Schubert's Sonata forms and the poetics of the lyric

Journal of Musicology

Volumn 23, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 263-306

  Mak, Su Yin ^a  

^a Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts   (Hong Kong)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950264308     PISSN: 02779269     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/jm.2006.23.2.263     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. Donald Francis Tovey, "Tonality in Schubert," Music & Letters 9 (1928)
2. reprinted in The Main Stream of Music and Other Essays (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), 148
3. Felix Salzer, "Die Sonatenform bei Schubert," Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 15 (1928): 125. "Was diese betrifft, so mußten wir in der Übertragung von Lyricism und ihren Formen in das Gebiet der Sonatenform die Haupteigenart Schuberts in der Behandlungsweise dieser Formgattung erkennen"; translation mine. For non-English sources cited in this study, only the English will be given when a standard translation is readily available. Where there is none, as in the Salzer article, translations are my own and the original will be given in an accompanying footnote
4. Theodor Adorno, "Schubert," in Moments musicaux (1928)
5. trans. Jonathan Dunsby and Beate Perry, 19th-Century Music 29 (2005): 7-11;. I am grateful to Cameron Gardner for making the unpublished manuscript of the Dunsby/Perrey translation available for my reference prior to its publication
6. A. B. Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, praktisch-theoretisch, 7th ed. (1868)
7. partial English trans. in Scott Burnham, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: Selected Writings on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 52
8. James Webster, "Schubert's Sonata Form and Brahms's First Maturity (I)," 19th-Century Music 2 (1978): 20, 26
9. Carl Dahlhaus, "Sonata Form in Schubert: The First Movement of the G-Major String Quartet, Op.161 (D.887),"
10. trans. Thilo Reinhard, in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), 1-12
11. Poundie Burstein, "Lyricism, Structure, and Gender in Schubert's G-Major String Quartet," Musical Quarterly 81 (1997): 51
12. Dahlhaus, "Sonata Form in Schubert," 1
13. Felix Salzer, "Die Sonatenform bei Schubert," Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 15 (1928): 86-125
14. Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition, trans. and ed. Ernst Oster (New York: Longman, 1979), §308-10, 131-33
15. Webster, "Schubert's Sonata Form and Brahms's First Maturity (I)," 30
16. Joseph Kerman, "A Romantic Detail in Schubert's Schwanengesang, " in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), 59
17. Charles Fisk, Returning Cycles: Contexts for the Interpretation of Schubert's Impromptus and Last Sonatas (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2001), 241-42
18. Salzer, "Die Sonatenform bei Franz Schubert," 99-100
19. Esteban Buch offers an interesting comparison between Salzer's reading of this passage and that by another pupil of Schenker, Otto Vrieslander, followed by further comparison between their analyses and Adorno's views on the same sonata. "Adorno's 'Schubert': From the Critique of the Garden Gnome to the Defense of Atonalism," 19th-Century Music 29 (2005): 25-30
20. Donald Francis Tovey, "Franz Schubert," in The Heritage of Music (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1927), vol. 1
21. repr. in The Main Stream of Music and Other Essays (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), 118-19
22. Webster, "Schubert's Sonata Form and Brahms's First Maturity (I)," 22, 26
23. Adorno, "Schubert [1928]," trans. Jonathan Dunsby and Beate Perry, 19th-Century Music 29 (2005): 3-14
24. Heinrich Christoph Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (Leipzig, 1782-93), vol. 2, part 2, section 3, chapter 1; partial English trans. by Nancy Baker (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), 1
25. A number of scholars have drawn attention to the importance of the Melodienlehre theorists to our understanding of how sonata form might have been conceived in the Classical style. See, for example, Leonard Ratner's groundbreaking article "Eighteenth-Century Theories of Musical Period Structure," Musical Quarterly 42 (1956): 439-54
26. Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric
27. and Joel Lester, Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992)
28. Elaine Sisman also offers an admirably clear presentation of Koch's discussion of expansion techniques in "Small and Expanded Forms: Koch's Model and Haydn's Music," Musical Quarterly 62 (1982): 444-78. The term "sonata form," as well as "exposition," "development, " and "recapitulation," would of course have been foreign to 18th-century theorists, but for ease of reference (e.g. "exposition" instead of "first principal period of the opening allegro") I will make use of modern nomenclature in the present discussion
29. As David Gramit and Ilija Dürhammer have shown, Gottsched's rhetoric formed the basis of Institutio ad eloquentiam (Vienna: Vindobonae, 1805), the textbook used by Schubert during his studies at the Stadtkonvict. See David Gramit, "The Intellectual and Aesthetic Tenets of the Schubert Circle" (Ph.D. diss., Duke Univ., 1987)
