He Wrote 600 Songs, 9 Symphonies, and 20 Sonatas.
He Died at 31.

You are seventeen. You are working as an assistant teacher in your father's school — a job you hate — and composing at every available moment. In 1815 you compose 144 songs. One hundred and forty-four. Including "Erlkönig" — Goethe's poem about a father riding through the night with his sick son, pursued by the supernatural Elf King. The poem shifts between the father's reassuring voice, the child's terrified cries, and the seductive whispers of the Erlking. Your setting, for voice and piano, captures all three voices simultaneously in a piano part that gallops without stopping for four minutes. Your friends hear it in your rooms on Saulengasse and are immediately overwhelmed. A professional performance is organized. Beethoven hears it — possibly, accounts differ — and calls it a masterpiece. You are seventeen. You have no idea this will happen to a poem you set in the morning.

You have left the teaching job and are trying to make a living as a music teacher, composer, and accompanist in Vienna. Vienna is Beethoven's city. Everyone in the musical world knows it. You admire Beethoven enormously — you have seen him from a distance but never dared approach him. Beethoven is deaf, inaccessible, famous beyond any other living composer. You are a nobody with a growing circle of devoted friends who organize evenings of your music ("Schubertiaden") in private homes. These evenings — piano music, songs, dancing — are the primary way your work reaches audiences. Almost nothing you write is published commercially during your lifetime. You live in friends' rooms, borrowed pianos, shared meals. You write constantly.

Your friends include some of the most interesting young men in Vienna: the baritone Johann Michael Vogl who performs your songs; the poet Franz von Schober who provides you a room and whose bad influence you enjoy; the painter Moritz von Schwind who later paints the Schubertiad evenings. The Schubertiad — a private concert centered entirely on one composer's work — is your invention, accidentally. The form still exists: concerts bearing this name are held in concert halls across the world.

In late 1822 you contract syphilis. The diagnosis is not recorded with certainty — what is recorded are the symptoms (severe rash, hair loss, the mercury treatment that was the standard cure and that had its own devastating effects) and the letters in which you describe yourself as "the most unhappy and miserable person in the world." You spend time in hospital. You lose much of your hair. You recover partially. The disease will recur and worsen. You continue composing. The "Wanderer" Fantasy and the "Unfinished" Symphony (two movements, never completed) are written around this time. The incompleteness of the symphony has never been definitively explained — many theories, no answer. You simply stopped at two movements and sent them to a music society in Graz that had commissioned you. They accepted them without complaint. They were either satisfied with two movements or did not notice the work was unfinished. The symphony was not performed until 1865, thirty-seven years after your death.

You write a letter to your friend Leopold Kupelwieser: "I feel myself to be the most unhappy and miserable creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair over this, ever makes things worse and worse, instead of better. Imagine a man whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom the felicity of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain; whose enthusiasm for all things beautiful threatens to forsake him; and ask yourself if he is not a miserable, unhappy man?" You are twenty-seven. The syphilis has returned. You are depressed. But in 1824 you also compose the Death and the Maiden string quartet, the Octet in F major, and begin work on the "Great" C Major Symphony. The productivity does not stop; the darkness and the work coexist.

You compose Winterreise. Twenty-four songs based on poems by Wilhelm Müller, about a wanderer in winter who has lost his love and walks alone through the frozen landscape toward an uncertain end. The final song, "Der Leiermann" (The Hurdy-Gurdy Man), is only sixteen bars — the wanderer encounters a ragged old man playing a hurdy-gurdy with frozen fingers in the road; dogs bark; no one gives him money; he plays on. The wanderer asks: "Shall I go with you? Will you play your music for my songs?" The music stops. The two of them — the wanderer and the hurdy-gurdy man — stand there together in the winter. That is the end. When you play the cycle for your friends, they are disturbed. "They had become sad," you tell your friend Spaun. "I'm not surprised. What I wrote is very different from what I've done before. You will soon understand."

In March 1828 you organize and perform in your only public concert — the first public concert of your own music in your lifetime. Every seat is sold. The program includes chamber music and songs. The audience loves it. The Viennese newspapers praise you. You earn about 800 florins. The reviews say you are a great talent who will have a great career. Two days before the concert, in the same city, Niccolò Paganini arrives and begins his celebrated Vienna concerts. The newspapers are full of Paganini for the rest of the month. You are the second topic. It is fine; you are used to it. You spend the spring and summer composing at an extraordinary rate: the last three piano sonatas, the String Quintet in C major, more songs. In October you fall ill with typhoid fever, possibly contracted from contaminated water. On November 19, 1828, you die. You are thirty-one years old. On your deathbed you ask to hear Beethoven's C-sharp minor quartet. Your request is granted. Then you die.

Schubert was buried in the Währing cemetery, his body placed near Beethoven, who had died the previous year. (Both were later moved to the Zentralfriedhof.) The inscription on his tombstone, written by the poet Franz Grillparzer, reads: "Here Music has buried a rich treasure but still fairer hopes." It is one of the great understatements in the history of art. The "rich treasure" included a body of work that took decades to fully discover: the "Great" C Major Symphony (1838, premiere conducted by Mendelssohn); the Winterreise (performed only gradually to wider audiences across the century); the last three piano sonatas (performed regularly only from the late 19th century onward). What was "richer" than anyone imagined, and "fairer hopes" than music actually needed.