Franz Schubert composed over 1,500 works — symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas, and over six hundred songs — and almost none of them were performed publicly during his lifetime. He died of syphilis at thirty-one, and the world spent the next century discovering masterpieces stuffed in drawers, stacked in cupboards, and scattered among friends who had no idea what they were sitting on.

This episode traces Schubert from his schoolteacher childhood through the astonishing output of his brief career, the poverty and illness that defined his adult life, and the posthumous treasure hunt that revealed one of music’s most prolific and most neglected geniuses.

• Schubert’s childhood in a schoolteacher’s household and his early flood of song composition
• The “Schubertiad” gatherings and the bohemian Vienna circle that was his only audience
• The syphilis diagnosis, the Unfinished Symphony, and the final burst of creation before death at thirty-one
• The posthumous discoveries — decades of masterpieces found in drawers and attics across Vienna