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Proceedings of international conference at NUI Maynooth on Goethe's
contribution to music. Goethe was interested in, and acutely aware
of, the place of music in human experience generally - and of its
particular role in modern culture. Moreover, his own literary work
- especially the poetry and Faust - inspired some of the major
composers of the European tradition to produce some of their finest
works.' (Martin Swales) [Subject: Music Studies, Goethe]
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is now rightly recognized as one of the
greatest and most original composers of the nineteenth century. His
keen understanding of poetry and his uncanny ability to translate
his profound understanding of human nature into remarkably balanced
compositions marks him out from other contemporaries in the field
of song. Schubert was one of the first major composers to devote so
much time to song and his awareness that this genre was not rated
highly in the musical hierarchy did not deter him, throughout a
short but resolute and hard-working career, from producing songs
that invariably arrest attention and frequently strike a deeply
poetic note. Schubert did not emerge as a composer until after his
death, but during his short lifetime his genius flowered
prolifically and diversely. His reputation was first established
among the aristocracy who took the art music of Vienna into their
homes, which became places of refuge from the musical mediocrity of
popular performance. More than any other composer, Schubert
steadily graced Viennese musical life with his songs, piano music
and chamber compositions. Throughout his career he experimented
constantly with technique and in his final years began experiments
with form. The resultant fascinating works were never performed in
his lifetime, and only in recent years have the nature of his
experiments found scholarly favor. In The Unknown Schubert
contributors explore Schubert's radical modernity from a number of
perspectives by examining both popular and neglected works.
Chapters by renowned scholars describe the historical context of
his work, its relation to the dominant artistic discourses of the
early nineteenth century, and Schubert's role in the paradigmatic
shift to a new perception of song. This valuable book seeks to
bring Franz Schubert to life, exploring his early years as a
composer of opera, his later years of ill-health when he composed
in the shadow of death, and his efforts to reflect in his music his
own profound inner experience.
The traditional approach to the study of Goethe and Schubert is to
place them in opposition to one another, both in terms of their
life experiences and in relation to the nineteenth-century Lied. In
her introduction to this book, Lorraine Byrne examines the myths
that have evolved around these artists and challenges the view that
Goethe was unmusical and conservative in his musical tastes. She
also considers Schubert's life in relation to his obvious affinity
with the poet and links the composer's Goethe settings with the
poet's perception of the Lied. Goethe judged the success of a
setting by whether the meaning of the text had been realised in
musical form. In his Goethe settings Schubert translates the poet's
meaning into musical terms and his rendition attains the classical
unity of words and music that Goethe sought. The core of this
volume is the series of individual analyses of all of Schubert's
solo, dramatic and multi-voice settings of Goethe texts. These
explore in detail both the literary and the musical dimensions of
each work, and Schubert's reading and interpretation of Goethe's
writings. This is the first study in English to treat both artists
with equal attention and insight. This, together with its
encyclopaedic coverage of this important corpus of works, makes
this volume an essential reference tool for all those who study
Schubert and Goethe.
Goethe and Zelter spent a staggering 33 years corresponding or in
the case of each artist, over two thirds of their lives. Zelter's
position as director of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin and Goethe's
location in Weimar resulted in a wide-ranging correspondence.
Goethe's letters offer a chronicle of his musical development, from
the time of his journey to Italy to the final months of his life.
Zelter's letters retrace his path as stonemason to Professor of
Music in Berlin. The 891 letters that passed between these artists
provide an important musical record of the music performed in
public concerts in Berlin and in the private and semi-public
soirees of the Weimar court. Their letters are those of men
actively engaged in the musical developments of their time. The
legacy contains a wide spectrum of letters, casual and thoughtfully
composed, spontaneous and written for publication, rich with the
details of Goethe's and Zelter's musical lives. Through Zelter,
Goethe gained access to the professional music world he craved and
became acquainted with the prodigious talent of Felix Mendelssohn.
A single letter from Zelter might bear a letter from Felix
Mendelssohn to another recipient of the same family, reflecting a
certain community in the Mendelssohn household where letters were
not considered private but shared with others in a circle of
friends or family. Goethe recognized the value of such
correspondence: he complains when his friend is slow to send
letters in return for those written to him by the poet, a complaint
common in this written culture where letters provided news,
introductions, literary and musical works. This famous
correspondence contains a medley of many issues in literature, art,
and science; but the main focus of this translation is the music
dialogues of these artists.
