Schubert, a Musical Portrait (Da Capo Press music reprint series) [Hardcover]

Alfred Einstein (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 343 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Pr (May 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306760835
• ISBN-13: 978-0306760839
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,590,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars EINSTEIN ON SCHUBERT, February 13, 2008

By 

DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Schubert, a Musical Portrait (Da Capo Press music reprint series) (Hardcover)

Not that Einstein, of course. This A Einstein is Dr Alfred E, the musicologist who has also given us a similar biographical study of Mozart.

I see that this book dates from 1951. It seems to have been around forever, but now that I actually go to the extreme of reading it I find that the mindset it displays is a modern one, and that in the best sense. The first thing that I like about the book is the overall plan. Instead of dealing with his subject's life in the first half of the volume and his compositions in the second, Einstein discusses the works more or less as they occur chronologically in Schubert's biography. He bends the rigidly chronological approach to a certain extent -- usually with a bit of complaining -- in order not to fragment the treatment of works that belong together logically, but he is surely right in his view that Schubert had so little by way of a life, and was so prolific as a composer, that the sense of imbalance had he adopted the `binary' scheme would have been grotesque. In this sense Einstein's is a more satisfactory production than that of Prof Arthur Hutchings in the Master Musicians series, but it is better in a much more important way also.

Einstein's mind is comparatively uncluttered with prejudices, second-hand outlooks and self-indulgent attitudes. In 1951 it was still comparatively uncommon for a writer on music to treat Beethoven as just another composer, to be assessed exactly like the rest; and when any did it was usually with a self-conscious show of being iconoclastic and different. A Beethoven-centred viewpoint has, in my own opinion, been the bane of musical criticism for a century and more, not least in the case of Schubert whose brief life was almost enclosed in the space of his great forerunner's. Einstein is neither a slave to conventional opinion nor a rebel, able for once to take a realistic stance in evaluating the actual influence of Beethoven on Schubert, in making direct comparisons in the few cases where they cover the same ground, and even in making more general value-comparisons, these last tending more to Schubert's benefit than to Beethoven's. In other words the great thing about this book is its rationality. I don't suggest for one moment that Einstein does not have some strong views, still less that I agree with all his arguments or judgments, only that I never find him arbitrary or unreasonable. Moreover he is extremely thorough, and in cases where I happen to know the out-of-the-way works that he highlights I can see good reasons for his opinions. This in turn leads me to treat with respect his findings regarding works that I do not know. I shall, for instance, make a point of hearing the early song Adelaide together with some others, since Einstein argues that Gretchen am Spinnrade and Erlkoenig are far from being isolated oases in a desert of juvenilia, which is what many say they are. When it is a matter of the second version of The Song of the Spirits over the Water, or of Lazarus, I too am on familiar ground and I second robustly what Einstein has to say about the intrinsic quality of these works and their importance to our understanding of the composer generally.

The strictly biographical side of the narrative is very interestingly presented. I suppose that I had previously been able to attach some individuality to Mayrhofer among Schubert's personal circle because Mayrhofer is the poet of a good number of Schubert's songs. This time round I have at last got at least a sketchy impression of Schober, Spaun and some members of Schubert's family. On a rather grimmer note, Einstein has a suspicion who it was that gave Schubert syphilis - not a prostitute apparently but a serving-wench, whose name Einstein knows but forbears to disclose. Turning his compass in the direction of Schubert's artistic output, Einstein also has some interesting thoughts to offer on the subject of Schubert's attitude to poetry, and in general the portrait he paints is a long way from the subject of such patronising biographers as Hutchings. I could not say whether I really agree with his view that a great composer must necessarily be a great man as well, but if Schubert had, as I firmly believe he had, the greatest purely musical gift that any human being was ever endowed with, he can hardly have been quite the insignificant figure in a personal sense that we are sometimes given to think he was.

On the musical side, I sympathise with Einstein's irritation over the frequent pigeonholing of his subject as `Viennese'. A lot of what we now think of as Viennese is really Schubert's own individual idiom. I thoroughly welcome the erudition that Dr Einstein puts at our disposal, and there is clearly a considerable amount I need to follow up in terms of the songs and choral music. Here and there I disagree. Einstein supports Schumann's view, for instance, that the op 142 Impromptus are some kind of sonata. Nonsense, say I. No sonata by Schubert or anyone else was ever anything like that. Nor can I hear the B minor entr'acte from Rosamunde as a finale to the Unfinished Symphony or indeed to anything. However I should say that Dr Brian Newbould can, and you can hear the thing in practice on Mackerras's set with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Einstein dates the great C major symphony to Schubert's last year, and I'm inclined to agree on stylistic grounds alone, above all the unprecedented handling of phrase-lengths in the slow movement. Where Einstein and I both disagree with Schumann (and Tovey) is in equating the Grand Duo with the lost Gastein symphony of 1824/5. That was the time of the so-called `Reliquie' piano sonata, which is in the required key of C, and whose first two movements are, to me and to Hutchings, blatantly orchestral, although Hutchings does not complete the linkage either.

A fine scholarly, sensitive and absorbing piece of biography and criticism.