3 “The passion for friendship”: music, cultivation, and identity in Schubert’s circle

David Gramit

What was Schubert’s circle?

To frame this chapter by means of such an apparently straightforward question may seem simplistic. If we take it seriously, however, it leads to an approach to Schubert’s immediate context considerably different than the catalogues of Schubert’s friends, their idiosyncrasies, and their accomplishments that have been a mainstay of Schubert scholarship. Both idiosyncrasies and accomplishments, admittedly, were considerable, and such anecdotes can provide entertaining reading as well as accurate information; however, not only are several accounts of this type already available, ¹ but a focus on the who of Schubert’s circle also implies that the nature of that group is self-evident.

A moment’s reflection suggests otherwise: why should Schubert have been associated from the earliest studies and accounts with a circle of friends, to the extent that “Schubert’s circle” (or the equivalent Schubertkreis ) has achieved the status of a standard formula? “Bach’s circle,” or “Mozart’s,” for instance, have nothing approaching such currency in their respective fields. ² No one would suggest that these earlier composers had had no friends or associates, so what is it about Schubert’s friends – or our perception of them – that has made them indispensable in Schubert studies, to the extent that Newman Flower, whose 1928 biography focused perhaps more single-mindedly on the circle than any other, could write: “the passion for friendship lived in Schubert. He could not exist without friends”? ³

The easy familiarity of such assertions and the approachability they imply reduce a crucial shift in the social position of composers to an individual personality trait and fold Schubert’s culture into our own by failing to question the meaning of such basic concepts as friendship in Schubert’s context. The following considerations seek to avoid these pitfalls by providing not a biographical collection, nor even a record of the self-perceptions of Schubert’s associates, but rather an interpretation of the nature and significance of that group within its culture from the perspective of our own.

Friendship, cultivation, and social class

Our knowledge of Schubert’s friendships begins with his schooling, and so any account of Schubert’s circle that goes beyond his immediate family takes as its starting point Schubert’s appointment as a boy soprano in the Imperial Court Chapel in 1808. Although Schubert received musical training as a result of this position, his appointment also gave him access to something that few earlier musicians would have known: an education in the Vienna Stadtkonvikt, a boarding school whose student body consisted primarily of boys and young men from families of considerably higher social standing than Schubert’s. The lists compiled many years later by Albert Stadler, one of Schubert’s school friends, make the point unintentionally but clearly:

Among our fellow pupils were: Michael Rueskäfer (Deputy to the Finance Minister, Excellency, etc.), Franz von Schlechta (now Freiherr and head of a department at the Finance Ministry), Franz Kindinger (Councillor at the Ministry of Justice), Josef Kleindl (Justiz-Hofrat ), Josef Kenner (Upper Austrian Statthaltereirat, retired, poet of “Der Liedler”), Franz Werner (legal adviser to the General Staff), Josef Beskiba (Deputy-Director at the Technical High School), Benedikt Randhartinger (Court Kapellmeister ) …. Every evening there was an orchestral practice with full orchestra …. The Court organist, Wenzel Ruzicka, conducted on the violin and, in his absence, our Schubert, who played the violin very nicely, took over …. As second violin [former student] Josef von Spaun (Court Councillor, but in those days still a junior) very often helped us as a visitor. Cellos were Anton Holzapfel (… Vienna Borough Councillor, now retired and living at Aistersheim near Wels), a thoroughly trained musician and a special friend of Schubert’s; – Max von Spaun (Kammeralrat in Laibach); violins, Anton Hauer (President of the High Court of Justice in Linz) and Leopold Ebner (Kammeralrat in Innsbruck); first flute, Franz Eckel (Director of the Institute of Veterinary Surgery… ); first clarinet, Josef Kleindl; timpani, Randhartinger; all seminary pupils at the time, and others I no longer remember. ⁴

Stadler’s parentheses served simply to specify the location and later position of his fellows (and, perhaps, to suggest some prestige – ne’er-do-wells are conspicuously absent) and likely seemed unremarkable at the time, but the overwhelming preponderance of government officials and bureaucrats they reveal is a clue to one of the distinctive features of Schubert’s cultural milieu. This administrative/professional middle class made up a tiny portion of Vienna’s population, but together with the (even less numerous) aristocracy and professional musicians themselves, they made up the bulk of the musically literate Viennese public, a group of only a few thousand in a city whose population numbered some 300,000 in 1827. ⁵

