This concludes our survey of Schubert's closest friends! (part one is here)
Of course there are many names left out (Vogl, for instance, who was a real mentor for Schubert but too high and mighty to hang out with the gang regularly). Ferdinand Schubert was always a close friend and an important presence in his brother's life; and then there is a great crowd of acquaintances, including Anna Hönig and the Fröhlich sisters, who often joined the group for a bit of music-making (this is the era of Schubertiades, after all.)
This second timeline is messier than the first, since Schubert had already known Kupelwieser for years, Bauernfeld didn't join the group until '25, Spaun returned to Vienna around the same time, and Schober was gone for ages in Breslau; but I decided anyhow to mark 1823 as the beginning of a new era, because it was the year Schubert first got sick, and things were never really the same for him afterwards.
gotta love the letters between Schubert, Schober and Schwind in particular and what they said to one of those about the third sometimes. I get that phrasing in Biedermeier times was different and Schubert used "I kiss you 1000 times" to his father/family as well, but ... the letters between those three are on another level ... fodder for fics if one was so inclined ;)
I think there are quite a few letters by Schwind, also from his later years (which I haven't read), so I don't know if Schubert still features in them. The problem was perhaps that Schwind at some point moved to Munich.
I'm not sure about Baunerfeld's reliabilty (but I might confuse him with the other famous writer who was in one of the circles, Grillparzer). Wasn't he one of the people who claimed Schubert was madly in love with Caroline? ... which erm, I doubt. Not even sure about Therese. But we'll never know for sure. (Personally, I'm definitely in the Schubert was likely gay camp)
Oh, about Schubert's symphonies, I think I had a comment about that at the end of the large ramble, but had to cut it so tumblr would post it at all O_O
From what I read Schubert wasn't famous enough to get the people in charge interested in performing his work professionally. There was a kind of laymen orchestra, but because Schubert had some of his work published, he was 'too' professional for those to play his work. And so Schubert died without ever hearing any of his larger works played. Except perhaps for the religious ones ...
btw. was the Linz circle the one that formed the Unsinnsgesellschaft or was that yet another circle? Though the Linz circle might have been more serious and the Unisinnsgesellschaft, as the name suggests, was more about poking fun at authorities and the likes.
schubert's friends weren't only his life and heart and soul. they are also our main source of information about his life. this is bad. they are not reliable.
the boarding school where schubert had a choir scholarship shared student housing with the university of vienna, and this is where the Linz Circle first met each other. this first friend group was all about self-education and hard work, very German Enlightenment liberalism. (schubert vibed with that until all the founding members sold out and got government jobs.) the group would meet regularly, read literature together, and share their own artistic works, even after student associations were banned.
not pictured here: kenner, a rather puritan founding member who moved back to linz early on; spaun's brother anton and his brother-in-law ottenwalt, central members who weren't super close with schubert; hüttenbrenner's brother josef, who was kind of schubert's secretary; and bruchmann, another of the unruly youths and senn’s best friend, with whose sister schober had a drama-filled secret affair.
this era ended in 1820, with senn's arrest. schubert dumped mayrhofer, who tactfully withdrew from the group. spaun moved back to linz; hüttenbrenner moved back to graz. schober and schubert stayed in vienna, wrote a terrible opera together, and eventually founded a new friend group... stay tuned for the ~Vienna Circle~
looking forward to part 2
I didn't know Anselm Hüttenbrenner was so unreliable. Which is a shame considering that we know of the meeting between Schubert and Beethoven from him.
As for Spaun, I rate his reliabilty about the same as Schindler for Beethoven for opposite reasons. I think Spaun would lie to protect Schubert. Not sure you can count working for the government against him. The government employed a lot of people of a certain statues and Spaun certainly fit. Didn't Mayrhofer work as a censor for example?
he was the Prince of Song but large structures (symphonies etc) weren't his strong suit
he was not successful in his lifetime
he suspected he was going to die young and lived his last few years with death hanging over him
he didn't advocate for himself (too shy and modest) and was not very business-savvy
i infodump about this below the break.
Schubert was relatively popular and well-known in his lifetime... as a song composer. He was recognized as a master of those genres considered 'trivial' - songs, duets, anything that could be played at home or as part of a social activity. He made a decent amount of money from his songs, too, and he was a pretty beloved public figure. Everyone knew him and he knew everybody.
I think it's fair to say that Schubert is best known for elevating these genres out of the trivial and into the 'great'. I've heard a lot of people today praise Schubert for his contribution to the German song form and claim that's where his greatest influence lies. I thought this was true myself until very recently!
