Rethinking Schubert

In Rethinking Schubert, today's leading Schubertians offer fresh perspectives on the composer's importance and our perennial fascination with him. Subjecting recurring issues in historical, biographical and analytical research to renewed scrutiny, the twenty-two chapters yield new insights into Schubert, his music, his influence and his legacy, and broaden the interpretative context for the music of his final years.

With close attention to matters of style, harmonic and formal analysis, and text setting, the essays gathered here explore a significant portion of the composer's extensive output across a range of genres. The most readily explicable aspect of Schubert's appeal is undoubtedly our continuing engagement with the songs. Schubert will always be the first port of call for scholars interested in the relationship between music and the poetic text, and several essays in Rethinking Schubert offer welcome new inquiries into this subject. Yet perhaps the most striking feature of modern scholarship is the new depth of thought that attaches to the instrumental works. This music's highly protracted dissemination has combined with a habitual critical hostility to produce a reception history that is hardly congenial to musical analysis. Empowered by the new momentum behind theories of nineteenth-century harmony and form and recently-published source materials, the sophisticated approaches to the instrumental music in Rethinking Schubert show decisively that it is no longer acceptable to posit Schubert's instrumental forms as flawed lyric alternatives to Beethoven.

What this volume provides, then, is not only a fresh portrait of one of the most loved composers of the nineteenth century but also a conspectus of current Schubertian research. Whether perusing unknown repertoire or refreshing canonical works, Rethinking Schubert reveals the extraordinary methodological variety that is now available to research, painting a contemporary portrait of Schubert that is vibrant, plural, trans-national and complex.

Lorraine Byrne Bodley is Senior Lecturer and Director of Research at the Department of Music, Maynooth University. She is the first woman in Ireland to have conferred on her a D.Mus. in Musicology, a higher doctorate awarded for published work (NUI, 2012). She also holds a Ph.D. in Music and in German from University College Dublin (2000). Her numerous other awards include a Gerda-Henkel Foundation Scholarship (2014); two DAAD Senior Academics Awards (2010 and 2014); an IRCHSS Post-Doctoral Scholarship (2001-03) and the Goethe Prize of the English Goethe Society (2001). She has published 11 books including: A Community of the Imagination: Seoirse Bodley's Goethe's Settings (Carysfort Press, 2013); Goethe and Zelter: Musical Dialogues (Ashgate, 2009); The Unknown Schubert (Ashgate, 2008); Proserpina: Goethe's Melodrama with Music by Carl Eberwein (Carysfort Press, 2007) and Schubert's Goethe Settings (2003). Forthcoming publications include: Schubert's Late Music in History and Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2015), co-edited with Julian Horon. She is currently writing a new biography on Schubert commissioned by Yale University Press. In 2014 she was elected to the Royal Irish Academy.

Julian Horton is Professor of Music and Head of Department at Durham University. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has taught at University College Dublin and King's College, London. He is the author of Bruckner's Symphonies: Analysis, Reception and Cultural Politics (Cambridge, 2004) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony (2013). In 2012, he was recipient of the Westrup Prize; in 2014, he was elected President of the Society for Music Analysis.