Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
opening a file on a figure who I think really
defines the idea of the hidden genius. We're
talking about an Austrian composer, Franz Schubert.
And I want to start with a statistic from the
research that just, uh, honestly, it didn't compute
for me. I had to read it like three times to
make sure it wasn't a typo. I have a feeling
I know exactly which number you're looking at.
It sort of jumps off the page, doesn't it? It
has to be the timeline versus the output. This
man died at the age of 31. 31. 31 years old.
I'm looking back at what I had accomplished by
31, you know, paying off some student loans,
maybe figuring out how to cook something other
than pasta. And let's just say the comparison
is unkind. Right. But Schubert. By the time he
died at 31, he had left behind a vast oeuvre.
That's the term that historians use of over 1
,500 works. It is staggering. It's a density
of creativity that is almost unique in human
history. To put that 1 ,500 number in perspective
for you, that includes over 600 liter. which
are, you know, German art songs, seven complete
symphonies, operas, masses, and just a literal
mountain of chamber music. It feels like he was
living on a completely different clock than the
rest of us. Yeah. Like his day had 48 hours or
something. Well, in a way, he was living on a
different clock because he was running out of
time, even if he didn't really know it at first.
But historically... You have to place them correctly.
Okay. Schubert's life from 1797 to 1828, it sits
right on this tectonic shift in music history.
He is the ultimate bridge figure. A bridge figure.
He stands with one foot in the late classical
era, you know, the structured, elegant world
of Haydn and Mozart, and the other foot is firmly
stepping into the emotional, turbulent waters
of the early Romantic era. But here's the paradox
that really hooks me. Despite this massive output,
1500 works, He wasn't a celebrity, right? He
wasn't the Taylor Swift or the Beyonce of 1820s
Vienna. Not even close, no. If you look at the
celebrity composers of that time, you're looking
at giants like Beethoven or Rossini. Right. They
were the ones selling out theaters and having
their names shouted in the streets. Schubert
was almost invisible to the general public. Invisible.
His appreciation was limited to a very tight,
small circle of friends in Vienna. He wasn't
selling out concert halls. He was playing in
living rooms. It's actually kind of tragic, but
it also sets up this incredible posthumous treasure
hunt story, which I know we'll get to. Okay,
absolutely. I was reading about how some of his...
Biggest works, absolute masterpieces like the
Great Sea Major Symphony, were just sitting in
dusty cabinets for years after he died. Exactly.
And that's really the mission of this deep dive.
We want to move beyond the one or two pieces
everyone knows, like Ave Maria. Which is beautiful,
but it's not the whole story. Not at all. We
need to understand the man, this guy nicknamed
Little Mushroom. We need to explore the tragedy
of his unfinished works, the mystery of his health.
And why Beethoven, who was the titan, arguably
the hardest man to impress in the history of
mankind. You're not wrong. Said on his deathbed,
truly the spark of divine genius resides in this
Schubert. If Beethoven says that about you, you've
made it. So let's unpack this. Let's go back
to the source. Where does a talent like this
even come from? Was he born into a dynasty of
musicians like the Bach family? Not exactly a
dynasty, no, but it was a musical household.
He was born in the Himmelfurtgrund. Which is
just a great name for a suburb. It means gate
of heaven. It was a suburb of Vienna. He was
the 12th child of a schoolmaster. The 12th child.
That is a very, very crowded house. Extremely
crowded, though tragically, it was common for
the nine of his siblings died in infancy. Whoa.
So death was just... present in the household
from the very start. His father, Franz Theodor,
was a schoolmaster, and he started teaching Franz
the violin at age five. His brother Ignaz taught
him piano. Okay, so a normal musical upbringing
so far. For a minute. But here is the first aha
moment in the Schubert story. It's what I call
the unteachable paradox. The unteachable moment?
Usually that means a student is bad. In this
case, it meant the exact opposite. It's the classic
prodigy problem. His brother Ignaz later admitted
that he was just amazed because only a few months
after they started lessons, Franz told him he
had no need of further instruction. Can you imagine
the scene? Your little brother looks at you and
says, Thanks, bro. I'm good. I've already surpassed
you. It was humbling for Ignaz, for sure. He
actually said Franz had completely distanced
and outstripped him. And it wasn't just his family.
Oh, this continues. They sent him to the local
organist, a man named Michael Holzer. for lessons.
