Product Description
Franz Shubert's two great song cycles are among the summits of the repertoire for Lieder singers and their accompanists. Arnold Feil, Professor of Music at Tubingen University, has written a thoughtful and subtle analysis of these two masterworks. His aim has been to provide a guide for musicians and their audiences that may lead to more meaningful interpretation and more intelligent listening. HARDCOVER. ... Read more

Product Description
Franz Schubert and the Mysterium Magnum explores the incredibly rich symbiosis of Jewish and Christian mysticism that flourished in Germany and Austria at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the music of Franz Schubert heaven and earth intertwine in the sublime experiences of a wanderer. This is some of the most elevated art that any civilization has produced. The door that leads to this is poetry.

Franz Schubert was called by Franz Liszt ''the most poetic of all composers.'' Poems inspired Schubert's operas and Lieder. Poems also inspired his instrumental masterworks. It is this poetry that gives us sure insight into the mystical depths of his art.

The poetically inspired works of Schubert tell the mythical tale of a wanderer experiencing life as a great romance, a romance between heaven and earth, a romance between earthly opposites. His instrumental works in particular reveal an artist caught up in the deadly torture and earth-transcending ecstasy of that romance. His artistic commitment seems to have been to the celebration in profound sensitivity and utter honesty of this life-transcending adventure. These celebrations reach their apex in the last eighteen months of his life, months some call the most important in the history of music. For those intrigued by this romance, there can be no better introduction then Ruppert's thoughts on Schubert. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

This book addresses the profoundly meaningful materializing of this processin Schubert's masterworks.

Although the author resorts to musicology whenever necessary this book is not just another musicological analysisof the works of Franz Schubert. Axiomatic to the study is that "we live in a world that is both an expression and a betrayal of a higher existence that seeks incarnation." The wisdom that most clearly embraces the incarnation process is embodied and supremely expressed in the music of Franz Schubert.This book addresses the profoundly meaningful materializing of this processin Schubert's masterworks.

The author assumes that while judgments of fact and the indirect experience of an ideal harmony ofvalues are opposites they can be reconciled through the wisdom of a "wanderer". Schubert depicts this reconciliation again and again in his masterworks, both vocal and instrumental.This happens through a unique interlacing of poetry and music.In both the Lieder and the instrumental compositions the poetry reveals an ascension out of sorrow towards triumphant bliss. Not himself a poet Schubert was intellectually sharp in spotting poemsby contemporariesthat expressed episodesin this drama, telling a portion of the life story as he saw it.

From decades of research Ruppert identifies many poemsthat inspired first a Liedor part song and then a movement from a piano sonata, a string quartet, a symphony, a piano trio, a piano-violin duo, or some other instrumental composition. Such linkages affect virtually all of Schubert's instrumental works. The story that the poetry reveals isthat of an emergence out of the dark agony of contradiction into divine peace and light. This story is repeatedin the operas and sacred music. It is this vision of life clothed transparently in music that places this composeron a unique niche of both European and world culture.

The drama that centers Schubert's art is all-inclusive. His wisdom reconciles all opposites and leads to union with God.He invites us to an ascension experience, its meaning expressed in this: "Dieu a besoin des hommes."God needs mankind. And God's descent towards mankind conditions that unique encounter.The metaphor of the mysterium magnum can be sensed not only in religion, but even more in everyday life, in nature, in the seductions and betrayals of love. Schubert is intensely aware of the pain of life.But through the love between two people the pain can be overcome and divine life can triumph.

Even as Schubert was composing, the Chasidim in Eastern Europewere saying that the divine sparkis present everywhere, even in the "leaves of grass". It is up to us to awaken to it. And Ruppert points to the fact that Schubert does not impose on ushis experience of this awakening.He invites us to experience it on our own terms as we are all wanderers in this world, treading the path for only a while. But in the experiencewe have from time to time a glimpse of the eternal. For instancethe Second Movement of the Symphony Number One in D Major D 82is inspired by the poem of Friedrich Schiller "Elysium", a vision of triumphant love, responding to the question asked in the First Movement (inspired by the same poem): "Will this agony never end?"

The messianic romance of the eternal feminine is central to an understanding of Schubert's music. A dream maiden both expresses the divine image and betrays it. The metaphor of the mysterium magnumis expressed in the wedding of the divine messiahand the sophianic image, symbolizing the wedding of divine love andsublime wisdom. The second part of Ruppert's book is filled with concrete examples of this ascent to love's triumph as that ascent is expressed in Schubert's masterworks.

