Schubert acquired the art of improvisation from Salieri, who had trained him in the old school of a kapellmeister, a proficient keyboard improviser able to compose, in a short space of time, a mass, symphony or opera, and furnish publishers with songs, chamber music and piano repertoire. Schubert’s friends dismissed his teacher’s theoretically grounded practice of keyboard improvisation as old-fashioned, unknowingly realising that numerous treatises were lamenting its disappearance from musical pedagogy.The skills Schubert acquired were finely honed in Viennese salons. Whereas pianists of the mid nineteenth century played for a vastly expanded concert audience with a lower level of musical education, Schubert’s improvisations – unlike Liszt’s or Hummel’s – were exclusively in private, elite company, where he was immediately understood. Sonnleithner recalls Schubert’s multilevelled improvisations, where he played light waltzes for friends to dance to while others gathered around listening, as he satisfied simultaneously popular and learned tastes. Louis Schlösser remembers Schubert improvising fantasies on Hungarian tunes, which shows the pleasing, popular side of Schubert’s improvisations. One of the most distinctive elements resulting from Schubert’s ‘improvisatory’ compositional technique is his use of harmony at local and structural levels, and novel use of form whose roots are in his improvisor’s fingers.

Women and Music in Ireland is the inaugural volume of the new series of Irish Musical Studies, published by Boydell & Brewer. The original series, published initially by Irish Academic Press (from 1990 until 1995) and subsequently by Four Courts Press (from 1996 until 2019) comprised twelve volumes, making this new volume the thirteenth in all to appear. Each volume of the original series was designed to explore specific themes within the general domain of Irish musical scholarship, including the development of musicology as an Irish discipline, music and Irish cultural history, documents and sources of Irish musical history, the growth of theory and analysis in Ireland, as well as period-based collections devoted to Irish art music in the seventeenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Two volumes of conference proceedings also appeared, one to mark the first international musicological conference in the history of the state in 1995 and the other to publish selected papers in Bach scholarship originally presented at the Ninth Biennial Conference on Baroque Music held at Trinity College Dublin in 2000. The series also featured an anthology of Irish church music, preceded by a companion volume of essays on the same subject.

The distinguishing feature of these volumes was that all of them, with the exception of the Bach volume, addressed topics that had hitherto received little or no previous scholarly attention, and certainly not to the extent of a collected volume of essays exclusively concerned with the topic in question. In this specific regard, Women and Music in Ireland is likewise a pioneering collection, and it thereby reflects the pervasive ambition of the series as a whole to open out and indeed to deepen our scholarly comprehension of Irish musical life. As the chapters in this new volume individually and collectively attest, the general discourse of women and music here attains not only to an Irish inflection of purpose and scholarly enquiry, but a decisive retrieval of the role of women in shaping the complexion of Irish musical life from the eighteenth century to the present day.

In this enterprise, many of the essays published here skilfully interrogate or deconstruct historical, social and cultural assumptions that have either eclipsed or distorted – often through the agency of gender politics – the originality and significance of women to the profession and practice of music in Ireland.

Prologue: Reception History of Schubert's Operas

In the first scholarly study of Schubert's operas, written in the 1920s, Rudolfine Krott raised the controversy between the lyrical and the dramatic, which has run as a leitmotif through Schubertian literature. In the absence of a historical performance tradition, the usual solecisms for Schubert's ‘failure on stage’ have been repeated: the lyrical composer who was incapable of writing dramatic music, coupled with the poor quality of his libretti. Beyond the question of Schubert's musical reaction to the libretto and the already-loaded questions of text setting, the general principles of stage dramaturgy, performance practice, and history apply. This criticism moves far beyond the lyrical and the dramatic and is rooted in negative prejudice, Schubert's lack of theatrical experience, fragmentary sources and, until recently, the lack of a proper performance edition.

Only on two occasions was Schubert granted the experience of watching his own operas in performance. He never benefitted from dissension at rehearsals that lead to the kind of solutions worked up in the theatre rather than imagined in the writing of a score. Most successful operatic composers are very well aware of this process. When revising his opera Le prophète, Meyerbeer directly acknowledged ‘the difference between an opera that comes from one's head, and the one that one sees in the theatre’; and when editing multiple versions of a Donizetti opera, Roger Parker acknowledges this practice of constant revision and conceded, ‘The more one becomes aware of this type of activity, the more arbitrary it seems to choose one particular stage of a work to present as its “base text”’. Most of Schubert's operatic scores are ‘base texts’, yet one only has to glance across at the four manuscripts of ‘Erlkonig’ D. 328 to see how willing Schubert was to fine-tune through performance, and how song for him was a fluid rather than a fixed form. Such music of revision is rarely found in Schubert's operatic scores, and this lack of opportunity had a drastic and long-lasting effect on his reception history.

