Wagner’s lack of interest was consistent with the prevalent critical opinion of Schubert held during the years of Wagner’s youth. Prior to his appropriation as a legitimate popular alternative to things Wagnerian in the late 1850s, Schubert’s place in history had been circumscribed. His achievement, according to Brendel (writing in 1855) was limited to the art song. Brendel dismissed the larger works but lauded Schubert’s elevation of the Lied into a fully contemporary medium of the “German spirit,” through his “expansion” of music’s narrative power on behalf of “the expression of the blossoming of life,” a “deepening of interiority,” the insertion of “subjectivity” into musical drama, and the “nuanced” representation of poetic meaning. Schubert was placed historically as an inspiration for Liszt and Schumann, a remarkable but restricted genius cut short by an early death. His works, for all their virtues, lacked the “grandiose seriousness, the manner, the refined artistic understanding and controlled power” of Beethoven.29
The influential 1861 Neues Universal-Lexikon der Tonkunst edited by Eduard Bernsdorf concurred. The “Great” C-Major Symphony was dismissed on account of its “formal deficiencies.” Schubert merited a place alongside the greatest German composers through his contributions to the Lied, since he brought that uniquely “German possession”—the art song—“to its highest fulfillment.” By perfecting the Lied, he brought an antiquated traditional genre to the limits of its historical significance.30 But it was a sidebar in the progressive march of music history.
This line of criticism would persist. In 1875 Heinrich Köstlin, while conceding that Schubert produced “important works in all musical genres,” observed that his greatness remained tied to the Lied and to music of “profound and moving lyricism” rather than music as an “imposing force that emanates from an organic work of art.” Schubert was akin to a Biedermeier landscape and genre painter who, though evoking charm within an aesthetic of naïve realism, mirrored almost despite himself “the overwrought sentimentality” of his times.31 This argument found a peculiar variant as late as 1900 in the views of Gustav Mahler, for whom barely four chamber works and just forty songs by Schubert were truly great. Mahler deemed Schubert’s melodies to be so “eternal” that they excused his lack of “technical skill” and reliance on an inherently deceitful strategy, repetition (so much so that many works could be cut in half). Nevertheless, for Mahler, the critical fact was that Schubert was unable to develop his material adequately.32
Such views left the way open for Wagner to claim the mantle of Beethoven, which he did most directly in 1870. The reinvention of Schubert as the composer of music capable of competing with the dramatic musical rhetoric of Liszt and Wagner was supported explicitly to blunt Wagner’s claim. To the reinventors Schubert was not only the rightful heir to Beethoven as a matter of history, but also the proper model for the future of music. In Schubert one encountered profundity, organic logic, nobility, individuality and even drama—all without the transgression of norms or historical precedent. As Brahms observed in 1887, “Schubert, not Mendelssohn or Schumann, is Beethoven’s true successor.”33
Culture as History
Wagner’s appropriation of the legacy of Beethoven was based on his own internalization of a mid-nineteenth-century philosophical conceit regarding the existence of an inexorable logic in history. The emergence of Schubert as a popular figure, with unknown major and defining works coming to light in the 1850s and 1860s, coincided with seminal developments in the study of history and culture in German-speaking Europe. Indeed, the strange ahistorical nature of Schubert’s posthumous emergence into the mainstream of classical musical culture made him an awkward subject for late nineteenth-century historians, particularly those who were ardent Wagnerians.
Historians and theorists in the generation after Leopold von Ranke—W. H. Riehl, Jacob Burckhardt, Karl Lamprecht, and Wilhelm Dilthey—all sought to challenge Ranke’s fundamental emphasis on the state and politics as decisive forces in history and as the proper sources for periodization in history. For Ranke, human history was, objectively, a sequence of distinct eras without a discernible overarching trajectory. Therefore, no era possessed a philosophical priority. At midcentury, particularly after the events of 1848, ideas of causality in history came under scrutiny, both the historicist conceit regarding the objective existence of distinct eras in the past, as well as the determinist teleological philosophical claims of Hegel and his followers, notably Marx.
The acquisition of literacy and culture—Bildung—had become a defining ambition of the increasingly dominant German middle classes, who, as Riehl observed in 1864, cultivated a self-conscious collective identity as bearers of a noble historic tradition of Bürgertum.34 The Schubert revival coincided with the search for an objective legitimation of contemporary middle-class cultural practices through the study of history. Music as a shared medium of cultural expression and the rise in popularity of Schubert, seen as a harbinger of the distinctive character of German values, coincided with the wide popularity of programmatic realist novels, such as the spectacularly successful 1855 Soll und Haben by Gustav Freytag (himself an anti-Wagnerian), written to celebrate the distinction and historic role of the German middle classes.35
Notions of history and culture (in a proto-anthropological sense) became ideological battlegrounds in the process of German unification after 1848. How did culture, or rather, a unified cultural sensibility and habits emerge? How might culture—including mores—be understood as coherent? If identifiable as a separate force, was culture itself a causal factor in historical change in politics and economics? Or was culture—literature, music, the visual arts, and philosophical ideas—subordinate to, or contingent on, the “real” forces in history: political power and material, economic conditions? Might culture be a primary historical factor, not only independent of economics and politics, but itself a shaping element in history?
