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Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer

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An insightful biography of the great composer, revealing Schubert’s complex and fascinating private life alongside his musical genius
 
Brilliant, short-lived, incredibly prolific—Schubert is one of the most intriguing figures in music history. While his music attracts a wide audience, much of his private life remains shrouded in mystery, and significant portions of his work have been overlooked.
 
In this major new biography, Lorraine Byrne Bodley takes a detailed look into Schubert’s life, from his early years at the Stadtkonvikt to the harrowing battle with syphilis that led to his death at the age of thirty-one. Drawing on extensive archival research in Vienna and the Czech Republic, and reconsidering the meaning of some of his best-known works, Bodley provides a fuller account than ever before of Schubert’s extraordinary achievement and incredible courage. This is a compelling new portrait of one of the most beloved composers of the nineteenth century.

736 pages, Hardcover

Published July 25, 2023

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Lorraine Byrne Bodley

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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
Profile Image for Isabella Leake.
200 reviews9 followers
May 30, 2025
It would be hard to say whether I learned more, or rolled my eyes more, in reading this book. On the positive side, it's a comprehensive and in-depth biography that acquainted me with Schubert's life, thought, and music. But on the negative side, much of it is chaff: idle speculation and irrelevancies, platitudes and banalities, incoherent arguments.

Beginning with the Acknowledgements section, which runs a full 14 (!) pages, the book is sprawling. My dominant impression was that the author simply wrote and wrote without sustained attempts to revise, streamline, or reconcile contradictions in her arguments.

The fatal flaw is a tendency to speculate. Much of the book reads more like a 19th-century biography—boldly (and without warrant from sources) making claims about Schubert's personality or motivations—than a careful academic study from 2024. These interpretations aren't always entirely off base, but they are fatuously presented as fact rather than suggestion. There is also an unsavory thread of determinism, so damning to historical writing: "things happened this way because they had to, because that's how things turned out."

And sometimes the interpretations seem very sketchy, especially when mingled with the determinism, like the claim that Schubert intentionally sabotaged his chances to marry Therese Grob because he recoiled from the idea of matrimony. (After all, if he became tied down at 18, how could he have written the freespirited music he would go on to write in his 20s?) And when he began a diary and failed to write more than a few entries? Clear evidence that he couldn't sustain a monologue (despite the fact that later in his life he continued journaling).

Apparently all Schubert's friends were also possible sexual partners—does evidence exist for this? No, but we can't rule it out—and although the early 19th-century German discourse of friendship sounds quite erotic to modern ears, that was merely the cultural expectation...and actually it was erotic. We can know with certainty what Schubert believed because of phrases from the Nicene Creed that he omitted in his masses; besides, we can extrapolate from the clear credal statements that Goethe made what Schubert (an entirely different person) believed. We will never know what liaison led to Schubert's contracting syphilis, and we should respect his privacy and not inquire, but only after several pages of speculation that fail to turn up an answer.

Moreover, if the Virgin Mary has been objectified as the ideal woman, can anyone still perform Schubert's Marian settings in the modern day? Yes, because Mary is actually, more fundamentally, a symbol of universal compassion. And who, exactly, was the historical Gretchen from Goethe's Faust? The answer is crucial for appreciating Schubert's setting of her words in "Gretchen am Sprinnrade"—though whether Schubert was familiar with the backstory of Faust is highly doubtful. Nevertheless, we need to know about the historical Gretchen, who was raped (alas, history hates women!) but given the most soaringly erotic poetry by Goethe set impeccably by Schubert (so let's now celebrate her sexual liberation!).