The Faust myth has been deeply engrained in the collective European consciousness since the early Middle Ages and has invited widely different interpretations. Hundreds of literary images of the Faust myth exist, from Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) to Gotthold Lessing (1729–91), from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) to Thomas Mann (1875–1955), from Paul Valéry (1871–1945) to Michel Butor (1926–2016), all of which brilliantly illuminate the personal and cultural codes of the artists. From Anton Radziwill (1775–1833) to Conradin Kreutzer (1780–1849), from Franz Schubert (1797–1828) to Robert Schumann (1810–56), from Carl Loewe (1796–1869) to Hugo Wolf (1860–1903), from Hector Berlioz (1803–69) to Guiseppe Verdi (1813–1901), from Franz Liszt (1811–86) to Gustav Mahler (1806–1911), from Charles Gounod (1818–93) to Henri Pousseur (1929–2009): their retelling of the Faust myth always involves personal choices, variations of a theme that the composer chooses based on his or her circumstances. Part of the reality of these readings is the way the myth becomes charged with new meanings and absorbs new interpretations that open it up to new dimensions of reality yet to be discovered or re-explored. So why has the Faust figure been so persistent in music history? What do we know about Goethe's analogue to the Faust tale? Why was he preoccupied with it over a period of sixty years? What ethics inspired it? What elements in his handling of the myth inspired its long musical history? What is the modern meaning of this mythical tale?

The motif of a ‘pact’ with the devil, which Goethe's Faust drama explores, can be traced back to the Early Middle Ages, when the myth emerged as a moral parable aimed to demonstrate a Christian's constant danger of being tempted off the path of moral righteousness and adherence to divine command, and his susceptibility to seek power and reward from other sources. The trade between man and the devil would normally imply forfeiting eternal life for gratification in the temporal and material world and thus serve as a reminder that ambitions reaching beyond man's allocated place can be achieved only at a price.

Goethe's influence on music

Anyone who ventures into the vast regions of the nineteenth-century Lied meets a powerful presence almost immediately. Time and again the text is by Goethe, whose lyric imagination left an indomitable imprint on European music history. Even a cursory glance at Friedlaender's Das deutsche Lied bears testimony to multiple settings of Goethe's poems: there are, for example, 132 settings of ‘Erlkönig’, and the range and variety of this abundant repertoire is immediately striking. Ernst Challier's Großer Lieder-Katalog and Willi Schuh's ‘Goethe Vertonungen’ give further evidence of the musicality of Goethe's language and its location of meaning at the cradle of the Lied. Schubert's first masterpiece, Gretchen am Spinnrade, was a setting of a dramatic scene from Goethe's Faust. The earliest songs of Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Louis Spohr, Carl Loewe, Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner and Hugo Wolf were to texts by Goethe, which raises the question as to the reasons for the poet's influence. Yes, Goethe was a supreme lyric poet. The binding force of form and meaning, or rhythm and sense, that characterizes Goethe's lyric poetry – so evident in ‘Auf dem See’, in the ‘galloping’ iambic rhythms of ‘Willkommen und Abschied’, the rhythmic virtuosity of ‘Erlkönig’, the restless dactyls of ‘Rastlose Liebe’, the rocking dactylic rhythms of ‘Über allen Gipfeln’ – offered composers a wealth of material with which to cut their compositional cloth. Goethe was an object of admiration, even veneration, throughout the nineteenth century, and the sheer quantity and variety of music his poetry has inspired bespeaks the huge fascination exerted by his writing and his personality. Yet the steadfastness of his occupancy of the Lied goes beyond these explanations. Deeper currents must explain why Goethe's poetry goes hand in glove in our musical heritage.

From the time he burst onto the literary scene with the publication of Werther in 1774 until long after his death in 1832, Goethe was a catalyst for many composers, who wanted to challenge what song could be.