Franz Schubert and His World

by Gibbs, Christopher H. , Solvik, Morten

  Example 3. Sehnsucht, D879, mm. 1–25.

  Though the harmonic trajectory of each strophe is different, Schubert returns to the tonic for each new beginning—to D minor for strophes one, two, and four; D major for the apostrophe to the beloved star in three, and again when the star’s glow touches the poet in strophe five. The first three strophes elide one into the next and the later ones close firmly. This is underscored by the words in the last line of each, which are always heard twice, followed by an echo of the formulaic cadence in the piano. The only exception to this pattern is in strophe three where the words “dich lieb’ und brauch’ ich ja” repeat instead. A casual translation of this line, “you know that I love and need you,” would miss a crucial point expressed in the poet’s word order: by placing dich at the head of the clause, ich at the end, a special emphasis is created: “You know ‘tis you I love and need.” Seidl’s positioning of the deictic pronoun dich lays stress on the identity of the beloved, and Schubert has us linger over these words.

  In the poem’s cryptic final couplet the formulation “Wenn mich mein Loos vom Liebchen warf” is awkward, undoubtedly because the poet was constrained by the need for a rhyme with “singen darf.” Words declaimed in song will sometimes rearrange themselves in our heads when musical forces gain the upper hand. To make a better fit with Schubert’s buoyant, upbeat music my own mind strains to assemble a meaning to this effect: If my lot’s been thrown to me by my love (“Wenn mir mein Loos das Liebchen warf “) then I feel that I may sing. His “Liebchen” grants him permission to sing, in conformance, say, with the courtly love tradition whereby a lowborn singer takes commands from his lady. But the syntax won’t allow this—“mich” is the accusative reflexive pronoun, not the dative “mir.”

  All these problems fall away if we take into account something external to the text. The song dates from the spring of 1826 and the poem was published that same year, just as tensions were mounting in Vienna.44 The three words on which this politicized hearing turns (less so a song about absent love, which can run parallel to it until the trouble at the end) are “Lieb,” so drastically underscored by Schubert; “darf “; and most inconspicuous of all, “fühl.” Moreover, Schubert’s setting does indeed perfectly take the last line at face value, only with a different mien than we may have first thought.

  “Words are proscribed,” Franz Grillparzer would observe in an April 1826 conversation with Beethoven, “it’s a good thing that tones, the exponential representatives of words, still are free.” This remark was entered into Beethoven’s conversation book just a few days after the raid on the literary association and social club known as the Ludlamshöhle (which took place during the night of 18 April and continued into the wee hours of the next morning).45 Grillparzer, who was placed under house arrest, and Seidl were both members; Schubert and Eduard von Bauernfeld (1802–1890), author of the libretto for Schubert’s Der Graf von Gleichen (it would be banned in October) and a passionate advocate of free speech, were on the verge of joining. By chance, the whole affair landed on Bauernfeld’s desk (he was an intern—Konzepts-Praktikant—in the department of the Lower Austrian Government that was expected to ratify such charges) and he was able to sweep it under a busy rug: “Had the police delayed their interventions by but a single day Schubert and I would also have become ‘Ludlamites’ and I might have had to assist at my own enquiry. What irony!”46 Even before this incident, however, there was talk that the censors did not have control over music. The political meaning in Sehnsucht comes together by a counterintuitive accent and the realization that “Lieb” or “Liebchen” names the ideal: “Wenn mich mein Loos vom Liebchen warf, / Dann fühl’ ich, daß ich singen darf” (If it is my lot to be cast away from my beloved Liberty then I truly feel that I may sing, that I may sing). The piano, all alone at the final cadence, has the last word: “singen.” I may sing—but not declare my love openly. Perhaps it was here that the political and the personal merged (Example 4).

  Tucked away in the new Schubert edition’s typescript critical report for volume 5 of Lieder (1985) is mention of an intriguing autograph leaf in Seidl’s Nachlass in which the poem appears outfitted with an alternate final couplet: “Muß ich, mein Lieb, dir ferne seyn, / Gleich stellt das Lied von selbst sich ein!” This is no less ambiguous. The antecedent clause is clear as “If I must be distant from you, my love,” but the consequent “sich einstellen” can suggest numerous possibilities. Are we to understand “Then, promptly, the song does (my) duty all by itself “? If so: in love or in war? Or perhaps we hear “stellt … sich ein” as a form of “zusammenstellen” (to put together), allowing the meaning “Suddenly the song comes together all by itself “? Too many mixed signals fly for any one meaning, or even a pun, to spring into place.

