Franz Schubert (1875)
Wilhelm August Rieder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Franz Schubert was a Austrian composer who, like his contemporary Beethoven, really bridges the gap between the Classical Period and the Romantic Period. While many of the techniques he uses are easily found in Classical composers, his music tends to be more expressive, emotional, and more concerned with storytelling than with formal structure.

Schubert was born in a Viennese neighborhood and, like Mozart and Beethoven, began to demonstrate musical talent at an early age. He began taking piano lessons from his older brother at the age of 5, but stopped after a few months when he surpassed him. After this, he began playing the violin with his father. As a teenager, he studied composition with Antonio Salieri and joined the "Society of Music Friends of Vienna" (Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien). Among his friends, he was known as "Schammerl" ("The Little Mushroom") due to his 5-foot height and tubby appearance.

In his short life, Schubert composed over 1,500 chamber works, religious music, and a pair of operas, but is primarily known for his solo piano works and songs for piano and voice, called Lieder (singular Lied.) These became highly popular and allowed composers to market their music to individuals of modest means rather than relying on wealthy patrons. For much of his material, he drew from German folklore, as evident in Der Erlkönig, "The Elf-King," or Gretchen am Spinnrade ("Gretchen at the Spinning-Wheel"), both written by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

In the climate of post-Napoleonic Austria, a close circle of Schubert's friends was one arrested and exiled. He had one successful public concert in 1828, but his health deteriorated soon afterward. His official cause of death was typhoid fever, but his symptoms matched mercury poisoning, which was a common treatment at the time for syphillis.