Schubert

Dead at thirty-one, leaving nine symphonies, twenty-one piano sonatas and more than six hundred songs. He earned almost nothing from public concerts; most of this music was first heard at friends' houses, at the evenings they called Schubertiads, and many manuscripts were not unearthed until the second half of the nineteenth century.

He turned German poetry and a piano into something new. The piano is not accompaniment but the scene itself — hooves in Erlkönig, the wheel in Gretchen am Spinnrade. His large instrumental works have a particular sense of time, modulating suddenly and to remote places, as if walking into another room; Schumann called it heavenly length. Winterreise, twenty-four songs, is the coldest and most complete thing in the whole repertoire of song.