LEON BOTSTEIN
When Franz Schubert died in 1828, the extent of his influence, fame, and popularity would have been hard to predict. His posthumous musical legacy in the nineteenth century and the controversies surrounding his biography in the twentieth would have astonished his contemporaries.1 Our understanding of Schubert the man and his music represents a remarkable case of historical reassessment and scholarly revision.
The impetus behind twentieth-century revisionist Schubert scholarship was the double-edged image of Schubert bequeathed to posterity at the end of the nineteenth century. The Schubert who persisted well into the modern era of recording and cinema was as much a mid-nineteenth-century mythic construction as an authentic historical figure from the 1820s.2 The myth-making was inspired only in part by posthumous discoveries of unknown major works, primarily in the 1850s and 1860s. Already in the 1850s, independent of these discoveries, Schubert’s stature in music history had begun to rise as a function of political and cultural change. However, in the six decades between the publication of the “Unfinished” Symphony in 1867 and the 1928 centenary of Schubert’s death, Schubert and his music achieved a status unique in the popular culture of German-speaking Europe, particularly in Vienna.
Schubert contra Wagner
In the 1850s the critical reception of Schubert became a battleground for protagonists in the mid-century culture war within Europe over the character and destiny of music. This conflict is frequently reduced to a split between Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians. But the issues in the cultural conflict in which Wagner would himself later play such a key role dated back to the 1830s, prior to his emergence as a major figure. The origins of this debate can be found in widespread anxieties about a cultural decline that was, ironically, partially the result of a remarkable increase of interest in music.3 Robert Schumann’s polemics against philistinism were one of many critiques concerning the growth of musical dilettantism and amateurism. Such criticism registered the fear that musical art in the tradition of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, once the nearly exclusive province of the aristocracy, was at risk. The new public appeared to favor a superficial expressive style: virtuosity detached from any higher aesthetic aspiration, facile theatricality (as in Meyerbeer), and a rather sterile Romantic music for the theater audible in the works of composers such as Heinrich Marschner. 4
Music, however, was merely one barometer of a perceived general decline in cultural standards that resulted from rapid changes in economic and social conditions. In his 1841 book on Vienna, the theater and music critic Heinrich Adami (1807–1895) observed:
The number of concerts and traveling virtuosi is increasing steadily—but not that of real artists … can we deny that concert music comes nearer to decline each year? … Is the fault with the audience or the virtuosi? … Or is the real reason for this tendency in all the arts to be found in our era’s trend toward the material, toward sensual enjoyment, superficial pleasure, toward gain and industry? … As it is always with a calamity, one side assigns fault to the other … and we allow ourselves to be told a hundred times how much better it was in olden days, and every complaint seems true and just—but … in the end we allow everything to remain as it was.5
The cultural debate that began in the 1830s centered on a presumed conflict between contemporaries obsessed with the virtues of progress in industry and commerce and their beneficial impact on mores and culture, and those who viewed contemporary economic and social change as a threat to the ideal of a true aesthetic sensibility—an inheritance of the eighteenth century. In the 1830s and 1840s, music and musical culture came to be understood as a key marker in the trajectory of history—a symptom of the consequences of the rapid spread of literacy and education.
In music the question was framed in terms of the legacy of Beethoven, whose shadow seemed inescapable to subsequent composers in German-speaking Europe. Purely musical issues intersected, not always neatly, with sharp divisions about the unique character of things “German.”
Music became representative of the connection between culture and politics, evidence of the essential relationship between aesthetics and ethics and the individual and the community.
German speakers widely agreed that music was the distinguishing and outstanding feature of their cultural singularity. As the composer Peter Cornelius exclaimed in 1867, in a review of a concert of string quartet music by Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert, “This magical mirror of the German quartet, which reveals to the eye of the soul a world history of emotional life … this is entirely our possession … and all the most noble passions of sentiment drive us to these proud thoughts: to be a German, to be a musician, to understand this language, to possess citizenship in the nation [Heimat] of the spirit.”6
Indeed, the history of music, as opposed to the history of other art forms, seemed to reveal a special connection to Germany’s emergence as a preeminent power in modern history. The nineteenth-century cultural historian and music critic W. H. Riehl observed, “There is no antiquity for the musician.”7 Consequently, the work of German composers from Gluck (one of Riehl’s favorites) to Beethoven had become widely acknowledged as representing universal aesthetic norms in music, the equivalents of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s idealization of Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity in the visual arts.8
Music was seen as well as exemplifying a uniquely contemporary German Romantic sensibility. In German hands music, it was said, had broken its inherited shackles as a trivial art form. It was not mere temporal entertainment and background distraction for the landed aristocracy. It had become an art of philosophical weight and spiritual profundity (both sacred and secular). It held a special key to the formation and expression of individuality and personality. Music possessed a formal capacity for the expression of the sublime and the beautiful; it was a means of communicating the intensity of life, and was tied to a stark psychological realism about suffering, love, joy, and death. But music also led, ultimately, to realism’s transcendence. Under the Romantics it had become rooted in life, yet was capable of exceeding its limits and expressing the infinite—all in forms that mirrored the highest abstract aesthetic ideals.
Given this singular prestige, it is not surprising that after 1815 music became a marker of status in German middle-class life, primarily through the spread of amateur choral societies. As a domestic pastime and public activity, it became a defining feature in the formation of community among literate and educated individuals from a wide spectrum of society.9 Consequently, the content, conduct, and meaning of an elevated musical sensibility—that uniquely German attribute—became a matter of contention. Was it on the decline? Was it being crushed by changes in the economy and society? Were its norms dependent on a slavish adherence to the past? Was it susceptible to progress? The young Wagner made his dramatic and commanding entrance into this already raging debate in the late 1840s and early 1850s, a debate in which Schubert took on an unexpectedly central, posthumous role alongside Wagner.
The challenge for a cultivated person wishing to maintain an elevated musical sensibility within the conditions of contemporary life after 1850 was eloquently expressed in 1869 by the twenty-four-year-old Florentine Galliny (1845–1913), a journalist and later editor of the Wiener Zeitung writing under the pseudonym Bruno Walden. She described the dilemma faced by a typical urban amateur music enthusiast in Vienna who was a member of a choral society:
In every person … there is a dim desire for the ideal. In his youth, he displays heaven-storming airs, but the steeplechase tempo slows as soon as he encounters and comes into contact with real life … it sinks below consciousness in the course of his fight for material survival…. This sort of opportunity-driven process gradually turns the arts from objects of sacred enthusiasm into mere means of entertainment. None of the arts suffers as much from this demeaning transformation from queen to chambermaid than our sweet, lovely Lady Musica. The holy shudder of awe vanishes and makes room for trivial familiarity. A voice that once sought to serve only the devout simplicity of Haydn and the noble Romanticism of Schubert, the delicacy bordering on gentleness of Mendelssohn and perhaps the bizarre energy of Schumann, now makes do with melodies [Walden cites a string of operetta titles]…. Certainly, the pursuit of the ideal can be bargained with … but the two driving forces, idealistic enthusiasm and the need for entertainment, do not need to be as separate as the sun and the moon…. Vienna owes much that is pretty in music, some that is beautiful, and that rare single extraordinary work to those who combine the two in their efforts. They serve our many musical societies, associations, and academies. These organizations have in turn created a new, sharply delineated type: the member of a choral society, an individual who differs considerably from all other useful and likable members of society.10
As musical culture spread at midcentury to an aspiring literate urban middle class, popular biographies of composers and music lexicons became a welcome genre. The rapidly growing audience was eager to find linkages between the music they admired and the lives of composers. Readers who were music enthusiasts sought clues to the connection between music and the expression of individuality. Precisely because music by nature differed so much from word and image, biography seemed to offer clues to meaning. And biography, per se, invites invention. The common nineteenth-century conceit that some illuminating coherence could be found in the way artists lead their lives (explaining how and why artists deviated from the restrictions and norms that ordinary people suffered) meant that biographies of composers were prone to embellishment. Few personalities invited and demanded as much invention as Schubert. His life and career had been local, if not provincial, and his life short, rendering the documentary evidence strikingly limited; fewer than a hundred letters survive, most fairly trivial.
At first, Schubert was identified primarily with the genre of the art song, the Lied, and therefore as a worthy but limited successor to Beethoven. At the same time, his music lent itself precisely to the participatory amateur activity that music had become. Yet Schubert, for all the accessibility of his vocal and choral music, still represented the noble aesthetic aspirations of Classicism. Not surprisingly, after 1850, an asymmetry became apparent between the scant historical record of his life and thoughts and the demand for his music (much of whose existence came as a surprise); between the circumscribed assessment of his importance on the one hand and the rapidly deepening popular adoration for it on the other. Schubert’s surviving friends compensated for this imbalance by writing memoirs. A few dated from the period right after his death, but most, like those of the writer Eduard von Bauernfeld, were penned decades later. The first biography, by Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn (who was unaware of the B-Minor “Unfinished” Symphony), was published in Vienna in 1864. Soon after, Franz von Suppé’s fanciful operetta on the life of Schubert, Franz Schubert, opened at Vienna’s Carltheater to great acclaim.
Nothing approaching the depth and complexity of Mozart’s correspondence or Beethoven’s sketchbooks, conversation books, and letters was left behind in Schubert’s case. The astonishing industry of Otto Erich Deutsch (1883–1967), the pioneer Schubert scholar, accumulated little more than three volumes of documents, memoirs, and images, not all consistently illuminating. This explains why a handful of letters of Schubert and his prose sketch “Mein Traum” (My Dream) have experienced such close scrutiny. Remembrances without corroborating evidence in historical sources are hard to rely on; they are history that begs for archeological remains as justification. Memories of friends and colleagues inspire extreme caution in scholars, especially if the subject is an increasingly and unexpectedly famous, and dead, friend who in his short life span elicited more compassion than envy.
Deriving biography from music is itself a hazardous undertaking, and in Schubert’s case working from the music led further away from history than otherwise might have been the case. So many of the works for which he ultimately became famous were discovered long after his death, and apart from references in the Lieder, musical clues fueled an ahistorical invention of Schubert the person. Fortuitously, the posthumous revelations brought Schubert’s entire oeuvre more in line with that of Beethoven, challenging the notion of Schubert’s limitations vis-à-vis the older master.
The posthumous revelations were indeed extraordinary. They started with Schumann’s “discovery” of the “Great” C-Major Symphony in 1839. Then, beginning in the 1850s, works such as the C-Major String Quintet appeared. The high point was Johann Ritter von Herbeck’s successful coaxing of the Symphony in B Minor, the “Unfinished,” out of the aged composer and friend of Schubert, Anselm Hüttenbrenner, a trick the charismatic Viennese conductor accomplished in 1865, in time for its premiere in December of that year. This work, which became subsequently Schubert’s most familiar and famous, was published in 1867. The discovery fueled hopes for more of the same. In 1868, Johannes Brahms, writing his friend Joseph Joachim, reported that he had been approached about completing the E-Major Symphony (D729). Ferdinand Schubert, the composer’s older brother, had shown Felix Mendelssohn the manuscript in 1846, but it had subsequently disappeared only to resurface again. Brahms was inquiring whether Joachim, who had so successfully orchestrated the “Grand Duo” (D812) in 1855, might be interested in a second Schubert project.11
Brahms’s suggestion echoed the history behind Joachim’s earlier orchestration. The idea initially came from Schumann, who heard in the Sonata in C Major for four hands a latent symphony. Why was Schumann eager to find a new symphony by Schubert? Why did Joachim complete the project? Why was Brahms, in 1868, concerned to see the E-Major fragment completed? And why did Brahms perform the Joachim “Grand Duo” orchestration twice in the early 1870s in Vienna? The answers rest in Brahms’s and Joachim’s negative perception of the contemporary rage for music as a dramatic medium of sentiment, sensuality, theater, and spectacle. They viewed this trend as a symptom of the decline in musical standards away from a Classical ideal of musical thinking and its formal requirements, albeit tempered by an early Romantic sensibility. The challenge, as they would come to see it from the 1860s onward, was how to reconcile the legitimate demands of a growing participant and listening public for an accessible expressive Romanticism with an allegiance to the normative standards of musical beauty bequeathed by musical Classicism.
Wagner came to represent the most persuasive case for the novel approach to music as an easily grasped dramatic medium tied to text and narration. He was the apostle of the idea that music needed to be a progressive art form whose historical imperative rendered Classical traditions obsolete. As music historian, critic, and Wagner advocate Franz Brendel wrote in 1855, “Our age is not only one of decline and the disintegration of an inherited art … it is … one of a new creativity.”12 By 1855, Brendel promoted Wagner as the protagonist of a new musical art that “leaves the narrow, limited customary musical spheres behind, and in opera, puts aside the one-sided overemphasis on music.” Wagner realized an historical imperative; he fulfilled the expectation that composition be justified by “a new spiritual substance.” “Musical creativity is purposeless,” Brendel wrote, “if it is not driven by a higher spiritual goal,” by which Brendel meant inspiration and meaning garnered from the other arts.13
The currency of such notions, not the originality and striking brilliance of Wagner’s music, caused the most concern among skeptics like Brahms and Joachim. What better antidote to Wagner’s success in the theater than new, large-scale works in traditional genres by Schubert, an acknowledged and popular master who had already made his entrance on the historical stage alongside Beethoven. The Schubert of the “Great” C-Major Symphony, the orchestrated “Grand Duo,” the “Unfinished,” of the E-flat Mass, the String Quintet, late piano sonatas, and Alfonso und Estrella, which Liszt premiered in 1854, represented a powerful alternative to Wagner: music that revealed the ideal synthesis of the Classical with a new “spiritual substance.”14 Schubert’s recently discovered works lent him a requisite if not exquisite expressive modernity. Wagner himself recognized Schubert as rising from the dead to challenge him. In 1869, at the end of his essay on conducting, he ridiculed Joachim and Brahms for “anticipating all sort of good things from a return to the new ballad-melody of Schubert.”15
They were not so far off the mark. Schubert’s music satisfied the public’s expectation of profound meaning in a musical language of narrative realism that conveyed the sensibilities and intensity of emotion so evident in Wagner. Schubert’s originality reflected a debt to Classical aesthetics in terms of melody, harmonic usage, formal structures, and conventional links between music and text. He undermined the claim by progressives that the logic of history rendered Viennese Classicism “narrow,” and that the musical “spheres” represented by masterpieces from the past were either sterile or irrelevant (as items of mere luxury), and disconnected from the needs and aspirations of the new, educated public for music.
