The Dark Year

"The circumstances of my health still do not permit me to leave the house." He wrote that on the last day of February 1823, to Ignaz von Mosel, a court official with a hand in the theatres, in a letter that was otherwise about business: a word of introduction he hoped for, an opera he hoped to place. The sentence sits in the middle of the page and is not dwelt on. He was twenty-six, and he had been indoors for some weeks.

The rooms in the Spiegelgasse in late winter were the same rooms as before. The piano stood where it had stood, Schober's furniture around it, the reading circle's chairs still pushed back against the wall from the last evening. Outside, the snow in the lane had gone to grey slush along the walls, and the light that came in over the roofs was the thin, level light of a Vienna February, which comes into a room like a visitor who has already decided not to stay.

On the table were the papers of the autumn, the symphony's two movements among them, and in the drawer were the things that were finished. He worked in the mornings as he always had, in shirt and trousers, and in the afternoons, when he would ordinarily have walked out to a coffee-house or to Schwind's, he stayed where he was.

Schwind came instead, up the stairs two at a time with the news of the town, and sat on the end of the sofa and talked until it was dark. Josef Hüttenbrenner came with copies to be checked. The others came on the reading evenings, and the piano was played, and when they had gone the rooms were as they had been.

Money had been settled that month in a way that seemed sensible at the time. Diabelli, who had sold the first seven songs on commission and made a good thing of them, offered to buy the rights outright — the first seven opus numbers and three more besides, the Variations dedicated to Beethoven among them — and Schubert took about eight hundred florins for the lot, which seemed a great deal at the time, and which Diabelli's firm would recover many times over. It is the one financial mistake the record holds against him, and it was made in a month when a man shut up in his rooms might be forgiven for wanting a sum he could count on the table.

The spring came in late and wet. In April he finished a comic opera in one act, Die Verschworenen — the Conspirators — a bright thing about wives who swear off their crusading husbands until the husbands swear off war, and the censor, who did not care for the word conspirators in any connection whatever, sent it back with a new title, Der häusliche Krieg, Domestic Warfare, which is a worse title and a truer one. And on the eighth of May, on a sheet by itself, he wrote a poem — a prayer in verse, that his life lay in the dust — and put it away with the rest.

Then, in the same month, he took up a book of poems by a Dessau schoolmaster named Wilhelm Müller, published two years before, and began to set them. They told a story. A young journeyman miller sets out on the road; a brook keeps him company and leads him to a mill; the miller has a daughter; there is a green ribbon, a lute on the wall, a hunter in green who comes down from the hills; and at the end the brook sings the young man to sleep. Twenty of the poems would be songs by November. The first of them were written in the Spiegelgasse in May, with the window open at last, before he had any idea how far the road would go.

That summer he was for some weeks a patient in the great General Hospital on the Alser road — two thousand beds, the most modern in Europe, and no place anyone wished to be. The friends said that some of the miller's songs were written there. There were pains that came and went. His hair was shorn, and when he came out he wore a wig until his own grew back. Kupelwieser, writing to Schober in late July, put it in one line: "At Collin's yesterday I heard that Schubert was ill."

What he said himself was a thousand pages of opera.

On the twenty-fifth of May he began Fierrabras, a grand heroic opera in three acts on a libretto by Josef Kupelwieser, the painter's brother: Charlemagne, a Moorish prince, a captive princess, a siege, a tower, a great deal of marching. The first act was scored by the last day of May. The second was scored by the fifth of June. That is a full orchestral act, with choruses, in under a week, and then another in under a week, by a man who could not go out. The third act took longer, because the summer intervened, but the score is dated complete on the second of October: an overture and twenty-three numbers, close on a thousand pages in his small quick hand, the biggest single thing he ever wrote.

It was written for the Kärntnertortheater, the Court Opera, and the Court Opera in 1823 was let to an Italian named Barbaja who had brought Rossini to Vienna and found that Vienna wanted nothing else. There was no room in his house for a German heroic opera by a young man known for songs, and there never would be, and by the autumn everyone concerned seems to have known it. The libretto had been passed by the censor in August, and that was as far as it went. Fierrabras was never staged in his lifetime. He tied it up and put it away with the others.

Weber came to Vienna that autumn for his own new opera, Euryanthe, which was given at the Kärntnertor on the twenty-fifth of October and did not go well, and the story is told that Schubert, asked what he thought, said what he thought, and Weber answered that the first puppies and the first operas are always drowned. If it happened, both men were tired and both had cause; Weber tried, in Dresden, to get Alfonso und Estrella on to a stage, which is the fact that matters.

In between the second act and the third, at the end of July, he got out of Vienna. Vogl took him.

They went up the Danube to Linz, where the Spauns' house was open and Josef himself was at his desk in the town, and where the local Musikverein, not to be outdone by Graz, made him an honorary member too; and then on to Steyr, Vogl's own town, where the two rivers meet under the mountains and where he had been happy four summers before. Vogl was fifty-five that August, retired from the stage two years, gouty and grand and short of patience, and he had decided that Schubert was to be got well, and went about it as he went about a role, by taking charge of it. He saw that the younger man ate. He saw that he walked, and how far. He read Epictetus aloud in the evenings and expected to be listened to, and if the patient's attention wandered he said so, as if correcting a tenor who had come in early.

On the fourteenth of August Schubert wrote to Schober from Steyr. "I am fairly well. Whether I shall ever be quite well again I am inclined to doubt." Then he went on to other matters, in the same paragraph, as he always did.

