Franz Schubert

Franz Peter Schubert was born on January 31, 1797, in Himmelpfortgrund, a working district on the northwestern edge of Vienna, then capital of the Austrian Empire ^[1]. His father, Franz Theodor Schubert, ran a parish school and taught there himself; his mother, Elisabeth Vietz, had worked in domestic service before her marriage. The household was crowded and modest. Of the fourteen children born to the couple, only five survived infancy, a mortality rate that was grimly ordinary for the period ^[2].

Music entered the boy's life early and through the family itself. His father taught him the violin and his older brother Ignaz gave him his first piano lessons, but the child soon outpaced both. Michael Holzer, organist at the local Lichtental parish church, took over his training in singing, organ, and figured bass, and later admitted that whenever he tried to teach the boy something new, he found the boy already knew it ^[2].

In 1808, at age eleven, Schubert won a choirboy's place in the Imperial Court Chapel, which brought free schooling at the Stadtkonvikt, Vienna's principal boarding school for commoners ^[1]. There he played violin in the student orchestra, eventually leading it, and absorbed the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven from the inside. The court Kapellmeister Antonio Salieri noticed his gifts and gave him lessons in composition that continued for years after Schubert left the school ^[3]. By his mid-teens he had already written string quartets, songs, and a first symphony.

When his voice broke in 1813, Schubert left the Stadtkonvikt and, under pressure from his father, trained as a primary school teacher. He spent roughly three years as an assistant in his father's school, a job he disliked and performed with little enthusiasm ^[1]. Yet these cramped years contained an astonishing creative surge. In 1814 the seventeen-year-old set Goethe's poem Gretchen am Spinnrade, a song whose restless piano figure mimics a spinning wheel while the voice traces a young woman's obsession. Many historians treat it as the birth of the mature German Lied ^[3].

The following year, 1815, may be the most productive single year any major composer ever had. Schubert wrote roughly 140 songs in those twelve months, among them Erlkönig, a galloping dramatic setting of Goethe's ballad about a father, a sick child, and a spectral elf-king, along with two symphonies, church music, and stage works ^[2]. He was eighteen.

Escape from the schoolroom came gradually. The law student Franz von Schober persuaded him to abandon teaching and lodge with him, and around Schubert there formed a loose circle of poets, painters, and civil servants who met for readings, games, and music. Their gatherings became known as Schubertiades, evenings built around the composer's songs and piano pieces performed in private homes ^[4]. The baritone Johann Michael Vogl, a celebrated opera singer thirty years Schubert's senior, became his most important interpreter and carried the songs to audiences the shy composer could never have reached alone ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Franz Schubert in the Vienna of the early 1820s would have heard of these rooms first, not of concert halls.

Any honest account of Franz Schubert achievements begins with the song. He composed more than 600 Lieder, and in his hands the form stopped being a polite parlor diversion and became a compressed drama in which voice and piano share equal weight ^[3]. His two great song cycles on poems by Wilhelm Müller, Die schöne Müllerin (1823) and Winterreise (1827), follow a single protagonist through love, rejection, and desolation. Winterreise in particular, twenty-four songs tracing a winter journey of a spurned wanderer, is often described by performers as the summit of the repertoire ^[5].

His instrumental music grew steadily bolder. The Symphony No. 8 in B minor of 1822, left with only two completed movements and known as the Unfinished, opens with a darkness and lyric breadth that had no real precedent ^[1]. The Trout Quintet of 1819 turned one of his own songs into a set of sunny variations for piano and strings. Later chamber works deepened dramatically: the Death and the Maiden string quartet of 1824, again built on one of his songs, and the String Quintet in C major of 1828, scored with two cellos, which many musicians regard as one of the finest chamber works ever written ^[5].

The last year of his life brought a final harvest that is hard to credit: the Symphony No. 9 in C major, nicknamed the Great, the three final piano sonatas, the String Quintet, and the songs published after his death as Schwanengesang ^[2]. He also left a large body of sacred music, including six complete Masses, and hundreds of dances and piano miniatures such as the Impromptus and Moments musicaux, pieces that brought serious craft into domestic music-making ^[3]. Among basic Franz Schubert facts, one is easy to state and hard to absorb: nearly a thousand works, catalogued in the twentieth century by Otto Erich Deutsch under D numbers, came from a career of barely fifteen years ^[6].

