Franz Peter Schubert

There are thousands, perhaps millions, of people in the world who will say that Schubert is their favourite composer, but if questioned, will not dare to put him on the level of Beethoven or Bach or Mozart. We encountered this dozens of times when making this film. 

The reasons are not far to seek.  Schubert died young and for all the appreciation of his intimate circle of friends, he was undervalued in his own lifetime and for at least a century more because he failed to achieve public recognition and financial success. He was the first great composer in Western music to live by his art alone, without patronage, and he enjoyed only one public concert of his music in the whole of his life. When he died at the age of thirty-one, his friend Franz Grillparzer, saddened and well-intentioned but misguided, wrote this epitaph, "Music has buried here great riches but far fairer hopes".

Those words remain on Schubert's tombstone and perpetuate an astonishingly durable impression; the myth that Schubert never achieved complete maturity because he died young and that he failed to reach the level of the greatest masters.

Schubert's reputation also suffered from the fact that he did things differently and when a work of art is new and different and the world cannot categorise or label it, it often takes a long time for the public to understand and accept what that work has to offer. In some ways, these things haunt Schubert's reputation even today. To complicate the picture still further, Schubert lived, and in some ways his music continues to live, under the shadow of Beethoven. Schubert himself asked the question "Wer vermag nach Beethoven noch etwas zu machen?" (Who would dare to do anything after Beethoven?). The answer, of course, was Franz Peter Schubert and most notably in the music that he wrote after Beethoven's death.