Schubert's Lieder and the Philosophy of Early German Romanticism by Lisa Feuerzeig (review)

In her accessible and engaging study of Franz Schubert's setting of texts by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Lisa Feuerzeig uses the central philosophical challenges treated by the early romantics to argue for a reading of Schubert's compositional practice as not merely tone painting or emotional expression but rather a complex kind of conceptual thinking. This does not, of course, mean that Schubert himself read the philosophy and theory of the early romantics (which Feuerzeig outlines very generally in her first chapter). Instead, Feuerzeig shows that Schubert's compositional process brings musical resources to bear on the conceptual and argumentative structures motivating the poems. Thus, for example, in "Die Berge," Schlegel's poem narrates a "process of development" which then "makes it possible for the protagonist to return to his original activity … in a more effective way" (35). Feuerzeig's claim is that Schubert makes use of enharmonic respellings, in which the song progress from and returns to a single key (G major) by way of progressions based on major thirds rather than the more standard progression via relationships of fifths, to create a musical version of the fundamentally romantic topos of unity in difference (or vice versa). What is written for practicality's sake as a G natural is really (based on the harmonic progression) an A double-flat (44); later a C double-flat is spelled as B natural (45). For readers without a background in music theory or musicology, this is quite technical, but the main point is clearly articulated: "The musical struggle begins on the text in which the protagonist begins his own process of labor, as he tries to emulate the mountains—and that difficult labor through a treacherous musical landscape brings him out on the other side of the enharmonic seam" (45).

Feuerzeig suggests we understand Schubert's technique of developing patterns or structures that correspond to the ideas in the poem as "analogous" to the formation of a schema in the Kantian sense: Schubert's "understanding of the poem is his schema, and once he has that, he is able to test potential musical solutions to judge whether they match the poem's conditions" (48). Feuerzeig does not go into the nuances of Kantian schemata, but the concept allows her to propose a mode of interaction between musical features and conceptual content that avoids reducing that relationship to mimetic representation (of, for example, a bird's song) and the more complicated quandary that given musical structures do not invariably correspond to single words or ideas: Schubert may (and indeed, does) use enharmonic respellings based on complex harmonic progressions to convey different features in other songs. Furthermore, according to Feuerzeig, this kind of template-creation for the working through of somewhat abstract ideas is not Schubert's only strategy for approaching texts: Feuerzeig also proposes an approach based on Schleiermacher's hermeneutics, in particular the process of reading large quantities of work by a single poet to gain a sense of the author's oeuvre (60) and the kind of sympathetic communion with the poet's emotional, personal, and linguistic world that Schleiermacher refers to as "divinatory hermeneutics" (56).

In her following readings of longer groups of settings of Schlegel and Novalis, Feuerzeig demonstrates compellingly that the Schlegel poems, which tend to be "governed by an abstract idea and … impl[y] that idea without fully explaining it" (61), lend themselves especially well to a schemata-based approach, in which Schubert "create[s] a diagram in music to spell out the aspects of an idea that the poem does not fully state" (61), while Novalis's more difficult, even hermetic, and aesthetically adept poetry tends to elicit from Schubert a divinatory hermeneutic approach. These modes of relating musical features and poetic content enable Feuerzeig, in her more detailed treatments of the setting of poems in Schlegel's Abendröte cycle and poems from Novalis's...