Franz Schubert and His World Read online

  FRANZ SCHUBERT AND HIS WORLD

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  FRANZ SCHUBERT AND HIS WORLD

  EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER H. GIBBS AND MORTEN SOLVIK

  PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

  PRINCETON AND OXFORD

  Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

  Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

  6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

  press.princeton.edu

  All Rights Reserved

  For permission information, see page xvii

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014940720

  ISBN: 978-0-691-16379-6 (cloth)

  ISBN: 978-0-691-16380-2 (paperback)

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This publication has been produced by the Bard College Publications Office:

  Ginger Shore, Project Director

  Karen Walker Spencer, Designer

  Anita van de Ven, Cover Design

  Text edited by Paul De Angelis and Erin Clermont

  Music typeset by Don Giller

  This publication has been underwritten in part by grants from Roger and Helen Alcaly and Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  Printed in the United States of America.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Contents

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  vii

  Permissions and Credits

  xvii

  Schubert: The Nonsense Society Revisited

  1

  RITA STEBLIN

  Excerpts from Beyträge zur Bildung für Jünglinge, 1817–1818

  39

  ANTON VON SPAUN AND JOHANN MAYRHOFER TRANSLATED, INTRODUCED, AND ANNOTATED BY DAVID GRAMIT

  “Those of us who found our life in art”: The Second-Generation Romanticism of the Schubert-Schober Circle, 1820–1825

  67

  JOHN M. GINGERICH

  Schubert’s Kosegarten Settings of 1815: A Forgotten Liederspiel

  115

  MORTEN SOLVIK

  The Queen of Golconda, the Ashman, and the Shepherd on a Rock: Schubert and the Vienna Volkstheater

  157

  LISA FEURZEIG

  Liszt on Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella

  183

  INTRODUCED AND TRANSLATED BY ALLAN KEILER

  Schubert’s Freedom of Song, If Not Speech

  201

  KRISTINA MUXFELDT

  Schubert’s Tombeau de Beethoven: Decrypting the Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 100

  241

  CHRISTOPHER H. GIBBS

  Schubert in History

  299

  LEON BOTSTEIN

  Index

  349

  Notes on Contributors

  363

  Preface

  Dein Freund Schubert. These were probably the last words the composer ever wrote, about a week before he died on 19 November 1828, at age thirty-one. They were the conclusion to a heart-wrenching letter to Franz von Schober, his closest friend, that began: “I am ill. I have eaten nothing for eleven days and drunk nothing. And I totter feebly and shakily from my chair to bed and back again.”1 He then made the simple request that Schober send him some novels by James Fenimore Cooper.

  Schubert’s last letter points to some defining dimensions of his all-too-brief life: that friends and family were at its center (he was living at the time with his older brother Ferdinand, having recently moved from Schober’s place); that literature was a consuming passion; and that serious illness led to early death. An obituary a few weeks later observed that the composer “lived solely for art and for a small circle of friends.”2 To this constellation of friendship, art, and a life of seemingly endless potential cut short, we should add another crucial element: Vienna. Unlike great predecessors who moved to the gloried “city of music,” Schubert was born and remained there, with only infrequent excursions not far away.

  An understanding of the music Schubert wrote during his brief career benefits enormously from awareness of the social, cultural, intellectual, and political context in which he lived and worked. This book, the twenty-fifth in the Bard Music Festival series published by Princeton University Press, aims more than ever to be true its title: to explore a particular composer’s world, a world that in Schubert’s case proved quite limited in duration, geography, and professional opportunities, but that nonetheless nourished astounding creative achievements, not only from contemporaries in music, such as Beethoven, but in the other arts as well.

  One of the many enduring myths about Schubert is that he was largely unrecognized during his lifetime, a sad situation allegedly allayed to some extent by a devoted circle of friends who embraced his music. The reality seems to have been much more complex. He enjoyed considerable success, both in Vienna and beyond, with his songs and small-scale pieces, most intended for domestic consumption. A culture of intimate music-making is epitomized by the Schubertiades of the 1820s, evenings devoted to his music at which Schubert and others played for friends and invited guests. Schubert’s ambitions, however, went much farther, extending to what he once described to a publisher as his “strivings after the highest in art.”3 He ultimately produced a staggering qua
ntity of music, although most of it remained unpublished during his time. Already as a teenager he composed a large number of chamber, orchestral, sacred, and dramatic pieces, but it was in his twenties that he claimed real ownership of these genres. (Had he been of the mindset of Johannes Brahms, he probably would have destroyed much of his early instrumental music.) Many of these large-scale works were never performed in his lifetime and some were therefore unknown even to certain friends who viewed him, as did the public in general, principally as a composer of Lieder. Franz Grillparzer, Austria’s leading writer and an acquaintance, captured contemporaneous perceptions in the epitaph he crafted for Schubert’s grave: “The Art of Music Here Entombed a Rich Possession, But Even Far Fairer Hopes.”4

