Franz Schubert and His World
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33. See the commentary of nineteenth-century literary historians on Kosegarten in Franck, Kosegarten, 161; see also Holmes, Kosegarten and Kosegarten’s Cultural Legacy.
34. Maximilian and Lilly Schochow in their Franz Schubert: Die Texte seiner einstimmig komponierten Lieder und ihre Dichter, 2 vols. (New York, 1974), 1:243–72, propose a volume of Gedichte published in 1788 as well as the complete edition of Kosegarten’s works of 1824 as possible text sources, but admit that neither could have been used by Schubert. Walther Dürr suggests two possibilities in Franz Schubert: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke (Kassel), Series IV. In vol. 3b (1982), 265. Dürr identifies Kosegarten’s Poesieen (Leipzig, 1802) as the text source for all but the last of Schubert’s Kosegarten settings but revises his proposal in vol. 5b (1985), 284, to Kosegarten’s Dichtungen. Siebenter Band. Lyrischer Gedichte. Siebentes, achtes, neuntes Buch (Greifswald, 1813) or some related source; in vols. 8 (2009) and 9 (2011) he returns to the 1802 edition as the likely text source. The 1803 source I suggest here, like the 1802 edition, departs very little from Schubert’s text, preserves all titles as they appear in Schubert’s manuscripts, and includes all the Kosegarten settings Schubert ever set (including An die untergehende Sonne, D457). The 1803 edition nevertheless comes closer to the texts in Schubert’s manuscripts; see, for instance, in Abends unter der Linde, (D237), “Mondenblitz” in Schubert’s text underlay and the 1803 edition, not “Morgenblitz” as in the 1802 edition (see vol. 8, 251).
35. The 1815 settings were all taken from vols. 2 and 3. Vol. 1 contains 41 poems, including An die untergehende Sonne, first set by Schubert in 1816, though apparently not completed until 1817 (see Deutsch, Verzeichnis, 271).
36. Marie-Agnes Dittrich contends that not all of these poems are particularly suited to a musically strophic treatment; see Marie-Agnes Dittrich, Harmonik und Sprachvertonung in Schuberts Liedern, Hamburger Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 38 (Hamburg, 1991), 58.
37. Walther Dürr (Series IV, vol. 9, xxvi) and Jörg Büchler (“Schuberts Kosegarten-Vertonungen,” 144–46) take issue with the contention that these songs form a narrative structure. Though the resulting story seems incontestable, just when the whole plot was pieced together from disparate poems remains a valid question. A detailed treatment of the topic would explode the bounds of this essay, but a good argument can be made for a story operating within the thirteen settings already completed by the end of July 1815.
38. Büchler, “Schuberts Kosegarten-Vertonungen,” 146–51, points to further examples of third textures throughout the set and some additional unifying melodic and rhythmic motives not mentioned here.
39. Richard Kramer, Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago and London, 1994), 19 and 21, makes this point as well.
40. Wilhelm proclaims “Ich hab’ ein Mädchen funden” at the very outset of Das Finden, while Ida reveals her discovery (“Ich habe ihn gefunden”) in verse 2 of Idens Nachtgesang. In the following song, Die Sterne, Wilhelm mentions Ida by name in verses 1, 4, and 6. Note that these are widely scattered poems in the text source (see Table 7).
41. Technically speaking, there is no chromatic center between two pitches a major seventh apart; either B or B could serve this purpose. The implications of key characteristics in the Kosegarten songs are discussed in Solvik, “Schubert’s Kosegarten Settings of 1815: A Newly Discovered Song Cycle, Final Report from the Schubert Liedskizzen Project,” 55–58 (unpublished); and Büchler, “Schuberts Kosegarten-Vertonungen,” 153.
42. Schubert’s use of the tritone points to an obvious awareness of the negative associations of this interval in a long tradition of musical rhetoric. For a discussion of such examples, see Hartmut Krones, “‘Ein Accumulat aller musikalischen Modulationen und Ausweichungen ohne Sinn, Ordnung und Zweck’: Zu Schuberts ‘schauerlichen’ Werken der Jahre 1817–28,” in Franz Schubert zum 200 Geburtstag, special edition of Österreichische Musikzeitschrift (January 1997): 32–40.
43. Winterreise, it seems, suffered a similar fate in terms of publication and performance. Schubert’s posthumously published sets of Ludwig Rellstab and Heinrich Heine, often collectively titled Schwanengesang, may represent similar though shorter projects at the end of his life.
