Following an unhappy interlude in which he studied to become a schoolteacher and then worked briefly for his father in that capacity, he made his living as a musician. By the time he was sixteen, Schubert seems to have felt that he had no more to learn in an academic setting.
#Franz schubert bibliography professional#
His father began to teach the boy violin at the age of eight, and in 1808 he became a chorister of the imperial court chapel and undertook intensive professional training in music. As it was, immediately after his death there was no one among his family or friends who fully appreciated the wealth and quality of his instrumental music, or who was willing or able to persuade publishers to make more of it readily available to the public.īorn in Vienna in 1797, Franz Peter Schubert was the youngest of four surviving children of Franz Theodor Florian Schubert, an elementary schoolmaster, and his wife Maria Elisabeth, who had been in domestic service before she married. Had he lived longer, might have looked back on this year as a turning-point in his fortunes, with the promise of publication of more of his instrumental works as well as a wider appreciation of his greatest songs. Because he was not yet famous at the time of his death in 1828, the wealth of documentary evidence normally available to biographers of major composers is, in Schubert’s case, largely nonexistent.
Nor is even an accurate telling of Schubert’s life as simple a task as it may sound. McKay, an English pianist and scholar, writes in her introduction that she has sought merely to provide for the educated general reader a concise account of Schubert’s life, times, and music, while incorporating the fruits of “many new developments and advances in research into Schubert and his music, particularly in Germany, Austria, and the United States.” This unassuming declaration of intent conceals a singular achievement: not only has McKay made the new Schubert scholarship available to nonspecialist audiences-including the speculative “research” of recent years which addresses the alleged significance of the composer’s sexuality-but she has also evaluated it critically and placed it in historical context. But among all the observances of this bicentennial, perhaps the most important passed largely without notice: the publication, here and in Great Britain, of Elizabeth Norman McKay’s Franz Schubert: A Biography. Franz Schubert was born 200 years ago this past January, and the anniversary was marked by countless public performances and new recordings of his music.
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