The Silence of Goethe: Schubert's Unanswered Dedication

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Twice Franz Schubert reached out to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and twice Goethe said nothing back. In April 1816 Schubert's friend Joseph von Spaun sent Goethe a package of Schubert's own settings of Goethe's poems. No reply came. In June 1825 Schubert tried again, dedicating three songs, published as his Opus 19, directly to Goethe. Again, silence. The traditional account reads this as a verdict: Goethe, whose musical taste ran to the plainer strophic settings of Carl Friedrich Zelter and Johann Friedrich Reichardt, simply could not hear what Schubert's dramatic, through-composed songs were doing, and declined to say so. Musicologist Michael Lorenz, working from Otto Erich Deutsch's documentation, offers a different reading. Goethe told Johann Peter Eckermann, in a conversation recorded on 21 January 1827, that when he could not tell someone something special and appropriate about their work, he preferred not to write at all, calling superficial phrases unworthy. On this account Goethe's silence toward Schubert was not a judgment on Schubert specifically but a standing policy applied to the many composers who sent him settings of his poems over the years. Whether Schubert himself ever knew which explanation was true, the correspondence itself does not say.