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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2016
Much musicological and historicist criticism has tended to ‘flatten’ Goethe by confining him to the thought-clichés of his time, and this in turn has led to an implicitly patronizing view of him as musically conservative. This article will show how Goethe proves again and again to be more musically intelligent and perceptive than scholars have given him credit for. Certain musicological questions engross the poet throughout his life: the nature of major and minor tonalities; musical identity throughout the ages; music and text; the rhetoric of attentive listening; musical language and its capacity to occlude and exclude. Yet Goethe’s thought, this article demonstrates, is anything but static; his writings keep returning to, modifying and complicating his musical preoccupations.
This article challenges the salient misconception that Goethe’s lack of musical judgement divorced him from the development of the nineteenth-century Lied and that Schubert’s settings ran counter to the poet’s intent. Two new readings of ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ and ‘Erster Verlust’ show how Schubert is listening to the poetry and the upshot is not a song that reflects the poem but one that reflects on it.
1 Hatten, Robert, ‘A Surfeit of Musics: What Goethe’s Lyrics Concede when set to Schubert’s Music’, Nineteenth–Century Music Review 5/2 (2008): 7–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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3 Goethe to Friederike Helene Unger, 13 June 1796, Goethes Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, 143 vols, ed. Gustav von Loeper, Erich Schmidt, Hermann Grimm et al (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1887–1912), IV/11: 92, hereafter referred to as WA.
4 Goethe to Zelter (GZ), 29 May 1801, Goethes Werke, Münchner Ausgabe, 20 vols, ed. Karl Richter et al (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1985f), 20.1: 17, hereafter referred to as MA. The translations of Goethe’s correspondence with Zelter are from Bodley, Lorraine Byrne, Goethe and Zelter: Musical Dialogues (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009): 35 Google Scholar. Hereafter referred to as: LBB.
5 GZ, 19 June 1805, MA 20.1:102; LBB: 76.
6 GZ, 2 May 1820, MA 20.1: 599; LBB: 266.
7 Heinrich Voss’s letter of May 1804 refers to Goethe as a bass: ‘Herrlich ist’s wenn Goethe in seinen tiefen, klaren Basse intoniert’ [It is marvellous when Goethe intones in his deep, clear bass], cited by Bode, Wilhelm in Goethe und die Tonkunst, 2 vols (Berlin: E.S. Mittler und Sohn, 1912), II: 289 Google Scholar; Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich, ‘Die Musik und Goethe’, in Goethe im Gegenlicht. Kunst, Musik, Religion, Philosophie, Natur, Politik, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer (Heidelberg: Palatina-Verlag, 2000): 42 Google Scholar.
8 David Veit on Goethe to Rahel Levin, 8 February 1795, ‘er spielt Klavier, und gar nicht schlecht’ [he plays piano, and not badly at all], in Goethes Gespräche. Eine Sammlung zeitgenössischer Berichte aus seinen Umgang auf Grung der Ausgabe und des Nachlasses von Flodard Freiherrn von Biedermann ergänzt, ed. Wolfgang Herwig, 5 vols (Zurich: Artemis, 1965–87), I: 587.
9 Goethe to Salzmann, 3 February 1772, WA, IV/2:14.
10 von Albrecht, Michael, Goethe und das Volkslied, 2nd edn (Bern: Lang, 1985)Google Scholar.
11 Hartmann, Tina, Goethes Musiktheater. Singspiele, Opern, Festspiele, ‘Faust’ (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Goethe, Italienische Reise, 1 March 1788, Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, 14 vols, ed. Erich Trunz (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1948–60), 11: 524, hereafter referred to as HA; 14 March 1788, HA 11: 528 and 22 March 1788, HA 11: 530.
13 GZ, 7 May 1807, MA 20.1: 151 and 22 January 1808, MA 20.1:170–71. Years later in the Tag- und Jahreshefte he referred to his Hauskapelle and recalled its most successful season, 1810–11, MA 14: 196–7, 217 and 221.
