Schubert's Desk

When Austrian Composer Franz Peter Schubert died in 1828, it was at the house of his favorite brother, Ferdinand. Affectionate, sociable, improvident, Franz Peter found his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness in the composition of music. Unmarried, and with no house of his own, he lived throughout his working life in lodgings or with friends. At his death, his principal personal effects (inherited by Brother Ferdinand) consisted of one writing desk and, within it, an enormous mass of manuscript music.

This week a newly formed society of music-lovers gave its first concert at the American Women's Club, London. Purpose of the society: to give performances and promote the study of the music preserved to posterity in Franz Schubert's writing desk. For, although much of this music is available in popular editions, and all of it is printed in the standard editions of Schubert's Works, the great bulk of it is seldom or never performed except in Schubert's birthplace, Vienna.

Franz Peter Schubert came of prolific peasant stock. His father, Franz Schubert, parish schoolmaster of Lichtenthal, now a suburb of Vienna, had 14 children by his first wife, five by his second. Brother Ferdinand himself had 17 children. This family fecundity, denied natural expression in Composer Franz Peter, found its outlet in an extraordinary musical fertility. Schubert, who died at the age of 31, was the most prolific first-rate composer who ever lived. Besides symphonies, choral works, masses, vocal duos, songs with instrumental accompaniment and a huge stack of miscellaneous chamber music, he wrote an average of nearly two songs for every week of his adult life.

There are between 800 and 900 Schubert songs for voice & piano in existence, some bad, some indifferent, but the greater part masterpieces.

Founded by the well-known Lieder-singer and Schubert authority, white-haired, pipe-smoking Reinhold von Warlich, London's new Schubert Society has met with extraordinary support from England's musical and social bigwigs. Patrons include two princesses, a sheaf of baronesses & countesses, illustrious scientists and world-renowned musicians. But the most interesting name on its letterheads is that of its president, Carola Geisler-Schubert, lifelong friend of Liedersinger von Warlich and granddaughter of Schubert's brother Ferdinand.

Now a gentle, snow-haired lady of 82 living in London, Franz Peter Schubert's grandniece talks easily of how, when a student, she heard Composer-Pianist Franz Liszt play in Budapest in 1870, heard Composer Richard Wagner conduct in Vienna in 1876. Fellow students with her were Conductor Artur Nikisch and Composer-Conductor Gustav Mahler (TIME, Feb. 7). She heard Russian Pianist Anton Rubinstein (Melody in F), Spanish Violinist Pablo de Sarasate (Zigeunerweisen), took piano lessons from Clara Schumann, gifted wife of Composer Robert Schumann.

Born only 28 years after Franz Peter Schubert's death, she can give information about her composer granduncle at direct secondhand, for she remembers talking about him as a young girl to her grandmother, Ferdinand's wife. Bitter about Franz Peter's early Viennese publishers, she claims emphatically that it was they who condemned him to a life of poverty. The copyrights of many of Schubert's songs, some of them the finest in the whole range of song-literature, were sold originally for less than a nickel.

From her mother, Ferdinand's daughter, aging Carola Geisler-Schubert inherited the writing desk which had originally contained Franz Peter Schubert's legacy to the world. In it, ten years after the composer's death, Robert Schumann discovered the manuscript of one of the great landmarks of symphonic literature, Schubert's monumental C Major Symphony. The writing desk is now in the Schubert Museum in Vienna, a gift from President Carola Geisler-Schubert.

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