“Those of us who found our life in art”: The Second-Generation Romanticism of the Schubert-Schober Circle, 1820–1825

JOHN M. GINGERICH

Mention of the “Schubert circle” and its members’ quintessential activity, the “Schubertiade,” conjures up an irresistibly appealing image: the intimacy of chamber music, a presiding genius, convivial high spirits, the companionship of gifted friends, and the unlimited promise of youth. The romance of the Schubert circle is perhaps most memorably captured in two well-known depictions: a sepia drawing by Moritz von Schwind, A Schubert Evening at Josef von Spaun’s (see Figure 1), and a watercolor by Leopold Kupelwieser, Party Game of the Schubertians (see Figure 2). Together they seem to illustrate several complementary aspects of the circle: playful and serious, fun-loving exuberance and a solemn devotion to art. And both show Schubert presiding from his accustomed position at the piano: in the Schwind drawing he is in the center, accompanying the singer Johann Michael Vogl, with the host at his left, in a position to turn pages, surrounded by some forty listeners; in the Kupelwieser painting Schubert is shown off to the left side, watching a group of five central figures who are acting out a charade or a tableau vivant, his left hand resting on the keyboard—giving a musical clue?—with Kupelwieser’s dog Drago seated under the piano, both in an attitude of rapt attention to the tableau. Of these two representations, the Schwind drawing is the most iconic, and it also unwittingly illustrates, just beneath its appealing, romantic surface, problems that persist in the historiography of the Schubert circle.

Schwind’s drawing is quite deliberately a retrospective composite. He worked on it in the immediate aftermath of the sensational discovery of the “Unfinished” Symphony in 1865, by which time Schubert had gained a fame he had never enjoyed during his lifetime, and Schubertiades had become enveloped in nostalgia. In revisiting an event that had taken place sometime between 1826 and 1828, he seems to have combined a wish to commemorate personal recollections of such evenings with a desire to provide an honor roll of Schubertians.¹ The listeners are grouped according to artistic field, with the painters Ludwig Kraißl, Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Schwind himself, August Wilhelm Rieder, and Leopold Kupelwieser standing centrally behind the seated ladies, and the dramatists and poets Ernst von Feuchtersleben, Franz Grillparzer, Eduard von Bauernfeld, Johann Senn, Johann Mayrhofer, and Ignaz Castelli grouped on the far right. Schwind included in the crowded collection of faces several who could not possibly have been there: Senn, for example, had been exiled to Tyrol several years before Spaun began hosting Schubertiades, and Eleonore Stohl, who became a well-known Schubert singer during Schwind’s lifetime, was not born until 1832.²

Figure 1. A Schubert Evening at Josef von Spaun’s. Drawing by Moritz von Schwind.

A Schubert Circle with Schubert at Its Center

As a representation of the Schubert circle, Schwind’s drawing illustrates only too well the problematic nature of that term. Over the years the Schubert circle has been invoked time and again without defining its membership or delimiting chronological boundaries: Otto Erich Deutsch’s venerable commentaries on the documents,3 the standard biographies, and the more recent writings on Schubert’s sexuality all assume that the Schubert circle is a self-explanatory entity. Anyone who drank Schmollis with Schubert,⁴ anyone who shared a Stammtisch with him,⁵ anyone who attended Schubertiades or reading parties, anyone who was a classmate at the Stadtkonvikt (City Seminary)⁶ and stayed in touch, has become an undifferentiated member of the Schubert circle.

Figure 2. Party Game of the Schubertians. Watercolor by Leopold Kupelwieser.

Rita Steblin, David Gramit, and before them Moriz Enzinger have expanded our knowledge of some of the subsidiary circles delimited by the Schubert circle. Although their discoveries about these circles tell us many fascinating things about Schubert’s milieu, Schubert did not play a central role, nor was he a central member of most of them. In chronological order, “circles” of which Schubert was a peripheral member, or perhaps a member, or on the brink of becoming a member, are the Linzer Bildungskreis (Educational Circle in Linz, 1811–18), sometimes called the Linzer Tugendbund (League of Virtue), to which his connections were almost always at one remove, through friends;7 the Unsinnsgesellschaft (Nonsense Society, April 1817 until no later than May 1819), of which he was likely a member, although his absence from the only membership list that survives is perhaps an indicator of his less than central status;⁸ the Senn circle (most of 1819 until 20 January 1820), of which, as the name indicates, he was not the central member;9 and the Ludlamshöhle (Ludlam’s Cave, 1817–26), which he was on the verge of joining when it was disbanded by the authorities.¹⁰ Of these, he was probably most active in the Unsinnsgesellschaft, but even there he does not seem to have been at its hub; its life and organization seems to have depended on the three Anschütz brothers, especially Eduard, and on Leopold Kupelwieser.¹¹ None of these subsidiary circles was a Schubert circle, although all involved some close friends of his. They add up to a Schubert circle only in the aggregate, and even the aggregate has no core that would justify naming it after Schubert. The only sense in which any of these were “Schubert” circles is ex post facto: he later became the most famous name associated with them.

Schubert did, however, form the core of one circle, along with his friend Franz von Schober. From 1820 through 1825 a small group of close friends revolved around Schubert and Schober. The Schubertiade is a practice and a term they invented: an evening devoted exclusively to Schubert’s music, whether songs, four-hand piano music, or dances, with the first Schubertiade taking place on 26 January 1821(SDB, 162).¹² That one of their defining activities is named after Schubert is only the most obvious sign of his centrality. Schubert provided in many ways the living embodiment of the circle’s ideals, while Schober was its mouthpiece, even as his example fell short.

The Schubert-Schober circle—or for the sake of euphony, the Schobert circle, a conflation which Schubert himself could not resist—is the hub in the vast wheel known as the Schubert circle.¹³ Of all these circles, the Schobert circle is the only one to which Schubert was essential rather than incidental. Except as seen in the retrospective light of Schubert’s fame, the Schubert circle without the Schobert circle would have been a composite like Schwind’s drawing, but it would be Schwind’s drawing with Schubert half-obscured by shadows somewhere in the last row, instead of front and center at the piano.

Several other factors also lend the Schobert circle a unique significance. The core members shared friendships of great intensity, and their fellowship together formed for a time the center of their creative as well as their social lives. At the peak of their organized activities during the winter of 1822–23 they met once a week for a Schubertiade at the Schober residence, and three times a week to read and discuss dramas and other literature.¹⁴ In addition they frequently met less formally in the afternoon at coffee houses, and in the evening in a designated pub (Stammlokal). In the summers they gathered for festivals (Feste) at Atzenbrugg, a country estate made available for several weeks each year through Schober family connections (SDB, 184). All of these activities revolved around the core members but included others as well.

In addition to the tremendous amount of time committed to these regular meetings, there were other get-togethers that were more intensely personal. The atmosphere is captured in a letter Schubert later wrote to Schober (21 September 1824):

If only we were together, you, Swind, Kuppel, and I, every mishap would seem but a trivial matter; but here we are, separated, each in a different corner, and that is truly my misfortune. I might exclaim with Goethe: “Who will bring back just one hour of that happy time!” That time when we sat together confidingly, and each exposed his artistic children to the others with motherly shyness, expecting, not without some trepidation, the judgment that love and truth were to pronounce; that time when each inspired the other, and thus a united striving for the highest beauty animated us all.15

This intense interaction between the friends occurred during crucial years when several members of the group were first exploring their vocations, while for Schubert those same years bridged his transition from obscurity to first fame. The circle became a crucible for testing its members’ fledgling talents, but it was also, as Schubert’s letter indicates, a place where they forged together a deeper sense of purpose for their art. For Schubert the fateful winter of 1822–23 was particularly poignant, since amid the most intense flurry of the circle’s activities he also irrevocably lost his health when he became infected with syphilis.

As might be expected, this hothouse of creative ferment could not last. The circle began to dissolve in 1823 for the most pedestrian of reasons, when several core members, including Schober, left Vienna for extended stays abroad, while Schubert’s syphilitic symptoms made him unfit for social gatherings for extended periods of time. The circle exploded in the fall of 1824 when a personal dispute between Schober and another member, Franz von Bruchmann, forced nearly everyone to take sides. But behind the personal acrimony lurked deeper divisions: the dispute soon enough revealed a break in the consensus the group had shared—a larger framework of political, social, and religious convictions that gave the arts an indispensable role in society. The fracture of the circle creates a unique prism not provided by any of the other circles for gauging Schubert’s own values, because Schubert unhesitatingly and unwaveringly took Schober’s side in the dispute with Bruchmann.

The Schobert circle, then, in addition to forming the hub of the Schubert circle due to its membership, was also central to the lives of its core members in ways that none of the other groups were. During this key transition in their lives each was struggling to find the work to which to dedicate himself and with it a happy meeting of inclination, talent, and a deeper sense of purpose. The importance they attached to the Schobert circle, the golden time they associated with it, is revealed in letter after letter they wrote to each other once it had dissolved.

After its dissolution Schubert never formed nor joined another similar circle, and although he looked back upon it with nostalgia, in many ways he had outgrown it. Not all, but many of the friendships endured, even while the circle did not. Painful as it was for Schubert, the end of the circle also freed him from their shared literary-musical-artistic preoccupations, so that beginning in 1824 he could concentrate on more purely musical matters with new compositions in Beethoven’s instrumental genres.16

The Membership and Identity of the Circle

While the winter of 1822–23 was the high point in the life of the Schobert circle, a symmetrical extension of the time frame, from 1820 to 1825, provides the necessary context for understanding the buildup to that central winter and its aftermath. The core members during those five years were Schubert (b. 1797), Franz von Schober (b. 1796), Franz von Bruchmann (b. 1798), Leopold Kupelwieser (b. 1796), and Moritz von Schwind (b. 1804), with the significant additions of Johann Mayrhofer (b. 1787) during the first year, of Eduard von Bauernfeld (b. 1802) during the last year, and of Josef von Spaun (b. 1788) always in the background.

The mutual loyalty and admiration of Schubert and Schober formed the unassailable bedrock of their circle. Josef Kenner (b. 1794), who had extensive discussions and debates with Schober in the Linzer Bildungskreis, but rarely had personal contact after 1816 with either Schober or Schubert,¹⁷ has given us the most extensive (and harshest) assessment of Schober’s character:

Schubert’s genius subsequently attracted, among other friends, the heart of a seductively amiable and brilliant young man, endowed with the noblest talents, whose extraordinary gifts would have been so worthy of a moral foundation and would have richly repaid stricter schooling than the one he unfortunately had. But shunning so much effort as unworthy of genius and summarily rejecting such fetters as a form of prejudice and restriction, while at the same time arguing with brilliant and ingratiatingly persuasive power, this scintillating individuality, as I was told later, won a lasting and pernicious influence over Schubert’s honest susceptibility. Anyone who knew Schubert knows how he was made of two natures, foreign to each other, how powerfully the craving for pleasure dragged his soul down to the slough of moral degradation, and how highly he valued the utterances of friends he respected, and so will find his surrender to the false prophet, who embellished sensuality in such a flattering manner, all the more understandable…. There reigned in this whole family a deep moral depravity, so that it was not to be wondered at that Franz von Schober went the same way. Only he devised a philosophical system for his own reassurance and to justify himself in the eyes of the world, as well as to provide a basis for his aesthetic oracle, about which he was probably as hazy as any of his disciples…. The need for love and friendship emerged with such egotism and jealousy that to his adherents he alone was all, not only prophet, but God himself…. Anyone who did not worship him exclusively and follow him blindly was unfit to be elevated to his intellectual heights and anyone who eventually turned away from him …, he allowed to fall away as being unworthy. These idiosyncrasies also effaced his respect for Mine and Thine, as regards marriage as well as in respect of the property of his followers. Just as he himself gave away what he did not happen to want, he had no hesitation in reclaiming it if he wanted it again …; as regards women he was completely unscrupulous, for he had learned to recognize only two kinds: those with whom he was successful and were therefore worthy of him, and those with whom this was not the case and who were therefore not worthy of him (SMF, 85–87).

Kenner’s testimony needs to be taken with a grain of salt; nevertheless, he helps us understand Schober’s attractions and the direction of his influence.18 Membership in the circle required at least a qualified endorsement of Schober’s philosophy, but as we will see, the circle’s appropriation of it did not always wear the unattractive face portrayed by Kenner.

The most revealing character sketch of Schober from within the circle is the 1825 Sylvesternacht (New Year’s Eve) satire written by Eduard von Bauernfeld (SDB, 489–94). In this farcical drama Schober is Pantalon von Przelavtsch. After giving a thorough critique of Columbine’s (Anna Hönig’s) smallness of bust and shortness of thigh, Pantalon shares the distilled wisdom of his wide experience and study by holding forth at great and flowery length on the virtues of rest and sex (Scene 8). According to Pantalon, the essence of life is rest, embodied superlatively by the plant. The plant does not strive, nor gather; it only lets itself be viewed. But it is not therefore without movement and inner life. It lavishes clouds of scent; that is its movement. And it even allows itself an act, but only one, since there is only one essential act: permitting its manly seed to mix with the female, and so to propagate its noble, godly race. This is the highest vocation, and Pantalon is willing to show the way altruistically, sacrificing class, employment, and profession (Stand, Beschäftigung, Gewerbe). Two and a half years later Bauernfeld was still expressing satisfaction at the aptness of this characterization of Schober.19

Josef von Spaun (his nickname was “Pepi”) played a kind of elder-brother role in the circle. He had been encouraging Schubert’s musical talents ever since Schubert first came to the Stadtkonvikt in 1808, where Spaun was running the student orchestra and playing the violin while he pursued his law studies. In those early years Spaun kept Schubert supplied with music paper, gave him his first experiences of opera, and introduced him to an extensive circle of potentially useful social contacts. Spaun got to know Schober through the Linzer Bildungskreis, with which both he and Schober engaged in extensive discussions and correspondence about aesthetic and moral issues, and of which his brother Anton von Spaun (b. 1790) was a central member; when Schober moved to Vienna in 1815 to study law it was likely Spaun who first introduced him to Schubert (SDB, 49).