44. Walther Dürr, “Lieder aus dem ‘Selam’: Ein Schubertsches Liederheft,” in Beiträge zur musikalischen Quellenkunde: Katalog der Sammlung Hans P. Wertitsch in der Musiksammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, ed. Günter Brosche (Tutzing, 1989), 353–61. See also Dietrich Berke, “Zu einigen anonymen Texten Schubertscher Lieder,” Die Musikforschung 22 (1969): 485–89.
45. David Gramit, “Schubert and the Biedermeier: The Aesthetics of Johann Mayrhofer’s ‘Helipolis,’” Music and Letters 74 (1993): 355–82.
46. Kramer, Distant Cycles.
47. Alfred Heuß, “Ein trunkenes Jünglingslied von Franz Schubert,” Zeitschrift für Musik 95 (1928): 619–24, 679–82.
48. Kramer, Distant Cycles, 19. Though he finds affinities between other songs as well, Kramer concludes that “to seek authenticity in some larger reconstruction of the Kosegarten settings is an exercise in futility” (20).
49. Walther Dürr and Arnold Feil with Walburga Litschauer, Reclams Musikführer: Franz Schubert (Stuttgart, 1991), 50–51. Dürr also refers to the Kosegarten settings as a “closed group,” in “Franz Schubert: Das Finden,” 345–51, here 350.
50. Friedrich Reichardt in “Etwas über das Liederspiel,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 3/43 (1801): 709–17, here 711.
51. Ibid.
52. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 18/47 (20 November 1816): 810–11 (original emphasis). The quotation is taken from a review of Hans Georg Nägeli’s Liederkranz auf das Jahr 1816, 809–16, a collection of 24 Lieder to texts by “Körner, Wagner, Usteri, Hottinger, Müchler, Arndt, Kosegarten, Matthisson, C. Schreiber, Wessenberg, Voss, Herder, Jacobi, Gries, Hill, Vogel” and one anonymous poem.
53. Otto Erich Deutsch, “Schuberts schöne Müllerin,” in Wiener Musikgeschichten (Vienna, 1993), 89–104, here 99, from Ludwig Rellstab’s 1846 biography of Ludwig Berger.
54. Ibid., 100.
55. This likeness also pointed out in Walther Dürr and Arnold Feil with Walburga Litschauer, Reclams Musikführer: Franz Schubert, 51.
56. Franz Schubert: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke (Kassel), Series III: “Mehrstimmige Gesänge für gemischte Stimmen,” vol. 2a (1996), ed. Dietrich Berke, makes special note of D236 having no voice designations in the manuscript score, speculating that it might be sung by three male voices, as in other examples of trios notated by Schubert without voice parts (ix). This seems highly unlikely, given that Schubert provides a piano part exactly doubling the SSB vocal parts. For a similar doubling of an SATB texture, see D439, An die Sonne, where the parts are provided in Schubert’s hand. This is also no doubt the reason Das Abendrot appears in this volume of the critical edition.
The Queen of Golconda, the Ashman, and the Shepherd on a Rock: Schubert and the Vienna Volkstheater
LISA FEURZEIG
Popular theater of Schubert’s time, generally known as the Volkstheater tradition, was a vivid and expressive component of Viennese culture.1 Performed in suburban theaters outside the city walls, Volkstheater plays attracted a broad audience ranging from prostitutes to royalty. The plays held a special position as one of the only outlets, despite censorship, for the social and political concerns of the public. The famous actors and the latest plays and songs—for there was much music in Volkstheater plays—were familiar throughout the city.
In his 1924 introduction to the music for works by playwright Ferdinand Raimund (1790–1836), musicologist Alfred Orel made the claim that the Viennese Classical style was rooted in folk music, observing that “through the deficient knowledge of Viennese folklike music, a great chasm yawns, preventing the rightful understanding of Haydn’s and Beethoven’s works … not to mention Franz Schubert, that most Viennese of all the great masters, who sprang up entirely from the ground of folk
like music and raised it to the highest power.”2 Orel does not clearly separate folk and folklike (volkstümliche) music in this comment—which is quite understandable in discussing music of the early nineteenth century, when such concepts were vaguely defined. The important aspect of his observation is that he recognized a pathway leading from the music practiced and enjoyed by ordinary Viennese people to the elevated music of Viennese Classicism—a pathway that even now remains largely unexplored.