What made this use of Schubert plausible after 1850 was that the Schubert everyone had already come to love turned out to be more than a familiar composer of vocal and piano music played at home and, more importantly, sung in semi-public and public venues.16 The surprise was that he was also the author of symphonies, masses, and operas—works for the concert stage. Furthermore, the music Schubert had written for amateur participation—primarily choral works absent in Wagner’s oeuvre (with the exception of arrangements of a few operatic excerpts)—could not be dismissed as old-fashioned. Herbeck, writing in 1862 to the director of the Choral Society in Königsberg, expressed delight “like a child” at an inquiry “from the far north for a choral work by Schubert.”17 He exhorted his colleague “to make much propaganda for this artist of the heart and spirit. Only so can we make the many choruses of our great common fatherland understand that male choral singing has to look for its greatest treasures in Schubert and that Schubert alone is the best remedy against the unfortunate and increasing superficiality of choral programs.”18 Schubert was new music for a new national consciousness at the highest level of aesthetic merit.
Nonetheless, by the mid-1870s many observers, even in Vienna, conceded reluctantly that German national sensibilities were becoming inseparable from the Wagnerian. Just as Bismarck and the Prussian Monarchy eclipsed all other alternatives to German unification, including the Austrian dream of a grand German nation that encompassed the Habsburg Empire, Wagner, with the opening of Bayreuth in 1876, appeared close to victory on the cultural front. But if the Austro-German option had been already defeated decisively on the battlefield in 1866, in culture there was still a war to be won. Schubert, not Brahms, offered the distinct alternative popular vision.19 Owing to Schubert’s historical status as a contemporary of Beethoven, it seemed more plausible to temper the Wagnerian with him than attempting a counter-revolution with Brahms.
Herbeck himself sought valiantly to straddle both sides of the mid-century cultural conflict. An enthusiast for Wagner, he ran afoul of the Master of Bayreuth when the 1871 Vienna premiere of Die Meistersinger under his baton turned into a near catastrophe. For all his advocacy of Wagner, as a conductor in Vienna he also sought to defend the Classical tradition and even brought Handel’s Messiah back into the concert repertory (in a performance that outraged the historically minded Brahms).
What made Schubert a perfect complement to Wagner in Herbeck’s view was not only that he was an historical figure, but that he offered a contribution to German art and culture uniquely absent in Wagner. Schubert possessed an “openness to nature and life” in which a true ideal of beauty dominated. His work reconciled high aesthetic ideals with a sense for “natural enjoyment.” He brought a “soft warm breeze from the south” into “the deep green German forest.” “Yes,” Herbeck wrote, “it is through the delightful marriage of the profound Germanic soul with southerly colorful passion that Schubert touches us so wonderfully.”20 Furthermore, Schubert justified the role of the amateur participant in public musical culture. “Schubert’s music was not devoted purely and only to the art song,” the conductor wrote as early as 1855 in the preface to a new edition of the works for chorus, noting that Schubert had produced the most original choral music of all composers. Herbeck ended his preface with the exhortation: “Sing Schubert! Schubert! And once more Schubert!”
The Schubert who rose to prominence in the public imagination and the repertoire of the concert hall after 1850 had first been “conceived” in 1839 when Schumann wrote about the newly discovered “Great” C-Major Symphony. This, his second life, lasted until 1867, when the “Unfinished” was published. Thus the Schubert inherited and embraced by the twentieth century as one of the great composers was born not in 1797 but rather in 1839, making him more a contemporary of Brahms and Wagner than of Beethoven and Weber. Brahms was keenly aware of this anomaly. He remarked to Adolf Schubring in 1863 that with Schubert “one has the sense that he is still alive.”21 Indeed, one cannot underestimate the astonishment at the novelty of the form and sound of the “Unfinished” at its first performance just two years after Brahms’s comment.
Thus by the end of the nineteenth century, Schubert’s music and personality came to be understood as a central representative of the German musical culture of late Romanticism rather than as a characteristic historical figure of the decade after the fall of Napoleon. The reinvention of Schubert in German-speaking Europe can be compared to the early nineteenth-century radical reassessment of Shakespeare by English literary critics. In Shakespeare, as one scholar has put it, “artistic achievement and national pride could be cemented together.” The “most desirable traits of British identity” were to be found in Shakespeare, as Henry Crawford said in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. “It is part of an Englishman’s constitution.”22
This refashioning of Schubert at midcentury was persuasive precisely because he possessed a twin identity. He was a familiar personage from a hallowed (and rapidly vanishing) past, the age of Beethoven and the Vormärz, the period before the revolutions of 1848. He was also a composer of spectacular works whose first appearance provided a fresh alternative to the allure of anti-historicist musical aesthetics. By the 1870s the foregrounding of a “new” Schubert based on the posthumous revelations gave renewed strength to anti-Wagnerian circles, to the allegiances shared by Brahms, Max Bruch, Joachim, and Hermann Goetz, and to a faith in the vitality and future potential of the Classical legacy: instrumental music, symphonic form, early-Romantic lyricism, and the conception of the expressive connection between music and text characteristic of the Lied.
Not surprisingly, Wagner had little to say about Schubert, who was at best a peripheral figure in the Wagnerian account of history. In 1841 he poked fun at German composers who sought to emulate Schubert’s songs just to gain notoriety in Paris. In 1869, he ridiculed those who hoped for a “Messiah” on behalf of that aesthetic. Wagnerians (with the notable exception of Bruckner) often derided Schubert, as George Bernard Shaw did (citing Schubert’s “thoughtlessness” and “brainlessness”).23 Even Richard Strauss confessed in the 1920s that for most of his career he had never given Schubert much thought.24 The “New German” movement’s debt to Schubert resided mostly in Franz Liszt’s advocacy and enthusiasm—understandable given the influence that Schubert’s expressive musical rhetoric had on Liszt’s notions of the connection between instrumental music and literature, between word and tone, and thus on the idea and realization of the tone poem.25 For example, Schubert entered Russia’s musical life through Liszt’s transcriptions of his Lieder in the late 1840s.26 Yet by the 1870s ardent Russian Wagnerians like Alexander Nikolayevitch Serov had no difficulty in saying that they “detested” Schubert’s symphonies.27 Other Wagnerians, like Hugo Wolf, would come to distance themselves from the music and its growing popularity in the 1880s.28
Wagner’s lack of interest was consistent with the prevalent critical opinion of Schubert held during the years of Wagner’s youth. Prior to his appropriation as a legitimate popular alternative to things Wagnerian in the late 1850s, Schubert’s place in history had been circumscribed. His achievement, according to Brendel (writing in 1855) was limited to the art song. Brendel dismissed the larger works but lauded Schubert’s elevation of the Lied into a fully contemporary medium of the “German spirit,” through his “expansion” of music’s narrative power on behalf of “the expression of the blossoming of life,” a “deepening of interiority,” the insertion of “subjectivity” into musical drama, and the “nuanced” representation of poetic meaning. Schubert was placed historically as an inspiration for Liszt and Schumann, a remarkable but restricted genius cut short by an early death. His works, for all their virtues, lacked the “grandiose seriousness, the manner, the refined artistic understanding and controlled power” of Beethoven.29
The influential 1861 Neues Universal-Lexikon der Tonkunst edited by Eduard Bernsdorf concurred. The “Great” C-Major Symphony was dismissed on account of its “formal deficiencies.” Schubert merited a place alongside the greatest German composers through his contributions to the Lied, since he brought that uniquely “German possession”—the art song—“to its highest fulfillment.” By perfecting the Lied, he brought an antiquated traditional genre to the limits of its historical significance.30 But it was a sidebar in the progressive march of music history.
This line of criticism would persist. In 1875 Heinrich Köstlin, while conceding that Schubert produced “important works in all musical genres,” observed that his greatness remained tied to the Lied and to music of “profound and moving lyricism” rather than music as an “imposing force that emanates from an organic work of art.” Schubert was akin to a Biedermeier landscape and genre painter who, though evoking charm within an aesthetic of naïve realism, mirrored almost despite himself “the overwrought sentimentality” of his times.31 This argument found a peculiar variant as late as 1900 in the views of Gustav Mahler, for whom barely four chamber works and just forty songs by Schubert were truly great. Mahler deemed Schubert’s melodies to be so “eternal” that they excused his lack of “technical skill” and reliance on an inherently deceitful strategy, repetition (so much so that many works could be cut in half). Nevertheless, for Mahler, the critical fact was that Schubert was unable to develop his material adequately.32
Such views left the way open for Wagner to claim the mantle of Beethoven, which he did most directly in 1870. The reinvention of Schubert as the composer of music capable of competing with the dramatic musical rhetoric of Liszt and Wagner was supported explicitly to blunt Wagner’s claim. To the reinventors Schubert was not only the rightful heir to Beethoven as a matter of history, but also the proper model for the future of music. In Schubert one encountered profundity, organic logic, nobility, individuality and even drama—all without the transgression of norms or historical precedent. As Brahms observed in 1887, “Schubert, not Mendelssohn or Schumann, is Beethoven’s true successor.”33
Wagner’s appropriation of the legacy of Beethoven was based on his own internalization of a mid-nineteenth-century philosophical conceit regarding the existence of an inexorable logic in history. The emergence of Schubert as a popular figure, with unknown major and defining works coming to light in the 1850s and 1860s, coincided with seminal developments in the study of history and culture in German-speaking Europe. Indeed, the strange ahistorical nature of Schubert’s posthumous emergence into the mainstream of classical musical culture made him an awkward subject for late nineteenth-century historians, particularly those who were ardent Wagnerians.
Historians and theorists in the generation after Leopold von Ranke—W. H. Riehl, Jacob Burckhardt, Karl Lamprecht, and Wilhelm Dilthey—all sought to challenge Ranke’s fundamental emphasis on the state and politics as decisive forces in history and as the proper sources for periodization in history. For Ranke, human history was, objectively, a sequence of distinct eras without a discernible overarching trajectory. Therefore, no era possessed a philosophical priority. At midcentury, particularly after the events of 1848, ideas of causality in history came under scrutiny, both the historicist conceit regarding the objective existence of distinct eras in the past, as well as the determinist teleological philosophical claims of Hegel and his followers, notably Marx.
The acquisition of literacy and culture—Bildung—had become a defining ambition of the increasingly dominant German middle classes, who, as Riehl observed in 1864, cultivated a self-conscious collective identity as bearers of a noble historic tradition of Bürgertum.34 The Schubert revival coincided with the search for an objective legitimation of contemporary middle-class cultural practices through the study of history. Music as a shared medium of cultural expression and the rise in popularity of Schubert, seen as a harbinger of the distinctive character of German values, coincided with the wide popularity of programmatic realist novels, such as the spectacularly successful 1855 Soll und Haben by Gustav Freytag (himself an anti-Wagnerian), written to celebrate the distinction and historic role of the German middle classes.35
Notions of history and culture (in a proto-anthropological sense) became ideological battlegrounds in the process of German unification after 1848. How did culture, or rather, a unified cultural sensibility and habits emerge? How might culture—including mores—be understood as coherent? If identifiable as a separate force, was culture itself a causal factor in historical change in politics and economics? Or was culture—literature, music, the visual arts, and philosophical ideas—subordinate to, or contingent on, the “real” forces in history: political power and material, economic conditions? Might culture be a primary historical factor, not only independent of economics and politics, but itself a shaping element in history?
These were not idle academic questions. Both the controversy between Heinrich von Treitschke and Riehl at the end of the 1850s about whether culture and society could be studied properly apart from politics, and the more extensive controversy over methods (Methodenstreit) that engulfed the writing of history at the turn of the nineteenth century were tied to ongoing struggles over politics, including the character of the new German State—its legitimacy, its origins, its connection to German language and culture outside of the post-1870 empire, its political system, and its relationship to the competing claims of liberalism and monarchical conservatism.36 Culture was seen as increasingly relevant to the sense of what Germany had become, and to its perhaps “special” path and unique destiny in history.
