Franz Schubert and His World
Page 13
The men of the circle whose courtships concluded successfully with marriage soon dropped out of the circle. Kupelwieser carried on a long courtship with Johanna Lutz, who participated in the circle’s formal activities and kept him well apprised of his friends’ doings while he was away in Italy. For the first several years of his courtship it does not seem to have affected at all his relationships within the circle, but by the time Kupelwieser and Johanna married in September of 1826, both confined their participation in the circle’s activities to occasional attendance at Schubertiades.
Spaun returned to Vienna in the spring of 1826, after an absence of five years, during which he had served his professional apprenticeship in the provinces. As we have seen, over the next two years he frequently hosted Schubertiades and was one of the most regular participants at the evening Stammtisch. On 6 January 1828 he became secretly engaged to Franziska Roner von Ehrenwert; his friends discovered the plans a week later (SDB, 713). In his memoirs Spaun wrote about Schubert’s reaction: “I was at that time engaged to be married. He said to me, ‘While it makes me very sad that we are going to lose you, you are right and have chosen well, and although I ought to be angry with your fiancée I should like to do something to please her. Invite her and I will bring Bocklet, Schuppanzigh, and Linke and we will have some music as well’; and that is what happened” (SMF, 138). That was the last Schubertiade hosted by Spaun in Schubert’s lifetime, and after his marriage on 14 April 1828, he and his new wife seem to have dropped out of the circle’s activities completely.
Marriage seems to have presented more of a problem for the circle than paying for sex or promiscuity. Nowhere do we see any sign that the other members of the circle considered such sexual behavior grounds for reproof or shame, and their tolerant and somewhat casual attitude toward a variety of sexual behaviors would seem to have been privately shared by many Viennese of the time. However, the members of the Schobert circle differed from most Viennese in their attitude toward official, public prudery. This they considered hypocritical, and they were impatient with it.
Two episodes illustrate both the circle’s private attitude toward sexual mores, and their desire to view those mores as publicly presentable ideals: their friendship with Katharina von Lacsny, and Bauernfeld’s and Schubert’s collaboration on the opera Der Graf von Gleichen (The Count of Equals—no pun in German).
Katharina von Lacsny (b. 1789) had been a singer at the court opera, was twice married, and rumored to have had many lovers, including several counts simultaneously during the Congress of Vienna. Two letters from Schwind to Schober give us our most revealing glimpse of how he and his friends regarded her. Schwind wrote the letters at a time when he was “ruled completely” by Anna Hönig. But upon first meeting Mme Lacsny, he confided to Schober:
What a woman! If she were not nearly twice as old as I [thirty-six and twenty-one] and unhappily always ill, I should have to leave Vienna, for it would be more than I can stand. Schubert has known her a long time, but I met her only recently. She takes joy in my things and in me, more than anybody else except you; I had quite a shock the first time, the way she spoke to me and obliged me, as though there were nothing about me she didn’t know. Immediately after-ward she was taken ill again and spat blood, so that I have not seen her for a long time; but we are to eat there tomorrow. So now I know what a person looks like who is in ill repute all over the city, and what she does.72
And two months later:
She is the only one about whom I care to talk to you, for she is a decisive and mighty figure, who in the greatest welter of temptation and licentiousness remained true to herself and who knows what she must honor…. God keep you for me, [and keep] the excellent Schubert and my pious girlfriend.73
Schwind’s attraction to Mme Lacsny was tempered only by her age and her interruption of their interviews by spitting up blood. He admired her integrity, not in spite of her promiscuity, but rather because of it; she knew herself, and acted upon that knowledge rather than according to convention. And presumably Schwind’s admiration was in some measure shared by Schubert, who had known her for a long time, and introduced her to his friend.74
