O UR S CHUBERT

His Enduring Legacy

David Schroeder

THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.

Lanham, Maryland • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
2009
SCARECROW PRESS, INC.

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Copyright © 2009 by David Peter Schroeder

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Schroeder, David P., 1946–

Our Schubert : his enduring legacy / David Schroeder.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-6926-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-6927-1
(ebook)
1. Schubert, Franz, 1797–1828. 2. Schubert, Franz, 1797–1828—
Influence. 3. Composers—Austria—Biography. 4. Motion picture music.
I. Title.
ML410.S3S295 2009
780.92—dc22 [B] 2009007155

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 Introduction

“OF SCHUBERT—I MIGHT ALMOST SAY of our Schubert—there is much I

should like to tell you.”1 With these words Anton Ottenwalt started a
long letter in 1825 in which he divulged to Josef von Spaun the happy
details of Schubert’s recent visit to Linz. Any good friend would ex-
press endearment with “our,” as Ottenwalt did elsewhere for Johann
Mayrhofer and others, but here he underlined it, making it all the
more special. The term stuck, and for the next half century or more
Schubert’s friends referred to him affectionately as “our” Schubert.
The day after Schubert died, on 19 November 1828 at the tragically
young age of 31, Eduard von Bauernfeld made this desolate entry in
his diary: “Buried our Schubert yesterday. Schober with his art estab-
lishment is near bankruptcy, Schwind and I are discouraged. What
a life is this!”2 For the moment he could not imagine life without
Schubert, and “our” in this case suggests that something of his own
life expired with Schubert’s passing. In the obituary notice he wrote
in 1828, Spaun, who had known Schubert intimately for two decades,
lamented the sad state of German opera, and how Schubert could
have rescued it: “our Schubert, who could have become an ornament
and a support of German opera, has already passed to a better life.”3
Like many, he wondered what might have been if this genius had lived
on; much more than a genius, Schubert was a dear friend who enjoyed
nothing “unless it was seasoned with the company of friends,” whose
approval always gave him the greatest pleasure. “A memorial stone,
erected by friends and admirers, will show later generations who rests

xiii
xiv INTRODUCTION

here, and how much we loved him. . . . Our gratitude and our love . . .
follow the dear departed beyond the grave.”4
Numerous other friends and family members also used the same
affectionate term; this continued as late as 1884, when Gerhard von
Breuning, only fifteen years old when Schubert died, called him “our
poor Schubert,”5 adding a new level of endearment. Another one of
Schubert’s earliest close friends, Anselm Hüttenbrenner, who met
him as a fellow pupil of Antonio Salieri in 1815, remembered with
affection in 1854 those good old days in Vienna:

When the merry musical brotherhood, of whom there were often

ten, met together intimately anywhere, each had his own nickname.
. . . Our Schubert was called Schwammerl. . . . We were young, gay
people and, in our dear capital, enjoyed ourselves as much as pos-
sible and used to go along arm-in-arm. Now those schöne Tage in
Aranjuez are long since over. . . . The divine spark, which burned in
his breast, cannot be extinguished throughout eternity.6

Not readily translatable into English, “Schwammerl” can mean any-

thing from “fungus” to “toadstool.” In another memoir four years later
Hüttenbrenner took the term of endearment a step further, individual-
izing it with “my Schubert.”7 Hüttenbrenner was absolutely right about
Schubert’s spark not being extinguished: in the century and a half
since he wrote these words there has not been so much as a flicker.
He could not have anticipated that the next generations, including
our own, would continue to think of his Schubert as “our Schubert,”
inspiring a type of devotion surpassing that shown to just about any
other composer from the recent or distant past, enticing us now even
more than he did his contemporaries then.
Schubert happened by chance to live during a half century that saw
the most extraordinary concentration of musical brilliance in one city
that the world has ever seen or likely will see. Haydn died in Vienna
when Schubert was twelve years old, and we continue to undervalue this
visionary musical innovator. Mozart exploded onto the world stage at a
very tender age, and by the mid- to late 1770s was producing incompa-
rable masterpieces. He died in Vienna six years before Schubert’s birth,
but his spirit lived on, especially among the next generation of compos-
ers. Beethoven was twenty-six at the time of Schubert’s birth in 1797,
although nothing of a personal nature developed between Schubert and
 INTRODUCTION xv

Beethoven, unlike Haydn and Mozart, who, despite a similar age gap,
became close friends. Beethoven certainly knew about Schubert, and
Schubert admired Beethoven with such ardor that it threatened to derail
him from his own quest for originality; at times, one could say, Schubert
actually wanted to become Beethoven. Schubert stands on equal footing
with these three giants, and in some ways even surpasses them, espe-
cially in his capacity to evoke intense personal responses, sometimes so
impassioned that they defy rational explanation.

