Franz Schubert stood about five feet tall, slept on friends’ couches, was nicknamed Schwammerl, and died at 31 having written more than 1,500 works, including over 600 songs. This deep dive follows him from a Vienna household where only five of 14 children survived, through the Imperial Seminary under Salieri, to an 1815 marriage consent law that barred him from marrying the soprano Therese Grob because he could not prove financial stability.

The episode explores the Schubertiads, the private gatherings of poets and radicals that gave him an audience for experimental work, and how he turned the piano into a co-star in songs like Gretchen am Spinnrade and Erlkönig. It also covers the 1820 police raid under Metternich, his 20 failed stage projects, the secret Unfinished Symphony of 1822, his illness, and the Winterreise cycle written in the year he carried a torch at Beethoven’s funeral.

• Joseph von Spaun buying manuscript paper for a student too poor to afford it
• 140 songs written in 1816 alone while living with Franz von Schober
• The Arpeggione Sonata, written for an instrument that went extinct soon after
• His single public concert of his own music in March 1828, overshadowed within days by Paganini’s arrival in Vienna
• George Grove and Arthur Sullivan’s 1867 trip to Vienna that unearthed lost symphonies