The Liedermeister & the Church
One of the most famous choral ensembles in the world is the Vienna Boys Choir. The group’s forerunner—the Wiener Hofmusikkapelle—was founded in 1498 to provide music for the imperial court of Maximilian I, especially for the music in Masses in the court chapel. The long-standing presence in Vienna of this corps of musicians receiving imperial patronage was not irrelevant to the fostering of the city’s rich musical life. Some of the greatest composers of the eighteenth century—those who shaped what came to be called the “Viennese Classical Style”—were not natives of Vienna, but they developed their aesthetic ways and means while living and working in Vienna.
Among the most noted migrant musical workers were Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, while lesser lights such as Gluck and Hummel also contributed to the city’s ability to attract young performers and—critically—to encourage the formation of discerning audiences. Musicologist and conductor Brian Newbould notes: “It was fortunate that all these composers converged on Vienna, for the richness of the city’s thus implanted culture was to be a boon to the only proponent of the Viennese Classical Style who was truly Viennese.”
That native son of Vienna was Franz Peter Schubert, born on January 31, 1797, and baptized into the Catholic faith the next day in the parish church at Lichtental. There he would receive his first musical training, which soon bore fruit. When Franz was seven years old, his father—recognizing his son’s musical abilities—sent him for an audition with one of the most prominent music teachers in the city, Antonio Salieri. An Italian immigrant who first came to Vienna when he was sixteen, Salieri had served as the Austrian imperial Kapellmeister since 1788.
After hearing the voice of young Franz Schubert, Salieri judged that his voice was suitable for singing in the court chapel choir. But since singers had to be at least ten years old, it was not until Schubert was eleven (in 1808) that he became one of the select group of Viennese choral scholars. Until then, his father arranged for him to study music with Michael Holzer, the choir director of the family’s parish church in Lichtental. Lessons included singing, piano, violin, and composition. As biographer John Reed writes, “Soon the boy was leading the treble line in the choir and playing violin solos from the organ loft.”
His induction as a Vienna choir boy in 1808 intensified his musical training. Not only was he now under the tutelage of Salieri; he also was granted a place in the Imperial and Royal Seminary where—as well as receiving a superior general education—he played in the school orchestra and in chamber ensembles. The experience here was decisive, and soon Schubert’s career as a composer began in earnest. By 1811 (he was then fourteen, so not really a child prodigy) his first orchestral works were composed, along with works for piano and wind band. In 1812, his voice broke, so he lost his spot in the boys choir. But he kept his place at the Seminary and—most importantly—continued studies with Salieri, resulting in more time to compose. A number of string quartets and the beginnings of his first setting of the Mass were among the early results.
Schubert’s Masses
Franz Schubert eventually composed six Masses, four while in his late teens. The first of these, his Mass in F Major, was written in 1814. It was his first publicly performed work, with civic dignitaries and his teacher, Salieri, in the audience at the Lichtental church. It is a large-scale composition for chorus, six soloists, and a full orchestra. In the judgment of Brian Newbould, this early composition shows “a remarkable awareness, for a seventeen-year-old, of the qualities and habits peculiar to the Viennese Classical mass, a genre which acquired its own phraseology and dynamic in the hands of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, whose Mass in C was one of Schubert’s favorite works.”
Perhaps most notable in this early setting is the rousing fugue at the end of the Gloria, on the words “Cum Sancto Spiritu, in gloria Dei Patris, Amen.” As Newbould concludes:
This may not be a fugue to clinch the youngster’s mastery of all that Handel, Haydn and others no less distinguished may have taught him by example. But it has youthful fire. . . . . [I]f we picture the scene at Lichtental parish church where a group of choral singers, instrumentalists and solo singers unfolded to the virgin ears of a sizeable audience the first extended, concerted church work of a local seventeen-year-old, it is not difficult to enjoy a retrospective share of the excitement of that occasion.
The following year, Schubert composed his second Mass, this one in G Major. This Mass is a more intimate work than the earlier setting: it employs only three soloists and a smaller orchestra of only strings and organ, and it is only half as long. The simple, homophonic texture of the Credo zooms breathlessly through the long text without much drama. But with the Agnus Dei, we enter a very different atmosphere. Musicologist and composer Wolfgang Hochstein observes that, “unlike many other contemporary settings of the Mass, in which the Agnus Dei forms an energetic finale, Schubert ends the G major Mass on a tender note.” The work concludes with “deeply-felt harmonies . . . . melancholy and mournful melodies and the unmistakable increase in inner tension achieved with the greatest economy of means.”
A more ominous sensibility is evident in the Agnus Dei of his Mass in E-flat Major, composed in 1828 during the final months of Schubert’s short life. The movement opens with the choir’s bass section singing the four syllables of “Agnus Dei” in a dark and menacing series of notes—C, B, E-flat, D—that outline the shape of a cross. Repeated by the other parts of the choir and punctuated with doom-laden notes from the horns, it feels as if the Lamb of God may in the end be overwhelmed by the sins of the world he has been sent to take away. Musicologist Werner Aderhold hears throughout this final Mass evidence that Schubert “meant to inspire terror rather than prepare its listeners spiritually.”
The plea for mercy in the Agnus Dei is sung tentatively and with apparent apprehension. The music shifts to a major key with dona nobis pacem—“grant us peace”—and as the soloists repeat that prayer for peace, we might feel the stirrings of the possibility of forgiveness and assume that we’re at last out of the dark. But suddenly Schubert reverts to the initial C-minor gloom-and-doom with the surprising return of the words “Agnus Dei,” and we’re back where we started. Has the Lamb of God been triumphant or not? Newbould judges that “Schubert is able to conclude the work with the two moods of fear and hope closely intermingled to the last.”
Schubert’s Faith
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
14.1—January/February 2001
A Sociologist Looks at Fatherlessness & Its Causes by David Blankenhorn
35.4—Jul/Aug 2022
The Death Rattle of a Tradition
Contemporary Catholic Thinking on the Question of War by Andrew Latham
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