Holzer ended up crying with admiration. He said
he didn't really teach Franz anything, he just
looked on with astonishment and silence. That
is a recurring theme here, isn't it? The people
who are supposed to be teaching him are just
stepping back and watching him go. It's like
trying to teach a bird how to fly when it's already
soaring. A perfect analogy. But obviously a talent
like that gets noticed eventually. He ends up
at the imperial seminary, right? The Stadtkonvikt.
Yes, at age 11. He gets a choir scholarship.
And this is crucial because it exposes him to
the greats. He's playing the music of Haydn,
Mozart, and of course Beethoven every single
day. And he catches the eye of Antonio Salieri.
Salieri. Now, I have to pause here. Anyone who
has seen the movie Amadeus creates this mental
image of Salieri as this villain, you know, the
man who hated Mozart. Right. But here, the narrative
is totally different. Completely different. That
movie is great drama, but it's terrible history.
Yeah. In reality, Salieri was Vienna's leading
musical authority. highly respected teacher.
Yeah. And he recognized Schubert's talent immediately.
So he took him under his wing. He taught him
privately for years, focusing on theory and composition.
But what I love about this period is the irony.
Here is Schubert, this young student leading
the school orchestra, composing his first symphony,
Symphony No. 1, D82, while he's still just a
kid in a school uniform. He's doing homework,
dodging bullies and writing symphonies, but then
reality hits. And this is the part of the story
that feels so relatable to anyone trying to be
an artist today. You leave... school and you
have to get a job. And for Schubert, that meant
returning to his father's school to teach. The
starving artist reality, but worse, it was the
drudging artist. He spent two years teaching
the youngest pupils. He described it as severe
drudgery. I can only imagine. You have this divine
music in your head. You're thinking about orchestration
and harmony. And then you have to go teach the
ABCs to a room full of six -year -olds who probably
just want to run around and scream. Yeah, he
was miserable. He was famously short -tempered
with the kids. But this is where we see the double
life of Franz Schubert. This is the key to his
productivity. A double life. While he was miserable
in the classroom during the day, his creative
output was exploding at night. Let's just look
at the year 1815. This year is statistically
insane. I have the numbers right here. It is
arguably the most prolific year of his entire
life. He's 18 years old, working a full -time
job he absolutely hates. And yet. And yet in
1815 alone, he writes over 20 ,000 bars of music.
20 ,000 bars. That includes nine church works,
a symphony. and roughly 140 liter. 140 songs
in one year. That's one every two or three days
while working a day job. Exactly. He would finish
a lesson, rush to his desk, and just pour music
onto the page. It's almost unbelievable. And
amidst all this work, there was also heartbreak,
right? We have to mention Therese Grubb. We do.
She was a soprano, a neighbor, and Schubert wrote
several liturgical works specifically for her
voice. He wanted to marry her. But he couldn't.
No. And this tells you a lot about the rigid
society he lived in. There was a strict marriage
consent law in 1815 Vienna. What did that entail?
It required a bridegroom to prove he had the
financial means to support a family. Schubert,
being a lowly schoolteacher with no real assets
and a volatile income, he just couldn't meet
the requirement. That is heartbreaking. Bureaucracy
literally stopping love. Show us your bank account
or you can't get married. Essentially, yes. So
he's miserable at work. He can't marry the girl
he loves because he's poor. The pressure is building.
Something has to give. And it does in 1816. A
friend comes to the rescue. Franz von Schober.
He was a charismatic, sort of wealthy friend.
And he essentially says to Schubert, stop this.
Quit. Come live with me. Just write music. the
ultimate i quit moment and so he shifts into
this bohemian lifestyle there's this quote from
him during this time that i love i compose every
morning and when one piece is done i begin another
that was his process he was a machine but he
was a machine that ran on friendship This is
where we get to the core of Schubert's adult
life. He didn't have a wealthy patron like the
old composers. He didn't have a Prince Esterhazy
paying his bills. He had a circle. The bros,
if you will, but very cultured bros. Indeed.
You had Johann Michael Vogel, who was a prominent
baritone. He was older, about 20 years Schubert's
senior. But he recognized the genius in Schubert's
songs and became his champion, performing them
in public. Okay, so Vogel was his voice to the
world. In a way, yes. Then you had Josef von
Spahn, who had supported him financially since
the school days, and Johann Merhoffer, the poet.
