Customer Reviews

The Life of Schubert (Musical Lives)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Poor Schubert! The Viennese-born composer was little appreciated in his day, even by the circle of close friends who periodically sponsored programs of his songs and chamber music. Despite the fact that several of his friends were writers, none seem to have thought to record their memories of the composer until decades later. After his death at age 31, the composer was turned into a Romantic symbol, a sentimentalized ideal of the tragic genius who's life was cut short, etc. In more recent times, Schubert has been the subject of intense scholarly debates about issues like gender, which also want to idealize the composer (as gay icon). Christopher Gibbs acknowledges all these issues and provides a clearly written and frequently insightful study of the composer's life, without taking sides in any of the academic debates that have consistently misinterpreted his significance. For example, Gibbs notes that 19th century writers often said (selfishly) "Alas, we have been denied more glorious examples of Schubert's work." Instead, Gibbs suggests that the real loss was that Schubert died just before he gained the popularity his music deserved, and before he had the chance to clearly distinguish between mature works and juvenalia. You will gain a sense of Schubert as a real flesh-and-blood artist with desires and problems (he sometimes drank too much, it seems), rather than as a romanticized image of "doomed youth." A very welcome addition to the literature!

"Poor Schubert!" Unfinished. Unrecognized during his brief lifetime. Ergo, the most 'posthumous' of composers. Pathologically bashful, agoraphobic, sexually repressed, possibly a virgin whose one libidinal adventure resulted in syphilis, of which he died. Beethoven's Heir. Or so one has heard, until recently, when biographers have asserted a 'darker' image of Schubert as ... well, you'll have to speculate.

I seldom read biographies of composers or writers. I tend to think the music or words tell me everything I want to know. But the 'accepted' image of Franz Schubert is so incongruent with what I hear in his music that I finally became curious about his life. The irony of that, it turns out, is that Schubert's life is extremely poorly documented; he wrote no memoirs, few of his letters have survived, few accounts of him from his friends or from public observers were written during his lifetime, and the accounts written years later, sometimes decades later, are about as reliable (ha!) as the Four Gospels.

Christopher Gibbs's "Life of Schubert" is eminently level-headed, properly modest in any claims to certitude, concisely and pleasantly written, neither a hagiography nor an agenda-driven expose. Of course, it will be of interest ONLY to people who are thoroughly enamored of Schubert's music. Don't think that this little book will "introduce' you to Schubert the composer, or will somehow convince you of his musical glory. Start with the music! When you've heard enough to care - the string quartets and quintet, the Lieder, the symphonies, the piano sonatas - then you may find this book interesting. Whatever I have to say about Schubert's life and career, for now, is totally informed by what Gibbs presents in this bio. Let's go point by point:

* Unfinished. The two movements of the "Unfinished Symphony" were not discovered by musicologists until decades after his death; the work was indeed unfinished, abandoned after some 40 measures of a third movement, for unknown reasons. Yet it's one of Schubert's best-known and most performed works. In fact, Schubert's manuscripts have been found to include an extraordinary number of unfinished compositions, including some that were 'half way' to being innovative masterworks. Another major example is his dramatic cantata "Lazarus", which has also become part of the active repertoire despite its unfinished condition. Neither Gibbs nor yours truly has any convincing explanation for Schubert's tendency to abandon great compositions short of completion. He wrote a lot of music, a vast amount of finished music, and he seems to have been unable to set a piece aside and return to it later, something that many composers do regularly. The "unfinished Symphony", by the way, was not a work in progress when Schubert died; it had been composed and abandoned years earlier.

* Unrecognized, unappreciated. Gibbs present quite a different picture. Schubert was adulated by a close circle of friends and fans. His published Lieder were numerous and sold well. He was not a performing virtuoso, and in his era that certainly hindered the spread of his reputation, but Gibbs makes a good case that Schubert's career was on the rise, that he was on the verge of quite ample renown and reward at the time of his death.

