Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert wrote over six hundred songs and died at thirty-one having heard almost none of his major works performed. Born in a Vienna suburb in 1797, the son of a schoolmaster, he was a chorister in the imperial chapel, studied briefly under Salieri, and worked as a schoolteacher in his father's school, which he hated. He wrote Gretchen am Spinnrade at seventeen and Erlkönig at eighteen, and with them made the German Lied a major form. In these the piano is not accompaniment but an equal participant — the spinning wheel, the galloping horse — and the vocal line follows the poem's meaning rather than a repeating tune. He set Goethe, Schiller, Heine and Müller, and produced the two great cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, the second among the bleakest works in the repertory. He had no patron, no court post and no publisher for years. He lived among a circle of friends, poets and painters who organised evenings devoted to his music, called Schubertiaden, and who supported him; he often had no piano of his own. He contracted syphilis in 1822 and was seriously ill from 1823. The instrumental works of his last years — the String Quintet in C, the last three piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the late quartets — were largely unknown. The Unfinished Symphony sat in a drawer for over forty years, and the Ninth was found by Schumann in 1839 and premiered by Mendelssohn. He died in November 1828, having asked to be buried near Beethoven, whom he had idolised and whose funeral he had attended the year before.

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