Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert was born in Vienna in January 1797, the twelfth of fourteen children in a schoolmaster’s family. He was admitted to the Imperial and Royal Chapel choir at eleven and to the *Stadtkonvikt* boarding school the same year, where he studied with Antonio Salieri among others. He trained briefly as a schoolteacher and taught for three years at his father’s school, but from around 1817 he gave up teaching and lived in Vienna as a freelance composer, supported by a close circle of friends — the *Schubertiaden* that met to hear his new songs and chamber works.

His output across the fifteen years of his independent career is among the largest in Western music for a composer of his age. Over six hundred lieder — including the cycles *Die schöne Müllerin* (1823) and *Winterreise* (1827) and the late *Schwanengesang* — set the standard against which all subsequent German song was measured. Beyond the lieder he wrote nine symphonies (the *Unfinished* and the *Great C major*), the *Trout* Quintet, the late string quartets and string quintet, the late piano sonatas, four masses, and several operas which never achieved their own stage success. He lived almost in the shadow of Beethoven, who died eighteen months before he did.

Schubert died in Vienna in November 1828, aged thirty-one, of complications from syphilis. He was buried near Beethoven at Schubert’s own request. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his vocal, chamber and orchestral work.