Franz Schubert and His World

by Gibbs, Christopher H. , Solvik, Morten

  For the early Romantics, as for the Schobert circle, pantheism also provided a congenial theological counterpoint to their philo-Hellenism. The myths and gods of classical Greek antiquity furnish the imagery that animates most of Johann Mayrhofer’s poetry, while the singer Johann Michael Vogl was sometimes called “der griechische Vogel” because of his passion for classical antiquity.87 But beyond these two worshipers of antiquity, knowledge of Greek myths and even of the Greek language (by Mayrhofer, Bruchmann, and Bauernfeld, at a minimum) was widespread within the group.88

  The combination of pantheism and a reverence for Greek antiquity was probably most pronounced in Bruchmann’s thinking. He later described the shared convictions of the Senn circle (early 1819 to early 1820) thus: “Morality is replaced by a philosophy of totality, Christianity by a new paganism! A great pantheism again becomes the world religion, the circle of blessed gods gathers again!”89 After two years of relatively solitary study and withdrawal Bruchmann rejoined his friends in the summer of 1822, and later described their shared religion: “There is no evil, there is only the beautiful and the ugly in the world. Consequently everything beautiful is good, and everything ugly is evil. Morality and philosophy are accordingly chimeras, as is religion—especially, as one can easily imagine, the Christian religion. Only the faith of the Greeks is true, because it is beautiful, and it is they alone whom we must imitate.”90 During his most intense time with the Schobert circle, from the summer of 1822 until the spring of 1823, Bruchmann prepared a draft of a grandiose manifesto in the mold of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “Reden an die deutsche Nation” in which he argued that in order to rebuild the nation Germans should abandon Christianity and follow instead Homeric models, with the goal of remaking “the Germans into perfected Greeks.”91

  By his own account Bruchmann tended to push whatever philosophy or religion he found attractive to its logical extreme. Both in 1820–23, when he embraced pantheism and philo-Hellenism, and in 1827, when he (re)converted to Catholicism, he found pantheism incompatible with Christianity. His descriptions of both the Senn circle and the Schobert circles as pantheistic and anti-Christian were made retrospectively, with all the zeal of the newly converted, so that he deemed almost everything he had believed and done prior to his conversion un-Christian. In the early nineteenth century many Christians who called themselves pantheists, including many churchmen, saw no contradiction. That was probably true of most of the members of the Schobert circle as well, and undoubtedly true of Schubert. Of Schubert we know that the churchmen he most admired and whose words he set were pantheists, and that some of the textual changes he made to the Latin Mass made it more pantheistic. And while the religious feelings of the other members of the circle may have been distinguished primarily for their lack of fervor, we know that Schubert cared about the church—enough to write six Masses and to make his unorthodox convictions a matter of public record.

  The Case of Bruchmann

  The story of Bruchmann’s exit from the circle brings into sharp relief many of the themes I have sketched above, especially the largely sub-merged but important role of religion. Already as a teenager Bruchmann led a life of great independence, and broke with Catholicism, the faith of his parents.92 His personal quest led to several years of intensive solitary study of philosophy, particularly Fichte and the more philosophical of the Romantics, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher—an inclination toward Idealism and Romanticism that Senn shared with him. During the time of the Senn circle his admiration for Goethe and Schelling knew no bounds, and he called Schelling the “greatest man our earth has ever borne.”93 After Senn’s arrest in early 1820 Bruchmann again withdrew to a life of solitary reflection and study, including a perusal of the journal Concordia, which Friedrich von Schlegel (he received the “von” in 1815) had just begun publishing, and whose program included the regeneration of German spiritual and intellectual life by bringing Catholic Christianity to bear on the fields of history, philosophy, and literature. In Concordia Schlegel argued for a political and social order with the family as its fundament, the Catholic Church as its crown, and the state in between, in a form similar to the Holy Roman Empire as it had existed up until the Protestant Reformation.94