MUSIC CRITICS AND MUSIC LOVERS

As often happens in major centers, one critic emerges as a dominating

force, and that certainly took place in late nineteenth-century Vienna
with Eduard Hanslick. He flexed sufficient journalistic muscle that he
became a serious threat to a composer as powerful as Wagner when
Hanslick championed Brahms as a reasoned alternative, if not anti-
dote, to the highly sensory and passionate Wagner. Wagner seriously
contemplated getting his revenge by building the pugnacious critic
into one of his operas, Die Meistersinger, holding him up to ridicule
for the entire musical world to see and leaving no question as to his
identity.8 As a critic, Hanslick focused on structure, showing much
less interest in expression, emotion, and especially the inclination of
some to construe programmatic readings from purely instrumental
works, dismissing these as “dilating on tinkling opium dreams.”9 When
it came to Schubert, some of whose greatest works, such as the “Un-
finished” Symphony, audiences heard for the first time in the 1860s,
Hanslick could hardly resist doing a little dilating of his own.
As new Schubert masterpieces continued to surface during those
years, Hanslick, astonished by one work more brilliant than the next,
enthused that “‘for thirty years the master has been dead, and in spite
of this it seems as if he goes on working invisibly—it is impossible to
follow him.’”10 At the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde premiere of the
“Unfinished” in 1865, Hanslick had difficulty restraining himself from
the type of language he found so objectionable:

When, after the few introductory measures, clarinet and oboe in

unison began their gentle cantilena above the calm murmur of
the violins, every child recognized the composer, and a muffled
xvi INTRODUCTION

“Schubert” was whispered in the audience. . . . And when, after this

nostalgic cantilena in the minor, there followed the contrasting G
major theme of the violoncellos, a charming song of almost Ländler-
like intimacy, every heart rejoiced, as if, after a long separation, the
composer himself were among us in person. The whole movement
is a melodic stream so crystal clear, despite its force and genius, that
one can see every pebble on the bottom. And everywhere the same
warmth, the same bright, life-giving sunshine!11

But before anyone can accuse Hanslick of indulging in mellowed

opium dreams, he manages to find something to disparage in the sec-
ond movement:

A few odd hints here and there of complaint or irritation are interwo-
ven in a cantilena otherwise full of heartiness and quiet happiness;
their effect is that of musical thunder clouds rather than of danger-
ous clouds of passion. As if loath to leave his own gentle song, the
composer puts off too long the end of this Andante. We know this
peculiar habit of Schubert’s, which weakens the total impression of
some of his works.12

Here, amid the phrases of his euphoric review, Hanslick rasps back
to his preferred formal territory, initiating the longstanding objection
to Schubert’s apparent lack or at least diminished emphasis on form.
Perhaps most importantly, he douses Schubert with thunder clouds,
denying him the passion that his music most certainly evokes, danger-
ous to listeners and even more so to critics. And to round this essay
off, after delighting in Schubert’s orchestration, which Hanslick finds
superior to Wagner’s, he reminds us of his previous warnings “of
overzealous Schubert worship and the adulation of Schubert relics.”13
Like many critics, he remains stingy with his praise, balancing it with
invective, if not for Schubert himself, then certainly for those left in
rapture listening to his music, although he came dangerously close to
succumbing to the passion himself.
In referring to the intimacy of the music, Hanslick hit on an ex-
traordinary possibility, meant by him one assumes in a fairly limited
way, but with far-reaching prospects for some Schubert fanatics:
the presence of the composer among us in person. The appearance
of new Schubert works throughout the nineteenth century seemed
to keep the composer alive as audiences discovered gems that his
 INTRODUCTION xvii

