The Trout
Two rivers meet at Steyr, and you can stand on the bridge and watch them do it: the Enns coming down broad and green from the mountains, the Steyr arriving from the west a shade paler and quicker, the two colours running side by side below the town for a little way before they consent to be one water. The houses climb from the banks in tiers, gabled and arcaded, painted the colours of butter and apricot, with iron everywhere — iron shop signs, iron balconies, iron in the names of the lanes — because iron is what the town has made for five hundred years. South of it the mountains stand up close, still holding snow in their creases in July.
Schubert had never seen a mountain. He had seen the Kahlenberg, which is a hill with a view, and the flat Hungarian wheat of the summer before, and that was the whole of his geography until Vogl brought him here.
Vogl had brought him to show him off. This was Vogl's own country — he had been born fifty-one years earlier on the far bank of the Enns, and the town knew him as its famous son, the Court Opera's great Orestes come home for the summer — and he went about Steyr like a man walking through his own house, pointing out the furniture. He had found his composer a bed with Dr Schellmann, a lawyer on the square, whose household ran to eight daughters. "Nearly all pretty," Schubert reported to Ferdinand, in a letter which also declared the country round Steyr "inconceivably lovely," and it is a fair guess which of the two remarks he expected his brother to weigh the more carefully.
He was twenty-two. He had a window on the mountains, dinners he had not paid for, and no ABC class in the morning.
The evenings belonged to Sylvester Paumgartner. Paumgartner managed the ironworks; he was fifty-six, a bachelor, comfortably off, and he played the cello with the seriousness of a man who has never been obliged to do anything for money. His house stood on the Stadtplatz, and it had a music room, and every few days the amateurs of Steyr climbed his stairs with their cases and made an orchestra of whatever arrived. What arrived was a violin, a viola, Paumgartner's cello, the piano, and a double bass — the bass because one of Paumgartner's friends happened to play it, and a man who has carried a double bass up a flight of stairs is not sent home again.
Vogl sang. Schubert accompanied him, and was afterwards made to play his own things, and played them, and was made to play more.
Vogl on home ground was a sight. He was fifty-one that summer, gouty already, tall and heavy-shouldered, with a great head and the habit of standing very still while he sang, so that the whole performance was in the voice and the eyes; he read Plato and Epictetus in the mornings and quoted them at dinner; he corrected Schubert's songs when he sang them, adding a turn here and a held note there, and Schubert let him, mostly. On the tenth of August the town celebrated his birthday. Albert Stadler, who had been at the Konvikt with Schubert and was home in Steyr now, wrote a poem in the singer's honour, Schubert set it as a little cantata in a day or two, and it was sung to Vogl in the evening, and he received it as a monarch receives a loyal address, with grave pleasure and no surprise at all.
He liked to tell a story against his composer from these years. He had taken one of the new songs, copied it out in a different key to suit his voice, and a fortnight later put it in front of Schubert without a word. Schubert played it through, nodded, and said, "I say, the song's not bad; whose is it?" Vogl told this with relish, as evidence of what he had to put up with, and it does show something: a man who wrote songs faster than he could remember them, and did not much mind.
They went down to Linz for a while, to the Spaun family's house, and came back to Steyr, and the summer ran on into September with the mountains going brown at the top. When they left, in the middle of the month, Schubert wrote a line in Stadler's sister's album, and the eight Schellmann daughters, one supposes, waved.
Somewhere in that autumn — at Steyr before he left, or at the rickety table in Vienna afterwards; the manuscript does not say, and nobody thought to write it down — he composed the piece Paumgartner had asked him for. Albert Stadler said, long after, that the commission had been exact: Paumgartner wanted a work for his own five instruments, piano, violin, viola, cello and the indispensable double bass, laid out on the pattern of a septet by Hummel which he owned in an arrangement for just that band; he wanted, somewhere in it, the tune of Die Forelle, which he loved beyond reason and had presumably heard Vogl sing in his own music room a dozen times that summer; and Schubert, Stadler went on, wrote out the five parts without ever making a full score, and when the thing was first played at Paumgartner's sat down at the piano and played his own part from memory.
