Franz Schubert and His World

by Gibbs, Christopher H. , Solvik, Morten

  Lamprecht’s emphasis on the psychological as a historical force put him at odds with Burckhardt. The difference between them is revealed not only in their radically opposed view of Wagner, but in their differing accounts of the significance of musical culture in history. For Burckhardt, literature and the visual arts were far more significant, whereas music always seemed to vanish from view, with the new replacing the old. While art and literature remained as living constant historical factors, music (in an age before recording) had to be realized in performance, in real time and space. For Lamprecht, on the other hand, music, precisely on account of its temporal nature and psychological, non-linguistic power, was a primary factor in history.

  But it was not only Wagnerians who privileged music as a historical force. W. H. Riehl, as skeptical about Wagner as Burckhardt, had argued a half century before Lamprecht that music, as a matter of cultural history, was an essential clue to understanding the past. If Burckhardt believed music to be more ephemeral and thus less promising than art and literature as a source of historical understanding, Riehl took the opposite view. For him “the cultural image of past centuries” was located in music. In music one could “hear chords once listened to by people long gone, just as they heard them.” The “most secret, instinctive moods of a past world’s emotional life … the natural sounds of their souls which were so different from ours” could only be revealed through music. Riehl concluded, “Image and word would be far more distant had they not found expression in music.”45

  The methodological dilemma was how to read the music of the past historically. Riehl understood that listening had a history, just as tuning did; the very frequencies of the pitches we assume to be identical had changed over time. In order to get the proper character of the culture of the past, the “musical ear of the age” had to be grasped.46 For Riehl that historical insight was inaccessible except through the historical reimagining of the music of the past.

  This methodological strategy concealed Riehl’s powerful bias. He idealized the late eighteenth century, particularly Gluck and Haydn, and distrusted the modern enthusiasm for the piano to the exclusion of all other instruments, particularly those closely allied to the voice. To him, the ideal musical education required training on the violin and the piano—combining the instrument of absolute lyricism and the instrument of harmonic drama. Riehl’s ideal of the string quartet as the highest form of music emerges in the short story “Das Quartett,” set in the mid-eighteenth century.47 Riehl, influenced by Schiller’s notion of aesthetic education, argued that for music to communicate emotion, passion, and therefore the essence of a particular historical culture, it had to adhere to a set of objective criteria regarding beauty. Riehl, writing during the 1850s (before Tristan or the Ring), thought that Wagner had gone too far by discarding the inherently objective nature of musical art, particularly in his use of the voice and his reliance on color and orchestral effects. Modern music lacked both the naïve and the sentimental clarity of eighteenth-century norms.

  Riehl did not doubt that music had to progress, particularly as the German-speaking community realized its own communitarian character through culture. But “the basic outlines of the basis of a musical aesthetic” rested in Viennese Classicism. “Understanding,” a dimension of Bildung, was a requisite attribute for Riehl’s beloved middle classes. That meant grasping the aesthetic and historically valid character of music. Wagner’s abandonment of tradition devalued that understanding and rendered music meaningless. The critique of older music as sterile and academic was a function of ignorance: it showed the inability to sense the objective aesthetic values beneath the shifting surface of historical style. Wagner’s appeal to modern expressivity was unpersuasive. His abandonment of the valid syntax and grammar of musical form resulted in the following paradox: “Modern music appears mostly to be passionate without being so; the Classical is, however, passionate without appearing to be so,” Riehl concluded.48

  Riehl countered the widespread notion that Wagner was the exemplar of the modern in music, a leading representative of using music as a means of nuanced subjective expression, by claiming that music, to carry any real meaning—even that of personal emotion—had to respect and adhere to the formal logic that exemplified the true nature of music. Only within that logic could content or meaning be differentiated. The promise of music in the future, therefore, rested on a synthesis of aesthetic norms and music as a mirror of history. Following Schiller’s distinction between the naïve and sentimental, Riehl thought that modernity had gone to extremes in its embrace of the sentimental, abandoning the naïve. Pure naïve simplicity in beauty and expressiveness could be reclaimed on behalf of contemporary German culture through the disciplined immersion in musical Classicism. Riehl, like Herbeck, worried about the loss of an Italianate sense of the melodic.49

