Franz Schubert and His World is the twenty-fifth instalment in the distinguished series begun in 1990 connected to the Bard Music Festival, whose goal is ‘to explore a particular composer’s world’ (p. vii). As the editors are keenly aware, assembling a collection of essays on Schubert in this context is challenging given the brevity of his life and the limited documentation produced during his career. The editors have shrewdly assembled a volume that acknowledges the pioneering archival work of Otto Erich DeutschFootnote ¹ (cited in 6 of 13 endnotes for the preface), resists echoing ‘the focus of much recent Schubert scholarship on ahistorical analytic matters’ and skirts the belaboured wrangling over the composer’s sex life (p. ix).Footnote ² The present volume of nine essays has a different purpose. ‘There remain large gaps to fill, facts to find, and secrets to solve, a project this book seeks to advance’ (p. ix). The undertaking is successful, although it has produced a collection that ‘in some of the book’s essays, scholars revisit, revise, and expand their own earlier work’ while including two lengthy translations with indirect connections with the composer’s world (p. xi).

Rita Steblin’s essay on the Nonsense Society presents a summary in English of previous discoveries.Footnote ³ The Unsinnsgesellschaft lasted from April 1817 to December 1818, and was an early instance of a congenial band of artistic friends that included Schubert. The essay will be welcome to those unfamiliar with her earlier monograph; it is a salutary reminder that dedicated archival work can still uncover valuable information. The evidence consists of humorous and ribald (to the point of obscenity) texts, newsletters (two-thirds incomplete) and watercolours by the club’s members. Steblin’s readings of the documents offer instances of the composer’s circle inspiring his early creativity. Coded phrases and wordplay – the artistic stock in trade of the club’s youthful members – are thorny thickets to negotiate and involve suppositions whose firm evidence remains elusive. One instance of the interpretive challenges presented by this material is Steblin’s certainty that Schubert ‘must have composed the music’ for Der Feuergeist (which she posits he adapted to his 1820 melodrama, Die Zauberharfe) while elsewhere characterizing the relationship as ‘most likely’ (pp. 13, 32). Schubert’s involvement in the society nonetheless seems secure, and it provides us with a window into the young composer’s emerging sensibility.

Contemporary to the Nonsense Society were the two volumes of Beyträge zur Bilding für Jünglinge (Contributions to Education for Youths). Schubert’s connection is oblique since he is never mentioned in them, and thus some extrapolation becomes necessary in order to adduce that the composer shared the contributors’ beliefs. Anton von Spaun, Anton Ottenwalt and Johann Mayrhofer were Schubert’s friends, although none were members of the Unsinnsgesellschaft. David Gramit has translated Spaun’s foreword and his essay ‘On Friendship’ as well as Mayrhofer’s ‘Raphael: A Dialogue’. Gramit’s introduction and annotations furnish a reminder that throughout his life Schubert enjoyed more than one circle of companions, a reflection of his multifaceted personality.

By contrast with the gag-filled drollery of the Nonsense Society, the contents of the Beyträge are suffused with literary and moral high-mindedness. The excerpts demonstrate the elusive aspiration of Bildung, the self-cultivation among nineteenth-century well-educated Germans that is reflected in ‘a determined effort to blend received wisdom with personal experience’ (p. 40). Gramit is discreet about reading into the essays’ contents deliberate references to Schubert, although he tantalizes the reader with the possibility that Mayrhofer was thinking of the composer when describing a musician who profits from a circle of friends not limited to those of his profession. Schubert’s contemporaries here wrestle with the seeming contradictions of the benefits of intimate friendships, deriving from classical thought, and the spectre of an individual’s physical desire: in ‘Raphael’, the painter’s fate was due to a bestiality caused by not ‘heightening his reason enough to master his instincts’ (p. 62). Readers will have to judge to what extent, if any, such issues informed the composer’s own outlook.

