Franz Schubert, complete: 96 pieces, from Der Erlkönig to the last one in the pool
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Franz Schubert (1797–1828) wrote hundreds of songs in a life that ended at 31, and his piano writing in those songs is not decoration — it carries as much of the storytelling as the voice does. The rippling brook under “Wohin,” the galloping triplets of “Der Erlkönig,” the spinning-wheel ostinato of “Gretchen am Spinnrade” — these accompaniments are cornerstone repertoire on their own, independent of the singer. Schubert's page on PracticeClef now holds 96 pieces, and it's complete: every Schubert song in the source corpus this catalog draws from that survives as a usable engraving is live. That means every playable engraving we have — not literally every note Schubert ever wrote, some of which survives only in forms we can't yet turn into a clean score.
The bulk of this collection is piano parts of Schubert's Lieder: songs for voice and piano, presented here as the accompaniment only, not the vocal line. Every one of those pieces says so on its own page. A difficulty rating below is PracticeClef's published 1–9 scale.
Four songs everyone will recognize
Der Erlkönig, D.328
This piece is in G minor, sits at level 6 of 9, and takes about 4 minutes to play.
Goethe's ballad of a father, a dying child, and the Erlking who only the child can hear. The piano part's relentless triplet octaves are as famous as the vocal line — a workout in their own right, played here without the voice.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Gretchen am Spinnrade, D.118
This piece is in D minor, sits at level 6 of 9, and takes about 4 minutes to play.
Schubert's first great Goethe setting, written at 17. The piano's turning sixteenth-note figure is the spinning wheel itself, and it stops cold at the song's emotional break — then has to start turning again.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Ellens Gesang III, D.839 (Ave Maria)
This piece is in Bb major, sits at level 6 of 9, and takes about 41 seconds to play.
The piece most people just call “Schubert's Ave Maria,” though it began life as Ellen's third song in a Walter Scott cycle, Op. 52 — the Latin prayer text was added later. The rocking arpeggiated accompaniment is instantly recognizable on its own.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Die Forelle, Op.32, D550d
This piece is in Db major, sits at level 6 of 9, and takes about one minute to play.
“The Trout” — the song Schubert later reused as a theme for his “Trout” Quintet variations. The piano part's rippling right-hand figure is meant to sound like the fish darting through water.
Open this score when you want to play it.
An easier way in
Heidenröslein, D.257
This piece is in G major, sits at level 5 of 9, and takes about 30 seconds to play.
Another Goethe poem — a boy, a rose, a thorn — set as a plain, folk-like strophic tune. Short and direct, and one of the lower-difficulty entries in the whole Schubert pool.
Open this score when you want to play it.
The piece that completed the pool
Wohin — from Die schöne Müllerin, D.795 No. 2
This piece is in G major, sits at level 5 of 9, and takes about 2 minutes to play.
Eighty-one measures of near-continuous rippling sixteenth notes over an offbeat bass — the young miller following a brook that seems to be talking to him. This was also the hardest piece in the batch to ship: the source engraving split the piano into two single-staff parts rather than one grand staff, so it had to be merged by hand, preserving all 1,317 notes, before it could pass the same checks as every other piece.
Open this score when you want to play it.
What “complete” means here
Schubert's page now carries 96 pieces — every Schubert song in our source corpus that survives as a usable engraving, playable free. “Complete” means every playable engraving we have, not every piece Schubert ever wrote in a 31-year life that produced an enormous amount of music, some of which no clean modern engraving exists for yet. You can browse the full page at /composers/franz-schubert.
Explore it
The full library is free to browse and play — filter by composer, difficulty, or era. Connect a digital piano for live note feedback. Turn on Wait mode when you want the cursor to advance after you play the written notes. See the docs for setup. No account is needed.
A note on the numbers. Every count, key, and difficulty grade in this post comes from each piece's own metadata record. Difficulty is PracticeClef's published 1–9 scale. Duration figures are estimates derived from the score, not measured performances. Pieces marked as piano parts contain the accompaniment only, not the vocal line.