The Concert and the Quiet

The first sound was a chord that could not make up its mind. Upstairs at the Red Hedgehog in the Tuchlauben, in the long hall the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde kept there, four string players sat on a low platform with a new quartet on their stands, and the opening bars they played were bright, and then, before the ear had settled, dark, and then bright again, the major and the minor changing places like a face deciding whether to smile. It was a Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of March 1828, seven in the evening. A year before, to the day, Beethoven had died across the town in the Schwarzspanierhaus, and that was why the date. Four years earlier, in the worst letter he ever wrote, he had told Kupelwieser in Rome that Beethoven was about to give a concert and that he meant, God willing, to give a similar one next year; it had taken four years instead of one, and when it came he set it on Beethoven's day.

The hall seated a few hundred and every seat was taken, and people stood along the walls and in the doorway and on the stairs outside it. Tickets were three florins. The quartet was led by Böhm; at the second desk sat Karl Holz, who had served Beethoven as his secretary in his last years and knew the anniversary as well as anyone in the room; Linke had the cello. They played only the first movement. It was the quartet written in ten days in the June of 1826 and never heard in public until that evening, and the flicker of the opening ran through the whole of it, so that the listener was never told for long whether she was to be happy, and it ended, and the composer got up from his chair at the side and went to the piano, and Vogl came out.

Vogl was in his sixtieth year. The gout had got into his hands and his temper, and he walked to the piano as a man walks who has decided that nobody is to see it cost him anything, and stood in the curve of the instrument with one hand on the lid and the other free, and nodded once to the round man in spectacles behind him, who did not look up.

They gave four songs. A monk at his window, watching the crusaders ride away and thinking his own life a crusade of another kind; the stars; a fisherman at the water without a care in the world, who tells a girl on the bridge that she will not catch him either; and a fragment out of Aeschylus in Mayrhofer's German, stern and short.

Vogl sang them as he had sung them in the parlours of Steyr and Gmunden, spreading his fine thoughts out properly, with the hand doing its work in the air. The accompaniment under him went exactly where he went, so that for the moment they seemed to be one, which was the phrase Schubert had found for it himself three summers before.

Then the girls came on. Josefine Fröhlich, the youngest of the four sisters from the Spiegelgasse, sang Grillparzer's Ständchen — a serenade — with a chorus of the pupils from the Conservatory, where her sister Anna taught.

It is a poem about young people creeping up under a window at night to sing to a girl asleep, on tiptoe, hushing one another so as not to wake the house. The hall laughed in the right places.

Then Bocklet took the piano and Böhm and Linke came back and they played the new trio, the whole of it, which is a long piece and asks a good deal of an audience that has already been sitting for an hour. When the second movement came, and Linke's cello began the slow march that, the friends said, Schubert had taken from a Swedish song sung one evening in the Fröhlichs' flat, the room went still in the way rooms do when several hundred people are making an effort not to cough.

The tune came back in the last movement, unannounced, from a long way off. Those who had heard the trio at the Musikverein in December knew it was coming and waited for it, and those who had not were caught.

There were two songs more. A tenor named Tietze sang Auf dem Strom — on the river — with a horn beside him, Rellstab's poem about a boat leaving the shore and the shore growing small, and the horn called back across the water at every verse until it was only a horn and no shore at all. Then Vogl came out again and gave them Die Allmacht, the Patriarch's great hymn from Gastein, at full sail; and after that a double chorus of men shouted a battle-song by Klopstock so that the concert should end with noise, as concerts did. That was the programme. It had been a long evening. The reports spoke of "enthusiasm," and the takings, when the hall was paid for and the copyists and the players, came to about eight hundred florins, which was more money than Schubert had ever held in his hands at one time.

History then played him a joke, and he was the first to laugh at it.

On the sixteenth of March, ten days before the concert, a thin man with long black hair and a violin had arrived in Vienna from Italy and taken rooms. His name was Paganini. His first concert was on the twenty-ninth, in the Redoutensaal, the great ballroom of the Hofburg, three days after Schubert's; the tickets were five florins, and the city lost its head. The newspapers went to Paganini and did not come back. Every critic in Vienna wrote about the Italian and his one string and his left hand, and not one of them wrote a line about the evening at the Red Hedgehog. The only notice of Schubert's concert that ever appeared in print came out in Berlin, some months on, and was lukewarm.