That Schubert’s Stadtkonvikt education brought him into contact with such men begins to suggest the contingency of many of the contexts with which Schubert is associated: the bourgeois salon, the Schubertiade, the cultured cluster of friends. None could reasonably have been extrapolated from the circumstances of Schubert’s birth as the son of a primary school teacher in one of Vienna’s poorer districts. These, however, are precisely the contexts that his fellow students had been raised to value above all others, for the primarily bureaucratic middle-class culture of Austria and Germany was one in which Bildung – intellectual, spiritual, and emotional cultivation as a lifelong pursuit – had become both a cherished value and evidence of suitability for membership in an administrative/cultural elite. In the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian civil service reformer of the turn of the eighteenth century: “Nothing is so important in a high-level official of the state as the complete conception he has of mankind and as the degree of intellectual clarity with which he ponders these questions and responds to them emotionally…. There is nothing so important as his interpretation of the idea of Bildung .” ⁶

Recognizing the centrality of this phenomenon to Schubert’s intellectual and aesthetic context begins to explain the tenacity of Schubert’s circle as a topos. Earlier composers, whatever their private relationships, had had their status defined not by those relationships but by their (often hereditary) calling, their relations to their patrons, or beginning in the late eighteenth century, to a growing music-buying, concert-going public. By contrast, Schubert could be seen – despite income from music sales during the latter part of his life – to have lived almost exclusively in relation to his friends; whatever more formal positions might later have materialized were prevented by his early death. This friend-dominated life was lent plausibility by anecdotes stressing Bohemian poverty and dependence on those friends even for such professional necessities as staff paper. Schubert appeared, then, not as a hereditary craftsman, but as an artist in, if not entirely of, the middle class, and this status brought with it the kind of personal associations familiar to and cherished by the bourgeois audience for music. Further, the pathos of Schubert’s humble origins and continuing poverty, regardless of their basis in fact, could only reflect favorably on his subsequent admirers: their appreciation put them in a position analogous to the anecdotally immortalized early friends whose acts of kindness had nurtured a young genius.

The prominent role of anecdote in these considerations leads to another observation on the place of the circle in the historiography of Schubert. Because of Schubert’s early death and the substantial gap between that death and the first full biographical study, published in 1865, ⁷ posthumously collected anecdotes have come to play an enormous role in establishing our image of the composer and his context. The bulk of these anecdotes derive either from obituary notices or from responses to inquiries by would-be biographers. Inevitably, Schubert assumes a centrality in both instances that has more to do with the purpose of the document than with the writer’s experience during Schubert’s life. The result has often been a conflation of posthumous fame and contemporary circumstance that constructs a circle with Schubert himself firmly at its center, surrounded by perceptive but fundamentally inferior admirers drawn only by Schubert himself. Once again, Flower’s biography sets the familiar tone: “Without Schubert, most of these people would not have been in common touch…. It was the extraordinary personality of Schubert that blended them. The richness of his mental gifts adorned his poverty, but it was the secret lodestone of his heart that brought these friends together and held them.” ⁸ Against this image we may place the descriptions of two of Schubert’s friends, one of whom knew Schubert at the beginning and one at the end of the composer’s career. First, consider the account of Johann Senn, an early friend exiled for politically suspect activities in 1821:

The German struggles for liberation, from 1813 to 1815, had left in their wake a significant spiritual upheaval in Austria too. Among other things, there was gathered in Vienna at that time, as it were by instinct and not as the result of any intention, a splendid, companionable circle of young writers, poets, artists and cultured people generally, such as the Imperial City had scarcely ever seen hitherto and which, after it was disbanded, sowed seeds for the future in every direction. (SMF 334) ⁹

Eduard von Bauernfeld, who met Schubert only after Senn’s departure, wrote independently in quite similar terms:

At the time Schubert came out into the world several young men in his native city, mostly poets and painters …, gathered together, whom genuine striving after art and similarity of views soon united in sincere friendship, and into whose circle Schubert too was drawn. The mutual communication between these youths and their artistic conversations had a great effect on him and stimulated him, if not so much to talk, at any rate to the most varied musical productivity…. He often expressed regret… that the friendly union of so many worthy young men, as will happen, became disrupted by their pursuing different careers and by other chances. ¹⁰

In both accounts, Schubert is part of an active group of varied composition, but even in Bauernfeld’s memorial tribute he is neither the sole center of attention nor the reason for the group’s existence.

