Before his contracting syphilis in 1823, Schubert wrote occasional great pieces like Erlkõnig, but his instrumental works sounded like a poor Haydn or Mozart piece without the surprises both composers could cook up. By 1823, on the way to his breakthrough, Schubert was leaving behind 3 unfinished symphonies (6.1, 6.2 and 7), an unfinished sonata, and he had left behind an unfinished quartet that shows the first sign of his mature style.
He came out of his health crisis with a profound understanding of his own mortality, and this led to the breakthrough. From this came the Unfinished Symphony (8) where he shows a new voice totally different from his juvenile symphonies. The next few years produced two string quartets (A minor, D minor) that were genuine works of maturity and "Fierrabras", an opera that, despite all its flaws, contains a lot of music in his mature style. In 1826, he produced the G Major quartet, which is the Mt. Everest of the genre.
By 1827, upon Beethoven's death, Schubert knew he was the greatest living composer in the world. The cogniscenti in Vienna knew he was the logical successor to Beethoven. Having absorbed from Beethoven, Schubert went about composing the great pieces listed in this article and a lot more. (Don't forget his 9th Symphony, which shows a completely different mature voice from his Unfinsihed.) I could fill a whole thread with the great songs he wrote in his last four years. At his point Schubert was ready to take on the challenges of being Beethoven's successor, and we were robbed of some magnificent music by his death.
When Graham Johnson finished Volune 37 of the Hyperion Schubert Edition of his songs, he wrote a full fantasy of what could have happened had Schubert made it to age 65. I'll quote it in full.
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As a result of their journey to see the ageing Goethe in 1831, Schubert and Vogl were able at last to perform for the old Lion of Weimar. The enthusiastic reception of the songs prompted a return to that poet’s texts and a preoccupation with the second part of Faust that led to the great work for various voices and orchestra that is counted as the greatest of all musical monuments to the poet.
Having dabbled in Scott and Shakespeare in his twenties, Schubert followed Schumann in an attempt to encompass world literature in song with settings of translations of Burns, Byron, Moore, Hans Christian Andersen and even Hugo and Gautier. The composer’s friendship with Thackeray and his later acquaintance with Dickens played a part in his world view. He became friendly with a number of younger Austrian poets – successors to Seidl and Bauernfeld – who would have remained unknown to music lovers and missed out on immortality had it not been for Schubert’s avuncular interest in their work. His only really successful opera made the name Adalbert Stifter as famous in music circles in the 1850's as Wilhelm Müller’s had been in the 1820's. The early masterpieces Winterreise and the connected Heine and Rellstab cycles were stepping stones to the later glories of the song repertoire – the immortal Tieck and Uhland cycles. It was these later pieces as well as several meetings between the two composers that so influenced the early songs of Brahms that he dedicated to Schubert.
Schubert bemoaned the unfortunate early deaths of his younger contemporaries Mendelssohn and Chopin. Can one imagine a world without the late Schubert Nocturnes for piano dedicated to Chopin’s memory and written for Clara Schumann? Above all, he mourned the loss of his younger friend and admirer Robert Schumann, whose Papillons, Carnaval and Dichterliebe had so influenced his own piano and song writing in his early forties.
Schubert needed to be persuaded to travel abroad in the first instance and then acquired a taste for it. He relished his jaunts to Germany to visit the Schumanns and to see his publishers, to England where his fame was taking root, and to Italy for holidays in the more prosperous circumstances of his later life.
His last work – his swan song if you like – was a group of epigrammatic settings of Paul Heyse’s Italienisches Liederbuch, translations from Tuscan originals that appeared in 1860. These songs were of such perfection that no other composer dared to set these texts again.
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I wanted to cry after reading that the first time.
Well done. Schubert had no idea he was dying. He had made plans with a teacher to study counterpoint in early 1829. But his early instrumental music is much better then a poor man’s Haydn and Mozart. The Trout Quintet is pure Schubert. His orchestral music actually got Rossini-ish after the latter’s operas had a huge vogue in Vienna in the 1810s.
All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players
They have their exits and their entrances.......
Ah, but some players are more than "merely". We silently mourn their early demises when listening to their masterpieces.
Shakespeare (quoted above) died at 52 (in 1616) which was probably a ripe old age for the era. I wonder what else he would have written if he had lived to be..........
Leni