These were not idle academic questions. Both the controversy between Heinrich von Treitschke and Riehl at the end of the 1850s about whether culture and society could be studied properly apart from politics, and the more extensive controversy over methods (Methodenstreit) that engulfed the writing of history at the turn of the nineteenth century were tied to ongoing struggles over politics, including the character of the new German State—its legitimacy, its origins, its connection to German language and culture outside of the post-1870 empire, its political system, and its relationship to the competing claims of liberalism and monarchical conservatism.36 Culture was seen as increasingly relevant to the sense of what Germany had become, and to its perhaps “special” path and unique destiny in history.
Herbeck’s evocation of Schubert’s “German” character as distinctly influenced by a gentle warm spirit characteristic of the south, in direct contrast to the dark forests of the north, was a transparent cultural metaphor that juxtaposed two norms, the Austrian and the Prussian. As the inevitability of a Prussian and North German political solution to unification became apparent in the 1860s, the fear of the loss of a German connection to the Italianate—visible in Goethe’s and Mendelssohn’s romance with Italy and the work of the “German Roman” school of painters, including Schubert’s friend Leopold Kupelwieser, who studied in Rome—was palpable. In this sense the impetus behind the rediscovery of Schubert during the 1860s went beyond music. The intense debate over defining culture as a factor in the laws of historical change heightened the stakes surrounding the midcentury reevaluation of Schubert; as an Austro-German figure his ties to the south seemed inscribed in his music.
Riehl, Burckhardt, Lamprecht, and Dilthey each had a deep, active interest in contemporary musical culture. They were (not always approving) witnesses of the dramatic expansion of the audience for music after 1848, as evidenced by the growth in amateurism, music education, music publishing, instrument manufacture, and concert life. These developments helped confirm the perception that the rate and nature of change during the second half of the century was unprecedented and
traumatic. Change ranged from population growth and migration to the transformation of agriculture and industry, the rise of cities and, for German-speaking Europe, the political resolution of a burgeoning nationalism through the creation of the klein-deutsch Prussian-dominated German Empire after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.
Historians struggled to understand the present in terms of the past. Was there such a thing as progress? Was there an endpoint to human development? What were the causes of change? Was it possible to grasp, in a manner that approximated or emulated the methods of science, a logic and coherence in history that illuminated the origins of social habits and justified sensibilities regarding collective identity and allegiance? Was the objective study of humankind and history—the human sciences—possible? Could it explain the past and present, even if it did not offer, as Marx claimed, a determined pathway into the future? And central to all these questions for the post-Ranke generation was the issue of the autonomy of culture and therefore music in shaping historical change.
By the time Schubert and Beethoven were reburied in adjoining plots in Vienna’s Central Cemetery with considerable pomp and circumstance in 1888, Schubert’s place in the larger frame of history had shifted from the periphery to the center. What did Schubert reveal in terms of what was distinctive about modern life and culture? As a representative of Classical aesthetic norms that transcended historical change, he had been placed alongside Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and in this sense he was a reminder of the dangers of modernity and the elusiveness of progress in aesthetics and mores. Yet he was also a unique forerunner, a legitimate symbol of a vital German spirit that existed beyond the terms set by Wagner. Schubert’s status as part historical and part contemporary, linked to a Classical, high-art tradition yet also a widely popular cultural symbol, made him a fiercely contested figure. In Vienna, Schubert’s dual resonance as reminder of the past and influential contemporary assumed particular urgency during the last decades of the Habsburg Empire and during the First Republic before the Anschluss.
The most significant contribution to the historical question of the origins and character of nineteenth-century modernity was the appearance in 1869 of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy, a work written in the very decade of renewed enthusiasm for Schubert. Burckhardt’s central thesis was that modernity had its roots in the Renaissance, and his aesthetic sympathies and prejudices help explain why he became one of Brahms’s favorite authors. According to Burckhardt, what characterized modernity was the emergence of the idea of individuality and the valorization of the private person as separate from a corporate or collective entity. Individualism, particularly in the arts, became a decisive marker of nineteenth-century culture; it had been nascent in the plastic arts and literature of the Renaissance, and had blossomed in the political theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Although music became in Burckhardt’s view a prominent cultural medium only after 1600, the role of singing in Renaissance music underscored for him the highlighting of the individual as a distinct actor in life and history; it provided a public “exhibition of the individual man in society.”37
Burckhardt was an avid amateur. He played the piano, even composed, and wrote music criticism early in his career in Basel, although in his later years he retreated from taking a role in music as a critic or active amateur. His tastes were distinctly anti-Wagnerian. Writing to the distinguished German jurist Friedrich von Preen (1823–1894), he derided the passion for Wagner as an example of the “horrendous” contemporary taste for luxury and the allure of a spiritual “nervousness” in the music. He expressed the hope that the Italians would not fall prey to the Wagnerian enthusiasms that had spread through German-speaking Europe, and thereby lose their natural lyricism.38
Each evening when he could no longer work, Burckhardt turned to his vast music library of piano vocal scores of operas, Lieder, and oratorios. His tastes ranged from Bach to Mozart, Cherubini, Rossini, and Verdi (but not Bizet). Mozart, like Raphael, was his ideal. Individuality and a Classicist sense of form were perfectly balanced in their work; Schubert and Weber—both defining figures in Romanticism before 1830—were not far behind. They had the virtue of appealing to a contemporary sensibility. The sensibility Schubert shared with Beethoven was the capacity to translate into the realm of the beautiful—into musical moments of joy—the subjective temporal transfiguration of the mundane realities in an individual’s life. As Burckhardt observed on New Year’s Day in 1887, only composers were granted this moment, though perhaps Raphael might have been an exception.39
Music was the prime medium for communicating a highly individualized expression of subjectivity that corresponded with an element of shared truth about reality. It was the most personal and intimate art form, the one most capable of expressing the individual. Beethoven was akin to Michelangelo—an instance of unparalleled individuality—but an intemperate one, suggesting the danger posed to norms of aesthetic beauty by the nineteenth century’s cult of originality. Schubert possessed, in contrast, a calm and economical intensity regarding the truth. His music did not decorate, deceive, or camouflage. Rather, it shared the intimate and gave voice to the individual, all through a command of beauty.
