The son of a schoolmaster who had settled in Vienna, Franz Schubert was educated as a chorister of the imperial court chapel and later qualified as a schoolteacher, briefly and thereafter intermittently joining his father in the classroom. Schubert spent his life largely in Vienna, enjoying the company of friends, but never holding any position in the musical establishment or attracting the kind of patronage that Beethoven had found twenty years earlier. Schubert's final years were clouded by illness, as the result of a syphilitic infection, and he died in 1828, leaving much unfinished. Franz Schubert's gifts had been most notably expressed in song. Memorable melodies infused all his work.

In 1816 Schubert wrote in his diary an interesting comment regarding Beethoven:

"An eccentric element dominates the works of most contemporary composers. This element of eccentricity is almost wholly due to Beethoven, who unites the tragic with the comic, the agreeable with the repulsive, the heroic with howls, the holiest with harlequinades. Who not only unites them but mistakes the one for the other without distinction, makes men mad instead of dissolving them in love, moves them to laughter instead of lifting them up to God."

Schubert wrote three small sonatas for violin and piano between 1816-1817 as well as his more ambitious A major sonata heard on tonight's program. Schubert had written in the same period his Fourth ("Tragic") and Fifth symphonies as well as more than 100 songs. His ability to produce music at such a rate has always been an extraordinary part of his myth. Before embarking on the composition of his violin sonatas Schubert had been listening to Mozart's g minor Quintet and wrote in his journal: "O Mozart, immortal Mozart, how many, Oh how endlessly many such comforting perceptions of a brighter and better life hast thou brought to our souls!"

The Sonata is cast in four movements, each full of elegant themes and contrasting characters, and as Schubert said of Mozart's g minor quintet, "...it shows us in the darkness of this life a bright, clear, lovely distance, for which we hope with confidence."