Franz Schubert

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

On 19 October 1814, three months before his eighteenth birthday, Franz Schubert composed Gretchen am Spinnrade, a setting of the spinning wheel scene from Part One of Goethe's Faust, in which Gretchen sits alone turning her wheel, her peace gone, obsessively recalling Faust's kiss. The piece was, by the Open University's own account, one of the few of Schubert's songs to sell in significant numbers during his lifetime, an unusual mark of recognition for a seventeen year old composer's first setting of Goethe. Before Schubert, the lied was largely a modest, strophic form, the same music repeated for every verse regardless of what the words were doing. Gretchen am Spinnrade instead lets the piano's rippling right hand figure, the literal turning of the spinning wheel, falter and stop at the exact moment Gretchen's thoughts break off, then resume, so that the accompaniment tracks the character's psychological state rather than merely supporting the voice. It was Schubert's first Goethe setting. The following year, at eighteen, he composed Erlkonig, a setting of Goethe's ballad about a father riding through the night with his dying son pursued by a supernatural spirit, published in 1821 as his Opus 1. Across his short life Schubert set more than seventy of Goethe's poems, work later lied composers, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf and Strauss among them, recognized as having founded the genre they inherited.

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.