“High” and “low” artistic realms in Viennese musical life frequently intersected. As a young man in the early 1750s, Haydn played for the theatrical producer Joseph Kurz and wrote the music for his play Der krumme Teufel (The Crooked Devil); there is a marvelous anecdote of how Kurz histrionically imitated a shipwreck to inspire Haydn’s improvisation at the keyboard.3 Beethoven too was well aware of the Volkstheater, as can be seen in his conversation books: his nephew Karl avidly passed along the theater gossip of the day, and his friend and assistant Anton Schindler was concertmaster of the orchestra in the Josefstadt Theater, founded in 1788—one of three principal venues that presented Volkstheater.
Theatricality was an important part of social life for Schubert and his friends, and their interest in theater took various forms. At the most casual and amateur level were such activities as the game of charades that Schubert, Franz von Schober, and others played at the castle of Atzenbrugg in July 1821.4 At the most ambitious were the plays and operas that Schubert and several librettist friends created in the hopes of having them professionally performed at theaters.
The theatrical activities of the Unsinnsgesellschaft, or Nonsense Society, a group discussed by Rita Steblin in this volume, might be considered as falling somewhere between the improvised and the composed. The handwritten journal Archiv des menschlichen Unsinns (Archive of Human Nonsense) issued by this society in 1817–18 parodied contemporaneous journal publishing by including assorted materials, from reports on politics and science to literary works. Among the latter were several plays that mocked the literary conventions of the time. One example is a play titled Der Feuergeist (The Fire Spirit) that Steblin believes to have been performed in April 1818. Although the journal issues that would have contained the text of the play are lost, a picture representing a scene from it survives, and Steblin argues that this play may have been a source for Schubert’s 1820 melodrama Die Zauberharfe (The Magic Harp), which was performed at the Theater an der Wien, one of the venues presenting a mixed repertoire, including Volkstheater.5
Schubert’s circle of friends both loved and practiced the arts; thus it is only to be expected that they were aware of theatrical news and events throughout Vienna. The writings of Franz von Hartmann, who arrived as a law student from Linz in 1825, suggest the atmosphere. He wrote to his sister Anna von Revertera of the high level of artistic quality in Vienna, “especially galleries and art collections, which all far exceeded my imaginings. As does the theater, the Burg as well as the Leopoldstadt, totally opposed as they are to each other.”6 It is significant that Hartmann mentions both these theaters. The first functioned as the center for classical drama, whereas the Leopoldstadt, founded in 1781 just across the Danube Canal from the inner city, was the central venue for Volkstheater. Hartmann’s comment shows that a sophisticated member of the upper middle class was drawn to both repertoires.
Given this cultural context, it is reasonable to assume that the two documented occasions when Schubert attended specific Volkstheater plays represent just the tip of the iceberg—he and his friends were no doubt immersed in this theatrical tradition.7 Furthermore, they were linked to the most important Volkstheater playwright of the 1820s, Ferdinand Raimund, who began his career as a comic actor and was well known to Schubert’s good friend Eduard von Bauernfeld, who may have introduced the composer and the dramatist.8 Both Raimund and Schubert were torchbearers at Beethoven’s funeral in March 1827. As it happens, Schubert also knew Johann Nestroy (1801–1862), whose more cynical plays would take over the Viennese stage in the 1830s. Nestroy had been a fellow student at the Stadtkonvikt (City Seminary). Schubert attended some of Nestroy’s performances as an opera singer, and Nestroy, who was a fine bass, participated in public performances of some of Schubert’s vocal quartets both in Vienna and in Amsterdam.9
The purpose of this essay is to explore several instances in which Schubert’s music is notably similar to that of extremely well-known Volkstheater songs—similar enough to suggest that Schubert may have intended deliberate references to Volkstheater music.10 In one such example the play involved was a classic of the genre, dating from the 1790s, and in the other three cases Schubert composed his work soon after the premiere of the relevant play. Taken together, these situations suggest that he was familiar with both the enduring Volkstheater tradition and the latest important works. The first two cases are based on observations already made by others; the second pair is presented here for the first time. In all instances the examples depend on a combination of musical and textual resemblances between the works compared. The musical similarities are not conclusive on their own, but when combined with shared textual elements—ranging from a single syllable to plot similarities to an overarching idea—they carry much more weight.
Such complex forms of reference offer a remarkable window into Schubert’s creative mind. It is widely recognized that as a song composer he unified music and text in extraordinary ways. The theatrical situations—in which textual relationships and musical connections to an outside source go hand in hand—provide further examples of how his mind operated. They may suggest models for similar readings of other works, helping us to identify larger meanings for Schubert’s music.
