Centennial

Five hundred torches pierced the blackness of a Vienna night. Five hundred dark-coated figures crowded their way down a crooked street in the Himmel-pfortgrund, stopped before an empty house tucked away there, hummed an invocatory pitch and sang the Serenade of Franz Peter Schubert. So last week, on his birthday and at his birthplace, tribute was paid to the memory of a great composer.

A hundred years have passed since young Franz Schubert was taken with typhus fever and died. Town officials were informed of his death . . . just another of those hungry-looking musical fellows. . . . They went to his lodgings, pounded on the door, pushed their way in when there was no answer. . . . They made a formal list of his leavings--six pairs of shoes, a hat, thirteen pairs of socks, a shabby suit, a blanket or two.

Ten dollars they appraised it, then found a pile of unpublished manuscripts and added two dollars more. But that was in 1828. Since then the world has added to the list--some 600 songs, and masses, cantatas, motets, hymns, operas and fragments of operas, piano sonatas, impromptus, dances and marches, string quartets, the bulk of ten symphonies.

It is by his songs that Schubert is measured today, by his Erlkonig that he wrote when he was eighteen, by Who is Sylvia?, Litaney, Tod und das Madchen and the Standchen, by the songs that crept in to become the life of his last string quartets, his quintet, the C Major and the great Unfinished Symphony. In Vienna he was first just the thirteenth child of a Moravian peasant-schoolmaster and a dreary cook in a middle-class family. He was the bushy-haired, undersized choirboy in the Imperial Chapel, the one with the thick spectacles. He was the feeble violinist in a small school orchestra. He was the round-shouldered fellow teaching in his father's parish school to dodge military service. He was the awkward, pasty-faced composer drifting about the city with never enough money to buy his own music paper.

No one knew the Schubert to whom music and poetry were the same. No one saw him up early in the mornings, taking the lyrics of Goethe, of Schiller, of Shakespeare and putting them into music, one after the other, with incredible swiftness, writing first drafts and calling them done.

What was a songwriter at best that Vienna should be mindful of him, Vienna who had her Beethoven there just around the corner making big symphonies and an opera? The Schubert operas with their trashy librettos were chaff compared to it. No one ever heard his symphonies, or of him, an awkward fellow, a song writer.

. . . When he was thirty-one, before minds had time to change, Franz Schubert died.

Now to commemorate him and his songs, musical organizations of the world have named 1928 as Schubert Centennial Year. Vienna did him first honor, began the New Year with Schubert on her orchestral programs, Schubert in her song recitals, Schubert in her churches. The U. S.

Committee, under Otto Hermann Kahn, has elaborate plans. There will be: 1) an international composer's contest extending throughout this spring, with prizes of $20,000 to be awarded by the Columbia Phonograph Co.; 2) outdoor singing festivals during the spring and summer, in which choruses the country over will participate; 3) special Schubert concerts in the autumn at which there will be performed cycles of his chamber music, his piano music, his symphonies, and the possible first U. S. performance of a Schubert opera; 4) special commemoration programs to be given on Nov. 19, the anniversary of his death.

As first gesture, Chairman Kahn cabled last week to the Mayor of Vienna, asked him in behalf of the U. S. to place a birthday wreath in the Schubert house.