Schubert's Poets and the Making of Lieder.

Most of us are drawn to lieder by the music, but when we study or write about this repertory we often begin, as the composers themselves did, with the poetry. Nevertheless, musicians still know relatively little about the lives and works of many of the poets whose works were set by some of the most acclaimed nineteenth-century composers. This seems a particularly significant lacuna in the case of Franz Schubert's poets, since some of his closest friends were writers, and literature was important to the members of his social circle. In Schubert's Poets, Susan Youens argues that a greater knowledge of these poets and their works will provide a better context in which to understand Schubert's lieder. (As Kristina Muxfeldt has also demonstrated, this increased awareness ultimately leads to more sensitive readings of the poems, which in turn influences the analysis of the respective musical settings: "Schubert, Platen, and the Myth of Narcissus," Journal of the American Musicological Society 49 [fall 1996]: 480-527.) Youens focuses on four of Schubert's poets: Gabriele von Baumberg, Theodor Korner, Johann Mayrhofer, and Ernst Schulze. Although their works are no longer in the literary canon, all were well-known figures in Schubert's Vienna. Youens vividly describes their lives, often focusing on the experiences that influenced their writings, and she speculates on some of the reasons that might have drawn Schubert to particular works.

Each poet receives a lengthy chapter, including a biography, an overview of the poetry, and an analysis of some or all of Schubert's related settings. Youens's enthusiastic style of writing as well as the inclusion of portraits of the poets and their associates make these sections the most compelling part of the book. Youens has deliberately chosen poets with extraordinary lives and she sensitively navigates their personal difficulties and successes. Her chapter on Baumberg is an excellent study of the conflicting issues for nineteenth-century female writers, and it includes numerous intriguing quotations that show Baumberg's deep insights on such issues as marriage and the fickleness of passion. Although able to attain early recognition as a writer, Baumberg's career was profoundly shaped (for the worse) by her husband, the writer and political activist, Janos Batsani. Like Baumberg, Korner began writing as a child. A German patriot whom Schubert met in 1812, he produced plays and poems at such a prolific rate that he was well established as a writer by the time he was struck down in battle at the tender age of twenty-one. His heroic early death was subsequently the basis for numerous fictional works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors. Mayrhofer and Schulze were both plagued by pressing psychological problems, with Mayrhofer eventually committing suicide and Schulze dying at the age of twenty-eight, having spent most of his life in obsession with the sisters Cacilie and Adelheid Tychsen. (He pursued the latter with such single mindedness that Youens describes his actions as those of a "stalker.") Despite their personal problems, both poets attained a degree of recognition, though some of their most important triumphs came in their final days.

Youens's narratives are so fascinating that one hungers for more information. For instance, just how did the unstable Schulze manage to complete his doctoral studies, work as tutor, and achieve such a reputation that he was offered a professorship at Luneberg? One ponders how Schubert's circle discussed these poets' works, and also how the poets themselves discussed music. All four were great music lovers, acquainted with music of the preceding centuries as well as that of their contemporaries. Mayrhofer drew inspiration from Schubert's music, Schulze claimed he read Kirnberger, Korner performed Baroque masterpieces with Carl Friedrich Zelter's Singakademie, and Baumberg wrote a poem on Joseph Haydn's Creation. Youens's descriptions of some of Vienna's other literati and musicians similarly provoke further study. In particular, Caroline Pilcher, while well known to historians of literature, is often relegated only a capsule biography in Schubert studies. Her popular salon in Vienna was the meeting place for numerous writers (including Korner and Baumberg) as well as musicians, with Michael Vogl occasionally performing Schubert's latest songs. Pilcher was herself a writer; Schubert set four of her poems, and her oratorio on Korner's death, Das befreite Deutschland, was set by Louis Spohr.

Choosing these four poets not only allows Youens to explore interesting individuals, it also provides her the opportunity to analyze songs that are not frequently discussed. As such, the book is an excellent complement to Youens's own books on the Muller cycles and her earlier article on Platen ("Schubert and the Poetry of Graf August von Platen-Hallermunde," Music Review 46 [February 1985]: 19-34). Although contrasting in approach and focus, it also complements Richard Kramer's Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), which focuses on the settings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Wilhelm Muller, Ludwig Rellstab, and Friedrich Schlegel. Youens begins each analysis with the respective poem; the original poem is printed, with engaging line-by-line English translations. As in many of her other publications, Youens offers finely nuanced observations on each poem's structure and imagery, often focusing on the characteristic sounds of particularly important syllables. She also grapples with the thorny problem as to why Schubert's texts differ from those published by the poet. While it is clear that Schubert felt free to alter the original poems, some of the textual differences are due to memory failures (i.e., he relied on his memory for a text rather than copying it from a printed source) and others result from his employment of the poet's own alternate versions. Trying to ascertain which scenario applies to a specific song is sometimes not possible. This is the case with Schubert's setting of Mayrhofer's "Erlafsee" (D. 586), a six-stanza work from which Schubert selected only two stanzas. Although Youens is unable to reach a definitive reason for his choice, she presents a number of possibilities, including the tantalizing idea that the two friends worked together on the two-stanza version, which subsequently became Schubert's first printed song, in 1818. Mayrhofer himself testified that he wrote poems specifically for Schubert to set to music, but an in-depth knowledge of this partnership seems to have eluded scholars. Nevertheless, David Gramit has concluded that Schubert relied more heavily on published sources for his last Mayrhofer settings than for his earlier ones, which were completed when he was sharing accommodations with the poet ("Schubert and the Biedermeier: The Aesthetics of Johann Mayrhofer's Heliopolis," Music & Letters 74 [August 1993]: 355-82).

