Composer Of The Week

Donald Macleod explores the work of Franz Schubert, focusing on five distinct phases in the composer’s life. And afterlife.We start in 1815, the year in which Schubert turned 18 and was a reluctant schoolmaster still living under his father’s roof. Although he was in many ways unhappy and constrained by his circumstances, he was still prodigiously prolific. In the years after 1820, we see him spreading his wings as he’d never been able to do before, enjoying a sense of liberation after being shackled to the schoolroom in his father’s house. In 1824 we see a year of ill-health for Schubert, but also a year of fighting back, with attempted cures and triumphant, ambitious music. In Schubert’s final year – inevitably coloured by sadness, but also by great spirit and tenacity - emerged what is for many people Schubert’s crowning achievement: his song-cycle Winterreise. Schubert died at the age of 31, when most people are just getting going in life – in the same decade as Keats and Byron and Shelley – and he's ofte