Lichtental Parish Church, Schubert's Church
Why is it significant?
Turn into the little Marktgasse and face the twin-towered church at its end, its baroque facade almost too grand for this modest street. This is the parish church of Lichtental, dedicated to the Fourteen Holy Helpers. Those fourteen saints were a medieval emergency service.
Key Facts
| Place | Lichtental Parish Church, Schubert's Church |
|---|---|
| Address | Marktgasse 40, 1090 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.22740, 16.35800 |
| Part of Walk | Couches, Wax and Radium: Freud's Vienna and the Medical Quarter of Alsergrund |
| Generated | Generated |
Turn into the little Marktgasse and face the twin-towered church at its end, its baroque facade almost too grand for this modest street. This is the parish church of Lichtental, dedicated to the Fourteen Holy Helpers.
Those fourteen saints were a medieval emergency service. Each was invoked against a particular trouble: one against headaches, one against throat illness, another against fever, another against a sudden death. People prayed to them especially in times of plague, and Vienna knew plenty of those. So in a walk through the history of medicine, here is the old pharmacy of the soul.
In this church, on the first of February 1797, a baby named Franz Peter Schubert was baptised, the twelfth child of a local schoolmaster. He sang here as a boy, played the violin, and in 1814, at just seventeen, heard his first Mass, in F major, performed in this church for a parish celebration. The soprano solo was sung by Therese Grob, a local girl he is believed to have loved and hoped to marry. He had no money and no position, and she married someone else.
You may hear people call this the Schubertkirche, Schubert's church, and the organ loft still feels like the place where a shy teenager first discovered he was a composer. His earliest real teacher was the church's own choirmaster, Michael Holzer, who reportedly said he had nothing left to teach the boy. There is a lovely injustice in it: the most local of geniuses, who barely left Vienna, became famous almost everywhere except in his own lifetime.
Keep that in mind for the next stop, because Schubert's short life is also a story about medicine, about what doctors in his time could and could not do. Walk west to the Nussdorfer Straße and turn right. A few steps along, a modest yellow house waits with a plaque beside the gate.