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

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

The 1869 English translation of the first full-length biography of the celebrated composer, incorporating reminiscences of his contemporaries.

Born just a few years after Mozart died, Franz Schubert had a lot in common with the famous composer. Schubert was also a gifted child who astonished adults with his musical ability. As a teen, Schubert was taught by one of Mozart s rivals. And like Mozart, Schubert s life ended prematurely and was filled with struggle. Still, while Mozart was celebrated across Europe, Schubert was almost completely unknown until just a few years before his death. The challenges of Schubert s life inspired his artmusic which is today performed across the world. Schubert s life, his challenges, and his compositions are all reasons he is considered one of the greatest composers.

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.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is now rightly recognized as one of the greatest and most original composers of the nineteenth century. His keen understanding of poetry and his uncanny ability to translate his profound understanding of human nature into remarkably balanced compositions marks him out from other contemporaries in the field of song. Schubert was one of the first major composers to devote so much time to song and his awareness that this genre was not rated highly in the musical hierarchy did not deter him, throughout a short but resolute and hard-working career, from producing songs that invariably arrest attention and frequently strike a deeply poetic note. Schubert did not emerge as a composer until after his death, but during his short lifetime his genius flowered prolifically and diversely. His reputation was first established among the aristocracy who took the art music of Vienna into their homes, which became places of refuge from the musical mediocrity of popular performance. More than any other composer, 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. This valuable book seeks to bring Franz Schubert to life, exploring his early years as a composer of opera, his later years of ill-health when he composed in the shadow of death, and his efforts to reflect i