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Franz Schubert

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Performers and composers

   Franz Schubert
   Franz Schubert

   Franz Peter Schubert ( January 31, 1797 – November 19, 1828) was an
   Austrian composer. He wrote some 600 Lieder, seven completed
   symphonies, the famous " Unfinished Symphony", liturgical music,
   operas, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. He is
   particularly noted for his genius for original melodic and harmonic
   writing.

   While Schubert had a close circle of friends and associates who admired
   his work (including his teacher Antonio Salieri, and the prominent
   singer Johann Michael Vogl), wider appreciation of his music during his
   lifetime was limited at best. He was never able to secure adequate
   permanent employment, and for most of his career he relied on the
   support of friends and family. Interest in Schubert's work increased
   dramatically following his death.

Biography

Early life and education

   Schubert was born in Vienna, Austria on January 31st 1797. His father
   Franz Theodor Florian, the son of a Moravian peasant, was a parish
   schoolmaster; his mother Elizabeth Vietz was the daughter of a Silesian
   master locksmith, and had also been a housemaid for a Viennese family
   prior to her marriage. Of the Schuberts' fifteen children (one
   illegitimate child was born in 1789), ten died in infancy; only four
   survived. Their father Franz Theodor was a well-known teacher, and his
   school on the Himmelpfortgrund was well attended. He was not a famous
   musician, but he taught his son what he could of music.

   At the age of five, Schubert began receiving regular instruction from
   his father and a year later was enrolled at the Himmelpfortgrund
   school. His formal musical education also began around the same time.
   His father continued to teach him the rudiments of the violin. At seven
   Schubert was placed under the instruction of Michael Holzer. Holzer's
   lessons seem to have mainly consisted of conversations and expressions
   of admiration and the boy gained more from his acquaintance with a
   friendly joiner's apprentice who used to take him to a neighboring
   pianoforte warehouse where he was given the opportunity to practice on
   better instruments. The unsatisfactory nature of Schubert's early
   training was even more pronounced during his time given that composers
   could expect little chance of success unless they were also able to
   appeal to the public as performers. To this end, Schubert's meager
   musical education was never entirely sufficient.

   In October 1808, he was received as a pupil at the Stadtkonvikt
   (Imperial religious boarding school) through a choir scholarship. It
   was at the Stadtkonvikt that Schubert was introduced to the overtures
   and symphonies of Mozart. His exposure to these pieces as well as
   various lighter compositions combined with his occasional visits to the
   opera set the foundation for his greater musical knowledge.

   Meanwhile, his genius was already beginning to show itself in his
   compositions. Antonio Salieri, a leading composer of the period, became
   aware of the talented young man and decided to train him in musical
   composition and music theory. Schubert's early essay in chamber music
   is noticeable, since we learn that at the time a regular quartet-party
   was established at his home "on Sundays and holidays," in which his two
   brothers played the violin, his father the cello and Franz himself the
   viola. It was the first germ of that amateur orchestra for which, in
   later years, many of his compositions were written. During the
   remainder of his stay at the Stadtkonvikt he wrote a good deal more
   chamber music, several songs, some miscellaneous pieces for the
   pianoforte and, among his more ambitious efforts, a Kyrie (D.31) and
   Salve Regina (D.27), an octet for wind instruments (D.72/72a) - said to
   commemorate the death of his mother, which took place in 1812 - a
   cantata (D.110), words and music, for his father's name-day in 1813,
   and the closing work of his school-life, his first symphony (D.82).

Teacher at his father's school

   At the end of 1813 he left the Stadtkonvikt and entered his father's
   school as teacher of the lowest class. In the meantime, his father
   remarried, this time to Anna Kleyenboeck, the daughter of a silk dealer
   from the suburb Gumpendorf. For over two years the young man endured
   the drudgery of the work, which he performed with very indifferent
   success. There were, however, other interests to compensate. He
   received private lessons in composition from Salieri, who did more for
   Schubert’s training than any of his other teachers.

Supported by friends

   As 1815 was the most prolific period of Schubert's life, 1816 saw the
   first real change in his fortunes. Somewhere about the turn of the year
   Spaun surprised him in the composition of Erlkönig (D.328, published as
   Op.1) — Goethe's poem propped among a heap of exercise books, and the
   boy at white-heat of inspiration "hurling" the notes on the
   music-paper. A few weeks later Franz von Schober, a student of good
   family and some means, who had heard some of Schubert's songs at
   Spaun's house, came to pay a visit to the composer and proposed to
   carry him off from school-life and give him freedom to practice his art
   in peace. The proposal was particularly opportune, for Schubert had
   just made an unsuccessful application for the post of Kapellmeister at
   Laibach (the German name for Ljubljana), and was feeling more acutely
   than ever the slavery of the classroom. His father's consent was
   readily given, and before the end of the spring he was installed as a
   guest in Schober's lodgings. For a time he attempted to increase the
   household resources by giving music lessons, but they were soon
   abandoned, and he devoted himself to composition. "I write all day," he
   said later to an inquiring visitor, "and when I have finished one piece
   I begin another."

