Kürnberger noted the irony, also perceived by Schlögl, that the admirable Viennese attitude to life encapsulated in the term Gemütlichkeit had been hijacked and undermined, if not perverted and destroyed, just as it had became world-famous. Furthermore, the Viennese, mostly newcomers who lacked Old Vienna’s virtues, were the first to idealize it in a depoliticized form at odds with its true historical character—to praise it, imitate and glorify it as a civic virtue. As Kürnberger observed in a glowing 1873 review of Schlögl’s most famous book, Wiener Blut, the real simplicity of mores and manners that once existed had little in common with any imitation mannerism and mythic redefinition by later generations. The myth of Gemütlichkeit in its modern form—which persists to this day—was a dishonor to the past, and a reflection of the philistinism of culture divorced from the engagement with an unvarnished account of daily life:
Our locale for “Viennese Blood” is that place of south-German laxity, multiplied with Slav slovenliness and rounded out by the clerical and secular mismanagement of a centuries-old Dalai-Lama absolutism. Thus there is inevitably much corrupted blood in that “Viennese Blood,” and the person who does not gloss over that fact is Friedrich Schlögl. He shows us indolence, frivolity, vulgarity, moral depravity, impotent childishness, sacrilegious lust, craving, smutty fanaticism, hatred of education and intellectuals, and the obdurate, absolute, self-affirmative roguishness with that firm German hand of a true Dutchman who does not falsify anything. He tells truth directly and dares to spit where there is no spittoon. But the compatriot who is in the know and is privy to this intimate material tells himself in astonishment: So you know all that too; you have seen it and have conjugated it like we do, yes, dissected it even more visually, and still, your love for the people and the country did not suffer a shipwreck on those countless and forlorn cliffs? Or vice versa: So much love did not blind you and your eyes stayed clear and open? It did not make you weak and your anger remained firm and your disgust healthy, precisely where a forceful repulsion remained in its proper place? And now we can sense something of the true meaning of “Gemütlichkeit.” We see the golden pearl of its most fine-grained gold.63
Schubert, through his music, remained an honest witness and protagonist of the best of Old Vienna—a morality tale of its virtues. He was the era’s “golden pearl”—not a dated relic from the past and not like Beethoven detached from the material and physical reality of the local. Three elements came forth in his work—a subjective emotional voice that responded to nature and life in Vienna with a disarming directness immediately evocative of local mores; a beauty of melody and musical logic transcending the local; and a profundity connected to the real experience of life that transfigured the harsh rootedness of the local.
At the core of this was a genuinely Viennese voice that through its aesthetic power could serve as an alternative model of the dominant modern German spirit. For this reason Kürnberger took aim at the modern enthusiasm for Schubert within the city that was most famously symbolized by the erection in 1872 in the Stadtpark of a Schubert monument. Kürnberger considered “the plague of monuments” dedicated to cultural heroes a reflection of the new elite of businessmen who were so self-conscious of their own apparent Bildung and discernment, so eager to display wealth and cosmopolitan pretense, that they sought to build garish public monuments rather than emulate the virtues of “the man whose name has been familiar to us for a long time.” Kürnberger commented with disdain on subsequent plans for a Schiller monument; it seemed as if the Viennese in charge were concerned with appearances, “covering up” as a liar might “the conscience of truth” by creating a false synthesis between an idealized neoclassicism and modern realism, ending up with an impossible distortion of the true reason to honor Schubert and Schiller. But the rage for displaying civic enthusiasm for high culture was unstoppable. Kürnberger suggested, sarcastically perhaps, that a whole array of bases for future monuments be built to more quickly satisfy the needs of “the unknown, the men of the monument committee. The famous person is the means, but the unknown are their ends in themselves. Monuments are erected to make unknown quantities famous.”64
The most prominent of this new elite, these “unknown quantities,”was no doubt Nikolaus Dumba (1830–1900), an industrialist and an amateur singer who was a fanatical Schubert admirer. He was instrumental in organizing the funding of the 1872 Stadtpark Schubert monument through his leadership in the Wiener Männergesangverein (Vienna Male Choral Society), a prominent civic organization founded in 1843 with a largely middle-class membership.65 Dumba, who came from a Greek-Austrian family, was not only a music enthusiast but a collector and patron of the visual arts as well. He would later commission Gustav Klimt to do what has become an iconic mural of Schubert at the piano in 1898 for the music room in his Ringstrasse palace (destroyed in 1945).
