1. All the surviving materials created by the Nonsense Society, including seventythree watercolor pictures, have been interpreted and published in my book Die Unsinnsgesellschaft: Franz Schubert, Leopold Kupelwieser und ihr Freundeskreis (Vienna, 1998), 490 pages. As yet, little of this material has been examined by other scholars. The present article, in English, summarizes my findings.
2. My project to conduct new research on Schubert iconography was initially suggested by Ernst Hilmar, founder of the International Franz Schubert Institute in Vienna, and was later supervised by Gerhard Stradner, director of the Collection of Ancient Musical Instruments in Vienna. Funding was provided by the Austrian National Bank, Jubiläumsfonds, with two research grants, 1994–97.
3. These documents had been purchased by the museum in 1943 from the Viennese antiquarian dealer Gilhofer but were mistakenly identified as belonging to the Ludlamshöhle, a different club—with older members—that was also founded in 1817. For a discussion of this second club, which was raided by the police in April 1826 just as Schubert was about to become a member, see Alice Hanson, “The Significance of the Ludlamshöhle for Franz Schubert,” in Essays on Music and Culture in Honor of Herbert Kellman, ed. Barbara Haggh (Paris, 2001), 496–502.
4. For the record, these illustrations do not have titles. I devised the titles referred to here from the captions on the individual portraits and group scenes, as well as from the written explanations in each newsletter, titled “Zum Kupfer” (About the Copperplate).
5. Rupert Feuchtmüller made a valiant attempt to explain this material in his book Leopold Kupelwieser und die Kunst der österreichischen Spätromantik (Vienna, 1970), 14–15, but he confused the Nonsense Society with the Ludlamshöhle. He also published two of the costumed portraits on pages 84–85 with the following identification: “Josef Kupelwieser/als Mitglied der Unsinnsgesellschaft/Blasius Lecks/1818” and “Leopold Kupelwieser [sic] / als Mitglied der Unsinnsgesellschaft/Gallimatias Hirngespinst/1818.” The second picture shows August Kopisch, not Leopold Kupelwieser, whose code name was Damian Klex.
6. I wish to thank Morten Solvik for showing me the book by Gerhard Renner, Die Nachlässe in der Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek: Ein Verzeichnis (Vienna, 1993), that led me to make the discovery of Nonsense Society materials located in Vienna’s City Hall. These items, divided according to year, have the call numbers Jb 86.125 (for 1817) and Jb 86.126 (for 1818).
7. The vice-editor’s real name was Franz Zöpfl (ca. 1791–1871), a bookkeeper who later became an official at the Austrian National Bank. I wish to thank Michael Lorenz for establishing the biographical connection between Zöpfl and Marie Schuster, the person who sold the twenty-nine newsletters to the Vienna City Library in 1937 (see Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft, 8). These surviving issues make up only about one-third of the original number of weekly newsletters that must have been created (between April 1817 and the end of 1818), and it may be that Eduard Anschütz, the editor, took the other two-thirds (about 58 issues). These newsletters are still missing. The material in the Wienmuseum apparently once belonged to Josef Kupelwieser, who penned the poems called “Unsinniaden” for the New Year’s Eve celebration in 1817. However, both the poem and the picture belonging to the third “Unsinniade” are missing.
8. In 1997 I read a paper at the American Musicological Society Meeting in Phoenix titled “Leks, Schmecks and Klex: Three Kupelwiesers and Franz Schubert in the Unsinnsgesellschaft” devoted to these three brothers: Josef Kupelwieser (1791–1866), Johann Kupelwieser (1794–1856), and Leopold Kupelwieser (1796–1862).
9. Heinrich Anschütz, Erinnerungen aus dessen Leben und Wirken (Vienna, 1866), 264–65, cited in Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, trans. Rosamond Ley and John Nowell (London, 1958), 222–23; translation amended by Christopher Gibbs. Deutsch commented that by the Nonsense Society “Anschütz probably meant ‘Die Ludlamshöhle’ to which Anschütz, though not Schubert, had belonged” (224).
