With Franz Schubert and His World the Bard Music Festival series, published each year by Princeton University Press, reaches its twenty-fifth volume. Many of the individuals deserving thanks for their efforts with this book have long been involved with the series, some going back to Brahms and His World in 1990. First and foremost is Leon Botstein, who when he founded the festival was determined that performance and scholarship should exist in fruitful dialogue and that a lasting legacy of each year’s explorations would be a volume of essays and documents.
Ginger Shore has overseen the process since 1996 and retires this year; our thanks to her for dedication to these volumes, for always keeping things moving forward, and for her sensitive oversight of design issues. Irene Zedlacher, executive director of the Bard Music Festival, brings her keen editorial eye to reading the book and deals with many other matters to make things run smoothly. Don Giller has set the musical examples since the series began and we thank him for his careful work. We are grateful to Erin Clermont for copy-editing, Karen Spencer for the layout, and Ruth Elwell for indexing.
Our special thanks to another veteran of the series, Paul De Angelis, who oversees the production of the book from start to finish. His generous help and support as well as his terrific editorial comments and suggestions are what editors, authors, and contributors crave but so rarely receive in publishing ventures these days. We count ourselves very lucky.
We would also like to thank our families for their patience and support as we put together this book in countless email exchanges, Skype calls, trans-Atlantic trips, and long nights of editing. We are grateful for their care and understanding.
Finally, when a publisher asked Schubert about the dedication of one of his pieces, the composer responded: “The work is to be dedicated to nobody, save those who find pleasure in it. That is the most profitable dedication.” In that spirit we wish to thank and dedicate this book to that most precious and endangered group in classical music, the generous music-loving patrons and benefactors who have made the Bard Music Festival possible year after year.
Christopher H. Gibbs, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Morten Solvik, Vienna, Austria