TAKE US TO YOUR LIEDER

The music world is mad for anniversaries, sometimes seeming to organize itself around them. In 1970, it celebrated the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, and in 1985 the 300th anniversary of Bach’s. It went hog- wild in 1991 for Mozart — it had been 200 years since his death. Every scrap of Mozart, no matter how ephemeral or inconsequential, was dutifully unearthed and performed on the world’s stages, less in homage than willful exhaustiveness. The year 2056 — which will see Mozart’s 300th birthday — should be a doozie.

This year, it is Schubert’s turn, and also — there is a lot of work to do – – that of Brahms. Schubert was born in 1797; Brahms died in 1897. Most of the attention is going to Schubert, and it is not entirely apparent why. It could be that every year is a Brahms year, given that composer’s near-primacy in the standard repertory. But Schubert is hardly a neglected composer. Indeed, scarcely a day has gone by since his death in 1828 when a song of his has not been performed, or a piano piece, or a chamber work, or one of the symphonies (“finished” or not). The first “Schubertiad” — an evening of music devoted solely to Schubert’s work — was held in January 1821, with the composer presiding; this year, Schubertiads will be almost as common as pops concerts.

True, there are reams of Schubert lying around that seldom get performed. Some of this music deserves a wider hearing — his masses, for example — and some of it should be allowed to sleep undisturbed. But anniversary celebrants have little patience for such distinctions. Joseph Epstein has noted that The Last Tycoon is read today simply because it is by the author of The Great Gatsby. So it is with music.

You might say that the composers who receive the big anniversary treatment are the ones who least need the exposure. Every fancier of music could provide a list of candidates for additional limelight. Jean-Philippe Rameau might be accorded more respect — we missed his 300th birthday in 1983 — and so might the piano master Aleksandr Scriabin, the centennial of whose death will occur in 2015. But in classical music, the rich just get richer.

Franz Peter Schubert is one of music’s darlings, loved not only as a composer but as a man. Interest in him has never ebbed. A century after his death, some 50 novels had been written about him. He was a strange but compelling man who lived just 31 unrestful years, composing for 18 of them and producing an astonishing one thousand works in that time. His new biographer, Brian Newbould, writes, “If a true composer is one who can seldom escape the compulsion to compose, Schubert was possibly the truest composer of all time.” He “spoke the language of music with the naturalness of conversation,” combining “the relish and wonder of an amateur with the discipline and technical rigour of a professional.”

It may seem odd to defend someone so revered and honored as Schubert, but that is Newbould’s project. He feels that his subject is misunderstood — thought of as “a podgy, lovelorn Bohemian Schwammerl (mushroom) who scribbled gemutlich tunes on the back of menus in idle moments . . .” Newbould takes up the cause of Schubert as a serious, formidable composer, wary of claims that Schubert was a “natural genius.” He believes that such a view slights Schubert’s intellect and hard-won mastery. To this end, he devotes over half of his 24 chapters to minute analyses of Schubert’s music in different media and periods, letting, as he says, “the music dwarf the man. ” The general reader may wish to skip over these parts — they remind us that, in music, there is no substitute for listening — but Newbould is a rarity: a musicologist who writes well. He succeeds in his aim, always difficult in musical biography, of achieving a “rapprochement” between the popular and the scholarly.

Schubert was a bridge composer, linking the Classical era (represented by Haydn and Mozart) to the Romantic (which crested with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff). This is not merely a matter of chronology, but of mind and spirit. Yet Newbould is correct that Schubert was “born at exactly the right moment” — and in Vienna, the right place.

