Franz Peter Schubert (; German: [fʁants ˈpeːtɐ ˈʃuːbɐt]; 31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. He was immensely prolific despite living a short life, leaving behind a vast oeuvre of more than 1,000 compositions, including over 600 Lieder (art song in German) and other vocal works, seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music. Among these are the songs "Gretchen am Spinnrade", "Erlkönig" and "Ave Maria"; the Trout Quintet; the Symphony in B minor, "Unfinished"; the Symphony in C major, "The Great"; the String Quartet No. 14 in D minor (Death and the Maiden); the String Quintet in C major; the Impromptus for solo piano; the last three piano sonatas; the Fantasia in F minor for piano four hands; the incidental music to the play Rosamunde; the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise; and the song collection Schwanengesang.
Born in the Himmelpfortgrund suburb of Vienna, Schubert showed uncommon gifts for music from an early age. His father gave him his first violin lessons and his elder brother gave him piano lessons, but Schubert soon surpassed their abilities. In 1808, at the age of eleven, he became a pupil at the Stadtkonvikt school, where he became acquainted with the orchestral music of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. He left the Stadtkonvikt at the end of 1813 and returned home to live with his father, where he began studying to become a schoolteacher. Despite this, he continued his studies in composition with Antonio Salieri and still composed prolifically. In 1821, Schubert was admitted to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde as a performing member, which helped establish his name among the Viennese citizenry. He gave a concert of his works to critical acclaim in March 1828, the only time he did so in his career. He died eight months later at the age of 31, the cause officially attributed to typhoid fever, but believed by some historians to be syphilis.
Appreciation of Schubert's music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased greatly in the decades following his death. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is considered one of the greatest composers in the history of Western classical music and his music continues to be widely performed.
Franz Peter Schubert was born in Himmelpfortgrund (now a part of Alsergrund), Vienna, Archduchy of Austria, on 31 January 1797, and baptized in the Catholic Church the following day. He was the twelfth child of Franz Theodor Florian Schubert (1763–1830) and Maria Elisabeth Katharina Vietz (1756–1812). Schubert's immediate ancestors came originally from the province of Zuckmantel in Austrian Silesia. His father, the son of a Moravian peasant, was a well-known parish schoolmaster, and his school in Lichtental (in Vienna's ninth district) had numerous students in attendance. He came to Vienna from Zuckmantel in 1784 and was appointed schoolmaster two years later. His mother was the daughter of a Silesian master locksmith and had been a housemaid for a Viennese family before marriage. Of Franz Theodor and Elisabeth's fourteen children (one of them illegitimate, born in 1783), only five survived to adulthood.
At the age of five, Schubert began to receive regular lessons from his father, and a year later he was enrolled at his father's school. Although it is not known exactly when he received his first musical instruction, he was given piano lessons by his brother Ignaz, but they lasted for a very short time as Schubert exceeded him within a few months. Ignaz later recalled:
I was amazed when Franz told me, a few months after we began, that he had no need of any further instruction from me, and that for the future he would make his own way. And in truth his progress in a short period was so great that I was forced to acknowledge in him a master who had completely distanced and outstripped me, and whom I despaired of overtaking.
When Schubert was eight years old, his father gave him his first violin lessons, training him to the point where he could play easy duets proficiently. Soon after, Schubert was given his first lessons outside the family circle by Michael Holzer, organist and choirmaster of the local parish church in Lichtental. In addition to instruction in piano and violin, Holzer gave the young Schubert lessons in organ, voice, harmony, and figured bass. Holzer later asserted that he did not give him any real instruction as Schubert would already know anything that he tried to teach him, recalling that he looked upon Schubert with "astonishment and silence". He also played viola in the family string quartet, with his brothers Ferdinand and Ignaz on first and second violin and his father on the cello. Schubert wrote his earliest string quartets for this ensemble. According to Ferdinand, Schubert also composed songs and piano pieces during this time, although none of these early compositions are known to have survived.
Young Schubert first came to the attention of Antonio Salieri, then Vienna's leading musical authority, in 1804, possibly at Holzer's recommendation. Salieri's previous pupils included Ludwig van Beethoven. In November 1808, he became a pupil at the Stadtkonvikt (Imperial Seminary) through a choir scholarship. At the Stadtkonvikt, he was introduced to the overtures and symphonies of Mozart, the symphonies of Joseph Haydn and his younger brother Michael Haydn, and the early overtures and symphonies of Beethoven, a composer for whom he developed the strongest admiration. His exposure to these and other works, combined with occasional visits to the opera, laid the foundation for a broader musical education. One important musical influence came from the songs by Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, an important composer of Lieder. The precocious young student "wanted to modernize" Zumsteeg's songs, as reported by Joseph von Spaun, Schubert's friend. Schubert's friendship with Spaun began at the Stadtkonvikt and lasted throughout his short life. In those early days, the financially well-off Spaun furnished the impoverished Schubert with much of his manuscript paper.
In the meantime, Schubert's talent began to show in his compositions, including his earliest surviving piano work, an 1810 Fantasy for four hands in G major (D. 1), and his first Lied, Klagegesang der Hagar (D. 5), written a year later. A definitive transition in his life and education occurred in May 1812, when Schubert's mother died from typhoid fever. The following month, Salieri officially took Schubert as his private home student and gave him lessons twice a week in thoroughbass and composition. Musicologist Lorraine Byrne Bodley interprets the compositional output that followed his mother's death as his seeking "refuge from grief in hard and relentless work". A month after his mother's death, Schubert completed his first Salve Regina in F major (D. 27) for his local parish church, likely performed during a month's mind service for his mother. That same year, he also composed his first operatic work, Der Spiegelritter (D. 11), a Singspiel to a text by August von Kotzebue that he left incomplete. Meanwhile, at the Stadtkonvikt, Schubert was occasionally permitted to lead the Stadtkonvikt's orchestra, and Bodley writes that his earliest orchestral compositions were possibly conceived with this orchestra in mind, including his Symphony No. 1 in D major (D. 82), which he dedicated to Stadtkonvikt headmaster Franz Innocenz Lang.
Teacher at his father's school
In November 1813, Schubert left the Stadtkonvikt and returned home for teacher training at the St Anna Normal-hauptschule. In 1814, he entered his father's school as the teacher of the youngest pupils. Concurrently, Schubert continued to take private lessons in composition from Salieri, who provided him with more technical training than any of his other teachers, until they parted ways in 1817.