ABSTRACT

Franz Schubert's first setting of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which is also his first masterpiece, has been hailed as the inception of the inspired gift for composition. As with the portrayal of Goethe's musicality, the misapprehension about Schubert's knowledge and understanding of literature has contributed to false notions in Goethe and Schubert scholarship. Schubert's settings of Goethe teach us a great deal about the sociology of song in the nineteenth century. The study of Schubert's Goethe settings demands a description of the formal qualities of their literary and musical language, as well as a description of the performance practice. When comparing Johann Friedrich Reichardt's and Schubert's Goethe settings, Reichardt's songs are judged unfairly because his aims as a composer are frequently misunderstood. Reichardt's composition of a large number of Goethe songs records the same liberating moment of Goethe as Schubert later experienced and his discovery of Goethe appears to have crystallized his thinking about song.