The fourth annual conference of the Schubert Research Center in Vienna saw a rich confluence of disciplines – musicology, literature, art history and philosophy – as participants explored the multivalent implications of landscape, and, more broadly, nature, in and beyond the Biedermeier period. Organizers Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl (Universität Salzburg), Wynfrid Kriegleder (Universität Wien) and Werner Telesko (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften) hosted the event warmly and fostered a welcoming atmosphere for all. Over the course of three days, not only did papers complement each other well, but outings arranged by the organizers to the Belvedere Museum and Wiener Konzerthaus also rendered themes discussed during the day visually and sonically palpable. Ever since the comparison of Schubert’s music to landscape in Robert Schumann’s review of the ‘Great’ Symphony in 1840, the topic of landscape has received considerable attention within Schubert scholarship. (See Robert Schumann, ‘Die 7te Symphonie von Franz Schubert’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 12/21 (10 March 1840), reproduced in German and in English translation in Mark DeVoto, Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2011), 111–119. For a sample of writings on Schubert and landscape see Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Schubert’, in Moments musicaux: Neu gedruckte Aufsätze 1928–1962 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), 18–26; Scott Burnham, ‘Landscape as Music, Landscape as Truth: Schubert and the Burden of Repetition’, 19th-Century Music 29/1 (2005), 31–41; and Burnham, ‘Thresholds Between, Worlds Apart’, Music Analysis 33/2 (2014), 156–167.) Overlapping with politics and aesthetics, the papers presented over the course of the conference continued familiar discourses of landscape and nature in Schubert research and extended them with further enquiries relating to philosophy and ecocriticism, as well as to different types of media, whether poetic texts, painting or film.

In the session ‘Landscape as Soundscape’, two papers by Stefan Schmidl (Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität der Stadt Wien) and Markus Böggemann (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien) probed the spatial aspect of landscape and music. While both presentations touched on the same repertoire by Schubert, ‘Der Hirt auf dem Felsen’, d965, the two focused on different aspects of landscape as soundscape while situating Schubert’s compositions relative to other works of the period between the French Revolution and the Revolutions of 1848. Schmidl’s paper, ‘Creating the Sound of Faraway: Immersive Landscapes in Early Romantic Music’, explored the means by which musical evocations of landscape developed to signify spatial depth and distance, particularly as they gestured at infinity. Böggemann’s paper, ‘Landscape as Soundscape: Evoking Nature in Schubert’s (and Others’) Songs with Obbligato Instruments’, examined relationships between music and landscape as spatial experiences of nature. Both papers observed details of instrumentation as they pursued the question of how landscape in music can be composed as a spatial experience. Böggemann noted that in Schubert’s ‘Auf dem Strom’ (d943) and Franz Lachner’s short collection of songs Waldklänge (Op. 28, 1834), the semantics of the horn as an open-air instrument immediately connoted the outdoors, thereby using sound to situate the music and listeners in an imagined world outside the domestic spaces in which performances historically took place. Further, Böggemann asserted that in the genre of songs with obbligato instruments, harmonic space becomes more than a metaphor. In the cases of ‘Auf dem Strom’ and ‘Der Hirt auf dem Felsen’, the wide dynamic ranges and unique timbres of the horn and the clarinet respectively encourage the exploitation of thirds relations. These issues of harmony, landscape and distance bring to mind Adorno’s centenary essay on Schubert, in which the philosopher likens the composer’s harmonic shifts to changes of atmosphere or light over a landscape (Moments musicaux, 27, 28).

While Böggemann’s paper focused on harmony and instrumentation, Schmidl’s probed the relationship between instrumentation, distance and longing – that is, how music sounds Sehnen (yearning). In Schubert’s ‘Hirt auf dem Felsen’, the clarinet’s held notes and echoes of the singer’s melodies draw attention to the words in Müller’s text that indicate direction or location – ‘hernieder’, ‘empor’, ‘unten’ and ‘hinüber’ – and, ultimately, the mountain shepherd’s longing for his distant beloved. In a contemporaneous non-texted work, the contrast of the framing shepherd scenes and the artist’s introspection in the ‘Scène aux champs’ from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830) bespeaks what Schmidl called a ‘Romantic two-world model’, whereby the internal realm of emotions is disconnected from or not aligned with actual lived experience, thereby generating unfulfillable longing. Even by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the subject’s desire still shapes the natural world: this is audible in the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony (1876), where the horn’s theme (evoking the alphorn) first appeared on a postcard to Clara Schumann in 1868. With the text ‘Hoch auf’m Berg, tief im Thal, grüß ich Dich viel tausendmal’ (high on the mountain, deep in the valley, I send you many thousand greetings) set to the melody, Brahms’s musical greeting sounds Sehnsucht over an imagined spatial expanse: the Bernese Oberland. Over the soaring strings, the horn’s sound and the emotions symbolically carried by the instrument dissipate into the ether, becoming part of the landscape. Through sound, longing is projected from within the subject into the landscape, where it strives for the metaphysical.

