Figure 4. Friedrich von Schlegel. Charcoal drawing by Philipp Veit, ca. 1810.
In other sections of Lucinde, Schlegel celebrated sensuality, lust, and sexual fantasy. When the novel was first published many considered it scandalous partly because Julius and Lucinde seemed to represent in undecently unveiled fashion Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea Veit, Moses Mendelssohn’s oldest daughter, who at the time was still married to Simon Veit. A generation later the novel was still controversial, hailed by the like-minded as the “proclamation of the emancipation of the flesh,” and condemned by critics as “an expression of naked sensuality.”126 Schlegel had begun the Romantic campaign in a similar vein, with some aphorisms (Fragmente) in the first issue of his journal Athenäum (1798) designed to épater les bourgeois. Nothing could be more hypocritical, Schlegel argued, than the prevailing prudery, “the affectation of innocence without innocence.” Most modern marriages were in his view little better than concubinage; in enforcing them the state prevents true marriage, which is a unity of souls. Then Schlegel added a few lines designed to shock: “It is difficult to see what one could reasonably object to in a marriage à quatre.”127
Lucinde consistently celebrates those vices that Schober cultivated most egregiously, idleness and lasciviousness, and no doubt one of the reasons Schober was not offended by Bauernfeld’s playlet was that he was flattered by the implied analogy between himself and the young Schlegel. Justina von Bruchmann, for her part, was identified with Lucinde to such an extent that after the Bruchmann-Schober rift Schwind hurried to hide his drawings of some characters out of Lucinde when Schubert and Bauernfeld unexpectedly came calling.128
Bruchmann corroborated the importance of Lucinde to the Schobert circle. After his conversion he described it, along with Schleiermacher’s Reden über die Religion (On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers) and Schelling’s early works, as putting the final touches on what he had already arrived at through studying Fichte, namely a nihilism that denied good and evil.129 This was the “wisdom” with which Bruchmann entered the Senn circle, and when after Senn’s arrest that circle dissolved into two groups, the group he later rejoined, the Schobert group, was characterized by “dedicating their whole lives to pleasure, and a fairly material pleasure at that, and they propped up this shabby bit of wisdom with some half-understood phrases from Lucinde, while the other group was too honest and conscientious to let these kinds of principles guide life, art, and science.”130 Remarkably, even after his conversion, when he was ready to damn almost all he had held dear prior to it, Bruchmann remained reluctant to categorically condemn Lucinde; he implies that his erstwhile friends’ wisdom would have been less shabby had they understood Lucinde better! Indeed, in a letter Schwind wrote to Schober, he complained about the difficulty of understanding Lucinde: “I’m reading Lucinde, but can’t make any progress. Those things I understand I’d like to memorize right away; those I don’t I read three or four times to convince myself that hastiness is not the cause.”131
Bauernfeld’s New Year’s Eve satire, the work of literature most closely identified with Justina von Bruchmann, and Franz von Bruchmann’s post-conversion condemnation of the Senn circle and the Schobert circle had in common Schlegel’s Lucinde. Whether parodied, celebrated, or condemned, the friends seemed to agree on Lucinde as a defining text of the Schobert circle, and as a kind of representation of the circle itself, particularly of the constitutive part Schober played in it.
Lucinde had been one of the most radical of the early Romantic critiques of bourgeois society and the emerging industrial economy in Germany. The “Idylle über den Müßiggang” was part of a broader challenge to a new kind of consumer, someone the Romantics called a philistine. For the philistine nothing had intrinsic worth, value could be reduced to price, and in general, life was reduced to its economic side. For the sake of comfort and security the philistine was willing to spend his time in mindless repetitive routines and conform to the moral, religious, and political status quo. Worst of all, the philistine reduced social relationships to means of achieving mutual economic benefit. To oppose the new materialism the Romantics sought to create a true community of love, which they felt could only be achieved through an open exchange between individuals freed of the pressure to conform. Art would play a crucial role in such a community, awakening all the powers of human empathy and imagination needed to participate in the education of the whole personality, in Bildung. Art could inspire to action where reason alone would fail, and art would restore the magic, beauty, and mystery of the natural and social world, so that the individual could again feel at one with it.132
Lucinde as embraced by the Schobert circle displayed the reciprocal relationship between criticism, art, love, sex, and community as the young Romantics had conceived of it. In Schlegel’s allegorical exposition of his philosophy in Lucinde the same work both disrupted old habits of thought and then healed. The healing function, the spirit of love that is the bond of the true community, and must according to Schlegel be “invisibly visible” everywhere in the work, is present in Lucinde both as prose about sex and more abstractly in the purpose of the novel as a whole.133 Lucinde helps us understand not only the sexual attitudes of the members of the Schobert circle, but also how and why they construed those attitudes as criticism, and why Schubert cared so much about preparing Der Graf von Gleichen for the public, against all odds. The reciprocal functions of Lucinde also help us understand why Schubert and Schwind seemed to feel that Bruchmann’s betrayal of Schober was more than personal, why it was also a betrayal of the core beliefs of the Schobert circle.
