"One more beautiful memory of Schubert": Schumann's critique of the impromptus, D. 935

Musical Quarterly

Volumn 84, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 604-618

  Daverio, John ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63549084941     PISSN: 00274631     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/mq/84.4.604     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. For a comprehensive overview of Schumann's critical engagement with the music of Schubert, see Marie Luise Maintz, Franz Schubert in der Rezeption Robert Schumanns: Studien zur Ästhetik und Instrumentalmusik (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1995), 117-254
2. Clara Schumann, ed., Jugendbriefe von Robert Schumann, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1886), 82-83
3. Emil Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, trans. J. C. Hudson and L. T. Frank, ed. M. Burkhard and L. T. Frank (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991)
4. Schumann, Tagebücher, 1:113
5. "Der Psychometer," NZfM 1 (26 May 1834): 63
6. NZfM 9 (1838): 192-93. Schumann appended a brief paragraph on Liszt's transcriptions of several Schubert lieder to the main body of the review
7. See Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: Die Dokumente seines Lebens, NSA, ser. 8, Bd. 5 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1964), 545
8. See Jeffrey Kallberg, "The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin's Nocturne in G Minor," 19th-century Music 11 (1988): 239-46
9. Likewise, Schumann originally took Schubert's Grand Duo for piano four hands (D. 812) to be a symphony arranged for piano. Even after seeing the manuscript, Schumann held to this opinion: "Whoever writes as much as Schubert doesn't bother much over titles, so perhaps in haste he called the work a sonata, even though it stood complete in his head as a symphony." NZfM 8 (5 June 1838): 178
10. and his review of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique in NZfM 3 (1835): 37
11. The symmetrical design of the finale of Schubert's Piano Trio in E-flat Major is comparable to that of the F-Minor Impromptu. For a discussion of large-scale formal symmetries in Schumann's own works - the Presto passionato for piano (originally the finale of the G-Minor Piano Sonata, op. 22), the finale of the Concert sans orchestre, op. 14, and the opening and closing movements of the C-Major Fantasie, op. 17 - see Linda Correll Roesner, "Schumann's 'Parallel' Forms," 19th-Century Music 14 (1991): 265-78. Other movements by Schumann notable for their symmetrical construction include the finales of the A-Major String Quartet (op. 41, no. 3), the Piano Quintet (op. 44), and the Piano Quartet (op. 47)
12. "Monument für Beethoven: Vier Stimmen darüber," NZfM 4 (24 June 1836): 212
13. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 13. The passage also resonates with Staiger's claim (82) to the effect that "[t]he present, the past, [and] even the future can be interiorized and remembered in lyric poetry."
14. For a summary of the structure, content, and function of the moments bienheureux, see Roger Shattuck, Proust's Binoculars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 69-78
15. "Even among novels there is a lyrical-epical-dramatic genre" (Fragmente zur Litteratur und Poesie, no. 1073, KFSA, 16:174)
16. "Sonaten für das Klavier," NZfM 10 (26 Apr. 1839): 134
17. As Berthold Hoeckner has shown in a sensitive and elegantly written study, thematic recall within a composition can also be motivated by a process akin to that of the mémoire involuntaire. See his discussion of the relationship between nos. 2 and 17 of the Davidsbündlertänze (op. 6) in "Schumann and Romantic Distance," Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997): 106-9
18. Theodor Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 21