Markus Eiche - Schubertlied Edition 9 [CD]

Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)Settings of poems by Schubert’s friends, Vol. 1Utopia and World-WearinessThe poetic horizon of Franz Schubert and his songs is reflected again in the poems of his circle of friends. Altogether Schubert set even more poems by his friends than he did those of Goethe or Schiller, by far the most distinguished poets. More than two thirds of these texts come from his closest friends, Johann Mayrhofer and Franz von Schober. While Mayrhofer, with about fifty settings, comes in third place after the two great classical German poets, Schober, with eighteen compositions, thirteen of them songs, stands on a par with Friedrich Schlegel, the leader of the German romantics. These quantitative comparisons are evidence of the essential quality of Schubert’s poetic creed: the songs on texts by his friends combine the idealistic feeling of the classical with the Utopian longing of the romantic. The echo of a ‘better world’ (besseren Welt) resounds particularly in Schober’s poems, yet under conditions of pessimism. The poetry of Schubert’s circle was not only under the influence of classical-romantic cultural inspiration, but showed in particular the symptoms of world-weariness spreading throughout Europe about 1820.	This late romantic phenomenon, that associates the poems of the circle with those of Heinrich Heine and Wilhelm Müller, has deep roots in contemporary history. Schubert and his friends were witnesses and victims of a period of systematic suppression of idealist endeavour. After the end of the Napoleonic wars the European powers at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815 determined on the restoration of absolutist government. The Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 had finally resulted in the repression of movements towards freedom. The revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity appeared no longer attainable. The consequent dreary reality of life plunged Schubert’s generation into an existential crisis. Yet Schubert’s circle of friends returned to a Tugendbund (League of Virtue), which, after the model of the poetic leagues of eighteenth-century friendship, paid homage to virtue and country in the service of a humanistic conception of man. Seminal to this circle was the Vienna Stadtkonvikt, a boarding-school for grammar-school boys, students and court chapel choristers. Schubert was at the school from 1808 until 1813 as a choirboy. Schober too, with whom Schubert later lived together for several years, had, while a student at Vienna University, moved in the same milieu. Schubert gathered there not only a practical knowledge of musical performance and of repertoire, but in productive exchange with his friends also acquired a literary stimulus towards the composition of songs. The creative relations with amateurs of the arts and cultivated men such as Josef von Spaun, Josef Kenner, Johann Senn or Albert Stadler enabled Schubert in this elite institution, in which he seemed