Schubert inherited the attitude from the end of the eighteenth century that to succeed as a composer – both commercially and artistically – one had to write good operas and symphonies. Throughout his life he turned and returned to these two genres, despite his realization that no throng of listeners, not even his most ardent fans and friends, requested such compositions of him. Schubert felt that he needed to go beyond the confines of the song, piano piece, and chamber work in order to link his name to those of Haydn, Mozart, and, especially, his greatest contemporary, Beethoven. In February 1828, just nine months before his death, Schubert informed the publisher B. Schott's Söhne of his available compositions. In this letter he lists various chamber compositions, works for piano solo and duet, songs for one or more voices, and choral works. After all this, however, he reveals his creed as a composer: “This is the list of my finished compositions, excepting three operas, a Mass and a symphony. These last compositions I mention only in order to make you acquainted with my strivings after the highest in art” (SDB 739–40).

It was rare for Schubert to discuss his symphonies in his correspondence. One senses that, although his aims may have been pragmatic in the case of opera, they were idealistic in connection with the symphony, and that, perhaps, his most important artistic goal was to compose a remarkably fine symphony – a great symphony – to match the symphonic accomplishments of Beethoven.

Schubert was not born into a family of professional musicians, as were Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. As a result, he was never expected to become a virtuoso, never wrote a full-fledged concerto, and showed relatively little interest in composing for virtuosos. Instead his family made music together; and for much of his life Schubert's compositions (songs, dances, four-hand piano music, but also most of his chamber and orchestral music) were written for Liebhaber, lovers of music, amateurs. When, near the end of his life, he was asked by the publisher of his E flat Piano Trio, Op. 100 (D929), to name a dedicatee, his response was: “This work is dedicated to nobody, save those who find pleasure in it” (SDB 796). Nor did he consort with the best musicians of his day, those at the cutting edge of contemporary music (i.e. the players promoting the music of Beethoven) until relatively late in his career. When he did, the result was a series of masterpieces: his last three string quartets, the Octet, the Piano Trios in B flat and E flat, and the String Quintet in C Major, to name only the chamber works of his last five years (1824–28).

But these impressive compositions rest on a considerable body of earlier chamber music, and to understand the mature Schubert, it is vital to recognize that before he wrote his first large group of successful songs (1814–16) he had already completed at least twelve string quartets and a string quintet. A case can be made that Schubert, the master of the Lied, was as indebted to his experience with instrumental music as was Mozart, the master of opera, to his experience writing instrumental compositions.

The songs

During his lifetime Schubert was known almost solely as a composer of Hausmusik – songs, dances, marches, and other characteristic pieces for the piano. So much is clear from the fact that of the 478 compositions published before his death (SDB 946), 209 were solo songs or partsongs with piano accompaniment, and 249 were keyboard pieces. It was as a song composer that he first made his name in Vienna, and inevitably when his name first began to be heard abroad it was for his songs. In London the pioneer was a German from Bremen called Christian Wessell, who came to London in the 1820s and founded the publishing firm of Stodart and Wessell.

The sequence of events as reflected in the Harmonicon, a musical monthly which managed to survive for eleven years (1822–32), was as follows. In December 1830 the London firm of Johanning and What more published a Christmas and New Year annual which included as one of its items Schubert's F Minor Moment musical (D780, 3) under its original published title of Air Russe. The annual, called the Cadeau, also appeared a year later, and this time included Schubert's Erlkönig (D328), using Sir Walter Scott's translation of the text. In the summer of 1832 the famous dramatic soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient came to London to take the prima donna role in the first London production of Beethoven's Fidelio, and took the opportunity to introduce Erlkönigto a London audience, whereupon Wessell and Stodart decided to publish the song with Scott's words “as sung by Madame Schröder-Devrient.”

What was Schubert's circle?

To frame this chapter by means of such an apparently straightforward question may seem simplistic. If we take it seriously, however, it leads to an approach to Schubert's immediate context considerably different than the catalogues of Schubert's friends, their idiosyncrasies, and their accomplishments that have been a mainstay of Schubert scholarship. Both idiosyncrasies and accomplishments, admittedly, were considerable, and such anecdotes can provide entertaining reading as well as accurate information; however, not only are several accounts of this type already available, but a focus on the who of Schubert's circle also implies that the nature of that group is self-evident.