Schubert took some of the eight hundred florins and bought a ticket to hear Paganini. Then he bought two more and took Bauernfeld, who had missed the first, and who wrote down what his friend had said to him when he protested at the price: "I've heard him once already and was annoyed that you were not there too! I tell you, a chap like that will not be seen again!" He had made eight hundred florins on a Wednesday and was spending them on the other fellow's Saturday, and he appears to have thought that this was what money was for.

The spring's own work was a piece for four hands. He had begun it in January, before the concert, and finished it in April. It goes back to the oldest habit he had — two people at one keyboard, the thing he and Ferdinand and the Konvikt boys had done since he was thirteen and filling thirty-two pages with a fantasy that wandered from one key to the next without a plan.

This fantasy has a plan. It begins with a tune that sighs: a dotted figure in the upper hands, falling and catching itself, over a murmur below, so unassuming that it sounds as if it has been going on in the next room for some time before the door was opened.

It comes back at the end, after everything, and stops.

It went out the next year with the name of the Countess Karoline Esterházy of Galanta on it, his pupil at Zseliz, who was twenty-two that spring, and it is the only work that carries her name. He played it through with Franz Lachner, the young Kapellmeister at the Kärntnertor, on the ninth of May at Bauernfeld's, and Bauernfeld put the date in his diary that night.

In the same weeks he went back over the big symphony from Gmunden and Gastein, the one the Gesellschaft had tried and set aside, and wrote a new date on its first page: March 1828. What he did to it that month, nobody has been able to say.

The summer was short of money. Eight hundred florins had gone wherever money went with him, and quickly, and a second visit to the Pachlers at Graz, planned all spring, was given up because the fare could not be found. Back in February, before the concert, he had written to publishers in Leipzig and in Mainz, cities where nobody had ever printed a note of his, and offered them everything he had. Schott of Mainz said yes, and went back on it in the autumn. Probst of Leipzig took the trio, and asked whom it was to be dedicated to, and was told: "to nobody, save those who find pleasure in it." It came out in October, with his name on it in a foreign town, the only piece of his ever first printed outside Austria while he was alive to see it.

In June and July he wrote a Mass, for Michael Leitermayer, choirmaster of the Trinity church on the Alser road, the church where Beethoven's coffin had rested on its way out to Währing. It is a big Mass, with wind and brass at the start and trumpets and drums where nobody expects them. It was Ferdinand who first conducted it, in that church, the autumn after his brother's death, and that was the first time anyone heard it.

In August he sat down and wrote out fair, on consecutive pages of one manuscript, thirteen songs — seven to poems by Rellstab, the Berlin critic, and six to poems by Heine of Hamburg.

Among the Rellstab songs is the Ständchen the whole world knows, the one with the plucked guitar in the piano; and among the Heine songs is Der Doppelgänger — the double — in which a man stands at night in front of a house where a girl he loved once lived, and sees another man standing there wringing his hands, and the moon shows him the other man's face, and it is his own.

The piano plays four chords over and over, very low, and the voice speaks more than it sings until it cannot bear it and shouts.

Schubert gave the manuscript no title. The publisher Haslinger bought the songs from the family after the death, added one more to the end of them, and printed them the next spring under a title of his own invention, Schwanengesang — swan song — which is the name they have carried ever since, and which he never chose.

On the first of September he moved out of Schober's rooms in the Tuchlauben and across the river Wien to his brother's. This was on Dr Rinna's advice. Rinna was a court physician, a good one, and Schubert had been going to him since the summer with giddiness and what the doctor wrote down as rush of blood to the head. Rinna prescribed air and exercise.

Ferdinand had just taken a flat in the Neue Wieden, at the edge of the town where the new streets were still being laid out, and there was a room. The house was new that year; the plaster was hardly dry.

Ferdinand's flat was on the second floor: three rooms, whitewashed, floors that creaked at every step, and a damp that came up through the new walls when the weather turned. Ferdinand was thirty-three, a schoolmaster like their father, with a wife and children and a post at the St Anna training school, and he had wanted his brother under his roof for years and worried about him for longer.

