Franz Schubert

1797–1828, AUSTRIAN

A master of melody, Schubert was renowned for his song settings of German poetry. His genius in symphonies and chamber and piano works was cut tragically short by his death at the age of just 31.

FRANZ PETER SCHUBERT
This oil portrait was made by Austrian painter Wilhelm August Rieder in 1875 from an earlier watercolor. Rieder was the son of composer Ambros Rieder, and became a close friend of Schubert.

IN CONTEXT

The Biedermeier period

In 1814–1815, Schubert’s native city hosted a conference, the Congress of Vienna, that marked the end of the long Napoleonic Wars. In the years that followed, known as the Biedermeier period, tastes were dominated by the middle classes, who reacted against the preceding turmoil by embracing domestic life. There was a rapid growth in music-making in the home and a strong market for sheet music, especially dances and songs. This was the form in which Schubert’s music was mostly known to the public in his lifetime.

MAHOGANY BIEDERMEIER TABLE PIANO

Franz Peter Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797, the twelfth of a family of 14 children, only five of whom survived beyond infancy. His father was a schoolmaster and a cellist (though a poor one); music was often played in the household, and Franz’s outstanding talent was soon noticed. In 1808, he won a scholarship to sing in the Austrian Imperial Court Chapel choir, which carried with it the right to be educated as a boarder at the prestigious Royal Seminary school.

A society figure

Schubert’s elite education brought him into contact with pupils from a higher social class, some of whom would remain his friends throughout his life. He took lessons in composition from the court composer Antonio Salieri (1750–1825)—notorious for his earlier rivalry with Mozart—and composed with extraordinary facility by early adolescence. By the time he left the Seminary in 1813, Schubert had already written songs, dances, choral works, chamber music, and even his First Symphony.

Following the death of his mother, he returned home to become a reluctant assistant teacher at his father’s school, but the flow of compositions continued. In the space of a single year in 1815 he wrote almost 150 songs, including a dramatic setting of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ballad “Erlkönig” that was to become one of his most popular works.

Schubert found an escape from teaching through his circle of friends. With the support of young aristocrats, including the wealthy literary dilettante Franz von Schober and Joseph von Spaun, a friend from the Seminary days, he was able to leave the family home and adopt an artistic bohemian lifestyle, devoted to music, café talk, and drinking—which he often did to excess. A good-natured, gregarious individual, nicknamed Schwammerl (literally “little mushroom”) because of his diminutive chubby figure, Schubert was soon established as a minor celebrity in the tight-knit world of Viennese musical enthusiasts. His wide group of literary and artistic friends celebrated his gifts through private gatherings dubbed Schubertiades, at which selections of his music were performed. Schubert attracted the attention and admiration of a famous singer of an older generation, Johann Vogl (1768–1840), whose performances introduced his songs to a wider public.

Schubert’s extravagant life put some strains on his finances, but these were largely alleviated by the well-paid summers he spent at the rural estate of the Hungarian aristocrat Count Esterházy, giving lessons in singing and piano to the count’s two daughters. Much of the music Schubert wrote during this period, such as the famous “Trout” Quintet of 1819, breathes happiness and tranquillity.

THE RED CRAB
Schubert was born in a house called Zum roten Krebsen (The Red Crab) in the Viennese suburb Himmelpfortgrund. He lived in the family apartment for nearly five years; the living space was modest, consisting of one room and a kitchen.

ON TECHNIQUE

Song cycles

A song cycle is a group of individual songs, each capable of standing alone but usually performed together in a fixed order, because they make emotional and dramatic sense as a sequence. Schubert was not the first composer to create cycles of German art songs (known as Lied, plural Lieder), but his masterpieces Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise established the genre’s major status. Their themes include unrequited love, melancholy, and isolation. Robert Schumann and Gustav Mahler were among the composers who continued the German song-cycle tradition.

