In a diary entry from 1816, the nineteen-year-old Schubert noted that the success of a performance of his “Rastlose Liebe”—which had been received with “unbroken applause”—was due, not to his own setting of Goethe’s lyric, but to the inherent musicality of Goethe’s poetry. The conceit throws into relief the extent to which studies of the composer’s Goethe settings have tended to focus on Schubert’s musical doings, to the exclusion of what “music” is already there in the poem.

The current paper proposes, instead, to examine some of Schubert’s early Goethe settings with an eye toward elucidating the features of the poetry that Schubert may have found so musical. Following recent work by Hatten, Byrne Bodley, and Guez that explores the importance that the form of Goethe’s “Erster Verlust” had on Schubert’s setting, I seek to understand the ways that other poems set around the same time might have had similarly strong impacts on Schubert’s compositional choices. I argue that Goethe’s poetry was decisive on Schubert’s musical development—that Goethe, in effect, was the Deist God that set Schubert’s interest in form spinning.

My paper offers novel interpretations of both Goethe’s and Schubert’s “Rastlose Liebe.” But my paper’s central concern is of a higher order. It is not that the form of Schubert’s song mirrors the form of Goethe’s poem. It is that the hyper-individuality of Schubert’s form—its urwüchsigkeit, Clark and Taruskin would say, following Goethe and Herder—may itself be said to have been inspired by Goethe’s poetic practice. Schubert, I argue, learned to valorize such formal originality directly from Goethe’s poetry. The poet, on this reading, played a crucial role in Schubert’s musical education.

In this paper, I explore the phenomenon of intertextuality as it arises in listener experience and use creative (re)composition as a technique for investigating interactions among similar works. Building primarily upon Martín-Rodríguez’s (2023) “intertextually-based model of reading” and Klein’s (2005) “ecology of pieces,” I give an account of listener response that considers the ways in which one work may “color our access” to another (Williams 2006). Specifically, I aim to motivate that access creatively by composing new texts that inhabit the overlapping space between intertextual referents. In this endeavor, I build upon recent scholarship exploring the theoretical, analytical, and pedagogical benefits of recomposition (e.g., Rabinovitch 2023; O’Hara 2017; BaileyShea 2007; Hannaford 2019; Hoag 2013).

By way of demonstration, I first align similar sequential passages in three mazurkas in B: Chopin’s op. 56, no. 1; Scriabin’s op. 25, no. 8; and Saint-Saëns’s op. 66. I imagine the three works as forming an intertextual network, a web of musical texts through which a listener might hear one mazurka resonating in another. I then present an abstract analytical nexus of the network: an imagined middle space that mediates between intertextual nodes and blends their characteristics into one. I argue, however, that such a nexus hints at a realization not in analytical prose, but in analytical music. By (re)composing the nexus of these and other mazurkas (by Chopin, Michał Bergson, and William Albright), my project ultimately revisits Clayton and Rothstein’s (1991) definition of intertextuality as an “impersonal field of crossing texts.” With the exercises I demonstrate, my aim is to penetrate that field creatively, making the impersonal personal.

Amy Beach described her Piano Concerto in C# minor, op. 45 (1899) as a “veritable autobiography” (Beach 1918, 695), primarily because of how the work extensively reuses musical content from her own songs opp. 1 and 2 in each of its four movements. The “hidden narrative” achieved by bringing the songs together in the concerto has been understood as the composer’s declaration of personal and artistic freedom (Block 1998, 141). There is more to be revealed about the concerto’s design with the songs as a hermeneutic key: the rondo finale’s formal processes interweave thematic and tonal resolution with ordered retrieval of content from the song “Twilight,” op. 2, no. 1, a song with poetry that thematizes memory. The rondo juxtaposes two contrasting themes and resolves tensions by combining them harmoniously only after Beach’s last selected segment of the song appears as a repurposed episodic memory.

Early on in the rondo, a brief passage attempts to link the two themes in succession, which generates a dissonant local climax and virtuosic cadenza in response. This dramatic tension is ameliorated by the romantic duet in the C episode, interlacing cyclic patterns of song retrieval with closure in the rondo. The movement concludes by combining the head motives of the two themes in counterpoint as the climax of the concerto. Though cyclical connections in Romantic piano concerti are common, and recomposition itself is not a particularly novel feature, Beach strategically employs both to great effect in this powerful yet overlooked composition.