A LITTLE SCHUBERT

Minimal is the word. In cold snowy Vienna a tiny Schubert — that immediately recognizable "short, fat young man with a small round nose, round eyeglasses and curly hair" — sits in a bare, unheated room and works on his music. The room is indicated by just a few floorboards joining a white wall — framed in the center of an otherwise blank page. If nothing seems to be happening, that's just the point; for Franz Schubert heard music when his friends heard nothing, and at last, to chase away the cold, little Franz begins to dance — "He clapped his hands and stamped his feet. . ." and "made his shabby coattails fly" — and the tune carries him right off the edge of the last page to Peter Schaaf's (soft plastic) record of five of Schubert's "Noble Waltzes." There's nobility in the very spareness; a lilt to the title's word play, and Schubert is, of course, the perfect subject for this doll-sized glimpse of greatness.