(IV) The miracle years.

In the autumn of 1814, after a promising but unspectacular adolescence, Schubert exploded into a burst of creative activity that over the next 15 months was virtually unrivalled in the history of Western music. He also introduced patterns of composition that prevailed for the rest of his life. Until 1814 Schubert had drawn on almost ten different poets for the texts of some two dozen solo songs and fragments. Beginning in the spring/summer of 1814, he devoted 13 of his next 15 songs to texts by a single poet, Friedrich von Matthisson. Throughout 1815 he set groups of between two and more than a dozen songs dominated by a single poet – Goethe, Körner, Hölty, Kosegarten, Baumberg, Ossian, Klopstock, Mayrhofer and Stoll. This intense focus on one poet at a time may help explain the composition of almost 150 songs in Schubert's 18th year – an average of more than one every three days. Schubert had encountered Goethe's Faust in the second half of 1814, and it made an indelible impression (fig.1). His first Goethe song (the first of a group of four) produced the extraordinary Gretchen am Spinnrade (d118; 19 October 1814), remarkable not only for its conjuring up of a spinning wheel and its waves of crescendos but for Schubert's empathetic representation of a woman's feelings. Towards the end of the following year he returned to Goethe for Erlkönig (d328), bringing astonishingly vivid and frantic life to a father, his feverish son and the figure of Death. In the same period he made the acquaintance through Spaun of the civil servant and poet Johann Mayrhofer (1787–1836), whose Am See (d124, December 1814) Schubert may have already set at Spaun's suggestion. Schubert doubtless relished the chance to meet a German-language poet, a counterpoint to Salieri's narrow emphasis on Italian. He set another Mayrhofer poem in 1815, as many as ten more in 1816, and more than 40 over his career. Almost ten years Schubert's senior, Mayrhofer was a gifted poet, a disturbed eccentric, a misogynist and ultimately a suicide. He and Schubert enjoyed a close if intermittent relationship. Mayrhofer was a member of the Viennese branch of a Linz ‘circle of friends’ established in 1811, and his participation in this self-improvement group, or ‘Bildung Circle’, probably led to Schubert's subsequent joining. German literature and poetry were major themes of the group's meetings and doubtless helped to spur Schubert's song production. Between the autumn of 1814 and the end of 1815 Schubert also wrote two string quartets (d112 and d173, in nine and eight days respectively) and two symphonies (nos.2 and 3, d125 and d200), as well as his second and third masses (in G, d167; in B , d324). In addition, he completed no fewer than four Singspiele (Der vierjährige Posten, d190; Fernando, d220; Claudine von Villa Bella, d239, whose second and third acts were apparently burnt in 1848 by servants of Schubert's friend Josef Hüttenbrenner; and Die Freunde von Salamanka, d326). In the autumn the bassoonist, violinist and conductor Otto Hatwig took over the private concerts that had grown out of musical gatherings at the Schubert home and that had taken place briefly at the house of a merchant, Franz Frischling.

In all of his combined categories, Schubert averaged an almost superhuman rate of at least 65 bars of new music each day, roughly half of which included an orchestra. The average may indeed have been higher, for we cannot assume that all of Schubert's works from this period have been preserved. And such figures assume that he was a full-time composer, although in fact he was a full-time, year-round teacher at his father's school. He was also taking composition lessons twice weekly with Salieri, attending numerous concerts and operas, doing a modicum of private teaching, and socializing with his friends from the Stadtkonvikt. In 1815 Schubert entered into long-term friendships with two very different kinds of men. He met the ever industrious Anselm Hüttenbrenner (1794–1868) while both were studying with Salieri. Though Hüttenbrenner was ostensibly a law student, their shared passion (fig.2) for music and composition soon brought them close.

Hüttenbrenner offered a memorable portrait of Schubert at 18:

Schubert's outward appearance was anything but striking or prepossessing. He was short of stature, with a full, round face, and was rather stout. His forehead was very beautifully domed. Because of his short-sightedness he always wore spectacles, which he did not take off even during sleep. Dress was a thing in which he took no interest whatever … and listening to flattering talk about himself he found downright nauseating.

