Five Minute Mozart - Music Theory Education

Franz Schubert was born on January 31st 1797 in Vienna, Austria.
 
As a child he showed great promise with his musical ability. He learned violin from his father, Franz Theodor, and piano from his brother Ignaz.
 
From the age of 17, Schubert taught at the same school where his father worked as a school master. However, he quit after only 3 years to focus on composing.
 
During his brief 15 year career as a composer he wrote over 600 lieder, or what we now call “songs”. Schubert set many of his lieder to the poems of the well-known German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, including “Erlkonig” which tells of a desperate father’s ride through the night to save his dying son from the hands of Death.
 
Although he is best known as the first master of Romantic lied, Schubert composed many outstanding pieces such as String Quartet No 14 in D minor “Death And The Maiden” and the “Unfinished” Symphony No. 8
 
Though they never formally met, Schubert attended the funeral of Ludwig van Beethoven as a pallbearer in 1827, less than 2 years before his own death.
 
Schubert died of typhus in Vienna, Austria on November 19th 1828 at the age of 31.