Goethe and Schubert: Across the Divide

These essays reconstruct a context that has become invisible to us because, in the two centuries that now separate us from it, it had unraveled almost completely. They show that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the symbiosis of words and music was far closer than we naturally assume today. Although Goethe was largely unaware of Schubert, it was the composer's transmission of Goethe through his superlative Lieden, or songs, that became a principal international conduit of Goethe's poetry. Given especially Goethe's own preoccupation with the affinities between language and tone, it is not too much to say that these affinities attain their greatest pitch and moment of intensity in Schubert's settings. Illustrated with many musical examples, the book includes essays by Susan Youens, Brian Newbould, and Walther Durr.