The implications of the ‘two-world model’ for musical interpretation and performance were brought up by Joan Grimalt (Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya). His presentation, ‘Schubert’s Impromptu, Op. 90 No. 1 in C Minor: An Inner Landscape’, read this work (d899/1) as a dramatic staging of the inner self that is heightened in performance by rubato, which he theorized as directly proportional to increasing subjectivity. Such a reading, which argues for the indirect representation of the self in instrumental music, raises long-rehearsed debates about ‘absolute’ versus programme music. Audience members’ perceptive suggestions of ‘musical topography’ and ‘narrative’, rather than the term ‘inner landscape’, brought up questions of the difference between landscape and other adjacent concepts. Indeed, how might we understand the difference between a musical topography and a musical landscape? And while the terms ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’ were used fluidly throughout the conference, what might scholarship gain from making further distinctions between the two?

Moving from our perception of landscape via the auditory senses (landscape as soundscape) to the visual, papers by art historians Stephanie O’Rourke (University of St Andrews) and Werner Telesko (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften) presented approaches to landscape that went against the grain of traditional frames. Telesko’s talk, ‘The Interest in the Seemingly Trivial: Microscopic Awareness in the Recording of Nature and Landscape in the Vormärz Period’, balanced the grand, sweeping vistas with which we are familiar, as in paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable and Johan Christian Dahl, with attention to works by these artists that focus on the microscopic. For example, Friedrich’s Cave in the Harz (c1837) is striking for its granular detail of the crevasses in rock faces and the angles of each blade of grass. But what caused this new attentiveness to minutiae? On the one hand, this newfound concentration on the seemingly trivial paralleled the inward retreat that marked the Biedermeier period. On the other hand, the microscope made possible not just a focused perspective in art, but also important observations in the natural sciences, such as those by Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin and other naturalists.

Challenging commonly disseminated narratives of Romanticism as ‘spiritual and emotional communion with nature’, Stephanie O’Rourke’s paper turned the typical horizontal axis by which we apprehend the romantic landscape on its side, re-reading landscape from a vertical perspective (for example, Friedrich’s Rock Arch in the Uttewalder Grund, c1803) and, consequently, seeing the relationship of humans to nature as being an extractive one. O’Rourke showed how Friedrich’s introduction of verticality into some of his paintings – by placing rock prominently in the foreground – reveals the invisible structures of mining in the very regions that inspired him, such as the Harz mountains. While Friedrich’s landscapes may promote aesthetic contemplation, O’Rourke reminded us that surrounding or beneath these idyllic landscapes were elaborate infrastructures that facilitated the extraction of and profit from natural resources. Suspending the typical horizontal perception of landscape, mining caves of the nineteenth century (such as those built in Saxony and Steyr, the latter being where Schubert spent multiple summers) were measured not with typical markers of distance, but by hour. The altered sense of time built into accumulated layers of rock – inaccessible from the surface – reveals ‘deep time’: a geological history that exceeds human history and comprehension.

Papers by philosopher Elizabeth Millán Brusslan (DePaul University) and pianist and artistic researcher Marlene Heiß (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz) sought to balance or challenge anthropocentric views of nature. Heiß’s ‘“Und das All ein einzig Chor”: An Ecocritical and Intermedial Approach to Schubert’s/Schlegel’s Abendröthe Cycle’ combined performance with an eco-critical approach to the first song in the group setting eleven poems by Friedrich Schlegel. The poem’s pantheistic attitude, most discernible in the joining of voices of the natural world into one choir (‘Und das All ein einzig Chor’), guided the creation of a short film by Lilli Kuschel that was shown as part of the presentation. Composed of a series of fragmented shots along the test site of a bicycle path (Radbahn) underneath the U1 U-Bahn line in Berlin, the film used the first song of Abendröthe (with Heiß playing the piano part) as a kind of soundtrack to images of plant life co-existing with – or even despite – urban structures. Superimposed over Schubert’s song were responses to the questions ‘What do you do in the evening after work to calm down?’ and ‘Does experiencing nature play a role in this?’. Re-enacting the confluence of voices in Schlegel’s poem, these responses gradually overlapped in stretto, finally becoming a twenty-first-century choir by the end of the film. While the film’s goal was to shift awareness to perceptions beyond the anthropocentric, the second-person form used to address interviewees pointed to the difficulty of this de-centring endeavour; this is where the visual component (the film) made its intervention.

