By Stuart Mitchner

Today, January 31, is Franz Schubert’s birthday. Born in 1797, he died on November 19, 1828, age 31. Toward the end of that year he was composing his last three piano sonatas and vicariously exploring the backwoods America of James Fenimore Cooper. I’ve been intrigued by this deathbed connection ever since I read Schubert’s last letter, in which he tells a friend, “I am ill. I have eaten nothing for eleven days and drunk nothing, and I totter feebly and shakily from my chair to bed and back again…. 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….”

For the past week I’ve been reading The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826) and listening to Schubert’s penultimate piano sonata, No. 20 in A-major completed on September 26, 1828. The sonata’s haunting second movement, the Andantino employed so powerfully in Robert Bresson’s 1966 film, Au Hasard Balthazar, has been following me around ever since last Wednesday’s  mist-making Schubertian snowfall.

Opening the Door

The relationship between snow and Schubert began for me in M. B. Goffstein’s A Little Schubert (Harper and Row 1972), which I shared with my 3-year-old son in the winter of 1980. The book opens with the image of  “a cold and snowy town called Vienna” and a short, fat, bespectacled, heavily bundled up young man walking through the falling snow like a Peanuts character on his way to give piano lessons to Schroeder. This long-in-coming musical revelation was abetted by a small plastic record called “Noble Waltzes” tucked into a pocket in the back of the book. So infectious were the 12 dances that I traded a Grateful Dead album to the Record Exchange for the three-LP set of Schubert’s piano waltzes that led me to his string quartets, piano sonatas, trios, symphonies, and, finally, songs and song cycles.

Four decades later, the same little book is open on my desk; even the plastic disc has survived, as has the seductive charm of Goffstein’s imagery and her celebration of the power of creation: Schubert sitting at a table in a bare little room without a fire writing music “as fast as it came into his head,” his mouth open as he writes, as if he were singing as he hears “music no one had ever heard before.” It’s so cold in the room that he has to clap his hands and stamp his feet, dancing to keep warm. As the book ends, he’s skip-dancing off the closing pages, both arms raised as if he were hoisting himself into heaven.

Reading Over His Shoulder

Also on my desk is an early-20th-century pocket edition of The Last of the Mohicans, from a set of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which I’ve been reading, in effect, over Schubert’s shoulder. My sense of the composer’s presence is based on the small wooden bust perched on the windowsill to my right and a mind’s-eye version of Goffstein’s Schubert smiling as he rereads in English one of his favorite passages from the novel he devoured in German in late September. Why is he smiling? Maybe because he’s dreaming of the set of songs he could write about the itinerant singing-master David Gamut, who introduces himself to Hawkeye, aka Leatherstocking, as “an unworthy instructor in the art of psalmody.”

Schubert would have appreciated the situation: the party Hawkeye is guiding, which includes the Munro sisters (dark-haired Cora and fair-haired Alice) has taken refuge in a cavern, hiding from the Maqua tribe. Although Hawkeye has doubts about the stranger’s profession (“Tis 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.”

Pleased, Gamut adjusts “his iron-rimmed spectacles” (a touch that would already have the bespectacled composer smiling) before handing his little volume of hymns to Alice, who shares it with Cora as the “sacred song” proceeds. Having composed hundreds of songs, including a number based on the prose and poetry of Sir Walter Scott, Schubert would have been accustomed to Cooper’s somewhat flowery description of the music’s effect on Hawkeye and the Mohicans Uncas and Chingachgook:

“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, and again it sank so low, that the rushing of the waters ran through their melody, like a hollow accompaniment. 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. The Indians riveted their eyes on the rocks, and listened with an attention that seemed to turn them into stone. 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. His roving eyes began to moisten, and before the hymn was ended, scalding tears rolled out of fountains that had long seemed dry, and followed each other down those cheeks, that had oftener felt the storms of heaven than any testimonials of weakness.”

A search online suggests that this may be the only time in the multi-volume saga when the stoic Leatherstocking is reduced to tears. In any case, Cooper makes sure the shock of the next sentence gives readers no time to absorb this glimpse of weakness: “The singers were dwelling on one of those low, dying chords, which the ear devours with such greedy rapture, as if conscious that it is about to lose them, when a cry, that seemed neither human nor earthly, rose in the outward air, penetrating not only the recesses of the cavern, but to the inmost hearts of all who heard it.”

Transcribing the Cry

When asked about the unearthly sound, the best Hawkeye can do is to admit that though he had ranged the woods “for more than thirty years” believing that there was no cry that Indian or beast could make that his ears had not heard, this proved that he “was only a vain and conceited mortal!” My guess is that on rereading the passage, Goffstein’s Schubert, who “heard music that no one had ever heard before,” would be pondering a musical equivalent for a sound “neither human nor earthly.”

As long as I’m taking liberties with time, space, language, and translation, I’ll suggest that Schubert’s response to the sudden unearthly “cry” might be one among numerous instances when the shock value of the narrative impacted the penultimate piano sonata he was composing in September 1828. Consider the language that the Andantino has provoked among critics quoted on sites like core.uk: for example, the way “the music continues to build with increasing savagery via extreme registers and the use of trills to sustain tension,” the continued use of the word “savage,” and references to the “dark, arpeggiated chords” that close the movement, “the rising sense of hysteria,” the “contrasting disruption,” and the way in which the lyricism of the opening section provides, in pianist Alfred Brendel’s words, “a dramatic foil to the savage intensity of the middle section.”

Schubert and Balthazar

This may be the most presumptuous “liberty” I have yet taken, but assuming that Schubert has been gently introduced to certain 20th and 21st century innovations prior to a personal screening of Au Hasard Balthazar, I’m supposing that he would approve director Robert Bresson’s use of the opening and closing measures of the Andantino from Sonata No. 20 as accompaniment to the life and death of a sublimely sympathetic donkey named Balthazar. Having just seen the film, frequently listed as one of the greatest of all time, I think Schubert would find himself at an emotional ground zero, in tears, devastated, immobilized. It’s said that Bresson regretted using Schubert on the soundtrack. In fact, the film is unimaginable without the music, which suggests a place for the stalwart Balthazar among the composer’s company of tragic wayfarers.

———

Note: I found Schubert’s last letter and other helpful information in Otto Erich Deutsch’s Schubert Reader (W.W. Norton 1947) and in his edition of Schubert’s Letters and Other Writings (Vienna House 1974).