The Torchbearer

The coffin came out of the Schwarzspanierhaus in the afternoon, into a courtyard so full that the bearers had to wait for a path to be made, and beyond the gate the street was fuller still. It was the twenty-ninth of March 1827, a Thursday, and the schools had been closed for it. Ten thousand people had come, some said twenty, and they stood on the carriage-steps and in the windows and on the roofs of the Alsergrund to see Beethoven carried out of the house he had died in three days before. Round the coffin walked thirty-six torchbearers in black, each with a bunch of white lilies tied with crape on his sleeve and a lighted torch in his hand, and they were musicians and poets of the city, chosen for it. Czerny was one. Grillparzer was one. Schubert was one — a short man in spectacles, holding his torch a little higher than the others because at his height he had to.

The procession went the few hundred yards to the Alser church at a walking pace that took an hour and a half, the crowd closing in behind it, soldiers pushing to keep the way open, a brass choir playing the funeral march from one of the dead man's own sonatas, slowed almost to a standstill. Hummel walked at the coffin's side. After the service the carriages went out through the Linienwall to Währing, the little village churchyard beyond the wall where the city buried people who could afford to be buried outside it, and at the gate the actor Anschütz read the oration that Grillparzer had written, because no speech was allowed inside the ground. The torchbearers stood in a ring with their flames guttering in the March wind and the smoke going sideways like breath on a cold morning, and the light was going by the time the earth went in.

Schubert had been in the house a week or so before. He went with the two Hüttenbrenner brothers, Anselm come up from Graz, and the painter Teltscher, and Schindler, who kept the door, admitted them to the sickroom; Beethoven could no longer speak by then, Anselm said, and looked at them and made signs with his hand that none of them could read. That was the whole of the meeting. Two men who had lived in the same city for the whole of the younger one's life, the younger dedicating variations to the elder and standing at the back of his concerts, had come face to face at last across a bed, and the one who might have said something could not.

Schindler had another story, which he told for the rest of his life: that in February he had carried a bundle of Schubert's songs, some sixty of them, to the bedridden man, who read through them for days and cried out, "Truly, in Schubert there dwells a divine spark!" Schindler said so, and Schindler was not always to be believed.

When the churchyard had emptied, the friends went back into the city and sat down in a tavern. Schober told what happened there. Schubert raised his glass to the man they had just buried, and the table drank; then he filled it again and raised it "to him who will be next," and the table drank to that too.

The spring before, in 1826, Josef von Spaun came home. Five years away had ended in a promotion and a transfer, and he was back in Vienna at thirty-seven, a little greyer and no less exact, and within a month the Schubertiaden had a house to happen in again.

It was to Spaun that Schubert wrote about the post. On the seventh of April 1826 he had applied to the Emperor for the place of vice-Kapellmeister to the court, which Salieri's retirement had left open in the chain below it: a salary, a title, a life's work in the chapel where he had sung as a boy. He was twenty-nine, had several dozen printed works to his name and had never held a position of any kind.

The court took nine months to decide. In January 1827 it gave the place to Joseph Weigl, who was sixty, had written Die Schweizerfamilie and had been part of the furniture of the Kärntnertor since the century began, and Schubert told Spaun that he would gladly have had it, but was glad it went "to so worthy a man as Weigl."

There is no other sentence about it in his hand.

That June he wrote a string quartet in ten days, between the twentieth and the thirtieth. It opens with a chord that is major and then, before the ear has settled, minor, and then major again, the whole quartet flickering between the two in its first breath as if it could not make up its mind which century it was in; it is the biggest quartet he had written, and nobody asked him for it.

In July he was out at Währing. The village beyond the wall was vineyards and beer gardens, and on Sundays the city walked out to it and sat under the chestnuts.

The story is told that on one such Sunday a party of the friends, coming back from a walk, found the singer Tieze at a garden table with a book, and that the book was Shakespeare in Bauernfeld's new translation, and that Schubert, turning the pages, came on the little morning song from Cymbeline — "Horch, horch, die Lerch" — and said, "such a delicious melody has just come into my head, if only I had music paper."

The story adds a bill of fare, ruled with staves on the back by a friend while the skittles went on, which the manuscript, a small bound notebook with two other Shakespeare songs in it, does not support.

The song is the one everyone knows. The lark goes up in the piano's right hand and the tune walks in under it, easy as a man crossing a lawn, and it was written in a beer garden in an afternoon, whatever it was written on.