  The promise and potential direction of modern music was therefore most audible for Riehl in the German Lied. Its purest naïve form was the folksong, since it represented the most direct and “unmediated” expression of the “mysteries” of feeling, and therefore the “interiority” of a people’s “actions and doings.” Beethoven, Mozart, and Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814)—the widely influential North German writer on music and composer)—had established the norms of the self-conscious “idealistic” adaptation of the song away from its “naturalistic” origins, just as Haydn had extracted the ideal terms of the symphony and sonata form from their roots in dance and folk tunes. Beethoven sought to expand beyond this, to break out of the confines within which Haydn worked. Schubert attempted to achieve the same progress with the Lied.50

  Despite the undeniable greatness of Schubert’s achievement in this form—his recasting of the song as a psychological drama—Riehl believed that Schubert also revealed the limits of the song form. In this, Riehl failed to take into account the formal and harmonic innovation of Schubert’s instrumental music such as the “Wanderer” Fantasy that so attracted Liszt. Indeed, he found such innovation absent in those few larger-scale instrumental works by Schubert he knew. Schubert, by perfecting the song and realizing the expressive potential of the song form, was still trapped by its inherent naïveté. For Riehl, the task facing the modern composer was to find new means for idealistic, aesthetic expression as a way of sustaining the naïve values underlying modern culture. One had to deny one’s own instincts and become self-consciously probing in an historical sense, Riehl noted, to get under the skin of a Reichardt song. In Schubert’s Lieder “the spirit of the age is found complete; it penetrates and sings it entirely naturally.”51 At the same time Schubert honored Classical norms. Wagner, in a desperate attempt to be modern, sacrificed this search for naïve beauty in favor of superficial theatricality. Riehl’s argument helps explain why Schubert was for many, including later anti-Wagnerians such as Felix Weingartner, more akin to Mozart than to Beethoven.

  Riehl’s critique of Wagner, which sought to redefine the challenge facing the contemporary composer in a manner that supported the notion that in Schubert an alternative viable path was discernable, found its echo at the turn of century in Wilhelm Dilthey. For Dilthey Erlebnis, experience (the conduct of daily life), generated the underlying values of an age. These can be found in the “inner relations” of “mental life” that in turn reveal shared, wide-ranging coherences. The evidence of the way individuals fashion a sense of meaning includes forms of autobiography (self-representation), but the shared values of a historical age find their most eloquent expression in the arts—in poetry and music. Like Riehl, Dilthey located the model origins of German modernity in the literature and music of the eighteenth century. Mozart and not Wagner was the model musical dramatist of life. Mozart’s achievement was characteristic of the naturalness and simplicity inherent in musical Classicism.

  In a manner reminiscent of Lamprecht, Dilthey observed that imitating Mozart was no longer possible on account of the “intensification of subjectivity, the renewed emphasis on expression” characteristic of t
he second half of the nineteenth century. Like Riehl, Dilthey allowed himself to render the following aesthetic judgment of contemporary taste: “Compare this all finally with Richard Wagner!”52 By employing material from a mythic German past, insisting on using specific markers for every emotion and passions as metaphysical notions, Wagner ended up “preferring musical abstraction”—a tendency already evident in the selection of mythic subjects for his music dramas. “He knows no lower reality, in which all life is rooted,” Dilthey concluded.53 But Schubert’s music (like Mozart’s) was rooted in that “lower reality”—the real conditions of life in Vienna. It possessed the intense subjectivity of modernity as well as the command of an ideal mode of aesthetic expression. For Dilthey, the “substance” of music, from a historian’s point of view, was in the way sound was organized by the composer’s imagination—the connection between memory and experience realized in music. Instrumental music—the Classical patterns of melody and form—offered the finest means to express artistically the expanse and detail of human experience. The ideal of program music in Liszt and the music drama of Wagner subordinated and limited the power of musical expression.54

