- Biography
- Symphony No. 5 in B Flat
- Trout Quintet
- Unfinished Symphony
- Ballet Music Rosamunde
- Die schöne Müllerin
- Octet
- String Quartet No. 13 in A Minor
- Die Winterreise
- Great C Major Symphony
Biography
Schubert’s father was by profession a teacher, but he was also a very keen amateur musician and taught his son to play the violin from an early age.
Franz was one of eleven children, of whom only three survived beyond infancy, and his elder brother Ignaz taught him to play the piano.
Young Franz was an extremely bright child and excelled at everything he turned his hand to.
Although aware of the exceptional talent that his son showed, his father insisted that Franz should get a proper job and attend a teachers’ training college.
Franz reluctantly agreed and this led to his eventually accepting a job as a teacher alongside his father, although very much against his wishes.
However, the composer in him was not to be suppressed and Schubert was throughout this period continually writing music.
In 1814 he wrote perhaps his first great masterpiece, ‘Gretchen am Spinnrad’, which is now one of his most famous songs.
He was incredibly prolific at this time and in the year following, 1815, he wrote five operas (none of which is much good) and an astonishing 150 songs (pretty well all of which are fantastic).
Schubert was an extraordinarily bright child and his intellectual gifts stayed with him.
He was an excellent improviser and would often entertain at soirées, social gatherings and dinner parties by composing on the spot and playing dance music.
He used this rare gift to his further advantage by his ability to remember what he’d played and write it down.
This explains how he built such a vast catalogue of music in his tragically short thirty-one years.
He spent most of his life living in and around Vienna and loved the very active social life that he led.
He held appointments in many courts of the aristocracy and was a very popular man socially, always being invited out to dine with friends and colleagues.
He developed syphilis in 1822, couldn’t finish the illustrious Eighth Symphony, and then spent a rather miserable six years being in and out of hospital until his death in 1828 from typhoid.
However, during these last five or six years of ill health he wrote some of his finest and most well-loved works, including the ‘Great’ C major Symphony, the Octet in F (for string quintet, clarinet, bassoon and horn) and the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin, Schwanengesang and Die Winterreise.
Although he’d been an extremely popular man he was quickly forgotten, and it is only in the last hundred years or so that both he and his work have been valued alongside the other great classical Viennese composers Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.
Symphony No. 5 in B Flat
Symphony No. 5 in B Flat: 1st Movement
1816, Symphonies, Orchestral
Incredibly, Schubert was only nineteen when he wrote this enchanting little symphony, which is sometimes referred to as ‘The Symphony without Trumpets and Drums’. The orchestra for which he wrote it was so small that today we would call it a chamber orchestra – an outgrowth of the string quartet that used to meet in Schubert’s home. At the time he composed the work, Schubert had gone through a major artistic crisis concerning the effects on him of the great symphonist Beethoven. His previous symphony, the ‘Tragic’, had been written very much under the influence of Beethoven, yet Schubert had come up against a temporary hatred of the man’s music. In his diary, the young composer described Beethoven’s influence as:
’. . . that eccentricity which joins and confuses the tragic with the comic, the agreeable with the repulsive, heroism with howlings, . . . so as to goad people to madness instead of dissolving them to love, to incite them to laughter instead of lifting them to God.’
However, Schubert returned later to his love of Beethoven, but only after having firmly established his own strong personality.
After his death, the manuscript of the symphony was lost and it was nearly forty years later that the orchestral parts were rediscovered by two Englishmen in Vienna. Its first public performance was, therefore, in London’s Crystal Palace, in February 1873.
The first movement (Allegro) begins pianissimo with a four-bar theme from the first violins before we are led gracefully into the bulk of the section, which has some wonderful dialogues between string choir and woodwinds.
The Andante con moto of the slow second movement is very much in the style of Mozart, as is the third (Allegro molto), which often reminds the listener of Mozart’s great G Minor Symphony.
In the finale (Allegro vivace) we are treated to a masterpiece of symphonic genius, with a grace and charm that is so well developed and natural in growth that the listener might forget to be impressed, surrendering to the spontaneous joy that Schubert had obviously felt himself.
Trout Quintet
Piano Quintet in A Major (‘The Trout’)
1819, Chamber Music
This is one of the jolliest pieces of chamber music Schubert ever wrote, and certainly evokes the title image with its leaping accompaniment and sparkling tune. This is Schubert at his most smiling and serene.
Unfinished Symphony
Symphony No. 8 in B Minor (‘Unfinished’)
1822, Symphonies, Orchestral
It will probably never be known why Schubert left his B Minor Symphony incomplete.
He began it in October 1822, finished the first two movements, which are among the greatest and most compact in symphonic history, and almost completed the sketch for his scherzo – even going as far as to orchestrate the first nine bars – before putting it aside for reasons unknown.
A popular theory as to why it was never completed is that Schubert may have recognised so many points of resemblance between this music and Beethoven’s Second Symphony (one of Schubert’s all-time favourites) that he became worried he would be accused of copying, and therefore made a conscious decision not to carry on. The symphony was first performed in December 1865 in Vienna, thirty-seven years after Schubert’s death.
The symphony begins (Allegro moderato) with a mysterious, yearning theme for cellos and double basses, which develops into an explosion of emotion before the movement closes with a return to the opening bars.
After all the feeling of the first movement, the opening of the second (Andante con moto) seems to promise peace and tranquillity, yet melancholy and yearning recur with a tender clarinet melody, which is followed by a stormy passage. The closing section is tinged with sadness.
Ballet Music Rosamunde
1823, Ballet
This ballet was written around the drama ‘Rosamunde, Princess of Cypress’ and took Schubert only nineteen days to compose. Rather than write a unique overture, Schubert took a previously written one, which he tacked on the rest of the music.
Die schöne Müllerin
1823, Songs
Like the ‘Winter Journey’, ‘The Beautiful Maid of the Mill’ is a set of songs on the subject of hopeless love. The songs have a bubbly piano accompaniment that represents both the mill stream and the hope in the heart of the love-struck young man.
Octet
Octet in F Major
1824, Chamber Music
Schubert was commissioned to write a chamber work modelled on Beethoven’s Septet and, instead of tossing it off lightly, as one would with a commissioned work rather than an inspired one, he put all his energies into creating a serious piece. His Octet is altogether a well-crafted piece of chamber music.
String Quartet No. 13 in A Minor
Chamber Music
A very Classical work, Schubert’s String Quartet is well paced, as if he were following some unwritten rules for making chamber music.
Die Winterreise
1827, Songs
The ‘Winter Journey’ is a set of songs, lasting about forty minutes, which is both sombre and tragic yet, at moments, quite uplifting.
Great C Major Symphony
Symphony No. 9 in C Major: Andante
1828, Symphonies, Orchestral
Nicknamed the Great C Major Symphony to distinguish it from Symphony No. 6, which is also in C Major, this is probably Schubert’s finest orchestral work. Even though it is rather long and grand, the main impression is one of good humour.