The Unknown Schubert (review)

The Unknown Schubert has a portentous title, promising a Franz Schubert as yet undiscovered, waiting to be revealed inside the covers. Unfortunately, the blurb on the dust jacket is pitched to a reader who has just barely heard of Schubert, making one realize just how contingent the term “unknown” can be. Furthermore, the jacket makes several statements that force one to question its author’s fitness to engage even the ignorant reader: “Schubert did not emerge as a composer until after his death”; and “[h]is reputation was first established among the aristocracy who took the art music of Vienna into their homes, which became places of refuge from the musical mediocrity of popular performance.” The book, fortunately, is much better than its cringe-making jacket.

“Unknown,” it turns out, refers to a cross-section of recent research on Schubert; the book is a collection of essays that grew out of the symposium “The Unknown Schubert: New Perspectives, New Insights” held at Luther College, University of Regina, Saskatchewan on 4 and 5 December 2004. The subtitle of the symposium was more modest than the book title, and some of the essays do live up to its promise. Some others are solid contributions that incrementally advance perspectives and insights already well established, and at least one essay earnestly sets to work tilting with a view of Schubert that was prevalent a generation or two ago but has long since faded into irrelevance. The ordering principle of the book is broadly generic: lieder, opera, chamber music, and piano music each have several essays, while sacred music and “unfinished works” are represented by one essay each. The approaches vary widely, as does the quality of the writing, all of which might matter little if there were a strong editorial voice summarizing and putting into some perspective the current state of Schubert research exemplified by these disparate essays, and placing the slice of current Schubert reception represented in the book in the larger context of the long and colorful history of Schubert reception. Alternately, the symposium could have been designed from the start to have a focus more specific than Schubert.

All caviling aside, libraries and Schubert scholars will want to own the book simply because a number of the essays are very good, and will prove important to further research. One unifying thread woven into many of them is the multiplicity of means by which Schubert appropriated a romantic yearning for wholeness, a “regaining [of] lost unity with the external world, or within the self” (Marjorie Hirsch, p. 12), both in its optimistic early romantic manifestations, and in its pessimistic, alienated Biedermeier variants. Su Yin Mak, for example, analyzes Schubert’s “Quartettsatz” (D. 703) in analogy with Friedrich Schiller’s concept of elegy as “the longing for an ideal that is lost and unattainable” (p. 147). She finds that the opening theme’s descending lamento tetrachord is composed out in the rest of the movement, and that the structure of the movement as a whole “refers to the discursive structure of the poetic elegy” (p. 153). This provides an explanation for the movement’s unusual sonata-form structure. But the first theme’s return at the end of the movement she finds structurally redundant, according to both the sonata principle and the elegiac model. Its return “represents neither summation nor apotheosis, but relentless, fruitless repetition, thereby changing the movement’s import from pathos to pessimism” (p. 153).

Marjorie Hirsch explores the history of the Memnon myth and its transmission as a background for Johann Mayrhofer’s poem “Memnon” and Schubert’s setting of it (D. 541). Schubert’s song “dramatizes the myth of lost paradise,” but, unlike Mayrhofer’s poem, offers “intimations of transcendence” (p. 23). Hirsch postulates that although Schubert did not yet share Mayrhofer’s existential despair, he was attracted to the poem partly as a means of appealing to the singer Johann Michael Vogl, who was a passionate classicist and who...