Schubert, Franz Peter

Schubert, Franz Peter (1797-1828), Austrian composer.

Franz Schubert died at the age of thirty-one but he had already published almost 1,000 musical works.

His father began to teach him music when he was five, and six years later he went to the most important music school in his home town of Vienna. One of his teachers there said, 'This boy needs no teacher. He has learned his music from God.'

He started writing music as a boy and he wrote his first famous song, Gretchen at the spinning wheel, at the age of seventeen.

For a time he was a school teacher but he gave this up to spend more time writing music and made a living by giving piano lessons.

Sometimes he wrote eight songs in a day.

He slept in his spectacles so that he could see to write if he woke up in the night with an idea for a song.

Before he was twenty, Schubert had written six symphonies and, in all, he wrote nine symphonies. The two most famous of these are his Symphony No. 8 in B Minor known as the Unfinished Symphony and Symphony No. 9 in C Major known as the Great Symphony because it is so long.

Schubert's work includes music in many forms for orchestras of different sizes. He wrote hundreds of songs and Ave Maria, Who Is Sylvia?, The Trout and Serenade are perhaps his best known today.

See Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis) ~ Lawrence Kramer