My most recent publication is a major new biography on Schubert. A Musical Wayfarer (Yale University Press, 2023), which is the book I consider my magnum opus. This new life of Franz Schubert takes an unparalleled look into the composer’s life, from his early years at the Stadtkonvikt through his harrowing battle with syphilis and to his death at the age of 31.

Schubert’s late music has proved pivotal for the development of diverse fields of musical scholarship from biography and music history to the theory of harmony. This collection addresses current issues in Schubert studies including compositional style, the topical issue of ‘late’ style, tonal strategy and form in the composer’s instrumental music and musical readings of the ‘postmodern’ Schubert. 

In Rethinking Schubert today’s leading Schubertians offer fresh perspectives on the composer’s importance and our perennial fascination with him. Subjecting recurring ideas in historical, biographical and analytical research to renewed scrutiny, the twenty-two chapters yield new insights into Schubert, his music, his influence and legacy, and broaden the interpretative context for the music of his final years. Paying close attention to matters of style, harmonic and formal analysis, and text setting, the essays gathered here explore a significant portion of the composer’s extensive output across a range of genres.

That Goethe’s poetry has proved pivotal for the development of the nineteenth-century Lied has long been acknowledged. Less acknowledged is the seminal impact in musical realms of Goethe’s Faust, a work that has attracted the attention of composers since the late eighteenth century and played a vital role in the evolution of vocal, operatic and instrumental repertoire in the nineteenth century.

Goethe and Zelter spent a staggering 33 years corresponding or in the case of each artist, over two thirds of their lives. Goethe’s letters offer a chronicle of his musical development, from the time of his journey to Italy to the final months of his life. Zelter’s letters retrace his path from stonemason to Professor of Music in Berlin. The 891 letters that passed between these artists provide an important musical record of the music performed by the Sing-Akademie in public concerts in Berlin, and in the private and semi-public soirées of the Weimar court. 

In his early twenties Goethe wrote Proserpina for the Weimar court singer Corona Schröter to perform. His interest in presenting Weimar’s first professional singer-in-residence in a favourable light was not the only reason why his monologue with music (now lost) by Seckendorff is important. Goethe’s memories of his sister Cornelia, who had recently died in childbirth, were in fact the real catalyst: through the work Goethe could level accusations against his parents about Cornelia’s marriage, of which he had not approved.

Schubert’s Goethe Settings is the first book to address the issue of Goethe’s musicality, his attitudes towards text setting and his reception of Schubertian song. The organizational framework of the book does not follow the obvious chronology of Schubert’s Goethe settings, but rather considers how Schubert responded to literary genres from the ballad to settings from Goethe’s Faust 1; from Mignon and the Harper’s songs from Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre to Goethe’s sonnets and handling of the ghazal in his West-östlicher Divan. 

The high degree of admiration for Goethe by people of all kinds, including some who were themselves possessed of creative ability of the highest order, and in fields quite different from literature is something unique in the history of European culture. Reasons for the poet’s reputation are found not only in his art but in his influence on contemporaries, and on the generation of artists and musicians who came after him. Perhaps more than any other writer, Goethe has had a great influence on a European musical heritage which – despite reimagining the canon in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – continues to the present day.

‘Taking the cue from Lorraine Byrne’s seminal study, Schubert’s Goethe Settings, Nicholas Boyle clearly identifies the main purpose of this volume of essays, namely to lay to rest long-held misconceptions and show that Goethe and Schubert, in spite of coming from different cultures and backgrounds ‘had more in common than the conventional assessments of either will allow’. In the ‘Afterword’, Harry White also congratulates the contributors for enriching German studies in their collective assertion that Goethe was anything but ‘profoundly unmusical’ and demonstration that both his poetry and Schubert’s vocal settings ‘provide that crucial intersection between music and language which lies at the heart of German Romanticism’. 

The impression of a hapless relationship between Schubert and Goethe has been fueled by the reception histories of both artists. This score charts an historic performance of Schubert’s and Goethe’s Claudine von Villa Bella—directly inspired by the musicological lacuna—where the author’s perception of both artists’ achievements informed the musical life of rehearsals and the decisions of directors and performers. 

‘Those who love Schubert are frequently forced to ponder the limits of what can be known about anyone, especially great artists whose genius in its totality was not fully recognized until after their deaths. No longer available to answer our pressing questions, Schubert has left us yearning for information and explanation, while his friends, caught up as young adults always are in their own lives, are seldom as forthcoming as we wish they had been.'

How do Goethe’s characters – Mignon, the Harper and Gretchen – illuminate questions which are important for us today? And how has Bodley’s reading of Goethe filtered into his own artistic consciousness?

Seóirse Bodley is one of the best-known composers of contemporary music in Ireland. This book seeks to examine his engagement with the poetry of Michael O’Siadhail and the making of these song cycles. It assesses the joint contribution to Irish art song, and seeks to understand its roots and departure from European tradition.

This book is a critical edition of Bodley’s three congregational masses – Mass of Glory, Mass of Joy and Mass of Peace. It provides revised performance editions of each of the three masses, which were long out of print. It also provides a scholarly introduction to Bodley’s congregational masses, including an informed reading of the structures of liturgical rites, the resources of musical liturgiology and aesthetics, compositional challenges posed by the mass text, analytical readings of each of Bodley’s three masses and performance practice guidelines for each score. 

A birthday, and reaching the age of sixty, make an appropriate time to celebrate one of Ireland’s most distinguished musicologists. The title of this book, ‘Music Preferred’, is from White’s very first publication, a poem written to announce his intention to privilege music as a preoccupation rather than take a purely literary path.  Since then White has actively built a stellar reputation as an eminent scholar of international stature.