   All this time his circle of friends was steadily widening. Mayrhofer
   introduced him to Johann Michael Vogl, a famous baritone, who did him
   good service by performing his songs in the salons of Vienna; Anselm
   Hüttenbrenner and his brother Joseph ranged themselves among his most
   devoted admirers; Joseph von Gahy, an excellent pianist, played his
   sonatas and fantasias; the Sonnleithners, a burgher family whose eldest
   son had been at the Stadtkonvikt, gave him free access to their home,
   and organized in his honour musical parties which soon assumed the name
   of Schubertiaden. The material needs of life were supplied without much
   difficulty. No doubt Schubert was entirely penniless, for he had given
   up teaching, he could earn nothing by public performance, and, as yet,
   no publisher would take his music at a gift; but his friends came to
   his aid with true Bohemian generosity-- one found him lodging, another
   found him appliances, they took their meals together and the man who
   had any money paid the score. Schubert was always the leader of the
   party, but more often than not, was penniless. Though he was known by
   half a dozen affectionate nicknames, the most characteristic was kann
   er 'was? ("Is he able?") or more colloquially, "Can he pay?" (for the
   food and drink), his usual question when a new acquaintance was
   introduced. Another nickname was "The Little Mushroom" as Schubert was
   only five feet, one and one-half inches tall, and tended to corpulence.

   The compositions of 1820 are remarkable, and show a marked advance in
   development and maturity of style. The unfinished oratorio "Lazarus"
   (D.689) was begun in February; later followed, amid a number of smaller
   works, by the 23rd Psalm (D.706), the Gesang der Geister (D.705/714),
   the Quartettsatz in C minor (D.703), and the "Wanderer Fantasy" for
   piano (D.760). But of almost more biographical interest is the fact
   that in this year two of Schubert's operas appeared at the Kärntnerthor
   Theatre, Die Zwillingsbrüder (D.647) on June 14, and Die Zauberharfe
   (D.644) on August 19. Hitherto his larger compositions (apart from
   Masses) had been restricted to the amateur orchestra at the Gundelhof,
   a society which grew out of the quartet-parties at his home. Now he
   began to assume a more prominent position and address a wider public.
   Still, however, publishers remained obstinately aloof, and it was not
   until his friend Vogl had sung Erlkönig at a concert (Feb. 8, 1821)
   that Anton Diabelli hesitatingly agreed to print some of his works on
   commission. The first seven opus numbers (all songs) appeared on these
   terms; then the commission ceased, and he began to receive the meagre
   pittances which were all that the great publishing houses ever accorded
   to him. Much has been written about the neglect from which he suffered
   during his lifetime. It was not the fault of his friends, it was only
   indirectly the fault of the Viennese public; the persons most to blame
   were the cautious intermediaries who stinted and hindered him from
   publication.

   The production of his two dramatic pieces turned Schubert's attention
   more firmly than ever in the direction of the stage; and towards the
   end of 1821 he set himself on a course which for nearly three years
   brought him continuous mortification and disappointment. Alfonso und
   Estrella was refused, and so was Fierabras (D.796); Die Verschworenen
   (D.787) was prohibited by the censor (apparently on the ground of its
   title); Rosamunde (D.797) was withdrawn after two nights, owing to the
   poor quality of its libretto. Of these works the two former are written
   on a scale which would make their performances exceedingly difficult
   (Fierabras, for instance, contains over 1,000 pages of manuscript
   score), but Die Verschworenen is a bright attractive comedy, and
   Rosamunde contains some of the most charming music that Schubert ever
   composed. In 1822 he made the acquaintance both of Weber and of
   Beethoven, but little came of it in either case, though Beethoven
   cordially acknowledged his genius, the quote attributed to Beethoven
   being: "Truly, the spark of divine genius resides in this Schubert!"
   Schober was away from Vienna; new friends appeared of a less desirable
   character; on the whole these were the darkest years of his life.

   In 1994 musicologist Rita Steblin discovered Schubert's brother Karl's
   marriage petition on the attic floor of the Lichtental church. The
   composer's own wish to marry Therese Grob was hindered by Metternich's
   harsh marriage consent law of 1815, as Schubert's heart-rending cry in
   his diary of September 1816 makes clear.

Last years and masterworks

   In 1823 appeared Schubert's first song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin
   (D.795), after poems by Wilhelm Müller. This work, together with the
   later cycle " Winterreise" (D.911; also written to texts of Müller) is
   widely considered one of the pinnacles of Schubert's work and of the
   German Lied in general.

