(VIII) Crisis.

25 years Schubert's senior, the composer and conductor Ignaz Franz von Mosel met Schubert at the dramatist Matthäus von Collin's around 1820. Spaun later recalled that, upon hearing Vogl sing some of Schubert's songs, Mosel declared Schubert to be ‘by no means just a prolific inventor of melodies, but a thorough musician’. On 28 February 1823 Schubert wrote a letter to Mosel with which he enclosed the overture and third act of his now completed opera Alfonso und Estrella. First soliciting Mosel's opinion, he then asked if Mosel might write him a letter of recommendation to Weber in Dresden, where Schubert also hoped for a performance. But dwarfing the main text of this otherwise routine letter is the opening sentence, which contains the first surviving mention of a development that altered Schubert's life permanently: ‘Kindly forgive me if I am compelled to inconvenience you with another letter so soon, but the circumstances of my health still forbid me to leave the house’. Although Schubert remained circumspect about the nature of his malady, the scattered references to its symptoms during his lifetime suggest that it was almost certainly the venereal disease syphilis. Syphilis was common in Europe throughout the 19th century; researchers have estimated that in some cities it afflicted as many as one in every five inhabitants. Those particularly unfortunate could contract syphilis through a single sexual encounter; more commonly, it gained a foothold in those practising a promiscuous lifestyle; and that such a lifestyle led to Schubert's illness is suggested by accounts from those who knew him personally. That Schubert's nature contained a strong element of sexual excess was long ignored or concealed by his biographers. Many of the relevant documents were known to biographers in the 1850s; but it was only in the late 1980s that scholars brought the contradictions in the composer's personality into the open.

References already exist in Schubert's lifetime; in a letter of 1825 from Anton Ottenwalt to Josef von Spaun, Ottenwalt wrote that ‘of Schubert I could tell you nothing that is new to you and to us; his works proclaim a genius for divine creation, unimpaired by the passions of an eagerly burning sensuality …’. When Schubert became the object of intense biographical scrutiny from the 1850s onwards, several of his friends provided reminiscences that spoke of the paradoxes in his character. In 1857 Eduard von Bauernfeld wrote to the composer's biographer Ferdinand Luib that ‘Schubert had, so to speak, a double nature, the Viennese gaiety being interwoven and ennobled by a trait of deep melancholy. Inwardly a poet and outwardly a kind of hedonist’. A dozen years later he wrote that ‘the Austrian element, uncouth and sensual, revealed itself both in his life and in his art’. Expanding on the nationalist theme, he writes that ‘the Austrian character appeared all too violently in the vigorous and pleasure-loving Schubert, there were also times when a black-winged demon of sorrow and melancholy forced itself into his vicinity’. In 1858 Josef Kenner wrote to his brother that ‘[Schubert's] body, strong as it was, succumbed to the cleavage in his – souls, I would put it, of which one pressed heavenwards and the other bathed in slime’, appending an explanation that ‘perhaps, too, it succumbed to frustration over the lack of recognition which some of his larger efforts suffered and to bitterness at the meanness of his publishers’. Schober – himself no model of virtue – attributed Schubert's illness to ‘excessively indulgent sensual living and its consequences’.

These characterizations of Schubert's lifestyle from his close friends – their probity notwithstanding – leave little doubt as to his powerful sexual appetite. What remains strongly in contention, however, is the nature of Schubert's excesses, specifically whether they were heterosexual, homosexual or perhaps bisexual. Schubert's illness offers no help; syphilis can be contracted through either heterosexual or homosexual activity. Those who argue for Schubert's orthodox, if hyperactive, heterosexuality point first to the purported love affair in 1816 between Schubert and Therese Grob. Schubert's failure to marry her is explained by Metternich's Marriage Consent Law, which forbade marriages by males in Schubert's class unless they could verify their ability to support a family. Although lost, a ‘long, enthusiastic letter’ from Schubert to his friend Anton Holzapfel was said to have described Schubert's infatuation with Therese. And in a reminiscence from 1854, Anselm Hüttenbrenner described a walk with Schubert in which the composer again declared his love for Therese. During the 1820s both Schober and Bauernfeld mention Schubert's apparently unrequited love for Princess Caroline Esterházy. In 1841 Wilhelm von Chézy wrote in his memoirs that Schubert ‘honoured women and wine’. On the other hand, it is difficult to explain away Schubert's pronounced preference throughout his life for the company of men. However congruent with contemporary practices in Viennese society, his most intimate expressions of sentiment are all directed to men. Not a single letter survives from Schubert to a woman, or to Schubert from a woman. Any homoerotic dimensions within Schubert's circle of friends would not have been openly aired but expressed through ambiguous codes known only to insiders. Even given Josef Kenner's near-puritanical uprightness, it is hard to imagine ‘bathed in slime’ as applying to orthodox heterosexuality. Hence we are left to ponder many ambiguities – for example, whether ‘Greek’ describes a homosexual or a devotee of ancient Greek culture, or whether ‘young peacocks’ refers to Schubert's need for young boys or for medicinal food. Moreover, the rigid distinction between ‘straight’ and ‘gay’, which solidified only at the end of the 19th century, would have been unknown to Schubert. It is possible that Schubert's passions encompassed a whole range of heterosexual and homosexual impulses that he was driven to fulfil.

Regardless of the direct cause, in the first stage of syphilis that followed about a month after contracting the disease Schubert would have developed genital chancres and swollen lymph nodes in the groin. Doctors urged patients in this phase to remain at home. A few months later – perhaps around mid-April 1823 – he would have found himself covered with a pinkish rash accompanied by fever. By now Schubert, who was becoming increasingly well known in Viennese musical circles, would have had to decline social invitations. From the onset of his illness (probably no later than January 1823) until his death six years later, Schubert would live with frequent physical impairment and chronic anxiety. In Schubert's Vienna the contraction of syphilis was for all practical purposes a death sentence; the time interval between contracting the disease and entering its tertiary, and usually terminal, stage was typically three to ten years, although in some instances it might be a good deal more. Given the widespread ignorance about hygiene and disease transmission, sufferers from syphilis often succumbed to other maladies first. Just how devastated Schubert felt about his sudden misfortune can be gleaned from a rare poem that he penned in May entitled Mein Gebet. Its opening lines – ‘With a holy zeal I yearn / Life in fairer worlds to learn’ – sharpens in the third of the four stanzas: ‘See, annihilated I lay in the dust, / Scorched by agonizing fire, / My life's martyr path, / Approaching eternal oblivion’. In the last of the four stanzas he finds the promise of redemption: ‘And a pure, stronger being / Let, Almighty, it be consecrated’.

Schubert, Franz, §1: Life