Herbeck’s evocation of Schubert’s “German” character as distinctly influenced by a gentle warm spirit characteristic of the south, in direct contrast to the dark forests of the north, was a transparent cultural metaphor that juxtaposed two norms, the Austrian and the Prussian. As the inevitability of a Prussian and North German political solution to unification became apparent in the 1860s, the fear of the loss of a German connection to the Italianate—visible in Goethe’s and Mendelssohn’s romance with Italy and the work of the “German Roman” school of painters, including Schubert’s friend Leopold Kupelwieser, who studied in Rome—was palpable. In this sense the impetus behind the rediscovery of Schubert during the 1860s went beyond music. The intense debate over defining culture as a factor in the laws of historical change heightened the stakes surrounding the midcentury reevaluation of Schubert; as an Austro-German figure his ties to the south seemed inscribed in his music.
Riehl, Burckhardt, Lamprecht, and Dilthey each had a deep, active interest in contemporary musical culture. They were (not always approving) witnesses of the dramatic expansion of the audience for music after 1848, as evidenced by the growth in amateurism, music education, music publishing, instrument manufacture, and concert life. These developments helped confirm the perception that the rate and nature of change during the second half of the century was unprecedented and traumatic. Change ranged from population growth and migration to the transformation of agriculture and industry, the rise of cities and, for German-speaking Europe, the political resolution of a burgeoning nationalism through the creation of the klein-deutsch Prussian-dominated German Empire after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.
Historians struggled to understand the present in terms of the past. Was there such a thing as progress? Was there an endpoint to human development? What were the causes of change? Was it possible to grasp, in a manner that approximated or emulated the methods of science, a logic and coherence in history that illuminated the origins of social habits and justified sensibilities regarding collective identity and allegiance? Was the objective study of humankind and history—the human sciences—possible? Could it explain the past and present, even if it did not offer, as Marx claimed, a determined pathway into the future? And central to all these questions for the post-Ranke generation was the issue of the autonomy of culture and therefore music in shaping historical change.
By the time Schubert and Beethoven were reburied in adjoining plots in Vienna’s Central Cemetery with considerable pomp and circumstance in 1888, Schubert’s place in the larger frame of history had shifted from the periphery to the center. What did Schubert reveal in terms of what was distinctive about modern life and culture? As a representative of Classical aesthetic norms that transcended historical change, he had been placed alongside Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and in this sense he was a reminder of the dangers of modernity and the elusiveness of progress in aesthetics and mores. Yet he was also a unique forerunner, a legitimate symbol of a vital German spirit that existed beyond the terms set by Wagner. Schubert’s status as part historical and part contemporary, linked to a Classical, high-art tradition yet also a widely popular cultural symbol, made him a fiercely contested figure. In Vienna, Schubert’s dual resonance as reminder of the past and influential contemporary assumed particular urgency during the last decades of the Habsburg Empire and during the First Republic before the Anschluss.
The most significant contribution to the historical question of the origins and character of nineteenth-century modernity was the appearance in 1869 of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy, a work written in the very decade of renewed enthusiasm for Schubert. Burckhardt’s central thesis was that modernity had its roots in the Renaissance, and his aesthetic sympathies and prejudices help explain why he became one of Brahms’s favorite authors. According to Burckhardt, what characterized modernity was the emergence of the idea of individuality and the valorization of the private person as separate from a corporate or collective entity. Individualism, particularly in the arts, became a decisive marker of nineteenth-century culture; it had been nascent in the plastic arts and literature of the Renaissance, and had blossomed in the political theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Although music became in Burckhardt’s view a prominent cultural medium only after 1600, the role of singing in Renaissance music underscored for him the highlighting of the individual as a distinct actor in life and history; it provided a public “exhibition of the individual man in society.”37
Burckhardt was an avid amateur. He played the piano, even composed, and wrote music criticism early in his career in Basel, although in his later years he retreated from taking a role in music as a critic or active amateur. His tastes were distinctly anti-Wagnerian. Writing to the distinguished German jurist Friedrich von Preen (1823–1894), he derided the passion for Wagner as an example of the “horrendous” contemporary taste for luxury and the allure of a spiritual “nervousness” in the music. He expressed the hope that the Italians would not fall prey to the Wagnerian enthusiasms that had spread through German-speaking Europe, and thereby lose their natural lyricism.38
Each evening when he could no longer work, Burckhardt turned to his vast music library of piano vocal scores of operas, Lieder, and oratorios. His tastes ranged from Bach to Mozart, Cherubini, Rossini, and Verdi (but not Bizet). Mozart, like Raphael, was his ideal. Individuality and a Classicist sense of form were perfectly balanced in their work; Schubert and Weber—both defining figures in Romanticism before 1830—were not far behind. They had the virtue of appealing to a contemporary sensibility. The sensibility Schubert shared with Beethoven was the capacity to translate into the realm of the beautiful—into musical moments of joy—the subjective temporal transfiguration of the mundane realities in an individual’s life. As Burckhardt observed on New Year’s Day in 1887, only composers were granted this moment, though perhaps Raphael might have been an exception.39
Music was the prime medium for communicating a highly individualized expression of subjectivity that corresponded with an element of shared truth about reality. It was the most personal and intimate art form, the one most capable of expressing the individual. Beethoven was akin to Michelangelo—an instance of unparalleled individuality—but an intemperate one, suggesting the danger posed to norms of aesthetic beauty by the nineteenth century’s cult of originality. Schubert possessed, in contrast, a calm and economical intensity regarding the truth. His music did not decorate, deceive, or camouflage. Rather, it shared the intimate and gave voice to the individual, all through a command of beauty.
For Burckhardt, Schubert realized the essence of music. As Burckhardt observed:
At the extreme frontier of art … we find music, which, if we wish to penetrate the essence of its being, must be taken as instrumental music, detached from words and, above all, apart from dramatic representation…. [Music] is a comet, circling round life in a vastly high and remote orbit, yet suddenly sweeping down closer to it than any other art, and revealing to man his inmost heart. Sometimes it is a kind of mathematics of imagination—then again just pure soul, infinitely far, yet close and dear. Its effect (where such effect is genuine) is so great and so immediate that the feeling of gratitude at once seeks for its creator and spontaneously proclaims him great. The great composers are among the most undisputed great men.40
Burckhardt’s admiration and ambivalence regarding Beethoven reveals the extent to which he was overcome, like Brahms, with a sense that in the growing attachment to music as the medium of drama and radical individuality he was witnessing a decline in taste and standards. In 1878 he confessed to Preen his fear that the broadening of the public and the cheapening of taste over the past two decades might ultimately obscure from future historians’ view all that was truly beautiful in the music of first half of the nineteenth century. Would the renewed interest in Schubert and the iconic status of the B-Minor Symphony succeed in retarding the widespread enthusiasm for mere dramatic effect, justified in the name of Beethoven? Was not the ideal contemporary synthesis of beauty in form and expression—what Cornelius called “the subjectively unstable”41—to be found in Schubert?
Karl Lamprecht’s reputation among historians never rivaled that of Burckhardt, but in his day he was perhaps more widely read and influential. He developed a theory of history that suggested music could be a central factor in the trajectory of history, a vital human activity that had causal consequences. Music, according to him, was a catalyst within the psychological life of humanity. It mirrored and shaped humanity’s inner life, its Seelenleben. In Lamprecht’s view, a key to understanding history was human nature as revealed through the still young science of psychology. This methodology put him at odds with a tradition of historical writing that began with Ranke and would reach its finest moment in the work of Max Weber. Lamprecht focused particularly on the human “capacity for fantasy” (Phantasiethätigkeit), and therefore on aesthetic proclivities. Aesthetic ideals in history prefigured the formulation of a new moral code (Sittenlehre) and worldview (Weltanschauung). In short, music was a leading force in modern history.42
Unlike Burckhardt, Lamprecht was not a cultural pessimist. For him, the distinguishing feature of post-1870 modernity was the transition from an age of assertive individuality to the contemporary age of radical subjectivity. The “total work of art” of Wagner exemplified subjective modernity through its synthesis of sound and word into drama. The use of extended chromatic harmony to represent nuances of psychological feelings and the emphasis on “sensation”—color and effect—in the orchestra were markers of a subjectivist outlook, where the total experience of the individual, not external reality, held sway. Wagner’s successors, notably Richard Strauss, went further with Wagner’s epoch-making appropriation of music as an instrument of subjective expression. Music held the key to understanding the essence of modern culture. “So it is proper,” wrote Lamprecht, “that the effort for a cultural historical understanding of the most recent past—and at the same time, our immediate present—begins with the retelling and elaboration of the great occurrences in musical art, and closes with the presentation of the most recent progress in worldview.”43
At the same time Lamprecht grasped the unusual but pivotal place occupied by Schubert in history. Schubert represented the transition from the age of individuality to the modern age of the subjective. Lamprecht understood the paradox of Schubert’s twin identity as an icon from the past and as a contemporary aesthetic force. “What better can be said,” he wrote, “of the weighty philosophy of his apparently unfinished sublime B-Minor Symphony than that it is worthy of being contemporary with that greatest of the great, who died just one year before him, and yet appears related to the work born much later of a Brahms?”44 Lamprecht located the impetus behind the midcentury embrace of Schubert not so much in Schubert as a historical figure, but in Schubert’s role as a newly discovered antidote to Wagnerism.
Lamprecht’s emphasis on the psychological as a historical force put him at odds with Burckhardt. The difference between them is revealed not only in their radically opposed view of Wagner, but in their differing accounts of the significance of musical culture in history. For Burckhardt, literature and the visual arts were far more significant, whereas music always seemed to vanish from view, with the new replacing the old. While art and literature remained as living constant historical factors, music (in an age before recording) had to be realized in performance, in real time and space. For Lamprecht, on the other hand, music, precisely on account of its temporal nature and psychological, non-linguistic power, was a primary factor in history.
But it was not only Wagnerians who privileged music as a historical force. W. H. Riehl, as skeptical about Wagner as Burckhardt, had argued a half century before Lamprecht that music, as a matter of cultural history, was an essential clue to understanding the past. If Burckhardt believed music to be more ephemeral and thus less promising than art and literature as a source of historical understanding, Riehl took the opposite view. For him “the cultural image of past centuries” was located in music. In music one could “hear chords once listened to by people long gone, just as they heard them.” The “most secret, instinctive moods of a past world’s emotional life … the natural sounds of their souls which were so different from ours” could only be revealed through music. Riehl concluded, “Image and word would be far more distant had they not found expression in music.”45
The methodological dilemma was how to read the music of the past historically. Riehl understood that listening had a history, just as tuning did; the very frequencies of the pitches we assume to be identical had changed over time. In order to get the proper character of the culture of the past, the “musical ear of the age” had to be grasped.46 For Riehl that historical insight was inaccessible except through the historical reimagining of the music of the past.
This methodological strategy concealed Riehl’s powerful bias. He idealized the late eighteenth century, particularly Gluck and Haydn, and distrusted the modern enthusiasm for the piano to the exclusion of all other instruments, particularly those closely allied to the voice. To him, the ideal musical education required training on the violin and the piano—combining the instrument of absolute lyricism and the instrument of harmonic drama. Riehl’s ideal of the string quartet as the highest form of music emerges in the short story “Das Quartett,” set in the mid-eighteenth century.47 Riehl, influenced by Schiller’s notion of aesthetic education, argued that for music to communicate emotion, passion, and therefore the essence of a particular historical culture, it had to adhere to a set of objective criteria regarding beauty. Riehl, writing during the 1850s (before Tristan or the Ring), thought that Wagner had gone too far by discarding the inherently objective nature of musical art, particularly in his use of the voice and his reliance on color and orchestral effects. Modern music lacked both the naïve and the sentimental clarity of eighteenth-century norms.
Riehl did not doubt that music had to progress, particularly as the German-speaking community realized its own communitarian character through culture. But “the basic outlines of the basis of a musical aesthetic” rested in Viennese Classicism. “Understanding,” a dimension of Bildung, was a requisite attribute for Riehl’s beloved middle classes. That meant grasping the aesthetic and historically valid character of music. Wagner’s abandonment of tradition devalued that understanding and rendered music meaningless. The critique of older music as sterile and academic was a function of ignorance: it showed the inability to sense the objective aesthetic values beneath the shifting surface of historical style. Wagner’s appeal to modern expressivity was unpersuasive. His abandonment of the valid syntax and grammar of musical form resulted in the following paradox: “Modern music appears mostly to be passionate without being so; the Classical is, however, passionate without appearing to be so,” Riehl concluded.48
Riehl countered the widespread notion that Wagner was the exemplar of the modern in music, a leading representative of using music as a means of nuanced subjective expression, by claiming that music, to carry any real meaning—even that of personal emotion—had to respect and adhere to the formal logic that exemplified the true nature of music. Only within that logic could content or meaning be differentiated. The promise of music in the future, therefore, rested on a synthesis of aesthetic norms and music as a mirror of history. Following Schiller’s distinction between the naïve and sentimental, Riehl thought that modernity had gone to extremes in its embrace of the sentimental, abandoning the naïve. Pure naïve simplicity in beauty and expressiveness could be reclaimed on behalf of contemporary German culture through the disciplined immersion in musical Classicism. Riehl, like Herbeck, worried about the loss of an Italianate sense of the melodic.49
The promise and potential direction of modern music was therefore most audible for Riehl in the German Lied. Its purest naïve form was the folksong, since it represented the most direct and “unmediated” expression of the “mysteries” of feeling, and therefore the “interiority” of a people’s “actions and doings.” Beethoven, Mozart, and Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814)—the widely influential North German writer on music and composer)—had established the norms of the self-conscious “idealistic” adaptation of the song away from its “naturalistic” origins, just as Haydn had extracted the ideal terms of the symphony and sonata form from their roots in dance and folk tunes. Beethoven sought to expand beyond this, to break out of the confines within which Haydn worked. Schubert attempted to achieve the same progress with the Lied.50
Despite the undeniable greatness of Schubert’s achievement in this form—his recasting of the song as a psychological drama—Riehl believed that Schubert also revealed the limits of the song form. In this, Riehl failed to take into account the formal and harmonic innovation of Schubert’s instrumental music such as the “Wanderer” Fantasy that so attracted Liszt. Indeed, he found such innovation absent in those few larger-scale instrumental works by Schubert he knew. Schubert, by perfecting the song and realizing the expressive potential of the song form, was still trapped by its inherent naïveté. For Riehl, the task facing the modern composer was to find new means for idealistic, aesthetic expression as a way of sustaining the naïve values underlying modern culture. One had to deny one’s own instincts and become self-consciously probing in an historical sense, Riehl noted, to get under the skin of a Reichardt song. In Schubert’s Lieder “the spirit of the age is found complete; it penetrates and sings it entirely naturally.”51 At the same time Schubert honored Classical norms. Wagner, in a desperate attempt to be modern, sacrificed this search for naïve beauty in favor of superficial theatricality. Riehl’s argument helps explain why Schubert was for many, including later anti-Wagnerians such as Felix Weingartner, more akin to Mozart than to Beethoven.
