He died at thirty-one, and the inventory of his estate came to sixty-three florins. In the drawers were several hundred pieces nobody had heard; some of them waited thirty years to be printed.
Schubert was born in 1797 on the outskirts of Vienna, one of many children of a parish schoolmaster. At eleven he won a place in the imperial court chapel choir, which bought him a free boarding-school education; when his voice broke he left and spent a few years as an assistant teacher at his father's school — the years in which, between spelling lessons, he wrote Erlkönig and Gretchen am Spinnrade.
Most of his music was not launched in concert halls but in friends' living rooms. Those evenings came to be called Schubertiads: one room, one piano, a crowd of painters and poets and law students, Schubert at the keyboard and whichever baritone was present doing the singing. That was the main way his work circulated, and it is why he wrote so much that fits exactly into one evening.
He gave a single public concert devoted entirely to his own music, on 26 March 1828. It sold well and made money. He died that same year, on 19 November, aged thirty-one.
He asked to be buried near Beethoven, who had died a year and a half earlier and at whose funeral Schubert had been a pallbearer. The request was granted.
What he left behind was more than anyone at the time could count: nine symphonies, over six hundred songs, a great quantity of piano and chamber music. Some of it was printed for the first time thirty years after his death. Some waited longer.
The giveaway with Schubert is the way he slips from major to minor inside a single tune and then slips back — nothing happens, the light simply changes for a moment. That instant is close to a signature.
His accompaniments are often one figure running the whole way through: triplets, a broken chord, or the same note repeated. The melody walks above it in very long phrases, one of which can stretch past the point where you expected it to land.
And he is never in a hurry. If something is good he is happy to say it again, then again in another key. Some people call that long-winded; it is also exactly why time slows down while you listen to him.
