On the subject of Schubert's "Unfinished" symphony: Was bedeutet die Bewegung?

Nineteenth Century Music

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 3-32

  Kurth, Richard ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67649268359     PISSN: 01482076     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ncm.1999.23.1.02a00010     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Arnold Feil's Studien zu Schuberts Rhythmik (Munich, 1966) offers insightful observations about rhythm and meter in a wide range of Schubert's compositions, but not the "Unfinished" Symphony. On the "Unfinished,"
2. Edward T. Cone discusses some metric and harmonic properties of the first movement's opening bass motto in "Schubert's Unfinished Business," this journal 7 (1984), 222-32,
3. and Carl Dahlhaus considers metric features of the symphony's second movement in "Studien zu romantischen Symphonien," Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz 1972 (Berlin, 1973), 104-10.
4. For discussions of rhythm and meter in other individual compositions, see also Kurt von Fischer, "Von einigen Merkwürdigkeiten in Franz Schuberts Metrik: Eine Interpretationsstudie zum Moment musical C-Dur D 780/1," in Franz Schubert - Der Fortschrittliche? Analysen - Perspectiven - Fakten, ed. Erich Wolfgang Partsch (Tutzing, 1989), pp. 105-14;
5. and John Glofcheskie, "Schubert's Notation of Accentual Hierarchy: Patterns of Displacement and Conformity in the Structure of His First Complete Piano Sonata" (unpublished paper read in Paris at the conference "L'évolution du style instrumental de Schubert," 13-15 October 1997).
6. 6-Bewegung"; see Stefan Kunze, Franz Schubert: Sinfonie h-moll, Unvollendete (Munich, 1965), p. 12.
7. The poem, by Marianne von Willemer, appeared in Goethe's West-östlichem Divan. For commentary on the song, see Arnold Feil, Studien zu Schuberts Rhythmik, pp. 63-64;
8. and Walter Gerstenberg, "Schubertiade: Anmerkungen zu einigen Liedern," in Festschrift Otto Erich Deutsch zum 80 Geburtstag, ed. Walter Gerstenberg, Jan LaRue, and Wolfgang Rehm (Kassel, 1963), pp. 232-39.
9. Ludwig Misch discusses Schubert's fondness for this rhythm in "Ein Lieblingsmotiv Schuberts," Die Musikforschung 15 (1962), 146-52.
10. Maynard Solomon suggests that this date "probably refers, in conformity with the composer's custom, not to the date on which sketching of the composition was started, but to the date on which he began to write out the full score"; see Solomon, "Schubert's 'Unfinished' Symphony," this journal 21 (1997), 111-33, at p. 111.
11. On the dating of the song's two versions, see Otto Erich Deutsch, Franz Schubert: Thematisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke in chronologischer Folge (rev. edn. Kassel, 1978), pp. 424-25; the autograph for the revised version is missing, so the revisions cannot be dated precisely.
12. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York, 1968), p. 25.
13. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (2nd edn. New York, 1965), I, 125-26.
14. 6). Cooper and Meyer do admit, however, that "with stress added, unsyncopated notes [such as the half note in our inverted trochee) can 'feel like' syncopations" (p. 102). In the symphony movement, the second beat in the inverted trochee |unknown entity| often feels syncopated in this way, by virtue of abrupt dynamic, timbrai, or harmonic change.
15. In the words of Frank Wohlfahrt, during the Fmusical sharp sign "die Bewegung . . . regungslos stehen bleibt"; see his "Franz Schuberts 'Unvollendete': Analyse des ersten Satzes," Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 119 (1958), 16.
16. Manfred Wagner describes the syncopation in m. 20 as "zeitaufhebend, unsicher machend im Rhythmusgefühl"; see his Franz Schubert: Sein Werk - Sein Leben (Vienna, 1996), p. 100.
17. 3); the melody and its accompaniment can be found in Deutsch, Franz Schubert: Thematisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke in chronologischer Folge, p. 599;
18. See Cone, "Schubert's Promissory Note: An Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics," this journal 5 (1982), 233-41 (rpt. in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch [Lincoln, Neb., 1986], pp. 13-30).
