Mapping Canada's Music: Selected Writings of Helmut Kallmann

12. *Franz Schubert in Canada: A Historical Survey of Performance, Appreciation, and Research (1996)

12 Franz Schubert in Canada: A Historical Survey of Performance, Appreciation, and Research The conference “Austria 996–1996: Music in a Changing Society,” organized by Walter Kreyszig of the University of Saskatchewan, sponsored by the Austrian government, and held in Ottawa in January 1996, comprised an unusually large number of panel discussions, lectures, and performances. HK delivered this paper , and later edited it for the published proceedings, projected but never issued. Tracing the reception history of a classical repertoire in a North American setting was the sort of research exercise HK enjoyed, and he produced some of the few Canadian examples. His previous entry in this genre was devoted to Beethoven.1 Choosing Schubert for the present article, a composer whose work he knew well and cherished especially, he broadens the topic to include speculations, recent evidence, text criticism, and even aesthetic judgments on particular pieces. In a later article, HK compared the music of three European masters—Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms—in their shared anniversary year, and concluded that Schubert’s had the deepest and most universal appeal. Schubert, he argued, “was far more learned, high-aiming and self-critical than he has been given credit for.”2  Let me begin with some statistics. Donizetti 206, Bellini 186, Verdi 144, Rossini 135, Handel 81, Balfe 76, Auber 54, Mendelssohn 50, Beethoven 48, Mozart 40, Weber 36—I’ll skip a few names—Schubert 13, and for good measure Chopin 4 and Schumann 0. Previously unpublished article, 1996 Mapping Canada’s Music 150 These figures are taken from David Sale’s quite exhaustive index of Toronto performances between 1845 and 1867.3 How was it possible, one may well ask, that a composer infinitely greater than Donizetti or Balfe and whose music presented no unusual technical difficulties was so little performed some thirty years after his death? Reception in Europe To explain the protracted introduction of Schubert’s music to Canada, one has to keep in mind the uneven and slow dissemination of his music on his Central European home ground itself. Whereas many composers were famous in their time, then forgotten and later rediscovered, such as Bach, or never lost their popularity, such as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, Schubert exemplifies both kinds at once. His music quickly achieved wide popularity but only by a mere fraction of his songs and piano pieces and a few chamber works, whereas the bulk of his works was only gradually discovered and printed, long after his death. The Octet came out twenty-five years after his death;4 the Unfinished Symphony was discovered and first performed after thirty-seven years. The reasons for Schubert’s delayed recognition are many, apart from the composer’s ineptness as a businessman. Most of his contemporaries became famous first of all as virtuosi and/or opera composers. Schubert did not have those attributes nor the benefit of promotional societies, biographers, or advocating critics (although eventually Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Liszt did a great deal for his music).5 In consequence, the literary and philosophical discussion of art and music during the nineteenth century paid little attention to the obscure songwriter and all the more to Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, or Wagner. Schubert’s music had to make its way into the ears and hearts of listeners mainly on its own merits. It is all the more astonishing that Schubert, who had little immediate influence on nineteenth-century composers outside song, anticipated or influenced so much of the future—the short lyrical piano piece, some of Schumann, much of Brahms’s chamber music, Bruckner’s nearly everything (in the view of Alfred Einstein), Dvořák’s almost everything , Mahler’s song-symphonies, Wagner’s declamatory style, and latenineteenth -century modulations and harmonies in general. Unmistakable are the threads from Schubert to later salon music, Viennese waltzes, Sullivan ’s operettas, and much more. I have always wanted to assign an essay contest with the topic, “The nineteenth century put Beethoven’s name on its banner, but in its bones it had Schubert.” Franz Schubert in Canada 151 The Dissemination in a Peripheral Country: Early Canadian Contacts Let me now turn to Canada, but first to the realm of speculation. Were there any Canadians who met and knew Schubert? The answer is a cautionary Yes. The German-born musician Theodore Frederick Molt, who had come to Quebec City in 1822, decided three years later to revisit Europe. Upon his return...