Summer in Hungary

The coach had left the Danube behind it somewhere in the early morning, and by noon there was nothing on either side of the road but wheat. He had applied for the passport on the seventh of July — a slip of paper that gave his height, which was not much, and the colour of his eyes — and ten days on, a hundred miles of Hungary were unrolling past the window in a heat that made the far edge of the plain tremble. He was twenty-one years old. He had never in his life been further from the schoolhouse than Erdberg, which is an afternoon's walk from it, and he was now going further every hour.

The country did not so much change as widen. The villages had one street each and the street was as broad as a square in Vienna, with geese asleep in the dust of it and a well-sweep standing up against the sky like a gallows for a giant. Women were in the fields with sickles, the wheat came up to their waists, and behind them the cut corn stood in stooks to the horizon and a little beyond. The dust came in at the window whichever way it was turned. He had music paper in his box, a summer's engagement in his pocket, and, so far as anyone knows, no idea at all what a Hungarian estate would be like when he got there.

What it was like was a long low house the colour of cream, with columns along the front, in a park of old trees that ran down to a slow river called the Hron. This was Zseliz, and the house was Count Johann Karl Esterházy's. He was not lodged in it. Across the way, past the stables and the kitchen garden, stood the inspector's house, where the people who ran the estate lived, and there the music master was given a room, a bed, a table, and a share in a servants' dinner that he found perfectly good. The Count's family had their piano in the big house. He would walk over to it.

The year had begun better than any before it, which is to say that something of his had been printed. Early in the year a Vienna publisher brought out one of the little picture-almanacs that were given as New Year presents — engravings, some verses, a song or two folded in at the back — and the song at the back of this one was Erlafsee (the Erlaf Lake), to a poem by Mayrhofer. It was the first note of his music anyone could buy. Nobody seems to have made much of it, least of all the composer.

Then, one night in February, he was at Anselm Hüttenbrenner's rooms, and he sat down to copy out Die Forelle — the Trout — for Anselm's younger brother Josef, who was away at Graz and had asked for it. It was midnight. Schubert wrote the whole song from memory, brook and all, reached for the sand-box to dry the last page, took up the inkpot instead, and emptied it over the manuscript. He did not start again. He sent the sheet to Graz as it was, with a line explaining what had happened; and that is why the most famous copy of the most famous fishing song in the world has a great black stain across the bottom of it, and a joke underneath the stain.

In the spring he asked to join the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the city's society of music-lovers, and was refused. The society was for amateurs and he was, in its judgement, no amateur; he was a professional musician, which was a category he would have been glad to hear he belonged to from anyone who was offering to pay him. And then Count Esterházy, who wintered in Vienna and summered on his Hungarian estate, wanted a music master for his two daughters for the summer months, and the name that came up was Schubert. The terms were two florins a lesson, with board and lodging found. His father charged one florin a month to teach a child its letters.

It was the best money he had ever been offered, and it came with a coach ticket out of the city and out of the Rossau classroom, where he had been teaching the alphabet again since the autumn with an expression that no pupil has left a description of, perhaps out of kindness.

He took to it at once. The heat of the first week broke in a thunderstorm that stood over the plain for an hour and then walked off eastward, and after it the air smelled of wet straw and the geese came out. He composed in the mornings in his room in the inspector's house, with the window open and the farmyard going about its business under it; he walked in the park; he taught.

On the third of August he wrote a letter to be handed round among Schober, Spaun, Mayrhofer and Senn, and it is the most cheerful thing he ever put on paper. "I live and compose like a god," he told them, "as if it had to be so." He had written a long song called Einsamkeit (Solitude) to a poem of Mayrhofer's — six poems, really, strung into one, twenty minutes of music — and he said of it: "the best thing I have done, for I was without care."

Nobody who has read the rest of his letters will pass over that last clause. He was twenty-one, he was paid, he was fed, and nobody in the house wanted anything from him but that he should sit at a piano with two girls in the afternoons.

The household he described in September, and it is worth having whole, because he so clearly enjoyed making the list. There was the inspector, a Croat, who played the lute; a bursar; a doctor; a surgeon; a magistrate; a cook; a lady's maid of thirty; a chambermaid, "very pretty, often my visitor"; a nurse; a caretaker; two grooms, who "get on better with horses than with people"; and the butler, whom he calls "my rival," and does not say in what. Over the way were the family: the Count, "rather coarse," who sang bass; the Countess, "proud, but with finer feeling," a contralto; Marie, sixteen, a soprano; Karoline, just thirteen, a contralto like her mother; and a small boy named Albert, five, who does not come into the music at all.

Somewhere in every hour of the day there were geese.

What Zseliz heard of him that summer, it heard through a wall. The estate people in the inspector's house had the morning noise — a piano being tried, stopped, tried again — and the big house had the afternoons, when the two Countesses sat on one bench at one piano with their master beside them and played four hands. That was the arrangement he wrote for, because it was the arrangement he had.

