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736 pages, Hardcover
Published July 25, 2023
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.
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 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.