The wanderer's many returns: Schubert's variations reconsidered

Journal of Musicology

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 374-416

  Perry, Jeffrey ^a  

^a LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950329574     PISSN: 02779269     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/jm.2002.19.2.374     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. Maurice J. E. Brown, Schubert's Variations (London: Macmillan, 1954)
2. See James Webster, "Schubert's Sonata Form and Brahms's First Maturity," 19th Century Music 2 (1978): 18-35 and 3 (1979): 52-71
3. Deborah Stein, "Schubert's 'Die Liebe hat gelogen': The Deception of Mode and Mixture," Journal of Musicological Research 9 (1989): 109-31
4. Patrick McCreless, "Schenker and Chromatic Tonicization: A Reappraisal," in Schenker Studies, ed. Hedi Siegel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 138-45
5. Kofi Agawu, "Theory and Practice in the Analysis of the Nineteenth-Century Lied," Music Analysis 11 (1992): 3-36
6. and "Perspectives on Schubert's Songs," Music Analysis 16 (1997): 107-22
7. David W. Beach, "Modal Mixture and Schubert's Harmonic Practice," Journal of Music Theory 42 (1998): 73-100
8. See, for instance, besides David W. Beach, "Modal Mixture and Schubert's Harmonic Practice," 87-99
9. Carl Dahlnaus, "Sonata Form in Schubert: The First Movement of the G-Major String Quartet, op. 161 (D. 887)," in Walter Frisch, ed., Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), 1-12
10. James T. Smitherman, "Of Variations And Themes: A Study Of The First Movement Of Brahms's Piano Quartet In C Minor, Opus 60" (M.A. Thesis, Louisiana State Univ., 1992)
11. Brown, Schubert's Variations, 1-2
12. Poundie Burstein, "Lyricism, Structure, and Gender in Schubert's G Major String Quartet," Musical Quarterly 81 (1997): 53
13. See Friedrich Blume, Classic and Romantic Music: A Comprehensive Survey, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 106-7
14. Albert Schweitzer, J. S. Bach, trans. Ernest Newman (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 1
15. Joseph N. Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), 12-15. Masculine pronouns have been used in this paragraph to cast the argument in terms the Romantics themselves would have used
16. Edward T. Cone helps refute the judgment of Schubert as "weak" and Beethoven as "strong" by showing that the former actually appropriated a great deal from the latter, repeatedly bending Beethoven's themes, textures, and formal architectures to his own purposes. See Edward T. Cone, "Schubert's Beethoven," in Paul Henry Lang, ed., The Creative World of Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 277-91
17. Cited in Kurt von Fischer, "Variations." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980)
18. On Marx's terminology, his Beethoven-centrism, and their enduring impact, see Elaine Sisman, Haydn and the Classical Variation (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 67
19. See Wallace Berry, Form in Music (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 295-96
20. Ellis B. Kohs, Musical Form: Studies in Analysis and Synthesis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 134
21. Douglass M. Green, Form in Tonal Music: An Introduction to Analysis (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 101-4. Green (pp. 113-17) introduces a dichotomy between "strict" and "free" variations, but only in the context of his analysis of the Eroica finale, which he isolates as a special case, apparently so that he can avoid value-laden dichotomies of the Beethoven/Schubert type
22. See Richard Kramer, Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 135-37
23. Thomas K. Nelson, "The Fantasy of Absolute Music" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Minnesota, 1998)
24. Brown, 2-3
25. Brown, 10
26. Carl Dahlhaus, "Sonata Form in Schubert," 1
27. See also David Beach, "Modal Mixture and Schubert's Harmonic Practice," 87-99
28. James Webster, "Schubert's Sonata Form and Brahms's First Maturity," 22
29. James Webster, "Schubert's Sonata Form and Brahms's First Maturity," 21, 25, 27, 35, etc
30. William Drabkin, Review of Music Forum 5. Music Analysis 1 (1982): 207
31. Elaine Sisman, Haydn and the Classical Variation, 7-10 and 45
32. Nicholas Marston, "Analysing Variations: The Finale of Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 74," Music Analysis 8 (1989): 303-4, 320-21
33. Jeffrey Perry, "Beethoven and the Romantic 'Unique Subject': The Dialectic of Affect and Form in Op. 26, III." Indiana Theory Review 18/2 (1997): 47-73
34. The progression from BMusic flat sign major at the start of Variation 5 to the E (= FMusic flat sign) major/ minor seventh in m. 123 makes of the latter a "sign of maximum tonal distance." See V. Kofi Agawu, "Perspectives on Schubert's Songs," in Music Analysis 16 (1997): 115. Writers whose approaches to Schubert's musical syntax are as different as Patrick McCreless and Lawrence Kramer find such a sign in Lieder such as "Pause" from Die schöne Müllerin and the Goethe Lied Meeres Stille. See Patrick McCreless, "Schenker and Chromatic Tonicization: A Reappraisal," in Schenker Studies, ed. Hedi Siegel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 138
35. and Lawrence Kramer, "The Schubert Lied: Romantic Form and Romantic Consciousness," in Walter Frisch, ed., Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), 200-236
36. Webster, "Schubert's Sonata Form and Brahms's First Maturity." 19th Century Music 2 (1978): 26
37. The epicenter of most current inquiry into Schubert's sexuality and psychology is Maynard Solomon's "Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini," 19th Century Music 12 (1989): 193-206
38. See also the symposium entitled "Schubert: Music, Sexuality, Culture" in 19th Century Music 12 (1993)
39. Joseph Kerman, "An die ferne Geliebte," in Alan Tyson, ed., Beethoven Studies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 129
40. Charles J. Smith, "Musical Form and Fundamental Structure: An Investigation of Schenker's 'Formenlehre'." Music Analysis 15 (1996): 235-37, 245-46, 267-69
41. See Walter Frisch, "Schubert's Nähe des Geliebten (D. 162): Transformation of the Volkston," in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, 192-94
42. An exploration of this distance is one of the essential features of the Brahms Horn Trio, Op. 40. Tovey's remarks on the latter work are suggestive in this regard. See Donald Francis Tovey, The Main Stream of Music and Other Essays (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1959), 247-50
43. See Walter Frisch, "Schubert's Nähe des Geliebten," 192
44. also Leonard Ratner, Classic Music, 18-19. In this account, I assume that the song was intended for performance by a male voice. I prefer the term "Waldhorn topic" to "horn fifths," since the former is more inclusive of the complete range of horn-related textures and musical turns of phrase
45. David Beach, "Schubert's Experiments with Sonata Form: Formal-Tonal Design versus Underlying Structure" in Music Theory Spectrum, 15 (1993): 1-18. Schubert was, of course, to compose both sonata forms with and sonata forms without a double return until the end of his life
46. Brown, 89
47. Charles Fisk, Returning Cycles: Contexts for the Interpretation of Schubert's Impromptus and Last Sonatas (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2001), 166-70
48. Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 75
49. A piano transcription of the entr'acte theme appears in Fisk, Returning Cycles, 168
50. McCreless, "Roland Barthes's S/Z from a Musical Point of View," In Theory Only 10/7 (1988): 1-29; see esp. 14-17. David Beach, in "Schubert's Experiments with Sonata Form," presents two possible readings of D. 667/1, one of which seeks to express underlying structure while the other seeks to privilege surface design. It is intriguing to note how, when taken as a single example, Beach's two graphics (page 12) correlate with the semic and proairetic codes of McCreless's Example 2 (page 20). David Beach, "Schubert's Experiments with Sonata Form," 1-18
51. Edward T. Cone, "Schubert's Promissory Note."