  The idea of an unfinished career finds expression in Schubert’s most popular instrumental work, his Symphony in B Minor—the “Unfinished”—composed in 1822, and actually just one of a handful of his unfinished symphonies. When the work was finally premiered more than forty years later, in December 1865, critic Eduard Hanslick noted the “excited extraordinary enthusiasm” of the audience and how after hearing only a few measures “every child recognized the composer, and a muffled ‘Schubert’ was whispered in the audience … every heart rejoiced, as if, after a long separation, the composer himself were among us in person.”5 Three years later Schubert’s close friend Moritz von Schwind created his famous sepia drawing of a Schubertiade at Josef von Spaun’s house (see Figure 1 on page 68). Schwind also worked on a version in oils, which appears on the cover of this book, but it was not yet completed when the artist died in 1871.6 The unfinished state of both the symphony and painting helps remind us of Schubert’s unfinished life, suggesting a figurative “program” to various pieces that have none declared, not just the “Unfinished” Symphony, but also the “Quartettsatz,” “Reliquie” Piano Sonata, and other marvelous torsos.

  The span of Schubert’s active public career lasted less than fifteen years, from 1814 to 1828. It is fitting that this book should appear in 2014, and that the Bard Music Festival honors Schubert during its twenty-fifth season, as the year marks the bicentennial of his miraculous masterpiece Gretchen am Spinnrade, whose composition on 19 October 1814 is often hailed as the “Birthday of the German Lied.” In political history, the year also had profound consequences for Schubert and his contemporaries, as it saw the convening of the Congress of Vienna, held between September 1814 and June 1815 to negotiate borders and balances of power in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. A period of reaction in Austria under the powerful Prince Clemens von Metternich led to censorship and repression that crucially defined aspects of Schubert’s world.

  A better appreciation of this time and place reveals matters that contemporaries, especially close friends, would have understood but that have since been obscured or forgotten. Despite the focus of much recent Schubert scholarship on ahistorical analytic matters, there have nonetheless been enormous strides in advancing archival and documentary knowledge of Schubert’s world, all building on the pioneering work of the great Schubert scholar Otto Erich Deutsch (1883–1967). The publications of the Internationales Franz Schubert Institut between 1987 and 2005, the journal Schubert: Perspektiven, abundant conference reports, contributory volumes, and monographs continue to enlarge our historical understanding of the composer.

  One result is that the image of Schubert has changed considerably, from the familiar one of a poor, shy, largely unappreciated figure, surrounded by merry friends, who composed “clairvoyantly,” to a darker portrait of one who struggled valiantly with health, depression, career, and political repression.7 The revisionist portrait is built on a firmer documentary basis and is surely more nuanced, although of necessity it is still often speculative and hampered by large holes in the historical record, not least because so few verbal documents survive from Schubert himself. The most sensational repositioning of Schubert, which generated the most heated debates, concerns his sexual life, an issue still far from resolved (and probably unresolvable) that is not much discussed in this book.8 What has proved salutary is the more skeptical and subtle examination of Schubert’s own writings and of those about him, which helps construct a much more psychologically complex and professionally confident figure than the clueless one earlier trivialized in sentimental fiction, operettas, films, and biographies.

  There remain large gaps to fill, facts to find, and secrets to solve, a project this book seeks to advance. The order of the chapters presented here combines the roughly chronological with the thematic. The first three in various ways consider Schubert’s social sphere, his famous “circle of friends.” In some of the book’s essays, scholars revisit, revise, and expand their own earlier work. Twenty years ago Rita Steblin, a Canadian scholar living in Vienna whose formidable archival work on Schubert and Beethoven has yielded fascinating finds (and sometimes controversial interpretations), discovered newsletters of the so-called Unsinnsgesellschaft (Nonsense Society). Schubert participated in this secret society, made up largely of artists and poets, along with some familiar friends, notably Leopold and Josef Kupelwieser, but also with individuals previously not known to have had any contact with him. The Unsinnsgesellschaft was active from April 1817 to December 1818, when Schubert was in his very early twenties. The surviving newsletters—the Archive of Human Nonsense—reveal a subculture in which code names, secrets, playfulness, and irreverence were paramount values. They shed new light on some of Schubert’s compositions and contain marvelous illustrations, a few included here, that add to the limited supply of contemporaneous images of the composer.