Schubert's Vienna was experiencing a reaction to the cold, rationalistic assumption of the Enlightenment.Schubert was able to absorb in a highly individual way undercurrentsof the mystery envisioned by Judaism through the Cabala, by gnostic-tinted Catholicism, by Freemasonry and the Rosicrucians, all a boiling, fermenting mixin that unique moment of history.Schubert created, as only a genius could,his own representation of an alliance between the Messiahand his Shekhinah, creating and passing on to us an unsurpassable art in which both mind and heart are stimulated to the highest degree. He opens to us the experience of this wisdom in our own personal lives.

The Number One merit ofRuppert's bookis its new and fresh approach to the transcendental significanceof Schubert's music in both the intellectual and emotional spheres.It shows how this composer operated on the highest level of everyday life, dealing with ethical standards, philosophical concerns, theological interests, and the need for the transcendental. In showing us that profound originality can be hidden in what seems commonplace Ruppert shines new light on the study of Schubert.He sets this Viennese genius against the background of a rich perspective on European and World history.

Jose Neistein

Centreville, Va.

A Guide for wanderers
I have had the great pleasure and intellectually stimulating experience of attending a number of Frank Ruppert's lectures on Franz Schubert's music and the poetry inspiring many of his compositions. The philosophical and theological underpinnings, the religious mysticism operative in Schubert's environment found in the Christian mystics, Jewish cabalists, German romantics and gnosticism absolutely enriched the pleasure of listening to the music of the truly great German composer. So mind-bending were the concepts discussed, so scintillating the music that on one occasion I said to Frank "You need to write this all down so I can study this in more depth." He replied that he had written one book on the subject and that a second was in preparation. "Franz Schubert and the Mysterium Magnum " is that second book. I am grateful that I now have this book for continued intellectual stimulation, and it certainly merits the five stars I'v awarded it. A life long love of Schubert's music learned at his mother's knee, and nurtured by his historical research and his studies in philosophy, theology and comparative religions, Dr. Ruppert has produced a work that will undoubtedly enrich any reader looking for spiritual growth and deeper enjoyment of classical music.

The author notes (pg 11) "I respect the giant steps that musicology has already taken in analyzing Schubert's art. My approach is different from most of these efforts. I strongly suggest that my approach is a valid and essential complement to them. This book hopefully will enable the reader to experience more deeply the life-transforming mystery suggested by the fourth movement of the unfinished Seventh Symphony inspired by this poem by Novalis:
The world is radiant with a new light.
At last it is home!
Down to the bottom of the sea
The fear of death is gone
And we embrace life with joy."

Writing for "wisdom addicts and seekers of the Grail", the author expands on the "mysterium magnum", the great mystery. He calls it the rose cross mystery with Schubert's expression of it "an experience of the Rosicrucian, German-Jewish, Christian-Islamic symbiotic wisdom...promising a union of races, nations and religions in the spiritual ascent (pg 10).Schubert's music set to poetry are musical parables reflecting an ascent to a union of opposites, an artistic metaphor of the divine invitation to the wanderer to reconcile opposites, to resolve contradictions.A major tenet of mystical insights in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the sacralization of life, is seen as an antidote to secularism which denies transcendence, and fundamentalism which reduces the transcendent, unknowable, ineffable reality to a systematic ideological creed.

A key metaphor in the poetry Schubert used is that of the wanderer. "Schubert's wanderer is a music maker telling tales about the spiritual ascent. He ascends to the divine harmony of his higher consciousness by making that harmony incarnate in his life and in his music...Above all he is a celebrant of wisdom, the soul of the new age. Through poetry-transcending music the wanderer transfigures all things, even dying, by love." (pg. 45)

This book is divided into two parts: Part One is Schubert and The Mystery; Part Two focuses on The Instrumental Works. For this reviewer, Part Oneof the book is the more dog-eared; Part Two is catching up with an increasing collection of Schubert's musical creations. Both parts can be challenging and rewarding. No reviewer can really do justice to the scholarly and well written efforts of the author so it is only hesitantly that I have submitted this review. If,however, like Schubert and this reviewer you too are a wanderer, "Franz Schubert and The Mysterium Magnum" can provide a wonderful guide for your wandering.

