Franz Schubert makes me feel like a real loser.
I was fortunate to attend the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra performance of Schubert's string quintet in C Major. It’s the last composition Schubert finished before he died at thirty-one from typhus or syphilis, probably both.
While Introducing the quintet, one of the violinists talked about Shubert’s prolific output during his short life, having composed hundreds of symphonies, operas, chamber pieces, and songs. She told us how Franz, suffering in excruciating pain, prayed every night that he would die before he woke up.
Yet in his final weeks, he managed to scratch out forty-five minutes of the most gorgeous, complex, and innovative chamber music ever written– with a quill pen.
I sat in the climate-controlled Stillwater, MN church last night mesmerized by the music, imagining a short little Franz withering away in a cold, drafty room rendered foul by an open chamberpot; a bowl of stew, for which he had no appetite, covered with flies among the sheaves of paper he could barely afford.
I later learned that in his final months, Schubert started to experience some critical acclaim and moderate financial success after years of struggling with poverty and failure. For most of his short life, he worked as a school teacher and music tutor, composing as a side hustle.
He was so poor that he wasn't even allowed to marry due to an Austrian law that required a groom to have the financial ability to care for a wife.
Scholars suspect that Schubert was depressed and almost certainly bipolar, as evidenced by the incredible volume of artistic work he produced during short, manic periods. He was also a bit of a lush.
Here we are, almost two hundred years later, where a modest income provides an unimaginable level of wealth and comfort. Yet we still complain about long commutes to air-conditioned offices and whine over microaggressions. We're so comfortable we invent maladies and pay for the opportunity to stress our bodies with exercise machines, saunas, and cold plunges.
In Schubert’s time, an hour of candlelight took four hours of work at the average wage. We have so much free artificial light we can't see stars; so much food and booze; abundance is a greater risk to our health than scarcity.
What do we do with all this free time and comfort? We pour our vast creative energy and wealth into making ourselves even more comfortable.
Sure, we still create some great art– and even more “content” we pretend is art, but after two centuries, very little of it rises to the level of Shubert’s deathbed Quintet.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. I’m grateful to live at a time and place with antibiotics, running water, electricity, jet propulsion, and internet memes. I love having the magical Amazon manifest my desires with free shipping.
I could go on, but I’m bored and tired. I think I’ll have a latte and stream the Unfinished Symphony, or a Netflix series. I’d make some art, but my shoulder hurts –I must have slept on it funny. Maybe I need a massage or a new mattress.