Franz Schubert

Browse piano sheets by Franz Schubert on Zen Virtual Piano. While Schubert was alive, appreciation of his music was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna. Interest in his work increased greatly in the decades following his death, when Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed it. That the champions of his music were composers themselves hints at how much of its appeal was to fellow musicians. On 26 March 1828, the anniversary of Beethoven’s death, Schubert gave, for the only time in his career, a public concert of his own works. It was a success popularly and financially, though it was overshadowed by Niccolò Paganini’s first appearances in Vienna shortly after. He embarked on twenty stage projects, each of them a failure that was quickly forgotten; in 1822 Alfonso und Estrella was rejected, partly owing to its libretto, written by his friend Franz von Schober. A single public concert, overshadowed soon after by Paganini’s first appearances in Vienna, suggests how crowded the city’s musical life was around him. 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 Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and in 1814 he entered his father’s school as the teacher of the youngest pupils while continuing private composition lessons with Salieri until they parted ways in 1817. One of his most prolific years was 1815, when he composed over 20,000 bars of music, more than half of them for orchestra, including nine church works, a symphony and about 140 Lieder. Teaching the youngest pupils at his father’s school while composing at this rate suggests days divided between the schoolroom and the writing desk. Schooling that put the orchestral music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in front of him at eleven may help explain why so much of one of his most prolific years went to orchestral writing. In 1816 Schober, a student from an affluent family, invited him to lodge at his mother’s house, and in early 1817 Schober introduced him to Johann Michael Vogl, a prominent baritone twenty years his senior, for whom Schubert went on to write a great many songs and who became one of his main proponents in Viennese musical circles. Schwanengesang (Swan Song), D. 957, is a collection of 14 songs written by Schubert at the end of his life and published posthumously. One reading is that a collection of late songs, published only after his death, hints at how his reputation grew after he was gone.

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