contemporaries did not know. Christopher H. Gibbs, in trying to get

at this longstanding identification that audiences have had with “our
Schubert,” explores the possibility of “an intriguing psychological
phenomenon whereby every listener constructs his or her own image
of the composer,” capturing “a possessiveness often directed toward
beloved figures,”14 especially pronounced in Schubert’s case. Gibbs
disapproves of the practice in that the images “our Schubert” devo-
tees form will be at odds with “reality,” although biographers often
do not fare much better at creating an impression of the real person.
Gibbs readily admits that the limited documentation in the case
of Schubert yields a much smaller biography than one would like,
that too few letters have survived to give a rounded impression, and
that his friends wrote their memoirs too many years after Schubert’s
death to be reliable. Biographers too often try to fill in the gaps,
making assumptions based on flimsy or manufactured evidence; in
Schubert’s case they speculate that he may have been a homosexual
or an opium user,15 positions that cannot be tested or verified by
anything we currently know.
The implications of these biographical assumptions can be per-
vasive, for example, Maynard Solomon’s hypothesis about Schubert’s
homosexuality. Defenders of a heterosexual Schubert—especially
those based in Vienna—have found this to be especially objection-
able, and a flood of articles has created a musicological battle royal
rivaled only by the “Shostakovich controversy” (did he abhor or blindly
submit to Stalin?), which similarly has taken some very nasty turns.16
We may, though, have missed the point of this controversy. The issue
has little or nothing to do with defining the real Schubert, since that
Schubert will continue to elude us; a Schubert sexually oriented ex-
clusively to women or to men will necessarily be more a reflection on
the view of biographers than on Schubert himself. The passion with
which Solomon’s hypothesis has been embraced in no way attests to
the quality of his argument but instead to the possibility of evoking
another response to “our Schubert”—this time, for some, “our gay
Schubert.” This force far transcends anything that documentation can
disrupt, and carries forward in a different way what Schubert’s music
has done all along, in this case opening it to a segment of society that
previously may have wished to identify with Schubert but lacked the
key to unlock that door of intimacy.
xviii INTRODUCTION

SCHUBERT’S VOICE

One normally, although not always, thinks of music in the classical

tradition as originating in the mind of a composer who then commits
the idea to musical notation, which in turn is read by performers who
transmit the score to a listening audience. Unlike the composer, the
novelist’s or poet’s work does not have to be mediated before it reaches
the reader, allowing for a highly intimate relationship between author
and reader (and authors—especially from the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries—sometimes even address the reader as though
in correspondence as “Dear reader” or “Gentle reader”). In contrast to
this, the composer depends on the good will of performers (conduc-
tors and players in the case of larger public works) who may or may not
grasp what the composer hopes to achieve. Because of this necessity
of performer as intermediary, a certain amount of distance inevitably
exists between composer and listener since the performer takes a
place of central importance in the process, and listeners are just as
likely to zero in on the quality of the performance as the work itself.
In some types of works the two become almost inseparable, such as in
concertos in which the composer often makes the solo performance
the primary focus. Even here, though, some composers have opted to
include their concertos among their most intimate works, as Mozart
does with the piano or Beethoven and Berg do with the violin, placing
the solo performer in a very delicate position. A performer who thinks
these composers wrote their concertos entirely for display of virtuosity
will create an unbridgeable gulf between composer and listener.
Composers, of course, may very often be performers themselves,
as Mozart was on both the piano and violin or Beethoven on the piano
earlier in his career, and that can help considerably to shorten the
distance between creator and listener, although even here others will
perform their works, if not at the time then certainly for posterity.
The nature of the relationship, though, remains one of considerable
distance since the composer/performer—a Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,
Mendelssohn, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Prokofiev, or Bartók,
to mention only a few—can do that which ordinary mortals cannot,
and the composer stands in a place of infinite superiority, speaking
with magisterial authority from the top of the mountain to the flock
gathered below. Not all will think of themselves as occupying such
 INTRODUCTION xix