John M. Gingerich continues the theme of Schubert’s friendships, turning to the circle that, unlike earlier examples, placed him with Schober (to whom Schubert referred endearingly as ‘Schobert’) at the centre of its regular social and artistic activities, notably its self-styled Schubertiades. Gingerich’s chronology situates 1822–23 as the most halcyon period for the circle’s activities. The Schubertiades amalgamated the humour of the Nonsense Society with the noble ambitions of the Beyträge. Mutual affection and creative aspiration were twinned until differences and the departure of some from Vienna splintered the group. The composer maintained friendships with some of the former members, however, aiding in reforming a new, less organized circle in 1825–26, with Schubertiades (now in a different location) still at its centre. Gingerich posits that the passage of years and the professional experience thus gained tamped earlier idealistic enthusiasms, and he argues for two distinct groups, the later one being ‘a pale continuation’ even as Schubert remained the personal and artistic glue for their members (p. 81). Like Steblin, he provides portraits of the most important figures, quoting extensively from Deutsch’s published sources. In Gingerich’s survey of social and intellectual sensibilities from the 1820s, only once does an attitude (toward marriage) commingle with music: Schubert’s collaboration with Eduard von Bauernfeld on the unfinished opera, Der Graf von Gleichen. With its ‘glorification of a bigamous marriage’, the libretto was unsurprisingly rejected by the censor, although Schubert maintained a loyalty toward the project for which only sketches survive. Gingerich posits that the composer’s ‘belief in the importance of the opera and its subject can have been his only conceivable motivation for doing so’ (p. 90). Otherwise, the composer appears as an outlier among his circle in his public engagement with religion, albeit one that was unconventional, in his mass settings.

Morten Solvik’s essay is one stage of an ongoing research project dating back to 1997.Footnote ⁴ Marshalling an impressive array of evidence, Solvik recounts the path by which he arrived at the proposition that Schubert’s settings of poems by Gothard Ludwig Kosegarten (an incompetent poet in Schiller’s opinion) constitute a planned set drafted in 1815. The composer was still a teenager developing his literary judgment when he selected 20 poems from 144 published in three volumes (ignoring the first book). The narrative produced by Schubert’s reordering of the poems – Solvik recognizes that his reading is not incontrovertible – is the stuff of familiar German romantic lyric poetry. More interesting is Solvik’s examination of musical relationships between the songs in the ordering that he presents. Together with the documentation, his analysis makes plausible his conclusion that the succession of songs evinces ‘a compelling sense of unity and common intention’ (p. 144). Solvik then considers the matter of dubbing the group a cycle in the context of Lieder composition in Schubert’s time. If the Kosegarten group lacks the ‘highly personal telling of a story’ characteristic of Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise (atypical fare for the period), it does fit into contemporary domestic production of song collections or Liederspiel, rendering the later two cycles all the more original (p. 145).

Lisa Feurzig examines relationships between Schubert’s works and contemporary songs from the popular tradition of Volkstheater plays. Rather than direct quotation, the musical connections, buttressed by analyses of the texts and their theatrical contexts, have a camouflaged quality in keeping with the fondness for wordplay that Steblin finds in the doings of the Nonsense Society. The fact that musicology has a range of terms for points of contact short of quotation reflects the challenge of not only parsing the composer’s intention, but also determining just who might have been in the know. It is an enterprise both worthy and daunting for Feurzig to illuminate the tradition of the Volkstheater in order to bridge the gulf between what the composer might have taken for granted, whatever his sources’ popularity at the time, and what contemporary performers and listeners would have gleaned. For example, Feurzig posits a mixture of possible emotions on the part of composer and audience regarding the appearance of a snippet from Aline, oder Wien in einem andern Weltheile, a play by Adolf Bäuerle (music by Wenzel Müller), and the scherzo from the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy. Equally, it may have been the nature of this genre that offered Schubert a rationale, as described in a contemporary review: the fantasy permitted a composer ‘to combine the unlikeliest forms into the greatest possible unity’.Footnote ⁵

Feurzig proposes new connections between two songs from Ferdinand Raimund’s Der Bauer als Millionär (music by Joseph Drechsler), and ‘Der greise Kopf’ and ‘Die Krähe’ from Winterreise, which she argues are deliberate, recognizing that ‘the resemblances between the two pairs of songs are fleeting and subtle’ (p. 170). Raimund’s Die gesesselte Phantasie (music by Wenzel Müller) provides a final example related to ‘Der Hirt auf dem Felsen’, an association that is, in part, ‘reminiscent, in an indirect way’ (p, 175). Readers will have to judge whether the resemblances are conscious on Schubert’s part (Feurzig concludes that they are not provable) and, if so, whether the composer designed such abstruseness to be perceived by performer or listener. Rather, her hypothesis is that ‘they were intended for his own understanding and that of anyone else who would both recognize the links and take them in the proper spirit’ (p. 176). If the connections offered by every example are not equally persuasive, together they offer another instance of Schubert’s complex creative personality, willing to draw from contemporary musical traditions – popular as well as classical – that might otherwise be deemed antithetical.

Thanks to Deutsch’s indefatigable efforts, critical responses to Schubert’s music in his lifetime are readily accessible. The editors have opted to include Franz Liszt’s 1854 appreciation of Alfonso und Estrella, the opera whose extensively reworked version he conducted that year. Readers can consider Allan Keiler’s translation against another, which appeared in 2014.Footnote ⁶ Liszt’s take on the composer was as affectionate as it was ill conceived. His reverential homage provides another brick in the long critical arch of nineteenth-century hagiography that created an image of the fecund tunesmith whose lyrical gifts were out of sync with his handling of larger forms. As critical as Liszt was regarding the libretto by Schober (their relationship is carefully laid out by Keiler), the opera’s composer was not blameless. ‘Schubert, so masterful within smaller frameworks, suffers the loss of much of his natural genius in broader expanses … . The rich, powerful flow of his melodies, diverted into too broad a channel [here, opera], lacked depth’ (p. 196). The argument implicitly leads to Wagner, unnamed but surely the one whose works ‘combine the most heterogeneous qualities, to be at the same time spontaneous and reflective, enthusiastic and erudite, forceful and gentle, vivacious and profound. And whoever wishes to choose the stage as his realm must belong to the ranks of the latter, for though the lyric is for the most part subjective by nature, dramatic works require the objectivity of character and action’ (p. 198).

The separate spheres of objectivity and subjectivity place Liszt’s rhetoric in a continuum that is a first cousin to Schumann’s 1838 essay on Schubert’s Mädchencharakter in comparison to that of Beethoven. Liszt’s piece appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik five months after Schumann’s complete writings were published. The editor of the journal, Franz Brendel, contributed to these archetypes in his Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich of 1852. Liszt’s concluding metaphor – Schubert’s natural inspiration as an effervescent mountain stream – echoes Franz Gernerth’s essay of 1847 on Schubert and Beethoven. Schubert’s Lieder and Beethoven’s symphonies would be the twin tributaries that would lead to Wagnerian music drama.

Kristina Muxfeldt considers images of freedom in Schubert’s songs. She surveys the political background in terms of the complex relationship between Germany and Austria that placed them as uneasy allies against France, their rift after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 and the subsequent curtailing of liberties by the Austrian state. This is good service since Clemens Metternich, mentioned in other essays, reappears clearly here as the controlling spider in the obscurantist web of repression.

Using selected verse, Muxfeldt detects a conflation of political and romantic symbols, reticulating images of freedom and love, which have obscure relationships that are not easy to unpack, but that continue the theme of indirect artistic expression in a city marred by official oppression cited by other contributors. Although Theodor Körner is given due treatment for his political views, none of Schubert’s settings are analysed. Rather, works by Mayrhofer (‘Der zürnenden Diana’) and Johnn Gabriel Seidl (‘Sehnsucht’) receive close readings. One will do well to have the entire scores at hand; it may take some readers more than the ‘little effort’ Muxfeldt expects in order to connect the analyses with veiled discourses on political liberty (p. 220). In ‘Sehnsucht’, what should we make of the unresolved dominant seventh of the supertonic lasting for six beats in the piano introduction, which returns only in the final stanza – thrown into relief on the only beat in which the voice rests after the oh-so important darf in bar 80 – and finally resolves, its E-minor sonority echoing faintly in the penultimate bar with Schubert’s addition of E and G as part of a dominant seventh above the tonic D: freedom – amatory, artistic or political – hoped for, achieved, silenced? Bauernfeld recalled that ‘Der zürnenden Diana’ was a ‘musical self-confession’.Footnote ⁷ How far can we take interpretation? Muxfeldt notes that Schubert was sharing Mayrhofer’s lodging at the time he composed ‘Der zürnenden Diana’: does the goddess’s deadly bow and arrow become a stand-in for the bayonet-like stick the poet jokingly liked to brandish at his roommate?Footnote ⁸

Gibbs’s contribution centring the Trio in E-flat Major represents one point in a continuum of his work on the subject dating back to 1997.Footnote ⁹ In its absence, the volume would have had only glancing references to Beethoven, the leviathan of Schubert’s world. Gibbs generously amplifies his argument that the Trio served as a monument to Beethoven, musical in its allusiveness and metaphorical in its resonances with the composer’s memorialization. Gibbs thus adds to a rich literature traversing analytical, critical and receptive relationships between the two masters.

Generous though the music examples are, readers should have at the ready the scores for the Trio and Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, whose second movement provided source material (along with the Swedish folksong ‘Se solen sjunker’) for Schubert’s equivalent slow movement. The latter’s main theme is famously reconceived in the finale, serving as both a devoted homage and a pronouncement of artistic independence. As good as Gibbs is in mobilizing documentary and musical evidence to cement his argument, perhaps his promised monograph will ruminate further on why Schubert left the Trio with no dedication other than to ‘those who find pleasure in it’, as the composer stated; describing Schubert’s secret tribute as an aid to ‘work through his mourning for the composer he most revered’ suggests a psychoanalytic echo that bears amplification (pp. 261, 279).

The final contribution shifts the tenor of the volume to ‘Schubert in the world’; Leon Botstein charts the composer’s reception from the middle of the nineteenth century to 1928, the centennial of the composer’s death. Such an undertaking must perforce be highly selective. Botstein limits his survey to German-speaking Europe with an emphasis on Vienna and focuses on the views of historians and those on the discipline’s fringes. Botstein considers Schubert’s emerging reputation between the premieres of the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies in 1839 and 1867 through the scrim of contemporary cultural politics emanating from the debates over the Music of the Future, and in the context of historical writing by Burckhardt, Lamprecht, Riehl and Dilthey. Schubert emerges as both the legatee of the classical tradition and ‘a harbinger of the post-Romantic aesthetics later adopted by modernist composers in the 1920s’ (p. 319). He certainly was for Schoenberg, who twice placed Schubert at the head of a list that included Mahler, Reger and Strauss.Footnote ¹⁰

This portion of the essay tills less familiar ground compared with Schubert’s reception in Vienna, caught between Alt-Wien reverie and the modern transformation of the city. Appropriating Schubert, for good or ill, depended very much on the writer’s prejudices. No one wrote from neutral ideological territory, certainly not Ferdinand Kürnberger, the feuilletonist who criticized Viennese nostalgia in his response to the Schubert monument of 1872 after having endured political exile from the city. Kürnberger was no more a historian than Bauernfeld, who, with characteristic Viennese tact, described the monument as ‘on the whole, not bad, but he still looks like a watered-down Beethoven’.Footnote ¹¹ As others have done, Botstein chooses the statue to mark nexus in the composer’s local reception. If ‘the facile glorification of Schubert in the previous two decades, exemplified by the 1872 monument, became unsustainable’, its architects retained a stubbornly hardy life: ‘By the late 1890s, and certainly by the 1920s, the connection between the myth of Old Vienna and the ideal of a distinct Austro-German sensibility whose centre was Vienna was still intact in all the variants of Schubert appropriation’ (pp. 327–8). To my knowledge, no one has observed one tangible collision between the aspirations of art and the reality of urban life: not Vienna’s financial crisis or World’s Fair in 1873 but rather the following year when the figure’s pristine marble was vandalized by miscreants who defaced it with red beets, prompting city officials to consider erecting a latticed enclosure or guardrail.Footnote ¹²

Botstein’s final section is something of a whirlwind: comparisons of Vienna and Berlin by Adolf Weissmann and Werner Sombert, David Josef Bach’s defence of musical modernism, Deutsch’s transformative contributions, Robert Lach’s 1928 commemorative speech in Vienna and evaluations by Theodor W. Adorno (inevitably) and Georg Knepler (briefly). In due course, it is as though Schubert, posthumously set adrift from his world, hurtles through a universe of Austro-German culture as he is sighted, described and interpreted – by turns sketchy and detailed – through a century of historians and polemicists.

In sum, the contributions evince scholarly thoroughness in supplying background material that those familiar with Schubert’s life and career may recognize and to which the contributors give due credit in extensive notes. Those sections are useful summations for those who know Vienna of the 1820s only from college textbooks, even as they serve as necessary foundations for the fresh perspectives in the collection. Taken together, the essays emphasize that in his lifetime Schubert’s world was characterized by a struggle between a hermetic society governed by a repressive and reactionary regime, and an individual’s ardent desire for artistic expression, with the former at times rousing the composer to trade in abstruse meanings and covert symbols in both vocal and instrumental works. The volume adds to our understanding of Schubert’s genius, in both his formative and mature years, as someone who negotiated the inherent conflict between a wish to be understood by a small coterie and a desire to establish a successful career. In its emphasis on the intellectual juices coursing through intimate social circles and the influences of local musical production – both informing the composer’s mastery at embracing both high and low art – Franz Schubert and His World tangentially throws down a gauntlet to scholars to examine other musical valences imported into the city.