2. See Helga Prosl, “Der Freundeskreis um Anton von Spaun: Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte von Linz in der Biedermeierzeit (1811–1827)” (PhD diss., Innsbruck, 1951); Dieter Lyon, “Anton von Spaun: Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte des Vormärz” (PhD diss., Graz, 1964); Walther Dürr, “Der Linzer Schubert-Kreis und seine ‘Beiträge zur Bildung für Jünglinge,’” Historisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Linz (1985), 51–59; David Gramit, “The Intellectual and Aesthetic Tenets of Franz Schubert’s Circle” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1987); and Dürhammer, Schuberts literarische Heimat.
3. See Dürhammer, Schuberts literarische Heimat, as well as his Geheime Botschaften: Homoerotische Subkulturen im Schubert-Kreis, bei Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Thomas Bernhard (Vienna, 2006).
4. Josef von Spaun, “Some Observations on the Life of Schubert by Herr Ritter von Kreissle-Hellborn (1864),” in Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, ed. Otto Erich Deutsch, trans. Rosamond Ley and John Nowell (London, 1958), 364. Spaun’s immediate reference is the slightly later group of friends around Franz von Schober, but Schober came to know Schubert through his activity in this earlier circle.
5. Dürhammer, in Schuberts literarische Heimat, cites reviews from Vienna and Jena, 56.
6. The letter is preserved in the Wienbibliothek, Inv. no. 36627. For a discussion and an extended excerpt, see Gramit, “Intellectual and Aesthetic Tenets,” 147–49 and 389–90.
7. Dürhammer, Schuberts literarische Heimat, 178–83.
8. For a more detailed consideration of the sources of Spaun’s essay, as well as the challenges he faced in dealing with the physical and erotic aspects of relationships in those sources, see Dürhammer, Schuberts literarische Heimat, 148–55.
9. The passage to which Spaun refers is actually 2 Samuel 1:26; the earlier verse describes Jonathan’s love for David as equal to his love for himself.
10. Chrysippus is discussed along with other Stoic philosophers in Book 7 of The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius.
11. Aphrodite.
12. Both speeches in this paragraph are found in the Theages, now not generally ascribed to Plato himself. The text is a translation of Spaun’s German. For a standard English translation, see Plato: With an English Translation, vol. 8, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library (London and New York, 1927). “For I know of some of my equals in age, and some a little older, who were of no account before they learnt from him, but after beginning to learn from him have in a very short time proved themselves superior to all whose inferiors they were before” (373). “‘For I never yet learned anything from you, as you know yourself: but I made progress, whenever I was with you, if I was merely in the same house, without being in the same room, but more progress, when I was in the same room. And it seemed to me to be much more when I was in the same room and looked at you as you were speaking, than when I turned my eyes elsewhere: but my progress was far the greatest and most marked whenever I sat beside you and held and touched you. Now, however,’ he said, ‘that condition has all oozed away’” (381).
13. The First Alcibiades, another work whose authorship is uncertain, is available in a translation by Bernadotte Perrin at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2008.01.0006. For a close discussion of the passage in question, see Victoria Wohl, “The Eye of the Beloved: Opsis and Eros in Socratic Pedagogy,” in Alcibiades and the Socratic Lover-Educator, ed. Marguerite Johnson and Harold Tarrant (London, 2012), 45–60.
14. Spaun’s conclusion seems to be drawn from Plato’s Lysis, which includes an extended discussion of good and evil in friendship, although it does not appear to be a literal quotation.
15. This interpretation originated with Moritz Bauer, “Johann Mayrhofer,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 5 (1922–23): 82. Dürhammer, in Schuberts literarische Heimat, includes the piece among the collection’s excerpts without considering Mayrhofer’s involvement (58).
16. Das Leben Raphaels von einem unbekannten Gleichzeitigen (Munich, 1817) is held by libraries including the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich and the Library of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. The Munich copy is now also viewable on Google Books. As I suggested in “Intellectual and Aesthetic Tenets,” the dialogue’s numerous local references make clear that it was a newly written work (71n62).
17. Das Leben Raphaels, 25–27.
18. The Belvedere Palace, originally built for Prince Eugen of Savoy, hero of the Siege of Vienna, housed the Imperial art collection and was open to the public for viewing. The view from the upper palace toward the center of Vienna was (and remains) perhaps the best known of the old city.