Der Graf von Gleichen was the great opera project of Schubert’s last years, even though in early 1824 he had given up ambitions of an opera career, at least unless and until conditions at Vienna’s opera houses became more favorable to German opera. But in March of 1825, Eduard von Bauernfeld shared with him an idea that forged their friendship (it became the immediate occasion for addressing each other familiarly with “Du”), and brought Bauernfeld quickly into the inner circle (SDB, 410). Bauernfeld’s proposed opera, Der Graf von Gleichen, had as its central conceit the glorification of a bigamous marriage. Bauernfeld eventually wrote the libretto in eight days in May of 1826 while on vacation in Carinthia; Schubert impatiently awaited the results (SDB, 530). It features a crusader who returns from the Orient with a second wife. The resulting triangle is so blissful that it inspires the pope to give his blessing. For its backdrop the story contains attractive possibilities for dramatic contrasts between, in Bauernfeld’s words, “Orient-Occident, Janissaries-Crusaders, romantic courtship-spousal love, etc., in short a Turkish-Christian stew” (SDB, 24). Predictably, the censor forbade the libretto, despite the friends’ appeal to the precedent of Goethe’s novel about mate-swapping, Die Wahlverwandschaften (Elective Affinities).75 The opera had no realistic chance of ever winning approval for performance, nor were the dismal prospects for German opera in Vienna likely to change in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, Schubert maintained his enthusiasm for Der Graf von Gleichen. During the summer of 1827, while he was composing other works that faced no censorship barriers and held at least a promise of furthering his career, he worked on sketches for the opera;76 deprived of other incentives, his belief in the importance of the opera and its subject can have been his only conceivable motivation for doing so.
Enthusiasm for the Graf von Gleichen was not limited to Schubert and Bauernfeld; Schwind also caught the Gleichen fever. Approximately a third of his thirty pen-and-ink illustrations for The Marriage of Figaro (completed by April 1825) were devoted to portrayals of imaginary guests at the wedding, from the Act 3 Finale of Mozart’s opera (SDB, 412). For these imaginary guests he chose characters, among others, from Der Graf von Gleichen, and from Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde, about which we will hear more later.
Der Graf von Gleichen did not necessarily represent in straightforward fashion the sexual ideology of the Schobert circle. After all, Schubert was an artist, not a propagandist. However, Der Graf von Gleichen and Schwind’s idealization of Frau von Lacsny have in common a skepticism of monogamy, which is seen in both cases as a hypocritical worldly convention. In the Vienna of their day, with its flourishing trade in prostitution (toward which the authorities turned a blind eye, implicitly giving it official sanction and encouragement), it would not have been hard to feel that the traditional official and church-sanctioned monogamous form of marriage represented a pious hypocrisy. Much better to stop pretending. But the idealistic young men of the circle were not ready to concede a disillusioned loss of principle. A higher ideal had to be found, one that could be honestly embraced. Promiscuity, especially of the publicly indiscreet variety, seemed admirable if it had a suitably romantic coloration. Then it became principled promiscuity. The higher ideal was a sexual practice that follows the vicissitudes of the heart.
Religious Nonconformity
Discussions of religious attitudes and convictions within the Schobert circle during the years 1820–25 have left hardly a trace in the available documents; religious beliefs would seem to have been either unimportant to the shared identity of the circle or the circle shared a consensus on religious matters that was so unproblematic as to barely warrant discussion. Those two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and they may both have been true for a time, but in the years after the circle dissolved, drastic changes in their religious convictions marked those who became
alienated from the group—especially Bruchmann—from those whose loyalties remained with Schubert and Schober. Even if religion did not itself become a subject of controversy during the life of the group, it remained a potent indicator of important group-defining beliefs just below the surface.
By the standards of the age the Schobert circle was as a whole not devout. Schober could debate theological points—on at least one occasion he argued against immortality and personal life after death—and his only published work, Palingenesien (1826), was a book of sonnets on Old Testament themes (Jean Paul had written a book in 1798 with the same title), but Spaun’s mother ended a growing attachment between Schober and her daughter Marie because Schober’s behavior and conversation led her to believe he was “not religious.”77 Schwind too, after a lengthy engagement, was eventually rejected by Anna Hönig for his lack of piety; he once told her to “go fall in love with the pope,” and later said, “Generally I can tolerate a pretty [hübsch] amount of Catholicism, but too much is too much” (SDB, 539, 901). Bauernfeld undertook a study of the New Testament in the original Greek with his two roommates in 1823–24, but soon confessed, “I don’t possess the talent for faith.”78 But it was Schubert more than any other member of the group who engaged publicly with religious matters, and it is Schubert’s views we know the most about.
