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.
The life, times, and music of Franz Schubert During his short lifetime, Franz Schubert (1797–1828) contributed to a wide variety of musical genres, from intimate songs and dances to ambitious chamber pieces, symphonies, and operas. The essays and translated documents in Franz Schubert and His World examine his compositions and ties to the Viennese cultural context, revealing surprising and overlooked aspects of his music. Contributors explore Schubert's youthful participation in the Nonsense Society, his circle of friends, and changing views about the composer during his life and in the century after his death. New insights are offered about the connections between Schubert’s music and the popular theater of the day, his strategies for circumventing censorship, the musical and narrative relationships linking his song settings of poems by Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten, and musical tributes he composed to commemorate the death of Beethoven just twenty months before his own. The book also includes translations of excerpts from a literary journal produced by Schubert’s classmates and of Franz Liszt’s essay on the opera Alfonso und Estrella. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Leon Botstein, Lisa Feurzeig, John Gingerich, Kristina Muxfeldt, and Rita Steblin.
An accessible multi-disciplinary exploration of Franz Schubert's haunting late song cycle Winterreise (1827) that combines context and different analytical approaches.
The concept of Schubert as a feminine type began in 1838. This work examines the historical reception of Franz Schubert as conveyed through the gendered imagery and language of 19th and early 20th century European culture. The figures discussed include Musset, Sand, Nerval, Maupassant, George Eliot, and others.
This Companion to Schubert examines the career, music, and reception of one of the most popular yet misunderstood and elusive composers. Sixteen chapters by leading Schubert scholars make up three parts. The first seeks to situate the social, cultural, and musical climate in which Schubert lived and worked, the second surveys the scope of his musical achievement, and the third charts the course of his reception from the perceptions of his contemporaries to the assessments of posterity. Myths and legends about Schubert the man are explored critically and the full range of his musical accomplishment is examined.
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'.
This book examines the impact of the daily life, political climate and artistic institutions of Vienna on its musicians and musical tastes between 1815 and 1830. Emphasis is given to Beethoven, Schubert, Paganini and Johann Strauss where their careers reflect typically Viennese musical life and when Viennese conventions may explain important turns in their lives. Attention is also paid to the incomes, service contracts and welfare of lesser-known musicians of the same period. An entire chapter is devoted to the regulation of music by the Austrian government, secret police and censors, since this period coincides with the height of Metternich's political power. Although the study is mainly intended for music historians and listeners, the book should also interest the Austrian, literary, theatre and political historian. Furthermore, the research presented here suggests that many of the intriguing questions and social issues in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, currently widely discussed by Schorske, Toulim and McGrath, are already present in Vienna in 1815.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is now rightly recognized as one of the greatest and most original composers of the nineteenth century. Schubert steadily graced Viennese musical life with his songs, piano music and chamber compositions. Throughout his career he experimented constantly with technique and in his final years began experiments with form. The resultant fascinating works were never performed in his lifetime, and only in recent years have the nature of his experiments found scholarly favor. In The Unknown Schubert contributors explore Schubert's radical modernity from a number of perspectives by examining both popular and neglected works. Chapters by renowned scholars describe the historical context of his work, its relation to the dominant artistic discourses of the early nineteenth century, and Schubert's role in the paradigmatic shift to a new perception of song.