  In early 1821 Schelling, who had been silent since 1806, began giving a series of lectures in Erlangen, Bavaria. Bruchmann traveled to Erlangen, and enrolled for the spring semester to hear him lecture in person, although study outside the Habsburg Empire was forbidden to university students.95 Schelling was lecturing on mythology, part of a larger attempt to address the problem of theodicy, a project that also subsumed his earlier “positive” philosophy, which had been an attempt to convey the complete history of religion through philosophical thought by understanding the world in terms of a history of God. That winter (1821–22) Bruchmann had frequent meetings with Friedrich von Schlegel in Vienna, both alone and in company.96

  The following summer, when Bruchmann joined the Schobert circle he wrote some poetry in accordance with his and their valuation of the artist above all other creatures.97 Schubert even set some of Bruchmann’s poems, but poetry did not engage Bruchmann’s best talents nor could it satisfy his ambitions, and during the months when his involvement with the circle was most intense, during the year “elevated with music and poetry,” he found time to sketch out his grandiose Fichtean scheme to remake Germans as perfect Homeric Greeks.

  In August 1823 Bruchmann once again journeyed to Erlangen to partake of Schelling, but soon found that what had seemed of world-historical importance two years earlier no longer compelled him. After only two weeks he began his return trip to Vienna. Not only did the gospel of Schelling no longer appeal, but this time the Austrian authorities had been tipped off about Bruchmann’s illegal studies abroad, so that he now had a black mark against him that would permanently sabotage a potential career in the vast Austrian civil service.98

  That November Schubert wrote his letter to Schober complaining that Bruchmann was “no longer the same,” that he now seemed “to conform to the conventions of the world.”99 Very likely Bruchmann’s changed attitude toward philosophy and Schelling, and Schubert’s observation that Bruchmann had become more conformist and conventional had a common source. The previous April Bruchmann had begun courting Julie von Weyrother, a young woman of the high aristocracy who was very pious, who “looked like asceticism personified,”100 and whose family had held the office of Master of the Horse (Oberbereiter) in Austria for more than a hundred years.101 As he put it later, he began “for the first time since he was a little boy” to think of duty (Pflicht) and morality (Sittlichkeit).102 While in Erlangen he was obsessed with thoughts of the “holy institution of the family” (Heiligthum der Familie), and could not bring himself to care about Schelling instead.103 In accordance with his new aspirations (and his father’s long-standing wishes), Bruchmann rededicated himself to his law studies, even though his future prospects in Austria now looked bleak (SDB, 342).

  Figure 3. Franz von Bruchmann. Drawing by Leopold Kupelwieser.

  Bruchmann was soon to give further evidence of changed attitudes and values that put him at odds with Schober and Schubert. His sister Justina had been carrying on a secret courtship with Schober—secret since the Bruchmann parents and especially father Bruchmann disapproved of Schober. Schwind often acted as secret courier, and his vicarious involvement in their affair was sometimes alarmingly intense,104 but Bruchmann himself also occasionally passed on messages from Justina informing Schober how to time his visits to take advantage of the absence of his father.105 Sometime in the summer of 1824 Bruchmann changed from collaborator to whistle-blower, and revealed all to his parents.106 His betrayal of Schober caused a great rift: Schubert and Schwind refused to speak to, or even acknowledge any of the Bruchmann family, while many of the more peripheral members of the circle seemed gleeful that Schober had gotten his comeuppance.107 This breach in the circle was never healed; Bruchmann and his family remained estrang
ed from Schober, Schubert, and Schwind for the rest of their lives—although not from Kupelwieser, as we shall see.

  Bruchmann’s beliefs and life soon moved even further from those of Schubert and Schober. At the end of August 1826 he converted to “positive Christianity,”108 a conversion in which he was following his brother-in-law Josef von Streinsberg’s lead. Streinsberg had also been part of the Senn circle, and was present when Senn was arrested, so his change of direction was nearly as radical as Bruchmann’s. The next step was to go to confession and resume communion as a Catholic, the faith he had grown up in, which he did on 27 and 28 February 1827.109 Then came marriage, in which he again followed Streinsberg, who had married Isabella von Bruchmann in January 1826; Franz Bruchmann married Juliane von Weyrother in June 1827.110 Friedrich von Schlegel and the bride’s father were the official witnesses (Trauzeugen) on the occasion (SDB, 652).

