Schubert's Winter Journey by Ian Bostridge

Author:Ian Bostridge [Bostridge, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-96164-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-01-27T05:00:00+00:00

WHAT OF WILHELM MÜLLER? He is the classic model of the comfortable German intellectual in the line of Goethe in Weimar. Born in Dessau, the son of a master tailor, after military service against the French and travels to Berlin and Italy, he was installed as ducal librarian at Dessau in 1820, a privy councillor by 1824, an upwardly mobile protégé of the duke of Anhalt-Dessau, himself a client of the Prussian royal house. Yet, at the same time, Müller had definite liberal form in a period when liberalism was anathematised by Prussia and the Holy Alliance; benefiting from the patriarchal benevolence of his prince, he managed to preserve and occasionally assert his intellectual independence in a manner typical of the Biedermeier era.

In 1816, while a student in Berlin, Müller and a group of friends had published an anthology of poetry called Die Bundesblüthen (Flowers of Union), which made a provocative nod towards the dangerous territory of secret societies. A reference in one of Müller’s poems to the recent fighting in which he had participated during the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon—“Für Gott, die Freyheit, Frauenlieb und Sang” (For God, freedom, love of women, and song)—was cut by the censor. In reply to Müller’s faux-naïf comeback that it was the king of Prussia who had asked his subjects to fight for freedom, the censor replied laconically, “Ja, damals” (Yes, once).

In 1817 and 1818 Müller travelled in Italy, first as companion to Baron von Sack and then on his own. The literary outcome was his Rom, Römer und Römerinnen (Rome, Roman Men and Roman Women), published in 1820: not a straightforward travel guide but rather a series of glimpses into the life of a people, the hidden sides of Italian life and customs. Müller presented his own immersion in the charms of Italy as a distraction from the troubles of Europe at large. There was something disingenuous in this, however. Italy was alive with anti-Austrian feeling, channelled through the revolutionary Carbonari. Already in 1817 there had been revolts in the Papal States; and in 1820, the very year in which Müller’s book on Rome appeared, revolution broke out in Naples, crushed by Hapsburg forces in 1821. Müller’s engagement with and promotion of a native Italian culture (his pioneering collection of Italian folk songs, Egeria, was published posthumously in 1829) was of a piece with the philohellenism he imbibed from his hero Lord Byron, and which gave him his familiar sobriquet “Greek Müller.” Promoting the national aspirations of others could not but be a political act for a German unable to secure his own political ideals. In 1823 the censor was to forbid publication of Müller’s hymn on the death of another radical, nationalist hero, Rafael del Riego, the executed Spanish general who had defended the short-lived constitutional government dissolved by the Quintuple Alliance. “Aber die Freiheit,” Müller wrote, “wer kann sie morden?” (But who can murder freedom?).

The second volume of Rom, Römer und Römerinnen is prefaced by a letter to an old companion from Müller’s sojourn in the Eternal City, the Swedish poet Per Daniel Atterbom.

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