The Life of Schubert.(Review)

The Life of Schubert. By Christopher H. Gibbs. (Musical Lives.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [xiii, 211 p. ISBN 0-521-59426-X (cloth); 0-521-59512-6 (pbk.). $44.95 (cloth); $14.95 (pbk.).]

In this new volume of the series Musical Lives, Christopher Gibbs presents a fluent, readable account of Franz Schubert's life, drawing on well-thumbed chronicles to shape a picture that, with its occasional new emphases, holds the reader by the sense of freshness illuminating many of its pages. The author is known for, among other things, his work on Schubert reception history, with a focus on the fortunes of the composed legacy in the posthumous period and well beyond in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These credentials bring one palpable benefit to the reader, in that the writer shows a particular interest in the emergence of the oeuvre-such as that emergence was-during the composer's lifetime, exploring how his reputation was built, his shifting concerns with popular (mainly domestic) products on the one hand and the "highest branches of art" (p. 62) on the other, and the possibility that in his later years, at least, he was writing not for the here-and-now audience but for posterity.

Was Schubert, then, becoming more of a Beethovenian figure at the end of his life? Was he, in the months left to him after the demise of his admired contemporary, poised to inherit the Beethoven mantle? Gibbs suggests that this was probably so, and his proposition that Beethoven's example (that is, the kind of composer he was) was as influential on Schubert as his actual note manipulations, if not more so, bears consideration. Beethoven's example, we are told, affected "Schubert's notions about the very function and status of the art of music. Beethoven showed him that music could go beyond the beautiful, into the sublime" (p. 153). In its treatment of the Beethoven-Schubert relationship, this book goes beyond, and thus complements, other biographies. Schubert's debt to another figure who trod the streets of Vienna a generation before him is, however, strangely underplayed: perhaps it is because Gibbs is less concerned with the roots of Schubert's art than with its efflorescence and goals that he tends to ov erlook the youthful indebtedness to, and indeed idolatry of, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

What is the reader to make of the paradox that Gibbs, like Elizabeth Norman McKay before him (McKay, Franz Schubert: A Biography [Oxford: Clarendon Press; New ...