Over the years Spaun continued to be interested and supportive, but receded further into the background when he moved to Linz in the fall of 1821 to become a tax assessor, and then to Lemberg in distant Polish Galicia, where he received his next bureaucratic post. He did not return to live in Vienna until the spring of 1826, and in the meantime participated in the circle chiefly through his letters.²⁰

In the years prior to their most intensive time together, the winter of 1822–23, the core members who gathered around Schubert and Schober tended to be young men they knew from preexisting circles. The circle around the poet Johann Chrysostomus Senn (b. 1795), who had been a fellow student of Schubert’s in the Stadtkonvikt, contributed at least two important members to the Schobert circle.21 The student of philosophy Franz von Bruchmann and Schubert had both been part of the Senn circle when it came to an abrupt and traumatic end after the police raided one of its gatherings in March 1820 on the suspicion that it was a nationalist student fraternity in the German mold.²² The subsequent investigation led to Senn’s arrest and internal exile to Tyrol in March 1821; Schubert never saw him again. Schubert first got to know Bruchmann well through Senn, and although Bruchmann had a falling out with Schober shortly after Senn’s arrest, he rejoined the group around Schubert and Schober in the summer of 1822.²³ For a short time he became one of the circle’s most important members, but by the fall of 1823 he had “lost his halo” (discussed below), and a year later (in the fall of 1824) he precipitated a crisis of loyalty and irrevocably parted ways with his erstwhile friends.

The poet Johann Mayrhofer participated in the Bildungskreis as well as in the Senn circle, although he was not present during the raid that led to Senn’s arrest.²⁴ Schubert had known him since 1814 when he first set one of Mayrhofer’s poems (Am See, D124) and Spaun then introduced them, but during the years of the Senn circle Mayrhofer was one of Schubert’s most constant companions since they also lived together. After the dispersal of the Senn circle Mayrhofer, like Bruchmann, transferred his loyalties to the Schobert circle, but for Mayrhofer his living arrangements with Schubert and his participation in the new circle both ended before the year 1820 was out.

The job Mayrhofer had in the imperial bureaucracy as “dritter Bücherrevisor” (a post in the extensive censorship bureaucracy) conflicted with the ideals of the Senn circle, with those of the Schobert circle, as well as with his own, and even if the other members excused his job as an existential necessity, his attendance would have furnished a constant reminder of the disharmony in which he was living.²⁵ As Anton Holzapfel later remembered (1858): “Certainly the cleavage between Mayrhofer’s inclination and his position in life, for he was compelled to act as a respectable Imperial book censor whereas he was an enthusiastic admirer of intellectual freedom, gave rise to the malady in his extremely sensitive soul and to the difficulty of [Schubert’s] living with such a character.”²⁶ Schubert moved out of their apartment toward the end of 1820, perhaps because he and Mayrhofer became estranged, or perhaps because they just found it difficult to live together (SDB, 163). He continued to set Mayrhofer’s poems to music, and in June 1823 he dedicated his settings of three Mayrhofer poems, Op. 21, to the poet. In all Schubert set nearly fifty of Mayrhofer’s poems, second only to the number of poems he set by Goethe.²⁷ On the other hand, Schubert set no Mayrhofer poems after 1824 (SDB, 332).28 In addition, after 1820 there are only two documented occasions when Mayrhofer participated in an activity at which either Schober or Schubert were present: the 11 November 1823 Schubertiade at Bruchmann’s, and the 15 December 1826 Schubertiade at Spaun’s.²⁹ Mayrhofer’s distance from the circle after 1820 and from Schubert after 1824 were probably due less to any clash over principles than to Mayrhofer’s pessimistic intellectual outlook, at odds with the youthful optimism and idealism of the other members who were about ten years younger, coupled with Mayrhofer’s increasingly melancholy, hypochondriac, and misanthropic disposition. Schubert’s death was a further blow that nearly put a stop to Mayrhofer’s writing.³⁰ He made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide in 1831, and succeeded in 1836.

Even before Mayrhofer had faded from the picture, the circle gained a new and vital member. During the summer of 1820, the second year Schubert participated in the Atzenbrugg festivals, a new “triumvirate” emerged, consisting of Schubert, Schober, and the painter Leopold Kupelwieser.³¹ Schubert probably first met Kupelwieser in 1816 at Professor Heinrich Watteroth’s house, where Spaun was then living, but his main point of contact with Kupelwieser may well have been the Unsinnsgesellschaft.³² Though other members of the circle had some facility at sketching scenes and faces—Schober, for example, who had facility at everything—with Kupelwieser the circle had gained its first serious painter. It soon gained another.

In 1822 Moritz von Schwind began to spend more and more time with the circle, and by the fall of 1823 had become one of its most important members, the younger-brother counterpart to Spaun’s elder-brother role in the circle. A later member of the inner circle, Eduard von Bauernfeld, who had known Schwind since school days, wrote the most vivid depiction of him during these years. Bauernfeld’s retrospective essay (1869) gives us a glimpse of Schwind’s moody temperament, his aesthetic predilections, and his hero worship of Schubert:

Schwind, an artist through and through, was scarcely less cut out for music than he was for painting. The Romantic element that was in him was now awakened for the first time by the musical creations of his older friend [Schubert]—this was the music for which his soul longed! And so, with all the fervor and tenderness of his youth, he drew close to the master; he was utterly devoted to him and in the same way Schubert, who jokingly called him his beloved, took him completely to heart…. “The way he composes is the way I should like to paint!” was the cry in his heart….

Although the young artist’s nature harbored much that was tender, soft, almost feminine, he often brooded and imagined the worst, was perpetually restless, and suffered self-inflicted doubts about his doings and leavings…. He was easily excited, and among friends, when he had hardly sipped wine or punch, he would suddenly cross from darkest brooding to the most frolicsome merriment.33

By late 1823 the circle’s glory years were over, at least for Schubert. He himself was sick, and Schober and Kupelwieser had embarked on extensive travels abroad, to Breslau (Wrocław) in Silesia, where Schober had gone to escape unwelcome attention while he tried his hand at the socially unacceptable profession of actor, and to Rome, where Kupelwieser had accompanied the Russian nobleman Alexis Beresin as an artistic chronicler.³⁴ The letters they sent to each other during the course of the following year provide us the best insight as to the nature of the bonds among the friends, and as to how they themselves viewed the significance of the circle.

Schubert to Schober (in Breslau), 30 November 1823:

Our circle, as indeed I had expected, has lost its central focus without you. Bruchmann, who has returned from his trip, is no longer the same. He seems to conform to the conventions of the world, and already thereby loses his halo, which in my opinion was due only to his determined disregard of all worldly affairs…. True, as a substitute for you and Kupelwieser we received four individuals, namely: the Hungarian Mayer, Hönig, Smetana and Steiger, but the majority of such individuals make the circle only more insignificant instead of better. What is the good of a lot of quite ordinary students and officials to us? If Bruchmann is not there, or even ill, we go on for hours under the supreme direction of Mohn hearing nothing but eternal talk about riding, fencing, horses, and hounds. If it continues like this, I don’t suppose I’ll stand it for long among them…. For the rest, I hope to regain my health, and this recovered treasure will let me forget many a sorrow; only you, dear Schober, I shall never forget, for unfortunately, what you meant to me no one else can mean. (SDB, 300)

Schwind to Schober (in Breslau), 20 January 1824:

The greatest things known to me on earth are love, beauty, and wisdom. You have yourself ranked me with you and Schubert, and I could not bear the delight of it. Pain has cleansed me, so that to be third among you means everything to me. (SDB, 324)

Schubert to Kupelwieser (in Rome), 31 March 1824:

At last I can once again wholly pour out my soul to someone. For you are so good and worthy, you will be sure to forgive many things that others would hold very much against me.— In a word, I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world…. Thus, joyless and friendless, would I pass my days, if Schwind didn’t visit me sometimes and turn on me a ray from those sweet days of yore.— Our circle (reading circle), as you probably know already, has done itself to death owing to a reinforcement of that rough chorus of beer-drinkers and sausage-eaters, and its dissolution is due in a couple of days—though I have hardly visited it myself since your departure. (SDB, 338–39)

Schwind to Kupelwieser (in Rome), 9 June 1824:

[When I think about] how I long sought you, Schubert, Bruchmann, and was almost ashamed of this seeking, and trembled at the thought of finding you, how I came among you and found myself loved, while I dared wish for nothing more than to see you—how then could I have been different than I was? Now that all are gone, love sinks into the ground, and as vital fellowship has vanished, I am holding fast to appreciation and the essence of things, which is eternal and unshakable. (SDB, 351)

Schubert (from Zseliz) to Schwind, August 1824:

I am still in good health, thank God, and would feel quite comfortable here if only I had you, Schober, and Kupelwieser with me. (SDB, 370)

Schober (in Breslau) to Schubert, 2 December 1824:

You, my good, ever faithful friend, you continue to value my love, you have loved me for my own sake, as my Schwind and Kupelwieser also will remain faithful. And are we not precisely those who found our life in art, while the others merely entertained themselves with it, are we not those who solely and certainly understood our inmost natures, as only a German can? (SDB, 385)

In these letters and others the special relationship between Schubert, Schober, Kupelwieser, and Schwind is touched on again and again. Even before the open break with Schober, Bruchmann had “lost his halo” (Schubert’s letter of 30 November 1823), and the only letter we have that places him within the charmed circle is Schwind’s of 9 June 1824, where he names Bruchmann instead of Schober. With that single exception, no other names are poured into the crucible of passionate friendship, although Senn’s name continues to be invoked as a distant inspiration.35

Whatever else may have comprised what Kenner called Schober’s “philosophical system” and his “hazy aesthetic oracle,” these letters reveal a commitment to the importance of art as the defining characteristic of the circle. What united them was a vocational commitment to art, of a sort that Schober (born in Sweden) considered possible only for “a German” (letter of 2 December 1824). The friends inspired, shaped, and criticized each other’s work (Schubert’s letter of 21 September 1824, quoted above). Schober made a distinction between the four friends who “found our life in art” and the others, who found only entertainment, while Schubert emphasized a fellowship of artistic creativity; those unable to produce “children” of their own had no place in it. This is consistent with other evidence: the friends sometimes called themselves the “Canewas” circle, because when a person was under consideration for possible membership, Schubert would invariably ask “Kann er was?” (Can he produce something?).³⁶ Bruchmann, too, confirmed the supremacy of art and the artist in the circle, although by 1827 when he wrote his lines, he was looking back with a jaundiced eye rather than with nostalgia. As he later recounted, he entered the winter of 1822–23, a winter whose “sparkling life, elevated with music and poetry, stupefied me,” with the following credo:

Only art has value, everything else is worthless. The productive artist is = creator = God. All others are but shades, are empty frumpery, useful only as means serving the ends of the artist. Human liberty is a delusion, an iron fate governs all, and even the gods are not excepted. Life after death is a phantom without proof, and only heroes and artists are immortal, because their fame lives on in the memory of humanity.³⁷

If the overriding importance of art and of the creative artist was the creed of the Schobert circle, the Schubertiade was their holy communion at the altar of art. They did not object to fun; the Schubertiade was a party and it was a house concert, but it was also serious. The rapt absorption with which the Schubertians observed their rituals is captured by Schwind’s commemoration of the Schubertiade, and Schubert’s familiar setting of Schober’s poem, An die Musik (D547), a hymn to the redemptive power of music, expresses well the religious fervor of their shared commitment.38

The intensity and passion of the circle’s years from 1819 to 1823 would never return, but for several months in the spring of 1825 an important new friendship compensated partly for the loss of the earlier close-knit circle. Eduard von Bauernfeld drank Schmollis with Schubert in February 1825; he, Schubert, and Schwind were soon inseparable.³⁹ Bauernfeld was a talented author of Lustspiele (theatrical comedies); he had a lively mind, a caustic wit, and diligent work habits. The new friendship was soon interrupted, however, for in May Schubert left on a six-month tour of upper Austria with the singer Johann Michael Vogl (b. 1768).

In the summer of 1825 the old friends began to trickle back to Vienna. Schober returned in July, and Kupelwieser in early August (SDB, 428, 450); after nearly two years’ separation there was at long last a great reunion among the friends when Schubert rejoined them in October (SDB, 469). And finally, in late April of 1826, Josef von Spaun returned to Vienna (SDB, 522). The old friends, without Bruchmann but joined by Bauernfeld, were all back together again, the circle reconstituted. At least superficially a gradual efflorescence of all its former activities began: it still functioned as a forum for a lively exchange of ideas and opinions; Schubertiades began again in early 1825;⁴⁰ the friends resumed their custom of meeting every second day or so at a Stammlokal by November 1826 at the latest;⁴¹ and in early 1828 weekly readings of new literary and dramatic works, suspended since 1824, began afresh (SDB, 706).

But the circle never quite regained its former importance in the lives of its principal members. They had changed. For one thing they had grown older. No longer were they an idealistic and impressionable group of young men, discovering and inventing a new world together. Not only Schubert and Kupelwieser, but now also Schwind and Bauernfeld had established a record of promising success in his chosen field, and each was extremely involved in his own work.⁴² Schober’s idleness and lack of focus made for a glaring contrast, and though his friends (especially Schubert) remained loyal to him, his personality and his opinions began to be treated less reverently.⁴³ Immediately after returning from Rome, Kupelwieser had lived with Schober for three months (August–October 1825), but soon distanced himself from the circle; by November, Schubert and Schwind were complaining that they hardly ever saw him. Anton Ottenwalt’s letter to his brother-in-law Josef von Spaun leaves no doubt that the health of the old circle had not been restored:

There is no circle around him [Schober]; Schwind follows him with slavish devotion, and Schubert too still likes his company, and a certain Bauernfeld is his roommate…. He [Kupelwieser] is … keeping to himself, so that Schubert and Schwind complain about their faithful old companion, and indeed about the decay of the old fraternity.44

The meetings of the reading group (Lesegesellschaft) were held every Saturday at Schober’s house, with a few new, eager young disciples in attendance; presumably Schubert participated, since he once again lived with Schober.⁴⁵ Schober also presided with dependable regularity over the gatherings at the Stammlokal, but Schwind and Bauernfeld now frequently found these occasions of insufficient importance to keep them from their work.⁴⁶ Consequently a full quorum of friends was rarely present: usually it was just Schober, Schubert, Spaun, and two new drinking companions, Fritz and Franz von Hartmann.

During the early months of 1825 regular weekly Schubertiades had been revived, but on a new basis. They were now held in the home of Josef Witteczek (b. 1787) and his wife, which they shared for a time with Karl Ritter von Enderes (b. 1787). These men had both been introduced to Schubert by Spaun, were both Spaun’s age (approximately ten years older than Schubert and Schober), and like Spaun they were art-loving career civil-service bureaucrats.⁴⁷ For the rest of Schubert’s life either Enderes, Witteczek, or Spaun hosted the Schubertiades in Vienna.⁴⁸ They and the colleagues from the civil service they invited, along with wives and other family members, now set the tone on these occasions.⁴⁹ The musical evenings were no longer just another activity of the Schobert circle, but became a salon for an older group of bureaucrats and their wives, albeit a salon for which Schubert, Vogl, and the pianist Josef von Gahy (b. 1793) provided the entertainment.

The diffuse group of participants in the Schubertiades, Stammlokale, and the Lesegesellschaft after the fall of 1825 can be called a revived Schubert circle, but for the most important members of the erstwhile circle this loose agglomeration of activities and personalities was a pale continuation, honoring the vivid memories they cherished of the constitutive role the circle had once played in their lives, without replacing it. The friendships formed between Schubert, Schober, Bruchmann, Kupelwieser, and Schwind from 1820 to 1823, and between Schubert, Schwind, and Bauernfeld in the spring of 1825, had been more passionate, and remained more important, than any subsequent attachments to new members of the circle. Moreover, the ideology and practices of the circle during those years had formed a cohesive whole, had given a meaning and a direction to their lives to which all except Bruchmann remained dedicated. And so it is the friendships among these six men that we must investigate if we wish to understand the significance of the Schobert circle.

Egalitarianism and a Communitarian Ethic

The letters between Schubert, Schober, Kupelwieser, and Schwind, as well as Schubert’s “Kann er was?” testify to a fellowship based to a large extent on artistic compatibility and achievement. Implicit in such a (qualified) meritocracy is a refusal to observe the class divisions that governed social relations in the larger society.

Schubert came from a family of schoolteachers, a profession that was respectable but did not pay well.50 The first summer Schubert spent as a music tutor with the Esterházy family in Zseliz, for example, he earned almost as much each month as he had earned during the whole previous year of teaching for his father (75 florins CM/month as opposed to 80 florins CM/year).⁵¹ Whatever its dignified pretensions to culture and learning, in its economic standard Schubert’s family ranked near the bottom of that small minority of Viennese who earned their living through mental instead of physical labor. And, unlike Beethoven, Schubert never made a splash as a virtuoso in the salons of the high nobility, never secured highly aristocratic patrons willing to guarantee him a handsome yearly stipend merely to remain in Vienna, never taught the Archduke, and never cultivated the friendship of the wealthiest nobles in the land.

Schubert’s humble background has often been invoked to explain his comparative dearth of hobnobbing with the high nobility. In fact, from his schooldays at the Stadtkonvikt, Schubert was used to socializing with the sons of the nobility, and as an adult many, if not most, of Schubert’s friends belonged to the minor nobility. In the inner circle were Ritter von Bruchmann, Ritter von Schober, von Schwind, Edler von Spaun, and later von Bauernfeld; only Schubert, Mayrhofer, and Kupelwieser did not sport the telltale “von.”⁵² In the circle of next proximate circumference were Baron von Schönstein, Freiherr von Doblhoff, and Freiherr von Grünbühel (Ferdinand Mayerhofer) from the higher aristocracy; Ritter von Uysdael (Walcher), Ritter von Enderes, Edler von Sonnleithner (father and son got their titles in 1828), von Gahy, von Bocklet, von Streinsberg, von Smetana, and the various members of the von Hartmann family. Schubert was used to being treated as an equal by all these people.

In Schubert’s fellowship with members of his circle (of whatever circumference), there seems to have reigned a social egalitarianism. This was a prerequisite for the straightforward candor and complete lack of pretense that by all accounts were central to Schubert’s character, and that he treasured in his friends. Bauernfeld later wrote about the kind of socializing Schubert disliked:

His favorite companions were artists and people with artistic affinities. On the other hand he suffered from a genuine dread of commonplace and boring people, of philistines, whether from the upper or middle classes, of the people, that is, who are usually known as “educated”; and Goethe’s outcry: “I would rather become worse than be bored,” was and remained his motto, as it did ours. Among commonplace people he felt lonely and depressed, was generally silent and apt to become ill-humored as well, no matter how much attention was paid to this man of rising fame.53

Just as Schubert did not hold aristocratic titles in awe, neither did formal education in the absence of artistic talent or achievement make someone a desirable companion. Everyone in the group except for Schubert had a background of studies in the Gymnasium, and all except Schubert had at least some university education. Spaun, Mayrhofer, Bruchmann, Bauernfeld, and Schober had all at least begun law studies, and Mayrhofer studied theology as well.⁵⁴ Schwind and Kupelwieser studied art at the university, and both later became professors. Schubert knew that his relative lack of formal education was a difference of choice rather than ability; when his voice changed in 1812 he could have chosen to continue his studies at state expense, after which one more year of humanities studies, and two more years of studies in philosophy would have prepared him for university.⁵⁵ The Schobert circle certainly did not lack for intellectual acumen or confidence, yet Schubert, despite his lack of formal education, held his own at its center. From the letter Anton Ottenwalt sent to Spaun (27 July 1825) we see that his friends deferred to Schubert not only because of his musical achievements, but also because of the force and persuasiveness with which he could articulate his convictions when he felt at ease:

We sat together until not far from midnight, and I have never seen him like this, nor heard: serious, profound, and as though inspired. How he talked of art, of poetry, of his youth, of friends and other people who matter, of the relationship of ideals to life, etc.! I was more and more amazed at such a mind, of which it has been said that its artistic achievement is so unconscious, hardly revealed to and understood by himself, and so on. Yet how simple all this was!— I cannot tell you of the extent and unity of his convictions—but there were glimpses of a worldview that is not merely acquired, and the share that worthy friends may have in it by no means detracts from the individuality shown by all this. (SDB, 442)

Schubert’s egalitarianism was much more than a mere character trait. It formed an explicit part of his ideology, part of what he had in mind when he harshly criticized Bruchmann for “conforming to worldly conventions.”

Some of Schubert’s friends—Bruchmann, Schober, Spaun—came from relatively well-off families whose money would always provide a cushion if a particular need arose. But other friends—especially Kupelwieser, Schwind, and Bauernfeld—depended like Schubert on their own resources from an early age, and earned their money more or less as freelancers. Kupelwieser began to earn more money at an earlier age than Schubert; by 1815 he was already in a position to support himself largely through the commissions he received.56 But for all four of these self-supporting artists, what income they had arrived in unpredictable and irregular installments, incompatible with any notions of budgeting. They negotiated the vicissitudes of their precarious economic situation by practicing an informal community of goods. When Schubert was flush, they shared in his good fortune for a while; naturally, with such an arrangement, the money never lasted long.⁵⁷ Bauernfeld later gave a vivid description of the sort of life he, Schwind, and Schubert led together in the spring of 1825 (while Kupelwieser was in Rome):

In the matter of property the communistic viewpoint prevailed; hats, boots, neckerchiefs, even coats and certain other articles of clothing too, if they but chanced to fit, were common property; but gradually, through manifold use, as a result of which a certain partiality for the object always ensues, they passed into undisputed private possession. Whoever was flush at the moment paid for the other, or for the others. Now it happened, from time to time, that two had no money and the third—not a penny! Naturally, among the three of us, it was Schubert who played the part of a Croesus and who, off and on, used to be swimming in money, if he happened to dispose of a few songs or even of a whole cycle, as in the case of the Walter Scott songs for which Artaria or Diabelli paid him f500 WW [fl. 200 CM]—a fee with which he was highly satisfied and which he wanted to use sparingly, though this, as always hitherto, remained merely a good intention. To begin with there would be high living and entertaining, with money being spent right and left—then we were short on commons again! In short, we alternated between want and plenty. To one such time of plenty I am indebted for having heard Paganini.58

The penurious members also relied on the generosity of the families of the well-to-do members of their circle when necessary, in particular the Schober and Bruchmann families. Schubert repeatedly depended on the Schobers, in their successive residences, to put a roof over his head: they enabled him to leave his parental home when they took him in as a guest from the fall of 1816 until August 1817; he also lived with the family for most of 1822 and 1823, and from March 1827 until August 1828, when they made three rooms available to him, the most living space he ever had to himself. Between 1816 and 1828 Schubert lived with the Schobers approximately four years. Although Schubert had the most occasion to take advantage of it, the Schobers’ hospitality also extended to the other members of the inner circle. When Leopold Kupelwieser returned to Vienna in August 1825 from his long trip to Italy, he lived with Schober until he could find other quarters.⁵⁹ As soon as Kupelwieser moved out, Bauernfeld moved in, and stayed with Schober from October 1825 until February of the next year (SDB, 462). During the spring of 1826, both Schwind and Schubert stayed temporarily with Schober (SDB, 931). And in November of 1828, when Schober was near bankruptcy, he nevertheless sent money to Schwind in Munich, so that he could continue his studies there (SDB, 828, 899). Schober seems to have squandered most of his family’s fortune, assisted by his indulgent mother, but his generosity could always be counted on to help one of his more diligent friends from the inner circle during a cash crisis (SDB, 230–31).

In addition to running a boarding house for destitute friends in Vienna, the Schobers made their summer retreat, Atzenbrugg, available to the Schobert circle. Apparently the Bruchmanns did the same with their summer house, Mutwille, from 1819 to 1823 (SDB, 278–79). Outside of Vienna, during his long trips of 1819, 1823, and 1825, Schubert was able to depend on Vogl’s deep pockets and on the hospitality of the Spaun family and their friends in Linz; his old friend Anton Ottenwalt married Josef von Spaun’s sister Marie in 1819, and Josef introduced Schubert to the Hartmann family in July of 1823 (SDB 284–85). In Graz Schubert could rely on Karl and Marie Pachler and the brothers Anselm and Josef Hüttenbrenner.

The Sexual Mores of the Circle

Twenty-five years after Maynard Solomon first posed the question, Schubert’s homosexuality remains a matter of speculation, unproven and likely unprovable.60 The strongest evidence that Schubert had sex with men is two references to his need for “peacocks,” the first a letter to him from Schwind, the second an entry in Bauernfeld’s diary.⁶¹ Bauernfeld explicitly mentions Benvenuto Cellini in this context, while Schwind makes the point that the satisfaction of Schubert’s fleshly needs requires money, which his friends do not have. But even these comments are equivocal, since Benvenuto Cellini was not only one of history’s most flamboyant homosexuals, but also one of history’s best-known syphilitics—and we know that Schubert had syphilis, so the two mentions of Benvenuto Cellini could refer to syphilis without necessarily indicating homosexuality.

As to the other men in the Schobert circle: no one over the last twenty-five years has provided grounds for speculation about the homosexuality of Spaun, Kupelwieser, and Bruchmann. The sexual orientation of the singer Johann Michael Vogl, and of Mayrhofer, Schober, Schwind, and Bauernfeld has been the object of some discussion, but a case for homo-sexuality for any of the latter three remains flimsy, based on nothing more than the hoariest stereotypes: Kenner’s description of Schober as “depraved,”⁶² Bauernfeld’s description of Schwind as “tender, soft, almost feminine,” and Bauernfeld’s bachelorhood.

The evidence we do have concerning the sexual lives of Schober, Schwind, and Bauernfeld is unanimously heterosexual. Schober’s continual involvement with a series of women, including Spaun’s and Bruchmann’s sisters, and references to his unscrupulous sexual behavior with women are well documented.63 Schwind’s stormy courtship of Anna “Netti” Hönig has left a pervasive trail in the Schubert documents from 1824 until after Schubert’s death, and his involvement with other women both before and after Hönig is also documented.⁶⁴ As for Bauernfeld, when he joined the circle in early 1825 he was in love with “Clotilde,” and had been so for at least four years.⁶⁵ He eventually decided not to marry her (the affair lasted from 1821 to 1826) “because he could not remain true to one woman alone.”⁶⁶

Other observations also testify to heterosexual practices: Schwind’s jealousy on Netti’s account could be easily aroused, as for example on one occasion when Bauernfeld walked her home at night.⁶⁷ On another occasion Schubert wrote to Ferdinand von Mayerhofer, who was on a surveying trip in Carinthia, to advise him to be more aggressive in his courtship of Jeanette von Mitis, because Schwind was “comforting” her.⁶⁸ Another example: Schober, Schwind, and Bauernfeld “worshipped” a particularly beautiful woman (no matter that she was married), provocatively named Kurzrock.⁶⁹ And one last example is Schober writing to Bauernfeld in June 1826: “Schwind’s mawkishness also makes him so thankless toward fate that he doesn’t even recognize his good fortune. For example, yesterday I met five young women at his place who were with him half the day, one of whom was gorgeous, yes, alluring, and would rather go to Grinzing [than] into the ruins of Windsor, but he is a painter, and will no doubt be looking for antiquities.”⁷⁰

Similar examples could fill many pages. They contradict the notion that the friends were united by secret homosexual affinities, and that homosexuality gave the circle its identity and sense of purpose. For though it makes good sense that the friends would use code to describe Schubert’s sex life, given the political situation and the possibility that letters would be opened, one cannot reasonably suppose that, if homo-sexuality (or homoeroticism) was the affinity that gave their circle its identity, they would pepper their correspondence and their private diaries with references to the physical attractiveness of various women, flirtations with women, minute details of the progress of various courtships of women, and petty jealousies and teasings among themselves concerning all of these. That this was an elaborate design to frustrate prying eyes is not only wholly unbelievable, it would have also debased the very currency of their discourse among themselves, which is everywhere revealed as frank and intimate.

