THE MYSTERY

When the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer mourned, in his funeral oration for Schubert, that “here we bury great treasure and greater promise”, he did not know the half of it. The definitive catalogue of Schubert's compositions lists nearly 1,000 items. Among them are perhaps the greatest song cycles ever written, seven completed symphonies and three incomplete ones, including the magical Unfinished, the incomparable late piano sonatas, and … well, I could go on. A quarter of Schubert's output would have sufficed to establish him as a major figure in Western classical music. Yet he lived for little more than a decade after he came to musical maturity. His last year, when he was scarcely into his thirties and probably knew he was dying, was, as Benjamin Britten has plausibly claimed, the most miraculous year in the history of music. The great Symphony in C, the Schwanengesang Lieder, the last three piano sonatas, and the peerless String Quintet in C were only some of the highlights.

Almost by definition, the art of a genius is underdetermined by the life, but with Schubert the mismatch between life and work seems particularly extreme. The twelfth of fourteen children, of whom only five survived, this quintessentially romantic composer was physically unattractive: a short-sighted and stocky dwarf, “The Little Mushroom” was rejected as “totally unserviceable” by the military selection panel.