14 Tag- und Jahreshefte, MA 14: 222.
15 GZ, 3 December 1812, MA 20.1: 296.
16 Bartholdy, Karl Mendelssohn, Goethe und Mendelssohn (Leipzig: Hirzel Verlag, 1872): 34–36 Google Scholar; GZ, 3 June 1830, MA 20.2: 469–70.
17 Zelter to Goethe (ZG), 8 to 11 June 1805, MA 20.1: 100.
18 MA 20.1: 550.
19 MA 20.1: 951.
20 HA 2: 188–90. Deutsch, Otto Erich, Schubert. Die Dokumente seines Lebens und Schaffens, 3rd edn (Leipzig, Paris and Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1996): 40 Google Scholar, hereafter referred to as Dok.
21 The manuscript of Book One is held in the German State Library in Berlin. Like the second book of Schubert’s Goethe songs it is preserved in a fair copy, although not quite complete. The manuscript of ‘An Mignon’ excludes the last four bars; ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, D. 118, contains only the first 16 bars; the third version of ‘Erlkönig’, D. 328, is used with an accompaniment in even quavers instead of triplets. Deutsch suggests that ‘An Schwager Kronos’, D. 369, or ‘Szene aus Goethes Faust’, D. 126, were also contained in this collection.
22 16 June 1825: WA III/10: 68–9.
23 Todd, R. Larry, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 72 Google Scholar.
24 Biba, Otto, ‘Goethe in the Vienna Music Scene of his Era’, in Goethe: Musical Poet, Musical Catalyst, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2004): 7–40 Google Scholar, here 27.
25 For Goethe’s acclamation of Schubertian song reported by J.G. von Quandt (1826) and Eduard Genast (1830), see Bodley, Lorraine Byrne, Schubert’s Goethe Settings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003): 22 Google Scholar.
26 See Sternfield, Frederick W., Goethe and Music. A List of Parodies and Goethe’s Relationship to Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979)Google Scholar.
27 Tudor, Jo, Sound and Sense: Music and Musical Metaphor in the Thought and Writing of Goethe and his Age (Oxford [u.a.]: Peter Lang, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Hatten, ‘A Surfeit of Musics’, 9.
29 Dichtung und Wahrheit, III/2, HA 9: 493.
30 In Goethe’s writing, he continually mentions the importance of Gehalt. In a letter to Jacobi on 6 January 1813, he writes, ‘Ein frischer Gehalt geht nicht in die alte Form’ [A fresh content does not fit the old form], HA 3: 221 and in Geschichte zur Farbenlehre, he claims, ‘Gehalt ohne Methode führt zur schwärmerei; Methode ohne Gehalt zum leeren Klügeln; Stoff ohne Form zum beschwerlichen Wissen, Form ohne Stoff zu einem hohlen Wähnen’ [Content without method leads to empty enthusiasm; method without content to empty musing; material without form to burdensome knowledge; form without material to empty imaginings], HA 14: 51. In MuR Goethe discusses Gehalt in relation to music, averring: ‘Die Würde der Kunst erscheint bei der Musik vielleicht am eminentesten, weil sie keinen Stoff hat, der abgerechnet werden müßte. Sie ist ganz Form und Gehalt und erhöht und veredelt alles, was sie ausdrückt’ [The value of art appears perhaps most eminently in music because it has no material which has to be accounted for. It is all form and content and elevates and enobles what it expresses], BA 18: 486 and the notion recurs in ‘Gott und Welt’ ‘Dauer in Wechsel’, HA I: 248. For a musicological interpretation of Gestalt and Gehalt, see Wellek, Albert, Musikpsychologie und Musikästhetik (Bonn: Bouveir, 1975): 196 Google Scholar.
31 Goethe to Moritz von Dietrichstein, 23 June 1811, WA IV 22: 113–14.
32 Walwei-Wiegelmann, Hedwig, Goethes Gedanken über Musik (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1985): 138 Google Scholar.