In summary, there is plenty of evidence that the primary sexual orientation of Schober, Bruchmann, Spaun, Schwind, Bauernfeld, and Kupelwieser was heterosexual, and no convincing evidence that any of them was bisexual, much less that the primary sexual orientation of the Schobert circle was a homosexual one, and still less that the cohesion and identity of the group depended on its status as a secret homosexual fraternity.

At the same time there is no doubt that a certain tension existed between the identity of the group, the loyalties of its members to one another, and the loyalties exacted by serious courtship and marriage. The break and subsequent feud between Schober and Bruchmann concerned Schober’s courtship of Bruchmann’s sister, and was the greatest conflagration experienced by the circle, but lesser flare-ups were also due to courtships that called into question the primacy of group loyalties. Sometime between the middle of April and the beginning of July 1825, for example, Schubert took a dislike to Anna Hönig, or at least Schwind felt this to be the case; Schwind remained upset for a time because Schubert seemed to be avoiding his company, and sent him a series of letters, assuring him that Netti had only the highest regard for him and would never have intentionally slighted him.71

The men of the circle whose courtships concluded successfully with marriage soon dropped out of the circle. Kupelwieser carried on a long courtship with Johanna Lutz, who participated in the circle’s formal activities and kept him well apprised of his friends’ doings while he was away in Italy. For the first several years of his courtship it does not seem to have affected at all his relationships within the circle, but by the time Kupelwieser and Johanna married in September of 1826, both confined their participation in the circle’s activities to occasional attendance at Schubertiades.

Spaun returned to Vienna in the spring of 1826, after an absence of five years, during which he had served his professional apprenticeship in the provinces. As we have seen, over the next two years he frequently hosted Schubertiades and was one of the most regular participants at the evening Stammtisch. On 6 January 1828 he became secretly engaged to Franziska Roner von Ehrenwert; his friends discovered the plans a week later (SDB, 713). In his memoirs Spaun wrote about Schubert’s reaction: “I was at that time engaged to be married. He said to me, ‘While it makes me very sad that we are going to lose you, you are right and have chosen well, and although I ought to be angry with your fiancée I should like to do something to please her. Invite her and I will bring Bocklet, Schuppanzigh, and Linke and we will have some music as well’; and that is what happened” (SMF, 138). That was the last Schubertiade hosted by Spaun in Schubert’s lifetime, and after his marriage on 14 April 1828, he and his new wife seem to have dropped out of the circle’s activities completely.

Marriage seems to have presented more of a problem for the circle than paying for sex or promiscuity. Nowhere do we see any sign that the other members of the circle considered such sexual behavior grounds for reproof or shame, and their tolerant and somewhat casual attitude toward a variety of sexual behaviors would seem to have been privately shared by many Viennese of the time. However, the members of the Schobert circle differed from most Viennese in their attitude toward official, public prudery. This they considered hypocritical, and they were impatient with it.

Two episodes illustrate both the circle’s private attitude toward sexual mores, and their desire to view those mores as publicly presentable ideals: their friendship with Katharina von Lacsny, and Bauernfeld’s and Schubert’s collaboration on the opera Der Graf von Gleichen (The Count of Equals—no pun in German).

Katharina von Lacsny (b. 1789) had been a singer at the court opera, was twice married, and rumored to have had many lovers, including several counts simultaneously during the Congress of Vienna. Two letters from Schwind to Schober give us our most revealing glimpse of how he and his friends regarded her. Schwind wrote the letters at a time when he was “ruled completely” by Anna Hönig. But upon first meeting Mme Lacsny, he confided to Schober:

What a woman! If she were not nearly twice as old as I [thirty-six and twenty-one] and unhappily always ill, I should have to leave Vienna, for it would be more than I can stand. Schubert has known her a long time, but I met her only recently. She takes joy in my things and in me, more than anybody else except you; I had quite a shock the first time, the way she spoke to me and obliged me, as though there were nothing about me she didn’t know. Immediately after-ward she was taken ill again and spat blood, so that I have not seen her for a long time; but we are to eat there tomorrow. So now I know what a person looks like who is in ill repute all over the city, and what she does.72

And two months later:

She is the only one about whom I care to talk to you, for she is a decisive and mighty figure, who in the greatest welter of temptation and licentiousness remained true to herself and who knows what she must honor…. God keep you for me, [and keep] the excellent Schubert and my pious girlfriend.⁷³

Schwind’s attraction to Mme Lacsny was tempered only by her age and her interruption of their interviews by spitting up blood. He admired her integrity, not in spite of her promiscuity, but rather because of it; she knew herself, and acted upon that knowledge rather than according to convention. And presumably Schwind’s admiration was in some measure shared by Schubert, who had known her for a long time, and introduced her to his friend.74

Der Graf von Gleichen was the great opera project of Schubert’s last years, even though in early 1824 he had given up ambitions of an opera career, at least unless and until conditions at Vienna’s opera houses became more favorable to German opera. But in March of 1825, Eduard von Bauernfeld shared with him an idea that forged their friendship (it became the immediate occasion for addressing each other familiarly with “Du”), and brought Bauernfeld quickly into the inner circle (SDB, 410). Bauernfeld’s proposed opera, Der Graf von Gleichen, had as its central conceit the glorification of a bigamous marriage. Bauernfeld eventually wrote the libretto in eight days in May of 1826 while on vacation in Carinthia; Schubert impatiently awaited the results (SDB, 530). It features a crusader who returns from the Orient with a second wife. The resulting triangle is so blissful that it inspires the pope to give his blessing. For its backdrop the story contains attractive possibilities for dramatic contrasts between, in Bauernfeld’s words, “Orient-Occident, Janissaries-Crusaders, romantic courtship-spousal love, etc., in short a Turkish-Christian stew” (SDB, 24). Predictably, the censor forbade the libretto, despite the friends’ appeal to the precedent of Goethe’s novel about mate-swapping, Die Wahlverwandschaften (Elective Affinities).⁷⁵ The opera had no realistic chance of ever winning approval for performance, nor were the dismal prospects for German opera in Vienna likely to change in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, Schubert maintained his enthusiasm for Der Graf von Gleichen. During the summer of 1827, while he was composing other works that faced no censorship barriers and held at least a promise of furthering his career, he worked on sketches for the opera;⁷⁶ deprived of other incentives, his belief in the importance of the opera and its subject can have been his only conceivable motivation for doing so.

Enthusiasm for the Graf von Gleichen was not limited to Schubert and Bauernfeld; Schwind also caught the Gleichen fever. Approximately a third of his thirty pen-and-ink illustrations for The Marriage of Figaro (completed by April 1825) were devoted to portrayals of imaginary guests at the wedding, from the Act 3 Finale of Mozart’s opera (SDB, 412). For these imaginary guests he chose characters, among others, from Der Graf von Gleichen, and from Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde, about which we will hear more later.

Der Graf von Gleichen did not necessarily represent in straightforward fashion the sexual ideology of the Schobert circle. After all, Schubert was an artist, not a propagandist. However, Der Graf von Gleichen and Schwind’s idealization of Frau von Lacsny have in common a skepticism of monogamy, which is seen in both cases as a hypocritical worldly convention. In the Vienna of their day, with its flourishing trade in prostitution (toward which the authorities turned a blind eye, implicitly giving it official sanction and encouragement), it would not have been hard to feel that the traditional official and church-sanctioned monogamous form of marriage represented a pious hypocrisy. Much better to stop pretending. But the idealistic young men of the circle were not ready to concede a disillusioned loss of principle. A higher ideal had to be found, one that could be honestly embraced. Promiscuity, especially of the publicly indiscreet variety, seemed admirable if it had a suitably romantic coloration. Then it became principled promiscuity. The higher ideal was a sexual practice that follows the vicissitudes of the heart.

Religious Nonconformity

Discussions of religious attitudes and convictions within the Schobert circle during the years 1820–25 have left hardly a trace in the available documents; religious beliefs would seem to have been either unimportant to the shared identity of the circle or the circle shared a consensus on religious matters that was so unproblematic as to barely warrant discussion. Those two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and they may both have been true for a time, but in the years after the circle dissolved, drastic changes in their religious convictions marked those who became alienated from the group—especially Bruchmann—from those whose loyalties remained with Schubert and Schober. Even if religion did not itself become a subject of controversy during the life of the group, it remained a potent indicator of important group-defining beliefs just below the surface.

By the standards of the age the Schobert circle was as a whole not devout. Schober could debate theological points—on at least one occasion he argued against immortality and personal life after death—and his only published work, Palingenesien (1826), was a book of sonnets on Old Testament themes (Jean Paul had written a book in 1798 with the same title), but Spaun’s mother ended a growing attachment between Schober and her daughter Marie because Schober’s behavior and conversation led her to believe he was “not religious.”77 Schwind too, after a lengthy engagement, was eventually rejected by Anna Hönig for his lack of piety; he once told her to “go fall in love with the pope,” and later said, “Generally I can tolerate a pretty [hübsch] amount of Catholicism, but too much is too much” (SDB, 539, 901). Bauernfeld undertook a study of the New Testament in the original Greek with his two roommates in 1823–24, but soon confessed, “I don’t possess the talent for faith.”⁷⁸ But it was Schubert more than any other member of the group who engaged publicly with religious matters, and it is Schubert’s views we know the most about.

In Schubert’s childhood home religious matters formed a constant source of friction between his free-thinking brother Ignaz (twelve years older than Franz) and his dogmatically orthodox father; Ignaz and Franz formed a furtive alliance in their free-thinking rebellion against their dictatorial father (SDB, 105). Schubert’s schooling by the Piarist order, and his later friendships with prominent churchmen provided him with further spurs to test and refine his unorthodox convictions. A letter from Ferdinand Walcher saying that he knew full well that Schubert did not “credo in unum Deum” shows that Schubert’s unorthodox religious views were both well-enough known, and uncontroversial enough to be brought up in a lighthearted context.⁷⁹ Walcher’s quotation of the opening of the Credo of the Latin Mass also locates the most public source of Schubert’s departure from the norm: the text he used for his six Mass settings.

Schubert’s unusual Mass texts were a result of his own conscious, informed choices, as I showed in an article published in 2002.⁸⁰ The pattern of excisions in the texts of the Glorias and Credos of Schubert’s Latin Masses, combined with dovetailing patterns of telescoping—folding successive phrases together—permits no other conclusion. Contrary to a reception history that remained impressively monolithic right through the celebrations of Schubert’s bicentennial, none of the changes Schubert made to the texts can be attributed to ignorance of Latin, ignorance of the orthodox version of the texts, carelessness, forgetfulness, or any other mental shortcoming, or to the existence of a yet-to-be discovered master text that Schubert unwittingly copied.⁸¹

The dovetailing patterns of excision and telescoping show not only that Schubert meant the words he set, but also that they were important to him. He cared enough about the Mass and the Church to keep composing Masses even though he dissented on key points. He began his life in music as a choirboy, his first great public triumph was the performance of the Mass in F in 1814, and a part of him always remained a church musician. His six Masses and other liturgical compositions kept him involved with churches throughout his life: the Lichtental parish church, St. Augustine’s Court church, St. Ulrich’s, Alt-Lerchenfelder, and the Dreifaltigkeitskirche. He maintained warm relations all his life with church music directors who included his brother Ferdinand, his first teacher and the dedicatee of his Mass in C, Michael Holzer, and his boyhood friend Michael Leitermayer. Unlike Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, which, in spite of its complete, orthodox text, has always found a more comfortable home in the concert hall than in the church, Schubert’s two late solemn Masses, in spite of their spacious amplitudes, were conceived for the church and are still appropriate there. In those two Masses, in A-flat (1819–22, revised 1826–27) and in E-flat (June 1828), Schubert needed to express something that could only be said in a Mass; he needed to speak to the church.

Certainly he also had professional incentives for writing the last two Masses: he consistently had greater success in gaining a public hearing for his Masses than for his symphonies, and he had some hopes of a Kapellmeister post for which the revised Mass in A-flat could have proved useful. But the time he lavished on the first version of the Mass in A-flat, a letter to Schott in which he listed it as a testament to his “striving after the highest in art,”82 and the priority he gave to writing his Mass in E-flat after hope of a Kapellmeister post had vanished—all indicate that the Mass meant more to Schubert than a career opportunity. When Schubert decided to write these last two Masses instead of composing more songs, symphonies, or string quartets, it was surely because the Mass allowed him to say something offered by no other genre. And that something could only have concerned his faith and his church, expressed through his music and his text.

Schubert’s Mass texts, even when examined with their musical settings, do not directly represent his beliefs but rather an intersection of his beliefs with the affirmations that he believed the words of the Mass expressed. In setting the Mass so that it did not violate his conscience, he would have had to struggle for clarity in his own convictions, avoid affirmations that violated those convictions, and make the most of the affirmations most important to him. Most difficult, he had to decide what to do about those affirmations to which he was relatively indifferent.