Literary activity in Schubert’s circle

The regret that Bauernfeld reports Schubert to have felt at the transitory nature of the circle is plausible, for the context of relationships in which Schubert lived was indeed constantly changing. Of the school companions mentioned by Stadler, only Josef von Spaun remained close to Schubert until his death. Career and family considerations, as well as occasional personal differences, drew friends apart both geographically and personally; a few examples must suffice. Schubert met the poet Johann Mayrhofer through Spaun in 1815; they grew increasingly close until the early 1820s, after which there is virtually no evidence of personal interaction, let alone intimacy. ¹¹ The painter Leopold Kupelwieser had become a close friend by the time of Mayrhofer’s withdrawal; in 1823, however, he began an extended trip to Italy, and despite correspondence with Schubert during his absence, he too is far less prominent among Schubert’s friends after his return. By the end of Schubert’s life, in addition to his long-time friends Spaun and Schober – both of whom had also at various times left Vienna for extended periods – Moritz von Schwind and Eduard von Bauernfeld were among those closest to Schubert. The former he had most likely met in 1821, the latter only in 1825. Although the image of a circle, with its associations of fixity and completeness and its long history, going back to Schubert and his friends themselves, is unlikely to be replaced, a loose and constantly shifting web of relationships offers a more apt metaphor.

Whatever this group is called, however, one of its primary values is both obvious and constant: a seriously pursued interest in the arts, including but by no means limited to music. This variety of interests has fueled a recurrent criticism of Schubert, equating excessive traffic with practitioners of other arts with a betrayal of disciplinary integrity; a betrayal confirmed by what has been perceived as the insufficiently disciplined form of Schubert’s larger works. As early as February 1829, Leopold von Sonnleithner wrote in the monthly report of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde:

It is much to be regretted that, especially in his earlier days, Schubert chose scarcely a single musical artist for his closest and most intimate relationships, but for the most part only artistic practitioners in other branches, who could indeed pay homage to his genius, but were incapable of leading it. An excellent, experienced composer would probably have guided Schubert towards even more works of the larger kind and have stood by him as adviser in matters of outward form, well-planned disposition and large-scale effect. (SDB 856)

From the standpoint of bourgeois self-cultivation, however, such a variety of contacts bespoke well-roundedness rather than amateurishness, and it is that context that defines the literary and aesthetic values of Schubert’s friends.

The future bureaucrats of the Stadtkonvikt are thus once again relevant, particularly a single group with whose members Schubert had continued interaction throughout his life. Josef von Spaun, Josef Kenner, Johann Mayrhofer, Franz von Schober, as well as Schubert’s later friends the Hartmann brothers, Franz and Friedrich (Fritz), and a number of more peripheral friends including Spaun’s brothers Anton and Max, and Anton Ottenwalt, all shared common ties to Upper Austria, primarily to Linz; many also had in common schooling at the monasteries of St. Florian and Kremsmünster. The older members of this group, particularly Anton von Spaun and Ottenwalt, adopted an educational ideal based on moralistically oriented studies of the classics as well as of recent German literature. ¹² Similar ideals had been advocated by educational reformers such as Herder and Humboldt, but had not yet had significant impact on Austrian schools; ¹³ accordingly, the friends resolved independently to cultivate both themselves and those whom they could influence. Their zeal, their means, and the role of the arts in the process are suggested in the following excerpts from letters written by Anton von Spaun to Schober, whom the elder friends found a perpetual challenge to their ideals of moderation and self-discipline:

Feeling and thinking – in them is higher existence. From both proceeds action – but what shall we act upon? We cannot depose tyrants, live for the world in death for the Fatherland, we cannot teach wisdom to youth in the columned corridors of Athens, nor struggle on behalf of oppressed innocence – but we can still act and achieve true greatness. It’s not true when someone says: the world is as it is, the individual can do nothing against it, it’s foolishness to want to protest against the spirit of the age. Just to be better than our times is already a great deal, and it’s even better to pull others out of their tumult – and because it would be bad not to practice in life what one realizes is good, you, I, and all who are inspired by like convictions will hold firmly to them and sow them everywhere we find unspoiled character and receptivity to them.

*

We must study humanity, and all ages, and what the best people of the past did and thought, and how one thing leads to another, and how one thing follows out of another, so that we can understand clearly and have a positive influence on the people we love, on our brothers. Beauty too influences human hearts powerfully, refreshingly, and upliftingly, and the sounds of music, a madonna by Raphael, an Apollo, the song of a divinely inspired poet, all pull heavenwards with an unknown power; therefore let us too dedicate our lives and flee nothing so much as an excess of destructive passions and the deficiency and emptiness of an indolent spirit. ¹⁴