Sarcasm aside, there are some things I can admire in this book. The author's obvious love and zeal for Schubert is one—although I had the uncomfortable feeling that these sentiments led her to fabricate the image of Schubert that most appealed to her personally. Her familiarity with contemporary German literature and philosophy is also a selling point—although I was unwilling to trust most of her judgments (and the inclusion of Goethe especially often seemed gratuitous), I was glad to see her bring Goethe and Schiller and others so prominently into the conversation, because Schubert, quite a man of letters himself, was attuned to these discussions. Perhaps the book's greatest and most unadulterated strength is the detailed discussion of Schubert's training with Salieri and the Neapolitan style and partimento approach that influenced so much of his subsequent work. Here the author is on the firmest ground and doing the best scholarship. Her musicology seems on point; her historical scholarship sadly deficient and her rhetoric often incoherent.
Profile Image for Tony.
61 reviews46 followers
May 27, 2023
Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer is a magnum opus bequeathed to Schubert lovers by a Schubert lover.

Franz Schubert has never had the cachet to attract a popular biography by the likes of an Alan Walker, a Paul Johnson, or a Jan Swafford. It is hard to say why not (though I suspect market forces may be at work). Two months before he died at age 31, childless and unmarried, Schubert finished a work of such crippling beauty, of such transparent cognition of the composer's impending expiration, that I have long found it difficult to listen to. As Bodley writes, the C major string quintet "comforts and bolsters the courage of those facing slow departures; it helps us to order our thoughts, make sense of our lives." It was Thomas Mann's favorite piece.

The output of most famous composers can be somewhat neatly divided into their serious works and the less serious – though not uncommonly very pleasant – works written out of economic necessity. Schubert adheres to this rule. His little character pieces, like his ländler and waltzes, were enormously popular in Vienna during his life, but other works, like the string quintet and his two late masses, he wrote for art's sake, a distinction that is always audible in Schubert's music.

Bodley's volume does not aspire to placement on Barnes & Noble's new nonfiction shelves. It is self-consciously an academic work and, owing to its density, will be best appreciated by the musically inclined. The prose sometimes trods into the opaque: "Their friendship was of a special nature that exceeded the degree to which most can approach an ideal between permanence and balance based on complementarity." I am not young, I am trained in music, and I am trained in law, but reading this sentence a dozen times brought me no closer to understanding what the author is getting at. The throat-clearing prologue, in which every biographer now feels compelled to explain how they shall approach the subject, was three times as long as it should have been.

Yet in this expectedly overanalytical academic study, some omissions surprised me. The last three piano sonatas, written during Schubert's final months, were not discussed. This, despite the conventional acceptance that the sonatas all speak of death, particularly the slow movements of the A major and B-flat major sonatas. And this, despite a quotation of Beethoven that verges on the plagiaristic, in the introduction to the C minor sonata. After an eternity's buildup, even Winterreise seemed to receive an incongruously brief treatment set against, say, the elaborate analysis of the early church music.

Nor is the degree to which Bodley engages in undue psychological speculation befitting of the genre. Schubert and Theresa Grob, a soprano, badly wanted to marry each other. But the Marriage Consent Law of 1815 "required that all men give proof of an adequate income to support a wife and family" before middle-class men could marry. It turned out that just winging it as a bohemian composer, however attractive this may seem in Willamsburg today, would not cut it. Schubert applied for one job that would have satisfied both his career ambitions and the state's requirements. When his application was rejected, Schubert and Grob apparently accepted that they could not marry. (Though Bodley wonders how hard Schubert really tried: his application was late and didn't answer all of the questions.) Bodley suggests that this was for the best, because Schubert was a gifted improviser, and his improvisation would have been stunted by the permanency and predictability of marriage, as if all married composers lose their faculty for improvisation at the altar.

But my nitpicking this biography is like judging Franz Schubert's music by reference to a single thirty-second waltz. Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer is a needed addition to the too-small collection of reading about an artist who left us so much in so little time.
Profile Image for Tom van Veenendaal.
52 reviews9 followers
October 31, 2023
When I heard a new, large-scale Schubert biography was being written by a leading scholar on him, I was very excited, and I eagerly awaited my pre-order. Sadly, the book falls short in almost every conceivable respect. It's a haphazard pseudo-biography that fairly randomly touches on little explored aspects of Schubert's life and music, written with the tone of a college sophomore trying to impress teachers.

