(Born at Lichtenthal, near Vienna, January 31, 1797; died at Vienna, November 19, 1828)

Schubert was a clumsy man, short, round-shouldered, tallow-faced, with a great shock of black hair, with penetrating though spectacled eyes, strong-jawed, stubby-fingered. He shuffled in his walk, and he expressed himself in speech with difficulty. He described himself as unhappy, miserable; but his practical jokes delighted tavern companions, and he was proud of his performance of The Erlking on a comb. He kept a diary and jotted down platitudes. He had little taste for literature, painting, sculpture, travels; he was not interested in politics or in questions of sociology. He went with his own kind. Unlike Beethoven, he could not impose on the aristocracy of Vienna. He loved the freedom of the tavern, the dance in the open air or late at night, when he would play pretty tunes for the dancers. Handel was the superb personage of music. Gluck was a distinguished person at the Court of Marie Antoinette; Sarti pleased the mighty Catherine of Russia; Rossini, the son of a strolling horn player, was at ease with royalty and worshiped by women. There is little in the plain life of Schubert to fire the zeal of the anecdotical or romantic biographer. No Grimm, no Diderot, relished his conversation. There is no gossip of noble and perfumed dames looking on him favorably. There is a legend that he was passionately in love with Caroline of the House of Esterhazy; but his passion followed a spell of interest in a pretty housemaid. He sang love in immortal strains; but women were not drawn towards him as they were towards Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—the list is a long one. He was not a spectacularly heroic figure. His morbidness has not the inviting charm of Schumann’s torturing introspection. We sympathize more deeply with the sufferings of Mozart, and yet the last years of Schubert were perhaps as cruel. Dittersdorf is close to us by his autobiography. Smug Blangini amuses by his vanity and by his indiscreet defence of Pauline Bonaparte, his pupil. No one can imagine Schubert philosophizing in books after the fashion of Wagner, Gounod, Saint-SaËns. It would have been easier for him to write a dozen symphonies than a feuilleton in the manner of Hector Berlioz. Schubert was a simple, kindly, loving, honest man, whose trade, whose life, was music.

Schubert thought in song even when he wrote for the pianoforte, string quartet, or orchestra. The songs which he wrote in too great number were composed under all sorts of conditions, almost always hurriedly, in the fields, in the tavern, in bed. There were German songs before Schubert—folk songs, songs of the church, set songs for home and concert; but Schubert created a new lyric—the emotional song. Plod your weary way through the ballads of Zumsteeg, the songs of J. A. Hiller, Reichardt, Zelter, and the others: how cold, formal, precise they are! They are like unto the cameo brooches that adorn the simpering women in old tokens or keepsakes; as remote and out of fashion as the hair jewelry of the early ’sixties. Take away “The Violet,” and what interest is there in Mozart’s book of songs? There is Haydn’s famous Canzonet; there is perhaps Beethoven’s “In Questa Tomba” with a few of the songs addressed to the “Ferne Geliebte”; but Beethoven knew the voice best as an orchestral instrument. The modern song was invented by Franz Schubert.

The striking characteristics of Schubert’s songs, spontaneity, haunting melody, a birthright mastery over modulation, a singular good fortune in finding the one inevitable phrase for the prevailing sentiment of the poem and in finding the fitting descriptive figure for salient detail, are also found in the best of his instrumental works.

There is the spontaneous simplicity, the simplicity praised by Walt Whitman: “The art of art, the glory of expression is simplicity. To speak with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art. The greatest poet swears to his art: ‘I will not be meddlesome. I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. What I tell, I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe, I will have purposes as health or heat or snow has, and be as regardless of observation. What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.’”

Then there is the ineffable melancholy that is the dominating note. There is gayety such as was piped naÏvely by William Blake in his Songs of Innocence; there is the innocence that even Mozart hardly reached in his frank gayety; yet in the gayety and innocence is a melancholy—despairing, as in certain songs of “The Winter Journey,” when Schubert smelled the mould and knew the earth was impatiently looking for him—a melancholy that is not the titanic despair of Beethoven, not the whining or shrieking pessimism of certain German and Russian composers; it is the melancholy of an autumnal sunset, of the ironical depression due to a burgeoning noon in spring, the melancholy that comes between the lips of lovers.

No one has treated the passion of love more purely. Love with the modern French composer is too often merely a pronounced phase of eroticism, or it is purely, or impurely, cerebral. With Wagner it is as a rule heroically sensuous if not sensual. Is there one page of Schubert’s music that is characterized first of all by sensuousness? A few measures are played or sung; the music may be unknown to the hearer, but he says to himself “Schubert,” and not merely because he recognizes restless changes from major to minor and from minor to major, tremulous tonalities, surprising ease in modulation, naÏve, direct melody. The sedulous ape may sweat in vain; there is no thought of Schubert, whose mannerisms are his whole individuality.

This individuality defies analysis. It was finely said by Walt Whitman that all music is “what awakens from you when you are reminded by the instruments”; the hearer’s thoughts are sweeter and purer, his soul is cheered or soothed, when he is reminded by the music of Schubert.

Pompous eulogies have been paid this homely, human, inspired man, who knew poverty and distress, who was ignored by the mob while he lived his short life, who never heard some of his most important works, whose works were scattered.

“Schubert, turning round, clutched at the wall with his poor, tired hands, and said in a slow voice, ‘Here, here is my end.’ At three in the afternoon of Wednesday, November 19, 1828, he breathed his last, and his simple, earnest soul took its flight from the world. There never has been one like him, and there will never be another.” When you read these words of Sir George Grove, something chokes you; they outweigh the purple phrases and dexterously juggled sentences of the rhetorician.