Life and Works: Schubert

by Jeremy Siepmann

Narrated by Jeremy Siepmann, with Tom George as Schubert. Other roles taken by Peter Yapp, Stephen Critchlow, Sean Barrett, Jonathan Keeble, and Charlie Simpson

The life of Franz Schubert has been a gift to romantically inclined biographers: the beautiful, brilliant, modest boy who sprang to fully fledged genius at the age of sixteen; the quintessential ‘artist in a garret’, entirely consumed by his art and living a hand-to-mouth existence in Vienna (home of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven); the gentle, cheerful, convivial young man who prized friendship almost as highly as music itself; the unworldly poet from whom great music poured like water from a fountain; the unrecognised master who died almost penniless at the age of thirty-one. And most of this is true. But, as revealed in this dramatised biography (lavishly illustrated with musical examples), there was a secret, darker side to Schubert which only renders his story that much more fascinating.

4 CDs and 148-page booklet • ISBN: 1-84379-065-3 • Catalogue no: 8.558135–38 • SRP: $35.99 USD