The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001

ROBERT WINTER

Schubert, Franz (Peter)

(b Vienna, 31 Jan 1797; d Vienna, 19 Nov 1828). Austrian composer. The only canonic Viennese composer native to Vienna, he made seminal contributions in the areas of orchestral music, chamber music, piano music and, most especially, the German lied. The richness and subtlety of his melodic and harmonic language, the originality of his accompaniments, his elevation of marginal genres and the enigmatic nature of his uneventful life have invited a wide range of readings of both man and music that remain among the most hotly debated in musical circles.

1. Life.

2. Works.

WORKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schubert, Franz

1. Life.

(i) Background and childhood.

(ii) The adolescent composer.

(iii) Finding a career.

(iv) The miracle years.

(v) Independence.

(vi) Travel.

(vii) The professional composer.

(viii) Crisis.

(ix) Despair and resolve.

(x) Respite: the summer of 1825.

(xi) Return to reality.

(xii) Beginnings and the end (1828).

(xiii) Schubert's character and the reception of his works.

Schubert, Franz, §1: Life

(I) Background and childhood.

Schubert's Vienna was a polyglot city, more than a fifth of whose population comprised Hungarians, Czechs, Italians, Croatians, Poles, Germans, Turks, Greeks and other nationalities. Most of Vienna's most celebrated musicians – Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Salieri, Hummel – had been born in other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or outside it. As a native Viennese, Schubert became the direct beneficiary of its musical offerings. He was born in the district of the Himmelpfortgrund just north-west of the Ring, the bustling, overcrowded centre of the capital of the empire. His paternal ancestors were Moravian farmers; his father, Franz Theodor Florian (1763–1830), moved when he was 20 to Vienna from Neudorf (Nová ves) in the Altstadt (Staré Město) district of Moravia (today part of the Czech Republic). He followed his oldest brother Karl, who had become the headmaster of the Carmelite School in the suburb of Leopoldstadt. He took up the position of schoolteacher, one that offered little social standing or financial reward; education was an enterprise supported only meagrely by the imperial government. Within a year Franz Theodor met Elisabeth Vietz (1756–1812) whose father, a locksmith and gunmaker, spent time in prison for embezzlement. Her family had also migrated to Vienna from the northern provinces. In January of 1785 Franz and Elisabeth married; one reason may have been the birth of their first child two months later. Of 14 births, nine children died in infancy – only slightly worse than the 50% infant mortality rate common in Europe before the discovery of germ theory. The survivors included Ignaz (b 1785), Ferdinand (b 1794), Karl (b 1795), Franz Peter (b 1797) and Maria Theresia (b 1801). All of the children were born in a one-room apartment in a house called ‘Zum roten Krebsen’, a surviving building now bearing the address 54 Nussdorferstrasse. Schubert's birth in the early afternoon of 31 January 1797 took place in a kitchen alcove whose fireplace provided the family's only source of heat. He was baptized the next day, with his uncle Karl Schubert named as godfather. Schubert thereby became the only one of the canonic quartet (with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) of Viennese Classical composers to be born in Vienna – although many natives of the city have been quick to point out that he was only first-generation Viennese.

Less than a year after Maria Theresia's birth, Franz Theodor moved his family to a house (‘Zum schwarzen Rössel’) in the nearby Säulengasse (today no.3) on which he had taken out a mortgage a few months earlier. The bottom floor of this two-storey structure with courtyard served as the school; the upstairs served as the family's living quarters. Here Franz Theodor, an industrious, devout Catholic, built his student population steadily until he had 40 students in 1804, peaking to 300 students in 1805. Most of the scant information we possess about Schubert's childhood comes from later reminiscences by his father and his brother Ferdinand. Six-year-old Franz became a pupil at the school in 1803 and by all accounts he was a high achiever, although in a system that, by imperial decree, depended almost entirely on rote learning. The Schubert family were great music lovers, and although musical training played no role in formal education, there was plenty of it after hours. Schubert received his first piano lessons from his older brother Ignaz, but soon left him behind, averring that he ‘would continue on his own’.

When Schubert was seven he was sent for an audition to Antonio Salieri; presumably his father made the arrangements. Salieri's reputation as a composer had peaked years before, but in his 50s he still enjoyed the power and prestige of the court music director. He was sufficiently impressed with Schubert to include him as a mezzo-soprano on a list of nine singers fit to sing for services in the imperial Hofkapelle. At the age of eight Schubert received his first violin lessons from his father. He also took lessons in counterpoint, figured bass, singing and organ from Michael Holzer, the organist at the Schuberts' parish church in Lichtental. Schubert's brother Ferdinand reported that Holzer acknowledged, with tears in his eyes, that ‘whenever I wished to impart something new to him, he always knew it already’. Ferdinand also noted that Schubert was already composing songs, string quartets and piano pieces. When vacancies in the Hofkapelle choir opened up in 1808, Schubert passed the highly competitive audition easily. Perhaps the biggest perk was his free tuition-and-board admission into the Kaiserlich-königliches Stadtkonvikt (Imperial and Royal City College), which as the principal Viennese boarding school for non-aristocrats offered Schubert his best possible opportunity for a quality education. The 130 all-male students ranged from 11 to university age and were tutored by Piarist monks whose order was founded in the 17th century to educate the poor. A few months after entering the college, Schubert cowered while Napoleon's bombardment of Vienna sent a shell through the roof of the Stadtkonvikt. Nonetheless, he was to stay at the college for five full years, receiving the kind of education usually reserved for titled Viennese.

Encouraged by its principal, Dr Innocenz Lang, music played a sizable role in the life of the college. Its student orchestra was first-rate, and Schubert was soon invited to join the second violins. Here he became acquainted at first hand with the orchestral works of Haydn, Mozart, early Beethoven and their lesser Viennese contemporaries. The orchestra's founder and leader of the second violins was a law student named Josef von Spaun. Eight years Schubert's senior, Spaun soon befriended the impressionable youth, and the friendship flourished, in spite of interruptions, until the composer's death. At the end of the school year Spaun graduated; he left Vienna in September 1809 to join the civil service at Linz. According to Spaun, Mozart's Symphony no.40 in G minor and Beethoven's Second Symphony made a particularly strong impression on Schubert. From these years come the earliest of his surviving compositions. During his first two years he received permission to take regular lessons with Salieri, who urged him to find his models in Italian opera, a directive that conflicted sharply with Schubert's enthusiasm for the music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, as well as his growing interest in the poetry of Goethe and Schiller as material for songs. By the time he was 13 Schubert seems to have interrupted his regular lessons with Salieri. Yet by the end of 1813 he had, largely under the tutelage of Spaun, seen half a dozen staged operas, including Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, Weigl's Die Schweizerfamilie and Cherubini's Médée. According to Spaun, upon attending a January 1813 performance of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, with Johann Michael Vogl and Anna Milder-Hauptmann in the leading roles, Schubert ‘was totally beside himself over the effects of this magnificent music and asserted that there could be nothing more beautiful in the world’. In spite of Schubert's heavy involvement with musical activities, his report cards from the first four years show him to have earned regular grades of ‘good’ or ‘very good’ in all his academic subjects.

Schubert, Franz, §1: Life