Library

Kreissle’s work was the first full-length biography of Schubert and drew on testimony from people within the composer’s Viennese circle, including material gathered for an earlier projected biography by Ferdinand Luib. Volume I covers the formative and central years and preserves a large body of early Schubert tradition.

Volume II covers Schubert’s final years from 1824 to 1828 and moves beyond narrative biography into character assessment, general survey and repertory documentation. George Grove’s appendix is itself historically important because it records the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Schubert manuscripts and symphonic sources.