"Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?"
About this Quote
A defense of artistic transformation stands behind the line of protest: why should a composer be judged more harshly than a poet who is animated by someone else’s spark? Inspiration often begins outside the self, a strange flame that lights the imagination. Poets turn myths, legends, and other writers’ ideas into new works through their own cadence and tone. Composers do the same, but with harmony, rhythm, and color, reshaping borrowed material into a different language. The question challenges a hierarchy that treats musical adaptation as derivative while celebrating poetic reimagining as genius.
Schubert’s own career makes the point concrete. His Lieder engage with Goethe, Schiller, Mayrhofer, and Muller, not as illustrations but as conversations. When he sets Goethe’s Erlkonig, the relentless triplets and abrupt modulations generate terror the poem only implies; repeated lines and vocal characterization intensify meaning by musical means. In the song cycles Die schone Mullerin and Winterreise, he occasionally adjusts stanzas, repeats words, and reorganizes emphasis, granting the piano an active narrative voice. Such choices are not betrayals of the text but acts of interpretation. Just as a poet might recast a classical myth to explore modern anxieties, a composer might recast a poem to probe emotional depths available only in sound.
The appeal to guilt is rhetorical. It turns suspicion of borrowing on its head and insists that originality lies in treatment, not in untouched source material. Romantic aesthetics prized the individual inflection of feeling, and for Schubert that inflection occurs where poetry meets music and something third is born. The composer does not merely set words; he tests them against harmony and silence, finds hidden rhythms, and lets subtext speak. If the poet’s freedom to transform an idea is admired, the composer’s parallel freedom deserves the same respect. The flame may be strange, but the fire it kindles is unmistakably his.
Schubert’s own career makes the point concrete. His Lieder engage with Goethe, Schiller, Mayrhofer, and Muller, not as illustrations but as conversations. When he sets Goethe’s Erlkonig, the relentless triplets and abrupt modulations generate terror the poem only implies; repeated lines and vocal characterization intensify meaning by musical means. In the song cycles Die schone Mullerin and Winterreise, he occasionally adjusts stanzas, repeats words, and reorganizes emphasis, granting the piano an active narrative voice. Such choices are not betrayals of the text but acts of interpretation. Just as a poet might recast a classical myth to explore modern anxieties, a composer might recast a poem to probe emotional depths available only in sound.
The appeal to guilt is rhetorical. It turns suspicion of borrowing on its head and insists that originality lies in treatment, not in untouched source material. Romantic aesthetics prized the individual inflection of feeling, and for Schubert that inflection occurs where poetry meets music and something third is born. The composer does not merely set words; he tests them against harmony and silence, finds hidden rhythms, and lets subtext speak. If the poet’s freedom to transform an idea is admired, the composer’s parallel freedom deserves the same respect. The flame may be strange, but the fire it kindles is unmistakably his.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|
More Quotes by Franz
Add to List
