I Don't Have to Believe It If I Don't Want To

The late author John O'Hara once said, “George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, but I don't have to believe it if I don’t want to.” A lot of us still feel that way. Gershwin, perhaps the greatest melodist of our age, was not quite 39 when he died. What, then, is to be said of Franz Schubert, who died in 1828 at the age of 31?

Rumors about Gershwin's death still persist—that he died of syphillis, that he was a closet homosexual, that he fathered an illegitimate son. Truth is, he died of a brain tumor on the operating table, his sexual preference was for leggy showgirls, and the alleged son, I am told, is an imposter. But Schubert did die of syphilis, though his prudish protectors for a century insisted it had been typhoid—and he was perhaps the greatest melodist of any age. Every one of his 600 Lieder, his 14 surviving string quartets, the 15 piano sonatas, 15 operas, and seven symphonies he completed, plus the several he didn’t, and all the rest of his astonishing legacy to the world of music—the Masses, the overtures, whatever he set down—is spun out of the stuff of pure song. As naturally and spontaneously as the notes that issue from the throat of a thrush the melodies poured forth from Schubert's pen in copious profusion. Nature is prodigal; so was his genius.

They were not all merry, those Schubertian melodies, to be sure. Some were as plaintive and poignant as the outpourings from the musical heart that another great melodist, Tchaikovsky, was later in the century to wear on his very sleeve.

Schubert was all of 19 and had already composed a number of earlier masterpieces when he wrote his Symphony no. 5 in B-flat, yet there isn't an uncertain phrase or an ounce of adolescent excess in the entire score. It is small in scale—no trumpets, no drums, no clarinets—composed, in fact, for an orchestra that was set up to play it not in a concert hall but in a living room. But its small proportions are perfect. It flows from start to finish with inimitable grace and fleetness. And it sings—how it sings—to us in our noisy age even as it must have to the little group who first gathered to hear it on an evening in 1816, at a time when the composer was teaching elementary classes at his father’s school in the Vienna suburb of Lichtenthal.

A little more than a year later, at the ripe old age of 20, Schubert composed his Symphony no. 6 in C (the “Little Symphony in C,” it's nicknamed, to distinguish it from the “Great” —and sweeping—ninth in the same key). Little or not, it is surely one of the most exuberant works ever to find a place in the standard repertoire. It tumbles, it marches, it jokes, it preens its bright orchestral feathers, as it, too, sings its heart out, from its deceptively somber opening to ‘its tumultuously high-spirited conclusion.

Over the years, both these works have been recorded many times, by many orchestras, under a variety of conductors all over the Western world. I have just listened to this version, with Julius Rudel leading the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and it strikes such a fine balance between formal poise and expressive vigor that I have broken my own vow not to expand my already over-crowded shelves with any more versions of Schubert symphonies and managed somehow to squeeze room for it in my permanent collection. For here once again, echt Schubert lives on, in a fine pair of exhilarating, carefully recorded performances.

Franz Schubert died in Vienna on November 19, 1828, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to!