This chapter examines the long-held belief that Arnold Schoenberg endured dire financial hardship for most of his life, due in large part to his unwavering and highly principled commitment to modern music. Schoenberg can be compared to Mozart with regard to his money woes: both composers apparently struggled to support themselves and their families and were tragically under-appreciated and under-compensated during their lifetimes, despite the enormity of their artistic significance. In each case, however, the situation is more nuanced: for both composers, money came and went, for a variety of reasons. In the chapter, the popular mythos of Schoenberg’s ‘perpetual insolvency’ is contextualized and challenged by considering his constantly changing personal and professional circumstances, and the different ways in which he earned money.

The chapter looks at fin-de-siècle Vienna, and reviews its cultural politics, the impact of its city life on writing and artistic expression and, above all, the new attention to language that was absorbed into literature and poetry emanating from French Symbolism. The dangers of lapsing into an aestheticism that denied political reality is discussed, and there is a focus on the importance of the indirect impact such perceived changes in expression and the value of poetic language had on Schoenberg, and indeed on Berg and Webern. Key figures included here include Rilke, Schnitzler and, above, all Hofmannsthal and Stephen George, taken here as writing in crucially different modernist modes, but both directly influential.

Schoenberg’s music has always attracted the avid attention of critics. Some ridiculed his music, especially at first, while others came to respond favourably to its modernist demands. This chapter explores trends in the critical reception of Schoenberg as they have varied across time and place, from his initial entry into the Viennese music world in the early 1900s, through the increasingly harsh, often antisemitic rejections he endured in the 1920s and 1930s, to his re-evaluation in the post-war years, particularly in the United States. In addition, it highlights the composer’s reactions to some of the harsher criticism he received.

This chapter highlights Schoenberg’s encounters with art, literature, politics and religion in Vienna, the city where he spent more than half of his lifetime and where he made his first steps as a composer. With his broad interests, Schoenberg profited from the diverse, international metropolis that affected his world views and artistic work. Social democratic ideas and the workers’ movement were influencing him as well as Jewish culture, embedded in the fall of the Habsburg Empire and rising antisemitic ideas. Vienna’s coffee houses as meeting points for artistic circles, a vivid music scene, as well as the visual arts such as the Secession, Jugendstil and Expressionism, were equally inspiring for his artistic output.

The production of West Side Story at the Vienna Volksoper in 1968 contributed to the rise of the Austrian metropolis as a European centre of American musical theatre. As this chapter shows, the main link between Bernstein, Broadway, and Vienna was Marcel Prawy (1911–2003), a well-known Austrian dramaturg, opera connoisseur, and critic. Prawy created a German adaptation of West Side Story, and in it he imputed Central European cultural viewpoints and preferences into the American artform, particularly in its representation of ethnic conflicts. The differences between Prawy’s German adaptation and the English original suggest that Prawy was concerned about making the American work more understandable for Viennese audiences not only through his approach to language and the poetic properties of the lyrics, but also by subtle but significant changes of the work’s meaning. Most prominently, Prawy aimed at increasing the Broadway work’s exoticist elements.

More than half of Schubert’s chamber works from 1824 to 1828 feature his preferred instrument, the piano. Yet in none of them does it function as an instrumental accompaniment, being instead an equal participant in a duo or trio chamber format. Especially in solo chamber works written for performance in recitals by befriended virtuoso instrumentalists, Schubert was perfectly willing to adapt the style brillant that flourished between 1820 and 1830. Based on the assumption that Schubert applied the style brillant solely for reasons of economy, his virtuoso chamber music has previously been considered to be of lesser value, mentioned only in passing. More recently, however, his turn to extroverted forms of expression has been described as a deliberate counterfoil to the introverted sublimation of his other ‘late’ works. This chapter considers the Fantasy in C Major (D934) and Variations in E Minor on ‘Trockne Blumen’ (D802) to show how Schubert discovered the sophisticated and outgoing mannerisms of the style brillant; it also discusses the development of ornamented variation techniques as an alternative to thematic development, and how this shift of emphasis between musical substance and figuration seems to anticipate the aesthetics of the Romantic arabesque.

There can be little doubt that the piano was one of Schubert’s instruments of choice, featuring not only in an array of solo pieces but also in chamber music and as an accompaniment to Lieder. Given the popularity of the instrument in Vienna during the early nineteenth century, this is perhaps not surprising. However, very little is known about Schubert’s own instruments, or which specific makers and models he preferred throughout his career. The instruments themselves underwent substantial change during Schubert’s lifetime, with preference moving away from the delicate touch and tone of late eighteenth-century models to the larger compass and more weighty tonal qualities of the instruments of the 1820s and 1830s, in part as a reaction to the demands of composers. By considering Schubert’s connection to specific instrument makers, the unique qualities of Viennese instruments and individual works for pianoforte by Schubert, this paper revisits what is known about the instruments he may have preferred, while also making observations about the connections between his keyboard music and the instruments that were available in early nineteenth-century Vienna.