Riehl’s critique of Wagner, which sought to redefine the challenge facing the contemporary composer in a manner that supported the notion that in Schubert an alternative viable path was discernable, found its echo at the turn of century in Wilhelm Dilthey. For Dilthey Erlebnis, experience (the conduct of daily life), generated the underlying values of an age. These can be found in the “inner relations” of “mental life” that in turn reveal shared, wide-ranging coherences. The evidence of the way individuals fashion a sense of meaning includes forms of autobiography (self-representation), but the shared values of a historical age find their most eloquent expression in the arts—in poetry and music. Like Riehl, Dilthey located the model origins of German modernity in the literature and music of the eighteenth century. Mozart and not Wagner was the model musical dramatist of life. Mozart’s achievement was characteristic of the naturalness and simplicity inherent in musical Classicism.
In a manner reminiscent of Lamprecht, Dilthey observed that imitating Mozart was no longer possible on account of the “intensification of subjectivity, the renewed emphasis on expression” characteristic of the second half of the nineteenth century. Like Riehl, Dilthey allowed himself to render the following aesthetic judgment of contemporary taste: “Compare this all finally with Richard Wagner!”52 By employing material from a mythic German past, insisting on using specific markers for every emotion and passions as metaphysical notions, Wagner ended up “preferring musical abstraction”—a tendency already evident in the selection of mythic subjects for his music dramas. “He knows no lower reality, in which all life is rooted,” Dilthey concluded.53 But Schubert’s music (like Mozart’s) was rooted in that “lower reality”—the real conditions of life in Vienna. It possessed the intense subjectivity of modernity as well as the command of an ideal mode of aesthetic expression. For Dilthey, the “substance” of music, from a historian’s point of view, was in the way sound was organized by the composer’s imagination—the connection between memory and experience realized in music. Instrumental music—the Classical patterns of melody and form—offered the finest means to express artistically the expanse and detail of human experience. The ideal of program music in Liszt and the music drama of Wagner subordinated and limited the power of musical expression.54
For anti-Wagnerians, even avowed cultural pessimists such as Burckhardt and Brahms, Schubert offered the most optimistic model for the future. Schubert’s inspiration was drawn from individual experience, from a realistic account of life’s struggles. He conveyed his subjective response using the inherited Classical legacy of musical logic and form, without suggesting an academic neoclassicism (which was Riehl’s critique of Mendelssohn). Rather, he presented a viable synthesis of the historical imperative to be within the present moment and the aesthetic imperative to affirm and adhere to norms of musical beauty and form. The popularity Schubert achieved by the early 1900s only confirmed these notions. Schubert became a voice of the contemporary world. He was not merely Beethoven’s immediate successor, the last exponent of a Viennese Classicism that began with Gluck, but an alternative within late Romanticism and a harbinger of the post-Romantic aesthetics later adopted by modernist composers in the 1920s.
Schubert and the Myth of Old Vienna
An explicit realist strategy lay behind Schubert’s music. His realism resided in his use of music as a medium for individual self-expression in the face of the severe political, grim economic, and brutal physical circumstances that defined life in Vienna in the 1820s.55 These circumstances emancipated Schubert from remaining a short-lived, brilliant, and somewhat peripheral contemporary of Beethoven and precursor of Romanticism. This recognition of the psychic and narrative realism in Schubert remained most apparent in the very local context in which he had lived and worked: Vienna.
Burckhardt, an outsider with respect to Vienna, welcomed the massive physical transformation the city experienced after the Imperial patent of 1859 that permitted the demolition of the walls surrounding the inner city, the building of the Ringstrasse, and the integration of communities previously regarded as suburbs into one major metropolis. Arriving there in 1884, Burckhardt exclaimed, “Vienna has become enormously magnificent … something like the distance on the Ring between the Elisabeth Bridge and Schottenring can nowhere be found in Europe any longer.” He raved about the “magical beauty” of the Burgtheater, “the jewel of the neighborhood,” and of the “ravishing” Votivkirche.56
This enthusiasm for apparent progress was hardly universal among the Viennese, the majority of whom were ambivalent and discomforted by the city’s changes: the massive historicist public structures and the palatial houses and apartment buildings that replaced the Glacis, the stretch of green that once separated the inner city from the suburbs. He likewise failed to see this physical transformation as the symbols of the massive demographic and political changes in the 1860s and 1870s. As the Viennese journalist Adam Müller-Guffenbrunn lamented in a 1915 volume titled Old Viennese Journeys and Visions:
There are still people among us who have known the old Vienna. They are to be envied; they have seen perhaps one of the loveliest among major European cities. One hears tell of the hesitation with which the Emperor signed the patent of 1859 that resulted in the destruction of the old cityscape. How understandable. We younger people can hardly imagine the peculiar magic than emanated from this cityscape … the wide space of the Glacis, which was never to be built upon, kept all that was not in accord with an aristocratic character away from the inner city…. Old Vienna was a garden city despite its tall walls, and an evening stroll on its ramparts must have been an incomparable delight.57
The images and accounts of Schubert and his friends happily going out into nature for picnics and parties that accompanied the post-1850 cult of Schubert tell a true story of the topography and social structure of pre-1848 Vienna. A decade after Schubert’s death, Adolf Schmidl published a two-volume guide to Vienna’s surroundings, organized by round-trip journeys that took twenty hours or less. Schmidl was proud that recent improvements in the transportation system (not railroads) had made what was once the province of a few—the ability to avail oneself of a unique connection between urban life and nature—a reality for many:
The advantages of Vienna—that it has pleasanter surroundings than any other imperial city—are too well known to bear repeating here in detail. But it has only been a few decades that the Viennese has been able to enjoy the charming setting of the city as it deserves, and he owes this in particular to the implementation of the omnibus. Before this truly social institution existed, most of the inhabitants of Vienna had to limit themselves to a few extended excursions into the countryside each year…. Only the rich could afford to spend the summer in the country…. Ten years ago a communal carriage to Hietzing was established … interest soon was so great that it had to go back and forth at all hours of the day. Soon more such conveyances to other neighboring villages followed, and at present no fewer than 60 carriages go daily to the various surrounding areas of Vienna, and 18 of those leave every hour. On Sundays in beautiful weather more than 140 carriages are busy and convey at least 10,000 people. Naturally, the Fiaker coaches were initially the greatest opponents of this undertaking and there was no lack of tensions of all kinds….
Because of these institutions, a stay in the country is no longer an unaffordable expense; for a few pennies each day, the businessman can come into the city, and a visit to the country is now so much easier for friends and acquaintances…. The situation benefited greatly from the limitation of office hours in most of the offices to 9am to 2pm and the abolition of afternoon hours instituted a few years back…. Because easier traffic connections have allowed them to live at a distance, more officials of small income, who previously were not able to support a family, have dared to marry and lead, however narrow, a life cheered by domestic joys.58
The nostalgia for an old Vienna framed by nature and green spaces was more than a convenient myth. The physical transformation of Vienna that began in 1859 altered the daily life of the inhabitants; it made the city more susceptible to a rationalized sense of work and the use of time. No wonder that the invocation of the good old days of “Alt Wien” became a prominent vehicle for the expression of resistance and ambivalence not only to the physical and demographic changes that Vienna witnessed between the 1860s and the 1890s, but also to the cultural habits they brought with them. Eduard von Bauernfeld, the friend of Schubert’s and Schwind’s, described in 1872 the era leading up to the post-1859 years this way: “One lived a sort of double life. The old Viennese sense for enjoyment remained intact, as before, and remained loyal to its Strauss and Nestroy, just as one also began to harbor doubts about all the new material ambitions, forerunners of a new spirit.”59
The rhetoric of lament and loss was picked up not only by voices with deep roots in early nineteenth-century Vienna, but also by newcomers eager to display Viennese credentials. The nostalgia for the physical character of pre-Ringstrasse Vienna framed the basis of a critique of the contemporary attitude to culture. Ferdinand Kürnberger (1821–1879) was a key figure in the Viennese 1848 revolution, a great satirical writer whose 1855 novel on America, Der Amerika-Müde, remains a classic; he was admired by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Otto Erich Deutsch. Kürnberger reminisced in 1872 about the shift from a traditional and genuine Viennese wonderment at real talent and beauty, rendered simply, to the present habits of enthusiasm for appearances—a commercialized sense of fashion spellbound by mere fame:
Instead of the old law, an entirely new and changed natural one has thus emerged; the old law no longer exists. When I still was carrying my books to school, I used to stop reverently in front of the window of an art shop then across from the Court Theater. There I saw Kriehuber’s lithographs of portraits of Löwe, Anschütz, Fichtner, La Roche, of Rettich, Schröder, Neumann, Haitzinger—people known to the boy by their artistic reputation though he had not yet set foot into a theater, and whom he was interested in knowing, be it only by face, through the picture. That was the old style. Today I regularly see in this or that window a life-size headshot photograph in a garish golden frame and have to ask: who is that? Then I’m told: this is the new soubrette to be engaged by Stramper; that is the leading lady to be engaged by Ascher; it is the violinist, the singer who will come to Vienna soon! Nobody knows them yet; they have not yet impressed with their art, thus one cannot yet be interested in them, but yet … their person is the advertisement for their art. And before we owe them for one single artistic pleasure we know the worthy faces of people we may boo at next Sunday. That is a new style!60
Comparing the Vienna of the day to the earlier era, the legendary and critical chronicler of all things local, Friedrich Schlögl (1821–1892), lamented the same changes. Writing in 1883, he noted that the worlds of theater and music had become dominated by fashion, pretentions, the economics of advertisement and newspaper criticism; the people had become humorless, overcome with an obsession for money. An authentic local aesthetic culture, marked by simplicity and decency, had vanished and with it a natural sense of humor and taste.61 Schlögl was equally suspicious of a false nostalgia for Old Vienna, and lamented that those who longed for a relief from a culture dominated by the day’s all-powerful “era of fraud” through nostalgia were perhaps the only genuine idealists left in a time of fools and “knaves.” Where had Old Vienna’s taste for morality, clarity, lightness, life-affirming and cheerful beauty gone? “Time and people have become different,” he concluded. “One used to go to the theater as the one place for distraction and inspiration, but today people are buried in those evil newspapers. After all, we have become a ‘politically educated’ people.”62
Kürnberger noted the irony, also perceived by Schlögl, that the admirable Viennese attitude to life encapsulated in the term Gemütlichkeit had been hijacked and undermined, if not perverted and destroyed, just as it had became world-famous. Furthermore, the Viennese, mostly newcomers who lacked Old Vienna’s virtues, were the first to idealize it in a depoliticized form at odds with its true historical character—to praise it, imitate and glorify it as a civic virtue. As Kürnberger observed in a glowing 1873 review of Schlögl’s most famous book, Wiener Blut, the real simplicity of mores and manners that once existed had little in common with any imitation mannerism and mythic redefinition by later generations. The myth of Gemütlichkeit in its modern form—which persists to this day—was a dishonor to the past, and a reflection of the philistinism of culture divorced from the engagement with an unvarnished account of daily life:
Our locale for “Viennese Blood” is that place of south-German laxity, multiplied with Slav slovenliness and rounded out by the clerical and secular mismanagement of a centuries-old Dalai-Lama absolutism. Thus there is inevitably much corrupted blood in that “Viennese Blood,” and the person who does not gloss over that fact is Friedrich Schlögl. He shows us indolence, frivolity, vulgarity, moral depravity, impotent childishness, sacrilegious lust, craving, smutty fanaticism, hatred of education and intellectuals, and the obdurate, absolute, self-affirmative roguishness with that firm German hand of a true Dutchman who does not falsify anything. He tells truth directly and dares to spit where there is no spittoon. But the compatriot who is in the know and is privy to this intimate material tells himself in astonishment: So you know all that too; you have seen it and have conjugated it like we do, yes, dissected it even more visually, and still, your love for the people and the country did not suffer a shipwreck on those countless and forlorn cliffs? Or vice versa: So much love did not blind you and your eyes stayed clear and open? It did not make you weak and your anger remained firm and your disgust healthy, precisely where a forceful repulsion remained in its proper place? And now we can sense something of the true meaning of “Gemütlichkeit.” We see the golden pearl of its most fine-grained gold.63
Schubert, through his music, remained an honest witness and protagonist of the best of Old Vienna—a morality tale of its virtues. He was the era’s “golden pearl”—not a dated relic from the past and not like Beethoven detached from the material and physical reality of the local. Three elements came forth in his work—a subjective emotional voice that responded to nature and life in Vienna with a disarming directness immediately evocative of local mores; a beauty of melody and musical logic transcending the local; and a profundity connected to the real experience of life that transfigured the harsh rootedness of the local.
