20th and 21st Century Comments

Ralph Bates

There was really only one possible teacher for the young Schubert, and that one also impossible, the deaf Beethoven.. [from his biography of Schubert].

Oscar Bie

If he had lived, he would have projected the distinction of his youth into a still riper manhood - into an indescribably fruitful future - and would have become the first and foremost of all. [from his biography of Schubert.

Eric Blom

Schubert, of all the great Masters, is seen least clearly as a link in musical evolution. He appears even to a fairly close scruitiny as a curiously detached phenomenon, the characteristics of whose idiom are singularly little apparent in his precursors and become all but lost again after his disappearance {from His Favourite Device, in Music and Letters, Schubert Number, October 1928].

Alfred Brendel

Of the important Schubert pioneers, only Brahms was connected with Vienna; Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, George Grove - none of them was Viennese. To see four of the great composers of the nineteenth century among Schubert's most faithful admirers ought to impress those who persist in the belief that Schubert, though gifted was not sufficiently professional. [from his book Musical thoughts and after thoughts].

A Brent Smith

...Schubert the eternal child in music ... [from his book Schubert - the Symphonies]

Truth compels us to admit that Beethoven rarely achieved such distinctive orchestral effects as does the rather overshadowed Schubert..[from his book Schubert - the Symphonies]

Richard Capell

Dear Schubert, how can we praise you enough ? Dear, lovely music, inexhaustibly gushing from the pages as long as we like to keep them open, how can we ever have borne to neglect you ? Schubert is the country, the sunlight, young love !.[Musical Times, 1st Feb 1925, from a review of AH Fox-Strangways' Schubert songs translated]

Neville Cardus [Yep, the cricket writer]

Schubert followed music like any child that ran after and with the Pied Piper. [from his book Ten Composers].

Richard Dawkins

Schubert's musical brain is a wnder of improbability, even more so than the invertebrate's eye. [from his book The God Delusion

A. E. F. Dickinson

The broad fact is that there is hardly another composer who can so often put every listener, from highest to lowest brow, into that humble, uncritical and altogether happy frame of mind which possesses us in the presence of great music. [from Schubert and Beethoven, Music and Letters, Jan 1928].

Edmondstoune Duncan

It is a cynical reflection that Schubert might easily have earned a better living as a copyist, owing to the extreme rapidity of his pen. [from his biography of Schubert].

A. H. Fox Strangways

In a couple of centuries Schubert may be two men, like Shakespeare. In a couple more, seven towns may claim the honour of his birth. At present he is still the son of a peasant, was born at 54, Nussdorferstrasse, which lies to the right as you go northward out of Vienna, spent his life in that capital, thought, made, wrote music till he was tired, and then lay down. [Conclusion of his article Schubert in his songs, from the special Music and Letters, Schubert Number, October 1928.]

Cecil Grey

...if we are speaking of his work as a whole it would be probably nearer the truth to say, in a somewhat depreciatory sense that he was the most musicianly of all musicians who have ever lived; the least in contact with the outside world or with anything apart from music, the most completely lacking of all great composers in the purely cerebral power which is the necessary concomitant of the highest artistic achievements and the most dependent on the commonplace formulas and clichés which are the stock-in-trade of the professional hack musician. He, indeed, and not Mozart, is the very type of the conventional music-machine, contentedly turning out work after work, day after day, without any expenditure of mental effort, and unrestrained by any faculty of self-criticism. [from his book, The history of Music].

Peter Gülke

...the early death of Schubert appears as one of the greatest catastrophes of musical history. [From the essay In what respect a quintet? in the book Schubert Studies edited by Badura-Skoda and Branscombe].

Chau Hau

… the Unfinished Symphony reflects class feelings of depression, hopelessness and disappointment, flight from reality, dreams of freedom: that is its social content. [Quoted by Leo Black in his Franz Schubert: Music and Belief, quoting Reininghaus].

Geoffrey Jackson

One of the happiest summers of my life occurred duing the late 1970s, when I decided to make analytical and stylistic notes on all the Schubert songs then available to me in recording … Re-reading those notes now, I am aware of how much more might have been included. It seems that the understanding of Schubert's greatest songs is quite literally bottomless. New thoughts, new ideas, new responses have continued to occur to me throughout the intervening years and will, I hope, never cease. And yet I remember well how absorbed I became in my task. The thought that there were no more Schubert songs to work on seemed unreasonable to me and quite distressing. [From his article 'Schubert the Dramatist: The miscellaneous songs' in The Schubertian no 35, April 2002.].

If justice were to be done, Schubert would be recognised as one of the most important progressives of the 19th century. [From his article 'Schubert the Dramatist: The miscellaneous songs' in The Schubertian no 35, April 2002.].

Stephen Jackson

Yet it is also time for us to celebrate Schubert's essential indeterminacy not as an intimation of weakness, but ... the language of music's first truly modern artist. [From his biography of Schubert].

Graham Johnson

...It is not the only story of this kind which shows the composer's touchiness when he was challenged by musical inferiors, who included, after all, the whole of Vienna's population with the exception of Beethoven! [From the notes to the 26th CD of the Hyperion Schubert Edition].

