2014 and 2015 are not Schubert years in the strict sense, unless overeager Schubertians want to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of two of his Goethe settings, ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ and ‘Erlkönig’, with which Schubert infused a stagnant musical genre with new energy (and claimed the rights of the composer as an interpreter of poetry). And yet, two major publications recently have seen the light of day: Graham Johnson’s magisterial three-volume reference tool Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs,Footnote ¹ which supplements and supersedes a similar German-language encyclopedia, the Schubert Liedlexikon, edited by Walther Dürr et al,Footnote ² and Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey: An Anatomy of an Obsession.Footnote ³ In view of these major contributions, do not overlook Lisa Feurzeig’s Schubert’s Lieder and the Philosophy of Early German Romanticism, which manages to hold its own even in the shadow of the weightier and more comprehensive publications just mentioned.

The focus of Feurzeig’s book is nearly 20 Schubert songs, all of them relatively unknown and based on poems by two important representatives of that literary-philosophical movement known as early German Romanticism centred in Berlin and Jena: Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg). Schubert was drawn to their poetry, in spite of a certain mannerist and cerebral quality inherent in the verses, in years of ‘crisis’ between 1819 and 1823, and Feurzeig shows that the composer’s interpretative strategies were appropriate to the pantheistic philosophies of Schlegel as well as the conflation of religion and eroticism in the poems of Novalis written in response to the death of the poet’s fiancée. It cannot be the function of this review to go into detail on the author’s readings. But I would like to single out two chapters in which songs come in for particularly detailed and incisive interpretations. Schubert’s setting of Schlegel’s ‘Die Berge’ serves as a ‘case study’ for Feurzeig’s approach to text–music relations. With the help of Neo-Riemannian theory, she explains the harmonic design of the song, traversing the octave by major thirds, as singularly appropriate for the composer’s understanding of Schlegel’s rather abstract text. What appears to be just a traditional ternary design (ABA), corresponding to the three stanzas of the poem, is really a clever sleight of hand: after capturing the mountain climbing in arduous harmonic sequences of the B section, the composer returns to the home key on a new level, the enharmonic A-double-flat rather than G major. Schubert’s setting of ‘Im Walde’ (not part of Schlegel’s Abendröte cycle that served the composer for most of his Schlegel settings) receives a similarly detailed treatment in the final chapter of the book. Feurzeig likens the structural experimentation evident in the song (repetition and transposition of small motives, generating a mosaic-like tapestry) to that of the Quartettsatz (D. 703) composed at the same time (December 1820). Her readings of ‘Wenige wissen das Geheimnis der Liebe’ and ‘Nachthymne’ (both on poems by Novalis) are similarly incisive and insightful.

When Schubert set the Schlegel and Novalis poems, he may have contemplated organizing the individual settings into groups or cycles. Eleven of the Schlegel settings are from the poetic cycle Abendröte published in 1802, and Feurzeig convincingly explains the bi-partite structure and philosophical implications of the 22 poems and the ways in which Schubert’s awareness of their connectedness subsequently informed his settings. That Schubert abandoned the idea of a cyclic grouping of the songs is clear from the fact that he published one of them in 1822 as a supplement in a Viennese newspaper (‘Die Rose’) and three others in 1826, including them in his Op. 57 (‘Die Berge’ and ‘Der Schmetterling’) and Op. 65 (‘Der Wanderer’), respectively. While there is tantalizing musical evidence for some group identity of the songs based on Schlegel’s poetic cycle, especially in form of an exposed augmented triad that occurs in several of the settings, they are, in the words of Richard Kramer with which Feurzeig concurs (p. 72), a ‘failed cycle’.Footnote ⁴

Searching for ‘distant cycles’ leads Feurzeig to more tangible results in the case of the Novalis settings. The unity of the poems was imposed on the texts by the Schlegel brothers and Ludwig Tieck, posthumously editing the work of their deceased friend. Schubert composed the six Novalis poems in close chronological proximity around 1820 and conceived them from the outset as a group. Feurzeig makes a case, on stylistic and structural grounds, for including ‘Nachthymne’ (‘Vorüber wall’ ich’) as the cantata-like finale of the set, balancing the equally weighty first song (‘Wenige wissen das Geheimnis der Liebe’) and, together, framing as bookends two pairs of interior songs that are shorter: ‘Wenn ich ihn nur habe’ and ‘Wenn alle untreu werden’ as well as ‘Ich sag es jedem’ and ‘Ich sehe dich in tausend Bildern’. Performers of the Novalis settings may want to take into account Feurzeig’s proposal of a cyclic grouping.

The book has its theoretical underpinnings. The first chapter is arguably the best concise introduction in English to the central figures of Early German Romanticism: their intellectual and personal interaction (which involved also the partnership of several females); and their far-reaching goals of reconciling feeling and reason as well as seeing human inquiry as a continuum encompassing science, history, philosophy and theology. The third chapter focuses on the concept of hermeneutics as propagated by Friedrich Schleiermacher, a theologian and philosopher (and more distant ‘member’ of the group of early Romanticists): interpretation and translation as a sympathetic act of understanding, exploring kinships between now and then, between different media and between different arts. Enter Schubert: his sensitivity to poetry was extraordinary, and his divinatory capabilities enabled him to grasp the central idea of a given text and render an interpretation or translation of it in musical terms. But Schleiermacher’s ideas can be read also as a blueprint for today’s interpreters, seeking meaning in texts or translating texts written long ago. In that regard the chapter serves also as a theoretical foundation of Feurzeig’s approach for shedding new light on Schlegel’s and Novalis’s poetry by way of reading Schubert’s songs.