It's really the worst kind of academic style: at once ponderous, pretentious, but really facile and downright nonsensical too. Misha Donat, in his BBC Music Magazine Review of the book, writes that Bodley "is much given to philosophising of a simplistic kind, and a firmer editorial hand would not have gone amiss", and I concur. Take this passage for instance:
Even a post-Kantian reading of Schubert’s storm and stress years as a deviation into what Kant calls heteronomy – allowing himself to be determined by something other than his rational self – raises questions about the circumstances of the composer’s life and his ability to rise above them. There is no rational explanation of a choice to be irrational: these years are radical and go to the root of his humanity.

It has it all: intellectual name-dropping, academic buzzwords, hard to follow sentences, then a conclusion that is generic and doesn't seem to connect to the argument. What does it mean to say that those years "go to the root of [Schubert's] humanity" exactly? Nothing, it's just empty phrase-spinning. And passages like this are everywhere. What are we to make of this sentence: "Winterreise is open-ended because philosophizing has so much to do with pure awareness that, in being aware, questioning falls silent"? Or, "In a similar vein the String Quintet in C (D 956), and other works, are a musical reflection of Schubert’s life: the Quintet represents the metaphysical but can only allude to it"? How can something both represent something, while also 'only' alluding to it? The style really gets grating and irritating. Nor does it really deliver any great conclusions. A case in point: “When attempting to answer these questions one stands at a crossroads where different truths intersect”. In plain English: we don't really know the answer, and there are multiple ways to look at it. Oh, no, sorry, we are standing at crossroads where multiple truths intersect, where the metaphysical is represented but only alluded to, where questioning falls silent because pure awareness is so aware (or something). (If you're wondering, this book adds nothing to the discussion of Schubert's sexuality: Bodley's final conclusion is that we can't know and it shouldn't matter.)

Excessive enthousiasm for a biography's subject leading to awkwardness in style is forgiveable, of course, and it's not as if books my musicologists, whose field is music and not language, are often very well-written, but something about the tone of the whole thing is off too. Bodley has done a lot of research about Schubert and his times, and seems to want to impress on us that many things have not been adequately investigated, and she keeps reminding readers about lack of research in one area or another. For instance:
Analysts pondering the mysteries of Schubert’s symphonies need to resituate them in a broader environment of intertextual resonance with a broader range of Viennese contemporaries and forebears, whose influence he absorbed through performing their work. The D major symphony by the Bohemian composer Johann Baptist Wanhal (Jan Křtitel Vaňhal, 1739–1813) is never evoked in the list of D major symphonies associated with Schubert’s First Symphony, nor is his propensity for interrelation between themes traced back to the symphonies of Salieri’s teacher and predecessor, Florian Leopold Gassmann (1729–1774).

There is the sophomore's emphasis on how what she's writing is 'new' and previously unstudied (after all, in academia you always have to come up with new interpretations, original analyses), and also a sort of arrogance about how everybody else seems to have missed all this. Well, maybe it really isn't all that interesting that there's a Vanhal symphony also in D major that Schubert possibly heard and might have influenced his D major symphony. I'd rather have had a proper new biography, but because of its academic pretensions the structure of this book is a mess: Bodley seemingly at random writes long stretches on this or that topic that hasn't been previously studied, then ignores some major works because of lack of space. In fact, the start of Schubert's studies in music with teacher Salieri gets immensely undue attention, because Bodley apparently has greatly researched Schubert and Salieri's relationship. It's really not all that fascinating: worthy of a scholarly article and a few paragraphs in a biography, sure, but not a mind-blowing reassessment of Schubert. Bodley almost seems convinced almost every compositional quirk of Schubert can be traced back to Salieri's teachings, given how often she brings it up. Then towards the end of the book, Bodley seems to be running out of space, or time, or academic grants, and rushes to the finish. It's not really a complete biography in that sense, more a selection of academic, biographical or musicological mini-essays.