At the core of this was a genuinely Viennese voice that through its aesthetic power could serve as an alternative model of the dominant modern German spirit. For this reason Kürnberger took aim at the modern enthusiasm for Schubert within the city that was most famously symbolized by the erection in 1872 in the Stadtpark of a Schubert monument. Kürnberger considered “the plague of monuments” dedicated to cultural heroes a reflection of the new elite of businessmen who were so self-conscious of their own apparent Bildung and discernment, so eager to display wealth and cosmopolitan pretense, that they sought to build garish public monuments rather than emulate the virtues of “the man whose name has been familiar to us for a long time.” Kürnberger commented with disdain on subsequent plans for a Schiller monument; it seemed as if the Viennese in charge were concerned with appearances, “covering up” as a liar might “the conscience of truth” by creating a false synthesis between an idealized neoclassicism and modern realism, ending up with an impossible distortion of the true reason to honor Schubert and Schiller. But the rage for displaying civic enthusiasm for high culture was unstoppable. Kürnberger suggested, sarcastically perhaps, that a whole array of bases for future monuments be built to more quickly satisfy the needs of “the unknown, the men of the monument committee. The famous person is the means, but the unknown are their ends in themselves. Monuments are erected to make unknown quantities famous.”64
The most prominent of this new elite, these “unknown quantities,”was no doubt Nikolaus Dumba (1830–1900), an industrialist and an amateur singer who was a fanatical Schubert admirer. He was instrumental in organizing the funding of the 1872 Stadtpark Schubert monument through his leadership in the Wiener Männergesangverein (Vienna Male Choral Society), a prominent civic organization founded in 1843 with a largely middle-class membership.65 Dumba, who came from a Greek-Austrian family, was not only a music enthusiast but a collector and patron of the visual arts as well. He would later commission Gustav Klimt to do what has become an iconic mural of Schubert at the piano in 1898 for the music room in his Ringstrasse palace (destroyed in 1945).
The cult of Schubert in Vienna in which Dumba played such a leading role led in 1863 to the founding of the second major Viennese male choir made up of teachers—the Schubertbund.66 Glorifying Schubert was inextricably tied to the appropriation by newcomers and a new generation of a traditional Viennese conceit of cultural discernment and grace rooted in local nostalgia—nostalgia for the remnants and reminiscences of the rural within the urban, the evocation of nature, the ideal of human modesty and simplicity, a way of life before the walls came tumbling down: more carefree, relaxed, humble, and warm. The nostalgia was for a city in which the population had been homogenous (unvermischt, as Schlögl put it)67 and not polluted by the massive post-1867 emigration of Moravians, Bohemians, southern Slavs, Poles, and above all, Jews.
The affectation of Old Viennese mores and attitudes appealed to those who wished to prove how much they were truly Viennese. Authenticity took the form of a reimagined Vormärz Viennese sensibility. What better medium to embrace than Schubert, himself a reimagined witness of that very past? Franz Mair (1821–1893), the composer and teacher who founded and led the Schubertbund, was born and raised in Weikendorf, in Lower Austria. He became Schubert’s devoted advocate after his career brought him permanently to Vienna. It was he who conducted the choir that accompanied the reburial of Schubert in 1888. He was an epigone as a composer, eager to be taken seriously. Liszt’s praise for one of his works in 1855 remained the high point of his career.
The formation of the Schubertbund was about art as much as politics. Mair was a liberal in the 1848 context, and in the 1850s he joined his fellow teachers in a political movement to create a teacher’s organization. As part of the planned teachers’ association, he proposed the creation of a choral society to strengthen the sense of solidarity among teachers and increase the visibility of the profession and its members. Schubert offered the ideal name; after all, he and his father and brothers had been teachers.68
Before the founding of the Schubertbund, Mair had been part of the Männergesangverein, the organization that spearheaded the Schubert cult in the 1850s. Interestingly, the repertoire of the Männergesangverein in its first two decades was not particularly dominated by the music of Schubert.69 Only a few works were done. Schubert came rather to represent to the members their own solid, Viennese middle-class virtues—education, aesthetic judgment, simplicity, and patriotism. That Schubert composed for friends, lived with them, and remained close to his family made him an apt symbol of friendship, family, and community—communal virtues which were institutionalized in the mission of the choral societies of German-speaking Europe. His loyalty to the local and his use of music to cement and define community were transformed into ideological emblems of a city once bound not by economic interests, but by organic cultural connections within the middle-class citizenry.
In this manner Schubert the man achieved more local fame than did Schubert’s music. The myth of how his person was embodied in music became linked to the idealization of the authentic pre-1848 Viennese, the quintessential Austro-German. Above all, Schubert was the “man of the people”—a teacher and non-aristocrat of modest economic means who nonetheless rose to be the last exponent of the Viennese musical Classical tradition. This view of Schubert as representing the best in the mores and habits of the citizens of Old Vienna, who at the same time became a master equal to Mozart and Haydn, was endorsed by Viennese critics at the end of the century. Between the 1870s and the early 1900s Eduard Hanslick, Robert Hirschfeld, and the scholar Guido Adler, all endorsed the idea of Schubert as an ideal representative of local middle-class sensibilities, as an accessible populist icon.
Yet an inherent tension and paradox lay in this post-1848 cult of Schubert. As a historical representative of modest middle-class autonomy, he also was a reminder of a social and economic system that was being systematically undermined by the developments of late nineteenth-century finance and industry. The ardent defenders of Schubert as the finest flower of local Viennese virtues after 1860 were Kürnberger’s “unknown quantities”—modern businessmen and newcomers, whose wealth came at the expense of the traditional Vormärz artisan guild economy of the city. For them, Gemütlichkeit was a pose, not a reflection of a way of life. The public celebration of culture—visible through the erection of monuments to surround the new historicist architecture of Vienna—was more a sign of a shift away from the actual mores and habits of the Vormärz. The Schubert who was enshrined—particularly in the 1872 monument—was put forward as an exemplar of an affirmative, depoliticized way of life in which culture played the central role.
Wagner’s triumphant visit to Vienna in the mid-1870s underscored the extent to which the Wagnerian aesthetic fit in with the grandiosity of the architecture of the Ringstrasse and its monuments. The pretentions of Hans Makart’s historicist canvases were equivalent to Wagner’s heavy-handed pseudo “old” German rhetorical and poetic style. Wagner mirrored the modernity of industry, journalism, the machine age, and philosophically-minded discourse. The Schubert memorialized in 1872 fit in, even though the underlying factual premise of his posthumous fame was subversive. Beneath the bland compromise of history visible in the sculptor’s idealization was a bittersweet nostalgia about a vanished past and an ambivalence if not resistance to the economic and social changes of the era.
Therefore, after 1873—the year of a catastrophic financial collapse and a controversial World’s Fair—the facile glorification of Schubert in the previous two decades, exemplified by the 1872 monument, became unsustainable.70 The subversive aspect caused a split. In the wake of the economic collapse and ensuing stagnation, Schubert became a rallying cry for a regressive reactionary politics, toward an assertive Austro-German patriotism and, by the 1880s, the anti-liberal and anti-Semitic agenda of Christian Socialism. Opposed to this was the liberalism associated with those who built the 1872 monument and a populism that would ultimately be linked to the Austrian socialist movement, heirs of an embattled liberal tradition of civic reform that sought, among other goals, the extension of suffrage. In the struggle in Vienna between liberals and conservatives and between pan-Germans and Habsburg dynastic patriots, Schubert emerged readily as an authentic Viennese contrast to things Prussian and Wagnerian. Schubert’s status as teacher and middle-class man of the people made this ever more plausible to those Viennese who began to pierce the veil of a false nostalgia and Gemütlichkeit and question the facile claims of economic and social progress.
In the 1880s, liberals such as the critic Robert Hirschfeld (1857–1914) sought a way around Christian and Marxist Socialism through the substitution of culture for politics. Schubert became emblematic of a local spontaneity, a love of nature, and a simplicity that defied politics. Schubert more than any other figure could bind together a city divided by class, religion, and ethnicity and defined by rapid growth from emigration within the empire. Commenting on the official 1897 centenary celebrations, Hirschfeld (himself not a native Viennese) criticized the attempt by the Christian Social Party to appropriate Schubert as a populist symbol against aristocrats, liberals, and Jews. Rather, Schubert represented the power of art over politics. By spreading the musical culture that Schubert represented—an art of restrained elegance, beauty, and accessibility—music could ennoble the people and reconcile patriotism with cosmopolitan virtues, including tolerance. Even Schubert’s religious music was for Hirschfeld rather more the “elegant expression of individual feeling through which all love streams” than the expression of Catholic piety.71
Schubert also represented the need to sustain music as an active participant activity. Inviting citizens to be more than spectator held promise for Hirschfeld as part of a platform for civic education. But as the Viennese male choirs became politicized, mostly to the right, the middle-class patriotic pride in singing Schubert was absorbed within either the pan-German movement, which called on the German part of the Austrian monarchy to ally itself with imperial Germany, or a loyal Habsburg conservatism based on a fiercely local idealization of the Austro-German.
By the late 1890s, and certainly by the 1920s, the connection between the myth of Old Vienna and the ideal of a distinct Austro-German sensibility whose center was Vienna was still intact in all the variants of Schubert appropriation. In 1911 Walter von Molo, writing in Der Merker, reversed Kürnberger’s scorn, turning it on its head: “Franz Schubert is the monument that this city erected for itself.” He declared (after repeating all the familiar virtues of a southern spirit, Gemütlichkeit, and humanism), “Vienna is the focal point of German culture, which is why Vienna gave birth to Franz Schubert … the artist from the people, the artist of the people, the artist of the everyday.”72 These powerful sentiments, expressed in part to deflect widespread criticism of the city and its fin-de-siècle rage for operetta—the derisive claim that Vienna was merely a place of superficial sensuality—explain why Vienna became the crucial foil in what emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a real and symbolic contrast between Berlin and Vienna as models of urban modernity.
By the early twentieth century the reception of Schubert’s music began to show signs of change. Schubert increasingly was seen through the lens of the historical, as evoking the authenticity of an earlier age—the penetrating simplicity of the language of Johann Nestroy and Ferdinand Raimund; the colorful and subtle landscape and genre painting of Ferdinand Waldmüller and Josef Danhauser; the sleek restraint, refinement, and elegance of Biedermeier architecture and design that eschewed decorative ornamentation and permitted materials, notably wood, to reveal their natural beauty, all on a human scale. After the death of Wagner in 1883 and of Brahms and Bruckner in the 1890s, Schubert lost his role as an alternative to Wagnerian Romanticism. Rather, he became a source of twentieth-century anti-Romantic, modernist, aesthetic convictions.
Art and Politics: Vienna, Berlin, and the 1928 Schubert Centenary
The rivalry between Berlin and Vienna—the two major cities of German Europe—was cultural. In political and economic terms Vienna had, by the outbreak of World War I, lost out. But to Berliners, Vienna represented competition in culture. Writing in his 1911 music history of Berlin, the critic Adolf Weissmann took aim at Vienna’s conceits. He explained Beethoven’s unhappiness with his circumstances after 1815 as emblematic of how “the joy in life” characteristic of Vienna was incompatible with the “dark” creations of Beethoven. There was, in the end, no “causal link” between Beethoven’s creative genius and the city in which he resided for the most significant thirty-five years of his adult life. The “flattering” mores of the Viennese never seduced him in the way they did Mozart and Haydn.73
These were fighting words. After all, Beethoven’s art represented the deepest and most profound aesthetic achievement in German history, second only to Goethe’s. Beethoven’s centrality to the world knew of no linguistic barriers. But he was profoundly German in a manner Vienna was not. Weissmann juxtaposed Berlin and Vienna, claiming that serious thought and ambition resided in the first, and superficiality and lightheartedness reigned in the other. This contrast had become so common in cultural criticism that it motivated the distinguished economist Werner Sombart to write an editorial in 1907 titled “Vienna,” in which he took the opposite view.74
To Sombart, Berlin represented the worst of modernity; he dismissed it as a suburb of New York, itself a “cemetery of culture,” the place where mere scale and quantity dominated over quality and individuality. Berlin was all about “traffic” and motion—commercial, industrial—as well as order, all qualities praised in the name of material progress. Berlin represented the victory of a heartless capitalism that had created fragments out of individual humans and the community as a whole. Vienna might seem backward and resistant to innovation to Berliners, but to miss the value of Vienna was to miss an object lesson as to how and why modernity dominated by technical rationality must be combatted.75
For Sombart, Vienna was above all a place of culture. “Vienna has culture. I do not even mean specifically ‘old’ culture. If one is seeking a modifier, an epithet, I would say ‘aesthetic culture.’”76 Sombart was reacting to an article by the writer (and Bambi author) Felix Salten, who, imitating a tradition of self-critical Viennese journalism that included Kürnberger, Daniel Spitzer, and Karl Kraus, offered a critique of Vienna that praised Berliners for their work ethic and concrete economic and scientific achievements. In reply, Sombart lauded the Viennese both for their humanity and their productivity. He urged readers who were concerned about German culture to “honor Vienna as holy,” as a “symbol of that which we must preserve, and which we must seek to gain again for ourselves.” For culture meant “human creativity, beauty, and harmony, a meaningful and reassuring life.”77 Culture meant Vienna.