Goethe's Faust, a work which has attracted the attention of
composers since the late eighteenth century and played a vital role
in the evolution of vocal, operatic and instrumental repertoire in
the nineteenth century, hashad a seminal impact in musical realms.
That Goethe's poetry has proved pivotal for the development of the
nineteenth-century Lied has long been acknowledged. Less
acknowledged is the seminal impact in musical realms of Goethe's
Faust, a work which has attractedthe attention of composers since
the late eighteenth century and played a vital role in the
evolution of vocal, operatic and instrumental repertoire in the
nineteenth century. While Goethe longed to have Faust set to
musicand considered only Mozart and perhaps Meyerbeer as being
equal to the task, by the end of his life he had abandoned hope
that he would live to witness a musical setting of his text.
Despite this, a floodtide of musical interpretations of Goethe's
Faust came into existence from Beethoven to Schubert, Schumann to
Wagner and Mahler, and Gounod to Berlioz; and a broad trajectory
can be traced from Zelter's colourful description of the first
setting ofGoethe's Faust to Alfred Schnittke's Faust opera (1993).
This book explores the musical origins of Goethe's Faust and the
musical dimensions of its legacy. It uncovers the musical furore
caused by Goethe's Faust and considers why his polemical text has
resonated so strongly with composers. Bringing together leading
musicologists and Germanists, the book addresses a wide range of
issues including reception history, the performative challenges of
writing music for Faust, the impact of the legend on composers'
conceptual thinking, and the ways in which it has been used by
composers to engage with other contemporary intellectual concepts.
Constituting the richest examination to date of the musicality of
language and form in Goethe's Faust and its musical rendering from
the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, the book will appeal to
music, literary and Goethe scholars and students alike. LORRAINE
BYRNE BODLEY is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at Maynooth
University and President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland.
Contributors: Mark Austin, Lorraine Byrne Bodley, NicholasBoyle,
John Michael Cooper, Siobhan Donovan, Osman Durrani, Mark
Fitzgerald, John Guthrie, Heather Hadlock, Julian Horton, Ursula
Kramer, Waltraud Meierhofer, Eftychia Papanikolaou, David Robb,
Christopher Ruth, Glenn Stanley, Martin Swales, J. M. Tudor
Goethe and Zelter spent a staggering 33 years corresponding or in
the case of each artist, over two thirds of their lives. Zelter's
position as director of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin and Goethe's
location in Weimar resulted in a wide-ranging correspondence.
Goethe's letters offer a chronicle of his musical development, from
the time of his journey to Italy to the final months of his life.
Zelter's letters retrace his path as stonemason to Professor of
Music in Berlin. The 891 letters that passed between these artists
provide an important musical record of the music performed in
public concerts in Berlin and in the private and semi-public
soirees of the Weimar court. Their letters are those of men
actively engaged in the musical developments of their time. The
legacy contains a wide spectrum of letters, casual and thoughtfully
composed, spontaneous and written for publication, rich with the
details of Goethe's and Zelter's musical lives. Through Zelter,
Goethe gained access to the professional music world he craved and
became acquainted with the prodigious talent of Felix Mendelssohn.
A single letter from Zelter might bear a letter from Felix
Mendelssohn to another recipient of the same family, reflecting a
certain community in the Mendelssohn household where letters were
not considered private but shared with others in a circle of
friends or family. Goethe recognized the value of such
correspondence: he complains when his friend is slow to send
letters in return for those written to him by the poet, a complaint
common in this written culture where letters provided news,
introductions, literary and musical works. This famous
correspondence contains a medley of many issues in literature, art,
and science; but the main focus of this translation is the music
dialogues of these artists.
The traditional approach to the study of Goethe and Schubert is to
place them in opposition to one another, both in terms of their
life experiences and in relation to the nineteenth-century Lied. In
her introduction to this book, Lorraine Byrne examines the myths
that have evolved around these artists and challenges the view that
Goethe was unmusical and conservative in his musical tastes. She
also considers Schubert's life in relation to his obvious affinity
with the poet and links the composer's Goethe settings with the
poet's perception of the Lied. Goethe judged the success of a
setting by whether the meaning of the text had been realised in
musical form. In his Goethe settings Schubert translates the poet's
meaning into musical terms and his rendition attains the classical
unity of words and music that Goethe sought. The core of this
volume is the series of individual analyses of all of Schubert's
solo, dramatic and multi-voice settings of Goethe texts. These
explore in detail both the literary and the musical dimensions of
each work, and Schubert's reading and interpretation of Goethe's
writings. This is the first study in English to treat both artists
with equal attention and insight. This, together with its
encyclopaedic coverage of this important corpus of works, makes
this volume an essential reference tool for all those who study
Schubert and Goethe.