19. see Eric Sams, "Schubert's Illness Re-examined," Musical Times 121 (1980), 15-22, at p. 21.
20. See Scott Burnham, "A. B. Marx and the Gendering of Sonata Form," in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 163-86, at pp. 168 and 172 respectively.
21. Marx's dictum, translated here by Burnham, appears in A. B. Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, praktisch-theoretisch (2nd edn. Leipzig, 1841-51), vol. 3 (1848), p. 259.
22. Dahlnaus, for instance, remarks that the first theme, "standing out like a lied melody . . . strikes a lyric tone." See Dahlnaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), p. 153.
23. Tovey describes this transition with remarkable honesty: "In his most inspired works the transition is accomplished by an abrupt coup de théâtre; and of all such coups, no doubt the crudest is that in the Unfinished Symphony. . . . Is it not a most impressive moment?" (Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis: Volume I: Symphonies [London, 1935], p. 213).
24. See, for instance, Kunze, Franz Schubert: Sinfonie h-moll, Unvollendete, p. 15; and Wohlfahrt, "Franz Schuberts 'Unvollendete': Analyse des ersten Satzes," p. 17.
25. The first to characterize the second theme in this way was Eduard Hanslick, in his review of the first performance (17 December 1865), which described it as "an enchanting passage of song of almost Ländler-like ease" (quoted in Franz Schubert, Symphony in B Minor (" Unfinished"), p. 114).
26. For Tovey's very critical attitude toward the notion of Ländler character, see Essays in Musical Analysis: Volume I: Symphonies, p. 212.
27. See Heinrich Christoph Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, Dritter Theil (Leipzig, 1793), p. 25;
28. see also the English trans. Nancy Kovaleff Baker, Introductory Essay on Composition: The Mechanical Rules of Melody, Sections 3 and 4 (New Haven, 1983), p. 72.
29. See Franz Schubert: Sinfonie in h-Moll "Die Unvollendete," ed. Walther Dürr and Christa Landon (facs. edn. Munich, 1978).
30. See Bumham, "Marx and the Gendering of Sonata Form," pp. 163 and 165.
31. Tovey, Essays: Volume I: Symphonies, p. 213.
32. Supplementarity is a concept pervasive in Derrida's early writings, including Speech and Phenomena: Introduction to the Problem of Signs in Husserl's Phenomenology [La voix et le phénomène, Paris, 1967], trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill., 1973), esp. pp. 88-104, and Of Grammatology [De la Grammatologie, Paris, 1967], trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974), esp. pp. 141-64.
33. Martin Chusid has argued that a sudden perception of resemblances between the "Unfinished" Symphony's (fragmentary) third movement and the trio from Beethoven's Second Symphony might account for Schubert's abrupt abandonment of the symphony while working on the trio. See Chusid, "Beethoven and the Unfinished," in Franz Schubert, Symphony in B Minor ("Unfinished"), pp. 98-110.
34. Susan McClary, "Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music," in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York, 1994), pp. 205-33.
35. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 154.
36. On the history of how the masculine/feminine binary has been applied to the music of Beethoven and Schubert respectively, see David Gramit, "Constructing a Victorian Schubert: Music, Biography, and Cultural Values," this journal 17 (1993), 65-78.
37. Dahlhaus (Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 76) observes that "the works on which the Beethoven myth thrives represent a narrow selection from his complete output: Fidelio and the music to Egmont; the Third, Fifth, and Ninth Symphonies; and the Pathétique and Appassionato sonatas. It is not a fact in support of the Beethoven myth that these works are 'representative,' but rather one of the claims that make up the myth." For recent contributions on the Beethoven myth, see Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton, 1995);
38. and Tia DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792-1803 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995).
