What would Franz Schubert (1797–188) have become if his father had been unaware of this vacancy and if he had not made his son apply, thus allowing him to become a Sängerknabe
and thereby a student at the Imperial and Royal Stadtkonvikt? Coincidence or destiny? An idle question; what has been, has been. But whichever the answer, Schubert’s father made a decision that was to be extremely important in the history of western music.

Franz Theodor Schubert, an educated farmer’s son hailing from North Moravia who had settled in Vienna as a schoolmaster, taught his son Franz Peter the violin from an early age. Franz’s elder brother Ferdinand gave him piano lessons and choral conductor Michael Holzer, singing lessons. Franz, his brothers Ignaz and Ferdinand, and father Schubert regularly played string quartets at home. No wonder that the auditors at the Stadtkonvikt immediately spotted young Franz's talent.

Being accepted meant that his education and musical instruction were from now on taken care of. He was to remain in the Stadtkonvikt as a boarder for five years. He was a singer in the Royal Chapel, whose director of music was Antonion Salieri, and joined the Stadtkonvikt’s orchestra. Yet it wasn’t all roses at the Stadtkonvikt. The longer he stayed there, the less flattering his terminology for the Stadtkonvikt became in his letters home; the words institute and school were eventually replaced by prison. To work off his exasperation and frustrations, the thirteen- or fourteen-year-old adolescent began composing, by way of distracting himself. Each piece of music paper he could lay his hands on—rare and expensive material in those days—he’d fill up; a few of them with a one-movement piano trio (Sonatensatz in B flat major, D. 8). Schubert was 15 when he wrote it. Between this Sonatensatz and his other piano trios (Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat major, op. 99, D. 898, Piano Trio No.  in E flat major, op. 100, D. 99, and the piano trio movement Notturno in E flat major, op. posth. 148, D. 897) there were to be fifteen years, almost half of Schubert's lifetime. Fifteen years of hard work, and of waiting for recognition—in vain. For outside his circle of friends, Schubert was little known. He never heard most of his compositions performed. To make a name for yourself in Vienna, you had to be a flamboyant virtuoso, like Mozart or Beethoven, and Schubert was not. Or you had to wow audiences with some witty opera; but truckling to the taste of the public was not like Schubert. He led a fairly secluded life, without a permanent job. He was often ill, he was lonely, poor, and able to survive only thanks to the help of his friends. Prints and paintings from those days may show us a charming world, idyllic scenery, sophisticated interiors, wealth and well-being. But they fail
to tell us that the averageViennese lived in abject poverty, that 45 per cent of all deaths were caused by typhoid fever due to the extremely unhygienic living conditions in the city. At the beginning of the 19th century, Vienna was a social refuse dump, no more, no less. And it was on the edge of that refuse dump that Schubert lived.

Yet there were times when he lived a merry and even loose life. He was a regular in a number
of Viennese coffee houses. His sex life was anything but exemplary. It was probably in the late summer of 18 that he contracted syphilis. Neither the diagnosis of this disease, at the time both widespread and incurable, nor the realization that he would die young, seems to have negatively affected Schubert’s creative urge, bountiful as that had been before. Rather the opposite was the case. In the six years that he had left, both the quantity as well as the quality of his work would reach its pinnacle.

In November 187, exactly one year before his death, he wrote his second piano trio. It was his one composition that was published abroad in his lifetime, in Leipzig. Schubert heard
it performed twice. After its creation on December 6, 187, Schubert wrote that it pleased everyone. That was why he gave this trio a central place in the very first concert devoted exclusively to his own music, on March 6, 188. It would also be the last. The Viennese press ignored it completely. Its timing was rather infelicitous, as the “diabolical artist” Paganini

had just arrived in Vienna and was getting all the attention from the media. As a Vienna correspondent of the Dresdener Abendzeitung put it, “The lesser stars paled in the brilliance of this comet in the musical sky”. 

In September 187 Schubert had gone to Graz to visit some old friends of his. He must have enjoyed his visit. Afterwards, back in Vienna, he wrote his hostess that he “had not had such
a pleasant time in ages.” Maybe it is the echo of that stay in Graz that we can hear in this delightful trio. If it were not for the somber and melancholy Andante con moto, the fresh verve, the lightness and the dance rhythms of the other movements would hardly indicate that at the time he was seriously ill, as he had in fact been for years, that he was constantly plagued by headaches, dizziness and nausea. This almost swinging music seems rather typical of a composer at the height of his powers and in the prime of his still young life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing is what it appears to be.