From Publishers Weekly
This elegant, lyrical and convincing biographical novel makes an imaginative leap into the mind of Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828) while hewing to the facts of his life. The Schubert we meet here is a restless, self-castigating wanderer wrestling with inner demons; a generous friend who still can fly into a drunken rage and pummel a comrade with his fists; a sublime poet of love who visits prostitutes and whose hair falls out due to syphilis or to the mercury treatments intended to cure it. Schubert's love life, as depicted by German novelist, poet and playwright Hartling (A Woman), is a series of false starts, including his teenage romance with Therese Grob, who finally rejected him, and his unspoken love for his 13-year-old piano pupil, the Countess Karoline Esterhazy. Hartling's writing is aptly musical, with subtle modulations and thematic variations as he weaves in letters, reviews of Schubert's concerts, verses that the composer set to music and 12 "musical moments" that reenact revealing incidents, such as Schubert's break with his self-righteous schoolmaster father. This moving and memorable portrait of a tragic genius rings true.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This spare, unsentimental, but affectionate novel about Schubert's life is composed of equal parts of research, empathy, and speculation. Sensitively interpreting Schubert's Lieder as encoded autobiographical texts, Hartling paints a plausible portrait of Schubert's emotional life, including his grief at the loss of his beloved mother, his alienation from his strict and conventional father, his unhappiness in love (heterosexual, that is; Hartling only hints at any homosexuality in the composer's relationships with his friends), his loneliness amid the bonhomie that surrounded him later in his life, and his growing isolation and anxiety in his long final illness (syphilis). This technique awakened in this reader a desire to hear the songs again, especially Die Schone Mullerin and Die Winterreise. In addition, Hartling's late 20th-century propensity to seek the reality beneath the myths of an earlier, merrier Vienna yields a thought-provoking picture of life in this fascinating city. From the author of A Woman (Holmes & Meier, 1988); recommended for most collections.
Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
