(VII) The professional composer.

By the end of 1820 the stresses of sharing a single room with Mayrhofer had brought Schubert to breaking point. Early in 1821 Schubert moved to new lodgings in the same street (21 Wipplingerstrasse), although the two men remained on warm enough terms for Schubert to continue setting poems by Mayrhofer. Around this same time Schubert made the acquaintance of Moritz von Schwind, a philosophy student at the University of Vienna who had recently decided to become a painter (fig.4). Intelligent, witty, good-looking and ingratiating, Schwind (nicknamed ‘Cherubin’ after the character in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro) became one of Schubert's closest confidants. He even referred to Schwind as his ‘beloved’. Unlike Spaun, Schwind became considerably enamoured of Schober and maintained a lively correspondence with him after Schober moved to Breslau in 1823. Just before Schober's return to Vienna in 1825 Bauernfeld remarked that ‘Moritz reveres him [Schober] like a god’. In February Schubert found brief employment as a répétiteur at the Hofoper, where he coached the contralto Caroline Unger in the role of Dorabella in Mozart's Così fan tutte. On a practical front, Schubert began gathering testimonials from Count Dietrichstein, Ignaz Franz von Mosel, Salieri and Josef Weigl, perhaps with the intention of seeking a post at the Hofoper or of soliciting a commission for an opera.

During 1821 performances of Schubert's vocal music increased rapidly. In January Joseph Huber wrote to his fiancée about his experience at the first documented Schubertiad:

Last Friday [the 26th] I was excellently entertained; since [Fräulein] Schober was in St Pölten, Franz invited Schubert and 14 of his close acquaintances for the evening. Schubert sang and played a lot of his songs by himself, lasting until about 10 o'clock in the evening. After that we drank punch offered by one of the group, and since it was very good and plentiful the gathering, already in a happy mood, became even merrier; it was 3 o'clock in the morning before we parted.

In the same month Gymnich sang Der Wanderer (d489) at Ignaz von Sonnleithner's and Erlkönig at an ‘evening entertainment’ of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. In February Josef Götz sang Sehnsucht (d636) at the Gesellschaft; in March Sophie Linhart sang Gretchen am Spinnrade at Sonnleithner's. In March, too, Vogl presented the first public performance of Erlkönig at the Kärntnertortheater. The same programme included the first public performances of the quartet Das Dörfchen (d598) and the octet Gesang der Geister über den Wassern (d174). Das Dörfchen was repeated in April at a Gesellschaft concert, while Die Nachtigall (d724) received its first public performance at the Kärntnertortheater. In June, Hérold's Das Zauberglöckchen (originally La clochette) received its première at the Kärntnertortheater with two additional numbers supplied by Schubert. He also completed the two Suleika songs (d717 and 720), to texts by Goethe, and possibly the Rückert song Sei mir gegrüsst (d741). Perhaps most importantly, April saw the publication, as opp.1 and 2, of Erlkönig and Gretchen am Spinnrade, underwritten through the generous support of Leopold von Sonnleithner and other of Schubert's friends. In 1821 he also published 36 dances (d365, among them the Trauerwalzer) and ten more Goethe songs, including Der König in Thule (d367), Heidenröslein (d257), Schäfers Klagelied (d121) and Wandrers Nachtlied (d224), in addition to such songs as Der Tod und das Mädchen (d531) and Der Wanderer (d489). By November at the latest he had been accepted as a member of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Almost simultaneously he was invited to compose an opera for the Hofoper (in fact, none of his operas was ever produced there). By now Schubert was not simply a prolific composer but, in Vienna, a widely performed, published and visible one as well.

In mid-September Schubert travelled with Schober to St Pölten (some 55 kilometres west of Vienna) and to nearby Ochsenburg Castle, where they spent some of their four weeks as the guests of Schober's relative Johann Nepomuk von Dankesreither, the Bishop of St Pölten. Here they collaborated closely on a new opera, Alfonso und Estrella (d732), for which Schober served as the librettist. They finished Act 1 and began Act 2 before returning to Vienna where, on 3 November, they attended a truncated version of Weber's Berlin sensation, Der Freischütz. That same autumn Spaun was transferred to the customs office in Linz; a few months later Schubert wrote a parody of an Italian opera aria (Herrn Josef Spaun, Assessor in Linz, d749) that castigates Spaun for not writing. Schubert's visibility in Linz grew substantially during Spaun's sojourn there. At the beginning of 1822 Schubert moved in with Schober at the family home (9 Spiegelgasse), where he remained until the summer of 1823 except for a stint at his father's house from late 1822 to the spring of 1823. On 21 January 1822, after accompanying Schwind to a party presented by Professor Vincentius Weinridt, Schubert sang some of his songs to an enthusiastic reception. Present at the same party was Eduard von Bauernfeld, whose friendship with Schubert was not to blossom until three years later. The composer continued to become a more visible part of Viennese musical life. In February he made the acquaintance of the visiting Weber, around the time that both of them (along with Spontini, Weigl and Umlauf) had been invited by Italian impresario Domenico Barbaia to submit works for the 1822–3 season at the Kärntnertortheater, of which he had taken control.

