We live in an age of isolation. Its dangerous effects are becoming ever clearer: online radicalization, increasingly poisonous politics, evidence that more and more people consider themselves functionally friendless. This crisis is particularly acute during the holidays.

But 200 years before the term “loneliness epidemic” entered the lexicon — before the scholarly articles and the surgeon general’s warnings and the World Health Organization reports and the think pieces and the hand-wringing and the finger-pointing — there was Franz Schubert.

Schubert, one of the greatest composers, understood solitude better than most mortals and made poetry of it. While 21st-century technologies are conspiring to distance us from one another, his music speaks to something timeless: the longing for connection, and the pain at not finding it. He gives voice, and then consolation, to that part of us that feels alone in the world even when surrounded by people who care for us. A colleague of mine refers to him as “the musician’s best friend.”

In recent years, he indeed has been mine. When the pandemic hit and for the first time in decades I had no concerts to practice for, instinct led me to Schubert’s final three piano sonatas. Living alone and peering at an anxious future, I felt those pieces spoke to me like no others. In the nearly five years since, hardly a day has gone by when I haven’t worked on at least one of them; in that time I’ve performed these sonatas scores of times, as recently as this month during a tour in Asia. Immersion in these works has been among the greatest gifts of my life.

Before the pandemic, I had immersed myself in the world of Beethoven. The difference between the two is profound. Beethoven grabs you by the collar; Schubert leads you by the hand. Even when Beethoven’s music is lyrical or (more often) spiritual, those qualities are communicated with epic intensity. But while Schubert’s narrative arcs can be monumental or harrowing — frequently they are both — he always feels fully human. His vision is grand, but his fragility is palpable.

Schubert was 31 when he wrote these piano sonatas, in September 1828; two months later, he was dead. He was living in his brother’s house in suburban Vienna, in a dank, poorly heated room barely large enough to hold a desk and a bed. The mattress he died on and a few items of clothing formed the entirety of his estate.

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