The cult of Schubert in Vienna in which Dumba played such a leading role led in 1863 to the founding of the second major Viennese male choir made up of teachers—the Schubertbund.66 Glorifying Schubert was inextricably tied to the appropriation by newcomers and a new generation of a traditional Viennese conceit of cultural discernment and grace rooted in local nostalgia—nostalgia for the remnants and reminiscences of the rural within the urban, the evocation of nature, the ideal of human modesty and simplicity, a way of life before the walls came tumbling down: more carefree, relaxed, humble, and warm. The nostalgia was for a city in which the population had been homogenous (unvermischt, as Schlögl put it)67 and not polluted by the massive post-1867 emigration of Moravians, Bohemians, southern Slavs, Poles, and above all, Jews.
The affectation of Old Viennese mores and attitudes appealed to those who wished to prove how much they were truly Viennese. Authenticity took the form of a reimagined Vormärz Viennese sensibility. What better medium to embrace than Schubert, himself a reimagined witness of that very past? Franz Mair (1821–1893), the composer and teacher who founded and led the Schubertbund, was born and raised in Weikendorf, in Lower Austria. He became Schubert’s devoted advocate after his career brought him permanently to Vienna. It was he who conducted the choir that accompanied the reburial of Schubert in 1888. He was an epigone as a composer, eager to be taken seriously. Liszt’s praise for one of his works in 1855 remained the high point of his career.
The formation of the Schubertbund was about art as much as politics. Mair was a liberal in the 1848 context, and in the 1850s he joined his fellow teachers in a political movement to create a teacher’s organization. As part of the planned teachers’ association, he proposed the creation of a choral society to strengthen the sense of solidarity among teachers and increase the visibility of the profession and its members. Schubert offered the ideal name; after all, he and his father and brothers had been teachers.68
Before the founding of the Schubertbund, Mair had been part of the Männergesangverein, the organization that spearheaded the Schubert cult in the 1850s. Interestingly, the repertoire of the Männergesangverein in its first two decades was not particularly dominated by the music of Schubert.69 Only a few works were done. Schubert came rather to represent to the members their own solid, Viennese middle-class virtues—education, aesthetic judgment, simplicity, and patriotism. That Schubert composed for friends, lived with them, and remained close to his family made him an apt symbol of friendship, family, and community—communal virtues which were institutionalized in the mission of the choral societies of German-speaking Europe. His loyalty to the local and his use of music to cement and define community were transformed into ideological emblems of a city once bound not by economic interests, but by organic cultural connections within the middle-class citizenry.
In this manner Schubert the man achieved more local fame than did Schubert’s music. The myth of how his person was embodied in music became linked to the idealization of the authentic pre-1848 Viennese, the quintessential Austro-German. Above all, Schubert was the “man of the people”—a teacher and non-aristocrat of modest economic means who nonethel
ess rose to be the last exponent of the Viennese musical Classical tradition. This view of Schubert as representing the best in the mores and habits of the citizens of Old Vienna, who at the same time became a master equal to Mozart and Haydn, was endorsed by Viennese critics at the end of the century. Between the 1870s and the early 1900s Eduard Hanslick, Robert Hirschfeld, and the scholar Guido Adler, all endorsed the idea of Schubert as an ideal representative of local middle-class sensibilities, as an accessible populist icon.