In many such letters, which scholars have only recently begun to reconsider, a record of the reading and discussion that these values implied has been preserved. They are evident as well in much of Mayrhofer’s classicizing poetry and in the pages of the two volumes of the Beyträge zur Bildung für Jünglinge (Contributions to the Cultivation of Youth) on which several of the friends collaborated in 1817 and 1818. From our perspective, such idealism can seem naïve and resolutely unconnected to the political cynicism of Restoration Austria, but – perhaps precisely because of that – their program provided not only a prominent place for the arts, but also a basis for judging them: “every art worthy of humans has as its goal the betterment of our circumstances – directly or indirectly serving our perfection or ennoblement.” ¹⁵ The friends looked to classical models and revered artists and authors (most prominently Goethe and Schiller) who could be seen to follow those models. A corollary of this stance was an attitude toward Romanticism that ranged from suspicion to outright rejection. Thus Mayrhofer contrasted the “distortions and blunders of the German school” of artists to the “canon of the beautiful and truthful, in a word, the classical,” which had been lost since the fall of Rome; Anton von Spaun criticized the “completely incoherent, chaotic longing of the heart” characteristic of modern poetry; and Anton Ottenwalt castigated critics who “most often lead a petty, perhaps perverted life, let history count for nothing, know of nothing but the dreary night of the absolute everything-and-nothing doctrine, over which the will-o’-the-wisps and spooks of Romanticism hover.” ¹⁶

The extent to which this circle and its views overlapped with Schubert’s deserves careful consideration, particularly since the passages just cited contrast so markedly with the conventional portrait of Schubert the Romantic. There can be no question of Mayrhofer’s long and intense contact with Schubert, but Anton von Spaun and Ottenwalt only visited Vienna during Schubert’s lifetime; those in Vienna most closely associated with Schubert – including Josef von Spaun, Mayrhofer, and Schober – never matched their counterparts in Linz in their overt pedagogical zeal. ¹⁷ They did, however, share not only their passion for literature and the arts, but also the habit of formally established meetings to encounter and discuss those arts. So, for instance, Johanna Lutz wrote to her fiancé Leopold Kupelwieser on November 18, 1823, that “last Saturday there was a meeting at Mohn’s, where the readings were fixed for Mondays and Thursdays” (SDB 392). In Kupelwieser’s and Schober’s absence, these meetings eventually broke up, but on his return, Schober organized another reading group, frequently reported in the diaries of the Hartmann brothers.

With the passage of time, though, what was read around Schubert was changing as well. Schubert’s own occupation with song texts by such poets as Novalis and Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel in 1819 and thereafter, along with a concomitant decline in the quantity of texts by Goethe and Schiller, parallels a significant change in the group’s literary horizon, corresponding as well to the increasing prominence of younger men among Schubert’s closest friends. Although the fluid nature of the circle precludes setting rigid boundaries, Senn’s arrest and exile, as the most dramatic and abrupt event in which Schubert was involved, offers a useful marker. Senn (b. 1795) and the friends associated with him and Schubert before 1820 were virtually all of Schubert’s age or older, for example Josef von Spaun (b. 1788), Mayrhofer (b. 1787), Kenner (b. 1794), Schober (b. 1796), and the brothers Anselm and Josef Hüttenbrenner (b. 1794 and 1796, respectively). Schubert remained in contact with some of these older friends throughout his life, despite extended separations from most for a variety of personal and professional reasons; Kupelwieser (b. 1796) and Franz von Bruchmann (b. 1798) – both prominent in the early 1820s but more distant by the end of Schubert’s life – were also near-exact contemporaries. After 1820, however, most of Schubert’s close associates were notably younger: Eduard von Bauernfeld (b. 1802), Benedikt Randhartinger (b. 1802), and Franz Lachner (b. 1803) – the latter two, as active professional musicians, exceptional among Schubert’s close friends – Moritz von Schwind (b. 1804), Fritz von Hartmann (b. 1805), Ernst von Feuchtersleben (b. 1806), and Franz von Hartmann (b. 1808). Although as intensely interested in literature as the older group, this younger one was not only more sympathetic to such currents as the Romanticism of Schlegel and Hoffmann and the cynicism of Heine or Kleist, but also considerably more eclectic in its taste. ¹⁸

Even this brief overview of literary taste begins to suggest something that has long been recognized about the role of Schubert’s circle, particularly in relation to his vocal music: its members both provided song texts and collaborated on operatic projects (as did Mayrhofer, Schober, Bruchmann, Senn, and Kenner) and introduced Schubert to the poetry of their own acquaintances (as Josef von Spaun did in the case of Mayrhofer and Bruchmann did for August von Platen). Even more importantly, they mediated his introduction to an extraordinarily broad corpus of poetry, the product of a culture in which the writing of poetry was simply a part of being an educated person. It is less easy to dismiss the phenomenon of poet-officials if one remembers that not only the likes of Kenner and Mayrhofer, but also Goethe and Grillparzer (who moved in many of the same Viennese social circles and was an acquaintance of Schubert’s later years) exemplify it. In any case, Schubert’s exposure to the latter two figures was due in large part to his close contact with those like the former.

