Schubert was one of the fourteen children of a schoolmaster at Lichtenthal, a suburb of Vienna. His father was his first music teacher and at the age of ten he became first soprano in the church choir. About this time he also began to compose songs and short instrumental pieces. The following year, 1808, he became a singer in the Vienna court choir and also in the Konvict, the training school for court singers. He played violin in the school orchestra, rising ultimately to the position of first violinist. His first extant score is a fantasy in twelve movements for four-hand piano duet, composed when he was thirteen. By the time he was sixteen he had composed his First Symphony and much else besides.

A profound crisis was precipitated in Schubert's life in 1813: his voice broke and he was obliged to leave the Konvict choir, though he remained as a student at the seminary school for about another year. On his music for a mass by Winter he scribbled, "Schubert, Franz, crowed for the last time, 26 July 1812." In order to escape military conscription he studied for a few months at a training school for elementary teachers and by the autumn of 1814 he was teaching at his father's school. He taught there for two years and spent his leisure time in studying and composing, particularly songs; as many as eight songs in one day flowed out of him and in 1815, his eighteenth year, he composed more than a hundred songs including such a masterpiece as Der Erlkonig. Between 1814 and 1816 he composed a whole series of works, including operettas, Singspiele, stage pieces and masses. In 1816 he was an unsuccessful applicant for the position of Director of a new State Music School.

From 1817 Schubert lived in Vienna, except for the summers of 1818 and 1824 when he served as music teacher to the family of Count Esterhazy at Zelesz, Hungary. How Schubert was able to exist on a no-income basis is something of a mystery but it is known that his friends were extremely generous and helpful. By 1821 Schubert had written over six hundred compositions and he was coming to be recognized as one of Vienna's most important creative artists. An 1821 performance of Der Erlkonig at a concert by the Vienna Musikverein attracted wide attention. In the following year Schubert declined what may have been the one genuine opportunity he ever had to hold a salaried job — the position as organist at the court chapel.

For most of his mature years Schubert was strongly attracted by the theater and he wanted desperately to compose for the stage. Though the catalog of his output lists more than half a dozen completed "operas", not one of them has survived the test of time. Whether better librettos might have changed the picture is open to conjecture; one wonders if Schubert wasn't really striving after an area that was not truly congenial to his nature and talent. Whatever the reasons, however, only a few overtures and the Incidental Music to the Play Rosamunde seem worthy of performance today.

Franz Schubert was a ripe old twenty-two at the time he wrote his "Trout" Quintet, but he had already composed six symphonies, eleven string quartets, four masses and nearly four hundred songs. What gives the "Trout" Quintet pride of place in the composer's instrumental output up to that time is its wonderfully effective blending of the qualities that together added up to the magic of Schubert's early art. It gives off an irresistible lyric glow; its instrumentation is transparent and pure; its thematic development is masterful.

The circumstances that produced that "Trout" Quintet were extremely casual. Schubert was spending the summer of 1819 on the walking tour of Upper Austria with his friend Johann Vogl, the renowned baritone of Vienna's Imperial Opera. Only once before had the composer been out of Vienna, during the previous year, when he spent some dreary time as music teacher to the Esterhazys. Now he was enchanted by everything — the beauty of the countryside, the congeniality of the people, the excitement of discovery.

The two friends spent some time in the little town of Steyr, the birthplace of Vogl, and they soon became the leading participants in the town's intellectual life. Regular musical evenings were held at the home of Sylvester Paumgartner, and amateur cellist and the assistant manager of the local mines. Paumgartner conceived the idea to commission a work from Schubert, specifying that one of the movements should be a set of variations on "Die Forelle" ("The Trout"), a charming song Schubert had composed about two years earlier.

Schubert set to work on the piece soon after his return to Vienna in the early autumn. He was filled with the pleasant memories of his delightful summer, and the music he produced was the perfect mirror of his warm, amiable experiences. It is quite likely that he composed the work with specific performers from the Steyr circle in mind, which probably explains the unusual instrumentation: piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass. Only one other work for the same combination is readily recalled, a quintet by Schubert's contemporary Johann Nepomuk Hummel. An earlier theory had held that Schubert was acquainted with the quintet by Hummel, that in fact the score might have been one of those played in Paumgartner's house. Recent research shows, however, that Hummel's quintet was not published until 1821, in Vienna, and the likelihood of a performance from manuscript two years earlier is extremely slim. It is more probable that Hummel took Schubert's quintet as a model, rather than vice versa.

Toward the end of 1822 a catastrophe befell Schubert that was to cut his life mercilessly short. He contracted syphilis, a disease then rampant in Vienna for which there was no cure in those pre-penicillin days. By the spring of 1823 he was desperately ill but then he seemed to recover. It has been suggested that the syphilis was the reason for Schubert's leaving the "Unfinished" Symphony incomplete: he was working on the score at the time he contracted the disease; he had to put it aside, naturally, when he became so ill, and upon his improvement from the ravages of the illness he may simply have avoided returning to the score which surely would have been associated in his own mind with the onset of the sickness.

Despite his pushing aside the "Unfinished" Symphony, Schubert continued to produce music at a feverish pace — sonatas and other works for solo piano; his greatest string quartets; the song cycles Die Schone Müllerin and Die Winterreise; the two piano trios; the "Great" C Major Symphony; and the C Major Quintet for Strings. The feverish creative activity of 1828 along with Schubert's generally debilitated condition left him an easy prey to typhoid fever. On the last day of October 1828 Schubert tried to eat fish at the Red Cross Tavern and was nauseated by it. He went home and got into bed. On the twelfth of November he wrote to a friend: "I am ill. I have eaten nothing for eleven days and drunk nothing, and I totter feebly and shakily from my chair to bed and back again." On the sixteenth of November two doctors conferred at Schubert's bedside and presumably typhoid was diagnosed. Between periods of delirium Schubert was able to recognize and converse with friends who kept vigil over him continuously. At three o'clock on the afternoon of November 19 Schubert turned from his brother Ferdinand with the words, "Here, here, is my end," and he died.

Two days later Schubert's body was borne by students to the Wahring Cemetery and there he was buried, only two graves away from where Beethoven had been laid to rest twenty months earlier.