Franz Schubert

Franz Peter Schubert was born on 31 January 1797 in Himmelpfortgrund, a suburb of Vienna, the twelfth child of a schoolmaster. He was singing in the Imperial Court Chapel choir by age eleven, studying composition under Antonio Salieri from 1812, and producing string quartets and piano works of startling assurance before he was sixteen. In October 1814 — aged seventeen — he composed Gretchen am Spinnrade, his setting of Goethe's lyric from Faust, in a single sitting. The is a complete psychological portrait in under four minutes: the spinning wheel's motion in the piano, the girl's mounting delirium, the abrupt break at 'his kiss'. It inaugurated a new art form. The following October he composed Erlkönig, again from Goethe: a galloping ballad of supernatural terror in which a single pianist conjures three distinct characters — narrator, father, and the seducing death-spirit — simultaneously. Schubert was eighteen. He continued schoolteaching under his father until 1818, hating it, and spent two summers in 1818 and 1824 as music tutor to the Esterházy family in Hungary, his only significant time outside Vienna. His permanent income was negligible: he never held a salaried musical post, was rejected from a conductorship in Laibach in 1816, and survived on the generosity of friends and the occasional sale of songs to publishers. What sustained his creative life was the Schubertiade — informal gatherings at friends' apartments in Vienna at which he and his circle of poets, painters, and intellectuals performed his latest songs. The painter Moritz von Schwind depicted one such evening in 1821 in a watercolour that has become the canonical image of Biedermeier musical culture. Between 1815 and 1828 Schubert produced over six hundred songs setting texts by Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Müller, Mayrhofer, and others — an output so large and varied that it encompasses nearly every emotional register from radiant joy to existential dread. The cycles are the summit: Die schöne Müllerin (1823), twenty songs following a miller's boy through love to drowning; and Winterreise (1828), twenty-four settings of Wilhelm Müller's poems following a rejected lover through a frozen winter landscape. Winterreise, composed in the months before Schubert's death, is the most sustained meditation on grief and alienation in the entire repertoire. His instrumental music was championed less in his lifetime but proved equally far-reaching: the 'Trout' Quintet (1819), the String Quintet in C major (1828), the late piano sonatas in the final months of 1828, and two symphonies whose posthumous discovery reshaped his reputation. The Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the 'Unfinished' (D.759, 1822), left at two completed movements, achieves a depth of tragic expression no classical symphony had previously reached. The Symphony No. 9 in C major, the 'Great' (D.944), was not performed until Schumann found the manuscript in 1838, ten years after the composer's death. Schubert contracted syphilis, almost certainly, in late 1822. He underwent mercury treatments in 1823 and lived with the illness's fluctuating symptoms for the rest of his life. He died on 19 November 1828, probably of typhoid fever (contracted, it is believed, from contaminated water in the final weeks), aged thirty-one. He was buried in the Währing cemetery close to Beethoven, whom he had idolised and whose coffin he had helped carry in March of that same year. His total output — approximately one thousand works across every genre — was produced in a creative lifespan of barely fifteen years.

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