Cultivating connections: Schubert’s circle in society

While the literary relevance of Schubert’s circle may be obvious, and the short-sightedness of some of its members concerning Schubert’s instrumental music is easily ridiculed, ¹⁹ their role in facilitating his activity both within and outside the realm of Lieder was also considerable. Simply put, their social connections were far more powerful than his own, and they willingly exploited them to his benefit, making crucial introductions, providing performance opportunities, and facilitating the publication of his music. Most obviously, through his early friends, Schubert established his ties to Johann Michael Vogl, the retired court opera singer who became Schubert’s friend, a mentor of sorts, and a staunch advocate. Vogl, another Upper Austrian, also shared the Linz circle’s dedication to classical-humanistic moral cultivation to the extent that it is difficult to distinguish his ideals and influence from their own. ²⁰

In a society in which the administration and often the performance of serious music was still to a great degree the domain of the same cultivated amateur class that was vital to literary culture, the friends’ ties to those outside the world of professional musicians were perhaps even more significant. Thus, Josef von Spaun’s friend, the lawyer Josef Wilhelm Witteczek, collected Schubert’s songs in manuscript and sponsored musical evenings dedicated to Schubert’s music. Through Spaun’s cousin, the poet and philosophy professor Matthäus von Collin, he encountered not only literary figures like the pioneering orientalist Josef von Hammer-Purgstall, Johann Ladislaus Pyrker (the Patriarch of Venice and poet of two of Schubert’s songs), and Karoline Pichler (who presided over one of Vienna’s leading literary salons), but also significant figures in the Viennese musical world, including Count Moritz von Dietrichstein (administrative head of music at the imperial court) and Ignaz Franz von Mosel (who along with others of Schubert’s social contacts, including the Sonnleithner family and Raphael Georg Kiesewetter, was a leading figure in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, founded in 1814 and central to the promotion of serious musical taste in Vienna).

Both close friends and these more influential acquaintances came to be participants in the Schubertiades, evenings devoted to performances of Schubert’s music and to social interaction of those for whom that music was culturally meaningful. This formulation may seem needlessly circuitous, but it is necessary to encompass the range of events to which the term referred. Its original sense, specifying one aspect of the literary and musical activities of Schubert’s circle, is suggested in Schubert’s own letter of December 7, 1822, to Josef von Spaun: “Our life together [Zusammenleben ] in Vienna is quite agreeable now. We hold readings at Schober’s three times a week, and one Schubertiade.” ²¹ Within a few years, however, Schubert’s growing reputation – itself partially a result of advocacy by his friends – had changed the connotations of the term. The change appears clearly in the diary entry of Franz von Hartmann, a younger friend of the late 1820s, for December 15, 1826:

I went to Spaun’s, where there was a big, big Schubertiade…. There was a huge gathering. The Arneth, Witteczek, Kurzrock and Pompe couples, the mother-in-law of Witteczek: Dr. Watteroth’s widow, Betty Wanderer, and the painter Kupelwieser with his wife, Grillparzer, Schober, Schwind, Mayrhofer and his landlord Huber, the tall Huber, Derffel, Bauernfeld, Gahy (who played gloriously à quatre mains with Schubert) and Vogl, who sang almost 30 splendid songs. Baron Schlechta and other court probationers and secretaries were also there. I was moved almost to tears …. When the music was done there was grand feeding and then dancing. (SDB 571–72)

At such events, Schubert’s immediate circle and the broader society of similar interests came together, strengthening their sense of shared culture through conversation and dancing, as well as through a serious interest in music. In music, as in literature, promotion of that serious taste was crucially bound up not only with defining and advocating that taste, but also with thereby defining one’s self and one’s associates – and excluding other tastes from those associations. Serious art requires serious contemplation, and the contemplator must be appropriately cultivated to appreciate the unspoken significance that lies beyond mere recreation. ²² The cultivated bureaucrat and the artist are thus united; the socially marked rift lay not between bourgeois and Bohemian but rather common and cultivated. In this context, statements that might be read to mark off the artist resonate differently, as when Schober wrote to Schubert on December 2, 1824, “are we not precisely those who have found our life in art, while others found only entertainment in it?” (SDB 385) or when Bruchmann wrote to Platen on June 20, 1823, “life here is so miserable that the artist is the only person with whom a cheerful, beautiful life is still possible.” ²³ Schubert’s own letter to Schober of November 30, 1823, differentiates even more explicitly, not between artist and other, but between cultivated and crude:

