Toward a Culture of Self-Quotation

Those concertgoers in 1828, poised to comprehend the relationship between Schubert's song and the E-flat Trio, gained by coming equipped with layers of understanding. Whereas, as Viennese Catholics, they shared in the religious traditions conjured by the words “Ave Maria,” select members were obliged to recall their prior encounters, recent or distant, with the composer’s earlier score while also having that contact fortified by their memory of having read Scott's poem. Recognition of the symbolic echoes from verse and music brought within their grasp a creative design that both honored the deceased Beethoven and validated his legatee. To consider their experience as an exercise in “thick” listening is to strain that term's usage, although Schubert could have counted on some attendees having a relationship to his work like that between a writer and his audience, as expressed by the prominent author Christoph Martin Wieland in 1771: “The poet is entitled to assume in his male and female readers some knowledge of mythology and history, and some learning in novels, plays, and other works of imagination and wit. It would therefore be quite unnecessary to annotate such names, which must be known to anyone who has only the smallest degree of literacy.” By Schubert's time, self-references had become part of authorial repertory, abetted by an influential influx of autobiographical writing, whether introduced as mottos or embedded in the text, which, in current semiotic terms, are often subsumed under what Umberto Eco has called “the ensemble of codes” that nonetheless, as with Wieland, a writer “has to assume … is the same as that shared by his possible reader.”

This last observation was already enshrined by the generation of writers preceding Schubert. (None took as waspish a stance as Eco, whose stature as both successful novelist and literary theorist favored his claim that only “the happy few” could recognize the “imperceptible quotation marks” that signaled intertexuality, which “presupposes a previous world knowledge on the part of the spectator.