Given this singular prestige, it is not surprising that after 1815 music became a marker of status in German middle-class life, primarily through the spread of amateur choral societies. As a domestic pastime and public activity, it became a defining feature in the formation of community among literate and educated individuals from a wide spectrum of society.9 Consequently, the content, conduct, and meaning of an elevated musical sensibility—that uniquely German attribute—became a matter of contention. Was it on the decline? Was it being crushed by changes in the economy and society? Were its norms dependent on a slavish adherence to the past? Was it susceptible to progress? The young Wagner made his dramatic and commanding entrance into this already raging debate in the late 1840s and early 1850s, a debate in which Schubert took on an unexpectedly central, posthumous role alongside Wagner.
The challenge for a cultivated person wishing to maintain an elevated musical sensibility within the conditions of contemporary life after 1850 was eloquently expressed in 1869 by the twenty-four-year-old Florentine Galliny (1845–1913), a journalist and later editor of the Wiener Zeitung writing under the pseudonym Bruno Walden. She described the dilemma faced by a typical urban amateur music enthusiast in Vienna who was a member of a choral society:
In every person … there is a dim desire for the ideal. In his youth, he displays heaven-storming airs, but the steeplechase tempo slows as soon as he encounters and comes into contact with real life … it sinks below consciousness in the course of his fight for material survival…. This sort of opportunity-driven process gradually turns the arts from objects of sacred enthusiasm into mere means of entertainment. None of the arts suffers as much from this demeaning transformation from queen to chambermaid than our sweet, lovely Lady Musica. The holy shudder of awe vanishes and makes room for trivial familiarity. A voice that once sought to serve only the devout simplicity of Haydn and the noble Romanticism of Schubert, the delicacy bordering on gentleness of Mendelssohn and perhaps the bizarre energy of Schumann, now makes do with melodies [Walden cites a string of operetta titles]…. Certainly, the pursuit of the ideal can be bargained with … but the two driving forces, idealistic enthusiasm and the need for entertainment, do not need to be as separate as the sun and the moon…. Vienna owes much that is pretty in music, some that is beautiful, and that rare single extraordinary work to those who combine the two in their efforts. They serve our many musical societies, associations, and academies. These organizations have in turn created a new, sharply delineated type: the member of a choral society, an individual who differs considerably from all other useful and likable members of society.10
As musical culture spread at midcentury to an aspiring literate urban middle class, popular biographies of composers and music lexicons became a welcome genre. The rapidly growing audience was eager to find linkages between the music they admired and the lives of composers. Readers who were music enthusiasts sought clues to the connection between music and the expression of individuality. Precisely because music by nature differed so much from word and image, biography seemed to offer clues to meaning. And biography, per se, invites invention. The common nineteenth-century conceit that some illuminating coherence could be found in the way artists lead their lives (explaining how and why artists deviated from the restrictions and norms that ordinary people suffered) meant that biographies of composers were prone to embellishment. Few personalities invited and demanded as much invention as Schubert. His life and career had been local, if not provincial, and his life short, rendering the documentary evidence strikingly limited; fewer than a hundred letters survive, most fairly trivial.
At first, Schubert was identified primarily with the genre of the art song, the Lied, and therefore as a worthy but limited successor to Beethoven. At the same time, his music lent itself precisely to the participatory amateur activity that music had become. Yet Schubert, for all the accessibility of his vocal and choral music, still represented the noble aesthetic aspirations of Classicism. Not surprisingly, after 1850, an asymmetry became apparent between the scant historical record of his life and thoughts and the demand for his music (much of whose existence came as a surprise); between the circumscribed assessment of his importance on the one hand and the rapidly deepening popular adoration for it on the other. Schubert’s surviving friends compensated for this imbalance by writing memoirs. A few dated from the period right after his death, but most, like those of the writer Eduard von Bauernfeld, were penned decades later. The first biography, by Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn (who was unaware of the B-Minor “Unfinished” Symphony), was published in Vienna in 1864. Soon after, Franz von Suppé’s fanciful operetta on the life of Schubert, Franz Schubert, opened at Vienna’s Carltheater to great acclaim.
