Friends
The rain had held off. Twelve days earlier, on the professor's name-day, it had not, and the whole affair had been put away again in wet coats; now, on the evening of the twenty-fourth of July, the garden behind Heinrich Watteroth's house in Erdberg was dry, the gravel still dark from the afternoon's watering, the chairs set out under the fruit trees, and the professor's law students were standing in two rows in the long light with their parts in their hands. The man in front of them, with his back to the audience, was nineteen years old, short, round-shouldered, in spectacles, and he was conducting a cantata of his own on the subject of Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven and paid for it.
The students had made the words themselves — one of them had, Philipp Dräxler, whose name would not otherwise be in this book — and the students sang. Albert Stadler, who copied every note the composer wrote as fast as it appeared, was among them; so was Franz von Schlechta; so was a young man called Leopold Sonnleithner, whose father kept one of the best musical houses in the city. Sonnleithner's memory is the only description of the music we have: a slow march for the disciples of Prometheus, men's voices walking in step. The rest is lost. It was sung that evening in a garden and the manuscript went wherever such manuscripts went.
What survives is a line in a diary. On the seventeenth of June, when the cantata was finished and delivered, he had written: "Today I composed for money for the first time." The money was a hundred florins. His father's school paid him, for a year of the ABC class, something like eighty.
He had spent the spring trying to be respectable, and he had tried hard.
In February the Wiener Zeitung carried a notice from Laibach, in Carniola, a hundred and fifty miles to the south: the new public music school there wanted a master. Four hundred and fifty florins a year, and fifty more on top; three hours' teaching a day; applications by the middle of March. For a young man on eighty florins and his board it was a fortune, and it was a post — a real one, with a title and a salary paid by the state — and he wanted it.
He asked Salieri for a testimonial, and on the ninth of April Salieri wrote one, in Italian, as he wrote everything. He drew up the petition himself and signed it "at present school assistant at his father's school on the Himmelpfortgrund," which was true and which was the whole of what he could say for himself. The city authority forwarded the papers to Laibach with a warm word of its own.
In Laibach a committee read them and wrote, against his name, in the column for character: "morals very good … probably still very young and single." Then they waited for the other candidates, and in August they gave the post to another man, Franz Sokoll.
The same April, Spaun did something on his own account. He sat down in his room in the Landskrongasse and wrote to Goethe in Weimar. He described a young composer of his acquaintance, and proposed an edition of the songs in eight volumes, the first two to be settings of Goethe's own poems — Gretchen, Erlkönig, Heidenröslein and the rest — and he asked whether the poet would allow the dedication. Steady, careful Spaun; it was a good letter. No answer ever came.
In May he was staying at Watteroth's, in Erdberg, where Spaun lodged; on a set of little Scottish dances he wrote that they had been composed "as a prisoner in my room at Erdberg," which is the nearest thing to a holiday in the record so far. And in June, for five days, he kept a diary, and the diary is the best account of that summer that anyone could give, so it is his and not mine.
On the thirteenth he went to an evening of music where a Mozart quintet was played, and came home and wrote: "A bright, clear, beautiful day this will remain for my whole life … O Mozart, immortal Mozart."
On the fourteenth he walked out in the evening with his brother Karl, the painter, along the road towards Döbling, and they passed the cemetery, which "reminded us of our good mother." Four years, and it is the only time he writes of her.
On the sixteenth Salieri had been fifty years in Vienna. There was a gold medal from the Emperor, there was a Mass at the Italian church, and in the evening the old man's pupils gathered at his house and each brought him a piece. Schubert's was a little cantata to verses of his own, which called Salieri kindest, best, wisest, greatest, and finished by calling him grandpapa — "our grandpapa, stay with us a good while yet." The composer of Erlkönig was still, in that room, one of the boys who came twice a week with a roll of exercises under his arm, and he seems to have liked being so.
On the seventeenth, the hundred florins.
The diary starts again for a day in September, and the tone is different. He is writing on the eighth, and he is nineteen and a half. "Man is like a ball, with which chance and passion play," he begins, and works his way round, by way of some remarks on happiness and human folly, to this: "Marriage is a terrifying thought for the free man in these times."
