Schubert, Franz

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SCHUBERT, FRANZ

SCHUBERT, FRANZ (1797–1828), Austrian composer.

Unlike most of the celebrated composers associated with Vienna, the city of music, Franz Peter Schubert was born there, in the Himmel-pfortgrund suburb not far from the city walls, on 31 January 1797. He was the thirteenth child of a successful educator who ran a school where Schubert and his brothers studied and eventually taught. Domestic music making and activities at the parish church in Lichtental provided his first musical experiences. At age eleven, Schubert won an audition to join the choir of the Imperial Court Chapel and with it a scholarship to an elite private school. It was there that he formed friendships that lasted for the rest of his life. He was also given the opportunity to study with Antonio Salieri (1750–1825), court Kapellmeister and a leading figure in the Viennese musical scene. Friends encouraged his interest in literature and his inclination to set poetry to music. Even as a teenager Schubert experimented writing a wide range of music, including keyboard, chamber, sacred, dramatic, and orchestral pieces, but he won his first fame with smaller domestic genres, especially songs, part-songs, dances, and four-hand piano works. This intimate music was often performed at private homes in events that came to be known as Schubertiades. The poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) inspired Schubert's initial masterpieces at age seventeen and eighteen, specifically the songs "Gretchen am Spinnrade" and "Erlkönig." The public premiere of the latter in 1821, and its publication that year as Op. 1 (by which time Schubert had written hundreds of songs), marked a turning point in his career.

During the next seven years, before his death at age thirty-one, Schubert published more than a hundred lieder and became widely recognized for raising the stature of this nascent Romantic genre. In total, Schubert wrote more than six hundred lieder, setting to music the work of some one hundred different poets, ranging from friends to William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), and Goethe. His ambitions in large-scale works faced obstacles in a city dominated by the instrumental music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) and the operas of Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868). Schubert tried to succeed with German opera, with works such as Alfonso und Estrella (1822) and Fierrabras (1823), but these major efforts went unperformed. Focusing on instrumental music, he found greater success with piano sonatas and chamber music, which where performed and published by musicians and firms associated with Beethoven, the composer Schubert revered above all others. Some of his most famous instrumental works, such as the "Trout" Quintet, "Death and the Maiden" String Quartet, and "Wanderer" Fantasy are based in part on earlier songs.

Late in 1822, around the time of the "Unfinished Symphony," Schubert apparently contracted syphilis and was seriously ill for some time. (He is said to have written part of his song cycle Die schöne Müllerin while in the hospital in 1823.) Although he was better by 1825, Schubert feared he would never fully regain his health. The quantity of his song output significantly decreased as he spent more time working on formidable chamber music projects that he planned would "pave the way to a grand symphony." He wrote the so-called Great C Major Symphony in 1825, and probably revised it in 1828. That same year, on 26 March, the first anniversary of Beethoven's death, Schubert gave the lone public concert devoted entirely to his own music, which earned an enthusiastic response.

The twenty months that separate Schubert's death from Beethoven's saw a phenomenal outpouring of masterpieces. He wrote the "Drei Klavierstücke," the Mass in E-flat Major, the fourteen songs published as Schwanengesang, the String Quintet in C, three magnificent piano duets (including the Fantasy in F Minor), and the last three piano sonatas, as well as various brief sacred works, part-songs, dances, lieder, and some remarkable sketches for a "Tenth Symphony" (D936a). Many of these works, as well as significant earlier ones, were unknown for decades, which led the critic Eduard Hanslick to observe in his classic study of Viennese concert life (1869): "If Schubert's contemporaries rightly gazed astonished at his creative power, what shall we, who come after him, say, as we incessantly discover new works of his? For thirty years the master has been dead, and in spite of this it seems as if he goes on working invisibly—it is impossible to follow him" (Deutsch 1951, pp. 202–203).

Schubert, who traveled little, never married, and worked continuously, remains an elusive figure biographically. Less than a hundred of his letters survive, along with a few pages of an early diary. Information about his life comes primarily from his family and friends, most often from accounts written long after his premature death in November 1828 following a brief illness. The epitaph on his grave, written by Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872), Austria's leading writer and a friend of the composer, captures the sense of loss and expectation, as well as a limited understanding of what he had in fact accomplished: "The Art of Music Here Entombed a Rich Possession, but Even Far Fairer Hopes." As the true extent of that accomplishment gradually became known during the following decades, his achievement was recognized as extending well beyond the lied and profoundly influenced Robert Schumann (1810–1856), Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), and other later Romantics.

See alsoMusic; Romanticism.