In his 1997 biography of Franz Schubert, late Austrian musicologist Ernst Hilmar points a microscope at the minutiae of the composer’s travels. If you have ever found yourself desperate to know the route Schubert took on his first journey from Vienna to visit a noble family in Želiezovce in the spring of 1818, Hilmar has the answer: Hlohovec via Hainburg and Preßburg. Hilmar can tell you how much money Schubert earned from teaching when he got there (200 Gulden), and the rooms Schubert stayed in during his second visit to Želiezovce in May 1824 (first in the eastern part of the castle, later on the ground floor). “For people who live in these communities or who like to learn train schedules and telephone books by heart,” wrote a reviewer of the book on Amazon, “this stuff is probably interesting.”
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