Behind that sentence there is a law, and it has to be told once and plainly. In 1815, with the wars over and the city full of soldiers home with nothing to do, the government had required that a man wishing to marry must first prove to the authorities that he could keep a wife. Schoolteachers were exempt. A school assistant on eighty florins a year could marry whom he liked, because he was a teacher; the moment he stopped being one he would have to show an income he did not have. So the arithmetic in the schoolhouse that autumn was this: as long as he taught, he could have married her. If he left the school for music he could not.
Her name was Therese Grob. She had sung his Mass at fifteen, two years before, and he had loved her since. Anselm Hüttenbrenner said that Schubert, asked once whether he had never been in love, answered: "For three years she hoped I would marry her; but I could find no post that would support us both." Laibach had been the post.
In November he wrote out seventeen songs fair, in his own hand, bound them into a book, and gave the book to her brother Heinrich, who played the piano and the violin and could accompany her. Among them was Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen — the Litany for All Souls — which had been written in August and asks rest for the souls of the dead, verse after verse on one tune, the piano under it going step by step as a procession goes. That was his gift. She married a master baker in the autumn of 1820, and she leaves this book here.
The man who opened the other door was eight months older than Schubert, and had been born in a castle in Sweden.
Franz von Schober's father had managed estates near Malmö for a Swedish family and died there when the boy was six; the mother, a Viennese, had brought her children home, and the money that came with them was enough to make a young man comfortable without making him work. Schober had been to good schools, one of them Kremsmünster, where the monks taught the sons of Upper Austria, and it was through Upper Austria that he came to Schubert. In 1813, staying with the Spauns at Linz, he had been shown some songs by a Konvikt boy nobody had heard of, and had read them at the piano and wanted, from that hour, to know the person who could write such things. He was seventeen. When he arrived in Vienna at the end of 1815 to study — philosophy, law, whatever his mother was told — one of the first things he did was to find the schoolhouse in the Säulengasse and knock.
He found him, Schober said long afterwards, correcting school exercises, with heaps of manuscript around him. Schober's dates were never reliable and his stories improved with keeping, but the picture is right, and it is the picture everyone who knew Schubert in those years carried away: the exercise books on top, the music underneath, and the young man in spectacles doing the one because he had to and the other because he could not help it.
Schober was tall, fair, quick, and easy in any room. He wrote verses, he drew, he acted a little, he read everything, and he had the gift, which Schubert entirely lacked, of making a thing happen by deciding that it should. What he decided, in the course of 1816, was that Franz Schubert should stop teaching the alphabet to infants and come and live with him. The Schobers had a flat in the Landskrongasse, in the middle of the city, in the same street as Spaun; there was a room in it that nobody needed; the mother could be talked round, and was. The schoolmaster, whose consent was also needed, gave it. Whatever he said, he had watched his son in the ABC class for two years, and he may have been readier to let him go than either of them expected. By December Schubert was living in the Landskrongasse, rent-free, at Schober's mother's table, with a piano, and the school in the Säulengasse had one assistant fewer.
The songs came in a run that winter, and the friends heard them one by one in the room in the Landskrongasse. In October there had been Der Wanderer — the Wanderer — a poem by a north German nobody in Vienna had heard of, about a man who comes down from the mountains and belongs nowhere: the slow strain in the middle, where the piano drops to a low pulse and the singer says, almost under his breath, "Dort, wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück" — there, where you are not, there is happiness — was the tune half of Vienna would come to know before they knew the name of the man who wrote it. That same autumn a symphony, his fifth, small enough for an orchestra of friends, was played through at the amateur Otto Hatwig's rooms in the Schottenhof, with Schubert among the violas.
In February came Der Tod und das Mädchen — Death and the Maiden. A girl begs, breathless, in short phrases, for Death to pass her by; and Death answers, slow and low and kind, on almost a single note, telling her to give him her hand, that he is a friend and not a punishment, that she will sleep softly in his arms.
The piano has the last word, and it is a lullaby.