Yet an inherent tension and paradox lay in this post-1848 cult of Schubert. As a historical representative of modest middle-class autonomy, he also was a reminder of a social and economic system that was being systematically undermined by the developments of late nineteenth-century finance and industry. The ardent defenders of Schubert as the finest flower of local Viennese virtues after 1860 were Kürnberger’s “unknown quantities”—modern businessmen and newcomers, whose wealth came at the expense of the traditional Vormärz artisan guild economy of the city. For them, Gemütlichkeit was a pose, not a reflection of a way of life. The public celebration of culture—visible through the erection of monuments to surround the new historicist architecture of Vienna—was more a sign of a shift away from the actual mores and habits of the Vormärz. The Schubert who was enshrined—particularly in the 1872 monument—was put forward as an exemplar of an affirmative, depoliticized way of life in which culture played the central role.
Wagner’s triumphant visit to Vienna in the mid-1870s underscored the extent to which the Wagnerian aesthetic fit in with the grandiosity of the architecture of the Ringstrasse and its monuments. The pretentions of Hans Makart’s historicist canvases were equivalent to Wagner’s heavy-handed pseudo “old” German rhetorical and poetic style. Wagner mirrored the modernity of industry, journalism, the machine age, and philosophically-minded discourse. The Schubert memorialized in 1872 fit in, even though the underlying factual premise of his posthumous fame was subversive. Beneath the bland compromise of history visible in the sculptor’s idealization was a bittersweet nostalgia about a vanished past and an ambivalence if not resistance to the economic and social changes of the era.
Therefore, after 1873—the year of a catastrophic financial collapse and a controversial World’s Fair—the facile glorification of Schubert in the previous two decades, exemplified by the 1872 monument, became unsustainable.70 The subversive aspect caused a split. In the wake of the economic collapse and ensuing stagnation, Schubert became a rallying cry for a regressive reactionary politics, toward an assertive Austro-German patriotism and, by the 1880s, the anti-liberal and anti-Semitic agenda of Christian Socialism. Opposed to this was the liberalism associated with those who built the 1872 monument and a populism that would ultimately be linked to the Austrian socialist movement, heirs of an embattled liberal tradition of civic reform that sought, among other goals, the extension of suffrage. In the struggle in Vienna between liberals and conservatives and between pan-Germans and Habsburg dynastic patriots, Schubert emerged readily as an authentic Viennese contrast to things Prussian and Wagnerian. Schubert’s status as teacher and middle-class man of the people made this ever more plausible to those Viennese who began to pierce the veil of a false nostalgia and Gemütlichkeit and question the facile claims of economic and social progress.
In the 1880s, liberals such as the critic Robert Hirschfeld (1857–1914) sought a way around Christian and Marxist Socialism through the substitution of culture for politics. Schubert became emblematic of a local spontaneity, a love of nature, and a simplicity that defied politics. Schubert more than any other figure could bind together a city divided by class, religion, and ethnicity and defined by rapid growth from emigration within the empire. Commenting on the official 1897 centenary celebrations, Hirschfeld (himself not a native Viennese) criticized the attempt by the Christian Social Party to appropriate Schubert as a populist symbol against aristocrats, liberals, and Jews. Rather, Schubert represented the power of art over politics. By spreading the musical culture that Schubert represented—an art of restrained elegance, beauty, and accessibility—music could ennoble the people and reconcile patriotism with cosmopolitan virtues, including tolerance. Even Schubert’s religious music was for Hirschfeld rather more the “elegant expression of individual feeling through which all love streams” than the expression of Catholic piety.71
Schubert also represented the need to sustain music as an active participant activity. Inviting citizens to be more than spectator held promise for Hirschfeld as part of a platform for civic education. But as the Viennese male choirs became politicized, mostly to the right, the middle-class patriotic pride in singing Schubert was absorbed within either the pan-German movement, which called on the German part of the Austrian monarchy to ally itself with imperial Germany, or a loyal Habsburg conservatism based on a fiercely local idealization of the Austro-German.
