The story goes that Franz Schubert, as a struggling, 19-year-old composer, was visited by two of his friends one day in 1815. They found him in a state of excitement, reading Johann von Goethe's ballad "Erlkönig". He went straight to his desk - he didn't own a piano - to turn this poem into a song. Within two hours, he had written a four-minute score, intricate and powerful enough to match the poem itself. He and his friends then went out to perform the song for the first time.
Read more in Mark Juddery's column section.
