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  • Schubert’s Lieder and the Philosophy of Early German Romanticism by Lisa Feuerzeig
  • Suzannah Clark
Schubert’s Lieder and the Philosophy of Early German Romanticism. By Lisa Feuerzeig. Farnham, Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. [xvi, 198 pp. ISBN 978-1-4094-4788-7. $149.95 (cloth)]

Schubert’s contemporaries cultivated the idea that Schubert was an intuitive composer with little intellectual acumen for handling large-scale instrumental forms and even less discrimination or care for the poetic quality of the texts he set to song—a legacy that has persisted to the present day, especially amongst Schubert lovers. Feurzeig’s study belongs to a growing body of critiques of this received view of Schubert, including studies by such scholars as Christopher Gibbs, Scott Messing, Susan Youens, and myself. Feurzeig thus presents a very different image of Schubert, arguing that he exhibited sustained engagement with the highly intellectual philosophical movement of the Frühromantik. Capable therefore of abstract thinking, Schubert returned frequently to the poems of two of the movement’s central proponents: Friedrich [End Page 319] Schlegel and Novalis, the latter being the pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg. Feurzeig’s book deals with all of the Novalis settings taken from the poet’s Geistliche Lieder and Hymnen an die Nacht, all of the settings from Schlegel’s Abendröte, and two of five other Schlegel settings, “Im Walde” and “Blanka” (p. xiii). Far from setting poems haphazardly, Feurzeig demonstrates that Schubert made judicious choices in selecting eleven of the twenty-two poems that made up Schlegel’s poetic cycle Abendröte. While apparently eschewing some poems such as “Die Lüfte” (“The Breezes”), “Zwei Nachtigallen” (“Two Nightingales”), “Der Wasserfall” (“The Waterfall”), and “Der Sänger” (“The Singer”) that would have lent themselves to latent musical effects, Schubert’s choices reveal a willingness to tackle the art of setting poems about inanimate objects and silent phenomena.

The book comprises six chapters. The first and third introduce readers to the important philosophical debates that consumed the young thinkers who ushered in German Romanticism in the 1790s. The first chapter, “The Berlin/Jena Romantics”, provides an overview of the ideas and chief figures involved in the Frühromantik, who were largely located in Berlin and Jena. The third chapter, “Early Romantic Hermeneutics”, explicates the early Romantic revival of Greek art and literature and interest in the Bible, focusing in particular on the profound influence of Schleiermacher, a theologian and translator into German of Plato’s dialogues. As Feurzeig herself readily admits, these chapters do not contain new discoveries or ideas but are historical and philosophical overviews (p. 1). They are, however, immensely valuable chapters. Novices to early Romantic philosophy and nineteenth-century hermeneutics will do well under Feurzeig’s tutelage: her summaries are highly readable and the concepts are lucidly explained. The seasoned philosopher and/or practitioner of hermeneutics will marvel at her ability to distil the essence of the complex and at times abtruse ideas of the early Romantics and to explicate how the foundational ideas of modern hermeneutics in the nineteenth century continue to shape our interpretative impulses.

In between these two chapters, Feurzeig sets out her case for Schubert as abstract thinker using the song “Die Berge” (D. 634), which is drawn from Schlegel’s Abendröte (Chapter 2: “Case Study: ‘Die Berge’ and Schubert as Abstract Thinker”). Abendröte is a cycle in which each poem is told from the perspective of a different persona, always named in the title. While she could have chosen any of the songs by Schlegel to build her case, “Die Berge” (“The Mountains”) is a particularly pertinent example for overturning common wisdom about Schubert. As John Reed opined in The Schubert Song Companion (Mandolin: Manchester University Press, 1985; reprint 1997, 159) “Schubert is content to look at the external imagery rather than the contemplative centre. . . . The commentators are silent about Die Berge, and indeed it is a strangely unconvincing song.” The emphasis on the external imagery is precisely the philosophical point: Schlegel’s poem is a manifestation of the Kantian schema, which requires “a text that is governed by an abstract idea and that implies that idea without...

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