Schubert: The Music and the Man

Newbould, a musicologist at the University of Hull, England, is known for having worked over orchestral fragments by Schubert and ""completing"" them so that they could be recorded by Neville Marriner in a kind of musicological taxidermy. This ""life and works"" of Schubert, in time for the composer's much-deserved bicentenary celebrations, is reliable on the works, benefiting from the author's clear familiarity with the basic materials. Still, Newbould offers some odd musical views, such as that Beethoven was ""no noted composer of lieder,"" and his text is too often written exclusively for other musicologists, such as this analysis of Schubert's song cycle, ""Die Winterreise"": ""Now that D major has superseded D minor, F major is no longer `neighbouring,' so Schubert... [moves] to G major instead."" Newbould also has a hard time verbalizing just why Schubert's music is moving. Newbould agrees with an improbable recent theory that ""Mein Traum"" was written after taking opium, though refuses to make any decision whatsoever about a current burning issue, whether Schubert was gay, apart from offering the rather sniggering point that there is no ""identifiably gay way of proportioning a sonata movement...."" Although this is better than some other Schubert biographies, it is likely to be superseded by the expected deluge of new Schubert bicentennialia. (May)