Franz Schubert’s waltzes may seem small, but they bear more than meets the eye. Leopold von Sonnleithner tells us that Schubert ‘never danced, but was always ready to sit down at the piano, where for hours he improvised the most beautiful waltzes; those he liked he repeated, in order to remember them and to write them out afterwards’. The composer appears to have been inspired by the motion and joy he saw and caused, for certain waltzes communicate physical momentum and personalised interiority – reflections and echoes from the past.The effects expressed within Schubert’s waltzes arise from expectations elicited by their voice-leading, coupled with changes in texture, register, dynamics, metre and rhythm. This chapter will explore representative examples from Schubert’s Originaltänze, Valses sentimentales, Valses nobles, and the Zwanzig Walzer (Letzte Walzer) to demonstrate how they convey impressions of physicality and flow, perceptions of distance and disturbance, plus aspects of sonority and spatiality. In turn, these reflections and echoes offer insights regarding Schubert’s art and aesthetics, as well as the past they inhabited.

The word ‘Klavier’ occurs only twice in the texts of Schubert’s lieder, but both times in a prominent position – namely, in the titles of Christian Daniel Friedrich Schubart’s ‘An mein Klavier’ and Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Laura am Klavier’, both set to music in 1816 (respectively D342 and D388). The first poem deals with two figures – the narrative persona and his piano; the second with three – Laura, the piano and the narrative persona. In Schubart, the emphasis falls on the piano’s expressive potential; in Schiller, mainly on the impression it imparts. The two poems thus present the instrument in quite different, even antithetical, guises: introverted versus extroverted. Although Schubert turned to poems that were already a generation old (they were first published in 1785 and 1782, respectively) and had a different sound in mind compared to the two poets (this was an age of rapid evolution in keyboard instrument construction), the instrumental aesthetic displayed in Schubart’s and Schiller’s poems still applied with undiminished force in 1816. The antitheses marked by the poems Schubert chose with respect to the Klavier reveal the breadth of notions associated with the instruments that went by that name around 1800.

In spring 1838, Franz Liszt made his first appearances before the Viennese public with a selection of his transcriptions of Schubert’s Lieder for pianoforte. The performances unleashed veritable storms of applause from audiences and critics alike; some of the rapturous reviews even claimed that the music of Schubert, who had died ten years earlier, only became intelligible through Liszt’s playing. Liszt’s transcriptions were meant to transfer Schubert’s piano writing effectively to the new generation of concert grands. Their formidable virtuosity, which was frequently criticised in later years, was only superficially an end in itself, however. Instead, Liszt viewed virtuosity as a vehicle for obtaining the maximum expression appropriate to the original and for capturing the emotive quality of Schubert’s music. His precepts as an editor of Schubert’s piano music were of a different nature. Unlike contemporary editions, the Schubert volumes that Liszt prepared for the Stuttgart publishing house Cotta around 1870 are exemplary in quality and indicate every editorial intervention, while also being devoid of the arbitrary additions common to the subjectively tinged performance tradition of his generation. This chapter provides a thorough study of Liszt’s approach to Schubert’s music, while also considering the reception of his adaptations and editions.

In contrast to many contemporary composers, Franz Schubert was neither a virtuoso at the piano nor on any other instrument. His relationship to the piano appears rather pragmatic, in that he turned to the instrument when he was in demand: as a song accompanist and for dance music at Schubertiaden, as a four-handed partner or as a page-turner at larger events. He certainly did not see himself as a pianist, but first and foremost as a ‘composer’.This chapter explores Schubert’s public and semi-public appearances as a pianist by evaluating the contradictory statements about the quality and the quantity of his piano playing. It is concerned with his musical education, explores his piano playing in his later years and highlights his public appearance as a pianist. The comparison of Schubert’s biography with those of Viennese piano virtuosos and other composers sheds new light on the rapid development of the musical tastes of the Viennese bourgeois society in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Finally, the question of whether and to what extent the fact that Schubert was not present in the public concert life of his time diminished his career as a composer of ‘great’ works is discussed.

