.

Yet there's still something missing to grasp the character: he's not simply a composer with an easy style that would compensate nicely for Beethoven's less digestible music. Schubert's life, too, is deeply tragic. First of all, there was the tragedy of disappointed love. Precariousness prevented him from marrying Therese Grob, because, according to the laws of the time, he had to demonstrate that he had the means to support a family.

He had to give up marrying her for good after being refused the position of choirmaster in Ljubljana at the age of nineteen. He already expresses this sentiment in the lied Marguerite at the spinning wheel, composed when she was seventeen, a month after meeting Therese: coincidence or premonition? As Marguerite spins, she goes from wanting to kiss Faust to believing she'll never see him again... 

Then there's the omnipresence of death. Schubet was the thirteenth of sixteen children, and eleven of his siblings never reached adulthood. From the age of twenty-five, he had to be treated for syphilis, a disease he had probably carried for a long time, given its slow progression. He died six years later, unless it was mercury poisoning as a result of the treatment, or typhoid fever. 

Several of his masterpieces refer to death: the Lied The girl and death, and the quartet of the same name, but above all The alder king. These lieder are often doubly brilliant: the poem is magnificent, and the music illustrates and interprets it. Schubert brought this art to perfection, but to fully appreciate it, you have to listen to the text.

In Marguerite at the spinning wheel, The right-hand accompaniment imitates the repetitive movement of the wheel. In The alder king, A father travels on horseback with his son. The child sees that the alder king wants to seize him. The father reassures him, explaining that it's only the fog or the wind in the leaves. However, sensing danger, he hurries his horse, but by the time he reaches home, the child is already dead. The rapid triplets simulate the horse's gallop, expressing urgency. His fourth symphony is also called «tragic».

At Beethoven's funeral, Schubert was there, fulfilling the modest role of torchbearer. Yet it was Schubert who should have opened the procession, who, along with Beethoven, was the founder of Romanticism and, musically, its most direct heir.

Read also: What lessons can we learn from Beethoven?

Since the living failed to pay him tribute, is it daring to claim that the dead did? On November 19, 1828, on his deathbed, he asked his brother Ferdinand to rest beside Beethoven. This was the only ambition of Schubert's that fate ever agreed to satisfy. He was buried next to Beethoven in the Währing cemetery. In 1872, their mortal remains were transferred to Vienna's Central Cemetery. Their graves are close to those of Brahms, Bruckner and Johann Strauss Jr.

Write to the author: jean-david.ponci@leregardlibre.com

Image: Gustave Klimt, Schubert at the piano (1899)