Schlegel’s quest for community was the constant that guided his political shift from liberal reformer to supporter of Clemens von Metternich,134 but his vision of the utopian community held together by love and mutual obligation between free and equal persons came to focus more and more on an ahistorical, idealized model of German feudalism in the Middle Ages, supported by a resurgent Roman Catholic Church. The members of the Schobert circle, with their much less grandiose vision for changing the world, probably realized as closely as possible within their small countercultural circle Schlegel’s original vision for a community of love; and their modest and fragile version of the utopian community allowed them—unlike Schlegel—to retain Schlegel’s original political views. On an ideological level, Bruchmann’s estrangement from his friends in the circle can be seen as a rift between early and late Romanticism; or, more accurately, a rift between a second-generation Romanticism that kept the ideals of early Romanticism but scaled down its political ambitions and a second-generation Romanticism that kept its grand political ambitions but changed its ideals to accommodate them. But it was also a rift between those, as Schober put it, “who found our life in art,” and those like Friedrich Schlegel and Bruchmann who were more philosophers than artists, who were inspired by the much grander vision of a community shaped by the German nation and Christianity.
NOTES
1. Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Schubert: A Documentary Biography, trans. Eric Blom (London, 1946), 784 (hereafter SDB), contains a partial key to Schwind’s drawing, which is reproduced on the facing page. Maurice J. E. Brown, “Schwind’s ‘Schubert-Abend bei Josef von Spaun,’” in his Essays on Schubert (London, New York, 1966), 155–68, gives a history of the Schwind drawing. The Kupelwieser painting is reproduced on the page facing, SDB, 484.
2. Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, trans. Rosamond Ley and John Nowell (London, 1958), 370 (hereafter SMF).
3. The documents Deutsch collected and annotated are still the starting point for any Schubert scholar. He first published these in German in 1913, then in a revised English version as SDB; then a U.S. version, The Schubert Reader: A Life of Franz Schubert in Letters and Documents (New York, 1947); and finally again in German, Otto Erich Deutsch, ed. Schubert: Die Dokumente seines Lebens (Kassel, 1964) (hereafter DsL). Although in this article quotations from these documents cite SDB, I have often amended t
he somewhat Macaulayesque translations.
4. That is, anyone with whom Schubert drank brotherhood and with whom he was therefore on a familiar “Du” basis. See the explanation of “drinking brotherhood,” SDB, 296.
5. A regular gathering in a pub.
6. The school run by the Piarists at which Schubert was a scholarship student. See SDB, 7–8, for more on the term and the variety of students in the Stadtkonvikt.
7. David Edward Gramit, “The Intellectual and Aesthetic Tenets of Franz Schubert’s Circle: Their Development and Their Influence on His Music” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1987). For the dates of the circle’s formation, see 32; see Appendix 1, 376–91, for correspondence with or about Schober, including letters written by Anton Spaun, Anton Ottenwalt, Josef Kenner, and Josef Spaun.
8. Rita Steblin, Die Unsinnsgesellschaft: Franz Schubert, Leopold Kupelwieser und ihr Freundeskreis (Vienna, 1998); see 11, 44, for the membership list.
9. Moriz Enzinger, introduction and ed., Franz v. Bruchmann, der Freund J. Chr. Senns und des Grafen Aug. v. Platen: Eine Selbstbiographie aus dem Wiener Schubertkreise nebst Briefen (Innsbruck, 1930), 128–29; all translations are mine.
10. Steblin, Unsinnsgesellschaft, 2–5.
11. See Rita Steblin’s essay on the Nonsense Society in this volume.
12. Hans Joachim Kreuzer, “Freundschaftsbünde–Künstlerfreunde: Das Erbe von Aufklärung und Empfindsamkeit im Schubert-Kreis und seine Verwandlung im romantischen Geist,” in Schubert und Brahms: Kunst und Gesellschaft im frühen und späten 19. Jahrhundert. Dokumentation der Veranstaltungsreihe der Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover 3.–25. November 1997, ed. Arnfried Edler (Augsburg, 2001), 80–81. Kreuzer postulates that in the Schubert circle starting in 1820–21 a new culture of sociability (Geselligkeitskultur) in which music was central replaced the old understanding of (male) friendship that was centered on language and literature.
13. For Schubert’s use of “Schobert,” see SDB, 98. Another conflation would be that used by Friedrich von Schlegel writing to Schwind’s teacher, Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who spoke of “Dein Schober-u. Schuber-Dienstag” (SDB, 254).
14. Schubert to Spaun, 7 December 1822 (SDB, 248). The Schubertiades were held most regularly (once a week at Schober’s on Tuesdays) from about December 1822 to about April 1823.
15. Sent from Zseliz to Breslau, SDB, 374. Swind was Schubert’s nickname for Schwind, while the whole group called Kupelwieser Kuppel.
16. See John M. Gingerich, Schubert’s Beethoven Project (Cambridge, 2014).
17. SMF, 85, 89.
18. On the love-hate relationship that leading members of the Linzer Bildungskreis, especially Kenner and Anton Ottenwalt, had with Schober, see Ilija Dürhammer, “‘Affectionen einer lebhaft begehrenden Sinnlichkeit’: Der ‘Schobert’-Kreis zwischen ‘neuer Schule’ und Weltschmerz,” in Schuberts Lieder nach Gedichten aus seinem literarischen Freundeskreis: Auf der Suche nach dem Ton der Dichtung in der Musik. Kongressbericht Ettlingen 1997, ed. Walther Dürr, Siegfried Schmalzriedt, and Thomas Seyboldt (Frankfurt, 1999), 39–58.
19. Bauernfeld to Ferdinand von Mayerhofer, 27 August 1827, in Neue Dokumente zum Schubert-Kreis: Aus Briefen und Tagebüchern seiner Freunde, ed. Walburga Litschauer (Vienna, 1986), 67; all translations are mine.
20. SDB, 418. After April 1826 Spaun returned to Vienna to take up the office of Third Assessor for the state lottery commission (SDB, 522).
21. Senn himself described this circle retrospectively (1849) as arising spontaneously from the spirit left behind by the “wars of liberation” (Befreiungskriege) of 1813–15 and specifically mentioned Mayrhofer and Schubert as contributors. See Werner Aderhold, “Johann Chrisostomus Senn,” in Schuberts Lieder nach Gedichten aus seinem literarischen Freundeskreis, 99, 107, citing Hugo Klein (1921).
22. After August von Kotzebue, a dramatist of absolutist political views, was assassinated in 1819 by a student, the authorities regarded all student fraternities as extremely suspicious (SDB, 129). See Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 129–31, for details on Senn’s arrest.
23. See the letter Senn wrote to Bruchmann, 28 April 1820, in which he says that since he is being forced to choose between Bruchmann and Schober he will choose Schober (Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 287–88). In an undated letter, estimated by Enzinger as written in February 1822 (291–93, 360), Senn agrees to resume friendship. Bruchmann gives the summer of 1822 as the time when he “once again entered into closer relations with that portion of our earlier group of which I spoke earlier, which had anchored the έν και παν [en kai pan or “one and all”] ‘of its wisdom in the enjoyment of life’” (216, my translation).
24. Ibid., 128–29. See also Ruth Melkis-Bihler, “Politische Aspekte der Schubertzeit,” in Schuberts Lieder nach Gedichten aus seinem literarischen Freundeskreis, 92, where Senn and Mayrhofer were two of twelve persons listed, presumably by the police, as belonging to a “burschenschaftlicher Kreis” (fraternity).
25. SDB, 44. Josef Spaun said that Mayrhofer was “extraordinarily liberal-minded, yes even democratic,” and when Spaun kidded him about his reputation as a strict censor, Mayrhofer said his duty and his opinion differed. Spaun, “Aus den Lebenserinnerungen des Joseph Freiherrn von Spaun,” ed. Carl Glossy, Jahrbuch der Grillparzer Gesellschaft 8 (1898), 295. Mayrhofer was appointed as “dritter Revisor” in November 1814, about the same time he first got to know Schubert. Michael Lorenz, “Dokumente zur Biographie Johann Mayrhofers,” Schubert durch die Brille 25 (June 2000): 29-30.
26. SMF, 63.
27. However, there are more Schubert settings to poems by Schiller, more than sixty settings to more than thirty poems, than settings to poems by Mayrhofer, since Schubert often set and reset the same Schiller poem in several versions.
28. Mayrhofer’s poems were published in Vienna in October 1824 while Schubert was in Zseliz (Lorenz, “Dokumente zur Biographie Johann Mayrhofers,” 47), which would explain the absence of Schubert’s name from the list of subscribers if the poems were subscribed after the end of May when he left for Zseliz. Now in Slovakia, Zseliz was then part of the Habsburgs’ Hungarian lands.
