He continued to pour out in careless profusion songs, symphonies, quartets, and operas, many of which knew no existence but in the score till after his death, hardly knowing of himself whether the productions had value or not.  He created because it was the essential law of his being, and never paused to contemplate or admire the beauties of his own work.  Schubert’s body had been mouldering for several years, when his wonderful symphony in C major, one of the chefs-d’oeuvre of orchestral composition, was brought to the attention of the world by the critical admiration of Robert Schumann, who won the admiration of lovers of music, not less by his prompt vindication of neglected genius than by his own creative powers.

In the contest between Weber and Rossini which agitated Vienna, Schubert, though deeply imbued with the seriousness of art, and by nature closely allied in sympathies with the composer of “Der Freischuetz,” took no part.  He was too easy-going to become a volunteer partisan, too shy and obscure to make his alliance a thing to be sought after.  Besides, Weber had treated him with great brusqueness, and damned an opera for him, a slight which even good-natured Franz Schubert could not easily forgive.

The fifteen operas of Schubert, unknown now except to musicians, contain a wealth of beautiful melody which could easily be spread over a score of ordinary works.  The purely lyric impulse so dominated him that dramatic arrangement was lost sight of, and the noblest melodies were likely to be lavished on the most unworthy situations.  Even under the operatic form he remained essentially the song-writer.  So in the symphony his affluence of melodic inspiration seems actually to embarrass him, to the detriment of that breadth and symmetry of treatment so vital to this form of art.  It is in the musical lyric that our composer stands matchless.

During his life as an independent musician at Vienna, Schubert lived fighting a stern battle with want and despondency, while the publishers were commencing to make fortunes by the sale of his exquisite Lieder.  At that time a large source of income for the Viennese composers was the public performance of their works in concerts under their own direction.  From recourse to this, Schubert’s bashfulness and lack of skill as a virtuoso on any instrument helped to bar him, though he accompanied his own songs with exquisite effect.  Once only his friends organized a concert for him, and the success was very brilliant.  But he was prevented from repeating the good fortune by that fatal illness which soon set in.  So he lived out the last glimmers of his life, poverty-stricken, despondent, with few even of the amenities of friendship to soothe his declining days.  Yet those who know the beautiful results of that life, and have even a faint glow of sympathy with the life of a man of genius, will exclaim with one of the most eloquent critics of Schubert: