Abstract: Studies of Schubert's Goethe settings have tended to focus on Schubert's musical techniques and neglect the “music” that is already there, in the poem. This paper examines a few of Goethe's early poems, elucidating the features of the poetry that Schubert may have found so musical, to understand the impact that Goethe's poetry might have had on Schubert's compositional development. Through close reading of “Rastlose Liebe” along with historical and documentary sources from both Goethe's and Schubert's circles, it argues that this and other poems by Goethe were decisive for Schubert's musical development—to put it actively, that Goethe played an important role in Schubert's education.

Keywords: Goethe, Schubert, Lieder, Form, Music

The growth of [Schubert’s] mind … is a highly characteristic growth, and Goethean.

Can it be coincidence that so many of [Schubert’s] most original early songs are settings of Goethe?

In a diary entry dated June 13, 1816, the nineteen-year-old Schubert noted that the success of a performance of his “Rastlose Liebe”—which had been received with “unanimous applause”—was due not to his own setting of Goethe's lyric but to the “essential musicality of Goethe's poetic genius.” The conceit is striking because it throws into relief the extent to which studies of the composer's Goethe settings have tended to focus on Schubert's musical doings, to the exclusion of what “music” is already there, in the poem.