Lorraine Byrne Bodley

In Pursuit of a Single Flame? On Schubert’s Settings of Goethe’s Poems

Much musicological and historicist criticism has tended to ‘flatten’ Goethe by confining him to the thought-cliches of his time, and this in turn has led to an implicitly patronizing view of him as musically conservative. This article will show how Goethe proves again and again to be more musically intelligent and perceptive than scholars have given him credit for. Certain musicological questions engross the poet throughout his life: the nature of major and minor tonalities; musical identity throughout the ages; music and text; the rhetoric of attentive listening; musical language and its capacity to occlude and exclude. Yet Goethe’s thought, this article demonstrates, is anything but static; his writings keep returning to, modifying and complicating his musical preoccupations. This article challenges the salient misconception that Goethe’s lack of musical judgement divorced him from the development of the nineteenth-century Lied and that Schubert’s settings ran counter to the poet’s intent. Two new readings of ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ and ‘Erster Verlust’ show how Schubert is listening to the poetry and the upshot is not a song that reflects the poem but one that reflects on it.

A Place at the Edge: Reflections on Schubert’s Late Style

Abstract In 1822 Franz Schubert contracted syphilis and became aware that he had only a short time to live. The last six years of his life, in which he valiantly struggled to overcome his anguish and despair, were a period of exceptional creativity. This article will examine the relationship between the act of composing and the process of dying in Schubert’s late years, during which he composed an array of ambitious works in which he adapted genre conventions to the occasion. Was the unearthly serenity that permeates this work an escape from the fierce weather of the mind? Or are the irreconcilable antinomies in Schubert’s late works musical proof of Yeats’s belief: ‘A man awaits his end dreading and hoping all’? This article is an attempt to explore the antinomies in Schubert’s ‘late’ works and to answer to such rhetorical musings.

Introduction: Musical Responses to Goethe’s Faust

The fi gure of Johann Faust has mythical proportions, and it has entered public consciousness in so many shapes and medial incarnations that any engagement with it can only ever be approximate (to appropriate the title and tenor of a representative volume that attempts just that).1 From chapbook to puppet play, from drama to fi lm, from poetry to opera, from prose fi ction to the visual arts, the quantity and diversity of artistic interpretations is impressive, encompassing of all walks of life. It has also been continuous; for the last fi ve hundred years, almost every decade has seen Faust resurrected, reinvented, reimagined, restaged, translated, or rewritten. Recent new productions of the entire two parts of Goethe’s Faust (Peter Stein in 2000 and Nicolas Stemann in 2011) and attempts to bring Faust to new audiences by turning him into a rock opera (Rudolf Volz, fi rst performed 1997), but also the continuing presence of Faust in everyday culture, witnessed by Faust beers, shoes named after his antagonist, and such like, are testimony to an enduring appeal that transcends genres, cultural spheres, and generations. Since the publication of the fi rst part of Goethe’s drama in 1808, any engagement with the Faust character, any new version or interpretation of the subject matter in general, cannot but implicitly or explicitly refer to Goethe as a touch-stone. Even by ignoring this seminal version or by drawing on alternative sources, artists and authors articulate their view of the relevance or authority of Goethe’s play, the form he imposed on the material or the stature he ascribed to his protagonist as the embodiment of the modern human condition. Musical rendition is only one form of engagemen t, but one that seems to have been particularly productive, appealing, and multifarious since Goethe’s Faust. Faust lives on in individual songs, song cycles, incidental music for stage productions, symphonic poems, operas, and other musical genres. Goethe’s play provided particularly rich material for musical engagement because of its many songs and choruses, and its rich potential to use musical backdrops, rhythmical chanting, melodious incantation, and other sound effects. In line with contemporary theatre practice, Goethe himself envisaged and promoted productions of his work with appropriate music, or the composition of an opera based on his version — and some attempts were indeed made during his lifetime, most notably by Prince Antoni Radziwill in the early 1820s, but without lasting impact. This might be one of the reasons why posterity felt particularly inspired to take up this legacy as