Felix Kaufmann, Mr. Stonier and Mr. Sweezy

Felix Kaufmann’s farewell song, presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation and arrangement of the folk melody Prinz Eugenius, der edle Ritter, stages intellectual exchange as convivial comedy. Its nine stanzas move from regret at two visitors’ departure through their encounters with Viennese economic thinking to a concluding toast. The song’s governing tension is between enthusiasm for theoretical insight and uncertainty about how to apply it.

Sweezy arrives from Boston eager to learn. The advice he receives makes marginal judgment the key to an apparently portable wisdom:

Make your judgments on the margin Values small and values large can Up and change as life unfolds.

The verse links marginal reasoning to changing valuations, turning an economic principle into memorable counsel. Sweezy’s immediate ambition to spread marginal utility at Harvard comically enlarges the visitor into a missionary. Yet his confidence falters before departure: numbers, formulations, and foregone choices disturb the apparent simplicity of decision-making.

“Ach! it’s not that complicated Values can’t be calculated, People do just what they do.”

This deliberately brisk response does not resolve the difficulty so much as dramatize it. The song places formal calculation beside the irreducibility of valuation and action, making the gap between learning a principle and using it the center of Sweezy’s episode.

Stonier’s shorter appearance supplies a contrasting voice. Suspicious of the locally esteemed theories, he treats free thinking as both capricious and amusing. His promised return nevertheless imagines disagreement yielding sharper questions, lively exchanges, and shared wisdom. Skepticism thus remains inside the fellowship rather than becoming grounds for exclusion.

The final toast reunites guests and hosts through gratitude for both affiliation and new knowledge. The work’s significance lies in this fusion of theoretical vocabulary with sociability: marginal utility, calculation, and intellectual disagreement become material for affectionate performance. Kaufmann celebrates an intellectual circle capable of laughing at the ambitions and uncertainties through which its ideas travel.