Hyewon Chang - Franz Schubert: Piano Sonatas I (D. 557, D. 664 & D. 960) (2026)

Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century was a polyglot, bustling capital where Italian opera and German song, church polyphony and salon music coexisted at close quarters. Unlike Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven—each drawn there from elsewhere—Franz Schubert (1797–1828) was Viennese by birth, raised in a schoolmaster’s household in the Himmelpfortgrund and educated at the Imperial City College. A choirboy at the Hofkapelle, he studied with Salieri, absorbed Mozart and Haydn from the college orchestra, and moved among a circle of literate, music-mad friends. That mix of cosmopolitan influence and local habit left a distinctive mark: a composer who thought lyrically yet wrote with structural daring; a native of Vienna for whom song, theatre and the domestic keyboard were natural, almost inseparable, idioms.