Friends described opposite impulses in Schubert’s personality. Johann Mayrhofer, a poet and librettist, defined it as “tenderness and coarseness, sensuality and candour, sociability and melancholy”. More dramatically Joseph Kenner, another acquaintance, said long after Schubert’s death: “His body, strong as it was, succumbed to the cleavage in his souls, as I would put it, of which one pressed heaven-wards and the other bathed in slime. Anyone who knew Schubert knows how he was made of two natures, foreign to each other; how powerful the craving for pleasure dragged his soul down to the slough of moral degradation.”

— The enduring chill of Schubert's Winterreise, Phil Hebblethwaite