![]() Yet the effect of this encounter with Beethoven’s orchestral music was intimidating as well as inspiring. This was new and exciting music and showed Schubert just what could be achieved in the realm of orchestral music. 3, published 1807) – both then hot off the press. Another fellow-student, Anton Holzapfel, 4 mentions the first and second symphonies, plus the overtures Coriolan (published 1808) and Leonore (probably No. Josef von Spaun 3 mentions the second symphony in D major (published in 1804) as a favourite which made the ‘deepest impression’ on Schubert, then only just 12 and playing in the violin section. The performances were enjoyed in the summer months by an appreciative crowd of locals, who gathered beneath the open windows of the school. The excellent student orchestra at the Konvikt, the Viennese boarding school which Schubert attended from 1808 until 1813, played the earlier (and easier) symphonies of Beethoven. Known links between the two great contemporaries By then Beethoven is important more as a personal model of the independent professional composer, and his example confirms Schubert in his determination to compose what inner necessity dictates, even if this is out of step with fashion and may not be fully appreciated by his contemporaries. In his later music, Schubert occasionally echoes motives from Beethoven works, including deliberate quotations as homage, but rarely seeks to imitate Beethoven’s style as such. Schubert is clearly parroting the views of his musically conservative teacher Antonio Salieri to a large extent 1, but he consistently disapproved of music as a tool to arouse cheap emotions and could never bring himself to debase music by making it a butt of humour in itself 2. This ‘Bizarrerie’, which Schubert roundly condemns, is characterised by what Schubert considers an almost sacrilegious tendency to mix tragic and comic elements, to combine ‘the holiest with the Harlequin’, and arouse wild passions instead of leading listeners towards love and God. Indeed, despite occasional influences which can be traced in Schubert’s early compositions (where, like most young artists, he was studying a number of recognised sources as part of his apprenticeship), we find Schubert in 1816 blaming Beethoven for the trend towards ‘Bizarrerie’ in music. Throughout his life Schubert admired Beethoven as an artist and a composer, but he did not set out slavishly to emulate the composer or to model his music directly on Beethoven’s. Could the Titan, rendered yet more remote by his deafness, have given heed to compositions by the retiring Schubert, twenty-seven years his junior? There can be no definitive answers to these questions, but we can at least offer a commonsense survey and a commentary on the facts and issues relevant to their investigation. A final, intriguing question concerns the possible influence of Schubert on Beethoven. If we seek to estimate the influence exerted on Schubert by the personality of Beethoven, our imagination in the interpretation of facts and events is again exercised. When asking how the work of the older composer influenced that of the younger, we have plentiful evidence at our disposal. We are bound to ask whether they met – and equally frustrated at the lack of evidence that renders all our answers ultimately conjectural. Two of the world’s greatest composers lived in the same small city for thirty-one years, the entire life of the younger man. He also contributed his realisation of Beethoven’s Der Gute Fürst to this website. Paul Reid is the author of The Beethoven Song Companion (2007), and former Chairman of the Schubert Institute (UK).
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