Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert (1797–1828) died at 31. In those 31 years he wrote over 600 songs, 9 symphonies, 15 string quartets, 21 piano sonatas, 6 masses, and many other chamber and vocal works. The productivity is incomprehensible. So is the quality: a significant portion of those songs are masterpieces by any standard.

Schubert invented the German Lied as a serious art form. A Lied is a setting of a poem for voice and piano — and Schubert understood that the piano wasn't accompaniment but an equal partner. The piano in Erlkönig (the Erlking) creates the galloping horse, the wind, the father's fear, the child's fever. The voice tells the story; the piano lives it. He set Goethe, Schiller, Wilhelm Müller. The song cycles Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin are sustained emotional arguments — 20+ songs, a single story, a single emotional arc.

His late chamber music — the String Quintet in C major, the Piano Trios — shows what he might have become. The Quintet's slow movement is one of those places where music stops being music and becomes something else. He died eight months after Beethoven, having attended Beethoven's funeral. The Ninth Symphony he wrote was unperformed until Robert Schumann found the manuscript in a drawer eleven years after Schubert's death.

StyleEarly Romantic lyricism. Unexpected harmonic shifts (often a third apart), long melodic lines, emotional immediacy. More interested in color and feeling than argument.

Listen: Winterreise, Nacht und Träume, or — if you want to weep — the slow movement of the String Quintet in C major.