Schubert inscribed his Trauerwalzer (d365, 1818) with ‘written down for my dear fellow coffee, wine and punch drinker Anselm Hüttenbrenner, the world-famous composer’. In 1821 Hüttenbrenner was forced to leave Vienna to take over his family's estate in Styria; in that same year he married and eventually fathered nine children. A respectable pianist, he also became a prolific composer who played an important, if not entirely understood, role in the saga of Schubert's ‘Unfinished’ Symphony (d759).

In the same year that he met Hüttenbrenner, Schubert was introduced by Josef von Spaun to a highly charismatic yet profligate dabbler in the arts, Franz von Schober (1797–1882). Although his father died when Schober was six, the family remained prosperous enough for him to attend private schools for the nobility (the family had been ennobled only in 1801) in both Germany and Austria. He began law studies in Vienna in 1816 but failed to complete the course. From his mother's spacious apartment in the Tuchlauben, Schober's warm hospitality cast its spell on members of a growing literary and musical circle, which soon included Schubert. In 1858 a friend from Schubert's youth, Josef Kenner, wrote unmistakably about Schober without naming him:

Schubert's genius subsequently attracted … the heart of a seductively amiable and brilliant young man, endowed with the noblest talents, whose extraordinary gifts would have been so worthy of a moral foundation and would have richly repaid a stricter schooling than … the one he unfortunately had. But shunning so much effort as unworthy of genius and summarily rejecting such fetters as a form of prejudice and restriction, while at the same time arguing with brilliant and ingratiatingly persuasive power, this scintillating individuality … won a lasting and pernicious influence over Schubert's honest susceptibility.

The nature of this influence cast its shadow over the rest of Schubert's life.

Although the unparalleled productivity of 1815 tapered off slightly the following year, 1816 was nonetheless a remarkable year in Schubert's creative life. He composed more than 110 songs, largely in clusters of poems by Salis-Seewis, Goethe, Ossian (in translation), Schiller, Hölty, Matthisson, Klopstock, Jacobi and Mayrhofer. For the meetings of the ‘Bildung Circle’, Schubert's friends would search through volumes of poetry and present their favourites to Schubert – some of which he would subsequently set. He also completed another mass (d452, in C), two acts of his first attempt at a three-act opera (Die Bürgschaft, d435), two symphonies (d417, in C minor, later given the somewhat misleading subtitle ‘The Tragic’ by Schubert; and in B , d485, the most popular of the youthful symphonies), a string quartet (d353, in E) and three sonatas (published as ‘sonatinas’) for violin and piano (d384, 385, 408). Still conspicuously missing are any significant works for solo piano. In mid-April Spaun sent a first volume of Schubert songs based on texts by Goethe to the ageing poet, hoping to secure his permission for dedications; Goethe returned the package unopened. In April Schubert applied for the post of music teacher at the teachers' training college in Laibach (now Ljubljana). The attractions probably included a higher salary and more time available for composition. Might he also have hoped to make himself appear more acceptable to Therese Grob's family? Not until September did Schubert learn that the post had gone to another applicant – about the same time that he made the diary entry appearing to renounce marriage. In mid-June Schubert participated in the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of Salieri's arrival in Vienna, contributing both the text and the music of a vocal quartet, aria and three-part canon (d407). Although his lessons had been intermittent, the large number of instrumental and compositional exercises from his 11th to his 19th year attest to the thorough, if ultimately limited, training he received from Salieri. On 24 July Schubert conducted his (lost) cantata Prometheus (d451) at Heinrich Josef Watteroth's house; among the participants was the lawyer Leopold von Sonnleithner (probably in the title role), the son of a music-loving family and himself an accomplished musician, whose new-found enthusiasm led him to become one of Schubert's most ardent and influential supporters.

Schubert, Franz, §1: Life