By the late 1890s, and certainly by the 1920s, the connection between the myth of Old Vienna and the ideal of a distinct Austro-German sensibility whose center was Vienna was still intact in all the variants of Schubert appropriation. In 1911 Walter von Molo, writing in Der Merker, reversed Kürnberger’s scorn, turning it on its head: “Franz Schubert is the monument that this city erected for itself.” He declared (after repeating all the familiar virtues of a southern spirit, Gemütlichkeit, and humanism), “Vienna is the focal point of German culture, which is why Vienna gave birth to Franz Schubert … the artist from the people, the artist of the people, the artist of the everyday.”72 These powerful sentiments, expressed in part to deflect widespread criticism of the city and its fin-de-siècle rage for operetta—the derisive claim that Vienna was merely a place of superficial sensuality—explain why Vienna became the crucial foil in what emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a real and symbolic contrast between Berlin and Vienna as models of urban modernity.
By the early twentieth century the reception of Schubert’s music began to show signs of change. Schubert increasingly was seen through the lens of the historical, as evoking the authenticity of an earlier age—the penetrating simplicity of the language of Johann Nestroy and Ferdinand Raimund; the colorful and subtle landscape and genre painting of Ferdinand Waldmüller and Josef Danhauser; the sleek restraint, refinement, and elegance of Biedermeier architecture and design that eschewed decorative ornamentation and permitted materials, notably wood, to reveal their natural beauty, all on a human scale. After the death of Wagner in 1883 and of Brahms and Bruckner in the 1890s, Schubert lost his role as an alternative to Wagnerian Romanticism. Rather, he became a source of twentieth-century anti-Romantic, modernist, aesthetic convictions.
Art and Politics: Vienna, Berlin, and the 1928 Schubert Centenary
The rivalry between Berlin and Vienna—the two major cities of German Europe—was cultural. In political and economic terms Vienna had, by the outbreak of World War I, lost out. But to Berliners, Vienna represented competition in culture. Writing in his 1911 music history of Berlin, the critic Adolf Weissmann took aim at Vienna’s conceits. He explained Beethoven’s unhappiness with his circumstances after 1815 as emblematic of how “the joy in life” characteristic of Vienna was incompatible with the “dark” creations of Beethoven. There was, in the end, no “causal link” between Beethoven’s creative genius and the city in which he resided for the most significant thirty-five years of his adult life. The “flattering” mores of the Viennese never seduced him in the way they did Mozart and Haydn.73
These were fighting words. After all, Beethoven’s art represented the deepest and most profound aesthetic achievement in German history, second only to Goethe’s. Beethoven’s centrality to the world knew of no linguistic barriers. But he was profoundly German in a manner Vienna was not. Weissmann juxtaposed Berlin and Vienna, claiming that serious thought and ambition resided in the first, and superficiality and lightheartedness reigned in the other. This contrast had become so common in cultural criticism that it motivated the distinguished economist Werner Sombart to
write an editorial in 1907 titled “Vienna,” in which he took the opposite view.74
To Sombart, Berlin represented the worst of modernity; he dismissed it as a suburb of New York, itself a “cemetery of culture,” the place where mere scale and quantity dominated over quality and individuality. Berlin was all about “traffic” and motion—commercial, industrial—as well as order, all qualities praised in the name of material progress. Berlin represented the victory of a heartless capitalism that had created fragments out of individual humans and the community as a whole. Vienna might seem backward and resistant to innovation to Berliners, but to miss the value of Vienna was to miss an object lesson as to how and why modernity dominated by technical rationality must be combatted.75
For Sombart, Vienna was above all a place of culture. “Vienna has culture. I do not even mean specifically ‘old’ culture. If one is seeking a modifier, an epithet, I would say ‘aesthetic culture.’”76 Sombart was reacting to an article by the writer (and Bambi author) Felix Salten, who, imitating a tradition of self-critical Viennese journalism that included Kürnberger, Daniel Spitzer, and Karl Kraus, offered a critique of Vienna that praised Berliners for their work ethic and concrete economic and scientific achievements. In reply, Sombart lauded the Viennese both for their humanity and their productivity. He urged readers who were concerned about German culture to “honor Vienna as holy,” as a “symbol of that which we must preserve, and which we must seek to gain again for ourselves.” For culture meant “human creativity, beauty, and harmony, a meaningful and reassuring life.”77 Culture meant Vienna.
Franz Schubert and His World Page 42
