Schubert

One of fourteen children born to a schoolmaster and a domestic servant with family roots in what is now the Czech republic. Schubert was the quintessential Viennese composer. The poetry of his music, its love of dance rhythms and its emotional ambiguity capture artistically the feeling of Eastern European folk culture for the joy and sadness of life. He was the first of many nineteenth-century composers to struggle with the challenge of creating original music in the shadow of Beethoven. The relationship between Schubert's apparently uneventful life and his towering achievement has long been something of a mystery, and the picture has grown more complicated in recent years. Modern scholarship has questioned and rejected many of the familiar images of Schubert - the impoverished Bohemian, the eternal youth, the reluctant lover, the genius in the garret; controversy has arisen over the composer's sexual orientation and how it might be reflected in his music. First published in 1987, this highly praised account has been revised and updated to reflect current knowledge and thought about Schubert's life and works. As before, biography and music are treated together in a continuous narrative, in the context of the musical life of early nineteenth-century Vienna, with the aim of providing an accessible and authoritative guide to Schubert's life and works for the student, the musician, and the general reader.