a commanding position; Haydn, for example, remained genuinely

humble about his achievements, but others, especially Schubert’s
contemporary and idol Beethoven, saw themselves peering down from
the dizzying heights.
Schubert may have thought wistfully about Beethoven’s vantage
point from Mount Olympus, and at times he tried to scale those lofty
heights himself, but Schubert does not hold his position of equality
with Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn because of a misguided attempt
to emulate his elevated contemporary. Schubert’s stunning achieve-
ment lies in his discovery of what Beethoven and the others could
not find: he shortens the distance drastically between composer and
listener, finding a directness to parallel that of the novelist or poet.
Robert Schumann, for one, had no doubts about Schubert’s ability to
achieve this intimacy: “‘Schubert expresses Jean Paul, Novalis, and E.
T. A. Hoffmann in tones. . . . when I play Schubert, it’s as if I were
reading a novel composed by Jean Paul.’”17 It should not surprise us
that the Schubert circle, the intimate groups of friends and associ-
ates from the earliest literary club of the Seminary days to the various
reading societies he felt so passionately about at every stage of his life,
consisted of people devoted to literature and painting, some of whom
became professionals working at a high standard, but all committed
to the principles of art.18 Among those closest to Schubert we find
the writers Johann Mayrhofer, Franz von Schober, Josef Kenner, and
Johann Senn, and the painters Leopold Kupelwieser and Moritz von
Schwind. Not only did Schubert exchange ideas freely with aspiring
and established writers, but he received an education from them that
no school or university could offer on the major writers of his time.
That may have focused during the Seminary years on writers of the
highest moral standards, but later, through Schober and others, he
became familiar with dissident writers as well. Aside from his teacher
Salieri, and professional associations with figures such as Karl Maria
von Weber later on, Schubert did not spend his time with other pro-
fessional musicians. The retired opera singer Michael Vogl proved to
be one of the few exceptions.
There can be little doubt that Schubert’s life among writers con-
tributed much to his discovery of how to cut the distance between
himself and listeners, and while literature itself played a role in this, es-
pecially poetic texts used for songs, the principle itself applies broadly
xx INTRODUCTION

to instrumental as well as vocal music. Unlike his composer colleagues

who were or had been virtuoso performers, Schubert achieved much
more modest results as a performer—as a singer and on piano, violin,
and viola—placing him more in the company of talented amateurs, of
whom no shortage existed at the time. As a singer he excelled in his
youth; before his voice changed he was perhaps the finest singer in the
chorus that would later evolve into the Vienna Boys’ Choir. After his
voice changed, he ended up with a pleasant but not outstanding voice.
On the piano we should not doubt his exceptional musicality, but he
never reached the point of virtuosity; he could not adequately play his
own most difficult works, such as the “Wanderer” Fantasy or the last
three piano sonatas, and the accompaniment to “Erlkönig” bedeviled
him to the point that he made an arrangement without the triplets.
On violin and viola he played well as a chamber music player or as
a sectional leader in amateur orchestras, but the solo repertoire lay
beyond his grasp. As a composer/performer Schubert did not elevate
himself above others, but on the contrary, placed himself firmly with
them, writing himself into virtually all of his works as a participant,
sharing with others the sensuous pleasure of music making in cham-
ber settings, piano four-hands, songs, and even symphonies. All of
his early works, with the exception of operas, allow this participation
of the composer, and in later works written for professional perform-
ers, such as the two last symphonies, that sense of involvement still
remains intact, allowing these major works to be experienced in ways
that Beethoven’s symphonies could not.
As a composer, then, Schubert wrote for involvement instead
of education or some other form of edification—as both Haydn and
Beethoven often did. Previously the symphony had functioned not
unlike opera, performed by professionals for a listening audience and
making its impact through the dramatic means of sonata form or the
sensory appeal of attractive themes and orchestration. While Schubert
continued to be engaging in that way, he also introduced something
different, allowing talented amateurs an experience of participating
with him; by this means he could elevate and intensify the involve-
ment of listeners by appealing to their own performance instincts
without in any way reducing the quality of the musical encounter. The
listener in Schubert’s scheme of things becomes a performer, playing
the role that Schubert himself does as performer of his own works, or
 INTRODUCTION xxi

that his friends do in sharing that performance experience with him.

