General Biography on Schubert (late)

Whether or not it showed—and it often did show—Franz Schubert’s final years were largely characterized by sickness. When he died on November 19, 1828, just two months shy of turning 32, it was not sudden. He had ceased taking food and drink around the first of November and was completely bedridden for the final five days. His attending physician indicated typhoid fever as the cause of death, though it is equally probable that the onset of late-stage syphilis should be described as the ultimate cause. In a broader sense, Schubert had not been completely well ever since contracting syphilis sometime late in 1822. During the final six years of life, he would have experienced tell-tale skin rashes, hair loss, and lesions in his mouth and throat (making singing impossible).
Perhaps more significantly, as his letters reveal, the composer endured alternating periods of isolation and depression on the one hand, offset by normal social activity and fervent optimism on the other. Shortly after contracting the disease, Schubert penned a revealing, hyperbolic poem about his lamentable existence. Mein Gebet (My Prayer) closes with the lines “Take my life, my flesh and blood / Plunge it all in Lethe’s flood, / To a purer, stronger state / Deign me, Great One, to translate.” In spring 1824 he wrote to a friend:

I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair over this ever makes things worse and worse, instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have perished . . . Each night on retiring to bed, I hope I may not wake again, and each morning but recalls yesterday’s grief.

The extent to which Schubert sensed his death coming is open to debate, and one looks in vain to find poignant musical testaments by way of leave-taking. The works on tonight’s program, written between early 1826 and October 1828, generally effuse an optimistic tone. Judging from the musical evidence, Schubert had negotiated a tentative peace with his looming mortality: better kept at arm’s length, but not to be resisted with lamentations.
Schubert’s suffering was compounded by the mercury treatments for syphilis, as well as his gluttonous relationship with food and drink. Little of this behavior comes through in the portraits of the man: slightly overweight (he was affectionately nicknamed “Tubby” by friends), with scholarly spectacles and a gentle, reserved glance. Yet in the late years he was often obscene and habitually aloof in social situations, sometimes turning up hours late or not at all for important events. There is clear evidence for bipolarity in this complex man: on the one hand, carousing, hard drinking, late nights; on the other, naïve to a fault, affectionate, retiring. According to one story, he shyly cowered in a corner when he and Beethoven happened to be dining at the same tavern. But on his deathbed, he confidently requested a burial plot next to the elder master.

(c) Jason Stell