Books in Brief: Schubert’s Songs: A Biographical Study

Schubert’s Songs: A Biographical Study, by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Knopf, 333 pp., $12.50). As the world’s foremost baritone, the most subtle interpreter of Schubert’s Lieder, and the scholar-musicologist who edited and sang for the first time many of the 608 songs, Fischer-Dieskau could hardly have failed to give us the most searching and rewarding study of Schubert’s incomparable masterpiece. Perhaps it was too much to hope that this would also prove to be the definitive book about a composer whose enthusiasts have not treated him well. Unfortunately Fischer-Dieskau has nothing to say about Schubert’s almost invariable failure to realize the full potential of music in larger formats, nor is he quite frank in acknowledging the great composer’s lack of literary discrimination, for Schubert, as was said later of Rossini, was quite capable of turning a laundry list into song. “It is rather surprising,” Fischer-Dieskau says, “that no one has pointed out the close connection between Wagner and Schubert.” This is not fair to writers like R. W. Gutman and W. A. Ellis, who have pointed out Wagner’s enormous debt to innovative songs like “Erlkönig” and “Doppelganger” and to the revolutionary harmonies of the posthumous B-flat Sonata.

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Schubert’s Songs: A Biographical Study, by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Knopf, 333 pp., $12.50). As the world’s foremost baritone, the most subtle interpreter of Schubert’s Lieder, and the scholar-musicologist who edited and sang for the first time many of the 608 songs, Fischer-Dieskau could hardly have failed to give us the most searching and rewarding study of Schubert’s incomparable masterpiece. Perhaps it was too much to hope that this would also prove to be the definitive book about a composer whose enthusiasts have not treated him well. Unfortunately Fischer-Dieskau has nothing to say about Schubert’s almost invariable failure to realize the full potential of music in larger formats, nor is he quite frank in acknowledging the great composer’s lack of literary discrimination, for Schubert, as was said later of Rossini, was quite capable of turning a laundry list into song. “It is rather surprising,” Fischer-Dieskau says, “that no one has pointed out the close connection between Wagner and Schubert.” This is not fair to writers like R. W. Gutman and W. A. Ellis, who have pointed out Wagner’s enormous debt to innovative songs like “Erlkönig” and “Doppelganger” and to the revolutionary harmonies of the posthumous B-flat Sonata.