But throughout his life, while financial necessity forced him to continue working (and innovating) in popular genres, Schubert was simultaneously trying to make a name for himself as a 'serious' composer, and the pieces he worked in vain to promote - including chamber music, sonatas, and a symphony (yes, a, singular; more on that later) - were equal to anything Beethoven was writing at the time.
But no one knew. It took decades for these pieces to even be discovered, and when they were, people were blown away. The major reason for this is that Beethoven WAS writing things at the time, and publishers didn't have space for new large-scale instrumental works, which never sold that well anyway. Schubert masterpieces got turned down by publishers again and again and almost none got published.... until Beethoven died in 1827.
With Beethoven's death, a space opened for Schubert, and he made the most of it. His great instrumental works began receiving interest for the first time, and he gave his first concert in 1828, which was a massive success. He was poised to become the next famous, great composer, the successor to Beethoven... when he died, suddenly, at age 31. It came as a huge shock to everyone - not least to Schubert himself.*
(*The myth that he died of syphilis seems to have been disproven... he probably did catch the illness in his early 20s, but he recovered, albeit with a weakened immune system. For the rest of his life he was much more frequently ill, and often worried about his health. He was preoccupied with themes of death, but his own took him by surprise. That very month, he'd been on a long hiking tour with his friends to visit Haydn's grave. Two days before he died, he talked enthusiastically with his friend Bauernfeld about the opera they were writing together**, making grand plans for the future. His friends all report that they were shocked to hear of his death.)
After his death, Schubert compositions were gradually published and many were 'discovered' throughout the following decades. This is the reason he's considered a great composer today... but with a catch.
Firstly, Schubert liked to practice. There are a LOT of unfinished pieces in Schubert's repertoire (the so-called 'Unfinished Symphony' is only the most famous.) They weren't unfinished for any tragic reason... actually, Schubert never intended to publish them. Of the great mass of music posthumously 'discovered' and published, only a handful are pieces that Schubert meant to show the world. For example, his C Major Symphony, called the 'Great', is given the number nine. But when advocating it to publishers, Schubert said it was the only symphony he'd written... because it was the only REAL symphony he'd written. The man was still in his 20s; he knew he would write more; he was in no rush.
Schubert knew how good he was, and he knew he had written masterpieces. The works he tried and failed to publish in his lifetime are peerless. Unfortunately, they've gotten bogged down among a lot of early and 'practice' pieces that, posthumously, were hailed as 'lost Schubert masterpieces' by publishers wanting to make a quick buck. Combined with the fact that Schubert's closest friends and most loyal advocators weren't very musical themselves, and therefore tended to value and promote Schubert as a song composer after his death, this led to the ENDURING perception of Schubert as a composer who couldn't handle long forms.
(**'The Count of Equals.' Schubert had collaborated with his friends on operas before, but Bauernfeld was the first one who could actually write (offense very much intended, Schober). 'The Count of Equals' was rejected by the censors, which is how you know it's good (it's very progressive and i'm pretty sure the central love triangle resolves by all three of them getting together). The rejection didn't dissuade Schubert at all and he was very excited about the project up until his death.
This is also related to the myth that Schubert was this shy, modest kid. He was indeed modest, by all accounts! But modesty only means something if you know how good you are; it shouldn't be confused with self-doubt. Even though his friends couldn't match him musically, and didn't always pick up what he was throwing down, he never abandoned them or thought he was too good for them. He wrote an opera with Schober even though Schober couldn't write for shit. He never belittled, either, the song and duet forms that had made him popular; he composed great music within them and he often referred back to them in his large-scale works, too. His first and only concert is well-balanced; he promotes his new string quartet and his spectacular Trio in Eb, a tribute to Beethoven, but surrounds them with songs he knew the public would enjoy. He wasn't pretentious, but he was certainly self-assured. If his friends were his major advocates when he was younger, by his late 20s he had become savvy enough to promote himself, and with success, too!)
some random bits, if I may add
from what I had learned from my research - if one might call it that ... (had to stop at some point to start writing the fic or I'd get stuck in 'need to learn everything' limbo)
- one also has to consider the times in which he wrote
the war with Napoleon left a lot of the noble and wealthy with less money to spare on being patrons of the arts
(Schubert was a good piano player, though not a virtuoso. Still, if he had lived a few decades earlier, at the time when Beethoven was active in the 'piano duel scene' I'm sure his ability to come up with things quickly would have made the rounds. e.g. give him a poem by breakfast and get a new piece of music in the evening event)
- many of Schubert's friends weren't musicians, but there's the infamous quote of "Kanner was?" (Kann er etwas?) as in "Can he do something?" questioning if potential newcomers to the circles of friends had any artistic merit. And at least they needed an understanding of what was going on in the arts, writing and music of the time to be let in.