Schubert was first taught by his father and brother. But he quickly outpaced them and was taken, at seven, to Anton Salieri, the court music director. (Salieri is known today chiefly for his depiction in Peter Schaeffer’s entertaining but fallacious story of Mozart, Amadeus.) Salieri was to oversee young Schubert’s education off and on for the next 12 years, reportedly saying to him, “Franz, you are my pupil, and you will bring me yet more honor.” According to Newbould, Salieri “tried to channel [Schubert] into opera composition, using Italian models for practice, and was apparently unable to comprehend [his] enthusiasm for Beethoven or his interest in the writing of Goethe and Schiller as potential song material” — “that barbarous German language,” Salieri would say. When Schubert quit him, he had gained much, but glimpsed possibilities far beyond his teacher’s limited conception — and, to be fair, that of just about everyone else around except for Beethoven.

Beethoven looms large over this book, sometimes amusingly so. Newbould returns to him again and again, holding him out as the standard, measuring his man against him. Defensive about Schubert’s early symphonic efforts, he writes, “But . . . Schubert was twenty-eight when he embarked upon his Ninth Symphony, and when Beethoven was twenty-eight he had not yet produced a first. ” In 1819, Anton Diabelli invited numerous composers to write variations on a waltz of his creating. Newbould admonishes, “Let our admiration for the towering set of thirty-three variations with which Beethoven responded (after a due interval of three years) not blind us to the characteristic merits of the thirty-two-bar miniature with which Schubert responded at once, before any other of those invited.” So there: Schubert’s Diabelli variations may not be the equal of Beethoven’s, but they were punctual.

This kind of scorekeeping goes on and on, until something rather touching becomes clear: Newbould is envious for Schubert of the whopping 56 years of life granted Beethoven. Schubert was doubtless “awestruck” after an 1824 concert at which Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Ninth Symphony were played, but “he could have pondered the fact that he had just produced two impressive, mature string quartets at an age at which Beethoven had published none. How might he envisage what he could produce when he was fifty-four?” Newbould will not let go even unto the end, when he observes that, at the age that Schubert had attained when he died, Beethoven was laboring over his second symphony.

Schubert soaked up every note of both his contemporary Beethoven and his hero, Mozart (“O Mozart, immortal Mozart,” he wrote, “how many, oh how endlessly many such comforting perceptions of a brighter and better life hast thou brought to our souls”). Like them, he attempted every form of music, failing in none of them (although his operas do not show him at his most inspired). He did some schoolteaching in his late teens, but eventually cast his lot with fulltime composing, a financially risky proposition. This cost him his first, greatest, and never-forgotten human love, Therese Grob, the daughter of a neighboring family and a soprano in the church choir. Her parents insisted on a more stable husband, and she married a baker (though Schubert, before he died, was to know both fame and prosperity). In 1816, when he was 19, Schubert received a commission to write a piece d’occasion, the cantata Prometheus, for which he was paid the tidy sum of 100 florins. He told his diary, “Today I composed for money for the first time.” He never ceased and he usually sold.

Newbould reports many interesting cocktail facts, such as that the pianist in an early performance of Schubert’s song Erlkonig was Mendelssohn. He also tackles the elusive topics, such as Schubert and religion, “a problem that has much teased musicologists.” Every music student knows about Schubert the tavern-goer and bon vivant, but fewer know about Schubert the religious seeker, though Schubert, like all cornposers of the time trying to earn a living, wrote a good deal of liturgical music. Schubert himself realized that this aspect of his character was overlooked, as when he wrote that his public “wondered greatly at my piety, which I expressed in a hymn to the Holy Virgin [Ave Maria]. I think this is due to the fact that I have never forced devotion in myself and never compose hymns or prayers of that kind unless it overcomes me unawares; but then it is usually the right and true devotion.”

When he was in his mid-twenties, just hitting his stride as a composer of high, enduring art, Schubert did something tragic and not entirely explained: He fell into debauchery, debauchery so severe that it wrecked and finally cut off his life. Newbould notes this “cruel juxtaposition” of “artistic immortality and temporal mortality,” but his guess that “the harsher realities of life” led him to “a lifestyle that triggered the onset of” illness and death is unsatisfying. Whatever the case, Schubert’s slide was rapid and horrible.

