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Elizabeth Norman McKay
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996 378 pages, $35.00
In the forty years since the publication of Maurice Brown's Schubert: A Critical Biography, no challenger has usurped its claim to being the richest and most authoritative narrative account of the Viennese composer's life.1 Schubert scholarship, however, has marched steadily onward since Brown's book, with the result that dramatic revisions in the chronology of Schubert's works, the discovery of substantial new caches of material documenting his life and milieu, and the close examination of both from a variety of social, psychological, sexual, and contextual perspectives have rendered great parts of Brown's book hopelessly obsolete.
In her Franz Schubert: A Biography, Elizabeth Norman McKay has succeeded in providing a readable and current account of the composer's life. Probably the book's greatest contribution is to offer the nonspecialist, English-language reader ready access to the most up-to-date scholarly work on him, including all of the new information and all of the areas in which scholarly opinion is so divided. While it seems unlikely that this volume will attain the unchallenged stature of the Brown biography in its day, it may well be where most musicians and general readers will now want to start their exploration of Schubert's life.
True to its subtitle, McKay's book is primarily a "life" of Schubert the man. While she does chronicle Schubert's creative output as it fits into this narrative, her discussion of the "works" is clearly a secondary priority. Readers seeking detailed information about individual works will have to look elsewhere, and the 1997 Cambridge Companion to Schubert is an excellent starting point.2 Of particular interest to readers of The Opera Quarterly, McKay's coverage of this little-known aspect of Schubert's output is somewhat the exception here. Since she has devoted the greater part of her scholarly life to the study of Schubert's operas, her scattered commentary on these works constitutes a concise, well-- informed introduction to his stage works. Nonetheless, opera lovers would be well advised to consult her comprehensive book, Franz Schubert's Music for the Theatre, for far richer coverage.3
The organization of the book is essentially chronological. Some chapters focus on the progress of Schubert's career (such as "Opportunities" of 1817-I9 and "Friends, Publishers, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde"...