Picture the room, then, on an evening in October, rain on the square outside and the stove lit. Candles on the piano. Paumgartner's cello between his knees, his spectacles pushed up on his forehead. The bass player over by the door, because there is nowhere else to stand him. The violin and the viola with their parts propped against the piano's lid, since parts are all there are.
The piano begins alone — a chord, and a run thrown upward like a handful of water — and the strings come in under it as if they had been waiting on the landing.
What follows for the next forty minutes is not music to sit still for. It walks. It stops to look at things. It has a slow movement that is a summer afternoon with the shutters half closed, and a quick one that stamps its feet.
And then, fourth of five, because Paumgartner had asked and Paumgartner was host, the strings alone play the brook-song, plain, the tune every man in the room could whistle, and hand it round. The piano takes it and decorates it. The viola and cello take it and the piano chatters above them. The bass has it, growling, while the violin flickers overhead like the fish itself. It clouds over, as the song does when the angler muddies the water, and clears.
And at the very end the little rippling figure from the song, the one that was the brook in the pianist's right hand, arrives under the tune at last, as though it had been on its way all evening — and every player in the room who knew the song, which was every player in the room, is grinning at the man on the piano stool, who is grinning back.
Paumgartner kept the parts. It was played in Steyr, and wherever else in Upper Austria a double bass could be found, and it was not printed in Schubert's lifetime. He had written the happiest forty minutes of music in his life for a bachelor with a cello and five friends, and he went back to Vienna and began something else.
The something else was a Mass, a large one, begun in November, which he would carry about with him for the next three years. He wrote it, and everything else that winter, at the table in Mayrhofer's room. The light in the Wipplingerstraße went by four.
He was up and at the table by seven regardless, in shirt and trousers, spectacles on, the worn-out piano at his elbow and the sunken ceiling over his head, and he wrote until one, when he stopped and went out to eat.
Mayrhofer was gone by then to his office, and from that year the office was the censor's: the poet who wrote about freedom sat all day in a government room reading other men's books for the crown, pencil in hand, and came home in the evening and did not talk about it.
He did not talk about much. He was ten years older than his lodger, austere, gloomy, with a sarcastic mouth and a pipe, and the only thing that reliably lit him was hearing his own poems come back to him as songs, which happened, in that room, forty-seven times.
The year had begun, before Steyr, with a small door opening. On the last day of February a tenor named Jäger had sung Schäfers Klagelied — the Shepherd's Lament — at a five o'clock concert in the hotel Zum römischen Kaiser, and it was the first time a song of Schubert's had been heard at a public concert, with tickets, and a notice in the paper afterwards. Nobody's life changed. But it had been sung, in a hall, to strangers, and a man who had spent five years giving his songs away in friends' parlours took note.
Somebody else took note more energetically. Josef Hüttenbrenner, the younger brother of Anselm from Graz, had appointed himself Schubert's clerk, copyist, archivist and agent, unpaid and unasked, and pursued the office with a devotion that was faintly alarming. He copied everything. He collected manuscripts that Schubert had left in other people's houses and forgotten. He wrote to theatres about the operas and to publishers about the songs, and the theatres and the publishers wrote back, or did not. One November afternoon Schubert dashed off an overture for four hands in Josef's lodging in three hours flat, and missed his dinner doing it, and Josef, one imagines, copied it before the ink was dry. "Everything I write seems to please him," Schubert said, in the tone of a man describing a large and affectionate dog.
Vienna in those months was not a comfortable city for young men who talked. In the autumn of 1819 the German princes, frightened by a student who had murdered a playwright, had agreed among themselves to dissolve the student societies, muzzle the universities and hunt what they called demagogues, and Metternich's Austria, which had needed no encouragement, set about it with system. Mayrhofer's pencil was one small part of the system. The police were another.
Johann Senn was a Tyrolean, a poet, a Konvikt friend of Schubert's from the old days — one of the four to whom the "I live and compose like a god" letter had been addressed the summer before — and he kept a room in which young men said what they thought.
One night in March the police came to it looking for papers. Senn, the report says, was stubborn and insulting; he told the officer that he had no need to concern himself with the police, and that the government was too stupid to penetrate his secrets.
