Schubert, Franz Peter

(1797–1828)

   The greatest of all composers to work in the genre of the art song, Schubert was born and spent his first years in Lichtental, then one of the outlying districts of Vienna. His father was a schoolteacher and gave him his first instructions in music theory and violin. A brother, Ignaz, taught him piano. Schubert sang as a choirboy in the University Church in the center of the city. We know relatively little about his childhood and his family relations; frustrated biographers have speculated much about Schubert’s psyche and his feelings, but have relied heavily upon the memoirs of the composer’s friends and acquaintances for their information.

   Franz Schubert assisted his father at the latter’s school for a time. Between 1814 and his death, however, gifted with seemingly inexhaustible melodic resources and an uncanny feel for sometimes subtle, sometimes startling, modulation, the youthful composer turned out a staggering amount of music that probed a wide range of emotions. Taking his texts from the famous, such as Johann Wilhelm Goethe, as well as from the modest and all but unknown poets of his day, Schubert wrote more than 600 songs with piano accompaniment. They often had their first performances at so-called Schubertiades, held initially in Schubert’s family home, then in the quarters of musically inclined friends who represented the spectrum of cultivated Viennese society. These occasions finally became full rehearsals and orchestral concerts. Though Schubert was financially more astute than some of his biographers have believed, his intimates occasionally published his works at their own expense.

   Beyond his songs, his 18 string quartets and quartet movements, his piano quintet The Trout (1819), two piano trios, and several of his 23 sonatas for piano, along with many smaller works for the instrument, such as the eight impromptus and six Moments musicaux, are classics of their type. His eight symphonies were more problematic, suffering from awkward orchestration and fitful inspiration. The best known, the B minor, has gone down in posterity as the “Unfinished” because it ends after the second movement. It has long been believed that Schubert suffered from pangs of inadequacy brought on by comparing his own symphonic resources to those of Ludwig van Beethoven, who was working in Vienna at the same time. But the relationship of the two men is still a matter of debate. If their careers were parallel at all, it was in their mutual failure to write successfully for the theater. Nevertheless, Schubert’s music toward the end of his life suggests that the author very much wished to follow structural patterns that his great contemporary had perfected for the piano and symphonic works. Schubert gave a eulogy at Beethoven’s funeral in 1727.

   See also Biedermeier.