It also sounds like there were multiple friendship circles of which Schubert was part of over time. Schubertiade as a term wasn't coined immediately.
Also, it appears that Schubert wasn't happy when such meetings were later derailed by people to talk about hunting and when they just went there to eat some Würstl.
- the problem with getting operas published was because a lot of it was based on knowing the right people. e.g. one of the people who was supposed to get Schubert into it then made a blunder (I think it was a relative of Kupplwieser, brother or cousin, who then ran off to have a relationship with someone?! But it kind of prevented that production.)
Schober indeed wasn't really good at anything aside from spending money and reinventing himself every now and then ...
Another libretto that was kind of pushed onto Schubert by some friends (or at least one who was madly in love with the author) and rejected by others of course didn't last long past the premiere.
- on the note of operas, Schubert also seemed to loathe the popularity the Rossini operas and those written in that style. He then wrote on in that style which was his most popular one. But it seems he didn't continue down that line. So he knew what might sell well, but if it wasn't to his liking he didn't do it.
- he could be quite stubborn about his music in that regard. While Schubert has a lot of music suited for chamber music - and at the time that usually meant people playing in private, the levels of musical knowledge might have varied ... some of it could also be difficult and when publishers wanted something simpler Schubert refused to budge.
- Schuppanzigh, a known violinist of his time, started to perform chamber music on stage and that became quite popular. Schubert hoped to sell some of his work this way. And so did Beethoven actually.
- definitely agree that Schubert later advocated for his own music. We know he was in correspondence with publishers in Germany to get his work out there as well.
- he wasn't one who liked to be in the limelight though. At his first and only concert, on the death day of Beethoven, he didn't play himself.
And when he toured with Vogl, he didn't mind so much that Vogl - who had been a well-known singer - was often the one getting celebrated at their performances, and he was seen as the pianist only, not the composer.
- after his death a publisher bought the rights to his music from the family and proceeded to release it over time. This lasted for decades!
By then there was a 'War of Succession' of who would be the successor of Beethoven. Some championed Wagner, but others like Brahms championed Schubert. Which was possible, many years after his death, because new music was still getting published almost as if he were still alive.
I'm not sure he's *just* without shirt in the first one XD
and don't give me ideas :D
for the time Ludwig was already a rascal for being out in summer with his shirt sleeves rolled up. Biedermeier version of ankle pics or something. (though i've recently read about the ankle thing might have been blown out of proportions - in case anyone remembers the foot fetish post)
guy who's listened to 1 classical piece: my favorite composer is mozart
guy who's listened to 100 classical pieces: my favorite composer is Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, creator of Opus Clavicembalisticum, who also restricted the performance of his music
guy who's listened to 1000 classical pieces: my favorite composer is mozart
In this post: I talk about historical RPF ship Mayrhofer/Schubert. See below the cut.
Mayrhofer and Schubert are my one historical RPF guilty pleasure. Approximately 50% of that is the historical context (following text from the article "This soil, a stranger to ideals" by Sílvia Pujalte of Liederabend):
(Also take Mayrhofer's poem "An Franz," printed in full at this link and recited by Julien Prégardien in this YouTube video.)
Approximately 40% is the fault of one (1) Peter Härtling, who wrote the novel Schubert: twelve moments musicaux and imbued his reimagining of their relationship with ambiguous, rather homoerotically charged undertones:
...and the final 10% is the various material I find alluding to Mayrhofer's feelings for Schubert in particular, for example Spaun's account, which reads: "Mayrhofer often said that his life had been illuminated by Schubert's beautiful songs, and that his own poems pleased him most when Schubert had set them to music."
In 1829, Mayrhofer himself wrote: "The cross-currents of circumstances and society, of illness and changed views of life kept us apart later; but what had once been was no longer to be denied its rights. I often had to console Schubert’s worthy father about his son’s future, I dared to prophesy that Franz would surely win through, nay, that a later world would give him his due, slowly though it came to him at first. While we lived together, our idiosyncrasies could not but show themselves; we were both richly endowed in that respect, and the consequences could not fail to appear. We teased each other in many different ways and turned our sharp edges on each other to our mutual amusement and pleasure. His gladsome and comfortable sensuousness and my introspective nature were thus thrown into higher relief and gave rise to names we called each other accordingly, as though we were playing parts assigned to us."
We can't say whether there was really anything between them — Schubert's life is mysterious, up to and including his relationships and inclinations — but it has all the makings of tragically doomed pining from Mayrhofer, at least, so it's fun to think about the what-ifs.
Finally, look at this sketch of them by Martha Griebler and the tenderness between friends (Schubert listening very attentively). Man, I love them.
