Two decades ago, the bicentenary celebrations of Franz Schubert’s birth in Duisberg, Graz, Oxford, Paris and Vienna confirmed that a warm spirit of collegiality, one rare among musicians today, had arisen and begun to flourish. Perhaps tired by the irresolvable controversy regarding Schubert’s sexuality, or taken with the newly emerging portrait of the composer and his art, many embraced the collaborative process of developing that image, engaging in cordial conversation regarding their shared fascination in print, in public and in private. The result was a burgeoning of literature in the field of Schubert studies, evidenced and furthered by the founding of five Schubert-centred journals, including Cahiers Franz Schubert: Revue de musique classique et romantique,Footnote 1 the Schubert-Jahrbuch,Footnote 2 The Schubertian,Footnote 3 Schubert durch die Brille Footnote 4 and Schubert: Perspektiven.Footnote 5 The wealth of research published in these and other journals has greatly enhanced our understanding of Schubert’s social circle, addressed historical and biographical issues, drawn attention to neglected repertoire and changed our perception of his compositional practice.Footnote 6 In turn, this synergetic exchange has begun to spread outward beyond the domain of Schubert studies, quietly reorienting our approaches to and understanding of nineteenth-century music and culture.
Such dialogues continued with particular momentum in analytical studies where great strides were made in our understanding of Schubert’s approaches to tonal strategy and form in his vocal and instrumental music. Since pioneering studies of Schubert’s handling of sonata form by Carl Dahlhaus, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen and Xavier Hascher,Footnote 7 this theme has been developed by Gordon Sly, Scott Burnham, Su Yin Mak, Charles Fisk and Anne Hyland,Footnote 8 with particular focus placed on Schubert’s String Quintet in a recent special edition of Music Analysis (2014).Footnote 9 Schubert’s very personal harmonic practice has also been the subject of numerous monographs and articles, most notably those by David Lewin, Richard Cohn, Suzannah Clark and David Damschroder.Footnote 10 Susan Wollenberg has shared with us her deep knowledge of the composer’s stylistic ‘fingerprints’,Footnote 11 while Robert Hatten has identified musical gestures, topics and tropes in several treasures from among Schubert’s piano literature, including the Sonatas in A minor, D. 784, G major, D. 894, and A major, D. 959.Footnote 12
In song studies, a triumvirate of Schubert scholars – Susan Youens, Walther Dürr and Graham Johnson – have become renowned for their ability to nurture dialogues between scholarship and performance. Author of eight monographs,Footnote 13 Youens regularly writes for song recitals at Carnegie Hall and has lectured at numerous festivals, inspiring exchange between scholarship and performance. This duality, so immediately evident in Graham Johnson’s Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs,Footnote 14 lies at the heart of the mission of the Neue Schubert Ausgabe, whose volumes are intended for scholars and performers alike. Such interchange of scholarly and performance expertise was particularly evident not long ago at the 50th Anniversary Celebrations of the Neue Schubert Ausgabe, 1–3 May 2015, at which two lectures entitled Musikforschung und –praxis im Dialog took place in the Markus-Sittikus-Saal, Hohenems. In the first of these two conversations Walther Dürr and Thomas Seedorf, in dialogue with tenor, Christoph Prégardien and pianist, Urs Liska, discussed the hidden aspects of a score that are immediately audible in performance. The second music master class was led by Walther Dürr, editor of all lieder volumes in the Neue Schubert Ausgabe,Footnote 15 and Graham Johnson, who has recorded all of Schubert’s songs for Hyperion RecordsFootnote 16 and recognizes the New Schubert Edition as a goldmine for interpreters. Both scholars were joined by the editorial board of the Neue Schubert Ausgabe Footnote 17 to discuss the difference editions can make in performance, with ideas illustrated by soprano, Carolina Ulrich, and baritone, Benjamin Appl, accompanied by Graham Johnson.
This collaborative spirit between performance and practice, musicology and analysis also has been evident in numerous conferences and festivals. The largest international gathering of Schubert scholars took place at Maynooth University, 21–23 October 2011 where 66 papers addressed the conference theme, Thanatos as Muse? Schubert and Concepts of Late Style, with Johnson as guest artist. Since then the conference has inspired two volumes of essays, Schubert’s Late Music: History, Theory, Style and Rethinking Schubert.Footnote 18 The Deutsche Schubert Gesellschaft international conference, Vom Wasser haben wir’s gelernt, boasted a similar spirit of collaboration between practice and performance,Footnote 19 as did the Bard Music Festival dedicated to Schubert in 2014.Footnote 20 A recent interest in performing the entire Schubert lieder repertoire was pioneered by Sholto Kynoch at the Oxford Lieder Festival in 2014 and is also being undertaken by the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg and Hohenems 2015–16 in collaboration with Wigmore Hall, who will present the complete Schubert lieder in 2015–16 and 2016–17. All of these achievements and events in the Schubertian sphere proceed, we believe, from a shared resolve to engage, discuss and debate collegially, plus a mutual desire to advance our intellectual and artistic enterprises cooperatively.