At the start of the book, Bodley writes that
There is an urgent need for a new biography of the composer, which reconciles the contradictory images of the man that are etched into our collective consciousness, and places him at the centre of his own story. A more nuanced portrait of Schubert which marks his gradual transition from a natural composer to a figure of authority and achievement is timely.

I don't think this book delivers on that promise at all. I wish, indeed, that a firmer editorial hand had been present, and I wish academic language wasn't so often so terrible, hiding plain, nonsensical or bathetic conclusions behind academic buzzwords and pseudo-profundity.
38 reviews1 follower
August 5, 2024
This book has some really great insights on Schubert short but productive life. If you’re someone who’s not a musicologist, a trained musician, or someone’s who’s deeply familiar with classical music, this book is not for you. It seems to be written for academics than for the general reader. The biographical parts are great but once getting to the close examination and details of the music, it can be a slog of a read. But it does give insights on Schubert’s breadth of works, including pieces I was not familiar with. I was disappointed there was little discussion on his solo piano sonatas, which are his most played works these days. German titles of works were not translated into English - a slight annoyance. But the access to a website to listen to Schubert’s lesser played pieces was nice to have.
Profile Image for Mandy.
3,628 reviews334 followers
January 11, 2025
It’s really difficult for me to review and rate this detailed and comprehensive biography and study of Schubert as it appears I’m simply not the intended audience. It was way above my head and although the author says it is written for the “educated” reader, I think that claim needs examining. I’m educated, I even know a bit about music theory and play the piano (after a fashion) but really only a musicologist is going to appreciate this book. It is in part a biography but the biographical details are submerged in a lot of abstruse musical theory and a deep analysis of the work, almost note by note. Scholarly and insightful, no doubt, but definitely not for the general reader. So how to rate it? Just because I didn’t enjoy it, doesn’t mean others won’t be fully engaged. So my rating reflects my own personal view and isn’t truly a judgement of the book.
Profile Image for Kathleen.
215 reviews
May 8, 2023
Lorraine Byrne Bodley’s research has led her to ask these questions: Who is the real Franz Schubert? What is real and what is myth?
Reconciling the various images of Schubert that have been presented previously is a big job but fulfilled in this book.

This is a good biography. I am glad I read it and find myself motivated to play more of Schubert’s piano works, perhaps a piano duet with my husband. I am happy to see there is a section devoted to Shubert’s piano teaching. My thanks go to Yale University Press and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review the e-arc of SCHUBERT: A MUSICAL WAYFARER.
Profile Image for Maksim Karpitski.
170 reviews7 followers
August 5, 2025
Just a side note: it's disheartening to encounter rambling about piety being passed down "genetically" in a book that aspires to a certain level of scientific rigor. It's probably just a bad metaphor and wasn't meant literally, but even then, it is indeed bad (as in, it doesn't really add any flavor to a sentence), and it perpetuates dumb, unscientific nonsense to boot. Still, I'm happy that I decided to trust that this blunder wasn't indicative of Lorraine's overall approach and kept reading. I also have to admit the musicology at times went over my head, but it was still well worth the time.
Profile Image for Loesje.
273 reviews
May 30, 2025
The book has been written too technical, to be read comfortably. Even it would have been a textbook instead of a biography I felt the content has been to unorganized. Being left unsatisfied, I decided to read an other biography.
Profile Image for Arnav Kapoor.
137 reviews
April 20, 2023
A musical genius who definitely deserves much more recognition than he does and this book does that incredibly. A must read for all music lovers out there.
3 reviews
June 19, 2024
If you've ordered this book then your an avid lover of Schubert and his musical world. This book is just in support of that ethos.
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