10. For a facsimile of this list of Nonsense Society members, see Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft, 9.
11. Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs, 32.
12. Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: A Documentary Biography, trans. Eric Blom (London, 1946), 338–40. The letter is discussed in Christopher Gibbs’s essay in this book as well as in John Gingerich’s.
13. See ibid., plate 18, Game of Ball at Atzenbrugg, facing page 465.
14. According to my research on Ludwig Kraißl, funded in 2000 by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council SSHRC grant administered by the University of Victoria, B.C., Canada, this member of the Schubert circle was christened on 11 December 1792 (Vienna, Pfarre Maria Rotunda, Taufbuch Tom. I, fol. 125). He died on 10 February 1871 in Klagenfurt, where he had lived since 1824 as a painter employed by the wealthy family of the industrialist August von Rosthorn.
15. See Steblin, “Schubert durch das Kaleidoskop” (Schubert Through the Kaleidoscope), Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 52/1–2 (Schubert Special Issue 1997): 52–61.
16. For the original German, see Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft, 335–36, which reprints the newsletter dated 16 July 1818. Since such information can readily be found in my book under the date of the newsletter (as well as through the footnotes of my articles), I will dispense with further references here.
17. The kaleidoscope could now be associated with Schubert’s music, as I suggested in “Schubert Through the Kaleidoscope” in 1997: “The inexhaustible variety of his melodic invention and in particular the sudden, abrupt changes between harmonic motives and keys have a kaleidoscopic effect about them” (56). My idea was then further developed by Brian Newbould in his article “Schubert im Spiegel,” Musiktheorie 13 (1998): 101–10, esp. 105. I later expanded this thought, connecting it with Donald Tovey’s term “star clusters” and Richard L. Cohn’s discussion of this term, in my article “Schubert’s Pepi: His Love Affair with the Chambermaid Josepha Pöcklhofer and Her Surprising Fate,” The Musical Times 149 (Summer 2008): 47–69, esp. 52–53.
18. This passage by Wilhelm von Chézy was discovered by Till Gerrit Waidelich and published in his book Rosamunde: Drama in fünf Akten von Helmina von Chézy. Musik von Franz Schubert. Erstveröffentlichung der überarbeiteten Fassung (Tutzing, 1996), 53–54.
19. Franz Lachner told the following anecdote about Schubert’s strict discipline: “Once, when with a group of friends, Schubert told of a sweetheart, who left him for the reason that she wanted to avenge herself for the beatings he had given her in the ABC class when he was a schoolteacher. He added: ‘It is quite true; whenever I was composing, this little gang annoyed me so much that the ideas always went out of my head. Naturally I gave them a good hiding then.—And now I have to suffer for it!’” See Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs, 292.
20. Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft, 375.
21. Ibid., 214–15. The theater announcement is signed with another code name for Eduard Anschütz: “Michael Karthaunerknall Schauspieler.” Knall (bang, explosion) refers to the meaning of his real name Schütz (shot), and Schauspieler (actor) refers to his profession.
22. Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft, 195.
23. Ibid., 190.
24. See Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: Die Dokumente seines Lebens (Kassel, 1964), 106; and the discussion in Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft, 29. The long review by B. S., which appeared in the Wiener Konversationsblatt on 29 August 1820, is given in its entirety in Deutsch’s 1964 German edition of Schubert’s documents but only in truncated form in his translated Schubert: A Documentary Biography, 148.
25. For a lengthier discussion of Der Feuergeist as the forerunner to Die Zauberharfe, see Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft, 26–30.
26. See Steblin, Babette und Therese Kunz: Neue Forschungen zum Freundeskreis um Franz Schubert und Leopold Kupelwieser (Vienna, 1996), which is dedicated to the memory of my harpsichord teacher in Vienna, Isolde Ahlgrimm (1914–1995).
