A music club concert promoter once confessed his relief that my programme didn’t contain Schubert piano sonatas, because ‘most members of the audience can play them themselves if they want to’. ‘No need to pay someone for that!’, he added, just in case I didn’t get the hint. It’s true that Schubert was no virtuoso, as we’re regularly being reminded in this volume, but he was undoubtedly a fluent player and an accomplished improviser. His piano pieces, contrary to received wisdom in some quarters, demand the refined touch and musical sensitivity that imply the possession of an advanced, if not necessarily flashy, keyboard technique.

It’s true that we don’t look to Schubert for pianistic novelty, even if the accompaniment to ‘Erlkönig’ is one of the toughest things around, on a modern piano anyway. Nevertheless, the composer didn’t entirely ignore the more fashionable keyboard textures of his era, as Christine Martin, one of the two contributing editors of this extensive and instructive volume, deftly demonstrates in a chapter titled ‘Schubert and the Style Brillant’. Her co-editor Matthew Gardner, in his ‘Schubert and the Viennese Piano’, concisely and usefully surveys the contemporary instruments on which the performance of ‘Erlkönig’is much less daunting – concisely, that is, until the last page, where we’re informed about Schubert’s probable preference for Viennese instruments twice within a few lines. Sometimes even editors need editing.

Repetition of contextual information is inevitably an issue in a symposium volume such as this, which comprises 15 independent essays/chapters organised under four rubrics: ‘The Piano in Schubert’s World’; ‘Instruments and Performance’; ‘Sound and Musical Imagery’; and ‘Understanding Schubert’s Writing for the Piano’. It therefore seems to me that the book, thought-provoking though it is, rewards sampling more than sequential reading: it’s a work of reference, rather than a structured narrative. But all the authors are acknowledged experts in their fields, and pianists will find much of practical value here, particularly in the chapters devoted to the use of the una corda pedal, to the interpretation of triplet notation, to contemporary Viennese piano treatises and to the role of piano improvisation in Schubert’s creative life. Some of the more general historical/aesthetic contributions also present interpretative frameworks that may well fire a player’s imagination, especially Joe Davies’s stimulating essay on ‘Franz Schubert, Death and the Gothic’.

Nonetheless, the book does try to kill too many birds with one stone. We read on the back cover that it ‘will appeal to a wide range of readers’ – a clichéd and, more often than not, misleading claim that routinely appears on the most preposterously abstruse volumes. Schubert’s Piano is mostly clear and readable, but it does include the occasional tangled thicket of prose, the meaning of which we discern only ‘through a glass, darkly’. The pages discussing Schubert’s setting of a text by Schubart, despite their undoubted insights, read like a convoluted Shakespearean plot involving unlikely pairs of identical twins. And what are we to make of this discussion of Schubert’s late sonatas (page 274): ‘The shortening of the hypermetre from bar 67, accompanied by the fragmentation of the theme to two-bar motives (incidentally, these are the fragments at bars 57-8 of the draft) and a harmonically unstable passage moving to diminished seventh harmony suggest continuation function. The expanded second variation (beginning in bar 74) then acts doubly as modulatory passage and cadential function, bringing about a(n elided) PAC in the desired key of F major (bb.79-80).’ Even with the salvation of a score excerpt, and an explanation of what a PAC actually is (a ‘perfect authentic cadence in the tonic key’, in case you were wondering), this sort of jargon-ridden prose will baffle even fairly learned musicians. Analysts writing exclusively for other analysts. So much for the ‘wide range of readers’.

More forgivable, if still frustrating, is the variable level of background knowledge expected from readers of individual chapters. We read, for instance, on page 44 about Schubert’s ‘clandestine… affair’. A footnote is provided for this spicy revelation, but it simply refers the reader, pointlessly, to yet another book by the author concerned. ‘Clandestine’ indeed. The inclusion of a short chronology of Schubert’s life somewhere in the volume might have helped to elucidate randomly enigmatic references such as these.

And finally, there’s the vital issue of the ‘Viennese Baked Chicken’ (page 312), which crops up in an otherwise admirable chapter by Andrea Wiesli on Liszt’s Schubert reception. Liszt did jokingly refer to his sixth Soirée de Vienne (an arrangement of Schubert waltzes) as a concert-programme Backhändl, because it was served up so frequently, and enjoyed by all. But I, and no doubt Colonel Sanders too, would humbly suggest that ‘baked’ is an inaccurate English translation for this famous Viennese dish. English and German cookery terms don’t directly map. I’ve eaten Backhändl, and in Vienna too. It’s fried chicken.

This review originally appeared in the SPRING 2025 issue of International Piano