For Burckhardt, Schubert realized the essence of music. As Burckhardt observed:
At the extreme frontier of art … we find music, which, if we wish to penetrate the essence of its being, must be taken as instrumental music, detached from words and, above all, apart from dramatic representation…. [Music] is a comet, circling round life in a vastly high and remote orbit, yet suddenly sweeping down closer to it than any other art, and revealing to man his inmost heart. Sometimes it is a kind of mathematics of imagination—then again just pure soul, infinitely far, yet close and dear. Its effect (where such effect is genuine) is so great and so immediate that the feeling of gratitude at once seeks for its creator and spontaneously proclaims him great. The great composers are among the most undisputed great men.40
Burckhardt’s admiration and ambivalence regarding Beethoven reveals the extent to which he was overcome, like Brahms, with a sense that in the growing attachment to music as the medium of drama and radical individuality he was witnessing a decline in taste and standards. In 1878 he confessed to Preen his fear that the broadening of the public and the cheapening of taste over the past two decades might ultimately obscure from future historians’ view all that was truly beautiful in the music of first half of the nineteenth century. Would the renewed interest in Schubert and the iconic status of the B-Minor Symphony succeed in retarding the widespread enthusiasm for mere dramatic effect, justified in the name of Beethoven? Was not the ideal contemporary synthesis of beauty in form and expression—what Cornelius called “the subjectively unstable”41—to be found in Schubert?
Karl Lamprecht’s reputation among historians never rivaled that of Burckhardt, but in his day he was perhaps more widely read and influential. He developed a theory of history that suggested music could be a central factor in the trajectory of history, a vital human activity that had causal consequences. Music, according to him, was a catalyst within the psychological life of humanity. It mirrored and shaped humanity’s inner life, its Seelenleben. In Lamprecht’s view, a key to understanding history was human nature as revealed through the still young science of psychology. This methodology put him at odds with a tradition of historical writing that began with Ranke and would reach its finest moment in the work of Max Weber. Lamprecht focused particularly on the human “capacity for fantasy” (Phantasiethätigkeit), and therefore on aesthetic proclivities. Aesthetic ideals in history prefigured the formulation of a new moral code (Sittenlehre) and worldview (Weltanschauung). In short, music was a leading force in modern history.42
Unlike Burckhardt, Lamprecht was not a cultural pessimist. For him, the distinguishing feature of post-1870 modernity was the transition from an age of assertive individuality to the contemporary age of radical subjectivity. The “total work of art” of Wagner e
xemplified subjective modernity through its synthesis of sound and word into drama. The use of extended chromatic harmony to represent nuances of psychological feelings and the emphasis on “sensation”—color and effect—in the orchestra were markers of a subjectivist outlook, where the total experience of the individual, not external reality, held sway. Wagner’s successors, notably Richard Strauss, went further with Wagner’s epoch-making appropriation of music as an instrument of subjective expression. Music held the key to understanding the essence of modern culture. “So it is proper,” wrote Lamprecht, “that the effort for a cultural historical understanding of the most recent past—and at the same time, our immediate present—begins with the retelling and elaboration of the great occurrences in musical art, and closes with the presentation of the most recent progress in worldview.”43
At the same time Lamprecht grasped the unusual but pivotal place occupied by Schubert in history. Schubert represented the transition from the age of individuality to the modern age of the subjective. Lamprecht understood the paradox of Schubert’s twin identity as an icon from the past and as a contemporary aesthetic force. “What better can be said,” he wrote, “of the weighty philosophy of his apparently unfinished sublime B-Minor Symphony than that it is worthy of being contemporary with that greatest of the great, who died just one year before him, and yet appears related to the work born much later of a Brahms?”44 Lamprecht located the impetus behind the midcentury embrace of Schubert not so much in Schubert as a historical figure, but in Schubert’s role as a newly discovered antidote to Wagnerism.
Franz Schubert and His World Page 40
