Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer
By Lorraine Byrne Bodley
Yale University Press 2023

Lorraine Byrne Bodley, Professor of Musicology at Maynooth University, has written an insightful, massively-researched life of the composer Franz Schubert, the kind of biography that immediately takes its place as a standard work on its subject. It’s got lots of company in that regard, of course: Schubert died tragically young at age 31, and right away, the biographies started appearing, springing from a comparative wealth of primary material. Bodley’s “select” bibliography runs to over 30 pages of close-typed references, an amazing resource in its own right.

The allures of the subject were obvious, foremost the young composer’s glowing amounts of talent but secondarily his almost uncanny aptitude for friendship. The challenge for any general-interest biographer will be giving just emphasis to both of these allures. The Schubert biographer who seeks to emphasize the composer whose talents were so great they impressed Beethoven will tend to produce a life that reads more like a treatise on musicology, and the biographer who seeks to emphasize the boyish, peculiar man whose friends found him so intensely lovable will tend to produce a life that leaves readers wondering what all the fuss was in Salieri’s Vienna. The risks are self-evident: spare the music and diminish the genius, stress the music and risk losing your non-specialist readers.

Naturally, given her credentials, Bodley isn’t shy of the musicological angle; her book is full of music scores and will probably be best appreciated by music-literate readers, particularly since Bodley’s running commentary on the nuances of Schubert’s working life is both brilliant and a consistent feature of the book. And even those scores don’t always tell the whole story, since Schubert was the king of improvising and probably tossed off hundreds of performances whose magic can never be fully recovered. “Many of his harmonic exploits were discovered by his improviser’s fingers as they freely traversed and explored the timbre of the instrument,” Bodley writes. “This point is central since Schubert’s basic ideas are frequently harmonic as well as melodic.”

But the personal side of Schubert’s story is also very feelingly represented in these pages, from his precocious youth to his torturous death in 1828, constantly trying to get out of bed as if death were something he could physically escape. “On Wednesday 19 November at 3 o’clock in the afternoon,” Bodley writes, “he took his final breath and reached a state of being that was denied him in life, where all the contradictions and conflicts were resolved.” 

Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer is ultimately a remarkable synthesis of the specialist observations and inviting narrative inclusivity (it bloody well better be so accomplished, considering the fact that in her Acknowledgments, Bodley thanks 216 named individuals and 400 institutions with combined staffs totaling in the thousands; it’d be pretty embarrassing if the population of a small Midwestern town managed to produce a stinker). Readers will feel tempted to love this odd little composer by the time they reach the end of the book; they’ll certainly want to call up some of his glorious music and get re-acquainted.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.