   In the spring of 1824 he wrote the Octet in F (D.803), "A Sketch for a
   Grand Symphony"; and in the summer went back to Želiezovce, when he
   became attracted by Hungarian idiom, and wrote the Divertissement a
   l'Hongroise (D.818) and the String Quartet in A minor (D.804). He held
   a hopeless passion for his pupil Countess Karoline Eszterházy; but
   whatever may be said about this romance, its details are not presently
   known.

   Despite his preoccupation with the stage and later with his official
   duties, he found time during these years for a good deal of
   miscellaneous composition. The Mass in A flat (D.678) was completed and
   the exquisite "Unfinished Symphony" ( Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D.759)
   begun in 1822. The question of why the symphony was "unfinished" has
   been debated endlessly and is still unresolved. To 1824, beside the
   works mentioned above, belong the variations for flute and piano on
   Trockne Blumen, from the cycle Die schöne Müllerin. There is also a
   sonata for piano and arpeggione (D.821). This music is nowadays usually
   played by either cello or viola and piano, although a number of other
   arrangements have been made.

   The mishaps of the recent years were compensated by the prosperity and
   happiness of 1825. Publication had been moving more rapidly; the stress
   of poverty was for a time lightened; in the summer there was a pleasant
   holiday in Upper Austria, where Schubert was welcomed with enthusiasm.
   It was during this tour that he produced his "Songs from Sir Walter
   Scott". This cycle contains his famous and beloved Ellens dritter
   Gesang (D.839). This is today more popularly, though mistakenly,
   referred to as "Schubert's Ave Maria"; while he had set it to Adam
   Storck's German translation of Scott's hymn from The Lady of the Lake
   that happens to open with the greeting Ave Maria and also has it for
   its refrain, subsequently the entire Scott/Storck text in Schubert's
   song came to be substituted with the complete Latin text of the
   traditional Ave Maria prayer; and it is in this adaptation that this
   song of Schubert's is commonly sung today. During this time he also
   wrote the Piano Sonata in A minor (D.845, Op. 42) and the Symphony No.
   9 (D.944), which is believed to have been completed the following year,
   in 1826.

   From 1826 to 1828 Schubert resided continuously in Vienna, except for a
   brief visit to Graz in 1827. The history of his life during these three
   years is little more than a record of his compositions. The only events
   worth notice are that in 1826 he dedicated a symphony to the
   Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and received an honorarium in return. In
   the spring of 1828 he gave, for the first and only time in his career,
   a public concert of his own works which was very well received. But the
   compositions themselves are a sufficient biography. The String Quartet
   in D minor (D.810), with the variations on Death and the Maiden, was
   written during the winter of 1825-1826, and first played on January 25,
   1826. Later in the year came the String Quartet in G major, the
   "Rondeau brilliant" for piano and violin (D.895, Op.70), and the Piano
   Sonata in G (D.894, Op.78) (first published under the title "Fantasia
   in G"). To these should be added the three Shakespearian songs, of
   which "Hark! Hark! the Lark" (D.889) and "Who is Sylvia?" (D.891) were
   allegedly written on the same day, the former at a tavern where he
   broke his afternoon's walk, the latter on his return to his lodging in
   the evening.

   In 1827 Schubert wrote the song cycle Winterreise (D.911), a colossal
   peak of the art of art-song, the Fantasia for piano and violin in C
   (D.934), and the two piano trios (B flat, D.898; and E flat, D.929): in
   1828 the Song of Miriam, the Mass in E-flat (D.950), the Tantum Ergo
   (D.962) in the same key, the String Quintet in C (D.956), the second
   Benedictus to the Mass in C, the last three piano sonatas, and the
   collection of songs published posthumously under the fanciful name of
   Schwanengesang ("Swan-song", D.957), which whilst not a true song
   cycle, retains a unity of style amongst the individual songs, touching
   unwonted depths of tragedy and the morbidly supernatural. Six of these
   are to words by Heinrich Heine, whose Buch der Lieder appeared in the
   autumn. The Symphony No. 9 (D.944) is dated 1828, and many modern
   Schubert scholars (including Brian Newbould) believe that this
   symphony, written in 1825-6, was revised for performance in 1828 (a
   fairly unusual practice for Schubert, for whom publication, let alone
   performance, was rarely contemplated for many of his larger-scale works
   during his lifetime). In the last weeks of his life he began to sketch
   three movements for a new Symphony in D (D.936A).