Berlin and New York were widely considered emblems of modernity. The essence of that modernity, in terms articulated most famously by Max Weber, Sombart’s contemporary and rival, was viewed with ambivalence. The domination of what Weber called “purpose rationality”—the hallmark of modern economic life—had shattered any inherited value system derived from religion and tradition. It had led to a collapse of any hierarchy of humanistic values. In the vacuum of values, modernity’s “iron cage” of mere calculation and material progress dominated life.78
At the same time, modernist artists and architects who rejected Romanticism and the historicist aesthetics of the late nineteenth century saw in Berlin’s and New York’s material progress a way out of the grip of an aesthetic tradition that celebrated decoration and ornament and a surface sense of beauty. The efficient industrial structures of modernity—in their materials and in the rationality of a design that privileged structure—became new aesthetic inspirations for design. The work of architect Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) and the inherent beauty of functional, industrial designs in bridges and factories became emblematic of a new aesthetic to Viennese critics such as Adolf Loos.
This new aesthetic, rooted in the historical imperative of industrial progress and scientific reason, sought an alliance between the aesthetic and rational ethics and social reform—and a break from notions of beauty rooted in the connection between art and privilege, and the need to camouflage reality and hide the consequences of science and industry beneath a façade of historicism in art. Amid the enthusiasm for the materials and methods of modern industry within a new generation of artists, architects, and composers, particularly in Vienna, came a predictable conservative reaction: the widespread fear that traditional norms of beauty, and the autonomy of aesthetic values, would vanish and that valid hallmarks of aesthetic judgment would be set aside. The modernism represented by abstraction, cubism, constructivism, atonality and, ultimately, the twelve-tone system, would become identified with the harsh rationality of economic and technological progress—a sterility devoid of links to the past, particularly to eighteenth-century humanism and the expressiveness and emotionally accessible (and residually humanistic) fantasy of Romanticism. In defending Vienna against this reflexive fear of a radical, discontinuous aesthetic modernism remote from valid, inherited canons of taste, Sombart took pains not to limit his praise to mere tradition, but to Vienna’s contemporary artistic culture.
His perception was not far off the mark. What emerged in Vienna between 1897 and 1914, amid the complex and often contradictory strains of modernist movements, was a distinctive variant of modernism and anti-historicism. Vienna displayed a unique approach to the embrace of modern materials, and the need to be truthful in design. The Viennese pioneered the belief that the substance of art should reflect a transformative synthesis of form and function, without purposeless ornamentation. In the realization of modernism, particularly in the work of Otto Wagner, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, the Wiener Werkstätte, and even Adolf Loos, a traditional pre-modern Viennese sensibility of grace and elegance was visible. The origins were local, and dated to the years of Schubert’s brief life. (Compare, for example the designs, one from 1803, the other from 1905, in Figures 1 and 2.)
This distinctive quality in Viennese modernism may perhaps not have been so evident to Sombart, but it was nonetheless crucial. Its source was a special shared enthusiasm among Viennese modernists: a nostalgia for the aesthetic ideals of the Biedermeier period.79 Viennese designers and architects adored Biedermeier furniture, fabrics, utensils, buildings, and clothes. The Viennese modernists who were most impressed by the local traditions of Biedermeier design produced an elegant variant of modernism, one that lent Viennese design, in the first decades of the twentieth century, its distinctly intimate and human character. The persistent glorification of “old Vienna”—this seemingly regressive taste for an old-fashioned simplicity—turned out to be fortuitous. Conservative nostalgia lasted long enough to be an impetus behind a novel progressive aesthetic and ideology in the visual arts.
Modernism in music in Vienna on the eve of World War I is best understood through the prism of the so-called scandal concert in March 1913. The music of Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern was attacked as rejecting traditional aesthetic norms, for being pompous, grandiose, abstruse, abstract, and vulgar.80 But most of all, their modernism in music was inaccessible to the participatory audience—the mass of amateurs. It was too advanced and complex. Much of the first wave of modernism—music by Mahler, Alexander Zemlinsky, and the young Schoenberg—had been rather more Wagnerian in character. The extension and rejection of tonality, the fragmentation and condensation of form, and the eschewing of repetition seemed logical progressive advances beyond late Romanticism, but to the general public the music on the March concert, with the possible exception of Mahler, sounded radical indeed.
Figure 1. Silver teapot, Vienna, 1803. Franz Würth.
All the composers on that program venerated Schubert. But that respect and admiration for the very Biedermeier attributes of clarity and refinement celebrated by contemporary painters, artisans, and architects did little to solve the paradox. The progressive aesthetic ideology of musical modernism sought to reconcile itself with a progressive social and political agenda along lines pioneered by modern architects. But how could one justify music that only a few could comprehend and follow? The art, design, and architecture of Viennese modernism were comprehensible even when controversal and also useful and susceptible to being spread throughout all social classes. But the music was not. Liberal and progressive Viennese, inherently sympathetic to a new movement in the arts, understood this problem. They realized the imperative inherent in the nineteenth century cult of Schubert to reach a wide populace. A new music was needed that retained the norms of aesthetic beauty characteristic of Classicism and early Romanticism while emulating Wagner’s success in reaching a wide audience. In this context, Schubert emerged as a model for a progressive populist musical art. The question of how that might be realized remained unresolved.
Figure 2. Coffee pot, 1905, Josef Hoffmann.
For Viennese composers concerned with retaining the wide audience Schubert had amassed during the nineteenth century, he became a source of inspiration: the moral equivalent of Biedermeier design. Echoes of Schubert can be heard first in Zemlinsky’s music, and later in that of Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), who grew up in Vienna. The public had been nurtured on Wagner as well as Schubert, and those on the left called for a modern music to which the masses could relate based on both or either—traditions once considered opposites. Among those who understood the relevance of Schubert for a populist modernism that merged an elegant Biedermeierstyle beauty with contemporaneity was David Josef Bach (1874–1947), the music critic for Vienna’s Arbeiterzeitung. The insight informed his ambivalent advocacy for Schoenberg.
Bach defended Schoenberg and his followers against the reactionary Christian Socialist and anti-Semitic cultural critique. But for all Bach’s efforts to reconcile Schoenberg’s music with his own commitments to socialism, he sensed contradictions. Like Schoenberg, Bach shared a belief in the autonomy of music, their mutual admiration for Wagner not-withstanding. Therefore the traditions of instrumental music remained ideal vehicles for the education of the masses. For Bach, new music had to be “understood plainly” and “respond to the basic needs of people.” Music was not an “intellectual process” but one of sentiment, thereby making music an art form that could elevate the masses without inadvertently using art to beautify and justify economic and social injustice. Mahler’s music suggested the accessibility of art for the masses, just as Schubert’s did. Bach believed that succeeding generations of composers needed to do the same.81
Schubert therefore offered a mirror of how to respond to and elevate the aspirations of the working classes—the musical analogue to Biedermeier design. Bach developed Hirschfeld’s dream of symphony concerts for the people with the production of Worker’s Symphony Concerts in Vienna. They began in 1905, but were organized in earnest between 1919 and the early 1930s.82 In June 1920, amid extreme postwar poverty and shortages, Bach announced a music festival devoted to “Great Performances of Viennese Music.” He argued: “Viennese music is not a mere topographical concept, but an artistic one … this land, this air brought forth a particular kind of music … this landscape, that has its own music also has its saint: his name is Franz Schubert. This saint is also its martyr.”83
A contradictory and competing appropriation of the myth of Old Vienna and the cult of Schubert also defined the character and politics surrounding the 1928 Schubert Centenary in Vienna. During the 1920s, Schubert had once again emerged as a contested figure. He was claimed by modernists like Bach with sympathies for the political left and by reactionary anti-modernists, protagonists of a renewed Austro-German cultural tradition in the neo-Romantic sense.
The revival of interest in the Biedermeier era in its local Viennese expression provided not only a more elegant and perhaps even humane path out of the labyrinth of eclecticism, density, and intensity of late Romanticism and historicism, but an impetus to scholarship. Otto Erich Deutsch’s painstaking effort to reconstruct the historical Schubert reflected the need to emancipate the image of the composer from the sentimentalizing that had made him an emblem of privileged middle-class culture. The late nineteenth-century Schubert had entered popular literature and the operetta, but mostly as a tragic figure, a composer of songs, emblematic of romantic dreams of love. He was at one and the same time a symbol of local middle-class virtues and a tragic figure. Schubert was more local hero than a great composer in the tradition of Beethoven. Wagner had succeeded in diminishing his importance in music history. The impact of the kitsch glorification of Schubert in Vienna between 1897 and 1938 cannot be underestimated; it ranged from a cup and saucer from 1897 with a Schubert picture, to postcards and Schubert marzipan, to the use of Schubert’s nickname “Schwammerl” as the title of Rudolf Hans Bartsch’s 1912 wildly popular Schubert novel, to Heinrich Berté’s legendary 1916 operetta Das Dreimäderlhaus. (As prime examples, see the illustrations in the portfolio commissioned by the Männergesangverein for the 1928 centenary, reproduced in Figures 3 and 4).
Deutsch sought to reconstruct Schubert and reassert his authentic historical roots as a Vormärz figure. Between 1905 and 1914, he immersed himself in Biedermeier culture with the intent to rescue Schubert from trivializing sentimentality—from the kitsch emblem of the Romantic that he had become—and from his place as an icon of local Viennese conservative middle-class provincialism. The garish sentimental cult of Schubert in fin-de-siècle Vienna thrived in the creation of tourist sites; Schubert was reduced to the Viennese cliché of the lighthearted, inspired, yet lovelorn hero. While seeking to puncture this image Deutsch also sought to strengthen, through research, Schubert’s place as a sympathetic, populist figure. The intense realism audible within Schubert’s music, as well as the trajectory of his life as outlined by Deutsch, could be readily associated with the profound alienation Marx described in his economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844.
The pioneering research into the brutal details of Schubert’s life, including his syphilis, the economic struggles of his father and brothers, and the difficulties posed by the absolutist tyranny of the pre-1830s era of Metternich, were dimensions of a cleansing of Schubert’s image. In Deutsch’s hands Schubert retained his singularity as a composer whose voice was motivated neither by the intent to amuse aristocratic patrons nor to please a bourgeois philistine audience. This reclaiming of Schubert as a Biedermeier figure and a spiritual forerunner of an egalitarian socialist ideal rooted in the authentic life of ordinary people caught in the web of nascent capitalism, laid the groundwork for the way in which Schubert would later be interpreted by T. W. Adorno as well as the eminent Viennese music historian Georg Knepler (1906–2003).84
The tension between two images of Schubert—the middle-class hero caught up by the personal search for love, master of songs and tunes uniquely expressive of local culture on one hand and, on the other, the troubled innovative genius, whose life experience inaugurated a new era in music history as a uniquely accessible composer in the tradition of Mozart and Beethoven—came to a head in 1928. Deutsch’s scholarship and the modernist Biedermeier revival in Vienna challenged the appropriation of Schubert as the exponent of local middle-class virtues by Austro-German nationalism and its successor, Austrofascism—heirs to Karl Lueger and the anti-Semitic Christian Socialists.
Figure 3. Cover from a portfolio commissioned by the Wiener Männergesangverein, 1928.
The contentious character of the 1928 centenary celebrations in Vienna stemmed as well from the politics of the moment. The Austrian Republic was in the midst of civil strife if not actual civil war. In July 1927, violence in the streets of Vienna between the Heimwehr on the right and the Schutzbund on the left, both paramilitary organizations, brought years of strife to a head; in these years of conflict the seeds of what would become the Austrofascism of the 1930s were sown. The Schubert centenary was planned to coincide with a massive gathering of German choral societies, including German-American choral groups from New York, San Francisco, and Ohio: the tenth annual Sängerbundfest.85 Pan-German choral society gatherings had been common since the mid-nineteenth century,86 and 140,000 participants assembled in July 1928 in Vienna. The events included a pageant on the Ringstrasse (Figure 5) and a gathering in the Prater.
Figure 4. Art by Karl M. Schuster, from a portfolio commissioned by the Wiener Männergesangverein, 1928.
Figure 5. Participants in the Tenth German Sängerbundfest, 1928.