Leopold Kupelwieser had come home from Rome the year before, and on the seventeenth of September he married Johanna Lutz, who had waited for him through the whole of Italy, and Schubert sat down at the piano after the wedding breakfast and played dances until the candles were changed. He would not be relieved. There was one waltz the bride liked above the others, and the family always said they kept it after him, by ear, mother to daughter, and that it was more than a hundred years before anyone wrote it down.

In October he took the big symphony from the Gmunden summer — finished now, and copied out fair — to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde with a dedication, and the Society thanked him, paid him a hundred florins, had the parts copied, put it in front of its orchestra at a rehearsal and set it aside as too long and too hard.

On the fifteenth of December, at Spaun's, there was a Schubertiade of the kind the friends measured all the others by. Franz von Hartmann, a young man from Linz studying law in Vienna, who kept a diary, went home and wrote that Vogl had sung nearly thirty songs, that there had been a great crowd, and that when the singing was over there was supper and then dancing; that is the whole written record of the evening. The picture is Schwind's, and he drew it forty-two years later, from memory, when most of the people in it were dead.

He put the piano in the middle of Spaun's drawing room, with the lid up. Schubert is at it in profile, spectacles on, hands on the keys, his round face turned up and to the right towards the singer. Vogl sits beside the piano in a wide chair, because of his gout, one leg out and one hand raised, palm open, halfway through a phrase. Spaun stands at the far end of the piano with a hand on the lid, host and page-turner, looking not at the singer but at the composer. Round the three of them the friends sit in a crescent, two and three deep, the women in the front chairs; Grillparzer among them with his long face; Kupelwieser and his three-month bride; Schwind himself, standing at the back; Bauernfeld beside him with his arms folded. On the wall behind the piano, between the candle-sconces, Schwind hung a portrait, and the portrait is of Karoline Esterházy, who was not there and had never been to Spaun's in her life.

Eduard von Bauernfeld had come into the circle the year before, when Schubert was in Upper Austria and Schwind was writing to him about everyone. He was twenty-three, a young civil servant who wrote comedies and meant to live by them, and he had a habit none of the others had, which was that he wrote things down on the day they happened.

His diary is why these years have dates. He was sharp where Spaun was kind, and worldly where Schwind was a boy, and he liked Schubert without adoring him, which Schubert seems to have found restful.

It was Bauernfeld who recorded that the first question Schubert asked about any newcomer to the circle was "Kann er was?" — can he do anything? — and that the friends had turned the question into a name and called him Kanevas behind his back; and it was Bauernfeld who set down, without complaint, the arithmetic of those years: that he, Schwind and Schubert had between them at any given moment about one purse, and that whoever was in funds paid for the others.

He and Schubert were writing an opera together, Der Graf von Gleichen — the Count of Gleichen, about a crusader who comes home with a second wife — which the censor had already refused and which they went on writing anyway.

That evening Vogl was fifty-eight and had been married for a matter of months, and he sang, Hartmann says, until the company could take no more. The songs he sang best in those years were the ones he could act sitting down: a man talking to the moon on a night road, a man watching the sun go into the hills. His voice by then was not what it had been at the Kärntnertor, and nobody in that room was counting.

In February 1827 Schubert found twelve poems by Wilhelm Müller, the poet of the miller and the brook, in an almanac a few years old. They were about a man walking out of a town at night in the snow.

Nobody has ever discovered what the girl did, or what the town was, or why he had to go; the first song only says that he came a stranger and leaves a stranger, and that he will write Gute Nacht — good night — on her gate as he passes so that she will know he thought of her. The piano walks under all of it, one step to a beat, never faster and never slower, for five minutes.

He set the twelve in that month and headed the manuscript Winterreise — Winter Journey — and one of them, the fifth, was a song about a lime tree by a well outside the town gate, with the wind in it, which the man passes in the dark with his eyes shut because if he looked he would stop.

That was Der Lindenbaum. The rustle of the leaves is in the piano before the voice comes in, and the tune is the kind that the whole German-speaking world would shortly assume it had always known.

Then the winter turned into the spring of the torch, and the spring into summer, and in September he went to Graz.

Johann Baptist Jenger, secretary of the Styrian music society and the best accompanist in Vienna after Schubert himself, had been trying for years to get him there, and on the second of September the two of them took the coach south.