33 Goethe to Carl von Schlözer, 27 August 1820, WA IV 23: 176.
34 Walwei-Wiegelmann, Goethes Gedanken über Musik, 139.
35 Walwei-Wiegelmann, Goethes Gedanken über Musik, 50.
36 Eduard Genast, April 1830, Pleß, Hans, ‘Goethe und die Musik’, Musikerziehung 3 (1950): 70–76 Google Scholar, here 73; Tappolet, Willy, Begegnungen mit der Musik in Goethes Leben und Werk (Bern: Benteli, 1975), 123 Google Scholar; Walker, Ernest, ‘Goethe and some composers’, The Musical Times 73 (1932), 497 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 Goethe to Zelter, 3 June 1830, in Bodley, Goethe and Zelter, 469–70; MA 20.2, 1357: ‘denn wer versteht irgend eine Erscheinung wenn er sich von dem Gang des Herankommens (nicht) penetriert?’
38 Goethe to Zelter, 3 June 1830, in Bodley, Goethe and Zelter, 469–70; MA 20.2, 1357: ‘und gedenke meiner als eines, zwar nicht immer behäglich, aber doch immerfort ernst ja leidenschaftlich strebenden und wirkendes Freundes, der sich an Deinen Beispielen gern erbaut’.
39 Goethe to C.L.F. Schultz, 11 March 1816, WA IV, 26: 290: ‘die Erfahrung “der Unzulänglichkeit der Sprache” [die] nur ein Surrogat [sei]’.
40 Goethe to Count Kaspar von Sternberg, 15 March 1832, WA IV, 49: 271: ‘Das Beste unsrer Überzeugungen ist nicht in Worte zu fassen. Die Sprache ist nicht auf alles eingerichtet’.
41 Hatten, ‘A Surfeit of Musics’, 11.
42 MA 2.1: 53; WA I/1: 98; HA 1: 142; Goethes Werke, Berliner Ausgabe, 22 vols, ed. Siegfried Seidl et al (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1965–78), I: 68, hereafter referred to as BA.
43 Kurt R. Eissler suggests that the verse was written just after 8 pm on 6 September 1780, Goethe: A Psychoanalytic Study, 1775–1786 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), I: 466.
44 Goethe to Charlotte von Stein, 6 September 1780, WA IV/4: 281–2. Although composed in 1780, Goethe’s verse was first published in his Werken 1815. Segebrecht suggests that Goethe reluctantly published the lyric after pirated versions began to appear in print after performances of Zelter’s Lied. Here Wandrers Nachtlieder were printed together, and the example is usually followed in later publications. There are three manuscripts, one sent to Charlotte von Stein in an unidentifiable hand (Eissler, Goethe: A Psychoanalytic Study, I: 478), Herder’s copy and one made by Fräulein von Göchhausen. In Charlotte von Stein’s manuscript, line one is written as ‘alle’, line two has ‘findest du’ in place of ‘ist’, ‘all’ is written in line three and line four has ‘Spürst’ in lieu of ‘Spürest’. Herder’s and Fräulein von Göchhausen’s copies have ‘Gefilden’ in line two, and all three editions have ‘Vögel’ for ‘Vögelein’. The diminutive first appeared around 1814 in musical renditions of the poem.
45 Gräf, Hans Gerhard, Goethe über seine Dichtungen, 3 vols (Munich: Rütten & Leoning, 1967), III: 64 Google Scholar.
46 WA III/13:129.
47 Boyd, James, Notes to Goethe’s Poems, 2 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), I: 159 Google Scholar. See Goethe: Conversation and Encounters ed. David Luke and Robert Pick (London: Oswald Wolf Publishers, 1966), J. Ch. Mahr, 27 August 1831: 236.
48 Boyd, Notes to Goethe’s Poems, I: 161.
49 16 October 1780, WA IV/4: 320.
50 MA 2.1, S. 53.
51 Wilkinson, Elizabeth M., ‘Goethe’s Poetry’, German Life and Letters 2 (1949): 316–329 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brody, Elaine and Fowkes, Robert A., The German Lied and its Poetry (New York: New York University Press, 1971): 62 Google Scholar.
