Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer is a magnum opus bequeathed to Schubert lovers by a Schubert lover.

Franz Schubert has never had the cachet to attract a popular biography by the likes of an Alan Walker, a Paul Johnson, or a Jan Swafford. It is hard to say why not (though I suspect market forces may be at work). Two months before he died at age 31, childless and unmarried, Schubert finished a work of such crippling beauty, of such transparent cognition of the composer's impending expiration, that I have long found it difficult to listen to. As Bodley writes, the C major string quintet "comforts and bolsters the courage of those facing slow departures; it helps us to order our thoughts, make sense of our lives." It was Thomas Mann's favorite piece.

The output of most famous composers can be somewhat neatly divided into their serious works and the less serious – though not uncommonly very pleasant – works written out of economic necessity. Schubert adheres to this rule. His little character pieces, like his ländler and waltzes, were enormously popular in Vienna during his life, but other works, like the string quintet and his two late masses, he wrote for art's sake, a distinction that is always audible in Schubert's music.

Bodley's volume does not aspire to placement on Barnes & Noble's new nonfiction shelves. It is self-consciously an academic work and, owing to its density, will be best appreciated by the musically inclined. The prose sometimes trods into the opaque: "Their friendship was of a special nature that exceeded the degree to which most can approach an ideal between permanence and balance based on complementarity." I am not young, I am trained in music, and I am trained in law, but reading this sentence a dozen times brought me no closer to understanding what the author is getting at. The throat-clearing prologue, in which every biographer now feels compelled to explain how they shall approach the subject, was three times as long as it should have been.

Yet in this expectedly overanalytical academic study, some omissions surprised me. The last three piano sonatas, written during Schubert's final months, were not discussed. This, despite the conventional acceptance that the sonatas all speak of death, particularly the slow movements of the A major and B-flat major sonatas. And this, despite a quotation of Beethoven that verges on the plagiaristic, in the introduction to the C minor sonata. After an eternity's buildup, even Winterreise seemed to receive an incongruously brief treatment set against, say, the elaborate analysis of the early church music.

Nor is the degree to which Bodley engages in undue psychological speculation befitting of the genre. Schubert and Theresa Grob, a soprano, badly wanted to marry each other. But the Marriage Consent Law of 1815 "required that all men give proof of an adequate income to support a wife and family" before middle-class men could marry. It turned out that just winging it as a bohemian composer, however attractive this may seem in Willamsburg today, would not cut it. Schubert applied for one job that would have satisfied both his career ambitions and the state's requirements. When his application was rejected, Schubert and Grob apparently accepted that they could not marry. (Though Bodley wonders how hard Schubert really tried: his application was late and didn't answer all of the questions.) Bodley suggests that this was for the best, because Schubert was a gifted improviser, and his improvisation would have been stunted by the permanency and predictability of marriage, as if all married composers lose their faculty for improvisation at the altar.

But my nitpicking this biography is like judging Franz Schubert's music by reference to a single thirty-second waltz. Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer is a needed addition to the too-small collection of reading about an artist who left us so much in so little time.

Lorraine Byrne Bodley’s research has led her to ask these questions: Who is the real Franz Schubert? What is real and what is myth?
Reconciling the various images of Schubert that have been presented previously is a big job but fulfilled in this book.

This is a good biography. I am glad I read it and find myself motivated to play more of Schubert’s piano works, perhaps a piano duet with my husband. I am happy to see there is a section devoted to Shubert’s piano teaching. My thanks go to Yale University Press and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review the e-arc of SCHUBERT: A MUSICAL WAYFARER.

A musical genius who definitely deserves much more recognition than he does and this book does that incredibly. A must read for all music lovers out there.