(XII) Beginnings and the end (1828).

Schubert began his final year with the familiar celebrations at Schober's. Along with friends such as Schober, Spaun, Schwind, Bauernfeld and the von Hartmann brothers, he made his way at 2 a.m. to Bogner's coffee house to celebrate and ponder the future. It seemed most promising. The reading sessions that had been suspended since 1824 were now revived at Schober's. On 20 January Slavík and Bocklet gave the première of the Fantasy for violin and piano at Slavík's private concert. On 15 January Spaun – Schubert's friend of longest standing – announced his long-awaited engagement. Schubert, although disappointed at the prospect of having to share his old friend, proposed a musical evening in honour of Spaun and his fiancée, Franziska von Ehrenwerth. On 28 January Bocklet, Schuppanzigh and Linke played one of the piano trios, after which Schubert and Bocklet played piano duets (including the magnificent A Variations) so brilliantly that, Spaun recalled, ‘everyone was enchanted and the highly delighted Bocklet embraced his friend [Schubert]’. It was not only the last Schubertiad at Spaun's, but the last one altogether. In the same month Schubert had begun work on the Fantasy in F minor for piano duet (d940), his most cathartic and structurally integrated work in that medium. The dedication to Caroline Esterházy testifies to the esteem in which he held her, although it stops short of being a clear-cut declaration of love. When two German publishers, Schott in Mainz and Probst in Leipzig, contacted Schubert about potential works, he replied with a varied list of largely instrumental compositions. Schott at first offered to take the second set of impromptus, but withdrew when his Paris office advised that they were ‘too difficult for trifles’. Probst accepted and published the E Piano Trio, including cuts in the finale that Schubert's friends had apparently urged.

For the first time in his career, Schubert felt emboldened to present a public concert devoted entirely to his own music. The Gesellschaft placed its concert hall in the Tuchlauben at his disposal. First planned for 21 March, it was changed to 26 March, the first anniversary of Beethoven's death. If the even-numbered verses of the one work composed especially for this evening, Auf dem Strom for tenor, horn and piano (d943), were meant to recall the Funeral March of Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ Symphony, then Schubert's homage could not have been more complete. Along with a group of songs (some recent, others as much as 12 years old), the Schuppanzigh Quartet played the first movement of the G major Quartet, and its members joined Bocklet in a performance of the E Piano Trio. Those who commented on the evening all state that the hall was full to capacity; in the end Schubert netted the healthy sum of 800 florins – enough to sustain a civil servant for many months. Money, however, always slipped quickly through Schubert's fingers. Of their group finances, Bauernfeld wrote: ‘Whoever was flush at the moment paid … for the others … among the three of us [Bauernfeld, Schwind and Schubert] it was Schubert who played the part of a Croesus and who, off and on, found himself swimming in money’. Schubert insisted on paying for tickets to hear Paganini, who gave several concerts in Vienna in 1828. After the concert Schubert treated him and Bauernfeld to several bottles of wine before moving on to the inn zur Schnecke for more celebrations with Franz von Hartmann.

Schubert's exploration of novel keyboard styles continued in May with the Drei Klavierstücke (d946); he may have expected the publisher to add fanciful titles. Around the same time he completed the passionate Allegro in A minor and the Rondo in A major, both for piano four hands. These two polarized works completed Schubert's extraordinary exploration of music for piano duet. An unrelated exception occurred the next month, when Schubert and his composer friend Lachner set off on a two-day excursion to Heiligenkreuz, where they hoped to hear the fine organ in the Cistercian monastery. In Baden, where they spent the night, Schubert proposed that each of them compose a fugue to be played at the monastery. By midnight, according to Lachner, they were finished, and at 6 o’clock the next morning they commenced the last leg of their journey. Both fugues were played in the presence of several monks, whose reactions are unrecorded. Diabelli's publication of Schubert's Fugue in E minor (d952) – saturated with pre-Wagnerian chromaticism – as a piano duet probably stemmed from his desire to make it more saleable. Meanwhile, Schubert continued to collect accolades, both in private correspondence (as from the University of Breslau music lecturer J.T. Mosewius on both Müller song cycles) and in print, as in a review in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst praising part 1 of Winterreise and the Rondo in B minor for violin and piano. In June Schubert turned, without any apparent external stimulus, for the last time to the mass. The Mass in E major (d950), while in some respects more restrained than the A Mass begun almost a decade before, shows Schubert's mastery of a wide range of choral textures.

As summer approached Schubert investigated the possibilities of another holiday in Graz with Jenger at the Pachlers, or in Gmunden. The exact reasons for delays are not known, but it may be that Schubert already felt unwell enough to be wary of straying too far from Vienna. In July, perhaps commissioned by the cantor Salomon Sulzer, he set Psalm xcii (d953) for soloists and chorus. In August Schubert's physical distress was great enough for him to consult the court physician, Dr Ernst Rinna, who made the ultimately fatal recommendation that Schubert move in with his brother Ferdinand in the Viennese suburb of Wieden. On 1 September Schubert joined his brother in a new building on Kettenbrückengasse 6, whose cleaner air on the outside was unfortunately complemented by very damp air on the inside. Schubert's symptoms, which may have included giddiness and headaches, were not enough to deter him from composing or completing a rich array of ambitious works that included the songs posthumously published as Schwanengesang (d957, August and October), the last three piano sonatas (d958–60, September), the String Quintet in C major (d956, September–October) and Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (d965, October) for voice, clarinet and piano. The seven poems each by Rellstab and Heine that make up the posthumously titled Schwanengesang were probably intended for separate publication. From the rippling demisemiquavers of Liebesbotschat to the languid triplets of Ständcher, from the ebullience of Abschied to the sprawling gloom of In der Ferne, the emotional range of the Rellstab settings is staggering. Five of the seven Heine poems are deeply tragic, and with a remakable economy Schubert plumbs the essence of images such as Ihr Bild and Der Doppelgänger. Even if we assume that Schwanengesang was begun earlier, the sheer quantity and quality of productivity in Schubert's last months point to a man who has by sheer force of will resolved not to acknowledge his failing body. But it could just as easily describe a man who knows that his time is almost up – or a man who, in his creative prime and, having survived worse bouts of illness, had no expectation of dying. Whatever the explanation, his productivity remains nothing short of miraculous. The rate of publication remained equally healthy, including the E Piano Trio, some 20 songs to texts by Goethe, Leitner, Schulze, Scott, Seidl and Shakespeare, and part 1 of Winterreise.

