The chapter titles are:
The minuets (for winds, piano, and string quartet)
The ecossaises
The early German dances and ländler
Published waltzes, ländler, and German dances I: for the Carnival seasons of 1822 to 1825
Published waltzes, ländler, and German dances II: for the Carnival seasons of 1826 to 1828
The polonaises and dances for piano duet: Schubert and the Esterhazy family at Zseliz
The dances published after Schubert's death: Diabelli and op. 127 (D. 146); The dances edited by Brahms; The remaining dance publications.
Careful, thorough, traditionally oriented musicological work is welcome, though the volume has the character of a documentation, as it lacks a firmly committed argument to set a context for the work. Instead, one gets the definite impression that the volume is simply meant to fill a gap in Schubert scholarship, to which Chusid had already made distinguished, lifelong contributions.
Assumptions about the priority of music for performance, rather than for dancing, come through clearly in chapter 1 (on the minuets), as do related preferences for possible cyclic designs and for distinctive harmonic or formal treatments. Thus, for example, D779n13, from the common observation that in "almost every musical aspect there are features . . . not commonly found in Schubert's other works in the genre," one jumps immediately to "the result is a remarkably complex and sophisticated composition," and of course to "perhaps the finest of all his dances" (135). It is also "the most ambitious" of the dances in D779, and one in which "Schubert avoids any sense of monotony."