Elizabeth Millán Brusslan’s paper on Humboldt’s portrait of nature (Naturgemälde) sought to balance scientific and artistic views. In his detailed map of Mount Chimborazo recording the various conditions for vegetation at different altitudes, Humboldt sought to understand nature through empirical investigation, yet his register of the manifold species and complexity of climatic factors also bespeak a different kind of aesthetic appreciation that balanced his quest for knowledge. Taking Humboldt’s assertion that ‘nature is the realm of freedom’ (Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, five volumes (Stuttgart: Johann Georg Cotta, 1845–1862)), Millán Brusslan’s presentation focused on the dialectic of nature as being present in ‘determinable appearance’ (quantifiable forms), while also being in a state of constant, ‘indeterminable appearing’ (see Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 15). Humboldt’s work sought to balance these two sides of nature as he attempted to grasp its spirit, that is, to bind them into what he called the ‘living breath of nature’ (‘lebendiger Hauch der Natur’). On the one hand, empirical methods constituted an attempt to master nature; on the other, the diverse landscapes of South America demonstrated its unknowability and ultimate freedom. Nature thus holds a lesson for art, which Millán Brusslan related to Adorno’s aesthetic theory and Martin Seel’s Aesthetics of Appearing: as with nature, works of art reveal a complexity beyond appearances, for they cannot be fully explained via conceptual knowledge. Thus art provides a refuge from the reaches of technical domination and holds the potential for social freedom.

If Humboldt discerned freedom through untamed nature, then papers by Tobias Lund (Lunds universitet) and Emily Eubanks (Florida State University) focused on cultivated nature: gardens. In his case study of Schubert’s setting of an Ossian poem (by James Macpherson) in ‘Die Nacht’, d534, Lund interpreted the lied as indirectly evoking the Scottish landscape via, first, the imagery depicted and, second, its fantasia-like qualities. Narrated through the perspective of five bards and a chieftain and set in the Scottish Highlands, the poem contrasts night and day via open vistas. This experience of the landscape, guided by key objects such as rivers or other natural landmarks, Lund noted, was shaped by tourists’ previous encounters with English gardens. Drawing on the work of Annette Richards in The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Lund suggested that as in the fantasia, Schubert’s song uses surprising harmonic progressions and textures to suggest picturesque English gardens. While Lund’s paper left aside the relationship of the Scottish Highlands to freedom in order to make a case for the landscape’s indirect connections to English gardens, Eubanks’s presentation interpreted Caroline Pichler’s idyllic poem ‘Der Sommerabend’ (which Schubert set as d483) as representative of her German cultural nationalism. As a refuge from city life, the Edenic garden in which ‘Der Sommerabend’ takes place critiques the oppressive social reality of Metternich’s Vienna. Focusing on the bee as a symbol for the ideal society, Eubanks showed how Pichler’s political ideas were influenced by Herder, who described a ‘republic of bees’ (‘Republik der Biene’) as a model for the co-existence of national communities.

Turning to the capacity of a particular element to shape aesthetic experience, literary scholar Ulrike Steierwald (Leuphana Universität Lüneburg) and I (Emily Shyr, Duke University) focused on the depiction of water in Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise respectively. Steierwald’s paper, ‘Romantic Monodramas of Water in Musical Language of Imagery: Die schöne Müllerin’, connected the progressive dissolution of the subject’s sense of self from ‘Das Wandern’ to ‘Tränenregen’ and finally ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’ to a tendency to abstraction in Friedrich’s and Turner’s paintings. Indeed, the inverted image of the sky reflected in the water – ‘as if immersed in the brook’ – recalls the criticism of Friedrich’s contemporaries, who, upon viewing the artist’s mountainscapes, ‘mis[took] the dark clouds for waves and the sky for the sea’ (Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 16). My paper, ‘Burning Tears, Floods, and Seething Torrents: Metaphors of the Natural Sublime in Winterreise, Part I’, contextualized invocations of ice, water and fire in the first part of Winterreise with popular geotheories (including glacier theory, Neptunism and Vulcanism) and contemporaneous natural disasters (such as the eruption of Mt Tambora in 1815). Focusing on a close reading of ‘Auf dem Flusse’, my paper proposed that the metaphorical comparison of the wanderer’s heart to the frozen river that conceals a ‘seething torrent’ imbues the wanderer’s passions with the sublime power of natural catastrophes.

Altogether, papers presented at the conference demonstrated the overlap of the three broad thematic groupings proposed by Thomas Seedorf (Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe) concerning the place of nature in Schubert’s vocal works: (1) as description, (2) as a metaphor for or symbol of human existence and (3) as an idyll or a threat. His acknowledgment and the papers’ demonstration of the overlap between these groupings showed the complexity of themes in counterpoint with those of landscape and nature, not only in music, but also in painting, film and literature. Indeed, outside the world of music, 2024 was a landmark year in art: to celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Caspar David Friedrich’s birth, the Alte Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Hamburger Kunsthalle and Metropolitan Museum of Art coordinated a travelling exhibition of Friedrich’s paintings. This international exhibition attests to the continued relevance of landscape for understanding themes within Romanticism and landscape’s hold on wide audiences. With the 2028 bicentenary of Schubert’s death looming on the horizon, the themes raised during the conference showed that the landscape of Schubert scholarship remains rich, with much more to be mined.