The 1928 Sängerbundfest was a symbol of pan-German sentiment in conflict with local Austro-German patriotism. The relentless public display of German cultural chauvinism and bourgeois pride (the Austrian Railroad Officials Chorus float in the parade featured a bust of Schubert), despite passing obeisance to a special “German-Austrian” tradition located in the Lied, fueled the Anschluss fantasies of the Austrian right (which were shared by some on the left during the early postwar years). It was an extremely tense moment in the history of the fragile First Republic.87 Anton Wildgans (1881–1932), the playwright and poet who briefly directed the Burgtheater and was a fierce defender of postwar Austrian independence, took pains in his poetic prologue to the official memorial concert of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde on March 26 to stress Schubert’s roots in Vienna, his role in bringing a different sensibility to the notion of the “German soul,” his suffering in his own day, and his place as a “man of our times.” Schubert, Wildgans proclaimed, embodied the hopes, dreams, and joys of Austria.88
The official Schubert celebration took place in Vienna, the home base of Austria’s socialist movement, where the left was strongest, and the program became the object of severe criticism from that quarter. Key personalities were conspicuously absent, including Guido Adler, who, though associated with Mahler and Schoenberg, was nevertheless the nation’s most distinguished music historian and a proud supporter of the Schubertbund and local Viennese musical traditions. Paul Pisk, the Schoenberg student and composer, writing in the socialist journal Kunst und Volk, argued that the centenary highlighted a “bourgeois” misunderstanding of Schubert as a bohemian and a superficial composer whose only real achievement was the Lied. Pisk averred that it was up to the working classes, the proletariat, to redefine Schubert as the great artist he was, whose inspiration came from the people and whose mastery of technique and form was both original and at the highest level.89
Pisk was taking aim at the lecture given by Robert Lach, an undistinguished musicologist who, through political maneuvering, had been named the successor to Guido Adler at the University of Vienna.90 Lach’s lecture on Schubert would become notorious, ridiculed by progressives as well as conservatives loyal to local Austro-German traditions. The historical revelations of Deutsch, the forging of a connection between Schubert and the harsh social realities (as opposed to a romanticized view) of Biedermeier Vienna—as well as its refined aesthetics—and the consequent link between Schubert and both modernism and socialism inspired Lach to assert a contrarian view. The old Romantic legend of Schubert as middle-class icon, bearer of stolid bourgeois virtues, and emblem of the ordinary Viennese of Old Vienna so cherished and exploited in the 1890s, was in his view no longer viable.91 Modern scholarship had exposed it as a fiction, just as it had the legendary biographical connection between Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and the mill at Höldrich.92 Schubert actually led a dissolute life, as far as Lach was concerned. Schubert, the mythic albeit sentimental reminder of an outdated Austro-German middle-class ideal, had been exposed as a fraud. He had been an undisciplined genius whose personal habits, including drinking and carousing, prevented him from reaching the true heights of German music and what his own talent might have made possible.
Lach’s critique of Schubert was both aesthetic and moral. He paved the way for what ultimately would become Schubert’s ambiguous place in Nazi aesthetics. Lach put forward views on the connection between health, manliness, and art favored by many pan-German groups and ultimately by fascism. He outraged both the socialist left and the Austro-German Christian Social right. His speech was one unintended consequence of the strategy to lend the 1928 centenary a more conservative anti-socialist bent. Using the most recent research of Deutsch, Lach criticized Schubert’s habits and exposed his shortcomings as a composer in a manner that echoed familiar criticisms in the nineteenth century by Brendel and Köstlin about the composer’s inability to handle long forms and techniques of development. Beneath “a mask” of friendliness and lightheartedness, Schubert was possessed by demons he could not control: “burning longing, boundless thirst for love, and a heart filled with a nameless pain.”93 He was bewildered and lacked the chance to develop the disciplined personal attributes characteristic of greatness. Schubert’s struggle did not lead to its transcendence and, owing to his early death, left his work a promise unfulfilled.
Lach’s essential argument was that the most profound music and the highest “educative” mission to humankind in the German culture of music, the “ultimate transfigured heights,” had been achieved by three figures: Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner.94 His attempt to qualify and limit Schubert’s historical significance and compare him unfavorably to Beethoven and the great German tradition of music was actually designed to undermine the viability of a distinct Austrian political and cultural existence, and to foreground the logic of an Anschluss that would render Austria subordinate.
Discarding the idealized late nineteenth-century version and high-lighting moral and aesthetic shortcomings in Schubert, Lach confronted the conceits of local Viennese traditions. He maintained that Austrian and Viennese sensibilities needed to emulate the German tradition from the north. His 1928 Schubert speech is therefore best understood as a prophetic direct criticism of Chancellor Ignaz Seipel’s attempt to appropriate the Schubert centenary on behalf of an independent albeit illiberal Austria.95 Lach joined the Nazi Party early and became a vociferous and enthusiastic Austrian Nazi. Unlike other future fellow Austrian Nazis, in 1928 he had little sympathy with the idea or possibility of an autonomous Austrofascist state.
The serious historical research by Deutsch, the controversy sparked by Lach, and the potential of Schubert as a model for modernist art frame the context for T. W. Adorno’s 1928 essay on Schubert (one of his earliest major publications on music)96 and the place Schubert would occupy in Marxist historiography, notably in the much underestimated and brilliant work of Knepler.97
Adorno used to Schubert’s advantage the invidious distinction between Schubert and Beethoven that had been a fundamental theme in Schubert criticism from Brendel to Lach. In Schubert’s work “art” became an “image of reality.” Schubert’s music was understood in visual terms, as a landscape. In it an “image of truth” stood “within history.” Schubert’s lyricism was not “the blasphemous super-elevation of art” of the nineteenth century. Rather, “the paling images of existent objectivity” were combined in “cells of musical concreteness” with “the power of subjective inwardness.” In Schubert’s originality, in the “asymmetry” of his themes that challenge the “architecture of tonality,” the “autonomy of the captured image” asserts “primacy” over the “abstract will to formal immanence.” With its unique dialectical character as both an objective mirror of concrete experience and a rhetorical template for subjective expression, Schubert’s music reaches where words cannot, into the regions of sorrow and hope.98
For Adorno, Schubert’s joy is “unruly.” Adorno used the true historical character of Schubert as revealed by Deutsch against both the sentimental Viennese mythologizing and against Lach’s moralizing on behalf of a fascist construct of health and aesthetic greatness. Schubert is therefore removed from both “petty bourgeois music making” and “impoverished sentimentality.” “Transcendental distance” through art “becomes attainable in the utmost proximity.” The local realist aspect was the means Schubert used to achieve “a liberated music for a changed humanity” that could register “the message of humanity’s qualitative change.” The language of Schubert’s music is, for Adorno, at once local and universal, “a dialect—but one that has no native soil. It has the concreteness of a homeland, yet its only homeland is one remembered.” Schubert achieves aesthetic transcendence and subjective profundity by using nature and the mundane as the foundation of art. We “weep without knowing why” through music in which nature has “annulled itself” and a utopian hope is expressed, giving voice to a joy in the thought of a “promised state.”
In stressing the metaphor of landscape and the visual imagery of music functioning as a crystal through which light shines, Adorno linked the modernist appreciation of Schubert, the affinity between modern design and Biedermeier precedents, and the ethical candor inherent in Schubert’s realism. Simplicity and honesty in both musical content and form evoked a critical dimension (reminiscent of Nestroy and Raimund) rooted in human empathy that was absent from the affirmative art associated with the high capitalism of the late nineteenth century. Using music, Schubert articulated the inner suffering forced on him and others by the historical transformations of the 1820s, without manipulating the rhetoric of music into an act of masking truth through beauty. Adorno’s theme of the close link between lived experience and aesthetic form set Schubert apart, rendering irrelevant the need to compare him to Beethoven as conventionally understood.
Georg Knepler took up Adorno’s idea that Schubert’s connection to concrete personal experience in history led to unique mechanisms of transcendence. Knepler’s view of Schubert represents the most persuasive synthesis of the modernist and the many-sided populist strands of enthusiasm for Schubert in the history of German and Viennese reception. Schubert was certainly “German,” but never in a political or nationalist sense. He was totally local in character, but never affirmative, more a critical realist than a Romantic: “In Schubert loneliness is not positive, and tears earn no praise. For him Winterreise is without purpose and filled with pain. In his presentation it becomes a bitter reproach against a world in which man must suffer.”99 In the great repertoire of songs, “desire, suffering, and despondency” predominate. Schubert’s lyricism is distinctive since it reflects the encounter “with the social tensions of his era,” which are transformed into “the emotions of his own heart.” In this process, Schubert found a unique way to transcend the local and express the hope that “love and happiness” would be the inheritance of humankind.100
The post–World War II reception of Schubert, particularly among those committed to the ideals of socialism, held fast to a view of Schubert that was an amalgam of the historical Schubert and the late nineteenth-century object of mythic populist adulation. A Brahms-like aesthetic admiration and a populist veneration tempered by modern historical research were synthesized to render Schubert a voice of existential contradictions within the social and economic conditions of modernity. His music possessed a singular honesty, a focused realism rooted in the individual’s encounter with the politics and landscape of Vienna. This had led Schubert to develop a distinctive new voice for Romanticism, in which a transcendent humanist idealism emerged from the concrete and the historical.
Subjective intimacy and progressive idealism about the power of music permitted Schubert to appropriate and extend the Classical heritage in music. At the same time, his work remained immune from the progressive critique of musical Romanticism as the self-serving, apolitical possession of a social and economic elite or as a voice of reactionary chauvinist nationalism. Schubert, in the twentieth century, appeared to redeem the autonomy and forward-looking power of music as a means of authentic, subjective, human freedom through aesthetic expression; his example suggested a path for an accessible musical modernism.
1. See the important work by Scott Messing, Schubert in the European Imagination, vol. 1: The Romantic and Victorian Eras; vol. 2: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Rochester, NY, 2006 and 2007). Messing’s impressive and detailed account focuses on aspects of Schubert reception in Vienna that are somewhat different but complementary to the argument in this essay. Another provocative and fine work is Andreas Mayer, Franz Schubert: Eine historische Phantasie (Vienna, 1997). The most radical biographical revision in recent memory was Maynard Solomon’s controversial article on Schubert’s sexuality, “Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini,” 19th-Century Music 12 (1989): 193–206. I would like to thank Irene Zedlacher, Christopher H. Gibbs, Morten Solvik, Anna Cafaro, and Lynne Meloccaro for their advice and assistance.
2. The literature on the popular reception of Schubert in modern times is immense. See David Schroeder, Our Schubert: His Enduring Legacy (Lanham, MD, 2009); and the essays by Cornelia Szabo-Knotik, “Franz Schubert und die österreichische Identität im Tonfilm der 1930er Jahre,” and Manfred Permoser, “Der Schubert-Film nach 1950: Anmerkungen zur jüngeren Rezeptionsgeschichte,” in Schubert und die Nachwelt, Kongressbericht: 1. Internationale Arbeitstagung zur Schubert-Rezension 2003, ed. Michael Kube, Walburga Litschauer, and Gernot Gruber (Munich, 2007), 309–19 and 321–28 respectively.
3. I do not wish to burden readers of this essay with extraneous historical background, but it is important to direct those interested in the historiography of the connection between culture and politics in the history of German-speaking Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the peculiar and often troubled interaction between the oft discussed high value placed on Kultur and Bildung in the German middle classes after 1815 and especially after 1848 and 1870 and the direction of German politics. The concept of freedom, the individual, and citizenship—the whole complex of attitudes associated with liberalism in German-speaking Europe—was influenced by the prestige culture and learning assumed as surrogates for political activity as construed in the English and American sense. The sufficiency of an apolitical notion of individuality and freedom was bolstered by the huge emphasis on culture, including music, as was a pessimistic attitude to democracy. Within the massive literature on this subject, see the classic essays by Fritz Stern “The Political Consequences of the Unpolitical German,” in The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany (New York, 1972), 3–25.
4. See Joseph Joachim’s letter to Robert Schumann from 21 March 1853. Quoted in Beatrix Borchard, Stimme und Geige: Amalie und Joseph Joachim (Vienna, 2005), 121–22.
5. Heinrich Adami, Alt- und Neu-Wien: Beiträge zur Beförderung lokaler Interessen für Zeit, Leben, Kunst und Sitte (Vienna, 1841), 82–83.
6. Peter Cornelius, Literarische Werke: Aufsätze über Musik und Kunst, ed. Edgar Istel (Leipzig, 1904), 152. The review was originally published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 51/52 (1867).
7. W. H. Riehl, Kulturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten (Stuttgart, 1862), 391.
8. See Katherine Harloe, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft (Oxford, 2013), passim.
9. The members of the Männergesangverein were overwhelmingly from the middle class, with less than 3 percent of active members coming from the aristocracy. The bulk were professionals, civil servants, commercial employees, followed by bankers, merchants, industrialists, and a very small group of artisans, i.e. 60 percent upper-bourgeoisie, 30 percent comfortable middle-class Viennese, and 10 percent from the lower spectrum of the bourgeoisie. See Leon Botstein, “Music and Its Public,” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1985), 372–73 and Tables 17 and 18 in vol. 5: Appendix.
10. Bruno Walden, Wiener Studien (Vienna, 1869), 42–43.
11. Brahms to Joachim, December 1868, in Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Joseph Joachim, ed. Andreas Moser, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1912), 60–61.
12. Franz Brendel, Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1855), 335.
13. Ibid., 336–37.
14. The operas are still not much known and rarely performed. Liszt premiered Alfonso und Estrella in the 1850s. See a translation of his article on the opera in this volume.
15. Richard Wagner, “About Conducting,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 4: Art and Politics, trans. William Ashton Ellis (New York, 1966), 363.
16. Herbeck, for example, premiered Die Verschworenen in Vienna in 1861.
17. Ludwig Herbeck, Johann Herbeck: Ein Lebensbild (Vienna, 1885), Appendix, 57.
18. Ibid.
19. On this subject see the essays in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity (Chicago, 2002).
20. Herbeck, Johann Herbeck, 112–13.
21. Brahms to Adolf Schubring, 23 March 1863, in Johannes Brahms: Briefe an Joseph Viktor Widmann, Ellen und Ferdinand Vetter, Adolf Schubring, ed. Max Kalbeck (Berlin, 1915), 196.