They were guests for three weeks at the house of Dr Karl Pachler in the Herrengasse, a lawyer who owned a brewery and let it be known that music mattered more, and of his wife Marie, who was a pianist of the first order and had, ten years earlier, played for Beethoven and been told so.

It was Gmunden again, on a smaller scale and with better pianos. There was music every evening; there was a concert at the society's hall on the eighth at which he was cheered; there was an outing to the castle at Wildbach in the hills west of the city, a day of wine-gardens and singing on the road back; and there was a small son, Faust, who was seven and had views.

He paid for it in the only currency he had. Before he left he wrote the Pachlers a Galopp and a set of waltzes as house-presents, and in October, from Vienna, he sent down a little march for piano duet for Faust to play with his mother on the father's name-day, with a letter apologising that it had taken so long. In his letter of thanks to Frau Pachler he had already written that he saw he had been too happy in Graz, and could not yet get used to Vienna.

In October, home again in the Tuchlauben, he found the rest of the poems. Müller had published twelve more of the winter songs in a book, and Schubert set them as a second half, and this time the man on the road has left the town far behind. There is a crow that follows him. There is a signpost pointing to a road nobody has come back from. There is an inn, which is a churchyard, and which has no room. And at the very end there is an old man standing barefoot on the ice at the edge of a village, turning the handle of a hurdy-gurdy, with his little plate always empty and the dogs growling round him, and nobody listening.

Spaun told what happened next. Schubert came to him one day and said, "Come to Schober's today, I will sing you a cycle of horrifying songs; they have affected me more than any others," and that evening, in Schober's rooms opposite the Red Hedgehog, he sat down and sang them through in a voice full of feeling, and the friends were dumbfounded. Schober, when it was over, said he had liked only Der Lindenbaum. Schubert said: "I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them too."

The last of them is the hurdy-gurdy man. The left hand holds two notes, a bare fifth, and does not let go of them for the length of the song, like a pedal held down on a village organ; over it, in the right hand, comes the old man's tune, four bars long, going round. The voice hardly rises. It tells what it sees — the bare feet, the empty plate, the dogs — and then it turns and speaks to him. Wunderlicher Alter, soll ich mit dir gehn? Strange old man, shall I go with you? Will you turn your hurdy-gurdy to my songs? The drone goes on for a few bars more, and stops.

In November he wrote a trio for piano, violin and cello, and the tune everyone remembers from it is the cello's, at the start of the slow movement. It is a march, but a slow one, a march for people who are walking away from something, the piano treading under it in even steps while the cello sings above in a voice that does not ask for sympathy; the friends said he had it from a Swedish song, The Sun is Sinking, that a visiting tenor had sung one evening at the Fröhlich sisters' flat in the Spiegelgasse. It comes back. In the last movement, which is long and bright and full of other business, the cello's march walks in twice from nowhere, unannounced, like a guest who has come back for his hat in the middle of the dancing, and the second time it stays.

He wrote a good deal else that year, and for the piano alone more than in any year before. There were eight pieces he called Impromptus, in two sets, short by his standards and made for other people's hands; one of them is the one in G flat, which is a single tune spun out over a murmuring accompaniment for six minutes without a seam, and another takes the entr'acte tune from Rosamunde — the one he had already used once in a quartet — and varies it again, as if he still had not got to the bottom of it.

On the twenty-sixth of December the trio was played for the first time, at Schuppanzigh's, in the Musikverein's rooms. Schuppanzigh, fatter than ever, took the violin part; Linke, who had been Beethoven's cellist and Schubert's at the Octet, the cello; and at the piano was Carl Maria von Bocklet, a young virtuoso from Prague who played Schubert's piano music in public when almost nobody did, and to whom the big one from Gastein was dedicated. In January Schubert wrote to Anselm in Graz that the trio had "pleased very much" and had been "exquisitely played by Bocklet, Schuppanzigh and Linke," which for him was a paragraph of praise.

A month after that, on the twenty-eighth of January, Spaun gave a party to announce his engagement — he was thirty-nine — and the same three players brought the trio to his drawing room and played it again for the friends. Hartmann was there with his diary. Bauernfeld was there with his opinions. And between the movements, and over supper, and on the stairs going down, the talk was of something the friends had been urging for years and Schubert had always found a reason not to do, which now, with a trio like that in hand and the Society's hall to be had, there seemed no reason not to do: a concert, a whole evening, of his own music and nothing else.