Schubert Studies

Schubert Studies
Author: Eva Badura-Skoda
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2008-10-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780521088725

This collection of articles clarifies problems of style and chronology in the music Schubert composed during the last decade of his life.

Schubert

Schubert
Author: Brian Newbould
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 1999-04-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780520219571

Of all the great composers, none - not even Mozart - has been so dogged by myth and misunderstanding as Franz Schubert. The notion of Schubert as a pudgy, lovelorn Bohemian schwammerl (mushroom) scribbling tunes on the back of menus in idle moments has never quite been eradicated. In this major new biography, Brian Newbould balances discussion of Schubert's compositions with an exploration of biographical influences that shaped his musical aesthetics. Schubert: The Music and the Man offers an eminently readable description of a musician who was compulsively dedicated to his art - a composer so prolific that he produced over a thousand works in eighteen years. Gifted with an intuitive know-how, coupled with a Mozartian facility for composition, Schubert combined the relish and wonder of an amateur with the discipline and technical rigor of a professional. He moved quickly and comfortably among genres, and sometimes composed directly into score but many pieces required painstaking revision before they satisfied his growing self-criticism. Examining afresh the enigmas surrounding Schubert's religious outlook, his loves, his sexuality, his illness and death, Newbould offers above all a celebration of a unique genius, an idiosyncratic composer of an astonishing body of powerful, enduring music.