(II) The adolescent composer.

We do not know whether Schubert began composing even earlier than brother Ferdinand reported. Although many of the dates assigned by scholars to his early works are speculative, Schubert's first surviving compositions appear to date from his 13th year. In the Fantasie in G for piano duet (d1; 8 April – 1 May 1810) and the song Hagars Klage (d5; 30 March 1811) Schubert seized on two marginal genres that over a lifetime he would transform into pillars of his output. A four-hand fantasy would have proved less intimidating to a precocious young composer than the more settled standards for a two-hand sonata. The Fantasie merits notice for its sheer length (more than 1000 bars) and modulatory brashness, averaging more than a new section per minute over its 20-minute duration. Its one-movement, multi-sectional plan was to spawn a chain of audacious experiments that extends over Schubert's entire career; and it is significant that both the Fantasie and Hagars Klage end in a key different from that in which they begin.

In the same month that Schubert completed what was probably his first song, his friend Spaun returned to Vienna, where he would remain in close contact with the composer for a decade. Partsongs and an overture round out the categories of finished works. The early years produced more than a dozen fragmentary works (including sketches for a symphony, several sacred vocal works, three string quartets and one complete act of a three-act Singspiel) – a pattern that was to accompany the composer throughout his career. These sketches rarely point to a compositional impasse; rather, Schubert seems either to have intended merely to dip his toe in the water or to have simply lost interest. During his school holidays from around 1811, Schubert took on the role of viola player in a family quartet that included brothers Ignaz and Ferdinand as violinists and his father on the cello. Shortly afterwards – following several earlier false starts – he composed his first string quartet (in D, d94), and then completed three more quartets (d32, 36 and 46) between September 1812 and early March 1813. The slow, chromatic opening of d46, in C major, suggests Schubert's acquaintance with Mozart's ‘Dissonance’ Quartet, k465, in the same key. Schubert was equally blessed with a symphonic laboratory at the Stadtkonvikt, and in October of 1813 he completed his first symphony (d82, in D), in which Schubert would have had the pleasure of both conducting and playing among the violins.

Yet the musical style of the early adolescent Schubert was largely an amalgam of the grammar of Haydn and Mozart sprinkled with flashes of Rossini and Bach (the latter expressed loosely in a series of student fugues and compositional exercises for piano or organ, some showing corrections in the hand of Antonio Salieri). The 16-year-old Schubert's style at the phrase level would have been scarcely distinguishable from scores of other turn-of-the-century Austrian composers. While occasional phrases are worthy of the best of Viennese Classicism, Schubert's style as it began to coalesce – especially in the instrumental works – conveyed a post-Classical looseness and freedom of structure that would set him permanently apart from his great predecessors. Indeed, one could argue that Schubert's very earliest works are less inventive, for example, than those of Mozart at a more tender age and less assured structurally than the early keyboard variations and sonatas of Beethoven.

In May 1812 Schubert's mother died at the age of 55, perhaps from a typhus infection. We have no evidence to help us gauge the impact of Elisabeth's death on the 15-year-old Schubert. Less than a year later (25 April 1813) Schubert's father married 30-year-old Anna Kleyenbock, who bore Franz Theodor five more children. Schubert seems to have enjoyed a cordial if not close relationship with his stepmother. In the summer of 1812, after a performance of a mass by Peter Winter, Schubert's voice broke, memorialized by the composer's entry on his part: ‘Schubert, Franz, crowed for the last time, 26 July 1812’. Although he could no longer sing in the choir, Schubert remained at the Stadtkonvikt for a fifth year. His increasing preoccupation with composition precipitated an inevitable decline in his academic performance, and he received warnings in both Latin and mathematics. In October 1813 Schubert was offered a scholarship for further study on the condition that he bring his academic subjects up to standard, ‘since singing and music are but a subsidiary matter … ’. Perhaps sensing that he was at a crossroads, perhaps believing that five years of serious study was sufficient, Schubert declined. Whatever paternal input he received, the decision must have been largely his.

Schubert, Franz, §1: Life