He gave him the room with the window.

What happened in that room in September has never been explained. On the twenty-sixth he dated the fair copies of three piano sonatas, written one after another through the month.

The last of them begins with a tune that walks, easily, as if it had all afternoon, and after a few bars a trill sounds under it in the bass, so low that it is less a note than a shudder in the floor, and the tune waits for it to finish and then goes on. He played the three through to friends the next evening at the house of a Dr Menz.

Then, or at the same time — the pages do not say which — he wrote a quintet for strings, and where the Steyr quintet had wanted a double bass because that was what Paumgartner's friends played, this one wanted two cellos, because that was what he wanted.

Its slow movement is the stillest music he ever wrote: the three middle voices holding one long line together, hardly moving, while the first violin and the second cello pick out single notes above and below, so that the whole room seems to be listening to itself breathe; and then, in the middle, the floor gives way and there is a storm, and it passes, and the stillness comes back with the memory of the storm in it.

On the second of October he wrote to Probst in Leipzig. "Among other things," he told him, "I have composed three sonatas for pianoforte solo, which I should like to dedicate to Hummel… also several songs by Heine of Hamburg, which pleased extraordinarily here, and finally I have written a quintet for two violins, one viola and two violoncelli… if any of these works appeal to you, let me know." Probst did not want them. The quintet was first played in 1850.

A few days after the letter he went for a walk. Ferdinand came, and two friends, and they set off on foot towards Hungary, by way of Unterwaltersdorf, to Eisenstadt, thirty miles from Vienna, where Haydn had served the Esterházys for most of his life and where he lay now in the Bergkirche above the town. Schubert, Ferdinand wrote, "lingered for some time, pilgrim-like, at the grave of Josef Haydn." Then they walked home. Three days in all, in October air, up to and past the Hungarian border and back; "very moderate in eating and drinking," his brother said of him, "his good spirits never failed him."

That month he wrote two songs more. One was for the great soprano Anna Milder, who had been Beethoven's Leonore and had asked him for a song to show her voice. It is a shepherd standing on a rock, calling down into the valley, with a clarinet instead of a second voice answering him back as an echo would, sad in the middle and then, because spring is coming, not. The other was to a small poem by Seidl about a carrier pigeon. The man in the song sends her out every day, and she flies to the beloved's house and looks in at the window and comes home, and she never tires and never loses her way, and at the end of the song he tells you her name: Sehnsucht, longing. It is called Die Taubenpost — the pigeon post. It was the last song he wrote.

On the last evening of October he went with Ferdinand and some friends to supper at the Red Cross, a tavern in the Himmelpfortgrund, a few doors along the street from the house with five windows where he had been born. Fish was brought. He took one mouthful and put down his knife and fork and said it tasted like poison. "From that moment," Ferdinand wrote, "Franz took little else but medicine."

He did not go to bed. On the third of November he walked from the Neue Wieden right across the city to Hernals, beyond the Linienwall on the other side, to hear a Requiem of Ferdinand's sung in the parish church there; and then, because the doctor had said exercise, he walked for three hours more, and came home worn out. On the fourth he went with a piano teacher named Lanz to call on Simon Sechter, the court organist, the most learned contrapuntist in Vienna, and arranged to take lessons from him in counterpoint, with Marpurg's old treatise as the textbook. He had written six Masses and was going back to school. One lesson took place. The second was fixed for the tenth, and he was too ill to go. On the eleventh of November he took to his bed in the room with the window, and did not get up again.

The room is easy to furnish, because Ferdinand furnished it. A bed. A chair beside the bed, and on the chair a watch, so that he could take his medicines at the hours the doctor had set without asking anyone the time. A table with proofs on it: Haslinger was bringing out the second half of Winterreise, and the sheets had come, and for the first days of the illness he sat up for two hours in the afternoon and went through them with a pen, the twelve songs from the post-horn to the hurdy-gurdy man, correcting the engraver's slips. On about the twelfth he wrote a letter. It went across the river to Schober, and it is the last thing in his hand.