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The first Nineteenth-Century Music Review Schubert-themed issue, published in 2008 as its Volume 5/2, captured an early phase of this expanding phenomenon and exhibited a similar spirit of collegiality. Entitled Schubert Familiar and Unfamiliar: New Perspectives, its principal articles circulated among the four authors – Robert Hatten, Susan Youens, Xavier Hascher and James Sobaskie – for preliminary peer review before its guest editors and external readers undertook formal examination. In addition, Schubert Familiar and Unfamiliar: New Perspectives offered a comprehensive review of the then-recently-released 40-CD set, Hyperion Records’ Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs, combining critiques by James Parsons, Susan Wollenberg, Suzannah Clark, David Gramit, Susan Youens, Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Richard Kramer to profile Graham Johnson’s prodigious contribution to Schubert song studies.
The current issue, a sequel to the first, carries a similar emphasis on song studies, theory and practice. Schubert Familiar and Unfamiliar: Continuing Conversations brings together six contributors from its predecessor, plus a multiplicity of new voices. The essays gathered under this title have in common a preoccupation with listening and responding: listening to the aesthetic, artistic and intellectual values of those who have written before us and responding to the music in new ways, our understanding enhanced by their discourse and experience. Collectively the chapters yield new insight into familiar and unfamiliar settings, Schubert’s practice of text setting in his lieder and sacred music, the cultural and intellectual contexts in which he lived. The music discussed spans Schubert’s creative life from ‘Erster Verlust’ composed in July 1815 to the concluding setting of ‘Geistes-Gruss’ published in July 1828. And it is timely that this special issue includes a review of Graham Johnson’s Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs – a new landmark in Schubert studies.
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Lorraine Byrne Bodley establishes a direct connection with the first NCMR Schubert issue through her essay, ‘In Pursuit of a Single Flame? On Schubert’s Settings of Goethe’s Poems’, inspired by Robert Hatten’s article, ‘A Surfeit of Musics: What Goethe’s Lyrics Concede When Set to Schubert’s Music’, from that earlier volume. Her article unveils a musical poet, quite different to the traditional image of Goethe handed down to posterity, a poet who was open to contemporary settings – including Schubert’s – when the composer had rendered poetic meaning in musical form. For Byrne Bodley, Schubert’s setting of ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ has a different ethical and spiritual specific gravity from any other contemporary setting, and the felicity of cadence and image in this lied reflects the composer’s abandoned trust in song’s ability to bear witness to sustaining human values. A response by Robert Hatten argues equally convincingly that you read Goethe as much for his poetic musicality as his subject matter. And in endorsing this argument, Hatten brings the dialogue full circle, for his original decision to discuss ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ is a fine example of the way fidelity to the speaking voice can co-exist with a complicated rhyme scheme and an emphatic metre and still produce something that sounds spontaneous. It is a masterpiece of vocal scoring, and in different ways, Byrne Bodley and Hatten endorse how a certain sound or musical effect stands for a particular way of understanding and experiencing the world.
The neo-Riemannian tendency in recent tonal theory is richly represented by Suzannah Clark’s essay ‘A Gift to Goethe: The Aesthetics of the Intermediate Dominant in Schubert’s Music and Early Nineteenth-Century Thought’. In this essay in the theory of postclassical harmony, Clark examines Schubert’s use of intermediate dominants that, together with other techniques such as the use of silence, act as ‘a harmonic cushion’ between abrupt mediant relations not only in multiple settings of Schubert’s ‘Geistes-Gruß’ but also the ‘Unfinished’ and ‘Great’ symphonies. The light Clark throws in the corners of history through her discussion of Schubert’s handling of the intermediate dominant is underpinned by an intimate knowledge of the theoretical writings of Anton Reicha and Gottfried Weber.
