By Albrecht Selge
A pupil at a Bonn grammar school where I was presenting my novel »Beethoven« recently asked me me whether Beethoven was my favourite composer. And much as I love Beethoven's music, especially his late works, I hesitated for a moment before answering that if I had to choose a single favourite composer, it would be Franz Schubert. I noticed that the German teacher sitting in the second row was nodding in agreement, apparently prompted by a similar level of intuition. Where does this unequivocal love of Schubert stem from? Is it a product of a bygone era, the cliché of revelling in music and wine? Or is it just the opposite?
Many works from the last four years, in particular, of Schubert's brief life (1797–1828) manage to move us so deeply every time we listen to them that the level of emotion is close to unbearable. One example is the composer's final string quartet, written three years before his death and numbered D 887 in the Deutsch catalogue. It is set in G major, but what does that really mean in this case? At the very beginning of the score, a rising G major chord suddenly switches abruptly to G minor. Nothing could be simpler, really, yet it knocks the stuffing out of the listener, pulling the proverbial carpet out from under his feet. This opening movement is marked Allegro molto moderato, which is actually quite misleading in terms of the feelings it elicits. As is so often the case in Schubert's music, the most touching or most outrageous moments have the label »Moderato« attached to them. In the quartet in G major or minor, the music continues to plunge into the abyss: sharp contrasts sweep away the Un poco moto that opens the second movement. The endless tenderness of the Mittelländler amidst the heavy shivering attacks of the outer scherzo sections reminds one of the literally scary Three Piano Pieces D 946, which Schubert wrote in the last year of his life. And the finale is one unbroken, gallopping chase. Like quite a few of his most important compositions, this »most extreme of Schubert's instrumental works« (Karl Böhmer) was underestimated for a long time. Even in 1871, nearly 50 years after the composer's death, a reviewer described it in the venerable Leipzig Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung in a burst of orthodox Classicism as »wild, colourful and without form«, criticising the »profligate use of such superficial mannerisms as the so-called tremolo. This is something Schubert uses in some of his songs too, continually switching to and fro between the major and the minor at the same pitch, and it occurs here ad nauseam; one of the four movements even ends with this senseless phrase«.
As listeners, we can happily leave such theoretical explanations to the musicologists and focus on our own feelings. Anyone who knows Schubert's »Winterreise« will recall tears shed upon first hearing the overwhelming change from minor to major »at the same pitch« in the opening song »Gute Nacht« when the forlorn lover finds peace in his dreams. Or at a different pitch in the next phase of reality loss, when in »Der Lindenbaum« (no. 5) Schubert first confronts us with a song in a major key – and this captivatingly beautiful major makes everything even sadder.
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HOUSE OF THE THREE LASSES – OR THE THREE LADS?
The consummate bleakness of »Winterreise« is rounded off not only by the utter sadness of the final song, the ghostly »Der Leiermann«, but also by the biographic detail that Schubert was still working on corrections to the score on his deathbed in November 1828. In recent times, the music's enormous emotional impact has repeatedly prompted scholars to look for – or rather, to invent – an equally enormous biography for the composer. And it's obvious what the story needs to revolve around: what role did love play in the life of a composer who wrote so poignantly about love, or about its absence and its utter, fatal loss? But even in Beethoven's case, latter-day attempts to draw conclusions about the composer's love life have their limitations, despite his fairly well-documented emotional life and (hetero)sexual inclinations. Even Beethoven's legendary »Letter to the immortal beloved«, which triggered numerous biographical accounts both fictional and academic, might well be simply a product of his imagination or a stylistic exercise, rather than a concrete declaration of love.
»I can either live with you completely or not at all.«
As far as Schubert is concerned, there was an eager but unsuccessful attempt a while ago to categorise him as gay. One of the driving forces behind this enterprise was the psychoanalytically inspired American Maynard Solomon, who had already dreamed up outlandish stories of active wife-sharing in his brilliant but absurd 1977 Beethoven biography: the deaf Titan in the swingers club, so to speak. In Schubert's case, entries in a diary kept by one of his friends, mentioning »young peacocks« and the Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini in connection with Schubert, were supposed to provide evidence that the composer was actually homosexual, something that was still a huge taboo at the time. The advocates of this view cited the composer's many close male friendships as evidence, as well as apartments shared with other men and effusive passages in his letters. The famous musical evenings known as »Schubertiades« were often dubiously redefined in this context – with a good dose of kitsch – as examples of a homosexual subculture, which means just as little as the certainty that Schubert could not possibly have been gay. But this didn't stop storytellers of the past from trying to prove precisely this certainty of Schubert's love of women (albeit thoroughly unhappy), based on references to some Therese or Caroline in his writings.
»Franz Schubert's Last Love« (1926) or »Two Hearts in Three-Four Time« (1930) were just two of the countless Schubert films made; among the others were »Your Heart Belongs To Me« (1934), »His Only Love« (1947), and time after time the notorious three lasses. Paul Hörbiger played the lead in »Drei Mäderl um Schubert« in 1936, while the (in)famous »House of the Three Lasses« first appeared on the silver screen in 1918, then in a new version in 1958. The story was so popular that until recently there was even a bar with the name in the Berlin suburb of Moabit, a working-class district back in those days! (And in all likelihood there is a brothel or a swingers club near a motorway exit somewhere with the same name.) Does someone really need to invent a House of the Three Lads to get rid once again of what are essentially long-forgotten clichés? Perhaps desire in general, be it heterosexual or homosexual, is really not of central importance in Schubert's biography. His friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner wrote in his memoirs: »From the time I first met Schubert, he didn't have anything resembling an amorous affair. He was dry as dust towards the fair sex, and gallantry was not his strong suit. He neglected his clothing and his teeth, smelled heavily of tobacco and was thus entirely unsuited to wooing women, and not socially acceptable, as the phrase goes«. A grubby fellow, then, with bad teeth: no Schubert lover will be happy to imagine that. But what if Schubert simply had the same attitude as we do, directing his love and desire primarily at the human voice and the world's misfortune – at his music, in other words? The adventures of the heart or the soul do not necessarily call for excitement in the real world.
