Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828) died young, but not before he was able to compose music that has become justly famous. As well as symphonies, piano works, sacred music, and chamber works, he composed over 600 songs or Lieder. This essay considers a few of his over 70 settings for poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Life of Schubert
Schubert was born and died in Vienna. His father, a teacher, recognized his gift for music and arranged for him to obtain a scholarship to the Stadtkonvikt (Imperial Seminary), where he received special training from Anton Salieri. After leaving the seminary, Schubert supported himself by teaching at his father’s school, giving music lessons (notably to the daughters of Count Esterházy), and by writing music for the theater and the church. Ultimately, he was able to publish his own works. The etching by Joseph Kupelwieser on the right shows Schubert in 1821. The following illustration shows a watercolor portrait of Schubert by Wilhelm August Rieder from 1825:
Schubert developed numerous friends among the nobility, and among the singers and actors who entertained them. Joseph von Spaun, an important patron, hosted many musical evenings for Schubert and his friends. These became known as the “Schubertiades.” The following oil sketch is by Moritz von Schwind (1804-1871). He had attended one of the Schubertiades as a young man and painted this from memory in 1868. Schubert is at the piano and the baritone, Johann Michael Vogl, is singing one of his songs.
Erlkönig
One of Schubert’s earliest songs was a setting for Goethe’s 1782 poem Erlkönig. Goethe adapted the story an old Danish ballad wherein the daughter of the King of the Fairies chases after a man she desires. Goethe’s poemtells the story of how a man rides through the night holding his young son in his arms. The Erlkönig desires the beautiful young boy for his own, and cajoles him to come away with him. Though the boy sees and hears the Erlkönig, his father dismisses his claims as illusions. Finally, the Erlkönig, unable to convince the child to come with him, takes the child by force. The father arrives home. His son is dead.
The poem deals with the mortality of children. Schubert’s mother gave birth to 14 children but only 5 survived infancy. No matter how fast one’s father rode, death claimed most children as his own. The poem also considers the nature of evil and desire: the powerful Erlkönig will have the child, no matter what. Desire triumphs: innocence is no defence.
The poem uses four distinct voices: the narrator, the father, the son, and the Erlkönig, These are shown in different colors in the following text:
Schubert composed his setting for Erlkönig in 1815 (Deutsch catalogue number 328). In 1821 it became his first published piece of music: Opus 1. The song is for one vocalist, but distinguishes the four different voices of the poem through different rhythmic and harmonic characteristics. In addition, the piano provides a fifth part: throughout the song, the right hand repeats in triplets the hoofbeats of the fleeing horse, while the left hand portrays its frantic breathing (Bodley, 2023, pp 166-171; Gorrell, 1993, pp 112-116; Newbould, 1997, pp 57-59). Both singer and accompanist arrive totally exhausted at the ballad’s end. The following shows the score for bars 10 to 21 of the song.
Below are performances by Sarah Walker accompanied on piano by Graham Johnson, and by Thomas Quasthoff accompanied by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe led by Claudio Abbado in an arrangement by Max Reger from 1914
Gretchen am Spinnrade
Goethe’s Faust (1808, lines 3374-3414) included a ballad sung by Gretchen (Margarete) who sits at her spinning wheel and thinks about her lover Faust:
Mephistopheles is helping Faust to seduce the young and beautiful Gretchen. Gretchen is in love but feels intense anxiety. She will soon become pregnant and tragedy will ensue. Goethe partially based the story of Gretchen on the life of Susanna Margaretha Brandt, who was seduced, gave birth to an illegitimate child, murdered her child, and was then executed for infanticide in Frankfurt in 1772 (Birkner, 1999).
Schubert’s setting of the song (D 118) was written in 1814 and later published as his Opus 2 in 1821. The piano accompaniment provides the rhythms of the spinning wheel in the right hand and the treadle in the left hand:
The song is a bravura representation of passion and foreboding (Bodley, 2023, pp160-166) The following is a performance by Dawn Upshaw with Richard Goode on piano.
Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was an early champion of Schubert’s Lieder. In 1835-39, he published piano transcriptions of 12 Schubert Songs (S558). The piano arrangement of Gretchen am Spinnrade (S558/8) includes an extra introduction, some thickening of the chords, and raising the “vocal” pitch by an octave for the last verse. The following is a performance by Idil Birit:
Gesang des Harfners
In Book 2 of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (“The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister” 1808), Wilhelm searches out the lodgings of an old harpist, named Augustin, and listens to him singing. On the right is an illustration by William Sharp from the Heritage edition of the book. The words of the song are shown below in German and in a literal translation. Below these versions is the wildly poetic translation of Thomas Carlyle for the first English translation of Geothe’s book
Schubert composed several settings for this song. The following version (D 480, 2; 1816), with tenor John Mark Ainsley accompanied by Graham Johnson, is a youthful questioning of theological implications of human suffering. If God is good and merciful, why do we have to suffer? When we make mistakes, why cannot we be forgiven?