52 Goethe im Gespräch, ed. Eduard Korrodi (Zurich: Manesse Verlag, 1944): 503–04. See also Goethe’s conversation with Soret on 8 March 1830.
53 WA IV/3: 329.
54 Goethe, Fragment über die Natur, HA 13: 46.
55 The date of this setting is uncertain. Richard Capell considered this setting to be ‘the last song of the year 1822’, Schubert’s Songs, 3rd edn (New York: Urwin Bros Ltd., 1977): 182. John Reed reinforces this suggesting that it belongs to the Goethe settings of December 1822, The Schubert Song Companion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985): 429. Otto Erich Deutsch and Trasybulos Georgiade both list the Lied as 1823: Deutsch, Thematic Catalogue, 353; Georgiades, ‘Schubert. Lyric as Musical Structure: Schubert’s “Wandrers Nachtlied” (Über allen Gipfeln D 768)’, translated by Louise Göllner, Marie in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986): 86 Google Scholar. Dürr lists it as being composed before 25 May 1824, in ‘Poesie und Musik: Über Schuberts Beziehungen zu Goethe’, in Schubertiade Hohenems (Austria, 1993): 43. The date here is taken from the revised edition of Deutsch, which lists it before July 1824, Franz Schubert: Thematisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke in chronologischer Folge, ed. Walter Dürr, Arnold Feil, Christa Landon et al (Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag Studienausgabe, 1996).
56 The edition cited in this article is from Franz Schubert. Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke ed. Walter Dürr (Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag, 1964f), IV/5a: 66, hereafter referred to as Neue Schubert Ausgabe (NGA).
57 Reed, The Schubert Song Companion, 429–30.
58 Bell, A. Craig, The Songs of Schubert (London: Alston Books, 1964): 57 Google Scholar.
59 Stein, Jack, ‘Schubert’s Heine Songs’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24 (1966): 559–566 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 561.
60 Einstein, Alfred, Schubert (London: Panther Books, 1971): 252 Google Scholar.
61 Graham Johnson, Liner Notes to ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ (with the baritone, Christopher Maltman), Hyperion CDJ33034.
62 Johnson, Liner Notes. See also Johnson, Graham, Schubert. The Complete Songs 3 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), vol. 3: 554 Google Scholar.
63 Hatten, ‘A Surfeit of Musics’, 10.
64 GZ, 22 April 1814, MA 20.1: 344; 2 May 1820, MA 20.1: 599; 4 September 1831, MA 20.2: 1530.
65 For a detailed reading of Goethe’s and Schubert’s preoccupation with the Wanderer trope and its situation in nineteenth-century cultural history, see Bodley, Lorraine Byrne, ‘Challenging the Context: Reception and Transformation in Schubert’s “Der Musensohn”’, in Rethinking Schubert, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
66 Cf. ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’, D. 531 and Mignon’s ‘Heiss mich nicht reden’ D. 726.
67 Ernst Graham Porter interprets this differently, considering that ‘a sense of mystery is infused by a compression in the fifth bar at the word ‘spürest’, an effect that is heightened by the change of the accompanying figure in the middle of the bar’, Schubert’s Song Technique (London: Dobson Books Ltd., 1961): 35–36.
68 I am indebted to the anonymous reader of this edition for their insightful engagement with my work and in particular for their important observation that a key aspect of the Wanderer trope is the feeling of alienation not only from humankind but from nature itself with death offering an eventual and welcome surcease. Their reading of the syncopated accompaniment (bars 6–8) and Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s closing couplet endorsed the Wanderer’s desire for repose.
69 Stein, Deborah and Spillman, Robert, Poetry into Song (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 46 Google Scholar.
70 Hatten, ‘A Surfeit of Musics’: 10.
71 Hatten, ‘A Surfeit of Musics’: 12.
72 Dok, 186.
73 Schubert to Schober, 30 November 1823, Dok, 207; see also Doblhoff to Schober, 12 November 1823, Dok, 89; Johanna Lutz to Leopold Kupelwieser, 9 December 1823, Dok, 209; Schwind to Schober, 24 December 1823, Dok: 219; Doblhoff to Schober, 7 January 1824, Dok, 221.
