Before Schubert, works for piano four-hands were associated with music for amateurs to be played at home. Music that was too much for one player was easier with more hands helping. The work’s title, Fantasie, although given in French, has

“Schubert’s music is the most human that I know.” – András Schiff Schubert’s music provides the bridge between the classical and romantic eras. Yet his music was not well known during his lifetime outside of Schubert’s own intimate circle of

Franz Schubert was in dire straits in the mid-1820s. He was very ill and this seems to have crept into his music. His String Quartet No. 14 in D minor was called ‘the most morose instrumental work’ in the Viennese

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) wrote hundreds of songs but started only 13 symphonies and completed only seven of them. And yet, it is his Symphony No. 8, known as the Unfinished that remains as one of his most popular orchestral works.

Describing the emotional effects of the Latin mass settings by his brother Franz, Ferdinand Schubert writes, “For through these pious compositions every person, if there is so much as a glimmer of feeling in him, must be aroused to religious

During the first decades of the 19th Century, the city of Vienna must have been a real party town. Conductors, performers and composers from all parts of Europe flocked to the city to take advantage of the rapidly expanding employment

Franz Schubert’s young life was spent at the imperial-royal municipal seminary as a choir boy, and thought he’d been sent to prison – the day was a cycle of obligatory mass attendance, hours of daily prayer, weekly confession, all in

In 1774 the poet Matthias Claudius (1740-1815) published a short poem titled “Death and the Maiden.” The poem is designed as a dialogue, contrasting a young woman’s fear with the reassurance of death. Claudius creates opposites and connections between the