  The last of the Bruchkinder, as Schubert called them, followed the path of the first two when Justina married Rudolph Ritter von Smetana on 19 November 1828. Justina von Bruchmann’s affair with Schober had furnished the proximate cause for her brother’s break with Schober, and yet when she married Smetana on Schubert’s death day, a member of the triumvirate, Kupelwieser, was one of the official witnesses. Thus, unlike Schubert and Schwind, Kupelwieser was not carrying on a feud with the Bruchmann family on behalf of Schober, nor was he put off by the new piety of the Bruchmann family salon.111 Not only did he remain on good terms with Bruchmann, but in his religious and private life he had been moving steadily in the same direction as Bruchmann.

  During Kupelwieser’s stay in Rome in 1824–25 he associated with the Nazarenes, a colony of German artists there who sought national renewal through religious art that took its models not from antiquity, but from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance in Germany and Italy—from artists such as Dürer, Fra Angelico, Giotto, and Raphael. For a time they led a semi-monastic life together inspired by Fra Angelico, but their aesthetic ideals were shaped by the writings of the Romantics, especially Friedrich von Schlegel’s Ansichten und Ideen von der christlichen Kunst (1802–23).112 (The Nazarenes also had personal connections to Friedrich Schlegel through his wife, Dorothea, who had two sons from her previous marriage who were both painters and Nazarenes.)113 Kupelwieser’s association with the Nazarenes marked a turn in his creative and professional life; after his return from Rome he dedicated himself almost exclusively to religious art, particularly altar paintings.114 As with the Bruchmann siblings, Kupelwieser’s turn to greater religious fervor was soon followed by his marriage to Johanna Lutz. At the wedding Schubert played dances at the piano and would not cede to anyone else (SDB, 554). It is a testament to Kupelwieser’s tact and temperate disposition that after the split he managed to remain on good terms with Schubert, Schober, and Schwind, as well as with Bruchmann and his family.

  The influence of the Nazarenes on the members and former members of the Schobert circle was not limited to Bruchmann and Kupelwieser. Schwind’s teacher in Vienna after 1821 was Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld, whose younger brother Julius was one of the leaders of the Nazarenes.115 Ludwig Ferdinand did not himself become a Nazarene, but he was profoundly influenced by their ideas, not least by their Catholic piety. He was also a close friend of Schlegel and of the dramatist, mystic, and preacher Zacharias Werner, and like them both he converted to Catholicism (in 1821). L. F. Schnorr von Carolsfeld participated in at least some of the readings and Schubertiades of the Schobert circle in 1821– 22, just before his student, Schwind, began spending a lot of time with the circle. Schwind moved from Vienna to Munich in 1828 in part for the chance to work with Peter Cornelius, another important leader of the Nazarenes.116 In Munich he also worked with Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. Both of the painters in the circle, Kupelwieser and Schwind, were thus very closely involved with the Nazarenes, although Schwind followed their painterly ideas, particularly the ideal of Raphael’s beautiful line and clear shapes, rather than their religious ones.

  The final steps in Franz von Bruchmann’s journey away from Greek paganism and the gospel of art and away from Schubert and Schober took him a step beyond even Kupelwieser and the Nazarenes to monasticism. Like his first step toward religion, this ultimate step involved his family. First, his sister Justina died from complications of childbirth (25 August 1829), and her widower husband, Smetana, joined the Redemptorist order (12 November 1829). Next, his wife, Juliane, also died from complications of childbirth (26 October 1830). After a year of self-imposed preparation in Rome with the Nazarenes, Franz von Bruchmann followed his brother-in-law into the Redemptorist order (3 July 1831). Smetana rose to the position of General-Vikar, and Bruchmann became head of the German province of the order, serving in that capacity until two years before his death in 1867 (SDB, 950, 959).