Our circle, as indeed I had expected, has lost its central focus without you …. True, as a substitute for you and Kupelwieser we received four individuals: the Hungarian Mayer, Hönig, Smetana and Steiger, but the majority of such individuals make the society only more insignificant instead of better. What is the good of a lot of quite ordinary students and officials to us? If Bruchmann is not there … we go on for hours under the supreme direction of Mohn hearing nothing but eternal talk about riding, fencing, horses and hounds. If it is to go on like this, I don’t suppose I shall stand it for long among them. (SDB 300–301)

The material implications of this split for Schubert as a composer were considerable. In a society where the musical public itself was small, the potential market for serious music (as Schubert himself seems to have conceived it) was frustratingly limited, as Schubert’s letter to Schober of September 21, 1824, suggests: “with [music publisher Maximilian Josef] Leidesdorff things have gone badly so far: he cannot pay, nor does a single soul buy anything, either my things or any others, except wretched fashionable stuff’ (SDB 375). Nor was this attitude limited to composers; long after Schubert’s death, his friends still opposed elite and popular taste in socio-economic terms. Josef Kenner made the tart observation that “today publishers with their reprints, and biographers are living on [Schubert’s] tardily appreciated posthumous works, now that Liszt’s conjuring tricks have made him palatable to the public” (SMF 82); and Josef von Spaun, whose obituary article had noted that “success and money never served [Schubert] as incentives in the dedication of his life to art,” later opined that “Schubert did not get the recognition he deserved in Vienna. The great majority of people remained, and still remain, uninterested. The blame for this does not lie with the lovely songs; the public that is enthusiastic over Rigoletto and finds [Gluck’s] Iphigénie boring cannot be Schubert’s public.” ²⁴

I have so far discussed only men within Schubert’s circle, for there is little verifiable evidence of Schubert’s interacting with women with anything like the degree of intimacy that can easily be documented with many men. This is not, however, to deny that women played significant roles in Schubert’s life. Some supposed connections, like the anecdotally reported liaisons with Therese Grob and Caroline Esterházy, are never likely to be disproven to an extent that will disabuse those who believe them, nor established with a degree of certainty that will convert skeptics. But Schubert’s work with the singer Anna Milder, or with Wilhelmine von Chézy, the author of Rosamunde, and his social interaction with women like the extraordinarily musical Fröhlich sisters, or Marie Pachler, his hostess for an 1827 stay in Graz, are undeniable. Since Schubert’s interaction with women has recently played a role in a controversy over his sexual orientation, and since both issues relate directly to the nature of Schubert’s circle, the subject warrants closer examination.

Maynard Solomon raised the issue of Schubert’s sexuality in two articles, the second of which achieved a notoriety that has spread well beyond the confines of the musicological community. ²⁵ Drawing on a wide variety of evidence, including allusions by Schubert’s friends to questionable morality on the part of the composer, passages in correspondence that can be interpreted as veiled references to same-sex activity, and the preponderance of intense male friendships among Schubert and his close friends, Solomon cautiously hypothesized that “although I cannot be certain that some of the evidence … may not be wide of the mark, I believe it is reasonably probable that [the] primary orientation [of the members of Schubert’s circle] was a homosexual one.” ²⁶ Despite detailed – and considerably less cautious – attempts at rebuttal, there seems no convincing reason to deny the probability of Solomon’s proposal, while remembering as well his caution: coded references to forbidden practices can hardly be expected to yield entirely unambiguous interpretations. ²⁷ Still, it is difficult to interpret passages like this one, from an unpublished letter of August 8, 1825, written by Antonio Mayer to Schober, as referring to anything but sexual activity that must not be discussed openly:

I am the happiest of men … – I have a three-coloured cat!… Since you have gone, I have relied much more on cats; it’s better than going to the dogs. I have made the acquaintance of two slender, one imposing, one curious, and two hardworking cats. I could tell you a lot about that, but since I don’t know if my friends are also yours, it would be doubly indiscreet to talk about it, first because it could bore you, and second because I could compromise my cats. ²⁸

In short, Solomon’s interpretation provides a background to much of the activity of Schubert’s circle more plausible than either Anselm Hüttenbrenner’s claim that Schubert had a “dominating aversion to the daughters of Eve” (SMF 70) or the mildly – but conventionally – adventurous Schubert proposed by Solomon’s opponents.

