By Stuart Mitchner
We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
—James Boswell (1740-1795)
Boswell’s reference to “a series of kindnesses” made me think of the moments in Franz Schubert’s music that encourage the illusion of a friendship between the listener and the composer. I’m referring to the odd, unexpected, playful yet haunting phrasings, each with a quality distinctly Schubertian, that bring warmth to everything from songs and piano sonatas to string quartets and symphonies.
My linking of friendship and kindness probably began with Schubert’s last letter, written around November 12, 1828, a week before his death on November 19. After eating nothing for days, unable to drink liquids or keep anything down, he contacted a friend: “Be so kind, then, to assist me in this desperate situation by means of literature. Of Cooper’s I have read The Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, The Pilot, and The Pioneers. If by chance you have anything else of his, I implore you to deposit it with Frau von Bogner at the coffee house.”
Cooper’s Gift
What struck me about the letter was the life or death urgency of the request, the idea that Schubert sought a form of sustenance as precious as food from an American writer who was his contemporary (1789-1851), having published The Last of the Mohicans in 1826. I like to think of James Fenimore Cooper unknowingly sending a gift “by means of literature” to a German composer during his last illness. Schubert might even have found something like a token of friendship in the passage about the itinerant singing-master David Gamut, who introduces himself to the sisters Alice, Cora, and their guide Hawkeye, aka Leatherstocking, while they’re hiding out in a cavern. Although Hawkeye finds the stranger’s profession “a strange calling! to go through life, like a catbird, mocking all the ups and downs that may happen to come out of other men’s throats,” he tells the singing-master to “let us hear what you can do in that way.”
Adjusting “his iron-rimmed spectacles,” a touch that might have roused a sympathetic smile from the bespectacled composer, Gamut hands his little volume of hymns to Alice, who shares it with Cora as he begins the “sacred song.” The air “was solemn and slow. At times it rose to the fullest compass of the rich voices of the females, who hung over their little book in holy excitement” while the “natural taste and true ear of David governed and modified the sounds to suit the confined cavern, every crevice and cranny of which was filled with the thrilling notes of their flexible voices.”
Having composed hundreds of songs, including a number based on the prose and poetry of his contemporary Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Schubert would surely have taken note of the music’s effect on the stoic Hawkeye. “But the scout, who had placed his chin in his hand, with an expression of cold indifference, gradually suffered his rigid features to relax, until, as verse succeeded verse, he felt his iron nature subdued, while his recollection was carried back to boyhood, when his ears had been accustomed to listen to similar sounds of praise, in the settlements of the colony.”
What Kindness?
Having just looked at the Sunday New York Times, I find myself writing about a long-dead composer’s kindnesses in a world where masked government agents are separating children from their parents, AI and crypto are devouring modern life, a culture of fear is destroying the Justice Department, and our president has demolished the East Wing of the White House, all as America approaches its 250th anniversary.
In fact, Schubert offers a great deal more than kindness, as I saw from a YouTube performance by pianist Alfred Brendel, who died at the age of 93 last June. Brendel was taking on the C minor Sonata, one of Schubert’s last three works for piano. At first he was cool, systematic and elegant, with his regimented lifting and poising of hands, everything as if measured and rounded off — until the music began demanding more, the camera moved in close, and the pianist seemed possessed by a combination of trauma and ecstasy, as if he were living and dying with the composer.
A December 28, 2024, New York Times piece by concert pianist Jonathan Bliss puts it all together: the C minor is “rageful and terrifying: it stares death in the face and demands that you do the same. For the most part, it unfolds with a remorseless momentum…. This music has no time for tenderness. Until, suddenly, it does. The slow movement arrives, and all the music’s hard edges soften. The principal theme is pure consolation. It begins by encircling a single note, regarding it from below and then from above with affection. This theme, with simplicity and honesty, reveals Schubert’s essence in all its generosity and all its loneliness.”
Last Days
Schubert “sang continuously” during the last days of his life, according to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s biographical-analytical study, Schubert’s Songs (Knopf 1997). No wonder, since the only piece of music the dying composer had been able to focus on was the proof of the second part of Winterreise. Think of Schubert facing death in his closet of a room above a coffee house in Vienna, musing over the last lines of “Der Leiermann” (“Hurdy Gurdy Man”) — “Strange old man, shall I go with you? / Will you grind your organ to my songs?”
Recorded a century and a half later by Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Gerald Moore, Winterreise was also the subject of the 17-year-old singer’s first public performance, given in early 1943 in the town hall of Zehlendorf, a Berlin suburb. Seven songs into the cycle, the RAF intervened. “We had a terrible bombing of the city that day,” Fischer-Dieskau recalls in a 2005 interview, “and the whole audience of 200 people and myself had to go into the cellar for two-and-a-half hours. Then when the raid was over we came back up and resumed.” Asked where in the cycle he began again, he says the song was “Rückblick” (“Backward Glance”): “So we looked back to the part already completed.”
A clip on YouTube shows the singer rehearsing “Rückblick” with Alfred Brendel for the 1978 recital that ends, memorably, with Fischer-Dieskau engulfed in darkness at the last stop in Schubert’s journey, singing “Der Leiermann.”
According to a television interview with lieder singer Christa Ludwig: “Schubert is so big, so delicate, but what he did was pick a form that looked so humble and quiet so that he could crawl into that form and explode emotionally, find every way of expressing every emotion in this miniature form.”
“The Heart Runs Over”
Looking for at least one example of Schubertian “kindness,” I ended, inevitably, with two songs. In “Der Jungling an der Quelle” (“The Youth at the Well”), the charm is so simple, so transcendent and yet so direct as to inspire thoughts of a Monty Python sketch where every time the song is played the listener drops dead from sheer delight. For Fischer-Dieskau, what seduces you is the way the piano “wanders up and down.” But “Im Frühling” (“In Spring”) doesn’t wander, it strolls, and the stroll Gerald Moore takes after the second verse is one of the most exhilarating moments in all of Schubert: love hurts, but life goes on, merry and bright, till the next blow falls.