29. SDB, 302, 571.
30. Adam Haller quoting Feuchtersleben: “Mayrhofer’s genius is wasting away, since with Schubert’s death his life has lost its harmonization” (SMF, 56; my translation).
31. In a letter to Schober (5 March 1822), Josef von Spaun refers to Schober, Schubert, and Kupelwieser as the “poetisch-musikalisch-malerische Triumvirat” (SDB, 212–13).
32. Steblin, Unsinnsgesellschaft, 109; SDB, 58–59.
33. In SMF, 239, from a lengthier passage in Eduard von Bauernfeld, “Jugend-freunde—Schwind und Schubert” (hereafter “Jugendfreunde”), chap. 4 in “Aus Alt- und Neu-Wien,” Gesammelte Schriften von Bauernfeld, vol. 12 (Vienna, 1873), 63–66.
34. Schober left Vienna in August 1823 for Breslau and returned in July 1825 (SDB, 287, 428); Kupelwieser left Vienna on 7 November 1823 and returned in August 1825 (SDB, 295–96).
35. Otto Stoessl, Moritz von Schwind: Briefe (Leipzig, n.d. [1924?]), 21, 27, 31; DsL, 203.
36. SDB, 178. The name “Canewas” is said to date from the time when Wasserburgers Café was the Stammlokal of the Schobert circle, that is, 1822. Schober later couched his rejection of Ferdinand Sauter (Dinand) in similar terms: “He doesn’t contribute anything to the society” (SDB, 564).
37. Enzinger, Franz v. Bruchmann, 218.
38. Walther Dürr, in “‘Tatenfluten’ und ‘bessere Welt’: Zu Schuberts Freundeskreisen,” in Schubert und Brahms: Kunst und Gesellschaft im frühen und späten 19. Jahrhundert, 92, discusses An die Musik as the “Motto” for what he calls “the Schober circle” and traces the poem’s connections to Friedrich Schlegel’s understanding of “Universalpoesie” and “Universalkunst” from Athenäum Fragment 116 (1798).
39. SDB, 403; “Jugendfreunde,” 76; SMF, 227.
40. After a year’s hiatus, a Schubertiade was hosted on 29 January 182
5 by Enderes and Witteczek (SDB, 397). They continued to be held on a weekly basis for four months until April 1825 (SDB, 401) and then were not resumed with regularity until December 1826 (SDB, 571). But Schwind did not find the new Schubertiades entirely satisfying: “a mix of faces that are all the same,” he reported to Schober (SDB, 401).
41. Records of these meetings survive mostly in the diaries of the Hartmann brothers, whom Schubert knew from visiting their family in Linz. Fritz and Franz had both been students in Vienna for several years, but only started socializing with the Schobert circle in November 1826 (SDB, 564).
42. At the end of August 1825, Bauernfeld was preparing to translate The Comedy of Errors (Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 30), for the Sollinger (Trentsensky) edition of Shakespeare. During the next three years he also translated Shakespeare’s sonnets and poems (SDB, 548) and The Rape of Lucrece (Litschauer, 60) and wrote three comedies of his own, Der Zweifler, Leichtsinn und Liebe, and Der Brautwerber (SDB, 663). Schwind worked on etchings for Weber’s Freischütz in September 1824 (SDB, 373); he had also finished thirty pen and ink drawings, Der Hochzeitszug des Figaro, by March of 1825 (SDB, 412). He then began producing Mandelbogen (single sheets with cutout figures) for Trentsensky, as well as slipcovers and two large vignettes for the volumes of the Viennese Shakespeare edition (SDB, 462, 471); he also illustrated various poems (SDB, 676–77).
43. See, for example, the New Year’s Eve 1825 satire by Bauernfeld (SDB, 486–501); a difference of opinion between Schober and Spaun over Schubert’s piano sonatas, Opp. 42 and 53, which Schober disliked (SDB, 589); an argument between Schober and Spaun over duels (SDB, 704); Bauernfeld’s diary, end of March 1826, “Schubert and I hold together against many a Schobertian foolishness; Moriz sways back and forth” (Litschauer, Neue Dokumente, 38); an argument between Bauernfeld and Schober about “nationality,” September 1826 (Litschauer, 52), which led to a lengthy exchange of letters between them before they were reconciled. Bauernfeld and Schober had another quarrel, 6 March 1827, because Bauernfeld satirized Schober’s habit of spending evenings at the tavern, which Schober “bore about as well as the lion does the crowing of the rooster” (Litschauer, 59). In March 1827 Bauernfeld wrote in his diary, “Schwind and Schober ever more in conflict. Schober’s total lack of occupation and his relationship with a woman of our circle are the chief sources” (Litschauer, 60).
Franz Schubert and His World Page 15
