Rehearing: River Writings: Schubert’s “Am Flusse” and the Liquid Temporality of the <i>Lied</i>

Moving water is closely associated with musical sound, both as a figurative expression of its temporal flow and as an object of word painting. An abundance of examples can be found in Franz Schubert’s Lieder, of which over a hundred evoke water in one form or another. Focusing on his two settings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “Am Flusse” (By the River), this article uses water as a lens through which the temporality and materiality of song can be perceived, from the recited or written poem to the recorded or living performance of song. The young Goethe paid keen attention to what we might call media specificity, often privileging vocal performance over notated song. In “Am Flusse,” he took the conventional idea of the river as signifying passing time and developed it into the image of writing on water, foregrounding the oscillation of song between ephemeral voice and fixed writing. Schubert’s settings, from 1815 and 1822, redirect these concerns into the Romantic German Lied. Here, water is both rendered in word painting by a repetitive flow of notes and employed as a self-reflexive device, thus channelling Goethe’s notion of writing on water into the Lied’s dramatization of its own means of expression, while also directing our attention to the larger temporality of shifting hermeneutic and material conditions in the history of the Lied.