Franz Schubert found himself confronted with Beethoven's extraordinary stature without any distance and felt his name as a great burden. Beethoven's benchmark never left Schubert in peace. While the period before 1813 was characterized by relatively carefree composing, afterward he entered a phase in which he grappled with the problems of sonata form and the thorough development of motivic and thematic concepts. Particularly from 1816 onward, a period of intensified inner conflict with Beethoven began.
Schubert's statements reveal a certain lack of understanding of Beethoven's compositional style—not in the sense of not grasping the compositional method, but rather a lack of understanding on an aesthetic level. He could not reconcile Beethoven's aesthetic understanding with his own. His pronouncements may even have been a defiant reaction stemming from dissatisfaction with the execution of those works in which he clashed with Beethoven's aesthetics and style.
Although Schubert died at the young age of 31, he left behind a rich and diverse body of work. Today, he is considered, alongside Beethoven, a founder of Romantic music in the German-speaking world. Unlike the composers of the Viennese Classical period, he also devoted considerable space in his oeuvre to smaller forms such as piano pieces, German Dances, Moments Musicaux, and Impromptus, a practice that continued in the works of many Romantic composers.
Musicologists agree that Schubert's most significant contribution to European music history lies in his song compositions. The art song genre, in its definitive new form, essentially originated with him. What is special about Schubert's songs is that he actually transformed the linguistic form of over 600 poems into music. Not a musical idea, but the linguistic framework was the guiding principle.