The Boy in Spectacles

The room where the Konvikt orchestra practised was never heated, and one of the boys who sat in it for years said, when he was old, that the cold was fearful. On an evening in December, in the boy's first winter there, the frost stood in feathers on the inside of the tall windows and the candles on the music stands leaned over every time the door opened, and forty boys were playing a Haydn symphony after supper, because that was what they did after supper, every evening, whatever the weather.

At the front desk of the first violins sat a law student from Linz named Josef von Spaun, who led the section and was eight years older than anyone near him.

Somewhere behind him, among the second violins, somebody was playing uncommonly well. Spaun turned round to see who it was, and he found — he remembered it half a century later, and told it every time he was asked — "a small boy in spectacles named Franz Schubert."

The spectacles were steel-rimmed and round and too big for the face, and behind them the boy was reading his part as if it were a letter addressed to him. He was eleven. He had been in the building eight weeks.

The orchestra was the work of one man. Wenzel Ruzicka was an organist of the court chapel and a viola player at the Burgtheater, a Moravian like the boy's father, and he had come to the Konvikt as its piano master and built, out of a hundred boarders who had come there to learn Latin, a full orchestra and a wind band besides. He taught them unpaid, often twice a day, and in the year the boy arrived they had played in front of the Archduke Rudolf and, sitting beside him, Beethoven.

Every evening after the meal they played through a symphony and an overture: Haydn and Mozart above all, then the fashionable men, Krommer and Kozeluch, Méhul and Cherubini, and now and then, with the parts passed along the desks like something slightly dangerous, Beethoven.

The boy took the older side in every argument about the repertoire. He defended old Kozeluch against Krommer, whom the others preferred; he loved the slow movements of Haydn beyond anything; and of the Mozart symphony in G minor he said to Spaun that you could hear the angels singing in it. Within a year or two he had moved forward to the first violins, and when Ruzicka was away it was the small boy who stood up at the front and beat time.

The paper came out of a confession. Spaun, having turned round once, went on turning round, and at some point that winter or the next he asked the boy whether he composed. The boy went red and said that he did, that he had done for a long time, but that he could not do it properly because he had no money for manuscript paper. Spaun bought it for him out of his own allowance, ream after ream, and it was, he said, used up faster than he could supply it. He took him to the opera, too, when there was money and permission for that. It was the first friendship of Schubert's life and it lasted the whole of it; nobody who came after ever quite replaced the man who had turned round.

In September 1809 Spaun finished his law and went home to Linz. The boy, who was twelve, said to him at the parting, "You are the person I like best in the entire Konvikt; I have no other friends here." Spaun came back to Vienna in 1811, to a post in the civil service, and found the boy still there, taller by a little, writing by the ream.

The Konvikt had been a Jesuit college before the Jesuits were suppressed, and it still had the bones of one: a big cold building beside the University church, long corridors, high rooms, about a hundred boarders divided into three groups by age. Each boy had a bed, a table, a chair and a lockable chest. Twice a week women came in to comb the boys' heads. There was a poor dinner at midday and then eight and a half hours until a wretched supper, and between them the Latin, the Greek, the mathematics and the catechism, and the choir practice for the ten boys who sang in the court chapel and wore, on that account, the coat with the gold lace, which the boy from the Himmelpfortgrund now wore too. His first report, in the spring, gave him "very good" for conduct and singing and violin, "good" for studies and piano, and in the margin, in the director's hand, three words: "a musical talent."

In May of that first year the French came back.

They had been in the city once already, when he was eight; this time they were made to fight for it. Napoleon's army reached the suburbs on the tenth of May 1809, and on the evening of the eleventh the batteries opened on the walled town from the north and east and fired all night. The Konvikt stood a few hundred yards inside the walls. Spaun's story is that a howitzer shell came through the roof, passed clean through every floor of the building one after the other, and burst in the room of the prefect Walch, who taught the boys mathematics and happened to be out. Nobody was hurt. Walch's mathematics, four years on, would do the boy more damage than the shell did.