27. Deutsch, Schubert: A Documentary Biography, 100. Deutsch identifi
ed the chambermaid as Pepi Pöckelhofer (102). For new biographical information on her, see Steblin, “Schubert’s Pepi.”
28. From Ferdinand Schubert’s letter from mid-October 1818: “Your city friends could not be sought out, as they were all in the country.” See Deutsch, Schubert: A Documentary Biography, 106; and from Schubert’s reply to Ferdinand, dated Zseliz, 29 October 1818: “The city friends are the limit!” (109). The German word actually used by Schubert here liederlich (lewd) is much stronger. See also Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft, 362, for my discussion of how Schober, disguised as a carp with a crooked tail, sings the words: “Ich bin liederlich, du bist liederlich” (I am lewd, you are lewd) in Schnautze’s tale “Die Fee Musa” about the transformed youths (Schubert as the frog, Schober as the carp).
29. Brian Newbould, “A Schubert Palindrome,” 19th-Century Music 15 (1992): 209–10.
30. For a detailed analysis of all the clues pointing to Schubert in this message, as well as a facsimile of this newsletter page, see Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft, 20–22. Josef Kupelwieser would later write the libretto for Schubert’s most important opera, Fierabras (D796), composed in 1823.
31. See Steblin, “Schubert’s Relationship with Women: An Historical Account,” in Brian Newbould, ed., Schubert Studies (Aldershot, 1998), 159–82.
32. Deutsch, Schubert: A Documentary Biography, 82.
33. See Steblin, “Schubert and the Pfarre Roßau: New Documents from the Diözesanarchiv Wien and the Servite Priory,” Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 46 (1998): 153–73.
34. Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft, 236.
35. For the original German, see ibid., 249–50.
36. See Steblin, “Michael Holzer, Schubert’s Music Teacher in Lichtental: A New Genealogical Study,” Schubert: Perspektiven 10/1 (2010): 10–44.
37. See Steblin, “Schubert’s Role in the Unsinnsgesellschaft as Revealed by Clues from Schiller and Aschenschlägel,” in Franz Schubert und seine Freunde, ed. Eva Badura-Skoda, Gerold W. Gruber, Walburga Litschauer, and Carmen Ottner (Vienna, 1999), 238–45.
38. Richard Wigmore, Schubert: The Complete Song Texts (London, 1992), 61. Schubert’s setting of this Körner text has puzzled scholars; the standard explanation is that he was thinking of his mother, since a mountain peak called Riesenkoppe was located in Silesia, although it was nowhere near the area where she grew up.
39. On 28 November 1822 Schubert wrote the traditional saying “Wer nicht liebt Wein, Mädchen und Gesang, Bleibt ein Narr sein Lebenlang” (Who loves not wine, maidens and song, remains a fool his whole life long) on an album leaf for Albert Schellmann. See Deutsch, Schubert: A Documentary Biography, 246.
40. See Steblin, “Schubert’s Pepi.”
41. Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs, 86. See Steblin, “Schober’s Love Affair with Marie von Spaun and the Role Played by Helene Schmith, the Wife of Mozart’s First Violinist,” in Schubert: Perspektiven 8/1 (2008): 49–87, in which I take issue with Susanne Eckstein’s interpretation of the pictures that accompany Schnautze’s tale about Musa and the transformed youths. Also, see the discussion of Schober in John Gingerich’s essay in this volume.
42. For the German text of “Mein Traum” see Deutsch, Die Dokumente seines Lebens, 158–59; English translation in Schubert: A Documentary Biography, 26–28
43. See Steblin, “Schubert’s Hidden Past as Caricatured by the Unsinnsgesellschaft: The Painter Carl Zimmermann and the Jewish Connection,” in The Past in the Present: Papers Read at the IMS Intercongressional Symposium, Budapest & Visegrád, 2000, ed. László Dobszay (Budapest, 2003), 263–86.