19. Raphael’s Madonna im Grünen (Madonna and Child with the Infant John the Baptist) came into the possession of the Habsburgs in 1662 and is still in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, as is the Heilige Familie mit Johannesknaben (Holy Family with Infant John the Baptist), acquired in 1779 and now ascribed to Raphael and his workshop, which may be the other painting referred to here. See the Bilddatenbank of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, http://bilddatenbank.khm.at/viewArtefact?id=1502; and http://bilddatenbank.khm.at/viewArtefact?id=1503, respectively.
20. Giovanni Santi, active 1469–1494.
21. Pietro Vannucci, or Perugino, ca. 1446–1523.
22. Emphases for these geographical terms, and all other terms given in italics, are in the original text.
23. The Baglioni Altarpiece, 1507.
24. Cited here in Mayrhofer’s footnote is Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg-Stolberg (1750–1819), a poet and scholar who prepared numerous translations of classical literature into German, including Plato’s Dialogues.
25. A reference to Horace’s Epistles, 1.19.19: “O imitatores, servum pecus” (O imitators, you servile herd).
26. Here “Romantic” has the sense of a world-historical period associated with medieval Christianity.
“Those of us who found our life in art”: The Second-Generation Romanticism of the Schubert-Schober Circle, 1820–1825
JOHN M. GINGERICH
Mention of the “Schubert circle” and its members’ quintessential activity, the “Schubertiade,” conjures up an irresistibly appealing image: the intimacy of chamber music, a presiding genius, convivial high spirits, the companionship of gifted friends, and the unlimited promise of youth. The romance of the Schubert circle is perhaps most memorably captured in two well-known depictions: a sepia drawing by Moritz von Schwind, A Schubert Evening at Josef von Spaun’s (see Figure 1), and a watercolor by Leopold Kupelwieser, Party Game of the Schubertians (see Figure 2). Together they seem to illustrate several complementary aspects of the circle: playful and serious, fun-loving exuberance and a solemn devotion to art. And both show Schubert presiding from his accustomed position at the piano: in the Schwind drawing he is in the center, accompanying the singer Johann Michael Vogl, with the host at his left, in a position to turn pages, surrounded by some forty listeners; in the Kupelwieser painting Schubert is shown off to the left side, watching a group of five central figures who are acting out a charade or a tableau vivant, his left hand resting on the keyboard—giving a musical clue?—with Kupelwieser’s dog Drago seated under the piano, both in an attitude of rapt attention to the tableau. Of these two representations, the Schwind drawing is the most iconic, and it also unwittingly illustrates, just beneath its appealing, romantic surface, problems that persist in the historiography of the Schubert circle.
Schwind’s drawing is quite deliberately a retrospective composite. He worked on it in the immediate aftermath of the sensational discovery of the “Unfinished” Symphony in 1865, by which time Schubert had gained a fame he had never enjoyed during his lifetime, and Schubertiades had become enveloped in nostalgia. In revisiting an event that had taken place sometime between 1826 and 1828, he seems to have combined a wish to commemorate personal recollections of such evenings with a desire to provide an honor roll of Schubertians.1 The listeners are grouped according to artistic field, with the painters
Ludwig Kraißl, Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Schwind himself, August Wilhelm Rieder, and Leopold Kupelwieser standing centrally behind the seated ladies, and the dramatists and poets Ernst von Feuchtersleben, Franz Grillparzer, Eduard von Bauernfeld, Johann Senn, Johann Mayrhofer, and Ignaz Castelli grouped on the far right. Schwind included in the crowded collection of faces several who could not possibly have been there: Senn, for example, had been exiled to Tyrol several years before Spaun began hosting Schubertiades, and Eleonore Stohl, who became a well-known Schubert singer during Schwind’s lifetime, was not born until 1832.2
Figure 1. A Schubert Evening at Josef von Spaun’s. Drawing by Moritz von Schwind.
A Schubert Circle with Schubert at Its Center
As a representation of the Schubert circle, Schwind’s drawing illustrates only too well the problematic nature of that term. Over the years the Schubert circle has been invoked time and again without defining its membership or delimiting chronological boundaries: Otto Erich Deutsch’s venerable commentaries on the documents,3 the standard biographies, and the more recent writings on Schubert’s sexuality all assume that the Schubert circle is a self-explanatory entity. Anyone who drank Schmollis with Schubert,4 anyone who shared a Stammtisch with him,5 anyone who attended Schubertiades or reading parties, anyone who was a classmate at the Stadtkonvikt (City Seminary)6 and stayed in touch, has become an undifferentiated member of the Schubert circle.
