Franz Schubert: Music and Belief (review)

As a first impression Leo Black's Franz Schubert: Music and Belief presents a free-flowing association of ideas, unfolding a blend of philosophical contemplation and musical analysis (use of theme, texture, and tonality) to reveal both the development of Schubert's own musical language and his indebtedness to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. But the book is more than a loose assortment of fanciful conclusions based on the author's wide reading and otherwise informed reflections.

The title 'Music and Belief' is as much an expression of Schubert's beliefs, in so far as they are accessible through his music, as of the author's belief that the truest way to appreciate the composer is through his music. Thus Black tries to counter the trend in the Schubert literature to put too much emphasis on biographical details or to rely too heavily on technical music analysis. On page 1 we read: 'To all but the most specialist scholars the composer by now amounts to the man, and details of his life should be superfluous where there is a receptive ear.' And on page 2: 'Exegesis of actual music is possible, but demands musical sensitivity and is likely, unless confined to the most dry-as-dust analysis, to be contentiously subjective.'

Black's long and successful career as a BBC music producer cemented his belief that the only logical approach to music is through its sound. He makes his position unambiguously clear in the introduction: 'In looking at [Schubert's] development my premise is that since his music is paramount, one may argue from similarities of sound to similarities of spiritual and mental state. In that sense, his music offers a covert autobiography, quite specific in some of its correlations with natural religious experience' (p. 5). If this attempt to reveal Schubert's autobiography through his music strikes the reader as ambitious, the Hofmannsthal quotation before the introduction—'we have no business seeking a great man elsewhere than in his work'—puts Black's narrative into a definite perspective. The carefully selected quotations that introduce each chapter provide key reference points for his commentary on the music and clarify his interpretation of its psychological implications. They also offer a neat parallel to the self-quotations and other musical echoes that provide an intriguing thread throughout Schubert's output.

In chapter 3 ('Years of Reflection'), for instance, Black uncovers striking resemblances between the song An den Mond in einer Herbstnacht, D614, the Gloria from the Mass in A flat, and Jemina's aria 'So schlummert auf Rosen' in Lazarus, D689 (Ex. 18, p. 76). But he could have gone further in interpreting the selection and meaning of Schubert's self-quotations. A thorough investigation of these self-borrowings and their significance is long overdue.

Chapter 5 ('Harvest—The Great C major Symphony and Other Music of Schubert's Fullest Maturity') leans heavily on Klaes-Göran Jernahke's thesis Schuberts 'stora C-dur symfoni'—Kommunikationen med ett musikalisk Konstverk (Uppsala, 1999), a hermeneutical study inspired by Paul Ricoeur that proposes a narrative plot for the 'Great' C major Symphony. Jernahke's is not the first hermeneutical interpretation of a Schubert symphony. In 1939 Arnold Schering published a similar essay in musical hermeneutics (Franz Schuberts Symphonie H-Moll ('Unvollendete') und ihr Geheimnis (Würzburg, 1939)). In this chapter, the complex of self-quotations (identified on pp. 142–4) suggests different readings based on the sequence in which the quoted themes appear in the symphony and the chronology of the original themes. But Black disappointingly fails to seize the opportunity to place his interpretation in the context of Schubert's crucial letter to Kupelwieser (31 Mar. 1824, in Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: A Documentary Biography (London, 1946, 339), not least since the 'Great' C major Symphony was Schubert's first successfully completed effort in the genre since the Sixth Symphony, D589 (1817–18).

Black does cite this much-quoted Kupelwieser letter later in the book (p. 174) during his discussion of...