The one passage omitted in all of Schubert’s Masses is “Et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam” from the Credo; the next most consistently omitted passage, absent in all except the first Mass, is “Et exspecto resurrectionem,” also from the Credo. Both of these excisions seem to be instances of Schubert cutting statements that violated his beliefs. Evidently he interpreted “one holy catholic and apostolic church” to mean “one holy (Roman) Catholic church” rather than “one holy universal church,” and rejected claims to universal authority by the institutional church. Equally, he felt unable to embrace the statement of belief in the resurrection of the dead.

Schubert also cut passages in order to strengthen a point he wished to make. Beginning with his first Mass he gave a conspicuous treatment to the plea for mercy, “miserere nobis,” in the Gloria. From this idea he gradually moved toward strengthening the connection between “miserere nobis” at the center of the Gloria, and the plea for peace, “dona nobis pacem,” in the Agnus Dei, first by telescoping some of the text that did not contribute to his conception of the central section of the Gloria, and eventually by cutting that text.

Walther Dürr has traced Schubert’s use in his last two Masses of a time-honored musical symbol for the cross, which further strengthens Schubert’s textual parallels between the pleas for mercy and for peace.83 Dürr links the appearances of the musical cross figure to a letter Schubert wrote in 1825 after viewing the site of a massacre of Bavarians by Tyroleans in the Lueg Pass, a letter that comes as close to any testimony we have in Schubert’s own words to describing his theology, as well as his attitude toward what he considered hypocritical conventions of piety:

This … they sought, with a chapel on the Bavarian side and a rough cross in the rock on the Tyrolean side, partly to commemorate, and partly, through the use of such holy signs, to expiate. You, glorious Christ, to how many shameful deeds must you lend your image. You yourself, the most gruesome memorial of human abomination, there they set up your image, as if to say: Behold! the consummate creation of the great God we have trampled with impudent feet, would it trouble us to destroy with a light heart the remaining vermin, known as humans? (SDB, 467)

Dürr endeavors to show not only how Schubert formally unified his two late Masses but how the themes of Christ’s suffering, the suffering of humanity, the futile plea for peace, and the hope of expiation especially permeate and unify the Mass in E-flat.

Another excision, the first one in the Credo, also seems to belong to the category of text cut, not because Schubert objected to it but to strengthen a point made by the remaining text. In his last two Masses the first line of the Credo reads “Credo in unum Deum, factorem caeli et terrae,” instead of “Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae.” By cutting “patrem omnipotentem,” Schubert gave the opening of the Credo a pantheist emphasis, consistent with more personal statements of faith he set outside the Latin Mass, such as Die Allmacht (D852, August 1825) to a poem by the Patriarch (Archbishop) of Venice, Johann Ladislaus Pyrker von Felsö-Eör, and Johann Philip Neumann’s Deutsche Messe (D872, September 1827).84

Pantheism had emerged as the preferred theological emphasis of the so-called Josephinian Enlightenment (from Emperor Joseph II’s reign, 1765–90), which had stressed rationalism and the church as a servant of the state, and Neumann and Pyrker were both Josephinian rationalists.⁸⁵ Pantheism stresses the all-embracing inclusiveness of God, conceived as divine immanence (the indwelling presence of God), as compared with the emphasis in traditional theism on God’s transcendence, or separateness from the world; in practice pantheism emphasized the revelation of God in nature. Schubert’s cut of “patrem omnipotentem” thus deemphasized God’s transcendence while emphasizing God as the creator of nature. Pantheism was especially congenial to early Romanticism, since it could be interpreted as more critical and rational than traditional Christianity, and at the same time allow the infinite mystery of God to infuse the concrete mundane reality of the natural world. Because of its rational intellectual pedigree, pantheism also appealed widely to the Josephinian church bureaucracy, many of whom retained influential posts until 1848.⁸⁶ The mystical and rational strains did not necessarily clash, since they tended to play out in different spheres of activity, the mystical in poetry and the rational in metaphysics.

For the early Romantics, as for the Schobert circle, pantheism also provided a congenial theological counterpoint to their philo-Hellenism. The myths and gods of classical Greek antiquity furnish the imagery that animates most of Johann Mayrhofer’s poetry, while the singer Johann Michael Vogl was sometimes called “der griechische Vogel” because of his passion for classical antiquity.⁸⁷ But beyond these two worshipers of antiquity, knowledge of Greek myths and even of the Greek language (by Mayrhofer, Bruchmann, and Bauernfeld, at a minimum) was widespread within the group.⁸⁸

The combination of pantheism and a reverence for Greek antiquity was probably most pronounced in Bruchmann’s thinking. He later described the shared convictions of the Senn circle (early 1819 to early 1820) thus: “Morality is replaced by a philosophy of totality, Christianity by a new paganism! A great pantheism again becomes the world religion, the circle of blessed gods gathers again!”⁸⁹ After two years of relatively solitary study and withdrawal Bruchmann rejoined his friends in the summer of 1822, and later described their shared religion: “There is no evil, there is only the beautiful and the ugly in the world. Consequently everything beautiful is good, and everything ugly is evil. Morality and philosophy are accordingly chimeras, as is religion—especially, as one can easily imagine, the Christian religion. Only the faith of the Greeks is true, because it is beautiful, and it is they alone whom we must imitate.”90 During his most intense time with the Schobert circle, from the summer of 1822 until the spring of 1823, Bruchmann prepared a draft of a grandiose manifesto in the mold of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “Reden an die deutsche Nation” in which he argued that in order to rebuild the nation Germans should abandon Christianity and follow instead Homeric models, with the goal of remaking “the Germans into perfected Greeks.”⁹¹

By his own account Bruchmann tended to push whatever philosophy or religion he found attractive to its logical extreme. Both in 1820–23, when he embraced pantheism and philo-Hellenism, and in 1827, when he (re)converted to Catholicism, he found pantheism incompatible with Christianity. His descriptions of both the Senn circle and the Schobert circles as pantheistic and anti-Christian were made retrospectively, with all the zeal of the newly converted, so that he deemed almost everything he had believed and done prior to his conversion un-Christian. In the early nineteenth century many Christians who called themselves pantheists, including many churchmen, saw no contradiction. That was probably true of most of the members of the Schobert circle as well, and undoubtedly true of Schubert. Of Schubert we know that the churchmen he most admired and whose words he set were pantheists, and that some of the textual changes he made to the Latin Mass made it more pantheistic. And while the religious feelings of the other members of the circle may have been distinguished primarily for their lack of fervor, we know that Schubert cared about the church—enough to write six Masses and to make his unorthodox convictions a matter of public record.

The Case of Bruchmann

The story of Bruchmann’s exit from the circle brings into sharp relief many of the themes I have sketched above, especially the largely sub-merged but important role of religion. Already as a teenager Bruchmann led a life of great independence, and broke with Catholicism, the faith of his parents.⁹² His personal quest led to several years of intensive solitary study of philosophy, particularly Fichte and the more philosophical of the Romantics, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher—an inclination toward Idealism and Romanticism that Senn shared with him. During the time of the Senn circle his admiration for Goethe and Schelling knew no bounds, and he called Schelling the “greatest man our earth has ever borne.”93 After Senn’s arrest in early 1820 Bruchmann again withdrew to a life of solitary reflection and study, including a perusal of the journal Concordia, which Friedrich von Schlegel (he received the “von” in 1815) had just begun publishing, and whose program included the regeneration of German spiritual and intellectual life by bringing Catholic Christianity to bear on the fields of history, philosophy, and literature. In Concordia Schlegel argued for a political and social order with the family as its fundament, the Catholic Church as its crown, and the state in between, in a form similar to the Holy Roman Empire as it had existed up until the Protestant Reformation.⁹⁴

In early 1821 Schelling, who had been silent since 1806, began giving a series of lectures in Erlangen, Bavaria. Bruchmann traveled to Erlangen, and enrolled for the spring semester to hear him lecture in person, although study outside the Habsburg Empire was forbidden to university students.⁹⁵ Schelling was lecturing on mythology, part of a larger attempt to address the problem of theodicy, a project that also subsumed his earlier “positive” philosophy, which had been an attempt to convey the complete history of religion through philosophical thought by understanding the world in terms of a history of God. That winter (1821–22) Bruchmann had frequent meetings with Friedrich von Schlegel in Vienna, both alone and in company.⁹⁶

The following summer, when Bruchmann joined the Schobert circle he wrote some poetry in accordance with his and their valuation of the artist above all other creatures.⁹⁷ Schubert even set some of Bruchmann’s poems, but poetry did not engage Bruchmann’s best talents nor could it satisfy his ambitions, and during the months when his involvement with the circle was most intense, during the year “elevated with music and poetry,” he found time to sketch out his grandiose Fichtean scheme to remake Germans as perfect Homeric Greeks.

In August 1823 Bruchmann once again journeyed to Erlangen to partake of Schelling, but soon found that what had seemed of world-historical importance two years earlier no longer compelled him. After only two weeks he began his return trip to Vienna. Not only did the gospel of Schelling no longer appeal, but this time the Austrian authorities had been tipped off about Bruchmann’s illegal studies abroad, so that he now had a black mark against him that would permanently sabotage a potential career in the vast Austrian civil service.⁹⁸

That November Schubert wrote his letter to Schober complaining that Bruchmann was “no longer the same,” that he now seemed “to conform to the conventions of the world.”⁹⁹ Very likely Bruchmann’s changed attitude toward philosophy and Schelling, and Schubert’s observation that Bruchmann had become more conformist and conventional had a common source. The previous April Bruchmann had begun courting Julie von Weyrother, a young woman of the high aristocracy who was very pious, who “looked like asceticism personified,”¹⁰⁰ and whose family had held the office of Master of the Horse (Oberbereiter) in Austria for more than a hundred years.¹⁰¹ As he put it later, he began “for the first time since he was a little boy” to think of duty (Pflicht) and morality (Sittlichkeit).¹⁰² While in Erlangen he was obsessed with thoughts of the “holy institution of the family” (Heiligthum der Familie), and could not bring himself to care about Schelling instead.¹⁰³ In accordance with his new aspirations (and his father’s long-standing wishes), Bruchmann rededicated himself to his law studies, even though his future prospects in Austria now looked bleak (SDB, 342).

Figure 3. Franz von Bruchmann. Drawing by Leopold Kupelwieser.

Bruchmann was soon to give further evidence of changed attitudes and values that put him at odds with Schober and Schubert. His sister Justina had been carrying on a secret courtship with Schober—secret since the Bruchmann parents and especially father Bruchmann disapproved of Schober. Schwind often acted as secret courier, and his vicarious involvement in their affair was sometimes alarmingly intense,104 but Bruchmann himself also occasionally passed on messages from Justina informing Schober how to time his visits to take advantage of the absence of his father.¹⁰⁵ Sometime in the summer of 1824 Bruchmann changed from collaborator to whistle-blower, and revealed all to his parents.¹⁰⁶ His betrayal of Schober caused a great rift: Schubert and Schwind refused to speak to, or even acknowledge any of the Bruchmann family, while many of the more peripheral members of the circle seemed gleeful that Schober had gotten his comeuppance.¹⁰⁷ This breach in the circle was never healed; Bruchmann and his family remained estranged from Schober, Schubert, and Schwind for the rest of their lives—although not from Kupelwieser, as we shall see.

Bruchmann’s beliefs and life soon moved even further from those of Schubert and Schober. At the end of August 1826 he converted to “positive Christianity,”¹⁰⁸ a conversion in which he was following his brother-in-law Josef von Streinsberg’s lead. Streinsberg had also been part of the Senn circle, and was present when Senn was arrested, so his change of direction was nearly as radical as Bruchmann’s. The next step was to go to confession and resume communion as a Catholic, the faith he had grown up in, which he did on 27 and 28 February 1827.¹⁰⁹ Then came marriage, in which he again followed Streinsberg, who had married Isabella von Bruchmann in January 1826; Franz Bruchmann married Juliane von Weyrother in June 1827.¹¹⁰ Friedrich von Schlegel and the bride’s father were the official witnesses (Trauzeugen) on the occasion (SDB, 652).

The last of the Bruchkinder, as Schubert called them, followed the path of the first two when Justina married Rudolph Ritter von Smetana on 19 November 1828. Justina von Bruchmann’s affair with Schober had furnished the proximate cause for her brother’s break with Schober, and yet when she married Smetana on Schubert’s death day, a member of the triumvirate, Kupelwieser, was one of the official witnesses. Thus, unlike Schubert and Schwind, Kupelwieser was not carrying on a feud with the Bruchmann family on behalf of Schober, nor was he put off by the new piety of the Bruchmann family salon.¹¹¹ Not only did he remain on good terms with Bruchmann, but in his religious and private life he had been moving steadily in the same direction as Bruchmann.

During Kupelwieser’s stay in Rome in 1824–25 he associated with the Nazarenes, a colony of German artists there who sought national renewal through religious art that took its models not from antiquity, but from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance in Germany and Italy—from artists such as Dürer, Fra Angelico, Giotto, and Raphael. For a time they led a semi-monastic life together inspired by Fra Angelico, but their aesthetic ideals were shaped by the writings of the Romantics, especially Friedrich von Schlegel’s Ansichten und Ideen von der christlichen Kunst (1802–23).112 (The Nazarenes also had personal connections to Friedrich Schlegel through his wife, Dorothea, who had two sons from her previous marriage who were both painters and Nazarenes.)¹¹³ Kupelwieser’s association with the Nazarenes marked a turn in his creative and professional life; after his return from Rome he dedicated himself almost exclusively to religious art, particularly altar paintings.¹¹⁴ As with the Bruchmann siblings, Kupelwieser’s turn to greater religious fervor was soon followed by his marriage to Johanna Lutz. At the wedding Schubert played dances at the piano and would not cede to anyone else (SDB, 554). It is a testament to Kupelwieser’s tact and temperate disposition that after the split he managed to remain on good terms with Schubert, Schober, and Schwind, as well as with Bruchmann and his family.