A moment's reflection suggests otherwise: why should Schubert have been associated from the earliest studies and accounts with a circle of friends, to the extent that “Schubert's circle” (or the equivalent Schubertkreis) has achieved the status of a standard formula? “Bach's circle,” or “Mozart's,” for instance, have nothing approaching such currency in their respective fields. No one would suggest that these earlier composers had had no friends or associates, so what is it about Schubert's friends – or our perception of them – that has made them indispensable in Schubert studies, to the extent that Newman Flower, whose 1928 biography focused perhaps more single-mindedly on the circle than any other, could write: “the passion for friendship lived in Schubert. He could not exist without friends”?

Leopold von Sonnleithner, an early and ardent champion of Franz Schubert, remarked in 1857: “Without any doubt the description of how his compositions gradually gained recognition must also find a place in Schubert's biography; but this requires laborious study” (SMF 119). Robert Schumann had already sounded a similar theme nearly two decades earlier, warning that “he who is not yet acquainted with [the “Great” C Major] Symphony knows very little about Schubert.” Unpublished compositions should be immediately released, Schumann urged, so that “the world finally arrives at the full appreciation of Schubert” (SMF 405). The lack of a truly representative selection of Schubert's music prompted his biographer Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn to write in 1865 that

These three concurring views of Schubert's problematic reception, expressed by his friend Sonnleithner, by his most passionate and articulate critical advocate, and by his first biographer, all point to the unusual difficulties caused by the posthumous release of so many extraordinary pieces. To borrow the phrase of another acquaintance, Josef Kenner, Schubert's “journey to immortality” encountered significant obstacles and detours (SMF 82). The history of Schubert's musical reception is thus largely the story of the gradual dissemination and increasing appreciation of his compositions.

At the same time as Schubert's fame started to spread across Europe during the late 1820s and 1830s, Paris rose to unprecedented heights as the Continent's foremost and busiest musical center. In spite of King Louis-Philippe's overt lack of interest in music (manifested in a complete absence of governmental support) the French capital became, more than it ever was, a place of intense rivalry between composers and performers from many different countries. Rossini and Meyerbeer (who had settled there before the July Revolution), Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner – to name but a few – bear witness to this extraordinary attraction. Particularly illustrative is the career of one of Schubert's champions, the Bohemian violin virtuoso Josef Slawjk (1806–33), who, unable to withstand such a competitive atmosphere, had to retreat to Vienna, obviously a less strenuous city.

Success in Paris could make the difference between international glory and recognition on a purely local level. The establishment of Schubert's fame, therefore, even though posthumous, necessitated the acknowledgment of the Parisian public. Hence the importance of retracing the history of Schubert's reception in France, more perhaps than in any other non-German country.

The historical process of discovering Schubert's musical output in France during the nineteenth century and up to the centenary of his death, falls roughly into four uneven periods.

The history of music in performance relies on a variety of resources: studies in the evolution of instruments, ensembles, and voices; the evidence of autographs, editions, proofs, marginalia, parts, books, diaries, and letters; tutors and related writings by teachers and performers over the years; and the documentation of concert life in programs and reviews. And since the 1890s, modern performance history has been revealed through a massive archive of recordings.

Schubert research, however, is somewhat disadvantaged in all of these areas except the last. Although we know much about the instruments and ensembles of his day, that information is not specific to Schubert. And of the hundreds of performance tutors published during or since Schubert's time (and now seldom read), few even mention his name. Until the first critical edition (ASA) began to appear in the 1880s his works were published piecemeal and poorly, and many autographs and other source materials went missing. During Schubert's lifetime, and for many years after his death, his music – especially his instrumental music – was championed by a mere handful of performers. For this reason, few pedagogical lines or performance traditions accumulated until late in the nineteenth century.

The only reliable body of evidence we have concerning Schubert in performance is the recordings. Somewhere around 1900 the recording industry discovered the saleability of certain pieces in the Schubert repertory: short works were tailored to match the capacity of the disc (Ave Maria, Erlkönig, etc.), then longer ones (Der Hirt aufdem Felsen, piano character pieces), and finally large-scale instrumental pieces (chamber works and the last two symphonies).