22. Quoted in Charlotte Sussman, Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Cambridge, 2011), 36–40.
23. George Bernard Shaw, “Goetz über alles,” in Shaw’s Music, vol. 3: 1893–1950, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York, 1981), 39.
24. Richard Strauss, “Über Schubert: Ein Entwurf,” in Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, ed. Willi Schuh (Zurich, 1981), 112–13. Strauss’s interest as a conductor was limited to the C-Major and B-Minor symphonies. On the general topic of the place of Schubert in the New German School, see Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, “Der geniale Naive und der nachträgliche Progressive: Schubert in der Ästhetik und Politik der ‘neudeutschen Schule,’” in Schubert-Jahrbuch 1999, ed. Dietrich Berke, Walther Dürr, Walburga Litschauer, and Christiane Schumann (Duisburg, 2001), 23–40.
25. The notion that the real recognition of Schubert came through Liszt was a widely held commonplace. The legendary cultural force during the Weimar Republic, Leo Kestenberg, even commented in 1956, “If I only think of what Liszt achieved for Schubert, how he was the one who brought Schubert to the world.” Leo Kestenberg and Franz W. Beidler: Complete Correspondence, 1933–1956, trans. and ed. Philip A. Maxwell (Victoria, CA, 2013), 305.
26. See Thomas Kabisch, Liszt und Schubert, Berliner musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten 23 (Munich and Salzburg, 1984).
27. Quoted in Vladimir Stasov, “Liszt, Schumann, and Berlioz in Russia,” in Selected Essays on Music, trans. Florence Jonas, introduction by Gerald Abraham (London, 1968), 88–89. See also Robert Engel, “Schubert und Russland,” Die Musik 21/2 (1921): 113–19.
28. Hugo Wolf, Briefe, vol. 1: 1873–1901, ed. Leopold Spitzer (Vienna, 2011), 358 (to Emil Kauffmann) and 420 (to Melanie Köchert).
29. Brendel, Geschichte der Musik, 176–78.
30. Eduard Bernsdorf, Neues Universal-Lexikon der Tonkunst, vol. 3 (Offenbach, 1861), 513–18.
31. Heinrich Adolf Köstlin, Geschichte der Musik im Umriss (Tübingen, 1875), 282–83.
32. This is all according to Natalie Bauer-Lechner, in Herbert Killian, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner (Hamburg, 1984), 158.
33. Brahms is quoted saying this in 1887 in Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms: 1856–1862 (Berlin, 1908), 220.
34. See W. H. Riehl, Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1851), passim.
35. See Maxim H. Botstein, “Popular History in an Age of Scholarship: Gustav Freytag’s Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit” (Senior thesis, Princeton University, 2014).
36. See Jasper von Altenbockum, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, 1823–1897: Sozialwissenschaft zwischen Kulturgeschichte und Ethnographie (Cologne, 1994), 85–90.
37. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, with an introduction by Hajo Holborn (New York, 1954), 291.
38. Jacob Burckhardts Briefe an seinen Freund Friedrich von Preen, 1864–1893, ed. Emil Strauss (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1922), 127 (scores), 63 (Wagner). The letter mentioning Wagner is quoted also in Max F. Schneider, Die Musik bei Jacob Burckhardt (Basel, 1946), 110–11.
39. Strauss, Burckhardts Briefe an seinen Freund Friedrich von Preen, 219.
40. Burckhardt, Reflections on History, with an introduction by Gottfried Dietze, trans. M. T. Hottinger (Indianapolis, 1979), 288–89.
41. Cornelius, Aufsätze über Musik und Kunst, 153.
42. See Karl Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte, 10 vols. and supplements (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1903–5), Zweiter Ergänzungsband: 3–10, and 10:3–5, 118–22, and 126–30. English readers can consult Karl Lamprecht, What is History? Five Lectures on the Modern Science of History, trans. E. A. Andrews (London, 1905; repr. 2012). The best short introduction to Lamprecht in English can be found in Karl J. Weintraub, Visions of Culture (Chicago, 1966), 161–207.
43. Karl Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte, 8/2:314; also 10:288–307.
44. Ibid., Deutsche Geschichte, Erster Ergänzungsband: 434–56, and 8/1:18–25, 30–33, 192–93.
45. Riehl, Kulturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten, 101.
46. Ibid., 374–78, 399–400.
47. W. H. Riehl, “Das Quartett,” in Neues Novellenbuch (Stuttgart, 1899), 190–240.
48. Riehl, Kulturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten, 377.
49. Ibid., 377–81.
50. See W. H. Riehl, “Das Volkslied,” in Die Gegenwart: Eine enzyklopädische Darstellung der neuesten Zeitgeschichte für alle Stände, vol. 3 (Leipzig, 1849), 680–81.
51. Ibid.
52. Wilhelm Dilthey, Von deutscher Dichtung und Musik (Leipzig and Berlin, 1933), 282.
53. Ibid.
54. Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7: Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (Stuttgart and Göttingen, 1961), 220–24.
55. See Leon Botstein, “Realism Transformed: Franz Schubert and Vienna,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge, 1997), 15–35.
56. Jacob Burckhardt to Gustav Stehelin, 2 August 1884, in Jacob Burckhardt: Briefe, vol. 8: 1882–1885, ed. Max Burckhardt (Basel, 1974), 218.
57. Adam Müller-Guffenbrunn, Altwiener Wanderungen und Schilderungen (Vienna, 1915), 191.
58. Adolf Schmidl, Wiens Umgebungen auf zwanzig Stunden im Umkreise, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1838), 1–3.
59. Eduard Bauernfeld, Erinnerungen aus Alt-Wien, ed. Josef Bindtner (Vienna, 1923), 221–22.
60. Ferdinand Kürnberger, “Ein Aphorismus zur Denkmal-Pest,” in Literarische Herzenssachen, vol. 2 (Munich and Leipzig, 1911), 289–90.
61. See Friedrich Schlögl, Wiener Luft! Kleine Culturbilder aus dem Volksleben der alten Kaiserstadt an der Donau (Vienna, 1876), vii–xvi.
62. Schlögl, Vom Wiener Volkstheater: Erinnerungen und Aufzeichnungen (Vienna, [1883]), 10–13; see also 24–25 and 165–66.
63. Kürnberger, “Friedrich Schlögls ‘Wiener Blut,’” 2:258.
64. Kürnberger, “Ein Aphorismus zur Denkmal-Pest,” 290.
65. See Botstein, “Music and Its Public,” passim; and Jahresbericht des Männergesang-Vereines in Wien 1847–1874 (Vienna, 1848–74).
66. Anton Weiss, ed., Fünfzig Jahre Schubertbund (Vienna, 1913), 3–9.
67. Quoted by Kürnberger, “Friedrich Schlögls ‘Wiener Blut.’” See also Friedrich Schlögl, Wienerisches (Vienna, 1883), vii–x and 240–41.
68. Aus meinem Leben: Erinnerungen eines alten Schulmannes und Tonkünstlers nach Franz Mairs Mittheilungen und Aufzeichnungen (Vienna, 1897), 25–28, 33–39, 50–59.
69. The repertoire was dominated by Mendelssohn, Kalliwoda, Kreutzer, Weber, Spohr, Lachner, Marschner, and a host of minor figures; see the lists in Jahresbericht des Männergesang-Vereines in Wien 1847–1874; e.g. for 1874: 93–106.
70. There has been a great deal written about this 1872 monument, its design by Carl Kundmann on a base by Theophil Hansen, the architect of the 1870 Musikverein. Schwind, Schubert’s friend, advised Kundmann on the design. The discussion about creating a monument dates from the 1850s; the Männergesangverein played the decisive role in getting the project done. The design was as controversial as the whole enterprise, but Schubert was the first of the Classical composers to be so honored in Vienna: the Beethoven monument was erected in 1880, the one for Haydn in 1887, and the Mozart monument was completed in 1896. Hugo Wolf was not alone in his ambivalence toward the sentimental and idealized image. As he explained to his parents in 1878, every time he walked by the monument, it forced him to confront his own views; see Wolf, Briefe, 1:39. On the monument, see Ludwig Speidel’s 1872 essay “Das Schubert Denkmal,” in Wiener Frauen und anderes Wienerisches (Berlin, 1910), 120–25.
71. Robert Hirschfeld, “Die Schubert-Feier,” Wiener Abendpost (Beilage zur Wiener Zeitung), 6 February 1897, 5–6. On Hirschfeld, see Elisabeth Riz, “Robert Hirschfeld: Leben– Wirken–Bedeutung,” in Biographische Beiträge zum Musikleben Wiens im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Friedrich C. Heller (Vienna, 1992), 1–80.
72. Walter von Molo, “Schubert und Wien,” Der Merker 2 (10/11 February 1911): 449–51.
73. Adolf Weissmann, Berlin als Musikstadt (Berlin and Leipzig, 1911), 121.
74. Werner Sombart, “Wien,” Morgen 6 (1907), repr. in Début eines Jahrhunderts: Essays zur Wiener Moderne, ed. Wolfgang Pircher (Vienna, 1985), 35–40.
75. Ibid., 37.
76. Ibid., 36.
77. Ibid., 39.
78. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1958), 181.
79. See the catalogue Moderne Vergangenheit: Wien 1800–1900 (Vienna, 1981) by Peter Pawerka for the 1981 exhibition at the Vienna Künstlerhaus.
80. See Botstein, “Vienna and Its Public,” 1018–36.
81. Henriette Kotlan-Werner, Kunst und Volk: David Josef Bach, 1874–1947 (Vienna, 1977), 21, 42–45.
82. David Josef Bach, “Arnold Schoenberg,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 17 February 1905; see also Botstein, “Music and Its Public,” 1208–10.
83. Quoted in Kotlan-Werner, Kunst und Volk: David Josef Bach, 74.
84. Another fine example of the Marxist interpretation of Schubert can be found in the work of Harry Goldschmidt in Franz Schubert: Ein Lebensbild (Berlin, 1960).
85. For a sense of this anniversary, see Offizielles Erinnerungsalbum an das 10. Deutsche Sängerbundesfest Wien 1928 and Festblätter für das 10. Deutsche Sängerbundesfest Wien 1928 (both Vienna, 1928).
86. See Der Deutsche Sängerbund 1862–1912: Aus Anlass des fünfzigjährigen Bestandes (1912), 2–67.
87. Richard Strauss wrote Die Tageszeiten, Op. 76, a work for male choir and orchestra, for the Schubertbund for the 1928 festival. See Roland Tenschert, Richard Strauss und Wien: Eine Wahlverwandschaft (Vienna, 1949), 121.
88. Anton Wildgans, Briefe, vol. 3: 1925–1932, ed. Lilly Wildgans (Vienna, 1947), 556– 58; see also 207–8.
89. Paul A. Pisk, “Schubertfeiern,” in Volk und Kunst 25 (June 1928): 1–2; see also Piero Violante, Eredità della musica (Palermo, 2007), 147.
90. On Robert Lach and Georg Knepler, see Gerhard Oberkofler, “Über das musikwissenschaftliche Studium von Georg Knepler an der Wiener Universität,” Mitteilung der Alfred Klahr Gesellschaft 3 (2006); available at http://www.klahrgesellschaft.at/Mitteilungen/Oberkofler_3_06.html. There is some controversy about the fact that a street in Vienna is named for Lach. See the Viennese newspaper Der Standard, July 2012. The lecture, delivered on 19 November 1928 at the University of Vienna, can be found in Robert Lach, Das Ethos in der Musik Schuberts (Vienna, 1928).
91. An example of this reception pattern—glorifying Schubert as emblematic of the essence of Viennese middle-class cultural values and practices, produced after Deutsch’s research—is the volume on Schubert in Jugendhefte für Literatur und Kunst published by the Lower Austrian Division of Youth right after World War I.
92. See Ludwig Speidel’s 1894 essay, “Franz Schubert in der Höldrichsmühle,” in his Wiener Frauen und anderes Wienerisches, 126–32.
93. Lach, Das Ethos in der Musik Schuberts, 22. On the 1928 Vienna celebrations, see Gabriele Johanna Eder, “Das Schubert-Jahr 1928 in Wien und anderen Städten des deutschen Sprachraumes,” in Schubert und die Nachwelt, 297–307.
94. Lach, Das Ethos in der Musik Schuberts, 28–30.
95. See Festblätter für das 10. deutsche Sängerbundesfest, 241, and Eder, “Das Schubert-Jahr 1928,” 302. On Seipel, see Klemens von Klemperer, Ignaz Seipel: Christian Statesman in a Time of Crisis (Princeton, 1972).
96. T. W. Adorno, “Schubert,” in Night Music: Essays on Music, 1928–1962, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. and introduced by Wieland Hoban (London and New York, 2009), 19–46; quotes at 22, 20, 23, 31, 37, 44, 45, 46. The original in German is in Die Musik 21/1 (1928): 1–12.
97. See Georg Knepler, Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, vol. 2: Österreich, Deutschland (Berlin, 1961), 591–656.
98. See the issue devoted to Adorno’s 1928 Schubert essay: 19th-Century Music 29/1 (2005).
99. Knepler, Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2:642.
100. Ibid., 2:634.