  Schubert had graduated a few years earlier from the Vienna Stadtkonvikt, an elite boarding school to which he had won a scholarship because of his musical gifts and where he began to forge lasting friendships. His somewhat older school friends (and then friends of these friends) initially guided his career, suggested (and sometimes wrote) poems for him to set to music, and helped to facilitate various career opportunities. Most of these young men were musical, but not professional musicians. David Gramit, in his presentation of three translated articles from Beyträge zur Bildung für Jünglinge (Contributions to Education for Youths), offers another window into Schubert’s early social milieu, an altogether more serious one than that associated with the Unsinnsgesellschaft. This short-lived annual appeared for just two years (1817–18) and contained essays, poems, translations, dramatic scenes, and other edifying offerings. Today we might think of it as akin to a literary journal put together by smart graduate students at a good university. One encounters earnestness, ambition, and idealism, a search for virtue, truth, and the good—all appropriate to the age of the contributors.

  As these two opening chapters show, Schubert was engaged with different social networks, but posterity has nevertheless loosely lumped them all together as a monolithic “Schubert Circle,” the individuals who populate Schwind’s composite Schubertiade illustrations. John M. Gingerich demonstrates that this was not the case and examines overlapping spheres in which Schubert participated, sometimes at the periphery or, with Schober, at its center (leading Schubert to coin the name “Schobert”).9 In the fall of 1824 a major conflict divided the circle around Schubert and Schober over an issue that superficially seems a mere test of loyalty. But the subsequent paths of various members reveal fissures that mirror divergences between early and late Romanticism, or more precisely, between the Friedrich Schlegel of 1799 and the same Friedrich von Schlegel of the 1820s, which means that they were also profoundly divided over religious and political issues. Gingerich traces the connections various members of the group had to both early and late Schlegel, some of them intense and personal, as well as the varied involvement of the painters in the circle with the so-called Nazarenes, a movement in German painting also influenced by the Romantic writer. The essay reveals a Schubert circle profoundly divided over some of the central ideological, social, and artistic controversies of the time, and to a surprising extent personally engaged with some of the main ac
tors in those controversies.

  The next three essays touch on Schubert’s engagement with dramatic works, each from a very different vantage point. In the first, coeditor Morten Solvik explores the Liederspiel, a form of semi-dramatic, domestic music-making associated with simple strophic songs. He lays out for the first time in English a case he has made in earlier work concerning Schubert’s 1815 settings of twenty poems by Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten, demonstrating that they form a group of Lieder for three singers portraying the tragic tale of an amorous adventurer and his forlorn mistresses. Schubert’s path-breaking later song cycles to poems by Wilhelm Müller, Die schöne Müllerin (1823) and Winterreise (1827), are much more familiar today and have obscured this earlier practice, a type of song performance in private salons involving amateur acting and multiple characters. In what emerges as something of a detective story, Solvik examines Schubert’s manuscripts for the Kosegarten songs, as well as musical evidence based on tonal planning, head motives, and other compositional devices, to make the case that the composer conceived these Lieder as a unified set telling a Biedermeier story of love gone astray.

  In addition to such domestic spheres, including the Schubertiades, Schubert regularly attended a reading group that discussed contemporary authors including Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Heinrich von Kleist, and Ludwig Tieck. Theater was a preoccupation for the Viennese in general and an area in which Schubert also hoped to succeed as a public figure—he wrote more than a dozen theatrical works, from brief Singspiele, to incidental music, to full-scale operas. Anselm Hüttenbrenner described his friend’s typical day: Schubert would get up early and compose from six to one, he “never composed in the afternoon; after the midday meal he went to a café, drank a small portion of black coffee, smoked for an hour or two and read the newspapers at the same time. In the evening he went to one or other of the theaters.”10 Even if Hüttenbrenner exaggerated the frequency of Schubert’s theatrical attendance, there is little doubt he and his friends went to a great many plays, folk theater, and operas. Lisa Feurzeig considers how the Volkstheater tradition, plays by Ferdinand Raimund and Adolf Bäuerle with music by Wenzel Müller and Joseph Drechsler, may have found echoes in pieces by Schubert, including the “Wanderer” Fantasy, Winterreise, and Der Hirt auf dem Felsen.11