Piano Music - Franz Schubert

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Schubert_Franz_by_Wilhelm_August_Rieder_1875

📖 POEM: SEVENTEEN

The adolescent Franz Schubert,
seventeen, composes music
to the wails of Faust Gretchen, a girl his own age.
Mein Ruh' ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer.
Immediately that noted talent scout, Deatch,
fawning all over him, signs him up.
Sends invitations, one oafter another.
One. After. Another. Schubert asks
for indulgence, he doesn't want to arrive
empty-handed. But how ungracious to refuse.
Fourteen years later he gives
his first concert on the other side.
Why does charity kill, why does being strong blind?
Meine Ruh' ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer.

Adam Zagajewski

📖 "The art of music here entombed a rich possession, but even far fairer hopes."
Franz Grillparzer
Schubert's epitaph in Wahring cemetery

📖 "Such is the spell of your emotional world that it very nearly blinds us to the greatness of your craftmanship."
Franz Liszt

📖 "His character was a mixture of tenderness and courseness, sensuality and candour, sociability and melancoly."
Johann Mayrhofer, quoted in Westrup's Schubert Chamber Music (1969)

📖 "Where other people keep diaries in which they record their momentary feelings, etc, Schubert simply kept sheets of music by him and confided his changing moods to them; and his soul being steeped in music, he put down notes when another man would resort to words."
Robert Schumann
Letter to Friedrich Wieck, 6 November 1829, quoted in Gal's The Musician's World (1965)

📖 "Heavenly length."
Robert Schumann
In 1839 on Schubert's 'Great' C major Symphony

📖 "In his larger forms, Schubert is a wanderer. He likes to move at the edge of the precipice, and does so with the assurance of a sleepwalker. To wander is the Romantic condition; one yields to it enraptured, or is driven and plagued by the terror of finding no escape. More often than not, happiness is but the surface of despair."
Alfred Brendel
'Schubert's Last Sonatas', in Music Sounded Out (1990)

Franz Schubert

1797 - 1828
Franz Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras.

📖 "No one understands another's grief, no one understands another's joy... My music is the product of my talent and my misery. And that which I have written in my greatest distress is what the world seems to like best."

📖 "Anyone who loves music can never be quite unhappy."

📖 "Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife."

📖 "When I wished to sing of love, it turned to sorrow. And when I wished to sing of sorrow, it was transformed for me into love."

📖 "You believe happiness to be derived from the place in which once you have been happy, but in truth it is centered in ourselves."

📖 "Every night when I go to bed, I hope that I may never wake again, and every morning renews my grief."

📖 "When all hopes of recognition or honor have faded into distant memory, when purity of heart meets sorrow of mind, when all the world seems to walk in blindness and yet a man works without wearying for that which he loves...only in this moment is passion truly understood"

📖 "Who can do anything after Beethoven?"

📖 "It sometimes seems to me as if I do not belong to this world at all. I deplore music that engenders in people not love but madness: which rouses them to scornful laughter instead of lifting their thoughts to God."

📖 "There is no such thing as happy music."

📖 "No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by."

📖 "O Mozart, immortal Mozart, how many, how infinitely many inspiring suggestions of a finer, better life you have left in our souls!"

📖 "The world resembles a stage on which every man is playing a part."

📖 "I am in the world only for the purpose of composing."

Quotes by Franz Schubert

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Find Piano Music by Franz Schubert

Books about Franz Schubert for Children

Books about Franz Schubert's Life and Works

Documentaries, Lectures and Conversations about Franz Schubert

David Dubal's 'Conversations with Arrau' (6 of 6): Albéniz, Debussy, Schubert

Selected Recordings of Franz Schubert's Music

Schubert - Piano Quintet D667 The Trout
Jacqueline du Pre, Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman

Selected Recordings of Franz Schubert's Piano Music

Schubert - Four Impromptus, D 899
Alfred Brendel, piano

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