In Schubert’s childhood home religious matters formed a constant source of friction between his free-thinking brother Ignaz (twelve years older than Franz) and his dogmatically orthodox father; Ignaz and Franz formed a furtive alliance in their free-thinking rebellion against their dictatorial father (SDB, 105). Schubert’s schooling by the Piarist order, and his later friendships with prominent churchmen provided him with further spurs to test and refine his unorthodox convictions. A letter from Ferdinand Walcher saying that he knew full well that Schubert did not “credo in unum Deum” shows that Schubert’s unorthodox religious views were both well-enough known, and uncontroversial enough to be brought up in a lighthearted context.79 Walcher’s quotation of the opening of the Credo of the Latin Mass also locates the most public source of Schubert’s departure from the norm: the text he used for his six Mass settings.
Schubert’s unusual Mass texts were a result of his own conscious, informed choices, as I showed in an article published in 2002.80 The pattern of excisions in the texts of the Glorias and Credos of Schubert’s Latin Masses, combined with dovetailing patterns of telescoping—folding successive phrases together—permits no other conclusion. Contrary to a reception history that remained impressively monolithic right through the celebrations of Schubert’s bicentennial, none of the changes Schubert made to the texts can be attributed to ignorance of Latin, ignorance of the orthodox version of the texts, carelessness, forgetfulness, or any other mental shortcoming, or to the existence of a yet-to-be discovered master text that Schubert unwittingly copied.81
The dovetailing patterns of excision and telescoping show not only that Schubert meant the words he set, but also that they were important to him. He cared enough about the Mass and the Church to keep composing Masses even though he dissented on key points. He began his life in music as a choirboy, his first great public triumph was the performance of the Mass in F in 1814, and a part of him always remained a church musician. His six Masses and other liturgical compositions kept him involved with churches throughout his life: the Lichtental parish church, St. Augustine’s Court church, St. Ulrich’s, Alt-Lerchenfelder, and the Dreifaltigkeitskirche. He maintained warm relations all his life with church music directors who included his brother Ferdinand, his first teacher and the dedicatee of his Mass in C, Michael Holzer, and his boyhood friend Michael Leitermayer. Unlike Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, which, in spite of its complete, orthodox text, has always found a more comfortable home in the concert hall than in the church, Schubert’s two late solemn Masses, in spite of their spacious amplitudes, were conceived for the church and are still appropriate there. In those two Masses, in A-flat (1819–22, revised 1826–27) and in E-flat (June 1828), Schubert needed to express something that could only be said in a Mass; he needed to speak to the church.
Certainly he also had professional incentives for writing the last two Masses: he consistently had greater success in gaining a public hearing for his Masses than for his symphonies, and he had some hopes of a Kapellmeister post for which the revised Mass in A-flat could have proved useful. But the time he lavished on the first version of the Mass in A-flat, a letter to Schott in which he listed it as a testament to his “striving after the highest in art,”82 and the priority he gave to writing his Mass in E-flat after hope of a Kapellmeister post had vanished—all indicate that the Mass meant more to Schubert than a career opportunity. When Schubert decided to write these last two Masses instead of composing more songs, symphonies, or string quartets, it was surely because the Mass allowed him to say something offered by no other genre. And that something could only have concerned his faith and his church, expressed through his music and his text.
Schubert’s Mass texts, even when examined with their musical settings, do not directly represent his beliefs but rather an intersection of his beliefs with the affirmations that he believed the words of the Mass expressed. In setting the Mass so that it did not violate his conscience, he would have had to struggle for clarity in his own convictions, avoid affirmations that violated those convictions, and make the most of the affirmations most important to him. Most difficult, he had to decide what to do about those affirmations to which he was relatively indifferent.