A later version (D 480, 3; 1822) presents the song more as tragedy than as question. This setting is performed by baritone Thomas Quasthoff with Charles Spencer on piano.
Mignons Gesang
In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Mignon is a traumatized young girl af 12 or 13 years, who was kidnaped in Italy and brought to Germany to perform with a theater troupe. She communicates only by song and dance. Wilhelm adopts her as his own child. In one of her songs, accompanied by the old harpist, she describes the feeling of longing for something that she cannot attain. The illustration on the right is by William Sharp. The words of her song are given below in German, in a literal English translation, and in a poetic translation by Thomas Carlyle:
The following is a performance of Schubert’s setting of Mignon’s song (D877) by Nancy Argenta accompanied by Melvyn Tan on fortepiano:
Wandrers Nachtlied
Goethe wrote his first Wanderer’s Nightsong in 1776. He had just become a courtier in Weimar and he sent this poem of youthful unrest to Charlotte von Stein, a lady in waiting at the court. The following is the German text and an English translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Schubert’s musical setting (D 224, 1815) accentuates the tranquility of the poem’s ending rather than the suffering at its beginning. He changed Erquickung (refreshment) to Entzückung (delight). As Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau remarked (1976, pp 43-44),
Anyone asking for peace in this fashion must have already found it.
The following is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s performance of the song with Jörg Demus on piano
And the illustration below gives the autograph:
Goethe wrote a second Wandrers Nachtlied in 1780 on the wall of a gamekeeper’s lodge where he stayed the night while hiking in the hills just outside of Ilmenau. Goethe visited the same lodge in 1831 just a few months before his death and recognized his writing on the wall. The following is the German text of the poem together with an English translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
The illustration below shows the poet as a young courtier in 1779 (Georg May) and as a venerated sage in 1828 (Joseph Stieler):
Schubert composed a setting for the poem (D 768) in 1822. At that time, he was 25 years old, younger than Goethe when he wrote the poem (31 years). The music beautifully presents the poet’s yearning for peace. The following is a performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Jörg Demus on piano:
And the following is the song as performed by Kian Soltani on cello accompanied by Aaron Pilsan:
Life and Death
Schubert contracted syphilis in 1822. Over the next few years, despite treatment with mercurials, the disease progressed, and by 1828 had begun to involve the nervous system. In 1829 Schubert developed typhoid fever and this finally caused his death at the age of 31 years (Mckay, 1996, Chapter 12; Bevan 1998). Goethe was troubled throughout his life by a bipolar mood disorder but survived into his eighties (Steinberg & Schönknecht, 2020). Though he was born 48 years before Schubert, he died four years later than the young composer. Death comes when it must and pays no heed to genius.
References
Bevan. P. G. (1998). Adversity: Schubert’s illnesses and their background. In B. Newbould (Ed.) Schubert Studies. (pp. 244–266). Routledge.
Birkner, S. (1999). Goethes Gretchen: das Leben und Sterben der Kindsmörderin Susanna Margaretha Brandt. Insel.
Bodley, L. B. (2023). Schubert: a musical wayfarer. Yale University Press.
Fischer-Dieskau, D. (1971, translated by K. S. Whitton, 1976). Schubert: a biographical study of his songs. Cassell.
von Goethe, J. W. (1796, translated by Thomas Carlyle, 1824, reprinted with illustrations by William Sharp, 1959) Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Heritage Press.
von Goethe, J. W. (1808, translated by W. Kaufman, 1961). Faust. Doubleday.
von Goethe, J. W. (translated by Luke, D., 2005). Selected poetry. Penguin.
Gorrell, L. (1993). The nineteenth-century German lied. Amadeus Press.
McKay, E. N. (1996). Franz Schubert: a biography. Oxford University Press.
Newbould, B. (1997). Schubert, the music and the man. University of California Press.
Steinberg, H., & Schönknecht, P. (2020). Goethe: A bipolar personality? Periodicity of affective states in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as reflected by Paul Julius Möbius. Journal of Medical Biography, 28(3), 174–180.
Wilson, A. N. (2024). Goethe: his Faustian life. Bloomsbury Continuum.
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