Nothing approaching the depth and complexity of Mozart’s correspondence or Beethoven’s sketchbooks, conversation books, and letters was left behind in Schubert’s case. The astonishing industry of Otto Erich Deutsch (1883–1967), the pioneer Schubert scholar, accumulated little more than three volumes of documents, memoirs, and images, not all consistently illuminating. This explains why a handful of letters of Schubert and his prose sketch “Mein Traum” (My Dream) have experienced such close scrutiny. Remembrances without corroborating evidence in historical sources are hard to rely on; they are history that begs for archeological remains as justification. Memories of friends and colleagues inspire extreme caution in scholars, especially if the subject is an increasingly and unexpectedly famous, and dead, friend who in his short life span elicited more compassion than envy.
Deriving biography from music is itself a hazardous undertaking, and in Schubert’s case working from the music led further away from history than otherwise might have been the case. So many of the works for which he ultimately became famous were discovered long after his death, and apart from references in the Lieder, musical clues fueled an ahistorical invention of Schubert the person. Fortuitously, the posthumous revelations brought Schubert’s entire oeuvre more in line with that of Beethoven, challenging the notion of Schubert’s limitations vis-à-vis the older master.
The posthumous revelations were indeed extraordinary. They started with Schumann’s “discovery” of the “Great” C-Major Symphony in 1839. Then, beginning in the 1850s, works such as the C-Major String Quintet appeared. The high point was Johann Ritter von Herbeck’s successful coaxing of the Symphony in B Minor, the “Unfinished,” out of the aged composer and friend of Schubert, Anselm Hüttenbrenner, a trick the charismatic Viennese conductor accomplished in 1865, in time for its premiere in December of that year. This work, which became subsequently Schubert’s most familiar and famous, was published in 1867. The discovery fueled hopes for more of the same. In 1868, Johannes Brahms, writing his friend Joseph Joachim, reported that he had been approached about completing the E-Major Symphony (D729). Ferdinand Schubert, the composer’s older brother, had shown Felix Mendelssohn the manuscript in 1846, but it had subsequently disappeared only to resurface again. Brahms was inquiring whether Joachim, who had so successfully orchestrated the “Grand Duo” (D812) in 1855, might be interested in a second Schubert project.11
Brahms’s suggestion echoed the history behind Joachim’s earlier orchestration. The idea initially came from Schumann, who heard in the Sonata in C Major for four hands a latent symphony. Why was Schumann eager to find a new symphony by Schubert? Why did Joachim complete the project? Why was Brahms, in 1868, concerned to see the E-Major fragment completed? And why did Brahms perform the Joachim “Grand Duo” orchestration twice in the early 1870s in Vienna? The answers rest in Brahms’s and Joachim’s negative perception of the contemporary rage for music as a dramatic medium of sentiment, sensuality, theater, and spectacle. They viewed this trend as a symptom of the decline in musical standards away from a Classical ideal of musical thinking and its formal requirements, albeit tempered by an early Romantic sensibility. The challenge, as they would come to see it from the 1860s onward, was how to reconcile the legitimate demands of a growing partic
ipant and listening public for an accessible expressive Romanticism with an allegiance to the normative standards of musical beauty bequeathed by musical Classicism.