The one passage omitted in all of Schubert’s Masses is “Et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam” from the Credo; the next most consistently omitted passage, absent in all except the first Mass, is “Et exspecto resurrectionem,” also from the Credo. Both of these excisions seem to be instances of Schubert cutting statements that violated his beliefs. Evidently he interpreted “one holy catholic and apostolic church” to mean “one holy (Roman) Catholic church” rather than “one holy universal church,” and rejected claims to universal authority by the institutional church. Equally, he felt unable to embrace the statement of belief in the resurrection of the dead.
Schubert also cut passages in order to strengthen a point he wished to make. Beginning with his first Mass he gave a conspicuous treatment to the plea for mercy, “miserere nobis,” in the Gloria. From this idea he gradually moved toward strengthening the connection between “miserere nobis” at the center of the Gloria, and the plea for peace, “dona nobis pacem,” in the Agnus Dei, first by telescoping some of the text that did not contribute to his conception of the central section of the Gloria, and eventually by cutting that text.
Walther Dürr has traced Schubert’s use in his last two Masses of a time-honored musical symbol for the cross, which further strengthens Schubert’s textual parallels between the pleas for mercy and for peace.83 Dürr links the appearances of the musical cross figure to a letter Schubert wrote in 1825 after viewing the site of a massacre of Bavarians by Tyroleans in the Lueg Pass, a letter that comes as close to any testimony we have in Schubert’s own words to describing his theology, as well as his attitude toward what he considered hypocritical conventions of piety:
This … they sought, with a chapel on the Bavarian side and a rough cross in the rock on the Tyrolean side, partly to commemorate, and partly, through the use of such holy signs, to expiate. You, glorious Christ, to how many shameful deeds must you lend your image. You yourself, the most gruesome memorial of human abomination, there they set up your image, as if to say: Behold! the consummate creation of the great God we have trampled with impudent feet, would it trouble us to destroy with a light heart the remaining vermin, known as humans? (SDB, 467)
Dürr endeavors to show not only how Schubert formally unified his two late Masses but how the themes of Christ’s suffering, the suffering of humanity, the futile plea for peace, and the hope of expiation especially permeate and unify the Mass in E-flat.
Another excision, the first
one in the Credo, also seems to belong to the category of text cut, not because Schubert objected to it but to strengthen a point made by the remaining text. In his last two Masses the first line of the Credo reads “Credo in unum Deum, factorem caeli et terrae,” instead of “Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae.” By cutting “patrem omnipotentem,” Schubert gave the opening of the Credo a pantheist emphasis, consistent with more personal statements of faith he set outside the Latin Mass, such as Die Allmacht (D852, August 1825) to a poem by the Patriarch (Archbishop) of Venice, Johann Ladislaus Pyrker von Felsö-Eör, and Johann Philip Neumann’s Deutsche Messe (D872, September 1827).84
Pantheism had emerged as the preferred theological emphasis of the so-called Josephinian Enlightenment (from Emperor Joseph II’s reign, 1765–90), which had stressed rationalism and the church as a servant of the state, and Neumann and Pyrker were both Josephinian rationalists.85 Pantheism stresses the all-embracing inclusiveness of God, conceived as divine immanence (the indwelling presence of God), as compared with the emphasis in traditional theism on God’s transcendence, or separateness from the world; in practice pantheism emphasized the revelation of God in nature. Schubert’s cut of “patrem omnipotentem” thus deemphasized God’s transcendence while emphasizing God as the creator of nature. Pantheism was especially congenial to early Romanticism, since it could be interpreted as more critical and rational than traditional Christianity, and at the same time allow the infinite mystery of God to infuse the concrete mundane reality of the natural world. Because of its rational intellectual pedigree, pantheism also appealed widely to the Josephinian church bureaucracy, many of whom retained influential posts until 1848.86 The mystical and rational strains did not necessarily clash, since they tended to play out in different spheres of activity, the mystical in poetry and the rational in metaphysics.