The influence of the Nazarenes on the members and former members of the Schobert circle was not limited to Bruchmann and Kupelwieser. Schwind’s teacher in Vienna after 1821 was Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld, whose younger brother Julius was one of the leaders of the Nazarenes.¹¹⁵ Ludwig Ferdinand did not himself become a Nazarene, but he was profoundly influenced by their ideas, not least by their Catholic piety. He was also a close friend of Schlegel and of the dramatist, mystic, and preacher Zacharias Werner, and like them both he converted to Catholicism (in 1821). L. F. Schnorr von Carolsfeld participated in at least some of the readings and Schubertiades of the Schobert circle in 1821– 22, just before his student, Schwind, began spending a lot of time with the circle. Schwind moved from Vienna to Munich in 1828 in part for the chance to work with Peter Cornelius, another important leader of the Nazarenes.¹¹⁶ In Munich he also worked with Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. Both of the painters in the circle, Kupelwieser and Schwind, were thus very closely involved with the Nazarenes, although Schwind followed their painterly ideas, particularly the ideal of Raphael’s beautiful line and clear shapes, rather than their religious ones.

The final steps in Franz von Bruchmann’s journey away from Greek paganism and the gospel of art and away from Schubert and Schober took him a step beyond even Kupelwieser and the Nazarenes to monasticism. Like his first step toward religion, this ultimate step involved his family. First, his sister Justina died from complications of childbirth (25 August 1829), and her widower husband, Smetana, joined the Redemptorist order (12 November 1829). Next, his wife, Juliane, also died from complications of childbirth (26 October 1830). After a year of self-imposed preparation in Rome with the Nazarenes, Franz von Bruchmann followed his brother-in-law into the Redemptorist order (3 July 1831). Smetana rose to the position of General-Vikar, and Bruchmann became head of the German province of the order, serving in that capacity until two years before his death in 1867 (SDB, 950, 959).

The Redemptorists were a missionary order, founded in 1732, whose major work was the preaching of parish missions, retreats, and novenas, especially to the poor.117 Its members took vows of poverty, chastity, and lifelong obedience.¹¹⁸ In the first two decades of the nineteenth century their leader Clemens Maria Hofbauer worked tirelessly to promote the restoration of papal influence in Habsburg lands, seeking to undo both the inroads that Enlightenment rationalism had made in the Church and the control the state had seized over the Church under the Josephinian Reforms.¹¹⁹ Because of “the prevalent spirit of Josephinism,” the Redemptorists were not able to establish their first canonical house in Vienna until 1820, several months after Hofbauer had died.¹²⁰

If Clemens Maria Hofbauer was the “heart and soul of the Roman Catholic revival,” the “intellectual leader of the Roman Catholic restoration movement” was Friedrich von Schlegel.¹²¹ In the years before his death Hofbauer was an “almost daily guest” in the home of Schlegel and his wife, Dorothea.¹²² As we have seen, Schlegel was also important to the Nazarenes, a close personal friend of Schwind’s teacher, Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld, and since the winter of 1821–22 a frequent advisor and interlocutor to Bruchmann.

Bruchmann’s religious journey had taken him from aesthetic paganism to Catholicism, to the Nazarenes, and to the ultramontane Redemptorists. His intellectual journey had taken him from being an ardent disciple of Schelling to being a follower of Friedrich von Schlegel—or at least a follower of the person Schlegel had become since his conversion to Catholicism and move to Vienna in 1808: the religious mystic, the apologist for Habsburg absolutism to the German people, and the spokesman for papal absolutism to German-speaking lands.¹²³ By 1820 Friedrich von Schlegel had become the very embodiment of reactionary Romanticism, which Heinrich Heine was to skewer in Die romantische Schule (1835). But the publisher of Concordia had also once published Athenäum, and the author of “Ansichten und Ideen von der christlichen Kunst” had once written Lucinde. The split between Schubert and Schober on the one hand and Bruchmann on the other was also in many ways a split between the values espoused by the Friedrich Schlegel who helped found the Romantic movement in the last years of the eighteenth century and the Friedrich von Schlegel who lived and worked in Vienna during the 1820s.

“Some half-understood phrases from Lucinde”

The members of the Schobert circle believed first and foremost in the value of art and were artists, not critics and philosophers. Although Josef Kenner disparaged Schober’s “philosophical system,” it is possible that they never felt it necessary to articulate a unifying rationale for the disparate traits of their community: artistic freedom, religious freedom, social egalitarianism, a loose community of goods, and an ideal of sexual freedom according to which sex should be at liberty to follow the pathways of sentiment. But the ideals and practices of the Schobert circle in the early 1820s are strikingly reminiscent of the ideals first propounded by the founders of the Romantic movement in Berlin and Jena twenty-five years earlier, and that congruence did not arise by chance. A work that the Schobert circle embraced as particularly relevant to their fellowship was also one of the seminal texts of early Romanticism: Friedrich Schlegel’s semi-autobiographical novel Lucinde (1799).

Within the Schobert circle the lovers and chief characters of the novel, Julius and Lucinde, were closely identified with Schober and Justina von Bruchmann. In Bauernfeld’s 1825 Sylvesternacht satire, the speech that he wrote for Schober’s character, Pantalon von Przelavtsch, is a parody of Lucinde, combining much of the language of a famous passage in the novel with the sexual theme of the rest of the novel.124 The passage comes from a section titled “Idylle über den Müßiggang” (Idyll on Idleness), in which Schlegel, speaking through his semi-autobiographical character Julius, questioned the work ethic of modern civil society:

What is the point of all this striving and progress without interruption and focal point? Can this storm and stress give nourishing sap or a pleasing shape to the infinite plant of humanity, which grows by itself and shapes itself in silence? This empty, restless striving is nothing but a Nordic perversity, and produces nothing but boredom…. Industriousness and utility are the angels of death with the fiery sword, who bar to humans the return to paradise. Only with calm acceptance and meekness, in the holy silence of true passivity, can one remember one’s whole self, and contemplate the world and life…. To sum it all up: the more godly a person or a person’s work, the more they will resemble a plant, which is among all the forms of life the most moral, and the most beautiful. And thus the most perfectly consummated life would be nothing but a pure vegetating.¹²⁵

Figure 4. Friedrich von Schlegel. Charcoal drawing by Philipp Veit, ca. 1810.

In other sections of Lucinde, Schlegel celebrated sensuality, lust, and sexual fantasy. When the novel was first published many considered it scandalous partly because Julius and Lucinde seemed to represent in undecently unveiled fashion Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea Veit, Moses Mendelssohn’s oldest daughter, who at the time was still married to Simon Veit. A generation later the novel was still controversial, hailed by the like-minded as the “proclamation of the emancipation of the flesh,” and condemned by critics as “an expression of naked sensuality.”126 Schlegel had begun the Romantic campaign in a similar vein, with some aphorisms (Fragmente) in the first issue of his journal Athenäum (1798) designed to épater les bourgeois. Nothing could be more hypocritical, Schlegel argued, than the prevailing prudery, “the affectation of innocence without innocence.” Most modern marriages were in his view little better than concubinage; in enforcing them the state prevents true marriage, which is a unity of souls. Then Schlegel added a few lines designed to shock: “It is difficult to see what one could reasonably object to in a marriage à quatre.”¹²⁷

Lucinde consistently celebrates those vices that Schober cultivated most egregiously, idleness and lasciviousness, and no doubt one of the reasons Schober was not offended by Bauernfeld’s playlet was that he was flattered by the implied analogy between himself and the young Schlegel. Justina von Bruchmann, for her part, was identified with Lucinde to such an extent that after the Bruchmann-Schober rift Schwind hurried to hide his drawings of some characters out of Lucinde when Schubert and Bauernfeld unexpectedly came calling.128

Bruchmann corroborated the importance of Lucinde to the Schobert circle. After his conversion he described it, along with Schleiermacher’s Reden über die Religion (On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers) and Schelling’s early works, as putting the final touches on what he had already arrived at through studying Fichte, namely a nihilism that denied good and evil.¹²⁹ This was the “wisdom” with which Bruchmann entered the Senn circle, and when after Senn’s arrest that circle dissolved into two groups, the group he later rejoined, the Schobert group, was characterized by “dedicating their whole lives to pleasure, and a fairly material pleasure at that, and they propped up this shabby bit of wisdom with some half-understood phrases from Lucinde, while the other group was too honest and conscientious to let these kinds of principles guide life, art, and science.”¹³⁰ Remarkably, even after his conversion, when he was ready to damn almost all he had held dear prior to it, Bruchmann remained reluctant to categorically condemn Lucinde; he implies that his erstwhile friends’ wisdom would have been less shabby had they understood Lucinde better! Indeed, in a letter Schwind wrote to Schober, he complained about the difficulty of understanding Lucinde: “I’m reading Lucinde, but can’t make any progress. Those things I understand I’d like to memorize right away; those I don’t I read three or four times to convince myself that hastiness is not the cause.”¹³¹

Bauernfeld’s New Year’s Eve satire, the work of literature most closely identified with Justina von Bruchmann, and Franz von Bruchmann’s post-conversion condemnation of the Senn circle and the Schobert circle had in common Schlegel’s Lucinde. Whether parodied, celebrated, or condemned, the friends seemed to agree on Lucinde as a defining text of the Schobert circle, and as a kind of representation of the circle itself, particularly of the constitutive part Schober played in it.

Lucinde had been one of the most radical of the early Romantic critiques of bourgeois society and the emerging industrial economy in Germany. The “Idylle über den Müßiggang” was part of a broader challenge to a new kind of consumer, someone the Romantics called a philistine. For the philistine nothing had intrinsic worth, value could be reduced to price, and in general, life was reduced to its economic side. For the sake of comfort and security the philistine was willing to spend his time in mindless repetitive routines and conform to the moral, religious, and political status quo. Worst of all, the philistine reduced social relationships to means of achieving mutual economic benefit. To oppose the new materialism the Romantics sought to create a true community of love, which they felt could only be achieved through an open exchange between individuals freed of the pressure to conform. Art would play a crucial role in such a community, awakening all the powers of human empathy and imagination needed to participate in the education of the whole personality, in Bildung. Art could inspire to action where reason alone would fail, and art would restore the magic, beauty, and mystery of the natural and social world, so that the individual could again feel at one with it.132

Lucinde as embraced by the Schobert circle displayed the reciprocal relationship between criticism, art, love, sex, and community as the young Romantics had conceived of it. In Schlegel’s allegorical exposition of his philosophy in Lucinde the same work both disrupted old habits of thought and then healed. The healing function, the spirit of love that is the bond of the true community, and must according to Schlegel be “invisibly visible” everywhere in the work, is present in Lucinde both as prose about sex and more abstractly in the purpose of the novel as a whole.¹³³ Lucinde helps us understand not only the sexual attitudes of the members of the Schobert circle, but also how and why they construed those attitudes as criticism, and why Schubert cared so much about preparing Der Graf von Gleichen for the public, against all odds. The reciprocal functions of Lucinde also help us understand why Schubert and Schwind seemed to feel that Bruchmann’s betrayal of Schober was more than personal, why it was also a betrayal of the core beliefs of the Schobert circle.

Schlegel’s quest for community was the constant that guided his political shift from liberal reformer to supporter of Clemens von Metternich,¹³⁴ but his vision of the utopian community held together by love and mutual obligation between free and equal persons came to focus more and more on an ahistorical, idealized model of German feudalism in the Middle Ages, supported by a resurgent Roman Catholic Church. The members of the Schobert circle, with their much less grandiose vision for changing the world, probably realized as closely as possible within their small countercultural circle Schlegel’s original vision for a community of love; and their modest and fragile version of the utopian community allowed them—unlike Schlegel—to retain Schlegel’s original political views. On an ideological level, Bruchmann’s estrangement from his friends in the circle can be seen as a rift between early and late Romanticism; or, more accurately, a rift between a second-generation Romanticism that kept the ideals of early Romanticism but scaled down its political ambitions and a second-generation Romanticism that kept its grand political ambitions but changed its ideals to accommodate them. But it was also a rift between those, as Schober put it, “who found our life in art,” and those like Friedrich Schlegel and Bruchmann who were more philosophers than artists, who were inspired by the much grander vision of a community shaped by the German nation and Christianity.

NOTES

1. Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Schubert: A Documentary Biography, trans. Eric Blom (London, 1946), 784 (hereafter SDB), contains a partial key to Schwind’s drawing, which is reproduced on the facing page. Maurice J. E. Brown, “Schwind’s ‘Schubert-Abend bei Josef von Spaun,’” in his Essays on Schubert (London, New York, 1966), 155–68, gives a history of the Schwind drawing. The Kupelwieser painting is reproduced on the page facing, SDB, 484.

2. Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, trans. Rosamond Ley and John Nowell (London, 1958), 370 (hereafter SMF).

3. The documents Deutsch collected and annotated are still the starting point for any Schubert scholar. He first published these in German in 1913, then in a revised English version as SDB; then a U.S. version, The Schubert Reader: A Life of Franz Schubert in Letters and Documents (New York, 1947); and finally again in German, Otto Erich Deutsch, ed. Schubert: Die Dokumente seines Lebens (Kassel, 1964) (hereafter DsL). Although in this article quotations from these documents cite SDB, I have often amended the somewhat Macaulayesque translations.

4. That is, anyone with whom Schubert drank brotherhood and with whom he was therefore on a familiar “Du” basis. See the explanation of “drinking brotherhood,” SDB, 296.

5. A regular gathering in a pub.

6. The school run by the Piarists at which Schubert was a scholarship student. See SDB, 7–8, for more on the term and the variety of students in the Stadtkonvikt.

