(VI) Travel.

In mid-1818 Schubert's gloomy spirits were lifted when he received an invitation from Count Johann Karl Esterházy of Galanta to tutor his two young daughters at his summer estate in Zseliz (today Želiezovce in Slovakia, then still in Hungary). Johann Karl Unger, a law professor at the Theresian Academy in Vienna, had suggested Schubert to his close friend Esterházy, and the composer quickly accepted. The two-day journey of more than 100 miles by stagecoach was easily the furthest the composer had ever ventured from Vienna. Schubert remained there for almost five months (July–November). He taught the piano and singing to his pupils Marie (aged 16) and Caroline (aged 12) and also provided musical entertainments for the family and their guests. Along with board and lodging he cleared some 75 florins a month. During that summer Esterházy introduced him to Baron Karl Schönstein (1797–1876), a senior official at the Hungarian ministry of finance who was also a passionate amateur singer. Although he had earlier expressed a marked preference for Italian music, upon making the acquaintance of Schubert's songs he quickly became an ardent advocate of German lieder and focussed on them almost exclusively for the rest of his career. Both Sonnleithner and Spaun praised him fulsomely, and Schönstein himself claimed that Schubert had told him on numerous occasions that he composed most of his songs with Schönstein's vocal range (‘a noble-sounding tenor-baritone voice’, according to Sonnleithner) in mind. Schubert's surviving letters to friends in Vienna portray a much more cheerful artist. Writing to a group of his friends, he exclaimed that ‘Thank God I live at last, and it was high time, else I should have become nothing but a thwarted musician’. He staked out his place in the previously minor genre of the piano duet, composing, probably for his pupils, a sizable assortment of pieces including three Marches militaires (d733). But by September the mercurial Schubert had become disillusioned with the Zseliz scene as well. He wrote to his intimate friend Schober:

At Zseliz I am obliged to rely wholly on myself. I have to be composer, author, audience and heaven knows what else. Not a soul here has any feeling for true art [this remark presumably extended to the Esterházy daughters], or at most the countess now and then (unless I am wrong). So I am alone with my beloved and have to hide her in my room, in my pianoforte and in my breast. Although this often makes me sad, on the other hand it elevates me the more. Have no fear, then, that I shall stay away longer than is absolutely necessary.

The merging of his art with the self-identity of an outsider was to become an ever more prominent theme.

Letters from his brother Ferdinand during the same summer show that the stultifying home atmosphere, especially where it concerned matters of religion, continued to worsen. It was hardly a surprise, then, that when Schubert returned with the Esterházys to Vienna during the third week of November he settled in with his friend Johann Mayrhofer rather than with his family. In his obituary of Schubert, Mayrhofer remarked that ‘I wrote poems, he composed what I had written’. Schubert was never to undertake formal teaching duties again. He probably continued to teach the two Esterházy daughters through the winter. It had not been a productive year – a symphony, two fragmentary piano sonatas, a few pieces for piano duet and just over a dozen songs. Although he was never to regain the sheer level of output from the miracle years of 1815–16, 1818 marked a career low point. 1819 began more propitiously. On 8 January Schubert's cantata Prometheus received another performance at Sonnleithner's apartment in the Gundelhof. On 28 February the song Schäfers Klagelied (d121) was performed by Franz Jäger in a concert at Zum römischen Kaiser – the first documented performance of a Schubert song in a public concert. During this year Schubert began the remarkable Mass in A major (d678), although he was not to complete it until 1822.

For the summer of 1819 the 22-year-old Schubert elected not to seek employment but to travel through Upper Austria in the company of Vogl, making extended stops in both Steyr and Linz. During this period he very probably composed one of his most famous chamber works, the Quintet for piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass known as ‘The Trout’ (d667). The work was apparently commissioned by a native of Styria, Sylvester Paumgartner, who was himself an amateur cellist. He is also supposed to have stipulated the unusual instrumentation and the use of Schubert's popular song Die Forelle as the basis of the theme-and-variations fourth movement. In Linz, Schubert made the acquaintance of Anton Ottenwalt, a civil servant, dramatist and poet. Schubert had already set one of Ottenwalt's poems, Der Knabe in der Wiege (d579), in 1817. He was married to Josef von Spaun's sister Marie, and the music-making began almost immediately. Ottenwalt was described by all who knew him as a man of great industriousness, integrity and culture.

Some time during 1820 Schubert participated in a musical soirée at the apartment of Matthäus von Collin, a well-connected dramatist, poet and friend of Spaun's who introduced Schubert to, among others, Count Moritz Dietrichstein, Ignaz Franz von Mosel, Caroline Pichler, Baron Hammer-Purgstall and Johann Ladislaus Pyrker. According to Anselm Hüttenbrenner, the company heard Der Wanderer as sung by Vogel and the Eight Variations on a French Song for piano four hands (d624), played by Schubert and Hüttenbrenner. In mid-March the other side of Schubert's existence surfaced when he was present at the time his schoolfriend Johann Senn's room was searched by the police. Senn had been under suspicion since his activist days in the ‘Bildung Circle’ at the Stadtkonvikt. The assassination of the dramatist Kotzebue (a government sympathizer) by a radical student in 1819 had emboldened the oppressive police to harass suspected malcontents in even greater numbers. For his lack of contrition Senn was greeted with 14 months of detention without trial and then deportation to the Tyrol. Schubert, who somewhat disingenuously registered himself as the ‘school assistant from the Rossau’, escaped, in spite of alleged offensiveness, with a warning that was sure to have reinforced his feelings of being an outsider.

Performances continued to accumulate throughout the spring. In March an overture (probably d648) was performed at Anton von Pettenkoffer's. In April an overture (probably d648 as well) was performed at a concert in Graz – the first known public orchestral performance of a Schubert work outside Vienna. The work received a third performance in November at a Gesellschaft concert. At the beginning of April Schubert conducted a performance of Haydn's ‘Nelson Mass’ at the Alt-Lerchenfeld church. More importantly, on 14 June the première of Schubert's Singspiel Die Zwillingsbrüder took place at the Kärntnertortheater (Schubert had finished the work a year and a half earlier). Based on a French play, the tale turns around a young woman under contract from birth to marry a man (one of two identical twins, as it turns out) she does not love. In the original production Vogl played both twins, creating a challenge in the last scene, where both are on stage at the same time. Although it had six performances (more than average), Die Zwillingsbrüder received a mixed reception, and the shabbily dressed Schubert declined to acknowledge the audience's applause.

In July Schubert once again ventured outside Vienna, where he stayed as Schober's guest in the Atzenbrugg Castle, some 40 kilometres west of Vienna (fig.3). So agreeable did he find it that he returned there in both of the two succeeding summers. After his return to Vienna in August the melodrama Die Zauberharfe (d644), for which Schubert supplied on commission almost 3000 bars of music, was produced at the Theater an der Wien. It received eight performances between August and November. While playwright George von Hofmann's contribution was readily dismissed, critics were again divided on Schubert's contribution. But almost all of them acknowledged that his score contained numerous flashes of originality and brilliance. November also marked the marriage of Therese Grob to a baker, Johann Bergmann. If Schubert expressed any regrets at the time concerning this turn of events, they have not come down to us. At the beginning of December August von Gymnich performed Erlkönig at Ignaz von Sonnleithner's. On 9 December the fourth version of Die Forelle was published in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst. Also in that same month Schubert set down the first movement (and fragments of a slow second movement) of a string quartet in C minor (d703, known as the ‘Quartettsatz’) that revealed an intensity and concentration only hinted at in his earlier work.

Schubert, Franz, §1: Life