In the process something extraordinary and unprecedented happens
as the distance shrinks miraculously between Schubert and his listen-
ers: a possibility for intimate exchange arises that gives an entirely
new definition to the understanding of “personal.” Beethoven may be
personal in his late string quartets, probing some of the most obscure
and complex recesses of his soul, but he does not invite the listener
to share his experience, only to observe it, as though assuming it will
not be comprehended. Schubert, in contrast, invites the listener to
share—in fact he demands that of the listener, beckoning us to feel
his presence and join him in a world that we may be able to intuit and
can confirm through his musical ability to describe it. In this invita-
tion we can, as did his contemporaries, hear Schubert’s voice, with
its sonorous tone of passion and intimacy, a voice that entices one to
enter a realm one would not otherwise be able to fathom, describable
only in music.
Schubert’s voice emerges uniquely from song, which, of course,
emanates from poetry; the role of Schubert the singer permeates all
else, giving him his distinctive voice. Without the poetry of Friedrich
Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Matthisson,
Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty, Wilhelm Müller, Matthäus von
Collin, Mayrhofer, and even Schober, none of this would have been
possible. Schubert’s experience of discovering poetry through the
reading circle and the subsequent literary clubs, a not uncommon
entry to literature at the time, runs very much parallel to his musical
experience as well. In fact, just as one can see similarities between the
emergence of the string quartet with its conversational style (and the
intimate settings for quartet performances among family or friends, in
parlors, or salons) and conversational elements in eighteenth-century
literature, similar literary/musical connections hold for Schubert.
Reading literature may be a solitary experience, involving one person
locked away with a book, but in the clubs, salons, sewing circles, or
other intimate gatherings that included reading aloud to a small group
of enthusiasts, reading more often than not became a social event.
Reading could be shared as a book passed from one person to the next,
all feeling as though they were reading at the same moment.
Schubert’s musical world functioned very much like a literary
club during the early part of his life, as he wrote his string quartets
xxii INTRODUCTION

for the family quartet and his symphonies for a group of friends and
acquaintances who met for the purpose of reading his symphonies and
any others that would be accessible. Even the Schubertiads of his later
life, evenings of performances of his songs or other works in intimate
settings, differ little from the format of the reading clubs. Poets aim at
these readers, hoping that publication may follow, but they first wish
to reach individuals and small groups; the poet/singer starts in the
same way, and if publication follows, so much the better. If someone
liked a song, he would, as Ilsa Barea describes, write to someone else
about it, perhaps “to his girl about the last Lied ‘our Schubert’ had
composed, and send her a copy to sing at home, say, at Linz.”19 Songs
could spread like a chain letter, as intimate as correspondence to the
“dear reader/singer participant,” forming an underground network that
expanded well beyond the boundaries of Vienna.
Schubert did not invent the art song, but he brought an essence
to it that changed it forever. His great contemporaries all excelled in
art song, but for Schubert it became much more than a type of writ-
ing rounding out his fullness as a composer: it became a way of life.
He wrote a staggering number of songs during his short life, around
630, and aside from the high quality of many of them, we must also
be struck by the apparent significance these songs held for him. That
is not to say that one can follow some sort of biographical progression
with song texts; instead, the nature of the songs themselves invokes
elements of personal significance that often reveal Schubert as a type
of biased participant, apparently identifying with a character or some
other facet, and transmitting the same response to the singer/listener.
The songs open an extraordinary window to Schubert, as well as to his
other works.
Schubert’s voice can be heard in some very subtle ways, not the
least of which involves his use of expression marks. Some of these,
such as the short or long wedge (hairpin) signs normally taken to sig-
nify dynamic variance, appear to have much less to do with dynamics
than with alerting the performer to certain aspects of vocal quality.
He seldom uses these signs in the voice parts of songs, and when
he does he has a very specific reason; his piano accompaniments,
though, brim with them, and almost invariably they ask the pianist to
find the appropriate vocal gesture, introducing a special element of
Schubert’s voice to his instrumental writing. It follows that the same
 INTRODUCTION xxiii

