The story of the orchestra in the nineteenth century usually focuses on two types of orchestras: theatre orchestras – such as La Scala, the Queen's Theatre (London), and the Paris Opéra – and concert societies – such as the Vienna Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic, the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (Paris), and the New York Philharmonic. It concentrates on the conductors who led these orchestras, many of whom were also famous composers, such as Weber, Spontini, Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Wagner, whose works form a large part of today's ‘classical’ music repertory. This story is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

The genesis of this special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review occurred at the Thirteenth Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music in July of 2004, when the journal was inaugurated at Durham University and Bennett Zon invited Susan Youens and me to serve as guest-editors of an issue devoted specifically to Schubert. The impetus behind this instalment of the publication benefits from the remarkable rise of scholarly interest in Franz Schubert that has been under way for nearly two decades now on both sides of the Atlantic. Distinguished by innovative applications of close analysis, historiographic context and aesthetic considerations, this scholarly groundswell has produced an intriguing new image of the composer – indeed, a vibrant view of a Schubert we never really knew.

Of the many possible relationships between music and poetry, which are but a small subset of the possible relationships between music and text, I have chosen a still narrower focus for inquiry. I will investigate two independent, lyric poems whose musically poetic language and form was fully conceived without any expectation that a composer might use their texts as structural scaffolding and expressive inspiration for related, and emergent, musical and artistic ends. Two lyric poems by Goethe, each set by Schubert, will serve to illustrate the conflict between poetic and instrumental/vocal musics, in which the lyric poems inevitably concede something of their music to an appropriation by, and not merely a translation into, another artistic medium. Even when Schubert succeeds in exemplifying, or expanding upon, the symbolic richness of meaning embodied in the poem, we should consider the fate of overwritten meaning embodied in the musical language and form of the poem by itself.

Broadly speaking, the British reception of foreign musicians appearing in London at the end of the eighteenth century was one of adulation. Most of these artists had arrived via Paris, where some had acquired a mantle of sophistication unknown in London. Paris was a city of fashion, which, if it could not rival London in economic clout, was the acknowledged European capital of culture, of refined taste and manners. British amateurs were therefore happy to admit these foreign artists into their homes both for private concerts, and in the capacity of music teachers for themselves and their children. One of the most alluring – not to mention gifted – of the performing artists to arrive in London from Paris was Giovanni Battista Viotti, whose public concerts in the last decade of the eighteenth century were among the most popular of the many that were on offer.

In the course of the development of Western culture, the ideas of Plato have wielded enormous influence. One of Plato's most influential ideas is his particular conception of truth. For Plato, truth exists in a different realm of reality from ourselves, a realm unlike the things we see around us in space and time. Truth consists of ideal being or ideal essences, subsisting in what he called the world of the forms.

The following inquiry began as an echo of my preoccupation long ago and far away with settings of late nineteenth-century French poetry. Mallarmé's ‘le cygne/signe’ arrives too late (involuntarily, I recall the immortal line ‘What time's the next swan?’) to be a player in the creation of Schubert's songs, but the great French poet had recourse to some of the same signifying swans at work in this composer's chosen poem by Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg-Stolberg. Struck by an analogy in the words for D. 774 (published in March 1827 as op. 72), I dug a little deeper and discovered multiple specimens of these emblematic creatures from Greek and Roman literature, medieval lore, Reformation iconography and Romantic art.

The writings of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798) constitute perhaps the most powerful and original source in the early German Romantic discourse on autonomous music, itself a spearhead of a European trend that matured at he turn of the eighteenth century. Wackenroder's perfervid yet strangely lucid and insightful observations on art and music are founded on the notion of Kunstreligion (‘art religion’), which he uses to replace the rational explanations of art, based on knowledge and representation of the external world, and derived from classical philosophy.

Why – one might be tempted to add: why again – the Heine-Lieder? And why psychoanalysis? Like most of Schubert's music and especially the late works, yet with a distinctive nuance, Schubert's set of six songs to texts from Heine's Buch der Lieder has been regularly discussed in the musicological literature of the last decades. Among those writings, the articles by Harry Goldschmidt and Richard Kramer, the collection of essays on Schwanengesang edited by Martin Chusid, and the latter's publication of the facsimile of the autograph and first edition of the cycle are of particular interest to us here. The reason for it has to do with the nuance referred to at the beginning of this paragraph. While some authors are inclined to discuss Schubert's understanding of the poetry (notably in terms of the celebrated Heinesque ‘irony’), others choose to address the set from another perspective, namely that of the order of the songs. Indeed, the following questions inevitably arise in considering the Heine songs: Why did Schubert alter the order of the poems from that in which they appear in Heine's original collection, therefore (seemingly) destroying the logic of the sequence? Did Schubert actually conceive the text as a sequence – that is to say, a cycle? In dealing with those issues, Goldschmidt and Kramer have suggested a provocative and radical solution, which consists in reordering the songs to match the succession in Heine. This, of course, has occasioned much eyebrow-raising in the musicological community, and has led to successive refutation and counter-refutation.

The later music of Franz Schubert confers a remarkable blend of impact and intimacy. Some masterpieces, such as Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, capture striking images of despair and loneliness. Others, such as the String Quartet in A minor, the Piano Trio in E major and the String Quintet in C major, carry stirring impressions of struggle culminated by success. Yet all captivate us with sensitivity and sincerity, the products of considerable self-investment.