On this date in 1828, Franz Schubert attended a party at the Vienna home of one of his admirers, and sat down and played from a new piano sonata in B-flat, which he had completed only the previous day. In the same month, Schubert composed one of his greatest chamber pieces, the String Quintet in C Major —a work that is tragic in tone, and seems to prefigure Schubert's imminent demise —for in less than two months, Schubert would be dead, an apparent victim of tertiary syphilis.

Syphilis was the most dreaded sexually-transmitted disease of Schubert's day. In our time, antibiotics can treat this once fatal disease, but in the early 1980s, its place was taken by the AIDS epidemic, which has shortened the lives of many contemporary artists.

One of these was the American composer Kevin Oldham, born in 1960 in Kansas City. His major work is a piano concerto, which was premiered to critical acclaim and a standing ovation by the Kansas City Symphony conducted by Bill McLaughlin in 1993. At that time, Oldham was seriously ill in a New York hospital and weighed only 135 pounds. Nevertheless he checked himself out, flew to his home town to solo in his concerto, then returned to the hospital the following day. He died six weeks later at age 32.

When Schubert died, he was only 31.