An insightful biography of the great composer, revealing
Schubert’s complex and fascinating private life alongside his
musical genius  Brilliant, short-lived, incredibly
prolific—Schubert is one of the most intriguing figures in music
history. While his music attracts a wide audience, much of his
private life remains shrouded in mystery, and significant portions
of his work have been overlooked. Â In this major new
biography, Lorraine Byrne Bodley takes a detailed look into
Schubert’s life, from his early years at the Stadtkonvikt to the
harrowing battle with syphilis that led to his death at the age of
thirty-one. Drawing on extensive archival research in Vienna and
the Czech Republic, and reconsidering the meaning of some of his
best-known works, Bodley provides a fuller account than ever before
of Schubert’s extraordinary achievement and incredible courage.
This is a compelling new portrait of one of the most beloved
composers of the nineteenth century.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is now rightly recognized as one of the
greatest and most original composers of the nineteenth century. His
keen understanding of poetry and his uncanny ability to translate
his profound understanding of human nature into remarkably balanced
compositions marks him out from other contemporaries in the field
of song. Schubert was one of the first major composers to devote so
much time to song and his awareness that this genre was not rated
highly in the musical hierarchy did not deter him, throughout a
short but resolute and hard-working career, from producing songs
that invariably arrest attention and frequently strike a deeply
poetic note. Schubert did not emerge as a composer until after his
death, but during his short lifetime his genius flowered
prolifically and diversely. His reputation was first established
among the aristocracy who took the art music of Vienna into their
homes, which became places of refuge from the musical mediocrity of
popular performance. More than any other composer, Schubert
steadily graced Viennese musical life with his songs, piano music
and chamber compositions. Throughout his career he experimented
constantly with technique and in his final years began experiments
with form. The resultant fascinating works were never performed in
his lifetime, and only in recent years have the nature of his
experiments found scholarly favor. In The Unknown Schubert
contributors explore Schubert's radical modernity from a number of
perspectives by examining both popular and neglected works.
Chapters by renowned scholars describe the historical context of
his work, its relation to the dominant artistic discourses of the
early nineteenth century, and Schubert's role in the paradigmatic
shift to a new perception of song. This valuable book seeks to
bring Franz Schubert to life, exploring his early years as a
composer of opera, his later years of ill-health when he composed
in the shadow of death, and his efforts to reflect in his music his
own profound inner experience.
Essays on the synthesis of the musical and literary arts in German
Romanticism. The interrelationship between music and literature
reached its zenith during the Romantic era, and nowhere was this
relationship more pronounced than in Germany. Many representatives
of literary and philosophical German Romanticism held music to be
the highest and most expressive, quintessentially Romantic art
form, able to convey what cannot be expressed in words: the
ineffable and metaphysical. The influence was reciprocal, with
literature providing a rich source of inspiration for German
composers of both instrumental and vocal music, giving rise to a
wealth of new forms and styles. The essays in this volume are
selected from papers presented at an international,
interdisciplinary conference held at University College Dublin in
December 2000, and include contributions from Germanists,
musicologists, comparatists, and performance artists. This
interdisciplinarity makes for informed and complementary approaches
and arguments. The essays cover not only the "Romantic" nineteenth
century (commencing with the early Romanticism of the Jena circle),
but also look ahead to the legacy, reception, and continuation of
German Romanticism in the modern and postmodern ages. Alongside new
readings of familiar and established writers and composers such as
Goethe, Hoffmann, Wagner, and Schubert, a case is made for other
figures such as Wackenroder, Novalis, Schlegel, Schumann, Brahms,
Liszt, and Berlioz, as well as less-known figures such as Ritter,
Schneider, and Termen, and for a reconsideration of questions of
categorization. The essays will appeal to readers with a wide
variety of academic, musical, and literary interests. Siobhan
Donovan is a Lecturer in the Department of German at University
College Dublin. Robin Elliott is Jean A. Chalmers Chair in Canadian
Music at the University of Toronto.
