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Schubert's Goethe Settings.

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Schubert's Goethe Settings. By Lorraine Byrne. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. [xix, 512 p. ISBN 0-7546-0695-3. $99.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

Although Franz Schubert's eighty-two musical settings of texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are widely known and highly esteemed, they remain misunderstood because of entrenched misconceptions about both composer and poet. So argues Lorraine Byrne, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Germanic Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, in her encyclopedic study Schubert's Goethe Settings. With "Gretchen am Spinnrade" (D. 118), Schubert first achieved fame as a lied composer, and he remained captivated by Goethe's verse throughout his life, eventually setting more texts by Goethe than by any other poet. Nevertheless, writers have often accused Schubert of lacking literary judgment and setting virtually any text to music, regardless of its poetic quality. Goethe's musical sensitivity and tastes have also met with criticism. Writers have claimed that Goethe showed limited understanding of music, reflected in his preference for the songs of Carl Friedrich Zelter and Johann Friedrich Reichardt to those of Schubert. These misconceptions about the composer's relation to poetry and the poet's relation to music, Byrne argues, have inhibited proper interpretation of Schubert's Goethe lieder, many of which count among his greatest masterworks.

Byrne believes that masterful song composition involves...

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