Books: Pierrots, peacocks and prostitutes

Dermot Clinch reads an unemotional inquiry into the manic depressive psyche of Franz Schubert; Franz Schubert by Elizabeth Norman McKay Oxford University Press, pounds 25

For New Year's Eve 1826 one of Schubert's friends wrote a comedy in which the composer and his circle figured in the guise of various stock theatrical characters. Schubert, in a fair indication of how he was seen was given the part of Pierrot: lazy, alcoholic, and tied inseparably to his pipe. The culmination of the entertainment came with Pierrot-Schubert marching on stage at the head of "a silent chorus of smokers" who all, simultaneously, to the sound of music, lit up.

As this new biography makes clear, Schubert was indeed a heroic smoker. Had Elizabeth McKay been at that New Year's party she would have told the composer in categoric terms what his "nicotine abuse" was doing to his health; not to mention his alcohol abuse, his opium smoking, his womanising and even - uncertain, but the possibility must be considered - his pederasty.

The pederasty is not proven, though this hasn't stopped Schubert becoming the focus of musicological attention for it in recent years. "Schubert ailing," reads a cryptic note in the diary of one of the composer's friends: "he needs 'young peacocks', like Benvenuto Cellini". Following which, the musicologist and psychoanalytic biographer Maynard Solomon has suggested that like Benvenuto Cellini, Schubert may have had a sexual preference for young male sexual partners, possibly even for transvestites. Elizabeth McKay demurs on this point, preferring to think of Schubert as "heterosexual in his adult life."

At any rate, the rosy, varnished picture of Schubert as a bespectacled, eternally cheerful denizen of the coffee house can be chucked out. Even Elizabeth McKay, reluctant on personal matters. concludes that the composer led a seriously double life. There is contemporary support for this view: anyone who knew Schubert, wrote an acquaintance, "knows how he was made of two natures, foreign to each other." His soul was dragged to "the slough of moral degradation" by his craving for pleasure.

Quite what those cravings were is not, and will perhaps never be, clear. Surviving documents in Schubert's hand are few and unrevealing, while after his death a conspiracy of silence appears to have developed to protect his reputation. He used prostitutes, it is suggested. He never married; one woman he loved didn't want him; another, of aristocratic birth, was a hopeless passion. His syphilis is now established with certainty, but provides biographers with evidence of an active sexuality and little more. Where his contemporaries described the composer as victim of the "black- winged daemon of sorrow and melancholy", Elizabeth McKay follows the modern consensus in judging Schubert as a mild manic-depressive.

On the whole, though, psychology is not this biographer's thing. Her work is somewhat unemotional: the facts are presented and then so are a few more. On some points - the humble origins of Schubert's parents in the Moravian countryside, the shifting ethos of his circles of friends - McKay dilates at length, in support, often of her theme that Schubert was torn between an instinctive wildness and an acquired morality. But who knows what caused his negligence, his discourtesy, or other "such lapses"? McKay's multiple choice treatment of such questions - "temperamental disorder, artist's licence, or character defect"- is not illuminating.

Schubert died aged 31 in 1828, having achieved in his short life what has often been called a kind of miracle. How his songs, from the very earliest, sprang with such apparent ease from his pen may always be a mystery. But there are areas of his creative life where biographies might shed light. What does his passion for The Last of the Mohicans tell us about the composer's inner life? What pressures did Beethoven exercise on his creative psyche? What led Schubert to seek tuition in counterpoint and fugue in his final years? Next year - Schubert year, the bicentenary of his birth - may perhaps bring answers to such questions, with two new Schubert titles announced from this publisher alone.