As a result of their journey to see the ageing Goethe in 1831, Schubert and Vogl were able to, at last, perform for the old Lion of Weimar. The enthusiastic reception of the songs prompted a return to that poet's texts and a preoccupation with the second part of Faust, leading to the great work for various voices and orchestra which is counted as the greatest of all musical monuments to the poet.
Having dabbled in Scott and Shakespeare in his twenties, Schubert followed Schumann in an attempt to encompass world literature in song with settings of translations of Burns, Byron, Moore, Hans Christian Anderson, and even Hugo and Gautier. The composer's friendship with Thackeray and his later acquaintance with Dickens played a part in this world-view. He became friendly with a number of Austrian poets, successors to Seidl and Bauernfeld, who would have remained unknown to music lovers and missed out on immortality if it had not been for Schubert's avuncular interest in their work. His only successful opera made the name Adalbert Stifter as famous in musical circles in the 1850s as the name Wilhelm Müller had been in the 1820s. The early masterpieces Winterreise and the connected Heine and Rellstab cycles were stepping stones to the later glories of the song repertoire: the immortal Tieck and Uhland cycles.
It was these later pieces, as well as several meetings between the two composers, that so influenced the early songs of Brahms, dedicated to Schubert, who bemoaned the unfortunate early deaths of his younger contemporaries Mendelssohn and Chopin. Can one imagine a world without the late Schubert Nocturnes for piano, dedicated to Chopin's memory, and written for Clara Schumann? Above all, he mourned the loss of his younger friend and admirer Robert Schumann whose "Papillons", "Carnaval" and "Dichterliebe" had so influenced his song- and piano-writing in his early forties.
Schubert needed to be persuaded to travel abroad in the first instance and then acquired a taste for it. He relished his jaunts to Germany to visit the Schumanns and to see his publishers, to England where his fame was taking root, and to Italy for holidays in the more prosperous circumstances of his later life.
His last work, his swan-song if you like, was a group of epigrammatic settings of Paul Heyse's Italianisches Liederbuch, translations from Tuscan originals which appeared in 1860. These songs were of such perfection that no other composer dared to set them again.
Bill was still on top of the world.
