The composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was not bereft of early advocates, from Schumann, Liszt, and Mahler to Sir George Grove. Brahms famously heralded Schubert as "the true successor to Beethoven." Nevertheless, it was not until the end of the twentieth century that Schubert's major instrumental works finally and fully emerged from Beethoven's shadow. Critics and scholars began to reinterpret Schubert's departures from Beethoven's formal and stylistic characteristics, and to see these departures not as flaws but as strengths and hallmarks of a new paradigm. Schubert's alternate constructions of "masculine subjectivities," first described by Schumann in 1838, parallel a developing appreciation for lyricism, melody, and song-traits historically regarded as feminine. Consequently, Schubert's approach is increasingly viewed as innovative and divergent rather than defective and deviant. Schubert's Reputation from His Time to Ours tells the story of how and why this has happened.

Audiences as well as other artists have responded to Franz Schubert's music with passion, both during his time and in the past two centuries. Musicians, painters, writers, and filmmakers have all found a connection with him, integrating his music into their own works in ways that have given their works greater depth. Our Schubert: His Enduring Legacy examines Schubert and the ways audiences and artists_both his contemporaries and their descendents_relate to him, analyzing some of the uses of Schubert's music and providing an intimate portrait of the man. Divided into two parts, part one focuses on Schubert's own time, discussing many aspects of Schubert's life and the effects they had on his compositions, such as the special importance and personal function Schubert's songs held for the composer and their effect on his other works; his association with his contemporaries; and the subtleties of his political activism. Part two considers Schubert's legacy, investigating the composer's ability to arouse passion in other artists through the intervening years to the present. This fascinating study includes several photos as well as a select bibliography and discography that include the works discussed.

This searching biography takes a fresh look at this elusive and misunderstood genius.

The Vienna in which Franz Schubert lived for the thirty-one years of his life was not just a city of music, dance, and coffeehouses - a centre of important achievements in the arts. It was also the capital of an empire that was constantly at war in the composer's youth and that became a police state during his maturity.

In Franz Schubert's Music in Performance David Montgomery challenges many operative myths about the music of this great, but often misunderstood, Viennese master. Chief among them is the lingering notion that Schubert was poorly-trained but still managed to turn out brilliant, if often flawed, scores. Modern adherents of this view believe that Schubert could not notate his own musical wishes accurately, and that he was principally a creature of intuition. Accordingly, musicians might allow themselves wide intuitive leeway in the interpretation of his music. Another myth challenged by Montgomery is that Schubert was a conservative, or perhaps even a chronological throwback. Opposing recent attempts to legitimize performer-generated embellishment of Schubert's music in the style of the eighteenth century, He clarifies Schubert's contributions to the radical intellectualism of nineteenth-century romanticism. The book offers six informative chapters ranging from aesthetics and acoustics to the specifics of tempo and expression, plus an appendix of pertinent Viennese pedagogical sources. In addition to many years of musicological research, Montgomery brings long experience as a concertizing pianist and conductor to this engaging and controversial work.

To this day, Schubert remains something of an enigma, despite the wealth of literature about him. Did he write the 'philistine sonatas' attributed to him by Richard Wagner, or did he have the 'divine spark' which Beethoven recognized in him? Was he the 'cosy Biedermeier character' of Vienna, known to his friends as 'little mushroom', or was he something else--a genius unrecognized? Inspired by his own love of performing Schubert's chamber and instrumental works, the author goes behind the commercially exploited myth of the 'jolly drinking companion', to portray another Schubert, the man who stood between two worlds--the Classican and the Romantic--and who realised works of extraordinary meoldic beauty. He traces Schubert's development as man and musician against an historical and social framework; from his birth in 1797 in war-shadowed Vienna, through his prolific career as composter, to his death of typhus fever at the early age of thirty-one. The portrait emerges is that of the man revealed through his music: 'a complex, sympathetic, always very real human being, a difficult man and an honest artist'.

"Fisk's portrayal of Schubert is based on evidence from the composer's hand, both verbal (song texts and his written words) and musical (vocal and instrumental). Noting extraordinary aspects of tonality, structure, and gestural content, Fisk argues that through his music Schubert sought to alleviate his apparent sense of exile and his anticipation of early death. Fisk supports this view through close analysis of the cyclic connections within and between the works he explores, finding in them complex musical narratives that attempt to come to terms with mortality, alienation, hope, and desire."--BOOK JACKET.