Schubert in Depth
Frank Ruppert gives us the fruits of an impassioned project on which he has spent many years. After noting years ago the close tie between text and music in Schubert's songs (the Lieder), he began to wonder might these texts have inspired his instrumental works as well. Listening to these works and studying the poetic texts finally convinced him that it is so. The larger portion of this book, Part Two, analyzes the instrumental works one by one and shows how the poems parallel the movement of the music. Even more, he explains the mystical background of these works, how they express the human quest for union with the divine, a point largely neglected in scholarly writing about Schubert.
Part One of the book is an extended examination, almost 200 pages long, of the mysticism expressed in the songs, the instrumental works and some of the operas. His focus is on the great mystery, the mysterium magnum, which is the point where humans make contact with the divine. It is the experience of transcendence which allows one to live amid the conflicting values of life. One learns to integrate them by accepting them, and thus ascend to union with the divine in this life and ultimately, through acceptance even of death, in a life beyond death. Living amid these conflicts involves not a rational but an imaginative integration of opposing values such as matter and spirit, intuition and reason, joy and sorrow, masculine and feminine, life and death. Ruppert illustrates how this has occurred in Christianity, Islam, Jewish cabala and Gnosticism, as well as paganism and Rosicrucianism. From this last source he has taken the expression "rose cross mystery" as another name for the mysterium magnum. The rose cross has a horizontal bar as an image for the conflicting values we live with; the vertical bar symbolizes the union of the human and divine. The rose at the point where the two bars of the cross intersect symbolizes their integration.
The book ranges widely through the history of philosophy and religion, extolling especially the period of German Romanticism at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, when thinkers and artists were aflame with expectation. They strove for a new world based on an integration of various religions and an awareness of their often forgotten mystical core. In society and politics, this new world never came to be, but it found expression in art, poetry and music, in a preeminent way in Schubert.
Despite the broad coverage of Part One and its focus on mystical experience, it remains fairly easy to read, interweaving recurrent basic themes that tie the many rich explorations together. These themes include, besides those already mentioned, the wanderer seeking to incarnate divine wisdom (Sophia), the divine romance of union between the human and divine, fundamentalist orthodoxies opposing spiritual growth, rationalist nihilism denying transcendence, and the primacy of personal experience so emphasized in esoteric religion. Ruppert's positive attitude to esoteric religion in no way means that this personal experience need be esoteric. Divine wisdom seeks to be incarnated in all things and a longing for the divine romance is latent in everyone.
Reading a work which returns again and again to the centrality of personal religious experience naturally awakens the question in the reader: Do I have any experience like this? As for myself, I am aware that I don't have convincing proofs for what I believe, but still I feel drawn to religion and to prayer and to God. This book tells me that such an attraction is not an illusion, but an experience of the divine. Even though I don't sense this romance with anything like the passion of Schubert, or Ruppert, for that matter, I find in this book a way to grow in self understanding and a path of openness to the manifold expressions of the divine in various religions and in our world in general. Perhaps in time with experience I will get a better grasp of the mystical expressed in Schubert's music. This book will be a great help in doing so. ... Read more

Product Description
An original concept: in one volume, a study-size score of a major musical work, and a comprehensive body of tools for the study of that work.

Music examples and charts illustrate the analyses, and each essay is fully annotated by the editor. In some cases, the results of the original research by the editor or by others working in the field are published here for the first time. Much of the material has never before appeared in English.

A score embodying the best available musical text.

Historical background—what is known of the circumstances surrounding the origin of the work, including (where relevant) original source material.

A detailed analysis of the music, by the editor of the volume or another well-known scholar.

Other significant analytic essays and critical comments, exposing the student to a variety of opinions about the music.

Product Description
Living in a bare room in Vienna, short, fat Franz Schubert wrote music and danced to keep warm. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A Little Schubert
M.B. Goffstein's lovely children's book "A Little Schubert" brings back memories.I thought of the book because I have been listening to CDs of Schubert's music of late and playing his works on the piano.

I bought and read this book repeatedly to my daughter in the 1980s.When my daughter married and had a baby daughter of her own, I gave the book to her in the hope that my daughter would remember it and that my granddaughter would hear the book or read it for herself and with time develop a love for Schubert.

The book is very short, about 40 pages, and consists of a simple story of the basic outlines of Schubert's life.Poor, overweight, clumsy, and dressed in a shabby coat, Schubert lives in an apartment in Vienna where he sings and dances in an effort to keep warm. Little Schubert heard beautiful melodies where the rest of us mere mortals could hear nothing, according to the text. He wrote music which will live forever.

The joy of this book lies less in the text and more in Goffstein's spare and simple black and white illustrations of little Schubert struggling with his bohemian life in Vienna. Goffstein's illustrations to her many children's books have received high praise.According to "Time" magazine, "Goffstein is a minimalist, but her text and pictures carry the same emotional freight as William Blake's admonishment to see the work in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour."And the New York Times Book Review observed that "a book by M.B. Goffstein is a beautifully simple and simply beautiful thing."These observations are amply supported by "A Little Schubert."

The book was first published in the early 1970's and then reissued in a slightly reduced format in 1984.The reduced format, which is the edition I have, included scores for six simplified renditions of Schubert dances on the piano by Metropolitan Opera conductor Richard Woitach.

At the age of 5, my granddaughter is already able to read this book herself. I enjoy thinking of her and of Schubert. Perhaps this book will encourage her to become interested in music and in Schubert. In any event the story is fun and the spare illustrations precious. It would be good to have this book in print again.