It's important to note that this article has more than a few inaccuracies (namely, "Schuore" instead of "Schwind" and putting Mayrhofer's attempt to jump into the Danube before Schubert's death; in all other biographies, he does so in 1831)... but it was written in 1867, so perhaps we can forgive it.
The following excerpts are from Rita Steblin's "Schubert's Problematic Relationship with Johann Mayrhofer: New Documentary Evidence," published in Essays on Music and Culture in Honor of Herbert Kellman (2001):
Josef von Gahy was often witness to the following scene: Mayrhofer would go after Schubert with a stick, crying in Upper Austrian dialect "Was halt mich denn ab, du kloaner Raker" [What's stopping me from beating you up, you little rake] to which Schubert would reply "Waldl, Waldl, wilder Verfasser" [Waldl, Waldl, wild author]. [...] With the new knowledge of Schubert being associated with a stick in material written for the "Unsinngesellschaft," the anecdote about Mayrhofer attacking the composer with a stick (the poet now being the stern teacher?) takes on a new meaning. Perhaps the role Schubert played in these scenes with Mayrhofer was that of "Don Giovanni," the composer's assigned role in [the Nonsense Society]. This would correspond with Mayrhofer's description of Schubert as being "sensuous" and no doubt reflected on the poet's disapproval of Schubert's womanizing.
Poor Schubert.
In April 1822, shortly after this review appeared, Schubert set three poems from the Heliopolis cycle (D 752-754), the first of which, "Nachtviolen," departs substantially from Mayrhofer's text. For example, he omitted line 9: "Ja so fesselt ihr den Dichter" [Just so you captivate the poet] and changed the word "sein" [his] to "mein" [my] in line 11: "Trefet ihr sein treues Herz" [you strike his loyal heart]. Obviously Schubert disregarded the reviewer's reservation about making changes to the poem. Gramit finds these alterations very striking: "Schubert quite literally eliminates the poet ('der Dichter' of line 9) from the text and substitutes 'my loyal heart' for 'his'." Gramit hypothesizes further that "the altered 'Nachtviolen' may be one of Schubert's responses to his altered relationship with Mayrhofer."
Ouch!
From Josef von Spaun:
Mayrhofer often said that his life had been illuminated by Schubert's beautiful songs, and that his own poems pleased him most when Schubert had set them to music.
From Edward von Bauernfeld:
Only music could at times release him from his mute stiffness,
And his whole being was transfigured when he heard the songs of his Schubert.
For love, he allowed his friend to entice him into society.
When we played tricks, I saw him crouching mutely there in the corner.
One evening, when Schubert indulged in improvisation,
Deep emotion overcame the poet-mummy there in the corner.
The man's shrunken body seemed to expand great;
Hot tears of sorrow ran down his thin cheeks.
From Mayrhofer himself:
For me Franz Schubert was and remains a genius who faithfully accompanies me through life with appropriate melodies, agitated or quiet, changeable and enigmatic, gloomy or bright as it is.
lots of interesting findings :)
I'll have to read the full article because I'm curious about the wreath. I only ever saw that mentioned in the memories of Breuning's son, Breuning being a lifelong friend of Beethoven and his son getting to know him during Beethoven's last years.
When Beethoven and Schubert were exhumed briefly young Breuning had Beethoven's skull for a while and he did observe the remains of Schubert and mentioned what was left of a flower crown/wreath. And I loved the image of someone caring enough about Schubert to adorn him with it.
on teeny tiny bit:
Racker, especially the term 'kleiner Racker' (kloaner is what it would sound like written in dialect), means a little rascal,
or also jokingly towards a grown person for being a bit mischievous, but one acknowledges it's in good humour, I'd say
also a bit of a general thing: as a native german speaker I have to say that e.g. Rita Steblin and also Maynard Solomon sometimes mistranslate words. Something to keep in mind because both can get quite deep into interpretations and seem to have had beef with one another over these things ...
“I know of no more beautiful occupation than making music.”— Franz Schubert
There are some quotes that feel like they were written to impress, and others that feel like they were simply lived. This one from Franz Schubert belongs to the second kind. It doesn’t try to explain music or elevate it into something abstract. It just states a truth that anyone who has ever sat with an instrument already knows.
Schubert’s world was not built on grand gestures. It lived in…
if you have characters with implied but undiagnosed mental health issues and you can send them to therapy and it improves their lives though ...
yeah, it's mundane and modern day fluff, but dammit they deserve a break (and a blanket, hot coco and cuddling the love of their lives)
ok, but this reminds me of when I merged two sketches by Klöber based on photos of the originals @freyalor had taken at the Beethovenhaus Bonn
Except he was clenching the sheets in his hand a lot more :D