74 Schwind to Schober, 13 February 1824, Dok, 221; Doblhauff to Schober, 2 April 1824, Dok, 237; Kupelwieser to Johanna Lutz, 8/12 May 1824, Dok, 238.
75 Dok, 234.
76 Schubert’s father to Franz, End of July 1824, Dok, 245; Ferdinand Schubert to Franz, 3 July 1824, Dok, 248; Schubert’s father to Franz, 14 August 1824, Dok, 253; Ignaz Schubert to Franz, 14 August 1824, Dok, 254; Schwind to Schoeber, 20 August 1824, Dok, 256; Schubert to Schoeber, 21 September 1824, Dok, 258; Ottenwald to Joseph von Spaun, 19 July 1825, Dok, 295.
77 25 July 1825, Dok, 300.
78 Goethe’s work on this Singspiel is recorded in his letters to Charlotte von Stein, 7 November 1786, WA IV/7: 115 and to Kayser, 23 December 1785, WA IV/7: 147 and 28 February 1786, WA IV/7: 185; Goethe published it under the title, Die ungleichen Hausgenossen. Singspiel. Fragmentarisch (1789).
79 Goethe, Annalen (1789).
80 WA IV, 7, Letter no. 2187, An Charlotte von Stein, 7 November 1786: 115.
81 WA IV, 7, Letter no. 2221, An Kayser, 23 December 1785: 147.
82 Tag- und Jahreshefte 1789, WA I, 35: 11. Goethe’s Singspiel presents a part-serious, part-comic view of the Weimar court, and it is perhaps for this reason that it remained unfinished: the Baron and the Baroness relate to Karl August and Louise, the countess correlates to Anna Amalia, the poet caricatures either Wieland or Goethe himself, while the figure of Pumper is characteristic of many servants of the court.
83 Tag- und Jahreshefte 1789, WA I, 35: 11.
84 MA 2/1: 100; WA I/1: 56 and I/12: 225–51; BA 1: 41 and 4: 331–357.
85 In its original working the poem was composed of two quatrains. The first four lines have remained unchanged and were originally followed by a second stanza: ‘Leise tönet meine Klage/ Ich verberge Wunsch und Triebe, / Einsam nähr ich Schmerz und Wunde,/ Traure mein verlornes Glück’ which was altered to: ‘Wer vernimmt nun mein[e] Klage,/ Wer belohnt die treuen Triebe / Heimlich nähr ich meine Wunde, / Betraure das verlorne Glück’ before gaining its final form.
86 On Goethe’s decision to publish the poem separately see Tag- und Jahreshefte (1789), WA I/35: 11.
87 Willi Schuh lists 44 settings, in Goethe Vertonungen: Ein Verzeichnis (Zurich: Artemis, 1952).
88 The Lied was published by Cappi und Diabelli on 9 July 1821. For contemporary editions of the song see: NGA IV/1: 44, from which this edition is taken.
89 Schubert, Franz, Briefe, Tagenotizen, Gedichte ed. Erich Valentin (Zurich, Diogenes, 1997): 79 Google Scholar.
90 Kramer, Lawrence, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998): 9–26 Google Scholar.
91 Joseph Kenner to Anton Kenner, 21 April 1858, Deutsch, Otto Erich, Schubert: Die Erinnerungen seiner Freunde (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1957): 96 Google Scholar.
92 Again, I am grateful to the internal reader who endorsed this reading, interpreting ‘the strong cadence in A flat for the vocal line (the desired memory of first love) transposed immediately into F minor in the piano for the song’s final cadence (the present truth.) The final cadence seems abrupt – like the sudden dissipation of a dream’.
93 This theme of musical communication is developed in many of Goethe’s literary works, for example: Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Werther, the Novelle and Faust. For the poet’s affirmation of this idea, see GZ, 19 October 1829, MA 20.2: 1266–67.
