![]() The Impromptus, Moments Musicaux and many small dances for piano reached popularity long before his expansive sonatas. Schubert expanded the sense of musical time with his "heavenly length" (Schumann's remark on his discovery of the Great Symphony #9 in C Major in the closet of Schubert's brother), and he is also one of the first composers to fully explore the possibilities of the lyric miniature. While the classical sonata moves inexorably toward an increase of tension and dominant harmonies, Schubert relaxes his forms with a tendency to move in the direction of subdominant harmonic areas. Where Beethoven is ultimately a classical composer, Schubert truly paves the way toward the full flowering of Romanticism with his lyric songlike themes that develop discursively and episodically. That Schubert, who worshipped Beethoven and lived in his shadow, could so resolutely forge his own independent path, is one of the miracles of the man who died only one year after his idol. In instrumental works such as the fifteen piano sonatas, a long melody is often the subject matter in a way that is quite different from the pithy germ cells that concerned Beethoven. The songs of Schubert number over 600 and range from his earliest masterpieces, such as Gretchen am Spinnrad and Die Erlkonig to the desolate Wintereisse of his final year, and it might be said that the German lied pervades most of Schubert's music. The first of the great Viennese composers who was actually from Vienna was barely known, except for his songs, in the city that was mad for Rossini and other more flamboyant forms of entertainment. The son of a school teacher, Schubert declared himself fit for nothing but composing music, and lived a modest existence with the support primarily of friends while he quietly revolutionized the art in his brief thirty-one years on earth. Whereas Beethoven was the first composer to assert himself as independent from the constraints of the 18th century aristocracy, Franz Peter Schubert, born a generation later in 1797, was perhaps the first bohemian. ![]()
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