Wagner came to represent the most persuasive case for the novel approach to music as an easily grasped dramatic medium tied to text and narration. He was the apostle of the idea that music needed to be a progressive art form whose historical imperative rendered Classical traditions obsolete. As music historian, critic, and Wagner advocate Franz Brendel wrote in 1855, “Our age is not only one of decline and the disintegration of an inherited art … it is … one of a new creativity.”12 By 1855, Brendel promoted Wagner as the protagonist of a new musical art that “leaves the narrow, limited customary musical spheres behind, and in opera, puts aside the one-sided overemphasis on music.” Wagner realized an historical imperative; he fulfilled the expectation that composition be justified by “a new spiritual substance.” “Musical creativity is purposeless,” Brendel wrote, “if it is not driven by a higher spiritual goal,” by which Brendel meant inspiration and meaning garnered from the other arts.13
The currency of such notions, not the originality and striking brilliance of Wagner’s music, caused the most concern among skeptics like Brahms and Joachim. What better antidote to Wagner’s success in the theater than new, large-scale works in traditional genres by Schubert, an acknowledged and popular master who had already made his entrance on the historical stage alongside Beethoven. The Schubert of the “Great” C-Major Symphony, the orchestrated “Grand Duo,” the “Unfinished,” of the E-flat Mass, the String Quintet, late piano sonatas, and Alfonso und Estrella, which Liszt premiered in 1854, represented a powerful alternative to Wagner: music that revealed the ideal synthesis of the Classical with a new “spiritual substance.”14 Schubert’s recently discovered works lent him a requisite if not exquisite expressive modernity. Wagner himself recognized Schubert as rising from the dead to challenge him. In 1869, at the end of his essay on conducting, he ridiculed Joachim and Brahms for “anticipating all sort of good things from a return to the new ballad-melody of Schubert.”15
They were not so far off the mark. Schubert’s music satisfied the public’s expectation of profound meaning in a musical language of narrative realism that conveyed the sensibilities and intensity of emotion so evident in Wagner. Schubert’s originality reflected a debt to Classical aesthetics in terms of melody, harmonic usage, formal structures, and conventional links between music and text. He undermined the claim by progressives that the logic of history rendered Viennese Classicism “narrow,” and that the musical “spheres” represented by masterpieces from the past were either sterile or irrelevant (as items of mere luxury), and disconnected from the needs and aspirations of the new, educated public for music.
What made this use of Schubert plausible after 1850 was that the Schubert everyone had already come to love turned out to be more than a familiar composer of vocal and piano music played at home and, more importantly, sung in semi-public and public venues.16 The surprise was that he was also the author of symphonies, masses, and operas—works for the concert stage. Furthermore, the music Schubert had written for amateur participation—primarily choral works absent in Wagner’s oeuvre (with the exception of arrangements of a few operatic excerpts)—could not be dismissed as old-fashioned. Herbeck, writing in 1862 to the director of the Choral Society in Königsberg, expressed delight “like a child” at an inquiry “from the far north for a choral work by Schubert.”17 He exhorted his colleague “to make much propaganda for this artist of the heart and spirit. Only so can we make the many choruses of our great common fatherland understand that male choral singing has to look for its greatest treasures in Schubert and that Schubert alone is the best remedy against the unfortunate and increasing superficiality of choral programs.”18 Schubert was new music for a new national consciousness at the highest level of aesthetic merit.
Nonetheless, by the mid-1870s many observers, even in Vienna, conceded reluctantly that German national sensibilities were becoming inseparable from the Wagnerian. Just as Bismarck and the Prussian Monarchy eclipsed all other alternatives to German unification, including the Austrian dream of a grand German nation that encompassed the Habsburg Empire, Wagner, with the opening of Bayreuth in 1876, appeared close to victory on the cultural front. But if the Austro-German option had been already defeated decisively on the battlefield in 1866, in culture there was still a war to be won. Schubert, not Brahms, offered the distinct alternative popular vision.19 Owing to Schubert’s historical status as a contemporary of Beethoven, it seemed more plausible to temper the Wagnerian with him than attempting a counter-revolution with Brahms.
Herbeck himself sought valiantly to straddle both sides of the mid-century cultural conflict. An enthusiast for Wagner, he ran afoul of the Master of Bayreuth when the 1871 Vienna premiere of Die Meistersinger under his baton turned into a near catastrophe. For all his advocacy of Wagner, as a conductor in Vienna he also sought to defend the Classical tradition and even brought Handel’s Messiah back into the concert repertory (in a performance that outraged the historically minded Brahms).
