Let me begin by thanking Dr Lorraine Byrne Bodley for her extensive response to my ‘Surfeit of Musics’ essay.Footnote ¹ Her scholarly expertise in both Goethe and Schubert, coupled with her own sensitive interpretation of Goethe’s poems and Schubert’s settings, are causes for celebration. Her splendid defence of the one setting that I criticized, Schubert’s later version of ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’, is supported by her equally splendid defence of Goethe’s attitude toward musical settings, documenting his own, rather extensive knowledge of music. Indeed, I was not surprised to learn that ‘Erster Verlust’ was conceived as lyrics for a song, since it has the clear metric scanning that apparently Goethe found best suited to his poetry intended for musical setting. And as I noted, Schubert not only captures much of Goethe’s poetic music but also enhances, through the resources of musical composition, the poem’s range of meaning.

I was very surprised, on the other hand, to learn that Goethe might have at one time considered Gehalt (translatable verbal meaning) of greater importance than Gestalt (the poetic form and hence vehicle for that meaning), which, as Byrne Bodley observes, would appear to place his aesthetic closer to Schoenberg’s (at least with respect to Schoenberg’s claim about the essential meaning of a poem, which he grasped from a setting of Schubert’s without knowing the words).Footnote ² Although Goethe’s ‘formative and beneficial’ portion of a poem (by which he appears to mean its ethical, philosophical or moral aspect) may well be found in such a translatable ‘message’, his poetry both exemplifies and develops what it already suggests in the realm of meaning through every aspect of what I call its ‘poetic music’.Footnote ³ As a poet myself, I find it curious that Goethe in this instance appears not to recognize the inseparability of Gehalt from Gestalt. I would counter that the full meaning of a poem cannot simply be extracted from its poetic incarnation, which suggests realms of connotations and exemplifications that far exceed the literal semantic meanings of words and phrases. As stated most extravagantly in the final lines of Archibald MacLeish’s Ars Poetica, ‘A poem should not mean/But be’, modern poetic practice and criticism speak to the utter inseparability of form and content.Footnote ⁴ When, in reading aloud the line ‘Die Vöglein schweigen im Walde’, I experience ‘both acceleration and decrescendo, exemplifying the settling down of the birds in the trees’,Footnote ⁵ this is an effect that exceeds or enhances the literal meaning of the words. And although Schubert brilliantly captures a certain rustling agitation in his setting, as I noted, I still miss the laconic dissolution of this ‘sentence sound’ (to borrow Robert Frost’s concept) and its intonational miming of birds settling into silence.Footnote ⁶

The ending of the song, where I criticized Schubert’s ‘too comfortably pat’ ‘moral reassurance’,Footnote ⁷ is even more dissonant to the poetic Gehalt that I interpret from the poetic Gestalt, in which ‘Ruh’ is an ‘unconsummated symbol’ (to adapt Susanne Langer’s term) that does not simply translate as ‘rest’ or (allegorically) as ‘death’ but glows with a numinous sense that Byrne Bodley beautifully captures in her description, and that Schubert, for my ear, fails to achieve in this instance.Footnote ⁸ I should be clear that I don’t blame the failure on repetition alone, which I perhaps unfairly implied in my essay. Schubert has exquisitely plumbed the mysteries and resonances of repetition in many a trance-like passage from his music. The last song of Winterreise is a wonderful example, and one that is so remarkable as to undermine (for me) any assurance that the ending of ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ represents Schubert’s best compositional choice. It is his particular harmonic setting of ‘ruhest du auch’ that most grates against Goethe’s poetic music in my ear, since Goethe’s laconic ending already reverberates without the reassurances so heavily overlaid in Schubert’s harmonic ending. Although his use of a particular yielding chromatic reversal that I have associated with resignation and even abnegation in analyses of Beethoven would seem highly appropriate to the Gehalt, its assurance in this context appears to undermine, by offering too specific an orientation toward spiritual consolation, that more resonant profundity I hear at the end of Goethe’s poem.Footnote ⁹

I suspect I will not have convinced those many scholars and performers (cited by Byrne Bodley) who love Schubert’s beautiful setting that Goethe’s even more remarkable poem suffers from its transmedialization in this way.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, Schubert’s interpretation is consistent and beautiful on its own terms, capturing a particular Stimmung that emphasizes the ‘peacefulness’ with which the poem is infused, as Byrne Bodley’s interpretation so aptly conveys. Whatever one might conclude in this case, however, my larger argument is that interpretation should begin with the poem, and its own music, before analysis and subsequent critical evaluation of any composer’s given setting. I retract my implication that Goethe must have been as critical of Schubert’s later setting of ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’; however, despite the documentary evidence of his general aesthetic, we can never know for sure whether he would have found Schubert’s version as congenial as he might well have found the much earlier setting of ‘Erster Verlust’, a poem conceived with musical transmedialization in mind.

I should also acknowledge that I am hearing Goethe’s unusual ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ with the benefit of later poetic sensibilities – those associated with modernist poetry, where strict formalisms of metre and rhyme are superseded by variable line lengths and irregular rhyme placement. The far different pacing created by this freer approach to rhythm and metre would lead in turn to an even more flexible mode of musical text-setting, as pioneered by Mussorgsky, Debussy and Janáček, to name but a few. My more modernist interpretation of a much earlier literary work is not unprecedented, nor need it be viewed as anachronistic. Büchner’s Woyzeck (1836), a play left incomplete at his death in 1837, appears so modernist in its structure and consequent ‘meaning’ that only a century later would a musical language emerge in which Berg could do justice to its more cinematic form and expressionistic subject matter in an operatic setting (although with clear liberties in scene selection, abbreviation and order). Indeed, it was only later in the nineteenth century that Woyzeck was first produced as a play.

I deeply appreciate Byrne Bodley’s clarifications of Goethe’s aesthetic positions and musical acumen, and I will thus refrain from assuming to do more than speak from my own perspective as a poet in defending his poetry. My theoretical analyses of Schubert’s settings may also lead me to alternative critical stances, but they can provide rather explicit means of demonstrating to what extent Schubert has found equivalents for, or enhancements of, the poetic music and emergent meaning found in these poems, prior to any evaluation of these findings. As I noted with respect to setting my own poetry (as opposed to my lyrics conceived for musical setting as opera librettos), I personally feel a deep sense of conflict, knowing that with any musical setting some of the complex music I have already composed into the patterning of verbal sounds will inevitably be lost. Douglas Hofstadter’s Le Ton beau de Marot is a fascinating study of this problem from the standpoint of poetic translation from one language to another.Footnote ¹¹ Hofstadter elegantly demonstrates how translators focus to varying degrees on formal, sonic or semantic equivalences, but also how capturing everything is impossible (reminding us of the venerable Italian motto, Traduttore, traditore, or ‘translator, traitor’).

I am grateful that Dr Byrne Bodley has found interest in my readings of Schubert’s two settings, and I find hers equally compelling in their own right. Clearly, we find much to value in these songs from our distinct perspectives. Just as composers continue to return to the poetry, scholars will continue to be drawn to both poetry and song in a quest to understand them more deeply. May that pursuit always be enhanced by our recognition of the surfeit of music that is already to be found in poems with such individual music already built in. And may we also appreciate the difficulty inherent in composing any setting, given the potential loss of poetic music (and the poem’s already emergent meaning) as a result of that appropriation.