Schubert's Birthplace
Why is it significant?
Step through the gateway at Nussdorfer Straße 54 into a small courtyard with galleries running around it and a single tree. It feels like the inside of a village, and that is what this was: a suburban house where many families lived around a shared yard.
Key Facts
| Place | Schubert's Birthplace |
|---|---|
| Address | Nußdorfer Straße 54, 1090 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.22750, 16.35520 |
| Part of Walk | Couches, Wax and Radium: Freud's Vienna and the Medical Quarter of Alsergrund |
| Generated | Generated |
Step through the gateway at Nussdorfer Straße 54 into a small courtyard with galleries running around it and a single tree. It feels like the inside of a village, and that is what this was: a suburban house where many families lived around a shared yard.
Franz Schubert was born here on the 31st of January 1797. His father ran a school in the same building, and the family is thought to have lived in a single room with a kitchen. Of the fourteen children Schubert's mother bore, only five survived childhood. That was not unusual. In Vienna around 1800, a family expected to bury some of its children, and nobody knew why fevers spread.
Schubert died in November 1828, at the age of thirty-one. His death was recorded as nervous fever, a term that usually meant typhoid. In his mid-twenties he had also fallen seriously ill, most biographers believe with syphilis, and the treatments of the time, including mercury, may have done him as much harm as good. Doctors could describe a disease, give it a name, and bleed the patient. They could rarely explain it.
And yet in those last years he wrote some of the most extraordinary music ever composed: song cycles, string quartets, the great late piano sonatas. He was so short-sighted, the story goes, that he slept with his glasses on, so he could start writing the moment he woke. In 1801 the family moved to a larger house nearby, on the Säulengasse, where the school grew and where much of his early music was written.
Within a generation of his death, the hospital a few streets south of here would start turning medicine into a science of observation, numbers and autopsy, the so-called Second Viennese Medical School. Diseases that killed Schubert's siblings would gradually become understood. Now walk back down towards the Liechtensteinstraße and look for an Art Nouveau staircase climbing the hill on your right.