"I am ill. I have eaten and drunk nothing for eleven days and shift exhausted and staggering from chair to bed and back. Rinna is treating me… Be so kind as to help me out in this desperate situation with some reading. Of Cooper's I have read The Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, The Pilot and The Pioneers. If by chance you have anything else of his, please leave it for me with Frau von Bogner at the coffee-house. My brother, who is conscientiousness itself, will bring it to me."

Frau von Bogner was Barbara Fröhlich, the second of the sisters, married now; the coffee-house was where the friends left things for one another. Whether the books came is not recorded. Schober did not come. He had the doctor's bulletins sent to him daily, and no letter of his from those days survives. People said afterwards that he was afraid of the fever, as many people were. That is all that is known.

Others came. On the fourteenth, Karl Holz, who had sat at the second desk on the night of the concert, brought his colleagues from the quartet to the Neue Wieden because the patient had asked for one piece of music and named it: the long quartet Beethoven had written the year before he died, the one in seven movements that runs from beginning to end without a break. They set up their stands in the little whitewashed room and played it through. Schubert, Holz said, was carried so far out of himself that "we all feared for him"; Holz said too that the King of Harmony had sent the King of Song a friendly bidding to the crossing. That is Holz's story, told long after; Ferdinand always said the Requiem at Hernals was the last music his brother heard, and both men were in a position to know.

On the fifteenth Spaun came, steady, formal, forty years old, the first friend and the most faithful, and sat with him, and went away thinking the illness was not serious. On the sixteenth Rinna himself was ill in bed, and two other doctors, Vering and Wisgrill, came together and consulted, and used the word Nervenfieber — nerve fever, which was as near as they could come to naming it, and which was very probably typhoid. On the seventeenth, a Monday, Bauernfeld and young Lachner sat by the bed, and Schubert talked to them about the opera they were making from Bauernfeld's libretto, Der Graf von Gleichen, and how he meant to finish it. He was tired but clear. That evening he stopped being clear.

He was delirious through the night and the next day and had to be held in the bed. Some of what he said Ferdinand wrote down in the letter he sent their father before dawn on the day of the funeral. "Ferdinand, put your ear close to my mouth," his brother said to him. And then: "Brother, what are they doing with me?" To the doctor, gripping the wall: "Here, here is my end." And, when Ferdinand told him that he was in his own room in his brother's flat, in his own bed: "No, it is not true: Beethoven is not laid here."

On Wednesday the nineteenth of November 1828, at three in the afternoon, he died. He was thirty-one years old. Bauernfeld wrote in his diary: "On Monday I still spoke with him. On Tuesday he was delirious. On Wednesday he was dead."

At six o'clock on the morning of Friday the twenty-first Ferdinand sat down and wrote to their father in the Rossau. He wrote about the last words. He said that Franz had said what he had said about Beethoven, and that Beethoven lay at Währing, out beyond the Linienwall on the far side of the city, and that a grave there instead of in the parish's own ground would cost about seventy florins more, and he asked his father to bear it. The old schoolmaster, who was sixty-five and had made his son take a teaching certificate so that there should always be bread, said yes.

At half past two that afternoon the coffin was carried down the creaking stairs by young men of the circle and along the street to St Joseph's church in Margareten. Schober walked first, as chief mourner. Inside, the choir sang a hymn Schubert had written in 1817, to which Schober had fitted a new text; then the procession went out through the town and the Linienwall to Währing, to the village churchyard there, which a biographer who saw it a generation on called a spot like a fair and kindly garden. He lay in the mortuary there that night, and in the morning, the twenty-second, he was put into grave number 223. Beethoven was in 290. Three plots lay between them.

Schwind was in Munich, working under the painter Cornelius, and did not hear until it was over. He wrote to Schober: "You know how much I loved him… I wept for him as for one of my brothers."

The court sent a clerk to the Neue Wieden, as the law required, to list what the dead man had owned. The clerk wrote it down and put a value on it, and the figure that has been repeated ever since is sixty-three florins. Three dress coats, three frock coats, ten pairs of trousers, nine waistcoats. One hat. Five pairs of shoes and two of boots. Four shirts, nine neckerchiefs and handkerchiefs, thirteen pairs of socks. One sheet, two blankets, one mattress, one bolster, one counterpane. And one line more, at the bottom, in the officer's hand: some old music, ten florins.