Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert was born on 31 January 1797 at Himmelpfortgrund, a suburb of Vienna. His father, Franz Theodor, was a schoolmaster, and the large family lived modestly in the house that also served as the school. Of fourteen children, only five survived. Franz learned violin from his father and piano from his elder brother Ignaz, then took lessons from the parish organist, who declared he had nothing to teach him: the boy already knew everything.

In 1808 he was accepted as a choirboy in the imperial chapel and became a pupil at the Stadtkonvikt, the imperial seminary, where he received an excellent education. He played in the students’ orchestra, which he came to lead, and discovered the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Antonio Salieri, the court composer, gave him composition lessons. When his voice broke in 1812 he left the Konvikt but continued to study with Salieri, who recognised his exceptional talent.

To avoid military service he became in 1814 a teacher at his father’s school, a job he hated. That same year, aged seventeen, he composed Gretchen am Spinnrade, on a poem by Goethe, in which the piano imitates the spinning wheel: his first masterpiece. The year 1815 was prodigious: he composed about 140 songs, including Erlkönig, a fantastic ballad in which a father gallops through the night with his sick child, pursued by a supernatural creature. He also wrote two symphonies, masses and several operas.

In 1816 he gave up teaching to devote himself to music, living with friends and on small earnings. He never obtained an official post. He was surrounded by a circle of loyal friends — poets, painters, singers — who believed in his genius, such as the poet Franz von Schober, the painter Moritz von Schwind and the singer Johann Michael Vogl. From 1821 they organised musical evenings called “Schubertiads”, where Schubert played his latest compositions. In 1818 and 1824 he spent two summers as music teacher to Count Esterházy’s daughters at Zseliz in Hungary.

In 1819, on a trip to Upper Austria, he composed the “Trout” Quintet, one movement of which is a set of variations on his song of the same name. In 1822 he began a symphony in B minor of which he completed only two movements: the famous “Unfinished”. At the end of 1822 he fell seriously ill with a disease that weakened him for the rest of his life. Yet he composed tirelessly: the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin (1823), the Songs of Ellen, including the famous “Ave Maria” (1825), and the “Great” Symphony in C major.

In 1827 he carried a torch at the funeral of Beethoven, whom he deeply admired. That same year he composed Winterreise, a cycle of twenty-four songs on poems by Wilhelm Müller describing a man’s desperate wandering through the snow. He also wrote his Impromptus and Moments musicaux for piano. On 26 March 1828, exactly a year after Beethoven’s death, he gave his only public concert devoted entirely to his own works, which was a great success.

His last months were incredibly productive: the last three piano sonatas, the String Quintet in C, the songs of Schwanengesang. But his health declined, and he died in Vienna on 19 November 1828, aged thirty-one, probably of typhoid fever. As he wished, he was buried near Beethoven. He left more than six hundred songs, nine symphonies and a vast body of chamber and piano music, much of which was discovered and performed only after his death.