The Schubert Treatment

A celebrated art therapist plays the cello for her patients and offers a moving reflection on the extraordinary power of music to enrich our lives, all the way to the very end.

When Claire Oppert plays the cello, miracles happen. Children with profound autism, patients in extreme pain and distress, even people on the threshold of death smile, cry, laugh, sing, and dance. "When you play, I'm not sick anymore," one man tells her. "I feel happy, I feel alive."

In The Schubert Treatment, Oppert recounts her remarkable story of healing suffering through music, alongside portraits of the many people she has helped. Born into a family of doctors and artists, Oppert trained as a classical cellist and began playing at a centre for autistic youth, where she witnessed how music could connect with even the most difficult-to-reach patients. Later, she began working as an art therapist with people with neurodegenerative diseases and palliative care patients, eventually conducting clinical trials that proved the effect of her 'Schubert treatment': using music as a counter-stimulation to reduce pain and anxiety during stressful procedures.

Oppert's crystalline, lyrical vignettes of the patients whose lives she has touched are punctuated with anecdotes from her own life as a musician, as well as reflections on the meaning of art and the human need for connection and creativity. Compassionate, uplifting, and deeply humane, The Schubert Treatment is a testament to the incredible power of music to heal our bodies, minds, and souls.

'[A] touching, lyrical book....Compassionate, intriguing, often uplifting vignettes delivered in crystalline prose.' — Kirkus Reviews, STARRED Review

'Oppert, a classical cellist and art therapist, debuts with a luminous ode to the "mysterious ways music... moves" patients with such conditions as dementia and autism... Assured and lyrical, this impresses.' — Publishers Weekly, STARRED Review

The Schubert Treatment is a life-affirming hymn to the power of music: to bring joy in the face of illness and suffering and to ease even physical pain. Claire Oppert has written a great and necessary work of art.' — Grammy Award-winning violinist and conductor Maxim Vengerov

'These healing musical encounters at the frontiers of "unimaginable lands"—the lands of profound dementia and non-speaking autism—resonate in the heart like chords on Claire Oppert's cello.' — Steve Silberman, author of Neurotribes

'In astonishing encounters with Oppert's cello, music becomes a lifeline for those who lack memory, language, hope, or trust. Raw and lyrical, The Schubert Treatment sparkles with insight and faith in the human spirit.' — Adriana Barton, author of Wired for Music