Figure 2. Party Game of the Schubertians. Watercolor by Leopold Kupelwieser.
Rita Steblin, David Gramit, and before them Moriz Enzinger have expanded our knowledge of some of the subsidiary circles delimited by the Schubert circle. Although their discoveries about these circles tell us many fascinating things about Schubert’s milieu, Schubert did not play a central role, nor was he a central member of most of them. In chronological order, “circles” of which Schubert was a peripheral member, or perhaps a member, or on the brink of becoming a member, are the Linzer Bildungskreis (Educational Circle in Linz, 1811–18), sometimes called the Linzer Tugendbund (League of Virtue), to which his connections were almost always at one remove, through friends;7 the Unsinnsgesellschaft (Nonsense Society, April 1817 until no later than May 1819), of which he was likely a member, although his absence from the only membership list that survives is perhaps an indicator of his less than central status;8 the Senn circle (most of 1819 until 20 January 1820), of which, as the name indicates, he was not the central member;9 and the Ludlamshöhle (Ludlam’s Cave, 1817–26), which he was on the verge of joining when it was disbanded by the authorities.10 Of these, he was probably most active in the Unsinnsgesellschaft, but even there he does not seem to have been at its hub; its life and organization seems to have depended on the three Anschütz brothers, especially Eduard, and on Leopold Kupelwieser.11 None of these subsidiary circles was a Schubert circle, although all involved some close friends of his. They add up to a Schubert circle only in the aggregate, and even the aggregate has no core that would justify naming it after Schubert. The only sense in which any of these were “Schubert” circles is ex post facto: he later became the most famous name associated with them.
Schubert did, however, form the core of one circle, along with his friend Franz von Schober. From 1820 through 1825 a small group of close friends revolved around Schubert and Schober. The Schubertiade is a practice and a term they invented: an evening devoted exclusively to Schubert’s music, whether songs, four-hand piano music, or dances, with the first Schubertiade taking place on 26 January 1821(SDB, 162).12 That one of their defining activities is named after Schubert is only the most obvious sign of his centrality. Schubert provided in many ways the living embodiment of the circle’s ideals, while Schober was its mouthpiece, even as his example fell short.
The Schubert-Schober circle—or for the sake of euphony, the Schobert circle, a conflation which Schubert himself could not resist—is the hub in the vast wheel known as the Schubert circle.13 Of all these circles, the Schobert circle is the only one to which Schubert was essential rather than incidental. Except as seen in the retrospective light of Schubert’s fame, the Schubert circle without the Schobert circle would have been a composite like Schwind’s drawing, but it would be Schwind’s drawing with Schubert half-obscured by shadows somewhere in the last row, instead of front and center at the piano.
Several other factors also lend the Schobert circle a unique significance. The core members shared friendships of great intensity, and their fellowship together formed for a time the center of their creative as well as their social lives. At the peak of their organized activities during the winter of 1822–23 they met once a week for a Schubertiade at the Schober residence, and three times a week to read and discuss dramas and other literature.14 In addition they frequently met less formally in the afternoon at coffee houses, and in the evening in a designated pub (Stammlokal). In the summers they gathered for festivals (Feste) at Atzenbrugg, a country estate made available for several weeks each year through Schober family connections (SDB, 184). All of these activities revolved around the core members but included others as well.
In addition to the tremendous amount of time committed to these regular meetings, there were other get-togethers that were more intensely personal. The atmosphere is captured in a letter Schubert later wrote to Schober (21 September 1824):
If only we were together, you, Swind, Kuppel, and I, every mishap would seem but a trivial matter; but here we are, separated, each in a different corner, and that is truly my misfortune. I might exclaim with Goethe: “Who will bring back just one hour of that happy time!” That time when we sat together confidingly, and each exposed his artistic children to the others with motherly shyness, expecting, not without some trepidation, the judgment that love and truth were to pronounce; that time when each inspired the other, and thus a united striving for the highest beauty animated us all.15
This intense interaction between the friends occurred during crucial years when several members of the group were first exploring their vocations, while for Schubert those same years bridged his transition from obscurity to first fame. The circle became a crucible for testing its members’ fledgling talents, but it was also, as Schubert’s letter indicates, a place where they forged together a deeper sense of purpose for their art. For Schubert the fateful winter of 1822–23 was particularly poignant, since amid the most intense flurry of the circle’s activities he also irrevocably lost his health when he became infected with syphilis.
