Schubert and Melancholy

I remain haunted by having said a couple of months ago that I 'never found Schubert down-hearted'. Not the only daft thing I ever said and for the most part I meant it but the disbelief it was met with makes it one of the more questionable of recent times. I've not seen Lilac Time, the 1934 film with Richard Tauber, so I can't blame it on that.

I spent much of a day playing discs of Schubert and still found much more 'lightness of touch' than depression. I don't find the Unfinished Symphony at all pessimistic.

I wondered if melancholy was a temporary condition or a character trait and found it can be both. Sadly, as it were, Robert Burton's Anatomy was rather longer that what I wanted to read 45 years ago in C17th Lit. I expect both Montaigne and Dr. Johnson are good on the subject, and more succinct.

So I ordered a Schubert biography from the library. He's about the most important composer whose life I've not read yet anyway. Elizabeth Norman McKay's book is excellent, balancing the demands of the life, the music, contemporary ideas and events very well and covering the 31 years in 340 pages in plenty but not too much detail.

But if ignorance is no defence, it looks like I'm guilty as charged. It says the Piano Sonata, D. 784, is,

one of the darkest of all his compositions, autobiographical in the emotions it expressed of pain, distress, anger, and ill temper,

and, yes, I was familiar with it. 

Perhaps the best short answer to a complicated question is summarized in a chaper on Two Natures in which Schubert could be a sociable, attractive and popular personality but increasingly refusing to be bound by social convention. The latter part led one witness to note,

how powerfully the craving for pleasure dragged his soul down to the slough of moral degradation.

It seems likely that debauchery, of which the book is short of lurid detail, was a factor in his death just short of 32. There is a suggestion that his friend Schober was a bad influence.     Quite how he found the time for such indulgence as well as reaching well over 900 opus numbers in so brief a life is hard to say, especially as there were fallow periods and illness.

It's a remarkable life, as were those of Mozart and Beethoven, to name only two. So is there some law that genius is bound to live an extraordinary life. Not necessarily, despite the prodigious output of music and children, Bach doesn't appear to have been outrageous.

But I'd better be more careful about my pronouncements. No, I don't generally find Schubert's music down-hearted but he was clearly 'bi-polar'. For me, though, it is the 'sincere, incapable of malice, friendly, grateful, modest, sociable, communicative of joy' character that comes most through the music. The world's not an easy place to negotiate for some and his talent and commitment was to his art rather than applied to the world. He comes across as a sort of ruined saint, somehow not quite on a par with Beethoven but not very far behind him at all.