Some of his friends were afterwards famous as painters or poets others belonged to the cultured bourgeois class. On finishing his course here for a time he became an assistant in his father’s school, but his whole being was absorbed in music and soon he abandoned everything for it, living sparely and then only subsisting by the help of generous comrades who believed in him. At eleven he was admitted to the choir school of the Royal Chapel and here he received a good general and musical education, with insufficient food and little comfort. But he had the advantage of being a member of an intensely musical family, whose string quartet playing was renowned in their suburb. He was the son of a schoolmaster with a small income, and his early life was not luxurious. His gift for pure and lovely melody is one of his greatest charms and in this he stands worthily beside Mozart. He composed with infinitely more ease and fluency than Beethoven and the list of his works seems very long when one considers the brevity of his lifetime some of them show a weakness of form or content, due to a rapidity and a facility that were so great that on occasion he was known to fail to recognize his own work when it was put before him. This form of art owes more to him than to any other one composer in history. ![]() Like Beethoven, too, he wrote symphonies, sonatas, and string quartets, but, unlike him, he developed a special talent for that type of solo song which, while tuneful and musically delightful, yet seizes characteristically the meaning and flavor of the poem and expresses these aptly. He was a contemporary of Beethoven in Vienna, and like his master, who was twenty-seven years older, he represents the classical school of Haydn and Mozart carried forward into the opening of the “Romantic Period.” With little money and nothing much more than his 'groupies' to support him, Schubert began to produce a seemingly endless stream of masterpieces that for the most part were left to posterity to discover, including the two great song cycles, Die Schone Mullerin and Winterreise, the Eighth ('Unfinished') and Ninth ('Great') Symphonies, the Octet for Wind, the last three string quartets, the two piano trios, the String Quintet, the 'Wanderer' Fantasy and the last six sonatas for solo piano.ĭuring 1815 alone, Schubert composed over 140 masterly song settings - including the unforgettable 'Erlkonig' - although he was still only 18 at the time.Franz Peter Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797 and died there in 1828, at the age of 31. Musical soirees known as Schubertiads became all the rage, during which Schubert might sing some of his own songs while accompanying himself at the piano. This period of intense creative activity remains one of the most inexplicable feats of productivity in musical history. ![]() While Schubert was still struggling to hold down his full-time teaching post, he not only composed 145 lieder (songs), the Second and Third Symphonies, two sonatas and a series of miniatures for solo piano, two mass settings and other shorter choral works, four stage works, and a string quartet, in addition to various other projects. The same year he began teaching - 1814 - he produced his first indisputable masterpiece, 'Gretchen am Spinnrade' ('Gretchen at her spinning wheel'). ![]() ![]() This was at once a calamitous move and a blessing, for it was Schubert's deep loathing of the school environment that finally lit the touchpaper of his creative genius. Franz Schubert (1797–1828) was an Austrian romantic composer and although he died at the age of 31, he was a prolific composer, having written some 600 lieder and nine symphonies.Īged 10, the young Schubert won a place in the Vienna Imperial Court chapel choir and quickly gained a reputation as a budding composer with a set of facile string quartets.Īfter leaving chapel school and having completed the year's mandatory training, Schubert followed his father into the teaching profession.
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