ABSTRACT
The most recent composer for whom Otto Erich Deutsch compiled a documentary biography was Franz Schubert. The central figure in documentary biographies is always a major composer, of course. In the process of reading his many collections of essays and his autobiography, we discovered furthermore that he left many miniature portraits of contemporaries. The process has so many implications for the documentalist that it might actually frighten him away. A general historian interested in documenting the ramifications of some types of information by perusing various kinds of documents stumbles on this sort of biographical material and is likely to become so enamored of it that he loses sight of the original goal. The problem of documentary biography finds here an ideal illustration, especially since the latest biographers of Clara Wieck-Schumann have not encountered all of the same material and their subsequent conclusions differ somewhat from those of this writer.
