Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert (1797–1828) was born in a suburb of Vienna and spent nearly all of his short life in the city. He showed unusual gifts as a child, had his first lessons from his father and an elder brother, and at eleven became a pupil at the Stadtkonvikt school, where he got to know the orchestral music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. He went on studying composition with Antonio Salieri while training and working as a schoolteacher. He wrote at great speed and left more than a thousand works, among them over six hundred songs, the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, the ‘Unfinished’ and ‘Great’ C major symphonies, the ‘Trout’ Quintet, the String Quintet in C and the last three piano sonatas. During his lifetime his music was valued mainly by a circle of friends and admirers in Vienna, and he gave only one public concert of his own works, in March 1828. He died that November, aged thirty-one. In the decades that followed, musicians including Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt and Brahms discovered and championed his music, and he is now counted among the greatest of all composers.