The city surrendered on the thirteenth. The French marched in, quartered themselves everywhere, and stayed until the autumn; the Emperor was gone, the court chapel with him, and the boys sang and studied and were fed, badly, under an occupation. On the last day of May, in a small house out at Gumpendorf, with a French guard of honour at the gate, Joseph Haydn died. He was seventy-seven. The boy who loved his adagios above anything was two miles away, across a city full of foreign soldiers, and there is no record that he knew of it until the same day everybody knew. What the record does have is the director's report of that October, which says that Ruzicka, "in this restless half-year too," had gone on giving the boys their extra music unpaid; and a commendation, a month later, of the choirboy Schubert "for his excellent employment in the art of music." The orchestra had not missed an evening.

He was thirteen when he began writing things down that survive. On the eighth of April 1810 he started a fantasy for piano, four hands, and on the first of May he finished it and wrote the two dates at the top and the bottom, as he would write dates on nearly everything for the rest of his life: begun, completed. It runs to thirty-two closely written pages. It has a dozen sections, and almost every one of them ends in a different key from the one it set out in, so that the whole thing wanders from room to room of the house like a child who has been told not to touch anything and is touching everything.

Because it was for four hands it needed a second person on the bench, and there were plenty. The Konvikt was full of boys who played the piano a little, and the four-hand piece, two friends side by side reading from one copy, was the form a schoolboy could hear his own music in without asking anyone's permission.

He would go on writing for four hands until the last year of his life.

The song came next. On the thirtieth of March 1811 he wrote Hagars Klage — Hagar's Lament — twenty-eight pages of it, the outcast in the desert over her dying child, cast as a scene in the manner of Zumsteeg, whose long dramatic ballads he had been copying and admiring: recitative, arioso, a new key for each turn of feeling, a piano that describes the desert. It is not a good song, and it is unmistakably his. It was this piece, so the account goes, that was carried across to Salieri. The day after Christmas that year he wrote another, on a poem called Der Vatermörder — the Parricide — which was, as one of his biographers dryly put it, a pleasant piece for the season.

The December before that, he had seen an opera in a theatre for the first time, as far as anyone knows: Weigl's Das Waisenhaus — the Orphanage — at the Kärntnertor. The following July he went again, to the same composer's Die Schweizerfamilie — the Swiss Family. The soprano was Anna Milder, for whom Beethoven had written Leonore; the baritone, in a part called Jakob Friburg, was a court singer named Johann Michael Vogl, not quite forty-three, a name on the playbill among other names.

Corpus Christi fell on the twenty-eighth of May in 1812. It is a great feast in Vienna, with processions in every parish, and in the afternoon of it, in the schoolhouse in the Säulengasse, his mother died. The illness was what the doctors then called nerve fever. She was fifty-five, she had borne fourteen children and buried nine, and she was buried herself two days later from the Lichtental church where all of them had been christened. He was fifteen and he was at the Konvikt, across the city, inside the walls. The register calls her "the most dearly cherished wife," which is the father's phrase. The boy's own words about her, if he wrote any, do not survive from that year.

Three weeks later, on the eighteenth of June, he wrote on a sheet of exercises, "Began counterpoint." The four words mark the beginning of his lessons with Salieri. The old Kapellmeister — sixty-one that summer, first musician of the court, the man who had examined him at the door four years earlier — had taken him as a private pupil, twice a week and for nothing, at his own house in the Seilergasse, and twice a week for the next several years the boy walked there from the Konvikt with his exercises in a roll under his arm.

Salieri was a Venetian by training, a pupil of Gluck's friends, and he had a settled dislike of German poetry, which he thought unmusical; he warned the boy off Goethe and Schiller and gave him Italian stanzas to set instead, and the boy set the Italian stanzas, dutifully, and went on setting Goethe and Schiller in his own time. On warm days Salieri took his boys out and bought them ice cream; the story is told, and there is no reason to doubt it.

He was fond of his pupils, and this one, it turned out, could do everything he was shown.

At the end of July the other thing happened, the one every choirboy waits for. On the alto part of a Mass by Peter Winter, above the line where his own voice was written out, he put down the date, the twenty-sixth of July 1812, and beside it: "Schubert Franz crowed for the last time." The voice had broken. The court chapel wrote to find two new sopranos. He stayed on at the Konvikt on a scholarship, as a student and a violinist and the orchestra's deputy, and no longer sang.