7. David Edward Gramit, “The Intellectual and Aesthetic Tenets of Franz Schubert’s Circle: Their Development and Their Influence on His Music” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1987). For the dates of the circle’s formation, see 32; see Appendix 1, 376–91, for correspondence with or about Schober, including letters written by Anton Spaun, Anton Ottenwalt, Josef Kenner, and Josef Spaun.

8. Rita Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft: Franz Schubert, Leopold Kupelwieser und ihr Freundeskreis (Vienna, 1998); see 11, 44, for the membership list.

9. Moriz Enzinger, introduction and ed., Franz v. Bruchmann, der Freund J. Chr. Senns und des Grafen Aug. v. Platen: Eine Selbstbiographie aus dem Wiener Schubertkreise nebst Briefen (Innsbruck, 1930), 128–29; all translations are mine.

10. Steblin, Unsinnsgesellschaft, 2–5.

11. See Rita Steblin’s essay on the Nonsense Society in this volume.

12. Hans Joachim Kreuzer, “Freundschaftsbünde–Künstlerfreunde: Das Erbe von Aufklärung und Empfindsamkeit im Schubert-Kreis und seine Verwandlung im romantischen Geist,” in Schubert und Brahms: Kunst und Gesellschaft im frühen und späten 19. Jahrhundert. Dokumentation der Veranstaltungsreihe der Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover 3.–25. November 1997, ed. Arnfried Edler (Augsburg, 2001), 80–81. Kreuzer postulates that in the Schubert circle starting in 1820–21 a new culture of sociability (Geselligkeitskultur) in which music was central replaced the old understanding of (male) friendship that was centered on language and literature.

13. For Schubert’s use of “Schobert,” see SDB, 98. Another conflation would be that used by Friedrich von Schlegel writing to Schwind’s teacher, Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who spoke of “Dein Schober-u. Schuber-Dienstag” (SDB, 254).

14. Schubert to Spaun, 7 December 1822 (SDB, 248). The Schubertiades were held most regularly (once a week at Schober’s on Tuesdays) from about December 1822 to about April 1823.

15. Sent from Zseliz to Breslau, SDB, 374. Swind was Schubert’s nickname for Schwind, while the whole group called Kupelwieser Kuppel.

16. See John M. Gingerich, Schubert’s Beethoven Project (Cambridge, 2014).

17. SMF, 85, 89.

18. On the love-hate relationship that leading members of the Linzer Bildungskreis, especially Kenner and Anton Ottenwalt, had with Schober, see Ilija Dürhammer, “‘Affectionen einer lebhaft begehrenden Sinnlichkeit’: Der ‘Schobert’-Kreis zwischen ‘neuer Schule’ und Weltschmerz,” in Schuberts Lieder nach Gedichten aus seinem literarischen Freundeskreis: Auf der Suche nach dem Ton der Dichtung in der Musik. Kongressbericht Ettlingen 1997, ed. Walther Dürr, Siegfried Schmalzriedt, and Thomas Seyboldt (Frankfurt, 1999), 39–58.

19. Bauernfeld to Ferdinand von Mayerhofer, 27 August 1827, in Neue Dokumente zum Schubert-Kreis: Aus Briefen und Tagebüchern seiner Freunde, ed. Walburga Litschauer (Vienna, 1986), 67; all translations are mine.

20. SDB, 418. After April 1826 Spaun returned to Vienna to take up the office of Third Assessor for the state lottery commission (SDB, 522).

21. Senn himself described this circle retrospectively (1849) as arising spontaneously from the spirit left behind by the “wars of liberation” (Befreiungskriege) of 1813–15 and specifically mentioned Mayrhofer and Schubert as contributors. See Werner Aderhold, “Johann Chrisostomus Senn,” in Schuberts Lieder nach Gedichten aus seinem literarischen Freundeskreis, 99, 107, citing Hugo Klein (1921).

22. After August von Kotzebue, a dramatist of absolutist political views, was assassinated in 1819 by a student, the authorities regarded all student fraternities as extremely suspicious (SDB, 129). See Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 129–31, for details on Senn’s arrest.

23. See the letter Senn wrote to Bruchmann, 28 April 1820, in which he says that since he is being forced to choose between Bruchmann and Schober he will choose Schober (Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 287–88). In an undated letter, estimated by Enzinger as written in February 1822 (291–93, 360), Senn agrees to resume friendship. Bruchmann gives the summer of 1822 as the time when he “once again entered into closer relations with that portion of our earlier group of which I spoke earlier, which had anchored the έν και παν [en kai pan or “one and all”] ‘of its wisdom in the enjoyment of life’” (216, my translation).

24. Ibid., 128–29. See also Ruth Melkis-Bihler, “Politische Aspekte der Schubertzeit,” in Schuberts Lieder nach Gedichten aus seinem literarischen Freundeskreis, 92, where Senn and Mayrhofer were two of twelve persons listed, presumably by the police, as belonging to a “burschenschaftlicher Kreis” (fraternity).

25. SDB, 44. Josef Spaun said that Mayrhofer was “extraordinarily liberal-minded, yes even democratic,” and when Spaun kidded him about his reputation as a strict censor, Mayrhofer said his duty and his opinion differed. Spaun, “Aus den Lebenserinnerungen des Joseph Freiherrn von Spaun,” ed. Carl Glossy, Jahrbuch der Grillparzer Gesellschaft 8 (1898), 295. Mayrhofer was appointed as “dritter Revisor” in November 1814, about the same time he first got to know Schubert. Michael Lorenz, “Dokumente zur Biographie Johann Mayrhofers,” Schubert durch die Brille 25 (June 2000): 29-30.

26. SMF, 63.

27. However, there are more Schubert settings to poems by Schiller, more than sixty settings to more than thirty poems, than settings to poems by Mayrhofer, since Schubert often set and reset the same Schiller poem in several versions.

28. Mayrhofer’s poems were published in Vienna in October 1824 while Schubert was in Zseliz (Lorenz, “Dokumente zur Biographie Johann Mayrhofers,” 47), which would explain the absence of Schubert’s name from the list of subscribers if the poems were subscribed after the end of May when he left for Zseliz. Now in Slovakia, Zseliz was then part of the Habsburgs’ Hungarian lands.

29. SDB, 302, 571.

30. Adam Haller quoting Feuchtersleben: “Mayrhofer’s genius is wasting away, since with Schubert’s death his life has lost its harmonization” (SMF, 56; my translation).

31. In a letter to Schober (5 March 1822), Josef von Spaun refers to Schober, Schubert, and Kupelwieser as the “poetisch-musikalisch-malerische Triumvirat” (SDB, 212–13).

32. Steblin, Unsinnsgesellschaft, 109; SDB, 58–59.

33. In SMF, 239, from a lengthier passage in Eduard von Bauernfeld, “Jugend-freunde—Schwind und Schubert” (hereafter “Jugendfreunde”), chap. 4 in “Aus Alt- und Neu-Wien,” Gesammelte Schriften von Bauernfeld, vol. 12 (Vienna, 1873), 63–66.

34. Schober left Vienna in August 1823 for Breslau and returned in July 1825 (SDB, 287, 428); Kupelwieser left Vienna on 7 November 1823 and returned in August 1825 (SDB, 295–96).

35. Otto Stoessl, Moritz von Schwind: Briefe (Leipzig, n.d. [1924?]), 21, 27, 31; DsL, 203.

36. SDB, 178. The name “Canewas” is said to date from the time when Wasserburgers Café was the Stammlokal of the Schobert circle, that is, 1822. Schober later couched his rejection of Ferdinand Sauter (Dinand) in similar terms: “He doesn’t contribute anything to the society” (SDB, 564).

37. Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 218.

38. Walther Dürr, in “‘Tatenfluten’ und ‘bessere Welt’: Zu Schuberts Freundeskreisen,” in Schubert und Brahms: Kunst und Gesellschaft im frühen und späten 19. Jahrhundert, 92, discusses An die Musik as the “Motto” for what he calls “the Schober circle” and traces the poem’s connections to Friedrich Schlegel’s understanding of “Universalpoesie” and “Universalkunst” from Athenäum Fragment 116 (1798).

39. SDB, 403; “Jugendfreunde,” 76; SMF, 227.

40. After a year’s hiatus, a Schubertiade was hosted on 29 January 1825 by Enderes and Witteczek (SDB, 397). They continued to be held on a weekly basis for four months until April 1825 (SDB, 401) and then were not resumed with regularity until December 1826 (SDB, 571). But Schwind did not find the new Schubertiades entirely satisfying: “a mix of faces that are all the same,” he reported to Schober (SDB, 401).

41. Records of these meetings survive mostly in the diaries of the Hartmann brothers, whom Schubert knew from visiting their family in Linz. Fritz and Franz had both been students in Vienna for several years, but only started socializing with the Schobert circle in November 1826 (SDB, 564).

42. At the end of August 1825, Bauernfeld was preparing to translate The Comedy of Errors (Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 30), for the Sollinger (Trentsensky) edition of Shakespeare. During the next three years he also translated Shakespeare’s sonnets and poems (SDB, 548) and The Rape of Lucrece (Litschauer, 60) and wrote three comedies of his own, Der Zweifler, Leichtsinn und Liebe, and Der Brautwerber (SDB, 663). Schwind worked on etchings for Weber’s Freischütz in September 1824 (SDB, 373); he had also finished thirty pen and ink drawings, Der Hochzeitszug des Figaro, by March of 1825 (SDB, 412). He then began producing Mandelbogen (single sheets with cutout figures) for Trentsensky, as well as slipcovers and two large vignettes for the volumes of the Viennese Shakespeare edition (SDB, 462, 471); he also illustrated various poems (SDB, 676–77).

43. See, for example, the New Year’s Eve 1825 satire by Bauernfeld (SDB, 486–501); a difference of opinion between Schober and Spaun over Schubert’s piano sonatas, Opp. 42 and 53, which Schober disliked (SDB, 589); an argument between Schober and Spaun over duels (SDB, 704); Bauernfeld’s diary, end of March 1826, “Schubert and I hold together against many a Schobertian foolishness; Moriz sways back and forth” (Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 38); an argument between Bauernfeld and Schober about “nationality,” September 1826 (Litschauer, 52), which led to a lengthy exchange of letters between them before they were reconciled. Bauernfeld and Schober had another quarrel, 6 March 1827, because Bauernfeld satirized Schober’s habit of spending evenings at the tavern, which Schober “bore about as well as the lion does the crowing of the rooster” (Litschauer, 59). In March 1827 Bauernfeld wrote in his diary, “Schwind and Schober ever more in conflict. Schober’s total lack of occupation and his relationship with a woman of our circle are the chief sources” (Litschauer, 60).

44. Ottenwalt to Spaun, 27 November 1825, my translation and emphasis (see also SDB, 476). Kupelwieser married on 17 September 1826 (SDB, 554), and thereafter he and his wife made only one (recorded) appearance at a function of the Schobert circle, namely on 15 December 1826, at Spaun’s first festive Schubertiade (SDB, 573–74).

45. At the very least the Lesegesellschaft met on 5, 12, 19, 26 January 1828; 2, 9, 15 February 1828, with Karl Enk von der Burg, Franz von Hartmann, Ferdinand Sauter, and Hieronymus von Kleimayrn in attendance; 23 February 1828; 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 March 1828; 5, 23, 26 April 1828, 21 June 1828; 12, 19 July 1828; 2 August 1828 with Enk, Josef Bayer, and Franz von Hartmann.

46. See SDB, 662. In 1827, for example, Schwind did not attend a tavern (Beisel) with his friends in January, attended only three times in February, three times in March, once in April, and once in June, not again until he left for Munich in August, and not again after he got back in October. By comparison, Schubert, Schober, and Spaun frequented a Beisel together between two and three times a week whenever they were in town. Bauernfeld attended these gatherings even less frequently than Schwind. His diary entry of 21 February 1826: “This week I receive the last of the Shakespeare money from Trentsenski. — Now what? Unde vivam? — Otherwise I spend a lot of time alone working hard. The friends have nicknamed me “Caveman” [Spelunk] since I seldom creep out of my cave in Landstraße [a suburb of Vienna]” (Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 38).

47. Witteczek married Wilhelmine Watteroth (b. 1800) in 1819; she was the daughter of law professor Heinrich Josef Watteroth, who had taught Spaun (SDB, 302). Witteczek was a Hof- und Staatskanzleikonzipist (SDB, 573–74). In 1825 Enderes was Konzipist in the Finanzministerium (SDB. 397), a Konzipist being someone with an academic education waiting for an appointment to a civil service post with life tenure (a Beamte) (SDB, 569).

48. The one exception was a Schubertiade hosted by Karl Hönig on 16 December 1826 (SDB, 573). Outside of Vienna there was a Schubertiade at Retz near the Moravian border, hosted by Prof. Vincentius Weintridt and Schwind, and several in Graz, hosted by the Pachlers.

49. For many of these Schubertiades we have a fairly complete guest list. The evening at Spaun’s on 15 December 1826 is representative (SDB, 571–72).

50. See Herwig Knaus, Vom Vorstadtkind zum Compositeur (Vienna, 1997).

51. DsL, 64–65, 592–93. CM refers to Conventionsmünze; four florins CM were worth ten florins WW (Wiener Währung).

52. The titles are not redundant: “Freiherr” was better than “Ritter,” which was better than “Edler,” which was better than plain “von.”

53. SMF 230; “Jugendfreunde,” 81.

54. On Mayrhofer, see Lorenz, “Dokumente zur Biographie Johann Mayrhofers,”and Spaun, “Aus den Lebenserinnerungen des Joseph Freiherrn von Spaun,” 294.

55. Both a week before and two days after the great victory over Napoleon at Leipzig in October 1813, the “Völkerschlacht,” Emperor Franz found the time personally to approve papers granting a continued scholarship to Schubert, on the condition of raising his mathematics grade from a “2” to a “1” (SDB, 34–37).