  For anti-Wagnerians, even avowed cultural pessimists such as Burckhardt and Brahms, Schubert offered the most optimistic model for the future. Schubert’s inspiration was drawn from individual experience, from a realistic account of life’s struggles. He conveyed his subjective response using the inherited Classical legacy of musical logic and form, without suggesting an academic neoclassicism (which was Riehl’s critique of Mendelssohn). Rather, he presented a viable synthesis of the historical imperative to be within the present moment and the aesthetic imperative to affirm and adhere to norms of musical beauty and form. The popularity Schubert achieved by the early 1900s only confirmed these notions. Schubert became a voice of the contemporary world. He was not merely Beethoven’s immediate successor, the last exponent of a Viennese Classicism that began with Gluck, but an alternative within late Romanticism and a harbinger of the post-Romantic aesthetics later adopted by modernist composers in the 1920s.

  Schubert and the Myth of Old Vienna

  An explicit realist strategy lay behind Schubert’s music. His realism resided in his use of music as a medium for individual self-expression in the face of the severe political, grim economic, and brutal physical circumstances that defined life in Vienna in the 1820s.55 These circumstances emancipated Schubert from remaining a short-lived, brilliant, and somewhat peripheral contemporary of Beethoven and precursor of Romanticism. This recognition of the psychic and narrative realism in Schubert remained most apparent in the very local context in which he had lived and worked: Vienna.

  Burckhardt, an outsider with respect to Vienna, welcomed the massive physical transformation the city experienced after the Imperial patent of 1859 that permitted the demolition of the walls surrounding the inner city, the building of the Ringstrasse, and the integration of communities previously regarded as suburbs into one major metropolis. Arriving there in 1884, Burckhardt exclaimed, “Vienna has become enormously magnificent … something like the distance on the Ring between the Elisabeth Bridge and Schottenring can nowhere be found in Europe any longer.” He raved about the “magical beauty” of the Burgtheater, “the jewel of the neighborhood,” and of the “ravishing” Votivkirche.56

  This enthusiasm for apparent progress was hardly universal among the Viennese, the majority of whom were ambivalent and discomforted by the city’s changes: the massive historicist public structures and the palatial houses and apartment buildings that replaced the Glacis, the stretch of green that once separated the inner city from the suburbs. He likewise failed to see this physical transformation as the symbols of the massive demographic and political changes in the 1860s and 1870s. As the Viennese journalist Adam Müller-Guffenbrunn lamented in a 1915 volume titled Old Viennese Journeys and Visions:

  There are still people among us who have known the old Vienna. They are to be envied; they have seen perhaps one of the loveliest among major European cities. One hears tell of the hesitation with which the Emperor signed the patent of 1859 that resulted in the destruction of the old cityscape. How understandable. We younger people can hardly imagine the peculiar magic than emanated from this cityscape … the wide space of the Glacis, which was never to be built upon, kept all that was not in accord with an aristocratic character away from the inner city…. Old Vienna was a garden city despite its tall walls, and an evening stroll on its ramparts must have been an incomparable delight.57

  The images and accounts of Schubert and his friends happily going out into nature for picnics and parties that accompanied the post-1850 cult of Schubert tell a true story of the topography and social structure of pre-1848 Vienna. A decade after Schubert’s death, Adolf Schmidl published a two-volume guide to Vienna’s surroundings, organized by round-trip journeys that took twenty hours or less. Schmidl was proud that recent improvements in the transportation system (not railroads) had made what was once the province of a few—the ability to avail oneself of a unique connection between urban life and nature—a reality for many:

  The advantages of Vienna—that it has pleasanter surroundings than any other imperial city—are too well known to bear repeating here in detail. But it has only been a few decades that the Viennese has been able to enjoy the charming setting of the city as it deserves, and he owes this in particular to the implementation of the omnibus. Before this truly social institution existed, most of the inhabitants of Vienna had to limit themselves to a few extended excursions into the countryside each year…. Only the rich could afford to spend the summer in the country…. Ten years ago a communal carriage to Hietzing was established … interest soon was so great that it had to go back and forth at all hours of the day. Soon more such conveyances to other neighboring villages followed, and at present no fewer than 60 carriages go daily to the various surrounding areas of Vienna, and 18 of those leave every hour. On Sundays in beautiful weather more than 140 carriages are busy and convey at least 10,000 people. Naturally, the Fiaker coaches were initially the greatest opponents of this undertaking and there was no lack of tensions of all kinds….

