Schubert: The Music and the Man

"but wonderful content." according to Buzz. Slow read, but wonderful content.. "Scholarly book on Schubert and his music by Brian Newbould" according to Mary Ann Bergman. Schubert was one of the greatest composers of the 19th Century, and one who had a profound impact on the music of several other composers that followed him, including Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and especially Dvorak, who adored Schubert's music. As a lyricist, he was second to none; h. Kirk McElhearn said The music, not the man. While this is an interesting book about Schubert, it discusses the music much more than the man. You get little feeling for Schubert as a person, and little understanding of his everyday life from this book. On the other hand, Newbould spends a lot of time talking about the music. But his discussions are little more than what

Newbould has been so bold as to finish the Unfinished Symphony and other of Schubert's uncompleted works, and he has a deep understanding of the man and his music. . The book is both readable and informative, the work of a professor of music at the University of Hull in Britain whose biographical data describes him as a composer, conductor, pianist, and lecturer. Brian Newbould brings together the biographical data of Schubert's life with the music that he composed

But in this major new biography (the first comprehensive work on Schubert in over fifty years) Brian Newbould lays to rest the stereotype of the composer plucking melodies out of the air, relying on instinct more than well-honed craft. 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. Instead he paints a vivid and compelling portrait of a man who was compulsively dedicated to his art, a composer so prolific that he produced roughly one thousand works in an eighteen year period.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. 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.. Of all the great composers, none, not even Mozart, has been so dogged by myth and misunderstanding as Schubert. Since the 1920s, when the musical Blossom Time hit the stage, the notion of Schubert as a pudgy, love-lor