Schubert does not directly quote his musical sources from the Volkstheater; rather he reshapes certain elements in ways that suggest another piece of music was a partial source for his own. This was a shrewd strategy given the Austrian political situation in Clemens von Metternich’s Vienna. Censorship and police surveillance were the norm—but within that context Volkstheater plays took some liberties, criticizing government and society in ways that were impossible elsewhere—and deniability was advantageous.11
Ich hört’ ein Bächlein rauschen and Wer niemals einen Rausch hat g’habt
In an article about Schubert written some forty years after his death, Eduard von Bauernfeld recalled some discussions with the composer in which he criticized various aspects of his friend’s compositional style:
With Schubert, so much about form, musical declamation, and the fresh melodies can be reproached. [The melodies] sometimes sound too national [vaterländisch], too Austrian; they recall folk tunes whose rather low tones and unbeautiful rhythms do not have full rights to push their way into the poetic art song. On this topic, it sometimes came to little discussions with Master Franz. Thus when we tried to prove to him that certain passages in Die schöne Müllerin recalled an old Austrian grenadiers’ march or Wenzel Müller’s Wer niemals einen Rausch hat g’habt. — He grew seriously angry about such petty, carping criticism, or else he laughed at us and said, “What do you understand? That’s the way it is, and it has to be that way!”12
Evidently, the link between Classical and folk traditions that Orel posited in 1924 would have troubled some young intellectuals a century earlier. Bauernfeld’s account makes it clear that Schubert did not share that perspective. When his friends made class distinctions between folk music and art song, he either grew angry or simply laughed at the notion that to mix these genres was inappropriate.
The song in which Schubert’s friends heard a link to Wenzel Müller’s Wer niemals einen Rausch hat g’habt must be the second song of Die schöne Müllerin, namely Ich hört’ ein Bächlein rauschen. The passages quoted in Examples 1 and 2 show the openings of both.
Example 1.Wenzel Müller, Wer niemals einen Rausch g’habt, vocal line, mm. 16–22.
Example 2. Franz Schubert, Ich hört’ ein Bächlein rauschen, vocal line, mm. 2–6.
Each melody moves up to the fifth s
cale degree, hovers on or around it, and then moves downward a full octave before coming to rest on the tonic note. In the process of descent, both melodies use the figure ˆ5–ˆ3–ˆ1 followed by other arpeggiations. These musical relationships are quite noticeable on their own, and they are strengthened by the texts, because the syllable rausch appears at the same moment in each phrase.
This textual parallelism creates a kind of pun, because the words rauschen and Rausch have entirely different meanings. The verb rauschen means to rustle or murmur and describes the sound that the miller hears as he approaches the brook. The noun Rausch means the state of being intoxicated. The character who sings Wer niemals in the play Das Neusonntagskind (Fifth Sunday’s Child) is quite the opposite of the protagonist in Die schöne Müllerin. While the miller is young, innocent, and hopeful as he sets out to seek his fortune, the play’s Hausmeister (Caretaker) is jaded and grumpy (though basically goodhearted), fond of the pleasures of alcohol, and prone to become deaf whenever someone needs him to open the door—unless the jingle of coins is added to the soundscape. The play by Joachim Perinet premiered in 1793, and the character of the Hausmeister became a Viennese classic.13 Indeed, the Hausmeister’s song praising drunkenness soon moved into the category of a folksong.14 There is specific evidence that friends of Schubert were familiar with the song, as it is mentioned in an 1817 document of the Nonsense Society. The motto at the top of the society’s newsletter of 4 December is the opening of the Hausmeister’s song, “Wer niemals einen Rausch hat g’habt der ist kein braver Mann!” (Anyone who has never been drunk is not a good man!)—which is then labeled as being from Act 7, scene 36 of Don Carlos.15 Thus Perinet is implicitly and satirically equated with Friedrich Schiller. Both the implication that Schiller is long-winded and the idea of linking such a revered writer of Weimar classicism with an icon of the popular theater are very much in the spirit of Viennese comedy of this period. One common literary practice in the Volkstheater tradition was the Verwienerung (or “Viennacization”) of well-known stories including Bluebeard, Othello, and various Greek myths. In musical quodlibets within their Volkstheater plays, composers delighted in mixing operatic and symphonic selections from composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, and Spontini with folksongs and songs from other popular plays.16 By allowing a folklike tune into his elevated song cycle, Schubert showed more affinity with these musical practices of the Volkstheater than with the taste of his friends.