The beautiful, haunted symphonies of Franz Schmidt

The sounds that Franz Schmidt made while learning the trumpet were pretty much unbearable, or so the story goes. In order to practise he would leave his home in the Lower Austrian town of Perchtoldsdorf and walk up to the heath, a grassy hillside above the town. There, far from unappreciative neighbours, and looking down towards the spires of Vienna, a few miles north and east, he could crack notes to his heart’s content — in perfect isolation.

Some artists hand you their metaphors on a plate. Schmidt spent his career trying to escape the suburbs of central European music, dogged by private grief and professional frustration. ‘Someone with a name like Schmidt should never become an artist,’ declared his piano teacher. Later, he played the cello in the Vienna Opera under Gustav Mahler — who stood by while the orchestra’s leader bullied Schmidt into submission. Schmidt lost a wife to mental illness (the Nazis murdered her after his death) and a daughter to childbirth, and continued to write music through heart attacks and nervous breakdowns, even after doctors told him that the effort would kill him — which it did in 1939, 11 months after the Anschluss.

It might have been better for his legacy if he’d died a bit sooner. Schmidt was — that old get-out — not interested in politics, but in his dying months Austria’s new rulers commissioned him to write a propaganda cantata. He never completed it, instead devoting his failing energies to a piano quintet for an old friend, the Jewish pianist Paul Wittgenstein. But for some, it’s proof that Schmidt was an enthusiastic Nazi, and if you ignore the testimony of Schmidt’s admirers Hans Keller and Oskar Adler — who knew him, and insisted ‘with all the emphasis at my disposal’ that he was neither a Nazi nor an anti-Semite — it’s case closed.