  Further small variants in the manuscript poem let us conclude that this was likely the earlier draft (see Figure 4). The second stanza’s first line reads “Mir fehlt etwas, das merk ich gut.” Beneath merk (to notice) we can just make out an erased fühl (to feel), the word that appears both in Schubert’s song and in Seidl’s 1826 publication, but this substitution was plainly made because fühl recurred in the last lines of the same stanza, “Und will ich in die Sterne seh’n, / Fühl ich die Augen übergeh’n” (When I wish to gaze into the stars, I feel my eyes brim over), a routine formulation next to the publication’s “muß stets das Aug’ mir übergeh’n” (again and again my eye must brim over). The excision of fühl at this point frees up this word for “Dann fühl ich, daß ich singen darf.” The only other variants are minor (but telling) ones. The penultimate stanza ends “Weil nimmer sich erzwingen lässt / Weil’s frei hinsäuselt wie der West” (in place of “Weil’s nimmer sich erzwingen lässt / Und frei hinsäuselt wie der West” in the publication). In the manuscript poem, interestingly, the first of these two clauses floats free of any referent; for a brief instant we do not know what will not be forced.

  Example 4. Sehnsucht, D879, mm. 73–89.

  Although the sense of the closing couplet in the manuscript poem is just as indeterminate as in the publication, its rhythm, sounds, and rhyme make better poetry than “Wenn mich mein Loos vom Liebchen warf.” A political meaning is not impossible but it is more remote. How, when, or from whom the suggestion came to replace the final couplet we do not know. Only one thing is sure: the manuscript version cannot be sung to Schubert’s music. His entire song is calibrated to be able to proclaim at the end: “daß ich singen darf.”

  Sehnsucht is only one song among many (Der zürnenden Diana is another) that must have delighted attentive listeners who recognized Schubert’s virtuoso command of music’s power to shape verbal meaning. In Sehnsucht the pleasing surface and understated rhetoric create emphases similar to the subtle verbal stresses that skilled actors like Nestroy employed on the stage to get around what censorship forbade.

  Figure 4. Johann Gabriel Seidl, Sehnsucht, autograph ms., Wienbibliothek.

  NOTES

  1. Beethoven’s own Fidelio is a case in point. Even at the 1805 premiere the French libretto’s revolutionary-era story was displaced to sixteenth-century Seville to escape Viennese censorship (in contrast to adaptations of this story for other European stages). For the 1814 revival strategic revisions to the libretto and music made the story current, yet the freedom that Beethoven’s Fidelio held out remained but a fervent hope and the historical mask was not lifted.

  2. August von Kotzebue, Ode an Napoleon (Moscow, 1813), 12. My translation. “Mögen Tausende zu Grunde gehen, hingewürgt von Hunger, Pest und Schwert; Wenn nur siegreich Deine Fahnen wehen, und Dich nichts in Deinen Planen stört. Nenne dich die Welt entmenschter Tyger! Treu und Glauben schändender Betrüger! Immerhin, bist Du allein doch Sieger! Dieser Zweck ist jedes Mittel werth.” One revision Georg Friedrich Treitschke made to Beethoven’s Fidelio in 1814 was to add a dramatic recitative for Leonore (adapted from Ferdinando Paer’s Leonora), “Abscheulicher! Wo eilst du hin?” In it, she excoriates the tyrant who no long feels pity, no longer h
ears humanity’s voice, has but a “Tigersinn” (the mind of a tiger). The vast majority of publications listed in Ernst Weber’s Lyrik der Befreiungskriege (1812–1815): Gesellschaftspolitische Meinungs- und Willensbildung durch Literatur (Stuttgart, 1991), 336–59, are poems and songs celebrating German emancipation and war heroes, but Weber also turned up two volumes apparently in praise of Napoleon “from one of his most avid followers and admirers” in Königsberg, ca. 1813–14 (343), and the above-mentioned ode attributed to Kotzebue (341).

  3. A fuller biographical sketch of Körner may be found in Susan Youens, Schubert’s Poets and the Making of Lieder (Cambridge, 1996), 51–150. Besides Schubert’s settings of Körner she discusses settings by north German composers. Details about Körner’s competing offers from Pállfy and Lobkowitz and his activity as a court poet are included in the narrative biography by Heribert Rau, Theodor Körner: Vaterländischer Roman in zwei Theilen (Leipzig, 1863).