Schubert’s connection to the Linz circle of the Spauns, Kenner, and Ottenwalt should be recalled in this context, for although it seems unlikely that this circle had an explicitly homosexual orientation – Ottenwalt had, after all, given perversion as one of the faults of Romantic critics, and Kenner’s evaluations of Schubert’s later life are the most vehement ²⁹ – the powerfully charged relationships between young men that the friends encouraged had strong affective and physical, if not explicitly sexual, components. An unpublished letter by Ottenwalt to Schober of January 1, 1816, sets this tone and reveals the role that music could play in it:

Anton sat at the piano in Frau von Brandt’s room, and while darkness fell he played his variations on the Almerlied, the new ones on the Russian folksong, the theme of which I love so, because it is in the minor, and the melancholy Traunerlieder and some others. The tones carried me away…. Suddenly I realized that the Kremsmünster students would have to leave the next day; I was driven to them …. Then I remained standing there between them, gave friend Kahl my right hand and put my left around our beloved Ferdinand, who sat arm in arm with Kenner. He drew me closer with his right arm, and as the tones thus spoke directly into the soul, I felt the gentle, fervent press of their hands, and I had to look back and forth into their faces and their beloved eyes. They sat so still, pleasantly moved by the music, but yet so peaceful and cheerful, and I gazed at them so, thinking: oh, you good souls, you are indeed happy in your innocence. Music makes you gentler, but not sad, not upset; what your heart desires you grasp in the hand of a friend, and you know no other wishes, you whom the melody gives only loftier waves. ³⁰

The distinction between such physical and emotional expressions of same-sex friendship and activity we would define as homosexual can be totally unambiguous only if homosexuality is defined with a focus on genital activity that would never be acceptable in the case of heterosexuality.

Again, although one student of Spaun’s circle noted with palpable embarrassment the “fast mädchenhaft” tone of such passages, ³¹ women themselves are conspicuously absent. In this respect, the issue extends beyond sexual orientation to encompass the link between gender definition and the high culture that so fascinated Schubert’s circle. In this society of cultivated bureaucrats, artists, and artist-bureaucrats, cultivation was a sign of belonging to the class cultivated to serve society and the state; women, who could have no such expectation of official service, also had no overt incentive to participate in such cultivating circles, nor were they encouraged to do so.

This is not to deny the role of the arts as pre-marital feminine “accomplishments,” nor to suggest that no women achieved cultivation or artistic prominence, despite social disincentives. One such exceptional case from Schubert’s circle is instructive. Johanna Lutz, who wrote faithfully to Leopold Kupelwieser during his Italian journey, is one of the principal witnesses to the reading society of 1823–24 mentioned above; she was involved enough to relay on relatively detailed reports. ³² When reporting on that society, however, despite her own apparent involvement, she mentions only men. Her letters also contain numerous reports of women, often in interaction with Schubert and his friends, but the reading group, excepting herself, seems to have been entirely male. Far from being “mädchenhaft,” such groups were a largely masculine affair; in terms of gender construction, their precise position on a continuum of homosocial relationships ranging from the promotion of mutual interests through friendship to active homosexuality is less crucial than the interpersonal bonds they established and the emotional and artistic sensitivity they cultivated, all of which prepared their members to participate in and so continue the (male-dominated) society to which they belonged. ³³

Refuge or training ground? The practice of art in everyday life

There is a tension between this alignment of Schubert’s circle with the values of a cultural elite and Solomon’s proposal that Schubert belonged to a repressed homosexual subculture. The tension – but also the potential for explanation – is clearest in Solomon’s account of what Schubert gained from his surroundings:

There were, however, compensations for Schubert’s concealment within the hermetic and self-sustaining world of his own subculture. Through his homosexuality Schubert left a realm of compulsion and entered what – at least momentarily – appeared to be a realm of freedom. To its members, the bohemian-homosexual community represented freedom from the restraints of family and the state, freedom from the compulsions of society and the straitjackets of heterosexuality, freedom from the imperative to raise a family and to make a living in a routine job – in short, freedom to ignore the reality principle in favor of the pursuit of beauty and pleasure. These were temporarily adequate, if ultimately insufficient, indemnities for a precarious existence on the margins of society. ³⁴

That Schubert’s friends at times perceived themselves as threatened by oppressive powers is beyond question, and as Kristina Muxfeldt has pointed out, sexual and political liberty – and crime – were at best incompletely distinguished by the law. ³⁵ By becoming government officials, teachers at state-supported institutions, and the like, however, most of Schubert’s friends also were or eventually became part of the same repressive apparatus whose incursions they resented; it will not do to imagine a band of revolutionaries confronting the state at every turn. The character of Mayrhofer, freedom-loving poet and dutiful book-censor, is the most extreme example, but beyond individual idiosyncrasies, we encounter what John Reed terms “the curiously schizophrenic character of Viennese society at the time, on the one hand a huge but inefficient bureaucracy, and on the other a civilized and tolerant middle class devoted to artistic pursuits.” ³⁶

