The son of a schoolmaster who had settled in Vienna, Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828) was educated as a chorister of the imperial court chapel and later qualified as a schoolteacher, briefly and thereafter intermittently joining his father in the classroom.
He spent his life largely in Vienna, enjoying the company of friends, but never holding any position in the musical establishment or attracting the kind of patronage that Beethoven had twenty years earlier.



His final years were clouded by a syphilitic infection, and he died at the age of 31, leaving much unfinished.



His gifts had been most notably expressed in song, his talent for melody always evident in his other compositions.



Schubert's compositions are generally numbered according to the Deutsch catalogue, with the letter D.