Schubert never married. In 1814 and 1815 he was attached to Therese Grob, a soprano who sang in his first Mass, but marriage laws of the time required proof of income he could not supply, and she later wed a master baker ^[2]. His emotional life afterward is thinly documented, and scholars continue to debate its character on limited evidence.

He was short, round-faced, and nearsighted, and friends nicknamed him Schwammerl, a Viennese diminutive often rendered as little mushroom ^[4]. Contemporaries describe a man who was reserved with strangers and warm within his circle, who composed with unusual speed in the mornings and spent evenings with friends in coffeehouses and taverns. Unlike Beethoven, he never held a court post, never secured a steady position, and lived mostly on modest publication fees, teaching, and the generosity of friends, frequently sharing rooms with one companion or another ^[1].

Late in 1822 or early in 1823 Schubert contracted syphilis, then incurable, and was seriously ill through much of 1823, including a stay in Vienna's general hospital ^[2]. The disease and its mercury treatments shadowed his remaining years, and letters from this period show a new bleakness. In one 1824 letter to a friend he described himself as the most unhappy, most wretched man in the world, whose health would never be right again ^[7]. The despair coexisted, remarkably, with music of expanding scale and ambition.

Public recognition arrived slowly and incompletely. Publishers bought songs and dances, the safest commercial goods, while symphonies and operas went unheard; none of his roughly twenty attempts at stage works held the boards, a failure that cost him years of effort ^[3]. He revered Beethoven and lived in his shadow in the same city. In March 1827 Schubert served as a torchbearer at Beethoven's funeral, an event that reportedly moved him deeply ^[2].

On March 26, 1828, the first anniversary of Beethoven's death, Schubert finally gave a full public concert of his own works in Vienna. It was well attended and earned him a solid sum, but its press coverage was quickly swallowed by the excitement surrounding the visiting virtuoso Niccolò Paganini ^[1]. That same year he continued to study counterpoint, arranging lessons with the theorist Simon Sechter just weeks before the end, evidence of a composer still intent on growing.

In the autumn of 1828 his health collapsed. Living at his brother Ferdinand's apartment in the Wieden suburb, he weakened through early November, corrected proofs of Winterreise from his sickbed, and died on November 19, 1828, at the age of 31 ^[1]. The official cause was recorded as nervous fever, generally interpreted today as typhoid fever, possibly acting on a body already undermined by syphilis ^[2]. At his request he was buried near Beethoven in the Währing cemetery; both composers' remains were moved in 1888 to the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna's central cemetery ^[4].

Schubert died with much of his greatest music unknown. The rediscovery took decades and reads like a relay of composers. Robert Schumann, visiting Ferdinand Schubert in 1839, found the manuscript of the Great C major Symphony, and Felix Mendelssohn conducted its premiere in Leipzig that year ^[3]. The Unfinished Symphony waited even longer: the manuscript sat with Anselm Hüttenbrenner until 1865, when it was finally performed in Vienna, thirty-seven years after the composer's death ^[1]. George Grove and Arthur Sullivan traveled to Vienna in 1867 and turned up further forgotten scores, including music for Rosamunde ^[3].

His influence on later composers was deep and openly acknowledged. Schumann and Brahms championed and edited his music, Liszt transcribed dozens of the songs for piano and called him the most poetic musician who ever lived, and the harmonic daring of his late works pointed toward Bruckner and beyond ^[5]. The Lied tradition that runs through Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and Mahler rests on foundations he laid almost single-handedly ^[3].

Today any Franz Schubert biography must reckon with a double image: the sociable young Viennese of the Schubertiades and the solitary artist of Winterreise. Performers return constantly to both. His birthplace on Nussdorfer Strasse in Vienna is preserved as a museum, the Deutsch catalogue keeps his works in scholarly order, and complete recorded surveys of the songs, notably the multi-decade Hyperion edition led by pianist Graham Johnson, treat the Lieder as a single vast achievement ^[6]. Few composers packed so much into so little time, and few have grown so steadily in stature since their death ^[5].