ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in this book. Over the years a number of misconceptions have evolved around Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Franz Schubert, both in relation to each other and to the nineteenth-century Lied. This chapter aims to redress these misconceptions and to compare rather than contrast these artists. Goethe's silence to Schubert's songs has bequeathed to literature a cloud of misconceptions. Goethe was a poet of transformation, and his development was towards wholeness, not disintegration. Goethe and Schubert are placed in opposition to each other through their conception of the nineteenth-century Lied, yet their connection with the Berlin school placed them, as it were, in pre-established harmony with each other. The power of Schubert's Goethe settings derives from the interaction between content and structure, and their unparalleled quality rests on this unity of form.