And these friends didn't just hang out. They
built their entire social lives around his music.
They literally called their parties Schubertiads.
Which is quite the honor. Imagine having parties
named after you. And these weren't formal concerts,
you know. Right. No tickets, no ushers. No. They
were gatherings in private homes like the Gundelhof.
They would crowd into a living room, smoke pipes.
drink, and just dedicate the entire evening to
listening to Schubert's newest music. But it
wasn't all serious, quiet listening, was it?
I saw something in the notes about the nonsense
society. The Unzensgesellschaft, yes. Schubert
was an active member. They would publish these
satirical newsletters, play pranks, make fun
of the establishment. I love that. There's a
famous caricature of Schubert from this time
playing with Drazine. which was an early prototype
of the bicycle. Just him goofing around with
his friends. That really humanizes him. Because
when you see the painted portraits, he looks
very serious, very stiff with the high collar.
But then you hear about his nickname, Shamarl.
Little Mushroom, or Tubby. He was very short,
only about 1 .52 meters, which is barely five
feet tall. A foot tall. Okay, Little Mushroom
makes perfect sense now. He was round, he wore
glasses, and he was often disheveled. And he
definitely enjoyed the nightlife. There are plenty
of references to heavy drinking and social fun.
He wasn't some recluse in an ivory tower. Right.
However, this bohemian life wasn't without its
dangers. We have to talk about the incident in
1820. The brush with the law. This surprised
me. You think of classical composers as part
of the establishment, wearing wigs and bowing
to kings. But Schubert got raided. Vienna in
1820 was a police state. We have to remember
the context here. The Napoleonic Wars had ended,
and the Austrian authorities, led by Metternich,
were terrified of French revolutionary sentiments
coming back. So they were cracking down. On everything.
They were deeply suspicious of any gathering
of students or young artists. So one night, the
police raided one of these gatherings where Schubert
was present. And Schubert was arrested. He was
detained along with four friends. One of them,
a poet named Johann Senn. was actually in prison
for over a year and then banished from Vienna.
Wow, just for being at a party. Pretty much.
Schubert got off lightly, but he was severely
reprimanded. And the police report is fascinating.
It says, Schubert used insulting and opprobrious
language against the officials. Schubert mouthing
off to the cops. Insulting and opprobrious. I
love that detail. It shows he had a temper. It
adds a layer of tension to his life. And this
context of surveillance, it explains why his
audience remains so insular. You couldn't just
advertise big public gatherings if you were associated
with revolutionary youth. So it forced his music
underground, in a way. It kept his music private,
hidden in these safe houses, which ultimately
hurt his career, but probably deepened his friendships.
So his environment shaped his career. But let's
pivot to the music itself. We keep saying he
wrote 600 Liter. Why is that so significant?
People wrote songs before Schubert. Mozart wrote
songs. Beethoven wrote songs. They did. But the
approach was completely different. Before Schubert,
the Lied, the German R song, was generally simple
and strophic. Strophic meaning? That means verse,
chorus, verse, chorus, using the exact same music
for each verse of the poem. It was folk -like.
Schubert turned them into psychological dramas.
How so? Give us an example. He made the piano
an equal partner in the storytelling. It wasn't
just background chords. Take Gretchen M. Spinraid.
Gretchen hit the spinning wheel. which he wrote
when he was just 17. 17. Okay, the text is from
Goethe's Faust, right? Exactly. Gretchen is spinning
wool and thinking about her lover, Faust, and
she's getting more and more agitated. And the
piano? The piano part. The right hand plays this
continuous, circling, undulating figure. It perfectly
mimics the mechanical motion of the spinning
wheel and the treadle. So it's literal. It's
literal, but it also mimics her racing thoughts,
her anxiety. And there was this moment where
she remembers his kiss. And the music just stops.
The wheel stops. Because she's so overcome with
emotion, she stops pedaling. Precisely. And then
you hear this clunk, clunk in the piano as she
struggles to get the heavy wheel moving again.
It is cinematic. It's like the soundtrack is
reacting to the character's physiology. That
is incredibly sophisticated for a teenager to
write. Or look at Ilkenik, the Elf King. There's
a horror story in the song. A father is riding
on horseback through the night, holding his sick
child. The child sees the elf king coming to
take him, but the father only sees fog. And the
piano here, what's it doing? The piano plays
these rapid, relentless triplets in the right
hand. It represents the furious gallop of the
horse. It is physically exhausting for the pianist
to play. It creates this sense of breathless
terror from the first second. Wow. And Schubert,
the singer. has to portray four different characters.