30. and Ilija Dürhammer, "Zu Schuberts Literaturästhetik, " Schubert durch die Brille 14: 4-99
31. English trans. by Louis E. Lord, in Cicero: The Speeches (London: Heinemann, 1937), 16-17
32. Eric A. Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700-1775, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), 150
33. Michael Patrick O'Connor, "Parataxis and Hypotaxis," in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), 880
34. Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, vol. 3, section 4, chapter 3, examples 361 and 362; Baker trans., 163-65
35. Elaine Sisman, Haydn and the Classical Variation (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 82
36. Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (Leipzig, 1782-93), vol. 3, section 4, chapter 4; Baker trans., 197-202
37. English trans. by Kenneth Negus, in German Poetry from 1750 to 1900, ed. Robert M. Browning (New York: Continuum, 1984), 92-93
38. Adorno has shown that Hölderlin's mature lyrics rely heavily on the technique of parataxis; see "Parataxis: Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins," Neue Rundschau 75 (1964): 15-46
39. Albert B. Lord, "Oral Poetry," in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 863-64. This dictionary article provides a clear and succinct summary of the Parry-Lord theory of oral-formulaic composition
40. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 167
41. Robert Schumann, "Schubert's C major Symphony " (1840), in Robert Schumann on Music: A Selection from the Writings, trans. and ed. Henry Pleasants (New York: Dover, 1965), 163-68
42. Dahlhaus, "Sonata Form in Schubert," 9
43. A. B. Marx, "Die Form in der Musik," Die Wissenschaften im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. J. A. Romberg, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Romberg, 1856)
44. English trans. by Scott Burnham in Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: Selected Writings on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 86
45. For a discussion of the influence of idealism on Romantic musical aesthetics, see Mark Evan Bonds, "Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century," Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997): 387-420. Bonds's interest is in idealism as the aesthetic basis for writings about music, and not its influence on compositional procedures found in actual musical works, which is my focus here
46. Johann Gottfried Herder, "Von den Lebensaltern einer Sprache," in Über die neuere Deutsche Literatur, erste Sammlung von Fragmenten (1767)
47. trans. as "On the Ages of a Language" by Timothy J. Chamberlain, in Eighteenth Century German Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1992), 106
48. Johann Gottfried Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Berlin, 1772), section 2
49. trans. as Essay on the Origin of Language by Alexander Gode (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966), 107-28
50. William Wordsworth, "My Heart Leaps Up," line 7
51. Johann Gottfried Herder, Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (Hamburg, 1773)
52. James William Johnson, "Lyric," in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 715
53. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), 50
54. English trans. by Richard Wigmore, in Schubert: The Complete Song Texts (London: Gollancz, 1988), 44-45
55. In Otto Erich Deutsch, The Schubert Reader, trans. Eric Blom (New York: W.W. Norton, 1947), 337
56. Friedrich von Schiller, "Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung" (1795-96)
57. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretations of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991)
58. Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1994). Hatten's ideas on musical markedness, stylistic opposition, and expressive genre are especially relevant to the present study
59. Webster, "Schubert's Sonata Form and Brahms's First Maturity (I)," 20. Hereafter, all music examples will refer to first movements unless otherwise indicated
60. Winter's "bifocal close" is equivalent to the "second-level default medial caesura" in James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's Sonata Theory. See "The Medial Caesura and Its Role in the Eighteenth-Century Sonata Exposition," Music Theory Spectrum 19 (1997): 115-54
61. Salzer, "Die Sonatenform bei Franz Schubert," 88
62. See Adorno's "Schubert," cited earlier, as well as William Kinderman, "Wandering Archetypes in Schubert's Instrumental Music," 19th-Century Music 21 (1997): 208-22
63. J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment from Wordsworth to Stevens (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), 40
64. Charles Rosen, "Explaining the Obvious," in The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 124-25
65. Scott Burnham, "Schubert and the Sound of Memory," Musical Quarterly 84 (2000): 662-63. I am grateful to Professor Burnham for making a copy of this article available to me before its publication
66. John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," line 14