Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl lecture Schubert the Successful

Thursday 30 May 2019, 4pm CAC Colloquium Room 3201

Schubert the Successful

Schubert was a failure in life, a composer neglected by his contemporaries; or so the story goes, traceable over generations, the appeal of which has been irresistible. Just as Schönberg sought to undermine the dominant narrative in his famous essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’, I will challenge this story, presenting instead a composer who planned ambitiously for his career and for the publication of his works. Despite what we have been told, these endeavours were not in vain. In a career of just over ten years, cut short by his early death, he achieved a remarkable level of success – success which has not yet been acknowledged by Schubert scholars, much less by the broader music-loving public.

This unconventional representation of the composer’s life is based on a rereading and reinterpretation of the documents of his life from a new perspective, specifically looking for indicators of success. I will discuss various potential meanings of success (personal, professional, financial, etc.) and ask how we might be able to measure a musician’s success in the early nineteenth century. One largely overlooked parameter is the number of music prints and reprints within and outside of Vienna. These can be determined with the help of the recently published catalogue of Schubert’s first and early editions. Using selected examples of famous compositions, I will show how quickly and continuously Schubert’s prints were distributed to a music market eager to play and hear his songs and instrumental works both in public and in private.

Although often criticised, Grillparzer’s epitaph on Schubert’s tombstone – The musical art here buried a rich possession, but still much fairer hopes – thus gains new meaning for a composer in his early thirties, suddenly deprived of the remains of his promising and already successful professional career.

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Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl is currently visiting researcher at UCI. She studied musicology, philosophy, and mathematics at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg and music at the Mozarteum University. After post-graduate studies at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (Switzerland), she received her PhD with a dissertation on Ockeghem. She completed her habilitation (professorial dissertation) on Schubert in 2001. After holding the Austrian Chair Professorship at Stanford University (2006/07) and a guest professorship at the University of Vienna, she was appointed as Full Professor at her home university at Salzburg in 2010.  Her field of research comprises studies in Renaissance music, manuscript and early print studies, music notation, editorial work, historiography of early music as well as Franz Schubert and his time. She directs several research projects and is vice-president of the International Musicological Society (IMS), RISM and the International Schubert Society.