  4. Jonathan Sperber, “The Atlantic Revolutions in the German Lands, 1776–1849,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, ed. Helmut Walser Smith (Oxford, 2011), 144–168, esp. 158. The picture he sketches is broad but Sperber believes that the early German nationalists were not concerned, as were their Atlantic revolutionary counterparts, with “the creation of a nation of equal citizens, repudiating the distinctions of the old regime society of orders” (157). Theirs was less a class struggle than an effort to forge a national identity, to which end they employed a range of scientific evidence, linguistic theories, and philosophical arguments.

  5. Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne: A Memorial, translated with excellent commentary and an introduction by Jeffrey L. Sammons (Rochester, NY, 2006), xi.

  6. The poet Wilhelm Müller fought in the war against Napoleon as well as in the Greek war of independence. In 1822 the journal Urania (the1823 issue contained the first twelve poems of his Winterreise) was given the Viennese censor’s damnatur, hence it was not for sale in Austria. Susan Youens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s “Winterreise” (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 10. Schubert originally set only these twelve poems. He kept intact their order in Urania even after composing part two of Winterreise (in the month following the poet’s death) from the new poems Müller had interleaved before reissuing his poetic cycle.

  7. Hans Sturmberger reports that as punishment for his free-thinking ideas C. E. Bauernschmied was appointed censor in Linz. The influence of Bavarian constitutionalism—Bavaria was under French stewardship—was even more pronounced there than in Vienna. Sturmberger, Der Weg zum Verfassungsstaat: Die politische Entwicklung in Oberösterreich von 1791–1861 (Vienna, 1962), 29. Contemporary reports abound of Metternich’s efforts to enlist dissident liberals as censors: Joseph Schreyvogel succumbed in 1817; Charles Sealsfield resisted. In Johann Nestroy’s 1848 play Freiheit in Krähwinkel the liberal Ultra replies to just such an offer from the Burgomeister with a brilliant tirade against censorship. Censorship restrictions finally were lifted in March 1848, only to be reinstated by year’s end. Following the premiere in Vienna on July 1, Freiheit in Krähwinkel played nightly to a packed house until the end of the season. Johann Nestroy, Stücke 26.1, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. John R. P. McKenzie (Vienna, 1995), 1–2.

  8. James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866, The Oxford History of Modern Europe, ed. Lord Bullock and Sir William Deakin (Oxford, 1989), 423–24.

  9. Moriz Enzinger, “Zur Biographie des Tiroler Dichters Joh. Chrys. Senn,” Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen 156 (1929): 169–83; letter of 24 February 1823 (176).

  10. Werner Ogris, “Die Zensur in der Ära Metternich,” in Humaniora Medizin—Recht—Geschichte: Festschrift für Adolf Laufs zum 70. Geburtstag (Berlin, 2006), 248. Gentz had already backed away from his early support of the French Revolution after reading and translating Edmund Burke’s pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France ca. 1793.

  11. Senn’s story has often been told and Schubert’s two songs on poems of Senn, Selige Welt (D743) and Schwanengesang (D744), have been richly explored in recent years. Suzannah Clark’s analysis of the “transformational” voice leading in Selige Welt, for example, is in dialogue with Gottfried Wilhelm Fink’s (we believe) observations on harmony and Charles Rosen’s comments on rhythm, phrase structure, and the song’s political implication. See Clark, Analyzing Schubert (Cambridge, 2011), 67–73. Fink’s remarks appeared anonymously in the 24 June 1824 issue of the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung; Rosen’s in “Schubert’s Inflections of Classical Form,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge, 1997), 77–78. Susan Youens explores how Schubert revisited Schwanengesang in another A-flat minor-major piece belonging to the same genre in “Swan Songs: Schubert’s ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen,’” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 5/2 (2008): 19–42. Philosophical (Hegelian) and political meanings in the Senn songs are taken up by Werner Aderhold in “Johann Chrisostomus Senn,” 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, Karlsruher Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 97–111. Aderhold also contributed entries on these songs to the Schubert Liedlexikon, ed. Walther Dürr, Michael Kube, Uwe Schweikert, and Stephanie Steiner, in collaboration with Michael Kohlhäufl (Kassel, 2012), 591–92.

  12. Christian Jansen, “The Formation of German Nationalism, 1740–1850,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, ed. Helmut Walser Smith (Oxford, 2011), 234–59, 243.