A GENERAL MALAISE
But if we return to biographic facts, there is no denying that the syphilis that we know befell Schubert from 1822 on must have originated somewhere. And it is equally clear that the composer suffered from this tedious illness: he wrote in a famous letter dated 31 March 1824 that »the joy of love and friendhsip offers [me] nothing but the utmost pain«. But syphilis didn't kill him; indeed, he entertained no thoughts of death whatsoever. The D minor string quartet D 810 bears the nickname »Death and the Maiden«; not applied by Schubert himself, this refers to his song of the same name, whose introductory theme the composer re-used as the basis for the set of variations in the quartet's second movement. The gloomy, desperate fixation on death that can be heard here certainly results from a more general malaise than Schubert's specific venereal disease. It's safe to assume that the »Venus« that infected Schubert was one of the wretched creatures of either sex that Vienna was literally teeming with as the centre European prostitution. While lying in his sickbed in autumn 1828, not long before his death, Schubert not only made corrections to »Winterreise«, he also read in German translation »The Last of the Mohicans« and ordered other books by the same author, James Fenimore Cooper.
»And even if our dreams came true, we would still feel disappointment.«
James Fenimore Cooper
In his well-researched little Schubert book of 2011, the musicologist Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen emphasises that the incredible masterpieces that Schubert wrote in the last years of his life formed part of a systematic career plan, an extremely self-confident strategy to place himself in the musical limelight. It was probably a typhoid infection that brought the plan to an abrupt end in November 1828: not any apocalyptic premonition on the composer's part, in other words, but an end as unexpected as it was senseless. The compositions that turned bitterly into his »late work« actually bore what Hinrichsen calls »the signs of an overwhelming new productive phase.«
SETTING OUT FOR NEW DIMENSIONS
Even if Schubert had no idea that his death was around the corner, but was looking to the future, this future was probably a bleak one for him personally. There is no getting round the darkness and the outbursts of despair in Schubert's late works. According to Hinrichsen, Man's underlying certainty of his own mortality was accompanied by the fact that »Schubert and many of his friends are likely to have seen the Metternich era as an unparalleled ice age«. The apocalyptic mood of »Winterreise« for example, about the metaphorical and political dimension of which tenor Ian Bostridge wrore an impressive book in 2015, was triggered by the fact that the story only begins after all hope of love has been lost.
»The patterns the frost makes are an uncanny sign of the intangible boundary between the living and the lifeless.«
Ian Bostridge in his book »Schubert's Winterreise«
Compared with »Winterreise«, the song cycle »Die schöne Müllerin«, written four years earlier, is still introspective and conventional: here, despair and failure are the culmination of the plot, not its starting point. »Die schöne Müllerin« opens on a hopeful note; by the middle of the work the hero is increasingly disappointed and disillusioned, and at the end he dies. Nonetheless, the solipsistic and perhaps even psychopathic traits that the Winterreisender displays are already evident in »Die schöne Müllerin«. Or is it no cause for concern that the first-person narrator only converses with a babbling brook throughout the cycle? – The same brook that sings the miller the lullaby of death in the last song. While the song »Die liebe Farbe« (Beloved colour) is an utterly gloomy adult version of the German folk song »Grün, grün, grün sind alle meine Kleider« (Green, green, green is the colour of my clothes). Perhaps even more grief-stricken is »Trockne Blumen« (Withered flowers). But for Schubert hopelessness was an artistic device and not a sign of any personal paralysis, as can be seen from the following example of positive thinking: after »Die schöne Müllerin«, Schubert went on to re-use the theme of »Trockne Blumen« for his Flute Variations D 802, which can fairly be described as functional music rather than music of personal confession.
»… YOU LIKE EVERYTHING FROM MY PEN«
But just how strictly should we differentiate here? The most emphatic distinction was made by Schubert himself in the case of the string quartets: he wrote twelve of these at a young age, first and foremost for domestic music-making. After a four-year break, a single quartet movement appeared in 1820: music of harrowing expression. After another interval of four years' length came the last three quartets; these are works that are among the most sublime chamber music ever written, works that change lives and can accompany a music lover throughout his life. Franz Schubert dismissed the twelve youthful quartets in a letter to his brother Ferdinand in the following words: »But you would do better to listen to other quartets than mine, for they have no special merit, except perhaps for the fact that you like them – and you like everything from my pen«. Now it's an old truism that few things in the world are so deserving of mistrust as an artist's comments about his own works. And Schubert's disparaging comments about his own music should certainly be seen in the context of the above-mentioned career plan to get to the absolute top of the musical world. The early quartets in all their charming naivety not only offer the unbiassed listener an interesting insight into the young composer's workshop – they also have their own special musical appeal. This much was recently made clear by the French Modigliani Quartet in their complete recording. But the true Schubert lover may well respond to this music like the composer's brother Ferdinand did: he will like it because he likes everything from Schubert's pen.
March 2023
Illustrations: Anselm Hirschhäuser
English translation: Clive Williams
This text appeared in the Elbphilharmonie Magazin (2/23)
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