From 1810 to 1830, Viennese piano construction evolved in an attempt to combine the special sonority of Viennese instruments with new advances in technology. One important factor was the possibility of varying the sound between full and reduced or dampened action. A particularly striking change of sound could be produced by the soft or una corda pedal, which shifted the hammer rail so that the hammers struck only one rather than the standard three strings of a triple-strung piano. Although detailed knowledge of which composers wrote which works for which instrument is lacking, hypotheses can be advanced regarding the influence of the action of certain instruments on compositional style. A comparison of works by two composers from different generations – one earlier (Beethoven) and another later (Mendelssohn, who had a predilection for Viennese instruments in his youth) – sheds light on several peculiarities of Schubert’s piano music. Beethoven’s late works and Schubert’s works of the 1820s both exploit this potential in order to coordinate sonority and structure. However, the two composers differ in one key respect: Beethoven tended to use the sonic contrasts he exploited (and meticulously notated) to articulate the work’s architecture, whereas Schubert used them to refine atmosphere and mood.

In the early 1820s, music critics called attention to an innovative feature of certain Schubert Lieder: musical imagery in the piano accompaniment that both unifies the song and creates dramatic immediacy. Writers hailed this aspect of ‘Erlkönig’ (Op. 1) and ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ (Op. 2) in particular. The two songs’ main musical motifs – racing triplet rhythms evoking a galloping horse and a whirling sixteenth-note pattern evoking a spinning wheel – do more than provide unity and vivify the represented scene, however; they also powerfully contribute to the expression of changing emotions. The outer and inner worlds of the song persona(e) converge in, and are projected through, the piano accompaniment. This chapter examines the nature of musical imagery in Schubert Lieder, different ways that the musical motifs evolve, and the interpretive significance of those changes. The motif might be placed in new contexts, altered from within, fragmented, interrupted, or sounded with greater or lesser frequency, to the point of disappearing. Paradoxically, it might even evolve in meaning by resisting change. Songs analysed include ‘Erlkönig’, ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, ‘Meeres Stille’, ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’, ‘Jägers Abendlied’, ‘Halt!’, ‘Gefrorne Tränen’, ‘Letzte Hoffnung’, ‘Im Dorfe’, ‘Der Wegweiser’ and ‘Die Stadt’.

Analysis of addressee and writer–recipient relationships is a common methodology for the interpretation of written correspondence of ‘great’ composers. By contrast, when a musical text is the object of study, music philologists and performers alike tend to neglect such a contextual perspective when attempting to reveal its meaning – as if composers had no particular audience in mind when they wrote their piano music. This chapter attempts a characterisation of Schubert’s pianistic audience in Vienna as reflected in contemporary Viennese pianoforte treatises. The first part presents evidence to support such a geographically focused source selection – the distinctly nationalist stance of the Viennese pianoforte scene in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna. The second part compiles a brief genre history of the Viennese pianoforte treatise – both produced in Vienna and imported from abroad – during Schubert’s lifetime. The third part deduces several common principles from this fascinating corpus of sources and reads selected passages from Schubert’s works through this lens, exemplifying how some of the traditional ‘problems’ can be resolved in the context of early nineteenth-century Viennese pianism.

Schubert’s piano music and songs contain several examples where triplets are notated alongside dotted rhythms. Editors, writers and performers disagree about the performance of these rhythms, which exist in keyboard music from at least the late Baroque to the early twentieth century. This chapter surveys evidence from the long nineteenth century, drawing on previous literature and introducing new lines of enquiry. It situates the problem as it applies to Schubert within a broader view of the meaning of notation through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggesting that many aspects of rhythmic notation remained unfixed during the period.A broader range of evidence than previously considered is documented, including contradictory passages from performance tutors and other literature, anomalous notation in the music of several composers, different versions of Schubert’s works and rhythmic alignment in a range of sources. A study of engraving practice offers insight into the rhythmic presentation of published sources. Finally, early recordings demonstrate that rhythmic performance continued to be controversial into the twentieth century.Because of the scant and sometimes contradictory nature of the evidence, it is not possible to arrive at definitive solutions to the performance problems. Nevertheless, this chapter draws some distinctive conclusions from the sources.

The religious world of late medieval and early modern Central Europe is complicated, convoluted and, above, all entangled. But despite the real and tangible connections that linked the various polities of this region together, scholars have tended to explore this landscape along anachronistic divisions defined narrowly by language and nation. This article, by contrast, examines connections that developed between the Bohemian and Austrian lands. It begins in the mid-fourteenth century by exploring rivalling efforts of Emperor Charles IV in Prague and his son-in-law, Duke Rudolf IV of Austria, to build the institutional foundations upon which critical ecclesiastical changes occurred in the following three centuries. The chapter traces parallel reform programmes in the fifteenth century that had very different outcomes. While Hussitism left Bohemia isolated, the efforts of Nicholas of Cusa and others helped to integrate the Austrian lands into the broader ecclesiastical culture of the West. The sixteenth century brought an Erasmian humanism to both regions as well as more radical expressions of reform. Protestantism reached its high point here in the late sixteenth century only to collapse dramatically a few decades later with the great crisis of the Thirty Years’ War. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the exiles who left this region after the Catholic victory.