  13. Ibid., 244–48. Jansen carefully notes regional differences (Bavarian, Prussian) in the accelerating development of organized nationalism. To indicate the range of early German nationalisms he provides sketches of the thinking of five influential representatives: Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the founder of gymnastic (paramilitary) societies with nationalist aspirations, and Ernst Moritz Arndt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher, and Heinrich Luden, 245ff.

  14. Sturmberger reports this in Der Weg zum Verfassungsstaat 27, citing G. Grüll, Die Robot in Oberösterreich (1952), 216ff.

  15. Michael Kohlhäufl, Poetisches Vaterland: Dichtung und politisches Denken im Freundeskreis Franz Schuberts (Kassel, 1999), 260. Kohlhäufl’s book sheds much light on political imagery in the poems that Schubert chose to set; he leaves others to explore how Schubert’s music inflects those meanings.

  16. I have discussed several such censorship incidents in the opening chapters of my book Vanishing Sensibilities: Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann (New York, 2012).

  17. Six hundred thousand soldiers fought for three days in this bloody battle known as the Völkerschlacht before Napoleon’s French army, supplemented by Italian, Polish, and German troops from the Confederation of the Rhine, lost to the coalition of Russians, Prussians, Austrians, and Swedes.

  18. Ludwig Börne: A Memorial, 75–76. My brief quotations are all from Sammons’s translation. “Alt Deutsch” refers to the propensity of the early nationalist groups to trace their tribal roots back to the Middle Ages.

  19. Ibid., 89. These remarks take aim at the conservative critic Wolfgang Menzel, who, to Heine’s witty and earnest relief, “joyfully vaulted back into the old circle of ideas … after the air grew cooler.”

  20. Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne: Eine Denkschrift und kleinere politische Schriften, ed. Helmut Koopman, vol. 11 of Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr (Hamburg, 1978), 83–84, 97–98. Heine writes Teutschthümler when he speaks of Menzel (see 84 and 97), mimicking one such mannerism. For more examples see vol. 11’s massive critical commentary. Members of a Burschenschaft in Linz also had distinctive paraphernalia, carrying gnarled walking sticks with friends’ names carved into them or wearing unmarked white caps. Sturmberger, Der Weg zum Verfassungsstaat, 22.

  21. Heinrich Heine, Briefe aus Berlin, ed. Jost Hermand, vol. 6 of Windfuhr, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, 43, 367. See also “The Formation of Ge
rman Nationalism, 1740–1850,” 247. Heine’s readiness to name the names of political (nationalist) activists so soon after the Carlsbad Decrees was noted with surprise in the contemporary press.

  22. French Affairs: Letters from Paris, vol. 7, bk. 1 of The Works of Heinrich Heine, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland (Hans Breitmann) (London, 1893), 14.

  23. There is just one more Körner song from 1818. Ilija Dürhammer, “Deutsch- und Griechentum. Johann Mayrhofer und Theodor Körner,” in Schubert 200 Jahre, Schloß Achberg: Ich lebe und componiere wie ein Gott,” ed. Ilija Dürhammer and Till Gerrit Waidelich (Heidelberg, 1997), 21–24.

  24. Ruth Melkis-Bihler, “Politische Aspekte der Schubertzeit,” in Schuberts Lieder nach Gedichten aus seinem literarischen Freundeskreis, 1–96, quote at 92. Her information on Senn’s and Mayrhofer’s fraternity membership is drawn from Max Doblinger and Georg Schmidgall, Geschichte und Mitgliederverzeichnisse burschenschaftlicher Verbindungen in Alt-Österreich und Tübingen 1816–1936, with an introduction by Paul Wentzke, Burschenschafterlisten, vol. 1, ed. Paul Wentzke (Görlitz, 1940), 15. The full list of twelve is Franz v. Bruchmann; Graf Colloredo (formerly a “Prager Teutone”); Anton, Freiherr von Doblhoff-Dier; Alois Fischer; “Gerhardi … aus Göttingen”; Karl Hieber; Karl Kiesewetter; Johann Mayrhofer; Josef von Scheiger; Georg Schuster; Johann Senn (later a member of Libera Germania Innsbruck); Karl Stegmayer. Doblinger and Schmidgall report that the police broke up the group even before it could be formally constituted as a Burschenschaft but that its members had already undertaken outings called “Turnfahrten” (14). Senn was arrested following a party for Alois Fischer that Bruchmann and Schubert also attended on 20 January 1820. Gerhardi fled to Prague and shot himself before the police could catch up with him. See also Enzinger, “Zur Biographie des Tiroler Dichters Joh. Chrys. Senn,” 172.