44. See Steblin, Ein unbekanntes frühes Schubert Porträt? Franz Schubert und der Maler Josef Abel (Tutzing, 1992), for my authentication of this oil portrait. Abel was a highly regarded member of the Vienna Art Academy and an artist praised by Schubert in his diary of 1816.
45. Ibid., 48n22. No fortepiano maker could be identified with these letters.
46. Two of Zimmermann’s illustrations, which he made in 1819 and 1820 in connection with the musical setting of Goethe’s Faust by the Polish Prince Anton Radziwill, are included in my article “Schubert’s Hidden Past,” on 283 and 285.
47. My book Die Unsinnsgesellschaft devotes a brief chapter to each of the members of the Nonsense Society, summarizing their biographies and the roles they played in the society. I have since conducted further research on the two Anschütz brothers and the three Kupelwieser brothers, and I provide some of this new information here.
48. See Hans-Eberhard Dentler, Johann Sebastian Bachs “Kunst der Fuge”: Ein Pythagoreisches Werk und seine Verwirklichung (Mainz, 2004).
49. Steblin, “Schubert’s ‘Nina’ and the True Peacocks,” The Musical Times 138 (March 1997): 13–19.
50. Steblin, “Schubert’s Elise: Das Dörfchen and the ‘Unsinnsgesellschaft,’” The Musical Times 140 (Spring 1999): 33–43.
51. See Steblin, “Hoechle’s 1827 Sketch of Beethoven’s Studio: A Secret Tribute to Schubert?” Beethoven Forum 8 (2000): 1–23. For a discussion of the Beethoven funeral procession in front of the Alsergrund Church, which is still virtually unknown, see my article “‘Höchle zeichnete mir diesen Leichenzug’: Anton Gräffer, Johann Nepomuk Hoechle und die verschollene Zeichnung von Beethovens Begräbnisfeier,” Wiener Geschichtsblätter 58/4 (2003): 299–315.
52. Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft, 233–34. For Schubert’s remarks at the opening of a manuscript of six écossaises that he wrote for Marie von Spaun, Schober’s beloved at the time: “Composed while confined to my room at Erdberg, May 1816,” see Deutsch, Schubert: A Documentary Biography, 59.
53. For a comprehensive discussion of Schubert’s relationship to this woman, see Steblin, “Schubert’s Beloved Singer Therese Grob: New Documentary Research,” Schubert durch die Brille 28 (January 2002): 55–100.
54. See Steblin, “Schubert’s Problematic Relationship with Johann Mayrhofer: New Documentary Evidence,” in Essays on Music and Culture in Honor of Herbert Kellman, 465–95.
55. I explain that the house at Wipplingerstrasse No. 2 where Schubert lived with the poet Mayrhofer had been “originally the place of rendezvous of the Jacobins” in ibid., 474. Citation from Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn, The Life of Franz Schubert, trans. Arthur Duke Coleridge (London, 1869), 1:48.
56. For a reference to Franz Gräffer’s 1844 mention of “misanthropic” in connection with the poet’s character, see Steblin, “Schubert’s Problematic Relationship with Johann Mayrhofer,” 480.
57. Johann Mayrhofer, Gedichte, ed. Ernst von Feuchtersleben (Vienna, 1843), 23.
58. See Steblin, “Schubert und die ‘Unsinnsgesellschaft’: Musikbezogene Ergebnisse,” in Schubert neu entdeckt, ed. Erich Benedikt (Vienna, 1999), 37–44.