39. The Eroica certainly reflects the immense social significance of the Napoleonic wars, regardless of the changes Beethoven made to its title page. The Pastoral invokes images of collective - rather than individual - life in the countryside, and Wagner's reception of the Seventh Symphony invokes the collective too, in the form of the dance (albeit "apotheosized"). The social significance of the Ninth Symphony is unquestionable; its performances at the collapse of the Berlin Wall and at the opening ceremonies of the 1998 Winter Olympics (with satellite linkage of four simultaneous performances) vividly record how the work is used to forge experiences of universal collective destiny. Among recent contributions on some of these matters, see Richard Will, "Time, Morality, and Humanity in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony," Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997), 271-329, as well as two other essays in the same volume: Mark Evan Bonds, "Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century," ibid., 387-420;
40. On the Ninth Symphony's continuing social and historical significance, see Caryl Clark, "Forging Identity: Beethoven's 'Ode' as European Anthem," Critical Inquiry 23 (1997), 789-807.
41. Genette (Introduction à l'architexte, passim) shows that from Aristotle until the eighteenth century the lyric mode and the lyric genres were of equivocal, even questionable status; focus on the individual made the lyric mode of dubious worth for public poetic discourse, compared with the epic or dramatic genres, which could have collective significance and serve systems of social organization and formation. Here I shall focus not on lyric genres but on the lyric as a mode whose focus is the representation of internal states and of an individual subjectivity. Some useful remarks on the lyrical mode can be found in Paul Alpers, "Lyrical Modes," in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 59-74 (esp. 59-63).
42. A very different concept of the lyrical appears in the binary system proposed by Karol Berger in "Narrative and Lyric: Fundamental Poetic Forms of Composition," in Musical Humanism and Its Legacy: Essays in Honour of Claude V. Palisca, ed. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Barbara Russano Hanning (Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1992), pp. 451-70.
43. Given that we are exploring explicitly temporal aspects of the symphony movement, this concept of the lyric will be of little use in the present exercise. For a comparison of the lyric with what he calls the discursive/dialectical, see Peter Gülke, "Musicalische Lyrik und instrumentale Großform," in Schubert-Kongreß Wien 1978, ed. Otto Brusatti (Graz, 1979), pp. 207-14, an essay that concentrates on Schubert's C-Major String Quintet, D. 956.
44. David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford, 1996), p. 12.
45. Solomon, "Schubert's 'Unfinished' Symphony," p. 132.
46. McClary, "Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music," p. 212.
47. Otto Erich Deutsch, The Schubert Reader: A Life of Franz Schubert in Letters and Documents, trans. Eric Blom (New York, 1947), letter no. 456, p. 339.
48. Wellbery, The Specular Moment, pp. 15 and 17.
49. Manfred Wagner describes these two moments as "ein Explodieren der inneren Welt, die sich um Konventionen nicht scherte und um äußere formale Gliederungen, das Durchbrechen einer individuellen Aufwallung, die jeder Norm widerstand" (Franz Schubert: Sein Werk - Sein Leben, p. 102, emphasis added). In connection with the Sublime and matters of symphonic convention and genre, the agitated music that follows the silences of mm. 62 and 280 might also be compared to the storm scene in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony (and to storm scenes in other contemporaneous works). For extensive commentary on the storm scene, often bearing on matters considered here, see in Richard Will, "Time, Morality, and Humanity in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony," passim.
50. Otto Brusatti has applied Adorno's famous Berg appellation "der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs" to Schubert for his characteristically rapid harmonic transitions, including mm. 38-41 from this movement (see Otto Brusatti, "Schubert - Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs," in Franz Schubert - Der Fortschrittliche? Analysen - Perspectiven - Fakten, ed. Erich Wolfgang Partsch [Tutzing, 1989], pp. 29-36, esp. p. 31). The sophisticated inner metric workings of the second theme suggest that we might paraphrase the epithet and call Schubert "der Meister des kleinsten Innengangs" or "der Meister des kleinsten Innenbewegungs."
51. For a recent exploration of the physicality of performing Schubert's music, see Philip Brett, "Piano Four-Hands: Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire," this journal 21 (1997), 149-76.
52. For another perspective on the role of the body, see Suzanne G. Cusick, "Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem," Perspectives of New Music 32 (1994), 8-27.
53. See also Manfred Wagner, Franz Schubert: Sein Werk - Sein Leben, p. 105.