Schubert and Schober hastily finished Alfonso und Estrella in February and rushed it off to Barbaia – who then failed to send them any response. Schubert's persistent efforts in Berlin, Dresden and elsewhere to get a staging all failed. In his declining years Schober described his contribution as ‘such a miserable, stillborn, bungling piece of work that even so great a genius as Schubert could not bring it to life’. Vienna had no shortage of competent and even gifted librettists, and Alfonso is perhaps one more example of Schober's hold over the composer. In mid-1822 Schubert scrawled in pencil a document that his brother Ferdinand later labelled Mein Traum. In the literary style of Romantics such as Novalis, it recounts the tale of a son who is twice expelled from his parental home and is reconciled with his father only at the graveside of a young maiden. The manuscript, which Ferdinand presented to Robert Schumann in 1839, has generally been interpreted as a ‘literary effusion’, but its very uniqueness and timing suggest that Schubert was grappling with fundamental issues of family, belonging and otherness. We should not demand direct parallels in Schubert's life in order for this document to shed light on his state of mind. Not only had Schubert become a much more visible part of Viennese musical life, he had climbed to a dramatically new level of creative expression. He completed the Mass in A (d678), begun in 1819. Nothing in his previous church music prepares us for its sweep; in the Viennese tradition perhaps only Mozart's Requiem and C minor Mass can compare in scale and intensity (Beethoven's Missa solemnis was completed around the same time, although there is no reason to believe that Schubert knew it before completing his own mass). In November he completed two movements and sketched the third of a symphony in B minor (d759), which posterity later dubbed the ‘Unfinished’. Again, the assurance, the focus and the sweep of both finished movements far exceeded anything that Schubert had previously achieved in the symphonic realm. Yet with their concentration on literature and drama, Schubert's circle of friends seem to have expressed little interest in his symphonic works. At almost the same time he put the finishing touches on the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy (d760), a work for solo piano of such unusual virtuosity and construction that it fascinated Romantics (notably Liszt) for decades to come. Schubert also completed more than a dozen solo songs and partsongs to mixed texts, including the headlong Der Musensohn (d764) and the tender Geist der Liebe (d747). In terms of Schubert's creative growth the year 1822 has to rank with the miracle year of 1815. Moreover, for his compositions Schubert was now being paid closer to what he was worth. In the years 1821–2 he earned more than 2000 gulden from the publication of his opp.1–7 and 10–12; the annual salary of a minor civil servant – the social layer from which Schubert sprang – was about 400 gulden. In today's parlance we would describe Schubert as being ‘at the top of his game’. Publications continued apace, including Eight Variations on a French Song for piano duet (d624); the vocal quartets Das Dörfchen (d598), Die Nachtigall (d724) and Geist der Liebe (d747); and the songs Der Alpenjäger (d524), Die Rose (d745), Geheimes (d719), Gesänge des Harfners from Wilhelm Meister (d478–80), Lob der Tränen (d711) and the first Suleika song (d720).

During the period of these miraculous achievements, more than one of his friends commented on Schubert's intense and potentially debilitating lifestyle. In 1820 Anselm Hüttenbrenner noted that Schubert ‘used to sit down at his writing desk every morning at 6 o'clock and compose straight through until 1 o'clock in the afternoon. Meanwhile many a pipe was smoked’. Lunch included black coffee at a coffee house and another hour or two of smoking. Leopold von Sonnleithner, one of Schubert's biggest supporters, lamented that ‘unfortunately, I must confess that I saw him in a drunken state several times’, recalling in particular a party that Sonnleithner had left at 2 a.m.: ‘Schubert remained still longer and the next day I learnt that he had to sleep there as he was incapable of going home. This happened in a house where he had not been known and where he had only been introduced a short time previously’. Accompanying these excesses were sharp changes of mood, frequent irritability and antisocial behaviour. Schober may have played an influential role in these developments; in December 1822 Schubert wrote to Spaun that ‘we hold readings at Schober's three times a week as well as a Schubertiad’. A Schubertiad at Schober's in mid-January of 1823 probably brought down the curtain on Schubert's age of innocence.

Schubert, Franz, §1: Life