When Fierrabras (D796), Schubert's last completed and best opera, received its Austrian premiere in 1988, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung proclaimed in its bold headline: “against the judgment of history: Schubert's ‘Fierrabras’ rescued triumphantly.” Although not all critics agreed, the headline succinctly captured the issues at stake in the Austrian premiere of Fierrabras, and indeed in any modern consideration of Schubert's operas in general. For “history” – some notable voices aside, such as Maurice J. E. Brown and Elizabeth Norman McKay – has generally judged Schubert a failure as an opera composer. The Vienna Fierrabras revealed the risks of making such judgments without experiencing these works in the theater.

With the exception of three commissioned works, Schubert's theatrical works were neither performed during his lifetime, nor for a long time afterward. While some of his Singspiels have enjoyed intermittent exposure, his “grand” operas have almost never been performed in their original form. For example, there have been performances of a work such as Alfonso und Estrella (D732) in abridged versions (Franz Liszt, Weimar, 1854), freely adapted versions (J. N. Fuchs, Vienna, 1882), bowdlerized versions (Kurt Honolka's Die Wunderinsel, 1958), and concert versions. Recently, there have even begun to be full performances, although Alfonso, unlike Fierrabras, has not yet made it to a major international opera house. In short, the generally negative body of received opinion about Schubert's operatic talent and accomplishment remains largely untested in the theater.

In the late eighteenth century the composition of Lieder was principally an amateur pursuit, taken up by composers who concentrated their efforts on this genre alone. Composers of the more acclaimed public genres, whether instrumental music or opera, only occasionally turned to song as a diversion, which explains why there are so few truly distinguished songs by Mozart and Beethoven. Even the most memorable of their songs only marginally challenge the amateur status of the genre, or else, like Beethoven's Adelaide, they resemble Italian aria more than the simple folk manner of the German Lied. Beethoven's An die feme Geliebte, Op. 98, is the only attempt by a composer of stature to compose a more ambitious work from songs so deeply invested in the Volkston. Yet significantly, the immediate roots of Beethoven's only song cycle lie much less in the tradition of the north-German Lied, with which he had had contact from his earliest years in Bonn, than in his extensive confrontation with British folksong resulting from the arrangements he was commissioned to provide for the popular series of Irish, Scotch, and Welsh folksongs issued by the English publisher George Thomson. (Haydn, too, had been enlisted in this enterprise.) The deep association of Lied with the naive and heartfelt expression of folksong must have served as a form of restraint as well as inspiration for Beethoven, defining both the character and the outer limits of the genre.

“Poor Schubert.” Ever since his death on November 19, 1828, this expression appears over and over again in the writings of Schubert's friends, critics, and biographers. One reason, of course, is that he died so young, at the age of thirty-one. More prosaically, the adjective refers to the composer's precarious financial state throughout his life, although he was far from the destitute artist later sentimentalized in novels, operettas, and movies. The tag also conveys the sense that Schubert was neglected, that his gifts went largely unrecognized.

How and why did these recurring images of Schubert come about? Their outlines are remarkably consistent, from initial portrayals found in his friends’ reminiscences, to the first entries in German encyclopedias of the 1830s, to accounts in even the Encyclopaedia Britannica at the turn of the century and in college textbooks today.

One can easily pick out a few more brush strokes in the established portrait: Schubert is viewed as a natural and naive genius who wrote incomparable songs – the Liederfürst (“Prince of Songs”). And then there are his festive friends in the background. Even if the public at large ignored him, at least he enjoyed the loyal support of his circle. Always the best man, never the groom, Schubert is seen as unlucky in love. Early death meant that his artistic mission was left unfinished. Even with so many miserable circumstances, Schubert's music laughs through its tears, and the maudlin conflation of his life and works in myriad biographies and fictional treatments makes readers past and present weep. Poor Schubert.