  Because of these institutions, a stay in the country is no longer an unaffordable expense; for a few pennies each day, the businessman can come into the city, and a visit to the country is now so much easier for friends and acquaintances…. The situation benefited greatly from the limitation of office hours in most of the offices to 9am to 2pm and the abolition of afternoon hours instituted a few years back…. Because easier traffic connections have allowed them to live at a distance, more officials of small income, who previously were not able to support a family, have dared to marry and lead, however narrow, a life cheered by domestic joys.58

  The nostalgia for an old Vienna framed by nature and green spaces was more than a convenient myth. The physical transformation of Vienna that began in 1859 altered the daily life of the inhabitants; it made the city more susceptible to a rationalized sense of work and the use of time. No wonder that the invocation of the good old days of “Alt Wien” became a prominent vehicle for the expression of resistance and ambivalence not only to the physical and demographic changes that Vienna witnessed between the 1860s and the 1890s, but also to the cultural habits they brought with them. Eduard von Bauernfeld, the friend of Schubert’s and Schwind’s, described in 1872 the era leading up to the post-1859 years this way: “One lived a sort of double life. The old Viennese sense for enjoyment remained intact, as before, and remained loyal to its Strauss and Nestroy, just as one also began to harbor doubts about all the new material ambitions, forerunners of a new spirit.”59

  The rhetoric of lament and loss was picked up not only by voices with deep roots in early nineteenth-century Vienna, but also by newcomers eager to display Viennese credentials. The nostalgia for the physical character of pre-Ringstrasse Vienna framed the basis of a critique of the contemporary attitude to culture. Ferdinand Kürnberger (1821–1879) was a key figure in th
e Viennese 1848 revolution, a great satirical writer whose 1855 novel on America, Der Amerika-Müde, remains a classic; he was admired by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Otto Erich Deutsch. Kürnberger reminisced in 1872 about the shift from a traditional and genuine Viennese wonderment at real talent and beauty, rendered simply, to the present habits of enthusiasm for appearances—a commercialized sense of fashion spellbound by mere fame:

  Instead of the old law, an entirely new and changed natural one has thus emerged; the old law no longer exists. When I still was carrying my books to school, I used to stop reverently in front of the window of an art shop then across from the Court Theater. There I saw Kriehuber’s lithographs of portraits of Löwe, Anschütz, Fichtner, La Roche, of Rettich, Schröder, Neumann, Haitzinger—people known to the boy by their artistic reputation though he had not yet set foot into a theater, and whom he was interested in knowing, be it only by face, through the picture. That was the old style. Today I regularly see in this or that window a life-size headshot photograph in a garish golden frame and have to ask: who is that? Then I’m told: this is the new soubrette to be engaged by Stramper; that is the leading lady to be engaged by Ascher; it is the violinist, the singer who will come to Vienna soon! Nobody knows them yet; they have not yet impressed with their art, thus one cannot yet be interested in them, but yet … their person is the advertisement for their art. And before we owe them for one single artistic pleasure we know the worthy faces of people we may boo at next Sunday. That is a new style!60

  Comparing the Vienna of the day to the earlier era, the legendary and critical chronicler of all things local, Friedrich Schlögl (1821–1892), lamented the same changes. Writing in 1883, he noted that the worlds of theater and music had become dominated by fashion, pretentions, the economics of advertisement and newspaper criticism; the people had become humorless, overcome with an obsession for money. An authentic local aesthetic culture, marked by simplicity and decency, had vanished and with it a natural sense of humor and taste.61 Schlögl was equally suspicious of a false nostalgia for Old Vienna, and lamented that those who longed for a relief from a culture dominated by the day’s all-powerful “era of fraud” through nostalgia were perhaps the only genuine idealists left in a time of fools and “knaves.” Where had Old Vienna’s taste for morality, clarity, lightness, life-affirming and cheerful beauty gone? “Time and people have become different,” he concluded. “One used to go to the theater as the one place for distraction and inspiration, but today people are buried in those evil newspapers. After all, we have become a ‘politically educated’ people.”62