This book challenges the assumption that Franz Schubert
(1797-1828), best known for the lyricism of his songs, symphonies
and chamber music, lacked comparable talent for drama. It is
commonly assumed that Franz Schubert (1797-1828), best known for
the lyricism of his songs, symphonies, and chamber music, lacked
comparable talent for drama. Challenging this view, Drama in the
Music of Franz Schubert provides a timely re-evaluation of
Schubert's operatic works, while demonstrating previously
unsuspected locations of dramatic innovation in his vocal and
instrumental music. The volume draws on a range of critical
approaches and techniques, including semiotics, topic theory,
literary criticism, narratology, and Schenkerian analysis, to
situate Schubertian drama within its musical and
cultural-historical context. In so doing, the study broadens the
boundaries of what might be considered 'dramatic' within the
composer's music and offers new perspectives for its analysis and
interpretation. Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert will be of
interest to musicologists, music theorists, composers, and
performers, as well as scholars working in cultural studies,
theatre, and aesthetics. JOE DAVIES is College Lecturer in Music at
Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. JAMES WILLIAM SOBASKIE is
Associate Professor of Music at Mississippi State University.
Contributors: Brian Black, Lorraine Byrne Bodley, Joe Davies,
Xavier Hascher, Marjorie Hirsch, Anne Hyland, Christine Martin,
Clive McClelland, James William Sobaskie, Lauri Suurpaa, Laura
Tunbridge, Susan Wollenberg, Susan Youens
Schubert's late music has proved pivotal for the development of
diverse fields of musical scholarship, from biography and music
history to the theory of harmony. This collection addresses current
issues in Schubert studies including compositional technique, the
topical issue of 'late' style, tonal strategy and form in the
composer's instrumental music, and musical readings of the
'postmodern' Schubert. Offering fresh approaches to Schubert's
instrumental and vocal works and their reception, this book argues
that the music that the composer produced from 1822-8 is central to
a paradigm shift in the history of music during the nineteenth
century. The contributors provide a timely reassessment of
Schubert's legacy, assembling a portrait of the composer that is
very different from the sentimental Schubert permeating
nineteenth-century culture and the postmodern Schubert of more
recent literature.
Schubert's late music has proved pivotal for the development of
diverse fields of musical scholarship, from biography and music
history to the theory of harmony. This collection addresses current
issues in Schubert studies including compositional technique, the
topical issue of 'late' style, tonal strategy and form in the
composer's instrumental music, and musical readings of the
'postmodern' Schubert. Offering fresh approaches to Schubert's
instrumental and vocal works and their reception, this book argues
that the music that the composer produced from 1822-8 is central to
a paradigm shift in the history of music during the nineteenth
century. The contributors provide a timely reassessment of
Schubert's legacy, assembling a portrait of the composer that is
very different from the sentimental Schubert permeating
nineteenth-century culture and the postmodern Schubert of more
recent literature.
In Rethinking Schubert, today's leading Schubertians offer fresh
perspectives on the composer's importance and our perennial
fascination with him. Subjecting recurring issues in historical,
biographical and analytical research to renewed scrutiny, the
twenty-two chapters yield new insights into Schubert, his music,
his influence and his legacy, and broaden the interpretative
context for the music of his final years. With close attention to
matters of style, harmonic and formal analysis, and text setting,
the essays gathered here explore a significant portion of the
composer's extensive output across a range of genres. The most
readily explicable aspect of Schubert's appeal is undoubtedly our
continuing engagement with the songs. Schubert will always be the
first port of call for scholars interested in the relationship
between music and the poetic text, and several essays in Rethinking
Schubert offer welcome new inquiries into this subject. Yet perhaps
the most striking feature of modern scholarship is the new depth of
thought that attaches to the instrumental works. This music's
highly protracted dissemination has combined with a habitual
critical hostility to produce a reception history that is hardly
congenial to musical analysis. Empowered by the new momentum behind
theories of nineteenth-century harmony and form and
recently-published source materials, the sophisticated approaches
to the instrumental music in Rethinking Schubert show decisively
that it is no longer acceptable to posit Schubert's instrumental
forms as flawed lyric alternatives to Beethoven. What this volume
provides, then, is not only a fresh portrait of one of the most
loved composers of the nineteenth century but also a conspectus of
current Schubertian research. Whether perusing unknown repertoire
or refreshing canonical works, Rethinking Schubert reveals the
extraordinary methodological variety that is now available to
research, painting a portrait of Schubert that is vibrant, plural,
trans-national, and complex.
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