The narrator, the worried father, the terrified
child, and the seductive, creepy elf king. It's
a one -man opera in four minutes. Exactly. And
then there's Winter Rise, the winter journey.
This is often cited as the dark heart of his
work. It is the absolute pinnacle of the genre.
It's a cycle of 24 songs about a wanderer in
a bleak, frozen landscape who has been rejected
by his love. Yeah. But it's not just about a
breakup. It's deeper than that. It's about existential
isolation. The Wiener Theater Zeitung wrote that
none can sing or hear without being deeply moved.
It was a heavy emotional experience. He finished
it while he was dying. So he wasn't just writing
catchy tunes. He was exploring the human psyche.
But he wasn't just a songwriter. We have to talk
about his instrumental stuff. There's this famous
phrase Robert Schumann used to describe Schubert's
great C major symphony. heavenly lengths yes
and that highlights a key difference between
schubert and someone like beethoven beethoven
is all about harmonic drama tension release struggle
he grabs you by the collar he's very direct very
schubert is about melodic development he lets
themes wander and evolve he's not in a rush to
get to the destination Heavenly lengths sounds
like a polite way of saying it's really long,
but Schumann meant it as a compliment, right?
Oh, absolutely. It means it's immersive. You
get lost in it. It creates a world. And he was
incredibly innovative with instruments. Think
about the trap quintet. Okay. A standard piano
quintet is a piano and a string quartet. Two
violins, viola, cello. Schubert swaps one violin
for a double bass. Which gives it that... Deep,
rich, bottom end. It changes the whole texture.
It's looser, more open, more rustic. Yeah. And
then there's the arpeggione sonata. He wrote
a masterpiece for an instrument. The arpeggione
was a trendy invention at the time. The arpeggione.
It was basically a mix of a guitar and a cello,
fretted and bowed. It's like writing a concerto
for the keytar in the 1980s. In a way. The instrument
went extinct almost immediately, but the music
was so good that now cellists or violists play
it. He backed the wrong horse, instrumentally.
He did. But we also have to mention his harmonic
daring. In the string quintet in C major, which
is just a staggering piece of music, the second
movement moves from E major to F minor. For those
of us who aren't music theory experts, what does
that feel like to listen to? E major is bright,
warm, stable. F minor is dark. distant, incredibly
tense. To just jump between them like that is
shocking. It creates this otherworldly emotional
shift, like the ground suddenly dropping out
from under you. So we have this genius output,
but we also have a lot of loose ends. The most
famous one being, of course, the unfinished symphony.
Why is it unfinished? That is the great mystery.
Symphony number eight. He wrote two absolutely
perfect movements in 1822, sketched a third,
and then just stopped. Did he run out of ideas?
Did he get bored? Neither seems likely. The first
two movements are masterpieces. But he never
mentioned it to his friends. You just put it
aside. Any theories? There are a few. Some suggest
he associated the piece with the onset of his
illness. Yeah. A bad memory. Or maybe he felt
he couldn't possibly write a finale that could
match the quality of the first two movements.
The wildest part is that it wasn't performed
until decades after his death. It was just sitting
in a drawer somewhere. It fits the pattern of
his life work created, then hidden away. But
he did try to get his work out there, specifically
operas. He really wanted to be a stage composer.
He tried so hard. He wrote about 20 stage projects.
Almost all of them failed. Why? If his music
was so good. A combination of bad luck, bad librettos,
the scripts, and just terrible timing. For his
big opera Furebras, it was rejected largely because
Vienno was completely obsessed with Rossini at
the time. The Italian composer. Right. German
opera was out. Italian opera was in. It was a
fashion issue. Trends kill art. And censorship
was a problem too, right? Absolutely. His opera,
The Conspirators, was banned by the censors simply
because of the title. Politics again. And then
there's Rosamund Schubert, wrote incredible incidental
music for this play. But the play itself, the
script by Helmina von Tese, was reportedly so
bad, so boring. That no one cared. The show was
canceled after two nights. That is tragic. The
soundtrack was amazing, but the movie sucked,
so nobody ever heard the soundtrack. That's a
perfect modern analogy. It took Schubert's beautiful
music down with the sinking ship of the play.
