The cliché that Franz Liszt was the rock star of nineteenth-century music at least captures something of what, as early as 1841, was known as ‘Lisztomania’. It also registers the extraordinary breadth and success of his travels as a virtuoso pianist. (Ken Russell shrewdly cast a real rock star, The Who’s Roger Daltrey, in the 1975 film Lisztomania.) The arc of Liszt’s entire life was of someone constantly on the move: quitting the provincial Hungarian village where he was raised to move to Vienna at age eleven, then at twelve to Paris and last, until near the end, when he divided his final years among Weimar, Rome and Budapest. The principal concern here will be the concentrated decade of Liszt’s almost constant concert touring, beginning in Vienna in 1838 and ending in Ukraine in 1847 with his decision to devote himself to composition, conducting and teaching. During his touring years, sometimes called the Glanzzeit (Time of Splendour), Liszt gave more than a thousand concerts, logged tens of thousands of miles and travelled from Glasgow to Gibraltar, Lisbon to Naples, St Petersburg to Constantinople.1 In a time before easy travel (he rarely used trains during those years, mainly going by horse-drawn coach) such scope is astonishing.

Vienna's golden musical age drew its glory from transplanted genius. Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, not to mention such lesser lights as Salieri, Gyrowetz, and Hummel, all gravitated to this celebrated musical city, capital of the Austrian Empire, which was and is so attractive to immigrants generally. Alone among the great composers of this era, Franz Schubert was born there, on 31 January 1797, where his parents had settled two decades earlier.

Of Schubert's first years we have scant knowledge, although some revealing information can be gleaned from parish records and other documents. A marriage register in Lichtental, the modest suburb not far outside the city walls, near where Schubert would be born twelve years later, records on 17 January 1785 that “Franz Schuberth [sic], a school instructor, native of Neudorf in Moravia, farmer's son, Lichtental No. 152, Catholic, 25 years old, single” married “Elisabeth Vitzin [Vietz], native of Zuckmantel in Imperial Silesia, master lock-smith's daughter, Lichtental No. 152, Catholic, 28 years old, single.” One of their two witnesses was the bridegroom's brother, Karl Schubert, who seven years later married Elisabeth's younger sister Magdalene. A birth-register entry less than two months later casts some further light on this union: the birth of a son, Ignaz Franz. We also learn that Schubert's father was not twenty-five at the time of his marriage, but twenty-two, nearly seven years younger than his pregnant bride. During the next three decades, the hard-working Franz Theodor Florian Schubert built a distinguished career as an educator, while Elisabeth was consumed with annual pregnancies and with needy young children who were frequently ill.

This book concerns less The Life of Schubert than “The Life of Schubert's Career,” a story more of the artist than the man. Perhaps someday a trove of new material will surface that might allow a future historian to write an intimate portrait of the man and artist, the son, brother, and friend. But for now, and probably forever, scholars can only speculate about such fundamental matters as Schubert's relations with his parents (his mother is virtually missing from all the surviving evidence) or about the true nature of his romantic and sexual activities. A recurring theme of this brief biography will be the reasons for, and the consequences of, voids in documenting Schubert's life, absences that have been filled with much fantasy and many projected images created by others, whether in popular biographies, novels, operettas, or movies.

The most important scholarly work on the composer in recent decades – including the German version of Otto Erich Deutsch's catalogue of compositions, a new complete edition of the music, and sophisticated critical and analytical studies – allows the full breadth of Schubert's creative achievement to shine forth as never before. Even though technical accounts are beyond the scope of this series of Musical Lives, some general musical observations are provided in relation to Schubert's professional career. The discussions of the music herein gain in length and significance as the composer matures, with special emphasis on his late compositions. My primary concern is to appreciate how Schubert negotiated between intimate songs, dances, and keyboard miniatures, and his far more ambitious instrumental, dramatic, and sacred projects.

The introductory chapter examines three visual depictions of Schubert (and can be read later if one wants to plunge immediately into the life story in chapter 2), and those that follow are roughly chronological, with each concentrating on larger issues relevant to the composer's daily existence, music, and reputation.

Schubert had been seriously ill for more than a year when he penned unusually anguished words to Leopold Kupelwieser on the last day of March 1824:

Schubert reached out desperately to his close friend, who was in Rome painting and studying art: “at last I can once again wholly pour out my soul to someone.” He had confided to Schober earlier: “I hope to regain my health, and this recovered treasure will let me forget many a sorrow” (SMF 301). While the omnipresence of the sick and the dying in an overcrowded city such as Vienna made illness and mortality all-too-familiar aspects of everyday life, perhaps this familiarity also made them somewhat less terrifying. Grave illness only intensified an acquaintance with death that Schubert had known for years. His mother died when he was fifteen; only five of fourteen siblings from his father's first marriage survived childhood.

Although Schubert's health had apparently been robust until this point, letters make painfully clear that he was under no illusions once it was shattered: his life was forever changed.

One of the most durable of Schubert myths concerns the neglect he allegedly suffered at the hands of an indifferent public. Only faithful friends, so the story goes, appreciated his true worth and actively supported his art. Schubert is cast as the unrecognized creative genius, whose real accomplishment was discovered too late, long after his far too early death. As with many legends, this misleading image does, in fact, register significant realities of Schubert's unusual career. Some noteworthy features of his reputation come into clearer focus when we consider the unfolding of his compositional and professional activities within their contemporary context. Was Schubert's music really so neglected during his lifetime? What opportunities were available to him? And what was the true extent of his public fame at the time of his death?

In truth, Schubert's situation was both better and worse than myth would have it. While the public appreciated a large quantity of his music, few, even among his supportive friends, knew the full reach of his artistic accomplishment. Schubert was one of the most widely published and performed composers active in Vienna during the 1820s. Reviews and advertisements often referred to him as a “popular composer” (beliebter Tonsetzer), but the pieces that made him beloved were limited primarily to the relatively unprestigious Lied and other genres that did even less to enhance his stature – dances, part-songs, and short piano pieces. The symphonies, operas, religious and chamber music that would normally have launched and sustained a major reputation – that would have made him a “great” composer – were generally unknown until his last years and were, even then, still quite unrepresentative in relation to the actual scope of what he had composed.

At dawn two days after his brother's death, Ferdinand wrote to their father, “Very many people have expressed the wish that the body of our good Franz be buried in the sacred ground of Währing Cemetery. I too am among them, because I believe Franz himself made this request.” In a delirium before he died, Schubert did not know where he was and cried out, “This is not where Beethoven lies.” For Ferdinand this could be nothing more than “an indication of his last wish to be buried beside Beethoven, whom he so greatly revered.” Ferdinand informed his father that he had already explored the expenses involved, which although very high were “surely very little for Franz!” He offered to pay more than half the cost himself (SDB 825).

The composer's final wish, at least according to Ferdinand's interpretation, was granted. Schubert was buried later that day, without much pomp and circumstance, following a well-attended funeral, but one that hardly attracted tens of thousands of mourners, as Beethoven's had just twenty months earlier. Schubert's Pax vobiscum (D551), fitted with new words by Schober, was played at the church. Schubert was buried in the new Währing Cemetery, and his grave placed as close to Beethoven's as possible, just three away. A memorial service the next month featured a Mass by Anselm Hüttenbrenner (SMF 121, 190), and plans were announced to raise money for a fitting funeral monument. On 30 January 1829, the eve of Schubert's thirty-second birthday, Anna Fröhlich, Vogl, Böhm, Linke, and other musician friends presented a memorial concert in the hall where Schubert's own academy of 26 March 1828 had taken place (SDB 851); they offered a quite similar program, presenting it again six weeks later.