Eighteen hundred and ninety-seven is the centennial year of Franz Schubert, the great composer, who was born in Vienna on the 31st of January, 1797. He was of humble lineage. His father, who also bore the name of Franz, was the son of a peasant, who studied in Vienna, and became assistant to his brother, a schoolmaster. He married Elizabeth Vitz, who had been in service as a cook in Vienna. Franz Peter Schubert was the thirteenth of a family of fourteen children. His love of music was apparent when he was very young. A relative often took him to visit a pianoforte warehouse, and there, and on an old worn-out piano at home, the child studied his first exercises without a master. At the age of seven he had a teacher, Michael Holzer, who used to cry out, "When I wish to teach him anything, he always knows it already."

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