Present in the room, and joining in, the report goes on, "in the same tone, inveighing against the official with insulting and opprobrious language," were a law student named Bruchmann, a jurist named Streinsberg, a private student from Cilli named Zechenter, and "the school assistant Schubert from the Rossau" — the police being a year and a half behind on his address, and further behind than that on his occupation.
Senn went to prison. The others were summoned, severely reprimanded, and their fathers informed.
Senn was held about a year, and then sent back to the Tyrol under an order that kept him out of Vienna for good; he was a soldier for eight years, and then a clerk, and he published one book. Two years after the raid Schubert set two poems of Senn's that Bruchmann brought back from the Tyrol. That is the only page in the police archive with Schubert's name on it, and it records a man who stood in a friend's room while the police were in it and did not lower his voice.
He was not a hero and did not think he was one. A reprimand was the whole of the price, and he paid it, and walked home to the Wipplingerstraße, and was at the table by seven.
Vogl, meanwhile, had got him a stage. There was a one-act comedy called Die Zwillingsbrüder — the Twin Brothers — which Schubert had finished eighteen months before and which had lain at the Court Opera ever since, waiting for someone with weight to lean on it; Vogl leaned, and on the fourteenth of June the Kärntnertortheater put it on, with Vogl playing both twins, which meant a good deal of hurrying behind the scenery and some fine comic business at the doors. The house was full. There were partisans — the newspapers noticed a clapping party and a hissing party, and a scuffle between them — and at the end the clapping party won and called for the composer.
Anselm Hüttenbrenner told the rest, and told it often. He and Schubert were up in the gallery together, in the cheap seats, and when the calls began Schubert would not go down. His coat was shabby. It was an old frock coat, the only one he had brought, and he was not going to stand on the stage of the Court Opera in it in front of the whole town. Anselm offered his own tailcoat, there and then, in the gallery. Schubert refused it.
Down below, the calls went on, and at last Vogl came out in front of the curtain, in one twin's costume or the other, and announced in his great voice that the composer was not in the house. The composer, four floors up, sat with his arms folded in his shabby coat and looked, Anselm said, rather pleased with himself.
It ran six nights. In August the Theater an der Wien, Schikaneder's big suburban house of spectacle, put up to replace the older house on the Wieden where Die Zauberflöte had first been played, staged a melodrama called Die Zauberharfe — the Magic Harp — with a great deal of scenery, a fine overture and a play so poor that Mayrhofer, of all people, was moved to review it. That ran a little longer and then stopped. Rossini had the town: the whole city was humming Tancredi, and a German comedy with a baritone in two hats was not the fashion. The overtures survived. The rest went into the drawer, which was getting full.
Ignaz von Sonnleithner was a lawyer, a professor of commercial law, a founder of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and, by common consent, the best talker in Vienna, and on his evenings the great flat in the Gundelhof on the Brandstätte held a hundred people at a time, standing along the walls and out onto the stairs. The music there was the best amateur music in the city, which in that city meant very good indeed. His son Leopold, a young doctor of law, had been at school with Schubert and had sung in the Prometheus cantata in Watteroth's garden four years before, and he had been feeding Schubert's songs into his father's programmes ever since, one at a time.
On the first of December, with a wet snow coming down on the Brandstätte and the windows steamed from the crowd, a young official named August von Gymnich, who had a good voice and nerve to go with it, stood by the piano and sang Erlkönig. Most of the room had never heard it. They heard the gallop begin, and the father, and the wheedling in the major, and the child's cry going a step higher each time, and the horse stop; and when the last line was spoken rather than sung there was a silence of the kind a hundred people make when none of them wishes to be the first to move. Then they made a great deal of noise. Gymnich sang it again.
Leopold Sonnleithner went to the publishers that week, with Gymnich beside him for weight. He went to Diabelli. He went to Steiner's. He explained what had happened in his father's drawing room, and he was refused, courteously, on account of "the insignificance of the composer and the difficulty of the accompaniments." He came back to the Gundelhof and reported it, and there was a short discussion among the men who had been in the room on the first of December, and it ended in a decision that none of them found remarkable at the time. If the publishers would not engrave the song, they would engrave it themselves.
