Franz Schubert

From angst to acceptance, Schubert's ability to switch seamlessly between states of mind was a unique part of his genius, says Stephen Johnson

- Stephen Johnson

On one level he seems so direct, so simple, so uncomplicatedly appealing. Schubert could turn on heart-lifting melody with the same ease that most of us would turn on a tap. Often he seems happy just to bask in his own lyrical ferility, rather than go in for the kind of ingenious, viscerally compelling development taken to such heights by Beethoven. And that's the idea of Schubert that prevailed until well into the 20th century. He was an innocent, an exquisite charmer who composed in a kind of ecstatic trance - a sleepwalker, but not one of music's challenging thinkers. George Bernard Shaw even called him 'brainless'.

It was Schubert himself who undid all this in the end, simply because more and more of his vast and hugely varied output came to light. His first surviving effort at composition dates from his eleventh year; 20 years later he was dead. Over this period he finished or partly completed over 20 piano sonatas, 13 symphonies, 20 stage works, 15 string quartets and over 630 songs, not to mention numerous sacred and secular choral pieces, and a staggering amount of this is of outstanding quality. But at his death, only a minute fraction of this had been heard, still less published. His poignant original epitaph, 'Music has buried here a treasure, but even fairer hope', turned out to be badly mistaken. But you can't blame its author, Franz Grillparzer. Like most of Schubert's friends, he'd seen only the tip of an enormous iceberg.