The conviviality of Schubert's milieu thoroughly colors our image of him. It seems fitting that his contemporaries should have known him best not only for his Lieder but also for his work in other genres conducive to friendly music-making by amateurs. This social music included part-songs and dances for solo piano, as well as pieces for two pianists at one instrument – a medium, Alfred Einstein noted, that is “symbolic of friendship.” Because they suited the tastes of the rising middle classes and the configuration of the Viennese music world, many such compositions by Schubert were published and performed during his lifetime, yet they are often overlooked today. Even in his Vienna, sociability would not usually have been considered an elevated attribute, and each genre had further limitations. Despite the popularity of the social music, it could never have ranked high in the system of genres.

Einstein, for one, was bothered by the “sociable” Schubert, in particular the composer of the four-hand music, whom he set in opposition to the “deeply serious Schubert,” the “real and great Schubert” of the later string quartets and piano sonatas. The implicit standard to which he held Schubert was, of course, Beethoven, the master of the string quartet and piano sonata who expended little effort on his work in the lesser genres. Although their careers overlapped, the two men had come of age as composers in different circumstances: Schubert did not compose for the aristocracy as Beethoven had. If he sometimes wrote with publishers (as opposed to patrons) in mind, Schubert for the most part did not regard his social pieces as mere potboilers.

Long underestimated, Schubert's compositions for piano have recently begun to assume their rightful place beside Beethoven's legacy as works of almost unparalleled expressive range and depth. Several factors contributed to their neglect: the fact that much of this music remained unpublished during Schubert's lifetime; the dominance, in these works, of musical expression over technical virtuosity; and the overpowering influence of Beethoven, whose works set standards that are not directly applicable to Schubert. Complaints of an alleged looseness of organization in Schubert's music, as expressed by critics like Theodor W. Adorno, who once described Schubert's thematic structure as a “potpourri,” have often arisen from an inadequate understanding of the aesthetic idiom of these works. Schubert's music is less deterministic than Beethoven's in that it does not present a self-sufficient sequence of events; it seems that the music could have taken a different turn at many points. Yet these very shifts in perspective are often exploited by Schubert as structural elements in the musical form, and they also embody a latent psychological symbolism. A key to this symbolism is found in Schubert's songs, in which the protagonist, or Romantic wanderer – who assumes the role of the lyrical subject – is so often confronted by an indifferent or hostile reality. Musically, Schubert uses a combination of heightened thematic contrast, juxtaposition of major and minor keys, and abrupt modulation to reflect this duality between internal and external experience, or imagination and perception – between the beautiful, bright dreams of the protagonist, on the one hand, and a bleak external reality, on the other.

This was the way the eminent Austrian author and painter Adalbert Stifter (1805–68), writing during the mid 1840s, recalled his first impression of Vienna. He penned this description in a thinly veiled autobiographical sketch about himself and two friends who came to Vienna to enter the university. The year was 1826. Stifter was twenty-one years old when he arrived from Bohemia to take up the study of law. Franz Schubert, already quite well known in the city, was twenty-nine and living with his close companion Franz von Schober, two blocks from St. Stephen's.

To the young Stifter – and to most other literate contemporaries of his generation raised in the German-speaking regions of the Habsburg Empire – Vienna was already the stuff of legend. It was a place of seductive paradoxes and symbol of both past grandeur and modernity. Danger, opportunity, squalor, and beauty existed side by side. Vienna with its own uniquely alluring surface possessed (as Stifter recounted) the power to render the ugly seemingly invisible, as if by magic. Yet the conditions of daily life in the city during Schubert's adult life were grim if not sinister. Vienna simultaneously ennobled and threatened the lives of those drawn to it.

In “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (WB,* 184-216), William James offers a general survey of moral philosophy and its central problems. Its main interests lie in answering what James calls the “casuistic” question of the “measure of the various goods and ills which men recognise,” and in the role which religious belief may play there. In that standard context of a justification for moral principles, he veers toward a utilitarian view but is also critical of any such philosophical task. But before he discusses that question he also identifies and answers two others; first a “psychological” question about the “historical origin of our moral ideas” and second a “metaphysical” question about the “meaning of the words 'good,' 'ill' and 'obligation' ” (185). The apparent contrast between those two questions is, however, blurred in James's answers to them. For even the metaphysical question, it seems, has more to do with the origins of moral discriminations than with what we should understand as an account of the meanings of those moral terms. This raises a general problem about James's enterprise in those two initial sections which I want to consider in this essay.