This transcription by Wayne Hooper (1920-; see Biographies) is taken from an anthem published by Plymouth Music Co., New York. It was number five (The Sanctus) in a series of eight short choral pieces that made up the German Mass written by Schubert in 1827 at the age of 30, one year before his death. The mass was scored for mixed voices with woodwinds, horns, trombones, timpani, and organ, the instruments doubling the voices in simple chorale style. No information is available on John Philipp Neumann, who wrote the German text, or Charles H. Davis, who translated it into English for the anthem. The scripture referred to is “Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come” (Rev. 4:8).

Franz Peter Schubert was born January 31, 1797, in Vienna in a modest house that is now maintained as a museum. His father was a schoolmaster and taught him violin; piano instruction came from his older brother, Ignaz. Michael Holzer, a local church musician, taught him singing, harmony, counterpoint, and organ playing. He soon outstripped all of them, and Holzer commented: “If I wished to instruct him in anything fresh, he already knew it. Consequently I gave him no actual tuition but merely talked to him, and watched him with silent astonishment!” Later, while studying at the Imperial and Royal Seminary, Schubert played first violin in the orchestra and even conducted when the master was away. Wenzel Ruzicka, his teacher, said of his rare ability, “He has learnt it from God, that lad.” At age 16 he left the seminary and took a training course for school teachers, and went to assist at his father’s school. But this was not his talent. Composing music became a consuming passion, and he soon gave up teaching to spend full time at it. Although he and Beethoven lived in musical Vienna at the same time, Schubert met the older man only once, on his death bed. Beethoven was given some 60 of the young man’s songs; after reading them through silently, he said, “Truly in Schubert there is a divine spark.”

Schubert was amazingly prolific; 20 full pages in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians are taken just to list his compositions, which include operas, stage music, church music, choral pieces with orchestra, overtures and symphonies, chamber music, works for violin and piano, and hundreds of songs. Schubert started composing at age 13 and ended only a short time before his death on November 19, 1828, from typhoid, at age 31. His prodigious output has been called “an outburst of composition without parallel in the annals of music: in sheer bulk alone this music would dwarf the output of the most industrious student, and industry alone could not account for it. The means of self-expression had been acquired, and his genius sought untiringly for utterance.”

📖 Reference: Companion to the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal by Wayne Hooper and Edward E. White. Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1988.