SCHUBERT AND THE BIEDERMEIER: THE AESTHETICS OF JOHANN MAYRHOFER'S ‘HELIOPOLIS’

Abstract

PART OF the rich legacy left by Carl Dahlhaus to historians of nineteenth-century music is the most extensive recent discussion of the concept of the Biedermeier as it applies to music.' By calling attention to the pervasive influence of middle-class culture and institutions both on musical activity and on contemporary perceptions of that activity, Dahlhaus encouraged a significant broadening of our understanding of musical life during the so-called Restoration period following the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars. Yet his conception of the Biedermeier becomes problematic in the case of Schubert, whose music Dahlhaus excluded from consideration under that term. The issue is clearest when Dahlhaus juxtaposes Schubert's immediate context with his music: 'As institutions, even the Schubertiaden were phenomena of the Biedermeier, despite the Romantic nature of the works around which the circle of initiates gathered'.2 Thus he distinguishes between the Biedermeier as a convivial, functional, institutionally-based phenomenon and Romanticism as an intellectual and aesthetic movement concerned with autonomous art. But so rigid a distinction between a composer's works and the environment in which they first thrived is disquieting. Are we right to isolate Schubert so completely from the friends with whom he socialized and for whom he wrote much of his music, particularly songs? This question hinges on two assumptions: first, that Schubert's friends were more than just a circle of passive admirers; and second, that his music can profitably be approached from a perspective that acknowledges the influence of ideas outside the Classic-Romantic mainstream. To accept the first demands consideration of the second, for the ideas current among Schubert's friends simply do not fit tidily into that mainstream. An investigation of a little-known collection of poems by one of those friends, Johann Mayrhofer's Heliopolis, offers insights into both these issues: it is a fascinating example of Schubert's creative interaction with his friends and reveals a variety of aesthetic issues with which they were concerned. The results further suggest that concepts associated with the Biedermeier can indeed enrich our understanding not only of musical institutions and of composers such as Spohr,