ABSTRACT
This change was perhaps indicative of a general effort on the part of Schubert's ageing friends to preserve a more respectable image of the composer, now that his growing fame was heightening the public's interest in biographical matters. And yet this pithy statement by the talented dramatist Bauernfeld, Schubert's close friend in later years, is the clue to understanding the truth about the composer's relationship with women. But such dark historical facts seem not to have made their way into the romantic fiction of the early twentieth century. Deutsch may have felt that it was his duty to protect the composer's reputation and hence keep all women, except for Therese Grob, away from the composer. Concerning Schubert's courtship of Therese, the particulars are given in the already mentioned memoirs by Anton Holzapfel and Anselm Huttenbrenner. In 1972 Walther Durr described the physical make-up of the Therese Grob Liederalbum in connection with the Neue Schubert-Ausgabe.
