The Hedgehog: Of fragments finished and unfinished

Nineteenth Century Music

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 134-148

  Kramer, Richard ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 62449316521     PISSN: 01482076     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/746895     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. Published under the title "Fragmente" in the journal Athenäum: Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm Schlegel und Friedrich Schlegel, vol. I, part 2 (Berlin, 1798)
2. The authoritative edition is the Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler in collaboration with Jean-Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner, vol. II, Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796-1801), ed. Hans Eichner (Munich; Zurich, 1967), pp. 165-255
3. The translations below are my own. For others, see Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, ed. and trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park, 1968)
4. and Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, 1971)
5. Kritische Ausgabe, II, 169, 197, 183
6. These matters are excellently treated by Walter Frisch in "Schubert's Nähe des Geliebten (D. 162): Transformation of the Volkston," in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln, Neb., 1986), pp. 175-99
7. For a meditation on other aspects of the song, see my Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago, 1994), pp. 13-16
8. For the particulars of publication, and on the whereabouts of the three autographs, see Otto Erich Deutsch, Franz Schubert: Thematisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke in chronologischer Folge (Kassel, 1978), pp. 116-17
9. A facsimile edition of the Reinschrift for Goethe, togeth er with a "Beihefte zur Faksimile-Ausgabe" by Peter Hauschild, was published as Franz Schubert: Sechzehn Goethe-Lieder (Leipzig, 1978)
10. Franz Schubert, "Reliquie": Sonata in C füi Klavier D 840: Faksimile-Ausgabe nach den Autogiaphen in Cambridge, Paris und Wien, ed. Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen (Tutzing, 1992)
11. Paul Badura-Skoda, "Possibilities and Limitations of Stylistic Criticism in the Dating of Schubert's 'Great' C Major Symphony," in Schubert Studies: Problems of Style and Chronology, ed. Eva Badura-Skoda and Peter Branscombe (Cambridge, 1982), p. 203
12. Franz Schubert, Klaviersonaten, vol. III, Frühe und unvollendete Sonaten, ed. Paul Badura-Skoda (Munich, [1979]), pp. 219-25
13. Elizabeth Norman McKay, "Schuberts Klaviersonaten von 1815 bis 1825 - dem Jahr der 'Reliquie'," in Faksimile-Ausgabe, pp. 60-61
14. Alfred Brendel, Music Sounded Out: Essays, Lectures, Interviews, Afterthoughts (London, 1990), p. 86
15. Andreas Krause, "Schuberts 'Reliquie,' Beethovens VII: Sinfonie und der 'Weg zur grossen Sinfonie'," in Faksimile-Ausgabe, p. 75
16. Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, "Zur Bedeutung des Werks in Schuberts Sonatenschaffen," in Faksimile-Ausgabe, p. 13
17. "Verschmelzung" is a term borrowed from A. Knab, "Schuberts unvollendete Klaviersonate in C-Dur und ihre Ergänzung," in Knab, Denken und Tun: Gesammelte Aufsätze über Musik (Berlin, 1959), p. 154
18. It was Thrasybulos B. Georgiades who did the counting, in Schubert: Musik und Lyrik (Göttingen, 1967), p. 283
19. and we are reminded of it in Arnold Feil, Franz Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin; Winterreise, trans. Ann C. Sherwin (Portland, Ore., 1988), pp. 75 and 170, n.74
20. On this matter, see my Distant Cycles, esp. pp. 119-20
21. Hinrichsen, "Zur Bedeutung," p. 33
22. In a probing review of John Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology ([New York, 1993] in Journal of Music Theory 40 [1996], 149-60)
23. Kristina Muxfeldt reminds us of the importance of two seminal essays that bear on the idea of fragment: August Wilhelm Schegel, "Über Zeichnungen zu Gedichten und John Flaxmans Umrisse," in Athenäum, 3 vols. (Berlin 1798-1800), II, 193-246 ("The fragments in the hypothetical new genre Schlegel envisions here are sketches, left as outline drawings so as to stimulate the imagination to make them fully comprehensible," writes Muxfeldt)
24. and Friedrich Schlegel, "Über die Unverständlichkeit, " in Athenäum, III, 337-54
25. The undated pencil drawing, formerly in the possession of Wilhelm Kempff, is now in the Bildarchiv of the Austrian National Library, Vienna. For an analysis of the leaf and some speculation as to its date, see Rita Steblin, "Schwinds Porträtskizze 'Schubert am Klavier'," Schubert durch die Brille 10 (1993), 45-52
26. The matter is complicated by the relationship of this sketch to the depiction of Schubert in Schwind's famous drawing "Ein Schubert-Abend bei Josef von Spaun" (1868), and the version in oils that Schwind did not live to complete (he died in 1871). Steblin ("Schwinds Porträtskizze," p. 50) dates the sketch "um 1826" on evidence that is inconclusive. While such a dating would amplify the distance between sketch and "finish" to an implausible forty-two years, I mean here only to suggest that the immediacy of the sketch has a value that even the artist's Vollendung cannot efface. For more on the drawings, see Maurice J. E. Brown, "Schwind's 'Schubert-Abend bei Josef von Spaun'," in Brown, Essays on Schubert (London, 1966), pp. 155-68
27. For a lively inquiry into these problems, see Robert S. Winter, "Of Realizations, Completions, Restorations and Reconstructions: From Bach's The Art of Fugue to Beethoven's Tenth Symphony," Journal of the Royal Musical Association 116 (1991), 96-126
28. No less provocative is a drawing that depicts Schubert seated at the piano and singing, together with Josephine Fröhlich and Johann Michael Vogl. A facsimile of the original, from a sketchbook of 1827 by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, now housed at the Graphische Sammlung Albertina in Vienna, is shown in Franz Schubert und seine Zeit, a catalog prepared by Otto Biba of an exhibition at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Vienna, 1978), p. 30
29. and in Schubert Studies: Problems of Style and Chronology, p. 142
30. What is Schlegel's sense of the word? Perhaps he had in mind the famous aphorism attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus, whose work Schlegel elsewhere cites: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (London, 1953; rev. 1978) opens with a meditation on "these dark words" whose authenticity and meaning (to say nothing of a sensible translation) remains unclear. It is, however, their figurative suggestiveness that inspires Berlin
31. Charles Rosen, taking the hedgehog as a purely natural conceit, deconstructs the Schlegel fragment in The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 48: "Like its definition, the Romantic Fragment is complete (this oxymoron was intended to disturb, as the hedgehog's quills make its enemies uncomfortable): separate from the rest of the universe, the Fragment nevertheless suggests distant perspectives. Its separation, indeed, is aggressive: it projects into the universe precisely by the way it cuts itself off."