Yevgeny Kissin

The great Russian pianist Vladimir Sofronitsky said once, 'Of all the great composers, Schubert was the best human being. Nobody had such a wonderful soul as Schubert.' This expresses my feelings precisely. Some of Schubert's divine music (like that of no other composer) is just filled with this feeling of goodness, of kindness that can bring one to tears of inner joy and happiness and make one aware of the link between aesthetics and ethics." [from the CD notes for "In Performance - Franz Schubert" on NPR Classics [NPR CD0003/4] ]

Daniel Gregory Mason

Compared with Schubert's pen, Aladdin's lamp seems a poor affair. [quoted by Robert Haven Schauffler in his biography]

So long as human feeling and its eloquent expression are prized in life and art Schubert's best songs will be loved by the layman as well as studied by the musician. [In an critical summary in the Masters of Music, October 1904. ]

And throughout all that work, there runs that golden thread of naïve tenderness and chameleon-like color, that child-like beauty of which Schubert alone had the secret. [from his Schubert Centenary Essay ]

Henry L Mencken

He was infinitely below old Ludwig as a technician; he lacked the sheer brain-power that went into such masterpieces as the first movement and the allegretto. of the Seventh. Such dizzy feats of pure craftmanship were beyond him. But where he fell short as an artisan he was unsurpassed as an artist. He invented more beautiful musical ideas in his thirty-one years than even Mozart or Haydn, and he proclaimed them with an instinctive skill that was certainly not inferior to any mere virtuosity, however dazzling and however profound.

He was, to music, its great heart, as Beethoven was its great mind.

In all the history of music there has never been another man of such stupendous natural talents.

Dead a hundred years, he remains in his peculiarly exhilarating and lovely way the greatest of them all. No composer of first rank has failed to surpass him in this way or that, but he stands above all of them as a contriver of sheer beauty, as a maker of music in the purest sense.

He is one of the great glories of the human race.

[All quotes from an editorial, first printed in The American Mercury, November 1928, and reprinted as An Appreciation of Schubert in The Etude, January 1929.]

Gerald Moore

The drudgery of sitting before a blank page, waiting for inspiration, forcing ideas into shapely proportions was unknown to him for the ideas blossomed and sprouted like the springing herb beside the banks of his beloved brook. [from his book The Schubert Song Cycles]

Being an accompanist himself Schubert was naturally modest. [from his book The Schubert Song Cycles]

András Schiff

He was a fantastic writer for the piano. [From his film, The Wanderer]

There is more drama in this 2 minutes [Der Doppelgänger] than in the complete output of Richard Wagner. [From his film, The Wanderer]

If I was a Catholic, which I'm not, I would say that Bach is the father, Mozart is the son and Schubert is the holy spirit. You have in Bach really a divine figure. In Mozart you have the greatest example of genius, but somebody who was very much aware of it and in Schubert you have modesty in person - somebody who had no idea about his ability and his significance and this humility and this simplicity touches me the most. [From his film, The Wanderer]

Artur Schnabel

...the composer nearest to God. [quoted by Gerald Moore in his book The Schubert Song Cycles]

Ethel Smyth

In order to be close to Joachim and his companions I would stand for hours in the queue at St. James's Hall, and ah! The revelation of hearing Schubert's A minor quartett! . . . All my life his music has been perhaps nearer my heart than any other---that crystal stream welling and welling for ever … [from her memoirs Impressions that Remained Vol. I, 1919]

Maynard Solomon

That the young men of the Schubert circle loved each other seems amply clear...I believe that it is reasonably probable that their primary sexual orientation was a homosexual one. [from his article "Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini" in 19th Century Music, Spring 1989]

Richard Strauss

Lucky Schubert, who could compose what he wanted, whatever his genius made him do. [from a sketch book in the 1940's quoted by Stephen Jackson in his biography]

Bill Strother

No matter how much you come to love him, you constantly find there is more that you never noticed before. However great he seems to be, he's greater than that! [from a posting to the Moderated Classical Music List, 23 Feb 1997 ]

John Philip Sousa

If there is no God, how could Schubert have rained out several masterpieces, one after the other in a day?" [Quote from Sousa to James Francis Cooke, editor of The Etude Magazine the day before Sousa died, and reported in his obituary in The Etude Magazine, June 1932]

Donald Francis Tovey

Perhaps the clearest sympton of distress at lack of opportunity for hearing his own orchestral music is the magnificent quality and enormous quantity of his four-hand pianoforte works, one of which, the Grand Duo in C, proved, when orchestrated by Joachim, to be essentially one of the most important symphonies in the classical repertoire.

And it is a sure mark of a good judgement of musical style when Schubert is regarded, on the strength of his important works, as a definitely sublime composer.

Every work Schubert left us is an early work.

The truest lover of Schubert confesses that he would not wish the Unfinished Symphony to have a typical Schubert finale.

Schubert's defects are often half-way towards the qualities of new art-forms. [from his famous article on Tonality, Music and Letters, Schubert Number, October 1928].

Joseph Wechsberg

There is no trace of genius which we think we see in the face of Beethoven, none of the arrogance of Wagner, the dignity of Brahms. Schubert looks like a nice drinking companion, an amiable fellow rather than a lonely genius standing close to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. A Chinese proverb says that a picture tells more than a thousand words. Not in the case of Schubert. If one did not know that this was him, one would not look twice. [from his biography].

C Whitaker-Wilson

Schubert was beautifully ugly. [from his biography].