59. Steblin, “Schubert Through the Kaleidoscope,” 61.
Excerpts from Beyträge zur Bildung für Jünglinge, 1817–1818
ANTON VON SPAUN AND JOHANN MAYRHOFER TRANSLATED, INTRODUCED, AND ANNOTATED BY DAVID GRAMIT
The Beyträge zur Bildung für Jünglinge (Contributions to Education for Youths) appeared in two volumes in Vienna in 1817 and 1818. Although the publication does not mention Schubert and he took no part in the project, this collection of pedagogical essays, translations, literary excerpts, and poetry nonetheless reveals important aspects of the literary, intellectual, and relational world that the young composer encountered through a number of his friends. He met most of them during his service as a choirboy in the Imperial Chapel Choir from 1808 to 1813, which brought with it enrollment in the Vienna Stadtkonvikt. This boarding school attracted students from relatively well-heeled families from other provinces, including a number with whom Schubert established lasting relationships—and it was those students, members of their families, and their friends who spearheaded the Beyträge: Anton von Spaun (1790–1849), leader of the project and brother of Schubert’s lifelong friend Josef von Spaun; Anton Ottenwalt (1789–1845) who, like Spaun, was a native of Linz and a former student at the monastic school
in Kremsmünster; and Johann Mayrhofer (1787–1836), the Steyrborn poet whose long relationship with Schubert led to more settings of his poetry by the composer than of any poet except Goethe.1
A number of scholars have drawn attention to the Beyträge and the impact of the friends whose activities inspired it and brought it into being.2 Most recently, Ilija Dürhammer has analyzed the League of Virtue (Tugendbund) and its ideals of friendship, patriotism, and freedom, each of which took forms deeply influenced by the intellectual and political climate of Austria in the Napoleonic and Restoration eras.3 Dürhammer’s tracing of the roots of this group gives rise to a more nuanced view of Schubert’s introduction to literary culture than has previously been available. It also makes clear that this group represents only a part of Schubert’s social and intellectual world—it is not only far removed from the lighthearted and satirical world of the Unsinnsgesellschaft (Nonsense Society) that Rita Steblin explores elsewhere in this book, but it is also distinct from the sphere of professional musicians active in Vienna. Indeed, Josef von Spaun would later feel compelled to argue that “living among this circle of people was far more advantageous to Schubert than if he had lived among a circle of musicians and professional colleagues, though he did not neglect these either.”4 At the time of the Beyträge, however, any such need to defend the activities of a great composer among them was well in the future; here the group of friends seeks rather to defend itself and its own intellectual and social world.
Still, the Beyträge zur Bildung für Jünglinge can orient readers to aspects of Schubert’s world more directly than virtually any other source. An overview of the two volumes reveals their characteristic blend of classical learning, Germanic history and Austro-German patriotism, and didactic and sentimental poetry and literature, both excerpted and original (see Tables 1 and 2, showing the contents of each volume). The ordering of selections seems almost random, but both volumes attest to a determined effort to blend received wisdom with personal experience, in the hope that the former would beneficially shape the latter. As the three selections below reveal, the Beyträge can provide insights into what it meant to be devoted to classically grounded self-cultivation as practiced not only among the friends of Schubert’s youth but also by countless others in the German-speaking world of the early nineteenth century. Furthermore, the volumes give expression to the sentimental, affective world in which those intellectual goals were pursued, and to the tensions that could arise as a result. Such an orientation would hardly have been necessary for Schubert’s own audiences, many of whom had grown up with the values and practices inculcated by such an upbringing. Indeed, the contents of the journal were unremarkable enough to receive at best lukewarm reviews at the time of its publication, and its existence was largely forgotten until scholars drew attention to it after World War II.5 For today’s readers and listeners, however, especially for English speakers without a grounding in Austro-German history and literature, the idea of self- and national development through reflective reading and earnest discussion, as well as the culture of sentimentality that characterized these intense male friendships, are likely to be foreign enough that simply to describe them conveys little of the spirit and power they held, whether in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Prussia or in Schubert’s Vienna and its environs. But for all their pedantry and awkwardness—indeed, in part because of them—the Beyträge zur Bildung für Jünglinge convey those ideals powerfully, along with the distinctive tensions that accompanied this group’s efforts.
Franz Schubert and His World Page 6
