One day Franz said, “If I had some paper I know I could write a song.”
But paper he had not, because his father could not afford to buy it. Spaun always had a little money to spend, however, so Franz got the paper and wrote the song, and after that his friend supplied him with writing material. He enjoyed doing it because he liked the lad, but he did not realize that it would mean much to the world. It did mean a great deal, however, for some of the songs Franz wrote during his school days are still sung as among the sweetest in the world, and perhaps but for Spaun’s paper they might not have been written.
Well, Franz grew up just as other boys grow, and still he went on loving music and working at it, playing and writing songs. Almost everything he read or saw made him think of a melody, and every melody that formed in his brain was beautiful.
One evening he went into a restaurant in Vienna for his dinner. He had a small copy of Shakespeare in his pocket, and as he waited to be served he took it out and read. His eye fell upon the lines:
Hark, hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings, And Phœbus ’gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies.
They made him think of a song, and he looked about for paper upon which to write it. He asked the waiter to get him a piece, but the waiter could find nothing but a bill of fare. Schubert took that and wrote his melody, and when Shakespeare’s words were sung to it, the song sounded like this:
[At this point in the story run a record of “Hark, hark the lark.”]
Another time he was passing through a poor quarter of Vienna and heard a peasant serenading a girl. Schubert did not think the song a very pretty one, and he went home and wrote one that he liked better. This is how it sounds:
When Franz Schubert was a little child, he heard his father tell an old German story. It was called “The Erl King” and was about a witchlike creature who was supposed to take children from their parents. Franz always remembered it, and after he grew to manhood and read Goethe’s poem, “The Erl King,” a friend told him how the master came to write it. One wild winter night the poet was visiting in the home of a physician and a man came riding through the storm, seeking help for the child he had with him. The little fellow was delirious with fever and kept clinging to his father, crying and begging him not to let the Erl King take him away. The incident affected Goethe so deeply that he wrote the poem, and Schubert, hearing the story, was so touched by it that he composed wonderful music to go with the master’s words.