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“I received the gift of suffering, and so I became a poet.”
Franz Schubert is esteemed not only as the unsurpassed master of the Lied and as the greatest musical lyricist but also as the most imaginative and most productive of composers. “Schubert has sounds for the most subtle feelings and thoughts, even life's events and conditions. And as manifold as are the forms of man's hopes and aims, so varied is Schubert's music.” (Robert Schumann)
Paradoxically, the story of his life is thin as to external experience. The biographies — brief of necessity — almost apologetically present circumstantial but quite uninteresting facts.
Introduced to music by his father, the boy's towering gift speedily outraced his teachers and by his tenth year Franz was already composing. Of his later works we know that they were produced with authentic artistry and were possessed of a luminous quality. He composed with amazing rapidity, often setting down in early morning ideas that had come to him during the night.
Existing accounts of Shubert's life reveal nothing startling. He was quiet, shy, unambitious, introspective, volatile. At the same time, he was also light-hearted, bohemian to excess, and, in the company of his fond friends popular and stimulating. He died unmarried at thirty-one. He had been secretly devoted to a charming adolescent countess. For a time he loved a girl of the middle class who had beautifully sung the soprano solo in his first Mass. She did, however, marry someone else.