principle applies to purely instrumental music, giving it a distinctive

sense of voice. The vocal element, of course, goes much further in the
instrumental works, as songs play many roles in these works, some
fairly overt, such as quotations of songs in sonatas or chamber works,
or in much more subtle ways, such as using musical procedures that
originated in songs, including unique tonal workings, or the idea of the
song without words.
Of the various instruments that Schubert himself played, the
piano is the one with the least inherently vocal quality because of its
strings being struck instead of activated by air or stroked with a bow.
Yet the piano emerged as Schubert’s single most prized instrument,
partly because of its great versatility in being able to carry a melody
as well as full harmony, but also because it can be the instrument of
blissfully isolated self-indulgence as well as a participant with others
in ensemble—especially duos, trios, and quintets. Schubert by no
means invented the notion of the singing piano; many of his predeces-
sors knew perfectly well how to make a piano sing. Schubert, though,
took the possibility much further than any other composer had, almost
making a fetish of it. One gets a sense of how he feels about the piano
with his song “An mein Klavier” (“To My Piano”) with text by Chris-
tian Friedrich Schubart, a love song to the piano that starts with the
words “Sanftes Klavier”—“gentle piano.” Here singer and piano join
together in a tender display of affection in which they become as one,
the poet expressing complete devotion to his beloved piano, whisper-
ing his feelings to it and being stirred by its touch and sound to sensual
and celestial ecstasy. This fusion suggests a poetic prospect that none
of Schubert’s contemporaries or predecessors had imagined—the pos-
sibility of the piano expressing a distinctive poetic voice fulfilling the
same type of function that a poet achieves with verse. Schubert’s great
admirers of the next generation such as Schumann, Mendelssohn,
Chopin, and Liszt understood what Schubert had pointed to and they
fully realized the poetic potential of the piano.
Genius refuses to be bound by conventional labels of periodiza-
tion or classification. Schubert may have lived in Biedermeier Vienna,
and some of his output—especially dance music, some songs, and
some chamber music—may subscribe to the gemütlich (cozy) Bie-
dermeier spirit, but on the whole the extraordinary phenomenon of
Franz Schubert cannot be accounted for by that classification—unlike
xxiv INTRODUCTION

his contemporaries Adalbert Gyrowetz, Konradin Kreutzer, or Joseph

Weigl. Some prefer to think of him as a Romantic, proceeding along
the path laid out by August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel,
W. H. Wackenroder, and Ludwig Tieck, and in this case one finds
much more alignment than with Biedermeier, especially considering
Schubert’s literary inclinations, but even here the term Romantic does
not give the full picture. Applying literary terms to music seems a
slippery business at the best of times, and for a composer who starts
from the premise of song, it proves especially troublesome since the
Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann moved in exactly the opposite
direction, finding a new essence for poetry through comparisons with
instrumental music with its indefinite or infinite qualities. Just as
Goethe did not welcome being called a Romantic, not wishing to be
dragged down to the level of the lesser poets who called themselves
Romantics, the term also has limitations for Schubert, whose unique-
ness transcends that classification.
Schubert’s distinctiveness lies with his voice, a poetic voice, often
melodic, emanating from the human throat, but sounding equally
well through the piano or other groups of instruments in his way of
making them sing. That voice can be subversive, just as Mozart’s was;
he could engage a large audience with the subtleties of political sub-
terfuge in his operas, and Schubert (along with Schober) appears to
have attempted something similar with the opera Alfonso und Estrella,
although it did not reach the stage during his lifetime. Most other at-
tempts at opera similarly faltered, and here he never found the means
to parallel his success in embracing individuals or small groups, in
which the music could spread through an underground network of
transmission from one individual to the next, skirting the banishment
of the censors who would not, in any event, have known how to find
it objectionable. In some ways Schubert’s music still disperses in that
manner, of course through performances by major orchestras, cho-
ruses, or string quartets, but in no small measure through the army
of devoted Schubertians who can find no substitute to playing his
music for themselves, regardless of their level of performance skills.
For them especially the distance from the composer seems almost
nonexistent, and they can respond to his voice as one does to another
person in conversation, picking up as much from the nuances as the
content of what he may be saying.
 INTRODUCTION xxv