Schubert has often been criticized for his poor taste in literature, but Youens defends his choices, and demonstrates that he had quite specific criteria when selecting poems. For example, he tended to avoid Schulze's long verses that used classical meters, favoring instead the small number of works that include images from nature. Youens also speculates whether the despair and loss that Schubert himself experienced drew him to this self-tormenting poet. But she does so carefully, pointing out that we lack clear evidence to confirm this; Schubert did not display the same symptoms of erotomania as Schulze, and it is not clear whether he was completely familiar with the details of the poet's torturous passions. Aside from the structure and topics of the poems, Schubert's choices may also have been influenced by other composers. Five of the Korner poems that he set in 1815 had also been used by a fellow Viennese composer, Stephan Franz, in 1814, and Youens suggests that it is not coincidental that both composers' works show the influence of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Schubert's settings of these four poets neatly span the various phases in his compositional output, from his earliest settings (including passages from Baumberg's "Lebenstraum," which he wrote when he was around thirteen years of age) to the 1825-26 Schulze settings that lead up to, and prepare for, Winterreise of 1827. Youens's analyses of the individual songs demonstrate her profound knowledge and great sympathy for Schubert's immense oeuvre. While mentioning such evocative details as range, piano figuration, melodic contour, and rhythm, she concentrates on the harmonic structures, repeatedly demonstrating Schubert's responsiveness to the subtleties of the original poems. Although one can never account for every aspect of the beautiful fusion of text and music, perhaps a few other elements could have been considered at greater length. In particular, one could investigate the relationship between the irregular rhythms and line length of some of Mayrhofer's proto-expressionistic poems and Schubert's phrase structures, considering not only the length of the melodic phrases but also the harmonic structure of each phrase, and the manner in which the piano joins them together. Comparisons could be made between such Mayrhofer settings as "Auf der Donau" (D. 553) and "Auflosung" (D. 807), as well as between the Mayrhofer works and songs with more symmetrical phrase structures.

A number of the songs demonstrate the type of harmonic tensions that initially led to rebukes from Schubert's contemporaries. "Auf der Donau" belongs to a group of works that begin and end in different keys. In this instance, Schubert employs unusual modulations (from E[flat] major to F[sharp] minor) to trace the poet's disturbingly gloomy journey from beauty to oblivion. This song dates from around 1817, when Schubert's interest in such tonal structures peaked, but other earlier songs, including "Sehnsucht der Liebe" (D. 180) of 1815, explore somewhat similar issues. In the key of G, both sections of this earlier song begin away from the tonic, with the first opening in E minor, and the second suggesting A minor, before returning to E minor and finally the tonic. The prominence afforded E minor is especially significant and at times it appears to challenge the overriding tonality of the more optimistic G major (see Harald Krebs, "The Background Level in Some Tonally Deviating Works by Franz Schubert," In Theory Only 8 [December 1985]: 13-16). Youens is keenly aware that composers frequently associated specific affects with individual keys, and in this case, she elegantly portrays the initial E minor as "a gentle minor-modal veil lying over the true G major tonality" (p. 133). She also describes E minor as "nocturnal" and refers to the return of E minor harmonies (which coincides with the word "Schlummern") as "slumber harmonies." Given the unsettling structural role of this key, perhaps one could consider other, less peaceful, attributes. For instance, according to numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, this key often connotes melancholy moods or lamenting, and thus it is a rather appropriate choice for a song dwelling on the endless yearning of the protagonist (see Rita Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries [Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1983; reprint, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1996]: 256-59).

By seeking to include both the poets' lives and works as well as analyses of so many songs, Youens sets herself an almost overwhelming task, as one could easily imagine an entire book devoted to just the biographies of Schubert's poets, or even to his settings of Mayrhofer, from whom he drew some forty-seven texts. Youens, however, also explores how the poets (with the exception of Mayrhofer) were treated by other composers, and both the Schulze and Korner chapters include analyses of a significant number of settings by other nineteenth-century composers. The number of works that Youens discusses is impressive, and she includes fairly extensive music examples of unfamiliar works as well as citations of reviews from nineteenth-century music journals. Among these lesser known composers is Emilie Zumsteeg, the daughter of the ballad composer Schubert revered, Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg.

Youens is to be commended for her superb handling of such a diverse array of nineteenth-century sources, from Schubert autographs to contemporaneous reviews of the poets, and above all else for her command of the extensive lied repertory. But despite her passion for the poets and the music, one often gets lost in the detail. The preface includes an introduction to the general topic that, for the novice, is a little too succinct, though, of course, a reader needing more of the context for this study could easily turn to Youens's own essays in German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schirmer, 1996) and The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Similarly, perhaps a few well-placed generalizations or tables would have provided a better overview of the other composers who set these poets, and this in turn would have led to a clearer assessment of how Schubert's taste in poetry compared to that of his contemporaries, including those working outside Vienna. For example, how many composers used these works? Was Mozart the only other composer who set Baumberg? Was Schubert alone in favoring Korner's gentle love songs over his blood-thirsty battle songs? Nevertheless, that the book provokes so many questions only underscores the importance of this type of study, and it is a reminder of how little we know about the musical, literary, and social context of Schubert's lieder, or as Youens puts it, their prehistory.

HEATHER PLATT Ball State University

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Author:	Platt, Heather
Publication:	Notes
Date:	Mar 1, 1998
Words:	2162
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