What made Schubert a perfect complement to Wagner in Herbeck’s view was not only that he was an historical figure, but that he offered a contribution to German art and culture uniquely absent in Wagner. Schubert possessed an “openness to nature and life” in which a true ideal of beauty dominated. His work reconciled high aesthetic ideals with a sense for “natural enjoyment.” He brought a “soft warm breeze from the south” into “the deep green German forest.” “Yes,” Herbeck wrote, “it is through the delightful marriage of the profound Germanic soul with southerly colorful passion that Schubert touches us so wonderfully.”20 Furthermore, Schubert justified the role of the amateur participant in public musical culture. “Schubert’s music was not devoted purely and only to the art song,” the conductor wrote as early as 1855 in the preface to a new edition of the works for chorus, noting that Schubert had produced the most original choral music of all composers. Herbeck ended his preface with the exhortation: “Sing Schubert! Schubert! And once more Schubert!”
The Schubert who rose to prominence in the public imagination and the repertoire of the concert hall after 1850 had first been “conceived” in 1839 when Schumann wrote about the newly discovered “Great” C-Major Symphony. This, his second life, lasted until 1867, when the “Unfinished” was published. Thus the Schubert inherited and embraced by the twentieth century as one of the great composers was born not in 1797 but rather in 1839, making him more a contemporary of Brahms and Wagner than of Beethoven and Weber. Brahms was keenly aware of this anomaly. He remarked to Adolf Schubring in 1863 that with Schubert “one has the sense that he is still alive.”21 Indeed, one cannot underestimate the astonishment at the novelty of the form and sound of the “Unfinished” at its first performance just two years after Brahms’s comment.
Thus by the end of the nineteenth century, Schubert’s music and personality came to be understood as a central representative of the German musical culture of late Romanticism rather than as a characteristic historical figure of the decade after the fall of Napoleon. The reinvention of Schubert in German-speaking Europe can be compared to the early nineteenth-century radical reassessment of Shakespeare by English literary critics. In Shakespeare, as one scholar has put it, “artistic achievement and national pride could be cemented together.” The “most desirable traits of British identity” were to be found in Shakespeare, as Henry Crawford said in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. “It is part of an Englishman’s constitution.”22
This refashioning of Schubert at midcentury was persuasive precisely because he possessed a twin identity. He was a familiar personage from a hallowed (and rapidly vanishing) past, the age of Beethoven and the Vormärz, the period before the revolutions of 1848. He was also a composer of spectacular works whose first appearance provided a fresh alternative to the allure of anti-historicist musical aesthetics. By the 1870s the foregrounding of a “new”
Schubert based on the posthumous revelations gave renewed strength to anti-Wagnerian circles, to the allegiances shared by Brahms, Max Bruch, Joachim, and Hermann Goetz, and to a faith in the vitality and future potential of the Classical legacy: instrumental music, symphonic form, early-Romantic lyricism, and the conception of the expressive connection between music and text characteristic of the Lied.
Not surprisingly, Wagner had little to say about Schubert, who was at best a peripheral figure in the Wagnerian account of history. In 1841 he poked fun at German composers who sought to emulate Schubert’s songs just to gain notoriety in Paris. In 1869, he ridiculed those who hoped for a “Messiah” on behalf of that aesthetic. Wagnerians (with the notable exception of Bruckner) often derided Schubert, as George Bernard Shaw did (citing Schubert’s “thoughtlessness” and “brainlessness”).23 Even Richard Strauss confessed in the 1920s that for most of his career he had never given Schubert much thought.24 The “New German” movement’s debt to Schubert resided mostly in Franz Liszt’s advocacy and enthusiasm—understandable given the influence that Schubert’s expressive musical rhetoric had on Liszt’s notions of the connection between instrumental music and literature, between word and tone, and thus on the idea and realization of the tone poem.25 For example, Schubert entered Russia’s musical life through Liszt’s transcriptions of his Lieder in the late 1840s.26 Yet by the 1870s ardent Russian Wagnerians like Alexander Nikolayevitch Serov had no difficulty in saying that they “detested” Schubert’s symphonies.27 Other Wagnerians, like Hugo Wolf, would come to distance themselves from the music and its growing popularity in the 1880s.28
Franz Schubert and His World Page 39