It was a fine dry August in the Enns valley that year, and there were evenings on the square at Paumgartner's, with the cello brought out and the old man's friends round the table as they had been in the year of the quintet, and there were the miller's songs, which Vogl had by now and sang in the big voice that was past its best and did not need to be at its best for this.

Picture the two of them on the bank below the town, where the Steyr comes in green and fast over stones: the tall old singer with his stick, the short young man with a wig he had not yet got used to, saying very little, and the water going past them and on to the Danube with the sound that is in the second song of the cycle, and that he had written before he ever came here.

Vogl, who had opinions on everything, had opinions on the songs, and gave them; Schubert, who had none he cared to state, changed nothing.

They went back up the hill to supper. By the middle of September the two of them were on the road home, and there was a third act waiting.

By November the cycle was done, and he dedicated it, when it came to be printed, to Karl von Schönstein — the baritone from Zseliz, who had come to the songs through the Esterházy household and sang them, Leopold Sonnleithner thought, better than anyone. It is called Die schöne Müllerin, the Fair Maid of the Mill, and it is the first song cycle of its kind: twenty songs that carry one story from the first bar to the last, written across the year this chapter describes.

Here is what one hears. Das Wandern — Wandering — is the journeyman's own tune, a walking song any apprentice could whistle, and under it, in the piano, the mill-wheel turns and the water drives it, round and round, without a pause, from the first note to the last.

Wohin? — Whither? — is the brook itself: a running figure in the right hand that never stops, over which the young man asks the water where it is taking him and gets no answer but the running.

Ungeduld — Impatience — is the one everyone knows the end of, "Dein ist mein Herz," Thine is my heart, flung out at the end of every verse, four times over, at the top of the voice, over a piano that cannot keep still.

There is a song about the green ribbon that fades on the wall, and a song in which the hunter comes down from the hills in his green coat and everything changes colour.

There is Trockne Blumen — Withered Flowers — in which the piano does almost nothing, a slow tread of chords under a voice that has run out of anything to hope, until the very end, when it lifts, once, into the major, for a spring that the young man will not see.

And then the brook sings. Des Baches Wiegenlied, the Brook's Lullaby, is the last song, and the longest. The piano rocks, slowly, on two chords, low in the instrument, and keeps to them. The brook tells the young man to rest: "Gute Ruh, gute Ruh, tu die Augen zu" — good rest, good rest, close your eyes. It tells him the wandering is over and the water will make his bed. It tells the girl to keep off the mill-bridge. It tells the hunter's horn that it will roar it down. It tells the little blue flowers not to look in. It goes on rocking, verse after verse, and the tune does not change, and at the end it says good night, and that the moon is up and the mist is going, and that the sky above is very wide; and the piano goes on a little way by itself, and stops.

The friends were leaving. Schober had gone to Breslau to try himself as an actor. Spaun was at his desk in Linz. In November Kupelwieser, who had drawn him at Atzenbrugg in the cart, set off for Rome to study, as painters did, and would be away for years. The reading circle went on meeting without them, and Schubert, writing to Schober on the thirtieth of November, told him what it had come to: the wrong people had got in — beer-drinkers and sausage-eaters, he called them — and he was not sure how long he would keep going. That month he left the Spiegelgasse. The letter is not a sad one. It is a cross one, which is different.

Then, in December, the theatre wanted him after all — the other theatre. The Theater an der Wien, the big suburban house across the river that Schikaneder had put up to replace the house where Die Zauberflöte was first played, and where they put on anything with a mechanical dragon in it, had taken a play by Helmina von Chézy, who had written the libretto of Euryanthe, and needed music for it: an overture, entr'actes between the acts, a romance for a singer, choruses for shepherds and hunters and spirits, two ballets. The play was called Rosamunde, Fürstin von Zypern — Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus. He wrote the music in five days. For the overture he took one he had by him. There was one rehearsal, of two hours, with the orchestra, which is not long for an overture, three entr'actes, two ballets, three choruses and a romance, and then, on the twentieth of December 1823, the curtain went up.

The play was bad. Nobody who saw it seems to have disagreed about that: a princess brought up by shepherds, a wicked regent, a poisoned letter, a great deal of speech, delivered by a company that had had about as long to learn it as the orchestra had had to learn the music.

But the overture was demanded twice before the play could begin, and the composer was called out on to the stage, blinking in the lamps, and what he had written between the acts was heard by that house with a kind of attention the play never got.

The entr'acte after the third act begins with the strings alone, a tune of such plainness that a listener may not believe, the first time, that it is going anywhere — a tune that walks, and turns, and walks back — and it does not need to go anywhere, it only needs to be played twice, and by the second time the house is quiet.

The shepherds' music is for clarinets and bassoons and horns, no strings at all, and it sounds like a village band heard across a valley, in tune for once and in no hurry.

Between the pieces the play went on, and the audience waited for it to stop. The romance was sung by a contralto, alone, with the full moon in the words and very little in the accompaniment.

None of it saved the play. It was given once more, the next night, and withdrawn. The orchestral parts, copied for two performances, were gathered up and tied in a bundle and put away, where they would stay for forty-four years.

On Christmas Eve Moritz von Schwind sat down to write to Schober in Breslau, and reported on everyone. He was nineteen, and his letters went at the speed he talked, which was faster than most people could listen. Schubert, he wrote, "will soon be going about with his own hair again."