By Stuart Mitchner

Man is like a ball, the plaything of Chance and Passion. — Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Right now the late Dr. Seuss may be the only author with the vision to do antic justice to the doomsday chaos spiraling out of Breitbart’s White House. Even if we could bring back the author of The Cat in the Hat, my guess is he’d throw up his hands and let his creation, the fussy fish, speak on his behalf, as the hysterical little scold does when he comprehends the extent of the devastation created by The Cat and Thing One and Thing Two: “This mess is so big and so deep and so tall, we can not pick it up, there is no way at all!”

In case you’re wondering what the new regime in Washington has to do with Franz Schubert, whose 220th birthday was Tuesday, the answer is that after two weeks of Trump this level of disorder is so big and so deep that words written, spoken, and thought 200 years ago jump out at you like the line about Chance and Passion from Schubert’s diary of September 1816, or this description of the Big Brother regime in Schubert’s Vienna — “absolutism mitigated by sloppiness” — during an era when “youthful high spirits … were viewed with suspicion.” The way things are going in D.C., “sloppiness” or Schlamperei (also defined as “muddleheadedness”) isn‘t doing much to mitigate the rush toward “absolutism.”

The passage about 1820s Vienna is from lieder singer Ian Bostridge‘s book Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (Knopf 2015), which reveals that Schubert was detained by the police in March 1820 for hanging out with members of a group suspected of engaging in radical student politics. When the most outspoken member claimed that “the Government was too stupid to be able to penetrate into his secrets,” he was sentenced to 14 months in prison and deportation for life.

Schubert’s Black Eye

Numerous sources agree that Schubert was released “with a black eye,” which makes you wonder exactly how that happened. Since we’re talking about one of the most famous glasses wearers in history, it’s fair to ponder the unwritten law about not striking a man wearing glasses. Did Schubert remove his specs as he faced the arresting officer? Or did some Viennese thug punch the 23-year-old, barely-five-foot-tall composer while the glasses were still perched on his nose? Schubert had strong opinions. In a poem titled “Lament over the Nation,” written four years after the incident, he refers to the “crowd’s gross pressure” while extolling the creative power that springs from pain and a “preternatural striving.” His remedy for the “sickness of the Nation” is “Art,” which in a time of “brawling Faction” gives relief to all those “whom Fate has huddled within walls.”

The blending of art and pain is echoed in the primary epigraph to Schubert’s Winter Journey, from a manuscript the composer headed “My Dream” and dated July 3, 1822: “With a heart filled with endless love for those who scorned me, I … wandered far away. For many and many a year I sang songs. Whenever I tried to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love.”

Schubert for Kids

The book that alerted me to the music I’d missed out on for almost 20 years of my adult life was written for children. M.B. Goffstein’s A Little Schubert is set in “a cold and snowy town called Vienna” where “a short fat young man with a small round nose, round eyeglasses, and curly hair” is living in “a bare little room without a fire.” Sitting at his tiny table writing music “as fast as it came into his head he hears “music that no one had ever heard before” so much that “he could not possibly remember it all.” He’s so busy writing that he doesn’t mind his “bare room or his shabby clothes.” When it gets so cold in the room that his fingers become too numb to write, he gets up and starts dancing to keep warm, much to the delight of my three-year-old son, whose joy in the absolutism of the Cat in the Hat was mitigated by his affection for the music of the endearingly driven composer, leading him to urge me to “go get more Schubert,” which I did, obsessively: string quartets, piano music, masses, and symphonies, and songs, songs, songs.

Tucked in the back envelope of A Little Schubert was a paper-thin 33 1/3 rpm disc containing five piano waltzes. I still have it. Judging from the toddler’s-tough-love look of it, it’s been not only played to tatters, but bitten, chewed, slobbered on, bent in half, slept with, and wept over. Goffstein’s Schubert appears in the center in mid-flight, arms outspread, an air-borne fairy godfather for young readers who will learn that poverty and cold and adversity are nothing next to the euphoria of creation.