  The Redemptorists were a missionary order, founded in 1732, whose major work was the preaching of parish missions, retreats, and novenas, especially to the poor.117 Its members took vows of poverty, chastity, and lifelong obedience.118 In the first two decades of the nineteenth century their leader Clemens Maria Hofbauer worked tirelessly to promote the restoration of papal influence in Habsburg lands, seeking to undo both the inroads that Enlightenment rationalism had made in the Church and the control the state had seized over the Church under the Josephinian Reforms.119 Because of “the prevalent spirit of Josephinism,” the Redemptorists were not able to establish their first canonical house in Vienna until 1820, several months after Hofbauer had died.120

  If Clemens Maria Hofbauer was the “heart and soul of the Roman Catholic revival,” the “intellectual leader of the Roman Catholic restoration movement” was Friedrich von Schlegel.121 In the years before his death Hofbauer was an “almost daily guest” in the home of Schlegel and his wife, Dorothea.122 As we have seen, Schlegel was also important to the Nazarenes, a close personal friend of Schwind’s teacher, Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld, and since the winter of 1821–22 a frequent advisor and interlocutor to Bruchmann.

  Bruchmann’s religious journey had taken him from aesthetic paganism to Catholicism, to the Nazarenes, and to the ultramontane Redemptorists. His intellectual journey had taken him from being an ardent disciple of Schelling to being a follower of Friedrich von Schlegel—or at least a follower of the person Schlegel had become since his conversion to Catholicism and move to Vienna in 1808: the religious mystic, the apologist for Habsburg absolutism to the German people, and the spokesman for papal absolutism to German-speaking lands.123 By 1820 Friedrich von Schlegel had become the very embodiment of reactionary Romanticism, which Heinrich Heine was to skewer in Die romantische Schule (1835). But the publisher of Concordia had also once published Athenäum, and the author of “Ansichten und Ideen von der christlichen Kunst” had once written Lucinde. The split between Schubert and Schober on the one hand and Bruchmann on the other was also in many ways a split between the values espoused by the Friedrich Schlegel who helped found the Romantic movement in the last years of the eighteenth century and the Friedrich von Schlegel who lived and worked in Vienna during the 1820s.

  “Some half-understood phrases from Lucinde”

  The members of the Schobert circle believed first and foremost in the value of art and were artists, not critics and philosophers. Although Josef Kenner disparaged Schober’s “philosophical system,” it is possible that they never felt it necessary to articulate a unifying rationale for the disparate traits of their community: artistic freedom, religious freedom, social egalitarianism, a loose community of goods, and an ideal of sexual freedom according to which sex should be at liberty to follow the pathways of sentiment. But the ideals and practices of the Schobert circle in the early 1820s are strikingly reminiscent of the ideals first propounded by the founders of the Romantic movement in Berlin and Jena twenty-five years earlier, and that congruence did not arise by chance. A work that the Schobert circle embraced as particularly relevant to their fellowship was also one of the seminal texts of early Romantic
ism: Friedrich Schlegel’s semi-autobiographical novel Lucinde (1799).

  Within the Schobert circle the lovers and chief characters of the novel, Julius and Lucinde, were closely identified with Schober and Justina von Bruchmann. In Bauernfeld’s 1825 Sylvesternacht satire, the speech that he wrote for Schober’s character, Pantalon von Przelavtsch, is a parody of Lucinde, combining much of the language of a famous passage in the novel with the sexual theme of the rest of the novel.124 The passage comes from a section titled “Idylle über den Müßiggang” (Idyll on Idleness), in which Schlegel, speaking through his semi-autobiographical character Julius, questioned the work ethic of modern civil society:

  What is the point of all this striving and progress without interruption and focal point? Can this storm and stress give nourishing sap or a pleasing shape to the infinite plant of humanity, which grows by itself and shapes itself in silence? This empty, restless striving is nothing but a Nordic perversity, and produces nothing but boredom…. Industriousness and utility are the angels of death with the fiery sword, who bar to humans the return to paradise. Only with calm acceptance and meekness, in the holy silence of true passivity, can one remember one’s whole self, and contemplate the world and life…. To sum it all up: the more godly a person or a person’s work, the more they will resemble a plant, which is among all the forms of life the most moral, and the most beautiful. And thus the most perfectly consummated life would be nothing but a pure vegetating.125