There was a set of variations on a French song that the girls could manage between them, and that he would one day put Beethoven's name on; there was a whole sonata for four hands, big enough to fill an evening; there were German dances by the dozen and polonaises that made the Countess look up from her needlework.

And under and round all of it, coming in at the windows from the kitchen and the village and the fields, were Hungarian tunes — a maid singing in the kitchen, a fiddler in the lane, the odd falling intervals and stamping rhythms that he had never heard in Lichtental — and they stuck. He carried them home in his head with the music paper and they came out of him for years.

The little march that every child who has ever sat at a piano has thumped through with a sister, the one the whole world knows, is often said to have been written here, for these lessons, on this bench. The story likes to place it here, and the manuscript is silent.

The lesson itself would have been much like any lesson. Picture the afternoon room with the shutters half closed against the glare, the Countess at the far end, the piano an ordinary good one, and on the bench the younger girl, Karoline, twelve, in the treble; her sister in the bass, with the wider reach; and a young man standing at the treble end, counting. He was better at four hands than at words. When a passage went wrong he did not explain it: he sat down and played it, and then stood up again and the child played it after him, and if it went right the second time he said "Gut" and nothing else, and if it did not he sat down again. He had no small talk and did not attempt any.

Karoline played well for twelve. That is all the record gives of her that summer, and it is all this chapter needs: her name, her age, that she played, and that he was patient.

By the last week of August the harvest was in and the plain was covered with the great Hungarian ricks the estate people called Tristen, long as a street, longer than anything a Vienna schoolmaster's son had ever seen made of straw.

He described them to Ferdinand in a letter begun late on the twenty-fourth and finished after midnight — eighty to a hundred yards each — and one can hear him deciding that nobody at home would believe it unless he gave the measurement.

He had been sitting up over a Requiem Ferdinand had asked him for, revising it, and now it was done and it was half past eleven and he reported the fact. He reported his pay too, exactly, because Ferdinand was the brother who liked figures: "For July, with the journey money, I got two hundred florins." His foot had gone to sleep under the table and he was annoyed with it, and said so.

And then, for the first time, a note that is not quite the god of the third of August: he found himself writing about "beloved Vienna" and everything and everyone in it, and asking for news, and asking again.

By the eighth of September he was bored. It was a good-tempered boredom, the boredom of a man who is well fed and well paid and has read every book he brought, and it produced the servants' catalogue above and one sentence that the friends must have passed round the coffee-house table with some pleasure. "Nobody here cares for true art," he wrote, "except now and then the Countess; so I must sit alone with my beloved and hide her in my room, my piano and my breast."

He was not unhappy. He was homesick as a schoolboy is homesick in the second month — for certain streets and certain people and the noise of a city at night, none of which Zseliz could supply, though it did its best with the geese.

Home wrote back. Ignaz, the eldest brother, twelve years older, still stuck in the family schoolroom and tired of it, sent a letter in October that is sour about the clergy who had the say over the Rossau school and the "bigots" among them, and ends by warning Franz, drily, not to write anything about religion in a letter their father might see. It is the one glimpse the summer gives of Ignaz, and it is enough: a free-thinking man with chalk on his sleeves, saying what he thought to the one member of the family who had got away.

The family went back to Vienna on the nineteenth of November and took the music master with them. The plain had gone brown and then grey; the storks had left the chimneys weeks before; the Hron had a skin of ice at its edges in the mornings. He had been away four months, which was longer than he had ever been away from anything, and he had a summer's wages in his pocket and a box of four-hand music that the girls had thumbed.

He did not go home to the Rossau. The schoolroom did not get him back, and his father, with a new school in a new parish to run, does not seem to have pressed it. Instead he went to Mayrhofer.

Johann Mayrhofer was thirty-one that winter, a poet, employed already in the office that read books for the crown and about to be made a censor in it — that is, a liberal paid to go through other men's manuscripts and strike out the parts that sounded like him.

The room was the one Spaun had walked him up to four years before, unchanged except that there were two of them in it now: the sagging ceiling, the worn-out piano, the light giving up before it reached the window. What it had gained was a landlady, a Frenchwoman, who went by the name of Madame Sanssouci and lived up to it.

Schubert moved in with him, and the two of them, with one table and one piano between them, settled into a routine that lasted two years.

It went like this. Mayrhofer was up first and gone to his office in the dark; he did not care to be there when the composing started. Schubert was at the rickety table by seven, in shirt and trousers, with his spectacles on, writing, and he wrote until one or two in the afternoon without stopping to dress. Then he went out and walked, and ate, and in the evening the poet came home up the three flights with the day's forbidden sentences in his head and found his friend at the worn piano trying something, and sat down on the bed and listened, and said nothing, and when it was over said one word, which was sometimes good.

The first snow that year came early in December, in the night, and by morning the lane was white from wall to wall and the light in the room was better than it had been since they moved in. Schubert was already at the table. Mayrhofer, putting on his coat at the door, looked at the window and then at the back of his friend's head, and said the lane would be black slush by noon, and went down to the office; and behind him the pen, which had stopped for exactly the length of the remark, started again.