Schubertmania

The first Schubert album I bought was a three-record Angel set of piano waltzes that brightened the household during a dark time. Although the split-level house on Hickory Court around the corner from the Choir College was not actually haunted — there were no ghosts, no poltergeists, no sudden inexplicable apparitions — once my wife found out about the family tragedy that had taken place there, all she could think about was moving. If we had any ghosts they were the beneficent spirits of music haunting the room where I was writing a novel long into the night with the record player volume down low, a female chorus softly singing the ghostly serenade Standchen at three in the morning. That was when I bonded with Schubert. The high point of this siege of Schubertmania came when my son and I ventured all over Mercer County in search of a bakery where we could have a cake made to order, inscribed Happy Birthday Franz Schubert in gothic chocolate letters and decorated with a yellow bird on a chocolate branch.

Westminster Marathon

Tuesday’s 24-hour music marathon organized by the Coalition to Save Westminster Choir College took place on Schubert’s birthday, a coincidence that started me thinking about the year we lived nearby. It makes sense that the family passion for the most celebrated and prolific composer of lieder developed while we lived a stone’s throw away from a college devoted to vocal music. I used to cut across the campus every day to pick up my son at nursery school, and as I became familiar with Schubert’s songs, I liked having the sound of singing all around me, even when it only came from students practicing scales.

“Let the Devil Play It”

Twenty years ago, January 31, 1997, my wife and I were there when Westminster marked Schubert’s 200th birthday with a program before a full house at the Bristol Chapel. The highlight was a performance of The Wanderer Fantasie, a piece so challenging that when Schubert himself performed it at a recital he reportedly threw up his hands at one point and shouted “Let the devil play it!” The pianist on that birthday night, an appealingly unprepossessing woman, looked unequal to the task. On top of that, she had no music. The other pianists had been following a score, with someone there to turn the pages.

In effect, the pianist was preparing to climb a Mt. Everest of music without a guide. The account of what follows in my journal teems with exclamation points. At first the excitement was in what Schubert was doing to the piano, seemingly taking the instrument apart, pitching it in the air, and putting it back together again, which was also what the middle-aged lady in the black gown was doing, she and Schubert. Rather than throwing up her hands at the impossible passages, she forged bravely ahead, and in those moments it really seemed that she and Schubert were one. As she was taking a bow, a young girl presented her with a bouquet of flowers. The pianist was Eva Bronstein-Barton, who is apparently still a member of the faculty.

Schubert Goes to America

That first year of living in Schubert inspired the creation of a fictional character in the novel I began at Hickory Court — an earthy Jersey Girl pianist who played duets with Schubert in her dreams. Some years later I published a poem based on Schubert’s famous last letter, written days before his death. Having read four novels by James Fenimore Cooper, including The Last of the Mohicans, Schubert was asking a friend to assist him “in this desperate situation” by bringing him “anything else” by Cooper. In the poem I imagined him making his passage into Cooper’s vision of the American wilderness where the two sisters from The Last of the Mohicans “wait in the firelight, one singing, one playing the mandolin.”

In Schubert’s Winter Journey, Ian Bostridge refers to the immense popularity of Cooper’s novels in Europe, “his works in the window of every bookstore.” He notes that “a fantastical America could be a promised land, free of the constricting politics and locked-in habits of a has-been Europe.” And like those who cherish the composer, his music, and his story, Bostridge finds “a wonderfully human picture” in the idea of Schubert reading The Last of the Mohicans “on his deathbed, in the midst of correcting the proofs for Winterreise.”

In 2017 “the promised land” is in the grip of, as Paul Krugman puts it,  “this shambolic administration” and its “pattern of dysfunction, ignorance, incompetence, and betrayal of trust.”

Says the Cat in the Hat. “Oh dear. You did not like our game … oh dear. what a shame! what a shame! what a shame!”

But at least the Cat comes back saying, “Have no fear of this mess. I always pick up my playthings.”