Franz Schubert: A Biography

One of the great German Romantic composers, Schubert has recently been the center of a scholarly debate over whether or not he was gay, and how that might have affected work from his String Quintet to his song cycles Die schone Mullerin to Winterreise. Sadly, this new biography adds nothing new to available data and still manages to confuse the picture. McKay, a piano teacher from England who has also written some articles and a technical book about Schubert's piano music, mentions the words ""manic,"" ""depressive"" and ""syphilis"" on nearly every page of this ponderous yet superficial study, but she cops out on Schubert's sexuality by saying the subject has been ""exhaustively debated"" elsewhere. Schubert's works are dealt with in very summary fashion (with no musical examples), and his life becomes a mass of cliches, apart from the idea that Schubert smoked opium before writing his famous account of a dream (Mein Traum). Although she admits that this silly idea is based almost entirely on the singular pipe in ""smoked our pipe,"" she is still so attached to it that she includes Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater to an otherwise scanty bibliography. It's hard to say why a reader should spend the time on this biography when Otto Deutsch's documentary biography or Maurice Brown's critical one are available. If another biography is called for, it would have made more sense to translate Brigitte Massin's fine synthesis of Schubert's life and works from the French, a recent and worthy addition to the list of books on Schubert, who ""dreaded the commonplace and boring"" and probably would have dreaded this book as well. (Oct.)