Franz Schubert stood about five feet tall, slept on friends' couches, was nicknamed Schwammerl, and died at 31 having written more than 1,500 works, including over 600 songs. This deep dive follows him from a Vienna household where only five of 14 children survived, through the Imperial Seminary under Salieri, to an 1815 marriage consent law that barred him from marrying the soprano Therese Grob because he could not prove financial stability.

The episode explores the Schubertiads, the private gatherings of poets and radicals that gave him an audience for experimental work, and how he turned the piano into a co-star in songs like Gretchen am Spinnrade and Erlkönig. It also covers the 1820 police raid under Metternich, his 20 failed stage projects, the secret Unfinished Symphony of 1822, his illness, and the Winterreise cycle written in the y ...