* Posthumous. This is certainly so. A goodly number Schubert's Lieder and some of his smaller compositions intended for domestic music-making had been published, but even his strongest admirers were unaware of his greatest, most ambitious music. Many compositions went undiscovered for decades; when they appeared, as if by archaeological magic, they again and again forced musicains and music lovers to re-evaluate Schubert's stature.

* Bashful, socially misfit? An inadequate myth fueled by 'romantic' idolatry. Schubert was extremely social, spending most evenings with friends, centering a world of social music-making, usually sharing his living quarters with friends. If anything, Schubert was a bit of a "party animal", certainly a bohemian in the style of his time and place, and he may have been a heavy drinker, a carouser. Gibbs speculates that he suffered from some degree of clinical manic depression - bipolarity - and that his drinking was a kind of self-medication. What little evidence exists is consistent with such a 'diagnosis', but Gibbs is appropriately open about the fact that he's merely guessing.

* Syphilis? In his early twenties, Schubert suffered a long period of serious illness, after which his few writings suggest a deep-set fear for his health. The symptoms recorded for that bout of illness are consistent with syphilis but hardly proof presumptive. Schubert's skeleton was exhumed in the 19th C; his skull did NOT show any of the characteristic degenerations associated with tertiary syphilis. There's no real medical evidence that syphilis was the immediate cause of his sudden death; in fact, there was mention of fever as a cause. Schubert had just taken a 35-mile hiking expedition weeks before his final sickness.

* Beethoven's Heir? I confess that I've supposed as much, metaphorically. But it makes little sense, given that a large number of Beethoven's greatest compositions and all of Schubert's were in fact written in the very same thirteen years, roughly from 1814 to 1827. Beethoven died a mere 14 months before Schubert. In a sense, Schubert (1797-1828) and Beethoven (1770-1827) were musical contemporaries, though Beethoven's established fame overshadowed Schubert's during the years when they were both living and working in Vienna. Schubert was not a child prodigy in the manner of Mozart, but he was astonishingly precocious, once he started composing. His first now-recognized masterwork, the piano-song Gretchen am Spinnrade, was composed in 1814, at age 16. And Schubert died at age 31, almost five years younger than Mozart! Mozart was thirty when he wrote "Nozze di Figaro", thirty-three when he wrote the sublime Clarinet Quintet, thirty-two when he wrote his last and best symphonies. And Beethoven was an oldster of thirty-three when he composed his Third Symphony and of thirty-six when he wrote the Rasoumovsky Quartets 7, 8, & 9. One could argue that, as a composer, Schubert was the most precocious of all, and he was just hitting his stride, approaching his own mature expectations of himself, when he died.

But let me say it once again: listen to the music. That's what there is. That's what astonishes.

This is an excellent and concise introductory biography of Schubert for the general reader. Gibbs debunks many of the Schubert myths that have arisen since his tragic early death, and explores Schubert's social mileu. Of primary importance in Schubert's life is his circle of male friends. In addition he tackles some of the recent research concerning the composer's possible homosexuality, and explores some of the rudimentary evidence that exists about Schubert's relationships with women. What is lacking in this book is more analysis of Schubert's oeuvre.

This book was the first biography of Franz Schubert that I have read. I don't think I could have picked a better introduction to Schubert's life and career. Although the book is only 200 pages in length, it completely and accurately reports the facts of Schubert's life and career and the various influences on him during his life. It also corrects a number of myths and inaccuracies regarding Schubert's life that I found to be of great interest. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Schubert and his circle of friends and supporters.

Balanced, concise, well-written. It's just about his life (the title!) but it does provide the historical context to enrich the listening of his works.

I'd cut this more slack if it were the only biography of Schubert ever written. Obviously it is not, so how does it distinguish itself from the others? It was more recently published, and that, I'm afraid, is it. It is always hedging, it wants desparately to offend nobody, and manages in this way to offend at least me.