He spent the night in jail, and his friend the political activist Johann Senn was jailed for over a year and then exiled to his native Austrian Tyrol. In 1820, Schubert attended a party that was raided by the police.In 1816, a year after the passage of a law that barred men of lower social classes from marrying unless they had sufficient income, Schubert wrote a tortured diary entry disparaging marriage and the monarchy.He spent his entire adult life in a society with strict government censorship and powerful secret police, and he chafed under the limits of his freedom at various times: In the aftermath of two successive defeats by Napoleon during Schubert’s childhood, Austria reverted back to a repressive political regime. Schubert didn’t just come from a strict family, he also lived in a rather strict society. Their help later proved instrumental in getting him out of his father’s house and off the path to becoming a schoolteacher, a low-level civil servant job, like his father. During Schubert’s five years there, he met the first members of what would become his adult circle of friends. Schubert first left home at the age of 11 to serve as a choirboy in the imperial court chapel, a position that included a scholarship to an elite school (“the principal Viennese boarding school for non-aristocrats” according to Grove Music Online). Sketch of a Schubertiad by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüllerīorn in 1797 in Vienna, Schubert grew up with a strict schoolteacher father who encouraged his musical pursuits. Schubert’s 20s were a lot like many artists’ and other urban dwellers’ 20s today: he was broke most of the time and lived with roommates, he hung out in pubs and drank heavily, he flirted with leftist political movements, and, most importantly, he had a close but ever changing group of friends to explore art, politics, religion, literature, and, of course, music. In any case, he was a bachelor who lived a life of his own choosing. Schubert wasn’t very keen on marriage for many possible reasons, perhaps because he didn’t have enough money, or because he was gay, or because he thought marriage was a bourgeois institution created to force conformity-or none of those things.

His personal life is shrouded in mystery.

He contracted syphilis at 25 and died at 31, which limited his life in many ways but also drove him to be an incredibly prolific composer. Younger than almost any other famous composer-younger than Mozart, Chopin, or Mendelssohn. Gesellschaftsspiel der Schubertianer (Party game of the Schubertians) by Leopold Kupelwieser

Franz schubert bibliography