Schubert: The Great Composers No. XVIII (in English)
Synopsis "Schubert: The Great Composers No. XVIII (in English)"
This is a long lost biography of the composer Franz Peter Schubert. It dates from 1886, and has been updated and enhanced by over 400 scholarly notes. It was written by Joseph Bennett an English music critic and librettist. Despite being one of the earliest Schubert biographies in English, it is not well known, presumably because it was not published as a book, but as a series of 9 articles in the magazine The Musical Times, between January and September 1886. It is sufficiently unknown that it does not appear in the big Schubert bibliography from Willi Kahl in 1938. Richard Morris of The Schubert Institute (UK) has edited the biography and added over 400 notes to update, correct and clarify Bennett's work, including citing sources and providing Deutsch catalogue numbers. The notes often inform the reader about things that Bennett simply could not have known at the time. The style and content of the biography reflects the time when it was written, and it is of interest for the light that it shines on Schubert's reception history, at a time when the prevailing views of Schubert, especially with respect to his 'heavenly lengths', 'lack of proper training' and 'clairvoyance' were quite different to today. However, by modern standards, this is not a *good* biography, and it is full of errors, although the editorial notes do help to correct those. A bonus appendix provides the quite extraordinary article about Schubert that Bennett wrote for the birth centenary year of 1897. This is very much 'of its age' and it is unlikely that anyone would approach such a task in this manner today - and if they did it would almost certainly not get printed. Bennett wrote biographies of many composers in the The Musical Times between September 1877 (the start of Haydn) and December 1891 (the end of Wagner), five of which (Berlioz, Chopin, Rossini, Cherubini and Meyerbeer) were published as stand-alone books. At the time, Bennett was chief music critic for The Daily Telegraph, but was allowed to contribute to music magazines. As well as The Musical Times and Musical World, these included journals like Concordia and Lute, which he edited. Most Print on Demand publishers of old out-of-copyright books print what are essentially just scans of all the pages, with no added value. The text of this book has been prepared by using OCR on the originals and then carefully proof reading, editing and formatting. This takes much longer, but the end product is much cleaner than that which results from essentially just scanning and printing. It also allows an editor to reformat for readability and add content, adding value to the resultant book.