Robin Friedman

A little inspiration
This very sweet little book is worth the investment of time and money. The simplicity of the illustrations and the addition of six musical pieces at the end of the book make for a delightful contrast. As we mark the 200th anniversary of Schubert'sbirth this book is a perfect way for young and old to celebrate genius.

Adelight
My four year old loved this book. It is simple and true. It was the inspiration for my child to run about the house pretending to be Schubert with his shabby coat tails flying. ... Read more

Product Description
In this book David Montgomery challenges many operative myths about the music of this great, but often misunderstood, Viennese master. Chief among them is the lingering notion that Schubert was poorly-trained but still managed to turn out brilliant, if often flawed, scores. Modern adherents of this view believe that Schubert could not notate his own musical wishes accurately, and that he was principally a creature of intuition. Accordingly, musicians might allow themselves wide intuitive leeway in the interpretation of his music.

Another myth challenged by Montgomery is that Schubert was a conservative, or perhaps even a chronological throwback. Opposing recent attempts to legitimize performer-generated embellishment of Schubert's music in the style of the eighteenth century, He clarifies Schubert's contributions to the radical intellectualism of nineteenth-century romanticism.

The book offers six informative chapters ranging from aesthetics and acoustics to the specifics of tempo and expression, plus an appendix of pertinent Viennese pedagogical sources. In addition to many years of musicological research, Montgomery brings long experience as a concertizing pianist and conductor to this engaging and controversial work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Interesting and useful observations, but don't take everything at face value
Yes, we too often accept and ape the performances we heard as a child.After all, our teachers and the masters knew what they were doing, right?The problem is, as with almost all scholarship and art, the closer you look at or into a thing, the more the thing eludes your grasp.After all, who gets to decide what a legitimate performance of a work is?Students of music know that the composers themselves often differ in what they notated, how they say their works should be performed, and how they actually performed them.Doesn't Stravinsky pop into your mind?

Additionally, how can we know that the way a composer was notating and performing at one period in their life applies exactly to a later period.Music notation is a guide, not a law.Performance requires taste and conception about what was notated.But this is all part of the endless and ongoing debate that is certainly about music and aesthetics, but also about opportunities for tenure and prestige in the world of musical academics.

I enjoyed the way David Montgomery points out the problems with our traditions and assumptions about Schubert's music.I especially enjoyed seeing four (well, five counting the Peters) editions comparing the same musical example, and comparing them to the autograph of the work.Looking at the detail of the devices of musical rhythm and expression are also interesting, if sometimes a bit tedious in the debate over tiny details.Do they really make such a huge difference in performance compared to other aspects of what it takes to pull off a musical work?Sometimes, I think the tone of authority is more firm than the evidence really allows.

Then there are the really strange statements.If you turn to page 231 where Montgomery is talking about the absolute tempo of a work in 6/8.He says this really odd thing:

"The absolute tempo of a passage in 6/8 marked in any category from Presto to Adagio is meant by definition to be taken about a third slower than if it were a passage of 2/4, even if the latter were to contain triplets.The same comparative statement can be made about 9/8 as opposed to ¾ and 12/8 as opposed to C.The reason is obvious: these uneven meters and analogues have one more eight note per beat." And so on...

This is so wrong that I don't know where to begin.Musical rhythm begins with a pulse, not notation.6/8 is not beaten in 6, but in 2.You can't notate a traditional time signature with a beat as a dotted quarter so it is notated in the sub-division.However, if the pulse is say, 60, you don't slow down if the work switches to 6/8.You keep the same pulse.The eighth note has no inherent value, only as a ratio to the pulse.Imagine a work in 2/4 where the right hand was all triplets and the left hand had all duple meter and simple two eighth subdivisions.Everyone understands how the three against two would be played (generally).Well, if you re-notated the right hand so it was in 6/8 and kept the left hand in 2/4, would you play it any differently?Of course not!Yet the above statement would imply that you would or should.Or at least have two different tempo marketings - one for each hand.

So, this kind of fundamental error undermines the reader's confidence in the other details in the book.If he gets something this basic to music so wrong, how do we know he got the other aesthetic judgments right?

Obviously, you will need to decide this for yourself.I enjoyed the book, but take most everything in it as something to consider rather than as law.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

An extremely technical and professional guide
Compiled and written by David Montgomery, Franz Schubert's Music In Performance: Compositional Ideals, Notational Intent, Historical Realities, Pedagogical Foundations is a comprehensive, 319-page guide written especially to help performers better understand and bring out the minute subtleties of Franz Schubert's classical works of music. Extensive history and detail, understandings of rhythm and tempo, advanced studies and methodology and a great deal more pack the pages of this extremely technical and professional guide intended especially for skilled performers who seek to hone their expertise to new heights. Enhanced with a thorough index, Franz Schubert's Music In Performance is a core addition to any Classical Music Studies collection in general, and Franz Schubert Studies reading lists in particular. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more