Noble simplicity and quiet grandeur: Franz Schubert's settings of Johann Mayrhofer's neoclassical poems

Abstract

Historians, artists, architects, linguists, and politicians in nineteenth-century Germany and Austria were fascinated with Greco-Roman antiquity. The neoclassical movement in German and Austrian art, which was largely inspired by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, found its way into music through poetry. Franz Peter Schubert, the preeminent Austrian art song composer of the early nineteenth-century, composed several Lieder that illustrate the prominent place that Greek classicism had in the arts during his lifetime. Of Schubert's many neoclassical settings, those based on poems by Johann Baptist Mayrhofer, taken collectively, most closely embody the spirit of Greek classicism as it was understood at the time. Following an examination of the neoclassical movement within Germany and the life of Mayrhofer, I discuss four of Schubert's songs that demonstrate, in varying degrees, the classical Greek ideal developed by Winckelmann: Memnon, Philoktet, Iphigenia, and Der zürnenden Diana