He wrote it in a month when the friends were being introduced to each other faster than they could learn names: Anselm Hüttenbrenner from Graz, the Salieri pupil, who had already been about for a year or two; his younger brother Josef, who from the first day could deny Schubert nothing; a pianist called Josef von Gahy, a civil servant with a good left hand, who became the other half of the four-hand music at the Schober piano.
And there was Die Forelle — the Trout — which he wrote early that year and wrote out again from memory so often, for anyone who asked, that there are five copies, no two the same: the brook rippling in the pianist's right hand, the fish darting, and then the moment where the angler muddies the water and the music darkens and the fish is on the hook and the singer, who has been enjoying himself, is cross about it.
In March Schober gave him a poem. It was not a great poem, and Schober knew it; it was two verses addressed to music itself — "Du holde Kunst," you gracious art — thanking it for the hours when life pressed too hard and one grey hour after another, and a chord from the strings or a sigh from the harp had opened the heavens. Schubert set it in the plainest way he knew. The bass walks, evenly, all the way through, and the voice floats over it, and there is nothing in it that a good amateur could not sing at sight. That is why it is the name of this book: it is the only time he thanked his own gift out loud, and he did it in his friend's words, at his friend's piano, in a room his friend had given him.
Schober's brother-in-law was an Italian tenor at the Court Opera, and through him Schober had a claim, thin but real, on the acquaintance of the greatest singer in Vienna.
Johann Michael Vogl was close on fifty, and he had been the leading baritone of the Kärntnertor for twenty years. He had been the Orestes of Gluck's Iphigenia, and Pizarro in the Fidelio of 1814, with Beethoven in the house. He had trained as a lawyer before he sang; he read Plato and Epictetus and the Bible, and kept a diary in which he argued with all three; he was tall, heavy, gouty, proud, and by his own friends' account obstinate, and he had been asked by a great many young men to look at a great many songs. Schober asked him for months. Vogl said the young man should send the songs round. Schober said the young man would not; that he was shy; that Vogl must come and hear them played by the composer, who could not play them anywhere else. It was, in the end, easier to go than to be asked again.
He came in 1817 — the season is not recorded — and Spaun and Schober were both in the room and told the story alike. The room was, as usual, strewn with music. Vogl was cool. He was polite to Schober, whom he knew, and civil to Spaun, and he looked at the small stout young man by the piano, who bowed and said next to nothing, with the expression of a man who has come to do a favour and means to do it quickly.
He took up the song nearest him from the pile — it was a Mayrhofer poem, Augenlied, a little thing about a pair of eyes — and said, "Play with me." Schubert played. Vogl hummed the voice part, half aloud, reading, and set it down.
"Not bad." He took up the next. It was Ganymed, Goethe's boy carried up into the spring morning towards the god — the piano quickening under him as the clouds come down to meet him — and Vogl did not hum this one; he sang it, or began to, and stopped, and read the last page through without a sound, and then picked up a third, Schäfers Klagelied, the shepherd on his hill looking down at the house where his girl no longer lives.
Something in his face had changed by the end of it, and Spaun, who was watching him and not the composer, saw it change.
He did not stay long. He said kind things about the third song, and something about the second, and he walked up and down once with his hands behind his back, and at the door he turned and delivered his verdict to Schubert, who had not moved from the piano stool: "There is something in you, but you are too little the actor, too little the charlatan; you squander your fine thoughts without spreading them out properly."
Then he went. Schober, who was nearer the stairs, went out on to the landing to see him down, and stood there a moment after the street door had closed on the big slow figure and the stick, and came back in delighted, talking, already planning the next visit. Spaun said it had gone well. Schubert, who had been told by the first singer in Vienna that there was something in him, gathered the three songs off the piano and put them back on the pile, and said, as far as either friend remembered, almost nothing at all. Within a few weeks Vogl was singing the songs in drawing rooms where the name Schubert had not been heard, and finding, to his own surprise, that he could not get them out of his head.
In the autumn Schober's brother came home from abroad and needed his room. Schubert packed his music and went back to his father's house, which was now in the Rossau, at a new school, and for a few months, that winter, he taught again.
