Serkin, Bernstein, Szell - Schubert: Greatest Hits-Includes Unfinished Symphony, Ave Maria, Serenade and More (1984)

So did one of Franz Schubert's friends describe the five-foot, one-inch tall composer when he died in 1828 at the age of 31, a victim of typhus. Schubert's life, which began in a lowly Vienna suburb on January 31, 1797, was one of perpetual hardship and poverty but, seemingly, no difficulty or deprivation could stem the flow of his music. In the bright, brief flame of his life, he produced a staggering volume of work, ranging from ambitious symphonies to simple songs—all marked with the singular beauty and expressiveness of a truly original genius.
Schubert may well be the world's most "posthumous" composer, for an extraordinary amount of his work remained unpublished and unknown until decades after his death. Typical of the fate of many of his works is the story of his great Symphony No. 8 in B Minor, aptly titled "Unfinished’' which had to wait more than forty years to receive its first performance. The score had been donated in 1822 by Schubert to the Styrian Music Society of Graz, Austria, in gratitude for his election as an honorary member. But the work disappeared until the conductor Johann Herbeck heard of its existence many years later and gave it its first performance in 1865. Whether the score was originally handed over in finished or incomplete state, whether a final third movement was lost or was never written—these are among the great enigmas of music.
No mystery surrounds Schubert's Marches Militaires for piano duet, generated by the Napoleonic period that had brought much suffering to the composer's beloved Vienna in the early part of the century. The best-known of the Marches, in D Major, was published in 1826, and has achieved worldwide popularity in treatments ranging from school band arrangements to full orchestration.
On a more intimate level, but equally famous, are the six piano works published collectively as Moments Musicaux, Op. 94, and the best known of these is No. 3 in F Minor, Allegro moderato, which first appeared in print in 1823, and which may well have been first heard at the informal "Schubertiad" musical evenings held by Schubert and his friends in Vienna.
Schubert's name is rarely associated with opera or operetta, but he actually ventured into this field some fifteen times, and never gave up the vain hope of having a success in the Viennese musical theatre. His incidental music for Rosamunde—written, according to one account, in only five days—has triumphantly survived, while the opera itself perished after only two performances.
But imperishable are the great Schubert songs, numbering some 600. Among the highlights of this vast output are "Ave Maria" and "Serenade". Contrary to widespread belief, however, the former is not a sacred work, per se, although Schubert himself referred to it as an expression of his own "piety’'. "Serenade" (or "Ständchen"), with words by the German poet and critic Ludwig Rellstab, was one of the composer's last songs and was published posthumously in a fourteen-work collection appropriately entitled Schwanengesang ("Swan Song").
Franz Schubert may have been a very little man but he was, indeed, a giant. He may have died young but, as the noted critic and musicologist Richard Capell has observed, '"He died, and will never grow old’'.