It really seems like he couldn't catch a break
professionally, and all this time he's living
in the same city as Beethoven. Did they ever
hang out? Rarely. They moved in different circles.
Beethoven was the established, grumpy, eccentric
genius. Schubert was the shy bohemian. But the
connection between them is so powerful. How so?
On Beethoven's deathbed in 1827, he was finally
shown some of Schubert's scores. And that's when
he made that famous quote. Truly, the spark of
divine genius resides in this Schubert. Can you
imagine what that must have meant to Schubert?
And then, a few weeks later, Schubert actually
served as a torchbearer at Beethoven's funeral.
A literal passing of the torch. It was symbolic,
wasn't it? The tragedy is that Schubert didn't
live long enough to carry it very far. Before
we get to the end of his life, I do want to touch
on a modern debate that came up in the research.
There's been a lot of discussion about Schubert's
sexuality. Yes, this is a major topic in modern
Schubert scholarship. It really started in earnest
around 1989 when a musicologist named Maynard
Solomon published an article suggesting Schubert
was attracted to men. And this caused a huge
stir in the classical music world. A huge stir.
It challenged the traditional, you know, Biedermeier
view of Schubert as this. Sexless chubby cherub.
Then you had other scholars like Rita Steblin
countering that argument, saying he was chasing
women like the Countess Caroline Esterhazy and
Therese Grob. It sounds like historians reading
between the lines of old letters and diaries
trying to decipher code. It is exactly that.
Whether his intense friendships were homosocial,
which was very common and even encouraged in
the 19th century, or if they were actually erotic
is hard to prove definitively. So what's the
takeaway? The key takeaway for us isn't necessarily
who he slept with. It's that his emotional life
was absolutely fueled by these deep, intense
connections with his male friends. That's where
his support system lay. That love, whatever form
it took, is what you hear in the music. Okay,
let's move to the final years, because things
start to go downhill pretty fast around 1823.
That is when the first symptoms of syphilis appeared.
And in the 1820s, that was a terrifying diagnosis.
It was a death sentence, but a slow and often
agonizing one. There was no cure. The treatment
was often mercury, which is a poison in itself.
And this changed his music. It absolutely did.
It became deeper, more personal, much darker.
You can hear the shadow of death approaching
in the later works. But, and here is that Schubert
paradox again, as his physical health declined,
his creativity spiked. We arrive at 1828, the
final year. The miraculous year. It rivals 1815.
In his last year, suffering from illness, likely
in constant pain, he writes the great C major
symphony, the mass in E flat, and the string
quintet in C major, which many consider the greatest
piece of chamber music ever written. It's like
he knew the clock was running out and he just
had to get it all onto the page. That's what
it feels like. And he finally got a concert,
right? A real one. Yes, in March of 1828. The
only time in his entire career he gave a public
concert entirely of his own works. And it was
a success. He made money. He bought a new piano.
Finally. A win. But fate is cruel. It was overshadowed
almost immediately because the great virtuoso
violinist Paganini arrived in Vienna shortly
after. Paganini! The guy who supposedly sold
his soul to the devil to play the violin. He
was the flashy rock star with all the pyrotechnics.
Schubert was the introspective songwriter. The
press and the public chased Paganini, and Schubert
just couldn't hold the spotlight. Then in November
of 1828, the end comes. He falls gravely ill.
He'd moved in with his brother Ferdinand. He
started suffering from terrible headaches, vomiting,
swollen joints. He couldn't keep any food down.
There's a touching story about music in his final
days, though. There is. Five days before he died,
his friends came to the apartment and played
Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 for him. It's
a dense, difficult, beautiful piece of music.
His friend Carl Holtz later wrote, The King of
Harmony has sent the King of Song a friendly
bidding to the crossing. That gives me chills.
The King of Song, and then he died November 19,
1828, at 31. What was the actual cause of death?
Officially, the death certificate said typhoid
fever. But that's been debated for years. Some
say it was tertiary syphilis. Others say it was
actually mercury poisoning from the treatment
for syphilis. I read something about him walking
42 miles shortly before he died. Is that fit?
Yes. In October, shortly before his final collapse,
he walked about 68 kilometers, that's 42 miles,
in three days to visit Hayden's grave. Which
would be pretty hard to do if you had advanced
syphilis affecting your muscles or your bones.
