(X) Respite: the summer of 1825.

In the first two years of his illness Schubert had suffered symptoms that were intermittent and variable but occurred at relatively close intervals. Hence the symptom-free period from roughly February 1825 until the first half of 1826 was one for which the composer must have been extraordinarily grateful. He may have even concluded that he was cured (spontaneous cures were rare but not unheard of). The absence of both Schober and Kupelwieser may have stimulated new friendships in Vienna. In February Schwind took Schubert to a marathon visit with Bauernfeld, who remarked with satisfaction in his diary that previously he had been only ‘distantly acquainted’ with the composer. The three soon became a threesome. Late that same month Sophie Müller, a 22-year-old principal singer at the Burgtheater, invited Vogl, Schubert and Johann Baptist Jenger to lunch. When Schubert visited her alone on 20 April she sang at least three of his songs with the composer accompanying. Anselm Hüttenbrenner later remarked that she performed Schubert's songs ‘most movingly’. They continued their pleasurable musical visits throughout 1825 and 1826. Schwind also introduced Schubert to his on-again, off-again flame Anna Hönig, the artistically untalented but well-educated and endearing daughter of a lawyer; in Schubert's circle she became known as ‘die süsse Anne Page’, an allusion to Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor.

In February Schubert moved to 9 Technikerstrasse, the house next door to Schwind and adjacent to the Karlskirche. Not too far away in the Wieden district, in the house where the composer Gluck had died, lived the painter Wilhelm August Rieder. Rieder had met Schubert around the time he fell ill at the end of 1822, and their friendship now grew closer. Rieder possessed a fine piano made by Anton Walter and encouraged Schubert to use it whenever he did not need quiet. According to an anonymous memoir of 1897, Schubert would walk frequently to Rieder's apartment looking for open curtains in pre-arranged window; if they were closed the chagrined composer returned home. In early May Rieder painted a three-quarter length watercolour portrait of Schubert that both Sonnleithner and Spaun praised as an extremely good likeness. Perhaps encouraged by the accessibility of Rieder's piano, Schubert worked during the spring on two ambitious piano sonatas. He completed the one in A minor (d845) but the C major Sonata (d840), dubbed ‘Reliquie’ by its publisher Whistling on the mistaken assumption that it was Schubert's last, broke off after three impressive movements (of which the third, a minuet, is almost complete) and 272 bars of an ineffectual finale.

Hence by the time Schubert left Vienna around 20 May for what was to be the most extended ‘holiday’ of his lifetime (four and a half months), he was in a compositionally expansive mood. His health had not been this robust for two and a half years. He and Vogl (who had preceded Schubert) met in Steyr, as they had in 1819. Together they then visited Linz, St Florian and Steyregg. On 6 June they reached the scenic lakeside town of Gmunden, where they tarried for six weeks. As guests of the merchant and music patron Ferdinand Traweger, Schubert had easy access to Traweger's ‘splendid piano’ and lived ‘like one of the family’. They were doubtless also captivated by the romantic rock cliffs that rim the swan-inhabited lake and seem to conjure up a distant horn call. It was indeed here that Schubert began the realization of what he had alluded to in his 1824 letter to Kupelwieser as ‘grand symphony’. What became the ‘Great’ C major Symphony (d944, perhaps only serendipitously in the same key as the previously abandoned piano sonata) opens with a sustained solo horn passage that would have wafted effortlessly across the lake. Anton Ottenwalt later reported that Schubert ‘had worked on a symphony at Gmunden’. A speculative reading of the date on its autograph led scholars to place the genesis of the ‘Great’ C major in 1828, necessitating a lost symphony from the summer of 1825. However, the paper used for the ‘Great’ C major and the works from that summer dated explicitly by Schubert makes clear that the ‘Great’ is the symphony from the summer of 1825.

From Gmunden, Schubert and Vogl made return visits to Linz and Steyr, taking in Kremsmunster and Salzburg as well. Even in the early 19th century the western portions of present-day Austria had long been known throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire as enviable ‘cure’ destinations. On 10 August Schubert and Vogl arrived in the more remote, cliffside town of Bad Gastein, famous for its vertical drops and waterfalls. Here Schubert not only worked further on the ‘Great’ C major Symphony but also composed the Piano Sonata in D major (d850), a work of torrential energy in its first and third movements and of symphonic scope in its slow movement. The technical demands on a fully professional pianist such as its dedicatee Karl Maria von Bocklet were substantial. While at Bad Gastein Schubert also composed Die Allmacht (d852), an epochal hymn of praise to a deity described by the poet Johann Ladislaus Pyrker (whom he met there) in a series of powerful nature metaphors. Schubert himself described the environs of Gmunden as ‘truly heavenly’; of Salzburg and Bad Gastein, whose ‘mountains rise higher and higher’, he wrote that ‘the country surpasses the wildest imagination’. He was equally impressed with man-made triumphs, such as Salzburg Cathedral. Virtually everywhere that he and Vogl went they performed recent songs such as Ave Maria!, the third of the three Ellen songs on texts from the Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott (d839); Schubert and Vogl both regularly performed songs specified for women. About their collaboration Schubert remarked to his brother Ferdinand: ‘The manner in which Vogl sings and the way I accompany, as though we were one at such a moment, is something quite new and unheard-of for these people’. When Schubert finally returned to Vienna in early October he learnt that the month before he had been elected a representative (Ersatzmann) of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. The publications of 1825 numbered more than half a dozen songs, including Die junge Nonne (d828), composed at the beginning of the year; two works for piano duet; and the Mass in C major (d452) – the only mass of his published in his lifetime.

Schubert, Franz, §1: Life