As might be expected, this hothouse of creative ferment could not last. The circle began to dissolve in 1823 for the most pedestrian of reasons, when several core members, including Schober, left Vienna for extended stays abroad, while Schubert’s syphilitic symptoms made him unfit for social gatherings for extended periods of time. The circle exploded in the fall of 1824 when a personal dispute between Schober and another member, Franz von Bruchmann, forced nearly everyone to take sides. But behind the personal acrimony lurked deeper divisions: the dispute soon enough revealed a break in the consensus the group had shared—a larger framework of political, social, and religious convictions that gave the arts an indispensable role in society. The fracture of the circle creates a unique prism not provided by any of the other circles for gauging Schubert’s own values, because Schubert unhesitatingly and unwaveringly took Schober’s side in the dispute with Bruchmann.
The Schobert circle, then, in addition to forming the hub of the Schubert circle due to its membership, was also central to the lives of its core members in ways that none of the other groups were. During this key transition in their lives each was struggling to find the work to which to dedicate himself and with it a happy meeting of inclination, talent, and a deeper sense of purpose. The importance they attached to the Schobert circle, the golden time they associated with it, is revealed in letter after letter they wrote to each other once it had dissolved.
After its dissolution Schubert never formed nor joined another similar circle, and although he looked back upon i
t with nostalgia, in many ways he had outgrown it. Not all, but many of the friendships endured, even while the circle did not. Painful as it was for Schubert, the end of the circle also freed him from their shared literary-musical-artistic preoccupations, so that beginning in 1824 he could concentrate on more purely musical matters with new compositions in Beethoven’s instrumental genres.16
The Membership and Identity of the Circle
While the winter of 1822–23 was the high point in the life of the Schobert circle, a symmetrical extension of the time frame, from 1820 to 1825, provides the necessary context for understanding the buildup to that central winter and its aftermath. The core members during those five years were Schubert (b. 1797), Franz von Schober (b. 1796), Franz von Bruchmann (b. 1798), Leopold Kupelwieser (b. 1796), and Moritz von Schwind (b. 1804), with the significant additions of Johann Mayrhofer (b. 1787) during the first year, of Eduard von Bauernfeld (b. 1802) during the last year, and of Josef von Spaun (b. 1788) always in the background.
The mutual loyalty and admiration of Schubert and Schober formed the unassailable bedrock of their circle. Josef Kenner (b. 1794), who had extensive discussions and debates with Schober in the Linzer Bildungskreis, but rarely had personal contact after 1816 with either Schober or Schubert,17 has given us the most extensive (and harshest) assessment of Schober’s character:
Schubert’s genius subsequently attracted, among other friends, the heart of a seductively amiable and brilliant young man, endowed with the noblest talents, whose extraordinary gifts would have been so worthy of a moral foundation and would have richly repaid stricter schooling than the one he unfortunately had. But shunning so much effort as unworthy of genius and summarily rejecting such fetters as a form of prejudice and restriction, while at the same time arguing with brilliant and ingratiatingly persuasive power, this scintillating individuality, as I was told later, won a lasting and pernicious influence over Schubert’s honest susceptibility. Anyone who knew Schubert knows how he was made of two natures, foreign to each other, how powerfully the craving for pleasure dragged his soul down to the slough of moral degradation, and how highly he valued the utterances of friends he respected, and so will find his surrender to the false prophet, who embellished sensuality in such a flattering manner, all the more understandable…. There reigned in this whole family a deep moral depravity, so that it was not to be wondered at that Franz von Schober went the same way. Only he devised a philosophical system for his own reassurance and to justify himself in the eyes of the world, as well as to provide a basis for his aesthetic oracle, about which he was probably as hazy as any of his disciples…. The need for love and friendship emerged with such egotism and jealousy that to his adherents he alone was all, not only prophet, but God himself…. Anyone who did not worship him exclusively and follow him blindly was unfit to be elevated to his intellectual heights and anyone who eventually turned away from him …, he allowed to fall away as being unworthy. These idiosyncrasies also effaced his respect for Mine and Thine, as regards marriage as well as in respect of the property of his followers. Just as he himself gave away what he did not happen to want, he had no hesitation in reclaiming it if he wanted it again …; as regards women he was completely unscrupulous, for he had learned to recognize only two kinds: those with whom he was successful and were therefore worthy of him, and those with whom this was not the case and who were therefore not worthy of him (SMF, 85–87).
Franz Schubert and His World Page 10