Exactly. That level of physical exhaustion suggests
his mobility was fine. The intense vomiting and
the rapid decline at the end, that points more
toward typhoid or maybe salmonella from contaminated
food or water. We may never know for sure. And
he was buried. At his own request, he was buried
near Beethoven in the Waring Cemetery. And later
moved. Yes. In 1888, both he and Beethoven were
exhumed and moved to the Central Cemetery, the
Zentralfriedhof, to lie alongside Brahms and
Strauss in the Musician's Corner. And there's
a truly macabre detail here involving the composer
Anton Bruckner. Oh, I saw this. Bruckner was
a huge Schubert fan, right? Obsessive. During
the exhumation, Bruckner was present. He actually
reached into the coffins and held the skulls
of both Schubert and Beethoven in his hands.
That is intense. Talk about venerating your heroes,
literally holding their heads. It just shows
the reverence they were held in by that point.
To Bruckner, these weren't men. Yeah. They were
saints. So Schubert dies. But in a way, his career
was just starting. This is the buried treasure
part of the story, which is just wild to me.
It really is. At his death, only about 100 opus
numbers were published. The vast majority of
those 1 ,500 works were unpublished. His family
had cabinets full of manuscripts. They just called
them the files. And then Robert Schumann shows
up, like the Indiana Jones of musicology. In
1838, 10 years after Schubert's death, Schumann
visits Vienna. He meets Schubert's brother, Ferdinand.
Ferdinand shows him the pile. Schumann starts
digging through these papers, and he finds the
manuscript for the great C major symphony. He
must have lost his mind. He was stunned. He realized
the world has never heard this masterpiece. He
takes it to Felix Mendelssohn in Leipzig, and
they perform it for the first time. Can you imagine
being the person to discover a symphony ten years
after the composer's death? And it didn't even
stop there. No. In 1867, George Grove of the
famous Grove Dictionary and Arthur Sullivan of
Gilbert and Sullivan fame went on a trip to Vienna.
They literally went digging in closets and dusty
boxes. They found missing symphonies, the Rosamund
music, operas. It's incredible that so much of
what we now consider the canon of classical music
was just sitting in a drawer one spring cleaning
away from being thrown in the trash. It changes
how you view history. If those drawers had been
thrown out. Music history would be fundamentally
different. We wouldn't have the bridge between
Beethoven and Brahms. Now I want to talk about
his epitaph. It was written by the poet Franz
Grillparser. It reads, The art of music has here
interred a precious treasure, but yet far fairer
hopes. It's a beautiful sentiment, acknowledging
the tragedy of his early death. But it became
surprisingly controversial among musicians. Oh,
so. It sounds complimentary. Well, the phrase
fairer hopes implies he was incomplete. That
we lost. what he would have become. Musicians
like the great pianist Radu Lupu agree. They
feel the tragedy of the lost future. But not
everyone sees it that way. No. Others, like Andra
Schiff and even Robert Schumann himself, disagreed.
They argue he lived a concentrated life. That
he did enough. Exactly. Schumann said he did
enough. And Schiff compares him to Mozart. You
can't speculate on what they would have done.
You have to appreciate the perfection of what
they did do. He fully realized his genius. just
in a much shorter time frame? It's a hard question
because 31 is so young. But 1500 works is a lifetime
achievement for anybody else. It is. He created
the modern song as we know it. He influenced
everyone from Brahms to Mahler. You could even
argue his melodic sense influenced the Beatles.
Before we wrap up, there's one final thought
I want to leave our listeners with. And this
is the one that really sticks with me from all
the research. It's about his mindset at the very,
very end. I think I know what you're going to
say. The lessons. Yes. Weeks before he died,
literally in the last weeks of his life, November
1828, Franz Schubert signed up for lessons. Counterpoint
lessons. He went to Simon Sector, who was a famous
theorist at the time. Think about this. He had
written the great C major symphony. He had written
Winter Rise. He was a master. He was being called
a genius by Beethoven. And yet he felt he needed
to learn more. He felt his counterpoint wasn't
good enough. He was still a student. He was still
trying to evolve. He didn't think he was done.
So here is the question for you listening right
now. If the Unfinished Symphony and Winter Eyes
were created by a man barely in his 30s who thought
he still had more to learn, what would the history
of music look like if he had lived to be 50?
What did we lose in that gap? It's the greatest
what if in music history. A genius who never
stopped being a student. Keep diving deep, everyone.
We'll see you next time.