The illness was syphilis, from whose ravages Schubert reeled for the final fourth of his life. He drank, ate, wenched, and smoked — all indiscriminatdy — and his pipe may from time to time have been laced with opium. He spent virtually every evening, when his health permitted, making merry in establishments like The Black Cat with his circle, which he once described as “that rough chorus of beer-drinkers and sausage-eaters.” Schubert suffered from bouts of acute depression and other types of mental disturbance, for which moderns are full of theories. Newbould is restrained about all of them, as he is about a question that has absorbed the musicological community for the last decade.

No one will be surprised that this question is, Was Schubert homosexual? (He has not yet been regarded as black.) The evidence supporting this notion is slim and manipulable, but one publication, 19th Century Music, devoted an entire issue to it. Schubert enjoyed the friendship and patronage of Franz von Schober, a monied swell who womanized and boozed right along with Schubert. As to whether there was a physical relationship between the two, Newbould judges that this is “unknown and probably unknowable,” though “there was, in any case, evidence of heterosexual urges on both sides.” Newbould finds “no reason not to keep an open mind” and concedes that, in Schubert, there were “possible bisexual tendencies,” but he is obviously impatient with the question and those who press it, concluding that “we can take some comfort from the certainty that the Schubert inheritance, which is what prompts our interest in the man in the first place, will remain almost wholly impervious to the debate.”

Illness, in addition to the hell it imposed, concentrated Schubert’s mind, and his last years were a frenzy of composition, with Schubert knowing the urgency of his situation and racing to the finish. Says Newbould, “Each passing year was critical to Schubert, in the sense that each would turn out to represent a considerable proportion of his adult life.” His later works are filled both with explosive energy and spiritual contemplativeness (although, as the eminent music historian Sir Donald Tovey remarked too cheekily, all Schubert’s works are early works). Schubert would often retreat to the country, to closet himself with his manuscript books. As the outer world grew distant from him, he wrote, “O imagination, thou greatest treasure of man, thou inexhaustible wellspring from which artists . . . drink!” Newbould sees that this was Schubert cherishing his “faculty to compose, worshipping imagination and pleading for it not to desert him, revelling in the creative powers that are enhanced by his current plight.”

To his credit, the author does not treat music as biography, the error of countless musical dullards. In one of his savvier passages, he says that those who see the bleak, dispirited song-cycle called Winterreise “as a reflection of Schubert’s depression or worsening illness have to be cautioned, ” for a composer works “through a person who is to some extent free of the day-to-day baggage of [his own] life, suspended above the present reality.” Newbould furnishes some apposite examples from Mozart and Beethoven, and adds that, at the time of Winterreise, Schubert “was shaping his Piano Trio in B fiat, a bright and ebullient work whose opening theme bounces in without preliminaries, brimful of youthful vigour and freshness.” The vigor and freshness of that observation, the likes of which the musicological field cries out for, is alone worth the book’s publication.

Beethoven died in 1827; Schubert, as a prominent composer, was a torchbearer at his funeral (though the two apparently never met). On his deathbed, Beethoven was shown a group of Schubert songs and exclaimed, “Truly, in Schubert there dwells a divine spark. He will make a great stir in the world.” A year later, Schubert was dead. He was still producing, still striving, had the makings of a tenth symphony, was even signed up with the theoretician Simon Sechter for, of all things, lessons.

Newbould aches to know what Schubert would have done with more time — his ” parting notes were poised so provocatively in a forward stance” — but don’t we all? In the end — as with Mozart and John Keats and innumerable others — such aching is a futile exercise. Schubert would have been worldbeating at 50, yes, but, if we are to play that way, imagine Bach at 120! And, as Newbould recognizes, “Schubert can hardly be thought to have sold us short on his life’s work,” less than two decades of “phenomenal clock-cheating creativity.”

So it is celebration time for Schubert. Just like always.

Associate editor Jay Nordlinger, our music critic, last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about the pianist Murray Perahia.