Schubert and his Vienna

Born in Vienna in 1797, Franz Schubert lived during the Biedermeier years, the final years of an extraordinary period in which Vienna was musically pre-eminent among Europe's cities. And although his life was brief (he died at 31), it is his music, more than anything else, that has come to seem to us almost synonymous with Biedermeier Vienna. Now, this concise yet richly detailed biography presents Schubert's life against the background of the unique political, artistic, and social life that was early-nineteenth-century Vienna. What is most surprising, given the tragic brevity of Schubert's life, is the breadth and depth of the oeuvre he left behind after a mere fifteen years of adult life. We see him already proficient at the violin and organ, and in the art of composition, by the age of 11. Singing in the Imperial and Royal Court Chapel Choir, Schubert received the finest musical education Vienna had to offer; and although his father forced him into a career as a teacher, nothing could stanch the flow of music from his pen. His first Mass was performed when he was 17; in the next year alone he set 30 of Goethe's poems to music; and by the time he was 19, his genius was so apparent that his friends - offering financial support - persuaded him to leave teaching and devote himself full time to composing. Which he did, until, at the age of 25, his personality began to change. Schubert was exhibiting the first symptoms of the venereal disease that would eventually take his life. From this point until his death six years later, his periods of good health and creative energy alternated with times of depression, illness, and a total inability to compose. Yet his genius never dulled; a year before Schubert's death, Beethoven - on his own deathbed - declared: "Truly, there is in Schubert a divine spark." Charles Osborne gives us more than the simple facts of Schubert's life; he probes the simple facts of Schubert's life; he probes the composer's rich and complex creative existence and traces his artistic development by brilliantly describing the major achievements for us. Through Schubert's own letters and diaries (quoted in their entirety), we learn what moved him to compose and what he felt about his own compositions and those of his contemporaries. And aided by the remembrances of Schubert's friends and colleagues, Osborne fathoms the contradictions in Schubert's character - the outer, typically Viennese gaiety and the inner, deeply rooted melancholy - that reveal themselves in the extremes of his music. The biographical chapters alternate with chapters that vividly depict the character and life of Vienna. They discuss the Congress of Vienna, which, though it was intended to settle Europe's post-Napoleonic political turmoil, succeeded mainly in creating a year-long carnival mood in the city; the great artistic flowering of Biedermeier Vienna; and the political and social influences that combined to create an atmosphere in which the Biedermeier ethic - comfortable and apolitical domesticity, denial of the darker aspects of life, devotion to the arts - was able to thrive, and to nurture the genius of Franz Schubert. - Dust jacket.… (more)