(III) Finding a career.

Schubert's decision to return the very next month to his father's home and take up a ten-month course of study at the St Anna Normalhauptschule that would certify him as a teacher seems in conflict with his decision to leave the Stadtkonvikt. Yet both his brothers were, like their father, teachers. At this stage Schubert could not expect to make a living pursuing the activity that engaged him most – composition. A teaching position might function as a ‘day job’ that would meet his modest overheads until he was sufficiently independent to strike out on his own. At all events, it is very unlikely that he saw his teacher training as leading to a lasting career. Six days a week he travelled from the Säulengasse house into the Ring district (the inner city) to receive instruction. The explosion in his compositional output suggests that the workload at the Normalhauptschule was not as great as that at the Stadtkonvikt. Schubert also found time to resume twice-weekly composition lessons with Salieri. In August 1814 he passed the final teaching examinations with strong marks in German and arithmetic but a poor grade in religion. His father had attempted to gain another position at the ‘Scottish Monastery’, but when that effort failed he engaged his son as his sixth assistant in the prosperous Säulengasse school that Schubert himself had attended. Schubert's responsibilities were apparently for the youngest students; Kreissle reports that he was strict, somewhat irascible and prepared to enforce discipline with a slap on the head. There is also evidence that Schubert the schoolteacher harboured sympathies for the student riots protesting against the oppressive Metternich regime that had became a regular part of the Viennese landscape. One of his classmates at the Stadtkonvikt, Johann Senn, lost his scholarship after trying to free a fellow student from prison. Some six years later he and Schubert were picked up from Senn's lodgings and held for questioning. While Schubert got off with a warning, Senn was deported. In May 1814 Schubert also completed his first opera, a three-act Singspiel, Des Teufels Lustschloss. It received its première half a century after Schubert's death. Of Schubert's passionate and abiding interest in opera there can be no doubt. From 1811 until 1823 there is no year in which he was not involved in an operatic project.

By the middle of 1813 the 16-year-old Schubert already boasted an impressive compositional catalogue. Nonetheless, few of Vienna's musical elder statesmen would have predicted a major career. Beginning in the summer of 1814, Schubert's confidence and productivity took a quantum leap forward. Near the end of July he completed his first mass (in F, d105), written for the centenary of the Lichtental church he had attended since a child. Although Schubert's spirituality was never in doubt, his freedom with the text (including the omission of ‘Et in unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam’) suggests that the church as an institution was not sacrosanct to him. Musically the mass displays a deep familiarity with the masses of Haydn and Mozart, and Beethoven's Mass in C, a particular favourite of the composer's. Schubert conducted the first performance himself in October. Ten days later the mass received another performance at the Augustinerkirche in the city. The first soprano soloist at the première was Therese Grob, another offspring of a schoolmaster (Schubert's brother Ignaz eventually married into her family) and presented by numerous biographers as the great love of Schubert's life. Two years Schubert's junior, she possessed a clear and pleasing high soprano voice. In a biographical note penned 26 years after Schubert's death, the composer's friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner recalled a conversation in which he had noted that the composer ‘was so cold and unforthcoming towards the fair sex at parties’. According to Hüttenbrenner, Schubert responded by saying that ‘I loved someone very dearly and she loved me too … . For three years she hoped I would marry her; but I could not find a position which would have provided for us both’. Only meagre corroborative evidence of a romantic relationship survives. Anton Holzapfel testified that Schubert had written of Therese in a long and enthusiastic letter to him that he unfortunately lost. Grob told Schubert's first biographer, Kreissle von Hellborn, that in her father's house Schubert ‘was like an adopted son’, but offered nothing about a more intimate relationship. Kreissle himself concluded that Schubert ‘was somewhat indifferent to the charms of the fair sex’. The final Schubert song from Therese's album dates from 1816, the same year in which he wrote in a diary entry (8 September): ‘To a free man matrimony is a terrifying thought these days; he exchanges it either for melancholy or for crude sensuality …’. Although not yet 20, Schubert never spoke of marriage again.

Schubert, Franz, §1: Life