56. Constant von Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich, 60 vols. (Vienna, 1856–91), 13:292–96. Kupelwieser needed to start earning his own money at the age of seventeen when his father died on 27 May 1813. See Rupert Feuchtmüller, Leopold Kupelwieser und die Kunst der österreichischen Spätromantik (Vienna, 1970), 12.

57. Bauernfeld’s diary, August 1826: “Schubert without money, as are all of us” (SDB, 548). See also SDB, 451, 805–6; and Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 56.

58. SMF, 228–29; “Jugendfreunde,” 77.

59. Kupelwieser wanted to get married as soon as possible upon his return, and initially seems to have planned to stay with Schober until the wedding (SDB, 451), but plans must have changed, since he did not get married until September 1826 (SDB, 554), although he had moved out of Schober’s apartment almost a year earlier (SDB, 462).

60. See Maynard Solomon, “Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini,” 19th-Century Music 12 (1989): 193–206; and a special issue of that journal entitled Schubert: Music, Sexuality, Culture, edited by Lawrence Kramer, and including Rita Steblin’s response, “The Peacock’s Tale: Schubert’s Sexuality Reconsidered,” 19th-Century Music 17(1993): 5–33; as well as Kristina Muxfeldt, “Political Crimes and Liberty, or Why Would Schubert Eat a Peacock?” 19th-Century Music 17(1993): 47–64; and Maynard Solomon, “Schubert: Some Consequences of Nostalgia,” 19th-Century Music 17 (1993): 34–46; and Charles Rosen, New York Review of Books, 20 October 1994.

61. Schwind to Schubert, 14 August 1825 (SDB, 451), and Bauernfeld’s diary entry, August 1827 (SDB, 548).

62. SMF, 85–87. Note that Kenner considered Schober’s whole family “depraved,” including his mother.

63. From Schober’s courtship of Marie von Spaun prior to 1819 (SMF, 350), to Bauernfeld’s diary in March 1827 when he reported spats between Schwind and Schober over Schober’s relationship with a “woman from our circle” (Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 60).

64. Schwind first became interested in Hönig on 22 February 1824 (Stoessl, Schwind Briefe, 27–28), in part because she had the same name as his earlier infatuation, Netti Prunner (SDB, 196; Stoessl, Schwind Briefe, 22, 24, 25); the earliest indication of a relationship between Schwind and Hönig in the Deutsch documents is April 1825 (SDB, 411–12). They announced their engagement in March 1828 (SDB, 754); in October 1828 Schwind moved to Munich to study at the Academy there “for Netti’s sake” (SDB, 817); the affair ended in October 1829 due to religious differences and Schwind’s impecuniousness (SDB, 539). See also Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 38.

65. We do not know Clotilde’s full name or identity. Most of Bauernfeld’s diary entries concerning Clotilde were edited out by Glossy. In the foreword to his edition, Josef Bindtner, in Erinnerungen aus Alt-Wien: Mit 28 Bildern (Vienna, 1923), ix–xi, published the diary entries for 7 February 1821, when Bauernfeld first mentioned Clotilde and his infatuation with her; May 1822, a physical description of Clotilde; December 1823, 4 January 1824, and April 1825, the only entry concerning Clotilde that made it into SDB, 413. Further diary entries mentioned by Bindtner concern 17 April 1826, when Bauernfeld embraced Clotilde for the last time, and 25 April 1827, when she married someone else. My thanks to Kristina Muxfeldt for bringing the Bindtner foreword to my attention and making it available to me.

66. Steblin, “The Peacock’s Tale,” 31n69.

67. See ibid., 16; and Bauernfeld’s diary entries for 14 May 1825 and June 1825 (Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 30).

68. Steblin, “The Peacock’s Tale,” 16; and Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 45.

69. SDB, 573–74 (17 December 1826).

70. Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 46.

71. See Schwind to Schubert, 2 July 1825 (SDB, 424–25), 1 and 6 August 1825 (SDB 443–44), and 1 September 1825 (SDB 451–52).

72. SDB, 401–2, 14 February 1825.

73. SDB, 414, 18 April 1825 (rev. trans.).

74. Schubert and Schwind continued to visit Mme Lacsny when her health permitted. Schubert met Hiller and Hummel at her house in March of 1827 (SDB, 619). He possibly also met Luigi Lablache at her house (SDB, 667). She died before Schubert, on 3 July 1828 (SDB, 789).

75. SDB, 561; and Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 57. Kristina Muxfeldt’s chapter on the opera, “The Matrimonial Anomaly (Schubert’s Opera for Posterity),” in Vanishing Sensibilities: Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann (Oxford, 2012), 41–83, attempts, as nearly as possible given the available sources, to understand why the censor forbade the opera, given that the story had been around since the thirteenth century and had been treated many times in German literature, most recently (1824) in a libretto for Carl Eberwein.

76. Richard Kramer, “Posthumous Schubert,” 19th-Century Music 14 (1990): 197–216 traces connections between the opera and Winterreise (Nebensonnen) and Schubert’s 1815 setting of Goethe’s poem “Wonnen der Wehmut”; he also discerns the influence of Fidelio and Figaro at crucial points in the music.

77. In his diary, June 1828, Bauernfeld noted a debate between Schober and Ferdinand von Mayerhofer, who later married the pious Anna Hönig (Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 69). On Schober’s courtship of Marie von Spaun, see SMF, 350.

78. “Jugendfreunde,” 30.

79. SDB, 597, 25 January 1827.

80. John M. Gingerich,”‘To how many shameful deeds must you lend your image’: Schubert’s Pattern of Telescoping and Excision in the Texts of His Latin Masses,” Current Musicology 70 (Spring 2002): 61–99. The discussion here of Schubert’s Mass text quotes freely from this article.

81. The notion that Schubert copied an unorthodox master text was supported by Otto Wissig, Franz Schuberts Messen (Leipzig, 1909), 34; Alfred Einstein, Schubert, trans. David Ascoli (London, 1951), 61; and Paul Badura-Skoda, “Schuberts korrumpierte Meßtexte—Absicht oder Versehen? Gedanken zum Buch von Hans Jaskulsky Die Lateinischen Messen Franz Schuberts,” Das Orchester 38 (1990): 132.

82. SDB, 740, 21 February 1828.

83. Walther Dürr, “Dona nobis pacem: Gedanken zu Schuberts späten Messen,” in Bachiana et Alia Musicologica: Festschrift Alfred Dürr zum 65. Geburtstag am 3. März 1983, ed. Wolfgang Rehm (Kassel, 1983), 62–73.

84. For an interpretation of the particular kind of pantheism present in Die Allmacht, see Walther Dürr, “Die Allmacht (D852): Schubert, Schelling und der Pantheismus,” in “Laudato si, mi Signore, per sora nostra matre terra”: Zur Ästhetik und Spiritualit¨at des ‘Sonnengesangs’ in Musik, Kunst, Religion, Naturwissenschaften, Literatur, Film und Fotografie, ed. Ute Jung-Kaiser (Bern, 2002), 103–16.

85. See Susan Youens, Schubert’s Late Lieder: Beyond the Song Cycles (Cambridge, 2002), 93–144, for a description of Pyrker as a champion egotist, self-promoter, and opportunist. By the early 1830s he had already become much more conservative than when Schubert knew him, and after Emperor Franz’s death Pyrker completed his transition from emperor-worship to pope-worship, and from having been a pantheist and Josephinian he became a staunch advocate of supreme papal authority—an Ultramontanist.

86. Adam Bunnell, Before Infallibility: Liberal Catholicism in Biedermeier Vienna (Rutherford, 1990), 42; Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy: From Enlightenment to Eclipse (New York, 2001), 43–44, 58, 66, 100.

87. On Mayrhofer, see Spaun, “Aus den Lebenserinnerungen des Joseph Freiherrn von Spaun,” 296; on Vogl, SDB, 99.

88. Philo-Hellenism seems to have generated surprisingly little enthusiasm of the Byronic sort in the Schubert circle for the modern Greek war of independence (1821–29), or at least generated surprisingly few records of such enthusiasm.

89. Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 193. Dürr, “Schubert, Schelling und der Pantheismus,” 108, speculates that Bruchmann’s “Totalitäts-Philosophie” refers to Schelling.

90. Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 218–19.

91. “Die Deutschen als vollendete Griechen.” Ibid., 220.

92. Ibid., 128.

93. In a letter to his sister Sybille, 23 July 1819, Bruchmann called Schelling “den grösten [sic] Menschen, den unsere Erde je trug.” Ibid., 284, emphasis Bruchmann’s.

94. See Friedrich Schlegel’s “Vorrede,” Concordia 1 (1820): 1; and “Signatur des Zeitalters,” Concordia 1 (1820): 59-62.

95. SDB, 187–88; Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 135. After the Carlsbad decrees of 1819 university students were not permitted to study abroad for much the same reason Senn had been arrested, because the Austrian head of police Sedlnitzky was leery of the contagion of German nationalist university fraternities (see SDB, 129–30).

96. SDB, 254. In a letter to his father, 7 May 1822, Bruchmann explained that as much as he admired Schlegel and his friends, he personally still found it impossible to convert to Catholicism (Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 297).

97. All five of Bruchmann’s poems set by Schubert (D737, 738, 746, 762, 785) are dated to sometime in 1822 or 1823 by Otto Erich Deutsch, Franz Schubert: Thematisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke in chronologischer Folge (Kassel, 1978).

98. SDB, 287; Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 146.

99. Schubert to Schober, 30 November 1823, SDB, 300.

100. “Wie die Askese in Person”: this according to Rudolph von Smetana, who became her brother-in-law (Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 158).

101. SDB, 303; and Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, 55:208ff.

102. Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 158, 222.

103. Ibid., 223.

104. See especially Stoessl, Schwind Briefe, 31–32, for Schwind reading and reacting to their letters to each other. Ibid., 35–36.

105. See SDB, 342, 314–15, 330–31 for letters from Schwind to Schober and Justina; see Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 315, for a letter from Bruchmann to Schober.

106. A long letter from Schwind to Kupelwieser in Rome, sent on 9 June 1824, indicates that by that time Justina had ended the affair with Schober, but that Schwind as yet had no inkling of Franz von Bruchmann’s role in Justina’s change of mind. Feuchtmüller, Leopold Kupelwieser, 31.

107. SDB, 384, 405–6.

108. The term “positive Christianity” is from Enzinger (Franz v. Bruchmann, 155) and Deutsch (SDB, 569) and probably refers to ideas put forward by Friedrich von Schlegel in his journal Concordia (1820–23), rather than to Schelling’s “positive” philosophy.

109. Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 155–56.

110. Ibid., 158–59.

111. Ibid., 157. Also worth noting is that Bruchmann addressed his father, Senn, and Schober with “Sie,” and Kupelwieser with “Du.” (See the letters at the end of Enzinger’s volume, 283–358.)

112. Rudolf Bachleitner, Die Nazarener (Munich, 1976), 19.

113. Jonas Veit (b. 1790) and Philipp Veit (b. 1793).

114. Bachleitner, Die Nazarener, 161: “In Rom wurde Kupelwieser Nazarener—er blieb es bis zu seinem Ende.” Feuchtmüller, in Leopold Kupelwieser, emphasizes Kupelwieser’s differences from other Nazarenes (113–21), and his individual working out of influences both German and Italian, in which, for example, Raphael’s predecessors play a larger role than do Raphael’s followers (116). Unlike the religious works, the commissioned portraits Kupelwieser painted in the first years after his return from Rome were done not out of inclination but for the money (118).

115. Although Schwind “probably” had regular lessons with L. F. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, he definitely learned how to paint in oils from Kupelwieser, who was thus both friend and teacher, and whose absence in Rome in 1824–25 left Schwind at loose ends. See Andrea Gottdang,”‘Ich bin unsern Ideen nicht untreu geworden’: Moritz von Schwind und der Schubert-Freundeskreis,” Schubert: Perspektiven 4 (2004): 3.

116. In a letter to Schober, 3 September 1827, Schwind described his first conversation with Cornelius in Munich, in which Cornelius was critical of Friedrich von Schlegel, and critical of the direction in which Schlegel had taken L. F. Schnorr (Stoessl, Schwind Briefe, 53).

117. Bunnell, Before Infallibility, 95.

118. Eduard Hosp, “Hofbauer, Clemens Johannes Maria,” Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 2nd ed. (Freiburg, 1960), 5:413–14.

119. Bunnell, Before Infallibility, 47.

120. Catholic Encyclopedia, “Redemptorists (Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer),” http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=9891.

121. Bunnell, Before Infallibility, 47.

122. Ibid., 47–48.

123. SDB, 254.

124. However, the names of the characters in Bauernfeld’s skit, Pantalon, Columbine, and Harlequin, had a long history in the traditions of the Viennese “Hanswurst-Komödie.” Eduard Bauernfeld, “Intermezzo—Die Wiener-Volks-Komödie,” in chap. 3 of “Aus Alt- und Neu-Wien,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12, 34.

125. Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1963), 34–35 (translation mine). This passage should be compared with Scene 8 of Bauernfeld’s Sylvesternacht (1825) satire, SDB, 493–94.

126. Praised by the “Jungdeutscher” Karl Gutzkow in 1835, and condemned by Søren Kierkegaard in 1841. Karl Konrad Pohlheim, Postscript to Lucinde, 116.

127. Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 260, from Fragmente nos. 31, 34.

128. SDB, 411–12, 2 April 1825. Schwind had managed to work characters from Lucinde and from Der Graf von Gleichen into sketches illustrating The Marriage of Figaro.

129. Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 188.

130. Ibid., 198.

131. Schwind to Schober, 6 January 1824, in Stoessl, Schwind Briefe, 26, my translation.

132. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, 231–34.

133. Ibid., 229–34.

134. Ibid., 261. Beiser dates the shift back to 1799. It was a shift for the Romantics in guiding texts from Schiller’s Aesthetische Briefe to Schleiermacher’s Reden über die Religion (239–40).