   The works of his last two years reveal a composer increasingly
   meditating on the darker side of the human psyche and human
   relationships, and with a deeper sense of spiritual awareness and
   conception of the 'beyond', reaching extraordinary depths in several
   chillingly dark songs of this period, especially in the larger cycles,
   (the song Der Doppelgaenger reaching an extraordinary climax, conveying
   madness at the realization of rejection and imminent death, and yet
   able to touch repose and communion with the infinite in the almost
   timeless ebb and flow of the String Quintet). Schubert expressed the
   wish, were he to survive his final illness, to further develop his
   knowledge of harmony and counterpoint.

Death

   Schubert's grave in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna.
   Schubert's grave in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna.

   In the midst of this creative activity, his health deteriorated. He had
   battled syphilis since 1822. The final illness may have been typhoid
   fever, though other causes have been proposed; some of his final
   symptoms match those of mercury poisoning (mercury was a common
   treatment for syphilis in the early 19th century). At any rate,
   insufficient evidence remains to make a definitive diagnosis. His
   solace in his final illness was reading, and he had become a passionate
   fan of the writings of James Fenimore Cooper. He died aged 31 on
   Wednesday November 19, 1828 at the apartment of his brother Ferdinand
   in Vienna. At 3pm that afternoon "someone observed that he had ceased
   to breathe." By his own request, he was buried next to Beethoven, whom
   he had adored all his life, in the village cemetery of Währing. In
   1888, both Schubert's and Beethoven's graves were moved to the
   Zentralfriedhof, where they can now be found next to those of Johann
   Strauss II and Johannes Brahms.

   In 1872, a memorial to Franz Schubert was erected in Vienna's
   Stadtpark.

Music

   Schubert composed music for a wide range of forces and various genres
   including opera, liturgical music, chamber and solo piano music.

   While he was clearly influenced by the Classical sonata forms of Mozart
   and Beethoven (his early works, among them notably the 5th Symphony,
   are particularly Mozartian), his formal structures and his developments
   tend to give the impression more of melodic development than of
   harmonic drama. This sometimes lends them a discursive style: his music
   was described by Robert Schumann as running to "heavenly lengths". His
   innovations in the Classical style include the earliest examples of
   sonata form in which the exposition ends in the subdominant rather than
   the dominant (as in the last movement of the Trout Quintet).

   He also expanded the range and emotional expression of the Lied and the
   song cycle.

Posthumous history of Schubert's music

   Some of his smaller pieces were printed shortly after his death, but
   the more valuable seem to have been regarded by the publishers as waste
   paper. In 1838 Robert Schumann, on a visit to Vienna, found the dusty
   manuscript of the C major symphony (the "Great", D.944) and took it
   back to Leipzig, where it was performed by Felix Mendelssohn and
   celebrated in the Neue Zeitschrift. There continues to be some
   controversy over the numbering of this symphony, with German-speaking
   scholars numbering it as symphony No. 7, the revised Deutsch catalogue
   (the standard catalogue of Schubert's works, compiled by Otto Erich
   Deutsch) listing it as No. 8, and English-speaking scholars listing it
   as No. 9.

   50 of his songs were transcribed for piano and then popularized by
   Franz Liszt.

   The most important step towards the recovery of the neglected works was
   the journey to Vienna which Sir George Grove (of " Grove's Dictionary
   of Music and Musicians" fame) and Sir Arthur Sullivan made in the
   autumn of 1867. The travellers rescued from oblivion seven symphonies,
   the Rosamunde incidental music, some of the Masses and operas, some of
   the chamber works, and a vast quantity of miscellaneous pieces and
   songs. This led to more widespread public interest in Schubert's work.

   Another controversy, which originated with Grove and Sullivan and
   continued for many years, surrounded the "lost" symphony. Immediately
   before Schubert's death, his friend Eduard von Bauernfeld recorded the
   existence of an additional symphony, dated 1828 (although this does not
   necessarily indicate the year of composition) named the "Letzte" or
   "Last" symphony. It has been more or less accepted by musicologists
   that the "Last" symphony refers to a sketch in D major (D.936A),
   discovered by Ernst Hilmar in the 1970s and eventually realised by
   Brian Newbould as the Tenth Symphony.

   Franz Liszt declared Schubert to be "the most poetic musician who has
   ever lived". Schubert's compositional style progressed rapidly
   throughout his short life, and he left many stunning masterpieces when
   he died, at 31. Chief sonic characteristics include a kind of spent
   resignation, ineffably deep sadness, self-consciously determined
   agitation, heartache (from striking key modulations and groundbreaking
   voicings), and a diluted intensity that, while lengthy and exhausting,
   is very moving both during its procedures and at the end. It is hard to
   imagine what magnificent music might have come from Schubert had he
   lived a normal lifetime. This is perhaps best expressed in the epitaph
   on his tombstone written by the poet Franz Grillparzer: "Here music has
   buried a treasure—but even fairer hopes".

   Schubert's Piano Trio in E Flat was used throughout the Stanley Kubrick
   film, Barry Lyndon.
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