It may have been Schubert's deeper study of the music of Handel (especially Messiah), or his attendance at the frequent colossal performances in Vienna of Handel oratorios that spurred him to seek counterpoint lessons with Simon Sechter, Vienna's most prominent music theorist and a strict advocate of the Fuxian tradition. It is hard to imagine why the composer of the E major Mass or the Fantasy in F minor felt it necessary to study counterpoint, but on 4 November, accompanied by the violinist and composer Josef Lanz (who apparently made the arrangements for both of them), Schubert took his one and only lesson with Sechter. On 31 October Schubert had dined at the tavern zum roten Kreuz often frequented by the composer and his family. His reaction to the fish that he ate was to feel ill. According to Bauernfeld, he had felt this way ‘from time to time and we attached no importance to it’. Around this time Schubert began sketches for a symphony in D major (referred to incongruously as ‘Symphony no.10’). Each of its three movements open new paths for exploration; the B minor Largo, especially, projects an almost Mahlerian sense of foreboding alternating with salvation. Schubert very likely worked on the symphony until he became too delirious to write.

On 3 November he felt well enough to attend the performance of a Requiem by his brother Ferdinand, followed by a three-hour walk with Schubert family friend Josef Mayssen. A few days later Spaun visited Schubert to have him check a copy of a psalm setting he had prepared at Schubert's request for the Ladies Choral Society in Lemberg. The composer was in bed but protested that there was nothing wrong with him, ‘only I am so exhausted that I feel as if I were going to fall through the bed’. His fate was now sealed, and his 13-year-old half-sister Josefa and Ferdinand's wife Anna prepared to care for him for the duration. On 12 November Schubert wrote an alarming letter to Schober, declaring that ‘I am ill. I have eaten nothing for 11 days and drunk nothing, and I totter feebly and shakily from my bed and back again. Rinna is treating me. If I try to take anything, it comes right back up’. The same letter requests more novels by James Fennimore Cooper, the American author of, among others, The Last of the Mohicans and The Spy. One unconfirmed report states that on 14 November Beethoven's String Quartet in C minor op.131 was performed at Schubert's bedside. Rinna now took ill himself, and Josef von Vering was called in. A bedside conference between Vering and another physician, Johann Wisgrill, led to a new course of treatment. We can only guess at the prescribed medications that Schubert imbibed at regular intervals using his stopwatch. Spaun, who visited Schubert during his last days, reported periods of delirium in which Schubert ‘sang ceaselessly’, alternating with periods of lucidity during which he corrected the proofs for part 2 of Winterreise. But on 18 November Schubert had to be restrained in his bed; by 3 o’clock the next afternoon he was dead.

The death certificate ascribed Schubert's death to Nervenfieber (nervous fever). For Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert's great chronicler, this meant either typhus or typhoid fever. But later writers such as Eric Sams argue that the most probable cause was tertiary syphilis. Some of the symptoms, such as giddiness and headaches, could have been caused by mercury, the standard medication in Schubert's time for those afflicted with syphilis. Narrowing of the arteries in the brain – another symptom of tertiary syphilis – could have caused a stroke that led to Schubert's fever and delirium. With the stigma already attached to venereal disease in Schubert's time, it is easy to understand why his physicians and family would have wished to gloss over the true cause of death. Still others have posited malnutrition, the effects of alcoholism, and deterioration of the immune system. The imprecision of medical practice and the poor understanding of causality in Biedermeier Vienna will always preclude a definitive account. What is certain is that, even by the standards of his day, Schubert died far younger than the vast majority of his less gifted friends. Two days after Schubert's death a funeral service was held at the Josephskirche in the Margareten suburb. A semi-delirious conversation Schubert had with Ferdinand the evening before he died led the brother to believe that Franz wished to be buried near Beethoven. There in Währing cemetery, in blustery November weather, Schubert, having not quite reached his 32nd birthday, was laid to rest. A heavily attended memorial service was held at the Augustinerkirche on 23 December, followed by a bittersweet Schubert concert at Spaun's. In January and March of 1829 Anna Fröhlich organized two private memorial concerts at the Musikverein, with half of the receipts going towards the erection of a funeral monument. Not until the summer of 1830 was Ludwig Forster's monument with the bust by Josef Dialer placed at Schubert's grave; it was inscribed with the celebrated epitaph by Grillparzer: ‘The art of music has entombed here a rich treasure but even fairer hopes’. Immortal as these words are, they also suggest that even Schubert's most ardent supporters had little idea what he had accomplished in his brief time on earth.

Schubert, Franz, §1: Life