The first part of this book looks at various topics that encompass
Schubert’s own orbit and creativity, although it resists becoming
a biography in the usual sense. Musicians since Schubert’s time,
both composers and performers, have responded passionately
to him, but perhaps not surprisingly some of the strongest responses
to Schubert have come from the other arts, especially from novel-
ists, playwrights, and filmmakers: this becomes the substance of
the second part of the book. The finest of these, such as Ariel Dorf-
man, Elfriede Jelinek, Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, and Michael
Haneke, have become co-conspirators, recognizing his essence in
fascinating ways that have often eluded music critics, bringing an
extension of his voice to their works in their recognition of both
his darkest visions and his deepest aspirations. For some writers
and filmmakers, certain works by Schubert stand out, which they
integrate into the fabric of their works, most notably Winterreise
(Winter’s Journey), the String Quartet in D minor (Death and the
Maiden, D810), the slow movements of the Piano Trio in E flat
(D929), the Piano Sonata in A (D959), the Quintet in C (D956),
and some others. The capacity of these works to go through a pro-
cess of putting forward something nostalgic, followed by destruction
of the memory, and then moving to an attempted return (usually
unsuccessful), has especially attracted these writers and filmmak-
ers. The works will be looked at individually before the discussions
in the last three chapters of how these artists have infused them
into their works.
Schubert’s distinctive voice encompasses joyful subversion, pain,
and recognition of complexities of the self; it embraces a mixture of
masculine and feminine; and it probes various aspects of sexuality, du-
alities impossible to reconcile, the absurdities of existence, the search
for salvation in nature, the longing for something better or different
(things are better where you are not), the joys of camaraderie, the
internalizing of rebellion, and wandering (traveling with a lack of clear
direction) led by irrational forces. The voice may be strong, plaintive,
seductive, muted, clear, haunting, or urgent, and it may speak through
different characters who may seem contradictory. Schubert’s voice
remains among us through our performance of it, and often stunningly
as well through some of the greatest achievements in writing and film-
making in recent time.
xxvi INTRODUCTION

NOTES

1. Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: A Documentary Biography, trans. Eric

Blom (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1946), 441.
2. Deutsch, Schubert: A Documentary Biography, 828.
3. Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, trans.
Rosamond Ley and John Nowell (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1958),
24.
4. Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs, 28–29.
5. Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs, 254.
6. Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs, 185–86.
7. Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs, 69.
8. Barry Millington, Wagner, revised ed. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton
University Press, 1984), 247.
9. Eduard Hanslick, preface to The Beautiful in Music, 7th ed., trans.
Gustav Cohen (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 4.
10. Otto Erich Deutsch, “The Reception of Schubert’s Works in Eng-
land,” Monthly Musical Record 81 (1951): 202–03.
11. Hanslick, preface to The Beautiful, 4.
12. Hanslick, preface to The Beautiful, 4.
13. Eduard Hanslick, “Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony (1865),” in
Vienna’s Golden Years of Music 1850–1900, trans. Henry Pleasants III (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), 103–04.
14. Christopher H. Gibbs, “‘Poor Schubert’: Images and Legends of the
Composer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H.
Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37.
15. In his article, “Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto
Cellini,” 19th-Century Music 12 (1989):193–206, Maynard Solomon has
prompted not only biographers but novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers
to consider the question of Schubert’s homosexuality. Elizabeth Norman
McKay speculates that Schubert may have used opium in Franz Schubert: A
Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 125–28 and 155–57.
16. Much of this has come from the pen of Rita Steblin in these books
and articles: Babette und Therese Kunz. Neue Forschungen zum Freundeskreis
um Franz Schubert und Leopold Kupelwieser (Vienna: Pasqualatihaus, 1996);
“In Defense of Scholarship and Archival Research: Why Schubert’s Broth-
ers Were Allowed to Marry,” Current Musicology 62 (1998): 7–17; “The
Peacock’s Tale: Schubert’s Sexuality Reconsidered,” 19th-Century Music 17
(1993): 5–33; “Schubert’s ‘Nina’ and the True Peacocks,” The Musical Times
138 (March 1997): 13–19; and “Schubert’s Relationship with Women: An
Historical Account,” in Schubert Studies, ed. Brian Newbould (Aldershot,
 INTRODUCTION xxvii

U.K.: Ashgate, 1998), 220–43. Contra Steblin, one finds an issue of 19th-
Century Music (17 [1993]) devoted to this matter. Articles include Maynard
Solomon, “Schubert: Some Consequences of Nostalgia,” 34–46; Kofi Agawu,
“Schubert’s Sexuality: A Prescription for Analysis?” 79–82; Susan McClary,
“Music and Sexuality: On the Steblin/Solomon Debate,” 83–88; James Web-
ster, “Music, Pathology, Sexuality, Beethoven, Schubert,” 89–93; and Robert
S. Winter, “Whose Schubert?” 94–101.
17. John Daverio, Crossing Paths: Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 14.
18. For a description of these groups see David Gramit, “‘The Passion for
Friendship’: Music, Cultivation, and Identity in Schubert’s Circle,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 56–71.
19. Ilsa Barea, Vienna: Legend and Reality (London: Secker and Warburg,
1966), 137.