The letter is dated the twenty-fourth of November 1812, and it is the first thing in his own voice that we have. It went from the Konvikt to his brother Ferdinand, who was eighteen and already earning, as an assistant teacher at the orphanage and organist at Lichtental, and it begins without preamble.

"Straight out with what is on my heart, and so I shall come to my point the sooner and not keep you hanging about with a lot of pretty talk. I have been thinking over my situation for a long time now and have found that, although it is on the whole satisfactory, it could be improved here and there. You know from experience that one would like now and then to eat a roll and a couple of apples, especially when after a middling dinner one has to wait eight and a half hours for a wretched supper. This wish, which has often become insistent, is now becoming more and more frequent, and I have been obliged, willy-nilly, to make a change. The few groschen I get from Father are gone to the devil in the first few days, so what am I to do for the rest of the time? 'They that hope in thee shall not be confounded' — Matthew, chapter three, verse four. That is what I thought too. What if you were to let me have a few kreuzer a month? You would never miss them, while I should think myself lucky in my cell and be content. As I said, I rely on the words of the Apostle Matthew, who says: 'He that hath two coats, let him give one to the poor.' Meanwhile I hope you will lend an ear to the voice that calls to you unceasingly to remember your loving, poor, hopeful, and once more poor brother Franz."

There is no Matthew three, verse four, about hoping and not being confounded; and the two coats are Luke's, not Matthew's; and he knew both things, and so did Ferdinand, who had sat through the same catechism. It is a begging letter written by a boy who is hungry and is making his brother laugh so that the begging will not sting. Ferdinand sent the money. He kept the letter for the rest of his life, in the same care with which he kept everything his brother ever gave him, which is why we have it.

The father married again in the spring. On the twenty-fifth of April 1813, at the church in Gumpendorf, Franz Theodor Schubert, forty-nine, a widower of eleven months, took as his second wife Anna Kleyenböck, who was twenty-nine and the daughter of a silk manufacturer of the district. There was nothing remarkable in it; a schoolmaster with a house full of pupils and a daughter of eleven could not run the place alone. What was remarkable, and is worth saying now, is that she was kind to the stepson who came home from the Konvikt at holidays, and went on being kind to him after he was grown, and — the family said so — used to slip him money out of the housekeeping when his father was not looking.

He was sixteen that year, and the record of it is a schoolboy's record: a poem of his own called Die Zeit in May; a little cantata for his father's name-day in September, words and music both his, for three men's voices and a guitar; and at the end of the school year the printed catalogue of the Gymnasium, in which the name Schubert appears with a first-class mark against everything except one subject. Against mathematics it says: second class. It was Walch's subject.

The rule was strict, because the places were paid for. A foundation scholar who fell to a second-class mark lost his foundation. The curator of the Konvikt, Count Dietrichstein, wrote to the Emperor to ask that an exception be made for this one, and the Emperor — Franz, who took a personal interest in his choirboys and read the files himself — decided, on the twenty-first of October, that the scholar Schubert might keep his place on the condition that he brought his mathematics up to standard over the holidays. It was a kindness, and it was not taken. One week later, on the twenty-eighth of October, he finished a symphony.

He had written it for the orchestra he had grown up in, for the players who had sat at the desks around him for five years, and he dedicated it to the director, Innocenz Lang, for his name-day. It begins with a slow, grand introduction, like a curtain going up, and the introduction comes back near the end, which nobody had told him to do; the rest is Haydn's manners and Beethoven's energy and, every few bars, a turn of tune that is neither. The Konvikt orchestra played it, with the composer presumably among them or in front of them; there is no report of the evening. At the foot of the last page, under the double bar, he wrote two words in Latin: Finis et fine. The end, and with the end.

The next document is a government decree, dated at the end of November, and it is one line long. It records that the foundation scholar Franz Schubert "has renounced his studies," and declares his place vacant for the next boy.

He packed the lockable chest and went home through the Schottentor and out along the Alser road to the schoolhouse in the Säulengasse, where his father had three hundred children, a new wife, and a plan. The plan was the teacher-training course at the Normal School of St Anna, in the Annagasse inside the walls, which turned out assistant schoolmasters in a year; the boy enrolled in it that winter. He was sixteen, he had written a symphony, and he was going to learn to teach small children their letters.