The split Reed notes is indeed significant, albeit less of an aberrant curiosity than of a strategy of coping that has significant ramifications for the arts. As Anton von Spaun’s letters, rejecting the deposition of tyrants in favor of selective reading, suggest, the turn to self-cultivation seemed self-evident; there was no viable alternative. Nor was seeking refuge from a hostile society through aesthetic activity limited to marginal subcultures. Rather, it was characteristic of the domesticated, self-limiting, and extremely widespread art and literature of the Biedermeier; indeed, in the words of one literary scholar, “the central concern of the period seems to be how to preserve the hope for a regenerative change in history while taking into account defeat and limitation.” ³⁷ Such art can be dismissed as inferior to a Classic-Romantic “mainstream” only at the cost of distorting the place of the arts during this period. ³⁸

The question of the marginality or centrality of Schubert’s circle, then, yields no straightforward answer. The freedom and artistic pursuits that Schubert and his friends valued indeed placed them in opposition to the authorities of Restoration Austria, threatened by overt expressions of freedom of any kind. Furthermore, many viewed the bureaucratic positions they eventually assumed as tedious and deadening. ³⁹ But yet, not only could the demands of the state ultimately not be evaded, self-cultivation itself proved admirable preparation for state service, and not only in theory, as the later success of many of Schubert’s associates testifies.

Art too played a conflicted role. As a realm in which free thought could find expression, in which the “Hoffnungspflanzen, Tatenfluten” (“plants of hope, floods of deeds”) that Mayrhofer described in Heliopolis 2 (D753) could thrive, it was carefully watched over by the state. But that freedom was circumscribed not only by overt restriction but also by awareness of that restriction and the resultant self-limitation: no one could object to art that merely provided refuge in “gray hours,” to quote Schober’s An die Musik (D547). This effectively eliminated any possibility that the “floods of deeds” art might generate would be anything but metaphorical, but if change was impossible, the blending of art and life at least made the inevitable tolerable.

Bauernfeld suggested one means by which this was possible in a letter to Schober of October 1826; wit and irony, two central concepts of Romantic aesthetics, appear not as tools of art criticism, but as tactics for everyday life:

The human being is a serious beast, says Schlegel, and I add to that: it is really our duty to work against this bestiality. No one would deny that the essence of today’s world is gratification – but how a poor devil can maintain himself among all these gratifiers [Geniessenden ] and authorities [Machthabenden ] other than through irony, I don’t know. ⁴⁰

Mayrhofer’s 1836 suicide is only the most dramatic evidence that the aestheticizing solution was ultimately a makeshift; it could make life more liveable by creating an interior space immune to repression, but the tension between that space and the hierarchy of power outside it remained unresolved. ⁴¹

Mayrhofer’s fate, however tragic, can be dismissed as irrelevant to autonomous art, just as Bauernfeld’s comments could be seen as trivializing great Romantic themes. Similarly, Schubert himself can be considered apart from his context and his music isolated from its surroundings. The result is music heard as pure sound or the expression of eternal aesthetic laws, or, less extremely, as a corpus of masterworks of Romantic (or Classical) style. Such a segregation of art and ideas from the circumstances of life is well suited to the concert hall and its ideal of aesthetic autonomy, but to listen to such “pure” music is also to silence the voices that once surrounded it and gave it meaning.

An alternative hearing recognizes that art – not only the relatively small-scale genres (song, partsong, dance, piano music) for which Schubert was known during his life, but also the more prestigious genres of chamber music, symphony, and opera through which he hoped to establish his name as a serious composer – takes on meaning not only through aesthetic contemplation but also through other, less rarefied associations. To acknowledge this is, after all, only to take Schubert himself seriously: in his letter to his brother Ferdinand of July 1824, he wrote of his “fateful recognition of a miserable reality, which I endeavor to beautify as far as possible by my imagination [Phantasie ] (thank God)” (SDB 363). Brought into relation to such texts – and Schubert’s circle, stripped of its sentimental veneer, provides them in rich variety – Schubert’s music gives up its splendid isolation, but in doing so reveals a very human voice both threatened by and embedded in structures of power, making do in part by making music. The recovery and continued survival of such a voice, I would argue, will be ample compensation for the loss of an eternal but neutralized cultural monument.