In ‘A New Source for Schubert’s Hebrew Psalm 92’, Alon Rees and David Schab examine Schubert’s one and only piece in Hebrew: an excerpt of Psalm 92, set for four-part choir and solo baritone solo in the summer of 1828. The article presents and explores a newly discovered manuscript, dating from 1832, which contains the earliest known source of Schubert’s piece. With its title in Hebrew calligraphy, this manuscript was clearly intended for Jewish use and demonstrates a starting point in the adaptation of Schubert’s Hebrew composition from the living, essentially oral performance tradition of an expert cantor to the formal written requirements of publication for a far-flung audience. The article tends towards the praxis side of the volume’s conception through its examination of the impact and posthumous history of this setting.
Finally, ‘Conversations within and between Two Early Lieder of Franz Schubert’, by James William Sobaskie, proceeds from a prior discussion by Susan Youens of ‘An die Geliebte’ and ‘An die Nachtigall’. Drawing upon biographical background, Sobaskie unveils layers of contextual meaning through his analysis of these companion songs, reminding us how music may serve as a way of coming at experiences a second time, not in a spirit of nostalgia or mere reflection, but in an active, searching, renovating manner. What Schubert does in these companion settings is to create a spirit where, in the words of W.B. Yeats, the spirit can ‘be secret and exult’ in prior experience made present. In her response to Sobaskie’s reading of ‘An die Nachtigall’, Susan Youens plays on a prominent reception trope: Schubert and Memory, as explored by Walter Frisch, John Daverio, Charles Fisk, John Gingerich and Scott Burnham. ‘We cannot step into the same river twice, and Schubert seems to have realized this, as much else, preternaturally early in his life’, writes Youens here. Everything does indeed flow, and even the most concentrated mind may indeed be little more than Yeats’ ‘long-legged fly upon the stream’, but as Youens beautifully illustrates, we would not have the pleasure of grasping even that much reality as satisfactorily as we do had not Heraclitus conceived of the course of events as a stream, had not Yeats thought of the attentive mind as a fly on the face of it, had not Schubert ‘insisted upon acknowledgement of [love’s] beauty and importance […] whatever the sense of loss’. We would not have the pleasure of even grasping that much reality had Schubert, in other words, not thought in images, had Youens and Sobaskie, who came after him not saved and valued those images and disseminated them.
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Conversation continues in the issue’s reviews sections, shifting to discussion of recent developments in Schubert studies. Heather Platt, Digital Resource Review Editor of Nineteenth-Century Music Review, profiles the recently overhauled Schubert-Online website, which enables easy access to digital reproductions of more than 500 of the composer’s score autographs, letters and other documents. Music collections held by the Wienbibliothek (Vienna City Library) and the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library), plus the National Library of Norway contribute to this remarkable database, and following a thorough description, Platt discusses ways in which it can further Schubert research. Blake Howe, CD and DVD Editor of the journal, offers a combined review that examines Ian Bostridge’s recent book on Schubert’s Winterreise, as well as the singer’s audio and video performances of that immortal cycle. In addition, recent volumes authored or edited by Martin Chusid, Lisa Feurzig, Christopher Gibbs and Martin Solvik, John Gingerich, Graham Johnson, Scott Messing, as well as Renate Wieland and Jürgen Uhde are reviewed, respectively, by Susan Wollenberg, Jürgen Thym, Scott Messing, Clive McClelland, James Sobaskie, Anne Hyland and Julian Caskel. Finally, a review of a recently released volume of Schubert’s piano works completes this issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review. Sally Pinkas profiles a new collection of the fantasies for piano solo, including the Fantasy in C minor, D. 2e, the ‘Graz’ Fantasy in C major, D. 605, and the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy in C major, Op. 15, D. 760, published by Bärenreiter.
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Taken together, these articles and reviews portray a much more psychologically complex and profoundly intellectual figure than that represented by the overly sentimentalized image of Schubert that prevailed from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, an artist whose works prompt regular re-envisioning and whose influence demands continuous reappraisal. Such discussions of Schubert’s engagement with poetry and the recollective impulse in music calls to mind a line from ‘Little Gidding’ in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, on ‘the use of memory’ where things ‘become renewed, transfigured in another pattern’. Collectively these scholars broaden the interpretative practice of this music by reminding us that a definitive version of Schubert must remain a phantom possibility: there always will be new readings, new ways of listening to that definitive sound ringing in the ear. Poetry means so many things to so many people that it is more the signal of a value than a precisely defined entity – a source of possible meanings. Of course, Schubert knew that song is an art that reaches after those hovering meanings and tries to connect them with the ground of our immediate experience. And we know, with similar conviction, that the conversations of this issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review are certain to continue.