AUTOGRAPH SCORE OF “GUTE NACHT” FROM SCHUBERT’S WINTERREISE, 1827

According to some accounts, in around 1814 Schubert fell in love with a young soprano, Therese Grob, a childhood friend. Prevented from marrying her because of his poverty, he could never love another woman. Yet solid evidence for this relationship, beyond the fact that she performed some of his music, is scant. Lack of evidence for any romantic attachments to women has led to speculation that Schubert was gay—and it is certain that close male friendships were at the heart of his way of life. It is clear at least that he had a sex life, for in 1822 he contracted syphilis, suffering a severe bout of the illness which disabled him for over a year and from which he may never have completely recovered.

THERESE GROB
In his teens, Schubert developed an affection for baker’s daughter Therese Grob. It is thought that he presented her with a collection of his songs (along with one of her own compositions) on her 18th birthday.

Illness and adversity

Several other factors, in addition to illness, darkened Schubert’s life in the 1820s. Paranoid about political subversion in the wake of the French Revolution, the Austrian authorities regarded all unconventional groups of young people with suspicion. In 1820, Schubert and four of his friends were arrested by Viennese police for allegedly insulting imperial officials. Schubert escaped with a reprimand but one of his friends was exiled.

Meanwhile, other members of his group were deserting carefree bohemianism for the security of paid jobs. Schubert continued to make a modest living out of music, but despite a growing reputation as a popular songwriter he found publishers reluctant to print his work and failed to break into the lucrative field of opera. One of his friends, the writer and dramatist Eduard von Bauernfeld, later spoke of “a black-winged demon of sorrow and melancholy” that at times overshadowed the sunnier side of his nature. Somber premonitions of mortality dominate the powerful “Death and the Maiden” String Quartet written in 1824.

Creative impetus

Although even Schubert’s admirers tended to see him as primarily a composer of songs, dances, and charming short piano pieces, his deepest ambition was to emulate the monumental achievements of Beethoven, the towering musical genius of his day. But his efforts to assert himself as an orchestral composer met with frustration. The true story of his “Unfinished” Symphony, written in 1822, has never been established—it is uncertain whether he only completed the first two movements and the opening bars of the third movement or whether the rest of the symphony has simply been lost. Either way, this innovative work was never performed in Schubert’s lifetime. His “Great” Symphony in C major, now considered one of the supreme pieces in the concert repertoire, was accepted for rehearsal by the orchestra of Vienna’s Society of Friends of Music in 1827, but then declared too difficult to perform.

Despite such setbacks, Schubert’s creative drive was at full strength in his final years. Works such as his last three piano sonatas, written in 1828, were complex achievements, harnessing a supreme lyrical gift for melody to an individual handling of large-scale musical structure. The late songs of the Winterreise cycle and the song collection Schwanengesang, both also from 1828, have a depth and range of feeling that announce the full onset of Romanticism. Schubert was only now beginning to receive the degree of recognition he craved. In March 1828, he gave a public concert of his works that was both a critical and a financial success. His renown at last began to spread beyond Vienna.

SCHUBERTIADE
One of Schubert’s obituaries described him as a man who had “lived solely for art and … [his] circle of friends.” The latter hosted gatherings, or Schubertiades, in their homes, where his new works were staged. This sketch, showing Schubert at the piano, depicts one such evening.

Death and legacy

Schubert died in 1828, possibly from typhoid, having allegedly requested a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 on his deathbed. His death was an unexpected shock.

Schubert was buried in Vienna’s Währing Cemetery, close to where Beethoven had been interred only a year before. There were laudatory obituaries in the press. His admirers regretted the loss of the works he might have created in the future, but none truly realized the scale of his achievement. As work after work received its posthumous first performance, the following decades saw his reputation rise to stellar heights. Championed by Romantic composers Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn, his “Great” C major Symphony was first performed in 1839 and the rediscovered “Unfinished” Symphony in 1865. Schubert’s total output turned out to be vast—about a thousand of his works are now cataloged and he has taken his place in the pantheon of great composers alongside Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart.