Returning Cycles: Contexts for the Interpretation of Schubert's Impromptus and Last Sonatas

This Page Intentionally Left Blank The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provi...

Author: Charles Fisk

47 downloads 695 Views 7MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the following individuals and organizations:

John and Jola Anderson Carol Franc Buck Foundation Emily Callaghan Frank A. Campini Foundation Patricia S. Dinner Eldorado Foundation Ann and Gordon Getty David B. Gold Foundation William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

R e t u r n i ng C yc l e s

california studie s in 19th-ce ntury music

Joseph Kerman General Editor

1. Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, by Carl Dahlhaus, translated by Mary Whittall 2. Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation, by Walter Frisch 3. Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After, by Lawrence Kramer 4. The Beethoven Sketchbooks: History, Reconstruction, Inventory, by Douglas Johnson, Alan Tyson, and Robert Winter 5. Nineteenth-Century Music, by Carl Dahlhaus, translated by J. Bradford Robinson 6. Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner, edited by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker 7. Music at the Turn of Century: A 19th-Century Music Reader, edited by Joseph Kerman 8. Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900, by Lawrence Kramer 9. Wagner Nights: An American History, by Joseph Horowitz 10. Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes, by Katherine Bergeron 11. Returning Cycles: Contexts for the Interpretation of Schubert’s Impromptus and Last Sonatas, by Charles Fisk

Returning Cycles Contexts for the Interpretation of Schubert’s Impromptus and Last Sonatas

charle s fisk

u n i v e r s i ty o f ca l i f o r n i a p r e s s

be rke ley

lo s ange le s

london

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2001 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fisk, Charles. Returning cycles : contexts for the interpretation of Schubert’s impromptus and last sonatas / Charles Fisk. p. cm .—(California studies in 19th-century music ; 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-22564-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Schubert, Franz, 1797–1828. Impromptus, piano, D. 899. 2. Schubert, Franz, 1797–1828. Impromptus, piano, D. 935. 3. Schubert, Franz, 1797–1828. Sonatas, piano, D. 958–960. 4. Piano music— Analysis, appreciation. 5. Sonatas (Piano)—Analysis, appreciation. I. Title. II. Series. ML410.S3 F6 2001 786.2'1894'092—dc21 00-059006 Manufactured in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).8 Portions of chapter 3 and the epilogue are reprinted from “Questions about the Persona of Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy,” College Music Symposium 29 (1989): 19–30; and “Rehearing the Moment and Hearing-in-the-Moment: Schubert’s First Two Moments Musicaux,” College Music Symposium 30 (1990): 1–18. Used by permission of the publisher. Portions of chapter 9 are reprinted from Charles Fisk, “What Schubert’s Last Sonata Might Hold,” in Music and Meaning, edited by Jenefer Robinson. Copyright © 1996 Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

For Agustin and in memory of my mother


Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Prologue: Schubert after Winterreise

1

1.

Resonant Beginnings

2.

Fields of Resonance

3.

The Wanderer’s Tracks

4.

Retelling the “Unfinished”

5.

Expanding the Scope of Schubertian Tonality: The Opus 90 Impromptus as the Stations of a Tonal Quest

25 38 60 81

6.

Displacing the Sonata: The Opus 142 Impromptus

7.

Beethoven in the Image of Schubert: The Sonata in C Minor, D. 958 180

8.

Recovering a Song of Origin: The Sonata in A Major, D. 959

204

Schubert’s Last “Wanderer”: The Sonata in Bb Major, D. 960

237

9.

Epilogue: Telling, Retelling, and Untelling Schubert Afterword Notes

287

Index

303

284

141

269

115


Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Wellesley College for the sabbatical leave in 1995–96 in which I began to write this book. Several passages included here have appeared before in print: sections II through IV of chapter 3 are largely taken from “Questions about the Persona of Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy,” College Music Symposium 29 (1989): 19–30; a few sentences of section V of the epilogue appeared in “Rehearing the Moment and Hearing-in-the-Moment: Schubert’s First Two Moments Musicaux,” College Music Symposium 30, no. 2 (1990): 1–18. Sections II through IV of chapter 9 are taken, for the most part, from “What Schubert’s Last Sonata Might Hold,” in Music and Meaning, ed. Jenefer Robinson (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 179–200. I am grateful to these publishers for permission to reprint these passages. My personal thanks go first to Joseph Kerman, who took an interest in this project in its earliest stages and has followed it closely ever since. I know no one who understands better how to temper firm, sometimes even di‹cult criticism with kind encouragement and support. Not only has he steered me away from some dubious paths, he has also encouraged me to persevere along some that I might otherwise have lacked the courage to follow wholeheartedly. In him I have been blessed with a sympathetically engaged mentor who, despite his deep involvement with my project, has never once imposed on me an agenda of his own.

ix

The colleague of my own generation to whom perhaps I owe the most is also the one I have known the longest. Within days after I arrived as a firstyear graduate student at the Yale School of Music, I heard the Bb-Major Sonata, which I myself had just learned, coming from a neighboring practice room. Eager to know my competition, I barged in on Janet Schmalfeldt. A steadfast friend over the many years since then, she has listened inexhaustibly, and with sympathetic and astute critical understanding, to both my performances of and my ruminations about Schubert, contributing much to their development. Martin Brody, my colleague at Wellesley for more than twenty years, has also listened sympathetically, and responded insightfully, to some version of just about every thought on Schubert I have ever had. He also read and commented on drafts of about half of the chapters of this book. Arlene Zallman, my other composer colleague at Wellesley, has also been wonderfully supportive of me both as a performer of and a writer about Schubert. Her extraordinary ear for tonal relationships has opened new paths for me. Fred Maus, whom I first knew as a colleague at Wellesley in the late 1980s, has remained an important friend and intellectual influence ever since. It was he who, on the basis of conversations with me about a book I especially admire, Edward T. Cone’s Composer’s Voice, invited me to contribute to a session on that book at the AMS meeting in Baltimore in 1988, thus providing me with the opportunity for my first conference paper. It was at that session that I first met Cone, whose writings have been inspirational to me, and also Kerman, who chaired the session. That paper, incidentally, is the basis of my chapter on the “Wanderer” Fantasy, which holds in essential ways the kernel of my argument. Mr. Cone himself read my manuscript for the University of California Press, and made careful and invaluable comments on it. Other friends and colleagues who have contributed especially to my understanding of aspects of music and performance germane to this study, and who have read and helped me with written work I have incorporated into it, include Julie Cumming, Donna Doyle, Joseph Dubiel, Jonathan Fineberg, Claire Fontijn, Richard Goode, Marion Guck, Gregory Karl, Jay Panetta, John Rhodes, Bonnell Robinson, Carl Schachter, Lois Shapiro, and Muriel Wolf. It has also been my privilege to collaborate with Lois Shapiro in the performance of some of Schubert’s four-hand works, to benefit from her extraordinarily sensitive help with my own solo performances, and to learn

x

ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

from her by listening to and discussing hers. Other wonderful musicians with whom I have enjoyed memorable and thought-provoking collaborations in Schubert works include violinist Nancy Cirillo, cellist Bruce Coppock, tenor William Hite, baritone Mark McSweeney, and soprano Sarah Pelletier. I also wish to acknowledge my students in recent years who have been especially stimulating in class discussions of this repertoire.Three of the best, Erica Schattle, Mandy Wong, and Joanna Wulfsberg, have played specific and crucial roles in the preparation of this book. Erica has prepared the figures, and Mandy and Joanna have proofread and commented constructively on the entire manuscript. I must also make grateful mention here of Phyllis Henderson Carey, who donated the professorship that I hold at Wellesley College. She is an avid and well-informed music lover, and it has been especially gratifying to enjoy her interest and support. Finally, I wish to dedicate this book to the two people without whose influence I could probably never have written it: Agustin Llona, whose love and support have made it possible for me to collect myself and know myself well enough to envision this project and carry it through, and my mother, who led me on my first excursions into the world of music, and who always nurtured our artistic inclinations without ever dominating them.

ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

xi


Prologue Schubert after Winterreise

I The questions addressed in this study of Schubert’s piano music originated as a performer’s questions. Wanting better to understand and to deepen my sense of identification with this music while playing it, I began to search for words to describe what it held for me. While drawn to all of Schubert’s mature piano music, I felt an a‹nity especially with the last three sonatas. I studied all three of them when I was a student, read what little I could find about them, and returned to them again and again in conversations with my friends. Even as a student I often mentioned that I felt the aura of Winterreise in these sonatas, especially in their slow movements, and that I was struck by the cyclic return of specific melodic and harmonic material within each sonata, from one movement to another. These two observations have come to seem closely related but cannot by any means be collapsed into each other. They not only help to articulate what follows but also become further articulated in the course of my narrative. Like almost every other pianist, I played several of the impromptus before playing any of the sonatas. I found stories in them, too, especially in the tragic Impromptu in C Minor, op. 90, no. 1, with its Ab-major episode of halcyon but essentially irretrievable memory that is so di‹cult for most young students to bring to realization, and in the Impromptu in Ab Major, op. 142, no. 2, which has for me always been a kind of musical refuge, a setting for an enraptured vision. Only after I realized that these pieces were composed in the same year as Winterreise, and almost certainly followed the

1

completion of its first part, did I begin to associate them, too, with the song cycle. I began to hear the continuation of its winter journey in the deliberate, unremitting rhythms of the first impromptu of each set and in their echo in the repeated-note melodies common to all eight of these pieces. I heard each of these sets as a single composition, as I did the last sonatas, rather than merely as a set of contrasting and complementary pieces. Even though the possible association of these sets with the Winterreise cycle had no specific implications for the musical organization of each set, it nonetheless stimulated my speculations about their cyclic interdependence. It was in the Sonata in A Major, D. 959, that I first specifically identified and described for myself several of the most elaborate and far-reaching of Schubert’s cyclic procedures, in which he based separate and contrasting movements on common musical material. Sometimes almost disjointed in its gestural juxtapositions, this music counterbalances its disjunctions with continual returns to its own generative motives. Although this sonata does not have any feature as manifestly and elaborately cyclic as the return of the theme of the Andante in the finale of the Trio in Eb Major, D. 929, from the same period, it exhibits a wide range of cyclic characteristics: its opening rhythmic motives return in all of its movements; the finale ends by virtually quoting the beginning of its first movement (see ex. 8.2b); the Scherzo incorporates another virtual musical quotation, a downward rushing C#-minor scale (see ex. P.1b, mm. 34¤.) recalling the wild central episode of its Andantino (see ex. 8.6a); and the Scherzo and the finale both return to secondary tonal regions especially stressed in the first two movements. On close examination, still more cyclic elements emerge, until virtually every passage in the sonata becomes implicated in processes spanning all four movements. Soon after making these discoveries about the A-Major Sonata, I studied for the first time the Fantasy in C Major, D. 760 (“Wanderer”), composed in 1822 and based on Schubert’s 1816 song “Der Wanderer.” Often hailed as a seminal cyclic work, and associated with Liszt’s tone poems and other later Romantic pieces, it has scarcely been considered in relation to Schubert’s own subsequent instrumental music. Several features of the A-Major Sonata of 1828—the wildness of its stormier episodes, the plaintive simplicity of its slow movement theme, the clear, if sometimes seemingly haphazard refer-

2

return i ng c yc le s

ences of its movements to one another, and the marked presence of C# minor (the “Wanderer” key) as well as C major—resonate especially strongly with the fantasy. Schubert composed no further fantasies until the last year and a half of his life. In this period, beginning with the completion of the first part of Winterreise early in 1827, he explored several genres in which he had not previously worked. At this time he composed not only two more fantasies— his first fantasies for more than one player—but also his first impromptus, his first complete piano trios, and his first string quintet. The fantasies, one for violin and piano, the other for piano duet, are the only pieces after the “Wanderer” Fantasy that might seem unquestionably related to it, most obviously because both also link together four separate movements through transitions. But the patently cyclic returns of themes, gestures, and motives in the Eb-Major Trio and the A-Major Sonata also have no other explicit antecedents in Schubert’s instrumental music. Although close study reveals subtle cyclic relationships in the instrumental music before Winterreise, Schubert only expanded on relationships of this kind by returning to manifestly cyclic procedures, and to music reminiscent of the “Wanderer” Fantasy, after his involvement with the song cycle. It therefore seems possible that his work on these songs may have intensified, or even reawakened, a cyclic impulse earlier revealed most explicitly in the “Wanderer” Fantasy, leading to a proliferation of new cyclic experiments, some of them drawing on techniques first explored in the fantasy. But how, or why, could Schubert’s work on Winterreise have had this e¤ect?

II The argument emerging here—the answer to this question—may seem quite simple: Schubert, after being consumed with the composition of Winterreise in 1827, was stimulated by his work on this cycle to undertake other cyclic compositional projects in the period immediately following, the period that turned out to be his last. But in fact, no obvious musical features link the application of the term cycle to Winterreise with that of cyclic to such pieces as the two last fantasies, the Eb-Major Trio, and the A-Major Sonata. The

p rolog ue

3

song cycle lacks the patently unifying devices characteristic of these pieces: missing in particular are a clearly unified tonal plan of some kind and clearly recognizable returns of material from earlier songs in later ones. My argument may seem to depend more on a deceptive terminological coincidence than on any truly musical a‹nity. Several substantial recent studies have taken up what makes Winterreise a cycle, and their conclusions seem only to confirm these doubts. Susan Youens’s synoptically states only that “a subtle web of tonal connections and dramatic associations links groups of adjacent songs and even forms associated arches between widely separated songs.” Ludwig Sto¤els and Richard Kramer both undertake more elaborate analyses of the cycle’s tonal networks, leading to perceptive and suggestive refinements of such a statement without necessitating any essential revision of its content.1 Sto¤els finds in the cycle a “dense network of tonal, motivic and rhythmic relationships,” but most of the relationships he describes are, again, subtle and in no way reminiscent of the conspicuous motivic unification of the “Wanderer” Fantasy.2 In a provocative formulation, Kramer writes of phrases that “seem to reverberate beyond the actual moment, to invade the pitched space of other songs, and thus to assume a significance that has much to do with the deeper questions of cycle making.”3 These words apply as well, in fact, to many passages in Schubert’s instrumental music, especially after Winterreise, but also before it. In my discussions of the impromptus and last sonatas, I shall consider some of these passages in detail. But they do not characterize the kinds of “Wanderer”-related cyclic procedures that appear in some of the compositions that followed the completion of the song cycle. It may be, as Youens argues, that the aimlessness and futility of the winter journey—the almost random succession of its scenes and the failure of the wanderer to achieve even the death he seeks—preclude the manifest cyclicism either of explicit motivic and thematic recollection or of any tonal reinforcement of closure in Winterreise. But its protagonist’s alienated predicament may still have linked him in Schubert’s mind with “Der Wanderer,” and thus indirectly with the musical homecoming of that figure in the “Wanderer” Fantasy. A brief exploration of this theme of the Winterreise poetry and of its musical expression in the song cycle suggests why Schubert might have needed, after completing the cycle, to find a companion figure for this protagonist.

4


III From his opening lines, the winter wanderer proclaims himself an outsider: “Fremd bin ich eingezogen, Fremd zieh ich wieder aus” (A stranger I came, a stranger I depart). He has no home with which he feels identified, and, accordingly, his journey has neither origin nor goal. It begins as he turns away from the town that might have become such a home, had he succeeded there in love. But his opening avowal of his alienation suggests the inevitability of that love’s failure, the impossibility of his desire’s fulfillment, and hence the impossibility of such a home for him. As he moves on, his immersion in one frozen, barren scene after another only deepens his isolation, so that he gradually becomes alienated even from himself, losing every memory or aspiration through which he might ever have forged or retained a sense of his own identity. Near the end, in “Der Wegweiser,” he realizes that not even the signpost he follows stands on solid ground. It ultimately discloses only an inner compulsion, and the route it indicates is one from which no one has ever returned. At the very end, in “Der Leiermann,” he retains only the shell of himself epitomized for him by the old beggar-musician, whom this final anti-apotheosis reveals to him as his Doppelgänger, a hallucinatory companion. Wilhelm Müller’s Winterreise poems never once give voice, even at the beginning, to any life-a‹rming hope. Unrequited love, their point of departure, has itself already become only a memory for the wanderer as he leaves the town by night. His journey leads, if it can be said to lead anywhere, to a deeper unrequited longing: a longing for death. The profound, but mostly subtle and only subliminally sensed musical relationships among the songs in Schubert’s setting might readily embody the unbidden, mostly unarticulated impulses that drive the winter wanderer onward. By contrast, the cyclic procedures that are absent from Winterreise—recognizably systematic tonal unification or explicit return of well-formed themes or motives—can easily bring a sense of a coherent narrative or of the a‹rmation of a life-order to a musical context, suggesting through various kinds of musical return the recovery of lost memories, the fulfillment of dreams, or a return home. The songs of Schubert’s cycle more than match the extremity of their texts. In their spareness—their unadorned melodies, their unrelenting rhythms,

p rolog ue

5

their frugal, expressively saturated chromaticisms, and their textural evocations of both the stillness and the turbulence of winter—they bespeak the intensity of Schubert’s identification with their lonely protagonist. After coupling his musical imagination so uncompromisingly to this poetry of devastation, Schubert may have needed, at the core of his composerly being, to recover musically his sense of narrative continuity, to reclaim himself through his own music. His use, after Winterreise, of the very kinds of cyclic procedures that are not incorporated in the song cycle enacts such a reclamation. Winterreise is a cycle without a center, spinning slowly out into a frozen wasteland; but many of the instrumental pieces that follow Winterreise are returning cycles. Their beginnings often suggest searching or wandering, but ultimately these compositions fulfill their quest and restore to their wanderer a sense of self-possession and belonging.

IV One might think that, instead of reflecting any musical a‹nity between Winterreise and the “Wanderer” Fantasy, Schubert’s return in the late instrumental music to some of the compositional procedures of the “Wanderer” Fantasy—and the elaboration of other cyclic procedures as well— might simply be a compensation for what is missing from the song cycle. Were this so, why might his work on the earlier song cycle, Die Schöne Müllerin, not already have entailed such a compensatory reaction? Like Winterreise, it avoids both explicit motivic or thematic recall and unity of tonal plan. As with Winterreise, its poems concern wandering and death, although their story of unrequited love di¤ers in ending with the young wanderer’s suicide. Written in 1823, this cycle comes much closer than Winterreise to the time of the “Wanderer” Fantasy. One might therefore expect that work on this first cycle would already have activated Schubert’s compositional memory of the “Wanderer” Fantasy and of techniques associated with it. But the textual themes of alienation and loss of direction in “Der Wanderer” are shared with Winterreise in ways that are not shared with Die Schöne Müllerin. And the “Wanderer” Fantasy musically articulates these themes. Its tonal and gestural shape can easily be heard as embodying, and even as intensifying, the alienation and waywardness of “Der Wanderer,” but then

6


overcoming them. This fantasy is in its own way a returning cycle: it marks Schubert’s return to sustained and fully realized instrumental composition after nearly three years of mostly unsuccessful operatic projects and instrumental works left incomplete.The fantasy is clearly based on the third stanza of his setting of “Der Wanderer” (see ex. 3.4a, mm. 23¤.), which provides not only the theme for the variations of the slow movement (see ex. 3.1, mm. 189¤.) but also the leading motives for all four movements. In the context of Schubert’s hypothetical return to the techniques of the “Wanderer” Fantasy as a response to his own musical identification with the poems of Winterreise, the resonance of the text of the third stanza with the opening lines of the later song cycle is stunning. The stanza culminates in the line “Ich bin ein Fremdling überall” (I am a stranger everywhere). As I shall argue in chapter 3, the intrusion of the music of this stanza, in its original C# minor, into the C-major context of the fantasy produces a conflict of tonalities that powerfully represents the wanderer’s sense of estrangement. But the ensuing tonal course of the fantasy brings the wanderer home. While we can only conjecture about Schubert’s musical reasons to recall the homecoming of “Der Wanderer” in his final year, we need not strain to imagine the motivation provided by the poetry. The memories and dreams of “Der Wanderer” reanimate a figure whose winter journey has culminated in the revelation, through the imagery of “Der Leiermann,” of his own selfannihilation. So far I have been stressing the striking, although isolated, returns of explicit “Wanderer”-related cyclic devices in the instrumental music of Schubert’s last year. As I have implied, these are only the most explicit of such procedures occurring in this music; the late instrumental music returns to the cyclic procedures of earlier instrumental compositions and Winterreise as well. But a subtler aspect of the fantasy finds deeper and far more pervasive resonances in this later music. The emphases of the “Wanderer” keys of C# minor and C major in the A-Major Sonata not only recollect the fantasy’s conflicting keys, they also manifest a similar, although more subtle and elaborate, tonal organization. This kind of tonal organization, which systematically sets mutually remote keys in conflict with each other and then gradually resolves that conflict, is characteristic of each of the last three sonatas. This organization can be said to individuate a Fremdling protagonist; but more integrated returns to the same remote keys in subsequent

p rolog ue

7

movements bring this protagonist home. Once again, this kind of tonal organization does not play a role in Winterreise. Like the more explicit compositional remembrances of the “Wanderer” Fantasy, however, this subtler and more pervasive remembrance of its cyclic tonal organization may again respond, in compensation or recovery, to the desolation of the song cycle.

V As I have already suggested, it seems unlikely that Schubert could ever have chosen to set the Winterreise poems, or found music so devastatingly appropriate for them, unless he had strongly identified with their Fremdling wanderer. In fact, the circumstances of Schubert’s life, from about the time of the “Unfinished” Symphony and the “Wanderer” Fantasy onward, make this identification very likely. By January of 1823, he was seriously ill with syphilis; he ostensibly recovered, but from then on knew he would probably die young. Moreover, Schubert was himself an outsider in fundamental ways: his family never fully supported his pursuit of a musical career; he never made a home for himself for any extended period, instead taking up lodging with one friend after another; and, if evidence of his homosexuality proves well-founded, he may have felt himself to be a stranger nearly everywhere.The peregrinations of these wanderers may have echoed his inner life. Several pieces of writing by Schubert and by his friends confirm these speculations. In constructing a biographical background for his immersion in Winterreise, Youens cites three: Schubert’s letter of 1824 to Leopold Kupelweiser, at first despairing about his personal life, then—as if in compensation— detailing his compositional ambitions; an 1827 entry in Fritz von Hartmann’s diary telling of Schubert’s inability, stemming from a kind of overinvolvement, to carry out his first Winterreise performance; and Joseph Spaun’s 1858 recollections not only of Schubert’s own very emotional first performance of these songs but also of his avowal of their central importance for him.4 Another document, Schubert’s own story, “Mein Traum” (which was discovered in his papers after his death), suggests Schubert’s feelings of estrangement from his father as a possible source for his identification with the Fremdling wanderer of this tale. The circumstances of the story’s

8


composition are not known, but in some respects they do not matter. It is di‹cult to imagine any external circumstance that would so completely determine the story’s particular course as to make it unrepresentative of its author.5 This narrative, its title preceded by the heading “Allegorical Story” in his brother’s hand, is dated 3 July 1822, only a few months before Schubert’s breakthroughs in sustained instrumental composition, and a few more before the full onset of his illness.6 It begins in a happy family setting, with the protagonist surrounded by his beloved parents, brothers, and sisters. But one day his father takes them to a feast, at which the protagonist’s sadness contrasts with his brothers’ merriment. When he refuses the food, his father banishes him, and he wanders o¤ to a faraway country to remain there, torn between love and pain, for years. When his mother dies, his father allows him to return home, and he stays. Eventually his father takes him back to the “pleasure garden,” the scene of the feast. When he rejects the food a second time, his father strikes him and he flees again. Of his second exile he writes: “Through long, long years I sang songs. But when I wished to sing of love it turned to pain, and when I wanted to sing of pain it was transformed for me into love.” But at the conclusion of the story, as if by a miracle, the protagonist is transported into a circle of men, young and old, who are gathered around the tomb of a dead maiden, bathed in heavenly thoughts and “the most wondrously lovely sound.” “And I felt,” he concludes, “compressed as it were into a moment’s space, the whole measure of eternal bliss. My father I saw too, loving and reconciled. He folded me into his arms and wept. And I still more.”7 The story corresponds in some, although clearly not all, respects to Schubert’s life. He did quarrel with his father over his musical aspirations and left home for several extended periods in order to pursue them.8 His first departure in 1816 also marked the end of his half-hearted courtship with Therese Grob, possibly the only such relationship in Schubert’s life. In a diary entry of about the same time, he expressed grave doubts—even revulsion—about marriage. Although certainly not in themselves conclusive, these correspondences with Schubert’s life encourage interpretation of “Mein Traum” as a secret psychological manifesto and thus as potentially revelatory of a¤ective dispositions and emotional upheavals that might have found expressive correlates in Schubert’s music. Toward the end of the story, music itself plays a

p rolog ue

9

seemingly functional, although not fully articulated, role: the only specified activity during the second exile of Schubert’s dream persona is his singing of his songs. His music apparently takes control of his emotions, transforming his love into pain and his pain into love. In the final scene of salvation, his awareness of the “lovely sound” marks the moment—one might even call it a “moment musical”—of his entrance into the blessed circle. In exile, he has tried to comfort himself by singing, but he has not overcome his su¤ering or disentangled it from his other emotions. When he becomes a member of the exalted circle he no longer has to sing. The lovely music of the circle is a sensory embodiment of the atonement he has sought through his own music. Music thus comes explicitly to “Mein Traum” only in the last two of its five scenes, but since the story is in its own way cyclic, these two scenes derive much of their meaning from the earlier scenes: from an earlier exile, in which he is “torn between the greatest love and the greatest pain” but does not yet sing of these feelings; from an earlier death, his mother’s; and from the ultimately failed homecoming that follows that death, echoed in his final redemptive homecoming to the circle around the dead maiden’s tomb. The story’s alternation of scenes of home and exile produces a simple, quasimusical ABABA pattern: home—exile—return home (after his mother’s death)—second exile, seeking consolation through music—second return home, to a home transfigured, possibly by music (after the death of the maiden). Only music di¤erentiates the second exile from the first; hence the transformative, expressive power of music helps bring about the final salvation that follows the second exile, through the sublimation of his mother (and even of some aspects of himself ) into the dead maiden and the sublimation of himself and his father into partners in the brotherhood of the circle. We cannot know for sure what “Mein Traum” meant for Schubert; Schubert himself could probably not know.9 But by placing himself in its scenes of banishment and exile and thus articulating a need for salvation, Schubert seems to express an understanding of himself that would make his identification with the lonely, essentially exiled protagonists of “Der Wanderer” and Winterreise very likely. That “Mein Traum” tells of his singing only in exile, never at home, also suggests that, for Schubert, his music was not merely pleasurable or comforting, but profoundly redemptive. With chilling yet poignant irony, the poetry of Winterreise concludes with an invocation of

10


this redemptive power of music. “Wunderlicher alter,” the wanderer entreats the beggar, “soll ich mit dir gehn? Willst zu meinen Liedern deine Leier dreh’n?” (Wonderful old man, shall I go with you? Will you turn your hurdygurdy to my songs?) For Richard Kramer, this poem, “about neither past nor future, drones its mantic questions in a timeless present.”10 Schubert’s obsessively minimalist setting makes palpable the falling away of memory and anticipation and the consequent emptiness—the nearness-to-death—of such a present. The wanderer’s world has reduced itself to an expanse of ice and snow that finally reveals his Doppelgänger, the old man who will presumably never speak or sing, but will only continue turning the handle of his instrument, recycling the same sounds again and again. Of course, Winterreise can also be read as an allegory of the Romantic Artist—or, more specifically, the musician—and perhaps even “Mein Traum” can be understood in this way. In both Müller’s poems and Schubert’s story, the central protagonist is a spurned wanderer who creates his own songs while in exile. Winterreise’s protagonist longs for death, yet, paradoxically, his wandering keeps him intensely alive. He sublimates the desire that drives him ever onward, the desire that by its nature can never be fulfilled, into his poems— his songs, his art. His final song brings his feverish but aimless quest into stark contrast with the Leiermann’s numb stillness. Does he pose his final question to another human being, or simply to another awareness within himself, one that realizes he has reached an outer limit? By joining with the Leiermann, by renouncing the desire that can lead only to death, he can perhaps be reborn, and thus recreate himself within the imaginary homeland of his art. In “Mein Traum,” the final scene might figure as that homeland itself: the dead maiden as the muse, the circle of men as other artists, here all reconciled for a common redemptive cause. Like the Romantic Artist, the protagonist is reborn. If Schubert identified with Winterreise’s wanderer as strongly as these speculations suggest, both personally and as an artist, then he might very well have sought to enact, through his subsequent instrumental music, the redemption or rebirth denied to that wanderer. He might have sought to revive the wanderer through that music, to restore to him or re-create for him his memories and aspirations, and to find for him a new home or a place of rest.11 Recollection of “Der Wanderer,” whose protagonist, unlike the winter wanderer, could still remember and dream of a homeland, might have

p rolog ue

11

o¤ered one possibility of such recovery and rebirth; recollection of the “Wanderer” Fantasy, in which that earlier wanderer finds his way home, would have suggested ways to achieve it.

VI Cyclic organization, both in the form of occasional obvious references to earlier material—references meant for recognition—and in the form of more pervasive subtle references that produce deep resonances between ostensibly unrelated passages, may seem uncharacteristic of the Schubert understood by most music lovers. Motivic unification through the return of the same motivic and tonal material in widely disparate passages and separate movements may initially seem unrelated to, if not even inconsistent with, a pervasive characteristic more traditionally recognized in Schubert’s music: the linking of passages of markedly contrasting tonality and character, as if in improvisation, through such sounding elements as common tones or chords. It is possible, however, to understand these linkages and the recurrences— especially veiled recurrences—of motivic material as complementary manifestations of a single complex of musical and expressive concerns. The associations that these elements rekindle through their resounding are musical analogues of what in the twentieth century came to be called the stream and the wellsprings of consciousness: the stream being the constant associative activity of the mind, and the wellsprings manifested by the constant return of the same structures of memory in the images this activity brings to awareness. In contrast with so much of Beethoven’s music, which in Scott Burnham’s recent formulation can seem to generate a world from the premise of a heroic self, Schubert’s music can seem to question the very existence of a persisting and unified self. Schubert’s music is thus preoccupied with the finding and preservation of self in a world that, in its disparate and conflicting demands, threatens to consume it.12 In Winterreise the wanderer’s journey, ultimately a quest to find himself, fails so utterly that he cannot even prepare to die. But he is left with music, however vestigial. And in much of Schubert’s subsequent instrumental music, a Winterreise-haunted self threatened with annihilation, in intensified doubt over its own unity and persistence, can seem gradually to regain continuity and integration.

12


VII A passage from the A-Major Sonata—the first page of its Scherzo (ex. P.1a–b)—exhibits with special concentration the seemingly contradictory tendencies that suggest such an interpretation of Schubert’s last music: its quasi-improvisatory manner and its rich cyclic allusiveness. In the first phrase, the introduction of Gn in measure 6 brings a deflection of the music’s tonal course to B minor. The Fn in measure 10 has the e¤ect of neutralizing, even of retracting this B minor, and the phrase cadences happily in the A major in which it began. Immediately after this cadence, with no direct modulatory preparation, C major intrudes (m. 17). The neighbor-note figure through which it announces itself summons back the melody of measures 11 and 12, transforming its E from 5 of A major into 3 of C major. Provisionally stabilized through a semicadence (m. 21), this C major becomes static, calming into quiet reverberation over a dominant pedal of twelve full measures. A violently downward-rushing C#-minor scale bursts into this calm (m. 34), again jolting the music without warning into a new key. Once again, a common melodic emphasis links this disruptive gesture to the music upon which it intrudes—this time the initiating A that the scale shares with the preceding measures. After the disruption the music, now a C#-minor dance, is calm again. It makes its return to A major only as if through sleight-ofhand, by reinterpreting in A the melodic ending heard moments earlier in C# minor (mm. 48–49).13 Rather than emerging as the stations of a purposeful tonal course, the principal tonalities of this Scherzo—C major, C# minor, and A major in its return—seem to befall the music.Thus this movement proceeds in the manner of free association: it is like an improvisation in which common tones and motivic resonances bind disparate, heterogeneous gestures and tonal regions together in a sounding stream. But even on first acquaintance a listener or reader of the score might recognize the allusion of the down-rushing C#-minor scale to the very similar gesture that wrenches the feverish music at the imperiled heart of the Andantino into C# minor for its harrowing climax (see ex. 8.6a, mm. 107–108). The recall of such an impressive gesture may seem in no way to controvert the improvisatory quality of this Scherzo. It may seem even to reinforce this quality, making the apparent improvisation of this moment especially evocative of the free association that it mimics, in which just about anything might

p rolog ue

13

example p.1 a. Mm. 1–24

Sonata in A Major, D. 959, Scherzo

Allegro vivace x 8va

y

7

8va

12

16

21

C major

example p.1 (continued) b. Mm. 33–54 33 3

3

C minor 37

cresc.

43

cresc.

49

8va

be remembered. But this Scherzo recalls material from the earlier movements in other ways that are less suggestive of improvisation. An extemporization might begin with a pregiven motive, and the reference to the beginning of the first movement (see ex. 8.2a) that opens the Scherzo represents as plausible a source as any for such a motive. But the elaborateness of the reference, through which the downbeat motive (x) of the sonata’s first phrase combines with the upbeat motive (y) of its second phrase to form the rhythm of the Scherzo’s first four chords, seems too deliberately contrived to have occurred spontaneously.14 The impulsive move to C major just after the double bar recalls the similarly, although quietly, impulsive one that introduces the C major of the first

p rolog ue

15

movement’s development by simply echoing the last E-major gestures of the exposition (see ex. 8.3, mm. 129¤.). This C-major passage lacks the distinctive motivic references to earlier movements of the Scherzo’s A-major opening and the C#-minor explosion, but it still subtly recalls the first movement’s C-major music, not only in the unprepared way it emerges but also in the stasis it produces by means of a sustained bass pedal. Through these abstract yet palpable resemblances, these two C-major passages resonate with each other. Thus this movement returns to material of the earlier movements in three distinct ways: through the near-quotation of a striking musical gesture, through a new configuration of explicitly recalled motives, and through the recollection of tonal stasis in a chromatically derived, third-related key. In each case it recalls the earlier material in its original key, highlighting the recollection through the suddenness of the tonal move that introduces (or, in the case of the tonic, reintroduces) it, so that each of these recollections comes as a surprise, and hence as an interpretive provocation.

VIII In its first fifty measures, the Scherzo accordingly gives almost equal weight to three very di¤erent tonal regions: the A major of its opening theme, with a tonic cadence at the double bar; the C major that begins forcefully just after the double bar, gradually quieting into static reverberation rather than preparing to move to another key; and the C# minor of the violent descending scale and the ensuing quiet dance. Apart from the passing digression to B minor in the opening phrase, the first harmonically articulated transition in this Scherzo occurs only with the return of the A major of its opening theme, and then only as if it were an afterthought. Understood in one way, then, this music does not so much progress from one tonal region to another as fall suddenly from the tonic into another region quite distant from it, and then from that region into yet another. Instead of sensing a continuum of tonal possibilities, one might apprehend the tonal space in which this music arises as stratified into dissociated realms. As already indicated, both C major and C# minor seem to befall the music; common tones and motivic resonances ensure the musical continuity threatened by these sudden changes of key, but these are disjunctive

16


changes that throw into relief the remoteness of C major from A major and, especially, of C# minor from C major. In this way Schubert invests these remote keys with an aura of autonomy, as if the activity within them might elude the control of the tonic. Can the same self who has lived through the lonely terror recalled in the C#-minor explosion in the Scherzo still have access to the pastoral tranquillity remembered through the C major that precedes it? What does either of these experiences contribute to the A-major world into which they intrude? Can life in that world draw comfort from the pastoral or win recovery from the terror, or must the protagonist who has these experiences always remain an outsider to that world, gaining access to pastoral enchantment only at the price of being subject to disorienting terror as well?

IX The interpretation suggested here depends not only on hearing C# minor as remote from C major, but on hearing C major—the lowered mediant degree—as remote from A major. But for Schubert the modulation from the tonic to the lowered mediant, along with various other tonal moves by third, had become common. The pervasiveness in his music of motion by thirds, often to chromatically altered degrees, has recently led to some reassessments of Schubert’s tonal procedures that disavow the structural role of the tonic-dominant axis of the Classical style in his music. In a discussion of the Sonata in Bb Major, D. 960, for example, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen argues that “the pervasive structuring of the exposition through descending major thirds” and the “numerous occurrences of circle-modulations” relegate fifth relationships to a secondary position.15 Such an account thus departs from the traditional one that would subordinate the moves to Gb major (see ex. 1.3, mm. 20¤.) and F# minor (see ex. 9.2, mm. 47¤.), which are so prominent in that exposition, to the eventual arrival of the dominant at the exposition’s end. No longer deflections or postponements in a motion from tonic to dominant, no longer excursions to remote keys temporarily taking the place of nearer ones, these moves instead become ends in themselves.16 Similarly, in such an account of the A-major Scherzo, the tonic triad and

p rolog ue

17

the dominant function would no longer underlie the moves to C major and C# minor as they would in a Schenkerian analysis. These secondary keys, like the Gb major and F# minor in the Bb-Major Sonata, would no longer elaborate on or take the place of more fundamental progressions, as they would in such an analysis. No longer heard as departures, they are simply what they appear to be. An explanation of Schubert’s tonality needs to build not only on an awareness of the keys tonicized, and of their succession, however, but also on close attention to the means of their tonicization. As in the passage after the double bar in the A-major Scherzo, the lowered submediant within the Bb-Major Sonata’s first theme, Gb major, comes without the preparation of an articulated modulation. Later on, F# minor also emerges quite suddenly, once again seeming to befall the music unexpectedly. The ensuing moves to A major and D minor never become confirmed or stabilized. Only F major, the dominant, makes a fully prepared entrance, emerging predictably from a six-measure prolongation of its own dominant (see ex. 9.3a, which begins with the last four measures of this prolongation). F major then controls the following twenty measures, culminating in a full cadence. The tonicdominant axis has surely weakened, but such reinforcement of the dominant betokens more than the nod to tonal convention that Hinrichsen accords it. Again, in the A-major Scherzo, Schubert’s articulation of the secondary tonalities, C major and C# minor, avoids preparation or strong cadential confirmation. He reserves these tonal strategies for the tonic. The secondary keys in both of these examples may emerge more vividly than the tonic and the dominant; but they never even momentarily win the reinforcement or stability reserved for those primary keys. Moreover, their instability is always palpable, directly sensed from their own character and deportment, manifest within them rather than merely inferable from their context. In the Scherzo, no cadential tonic triad occurs even momentarily in either the C-major or the C#-minor music. In C major, the quiet dominant pedal neutralizes tonal motion; in C# minor, the o¤beat accompanying chords make it tentative and searching. Because it underplays the qualitative di¤erences between Schubert’s articulation of subordinate keys and his articulation of tonic and dominant, Hinrichsen’s otherwise perceptive portrayal of Schubert’s tonal procedures cannot account for the pervasive dramatic tension that I hear, especially in

18


his later music. Certainly, progressions by third, as well as by step and half step, gain unprecedented prominence in this music. It sometimes “appears to drift freely through enharmonic and oblique modulations,” as Susan McClary asserts, “rather than establishing a clear tonic and pursuing a dynamic series of modulations.”17 The expansions that accommodate such tonal procedures seem to undermine the tensions and formal hierarchies of the classical style. According to Arthur Godel, “the hierarchy of formal components of the classical sonata is dissolved into a democratic juxtaposition.”18 But because of Schubert’s manifest characterological di¤erentiation of keys other than tonic and dominant from those fundamental keys, and because in his mature music he still accords to tonic and dominant their traditional structural roles, he does not simply relegate classical tonal and formal procedures to a peripheral, frame-producing status. Instead he explores his own idiosyncratic tonal paths and creates space for these explorations against the persisting and palpable background of the tonic-dominant axis as articulated by the various sonata forms. Much of the expressive poignancy of his music arises from the tension it activates between its own, sometimes seemingly wayward tonal and thematic course and the constantly felt—and eventually always confirmed—presence of that tonal and formal background. The characterizations of Godel, McClary, and Hinrichsen lose sight of this tension. Schubert’s music o¤ers up a veritable tonal feast, a “pleasure garden” of tonal possibilities, but it also is the setting for a protagonist, like the Schubert of “Mein Traum,” who cannot simply revel in these possibilities or take them on as aspects of self-definition. Schubert’s music can seem to wander, but its wandering remains constantly and poignantly aware either of its distance from home or (as an aesthetically intended e¤ect) of having lost its way, and it continually searches for paths of return.

X In some ways, especially with respect to tonal progression, Schubert usually completes a return from such wanderings within individual movements. But he often reintroduces the same outlying tonalities, and reconfigurations of the material associated with them, in subsequent movements to assimilate those tonalities and that material more fully with the tonal and motivic ideas

p rolog ue

19

associated with the tonic region. This is music that eventually achieves integration by recalling its tonal disjunctions and its most characterologically elusive motives again and again, finding new settings and constellations for these gestures that make them more flowing, more lyrical, and otherwise more continuous with their surroundings than they were at first. Schubert’s expansion of such musical wanderings, explorations, and homecomings beyond the confines of a single piece or movement into a set of pieces or an entire sonata enlarges the scope of his explorations and his resolutions in ways that each of the ensuing analytic chapters will explore in depth. Schubert’s mature music only very rarely manipulates its forms in ways suggestive of cyclic organization: outside of the three fantasies, it is apparent only in the linking of the slow movement to the finale of the Sonata in A Minor, D. 821, for arpeggione and piano, a piece without any other obvious cyclic characteristics. The absence of such formal manipulation explains in large part why the many cyclic procedures that this music does bring into play have gone unrecognized for so long. As the analyses in this study will show, these procedures, even though they are mostly not marked for recognition, account for much of the depth of this music—for the ways its themes and movements resonate with one another. They also provide a basis in musical detail for articulating an analytic and dramatic understanding of the complementary and respective roles of separate movements. While little has been written about the impromptus, Alfred Brendel’s important article on the last sonatas has already made a strong case for a cyclic understanding of these works.19 Brendel focuses especially on motives shared not only by the separate movements of each sonata but also by all three sonatas as a “family” of works. By identifying and tracing the most pervasive patterns of recurring melodic contours and intervallic emphases in these pieces, he draws virtually every thematic complex in all three sonatas into networks of cyclic relationships. Possibly because he writes not only for an audience of musical professionals and scholars but also for a wider audience of music lovers, Brendel does not investigate specific harmonic gestures in particular detail. The melodic and intervallic patterns he identifies often return in much the same harmonic and contrapuntal settings as before. By bringing into focus just what changes and just what stays the same in these returns, one can identify distinct stages of motivic evolution in each sonata

20


and thus draw from each an account not only of its cyclic coherence but also its story, its cyclic course. Deep resonances between distantly separated moments within these pieces are engendered by the return of specific tonal regions and of distinctive harmonic gestures within them. These returns do not usually bring conscious recollection of the earlier events to the hearing of the later ones; instead, they subtly reactivate and deepen the color or feeling immanent in those earlier events, imbuing harmonic color with developmental potential. One of the strengths of Brendel’s article is the awareness it conveys of Schubert’s personal, musical, and cultural situation at the time that he composed his last sonatas. But the possible relationship of these last instrumental works to Winterreise, and, through Winterreise, to “Der Wanderer,” is not among those that he explores. I do not wish to claim that these relationships explain any aspect of these pieces completely. But I am convinced that Schubert’s identification with the Fremdling wanderers of these songs links these protagonists, through the music they inspired, to the instrumental music of his last year, and that exploration of that link may explain more cogently than can any other line of inquiry some of the compositional paths on which Schubert embarked after Winterreise.

XI As I have indicated, overtly cyclic recollections—ones reminiscent of the “Wanderer” Fantasy—occur relatively rarely even in the music of Schubert’s last period. Far more pervasive, and hence more deeply significant, are subtle cyclic developments of material from one movement or piece to another. Schubert’s music gives substantial evidence of this kind of cyclicism well before Winterreise, as I have also indicated and shall demonstrate. After the song cycle, however, Schubert’s ways of recalling and developing material from earlier movements increase in both diversity and extent, occasionally coming into special relief through allusions—private though they may have been—to “Der Wanderer” and its fantasy. Even so, attention to the cyclic aspects of Schubert’s last pieces falls far short of explaining everything that happens in them. Every movement has

p rolog ue

21

in many respects its own self-su‹cient and distinctive character and takes its own (for the most part) intelligible course. Each can be told, and has most frequently been told, by itself. Awareness of what returns from one movement to another does not a¤ord the basis, then, for the only feasible telling of these pieces. But it does provide a context for telling them again, for a richer and newly focused retelling in which later movements return to and elaborate on what has happened before. In the impromptus and the last sonatas, moreover, specific musical allusions both to Winterreise and to “Der Wanderer” bring further definition to this context, o¤ering clues of what expressive valences the passages in which they occur might have held for Schubert himself. I tell of what happens in these pieces as if they had minds of their own, knew what they were doing, and experienced their own course as the outcome of specific circumstances and choices within a wider range of possibilities. An exploration of the implications of such a telling of music deserves a book of its own, and indeed my references to protagonists may have reminded some readers of one such book, The Composer’s Voice by Edward T. Cone.20 While I have been deeply influenced both by that book and by several of Cone’s articles on Schubert, I have not undertaken to adopt faithfully or to develop specifically his terminology. In particular, I almost never speak in what follows of the “persona” of any of these pieces—of the imaginary consciousness it generates and whose thoughts and experiences it embodies. But I believe that the characterization of music underlying Cone’s use of that term—admittedly intended to apply to an enormous range of music—applies especially aptly to Schubert and to the aura that it engenders of a psychological quest or journey. I do speak repeatedly, however, of protagonists: not of protagonists who enter the music, but instead of protagonists who become individuated through it.21 These protagonists are more like imaginary figures through which the persona of the composition defines or identifies itself than like other characters distinct from it. Like most such images or definitions of self, these protagonists emerge only in particular contexts and recede in others. In some cases, as in the “Wanderer” Fantasy, such a subordinate protagonist comes into enough relief to become a “subordinate persona,” to produce a “split persona,” embodying a conflict of identity that the subsequent music undertakes to overcome. Schubert returns to such a conflict of identity in his last sonatas, composed in the wake of Winterreise, partly by recalling aspects

22


of the fantasy. He incorporates passages suggesting a protagonist who feels like an outcast into a framework of passages suggesting the possibility of integration, ultimately for the same persona that has earlier been individuated as an outsider. Presumably almost everyone has felt like an outsider at one time or another and experienced at least some of the desolation of the Fremdling.Thus almost any performer who comes to find such a protagonist in Schubert’s music can draw on personal experience, on direct knowledge of such feelings, and of the kinds of gestures that manifest them to intensify an imagining of how this music might go. Realized again in performance, the music that owes its shape and character in part to those feelings is renewed as a setting for holding, assimilating, and transforming them. If I am right about Schubert’s last works, composing them helped him to resist the alienated and nihilistic vision of Winterreise’s lonely wanderer. Today, playing and listening to this music might still help to alleviate any tendency to the same capitulation.

p rolog ue

23


c hap t e r

1

Resonant Beginnings

I Schubert’s first impromptu, in C minor (op. 90, no. 1), and the finale of his last sonata, in Bb major (D. 960), could hardly be more di¤erent. Yet these two movements might strike a casual listener as beginning in much the same way (ex. 1.1a–b). In each, a forcefully struck, seemingly portentous G sets the stage for a C-minor melodic beginning that is marked motivically by repeated notes and keeps close to its tonic. In each, as well, the abruptness and the gestural isolation of the opening G suggest something other than a simple beginning: the G commands attention, like a symbolic call to whose meaning the ensuing melody provides the first clues; it invokes a setting from which that melody is heard as an emanation. In relation to these opening Gs, however, and to the initially undisclosed meaning to which these Gs allude, the impromptu and the finale soon reveal themselves as opposites. In the second period of the impromptu, each phrase seems to begin in Eb, the relative major, but then falls back into C minor for its cadence (ex. 1.1b, mm. 10–17). The music progresses—in a sense, fails to progress—as if the opening dramatization of G, C minor’s dominant, has revealed that dominant as invested not merely with its normal capacities for tonal hierarchization and resolution but also with a power to hold the music in its thrall.1 To be sure, the music digresses through a kind of echo into a contrasting episode in Ab major (ex. 1.1c, mm. 40¤.)—this is the second, or B, section of its five-part, ABA'B'A" form—but only with such contrasts of rhythm, texture, harmony, and phrase structure as to embody an

25

example 1.1 a. Sonata in Bb Major, D. 960, Allegro ma non troppo, mm. 1–10 Allegro ma non troppo.

6

b. Impromptu in C Minor, op. 90, no. 1, mm. 1–17 Allegro molto moderato.

x

6

9

14

stacc.

example 1.1 (continued) c. Impromptu in C Minor, op. 90, no. 1, mm. 33–46 33

39

(codetta)

B

43

escape into a di¤erent order of experience from the opening theme. This music evokes a dream, or perhaps only the memory of a time when dreaming was still possible, in relation to the opening’s bleak reality. In the return from Ab major to C minor, the G renews its force through agitated repetition (see ex. 5.5a, mm. 87¤.). Not only does G persist as a pedal through much of the second A section; it also then overtakes the music of the B section, which returns in the minor key of the opening G (see ex. 5.5b, mm. 125¤.), the escape once promised now denied. Clear echoes of the opening G still haunt the impromptu’s final phrases (see ex. 5.6, mm. 194¤.). In the finale of the Bb-Major Sonata, on the other hand, G loses its hold almost immediately. After only two dancing measures the bass slips away from this G, down through Gb to F, bringing the harmony from C-minor darkness into Bb-major light. The meaning or setting that the G implies persists only as a fleeting memory, one that the G summons again and again throughout the movement but that never casts more than a momentary shadow over its course. If one accepts the proposed implications of portent in these opening Gs,

r e s o na n t b e g i n n i n g s

27

one then normally draws inferences about these implications from the course of the ensuing music. Beyond that music, however, each of these two beginnings can also claim an intertextual field of reference to other music, mostly Schubert’s own, of about the same period: the opening of the impromptu recalls some of the Winterreise songs; the opening of the finale resonates supposedly with Beethoven’s String Quartet in Bb Major, op. 130, possibly with Schubert’s C-Minor Sonata and, most tellingly, with the first movement of the Bb-Major Sonata to which it belongs.2 These resonances may o¤er additional clues to the interpretation of these two openings as well as of the relationship between them. I shall introduce some exploratory comments on each with a citation from the Schubert literature.

II Is the first impromptu of opus 90 “a kind of keyboard paraphrase of ‘Der Wegweiser,’” as John Reed asserts?3 Reed’s claim would seem to depend on the assumption that Schubert composed the impromptu after part II of Winterreise, in which “Der Wegweiser” occurs. In fact, the exact compositional chronology of the opus 90 impromptus is uncertain. All of the impromptus, however, do come after part I of Winterreise, completed by the spring of 1827, and the first impromptu hearkens back to the opening song, “Gute Nacht,” in several ways: its walking tempo, its constant momentum, its repeated chords and melodic tones, its two dotted figures (one shorter, one longer), and its ambiguous turns to major at the end. Other songs in part I return to the sense of walking motion, the repeated notes, and some of the motives of “Gute Nacht,” but none so fully as “Der Wegweiser” (see ex. 2.3a). Youens, Kramer, and Sto¤els all agree in regarding this song as a station of culminating revelation near the end of part II.4 The central image of “Der Wegweiser,” the signpost pointing to the protagonist’s death, whether actual or psychological, is already foreshadowed in the poems of the first part. It is suggested by the wanderer’s self-description as a “Fremdling,” a stranger; by his compulsion to see himself mirrored in elements of the frozen landscape, first in his moon shadow and footsteps, then in the wind-bu¤eted weathervane, then more pervasively in the barrenness of the ice and snow, and ultimately in a tired cloud; and by his related com-

28


pulsion to attribute to the rest of humanity a collective consciousness so diminished by hostility that it can communicate to him only through the barking of dogs and the shrieking of ravens. Each of these images is a token of his existential state, a foreboding, like the signpost itself, of his psychological annihilation through obsession and inescapable isolation. Because such tokens, such virtual signposts, already pervade the first part of Winterreise, an instrumental piece written in response to these songs might, in the absence of words, come into focus through the musical embodiment of such a signpost. If Reed’s claim is meant to imply that the impromptu paraphrases “Der Wegweiser” by mimicking it or following its formal or developmental course, this claim is almost certainly untenable. In any case, one would have to be sure that Schubert composed the impromptu after the song even to consider it seriously. If Reed means instead that Schubert has created in this piano piece a musical metaphor for motifs pervasive throughout Winterreise, then his claim merits consideration. The G, starkly struck at the beginning and hauntingly reasserting its presence throughout, so overdetermines the dominant that this music seems not merely in C minor, but somehow confined within or consigned to that key. Schubert thus imparts to the dominant the profile of a Wegweiser.

III It has often been pointed out that the main themes of the finales of Schubert’s Sonata in Bb Major and Beethoven’s quartet in the same key, opus 130, have many points in common. These include the dance-like 2/4 meter, the introductory G and its continuation as a pedal, the interpretation of this G as V of II, and the ensuing establishment of the tonic. What is not often observed is that the two movements have certain unusual formal elements in common.5

Alfred Einstein, one of those who preceded Cone (here quoted) in commenting on this relationship between Beethoven’s and Schubert’s finales, characterizes Schubert’s finale as “an echo of Beethoven’s,” even adducing this resemblance as evidence for Schubert’s familiarity with the Beethoven quartet (ex. 1.2).6


29

example 1.2

Beethoven, String Quartet in Bb Major, op. 130, Finale, mm. 1–12

Allegro.

ten.

sempre stacc.

7

How close is the resemblance? Joseph Kerman aptly characterizes Beethoven’s final movement, written to replace the Grosse Fuge originally intended for the quartet, as “a sunny, gay, Haydnesque conclusion.”7 It is idiomatically written for the string ensemble, highly conversational, somewhat angular, full of contrapuntal and motivic play, propelled by almost constant motivically active rhythms at the eighth- and sixteenth-note levels. Schubert’s finale, although also predominantly gay and at least intermittently sunny, imitates Beethoven’s in none of these respects: its textures are pianistically homophonic throughout, except in one short developmental episode; its melodies ring out over their accompaniments, in which eighths and sixteenths are often subordinated as textural elements. One especially Haydnesque feature of Beethoven’s finale is the way it uses its deceptive open-

30


ing material to generate further deceptions: in the course of the movement the opening ostinato often returns on a pitch di¤erent from the initial G, sometimes only to make a willful modulation moments later. Schubert’s use of his opening gesture could not contrast more strongly: it returns always on the same G octave, always prepared (except in the immediate repetitions of the theme) by a quiet modulation back to the C-minor region. It has the persistence of an idée fixe. Schubert’s gesture—the struck, held G—echoes nothing in the Beethoven as strongly as it does the opening of the C-Minor Impromptu. One might argue that in the impromptu the portentous G holds further echoes of the mysterious, slow introductions of such Classical symphonic works as Beethoven’s Fourth and Haydn’s “Drum Roll” Symphony.8 But the finale of the Bb-Major Sonata invokes this serious, commanding gesture only in order to subvert it. The very Schubertian Gb through which the G dissolves into F also has no counterpart in Beethoven. With the finale of Beethoven’s opus 130 as model, one is likely to understand the Gb only as a touch of Romantic color applied to Beethoven’s opening formula, V of ii–ii E–V7–I. But with Schubert’s C-Minor Impromptu as model, or at least as forebear, the Gb takes on a dramatic role, releasing the music from the threat of the obsession that the G invokes. The form of Schubert’s finale does resemble that of Beethoven’s, as Cone observes. It also resembles just as strongly the forms of a number of Schubert’s own finales that were composed before Beethoven’s, as Cone also observes. However similar in form, finally, the two movements di¤er enough in character to render implausible the supposition that Schubert modeled his finale, or even its beginning, directly on Beethoven’s. In particular, Schubert’s long-breathed, flowing second theme (see ex. 9.1b), written entirely in quarter notes over chordal arpeggiations and o¤beat bass pizzicatos that ring on through nearly seventy measures of light and shadow, resembles nothing Beethoven ever wrote. The way this melody quietly breaks o¤, to be succeeded by the abrupt violence of fortissimo chords (m. 156), is also completely at odds with the constantly active conversational play in Beethoven’s finale. Moreover, the links between Schubert’s finale and his own music are rich and complex enough to obscure any role Beethoven’s finale may have had in its genesis.


31

IV I have already mentioned, in my prologue, a substantial and provocative study of Schubert’s piano music, the extended essay “Schubert’s Last Sonatas” by the pianist Alfred Brendel, originally delivered as a lecture in 1989. Hearing the three sonatas in some respects as a single cycle, Brendel remarks that the fortissimo episode in the finale of the Bb-Major Sonata comes in F minor (m. 156), a key that “mediates” between Bb major and the C minor of the first of these sonatas. Moreover, the movement “refers to the C-Minor Sonata in yet another way: it simply insists, as it were, on opening in C minor. It does so, stubbornly, no fewer than nine times: only before the stretta is the C-minor spell finally broken.”9 Here is another possible intertextual source for the C-minor opening of Schubert’s last finale. It is true that no gesture in the C-Minor Sonata resonates so fully with that beginning as does the opening G of the C-Minor Impromptu. But as with the impromptu, certain motives from the Winterreise songs seem to haunt the C-Minor Sonata. Is the obsession that the last finale brushes aside each time it slips from C minor into Bb major still an aftershadow, then, of Winterreise?

V All of these contextualizations of the finale of the Bb-Major Sonata—Cone’s elaboration on the tradition associating it with Beethoven’s finale for opus 130, Brendel’s linking of it with the C-Minor Sonata, my own interpretation of it in relation to the C-Minor Impromptu—bypass the question of its relationship to its immediate context: the other movements of the Bb sonata itself. The tradition linking Schubert’s finale to Beethoven’s, in particular, seems wedded to a commonly held assessment of Schubert’s finales. Godel’s book on the last three sonatas exemplifies this tradition in a summary statement about their concluding movements: “They make their own task di‹cult, in that they do not simply bring to a logical conclusion what has been built up in the earlier movements, but instead virtually abandon their contexts and, entering the scene from outside, hazard a new start.”10 In its abruptness, certainly, the oft-repeated opening gesture of this finale seems uncharacteristic of the sonata to which it belongs. It does not build

32


in any apparent way upon the glowing lyricism and mysterious undercurrents of the first movement, the melancholy serenity of the second, or the ethereal dancing of the third. Brendel makes sense of this contrast in character by interpreting the finale as an overcoming of what he calls the sonata’s “Dolens,” its troubled side, which he associates with the Gb of the mysterious trill at the end of the sonata’s very first phrase.11 Brendel also notes three significant recurrences of material from earlier movements in the sonata: the theme of the first movement appears, transformed, in the middle section of the Andante (see ex. 9.5a) and in the theme of the Scherzo (see ex. 9.6), and a phrase from the last part of the Andante recurs in the second theme of the finale (or so his musical examples imply) (see ex. 9.1a–b).12 Konrad Wol¤ earlier characterized the opening of the Scherzo through the image of playing a recording of the theme of the first movement at double speed.13 Given Brendel’s attention to such cyclic motivic recurrences and his interpretation of the theme of the finale as a response to the first movement’s Gb trill and its implications, it is surprising that he does not acknowledge the source of that theme itself in the first movement’s immediate response to the trill (ex. 1.3). The trill first occurs at the end of the first phrase pianissimo, but so marked rhythmically and registrally as partly to dissociate the Gb, as an intrusive element, from its surroundings. The second phrase, in response, incorporates the Gb into a continuous progression in which the bass descends chromatically (mm. 13–18), passing from the tonic down through Ab to Gn. The G is prolonged for nearly two measures before the bass slips down through Gb to F. The length of this Gb, in proportion to the Gs that precede it, is exactly the same as in the opening bass progression of the finale. Also as in the finale, C minor is tonicized over the G pedal, and the melody adheres closely to this momentary tonic, confining itself to the same four pitches—D, C, B, and Eb—in the same register.14 Again as in the finale, the phrase then moves—or, in this case, returns—to Bb major. The two melodies articulate the same pitches—now C, Bb, A, and D—although in a di¤erent order. Schubert has thus seemingly generated the theme of his finale by lifting not just a motive, a melody, or a progression, but a virtual musical block— a complex of melodic, harmonic, contrapuntal, and textural elements—from the second phrase of his first movement. But he has so transformed this material in tempo and character that even serious students of this music have


33

example 1.3

Sonata in Bb Major, D. 960, Molto moderato, mm. 1–23

Molto moderato.

legato

5

9

13

17

21

not recognized its return. In this finale the sonata seems to venture into new territory, but it makes this venture with its own resources, through a new articulation of its own idiom.

VI If accepted as a source for the theme of the finale of the Bb-Major Sonata, this passage from early in the first movement surely ought to take precedence over material from any other piece, no matter how strong that relation may seem. Presumably Schubert made this derivation deliberately, especially in the light of the thematic linkages of other kinds between the di¤erent movements of this sonata that Brendel and Wol¤ have recognized. In contrast, one can only speculate about the derivation of anything in this sonata from any other piece. Among the other pieces under consideration, the C-Minor Sonata has of course the greatest claim to influence on this one. Schubert worked on both sonatas, as well as the A-Major Sonata, at the same time, designating the one in Bb as the “3rd Sonata” even in his preliminary sketch.15 The C-Minor Impromptu, completed at least several months before Schubert began work on these sonatas, comes into consideration primarily because of the near identity of its opening gesture to that of the Bb-Major Sonata’s finale, and because no other piece by Schubert makes this gesture in just this way. The apparent relationship of both C-minor pieces, the impromptu and the sonata, to Winterreise suggests the possibility, already raised in the prologue, of a gestural or expressive domain common to at least some of the songs and instrumental pieces of Schubert’s last year or year and a half, a domain that the Bb-Major Sonata might still explore. There may thus be an expressive or gestural rationale for thinking through the relationships between the BbMajor Sonata and these two C-minor pieces in more detail, possibly along with some of the other works of this last period. Since we do not in fact know whether Schubert had the C-minor pieces in mind as he composed the Bb-major finale, we can also only speculate, even more tentatively, about how these possible intertextual references interacted with his decision to draw the material for the finale’s theme from the first movement. Might the possibility of a reference to one or both of


35

these pieces have stimulated this decision? Or might that decision, once made, have brought with it a heightening of Schubert’s awareness of a terrain common to all of these pieces and to Winterreise, an awareness that he might then have chosen to signal, if only for himself, through a gesture so reminiscent of the Winterreise-laden impromptu?

VII This preliminary investigation of a network of musical associations to the theme of Schubert’s last finale has led to a discovery that is remarkable because it has never been made, or, at least, made public. This theme not only responds, in both pitch content and gesture, to the first movement’s trill (as Brendel intuited), it also closely paraphrases, although with a marked change of character, the initial response to that trill in the first movement. This circumstance raises the obvious question of the possibility of other such veiled returns of blocks of material from earlier movements, a question that I shall begin to address in the next chapter. It also raises the broader question of the range and extent of cyclic procedures in Schubert’s multimovement compositions, and of how the return of a block of material might reflect or interact with other kinds of motivic linkages between separate movements. Simply combining this discovery about the finale, for example, with Brendel’s already cited observations about other motivic linkages between the movements of the Bb-Major Sonata promotes the conclusion that each of its four movements draws motivically from its opening thematic complex. The first phrase group of the first movement contains the generative material not only for that movement but also for the middle section of the Andante sostenuto and for the opening themes of the Scherzo and the finale. Although Brendel is more alert to motivic resonances among all three of the last sonatas than to a continuous compositional process running through and culminating in any one of them, he cites enough thematic linkages between the movements of each of the sonatas to suggest that each of them, by itself, may also engage in such a process. If this is so, then Schubert may have planned the developmental unfolding of these sonatas more deliberately and all-inclusively than even Brendel, who still calls him a “sleepwalker,” would be ready to maintain.16 Uncov-

36


ering evidence for such planning in these sonatas accomplishes far more than demonstrating their unity or conferring on them the increment of value traditionally associated with the achievement of such unity in nineteenth-century music. To return to the example discussed, the derivation of the theme of the Bb-Major Sonata’s finale from its first movement gives a specific basis for constructing a gestural or dramatic interpretation of that theme as a response to its immediate musical environment, the sonata itself. Rather than originating outside the sonata, as Godel suggests, the theme originates inside it and perhaps ventures outside, as if a C-minor beginning represented either a threatening world or an obsession that the protagonist has learned to keep at bay by gaining control of the Gb. The discovery of this derivation also necessitates a reevaluation of the possible indebtedness of this theme to any earlier music, whether by Beethoven or by Schubert. It seems almost inconceivable, for example, that Schubert had opus 130 in mind when he composed the second phrase of the first movement. That the momentary turn of that phrase to C minor holds memories of the C-Minor Impromptu, or the C-Minor Sonata, or even Winterreise still seems a possibility, one that will require careful and detailed consideration to assess.


37

c hap t e r

2

Fields of Resonance

I Thus the G that opens the finale of the Bb-Major Sonata does not simply mark a new beginning. Its resonance stirs a memory, highly specific even though subliminal, of the first movement’s second phrase, its first response to its own beginning. By the time it returns as the theme of the finale, a rich and elaborate web of associations has been gathered from all the intervening music, as I shall eventually show. When the G recalls that first response, summoning it into self-definition as a theme, it establishes the thematic identity of the finale with roots that run deeply throughout the entire sonata. Equally pervasive roots underlie the much more explicit return of the opening phrase of the A-Major Sonata’s first movement in its finale. Here the original phrase returns, in cancrizans, as the concluding phrase (see ex. 8.2a–b), in what Charles Rosen has called “only a framing device.”1 But as Ivan Waldbauer has shown, the bass of this framing idea is also, fundamentally, the bass of the Rondo theme itself.2 His observation can be richly elaborated. The theme of this Rondo (see ex. 8.1a) marks the culmination of a gradual transformation, extending throughout the four movements of the sonata, of its imposing opening idea into lyrical utterance. In contrast to the Bb-Major Sonata, whose lyrical opening theme, “problematized” by the low Gb trill, is its point of departure, the A-Major Sonata only comes to full lyrical self-expression as its eventual goal. The finale of the C-Minor Sonata also contains a block of musical material that returns, in clearly recognizable form, from an earlier movement. Here

38

the returning material comes not at the beginning, as in the Bb finale, or at the end, as in the A-major one, but in the middle. And this time the material originates not in the first movement, but in the second. During the developmental central episode of the finale, a modulating progression from the Adagio (ex. 2.1a, mm. 11–12) returns twice, its second return (ex. 2.1b, mm. 380–381) almost identical to its last occurrence in the earlier movement (see ex. 2.5b, mm. 104–105). This progression returns without being highlighted either as a theme or as a concluding fanfare, as in the other two finales; here it is only a fleeting, albeit conscious, memory.3 In the Adagio di¤erent variants of this progression arise in each occurrence of the theme. When it returns in the finale, therefore, this progression is already marked, as in the other two last sonatas, by its own history, by the complexity of its own associations. Such obvious quotations from earlier movements do not occur, or at least have never been acknowledged, in any of Schubert’s works before Winterreise. As for veiled self-quotations like the one made by the theme of the Bbmajor finale, one would have to search assiduously to know whether they occur elsewhere in these works. A veiled self-quotation of this kind does occur in another work of this final period, the opus 90 impromptus. Once again it is a returning block, a short passage from the second impromptu that returns in the third. What returns in this case is neither a theme nor a single progression, but instead a segment involving an ending (or phrase articulation) and a subsequent beginning. The segment in question first occurs in measures 37 and 38 of the second impromptu (ex. 2.2a), in which a melodic fall from 4 to 3 in Gb major is supported by the harmonic progression VF–I, while an Ebb appoggiatura in the tenor register strains within the dominant harmony. Essentially the same music reappears in measures 54 and 55 of the third impromptu (ex. 2.2b), to conclude the transition from its B section back to its opening theme. Here the dominant seventh comes in first rather than second inversion, but its bass still leads by step to a Gb-major tonic triad in root position. The melody falls once again from 4 to 3, and the same Ebb wells up within the dominant harmony. Playing these two segments several times, one after the other, makes their similarity both audible and palpable. In both, melody and bass occupy the same registers, both moving fundamentally by step while triplets fill in the octave below the controlling melodic register of the right hand. In both, the Ebb to Db sigh, the most expressively distinctive

f i e l d s o f r e s o na n c e

39

example 2.1 Sonata in C Minor, D. 958 a. Adagio, mm. 1–22 A

7

13

18

B

b. Allegro, mm. 377–383 377

380

cresc.

example 2.2 a. Impromptu in Eb Major, op. 90, no. 2, mm. 36–43 36

40

b. Impromptu in Gb Major, op. 90, no. 3, mm. 53–56 53

55

gesture of the passage, brings the same fingers to the same pitches. Playing the two segments in repeated alternation, one can easily lose a sense of which passage belongs to which impromptu. That such a Schubertian passage occurs in the course of the Gb-Major Impromptu is not surprising; that a variant of it occurs in the same key in the dancelike Eb-Major Impromptu is somewhat more so. Can the anticipation of Gb major in the earlier impromptu function as a sign of other links between the two pieces? Another return of a musical block deepens the association between two


41

of the culminating Winterreise songs, “Der Wegweiser” (no. 20) and “Das Wirtshaus” (no. 21). For the setting of the first two lines of “Das Wirtshaus”— “Auf einem Totenacker / Hat mich mein Weg gebracht” (To a cemetery / my way has brought me)—the music makes a modulation, quite unusual for the opening stanza of a hymnlike song, from the tonic, F major, up to the supertonic, G minor (ex. 2.3b, m. 7). The piano introduction to this song has already touched on G minor, deepening its resonance and its continuity with the G minor of “Der Wegweiser.” In that preceding song, the repeat of the second couplet—“Suche mir versteckte Stege / Durch verschneite Felsenhöhn” (I seek hidden paths / through snow-covered rocky heights)— involves fundamentally the same modulation in the same key, this time from F minor back to G minor, by exactly the same means (ex. 2.3a, mm. 16–18).4 In songs, of course, the words can form a basis for an interpretation of the music even in the most contrasting conceptions of the relationship between a text and its setting. But in untexted music, even a superficial explanation requires more musical contextualization than it does in vocal music. To work toward an understanding of the returns of the three musical blocks I have introduced in this chapter, I shall accordingly begin in the next section with the help of words. In the return of material from “Der Wegweiser” in “Das Wirtshaus,” a cross-referencing in the texts motivates a crossreferencing in their settings. As it happens, the texts of Winterreise can also suggest terms for the interpretation of the returning passages in opus 90 and the C-Minor Sonata. In the tonally extraordinary Eb-Major Impromptu, the major mode is threatened by the minor and finally succumbs to it. In the Winterreise songs, which are predominantly in the minor, the major mode is associated with texts about fading memories, dreams, and illusions.The dramatized subversion of the major in the Eb-Major Impromptu especially invites such associations. The Gb major of the passage under consideration comes in response to the first turn to Eb minor and the subsequent cadence in that key, as if to avert the threat that the minor poses, however gently at first. In the Gb-Major Impromptu, Eb minor persists as a troubling presence, especially in its agitated B section. The return of the passage from the preceding impromptu signals the final quieting of that troubled music, an ultimate overcoming of the Eb-minor threat. In the C-Minor Sonata, both the returning progression from the Adagio and the musical context in which it first occurs carry distinct echoes of various

42


example 2.3 Winterreise a. “Der Wegweiser,” mm. 10–19 10

su che mir ver steck te

Ste

ge durch ver schnei te Fel sen

höhn?

su che

15

mir ver steck te

Ste

ge durch ver schnei te

Fel

sen

höhn, durch Fel

sen höhn?

cresc.

b. “Das Wirtshaus,” mm. 5–9 5

Auf

ei

nen To dten a

cker hat

mich mein Weg ge bracht;

8

hier

will ich

ein

keh

ren, hab’

ich

bei

mir

ge dacht.

all

Winterreise songs, foremost among them the death-obsessed “Wirtshaus.” The progression itself, its modulatory course brought to hesitation over a subdominant made remote by its own minor subdominant, suggests a search for something outside or beyond the theme in which it occurs. The “Wirtshaus”-like atmosphere of the music brings associations of death and transcendence to this “beyond.”

II In “Der Wegweiser” and “Das Wirtshaus,” near the journey’s end, the wanderer comes to the clearest revelation of the nature of his journey and its destination. “Der Wegweiser” begins: Was vermeid’ ich denn die Wege, Wo die andern Wandrer gehn, Suche mir versteckte Stege Durch verschneite Felsenhöhn? (Why do I avoid the highways / that other wanderers travel / and seek out hidden paths / through snowbound rocky heights?)5

In the second stanza, the wanderer recognizes that an irrational longing drives him into the wilderness, and at the end he proclaims: Einen Weiser seh’ ich stehen Unverrückt vor meinem Blick; Eine Strasse muss ich gehen, Die noch keiner ging zurück. (One guidepost I see / ever fixed before my eyes; / I must travel a road / by which no one has ever returned.)6

One might assume the Wegweiser, the signpost, to be an emblem of death, the wanderer’s unavoidable destination. And indeed, his journey brings him to a cemetery at the beginning of the next song, “Das Wirtshaus”:

44


Auf einem Totenacker Hat mich mein Weg gebracht. Allhier will ich einkehren, Hab’ ich bei mir gedacht. (Into a graveyard / my way has led me. / Here will I stop, / I thought to myself.)

But the cemetery—the inn—is full. He cannot rest there, but must wander on: O unbarmherz’ge Schenke Doch weisest du mich ab? Nun weiter denn, nur weiter, Mein treuer Wanderstab! (O pitiless inn, / do you refuse to take me? / Then on, ever on, / my trusty sta¤!)7

In Schubert’s setting of the first lines of “Das Wirtshaus” (ex. 2.3b), the reference to the wanderer’s “Weg,” his way or route, motivates a momentary return to the key of “Der Wegweiser” (ex. 2.3a). By juxtaposing F major and G minor—the former the key of the cemetery where the wanderer seeks final rest, the latter the key of the signpost, which signifies not simply death but the obsession that brings him so close to death without granting it to him—this progression already encapsulates the final message of “Das Wirtshaus”: the turning away of the wanderer, against his will, from the gate of the cemetery and his resulting consignment to his seemingly endless and isolated path. By bringing back a chord progression from “Der Wegweiser” rather than merely referring to its key, Schubert incorporates a resonance, an aftere¤ect, a “feeling memory” of that song into “Das Wirtshaus.” Even though most listeners may remain unconscious of the reference, many must feel its resonance as an a¤ective richness, a layering of impressions, an emotional depth. Through this return, music identified with the protagonist’s personal fate is retained in and juxtaposed with music that, in its hymnlike character, might


45

be identified with our common fate. This juxtaposition brings into the music the dilemma in this protagonist’s relationship to death: not collected within himself, but instead lost in the winter landscape, he is not ready for the death he seeks. The sequence of these two songs, and the occurrence in each of them of a progression that links their respective tonics, underscores the crucial and complementary roles of the central images of each of these poems in finally disclosing to the wanderer the full significance of his journey. The signpost is a final, almost abstract symbol of the obsession that drives him into the winter landscape, a landscape that he anthropomorphizes in order to lose himself in it. The inn is an emblem of the comfort he would find through release from that obsession in death. Schubert may thus have reserved this “blocking technique” for a moment of special, summary significance.

III The minor ending of the Eb-Major Impromptu is extraordinary, perhaps even unique, for the time of its composition. The beginning of this impromptu is also extraordinary. To repeat an opening phrase is common; to repeat it twice is not. The music begins to take on the character of a perpetuum mobile, suggesting a motion that forever returns to its own center rather than generating any further progression. And indeed, instead of advancing to some new goal after its third phrase, this music continues at first to adhere to its own center, withdrawing quietly into its parallel minor in a first premonition, however ingratiating, of the music’s calamitous outcome (see ex. 5.4, mm. 25¤.). The Gb-major passage that this impromptu shares with the following piece comes just after its first Eb-minor cadence (mm. 33–35). In this tonal context, the Ebb appoggiatura in the left hand of this passage becomes more than a coloristic detail. In transforming Dn into Ebb, it neutralizes the leading tone of Eb minor, drawing it as a vestigial shadow into the aura of Gb major. By incorporating but transforming this leading tone, the progression sets these two keys in dramatic opposition to each other. The turn to Gb major balances the turn of the preceding phrase from Eb major to Eb minor. This subsequent move to Gb major may initially seem to be only an ingratiating exploratory digression, but it is also potentially a dramatic response: an attempt

46


to escape from the minor, to avert the threat posed by Eb minor to the impromptu’s opening Eb major.The threat—not averted, in the end—can plausibly be regarded as the central compositional issue of this piece. That Eb minor in the third impromptu is not merely a readily available harmonic station, but still a site of dramatic conflict, is strongly suggested by the harmonic move at its very beginning, from a Gb-major chord to an Eb-minor one (see ex. 5.1). It is at the very end of the extended and turbulent middle section in Eb minor, as already indicated, that Schubert recalls the progression from the second impromptu (see ex. 2.2b). This progression, once again transforming Eb minor’s D into the Ebb of a sheltering Gb major tinged with the minor’s dark memory, emblematizes in sound the persistence of Eb minor as a troubling presence, a tonal threat, in the third impromptu. Gb major represents a station of recovery from that threat.

IV In the C-Minor Sonata, as already indicated, the progression that returns in the finale already has a complicated history in the Adagio, its movement of origin. This progression, which Godel characterizes as the Adagio’s “Schlüsselstelle”—its key moment—occurs there six times, twice within each statement of the theme.8 In the second and third of these statements it undergoes significant changes, giving rise to new tonal explorations (see ex. 2.5a–b). Understanding how this progression motivates these explorations requires attention to its specific character and placement in relation to the thematic complex within which it is embedded. Only after considering its evolving role in the Adagio, moreover, can one assess its role in the finale, for it returns there in the last form it has reached in the Adagio. The foregoing discussions of the two Winterreise songs and the two impromptus move directly from descriptions of the progressions that return to interpretive summaries of the relationships, encapsulated in these returns, between the two songs or pieces. In the two songs, the interrelatedness of the texts illuminates the interrelatedness of their settings. In the two impromptus, the emergence in each case of the progression within a move away from Eb minor to Gb major, along with the strength and persistence of Eb minor in both pieces, makes it easy to identify a role for these progressions


47

in response to a recurring Eb-minor “threat.” In the C-Minor Sonata, on the other hand, the context within which the progression under consideration returns to the finale shares no easily recognizable features with the Adagio. And in the Adagio itself, the e¤ect of this progression on the form and resolution of the thematic complex in which it occurs is subtle enough to require careful assessment. The progression first occurs as the cadential part of the theme’s third four-measure subphrase (I shall henceforth call it the “focal progression”) (see ex. 2.1a, mm. 11–12). One can clearly divide this subphrase into two principal gestures (mm. 9–10, 11–12), the first of them a pianissimo return to the opening of the theme. While harmonically much richer than the first gesture, the second one, the focal progression, is much simpler rhythmically. Its even eighth-note chords contrast with the varied and contrapuntally di¤erentiated rhythms of the first gesture. Venturing here into new harmonic territory, the theme grows rhythmically quiet, or “pure,” as if in heightened attentiveness. At this focal moment, both melody and bass arrive on Db (m. 12), and a plagal extension with a fermata confirms this chord as the goal of harmonic as well as melodic motion. The fermata does not restrain a motion that would otherwise continue on to a strongly implied further goal; it marks instead a temporary suspension of motion. This hesitation in Db major-minor momentarily neutralizes further tonal implications, whether of returning to Ab or of moving on to other keys. What causes the music to stop? The two cadential measures that follow (see ex. 2.1a, mm. 13–14) depart for the first time from a regular articulation of motion into four-bar subphrases and thus disrupt the conclusion of a regular phrase group.9 The third subphrase, the one containing the focal progression, begins by repeating the first but then ends by expanding the Db—which originally was merely a neighboring eighth note—through a cadential extension of its own.The Gbminor chord in this extension, bringing in Bbb, the most foreign tonal element so far, coincides with the extension of the eighth-note rhythm beyond its former span at the end of the first subphrase.The rhythmic extension marks the introduction of the Bbb, and the ensuing fermata has the e¤ect of turning the focal progression into a question: what will become of the Db harmony or the Bbb? Do these elements register the presence, in the background of awareness, of something outside, something missing from the theme?

48


Thus the cadential idea in measures 13 and 14, while in some ways a satisfactory conclusion for measures 9 through 14 taken as a single six-measure phrase, works less well as a conclusion for the periodic design of the theme. This six-bar consequent does not balance the weight of its eight-bar antecedent. Instead of building, as one might expect, from the material of the second subphrase of the antecedent (see ex. 2.1a, mm. 5–8), its cadential idea merely concludes an expanded paraphrase of the first subphrase, elaborating on the C and Bb of measure 4. One might therefore expect the following four measures (mm. 15–18), in extending this group, to achieve fuller closure for the theme. In that they compensate for the brevity of the cadential idea and also repeat it in a codetta-like fashion, they do so. But by merely repeating the two gestures last heard, and by registrally displacing the focal progression, these measures in another sense underscore the inconclusiveness of the cadence, leaving the end of the theme hesitant and unsure of itself in the aftermath of the question. The diversion of harmonic movement into the subdominant, the distancing of this subdominant through its own minor plagal extension, the stalling of movement on the thus enshadowed subdominant through the fermata; the somewhat abrupt return to Ab major for the shortened cadence, and the abdication by that cadence from the function of rhyming, consequent resolution prepared for it by the antecedent—all these characteristics of the focal progression and of the music’s immediate response to it point to a disquieting intrusion upon the theme. When the new theme of the B section emerges in Db minor (see ex. 2.1a, m. 19), the focal progression immediately acquires new associative resonance: it has not only anticipated the arrival of Db as a tonal center but also foreshadowed its minor mode. This progression has, as it were, thought of the Db region—possibly major, possibly minor—without really going there.The thought trails o¤, like an unanswered question, into the fermata. Ab major, the home key, returns somewhat abruptly and very briefly, as if stunned after a disturbing or disorienting thought. These metaphors suggest that the fermata is not simply a halting or hesitation in the music, but a rift or break in its surface. Through the focal progression, Db, whether major or minor, intrudes into the music and makes it lose its way for a moment; it can continue only in an uncertain fashion. The focal phrase, in asking its question, either searches


49

for something or begins to remember something—or even both—without yet knowing just what it seeks. The theme needs to incorporate something that remains outside it in order to reach resolution. Instead of reaching a fully convincing cadence, the music of the A section recedes behind the ensuing revelations about what motivates the search or what needs to be recovered: the music of the B section.

V The focal progression of the Adagio of the C-Minor Sonata holds a distinct echo of Winterreise. In “Gefror’ne Tränen,” the third song, the music that introduces the question—“Ob es mir entgangen, dass ich geweinet hab?” (Has it happened to me, that I have cried?)10—shares with the focal progression its repeated notes, its stepwise descent in the bass, and its chromatic motion in the inner voices (ex. 2.4a). But the progression in the song might be said to take an opposite direction from the progression in the sonata. Instead of culminating in a Db-major triad, it takes this triad as its point of departure for a modulation from an F-minor opening to Ab major, and instead of rising from a repeated C to Db, the melody falls from a repeated Db to C.11 One could, in fact, incorporate the progression from the song (as in ex. 2.4b), played at an appropriate tempo, into the Adagio of the sonata as a response to the focal progression. In “Gefror’ne Tränen” the wanderer’s way of posing his question already incorporates its probable answer: he has indeed wept; he still has feelings. Even though the first stanza’s question answers itself, the second is still a question. Only the third stanza reveals the intensity of the wanderer’s feelings: Gefror’ne Tropfen fallen Von meinen Wangen ab: Ob es mir denn entgangen Dass ich geweinet hab’? Ei Tränen, meine Tränen Und seid ihr gar so lau,

50


example 2.4 a. Winterreise, “Gefror’ne Tränen,” mm. 7–17 7

Ge

fror’ ne

Trop fen

fal

len

von

ich ge

wein et

mei

nen Wan gen

ab:

dass

ge

12

ob es mir denn ent

gan

gen, dass

hab’?

ich

wein et

decresc.

b. Hypothetical continuation from mm. 9–12 of the Adagio of the Sonata in C Minor with mm. 12¤. of Winterreise, “Gefror’ne Tränen.” The latter has been renotated in B.

hab’?

Dass ihr erstarrt zu Eise Wie kühler Morgentau? Und dringt doch aus der Quelle Der Brust so glühend heiss, Als wolltet ihr zerschmelzen Des ganzen Winters Eis. (Frozen tears fall / from my cheeks: / and does it only now come to me / that I have been weeping? / Ah tears, my tears / are you then so lukewarm / that you turn to ice, / like cool morning dew? / And yet you gush from the well / of my glowing hot breast / as though you would melt / all the ice of winter.)

The wanderer’s feelings are so painful that he is compelled to numb them, to turn them out into the winter cold. He recovers their full bitterness, the full answer to his questions, only in the final stanza. In contrast, the focal progression, the fermata, and its too slight cadential sequel in the sonata imply a question that can have no readily identifiable answer. The two progressions can thus be heard as complementary opposites: both as questions, one carrying its own answer, the other open and enigmatic, suggesting a realm of experience still unknown or unacknowledged.The progression in the Adagio foreshadows the tonality of the movement’s B section, disrupting the closing of the theme in ways that allow the emergence of the B section to seem at first like a quiet intrusion from the realm of thought or memory. The music of the B section must hold part of the answer, then, or at least o¤er some clues to the conditions giving rise to the question. This new music also holds echoes of Winterreise, especially of the opening song, “Gute Nacht.” One echo is the upper neighbor figure in dotted rhythm, especially when it occurs on the second scale degree of E minor within a half-diminished supertonic harmony (cf. m. 29 with mm. 24 and 26 of the song). It leads immediately to a stepwise ascent reminiscent of the opening melody of “Auf dem Flusse” and some of the cadences of “Der Wegweiser” (see ex. 2.3a, mm. 16¤.). In the first three stanzas of “Gute Nacht” the dotted motive marks a retreat in the text from description or

52


narration into lonely reflection.12 This episode in the Adagio could thus suggest a return to winter desolation, an attempt to reflect on it again without becoming as lost in it as before. From the thematic complex that contains these echoes emerges an agitated episode (mm. 32¤.) built on an ostinato of triplet chords that are reminiscent of the accompanimental buildup of “Auf dem Flusse” and, even more, of the chordal crescendo dramatizing the words “Als noch die Stürme tobten” (When the storms were still raging) in “Einsamkeit,” the final song of part I. The dotted rhythms of this episode (mm. 32¤.), arising from violently struck long notes evocative of dark shapes looming up in a winter storm, also echo the opening gesture of this sonata’s first movement (see ex. 7.1a). The long notes themselves, in their dynamic and registral separation from the dotted figure that follows, further belong to the same gestural domain as the stark opening G of the C-Minor Impromptu. The context for all of these echoes of Winterreise is, of course, the opening theme of the Adagio, the theme from which the disturbing focal progression originates. As I have suggested, this theme also holds such echoes, perhaps the most recognizable of them all. In its very slow tempo, its conjunct melodic movement, its hymnlike chordal texture, and its occasional but not all-pervasive chromaticism, this theme occupies the same topical territory as “Das Wirtshaus” (see ex. 2.3b). We may accordingly imagine in the Adagio a protagonist again at the entrance of such an inn, reopening his contemplation of what he must reckon with in order to gain admission there and find rest. The plagal close that extends the final Db-major chord of the focal progression is, of course, a variant—albeit a troubled, questioning variant—of a final “Amen.” These musical allusions to Winterreise allow and even encourage us, in interpreting this Adagio movement, to draw on the imagery of death and the symbolic death of winter, on the search for final rest or transcendence, and the possibility of their denial. By producing a rift in the music, the focal progression opens not only dark memories but also the possibility of overcoming them and no longer having to live in their shadow. At the same time, a reawakening of these memories recalls the possibility that a way to such transcendence may never be found: the wanderer may become lost again in eternal, restless wandering and di¤usion of self, as in the death-in-life of Winterreise.


53

example 2.5 a. Mm. 51–64

Sonata in C Minor, D. 958, Adagio

from A' 51

56

60

B'

63

VI In the second A section (mm. 43–61; ex. 2.5a begins with m. 51), the entire subphrase containing the focal progression comes back etherealized, an octave higher than before, and much more di¤erentiated texturally from the two opening subphrases (cf. ex. 2.5a, mm. 51–54 with ex. 2.1a, mm. 9–12). In a new turn of events, its last four notes are echoed two octaves lower but a half step higher, as if in intimation of a distant, oracular voice. The short cadential idea also comes a half step higher, in A major (the enharmonic reinterpretation of Bbb), transforming the Db—now a C#—from a neighbor tone into a primary tone in the new tonality.

54


example 2.5 (continued) b. Mm. 94–115 94

A'' a tempo

98

101

3

3

105

un poco cresc.

110

3

3

This upward shift of a semitone has an enigmatic e¤ect. The inclusion of the low echo in measure 55 as its “cause” makes it seem the work of a mysterious, vaguely apprehended being, one that is possibly comforting, possibly threatening.13 Measures 58–61 (ex. 2.5a) parallel measures 15–18 (see ex. 2.1a), but they remain a half step high, holding the end of the theme


55

under the spell of Db/C#, as if wishing to prolong indefinitely the memories first recovered through the Db. This leads to a second, more agitated B section that begins in D minor instead of Db minor (ex. 2.5a, mm. 62¤.). The upward shift conveys a sense of potentially limitless openness, of realms of the imagination opening into further realms with no assurance of their containment or of the absorption of these realms into the real. The volatility of these events reflects back on the ending of the first A section, only reconfirming, in retrospect, its inconclusiveness. In the second B episode, the music immediately begins an exploratory sequence, filling in the ascent from minor to relative major (D minor–Eb minor–F minor–F major), dramatizing this ascent rather than simply allowing it to happen, as in the first B section. Especially a¤ecting is the emergence of F major in measure 73, its quiet subdominant chord taking the place of the powerful F-minor triad that is expected from the preceding progression. This subdominant—another plagal, hymnic allusion—comes like a moment of grace in an awe-inspiring setting as if in a return to the terrain of Winterreise.14 The rest of this B' section remains a half step higher than it was before, bringing back the wintry, stormlike music at this level, and only at its very end sliding back into Ab major (m. 93). Whereas the first B section leads seamlessly into the first return of the theme in measure 43, this return unobtrusively but unmistakably highlights the descent from A minor to Ab major as a disjunctive one. It thus signals again that the music of the B sections inhabits an extraordinary realm, a realm of thought or imagination encompassing dark memories at one extreme and dreams of release from them at the other. In the third and last occurrences of the focal progression (A", ex. 2.5b), the entire subphrase that contains it (mm. 102–105) appears first in its original registral disposition, but in shadowy pianissimo and increasingly minor coloration. The focal progression itself begins, this last time, with an Ab-minor harmony, from which the bass descends entirely, and somewhat uncannily, by whole step, taking it through Fb major to Dbb/C major. The entire phrase seems drawn in this way into the shadowy play of the two “echoes” that follow: a high one and a low one, each rising by half step. In this, its last occurrence, the opening gesture of the theme almost dissipates in a kind of ghostly fading. The sadness of the theme weakens, and the memories it awakens recede. Perhaps the protagonist imagines his own

56


death. A major, a realm of imagination in this movement, emerges from this shadow one last time, although the short cadential gesture is not allowed to resolve this time in this key. Instead, A major dissipates into silence, and Ab major replaces it in full voice, extending the short cadential progression into a fully major plagal close, followed by another authentic one over a tonic pedal. In this last progression, Db and its triad no longer lead away from Ab major but are instead fully incorporated into it. But in the immediate aftermath of so much discontinuity, this incorporation seems to embody not so much an achievement of integration or transcendence as an acceptance, tinged with melancholy, of the impossibility that memories can ever be completely remade.

VII The focal progression conveys a floating, even disembodied feeling in its pianissimo dynamic, its even, legato character, and its entirely stepwise, largely chromatic motion. Later I shall discuss a theme in the development of the first movement (see ex. 7.3, mm. 119¤.) that, without anticipating it motivically, mysteriously anticipates its character. In the finale, as already mentioned, the focal progression returns in its last, shadowy form, the form most suggestive of disembodiment or even death. Not quite all of the progression appears, but there is enough for clear recognition (mm. 365–367; mm. 380–382, see ex. 2.1b). Here it neither culminates in a plagal close nor brings the music to a point of hesitation; instead it is twice swept up into the enormous sequential climax of an obsessive tarantella (mm. 359–395), possibly a dance of death, bringing the music from Db major back through Ab major to Eb major, each region closer to the C-minor tonic. C minor’s dominant crashes against Eb major (m. 395), surging up in three great waves to bring the developmental journey to a grim conclusion. This dark, driven, cumulative music, by fleetingly recalling the Adagio’s focal progression, may seem to recollect its hope of release or transcendence only as a distant memory. But as I shall later argue, as a dance of death this finale is not consigned to signifying only a meek surrender to death. It may also embody a confrontation with death, an assertion of self in the face of death that the lonely wanderer of Winterreise has never attained. The sepa-


57

rate return of the goal of the focal progression, the plagal gesture in Db with its minor subdominant chord (see ex. 7.6, mm. 97–100) suggests such selfa‹rmation especially. In the finale it comes as a herald for the second theme (ex. 7.6, mm. 113¤.), whose opening i–iv–i progression it anticipates. It, too, brings the music not to questioning hesitation but to energetic assertion of a theme that takes hold, with fatalistic stoicism, of the Db-minor region (notated as C# minor). In the absence of an answer, the question itself becomes hypostatized as a theme. I shall argue (in chapter 7, section VII) that this theme at last brings clear self-definition to the protagonist who has sought that answer.

VIII As in the A-Major and Bb-Major Sonatas, the recurrences of components of the focal progression of the Adagio in the finale of the C-Minor Sonata belong to a much wider network of motivic, gestural, and tonal linkages that covers its four movements. Although these three sonatas do not manipulate formal conventions in ways that invite hearing them as full-fledged cyclic works, the cyclic relations between their movements are rich and complex, involving not only themes but also harmonic-contrapuntal complexes and recurring key areas. Brendel’s discussion reveals many of these relationships; and there are many more. As the above analyses of cyclically recurring progressions have begun to show, these relationships o¤er interpretive clues about how one movement or piece in a Schubert sonata or cycle responds to another.The Scherzo of the A-Major Sonata, for example, gathers together the most disparate memories from the preceding two movements, as if in a first attempt to reconcile them, to bring continuity to the self that has experienced them. It prepares for a finale in which these memories are more fully integrated. The last movement of the Bb-Major Sonata transforms a phrase that originates as a gentle, searching response into an assertive, self-su‹cient theme. In the C-minor finale, two components of a hesitant, questioning progression return in two di¤erent places, one driven and fleeting, the other imposing, as if finally to proclaim an answer to the progression’s original question. In each sonata the finale thus acquires resonance, depth, and even dramatic motivation from the background of the earlier movements.

58


Where do such cyclic features originate in Schubert’s music? I have already proposed that some of them grow from, or are at least intensified through, his preoccupation with Winterreise throughout most of 1827, probably more for poetic or psychological reasons than for musical ones. The particular cyclic technique on which this chapter has focused, the returning block, may have originated in the song cycle, specifically in “Der Wegweiser” and “Das Wirtshaus.” It may just as well have originated in the EbMajor and Gb-Major Impromptus of opus 90; the compositional chronology of these works is uncertain. But this procedure arises in the company of others that have their origins, for Schubert, well before Winterreise.The next two chapters will explore some of those origins in the works of his early maturity.


59

c hap t e r

3

The Wanderer’s Tracks

I The “Wanderer” Fantasy sets itself apart from most of Schubert’s instrumental music not only because of its unusual form and virtuosic character but also because of the place it occupies in his compositional career. At the time of its composition, late in 1822, he had not completed a large-scale instrumental piece in three years. He turned to it, as already mentioned, from his work on the “Unfinished” Symphony, which he had brought closer to completion than any other instrumental work in several movements since the “Trout” Quintet and the Piano Sonata in A Major, D. 664, of 1819.1 In the intervening three years he had occupied himself primarily with dramatic music, but without much public success. We shall probably never know why Schubert began to return his primary focus to instrumental music at the end of 1822. This return coincides, at least approximately, with the onset of his syphilitic infection. It also comes only a few months after the writing of “Mein Traum.” In the prologue I have discussed the story’s themes of alienation and banishment, reconciliation and salvation. These themes correspond aptly with the expressive range of both the symphony and the fantasy. We shall probably never know if Schubert had recognized the signs of his illness by October or November of 1822. If he had, the expressive range of these two pieces might reflect his need to return from texts by others to the text of himself, to collect and strengthen himself in the face of mortal danger. Such speculation aside, we can fairly regard the fantasy as the first completed large-scale instrumental work of Schubert’s ma-

60

turity; it is also the first such work that he succeeded in publishing. It was issued early in 1823, very soon after he completed it, as opus 15. Like the “Trout” Quintet, the fantasy includes a set of variations on one of the best known of his songs in his own time. But unlike the quintet, the fantasy makes easily recognizable references to its song throughout: the opening motives of each movement are clearly derived from the repeated notes, the ascending stepwise melodic figures (both diatonic and chromatic), and the long–short–short rhythm of the song. Although one can sometimes trace motivic relationships between the movements of Schubert’s earlier pieces, including the “Trout” Quintet, the fantasy is the first piece in which he makes such relationships so explicit. More surprisingly, however, it also seems to be the last in which he does so in such a consistent and thoroughgoing way. Although the “Wanderer” Fantasy is clearly Schubert’s prototype for his return to the fantasy genre after Winterreise, neither of the two later fantasies presents a network of such obviously interrelated motives. Nor do any of the works in sonata form evince this kind of patently cyclic motivic organization. In the Eb-Major Trio, as already noted, the return of the slow movement’s theme haunts and finally transfigures the finale, and I have also noted the various kinds of cyclic elements in the A-Major Piano Sonata. But none of Schubert’s other instrumental music after the “Wanderer” Fantasy comes any closer than do these two pieces to an unmistakable cyclic motivic organization. He simply did not make its explicit motivic cyclicism into a paradigm for any of his later music.The subtler motivic procedures linking separate movements observed in the preceding chapters do not seem traceable to the “Wanderer” Fantasy; as I have suggested and shall show in the next chapter, they do have another antecedent in the fantasy’s companion work, the “Unfinished” Symphony. Each of the two later fantasies, to be sure, does owe more than its way of forging a single movement from four separate ones to the “Wanderer.” The Fantasy in C Major, D. 934, of 1827 for violin and piano, like the “Wanderer,” once again has at its center a set of variations based on one of his better known songs, “Sei mir gegrüsst.” Although the song functions as a source of motivic material for this fantasy, it does so only in subtler ways than in the “Wanderer.” But the song does make its influence felt throughout in another way: by playing a decisive role, through its own refrainlike focal progression, in the fantasy’s overall tonal organization.2 The Fantasy in

t h e wa n d e r e r ’s t rac k s

61

F-Minor, D. 940, for piano, four hands, composed in 1828, has no song at its center, but like the “Wanderer” Fantasy it strongly emphasizes the enharmonic equivalent of its minor Neapolitan key. The wrenching turn from F minor to F# minor for its inner movements has no clearer antecedent in Schubert’s instrumental music than the equally wrenching intrusion in the “Wanderer” Fantasy of the C#-minor stanza of the song into its C-major surroundings. The earlier fantasy also provides an antecedent for the fugal finale of the F-Minor Fantasy.3 Do any of the other later instrumental works build on antecedents from the “Wanderer” Fantasy? The String Quartet in D Minor, D. 810 (“Death and the Maiden”), of course, has as its center once again variations on one of Schubert’s best-known songs. Christoph Wol¤ has convincingly identified a complex of mutually opposed motivic elements (initially associated with the fearful maiden on one hand and the figure of death on the other) that are carried over from the song into the other movements.4 The song thus casts its spell over the entire quartet, just as in the “Wanderer” Fantasy and the C-Major Fantasy for violin. Unlike any of the fantasies, however, the quartet owes its cyclic feeling partly to the almost monolithic unity of its tonal plan, with three movements in D minor (the original key of the song) surrounding the G-minor variations. So much for the “motivic” and formal influence of the “Wanderer” Fantasy. Do any of the other later instrumental works resemble the “Wanderer” Fantasy in their tonal plans? Do any of them, for example, have inner movements in keys so distant from their tonics? Schubert’s preoccupation with distant keys and unusual tonal relationships is one of his distinguishing characteristics: the first subordinate themes of his three-key expositions are only the best known and most easily identifiable of such explorations. But he does not normally extend such explorations into key relationships between separate movements. Only three of his completed mature instrumental works in sonata forms, the Grand Duo of 1824 for piano, four hands, the String Quintet in C Major, D. 956, and the Bb-Major Sonata, have movements— in all three cases, slow movements—in keys not closely related to their tonics. The most tonally remote of these three is the C#-minor Andante sostenuto of the Bb-Major Sonata. Even when enharmonically rewritten as Db minor, this key is six flats away from the Bb major of the surrounding movements; its tonic triad shares no tones with the Bb-major scale. Remote

62


as it may be, the choice of C# minor for this slow movement emerges, as Brendel and others have noted, from the tonal events of the first movement, where the development section begins in this same C# minor (see ex. 9.3b, mm. 118¤.). This C# minor is closely associated with the F#-minor second (or transitional) theme of the exposition (see ex. 9.2, mm. 48¤.), and that area is in turn associated with the low Gb trill at the end of the opening phrase (see ex. 1.3). As Brendel has also noted, the Scherzo (see ex. 9.6b) returns to these same areas, and the opening G of the finale still embodies a response to the Gb that has in a sense given rise to them. In these ways this last sonata gives evidence, along with the subtly cyclic motivic features already brought into consideration in chapter 1, of cyclic tonal organization. It shows a pattern of preoccupation with a particular group of remote pitches and keys, with Gb (associated with Gb major and F# minor), and with its dominant, Db (associated, in turn, with Db major and C# minor). The “Wanderer” Fantasy, in the way it dramatizes the emergence of its C#-minor song yet also integrates it into its C-major surroundings (in a process spanning its four movements), provides a model for this kind of tonal organization. It also o¤ers, through the song, a key to its interpretation.

II The choice of C# minor, the key of “Der Wanderer,” for the slow movement of a piece in C major is, of course, extraordinary. The way Schubert introduces the song into the fantasy makes this choice a source of dramatic conflict. Toward the end of the opening C-major Allegro, from measure 143 to measure 166, a grand prolongation of dominant harmony heralds the return of C major and perhaps even promises a recapitulation of the opening material. The suddenness of the E# diminished seventh chord in measure 167, linked to a C# dominant seventh two measures later, annihilates these expectations. A new scene abruptly opens here, built of the same rhythmic and melodic materials as the earlier scenes of the Allegro but so contrasting in tonality and soon afterwards in texture and tempo that it seems even to contradict those earlier scenes, to make them seem less real in retrospect.5 Thus the song that now begins (ex. 3.1) does not so much follow the


63

example 3.1 189

Fantasy in C Major, “Wanderer,” D. 760, mm. 189–200

Adagio. 5

193

5

197

199

dim.

Allegro as displace it, or at least displace the confirming conclusion for which it has prepared. In this way the C# minor of the Adagio, the wanderer’s song, forcefully intrudes upon the C major of the Allegro. The transition to the Adagio denies the Allegro its gesturally and tonally prepared ending, and thus presents the experience embodied in the Adagio as not only di¤erent from but also in conflict with the experience embodied in the Allegro. The conflict is dramatically, even violently presented; but it is not unprepared. E major and Db major, both keys closely related to the song’s C# minor, make striking appearances in the course of an opening movement as remarkable for its instability as for its vigor. One can interpret even the first cadence in the Allegro (ex. 3.2, mm. 16–17)—a fortissimo A-minor

64


example 3.2


11

15

17

semicadence followed abruptly by silence and a pianississimo return of the originally fortissimo C-major opening—as either a source or a sign of this instability. A “second theme” soon arrives, not in the G major prepared for it, but through an appropriation into E major of G major’s lingering third degree (mm. 45¤.). The E-major harmony of this theme does not lead to a further goal, but instead simply recedes quietly back into C major (mm. 66¤.). Like a distant rumbling, a tremolo marks the return of C major, calling the music back home from an E major only imagined rather than fully possessed. Dynamic or textural discontinuities thus articulate both the A-minor semicadence and the E-major lyrical theme, marking them as disturbances, one forceful, one quiet, within the C-major music of the opening pages. These two disturbances share an emphasis on the E-major triad—in the first as dominant, in the second as tonic—but in both cases they are directly followed, without functional harmonic mediation, by returns to C major. In that E major links itself much more closely, in traditional harmonic discourse, with C# minor than with C major, its presence in these opening pages might be


65

taken as a foretoken of the eventual emergence of the song’s C# minor. At the same time, the connection of E major to C major through the common tone, E, helps the emergence of the E-major sonorities to seem part of the same stream of consciousness as their C-major surroundings. Arising from the initially quiet but then surging C-major tremolo (mm. 67¤.), the opening music of the fantasy returns, this time leading directly into a stormy A-minor episode. At a climactic moment (m. 108), the A-minor frenzy is suddenly dissipated through a dominant seventh of Eb.The new music beginning in Eb major, both songlike and dancing in its evasion of the storm’s threat, culminates in a flamboyant fanfare in Db, and from there it moves majestically back to the dominant of C. It thus arrives at a key much more closely related, by traditional criteria, to the song’s C# minor than to the composition’s opening C major. In one way, the theatrical arrival of Db major and its subsequent reinterpretation as a Neapolitan in C prepare for the later arrival of the song’s C# minor. But in another, the final subsiding of the hammering alternation of Abs and Gs into an already much-prolonged, in this way already established G (m. 165) seems like a long-anticipated resolution: a resolution contradicted by the disorienting, fortissimo resurgence of the Ab as a G# only two measures later. In the subsequent progression the recent memory of the seemingly festive Db-major music, which was somewhat given to bravado, has surrendered its place to melancholically brooding music that moves into C# minor, as if reflecting a protagonist who generates great energy and charisma, but who also feels a consuming inner despair. Although foreshadowed by the E-major sonorities in the Allegro’s first pages and by the Db-major fanfare later on, this C# minor still seems lonely and foreign: in part because of the contradiction-of-resolution that introduces it, in part because of the extreme contrast of the Adagio with all the preceding music in both tempo and texture.

III The variations that follow, alternating between minor and major and incorporating two torrential interludes, find within this initially C#-minor territory the most extreme possible contrasts of gesture and mood. They suggest

66


example 3.3


586

591

an exploration in imagination of the relationship between terror in a lonely confrontation with nature and the possibility of revelatory consolation in its midst. Unlike the stormy interlude in the opening Allegro, these storms actually subside like storms lived through; the second one makes a transition, through a kind of shadow variation of the song, into the Ab-major Scherzo. Thematically this Scherzo recapitulates the opening phrases of the fantasy, but tonally it remains closer to the C#/Db region than to C. When the Scherzo returns after the trio, the stormy interlude that it, too, has incorporated takes a new direction, becoming a transition to the finale. Harmonically this transition links Ab major to C major by transforming the Ab major triad, through the addition of F#, into a German sixth chord (ex. 3.3, mm. 586–594). It thus also reinterprets, in relation to C, the same harmony that has earlier served as the dominant seventh of C#/Db. This harmony functions, finally, as a link between C major and C# minor, the two principal but mutually distant tonal regions of the fantasy. Augmented sixth chords—German sixths like this climactic one, and also French sixths like the one leading to the fantasy’s very first cadence (see ex. 3.2, mm. 16–17)—figure prominently in the shared thematic material of all four movements and in all the transitions between these movements (for thematic occurrences of these chords, see mm. 200–201, 271–273, 399–401, 656–658; for transitional ones, see mm. 176–181, 244 (when D# changes to Dn), mm. 549¤., and the already noted ex. 3.3, mm. 586–594).6 Along with


67

the repeated melodic tones in dactylic rhythm, the augmented sixth chord (originally a French sixth) is one of the motivic elements that the fantasy takes from the song. It plays an essential role not only in presenting and then resolving the fantasy’s central tonal conflict but also in imparting a common harmonic color to each of the four movements.

IV One can thus understand many, indeed most, of the tonal events in the “Wanderer” Fantasy either as preparing for its central tonal conflict between the C major of the fantasy’s virtuosic opening and the C# minor of the somber song at its heart, or as resolving that conflict once the song’s variations have ended. Before the song, especially, the emergence of such diverse tonal centers as E major and Eb, Ab, and Db major may seem improvisationally wayward, yet all of these keys come into association with the C#/Db minor region at the fantasy’s center. Moreover, when the Ab major of the Scherzo generates an augmented sixth chord, it becomes an agent of mediation between C#/Db and C major, integrating the fantasy’s divided tonal cosmos. One might finally characterize this cosmos as C major under the spell of C#/Db minor. The fantasy is an exuberant, virtuosic instrumental work under the spell of a melancholy song, whose melancholy it ultimately overcomes.7 The song’s text and its musical responses to that text o¤er unambiguous clues for interpreting these tonal and dramatic conflicts in the fantasy. The Adagio melody at the heart of the fantasy (see ex. 3.1) is fundamentally the same C#-minor melody that lies at the heart of the song (ex. 3.4a, mm. 23¤.), and that melody reaches its melodic high point, C#, on its key word, “Fremdling” (m. 29). The F#-minor subdominant harmony that supports it becomes immediately “entfremdt” (estranged) from itself as a pivot chord to the E-major cadence of “überall” (everywhere). Although most of the rest of the song remains in E major—it even ends there—the opening three stanzas have given their weight to C# minor, and this key never quite relinquishes its tonal hold over the song.8 Perhaps the cadence of the second stanza (ex. 3.4a, mm. 20–22), a repeated semicadence in C# minor buttressed by its augmented sixth, is what establishes this hold so strongly. I have already

68


commented on the importance of the same progression in the fantasy, beginning with its very first cadence (see ex. 3.2, mm. 16–17)9 and culminating in the return to C major for the finale and in the finale’s climaxes. In the song, this second stanza (ex. 3.4a, mm. 16–22), from which the second phrase group of the fantasy’s Adagio derives (see ex. 3.1, mm. 197¤.), begins in E major for “Ich wandle still, bin wenig froh” (I wander quietly, am scarcely happy), bringing its protagonist into focus in quiet reflection. The music then draws back into C# minor for “und immer fragt der Seufzer: wo, immer wo?” (and always asks my sigh: where, always where?), as if to capture the desolation that he experiences in that quietness. The same words and music return just before the last stanza (ex. 3.4b, mm. 63–64), disturbing the E major of the two preceding ones and leaving their unsettling impression on the final return to E. The words of that conclusion—“dort wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück” (there, where you are not, there is happiness)—almost demand musical inconclusiveness (ex. 3.4b). E major in this song is the key of wandering, of “überall,” of searching and of the hallucination of finding one’s true homeland. The song clearly ends in E major, but this tonality reemerges only ambiguously and never has time to reconfirm itself fully. In reality, the song’s protagonist is left in C# minor, a Fremdling to the E-major world of which he dreams. In the song, then, the simple contrast between a major key and its relative minor su‹ces to reflect the disparity between enraptured illusions of belonging and a desolate awareness of actual isolation. In the absence of words, a tonal contrast of this moderate degree is unlikely to suggest such a disparity. But the contrast on which Schubert bases the tonal structure of the “Wanderer” Fantasy, especially as the composition dramatizes it, easily suggests a contrast, even a conflict or a contradiction, between disparate and even incompatible experiences or ways of being. One could relate this tonal and gestural conflict between the C-major music and the C#-minor music in the fantasy to any number of stereotypes of conflict in di¤erent spheres of life. Within the realms of art, it might mirror a conflict between the epic and the lyric poet, or even between the instrumentalist and the singer in music itself. The derivation of the fantasy’s C#-minor music from the stanza of “Der Wanderer” that introduces its Fremdling, however, suggests a specific range of interpretations—ones that set happy, even joyous, feelings of inclusion against desolate feelings of alienation.The musical


69

example 3.4 a. Mm. 16–31 16

“Der Wanderer,” D. 489

(stanza 2)

Ich

wan

dle

still,

bin we

nig froh,

und im

20 3

fragt

der Seuf

(stanza 3)

3

zer

wo?

im

mer

mer wo?

Die son

ne dünkt mich

24 3

hier

so

kalt,

die

Blü

the welk,

das

Le

ben alt,

und

was

sie re

den

28 3

lee

rer Schall,

ich

bin

ein Fremd

ling

ü

ber all.

Wo

example 3.4 (continued) b. Mm. 62–72 62 3

fragt

der Seuf

3

zer wo?

im

mer wo?

Im Gei ster hauch tönt’s mir zu

rück:

67

Dort wo du nicht bist,

dort

ist

das Glück.

contrasts within the fantasy, not only tonal but also gestural and textural, bespeak such a conflict much more powerfully than do the contrasts in the song. But in its unambiguous, exuberant C-major conclusion, the fantasy, in contrast to the song, also resolves its central tonal conflict, as if in a utopian overcoming of the alienated state of the song’s protagonist.10 Insofar as such a telling is possible, the “Wanderer” Fantasy tells a story of such a Fremdling—in its case a story with a happy ending—in purely musical terms. Because of the fantasy’s basis in the song, one might want to claim that it draws on a residual text to tell this story. It does tell its story clearly enough that one might easily imagine something similar for it, even without the song’s poem. I have already explored, and shall return to, the possibility of imagining such a story for some of Schubert’s later instrumental pieces, a story of a di¤used or divided self that seeks or finds integration. The continuing self-identification as an outsider that can be assumed in part to have motivated his preoccupation with Winterreise also found further expression in his instrumental music, especially in the year that remained to


71

him after completing the song cycle. The kinship of the tonal configurations of the Bb-Major Sonata with those of the “Wanderer” Fantasy enacts a continuation in the sonata of the Fremdling’s story of a lost but eventually recovered self. I have already identified motives and gestures in the C-Minor Impromptu and the C-Minor Sonata that may link these pieces to Winterreise. In the remaining sections of this chapter I shall also explore some possible motivic and gestural links between the earlier “Der Wanderer” and other passages from the impromptus and last sonatas. These allusions, although only momentarily explicit in the music, are prominent and characterful enough to function as concrete evidence that Schubert’s preoccupation with the alienated wanderer in Winterreise may have recalled for him his musical realizations of that figure’s earlier soul mate in “Der Wanderer.” This wanderer di¤ers from his later counterpart in his ability to imagine, as Winterreise’s wanderer cannot, the fulfillment of finding a “Heimat”—a homeland, or an inner sense of place. The allusions to “Der Wanderer” corroborate the possibility that the prototypes of tonal conflict and resolution explored in “Der Wanderer” and the “Wanderer” Fantasy (although not especially in Winterreise) o¤ered Schubert ways to bring the Fremdling’s conflicts to a utopian musical resolution, a return to life.

V Much as the first impromptu of opus 90 shares its mood and some of its motives with such Winterreise songs as “Gute Nacht” and “Der Wegweiser,” so the fourth, the Ab-Major Impromptu, holds echoes of “Der Wanderer.” The opening of its trio (ex. 3.5a) is a variant of the song’s central melody. It shares with that melody its C#-minor tonality, an opening melodic gesture confined to the fifth scale degree and its upper neighbor, its repeated melodic emphasis of this scale degree, and its almost immobile opening harmonic progression, i–VI–i. Also as in “Der Wanderer” and especially in the fantasy, an augmented sixth harmony has great prominence in this trio, as the most registrally and dynamically marked harmony of its dramatic middle section (ex. 3.5b, mm. 127–128, repeated in 135–136). As in the setting of “wo, immer wo?” in the song, the melody of this climax, resonating with the trio’s open-

72


example 3.5 Impromptu in Ab Major, op. 90, no. 4 a. Mm. 105–110 105

decresc.

Trio.

108

b. Mm. 122–129 122

126

ing neighbor motion, lingers on a D# that is intensified by an upper neighbor. After the climax, the “Wanderer” melody appears in the major (m. 139), thus recalling the two maggiore variations in the fantasy. In spite of its di¤erent form, then, this entire trio holds enough resonance with the “Wanderer” theme to feel like a new, composite variation on it. The shared key, registral disposition, and melodic and harmonic emphases make it appropriate to characterize this trio as beginning not merely with a reference to “Der Wanderer” but with a virtual quotation of it, particularly as Schubert reconceived it for the fantasy. At first this quotation may sim-


73

ply mystify: the music surrounding the trio in this impromptu makes no apparent complementary reference to either the song or the fantasy. But this allusion encourages a rehearing of this familiar music that can remind us of how unfamiliar, how entfremdt, Schubert might have intended it—or at least its beginning—to be (ex. 3.6). The Ab-Major Impromptu unfolds at first in unbalanced six-measure phrase units. It begins with a descending arpeggiated figure of two measures, immediately repeated in the following two. It thus suggests, at least gesturally, the type of theme (known as a “sentence”), that opens so many Classical sonatas. In such a theme, a four-measure continuation normally follows the repetition of the two-measure basic idea, often extracting and developing motivic elements from that idea.11 But in this impromptu the continuation lasts only two measures, and its fragmentary melody and simple chordal accompaniment contrast almost too markedly with the opening idea to be appropriately identified as a continuation. In consequence, the return of the opening arpeggiation in measure 7 suggests a new attempt to begin, a search for a truer beginning, without quite knowing how (ex. 3.6). This impression is reinforced by the abrupt, although quiet, modulation to Cb of the chordally accompanied melody in its return (m. 11). The arpeggiation now recommences in Cb major, and the two-measure chordal idea again follows its repetition. Perhaps the music is ready to stabilize in Cb, the relative major—but no: the parallel minor of Cb, notated in sharps, immediately takes its place (m. 19). After this third beginning, this B-minor attempt, the chordal idea finally comes more than once. It first looks even farther afield, to D major, but then returns through B/Cb minor to the opening Ab minor. Here the contrasting idea takes on, at least in part, the role that was initially withheld—that of a continuing idea. Only now, after thirty measures, does the music finally emerge into Ab major. The repetition of the opening arpeggiation becomes fourfold and finally yields to the kind of motivic liquidation that might have occurred in an opening sentential phrase (ex. 3.6, m. 39). The resulting shorter, onemeasure arpeggiated figures, their progression repeated to confirm the expansion of the opening six-measure units into more balanced eight-measure ones, now become the accompaniment for the impromptu’s first true melody, brought by the left hand (m. 47). Thus the Ab-Major Impromptu can be said to begin with a search for its

74


example 3.6

Impromptu in Ab Major, op. 90, no. 4, mm. 1–50

Allegretto.

A minor 4

9

C major 13

16

C minor 20

(continued)

example 3.6 (continued) 24

decresc.

31

A major 35

39

5

43

cresc.

47

(“Horn theme”)

6

7

8

own conditions of beginning: for its key (or at least its mode), its phrase structure, and the theme that comes to it only after it has found that key and the phrase rhythm to stabilize it. The allusion to “Der Wanderer” in the trio supports an interpretation of the impromptu’s opening as wandering, and thus evoking this search for a tonal home, for a consequent sense of direction, and for thematic identity. Once found, Ab major never again loses its hold over the music of the A section. The tonicizations of Db major, its subdominant, and even the momentary Db-major climax in measure 64 only strengthen this hold. In spite of the chromatic Gb that they necessitate, these brief tonicizations of Db do not destabilize Ab major; on the contrary, they reinforce the subdominant as a stabilizing component of this hitherto withheld tonic. The Db-major climax sets the stage for a new, more fulfilled variant of the melodious Abmajor theme in the right hand (mm. 72¤.) and thus in a familiar melodic register. The strong emphases of the subdominant compensate for the prolonged tonal imbalance of the impromptu’s search through light and shadow for its mode and even, in a sense, its tonic. Because this impromptu begins not with an assertion of a stable theme or tonality, but with a quest for them, their arrival brings to the music a sense not only of joyous release but also of lingering uncertainty. The trio’s fall into C# minor plays on this uncertainty. Because Ab major is not given from the start but is instead only achieved, and because C# minor can be heard as a negation of Db major, the constituent of Ab major on which the music has especially depended for its assertion, the music of the trio suggests a denial of that achievement. On one description, the music— or its main protagonist—begins outside of Ab major; it eventually gains admittance to that region, but in the trio it finds itself outside again, a Fremdling, as at the beginning. There are few other pieces in such simple ternary form in which the return of the opening material takes on so much new resonance from the section that precedes it; when it returns in this impromptu, the opening music emerges from the trio as if still in its shadow. Insofar as one musical passage can account for another, the trio explains, at least in part, why the Ab-Major Impromptu begins as it does. In the language of “Der Wanderer,” the protagonist of the impromptu is a Fremdling in search of a home; the reference of the trio to that song helps both to articulate and to substantiate such an interpretation.


77

VI Not only is the Andante sostenuto of the Bb-Major Sonata in the “Wanderer” key, it also resonates, at least distantly, with the “Wanderer” theme. It begins with exactly the same treble and bass notes, and with a melody that once again opens on the fifth scale degree. The scale degree is prolonged in this case by a double neighbor figure—rather than the single neighbor tone of the “Wanderer” theme—that especially stresses the upper neighbor (as at both of the first two cadential articulations, in measures 8 and 12). Moreover, it once again has an almost immobile bass: a tonic pedal for the first eight measures, a dominant pedal for the next four. In the first section of this chapter, I noted that the C# minor of this movement is neither unprepared in the first movement nor altogether forgotten in the subsequent movements. As I already indicated, C#/Db is linked very closely with F#/Gb in this sonata. F# minor and C# minor both make their first appearances as sudden tonal deflections at points of formal articulation (the end of the first group and the beginning of the development), in ways that highlight these remote keys and emphasize their remoteness (see fig. 9.1). Like the song in the “Wanderer” Fantasy and the trio of the Ab-Major Impromptu, the music in these keys here suggests the presence of an outsider as lost and in search of a home as the protagonist of “Der Wanderer,” as the lonely wanderer of Winterreise, or as Schubert’s banished dream persona in “Mein Traum.” With the first turn to F# minor comes a new theme (see ex. 9.2, mm. 48¤.), in which the left hand at first predominates in a melodic and rhythmic elaboration of the long–short–short pattern of “Der Wanderer.” The association of this new rhythm with “Der Wanderer” might at first seem far-fetched, but the evolution of this rhythm in this movement makes the allusion unmistakable. It leads to another virtual quotation of “Der Wanderer,” this time of its introduction, a quotation that is just as clear as the one in the Ab-Major Impromptu (see ex. 9.4, mm. 159–160, 163–164). In the first stage of this evolution the long–short–short rhythm, now unadorned, emerges in the left hand as the leading motive of the F-major subordinate theme (see ex. 9.3a, mm. 80¤.). This rhythm then pervades much of the development section, first in the left hand, then as the head motive of an ostensibly new theme in the right, initially coming in Db major (see

78


”Der Wanderer,” D. 489, mm. 1–7

example 3.7

Sehr langsam 3

3

3

3

4

ex. 9.4, mm. 151¤.). After the emergence of this theme, the rhythmic motive returns to the left hand (mm. 159–160), now in A minor but in a melodic, harmonic, registral, and textural disposition that is almost identical to that of the very opening of “Der Wanderer” (ex. 3.7).12 Toward the end of this development, the same rhythm returns again to the right hand as the twicerepeated head motive of a D-minor theme (see ex. 9.4, mm. 174¤.) that eventually calls back the trill and then, in its wake, the memory of the opening theme. The quotation of “Der Wanderer” is short: it lasts for two measures, but it comes almost at the midpoint of an extended passage (mm. 131–185; ex. 9.4 begins with m. 149) that is continuously under the spell of the very same rhythmic motive, arising again and again in much the same upward triadic arpeggiation.13 This development begins with recollections of the sonata’s opening theme in C# minor and F# minor, followed by recollections of the F#-minor theme that bring the passage back to C# minor. I have already characterized these keys, the keys with which “Der Wanderer” opens, as a foreign territory in the tonal cosmos of the Bb-Major Sonata. From this Fremde, through the deceptive cadence in measure 131 (see ex. 9.3b), emerges the long, tonally exploratory passage just described. In its constant, wondrous modulations and its great textural and dynamic range, this passage richly evokes the perils and enchantments, the terrors and consolations, that might befall a lonely wanderer in search of a homeland.


79

VII In thinking about the legacy of “Der Wanderer” for Schubert himself, we must also consider the probable significance for him of C# minor, the key itself of “Der Wanderer.” Of the very few songs in this key, this one was by far the best known in Schubert’s time, and it remains so today.14 Schubert might well have regarded C# minor as “the wanderer’s key.” It is noteworthy that apart from the “Wanderer” Fantasy, the last three sonatas are the only of Schubert’s completed multimovement instrumental works to explore this key extensively, linking it with its close relative, F# minor. In the C-Minor Sonata, the contrasting episode of the Adagio, already much discussed, begins in this key, as does the second theme of the finale. In the AMajor Sonata, the wild central episode of the F#-minor Andantino is also in this key, which then returns powerfully in each of the subsequent movements. The preoccupation of the Bb-Major Sonata with C# minor is thus an ongoing one, one common to all three of these sonatas. Because of the ways Schubert sets o¤ its occurrences, it is also a strange key, an outside key, in all of these contexts. Even in the A-Major Sonata, in which F# minor and C# minor might figure as closely related keys to the A-major tonic, Schubert makes them sound remote in the Andantino by almost completely withholding from the first movement the triads and the sonorities that are most associated with them. He also reinforces the impression of C# minor as a strange and outside key through its violent intrusion upon C major in the Scherzo. In drawing on the “Wanderer” key in the last sonatas, then, Schubert may have drawn yet again on its meaning as articulated by the relation of the music to the poetry in “Der Wanderer.” He might still have been following the wanderer’s tracks, searching for new and subtler ways to rejoin the wanderer’s footsteps, to release the wanderer from oblivion and turn those footsteps homeward.

80


c hap t e r

4

Retelling the “Unfinished”

I In the Andante con moto of the “Unfinished” Symphony only a thread of sound connects the first thematic group to the second (ex. 4.1, mm. 60–63). This thread—a pianissimo G# in the first violins, left sounding when the other instruments fall silent—may be the Andante’s barest moment. It is the very stillness of this transition, its seeming incorporeality, that imbues it with dramatic tension. Suddenly without harmonic or textural support, the line becomes expectant and searching: it steals its way into darkness. The violins begin to draw a melodic gesture from this pitch by taking it up an octave. They then pass down, still pianissimo, through a C#-minor triad. When they reach the C# itself, they are joined by the second violins and violas in a syncopated ostinato recalling a very similar pattern from the first movement. The ostinato has originated in that movement as the accompaniment for the second theme, and it is first introduced there, as here, by a single sustained pitch (see ex. 4.4, mm. 38–41). But later that ostinato has come again, at a moment of dramatic crisis in the first movement’s development, when the music is wrenched from B minor into C# minor (see ex. 4.5, mm. 146¤.) to reintroduce it without the theme it is meant to accompany. It is this return, specifically, that the transition in the Andante now recalls. In the Andante, the G# of the transition emerges, in unanticipated shadow, from the final E-major chord of the first group. In the Allegro moderato, by contrast, the turn to C# minor marks the climax of the first stage of the

81

example 4.1

Symphony in B Minor, “Unfinished,” D. 759, Andante con moto, mm. 58–92

58

1.

Clarinets in A

Bassoons

Horns in E

Violin I

Violin II

Viola

Violoncello pizz.

Bass

67 Cl. in A

1.


1.

Cl. in A

78

1.

morendo

Cl. in A

(continued)


1.

Ob.

89

1.

Fl.

1. Ob.

development, the culminating shock in a rhythmic, dynamic, and textural intensification of thirty measures (see ex. 4.5). In its last stage before this harmonic turn, the music arrives at a dominant ninth of B minor that it then obsessively reiterates, with growing agitation, for twelve measures (mm. 134¤.). The harmony only breaks away through its precipitous turn to C# minor. Now the melodic line descends two octaves through the C#-minor triad, as if onto a barren expanse through which the ostinato of the second theme reverberates as an emblem of absence. Not only does the second theme not return here, it cannot. The return without it of its accompanimental pattern marks it as something lost. This is the crisis that the transition in the Andante quietly remembers, melodically articulating the same C#-minor arpeggiation that descends from G# and reintroducing through it much the same syncopated ostinato figure. The music of the Andante explicitly returns to this traumatic moment, as if to seek recovery by living through it again.

II This remembrance of a moment of the Allegro moderato in the Andante con moto is only the most explicit of such remembrances. Subtle and elaborate references to the Allegro permeate the Andante, making this slow movement a veritable Wordsworthian recollection, predominantly in tranquillity, of its predecessor. The tragic first movement, in never breaking the hold of its haunting and melancholy opening phrase, powerfully sets the stage for such a response. The movement begins, in Peter Gülke’s words, “with an oracular, whispering unison of the ’celli and basses, which is left hanging as an open question on its fifth degree.”1 In spite of the upward surge of the opening motive of its first two measures, this mysterious first phrase fundamentally descends by step from prolonged tonic to prolonged dominant (ex. 4.2). It is a quietly tortured elaboration, incorporating most of a descending B-minor scale, of a ground bass pattern traditionally associated, from the beginning of the Baroque onward, with the lament. Articulated here neither as a slow introduction nor as a main theme, it retains its associations to both and gains from these combined associations a quiet power that neither

rete lling the “unfinishe d”

85

example 4.2

Symphony in B Minor, “Unfinished,” D. 759, Allegro moderato, mm. 1–22

Violoncello

Bass

9

Vln. I

Vln. II pizz. Vla. pizz. Vc. pizz. Cb.

13

1.

Ob. 1. Cl. in A

pizz.

pizz.

pizz.


1.

1.

19

1.

Fl. 1. Ob. “sudden call”

Bsn.

Hn. in D

arco

pizz.

arco

pizz.

arco

pizz.

introduction nor theme could ordinarily hold by itself. Its veiled allusion to a ground bass pattern, a pattern ever present in the background of awareness, only enhances that power.This “oracular” phrase does not merely open the movement; it implicitly underlies all that will follow. It is a bass that is never reduced to functioning explicitly as one. We immediately sense that rather than literally playing out this role it will instead inescapably pervade the music that ensues from it.

III Several commentators have noted the a‹nity between the layered accompanimental texture that now arises and that of “Suleika I,” D. 720, composed in the preceding year (ex. 4.3). Against the background of the symphony’s somber opening phrase, the quiet agitation produced by this texture might still suggest something like the questioning and the underlying pain of Suleika’s opening lines, but it could hardly still reflect anything like the optimistic anticipation in them: Was bedeutet die Bewegung? Bringt der Ost mir frohe Kunde? Seiner Schwingen frische Regung Kühlt des Herzens tiefe Wunde. (What does this stirring mean? / does the East Wind bring me good news? / The fresh touch of its wings / cools the deep wound in my heart.)2

The song, like the symphony, begins in B minor; but unlike the symphony it scarcely tarries there. The second couplet is already fully in D major, confirmed by a full cadence (mm. 16–17). The immediate repetition of this couplet brings a turn back to B, but to B major, the key of the song’s eventual climax and ending. The poem tells of the healing power of nature and of love; the opening minor mode of its setting ultimately becomes only the background, the musical representative of the question eventually answered and of the pain eventually healed. Only 26 of the song’s 143 measures remain in B minor, and all but two of them are in its first third. The

88


example 4.3

“Suleika I,” D. 720, mm. 1–17

Mit Verschiebung.

4

Was

be

fro

he

sempre legato

8

deu

tet

die

Be

we

gung?

Bringt

der Ost

mir

11

Kun

de?

Schwin

gen

Sei

ner

14

fri sche

Re

gung

kühlt des

Her

zens tie fe

Wun

de

song is really in B major, a major that derives its healing significance from its origin in its parallel minor. The first theme of the symphony plays out exactly the opposite relationship to its own B minor, a B minor that is made ineluctable by the opening phrase and one from which, accordingly, the ensuing theme cannot break free. The cadence of its very first phrase not only dramatizes but even epitomizes this relationship. The phrase is articulated as an eight-measure sentence, beginning with a repeated, two-measure basic idea followed by a fourmeasure continuation and cadence (see ex. 4.2, mm. 13–20).3 In its falling fifth from F# to B and its unison of clarinets and oboes, the basic idea responds as a complement to the symphony’s opening unison descent from B to F# in the low strings. It is as if the line reaches down to complete and come to terms with that quiet but powerful opening idea. The continuation of this new theme twists away from B minor to venture a full cadence in D major (m. 20). But a sudden call of the horns and bassoons—an o¤beat figure whose initiating dominant ninth is exacerbated by a sforzando—pulls the music back into B minor.This call makes explicit, for the first time, the power of the sustained dominant, the three-measure F# that concludes the symphony’s opening phrase.4 The very first fully articulated semicadence of the symphony thus already enacts a conflict, subverting a full cadence in D by abruptly superimposing on it a semicadential gesture in the opening B minor and by forcing in this way a reinterpretation of the theme’s first sentential phrase as the antecedent of an extended period. The again sentential consequent once more ventures away from B minor. But that opening key, having already overtaken the first cadence, again overtakes the second, insisting on itself through another dissonantly interjected semicadence (m. 29). The continuation of the second phrase now comes again, this time sequencing by itself into B minor, as if assenting, however tormentedly, to remain in that key. Only the hammering syncopations of its cadence bring the querying agitation of its layered ostinato to a halt.

IV In sonata allegro movements, the transition to the key of the second group often arises from the thematic material of the first group, as if embarking

90


on a tonal excursion from within the territory of the main theme. In this Allegro moderato, every phrase of the main theme suggests the possibility of such an excursion, but each of its ventures away from B minor is thwarted. This music can be heard as striving to break free of the control of that key as articulated by the opening phrase without ever succeeding in doing so. The first emphatic full cadence comes when B minor overrides the other keys introduced within the main theme for the third consecutive time. The transition that follows (ex. 4.4, mm. 38–42) is but a moment. It condenses the transitional process—the departure from the tonic and the establishment of a second key—into four measures, three of them given over to a single note, the D sounded in unison by the horns and bassoons. This D is already literally present in the fortissimo cadential B-minor triad that immediately precedes it; it is played by one of the horns and one of the bassoons, plus a trombone. By suddenly coming alone on the second beat of the measure, in such rhythmic and textural contrast to the hemiola of the full orchestral cadence, this D also intrudes upon that cadence, giving the impression of an unprepared entrance. The predominance of the horns associates the D with hunting calls and forest sounds, with something coming from a distance.5 Like a stimulus that activates a memory, this unison D seems to come both from outside and from within, from both near and far. Again like such a stimulus, the D changes meaning as it sounds, metamorphosing from 3 of B minor into 5 of G major, the key of the second theme. Accordingly, the second theme emerges in the manner of a halcyon memory. Its opening descending fourth responds to the opening fifth of the main theme, and the earlier theme’s first moves away from B minor have anticipated its motivic short-long rhythm. This new theme responds to the main theme as if it were what that theme has been searching for. At the same time, the brevity and utter simplicity of the transition keep the first and second themes separated from each other as a longer and more graduated transition never could. Even though G major is not literally remote from B minor, the way this transition sets it in relief makes it sound remote. If the somber bass pattern of the opening phrase imbues the ensuing main theme with an aura of loss or dispossession, then the G-major second theme recovers what has been lost, but only as a memory. Even within the second group itself, the vulnerability of the new theme soon becomes apparent (mm. 61–63). “It abruptly falls silent,” in Gülke’s


91

example 4.4 36

Symphony in B Minor, “Unfinished,” D. 759, Allegro moderato, mm. 36–47 (transition)

B

Fl.

Ob.

Cl. in A

Bsn.

Hn. in D

Tpt. in E

Trb.

Timp. in B, F

Vln. I

Vln. II

Vla.

Vc. pizz. Cb.

example 4.4 (continued) 43 Cl. in A

words, “as if in the face of a horror, as which the first tutti of the orchestra breaks in after a general pause.”6 This first crisis that befalls the second theme proves short-lived. The music of the second group wins its way back to G major after a brief episode of strife, reaches a full and exuberant cadence and then, to close, returns to the second theme in a retrospective, imitative setting.

V As abruptly as it began, the G-major music now ends, its withdrawal marked by the same second-beat accent that has introduced it (cf. m. 104 with ex. 4.4, m. 38). A new, creeping pizzicato transition leads back to the ominous opening phrase in the bass, first—if the repeat is taken—in the opening B minor, then the second time in E minor, to begin the development (ex. 4.5, mm. 124¤.). The entrance of this phrase in a new key is in itself a dramatic event. In alluding to a ground bass pattern, and in having set the stage for a theme that cannot easily break away from its tonic key, this phrase feels not merely in its tonic, but essentially, even elementally, linked to it. If its entrance in


93

example 4.5 114

Fl.

Ob.

Cl. in A

Bsn.

Hn. in D

Tpt. in E

Trb.

Vln. I

Vln. II

Vla.

Vc.

Cb.

Symphony in B Minor, “Unfinished,” D. 759, Allegro moderato, mm. 114–153


a2

Bsn.

cresc.

cresc.

cresc.

cresc.

cresc.

cresc. 130

Ob.

Cl. in A a2 Bsn. a2 Hn. in D

Trb.

(continued)


1.

Fl. cresc. Ob. cresc. Cl. in A

Bsn. a2 Hn. in D cresc.

Trb.

Timp. in B, F

cresc.

cresc.

cresc.

cresc.

cresc.


Fl.

Ob.

Cl. in A

Bsn.

a2 Hn. in D

Tpt. in E

Trb.

1.

E minor thus reflects an elemental disturbance, its continuation does so even more.This brooding, one-step-per-measure drop specifically invokes the even rhythm of the lament bass at the very moment that it moves away from its harmonic pattern. In its depth and near-stillness, and in the arrest of its motion on C, the unstable sixth degree, this passage evokes a descent into a mysterious, threatening realm—or, perhaps, a venturing forth to an outer limit. Over the trembling C, the violins take up the ascending opening motive (ex. 4.5, mm. 122¤.). They reach up, expanding the motive as if in an attempt to possess it lyrically, to a B–A# appoggiatura figure. Soon detached from the opening motive, the appoggiatura figure rises sequentially over a chromatically ascending bass (mm. 130¤.) without ever finding consonant resolution. This sequence anxiously recalls, in slower motion, the rising, tonally exploratory sequences in the main theme (cf. mm. 128–134 with mm. 26–27 and 31–33). Like those sequences, this one returns to B minor. When the bass reaches F#, the upper voices leap up to G, recalling and greatly intensifying the same dominant ninth that blocked the first theme’s first move away from that key (cf. ex. 4.5, mm. 134¤., with ex. 4.2, mm. 20–21). For twelve measures the music remains ensnared in this harmony and in the obsessive circling of the melody back to the dissonant G. When the G finally breaks free, moving abruptly up to G# (ex. 4.5, m. 146), it brings the C# minor already described above. The arrival of the G# is climactic, marked as such not only by the sudden change of harmony after so many measures without one but also by the equally sudden changes to a much thinner texture and to a triadic falling melody. This climax throws into special relief the barren return of the second theme’s ostinato. In this passage, dramatizing the break away from B minor, the second theme is lost even as a memory. Because the climax brings no theme, but only the absence of one, it is not a true arrival; it introduces only a new sequence that ascends stepwise through three stages—like successive vistas of a wasteland—back to the E minor with which the development began. Thus the descent, at the beginning of the development, into the territory represented by the opening phrase does not lead to its lyrical possession. Instead it brings recognition of lyrical dispossession, of the irretrievability in this territory of the second theme. With the ensuing return to E minor, the opening phrase comes back powerfully to initiate a series of striferidden developmental sequences, like confrontations with an environment

98


hostile to lyrical self-expression or realization. For a moment, at the development’s end, some kind of mastery or catharsis seems possible: a triumphant D-major fanfare blazes forth from an ambiguous harmony akin to that introduced by the trembling C near the beginning of the development (cf. mm. 194–201 with mm. 122–128).7 But the triumph is illusory. Both cadential D-major triads immediately fade into the quiet, ever-waiting dominant of B minor.

VI In the recapitulation, both first and second themes gain some exploratory flexibility, although not enough to alter their characterological relationships to each other or to the opening idea. The coda begins with a final return to that opening phrase, at first exactly as it appears at the beginning of the movement. But in the last two measures of that phrase (mm. 334–335), its prolonged F# at last becomes the actual bass of a cadential dominant, melodically articulated by the 5–#7–8 figure that was generated at the cadence of the first theme. This figure has marked other important cadences in the course of the movement, but only now, as Cone has demonstrated, does it become linked with the opening phrase in its original form, as if its ultimate purpose were to complete and clarify that phrase, both harmonically and rhythmically.8 After a momentous cadence, another culmination in the 5–#7–8 figure (mm. 350–352), the opening three-note motive wells up six more times, finally pervading every register against the background of alternating tonic and subdominant harmonies. In this coda, as in the development, the underlying power of the opening phrase again becomes explicit. As befits it as an emblem of dispossession or death, and hence of ultimate and invincible control, it holds sway over the movement’s ending.

VII Schubert’s piano sketch of the last pages of the symphony’s first movement shows a much shorter coda. Barely more than a return of the opening phrase


99

with its new melodic cadential articulation followed by an additional, more emphatic cadence, this original coda ends with a plagal neighbor motion over a tonic pedal, resolving into a final B-major triad.9 Fortunately Schubert did not leave the movement’s ending this way; it is far too abrupt to make a fittingly dramatic final manifestation of the power of the opening phrase. If he had retained this coda, it would have prepared the E major of the Andante through E major’s own dominant triad. Even without such specific preparation, however, this E major grows from the harmonic ambience of the first movement, as defined by its opening and closing moments and as dramatized by its development. The ostinato that precedes and then underlies the main theme of the Allegro (see ex. 4.2, mm. 13¤.) alternates tonic and subdominant harmonies four times before moving on to other harmonies. The coda, in its final version, sets each chord of its plagal progression against the ascending opening motive, and then twice repeats the entire progression with di¤erent scorings (mm. 352¤.). E minor is both the point of departure (see ex. 4.5, m. 114) and, later on, the most emphasized point of arrival in the development. The movement is haunted by this subdominant harmony almost as much as by its opening phrase. The way the Andante articulates its tonic key also elaborately sets the stage for the moment with which I began this account of the symphony: the virtual quotation, in quiet transformation, of the C#-minor crisis from the first movement. No other key would allow this return to take place so naturally in its original key, in such complete stillness. Moreover, the C# minor brought into such relief by this return is already the source of the most pervasive tonal undercurrent of the first group, one that generates its own countercurrent.This return thus only makes explicit, however quietly, a tonal conflict already repeatedly implied within the theme itself of the Andante (ex. 4.6, mm. 3¤.). Because of the way it brings into the foreground a subordinate tonal emphasis already strongly felt within this movement’s E major, the C# minor that makes this return so literal has su‹cient importance to motivate, by itself, the choice of E major for this movement. This most explicit motivic reference to the first movement thus not only brings retrospectively into relief the event that it remembers; it is also the moment that most clearly demarcates the C# minor that pervades the Andante as a tonal antipode to E major. As I have indicated, this marked moment of remembrance occurs against the background of other less literal

100


example 4.6

Symphony in B Minor, “Unfinished,” D. 759, Andante con moto, mm. 1–29 Andante con moto.

Bassoons

Horns in E

Violin I

Violin II

Viola

Violoncello

pizz. Bass 11

Fl.

Ob.

Cl. in A 1. Bsn.

Hn. in E

pizz. arco

arco

(continued)


1.

Fl.

Ob.

Cl. in A

Bsn.

Hn. in E

remembrances, which bring resonance and depth to it. Before developing an account of the tonal drama thus brought into focus, I turn first to some other memories that this drama reanimates.

VIII The opening motto of the Andante comprises three timbral choirs: the horns, the bassoons, and the basses. Each of these instrumental parts rearticulates, in transformation, a separate idea from the first movement. As Gülke points out, the quiet opening call of the first horn is a recall—a recollection in tranquillity, as I have suggested—of the first movement’s opening

102


and concluding upward melodic surge from tonic to third degree.10 Just beneath it, the first bassoon sounds the motive 5–7–8, the motive for which Cone has identified a crucial dramatic role in the first movement. The combination of horns and bassoons, moreover, recalls the orchestration of the transition to the second theme in the first movement, the suddenly isolated D (see ex. 4.4, mm. 38–41).The double basses support these low winds with a pizzicato descending E-major scale, complete except for its third degree. While this pizzicato calmly refers to the uncanny pizzicato transitions of the first movement (mm. 104¤. and 322¤.), their initial stepwise descent from 8 to 5 transforms the lament bass pattern, the structural basis of the symphony’s opening phrase, into the major mode. Furthermore, the pitches of their second measure, B–A–F#, are exactly those that initiate the descent in the third and fourth measures of that opening phrase. The first movement’s opening, too, involves a nearly complete scalar descent from the tonic: a scrambled, tormented scale whose memory the opening bass progression of the Andante, through veiled reference, brings to rest. Unlike that original descent, this one simply fulfills its role as a bass line.11 As I have already implied, the transitions from the first to the second thematic groups of these two movements resonate tellingly with each other. Each isolates a single pitch, 3 in the home key, which is then transformed, as if by the associative power of its own resounding, into 5 of the submediant (cf. ex. 4.4, mm. 38–42, with ex. 4.1, mm. 60–64). I have already discussed in some detail how this transition in the Andante combines this recollection with the more explicit recollection of the sudden and dramatic turn from B minor to C# minor in the development of the first movement. It thus synoptically recalls from that movement both the entrance of the second theme and its subsequent irretrievability in the development. The second theme of the Andante (see ex. 4.1, mm. 66¤.), which climbs, even strives upward from 1 to 6 in C# minor before falling back to 5, makes no full motivic reference to either of the themes of the first movement. But like both of those themes, it strongly emphasizes its fifth degree. Moreover, the scoring of the melody—first for clarinet, then for oboe over a string accompaniment—and the pairs of even, measure-long notes that begin it recall both the coloristic and the gestural character of the first movement’s main theme, while the syncopated ostinato of the accompaniment incorporates a distinct memory of the second theme. This mingling of memories sets the


103

stage for a spectacular moment of motivic synthesis. In its second phrase, now in the major, the ascent of this new theme culminates in a new figure, 6–5–6–5–3–1, beginning forte but immediately fading away through echoing repetitions (see ex. 4.1, mm. 90¤.). As Cone mentions, this figure derives from the first theme of this Andante (see ex. 4.6), incorporating its entire opening 5–6–5–3–1 motion.12 But Cone does not mention its extraordinary fusion of thematic elements from both movements. By recalling the first theme of the Andante it also recalls the fall from 5 to 1 in the first theme of the first movement (see ex. 4.2). Far more articulate, however, is its recollection not only of the melodic form but also, in diminution, of the rhythm of the 6–5–6–5 motive first heard in measures 20 and 21 of that movement. The dotted rhythm is also one of the rhythmic motives of the first movement’s second theme; there it fills in an ascending third whose outline is recalled, both melodically and rhythmically, in this new thematic complex (see ex. 4.1, mm. 70¤.). Finally, as Gülke points out, the imitative episode that follows the C#-minor complex, beginning in measure 111, recalls the imitative closing music of the second theme of the first movement, even returning to the keys most associated with that theme.13

IX In the gentle, processional E-major music of the Andante, the turmoil of the first movement—manifest in its minor mode, its layered syncopations, its sudden dynamic contrasts and powerful climaxes—is seemingly forgotten. The Andante’s serenity is drawn from the same motivic wellsprings as those of the first movement, however: it is won by bringing to rest the very elements that are implicated in the earlier conflict and torment. These motivic references alone are enough to make the Andante resonate with the first movement as a specifically appropriate sequel to it. But as I have begun to suggest, the tranquillity of this sequel is not undisturbed, and the disturbances themselves arise as memories of the first movement. The disturbances that accompany the motivic references to that movement reenact the ways that harmonic progression from one key to another is framed

104


and restricted. Through its own thematic contrasts, the Andante evolves its own tonal drama, one that articulates its E-major tonic as a haven from the barren and inhospitable tonal world of the first movement.The haven, however, is not invulnerable. In their references to the motives of the first movement, the new thematic oppositions contribute to an experiencing of the dramatic conflicts of the Andante as elaborations of those already played out in the Allegro moderato, o¤ering the hope of a reversal of their outcome. Unlike the opening phrase of the Allegro, the opening motto of the Andante is not ambiguous in intent. It is clearly a short refrain, and it returns as such many times in the course of the movement. The motives that it incorporates and transforms—its three-step ascent from the tonic in the first horn, its fuller descent from the tonic in the basses, and its 5–7–8 line in the first bassoon—all derive either their basic shape or their ultimate significance from the symphony’s very first idea. This refrain thus answers to that opening phrase by transforming it, recalling it in order to stand as its opposite. While the symphony’s first phrase imbues its B-minor tonic with an atmosphere of desolation from which full release is never possible, the refrain that opens its slow movement imparts to its E major an aura of protective serenity. The evenness of its rhythms, the diatonic simplicity of all three of its voices, and the closed tonic–dominant–tonic progression that it articulates combine to envelop the ensuing theme in an extraordinary calm.

X Like the main theme of the first movement, this main theme repeatedly ventures away from its tonic, but it returns every time to E major before the tonal digression ever fully attains its goal. The first of these returns to E major, in particular, comes extraordinarily close to reenacting, with opposite e¤ect, the first return to B minor in the Allegro (see ex. 4.2, mm. 20–22). Like that moment, which is the first manifestation of tonal drama in the first movement, this one subverts a cadential arrival in a secondary key through an abrupt return to the primary key (see ex. 4.6, mm. 12–16). Moreover, the gesture that restores the tonic echoes not only the half-step appoggiaturas that occur throughout the first movement but also, more specifically,


105

the one that in its abruptness marks that first return to B minor as a moment of tonal conflict (see ex. 4.2, mm. 20–21). As in the first movement, this first thwarting of a progression to a new key also involves the first disturbance of a just-established phrase rhythm. The first phrase of the Andante’s theme follows the opening threemeasure refrain in elision; it is antiphonally contrasted with the refrain through its scoring for strings alone. The ending of this first phrase is ambiguous. Heard in one way, it is a five-measure phrase, ending with an imperfect authentic cadence. But at the tonic resolution of this cadence the refrain returns, again in elision (see ex. 4.6, m. 7), and the elision obscures the resolution, leaving the phrase in e¤ect a four-measure phrase ending in a semicadence. Another elision links the end of the second refrain to the beginning of the second phrase (m. 9), which begins like the first but then moves to C# minor in its fourth and fifth measures (mm. 12–13). In a continuation of the same phrase rhythm, a return of the refrain, transposed to C# minor, would coincide with the arrival of that tonic triad in measure 13. Such a regular continuation would befit the processional character of this music, bringing the second phrase into a rhyming accord with the first, again giving it the e¤ect of ending with a semicadence, quietly transposed to the relative minor, in its fourth measure (m. 12). Two more processionally rhyming phrases could then bring the theme back to E without fundamentally disturbing its purity. In this event, the digression to C# minor would only have the ultimate e¤ect of bringing out the undercurrent of longing already imbued in the C# of measure 4 by the subdominant harmony. But if this first harmonic turn to C# minor can be said to give rise to what follows it, it must be heard as disruptive rather than merely expressive. Although the basses begin again to underscore this new tonic with their even pizzicato rhythm, now ascending, the horns and bassoons of the refrain do not return with them. The melodic resolution to C# as tonic is left exposed in a way that allows the second phrase, in contrast to the first, to emerge provisionally as a five-measure phrase with a full cadence. This is the cadence that the following measure immediately retracts by extending the phrase through a sudden chromatic descent to a C that is dynamically, coloristically, and harmonically marked as an intrusion. The C simply resolves as a lowered submediant to the dominant of E major, introducing in turn a cadential garland of sixteenth notes.

106


The intrusion of the C is like a shudder of recognition, an anxious thought or memory that suddenly comes into awareness but then quickly passes. The harmony that accompanies it and the gesture that it initiates refer to the first movement, making the C quite literally into a memory—or an emblematic composite of memories—from that movement. The harmony, a dominant seventh on C that functions here as an inverted German sixth of E, is basically the same harmony that begins the development (mm. 122¤.) and enigmatically returns so near the development’s end (mm. 194¤.). Moreover, in both of these contexts it is linked with half-step appoggiaturas, ones that cry out for, but never achieve, the kind of resolution now granted to this C. The intrusion and resolution of the C also recall, both in gestural character and in specific tonal function, the moment of cadential disruption and redirection that occurs so early in the Allegro and that it structurally parallels (see ex. 4.2, mm. 20–21). There, too, the interjection emphasizes a melodic motion from 6 to 5 and home dominant harmony. But while there the return to B minor makes apparent a conflict, here the return to E major remembers that conflict in order to suggest recovery from it. Although the melodic and harmonic emphasis of C# and then C# minor amplifies the expressive range of the opening phrases of the Andante, C# minor emerges too smoothly as a key to forewarn in any way of the disturbing C that follows it. How C# could give rise to such a disturbance only gradually becomes apparent in the course of the movement. For its next phrases (see ex. 4.2, mm. 18¤.), the theme finds itself in a seemingly altogether di¤erent sphere, in G major. This is the key of the second theme in the Allegro, but nothing about the way it returns to the Andante initially alerts us to this. Indeed, this move has impressed more than one writer as exemplifying the free, quasi-improvisatory tonal exploration characteristic of Schubert.14 The G-major phrases closely adhere to the rhythm and melody of the preceding E-major ones—so closely, in fact, that the C in measure 19 owes much of its feeling to the C# that it replaces. This C, in referring to the C#, specifically circumvents it. G major, the key of the first movement’s second theme, thus returns to the Andante as a countercurrent to the C# minor associated later in the first movement with that theme’s absence. Through this circumvention, the theme of the Andante is led in a new tonal direction, one that in seeking to avert the pain or longing of the C# still retains that feeling as an a¤ective component. Like the second phrase


107

of the first phrase group, the second phrase of this G-major group moves to its relative minor (mm. 26–27). Instead of leading to a disruption as C# minor did, this E minor is easily assimilated into the thematic and tonal continuity of the music. Simple cadential gestures in E major follow (mm. 28¤.); thus the G major of the first movement’s second theme is more easily assimilated here than is E major’s own relative minor.15

XI Soon comes the transitional thread, bringing C# minor yet again (see ex. 4.1). This key emerges this time as quietly as the revelation of a secret. That secret is not the presence of C# minor in this tonal environment—that presence is already too apparent. Instead the revelation might involve the realization that the strangely accentuated Cs are not the only elements of the Andante to originate in the first movement: so, essentially, does the C# minor that has twice given rise to them. The memory of the Allegro in the Andante is therefore not restricted to the shudder of recognition brought by the intrusive Cs. The transition to its second group can have the e¤ect of a recognition that this memory has pervaded the Andante theme from its very beginning, in spite of the sheltering tonal distance of E major from B minor, and that reckoning with this memory requires a more explicit return to the scene of its origin in the Allegro. As I have indicated, the opening rhythmic gesture, the orchestral texture, and the accompaniment of the new theme all contribute to the impression of such a recollective journey.Together they reestablish what one might simply call the “atmosphere” of the first movement by mingling elements of its first and second themes to create a dreamlike stage for recollection. The new theme is clearly related to the themes of the first movement and, in its upward striving, just as clearly contrasted with them. It conveys an impression not of a simple memory but of an e¤ort to remember. When it reaches A, its high point, the floodgate of memory begins to open: like the held notes that have initiated the transitions of both movements, this A metamorphoses as it sounds (see ex. 4.1, mm. 72–74), first from 6 of C# minor to 5 of D, then on from 5 of D to 3 of F. The harmony then returns through

108


D minor to C# minor, the German sixth in measure 79 resonating with the one that brought the C# minor crisis of the first movement (see ex. 4.5, m. 146). The memory has not yet quite come into focus; it awaits the change to major that initiates the renewed ascent of the ensuing phrase.The melody climbs this time to A#/Bb instead of A and now brings the magical fusion of all the symphony’s themes, both a “moment musical” of remembrance and an Arcadian dream of catharsis through remembrance. The memory fades through its own echoes, and the theme returns to the minor. This time the culminating harmony is prolonged, finally yielding to a full phrase in D, an imitative flowering of the same melodic material (mm. 109¤.). Some commentators regard the ensuing imitative passage, which modulates from D through G to C, as a development, but in at least one essential respect it is not.16 No cadential closure has come to the C#-minor second theme. Instead the harmony has finally broken away into the D major that has already momentarily colored the sustained melodic A of its first phrase (see ex. 4.1, m. 72). Partly for this reason, this fuller turn to D major feels not like the opening of a new scene, but instead like a new evolution within an ongoing scene, a fuller emergence of the memories sought in this setting.

XII As in the first movement, the music of both thematic groups in the Andante becomes somewhat more tonally flexible in recapitulation. In the forte episode based on the refrain (mm. 174¤.), a turn to the subdominant in measure 178 allows the theme itself to reemerge in that key. It remains in A for its cadence and concluding refrains. This time the violins steal in on E, the fifth of the cadential tonic triad, rather than on the C# third that would parallel the earlier transition (cf. m. 201 with ex. 4.1, m. 60). For the first time, the isolated, transitional pitch retains its initial meaning, and the second theme comes without a change of tonic, in A minor. As in the first movement, these thematic groups retain their characterological opposition in spite of these tonal changes. But the gulf between them has narrowed enough to allow cadential material from the first group to infiltrate the second (mm. 256¤.) and bring it to the cadential closure that was denied be-


109

fore. In this way, the serenity of the first group finally comes to contain and quiet the agitation of the memories brought by the second.17 In the coda (mm. 268¤.)—in the deeper serenity that follows this resolution—the refrain grows into a phrase in its own right. A lone, quiet pitch still emerges from the final chord of this phrase; it is a B, once again the fifth, rather than the third, of that chord. For the first time, this thread of sound does not lead to a return of the second theme. Instead, through a sudden deflection of the B up to C, the first theme returns in an otherworldly pianississimo scored for the horns, bassoons, and trombones in the distant key of Ab. Also for the first time, this return of the theme’s first phrase combines with the cadential garland, with which the strings enter in the fourth measure of the phrase, bringing it to full tonic resolution in the fifth. The C of the connective thread returns at this cadence, but it enters too quietly for the elision to obscure the Ab tonic resolution. After the thread drifts back from C to B, the theme comes one last time in this final form; now its opening phrase is permitted to resolve by itself, and the inherent disturbance of its C# is finally quieted.The threat posed by the memory of the first movement has passed: both the C# that has stimulated that memory and the C that has stood for it come to final rest in this concluding passage.

XIII It may have occurred to some readers that the tonal antipodes of this Andante con moto, the E major of its first group and the C# minor of its second, are those of “Der Wanderer.” These keys might not in themselves warrant an association between the “Unfinished” Symphony and that song were it not that the theme itself of the Andante (ex. 4.6) explicitly recalls the song. It is a virtual quotation, in its original key, of the 5–6–5–3–1 melody that opens the second verse of “Der Wanderer” (see ex. 3.4a, mm. 16¤.), a setting of the line “Ich wandle still, bin wenig froh” (I wander quietly, am scarcely happy). This association lends support to the attribution of pain and longing to this theme from its very beginning, long before the emergence of the second theme makes these undercurrents explicit. Bringing the “Unfinished” Symphony into association with “Der Wan-

110


derer” also corroborates an interpretation of the break away from B minor to C# minor in the first movement as a crisis of expulsion or banishment, and of the return of C# minor in the second as an expression of Fremdling alienation in the context of a dream of homecoming or even salvation.These interpretations resonate, in turn, with the alternating scenes of home and exile and the underlying dream of homecoming and reconciliation in “Mein Traum.” In particular, the C# minor that inevitably arises from the E major of the Andante suggests the sorrow that always haunts the love of “Mein Traum,” while the various emergences of major-mode music from the C# minor of the second group suggest, in their turn, the story’s love born of sorrow—or at least memories of love. On another level, the form of the Andante mirrors that of the story. Although often analyzed as an instance of sonata form, this movement, with its peaceful theme and more agitated contrasting episodes, much more readily gives the impression of a five-part form; and its parts correspond, at least roughly, to the succession of scenes of home and exile in the story. While the theme of this Andante, from its beginning, may evoke the concluding scene of salvation in “Mein Traum” more aptly than its earlier scenes of childhood and homecoming, the Abmajor emergence of this theme in the coda is especially evocative of that final transfiguration. As it happens, I am not the first writer to link the “Unfinished” to “Mein Traum.” In one of his last hermeneutic ventures, Arnold Schering set forth his conviction that Schubert intended “Mein Traum” as a literal program for the symphony. Schering divides the story into two parts.The first, “earthly su¤ering,” incorporates the first four parts in my description of it; and the second, “heavenly vision,” my last part, the final scene around the tomb of the dead maiden.18 Each of his parts then corresponds to one of the movements of the symphony, the first movement incorporating the scenes of exile as its development and coda, and the second movement completely given over to the final scene of redemption. Schering’s interpretation, which depends on too many forced correspondences to be convincing, is almost completely forgotten today.19 But one well-known Schubert scholar, Arnold Feil, while rejecting Schering’s view of “Mein Traum” as an explicit program for the symphony, does take seriously the possibility that the two were linked for Schubert. Feil proposes, moreover, that the correspondence of the Andante with the end of a story


111

that suggests no earthly sequel might have made it di‹cult for Schubert to continue with the symphony beyond the ending of that movement.20 In a recent article on the “Unfinished” Symphony, Maynard Solomon, who has himself written about “Mein Traum,” characterizes Schering’s reading as “outlandish.”21 While his specific reservations about Schering’s account are all reasonable, his extensively researched speculations about the symphony itself, and about Schubert’s own conduct with respect to it, make it plausible at least to hypothesize that Schubert may have come to regard the symphony as complete, as implicitly telling some kind of story that needed no further continuation. In the Andante’s ending Solomon hears “a deep impression of closure that defines the sense of an ending . . . [and] a state of repose that calls for nothing beyond silence and inner reflection.”22 Moreover, nothing in his comments about Schering necessitates the conclusion that Solomon would reject, out of hand, a di¤erently, more moderately articulated association between the story and the symphony. Schering finds a resolution for the musical realization of “Mein Traum” in the “Wanderer” Fantasy—not so much an earthly sequel for Schubert’s story as a di¤erent, worldly conclusion for it. As repeatedly mentioned, Schubert turned to the fantasy just after abandoning work on the symphony. He thus worked on both the symphony and the fantasy just a few months after writing the story, emerging through these two pieces from an extended period of unproductivity (although not inactivity) as an instrumental composer. Citing the Fremdling stanza of “Der Wanderer” and the generative role of its setting in the fantasy, Schering notes its relationship, as I have, to the scenes of exile in “Mein Traum.” In consequence, he hears the fantasy as a “fantastical portrayal of what the youth experienced or pictured himself as experiencing in a far away region as a ‘wanderer,’ i.e., as a ‘Fremdling’ expelled from home.” This musical portrayal incorporates a “turn to a new, carefree life, to the joys of the here-and-now, to the determination to master fate at any cost,” a determination embodied in the final fugue.23 Schering also notes the occurrences of the “Wanderer” keys, E major and C# minor, in the Andante of the symphony, but he does not mention the resemblance of the Andante theme to the second stanza of the “Der Wanderer” or to similar E-major music that also makes its way into the slow movement of the fantasy (see ex. 3.1, mm. 197¤.). These resemblances strongly

112


corroborate the network of relationships among song, story, symphony, and fantasy that Schering proposes.

XIV I began this discussion of the “Unfinished” Symphony with the transition between the two thematic groups of the Andante and with the crisis in the first movement’s development that this transition so explicitly recalls. The specificity of this link between the two movements makes it an essential clue for understanding the cyclic relationships between them. Because it is so specific, and because it occurs in the “Wanderer” key, this link may also be an equally essential clue for understanding how the “Wanderer” Fantasy responds, in the compositional issues it raises, to the symphony. I have shown how the symphony’s second movement answers to its first as part of a subtly and elaborately cyclic conception, a conception that Schubert obviously did not bring to the completion he initially envisaged for it. Possibly he could not, perhaps because he could not imagine a finale that would both engage the memory of the earlier movements and match them in expressive range. Or possibly he decided, at some point, that any continuation would do violence to the music he had already composed—would begin to “untell” a story he had already told fully enough. Taken as a bit of teleological evidence, this clue, the most explicitly cyclic moment in this conception, looks ahead not only to the thoroughly overt cyclicism of the fantasy but even to its emphasis of C# minor to articulate a tonal conflict. This articulation is, once again, more overt—and more radical—in the fantasy than in the symphony. By making both motivic unity and the central conflict of the tonal drama more obvious in the fantasy, Schubert developed a cyclic conception for the fantasy that he could fully carry out. He unambiguously finished a large-scale instrumental piece for the first time in three years and soon got it published. The fantasy appears to stand apart, in both musical character and compositional technique, from the rest of Schubert’s music. But that appearance is deceptive. In many ways the fantasy only makes explicit the most pervasive compositional preoccupations of the symphony in ways that could mo-


113

tivate a triumphant conclusion. The exuberance of the fantasy only exemplifies, on one level, what Schubert must have felt in completing it. By finishing it he surmounted an obstacle that he never again had to face in the same way; its manner apparently became too obvious for him. With respect at least to motivic development, the symphony, more than the fantasy, became the model to which he returned in his later cyclic endeavors.

114


c hap t e r

5

Expanding the Scope of Schubertian Tonality The Opus 90 Impromptus as the Stations of a Tonal Quest

I Every once in a while one still encounters a piano student either playing or wanting to play the third impromptu of Schubert’s opus 90, but bearing an edition in which it appears not in Gb major but in the slightly heavenward transposition to G. Having to tell that student that the piece is really in Gb always somewhat numbs their pleasure over the prospect of playing it. To what circumstances do we owe this faintly unpleasant necessity? Schubert wrote out the four pieces that we know as the opus 90 impromptus in a single manuscript and first submitted them for publication in this form. Karl Haslinger initially published just the first two, the C minor and the Eb major, late in 1827, himself providing the title for them. Only thirty years later were the other two pieces from the manuscript incorporated into a new edition of opus 90 by Karl’s son Tobias, the fourth in its original Ab major, but the third in this already mentioned levitation from Gb to G. It is possible that it was simply the key, Gb major, that originally impeded the publication of the third piece; at any rate, this key remained too idiosyncratic even in 1857 to go unchallenged.The Gb-Major Impromptu is not merely Schubert’s only instrumental movement in this key but one of the first pieces ever written in it. Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, for example, never wrote any. So why did Schubert? Surely this question allows for no simple, fully explanatory answer. But as I have already strongly implied in Chapter 2, it finds an obvious partial one in the ending of the preceding piece.1 Whether or not the second

115

Impromptu in Gb Major, op. 90, no. 3, mm. 1–14

example 5.1

Andante.

I

vi

3

ii6

V7

I6

5

vii 4 /V

V

3

cresc.

7

9

I

IV

V

vi

ii

V7

I

V4 /ii

ii

V7 /vi

3

11

cresc.

IV/IV

IV6

V4 /IV

IV

3

13

dimin.

impromptu is the first instrumental piece in a major key ever to end in minor, it is surely the first well-known one to do so. Its tonal course, its way of being in its key, is therefore just as extraordinary for its time as is the key itself of the third impromptu. Because of the Eb-minor ending of the second impromptu, the Gb major of the third arises from its own relative minor, a source that it immediately acknowledges by returning to an Eb-minor triad in its first harmonic move (ex. 5.1).

II The harmonic linking of the ending of the Eb-Major Impromptu to the beginning of the Gb-Major one immediately assumes a significance a¤ecting far more than the moment of linkage itself. It strongly suggests that the idiosyncratic choice of Gb major for the third impromptu comes about through a correspondingly idiosyncratic tonal plan that also embraces at least the second impromptu. Other linkages between these two pieces confirm this impression. The opening tonic to submediant progression of the third impromptu does more than recall the concluding harmony of the second; it also anticipates the piece’s overall tonal structure, with its dramatic Ebminor middle section (beginning at m. 25). The Gb major of the third impromptu is thus su¤used with the Eb minor that has overtaken Eb major in its predecessor. But it is also su¤used with another, counterbalancing tonal emphasis: that of its own subdominant, Cb major, a common function that it highlights to an uncommon degree. Although the preceding impromptu does not emphasize Cb-major harmony at all, its entire middle section, as well as the beginning of its coda, is in Cb minor, notated as B (ex. 5.2, mm. 83¤.). Moreover, the way in which the Cb-major harmony first appears in the third impromptu makes it plausible to associate it with memories arising from the second. The subdominant occurs for the first time in the third impromptu at a focal moment in the opening period: not only does it come at the midpoint of the consequent and on a downbeat in the midst of heightened activity, it also immediately follows Eb minor’s dominant, as if Eb minor were yielding to it (see ex. 5.1, m. 7). Because this Cb-major triad initially averts a possible extension of Eb minor through this dominant, it enters the Gb-Major

s c h u b e r t i a n t o na l i t y

117

example 5.2

Impromptu in Eb Major, op. 90, no. 2, mm. 80–90

80

B ben marcato

86

Impromptu potentially as an agent of recovery from the Eb-minor crisis of the Eb-Major Impromptu’s ending and from the agitated B-minor music implicated in that crisis. The following eight-measure phrase of the third impromptu reaches its dynamic and registral climax over this subdominant (m. 12), and, unlike the opening period, it is repeated, with its bass progression now reinforced to bring the climactic subdominant harmony into even greater relief. The middle section wins its first respite from its Eb-minor agitation through a sudden quiet turn to this same Cb major (m. 32). In its second half, the parallel moment of calm comes in Eb major (m. 48), the hitherto forgotten opening key of the second impromptu. B minor itself finally returns in the coda (ex. 5.3, m. 75), like a troubled memory finally laid to rest. The subsequent and final phrase of the coda, in which the B-minor harmony is replaced by an even more jarring minor Neapolitan sixth (m. 80), distinctly recalls the 7 to 8 gesture that first introduced that B minor in the second impromptu (see ex. 5.2, mm. 82–83). This concluding phrase thus reinforces the impression that the recurrence of B minor in this coda links the B-minor episodes of the second impromptu to the Cb-major passages, both climactic and restful, of the third. It becomes plausible to interpret the Cb major that, along with Eb minor, so determines the tonal ambience of the third impromptu as specifically recalling the driven Cb minor that so strongly reinforces the ultimate minor coloration of the second.

118


example 5.3 74

Impromptu in Gb Major, op. 90, no. 3, mm. 74–86

(coda)

c r e sc e ndo

I

V4 /iv

iv

V4 /iv

2

76

iv

3

6+

78

V6

V7

4

5 3

cresc.

I

80

cresc.

iv 6

V4 /iv

V4 / ii

2

ii 6

2

6+

V6

V7

4

5 3

82

dim.

I 84

Shared melodic gestures and textural configurations further link these two pieces.The particular voicing, texture, and articulation of the Gb-major triad in the opening measure of the third impromptu (see ex. 5.1) refers unambiguously to events in the second. Except for the Db in the tenor, the pitches and their registers within this opening Gb sonority exactly reproduce those of the chord immediately preceding the earlier impromptu’s middle section and, again, its coda (see ex. 5.2, m. 82, m. 250). Meanwhile, the figuration in the inner voice of the right hand of the third impromptu, in its arpeggiation of those pitches, begins with the same kind of upward triadic motion in close position triplets, again in the same register, as in that earlier middle section (ex. 5.2, mm. 83¤.). Moreover, the melody, in its sustained repeated notes, makes a clear reference to the melody of that episode. The downward leap of a major third in the second measure enlarges on this reference by recalling the similarly pronounced and unadorned fall by a third from the apex of that earlier melody (ex. 5.2, mm. 87–88). That third, in turn, is a response to the rising third from Gb to Bb, also bare and unadorned, that immediately precedes that middle section (ex. 5.2, mm. 81–82), a third to whose same pitches the opening melodic gesture of the third impromptu returns, reversing their order and seeming import. That two pieces of such ostensibly contrasting character share such melodic gestures may seem surprising. The sharing of these gestures places the returning block of musical material already discussed in a context of shared motivic, as well as harmonic, concerns. In chapter 2, section III, I show how this material, by incorporating the leading tone of Eb minor but neutralizing it as Ebb within a Gb-major context, sets these two keys in dramatic opposition, helping to articulate Gb major as a station of potential recovery from an Eb-minor threat. The music of the second impromptu succumbs to that threat; the music of the third brings recovery from that crisis.

III I have claimed that the second impromptu articulates its key in an extraordinary way, a way that may give rise to the equally extraordinary choice of Gb major for the third impromptu and that may motivate in large part its tonal and dramatic course. I have based my claim about the second impromptu

120


example 5.4

Impromptu in Eb Major, op. 90, no. 2, mm. 1–29

Allegro.

3

legato

5

10

15

20

25

3

3

primarily on its minor ending and on the way the B-minor tonality of the middle section imparts additional force to that ending. But to convey the feeling of an unusual relationship to its own tonic, a piece should also begin in an exceptional way. Whatever its gestural and textural charms, the opening phrase of the Eb-Major Impromptu is in itself not tonally exceptional (ex. 5.4). What is exceptional about it—as I have argued—is its immediate repetition, not once, but twice.The second repetition suggests various metaphorical equivalences: a blithe innocence, a somewhat maniacal exuberance, or the turning of a kind of musical gear that cannot become fully engaged. To say that the Eb major that begins this impromptu proves to have been illusory is, of course, to extend the scope of the metaphors that I have already employed. I have summarized the unfolding of these two impromptus, for example, as a scenario of endangered innocence and loss of innocence in the second impromptu and recovery from that loss in the third. This new elaboration of those metaphors draws support from the already mentioned texts underlying the major-mode passages in Winterreise, passages whose words deal almost exclusively with illusions, fading memories, and unfulfilled dreams. The highlighting of these texts through the major mode lends credence to the hypothesis that Schubert might have associated such images with the setting of the major mode in relief against the minor in his instrumental music.2 Among these, the overpowered major of the second impromptu especially calls forth such associations. The innocence and loss of innocence already proposed might thus be more broadly articulated as illusion and disillusionment.

IV Clearly the kinds of relationships I have described between these two pieces are normally associated with cyclic procedures. In the case of these two impromptus, the relationships are especially rich and unusual, involving not merely shared motives, textures, and harmonic elements but also a thoroughgoing tonal plan in which the exceptional tonal course of the second impromptu can largely explain the exceptional choice of key for the third. To what extent might this multifaceted cyclic design also embrace the first and last impromptus of opus 90?

122


Although often performed as a cycle, opus 90 has not been traditionally described as one.The seeming absence of a controlling tonal center, for one, has impeded its conceptualization as a cycle, even though both of Schubert’s song cycles also lack such a center. Moreover, the sequence of keys in the set—the C minor–Eb major–Gb major–Ab major succession indicated by the key signatures—has suggested no compelling tonal unity or logic, or at least so various Schubert scholars have claimed.3 In particular, Gb major has seemed an inadequate link for a tonal chain connecting Eb major to Ab major. But these key signatures tell lies: the second impromptu is not simply in Eb major, but in Eb major-minor; and the fourth impromptu is not simply in Ab major, but in Ab minor-major. Like Eb minor, Ab minor is much more closely related than its parallel major to the third impromptu’s extraordinary key.

V Once again, an ending and a subsequent beginning are musically linked in a way that corroborates this tonal relationship. The last melodic gesture of the third impromptu—the F–Eb–Cb–Ab curve welling up in measure 83 between its penultimate tonic Gb and its final reiterated one (see ex. 5.3, m. 83)—anticipates the descending Ab-minor triad with which the fourth impromptu opens (see ex. 3.6). This last impromptu reaches and confirms its Ab major only after tonal digressions recalling not only the Cb major so prominent in the third impromptu but also the Cb/B minor so prominent in the second (fig. 5.1). Once again, the tonal instability of this opening suggests an idiosyncratic relationship of this music to its own tonic, an initial instability that is also reflected in its irregular phrase rhythm and its lack of thematic definition. In chapter 3 I explored the interpretive context for these irregularities: the unmistakable allusion of the trio of the fourth impromptu to “Der Wanderer,” once again suggesting a search for home, or a quest for identity, on the part of a journeying Fremdling. I have also mentioned how the opening exploration of the last impromptu of opus 90 recalls keys that are emphasized in the earlier impromptus before finding its way to Ab major: first the Cb major so highlighted in the third impromptu; then the B minor of the middle section of the second. The arrival in Ab major extends these recollections back another step: it is the key


123

∗

EbM

→m

GbM

AbM AbM

B/Cbm

CbM

C#/Dbm Reference to “Der Wanderer” →

Abm

EbM

Emerges into

and

EbM

GbM

A

A

B

CbM

Ebm With moments of release into

B

Driving bass rhythm takes over

B/Cbm

B

A

CbM

Suffused with Ebm and with a counterbalancing

A

Subversion of an “illusory” EbM

A

Form

Cm Echoes of “Erlkönig”: Escape was illusor y

A'

Abm

A station of recovery from Ebm

GbM

Ends in Ebm

EbM

AbM

Cm Seemingly inescapable, in the thrall of the opening G Escape? →

B

A

∗ First published in G major in 1857.

No. 4

No. 3

No. 2

Cm

Echoes of Winterreise: “Gute Nacht” and “Der Wegweiser”

Key

No. 1

The Opus 90 Impromptus as a Cycle

Impromptu number

figure 5.1

Abm →M Now emerging from the Wanderer’s shadow

A

→m

B/Cbm → Ebm

(B) Coda

Cm→ M? Climax breaks the hold of the G

A"

GbM Remembers B/Cbm and G/Abbm

(B) Coda

Gm G as an “absolute”

B'

of the B section of the first impromptu. Unlike the Cb major and minor left on the horizon of awareness after the third impromptu’s coda, however, this Ab major is a remote memory. Many will be tempted to deny it any significance because the link is so unlikely to be heard, but in the mid-nineteenth century, and even well into the twentieth, most music lovers came to know opus 90 not simply by listening to it but also by playing it. Seeing Ab major in the notation and feeling it under their fingers, they might have recognized it as a tonality that returns to the fourth impromptu from the first. Indeed, the ways in which Ab major articulates itself in the first impromptu—the quiet suddenness of its emergence, the transformations it brings to the opening theme, the subsequent annihilation both of it and of its e¤ects—cry out for a later return of the key, or at least for a return of some of those e¤ects. The impromptu begins with the powerfully struck G in double octaves that sets the stage for a quiet marchlike melody of extremely narrow range and repetitive rhythm (see ex. 1.1b). As I have suggested, its sense of motion, although not exactly that of any of the Winterreise songs, seems closely linked to them.The contrast between the fortissimo introductory dominant and the initially unaccompanied melody suggests loneliness or even, as McClary has argued, confinement.4 Rhythm, melody, and harmony all reinforce this sense of confinement. With one exception, every quarter-note beat of this theme is marked, almost oppressively, by rhythmic activity. The exception is in the first half of the second measure, where an augmentation of the opening dotted rhythm (into a dotted quarter, an eighth, and a quarter) first occurs. Both rhythmically, in the one moment of hesitation that it occasions, and melodically, in its sighing descent from the melodic peak of the phrase, this motive (henceforth designated x) engenders a central focal point for the theme—a heart for it, to speak metaphorically. At the same time, it provides a gestural contrast for the theme’s other, more marchlike elements. The eight opening phrases, which are rhythmically almost identical, group into pairs, each pair a parallel period. The first pair of phrases remains unambiguously in C minor, but each phrase of the second pair (ex. 1.1b, mm. 10–17) begins by suggesting the relative major, Eb, and could easily cadence in that key. I have stressed how, instead, the cadences return again and again to C minor. Many a Classical introduction concludes with such a portentously, if more quietly, struck dominant, prolonged like this opening one by a fermata. A


125

main theme then always ensues, usually articulating the tonic as its first harmony. But in this impromptu no introduction precedes the G. Not yet having played out its introductory role, this G now insists retroactively on that role by becoming the harmonic background, in place of the tonic, for virtually the entire theme. Thus when the theme, in its second period, gestures toward Eb major, it all too quickly returns to C minor, as if still in the thrall of the G—the G-as-dominant—that has set the stage for it. This music begins to seem not merely in C minor, but somehow confined to that key, in a way that has suggested to me the characterization of the G as a Wegweiser that ineluctably determines the music’s course.Thus in its own way this opening impromptu, like the second and the fourth that follow, establishes at its outset an idiosyncratic articulation of its own tonic.

VI Against this background, the turn to Ab major for the B section comes as an escape. At the end of the fourth period (see ex. 1.1c, m. 34) a codetta initiates an imposing ritual of C-minor closure. The cadential phrase has begun again, as if in an echo, when a sudden inflection introducing Db, the Neapolitan (m. 40), opens the opportunity for a deflection to Ab major. The closing of the first A section is thus never fully completed, but is instead elided with the beginning of a contrasting B section, suggesting one way that reverie, whether as reminiscence or fantasy, can intrude upon other kinds of awareness. The theme of this new section (mm. 42¤.) begins with the same upbeat figure in dotted rhythm followed by repeated quarter notes as in the A theme. This initial motivic resemblance imparts to the new theme the feeling of a variation on the A theme, and mitigates, at first, the otherwise extreme contrasts between the A and B sections. Rhythmically, after its initiating upbeat, the first phrase of the new theme—the phrase that establishes its character—includes no dotted figures, but only quarter notes and half notes. Texturally, its envelope of legato arpeggiated triplets contrasts markedly with the often accented, mostly nonlegato chords that accompany the A theme. Harmonically, the phrases are no longer paired together into periods; instead, each phrase reaches a full authentic cadence. Moreover, the harmony is no longer held to a single tonal center, but instead moves as if

126


in free exploration from Ab major, through modally mixed harmonies to Cb major, and back. The phrases of the B section also contrast with those of the A section in length. Since both the A and B themes begin with the same rhythmic and similar melodic motives, one can hear the five-measure melody of the B theme as an expansion of an already established four-measure prototype. A condensation of the first phrase of the B theme into four measures identifies the four half notes in the middle of the phrase as the locus of expansion (see ex. 1.1c, mm. 43–44), and both the stepwise melodic fall from the high point and the way this descent takes center stage invite their more specific interpretation as an expansion of motive x. If that motive, in its original form, suggests a longing for escape, then perhaps the new theme incorporates its transformation, whether imagined or remembered, in a state of freedom or fulfillment. What the sudden turn to Ab thus brings about is not so much a new theme as a liberating metamorphosis of the opening theme.

VII The B section has its own codetta (ex. 5.5a, mm. 75¤.), which gently echoes that of the A section and reaches full cadential closure. Whereas A’s deflected cadence has led to reverie, B’s full cadence now occasions something like catastrophe.The persistence of the same texture after this cadence, along with the recurrence of the head motive that is shared by both A and B themes, may initially obscure the extraordinary nature of the phrase that follows (mm. 83–87). After a single measure of repeated quarter notes and accompanying triplet chords, the Abs of both melody and bass fall together, in stark parallel motion, to G. This sudden fall extinguishes, in a single nullifying moment, the aura of Ab major. The entire five-measure phrase proceeds in closely conjunct parallel octaves, expanding upon and confirming the power of the impromptu’s opening G, which reinforces itself at the cadence of the phrase with agitated, “Erlkönig”-like repetition. Beneath the hammering Gs now comes a shadow of the opening theme (ex. 5.5a, mm. 88–95). The Eb of motive x now descends directly through a minor sixth to repeated Gs.The melody, fused with the bass, is under the control of the repeating Gs, which continue to reverberate with the memory


127


Impromptu in C Minor, op. 90, no. 1 (codettas of B ) 75

77

80

(“retransition”)

83

cresc.

87

91

3 3

6

example 5.5 (continued) b. Mm. 116–128 116

119

(transition)

decresc.

123

dim.

B'

126

of “Erlkönig.” The descending melodic sixth recalls, in grim parody, the similar melodic motion of the B theme and the B codetta, as well as the Ebmajor moments of the A theme. This new left-hand melody, already foreshadowing the actual return of the A theme, thus also echoes the B themes as a musical emblem of the inescapable persistence of specific memories. The escape to Ab major has proven as illusory, and perhaps even as dangerous, as the Erlking’s enticements in Goethe’s ballad. If a dream is unfulfilled, or a memory lost, its repression may only intensify its energy. As if enacting a response to such a repression, the second A section builds to an agitated and powerful climax in its codetta (an especially unevocative term in this case), which this time is brought to full gestural closure (ex. 5.5b).


129

The incorporation into this climax of the Db, the element that previously o¤ered escape from C minor as a Neapolitan (m. 114; ex. 5.5b, m. 118), only magnifies the confining power of this key, in that it implies that even this way out is now closed. In a kind of aftershock, the Db comes again, now turning in e¤ect into C# (m. 120) to initiate a shuddering, chromatic transition that recovers the music of dream or memory—the B section—in G minor. This G minor does, of course, represent another move away from C minor; but in bringing back music previously heard in Ab major, it has more the e¤ect of negating that Ab-major music, both through the change to minor and through its now agitated textures, than of opening a new avenue of freedom or exploration. Thus in this second B section we witness an unsuccessful struggle to recapture and relive the experiences remembered in the first B section. The G, from the outset an overdetermined dominant, now reveals itself as a kind of absolute, an inescapable presence with the power not merely to obstruct any escape from C minor but to ensnare material from the major within the minor’s purview. In the return of the codetta, at least, the struggling protagonist is rewarded with the nostalgic return of the major mode, with a moment of peaceful reflection before the agitated Gs return, renewing the ominous echoes of “Erlkönig.”

VIII The G minor of the B" section, the G major of its codetta, the return of the hammering G as the dominant of C minor—this succession throws the major into relief, but at the same time it highlights its transitory, even illusory character within the tonal drama of this impromptu. Again and again in the final A section the major mode will resurface, but it will never break altogether free of the minor. The second of the shadow phrases, which immediately follow the hammering G (mm. 161¤.), also turns major at its cadence (m. 167). A vision of the A theme in would-be C-major fulfillment now follows, its melody now soaring up to G, but lasting for only one twophrase period. In its afterglow, the ensuing C-minor antecedent withdraws into a higher register (ex. 5.6, mm. 177–180). For the first time the phrase that now follows this antecedent is not a consequent; instead it is another antecedent, beginning in the relative major like the third phrases of the earlier

130


example 5.6

Impromptu in C Minor, op. 90, no. 1, mm. 176–204

176

decresc.

(first antecedent) 180

cresc.

(second antecedent) 183

186

x

x

x x

190

194 Coda

199

cresc.

A sections, and leading, like them, to another half cadence in C minor (mm. 181–184). This succession of two antecedents, along with the registral displacement of the first of them, suddenly renders unfamiliar this music that has seemed, from the very beginning, obsessively overfamiliar. The greatly expanded phrase (ex. 5.6, mm. 185–193) for which these two antecedents set the stage departs in many respects from all that has preceded it. It is, for one, nine measures long—nearly twice the length of any earlier phrase. The downward rush of its first two measures, from G to A in the bass, and the V of ii harmony that the A supports, have no precedent. Neither have the following registral displacements, parenthetical echoes that bring a fourfold repetition of motive x, the sighing motive that has occurred once in virtually every phrase of the A sections, but never more than once. The bass continues to descend chromatically, with unprecedented weight, from the A. With its arrival on F#, the rhythmic character of the melody changes: motive x, just heard four times in a row, now audibly metamorphoses into a smoother expansion, a half note followed by two quarters. Smooth rhythms prevail for the rest of the phrase. This longer, culminating phrase, in the expanding rush of its outer voices to a fortissimo exclamation of the straining x motive over a powerful A in the bass, finally breaks away from the overcontrol of the G. In its insistence at this climax on the x motive, this A theme seems finally to escape from its confinement or isolation; in its final measures, the rhythm of x transforms itself (ex. 5.6, m. 190), taking on the rhythmic character of the B theme. In the following measure, the minor’s Eb yields directly to the major’s E in the tenor, while above it G is incorporated into a melodic line that then cadences in the a‹rming rhythm of B’s codetta. It is only in this breaking out of A’s confinement and in the resulting fusion of A’s and B’s rhythmic elements, of dream and reality, or of memory and present experience, that release into the major is at least partly won. Again, as in Winterreise, the “pure” major mode throughout this impromptu remains an apt metaphor for the unrealized, for imaginary realms, for the mingling of memory with dream and illusion. The major never becomes as fully established as it might if what it embodied were real, but instead remains essentially linked to the minor. The coda summarizes the impromptu’s points of departure and arrival by conjoining a two-measure condensation (ex. 5.6, mm. 194–195) of the very first three measures with

132


a similar condensation of the definitive closing measures just heard (cf. mm. 196–197 with mm. 190–193). Even here, at the end of the impromptu, the major never regains a complete phrase of its own. Instead, it emerges these last times from the minor, like the image of a freedom or fulfillment never achieved, or of a love that can still be born only of pain.

IX A Winterreise-haunted scene, upon which the memory of “Erlkönig” intrudes—this memory makes itself felt not only in the transformation of the stark opening G into hammering triplets but also in the emergence beneath them of a stepwise melody outlining a minor sixth from G to Eb. It is also deepened by the way this transformation immediately follows a seemingly self-contained lyrical episode in the major, an episode that contrasts with its surroundings in the same ways that the Erlking’s seductive singing contrasts to the cries of the boy in Schubert’s most famous song. What sense can be made of this intrusion? Certainly the windswept nocturnal setting of Goethe’s ballad has a‹nities with some of Müller’s winter scenes, but much other Sturm und Drang and Romantic literature shares these a‹nities. Can we infer from this mingling of memories in the C-Minor Impromptu a deeper thematic or psychological connection, for Schubert, between Goethe’s ballad and Müller’s cycle? In Goethe’s poem a father rides through the windy night, clasping his son in his arms; his child—and possibly only the child—sees and hears an Erlking who tries to seduce him, to lure him away with the enticements of his kingdom. In Müller’s cycle a lonely outcast without home, love, or family—who was probably never a father and in e¤ect is no longer a son— trudges on through an ever more barren winter landscape, all its enticements withered away. Although he seeks death he is still too driven by an insatiable desire to be able to die. The exceptional power of Schubert’s settings for these texts—one of his most miraculous early songs and the late cycle that is for many his greatest achievement—suggests that he strongly identified with both of them. In my introduction I have already argued that, in the case of Winterreise, the episodes of exile in Schubert’s story “Mein Traum,” along with the circumstances of his life that left him alienated in many ways,


133

give grounds for presuming his identification with the cycle’s Fremdling wanderer. This winter journey, without any homeland either of origin or of destination, takes the idea of exile to a nihilistic extreme. But with what or whom did Schubert identify in “Erlkönig” in such a way that the first impromptu’s memory of Winterreise might have brought that of “Erlkönig” in its wake? Once again, “Mein Traum” may hold the most powerful interpretive clue to this linkage. Schubert’s story gives a fuller explanation for its protagonist’s exile than does Müller’s cycle: Schubert’s protagonist rejects the feast in the pleasure garden to which his father twice takes him in the course of the story, while the wanderer of Winterreise was already a Fremdling before he came to the town he leaves behind in the opening poem. Moreover, Goethe’s ballad, like Schubert’s story, involves a father, a son, and a pleasure garden as well—in this case the Erlking’s domain. Can we presume that this is a pleasure garden not of the father’s imagining, but only of the son’s? If so—because it is then not encompassed by paternal imagination—its enticements are demonic and hence mortally dangerous. We cannot automatically or unambiguously ascribe the workings of such a paternalistic logic to Goethe’s poem, although we may well infer them. But what of the reading of the poem that Schubert’s setting implies? As Christopher Gibbs has clearly shown, Schubert’s setting of “Erlkönig” has so dominated the subsequent reception history of the poem that it has led to assumptions not necessarily implicit in the poem itself, including, for example, that the father rides hurriedly from the outset, that the reason for his haste is that his son is ill, and, most provocatively, that only the son sees the Erlking and hears his enticements, which the father dismisses as feverish hallucinations.5 In this terrifying setting almost all the music in the major, and all the most tonally stable music before the final cadences, belongs to the Erlking. This uncanny figure finally usurps the father’s control. Schubert invests this demon’s descriptions of his kingdom with the allure of a melodious, dancing major: we hear them as probably only the son, never the father, could hear them.The child, of course, does not immediately succumb, but instead cries out repeatedly, in terror, to his father. It is precisely the allure of the Erlking’s enticements that make them so frightening: they have enough power over the son’s psyche for him to experience them as life threatening.

134


Whatever Schubert’s own “feasts” or “pleasure gardens” may actually have been, there is ample evidence that his father would not have accepted them, or even imagined them at all fully. What is certain is that these aspects of Schubert’s life were in fact life threatening: they led to his syphilitic infection sometime in 1822 and to full-fledged illness and confinement early and again later in 1823. It seems almost inconceivable that this mortal illness would not have deepened whatever sense of alienation, of being a Fremdling, Schubert already felt. It would have linked his identification with the boy resisting and then succumbing to the Erlking’s wiles to his identification with Winterreise’s homeless and fatherless wanderer twelve years later. “Mein Traum” foretells the possibility of such a linkage; without resorting again to words, the first impromptu may confirm it.

X Both the structural cadence of the first impromptu—the moment when the minor yields directly to the major—and the last strain of its coda integrate and highlight G in their culminating melodies (see ex. 5.6). The coda also recalls the portentous opening gesture, the G-as-Wegweiser, as an o¤-thebeat, syncopated accompaniment for the final synoptic recollections of the impromptu’s theme, first below it, then above. The melody’s first notes now precede the first G, as if to give expression to a state of consciousness that is no longer so completely under the G’s dominion. But in their gestural isolation, these Gs still haunt that consciousness as vestigial, fateful calls. In the same high register in which it is highlighted three times in this coda, G returns as the focal melodic pitch of the second impromptu’s opening (see ex. 5.4). Meanwhile, the accompanimental figure, in the syncopated e¤ect of its second-beat half-note Bbs, arises as if through a rekindling of those syncopated fateful calls of the first impromptu’s coda. What other piece begins in this way, with a melodically and harmonically self-contained phrase that comes three times in a row? Repeated once, the first phrase could serve as the first half of a short dance in binary form; the second half might then even begin in the parallel minor, like the fourth phrase of this impromptu, returning to the major just in time for a final cadence. But here the motion of the dance is suspended, taken o¤ track, defamiliarized. It is extravagant


135

to entertain the notion that this might be the nightly dance of the Erlking’s daughters—but might it, at least, be an alluring dance emanating from some other pleasure garden, one to which Schubert’s father could never have led him? And might not joining in this dance—succumbing to its seductions— lead to the kind of catastrophe that befalls the Eb-major music of this impromptu when it so utterly succumbs to its parallel minor?

XI This drama of subversion in the Eb-Major Impromptu may bring to mind a similar tonal drama in another of Schubert’s piano pieces: the undermining of the major mode in the Moment musical in Ab major, op. 94, no. 6, as described by Cone in his well-known article “Schubert’s Promissory Note.”6 In Cone’s account, the subversive element, the “promissory note,” is an E that slides down chromatically into Eb instead of resolving to the F that has been projected for it. Initially just a chromatic detail, this pitch is then a stimulus for exploration, but it eventually becomes a pervasively undermining element. In the Eb-Major Impromptu, the subversive pitches—Gb and Cb— first occur not as momentary chromatic deviations but as components of an Eb-minor passage to which they diatonically belong. But in their increasing dominion and dramatic importance, these pitches have much the same function as does Cone’s E in the sixth Moment musical. They, too, eventually precipitate a devastating climax. The Gb overtakes the climactic confirmation of the tonic in measure 71. This reversal of mode is reinforced by the sudden return of the opening motive and by a hypermetrical shift to the threemeasure grouping already fleetingly suggested at the end of the first Eb-minor episode (mm. 33–35). The Cb, of course, becomes the tonic of the middle section (see ex. 5.2), in which the accompanimental pattern of the A sections, in another dramatic reversal, dominates the melody. Not only, then, does the Eb minor arising in this impromptu overtake its Eb major; the accompanimental motive, first gesturing toward thematic identity in the first Eb-minor episode (mm. 25–33; ex. 5.4 contains mm. 25–29), fully gains such an identity by taking control of the middle section thematically and then confirms its subversive role by returning in this form at the end to drive the

136


memory of the impromptu’s first innocence, its seemingly ethereal opening dance, into oblivion. In the sixth Moment musical, nothing follows what Cone calls the “final empty octave”; there is no opportunity for recovery from this bleak conclusion. In any event, the probable composition of this and the first of the two F-minor Moments musicaux, op. 94, no. 3, several years before the others complicates any attempt to understand the Moments musicaux as a cycle.7 It is striking, however, that each of these two earlier pieces ends one of the “halves” of the set. But regardless of whether these two pieces were ultimately implicated in a cyclic conception, Schubert probably did not compose them as components of one. In opus 90, on the other hand, the richness and specificity of the tonal and motivic material shared by the Eb-Major and Gb-Major Impromptus provide, of all the linkages between the separate pieces, the strongest evidence for such a conception. The Eb-minor triad within the Gb-major theme registers not only its dependence on the ending of the preceding piece but also the vulnerability that this dependence implies. As already pointed out, this Eb-minor triad also looks ahead to the turbulent Eb-minor central episode: it anticipates, in exactly the same voicing, the chord from which the first phrase of that episode will unfurl (cf. mm. 2 and 25). Although simply and gently expressive, this initial progression encapsulates both the tonal structure of this piece and its tonal relationship to the preceding one. It concretizes in music the way a particular emotionally charged image, embodied in a single progression, can gather and hold together the memories and anticipations of experiences separated in time. Within the context of the Gb-Major Impromptu itself, the turn to Eb minor for the middle section simply “composes out” the opening progression, unleashing the disturbing power of an element already present in the theme. In its direct emergence from the cadential Gb-major triad of the theme (mm. 24–25), this first Eb-minor chord of the middle section negates that Gb chord, swallowing it up. In the broader context incorporating the second impromptu, this turn perpetuates the crisis never resolved, or resolved only in a cataclysmic manner, in its predecessor. The agitated three-measure phrase that initiates this middle section (mm. 25–27), which responds to its own first hammering whole notes with breathless streams of quarter notes, con-


137

veys an anxiety appropriate to the return of such a harrowing memory. The two accented long notes only gain in dramatic force through their association with the wild middle section of the second impromptu, to which they refer even more clearly than does the opening theme of the third. The coda begins with a momentarily darkening return, now of course in Gb, of the transition that linked the B section to the return of the A theme (see ex. 2.2b). Beneath the long, swelling repeated Gbs in the melody, the bass descends one last time by step to Cb (see ex. 5.3, mm. 74–76), twice tonicizing its minor triad—the minor subdominant, as in that earlier retransition. By now, Cb major, the “proper” subdominant, has fully played out a dramatic role in this impromptu. In one way, this concluding emphasis of Cb minor lays that proper subdominant to rest while also recovering, in order to lay it to final rest as well, the memory of the Cb-minor episodes of the Eb-Major Impromptu. In addition, after the prolonged emphases throughout the Gb-Major Impromptu of Eb in both Eb-minor and Cb-major contexts, Cb minor brings about a complementary prolongation of the Ebb, the negation of Eb minor’s leading tone. From the resolving tonic triad, the same phrase begins again (see ex. 5.3, m. 78), this time breaking open at its climax into a minor Neapolitan sixth (Abb, notated as G, in m. 80). One role of this potentially devastating harmony is to reinforce the Ebb with even greater intensity, retaining it through all three measures that precede the German sixth. Another is to recall, for one last time, the aura of the Eb-Major Impromptu’s middle section (see ex. 5.2).8 A third role, admittedly far more hypothetical, may be to recall G minor itself from the second B section of the first impromptu (see ex. 5.5b) in anticipation of the soon-to-be-heard recollection of the Ab major of the first B section as the key of the ensuing and final impromptu.9

XII After the opening G of the first impromptu, all four of the opus 90 impromptus begin quietly; but only in the last does the character of this quietness draw upon silence (see ex. 3.6). The initial melodic gesture from 3 to 5 may recall the opening of the second impromptu, but in introducing a silence, this opening generates an opposite e¤ect: instead of releasing itself

138


into a luminous stream of sound, buoyed up by a dancing accompanimental pattern in every measure, the fourth impromptu begins as if searching tentatively, even if rhythmically, to illuminate the space into which it ventures, and so to find its way forward. Perhaps what it searches for is the lost innocence of the second. Each discrete two-measure gesture, after surging in its first measure, withdraws into silence by the end of its second. Even the chordal gestures (which first appear in mm. 5–6; see ex. 3.6), although not ending with rests, are separated from the ensuing arpeggiations by the silent spaces necessitated by shifts of harmony and register. In their quarter-note rhythm, mostly in repeated notes or conjunct motion, these chordal gestures once again reach back even beyond the memory of the second impromptu to that of the first. The gestural articulation arising from the silences brings into relief the asymmetry of the groupings, in which two arpeggiations, always of an ephemeral tonic falling into its dominant, are followed by a single, harmonically more exploratory chordal gesture. Only the fourth of these three-gestured groups leads to a new continuation (described in chapter 3, section V). This longer chordal passage, extended by the semicadence to eight measures, strongly suggests tonal stabilization in Ab, but not yet in the major. The ensuing first measures in the tonic major reinforce the newly established hypermetrical pattern of four-measure groups for the following music. In the two such groups that immediately follow (see ex. 3.6, mm. 39–46), a shorter figure derived from the opening arpeggiation articulates a harmonic change in every measure. The high points of the shorter arpeggiated figures, rising measureby-measure from 5 to 8, bring back in a high register the tenor melody of the second impromptu’s opening measures in a recovery of what there proved only illusory. The recall in these same measures of the left-hand rhythm of the second impromptu, here reiterated in every measure for the first time in the fourth, makes the possibility of an intentional reference especially plausible. From the rhythmic and harmonic pattern of these four-measure groups, enlivened by this subliminal memory, emerges a melody in the tenor register, evocative of distant horns and bringing a recognizable theme for the first time into the way-seeker’s awareness. Repeated, the melody extends itself, rising, growing louder and thus nearer, and climaxing in the subdominant. Both in the emergence of the major from the minor opening and in the evoca-


139

tion of horn calls, this impromptu once again recalls “Suleika I” (see ex. 4.3). Unlike the “Unfinished” Symphony, however, this music perfectly mirrors the e¤ects of the healing power of love in that song’s text. As I have already implied, the initial search in the fourth impromptu for both tonality and theme and the first emergence of that theme as a distant horn call create an apt context for the return of “Der Wanderer” in the impromptu’s trio. In the opus 90 impromptus, Schubert’s first instrumental work composed under the spell of Winterreise, an association between the winter cycle’s protagonist and that of “Der Wanderer” thus already becomes apparent. The echoes of “Der Wanderer” in the trio of the Ab-Major Impromptu suggest a return to loneliness and alienation—not to the utter desolation of Winterreise, but instead to the kind of loneliness still activated by personal feeling from which the “Wanderer” Fantasy has shown a way out. In relationship to the alienation of Winterreise, that of “Der Wanderer” is animated as if in a return of spring, a thawing of the frozen landscape that allows for a resurgence of conscious feeling. In this way, the last of the opus 90 impromptus, in drawing on the gestures and textures of “Der Wanderer,” throws o¤ the aura of Winterreise that still pervades the first.

140


c hap t e r

6

Displacing the Sonata The Opus 142 Impromptus

I In his review of Schubert’s second set of impromptus, published as opus 142 in 1838, Robert Schumann wrote: Few authors leave their seal so indelibly stamped on their works as he; every page of the first two impromptus whispers “Franz Schubert”—as we know him in his numberless moods, as he charms us, deceives us, captivates us again, so we find him here. Yet I can hardly believe that Schubert really entitled these movements “Impromptus.” The first is obviously the first movement of a sonata; it is so thoroughly developed and rounded out that there can scarcely be any doubt of it. I consider the second impromptu the second movement of the same sonata. In key and character it exactly fits with the first.1

Schumann is willing, although reluctant, to regard the last impromptu of the four as the finale of the sonata: “though the key would tend to confirm . . . [that it is the finale], the superficiality of its entire conception argues against it.”2 He does not grant the third impromptu a place in this scheme, however; instead he dismisses it as “undistinguished variations on an undistinguished theme” (see ex. 6.8a). But for Alfred Einstein, writing just over a century later, all four of these impromptus have gained admission to the sonata of Schumann’s imagining.3 Their inclusion depends on some reappraisals of their form and character: the second (see ex. 6.6) becomes a saraband, taking the place of a minuet; the variations can now serve as the

141

slow movement; and Einstein hears the fourth (see exx. 6.9–10) as a rondo, thus instantiating a form often chosen by Schubert for his finales. Walther Dürr, writing much more recently, closely agrees with Einstein’s assessments.4 Schumann acknowledges his appraisal to be presumption, a conjecture that only examination of the original manuscript of opus 142 could verify. Today we, unlike Schumann, have access to a manuscript, and, unlike opus 90, it bears the title “Vier Impromptus” in Schubert’s own hand.5 The publisher of the earlier opus, Tobias Haslinger, may have suggested its title, but Schubert seems at the very least to have accepted it and to have applied it himself to the second set of pieces. On the other hand, we know from Schubert’s correspondence with a potential publisher that he was willing to have the impromptus of the second set published “either separately or together.”6 We also know that Schubert at one point numbered the impromptus of this set as 5 through 8, as if he intended them as a continuation of the first set. Neither the letter nor the numbering, however, has unambiguous implications. He might have been willing to sacrifice the integrity of the set if doing so would lead to publication. And the numbering of the pieces might mean only that he regarded the pieces in the second set as similar enough to those of the first to be counted in their company. The fact remains that Schubert wrote out the second set, like the first, in its own separate manuscript, and that like the first it makes enough musical sense as a set to suggest that Schubert must have conceived it as one. But what made Schumann hear the two opening numbers of opus 142 as sonata movements? In his admiration of these pieces, he probably wanted, for one, to confer on them the enduring aesthetic status of the sonata. What presumably initiated this specific conjecture were certain features that the first impromptu, in F minor (see exx. 6.1–5), shares with none of Schubert’s other “shorter” pieces. The F-Minor Impromptu incorporates an apparent sonata exposition, which makes a transition from a first theme in F minor to a second theme (or group of themes) in the expected Ab major, and an apparent recapitulation, in which the transition and the second themes remain in the tonic. Presumably, what allowed Schumann’s conjecture to take root and, eventually, to embrace the entire set, are the ways in which the four pieces complement each other. In Einstein’s account, the return of the opening theme at the end of the first impromptu “cries aloud to be carried further to a log-

142


ical conclusion, a function which is met by the Allegretto in A-flat major.”7 The final impromptu not only returns to the tonic of the first, F minor, but also balances the weight of the first, both in its wildly energetic character and through its extended middle section and coda. The variations, in the meantime, introduce a character that is lighter than what prevails in the first two impromptus; although formally admissible into a Schubert sonata only as a slow movement, they also fill the role, through their pervasive playfulness, of a scherzo. If the manuscript bore no title, would these features permit the inference that Schubert intended these pieces, or at the very least the first two of them, as sonata movements? They would probably figure as credible sonata movements for some imaginary composer of Schubert’s generation, and even more so for one of Schumann’s. But one can only assess their plausibility as Schubert sonata movements by comparing them to the movements Schubert actually included in his mature sonatas or in his closely related chamber and symphonic works.8 None of the first movements of these works lacks a development section; the first impromptu not only lacks a development but also incorporates in its stead a lyrical episode in the rounded binary form characteristic of a trio section. Unlike any of Schubert’s developments, this quasi-trio is self-contained, beginning in Ab minor and returning at its end to the Ab major of the second theme. This section returns complete, in the tonic, at the impromptu’s end, as if it had really belonged all along to the exposition and was now simply playing out its role in the recapitulation. But even before this “trio” emerges for the first time, that exposition has articulated the relationship between its first and second themes in a way utterly uncharacteristic of Schubert’s mature sonata forms. This idiosyncratic thematic articulation is the background against which the substitution of a selfcontained trio for a development section must be understood. If the second impromptu fills the role of the dance movement in this supposed sonata—as its symmetrical minuet and trio form and even its rhythmic character suggest—then its placement as the second movement is unique in Schubert’s sonata forms in the last ten years of his life.9 If instead it fills the role of a slow movement, then the persistence of a rhythmic groundmotive throughout its entire ternary form and the rounded binary form of each of the sections of that ternary make it unique among the slow movements of the same period. Variations, on the other hand, do occur as slow

d i s p l ac i n g t h e s o nata

143

movements in this period, but none incorporates dancing or scherzando elements to quite the extent that the Bb-Major Impromptu does.10 Nor do any of the slow movements—or, for that matter, minuets or scherzos—written after the “Unfinished” Symphony occur in the major subdominant. The fourth impromptu, finally, is no rondo: formally, its theme is an elaborate hybrid that cannot be simply classified as either rounded binary or ternary; only one contrasting episode, albeit a long and complex one, occurs before the theme returns, and at the end comes an extended coda that, unlike those of any of Schubert’s concluding rondos, introduces seemingly new material rather than returning to the opening theme or to an earlier episode.

II Even these superficial observations make it clear that the standards that made it possible for Schumann and those influenced by his critique to hear these impromptus as sonata movements were not Schubert’s standards for such movements. The conception of opus 142 as a sonata is easily enough dismissed, finally, to be of little interest in itself. It can, however, lead to a more interesting question: that of whether the ideas and procedures that Schubert associated with the sonata might have had a role in the creation of an alternative—a work in some respects like a sonata, but only enough like one to stand as its opposite. Even though tonally exploratory, almost all of Schubert’s mature compositions in sonata forms are still structured, like those of his Viennese predecessors, upon the polarity between tonic and dominant or, for some movements in the minor, tonic and mediant. (In his three-key expositions, for example, the dominant is given a degree of stability never granted to the second key.) As with these predecessors, certain cadential strategies are especially highlighted to establish, if not always to dramatize, this polarity. The dominant or mediant at which the exposition ultimately arrives firmly establishes itself through its own predominant and dominant—and thus through a prolonged half cadence of some kind—and confirms itself not only through a strongly marked full cadence but also through ensuing closing material. In Schubert’s opening sonata allegro movements a development still always follows the exposition. Sometimes it is enigmatic and seem-

144


ingly nondevelopmental in character, but it always, in the end, can be seen only as a development. At the end of the development invariably comes a drama of recapitulation, a moment when the dominant of the home key reestablishes itself, making palpable the imminence of recapitulatory return.11 In its cadential strategies, the first impromptu of opus 142 consistently invokes these norms; then, in one way or another, it just as consistently subverts them. Within its “exposition,” its second key, Ab major, soon establishes and then repeatedly reestablishes itself, but it never confirms itself here as firmly as does the second key in Schubert’s sonatas: instead of closing material, this impromptu has only an immediate continuation into the ensuing trio-like section (see ex. 6.3, mm. 66¤.). Not only is there no development; there is also, at the end of this “trio” that takes its place, no drama of recapitulation, but instead a simple return, almost without warning, of the opening theme (see ex. 6.5). Unusual cadential strategies also characterize the later impromptus of the set. As if in response to the never fully satisfied cadential urgency of the first impromptu, the opening theme of the second avoids any strong cadential articulation until the end of its fourth “phrase” (see ex. 6.6, m. 16). That of the third impromptu (see ex. 6.8a), by contrast, might be said to overemphasize its root-position dominant, to be unproblematically intent on closure from its very beginning. The last begins, like the first, with a cadentially closed, self-contained idea (see ex. 6.9), but then departs from and returns to this opening idea in ever-widening circles. Its middle section (see ex. 6.10a–d) takes cadential evasion to unfamiliar extremes, subsuming phrase after phrase within simple, extraordinarily prolonged harmonic progressions. While the impromptus of the earlier opus 90 experiment with di¤erent ways of establishing their opening keys, those of this second set explore states of harmonically suspended animation within more conventionally established keys, throwing into question—or at other times exaggerating—their cadential confirmation. These cadential strategies derive their e¤ect, in part, from the ways they initially contrast, in the first impromptu, with the cadential maneuvers that articulate the tonal polarities of Classical sonata forms. They address, and find alternatives to, the tonal procedures of the sonata, and in this respect they open a new and in some ways comparable aesthetic domain—a domain that, paradoxically, Schumann himself had entered by 1838, in a very di¤erent way, through his early piano works.


145

No. 2

No. 1

Fm More closed-off and enigmatic than a “first theme”

A

(Search for memories)

AbM

∗ AbM Crucial chromatic “link” and Cannot ca“beyond” prodence until Fm gressions return incorporated from No. 1 through “link” (Making peace progression∗ with memory)

A

Fm

(B1–B2–B3)

C (not a development)

Form

↓ 3 motive New cadences V7–i of Gbm incorporate Gb “Beyond” into bass

DbM “Brook” figuration over same “saraband” bass as in A

B

↓

Gbm Gbm “Gateway chord”

DbM

Fm ↓ AbM

Fm → FM B and C exactly as before, but in the home key

A FM Fm V7–i of Gbm V7/n–n “Beyond”

Fm ↓

↓3 motive SHORT AbM CODA “Link”∗ Db–Gb “Beyond” A Exactly repeated

A

C

B (B1–B2–B3)

A Fm

Dbm A/Bbb Climax, suspended motion

Abm Abm— AbM AbM ↓ ↓ No articulated tranV7–i of sition and arrival. CbM Bbbm “Second theme” always V7/n–n already there; keeps “Beyond” “Duet arriving but is never texture” “Link”∗ → fully confirmed No drama of recapitulation

Fm →

B

The Opus 142 Impromptus as a Cycle

Impromptu number Key

figure 6.1

↓

† “Tag” gives narrative feel to theme.

V/f V/f

i/f i/f

Fm Breaking open of Fm A and B material from No. 1

Dancing, “embodied” recollections of No. 1, with elements of No. 2

I/A I/A

A1

BbM Only cadences when vii°/F is incorporated

↓ 3 motive

Fm Further expansion incorporating BbM–minor

A2

↓ 3 motive

AbM–m– M–m Opening and reopening, never cadencing

“pre-B”

TAG†

Var. 2

Abm Recalls “duet” of No. 1 Only cadences after E–A/Bbb harmonies are incorporated

B

BbM TAG† BbM

Theme (cf. Entr’acte No. 2 from Rosamunde) Var. 1

Fm

Theme and Variations (Simple memory: an actual story)

BbM

∗ “Link” progression:

No. 4

No. 3

Var. 4

AbM Again emphatically incorporating A/Bbb in order to cadence

Fm Exactly repeated

A1

Fm

A2

TAG → becomes transition chord

Bbm TAG† GbM

“post-B”

TAG†

Var. 3

Coda

DbM ↓ → Fm Key + progression from “trio” of No. 2

Coda

BbM TAG†

Var. 5

Already with Haydn and then, especially, with Beethoven, large-scale coherence and cyclic organization came to play a more and more explicit role in the aesthetics of the sonata. In view of Schubert’s preoccupation with the subtler forms of cyclic organization in his mature sonatas and formally similar chamber and symphonic works, we might only expect that he would have organized in similar ways any works for which he envisaged comparable status. Opus 90, which is on my account a masterfully achieved early experiment in progressive tonality, provides one example of such organization. Opus 142, much more like a sonata in its overall tonal plan, again shows signs of cyclic organization through motivic and idiosyncratic tonal elements common to all four of its pieces (as shown in fig. 6.1). One of these, especially, provides an especially potent link because of both the wealth and the ambiguity of its harmonic implications: a chromatic filling in of the whole step between Eb and F (transposed in the final impromptu to Bb and C), either in an ascending form with E (Eb–E–F, henceforth motive y) or in a descending one with Fb (F–Fb–Eb, henceforth motive z); and an associated stalling of this motion on the chromatic passing tone (in this case always notated as E), which becomes redefined in the second and fourth impromptus as a dominant that makes A into a momentary but climactic local tonic. As we shall soon see, the ascending form of this motive is elaborated as a specific, more fully defined progression that returns (like those already discussed in chapter 2), to link the second impromptu dramatically to the first.

III In at least one respect, the first impromptu of opus 142 begins in a conventional way (ex. 6.1): the two phrases of its theme balance each other as antecedent and consequent and thus together make up a parallel period. The antecedent of this period begins with an imposing basic idea: from the broadly spaced, forcefully arpeggiated first chord a descending melodic chain unfurls, its entire length spiked with dotted rhythms. The opening melodic C is almost too isolated to contribute to the establishment of a distinctive opening motive. Nor does the ensuing chain of undi¤erentiated dotted rhythms generate such a motivic presence; it sounds, instead, like improvisation. Whether or not one can claim this opening complex to be unique in its

148


example 6.1

Impromptu in F Minor, op. 142, no. 1, mm. 1–34

A Allegro moderato.

cresc.

4

3

3

3

3

7

cresc.

10

3

3 3

3

3

3

cresc.

3

13

(transition) 16

(continued)


B1

22

25

28

B2

cresc.

31

elusive thematic character, the way the rest of the impromptu relates to it gives it a special place in the instrumental music of Schubert’s maturity. In virtually every other movement of this music, either the opening theme or a motivic complex recognizably derived from it plays a continuing role in the passages that follow. Virtually every one of his sonata allegro movements, for example, audibly builds the transition to its second thematic group

150


on motivic elements from the first group.12 But in this impromptu, once the opening theme reaches the full cadence of its periodic structure in measure 13, it withdraws, so to speak, from view, merely setting an ominous stage for the ensuing music rather than persisting as an active presence within it. What immediately follows, then, is a new beginning. The new music is much more tenuous than the opening theme, both in the quietly measured tremolo of its upper parts and the hesitant but persistent syncopations of its lower ones, but at the same time it bears greater promise of thematic germination. On considered hearing, this new passage reveals close ties with the opening complex: it begins by again melodically emphasizing the fifth scale degree and its upper neighbor, and its first harmonic move momentarily tonicizes the subdominant. Like the opening melodic chain, it not only incorporates but also especially emphasizes Gb, its Neapolitan degree, in its melodic descent to the tonic. Its syncopations echo and, at the same time, assimilate into ongoing motion the violent o¤beat chord that first constrains the unfurling of the opening’s melodic chain in measure 4 and then arrests its more swirling descent in measure 10. Although it completely avoids overt motivic reference to the opening theme, therefore, this new beginning nonetheless remains heavily under its shadow. Through the relatively covert musical connections enumerated above, that brooding theme, only just completed but now abandoned, casts its aura over the new beginning. I shall argue that it thus becomes, in immediate retrospect, a potential emblem for the all-pervasive power of lost or unarticulated memory. Only eight measures after the new beginning in measure 13, this music arrives at a full cadence in the relative major, the tonal goal of its exposition. It also clearly foreshadows, from the moment of that same beginning, its second theme. No other exposition in Schubert’s mature music so quickly makes a full cadence in the key of its second theme, nor does any other of these expositions initially depart from its tonic through material that so audibly anticipates that second theme. In a sense, both the second theme and its key have already arrived by measure 21, yet as the music continues, both keep on arriving. Certainly by tonal criteria, perhaps even by motivic ones, the second thematic area of this exposition might be said to begin in this measure and to comprise three second themes, all variants of one another. The first two variants of the second theme both begin with two-measure


151

cadential subphrases in the manner of codettas (mm. 21–23, 30–32), reinforcing the tonal arrivals in Ab major from which they ensue. The third and final variant (ex. 6.2, mm. 45¤.) also begins with a cadential idea, now a fully articulated cadential progression that for the first time incorporates and emphasizes its subdominant harmony. This is the first of these variants not to be introduced through a full tonic cadence; instead, the preceding variant, through its climax in bare parallel octaves, has invoked the convention of anticipating the arrival of a new theme by dramatizing and prolonging its dominant. In this case, of course, the dominant so dramatized and prolonged is threateningly unfamiliar, even though earlier digressions to Bb minor have foreshadowed it; the familiar dominant emerges from this dominant, as if from under a cloud, only at the last moment (mm. 43–44). The first appearance here of motive z is thus especially marked: at the last moment it rescues the music from the wrong dominant. In these ways, this music accumulates arrival upon arrival, and, in its untiring attempts to confirm every arrival, cadential gesture upon cadential gesture. Almost from the moment of the completion of the opening period (see ex. 6.1, m. 13), both the second theme and its key are always already within hearing but always also awaiting further actualization. Through this pattern of repeated tonal and thematic arrival, with each arrival at first confirmed but then threateningly negated so as to require subsequent rearrival, this impromptu mimics the cycles of illusory certainty and apprehensive doubt that are characteristic of a quest for elusive personal knowledge. It aspires to the formal and dramatic definition for which the sonata had become the vehicle, but it makes its distinctive aesthetic e¤ect by not achieving that definition. Each arrival feels less tremulous than does its predecessor, but the need immediately to reconfirm each arrival through a further cadential gesture suggests overcompensation for lingering uncertainty. Even the final arrival of the second theme, emerging into ringing, full-voiced harmony from the bare parallel octaves of the deceptive dominant prolongation, does not break free of such overdetermined cadential reiteration. Indeed, for all its reassuring glow, the second theme never advances beyond a mere celebration of such reiteration (ex. 6.2, mm. 45¤.). Not only does each phrase of this final version insist on its dominant-to-tonic cadence by immediately repeating it in a two-measure extension, the same cadential phrase, in its

152


example 6.2 43

Impromptu in F Minor, op. 142, no. 1, mm. 43–50 B3

z

sempre legato

47

now expanded six-measure form, repeats itself and then repeats itself again, growing higher and fuller, and the last time longer, but garnering only additional textural, rather than harmonic, substance. This culminating passage a‹rms itself joyously, but it can never engender a complementary phrase for its already-cadential opening one. It thus consists in substance of only this single phrase, and in never finding its way to another it never achieves the correspondingly full melodic and harmonic range that would enable it to avert a lingering threat of disillusionment or loss of assurance and become fully realized.

IV Once again, the cadence that concludes this quasi-exposition (ex. 6.3, mm. 64¤.) is not articulated in the manner of any of the concluding cadences of Schubert’s actual sonata expositions. As already mentioned, no codetta or closing theme follows it; instead, its concluding sixteenth-note figuration simply resumes at the moment of its resolution, persisting in continuous, gradually quieting arpeggiations of the tonic triad. Within the near-stillness of the arpeggiation, Ab major turns suddenly minor to introduce a new episode. In taking the place of a confirming series of closural gestures, this new music implies not simply the new beginning that would follow a more


153

example 6.3


8va

63

sinistra

67

C (“trio”) decresc.

appassionato

70

fulfilled ending, but a beginning over again, a return to the aura of the nearly forgotten opening theme. In the minor and obsessed with its fifth degree, it makes a new attempt to draw something motivically and expressively distinctive from that characterologically somewhat elusive material. In the metaphorical terms already suggested, the memories over which the opening theme broods have not yet fully disclosed themselves. Like the problematic view of this impromptu as a movement in sonata allegro form, the explicit interpretation of it as a musical exploration of memory—perhaps at least as problematic a view for some readers—originates with Schumann, for whom “the whole seems to have been written during an hour of su¤ering as though in meditation on the past.”13 Interestingly, it is just those subversions of such a presumed sonata in this impromptu that make so plausible Schumann’s further hearing of it as an evocation of memory. Gülke has already elaborated provocatively on this interpretation: he hears the entire “exposition” as anticipation, as a “not-yet,” and the new Ab-minor section (the beginning-over-again in measure 69, after the second

154


theme’s final cadence) as a “no-longer,” the final stage of a search for an objectively irretrievable memory. Hearing the entire “exposition” primarily as preparation for this central episode, as “bringing it to light,” he then hears the episode itself as implying an underlying melody that it can never make fully explicit, but can only approximate through melodic fragments calling out in counterpoint to each other. For him, this composite of fragments becomes the musical equivalent of the insight that the act of remembering always transforms (and so leaves in partial obscurity) the memories it brings to awareness.14 Gülke finds apt terms for the tragic sense this impromptu conveys, through specifically describable tonal means, of a striving after goals whose fulfillment can be fully imagined but never fully attained. The isolation of the opening theme from the following music suggests a fateful setting for that music, a powerful and irretrievable past, and a protagonist in the thrall of that past, without articulate access to it.The acts of remembrance that Schumann’s and Gülke’s descriptions invoke are attempts to forge routes of access. Schumann’s metaphorical description consists only of a single characterizing statement, but Gülke bases his more elaborate description on a narration of the musical events of the piece. Within the Ab-minor section itself, however, Gülke does not take continuing musical developments into consideration; his account of this section gives the impression merely of a striving of memory that is unfulfilled and can never be fulfilled, and of an eventual surrender of the striving protagonist to either resignation or disillusionment. His interpretation seems to derive no new inflection from the harrowing intrusion of minor Neapolitan harmony after the double bar (ex. 6.4, mm. 88–90), for example, or from the ensuing transformation of the Ab-minor material into the major, a transformation that conveys a sense, at least as long as it remains in e¤ect, of reintegration. This episode begins not only with a return to the minor but with an accompanimental figure based on the same upward right-hand arpeggiation, from fifth to fifth, as the impromptu’s opening chord (see ex. 6.3, mm. 69¤.). I have already mentioned that the melody, too, returns to an emphasis of the fifth scale degree, now making that degree into the culminating and focal pitch of a rising three-note motive. As in the opening theme, this degree is thus the first point of melodic emphasis. Once again, it stands somewhat alone, but the rising upbeat figure that precedes it brings it into clearer


155

example 6.4


85

88

E

F

decresc.

E(=F ) 91

94

97

E

motivic definition: it becomes the focus of a calling figure. It continues, in e¤ect, to resound while the left hand answers it, rather than dissipating itself into a troubled melodic descent like that of the opening theme. Thus it links itself, as part of an implicitly ongoing melody, with the ensuing, rhythmically similar gestures in the same register. The texture of this passage suggests a duet, but as Gülke observes, the melodic fragments that call to each other across the accompanimental stream are too incomplete to suggest separate and independent protagonists. The two intermittent but regularly alternating strands of melody instead suggest di¤erent, only partly articulated voices within a single lone protagonist, voices representing di¤erent inner personae that call out to each other, depending on each other for fulfillment. In this way, for example, the call of remembrance in Gülke’s account strives for completion through the recovery, which is never fully possible on this account, of the voices of vividly specific memories. In the return from the relative major (Cb) to the tonic minor (Ab) at the double bar (m. 84), another rhythmic element, a quarter-note afterbeat, is recalled from the opening theme (ex. 6.4, mm. 85¤.). First introduced in measure 4 (see ex. 6.1) to arrest the momentum of the downward melodic motion, this rhythm then makes its motivic impression on the melody in the following measure.15 Now joined to a pervasively recurring three-note upbeat figure, it brings, through the new five-note motive thus engendered, a further fusion of this episode with the opening theme and a corresponding impression of the deepening of memory. With the sudden stalling of the melody on the E, the lower voice takes over the last note of this new fivenote motive, forcefully accenting it and holding on to it as urgent syncopation. The upper voice responds with a dotted rhythm, again drawn from the opening theme, that heightens still more the urgency of the E. For a brief span, upper and lower voices coalesce into a single strand of melody that sustains focus on this now defamiliarized, unsettling E. The context of the sudden chromatic upward shift of harmony brings an atmosphere of anxious expectancy to these rhythmic recollections, as in the setting of the opening stanzas of “Die junge Nonne.” Here, perhaps, it is the aura of remembrance itself, emerging in the turn to E, that plays the cathartic role of a divine presence, enabling the intruding pitch to split magically, thus receding as an Fb in the lower voice and streaming upward as an E in the upper one. Motives y and z converge to deepen the urgency of this revelatory moment. The


157

example 6.5


112

cresc.

A major

V4 /F minor 3

115

cresc.

F minor

upper voice emerges from the E into a virtually continuous melody (ex. 6.4, mm. 91–95) that the lower voice comes close to supporting as a simple bass, without ambiguously continuing as a would-be melodic counterpart. The return of the opening material of this episode in the tonic major, here Ab (ex. 6.4, mm. 98¤.), is the only purely diatonic passage in the piece. The upper and lower parts call to each other again while fulfilling each other melodically in a way they have not before. As long as it lasts, this culmination is as cathartic as is Schubert’s setting of the young nun’s marriage to her savior.The diatonic purity of this passage emerges in special relief against the anguished chromaticism that has preceded it. It also sets into relief the subsequent sudden return of a very di¤erent E and of the motive, y, that is associated with it, immediately negating Ab major through a V F of F minor in the ensuing retransition to the impromptu’s opening theme (ex. 6.5, mm. 112–115).Tonally, the demand for recovery of the tonic and subsequent balance in the tonic, a compositional strategy assumed for virtually all the instrumental music of Schubert’s epoch, necessitates this return. Dramatically, however, the way the voices of the duet strive for a fusion that remains partly unfulfilled also motivates this return, through which the Ab-major catharsis comes to seem, in retrospect, partly illusory. This recapitulation of the first impromptu—this return from the Ab-major ending of the trio-like episode to the F-minor opening theme—is unlike any of Schubert’s recapitulations in sonata allegro form. In virtually every such

158


sonata movement, he dramatically articulates, and usually prolongs, the dominant in root position. Here, the Ab-major harmony simply dissolves into a momentary passing VF of F minor, undramatized by any marked change of movement or texture (ex. 6.5). Through this suppression of recapitulatory drama, the return of the opening theme as an unchanging entity takes on an inexorable prominence. When this theme returns it is still in isolation, exhibiting no change whatsoever that might reflect the influence of the music that has intervened since its first occurrence. The one alteration—harsh broken octaves that reinforce the descending chain in the consequent—only magnifies the di¤erences between this theme and all the intervening material. As already argued, the theme is impenetrable, signifying a closed past and a fateful setting for the music that follows. The isolation of this theme may poetically motivate what might otherwise seem the merely mechanical tonic recapitulation not only of the entire “exposition” but also of the entire ensuing trio. The literal repetition of all this music may both symbolize and illustratively enact its thralldom to the past, which is embodied in the opening theme. At the same time, Schubert’s sectionalization of this and other movements of his music, as well as the full repetition of long sections, can obscure the drama that evolves through these sections. In the case of this impromptu, the drama is generated by the ways in which both the “exposition” and the trio articulate developing responses to the inscrutability of the opening theme.

V Gentle but resolute in the regular reiterations of its rhythmic pattern, the theme of the second impromptu, in Ab major (ex. 6.6), emerges from the final chord of its predecessor.The use of the word “emerges” here may seem an act of interpretive presumption.The juxtaposition of these pieces in Schubert’s manuscript cannot automatically be assumed to imply a compositional relationship between them. But clearly Schumann, and later Einstein, felt such a relationship strongly enough simply to assert its existence. Their feeling surely derives in part from the close relationship of the opening sounds of the Ab-Major Impromptu to the final sounds of the one in F minor.These chords are in the same register, and they share almost the same voicing.16


159

example 6.6


Allegretto. sempre legato

7

I 14

V4 /vi 3

20

26

32

vi *

The recognition of another, less immediately apparent relationship supports this relationship with a deeper, more fully articulated one. In the AbMajor Impromptu, a distinctive harmonic progression derived from the FMinor Impromptu occurs just before the first full cadence (mm. 13–15). The progression, which incorporates motive y, introduces the submediant harmony, F minor, through its own passing VF arising over a stepwise descent in the bass. The progression owes its poignancy, in the context of this theme, to several easily recognizable circumstances. It occurs in a completely diatonic context and thus brings to the piece its first chromatic pitch, the E that is so marked in the first impromptu. It also introduces the first nontonic or nondominant harmonies to this harmonically almost minimalist setting, and thus for the first time it furnishes the harmonic background for a full cadential progression. At the same time, the descent of the bass contrasts markedly with the upward circling, almost unvaryingly repeated fourmeasure pattern that precedes it. To an extraordinary degree, this progression becomes the focal moment of this theme, the moment that enables it to cadence after three subphrases in which the bass has been too closely tied to the melody and too given over to reiterating the root and third of the tonic triad through passing and neighbor motions to bring about any true harmonic arrival. At the same time that it brings harmonic definition to this theme, this progression makes explicit an expressive ambiguity. On the one hand, this theme conveys, from the very beginning, an a‹rmative feeling through its purely diatonic major harmony, its clear melodic emphasis of the components of the tonic triad, and its poised and regular rhythm. On the other hand, the theme also conveys a questioning feeling through hesitations in its basic rhythmic pattern, the expressive highlighting of each second hesitation as the tentative resolution of a first-beat dissonance (mm. 2, 6, 10, 14), and the avoidance, throughout the first three subphrases, of any strong harmonic progression. It is thus a theme subtly imbued, from its opening gesture, with the kind of expressive ambiguity that is invoked in “Mein Traum” and epitomized by the apt, if maudlin, epithet “smiling through tears” that is sometimes applied to Schubert’s music. In the first impromptu, it is this same progression—from an Ab-major triad in root position through a dominant four-three of F to an F-minor triad, also in root position—that links the lyrical trio-like episode to the re-


161

turn of the opening theme (see ex. 6.5, mm. 112–115). In that impromptu, too, this progression introduces the first chromatic pitch and the first change in the character of the bass after a purely diatonic passage in an Ab major of almost artless simplicity. In the first impromptu this progression happens only here, at the midpoint of the piece. Because it negates the key that has just recently been regained, it is a dramatic turning point. By making the definitive return to the F-minor tonic at this moment, the progression both usurps, while it essentially suppresses, the harmonic role of a development section. At the same time, it encapsulates the harmonic organization of the entire impromptu. In this way the opening theme of the second impromptu highlights, as its focal moment, a progression that is already central to the first in both position and significance. The second impromptu thus reaches the first a‹rmation of its Ab major, its first full tonic cadence, only by incorporating the same F minor that it attempts to leave behind. This theme also resonates with memories of another passage from the first impromptu: the final, most fulfilled variant of its second theme (see ex. 6.2, mm. 45–50). The first measure of the second impromptu exactly recalls the voicing of that theme’s cadential measures (mm. 48, 50), and, appearances notwithstanding, comes close to recovering the feeling of their melody, which rises from the fifth to the tonic. The second measure of the second impromptu then recalls the precadential measures of that earlier theme (mm. 47, 49) in much the same ways. By incorporating the precadential submediant and its applied dominant, the opening theme of the second impromptu brings to the memory of that earlier Ab-major music a fullness of resolution that it has previously lacked. Becoming suddenly forte and beginning with a quicker upbeat, the music after the double bar responds exuberantly to this first full cadence of the second impromptu, as if now imagining release from the memory on which it has drawn. This passage culminates in the first subdominant harmony of the impromptu, brought into relief through its deeper bass, its thicker doubling, and its fortissimo dynamic. These mutually reinforcing emphases already suggest a possible tonicization for this Db-major harmony, a possibility that is reinforced by the Gb-minor harmony, the minor subdominant, in measure 23 (ex. 6.6). Like the focal progression in the Adagio of the C-Minor Sonata discussed in chapter 2 (see ex. 2.1a), which quietly hesitates over

162


the very same harmonies, this minor plagal tonicization of the subdominant carries no unambiguous implication for harmonic continuation. The emergence of this Gb-minor chord after the double bar thus again introduces a shadow into the music. As in the progression leading to the cadence before the double bar, the Gb-minor chord also brings the first chromaticism to an otherwise purely diatonic passage. Like that earlier introduction of chromaticism, this one also draws on a harmonic memory from the first impromptu. The recollection is most easily recognized through a comparison of measures 22 through 24 of the second impromptu (ex. 6.6) with measures 201 through 203 of the first. The latter occur in the central portion of the recapitulation of the lyrical, trio-like episode and parallel measures 88 through 90 (see ex. 6.4) from the same piece. Perhaps the second impromptu recalls and recontextualizes that moment—in which the two melodic strands of the trio briefly converge—not only to register the fragility of its own new-found exuberance but also to raise the hope, in response to that awareness, of another, more abiding catharsis. Accordingly, the music comes, in e¤ect, to a halt: it immediately withdraws from the Db-major triad, forcefully wrenching back (or being wrenched back to) the Gb-minor triad that preceded it, as if momentarily stunned enough by that unexpected chord to be compelled immediately to recall it, to secure it as the center of focus in an attempt to overcome the uncertainty it holds (ex. 6.6, m. 25). Through an elliptical return to Ab, this seemingly powerful tonicization of Db major, colored by its minor subdominant, dissipates like another potentially transformative but not fully apprehended memory. In its return, the opening theme now infuses the tonic-to-dominant bass descent of its earlier cadential progression with the chromatic pitches arising from the intervening episode, thus incorporating and expanding upon motive z. In so doing, it brings itself sooner to a full cadence (mm. 35–38). By drawing on the immediate recollection of this intervening episode, this cadential progression only extends and deepens the expressive range of the first one. Perhaps it conveys comfort and fulfillment in the confirmation of Ab major; at the same time, however, the earlier reaching of a cadence, the now chromatic bass, and the hesitation over A may also convey resignation, a feeling of yielding somewhat reluctantly to a tonality that is still not free of the shadow of troubled memory.


163

example 6.7


59

*“gateway” chord 64

68

8va

8va

72

76

*“gateway” chord decresc.

The trio (mm. 47¤.) returns to the Db major that was so exuberantly introduced then so cryptically withdrawn in the theme. The music now flows in a broad harmonic rhythm, at first with changes of harmony only in every other measure—its melody is not explicitly enunciated but instead emerges from the triplet figuration. At the double bar the seemingly self-su‹cient Db major turns suddenly to the Db minor that has already once taken the place of Db major in the first section, once again remembering and coming to terms with the memories that have intruded there. It accordingly reintroduces the Gb/F#-minor triad, a proper subdominant in Db minor (ex. 6.7, m. 67).Through its recovery in this key, this already striking, memory-laden harmony now becomes a gateway that opens out to a further destination. The music climbs, with resolute harmonic support, to an apotheosis powerfully reinforcing a tonic arrival in A/Bbb major through a fourfold ringing out of the impromptu’s opening, and always underlying, rhythmic motive. The same harmony persists in subsiding waves for seven full measures (mm. 69–75) before it recedes, back through the gateway of the Gb/F#-minor triad into Db territory. A quietly rumbling trill signals the closing of this gate, and the vision made manifest through the seven-measure stalling of harmonic and rhythmic motion on the A/Bbb-major sound recedes into memory. After the gate has closed, the opening music of the trio returns (mm. 79¤.) and is followed by the impromptu’s entire opening section. A heightened sense of repose arrives only in the four-measure coda, only at the very last moment allowing the impression that the revelations of the trio have indeed brought some resolution to the questions from which they arise.

VI Each of the first two impromptus of this set thus suggests, through subtle forms of discontinuity, ellipsis, or unrealized implication, a beyond—something not yet fully known, something awaiting disclosure. The first impromptu suggests this region beyond through the isolation of the opening theme and the apparent (although only apparent) motivic unrelatedness of this theme to the following music. This is music that, in one way or another, never fully actualizes itself: the second theme does not reach harmonic fulfill-


165

ment; the lyrical quasi-trio is melodically fragmented. The Ab-Major Impromptu suggests such an unknown region through sudden incursions of chromaticism into purely diatonic contexts (see ex. 6.6, mm. 14, 23), which are immediately followed, in seeming reaction, by dramatic gestural inflections and changes of musical character (mm. 17, 25). Even if these incursions did not have their source outside this piece—in the preceding one— their sudden poignancy might easily suggest such an outside source for them. The uncharted territory that Schubert suggests through these means might just as well be metaphysical as psychological: the A-major vision at the climax of the Ab-Major Impromptu could be a vision of a supreme force or being, and all the surrounding music, in its unusual degree of symmetry, a hallowed setting for that vision. One wonders if E. T. A. Ho¤mann would have found in these pieces a contemplative, more poetic than dramatic manifestation of the infinite longing that he identified as the essence of Romanticism. Whether or not Schumann would have found such psychological or metaphysical depth in these two pieces, he clearly found no such depth in the next one (ex. 6.8a): As for the third impromptu, I would hardly have taken it for a work by Schubert, except, perhaps, as something from his boyhood. It consists of undistinguished variations on an undistinguished theme. It shows none of the invention or imagination Schubert exercises so masterfully elsewhere, even in other variations.17

Schumann even recommends a performance of the other three pieces of opus 142 without the Bb-Major Impromptu, urging that through such a performance “we shall possess, if not a complete sonata, one more beautiful memory of Schubert.”18 Although one might easily dismiss Schumann’s disdain for these variations as overhasty or ill-considered, his intuition of the impromptu as a youthful work does correspond, however coincidentally, to the origin of their theme in an earlier (although not youthful) composition, the incidental music for Rosamunde, D. 797, which was composed in 1823 but was published far too late—in 1891—for Schumann to know it (ex. 6.8b). But he may well have known the String Quartet in A Minor, D. 804

166


example 6.8 a. Impromptu in Bb Major, op. 142, no. 3, mm. 1–18 Andante.

y 5

9

decresc.

13

cresc.

16

dim.

example 6.8 (continued) b. Incidental music to Rosamunde, D. 797, Entr’acte No. 2, mm. 1–44 Andantino.

9

17

cresc.

Minore I.

26

3

Fine 34

3

40

espress.

(published in 1824 as opus 29), which bases its slow movement on a transposition to C major of the Bb-major theme in its Rosamunde version. It is impossible to ascertain with certainty that Schumann knew this Rosamunde version even through the A-Minor Quartet. But we can speculate that if he did, he might not have dismissed that music as readily as he did its simpler variant. Unlike the opus 142 theme, the Rosamunde theme is unusually rich harmonically. In the impromptu Schubert removes both its early harmonic excursion to the supertonic and the harmonic ambiguities after the double bar. He does draw on a chromatic element for this new variant, one implicitly present but not highlighted in the earlier versions of this theme, but already of marked importance for its new context here: motive y (ex. 6.8a). He reintroduces this motive not to suggest or intensify a conflict as before, however, but to confirm the familiar. Here, in contrast to its roles in the first and second impromptu, motive y only reinforces and brings color to the arrivals of cadential, root-position dominant harmony (mm. 4, 8). The simple harmony helps to imbue the theme with a fresh naiveté. In the new continuation after the double bar, Schubert retains from the earlier theme an excursion to the submediant (mm. 9–10; cf. ex. 6.8b, mm. 21–23), but he both generates and relinquishes it quickly, without a trace of harmonic ambiguity. In the final phrase comes one further momentary tonicization, here of the subdominant (ex. 6.8a, mm. 13–14), but again it passes quickly, adorning the way to the cadential dominant without in any way obscuring it. Like the chromatic inflections in this theme, no other aspects of it introduce an impression of disjunction or unrealized implication. It is spirited, charming, and in no way mysterious. Why did Schubert simplify this theme? In its Rosamunde version, for one, it holds too much harmonic interest to leave much room for elaboration in ensuing variations. Even if these variations remain primarily figural, as Schubert’s do, any chromaticisms arising from the play of figuration would best emerge in relief against a simpler, less chromatically inflected harmonic background. Moreover, if repeats are taken in such a set of figural variations, every harmonic progression in the theme will return, largely unaltered, perhaps ten times. The drama of the progressions after the double bar in the Rosamunde theme would not bear such repeating. Thus, for internal reasons, reasons pertaining to the nature of variations, Schubert may have wished to simplify this theme.


169

The context of the two preceding impromptus might also have given him external reasons for such a simplification. After the searching expressiveness of the first two impromptus, another searching theme, even if undertaking its search through the di¤erent route of harmonic ambiguity, might well have spawned an expressive overload. At the same time, the simplicity of the new theme in some respects matches, while it also complements, the simplicity of the theme of the Ab-Major Impromptu. Indeed, it echoes that impromptu’s simplest, most ebullient moment: the descending third just after the double bar (see ex. 6.6, mm. 17–18). Like that theme, and unlike its forebear in Rosamunde, this theme of the Bb-Major Impromptu circles back to the same harmonic goal for each of its three initiating subphrases (ex. 6.8a, mm. 2, 4, 6). But unlike the theme of the Ab-Major Impromptu—in fact, in diametric opposition to it—this one articulates these goals as root-position dominant sevenths, thus making the opening of this new theme as harmonically grounded, as objective in feeling, as the previous impromptu’s theme was searching and subjective. The directness and simplicity of its cadences serve as a foil for the expressive cadential subversions occurring throughout the rest of opus 142. Even the returns of motive y to embellish these simpler cadences only underscore their simplicity; here this motive suggests none of the ambiguity or conflict that is linked with it in the preceding pieces. Thus, whether or not the composition of the theme for these variations involved an act of recollection for Schubert, the theme itself could seem to embody an actual, clearly retained memory in contrast to the search to recover lost memories that the first two impromptus can plausibly exemplify. One might protest that nothing about this simple, charming, seemingly objective theme suggests an evocation of memory. In fact, something does. The two measures that come after this theme simply echo the resolution of its final cadence, bringing no new harmonic or melodic substance. These measures, variants of which follow every one of the ensuing variations, distance the theme and the individual variations from each other and, through this distancing, approximate an act of recollective synopsis. Because of these short, echoing, postcadential interludes, these variations do not build in intensity to an emotional or dramatic climax, as do most of the sets that Schubert incorporates as slow movements into larger works. These brief, recollective interludes make each of the variations into a separate scene, as if they

170


evoked, through a series of vignettes of contrasting character, but with a certain narrative logic, a succession of di¤erent stages in the life of the protagonist represented by the theme. A familiar sequence of scenes can serve to illustrate this logic. The first variation might tell, through its smooth sweetness, of falling in love; the melodic garlands and springing syncopations of the second might then tell of the exuberant joy of being in love. The extroverted anguish of the third might move ahead to the distress brought by the loss of that love, and the turn from Bb minor to Gb major for the fourth could then bring memories of consolation and recovery from that loss. After this recuperation, the memory of love, embodied as always in the postcadential echoes, extends itself first to bring the restoration of the tonic Bb major and then of the garlands and buoyant syncopations, now heightened and quickened, of the second variation. By remembering love, telling of love, one feels, in this happy context, as if in love again. The coda calmly closes and summarizes the entire story, even incorporating Rosamunde’s tonicized supertonic, although it is immediately dissipated. These measures recall trouble but allow it immediately to pass and, in passing, to contribute to a final sense of calm.

VII The last impromptu recalls the first, and eventually the second, both motivically and harmonically. Because it is more strongly linked to these two impromptus than to the third, it may seem, initially, to furnish further justification for Schumann’s exclusion of the third from the sonata he otherwise finds in opus 142. Rather than acquiescing to Schumann’s view, however, we must attend more closely to what links there are between the third and the fourth impromptus. The first to merit our notice is the material that the final phrases of the third impromptu share with opening ones of the fourth. In the coda of the third impromptu, a melodic idea that in the theme has always led to a half cadence—a complete neighbor figure around C that incorporates the chromatic B—now leads for the first time to a full cadence (mm. 123, 125). The theme of the fourth impromptu (ex. 6.9) echoes the aspects just enumerated of that melodic idea: it begins as a neighbor figure


171

to the same C as in measure 125 of the third impromptu, and it incorporates the same B. This new theme may also have its origin in the Entr’acte from Rosamunde that I explored as the source for the theme of the third impromptu. It is built on the same scale degrees—5–6–5–2—as the opening measures of the first interlude, Minore I, of that Entr’acte (see ex. 6.8b). The interlude continues by moving from A to Bb (ex. 6.8b, mm. 34–35), linking the falling fourth, from D to A, to the falling third, from D to Bb, of the main theme of the Entr’acte. Thus possibly, through this Entr’acte, the theme of the third impromptu is actually associated with a prototype of that of the fourth.19 Unlike the recollections in opus 90 of Schubert’s bestknown songs, however, these possible recollections of Rosamunde in opus 142 are unlikely to generate interpretive clues. The Entr’acte has no text, and the play for which Schubert composed it is all but lost. To ground and construct an interpretation for it through the play would be, for these reasons, a daunting exegetical task, and an excessively speculative one. The theme of the last impromptu combines elements from the opening complex of the first—an emphasis on the fifth and sixth scale degrees and a syncopated second-beat accent introduced by a leap of a fourth—with others from the ostinato-like music that immediately follows that impromptu’s first cadence. The B in measure 3 (ex. 6.9) and the broken figuration of measure 7 both echo the first measure after that cadence (see ex. 6.1, m. 13).Through this intermingling of material from that opening complex with what immediately follows and opposes itself to it, this new theme thus has the e¤ect of beginning to break open that imposing and inscrutable material, of taking possession of it by transforming it, finally, into the bodily motion of a dance. Each of the first three periods of this dance has almost exactly the same cadential structure, suggesting, though not fully articulating, a half cadence in its fourth measure (ex. 6.9, mm. 4, 12, 20), then reaching a full cadence four measures later (mm. 8, 16, 24). To the fourth period comes an interpolation: like the second period, this one begins as an upward octave transposition of the preceding one but then prolongs the Db in its sixth measure (m. 30) for four additional measures, bringing urgency to this prolonged neighbor tone in the bass by setting above it a chromatic ascent from Bb to C (a transposition of motive y). The second time around, four vehement cadential flourishes reinforce (but in their syncopated insistence also challenge)

172


example 6.9


Allegro scherzando.

8

15

23

8va

30

cresc.

the overdetermined closure of the theme, as if still responding to the memory of the first full cadence of the first impromptu of the set and still trying to break free of its hold. The last of these flourishes subsides into a return of the theme, which now wins its way to further expansion and thus to greater freedom. This time the interpolation comes sooner, after the sixth measure of the second phrase instead of the fourth (mm. 59¤.), and lasts more than four times as


173

long, building through hemiola and registral expansion to a highly climactic cadence that is immediately reinforced by the return of the cadential flourishes. Here the dance loses itself in the hemiola; the cadential flourishes, in their still vehement return, jolt the meter back from C to the opening G, dramatizing this opposition of C to G as a conflict. In a single gesture, the sforzando Eb dominant seventh in measure 86 (ex. 6.10a) sweeps F minor and its cramped G meter aside. An ethereal Ab-major dance begins, carried along for the most part in the broader C, and kept aloft harmonically through an extraordinary series of cadential evasions. First come four eight-measure noncadencing “phrases” in chiaroscuro—major– minor–major–minor—almost entirely over a tonic pedal (these are mostly really in C, switching to H for their final measures). The meter returns to G, and three four-measure half-cadential gestures in the minor (each really sounds like two measures of H ) lead to a new Ab-minor theme (ex. 6.10b, m. 131). This theme, beginning with a stepwise melodic ascent of a third, recalls the music of the Ab-minor quasi-trio that took the place of a development in the first impromptu (see ex. 6.3, mm. 70¤.); like that music, it reaches its tonic cadence, again in the major, only after motion stalls on E. By some criteria this new theme has only this one cadence—at its end, after 66 measures, in measure 197.Two-measure interpolations twice keep it aloft (ex. 6.10b, mm. 143–144; 157–158) before it breaks o¤, climactically and noncadentially, on the Eb dominant ninth in measure 163 (ex. 6.10c). The Fb of this dominant ninth is then prolonged as E for twenty measures before it returns to the Eb dominant (ex. 6.10c, m. 185), finally to introduce the cadential gestures. This stalling of motion on Fb/E has less urgency than the drama that it recalls from the first impromptu (see ex. 6.4, mm. 88–90). Once again it has the e¤ect of appropriating, or making real, through the bodily motion of a dance, what originally seemed a message from some mysterious, not fully apprehended realm. The closing material that follows makes the organization of this B section tripartite: as a whole, the section comprises an introduction (mm. 87–130), a new dance (mm. 131–197), and closing material that recalls both the introduction and the theme of the dance (mm. 197–271). The return to the dance motive comes just after the dynamic climax—the only fortissimo— of this entire prolonged B section (ex. 6.10d, m. 223). This climax highlights a startling harmonic shift from Ab minor to its Neapolitan, notated as

174


example 6.10 a. Mm. 83–100 83

Impromptu in F Minor, op. 142, no. 4

8va

5

5 13

87

B legato

(major) 94

(minor)

b. Mm. 129–145 129

137

con delicatezza

example 6.10 (continued) c. Mm. 162–191 8va

162

170

178

cresc.

185

8va

d. Mm. 213–233 213

219

3

223

3

(continued)


223

228

A major. A two-measure prolongation of the descending scalar figuration highlights even more the return, in this same A major, of the dance motive. As at the climax of the second impromptu, the A-major harmony simply insists on itself for seven measures before relinquishing its hold over the music. Once again, this final impromptu recalls a visionary moment from an earlier impromptu in the set, again appropriating it by transforming it into faster and more familiar dance music. Both the rest of this closing material and the ensuing extended retransition to F minor play repeatedly on the E/Fb ambiguity originally introduced to opus 142 through motives y and z. The return to F minor is, of course, inevitable, but through this prolonged process of return, its relative major is not simply negated, as in the first impromptu; instead it contributes its distinctive resonance to the atmosphere of the opening theme’s return. The coda revives another memory of the second impromptu, that of its Db-major middle section. That earlier episode is recalled not only by its key and essentially chordal articulation but also by its opening alternation of a tonic harmony with a dominant seventh in first inversion. The motive that soon gains prominence in this coda, a chromatic upper neighbor figure on the fifth degree, also resonates with occurrences of this motive in the earlier impromptus of the set.20 These occurrences of the lowered sixth degree convey a sense of pain remembered but transcended, a message that almost


177

has the final say in opus 142. Instead, in the most frenzied episode of the entire opus, the F-minor dance returns in a faster tempo to climax explosively into a downward-rushing F-minor scale.

VIII After dismissing the third impromptu, Schumann came close to dismissing the final one as well, complaining of “the superficiality of its entire conception.” His disdain may have arisen from reading it formally as a loose approximation of a rondo, or of some other form he would have considered appropriate for a finale. If so, then Alfred Einstein was following his lead in hearing it as a rondo. Brian Newbould has likened its organization to that of another Classical form, the scherzo and trio.21 Like Schumann’s assessment of the first impromptu as a sonata, these later formal appraisals of the fourth impromptu not only are misleading in themselves but also deflect attention from some of its most distinctive features. Such an interpretation ignores the way its A section furiously, even maniacally, reiterates tonic cadences to a degree not characteristic of, or even formally consistent with, any Classical scherzo; it also ignores the way the B section seems to take flight through extraordinarily prolonged cadential evasions, avoiding anything like the binary or rounded binary form of a trio section. Nor does a rondo or a scherzo usually incorporate such a long and elaborate coda. Schubert’s conception is not superficial (although it may initially seem improvisatory in character, thus becoming the only one of Schubert’s impromptus to reflect for more than a moment the suggestion of improvisation in their title). This impromptu is simply too free of any model to exemplify any preexisting standard. It is deeply innovative, and this depth is only enhanced by its elaborate references not only to motives from all the earlier impromptus of the set but also to the unusual cadential strategies of the first two. Like the third impromptu of opus 90, the third of opus 142 marks a turning point in the set, in this case a return to the comfort of the real after the probing metaphysical or psychological quest of the first two. As already mentioned, its theme (see ex. 6.8a) echoes the repeated notes and the descending third that occur just after the first double bar in the second impromptu (see ex. 6.6, mm. 17¤.), as well as mimicking, in its own more objective way,

178


the simplicity of that impromptu’s theme. Later, the last strains of its coda are linked, in turn, to the opening of the fourth impromptu (see ex. 6.9). The third is, indeed, lighter in character than the other impromptus of opus 142. It has its own considerable charm, however, and it is also motivically linked with the others, providing through this linkage a foil against which to experience those deeper explorations in whose midst it takes its place. A set of pieces enough like a sonata to be called one by musically sophisticated critics, yet in the end clearly not a sonata; a set that, for all its tonal and motivic interconnections, need not necessarily be performed or regarded as a set. Schubert’s intentions about what posthumously became opus 142 can never be fully known. But one last speculation might help in reconstructing them. Having composed in opus 90 one set of pieces that, despite its remarkable cyclic coherence, could never be confused with a sonata, Schubert may have felt a need to come to terms with that achievement by immediately composing another set in which he worked out a compromise between it and the sonata forms with which he was accustomed to working. On this account, although opus 142 is still not a sonata, it does represent the integrative, consolidating response of a composer grounded in sonata forms to one of his own most extraordinary compositional innovations.


179

c hap t e r

7

Beethoven in the Image of Schubert The Sonata in C Minor, D. 958

I More than any of Schubert’s other sonatas—more, indeed, than any of his other works—the C-Minor Sonata is compared to Beethoven. Virtually every discussion of the sonata draws parallels between it and one or another—or, more often, several—of Beethoven’s works. The gestural and thematic reasons for this comparison are obvious. Like both of Beethoven’s early sonatas in this key, op. 10, no. 1, and op. 13, Schubert’s C-Minor Sonata (see ex. 7.1a) begins aggressively with a full-voiced, forte tonic triad; as in both of these Beethoven sonatas, forceful accents, dotted rhythms, and abrupt silences impart to this theme’s opening a defiant tension. And most tellingly, the theme itself begins almost as a clone of the theme of Beethoven’s Thirtytwo Variations in C Minor (see ex. 7.1b).1 Walther Dürr, hearing this CMinor Sonata as a tribute to Beethoven, also compares the chordally accompanied second theme (see ex. 7.2, mm. 40¤.), immediately repeated with triplet figuration, to that of the “Waldstein” Sonata.2 Dürr is not alone in hearing the figuration of Schubert’s development (see ex. 7.3, mm. 99¤.) as Beethovenian, or in relating the character of Schubert’s Adagio (see ex. 2.1a) to that of the slow movements of the early Beethoven sonatas already mentioned.3 Cone and Godel also associate the finale with Beethoven; Godel invokes particularly the finale of the Sonata in Eb Major, op. 31, no. 3.4 Less obvious than the similarities between Schubert’s C-Minor Sonata and certain Beethoven works is the nature or import of this relationship. Godel’s comments seem to align him with Dürr in regarding Schubert’s

180

sonata as a kind of homage to Beethoven, who had died in the preceding year. For Brendel, in contrast, Schubert’s music evinces too indirect and complex a relationship to Beethoven’s to accommodate the possibility of a simple homage. “Schubert relates to Beethoven, he reacts to him,” writes Brendel, “but he follows him hardly at all. Similarities of motif, texture, or formal pattern never obscure Schubert’s own voice. Models are concealed, transformed, surpassed.”5 Andreas Krause attributes to Schubert a more deliberate, self-conscious aesthetic response to Beethoven, hearing the reflections of Beethoven in Schubert’s last sonatas as marking stages in an explicitly emancipatory process.6 Hinrichsen, finally, suggests that through the functional transformation of the theme of a set of variations into the theme of a sonata, Schubert self-consciously establishes in his C-Minor Sonata an antipode to this, and by implication, any other, Beethovenian model.7 Hinrichsen shows how this theme, instead of providing a fixed melodic or harmonic structure for Schubert’s sonata (as it does for Beethoven’s variations), becomes a malleable source of chromatic motivic elements. But Hinrichsen does not note that even within Schubert’s theme Beethoven’s material— even before it is subjected to developmental motivic liquidation—becomes a foil for a powerful, contravening Schubertian response.

II To establish such a foil, Schubert begins by making Beethoven’s theme more Beethovenian than Beethoven himself made it—or, at least, more like the opening of a dramatic Beethoven sonata. He simplifies the melodic beginning, eliminating the syncopation that initiates the melody in Beethoven’s theme. He also transfers the descending chromatic motion of Beethoven’s bass to an inner voice, underpinning that erstwhile bass with a tonic pedal that, along with the thicker chords, imparts to his theme a more massive cast.8 In both Beethoven’s and Schubert’s melodies, the E in measure 3 (ex. 7.1b, ex. 7.1a) initiates a measure-by-measure chromatic ascent that culminates on Ab. Both themes especially dramatize this culminating pitch. Beethoven’s Ab arrives too soon: his theme makes one determined step, harmonically and in basic melodic outline, in each of its first five measures; but with the arrival of the G in both melody and bass the theme undergoes a convulsion. The Ab

b e e t h ov e n i n t h e i mag e o f s c h u b e r t

181

comes out of step, on the very next beat, jarringly emphasized through its sforzando and through the thick voicing of its harmony. After this convulsion, the theme slyly mutters its close, too low and without chordal support. No such convulsion disrupts the sixth measure in Schubert’s theme. The Ab waits its turn in measure 7 (ex. 7.1a), and then gets it only provisionally, as a quasi-dissonant appoggiatura leading to a half cadence. The gesture is repeated—freely—with the hands reversed. The cadential gesture begins a third time, intensified even more; now the high tonic replaces Ab as if to leave it behind. Where a third half-cadential dominant might be expected (m. 12), Ab suddenly and imposingly returns, usurping the place of the dominant. As if through sheer force of will, it makes a weak measure into a strong one, superimposing its own tonal and metrical order on the one already established. After the leap up to this high fortissimo Ab, an Ab-major scale rushes down through four octaves like a violent gust of wind, filling up two full measures and most of a third. This three-measure gesture, so registrally and dynamically emphasized, disrupts not only the regular alternation of strong and weak measures that precedes it but also the organization of the entire theme before its arrival into two-measure groups. The disruptive force of this descent has the e¤ect of immediately tonicizing the Ab, of wrenching the music into this key and thus of suddenly collapsing the momentum toward a C-minor cadence. The quiet subphrases that ensue from the low Ab are drawn even further into the sphere of Ab through the Fbs of their diminished seventh chords. They generate a new wave of movement within the prolongation of Ab in order to regain the cadential dominant from its perspective. Beethoven’s way of emphasizing the Ab confers on it a pivotal role in the closure of his theme: it brings the precadential subdominant harmony into special relief and demarcates a boundary between the opening and the cadential elements of the theme. Of course Beethoven’s theme is of a type exceptional for variations in the Classical period, and unique among his own: it recalls the Baroque tradition of variations on a ground bass, of the chaconne and the passacaglia. This theme, unlike that of any of Beethoven’s other sets of variations, consists of a single self-contained phrase instead of a group of balancing and complementary phrases. It must reach full closure within that phrase; and Beethoven draws on the gestural and textural resources of his own sonata-based style to dramatize that closure—and make it problematic—in a way that was unthinkable in the Baroque period.

182


example 7.1 a. Sonata in C Minor, D. 958, Allegro, mm. 1–20 Allegro.

cresc.

7 3

1

13

7 1 2

3

3

3

4 3

cresc.

17

8va

b. Beethoven, Thirty-two Variations in C Minor, mm. 1–8 Allegretto

5

5

Beethoven’s exceptionally concentrated dramatization of closure in the C-Minor Variations provides Schubert with a special opportunity to enact a negation of closure—to turn the same Ab in his own theme to an opposite purpose. He first introduces his Ab as part of a cadential procedure that is more conventional than Beethoven’s. But then Schubert dramatically subverts the provisional closure toward which those half-cadences have gestured, instead throwing the music wide open. What enters through the opening, within the tonal and rhythmic sphere of the Ab, is a generative kernel for much of the ensuing music of this and the following movements, an emblem of Schubert’s own themes and progressions for this sonata (ex. 7.1a, mm. 14–15). In this way, within the clearing ripped open by the downward rushing Ab scale, a protagonist identified with Schubert’s own new thematic nucleus supervenes upon the one that struggles with Beethoven’s memory. Schubert himself once asked: “What can one do after Beethoven?” Here Schubert o¤ers one possible answer to his question.

III The first of the themes to unfold from Schubert’s generative nucleus is the second theme, which enters in measure 40 (ex. 7.2). The emergence of its Eb-major tonality from an Ab-major sonority immediately establishes the theme’s harmonic aura. The contentious Ab harmony, now becalmed, su¤uses the second theme with its subdominant coloration.The entirely stepwise melody of this theme’s opening four-measure phrase incorporates the melodic motive (1)–7–1–2–3–4–3 as its own nucleus in its second and third measures (mm. 41–42). In the recent memory of the sonata’s opening strife, the second theme comes as a vision of calm, sheltered from the first theme’s conflict, although it is not without an inner striving of its own. In contrast to the aggressive chromatic upward striving of the first theme, however, this theme sways tranquilly, diatonically rising and falling in gentle waves without strong accents or dotted rhythms. The first of these waves rises to the subdominant, accompanied by subdominant harmony. The two waves of the next, longer phrase do not return to the subdominant harmony itself, but nonetheless remain under its spell in a way that specifically articulates its absence. The

184


example 7.2 39

(B)

Sonata in C Minor, D. 958, Allegro, mm. 39–53 legato

1 7 1 2 3

4

3

46

cresc.

cresc.

first of these rises, through the first leap in the melody, to Bb (m. 46). Harmonic motion stalls momentarily on the Eb dominant seventh chord that supports this high point. When the harmony does change, it proceeds not to Ab major; it moves instead in a way that leaves the Eb harmony hanging as a tonic imbued by its Db with longing to recover the subdominant of the first phrase’s crest. That subdominant does follow in the melody, but not in the harmony: the Db dominant seventh chord that succeeds the Eb one makes the Ab distant, as if in a receding image of a faraway place. Rather than resolving the Eb dominant seventh, the Db one merely echoes it, implicating in a suggestion of Gb major the Ab that would have brought it to resolution. This Db harmony takes the place of the precadential subdominant or supertonic that would bring a firm sense of closure to the second theme and thus leaves the theme’s cadence somewhat attenuated, suggesting the fading away of a dream. Whereas, for Beethoven, the precursor of Schubert’s opening theme served as a theme for variations, it is Schubert’s second theme, this new theme of his own, that now becomes a basis for variations of a very di¤erent sort. The first of these (mm. 54–67) is a simple figural variation in which this theme comes again, made more vivid by the octaves in the right hand and more fluid by the accompanimental triplets in the left. A second variation, more agitated and beginning now in Eb minor, follows as if in a quest for the confirmation of closure withheld from the second theme thus far (mm. 68¤.).


185

It uses only the first four measures of that theme as the model for a sequential move to Gb major in a delayed “resolution” of the second theme’s parenthetical Db dominant seventh.9 The variation culminates in a chromatic neighbor motion around the dominant in the bass—Cb–Bb–A–Bb (mm. 77–84)— while also winning strong harmonic support for 5 in the melody (m. 80), initially made ambiguous by the Db. This brings the second thematic area to a close. In the peaceful but resigned closing theme (see ex. 7.3, mm. 86–98) the chromatic neighbor figure from the bass of the second theme’s climax returns in the melody, with a subdominant harmony underlying its initiating Cb. By beginning with a full measure of subdominant harmony with its third in the melody, this final theme of the exposition recalls the very moment of the transition (m. 27) that, through the Ab harmony as subdominant, opened the way from C minor to Eb major. This closing theme, like that transition, melodically outlines a descent by step from 6 to 3. In making minor the major subdominant to which it refers, this theme signals once again the inability of the second theme to realize itself through a diatonic resolution in Eb major and, thus, the unattainability, for now, of the calm-afterresolution that that major subdominant might potentially bring. In the specificity of its reference to the transition, the closing theme has the e¤ect of closing only the scene that that transition has opened without making a gestural reference to the first theme. The cadence of the closing theme, which like that of the second theme falls only to 3 rather than to 1, is immediately echoed as a separate twomeasure gesture (mm. 94–95). The echo is then reechoed in one-measure gestures that recall the 6–4–3 melody of that first cadence of the second theme. Further echoes reduce the gesture to two beats, producing an e¤ect of hemiola and, dramatically, of the fading of the realm imagined through that second theme.

IV The powerful Ab-major triad with which the development abruptly begins only strengthens the impression of Ab as a dramatic antipode to C minor in this sonata. The chromaticism of the opening theme completely saturates

186


the development.The chromatically ascending bass moves the harmony from Ab through Bb to C (ex. 7.3, mm. 103–109). The ascending chromatic line is then transferred to the upper voices, progressing from C all the way up to Gb (m. 113) while the supporting harmony moves by ascending minor third. With the next melodic move, to G (really Abb), the bass suddenly becomes diatonic, slowing the harmonic rhythm and somewhat simplifying the texture to bring a D major (really Ebb major) cadence (mm. 113–117). Harmonically, dynamically, and in its duration, the arrival of this new key is the most strongly articulated of any to occur in the movement, except for the Ab in the opening phrase. A highly chromatic three-measure phrase, clearly in D/Ebb but strongly emphasizing Eb/Fbb, follows like an epigram (ex. 7.3, mm. 119–121). Its opening motto, 1–7–1, fuses the half-step lower neighbor figure of the second theme (see ex. 7.2, mm. 40–41) with the repeated-quarter-note motive of the first theme. The third note, a quarter note, marks o¤ the first three notes as a motto. Were this not a quarter note, the melody of this phrase would move entirely in eighth notes. And were it not for the penultimate A/Bbb of this phrase, the melody would consist only of half steps. Both its extreme chromaticism and its very narrow range enable this phrase to stand alone rather than to give rise, as most phrases do, to a complementary phrase or to serve immediately as a point of tonal departure. Accordingly, this single mysterious short phrase comes first below, then above, the accompaniment, like the oracular voice of a disembodied being. Reminiscent in its chromatic neighbor motions of Winterreise’s “Erstarrung” as well as the wind motive of “Der Lindenbaum,” this laconic phrase (henceforth the “development theme”) comes like a voice from a no man’s land such as the one that Müller’s and Schubert’s wanderer creates from the barren winter landscape.This voice thus gives the impression of arising not from another person but from the di¤usion of a searching self into a lonely void. After the portentous calm of these two phrases, the head motive of the new theme separates and repeats itself to initiate a further chromatic ascent. Its first articulated goal is a return to the Ab major with which the development began (mm. 125–130). Thus, even in retrospect, the apparent D major of this theme never acquires the function that one might expect of it in a C-minor piece, as the dominant of the dominant. Instead it arises near the midpoint of an expanse that is controlled at its beginning and again at its


187

example 7.3

Sonata in C Minor, D. 958, Allegro, mm. 85–121 K

85

decresc.

90

95

(development)

dim.

101

cresc.

105

109


cresc.

115

118

“development theme”

first provisional end by Ab major. The return of this key occasions a transformed reemergence of the second theme (mm. 131–133), the theme that was so marked in its original Eb-major occurrence by both the presence and the subsequent absence of Ab as a harmony and is now su¤used with the chromatic neighbor motions and rhythmic anonymity of the development theme.10 This drawing of the second theme of the exposition into the net cast by the development theme metaphorically achieves a fusion of the second theme’s Schubertian voice with the mysterious voice disclosed through that new theme, as if the self-assertion and ensuing self-exploration of the Schubertian persona have prepared it for the possibility of its own dissolution. In a sense, this fusion parallels an imagined fusion of the winter wanderer’s voice with the stilled voice of the Leiermann. The ensuing progression from Ab major to Db major remains under the spell of Ab, extending its sphere of influence rather than allowing it to be reabsorbed into C minor.The chromatically infiltrated second theme sounds again in Db before the laconic development theme returns in the left hand


189

(m. 142) beneath ghostly, mostly chromatic scale-passages in the right. Only with this reappearance in Db of that theme beneath the eerie sixteenth-note figuration does a return to C minor begin. Four statements of this phrase spread the development theme’s net to envelop tonic territory. The music sinks into a quiet vortex (m. 152) from which a threatening chromatic ascent, articulating the sonata’s opening motive beneath sinister rising and falling chromatic scales, prepares for the vehement resurgence of the opening theme from a terrain now enveloped in the net cast by the development theme. Unquestionably this is a powerful return of the first theme, yet this theme in recapitulation almost immediately loses its Beethovenian shape, its drive toward its cadence. Elements associated with Ab major now enter into conflict with Beethoven’s theme and its C minor tonality to subvert its chromatic ascent to the dominant. At the end of the recapitulation the cadence of the closing theme and the codettas that echo it, which die away into ever shorter fragments, can now be recognized as articulations of the three-note head motive of the development theme. The return and transformation of this theme in the immediately following coda make this relationship quietly but dramatically explicit. From the final dominant seventh into which the hemiola of the last codetta fades, the music falls silent (m. 248). This unmeasured silence, this void, reflects in a new way upon the dissolution of identity implicit in the development theme. The ostinato of the development, now brought home to C minor, reemerges from the silence. Beneath it the development theme begins once again (mm. 250¤.). In its final form it responds to a hitherto unrealized implication of the chromatic neighbor motion around its tonic: the tonal ambiguity of this chromaticism, the instability of a tonic that can easily become a dominant. Thus this tonic becomes this last time the dominant of the subdominant: the melody, serving as the bass, descends to the fourth degree and finally discloses the power of this phrase’s generative voice to take control even of the movement’s closural gestures.This disclosure unbalances the phrase; it now requires a consequent. In this consequent the melody begins with the 4 just reached, only an octave higher, then rises to 6, finally capturing this Ab in the development theme’s net and making it the source of the final descent to the tonic. Thus the Ab, Schubert’s Ab, wins control of this ending, but it secures this victory only after it is harnessed to

190


the mysterious motive that it helped to engender in the development and, hence, to the idea of its own transience as a marker of identity.

V The downward rushing Ab-major scale and the motivic kernel that arises from it, so near the beginning of the sonata, foretell not only events that will ensue in the first movement, they also prefigure events in the later movements. Foremost among them are the key and the theme of the slow movement (see ex. 2.1a). As several writers have noted, this movement shares its tonality with the slow movements of both of Beethoven’s early C-minor sonatas; but the dramatic role of this key in Schubert’s first movement powerfully motivates, within Schubert’s own conception, its return as the key of the Adagio. Like the first movement’s second theme, this movement’s opening theme draws from Schubert’s motivic kernel, sharing its basic melodic outline—1–7–1–2–3–4–3–2—with the last tone incorporating a half cadence. In its hymnlike texture and very slow tempo, it creates an atmosphere of still meditation that contrasts with the gentle and yearning sway of the second theme. The need for such a contrast between themes of such similar melodic character is what motivates, within Schubert’s own plan, the tempo of this movement, its purportedly Beethovenian Adagio. As explained in detail in chapter 2, the dramatic course of the Adagio hinges in important respects on the recurrences of the focal progression that first occurs in measures 11 and 12 (see ex. 2.1a). Although not directly or fully anticipated in the first movement, this progression bears a strange family resemblance—despite the lack of any clear motivic reference—to the development theme. Like that theme, although at a much slower tempo, it progresses almost entirely in even eighth notes, and its melody and its inner voices all move predominantly in half steps. Finally, because of its fermata, the rhythm of its plagal close echoes, in augmentation, the head motive of the development theme. Through these characteristics—its extreme rhythmic simplicity, its minimal melodic motion, and the rhythm that brings it to hesitation—this focal progression seems, like that theme, to suspend forward motion, to withdraw from overtly gestural expression and thus, mo-


191

mentarily, even from a sense of embodiment. Like this progression in the Adagio, the drop from the Eb dominant seventh to the Db dominant seventh in the second theme of the first movement (see ex. 7.2, mm. 46–50) also suspends directed tonal motion, and in this way it also suggests a rift in that theme’s surface, a possible allusion to a realm outside or beyond the theme, a realm not fully apprehended by or accessible from it. As already proposed, the disembodied, oracular voice of the development theme seems to emanate from that realm itself. The focal progression in the Adagio suggests a return to that realm from the serenity of contemplation. In echoing these events from the first movement the Adagio’s focal progression draws on specific musical memories within the sonata while also suggesting as yet unexplored realms.The questions—both hopeful and fearful— that are raised by this progression do not originate in this movement: they are raised in the first movement as well. This progression so near the Adagio’s beginning only returns to these questions, this time much more reflectively, even prayerfully. Both movements recall Winterreise through the links with the cycle that I have enumerated: the development theme in the first movement with “Erstarrung” and “Der Lindenbaum”; the opening theme of the Adagio with “Das Wirtshaus”; the focal progression of the Adagio with “Gefror’ne Tränen”; and the episode that follows this focal progression with “Gute Nacht,” “Auf dem Flusse,” “Der Wegweiser,” and “Einsamkeit.” These connections give grounds for a metaphorical interpretation as well: these passages suggest a search, if not for some kind of transcendence, then at least for a loss or forgetting of self, a suspension of familiar motion and emotion, that might ultimately lay open an arena of self-rediscovery and re-creation. In the return of the Adagio theme, the low echo of the focal progression’s plagal close (see ex. 2.5a, mm. 54–55) again seems to emanate, like the first high echo of the development theme in the first movement, from an oracular voice. In fact, this echo isolates the part of the focal progression that also echoes the head motive of that development theme so closely. The upward shift by a half step in this echo, which is linked to the ensuing, varied recurrence of the entire B section a half step higher than before, composes out the upper neighbor motions within the focal progression itself. These neighbor motions themselves compose out, in turn, the C–Db–C neighbor figure in the opening phrase of the Adagio, but they also draw on

192


the memory, as already indicated, of the predominantly chromatic neighbor motion in the development theme. In the final return of the Adagio’s theme, after the focal progression’s initiating turn to Ab minor, the voice leading becomes even more chromatic. The resulting bass descent, now entirely in whole tones, becomes even stranger and more disembodied (see ex. 2.5b, mm. 104–105), as if the protagonist actually imagined being drawn o¤ into the distant realms hitherto suggested only from a distance or even into death. The cadential figure of this last occurrence of the focal progression is now echoed and reechoed, each time a half step higher (mm. 106–107); the “echoes” not only rise but also make a quiet crescendo, as if approaching rather than receding from their source. Momentarily, as a sense of tonal orientation is lost, the remote realms, the imaginary realms, take hegemony over the real ones. As does the final stanza of “Der Wegweiser,” this last, quiet, echoing exploration of the chromaticism of the focal progression finds an apt, although very di¤erent, musical realization for a realm from which no one has ever returned. The music itself, in fact, does not e¤ect a return. Instead, it falls silent (m. 109) and then simply reasserts the cadence of its theme in its home key, plagally reinforcing that cadence in a gesture not so much of integration as of resigned but hopeful acceptance of the limits of knowing or experiencing.

VI The Menuetto once again articulates Ab major as a dramatic, countervailing presence for its C-minor tonic. Not only is its trio in Ab, the music of the Menuetto proper returns three times to this key, one of these times jarringly and with a somewhat disorienting e¤ect (ex. 7.4, m. 21). The opening twelve-measure phrase consists of three subphrases; the first of them is in C minor and the last in Eb major, in keeping with well-established tonal convention. The second of these subphrases is in Ab major until its harmony pulls away to F minor (ex. 7.4, m. 8) in an upward twisting of the melody that denies for Ab major a smooth, integrated return to tonic territory. Ab major thus still insists on inclusion, an inclusion that always brings with it a degree of disruption. The melody of this Menuetto is closely related to the second theme of


193

example 7.4

Sonata in C Minor, D. 958, Menuetto, mm. 1–51

Allegro.

7

12

1

2

A “interruption”

19

28

35

8va

8va

1

2

example 7.4 (continued) Trio.

48

42

1

the first movement, and the music after the double bar plays on the descending third motive from that theme. Before the return of the theme, an Ab-major gesture once again overtakes the music tonally and rhythmically. Through its fortissimo intrusion upon an established rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic pattern, the arpeggiated Ab-major triad (m. 21) willfully transforms a weak measure into a strong one, and wrenches the music away from C minor. Thus it reenacts, within the more gesturally integrated framework of the Menuetto, the self-assertion through which it supervened upon the Beethovenian theme of the first movement. The hammering Abs that follow mark this pitch as still staking out a separate realm within this Menuetto, and the recurrence of a leading-tone diminished seventh chord of Ab (m. 24), reinforced by the sudden melodic leap up to Db, confirms the association of this passage with the first dramatic appearance of Ab major in the first movement. But the passage in the Menuetto in which this Ab major takes part is now more concerned with closing than with opening; the intrusion of Ab major delays that closure, but cannot forestall it. The return of the Menuetto theme in the left hand, beneath even, quiet passage work in the right, once again recalls the first movement, especially the last occurrences of its oracular theme in the development (mm. 142¤.). Measures of silence now come between the subphrases of the theme, retrospectively rescinding their ambiguities of phrase rhythm. Unlike the silence before the coda of the first movement, these silences are measured.


195

Each separate subphrase falls silent, and the silences accrue weight from the memory of the continuity that they negate. This final passage of the Menuetto seems only to remember the movement’s beginning, rather than to bring its full return. Somewhat paradoxically, the separation of the Abmajor subphrase from the others has the e¤ect of equalizing the three subphrases of the theme more than before and, thus, of stilling the subversiveness of the Ab. The trio recalls the theme of the Adagio in its opening figure and in the ascending chromatic voice leading of its harmonic progression from the dominant of Ab to the dominant of F minor (ex. 7.4, mm. 48–49). In its quietly dancing rhythm (its legato leaps also again recalling the second theme of the first movement), it imparts a feeling of bodily movement to material that has previously seemed more purely meditative; thus that material seems to become more physically real, more fully possessed. In a sense, this quiet transformation prepares for the far more dramatic transformations of the Adagio’s focal progression in the finale.

VII The finale, like that of the String Quartet in D Minor, D. 810 (“Death and the Maiden”), is a tarantella. The impulse to interpret it, through this association, as a dance of death gains plausibility from the resonance of key passages from the earlier movements with Winterreise—particularly the oracular theme in the first movement and the focal progression of the Adagio, with its suggestion of a meditative return to the mysterious realms that the oracle might inhabit. But simply to equate such realms with death is to limit them arbitrarily, especially in the work of a composer as attuned as Schubert was to his literary contemporaries. Rather than unequivocally implicating a deathly realm, these passages suggest, more ambiguously, something outside or beyond the context in which they occur—something not fully known, in its mysteriousness potentially enlightening, but also powerful and threatening. In many conceptions death is the gateway to such a realm; in Romantic conceptions, however, nature, art, and even love also become such gateways. Romantic wanderers and artists, placing themselves outside social and dis-

196


cursive convention, often seek to define and validate themselves through their privileged access to such realms.The protagonist of Winterreise, disillusioned in his Romantic quest—explicitly a quest for love, but implicitly an aesthetic and philosophical one as well—seeks to die, or perhaps to be reborn, but instead he endures a kind of living death. The C-Minor Sonata, suggesting access to such mysterious realms for its Schubertian protagonist, perhaps undertakes a resurrection, or at least a validation, of this lonely outcast. Its final tarantella might signify not merely the wanderer’s death, but a new-found access to realms of enlightenment, mystery, and terror, and a consequent ability to embrace death without feeling annihilated by the prospect of it. As I interpret the first movement, this protagonist boldly and antagonistically individuates himself through the downward rushing Ab-major scale within the initially Beethovenian thematic complex of the opening. In the finale this protagonist again boldly proclaims himself, this time martially transforming the Db plagal cadential gesture from the focal progression of the Adagio and festooning it with aggressively ascending scales. This enables the protagonist to introduce—and manifest his control through—the second theme (see ex. 7.6). Before that announcement, however, a strong tonal undercurrent in the first theme of the tarantella anticipates this proclamation of Db by repeatedly pulling the music into Db major and minor. Db, the only non–C-minor component of that original Ab scale, has figured prominently in every harmonic articulation of Ab throughout the sonata. One might ask how it could fail, as the subdominant of Ab, to do so. But the establishment and exploration of Ab as a harmony or tonal region does not require the substitution of a Db dominant seventh for an Ab-major triad in the second theme of the first movement (see ex. 7.2, mm. 46–50) or the Db-major sectional articulation in its development (mm. 142¤.); neither does this tonal articulation require the cadential hesitation over Db in the focal progression of the Adagio (see ex. 2.1a, m. 12) or the return to Db minor for its contrasting episode (m.19); nor does it require the melodic leap up from Ab to Db at the climax of the Menuetto (see ex. 7.4, m. 24). In these ways, the Db within the Ab-major complex that opposes C minor throughout the sonata has been consistently and emphatically marked. It comes into its own in the finale, as if to ground the Ab and reinforce its independence from the Cminor territory of its origin. The opening theme of the finale is drawn into Db far more than into any


197

example 7.5

Sonata in C Minor, D. 958, Allegro, mm. 25–43

25

D major 31

38

D major

other secondary tonal region. A tonicization of Db major initiates the formal expansion of this theme (ex. 7.5, m. 29); another one prolongs this expansion (m. 39); and a third, now articulating both Db minor and major in two successive outbreaks, marks its climax. The harmony eddies about C minor’s dominant for ten measures after this climax, entwining it melodically with its chromatic neighbors, Ab and F#, in a motivic echoing of both the opening theme of the first movement and its development theme. The theme of this finale now returns, delicate and dreamlike, in C major (m. 67), although Db still haunts it as it fades away, sinking into a quiet rocking motion between this Db and its ephemeral C-major tonic (mm. 86–92). In a sudden swell, a fortissimo Db overtakes what might have been the final C of this fading undulation (ex. 7.6, m. 93). In its seeming willfulness, and in the jarring and immediate return to Db major that it brings about, this Db parallels the Ab that overtakes the theme of the first movement. The ascending, marcato Db scale remembers and complements the downward rushing

198


example 7.6 93


(transition)

cresc.

98

cresc.

103

107

8va

113

B

8va

Ab scale from that opening thematic complex. And the two hammering blows to which it leads, along with the essentially dotted rhythm that follows (mm. 97–100), recall the opening gestures of the sonata as if to gain control over them in a new way, or from a new perspective.11 The ensuing Db-major fireworks (ex. 7.6) thus do not make an entirely unprepared proclamation. Instead they have the e¤ect of an explicit and


199

dramatic manifestation of something already implicitly known, but never yet overtly acknowledged. They proudly bring the Db-rooted protagonist out, transforming his hesitant self-questioning in the Adagio’s focal progression and his lonely self-searching in the ensuing Db-minor episode into an imposing self-assertion. The Gb-minor subdominant chord that in the Adagio deepens the hesitation here reinforces the self-assertion of Db as a separate region from C minor. The C#/Db-minor theme that follows (mm. 113¤.), opening with an expansion of the same tonic–subdominant–tonic progression, further carries this transformation of a question into a proud proclamation. In the immediately following repetition of this theme, the chromatic embellishing runs recall the ominous ones from the end of the first movement’s development, as if in a mastering of a pervasive fear through self-assertion (cf. mm. 131–132 et sim. with mm. 142¤. of the first movement).The sequential progression that comes next recalls the harmonic ambience of that development; this time it advances upward by minor third with the determination of a crusader.The Eb-major closing theme (mm. 213¤.) that follows the grand Eb-minor climax of the sequence recalls, once again in tranquillity, the minor plagal gesture of the focal progression, but the augmented sixth chord (m. 216) that now precedes this gesture makes its harmony into a V of ii and prepares for its rhyming repetition as a dominant of Eb major, which is at this point the home key. In this way, the closing theme brings the focal progression home and its questioning to rest.12 If this finale were simply a dance of death (which it is not), then the B/Cbmajor theme that follows (ex. 7.7, m. 243¤.) would suggest a vision of paradise and the ensuing development (mm. 305¤.) a descent into purgatory. The B-major theme fuses a melodic motive from the closing theme with a rhythmic augmentation of the head motive of the opening theme (5–3–2–1). This fusion brings an Elysian calm to the memory of the opening theme and then celebrates this calm in Arcadian dancing (mm. 258¤.). A quiet Bmajor scale descends from the dance’s end (mm. 301¤.) into a portentous, hushed ostinato. Now the head motive of the B-major melody returns beneath the continuing ostinato (m. 309). It is darkened and sequentially repeated, as if in a search for true access to, or confirmation of, the newly discovered theme. In each of the six ensuing phrases, the left hand controls both the harmony

200


example 7.7


240

246

251

and the melody; each phrase begins with a double reiteration of the same head motive and culminates in a shadowy anticipation of the return of the Adagio’s focal progression. In the first two of these phrases, that anticipation is created by the five rhythmically even concluding steps of a nine-step descent in the bass, bringing an overall tonal descent by whole step (from E minor through D minor to C minor). The next two phrases (mm. 325–338, 339–352) are almost twice as long, and they elaborate on this anticipation of the focal progression. In each of these phrases the left hand culminates in an ominous recollection of the upper voices of that progression; the chromatic line, now in the bass instead of a middle voice, ascends beneath a melody of repeated notes, now in the tenor but still in the same evenly, even implacably, advancing rhythm. Each phrase leads to a suspension (mm. 335¤., 349¤.) whose resolution, chromatically elaborated, is subverted by a chromatic voice exchange with the right hand. The suspension figure, low and prolonged, comes close to a deathly moan. In the fifth phrase (mm. 353– 367), the unit of rhythmic construction swells to three measures, and the fivefold articulation of this unit extends the length of the phrase yet more,


201

to fifteen measures. The culminating remembrance of the focal progression now becomes more complete; it is the virtual quotation that motivates the analysis in chapter 2. The entire fifteen-measure phrase comes sequentially again, and most of it a third time. Harmonically, these climactic phrases ignite at their peaks into flares of Db major, then Ab major, then Eb major. This entire culminating sequence has the e¤ect of a blaze of glory, triumphant but fatal. The quotations of the focal progression signal the fulfillment of the quest that it has initiated, but they also create the sense that fulfillment has been reached only in some kind of death and rebirth. The dominant of C minor now supervenes in three great waves (mm. 395¤.), each wave billowing through a rising scale in the right hand and then breaking over another in the left. The last of these waves subsides through a descending G-major scale (mm. 413–417) similar to the B-major scale that opened the way for this development’s beginning. These are the first descending scales without accompanying harmonic activity since the dramatic Ab-major scale in the first movement’s opening thematic complex. They quietly recall the dramatic gesture that marked the beginning of the story, as if to signal its end. Unlike that Ab-major scale, this final G-major one is assimilated—it is a simple hushed articulation of C minor’s dominant. Ab, no longer in control of the scale, then resurges (m. 421), now as the bass of a Db-minor chord in second inversion, in a sudden aftershock, a musical death convulsion.13 Fortunately this moment articulates only the return of the opening theme rather than the end of the movement. We hear again the proud, if stoic, second theme and the restful waves of the closing theme. This last time the closing theme flows directly into the coda, which begins by returning one last time to Ab major. This coda expands the four-measure progression in Ab that initiated the development in the first movement (see ex. 7.3, mm. 99–103), now allowing it to fill twenty-four dancing measures. This passage comes as close as possible, perhaps, to bringing home and making real the Arcadian dance within the B-major theme that intervened in this finale between the exposition’s end and the development’s beginning. That part of the opening theme that so emphasizes Db returns only now, at the very end of this long movement. The Db maintains its heroic hold almost to the very end, the D taking its place only in the last climactic gesture and final fouroctave descent to the cadence.

202


VIII Beethoven had been dead only about a year when Schubert began work on the C-Minor Sonata. Schubert presumably did not realize that he himself would die soon after. The sonata’s Beethovenian beginning might therefore tempt us to associate its evocations of death more with Beethoven’s passing than with Schubert’s thoughts of his own mortality. This work begins with possibly the fullest and most explicit quotation of Beethoven in all of Schubert’s instrumental music, but it also holds its deepest and most explicit memories of Winterreise. And it is di‹cult to imagine that in drawing on those memories of a lonely, outcast wanderer, Schubert would have associated them with such an illustrious—even if lonely—figure as Vienna’s most famous composer. How then do we make sense of the progression in the C-Minor Sonata from a Beethovenian beginning into an idiosyncratically Schubertian, even Winterreise-haunted world? Of course Schubert idolized Beethoven and felt his influence constantly. In a finely balanced account, John Gingerich has described in sensitive detail both how Schubert, in his mature instrumental music, emulated Beethoven, and how he never lost his own distinctive voice in doing so.14 To regard Beethoven as Schubert’s musical father figure is perhaps too obvious to bring any new revelation to a general consideration of their relationship. But for the C-Minor Sonata, which Schubert in a sense begins by casting Beethoven aside, a quasi-parricidal myth can help to explain the ensuing descent into a Winterreise-haunted wasteland. In this myth, Schubert is profoundly alone: not because he has been spurned, like the protagonists of Müller’s poetic cycle or his own “Mein Traum,” but because he himself has spurned his most powerful forebear. In doing so, he is himself threatened with loss of identity until he accepts the fusion of his own voice with that of the oracular figure, the counterpart of the Leiermann—who could even be Beethoven’s ghost—that he first encounters in the development of the first movement. In gradually re-creating himself in the wake of this encounter, he also re-creates Beethoven in his own image.


203

c hap t e r

8

Recovering a Song of Origin The Sonata in A Major, D. 959

I For both its beginning and its ending, the finale of the A-Major Sonata draws on sources outside itself. As is well known, it appears to take its theme (ex. 8.1a) from a much earlier piece, the E-major Allegretto quasi Andantino of the Sonata in A Minor, D. 537 (ex. 8.1b), which was composed in 1817. Schubert cannot have intended his reuse of this theme in the A-Major Sonata of 1828 to be heard as a self-quotation, however, for the early A-Minor Sonata was not published until the early 1850s. It is not even certain, although it is surely likely, that he realized that he was quoting an earlier composition. In contrast, the use of the first movement’s opening to end the AMajor Sonata (see ex. 8.2a–b) is unmistakable in its intent; striking and unique, it is a stratagem that Schubert employs only in this one instance. On first reflection, the occurrence of these two very di¤erent kinds of allusions in the same movement may make little sense. No matter how we ultimately understand its presence—even as nothing more than the framing device that Rosen has called it1—the reference of the finale’s ending to the first movement’s beginning is unquestionably a unifying gesture, one of the most manifestly cyclic moments in all of Schubert’s instrumental music. But the reference to the earlier sonata can seem quite the opposite: indeed Godel cites it as his first evidence for his claim that Schubert’s finales “virtually abandon their contexts and, entering the scene from outside, hazard a new start.”2 How is it that Schubert ends the very same movement that begins with a seeming reference to a di¤erent sonata with one of his most patently

204

unifying gestures? Does the cyclic gesture simply counterbalance the outside derivation of the theme? Or does it, instead, compositionally implicate that theme in some way? A simple musical thought experiment can quickly suggest an answer to this question. Play the opening of the sonata (see ex. 8.2a, mm. 1–6); this is the phrase that will return in cancrizans at the end of the concluding Rondo (see ex. 8.2b). Then, instead of continuing in the first movement, immediately play the theme of the Rondo (ex. 8.1a). In this juxtaposition the opening phrase of the sonata becomes an apt introduction, a perfect foil, for that theme. The Rondo theme, in its flowing lyricism, is everything that the sonata’s opening phrase might want to be but is not. Indeed, the opposition between that opening and the Rondo theme is far greater—and more satisfying—than it would be had Schubert simply reused the Rondo’s theme in its 1817 form (ex. 8.1b), with its staccato bass and slower moving, less fluid melody. At the same time, this new version of the Rondo theme evinces a much closer compositional relationship than does its 1817 forebear to the sonata’s opening material. I have mentioned Ivan Waldbauer’s observation that this theme and the opening of the first movement share fundamentally the same stepwise ascending bass, a bass not present in the 1817 version.3 But that is not all they share: the Rondo theme also incorporates other aspects of the first movement’s contrapuntal and melodic structure. Once the Rondo’s melody reaches the tonic A at the end of the first measure, that A is retained—after its momentary deflection to G# in measure 2—either as melody or as the next highest voice throughout the rest of the phrase. Unlike the 1817 version, the new version of the first semicadence now returns to that tonic and its leading tone, thus responding as a distant echo to the sonata’s very first melodic move from the same A to the same G#. The new Rondo theme can thus be heard as essentially incorporating the sonata’s opening material, embedding this material within itself in order to transform it from an imposing but expressively and functionally ambiguous fanfare into song. This new version of the theme is thus seemingly a hybrid. The return of the opening material to end the Rondo immediately becomes more than a mere framing device; this material returns, at the very least, as an emblem of a significant compositional relationship. To understand that relationship we must trace its evolution through the A-Major Sonata.

r e c ov e r i n g a s o n g o f o r i g i n

205

example 8.1 a. Sonata in A Major, D. 959, Rondo, mm. 1–17 Allegretto.

5

cresc.

10

15

1

2

b. Sonata in A Minor, D. 537, Allegretto quasi Andantino, mm. 1–16 Allegretto quasi Andantino. legato

9

II I have just considered the Sonata’s opening phrase as a foil for the Rondo theme, which answers to it as its lyrical complement. Within the first movement itself, the music that immediately follows the opening (ex. 8.2a) also opposes itself to it in almost every way. The sonata begins with an assertive rhythmic motive of two quarters, downbeat and afterbeat (motive x). The left hand makes a stepwise diatonic ascent in the lowest moving voice against the insistently repeated tonic in the top voice, producing what might be called a diatonic wedge, while the harmonic rhythm of the block chords accelerates gradually through simple duple subdivisions. In quiet opposition, the second phrase immediately introduces triplets and arpeggiation. This leads to a complementary motive of two quarters, beginning with an upbeat (motive y, the opposite of x), and a chromatic bass ascent against the fourth scale degree (rather than the tonic) in the top voice, creating a chromatic wedge that responds to the diatonic one in the opening phrase. The blankness of the opening phrase makes it, in a sense, inscrutable.This is one of Schubert’s most Classical, “multum in parvo” gestures, neither lyrical nor immediately passionate, but instead abstract and pregnant with motivic possibilities.4 It owes its seeming abstractness especially to the insistently unmelodic quality of the repeated tonic in the top voice, which rings out no less than fourteen times before resolving down to its leading tone at the first cadence. Even though it appears more Classical than Romantic in character, this opening di¤ers from most Classical openings because it seems unsuitable for incorporation into either a period or sentence structure. Instead it stands alone, as if it really were the introduction that the just-ventured thought experiment made of it. Schubert’s second phrase therefore does not so much follow his first phrase as encounter and quietly interrogate it, opposing itself to the first through rhythm, texture, and harmony. The second phrase makes the first seem more enigmatic, even more inscrutable, than it otherwise might. If the opening idea, in its assertiveness, can be taken as a musical image of objectivity, then the ensuing response, which throws into question so many aspects of the opening idea, immediately emerges as its subjective counterpart. In the third phrase, the left hand quietly reiterates the first, producing a ternary structure, while the right mirrors the lower-voice motion with a


207

example 8.2 Sonata in A Major, D. 959 a. Allegro, mm. 1–31 Allegro.

6

x

y 10

cresc.

13

16

21

(continued)


cresc.

E major 28

C major

A major

b. Rondo, mm. 375–382 375

new countermelody and so incorporates it into a more flowing musical continuum. The two hands in their interaction already suggest a possible combination of the opposed motives x and y into a three-note motive, z, consisting of two quarters and a half note. Triplets and touches of chromaticism further this synthesis of elements of the second phrase with those of the first and, along with the countermelody, enhance the impression of music now flowing naturally. The ease with which the third phrase achieves a fusion of the seemingly impenetrable “objectivity” of the first with the “subjectivity” that interrogates it in the second conveys an air of youthful innocence, an imperviousness to the dangers that the disjunctions between the opening two phrases might imply. The fourth phrase, a gestural echo of the second, begins as a quiet confirmation of the tonic resolution of the third. The sudden intrusion of a new triplet arpeggio breaks the established rhythmic pattern and abruptly


209

shifts the harmony to the dominant key (ex. 8.2a, m. 27). This summary modulatory gesture might again be taken as objective in its simplicity; but it immediately leads to what again seems a subjective response, a harmonic flight of fancy. An evocative modulatory sequence, based on the chromatic wedge, takes the music through a circle of descending major thirds: from the just announced E major through C major and Ab major and back to E, only averting a return to C in order to stabilize E’s dominant.5 Instead of opposing dominant to tonic, this first movement might be viewed as establishing a tonal opposition between tonic and dominant together, taken as one pole, and the tonalities and tonal procedures that arise from the chromatic wedge, taken as the other. The dominant thus joins the tonic in the objective sphere while the subjective interrogating stance articulates itself through a development of the harmonic implications of the sonata’s second phrase. What I am calling the harmonic flight of fancy in the transition is in a sense only a digression, rather than a goal-directed motion, but it is only after this digression, this seeming exploration of the subjective, that the opening material can be reapproached.The progression from low, darkly eddying triplets to high, luminous unaccompanied eighth notes at the end of this transition (mm. 45–55; ex. 8.3 begins at m. 48) evokes a return from imaginative ferment into objective, even if euphoric, clarity— an innocently optimistic return to home territory. The impulse to take tonic and dominant together as representing a single composite tonal domain—a kind of objective stratum—in this movement is supported by their sharing the same thematic material. As Waldbauer and Brendel have both recognized, the second theme is a new version of the first, incorporating the same stepwise ascending bass and accompanying thirds. Before this bass gets under way, the new melody (ex. 8.3, mm. 55¤.) reaches from 5 up to 8 to lure the top voice down through the newfound scalar eighth-note motion, dislodging it from the intractable position it occupies in the opening phrase. Now the top voice rises with the bass, and a melody thus begins to emerge—or to be won—from the sonata’s opening material. The new theme begins to sing: it rises to a new motive, 5–3–6, 5–3–2 (henceforth motive a, here also a twofold lyrical articulation of motive z), but then breaks o¤ without reaching a cadence. It begins again an octave higher, but with the new motive it turns to the parallel minor and then immediately to G major, as if it had to seek a first lyrical self-realization

210


example 8.3 48

Sonata in A Major, D. 959, Allegro, mm. 48–140

(end of transition)

decresc.

51

a 55

5

B

3

6

5

3

2

60

cresc.

decresc.

b 65

8

7

cresc.

70

(continued)


77

dim.

decresc.

82

E: 86

V7 /C

z

V7 /A

C

A /G

90

cresc.

V7 /E

E

94

x


x 100

103

cresc.

106

109

cresc.

114

(continued)

example 8.3 (continued) from a 118

123

dim.

128

1

cresc.

129

133

137

2

outside its home territory. Now comes a new strain in G major, elaborating on the sonata’s first melodic move, the 8 to 7 motion of the very first cadence (mm. 65¤.).The isolation and elaboration of this melodic idea makes this semitonal descent, at least potentially, into a motive (motive b), one that will take on prominence in the later movements. Here it gestures toward closure, but only in this relatively remote key of G, deepening the sense that it aspires to a lyricism it cannot yet achieve, or that it can achieve only away from home. At what seems the end of the second theme, its head motive returns as a mere echo, only to subside without cadencing. Its last echoes enkindle a new development of the chromatic material that originates in the sonata’s second phrase (mm. 82¤.), a development that makes the fusion of motives x and y into z fully explicit for the first time.The way this new episode arises from the echoing away of the second theme seems to make the very act of listening—a form of questioning contemplation—its primary motivation. The episode begins with the same circle of descending major thirds— E–C–Ab–E—as in the earlier transition. With the completion of the circle, the return to E (m. 91), the chromatic ascent in the bass becomes slower and more momentous. When it reaches the G in measure 95, the reinforcement of the falling E-minor arpeggio through motive x in the left hand suggests a first appropriation of the sonata’s opening material into this now agitatedly chromatic but still quasi-subjective domain.The E-major measure that follows only strengthens this impression, as does the full ascent of the bass from tonic to dominant—a composing out of the sonata’s opening bass progression—in measures 91 through 100. The ensuing culmination of this developmental episode, pitting triplet and duplet articulations of motive x against each other, brings to a climax this advance of the subjective—the searching, interrogating protagonist first individuated in the sonata’s second phrase—upon the sonata’s opening material. The contest breaks o¤, once more without a cadence. The dancing unaccompanied eighth notes, again magical in their emergence from the tense silence, bring back the second theme. By touching momentarily on “proper” submediant harmony in measure 120, the theme almost reaches a full cadence. An ethereal echo, a phrase extension that introduces the movement’s first sixteenth notes to animate the lyrical a motive, brings the cadence itself. The closing idea (mm. 123–126) remembers the bass progression from the


215

end of the transition (mm. 43–46) in a chromatic shadowing of the diatonic cadence just achieved. The juxtaposition of contrasting diatonic and chromatic cadential gestures keeps alive the echo of the opposition established by the sonata’s opening two phrases.

III Like the turbulent developmental episode within the second group of the exposition, the music that begins the development arises from simple reverberation. Once again, the act of listening seems to enkindle the new from the just heard, as if in free association. Suddenly the echoing of motive z shifts from E major over a tonic pedal to C major, and a new ostinato of eighth-note chords quietly begins, their constant pulsation linked to the chains of eighth notes that have already twice led into the second theme. Above this ostinato a seemingly new theme emerges. It begins with the version of motive a, animated by sixteenth notes, that finally brought the second theme to a cadence (ex. 8.3, mm. 121–122). The new theme articulates itself as a fantastical ten-measure period: its first phrase slips away from C major into B major, while its second slips just as magically back up to C. An even more ethereal variant of the same phrase pair immediately follows, its sixteenths now spun out into gossamer webs. For these two periods, the music simply oscillates between C and B, achieving what Rosen characterizes as a stasis with a “physical e¤ect . . . like nothing in music before.”6 Brendel’s characterization of Schubert as a “sleepwalker” seems especially apt in view of the way this new music appears and then seems to hover.7 Schubert chances on a new idea at the very last moment of his second thematic group (mm. 121–122); the short closing group that follows merely echoes a motive from that second group (cf. m. 123 to m. 82). The closing material fragments, echoing itself; and then opens into a static dream space. In this enchanted space, held fast for the moment by the constantly pulsating chords, the last-minute idea from the cadence of the second group becomes the leading motive. It recollects and reassociates itself with the repeated notes common to all this movement’s melodies, which now follow rather than lead as they have before. Like a dream, the music of this development—

216


or antidevelopment—takes on its own life, losing any sense of tonal destination. Through its exotic, even hypnotic alternation with B major, C major—twice touched upon in the exposition’s sequential flights of fancy (see ex. 8.2a, mm. 29–30, and ex. 8.3, mm. 84–86) and once again before its climax (ex. 8.3, mm. 103–104)—gains an illusory stability. But if closely attended to, the harmonic countercurrents within this oscillation between C major and B major—this enchanted stalling of motion— betray its instability, its necessarily ephemeral quality.The C-major antecedent feels the pull of A minor and then of E minor, and the B-major triad of its cadence emerges from an augmented sixth chord that under more ordinary circumstances would have made it into a dominant of E minor. The pull of this minor tonality on that B-major harmony is still felt in the consequent, but C major reemerges from it instead. Only in the phrases beginning at measure 161 does the dreamscape darken completely: the antecedent becomes fully minor and wells up passionately, this time staying caught in C-minor harmony. In place of the tonic triad that would bring the dream to a despondent end comes an ambiguous diminished seventh chord (m. 168), which resolves via an augmented sixth onto the dominant of A. Like the awakening memory of a dream just dreamt, the C-minor phrase comes quietly again in the home key—here A minor—and the drama of recapitulation—in this case a still optimistic return to the reality of waking life—thus begins. Cone has commented astutely on the recapitulation and the coda.8 He shows how the only significant changes within the recapitulation itself respond to the instability of the opening three phrases, the first and third of which he characterizes as “unappeased antecedents.” In place of the fourth phrase (the A-major material that begins the transition in the exposition) a minor-mode echo of the third phrase enters an octave higher (mm. 219–225). This new variant seems to draw on the memory of the C-minor and A-minor phrases that mark the end of the dream sequence in the development, but it now has an integrative e¤ect: the A-minor variant ends in F major, and the new transition begins in this key. Instead of emerging through the chromatic wedge, the lowered submediant now arises directly from a variant of the opening material, as if that material has now become more malleable, more accessible, than at first. In the coda that material finally surrenders itself to a fully articulated, if extraordinarily extended, thematic structure (mm. 331–349). If A major is


217

home, it begins as a home that cannot be fully possessed or occupied by the protagonist individuated in the second phrase. The second theme represents a first attempt at its possession, an attempt that involves a lengthy search for some kind of resolution. In this stilled lyrical expansion at the movement’s end, its lyrical possession becomes at least fully imaginable. The augmented sixth over Bb, the penultimate harmony, in one way brings that searching subjectivity to rest, but in still casting a shadow over the movement’s ending, it is also a resolution that leaves that calm uncertain.

IV The very pitch that melodically closes the first movement also opens the second (ex. 8.4). But that A now introduces the sighing motive that not only begins the Andantino theme but permeates it, becoming both its motivic kernel and its expressive core.9 This opening sigh recalls the very first melodic move of the first movement, a descent from the same A to the same G#, embellished in its first occurrence for the sake of breadth and grandeur. The highlighted, more intimate embellishment of the same semitonal descent within the first movement’s second theme (see ex. 8.3, mm. 65–70 et sim.) has already suggested a motivic role for it (I have identified it as motive b in that movement), a role now made fully explicit by its unembellished emergence as the head motive of the Andantino. Rhythmically and texturally, this new theme also plays on the echo of the first movement’s coda. In that coda, the opening rhythmic motive, x, recedes for the first time into a purely accompanimental role. Now elaborated with a legato afterbeat, it reemerges in the same role to accompany the new melody. Despite all of these linkages to the first movement, this new theme sounds not merely poignant but desolate, as if sung in exile from the wondrous and mysterious but ultimately innocent world of that movement.10 The feeling owes its intensity partly to the utterly di¤erent character of the Andantino melody, so filled with sighs after so much music almost entirely free of them. But what really generates the sense of alienation in this Andantino—paradoxically, it may seem—is its key, its F# minor, which is the relative minor of A and thus is seemingly not at all remote. It sounds remote nonetheless; for the first movement not only avoids proper submediant

218


example 8.4

Sonata in A Major, D. 959, Andantino, mm. 1–32 a 5

Andantino.

6

5

4

3

2

9

b 17

A: 8

7

25

harmony except at a few key moments (see ex. 8.3, mm. 71, 120, 122 et sim.) but also achieves in large part its particular tonal ambience by consistently replacing that submediant with its lowered counterpart. The Andantino thus begins with a tonal color that the first movement has not merely overlooked; it has specifically avoided it by positing a substitute.The F-major ending of the first movement’s antepenultimate phrase (mm. 340– 344) retains this substitution even in the tonal aura of that movement’s coda. It is by emerging so directly from that aura that the F# minor of the Andantino can sound so foreign. Another reference of the Andantino theme to the first movement—more


219

Sonata in A Major, D. 959: Motive a

figure 8.1

5

3

6

5

3

2

a. i, mm. 55–58 5

6

(3)

5

(3)

2

b. i, mm. 131–135 5

6

5

(4)

3

2

c. ii, mm. 1–8 5

6

(3)

5

3

2

d. ii, mm. 140–146 (cf. [b] above) 5

6

(4)

5

3

2

e. iii, mm. 38–43 (cf. [c] above) 5

(4)

5

6

5

3

2

f. iv, mm. 47–51

veiled and more elaborate, but unmistakable once recognized—again paradoxically only intensifies the sense of alienation so palpable in this plaintive song. After responding to its first two falling sighs with a similar rising gesture, from the fifth to the sixth scale degree (ex. 8.4, mm. 5–6), the Andantino melody then descends through a quickened stepwise chain of sighs from the sixth to the second (mm. 7–8). This seemingly new melodic idea is only a variant of the first movement’s motive a (fig. 8.1), the first tentative drawing of song from the sonata’s opening idea in its second theme (see ex. 8.3, mm. 57–58). Here, in the Andantino, this motive from the earlier theme—5–3–6, 5–3–2—loses a triadic diminution in its first half and gains a passing one in its second to become 5–6, 5–4–3–2 (this scalar descent is further elaborated with appoggiaturas). In the first movement every aspect

220


of the presentation of this motive, but especially its simple melody and rhythm and its root-position triadic harmony, bespeaks purity and innocence: Brendel christens it the “bliss formula.”11 The dream sequence arising from this motive in the development both heightens that innocence and betrays its fragility. By draping this motive with motive b, the Andantino theme now envelops motive a in sighs. It recalls the innocence of this motive to lament the loss of that innocence. It is the song of a fallen angel. In the second period, the same melody comes unexpectedly over a dominant pedal in A major (ex. 8.4, mm. 19¤.). It thus recalls the first melodic move of the sonata in its original key and contrapuntal setting, as a 4–3 suspension (here an appoggiatura) over a dominant bass. Nothing prepares this A-major tonality here, and it never achieves a cadence, receding instead into F# minor.This reharmonization of the melody only intensifies the sense of a distance between F# minor and A major by alluding to the sonata’s home tonic without allowing the music to return there.The key of A major comes here as a memory: not as a goal achieved but, once again, as a source lost and suddenly remembered. Schubert learned very early to use the dominant of the relative major to imbue the minor mode with a feeling of isolation, loss, or bereavement. In the first phrase of “Gretchen am Spinnrade” he uses this harmony—there, admittedly, tonicized—to convey Gretchen’s inability to recover her peace of mind: “Meine Ruh ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer, ich finde sie nimmer und nimmermehr” (My peace is gone, my heart is heavy, I shall find it never, never again). The Andantino of the A-Major Sonata seems similarly su¤used with a feeling of irreparable loss and isolation. The relative major itself, the tonal home of the expansive preceding movement, can indeed be remembered here, and it is thus experienced as what has been lost. The absence from the Andantino’s second period of the beginning of a consequent makes this appearance of A major more urgent because it is more fleeting.12 After coming again in an octave doubling that makes it still more urgent, the theme finally recedes through a dark, descending version of the diatonic wedge—again a forlorn, emblematic recollection of the first movement. Only now does the ostinato that has constantly cradled it since the beginning also abate, leaving open an empty space. The right hand, unaccompanied, quietly begins again to stir above this chasm in a rising, appoggiaturasaturated arabesque that draws the theme’s sighing gesture into enigmatically


221

neutral proliferation. As the slow sixteenths advance into triplets, the left hand reenters with a diminished seventh chord (ex. 8.5, m. 73). Now, as sixteenth-note triplets advance to thirty-second notes (m. 75), the chord’s G# bass note, in the guise of an Ab appoggiatura, falls to G. The harmony shifts, mercurially and mysteriously, from F#-minor darkness to C-major light in a dreamlike moment that seems to recall the dream itself: the C-major sixteenth notes (moving at about the same tempo) from the first movement’s development. Like the other recollections of the first movement in the second, this one only deepens the chasm between the two, increasing the sense that the innocence of the first has been lost. Because of its rocking accompaniment, the theme of the Andantino is sometimes called a barcarole.13 If so, then whoever sings it has been cast o¤ from the first movement’s shores and so has lost sight of the play of sun and shadow in its mountainous vistas. The extraordinarily wild episode that now arises within this movement brings the rocking boat, on this description, through a terrifying storm. Both the quieting, leveling proliferation of the sighs at the beginning of this B section and its momentary suggestion of Cmajor harmony might epitomize the eerily deceptive calm that one learns, through experience, to take as a storm’s forewarning. But Brendel, in describing this episode as a “feverish paroxysm” and associating its dynamic and gestural extremes with those of “Der Doppelgänger,” brings it into a domain that is more personal, both physically and psychologically, than its interpretation as a storm scene is likely to suggest.14 In its slow advance and its uncanny shifts of harmonic focus (first from C minor to C# minor to E minor in mm. 85–93, then from E minor to F and finally to F# minor in mm. 94–104) this music suggests something more deeply sinister, more profoundly disorienting than even the most violent storm. Does Schubert here commute into music his own experience of illness? Is the alienation of the Andantino theme his own alienation, the alienation that that same illness, because of its origin, is so likely to have intensified? If so, then the allusion to the C-major of the first movement’s development can figure as the memory of some youthful dream, some fantastical pleasure garden like the one in which the seed of illness took root. The climax of this violent episode seems as chaotic as tonal music can ever be, yet even so it is motivically linked to the sonata’s opening lines. When the downward-rushing C#-minor scale that launches this climax

222


example 8.5 66

Sonata in A Major, D. 959, Andantino, mm. 66–76

(diatonic wedge)

B 3

73 3

reaches its bottom G#, it initiates a slow chromatic ascent from that quavering bass note up to its C# tonic (ex. 8.6a, mm. 107¤.). The E in the top voice that signals both the arrival and the first culmination of this climax keeps sounding throughout the entire bass ascent (mm. 107–116), making this passage a variant of the chromatic wedge from the sonata’s second phrase. Thus this feverish crisis—this disorienting, sense-defying experience—is not in every respect as chaotic or as senseless as it may sound. Its origin is not in the outside world, as a storm’s would be, but inside, in the personal exploration connoted by the sonata’s second phrase. It reveals, as the first movement never can, the possible danger of such exploration, transforming the first movement’s dream into nightmare and its optimistic health into tormented illness. The episode abruptly culminates in violent chords (mm. 122, 124, 128, 130), like the awakening shrieks of a terrified—even fevera›icted—dreamer piercing the night air. These chords can, once again, stir contrasting memories of the first movement. That movement begins with an isolated A-major triad whose bright resonance is enhanced by the afterbeat of motive x. Here, at the Andantino’s climax, the absence of such an afterbeat from the first C#-minor chord, after so much unremitting turmoil, is just as palpable as its presence at the sonata’s beginning. Measures of recitative, which fuse recollections of this episode’s beginning (see ex. 8.5, mm. 69¤.) and the decorative intensification of the theme (see ex. 8.4, m. 3 et sim.), immediately lead, three times more, to


223

example 8.6 Sonata in A Major, D. 959, Andantino a. Mm. 104–116 104

8va

8va

3

3

3

3

3

108

(chromatic wedge) 8va

111

6

cresc.

8va

114 3

3

3

b. Mm. 132–146 132

cresc.

139

5 4 3 2 1

6

5 4

3 2

further violent outbursts. The fourth time, however, the chordal shriek is replaced by a melodic call, an incipient lyrical transformation of motive x (ex. 8.6b, m. 132). In this new form, the motive that imparted its resonance to the sonata’s opening returns in the wake of a climactic gesture remarkable for the absence of any such resonance. The still violent left-hand chord that immediately follows this melodic transformation of x now enhances the resonance not of a chord but of a single tone, G#. Robert Hatten justifiably associates the resonant e¤ect of this chord with the similar function of motive x in the first movement.15 Thus, just as motive x, which originally enhanced a chord, becomes melody, a chord itself takes over its resonance-enhancing role. On its fifth try (ex. 8.6b, m. 141), the chord turns hushed and major, and the melody of the recitative flowers into an expanded free elaboration of motive a (mm. 140–146) that subtly recalls the first movement’s development theme with a momentarily assuaging e¤ect (see fig. 8.1). The transition that follows recalls the similar retransition in the Gb-Major Impromptu, a passage that I have associated with recovery—there not from illness, perhaps, but certainly from some calamity associated with a loss of innocence. Within this Andantino, however, this recovery, although glimpsed, is not yet achieved. The aftere¤ect of the violence is felt in the hypnotically layered texture of the theme’s return. The relationship of the A-major phrase (m. 177) to the first movement’s beginning—its derivation from motive x—becomes transparently clear. In a cruel response to the innocent pleading of this texturally simplified phrase, the truncated consequent surges up into a violent cadence, even more curt than before. In the cadence’s aftermath, G darkens the final melodic descent of the coda, as if the protagonist can no longer even plead. The final chords expand on the desolate recollection of the diatonic wedge, the memory of the first movement’s opening.

V As I have already argued in the prologue, the Scherzo exemplifies aspects of Schubert’s music that can seem conceptually incompatible with one another: on the one hand a quasi-improvisatory continuity, in which the music takes new turns as if by chance; on the other a rich cyclic allusiveness, in which everything that comes about through this seeming improvisation turns out


225

to be derived from what has come before.Thus the opening measures clearly juxtapose motives x and y (see note 14 to the prologue), and measures 11 through 16 (see ex. P.1a) structure themselves upon a new variant of the diatonic wedge through their stepwise ascent in the bass against an implied dominant pedal in the upper voices. The C major of the first movement’s dream and the C# minor of the Andantino’s nightmare both return, as I have indicated, without preparation, like direct emanations from realms of experience that are not merely di¤erent but are even dissociated from each other. C major and C# minor thus come here not simply as the way stations of an A-major tonal course, but in some respects appear as quasi-independent tonal strata bearing distinct and complex memories. Like A major itself, which in the first movement joins with its dominant, E major, to form a single composite tonal domain, both C major and C# minor can also be understood here as representatives of similarly composite domains. C major, arising in the first movement’s exposition and development as the lowered submediant of E, is therefore linked with F major, which takes the same role with respect to the tonic in the recapitulation and coda. And C# minor, the only key to achieve any stability in the Andantino’s middle section, is linked through a similar fifth relation to F# minor, that movement’s main key. From the vantage point of the Scherzo, the entire sonata can be seen as structured upon these three composite tonal strata, which the Scherzo juxtaposes, as if to gain an overview of them for the first time. The trio (ex. 8.7) remembers the first movement even more transparently than does the Scherzo. Again it concerns itself with drawing lyrical continuities from motives x and y in new ways. At its beginning, motive x introduces melodic garlands around motive a, now in the major-mode harmonization toward which the second period of the Andantino theme gestured. The stepwise eighth notes of the garlands come straight from the first movement’s second theme, but they now sound more tripping and less tentative. At the double bar the mezzo forte exclamation almost literally recalls the first movement’s opening. With the sudden turn from A major to F major in measure 93, motive x yields to motive y in a revelatory moment of synthesis—a moment that through this reference to y acknowledges the source of F major, like its close C-major relative, in the querying music of the sonata’s second phrase at the same time that it juxtaposes A major and

226


example 8.7

Sonata in A Major, D. 959, Scherzo, mm. 80–101 1

Un poco più lento.

80

2

x

87

y

95

decresc.

F major as equals. The sudden return of the dominant seventh of A major (m. 99), by rediscovering the Scherzo’s opening gesture, e¤ects a corresponding return of motive x. Like the coda of the first movement, the remaining phrase of this trio momentarily tonicizes the subdominant in a moment of quiet lyrical a‹rmation, a moment in which the pitches C and C# are melodically and harmonically integrated.

VI The rising A-major arpeggiation, 3–5–8, with which the Rondo theme begins (see ex. 8.1a) seems to arise directly from the falling arpeggiation, 8–5–3–1, with which the Scherzo ends. Similar echoes have linked the beginning of each movement to the ending of the preceding one: the x-based ostinato of the Andantino theme darkly echoes the accompanimental use of the same motive in the first movement coda; later, the high rolled chord that sets o¤ the Scherzo resonates with the low rolled chords that conclude the


227

Andantino; finally, this rising arpeggiation reverses—and complements—a falling one. The Rondo theme gathers together more motivic allusions than any other thematic complex in the sonata (fig. 8.2). It begins with a new lyrical manifestation of x, one that because of its held, syncopated second note also carries echoes of y.16 Its second measure brings a new lyrical variant of z, one that incorporates b at its original pitch level, from 8 to 7 and then immediately resolves it back to 8. I have described how the first phrase incorporates the diatonic wedge on which the opening phrase of the sonata is constructed. In the Rondo’s second phrase, the elaborated upper neighbor motion from B in measure 7 (see ex. 8.1a) quite explicitly recalls the intervallically identical upper neighbor figure on E at the center of that original phrase (see ex. 8.2a, mm. 3–4). The apex of the melody, which occurs just after the double bar, structures itself, like motive a, upon an upper neighbor to 5 followed by a fall to 2. Its cadential gesture, which rises from a repeated 2 to 3 and then falls through the same repeated figure to the tonic, echoes the grim cadences of the Andantino (see ex. 8.4, mm. 15–18), transforming their tense, death-haunted pulsation into life-a‹rming lyrical e¤usion. Every element that returns in this theme now arguably attains its most lyrical actualization, its most self-possessed, unselfconsciously singing form. The immediate repetition of this theme in the left hand beneath accompanying triplets in the right has an obvious and frequently cited precedent in the finale, also a Rondo, of Beethoven’s Sonata in G Major, op. 31, no.1. This is the first of several features that strongly suggest that Schubert modeled this Rondo on Beethoven’s—indeed, the suggestion is so strong that the modeling is now commonly assumed to be fact.17 The formal and textural development of Schubert’s finale follows Beethoven’s almost pointfor-point, but the sequence of events in the opus 31, no. 1, finale is logical enough to allow for the possibility that Schubert might have hit upon it again without remembering it explicitly—that in composing his A-major finale he might have been working under the influence of subliminal, rather than conscious, Beethovenian memories. If not, then Schubert’s composition of this finale represents an improbable juggling act indeed: it contains an earlier theme of his own in a movement modeled on Beethoven and yet still contributes significantly, within its own context, to a cyclic conception. Improbable, although—I must add—certainly not impossible.

228


Sonata in A Major, D. 959

figure 8.2

Reduction of the Rondo theme 1

Motivic recollections

n

b

‘Diatonic Wedge’

b

n

(cf. melody above) x

y

z

i, second theme

i, bass, mm. 13–16

Reduction of the Rondo theme 9

5

6

5 4 2

4

5

1

2 3

2 2

2

3

2 2

3

2

2

1

Motivic recollections 5

6

i, mm. 57–58 5

i, mm. 16–22

5

2

2

a

2

2

ii, mm. 15–18 6

4

3

2

3

2

2

1

Whatever its claims on our belief, the assumption of this modeling tends to discourage—although it certainly does not preclude—serious thought about the relationship of this finale to the earlier movements of the sonata that it completes. The arguments supporting the assumption encourage us to accept the modeling process as a full explanation for Schubert’s compositional choices in this movement, but close attention to the Rondo reveals its many ties to the first movement. In the opening of Schubert’s first movement, material played by the right hand soon moves to the left (see ex. 8.2a, mm. 16¤.), just as it does in the finale. Triplets are prominent near the beginning of the first movement as well (although they occur there in opposition to the opening material rather than in conjunction with it). Much of the music of the first movement’s exposition involves a conflict between “objective” duplets and “subjective” triplets, a conflict whose memory lends a special sense of peaceful integration to the supportive role of triplets throughout so much of the finale. The Rondo imparts the sense that these two opposing domains are finally reconciled with one another. The flowing stream of triplets persists through a luxuriant, unproblematic transition and then through all of the ensuing B section. The new B melody (ex. 8.8) begins with a simple ringing forth of motive z before rising to its crest in motive a through eighth-note figures that recall those of both the first movement’s second theme and the Scherzo’s trio. At the same time, the way the 5-to-8 motion of its first eighth-note figure immediately follows the z motive recalls, in calm transformation, the shape of the gesture that initiates the turbulent developmental episode in the first movement’s second group (see ex. 8.3, mm. 82¤.). Here, as in the first theme of the Rondo, old motives return in flowing, lyrically consummated forms. The phrases of this new B theme rhyme with each other: in each, the same rhythms come in the same order. But this regularity masks a subtle irregularity: three phrases rather than two or four, each of them five measures long. This melody rings out as simply and unselfconsciously as a folk song, but it achieves its e¤ect in part through this sophisticated freedom of phrase structure. Tonally it ranges freely as well, from the E major of the first phrase, through a memory of the Andantino’s F# minor in its second phrase, to the A major through which its third phrase lays that memory, for the moment, to rest.

230


example 8.8 46

49

Sonata in A Major, D. 959, Rondo, mm. 46–51 z

5

6

5

3

2

Lulling codettas confirm this subdominant arrival, but then the new melody begins again (m. 68), now in four-measure phrases that take the music further in the subdominant direction, first to D major and then, were it not for a cadential evasion, to G major. The evasion brings the music back to E major for a full cadence. But it is immediately o¤ again: E major, E minor, again G major, and once again an evaded cadence, this time standing on the dominant of E major, with a persisting minor shadow, for seven measures. The melody begins yet again, but it is for the first time in E minor (m. 91). Now, instead of returning from the dominant to tonic, the first harmonic progression of this new phrase is suddenly diverted to C major (m. 92), to be held there, in tonic-dominant oscillation, for eleven measures. Much as in the first movement and the Scherzo, C major thus suddenly emerges without preparation and then persists in stalled motion. More like a daydream than a night dream in this instance, the C-major passage leads smoothly back into an exuberant E-major cadence (mm. 104¤.). Although still improvisatory enough in character to remind us of its earlier appearances in those movements, C major feels far more integrated now than ever before. The strong subdominant pull of the entire B section has indirectly prepared for it: the progression from E major through A major and D major to G major would have arrived at C major in one more step—and the chromatic progression in measures 102 and 103 allows C major to bequeath its dream-stirred magic to a jubilant E-major resolution.


231

The incorporation of the chromatic wedge into the continuing triplet figuration of the retransition to the first theme (mm. 117–125) once again betokens calm integration. With the return of the Rondo theme above the still undulating triplets, the shadow reintroduced by the chromaticism quickly passes. But the darkness is not yet over; it returns when the theme moves again to the left hand and the triplets to the right (mm. 142¤.). The theme now comes in the tonic minor, and it leads into a development that ascends by fifth through minor keys, from A through E, B, and F# to C# minor. With mounting turbulence, this music heads back into the tonal territory of the middle section of the Andantino. But while the C# minor of that nightmarish episode came about through a series of eerily and violently chromatic shifts, as if in the thrall of a sinister force, this time it is attained through a sequence of quasi-logical, quasi-deliberate moves by ascending fifth. The manner of its reemergence suggests a courageous return to the scene of an earlier trauma, leading this time to mastery of it. At the climax of this episode, after two turbulent C#-minor assays on the Rondo theme, motive z splits registrally apart to become, in e¤ect, a powerful augmentation of x (mm. 180¤.). This passage, by at first invoking the diatonic wedge, produces an e¤ect of splitting it open and thus, at last, gaining control over it. As the climactic passage dies away, C# minor turns major, yet again recalling the Andantino. Now, in place of the F# minor that followed in that movement, comes the theme itself of this movement in F# major, with a concurrent quieting of triplets into duplets. An aura of epiphany persists as the consequent brings the harmony back to A major, allowing the tonic to return in the guise of a lowered submediant and thus for a moment to fuse the dream associated with that altered degree with the reality associated with the tonic.18 Schubert’s coda parallels Beethoven’s not only in the pauses that interrupt the theme in its last occurrence but also in the ensuing presto and the concluding chordal allusions to the first movement. Here, in this eccentric coda more than anywhere else in Schubert’s finale, comes the most seemingly incontrovertible evidence for its modeling on Beethoven’s template. But even now certain striking aspects of Schubert’s coda, without antecedent in Beethoven’s, respond to earlier events in this A-Major Sonata. After its first pause (m. 332), the theme turns to A minor and then to F major, paralleling the one change Schubert introduced into the recapitu-

232


lation of his first movement (mm. 220–225) and carrying an echo of the coda of that movement (mm. 343–344). The way A major returns from F, through the augmented sixth in measure 343, once again brings the lowered submediant into harmonic continuity with the tonic, in this way allowing it finally to contribute its aura to the Rondo theme itself. In the presto, not only F major but even Bb major is momentarily tonicized, and a final allusion to C# minor—along with G# minor and F# minor—follows moments later. The presto thus surveys the tonal range of the A-Major Sonata one last time, sweeping it up into one gestural continuity. The very ending of Schubert’s finale, in alluding explicitly to the first movement, introduces a ploy at which Beethoven’s ending does hint—through its reference to the first movement’s successions of blocked G-major chords— but at which it hints just barely.

VII Not only in its theme but at every stage of its form, Schubert’s finale thus returns to material from the earlier movements of the sonata in order to render this material more flowing, more lyrical, and more tonally integrated with its A-major home. The B section draws three separate ideas from the first movement—motive z, motive a, and a “four-eighths motive,” all of which are, at first, hesitantly presented in that movement—together into one unbroken melody (see ex. 8.8). At the same time it progresses harmonically, through a succession of turns to the subdominant, toward the C major that has previously always come without preparation. It appears without preparation here as well, only much less so. The dramatic middle section returns in a similar way—through minor-mode turns to the dominant— to the C# minor of the Andantino’s “feverish paroxysm” (see ex. 8.6a), now plotting a continuous, seemingly controlled course toward that key, making a deliberate tonal goal out of what was previously a vortex. Finally, the coda draws the A-Major Sonata’s disparate tonal regions—the tonal strata of A major–E major, C major–F major, and F# minor–C# minor—together in one place for one last time, making a final continuity of them while still acknowledging their discontinuity.This finale is thus the capstone of what may be Schubert’s most profoundly cyclic conception.


233

And yet Schubert drew this finale’s theme, probably knowingly, from one of his own earlier sonatas and then supposedly modeled it on one of Beethoven’s finales. How can this be? How can a movement so profoundly responsive to its own context be at the same time so derivative from outside sources? Why would a composer, in approaching the culmination of an already elaborately cyclic conception, suddenly introduce thematic material and even a formal plan of outside origin? Of all Schubert’s conceptions, this one would seem one of the least likely to resort to such borrowing—unless, of course, that borrowing was already part of Schubert’s original plan, already in his thoughts as he began work on the sonata. Such it was with the “Wanderer” Fantasy and, seemingly, with the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet. It must also have been so, more profoundly and obviously more subtly, with this A-Major Sonata. Let me propose the following scenario for the composition of this work— one that renders it a “work” indeed, a deeply unified conception in itself, but one that explicitly acknowledges Schubert’s indebtedness both to tradition and to his own earlier compositional experience by drawing in a complex way on outside sources. Schubert recalls one of his own earlier themes, which now comes back to him in an enchanting lyrical transformation. Something about this new version of his theme reminds him of the finale to Beethoven’s opus 31, no. 1: the resonance of its texture, perhaps, with its held notes in the left hand, or the way its melody rises, within its opening idea, to take lyrical possession of the tonic, or the way the approach to the first semicadence incorporates the raised fourth degree. It occurs to him that his own melody might work well as the theme of a movement like Beethoven’s, and he sketches it out. As Beethoven’s movement is a finale, so will Schubert’s be. The way Beethoven’s ending resonates with his first movement sparks Schubert’s cyclic impulses, and their energy becomes all consuming. From his own theme he not only derives a kind of Grundgestalt for the material of his new sonata but also finds a form for it that will enable it to open and close the entire work. The original version of Schubert’s opening, not yet enlivened by motive x, is accordingly even more abstract than the sonata’s opening in its final form: it makes the scenario I am proposing especially plausible. In building his sonata upon it, Schubert finds ways to progress at first only tentatively, only gradually, towards more lyrical manifestations of its motives. He arrives at a conception for which the Rondo

234


theme becomes a lyrical culmination, finally bringing all of its principal motives flowingly together in the home key for the first time. Until its end, the Rondo feels seamless and self-contained in ways the earlier movements do not. The puzzling, sometimes even violent disjunctions in each of those movements leave open questions that the Rondo seems finally to answer. For these reasons, the hypothesis that I propose here about how Schubert composed this sonata makes sense even if Schubert did not knowingly reuse his own theme and even if he did not consciously model the finale that begins with this theme on one of Beethoven’s.

VIII I have described the sonata’s opening as objective, yet inscrutable. In its athematicism it has more the character of an introduction to a movement in sonata allegro form than of a main theme for such a movement. Not only is its A major unambiguously clear, it also comes forth, through motive x, assertively. But this is surely one of the most unsingable opening themes ever composed within the Viennese Classical tradition. We know from the outset what the tonic is, but we cannot aurally take possession of it; it has no melodically distinctive motivic shape that would articulate the tonic for us. We know that A major is, but not what it is, except a functioning tonic. This beginning is like a musical realization of the Kantian Ding an sich, a reality whose existence we are forced to acknowledge but whose essence eludes us. This simile might encourage us to interpret the course of the sonata as a proto-Schopenhauerian advance of the Will upon the World, a turning inside—through a gradual winning of lyrically contemplative depth—in order to gain understanding and control of what lies outside. With respect to Schubert’s own project of musical rediscovery and rebuilding of himself in the aftermath of Winterreise, the A major of this sonata is perhaps most aptly understood simply as home. At the beginning it is a home that the protagonist who is individuated in the second phrase must encounter and question: he cannot sing in it, and for this reason cannot fully live in it. He explores his own imagination—his own subjectivity, his own pleasure gardens—and derives new approaches to home from these explorations. By the first movement’s end, its opening idea has already become


235

singable, and in this way it is far more accessible now than at first. A shadow still hangs over this ending, however, a shadow whose menace overtakes the second movement. As in “Mein Traum,” an exiled protagonist sings of love and pain, but the horror of his exile overwhelms him and he has to cry out in terror before he can sing again. The Scherzo, at least provisionally, returns home, there a¤ording a vista from which the desired and the feared, the dream and the responding nightmare, can be viewed together. But only the Rondo takes full lyrical possession of home territory and finds ways within that territory to embrace both the dream and the terror to which the dream’s pursuit has led. The home that Schubert created in this finale is perhaps utopian, but this is a utopia that he deeply wins and one, accordingly, that comes to life as though it were animated by his own breath and blood.

236


c hap t e r

9

Schubert’s Last “Wanderer” The Sonata in Bb Major, D. 960

I In the Andante sostenuto of the Bb-Major Sonata, the sudden, quiet turn to C major in the last section is a transfixing moment. After an A-major middle section that recalls the first movement both thematically and texturally, the somber C#-minor theme of this slow movement returns (ex. 9.1a, mm. 90¤.). The ostinato has derived a new rhythmic figure and a new sense of urgency from the accompanimental sixteenths of the middle section. The chords that cling closely to the slow, almost unadorned melody still impart to it their quiet intensity, while the new ostinato continues to create a sense of an open, empty space into which the melody resonates as a lonely, searching song. For thirteen measures the theme stays the same, melodically and harmonically, as it was the first time. Then, suddenly, instead of moving to its relative major, E, as it did before, it shifts to C major (m. 103). The music is held in C, in what feels like a revelatory stilling of motion, for eight measures. The melody of this new turn to C di¤ers only slightly but nevertheless crucially from the E-major melody whose place it takes. The G#, which before was held over from the C#-minor semicadence as 3 of E, now slips down to G, 5 of C, and the melody becomes 5, 8–7–6, 6–6–5, 4–3–1. In the context of this C#-minor song, what is revealed through this C-major phrase may still seem remote and mysterious. But it will return later as something real and close at hand: it will become the jubilant second theme of the finale (ex. 9.1b). The C# minor of this movement is, of course, the “Wanderer” key, and

237

example 9.1 Sonata in Bb Major, D. 960 a. Andante sostenuto, mm. 82–112 82

(end of b' 2 )

(B : evaded cadence)

84

87

dim.

90

94

98

A'

example 9.1 (continued) C:

5

8

7

6

6

101

cresc.

6

5

4

3

1

105

109

b. Allegro ma non troppo, mm. 85–94 5

85

90

4

3

8

7

6

6

5

5

4

the virtual quotation of the beginning of that song in the first movement has created a context for hearing it as such.1 C major is also associated with “Der Wanderer”: as I argued in chapter 3, the “Wanderer” Fantasy made it the home against which C# minor comes into relief as a Fremdling region, a scene of exile. And indeed, although nothing about this C-major moment in the Bb-Major Sonata pointedly recalls “Der Wanderer” or the “Wanderer” Fantasy, C major does feel here, in its suspension of harmonic motion, like a profoundly peaceful, even maternal memory—like an idealized vision of home. Even within the Andante sostenuto itself, this C-major passage proves to be a turning point: its melody returns at the end to transform the C#minor ending into the major (mm. 123¤.), as if the e¤ect of the C-major passage has been to show a way out of the minor. This moment at the sonata’s center, so extraordinary in itself as to seem self-justifying, therefore has far-reaching import, a¤ecting both the subsequent course of its own movement and the thematic character of the concluding movement.

II Thus not only the first theme of the finale (see ex. 1.1a) but also the second (ex. 9.1b) has its source in an earlier movement. Like the first, however, the second theme di¤ers so markedly from its source in both articulation and sense of motion that its derivation has gone virtually unrecognized.2 The first theme not only originates in the sonata’s second phrase (see ex. 1.3, mm. 14–16), as explained in chapter 1, but in essence transports the phrase to this new site to foreground it as an opening theme. The octave G that introduces the finale theme opposes itself to the memory of the Gb trill of the first movement so categorically as to figure still a response to it: it leads now rather than follows, as the trill did, and comes as a diatonic rejoinder—in the foreground, solid and clear—to a chromatic foil, originally in the background, trembling and mu›ed. The G brings the elusive power of the Gb trill under control while finding its own release from obsessiveness through the Gb itself. As just suggested, the second theme of the finale originates in a passage that suggests a haven away from the C# minor of the slow movement. Inasmuch as that key can be said ultimately to arise from the first movement’s

240


trill (through a Gb–F#–C# “trajectory”), the e¤ect of the sudden turn of this passage from C# minor to C major also implicates the memory of the trill; it envisions, but does not yet achieve, a release from the C# minor—the “Wanderer” key—to which the trill’s Gb has indirectly given rise. In its return in the finale, this melody celebrates that escape, the “overcoming of the Sonata’s dolens” first registered by the finale’s opening theme, as something now realized.3 As Rosen has written of the trill, “the more one plays it, the more the entire work seems to arise out of that mysterious sonority.”4 It is through the exploration of that sonority and its implications that the figure of the wanderer enters into Schubert’s last sonata; and it is through the memory and the mastering of that sonority that that figure wins his way home.

III In itself, the emphasis of Gb in a Bb-major piece—even if prolonged—is nothing extraordinary. By Schubert’s time, the use in the major of the sixth scale degree borrowed from the parallel minor had become one of the most common of chromatic inflections. At the beginning of the Bb-Major Sonata, however, Schubert draws not only on textural, dynamic, and registral resources but also on subtler rhythmic ones to make the first appearance of the Gb into what Kerman calls a “mysterious, impressive, cryptic Romantic gesture.”5 Thus Schubert not only emphasizes the Gb through a trill, as soft and low as possible, but he introduces it into a subtly disoriented thematic complex, one that has already begun to lose its way, rhythmically and melodically. The second subphrase, the one to which the trill belongs, begins by reversing the pattern of rhythmic stress established in the first subphrase (see ex. 1.3, mm. 5–9). It then extends the following motion in quarter notes so that the melodic goal, C, arrives not on a downbeat, like the earlier long notes, but in mid-measure. Through this manipulation of phrase rhythm, Schubert finds a context for his mysterious gesture that makes its Gb not merely a coloristic element, but a seemingly portentous one. The trill—Schubert’s particular trill, so low, so hushed, so close to stopping time—reconfigures a common chromatic inflection, the lowered sixth degree, as something extraordinary. The Gb emerges beneath the first semicadence as a harbinger of

s c h u b e r t ’s l a s t “ wa n d e r e r ”

241

something outside or beyond what is implied by the theme itself, something fascinating in both its allure and its danger. After a consequent that incorporates the Gb into a chromatically descending bass, the pianissimo trill comes immediately again (see ex. 1.3, m. 19). Beginning now on Bb, it immediately shades the tonic with a Cb neighbor; by itself it draws the music, without recourse to modulatory harmony, into its own Gb territory. The theme comes again now in a variant beginning with the same opening Bb, but as 3 instead of 1, over a Gb tonic pedal that lasts for sixteen measures. It is as if a protagonist individuates himself through the trill to make a first, charmed exploration of the Gb-major territory. The music reemerges from this Gb major into a seeming rea‹rmation of Bb, played forte over a dominant pedal. But now the Bb-major cadence is denied: Bn takes the place of its Bb melodic resolution over an ambiguous diminished seventh harmony (ex. 9.2, m. 45). After hovering with growing tension on this harmony for three measures, the music is plunged into F# minor. In Schubert’s first sketch of this movement, more of the Bb-major music returned, and it came to a second full tonic cadence like the one at measure 18 (see ex. 1.3). Another Bb to Cb trill, just like the first one but twice as long, led directly into an F# minor as harmonically unprepared as the earlier turn to Gb major. In this first version, Schubert thus made the parallelism of F# minor to Gb major completely explicit, so that the F# minor after the second full cadence literally took the place that Gb major had taken after the first. The final version somewhat conceals the relationship of this F# minor to Gb major and hence to the Gb trill, but at the same time it makes this new key more powerful in its emergence from the thwarting of the second tonic cadence. In the final version, once the protagonist has been to Gb major he cannot take part any longer in a Bb-major cadence. Instead he is drawn back into the territory of the Gb itself, which has suddenly turned darkly minor. Like the protagonist of “Mein Traum,” he is cast out—not for rejecting his father’s garden of delights, but for already venturing into his own—and he begins to search and to wander. The first F#-minor phrase already gestures toward A major, but it is pulled back to F# minor in its fifth measure (ex. 9.2, m. 53). Its consequent reaches A major (m. 58), but the ensuing music immediately takes a vacillating course that ultimately returns through Bb (m. 70) to another resolution-evading B (cf. m. 72 with ex. 9.2, m. 45), this one finally resolving to the dominant

242


example 9.2


42

45


decresc.

cresc.

(transition theme) 48

f minor

v

51

cresc.

decresc.

V7 /A

V65/f

of F major. This emergence reverses, for the moment, the e¤ect of the earlier plunge, from the same B over the same diminished seventh, into F# minor. Thus this first short journey, although vacillating, does reach a comfortingly familiar goal: the dominant of the dominant. The dancing music that celebrates this arrival in F major (ex. 9.3a, mm. 80¤.) unfurls garlands of triplets over the long–short–short rhythm (henceforth motive w) already implicitly present in the F#-minor theme (I shall call its form in that theme, beginning with a dotted quarter and an eighth in place of the simpler half note, motive v). The new dance swells into sixmeasure phrases, and the shadow of the F# that appears in the fifth measure (m. 84) immediately passes in the sixth. When the phrase comes again, at


243


Sonata in Bb Major, D. 960, Molto moderato 8va

76

V/F 79

8va

B

w 83

b. Mm. 99–134 v 99

K

102

cresc.

v 106

(continued)

example 9.3 (continued) 8va

111

decresc.

1

115

3 3

(development)

2

118

ritard.

(A theme)

121

(continued)


(“transition theme”)

129

(B theme) 132

first with the hands reversed, the emergence and passing of the shadow is echoed and reechoed, almost bringing the dance to a halt. The phrase cadences a‹rmingly nonetheless, leading into a closing theme that attempts to transform the F#-minor theme into a comforting a‹rmation (ex. 9.3b, mm. 99–100, recall the melody of the transition; see ex. 9.2, m. 49), but stammers again and again. By delving into darker harmonies and reemerging from them, this closing theme seems to reach an a‹rmation in the extension of motive v through an additional long note (mm. 106–107). The echoings of this extension, in their lack of melodic resolution, only cast doubt on the seeming a‹rmation. The exposition ends, to an unusual degree, in an aura of questioning hesitation.

IV The first ending of the exposition, the transition back to the beginning, only makes this questioning more radical—even astonishingly so.The slurred pairs

246


of sixteenth notes that initiate it stir memories, already turned fragmentary, of the slurs in the dancing F-major theme (ex. 9.3a, mm. 80¤.). The following pianissimo short–short–long gesture reverses motive w, already losing hold of the initially a‹rmative extension of that motive in measures 106 through 115 (ex. 9.3b). In its hesitancy and fragmentation, this passage reflects the uncertainty of the resolution just achieved. Perhaps in anxious response to this uncertainty, it grows quickly agitated, exploding into a violent chordal outburst that is immediately followed, just as violently, by the Gb trill. Anyone who has doubted the danger of the trill can doubt it no longer. Beneath its enigmatic allure it harbors an elemental and potentially annihilating force. The second ending, as stilled as the first was violent, is nonetheless almost as shocking. With devastating simplicity, it merely isolates and echoes, in remote C#-minor harmony, the last short–short–long gesture, as if suddenly taking the protagonist back into exile. This fall from F major into C# minor parallels and echoes the earlier fall from Bb major into F# minor. In this key comes the opening theme, not in its first strain but in its second— the version beginning on the third scale degree, originally in Gb major: the one through which, on my account, this protagonist first individuates himself. Not only the first theme but also the F#-minor theme itself (ex. 9.3b, mm. 126¤.) returns in this tonally remote interlude, in which these themes of the exposition appear drawn together in meditative recollection. At the deceptive cadence (m. 131) comes the additional recollection of the dancing theme (from m. 80; ex. 9.3a), which soon initiates a new tonal exploration. The first stage of the journey, animated by a triadically ascending version of motive w, passes from A major through G# minor, B major, and Bb minor to arrive at a Db-major climax, an optimistic brightening of the C#-minor region in which this development began. This arrival, which reverses the exposition’s darkening sequence from Gb major to F# minor, signals itself through a dynamic climax and the cessation of motive w in the left hand, which firmly resolves into a Db-major tonic chord. The climactic triplet arpeggio descends into a calmly repeated bass Db that resonates by itself for a full measure, thus also marking the climactic arrival as a gateway, a new beginning. This resonating Db opens the space for a new theme, one that brings the upward-moving arpeggiation of motive w for the first time into the right hand as its head motive (see ex. 9.4).


247

With this departure from the C#-minor territory by way of a new Dbmajor theme, the music embarks on further exploration. The second phrase of this theme moves to E, and it is here, beginning with an E-major triad followed by an A-minor one (ex. 9.4, mm. 159–160), that motive w discloses its identity by virtually quoting the opening measures of “Der Wanderer.” In the wake of this disclosure, the music begins a modulatory trajectory that takes it through six keys to D minor in only twice as many measures (mm. 159–171)—as if its protagonist were venturing forth as a wanderer into uncharted territory. In this D minor, harmonic motion is suddenly stilled, and in this key comes another new theme, once again based on w, the same “Wanderer” motive. D minor arrives as the culmination of the most agitated, thickly textured, tonally complex, and sustained buildup in the movement. This key is of course closely related to Bb major, the home key, but it comes only as the last in a series of chromatic modulations (from F minor through Ab minor and B minor) in which no key is closely related to the ones that precede and follow it. Even someone reading and recognizing this D minor will probably not hear it as close to home—despite the coherence of the voice leading through which it comes about—but rather as lost. It seems cut o¤ from any tonal mooring, neither close to home nor recognizably far from it. The theme that this unique climax introduces carries the obvious memory of the Db-major theme that marked the only distinctive point of arrival earlier in the development. It also carries more subliminal memories of events that originate in the first moment of agitated tonal disorientation—the sudden deflection of the cadence of the first theme into F# minor (see ex. 9.2, m. 48). As already indicated, the first measures of the F#-minor theme are already structured on motive v, a variant of w, whose evolution I have traced through the dancing F-major theme, the closing theme, and the journeying passages of the development. In phrase structure, this new D-minor theme revisits the six-measure pattern, motivically three plus three, of the dancing theme (see ex. 9.3a, mm. 80¤.). Harmonically, it shares with the F#-minor theme (see ex. 9.2, mm. 49¤.), also the source of its rhythmic impulse, an ambiguous oscillation between a minor key and its relative major. Both themes withhold any unambiguous suggestion of the direction of their resolution until the moment of its occurrence. The F#-minor theme finally

248


example 9.4


149

153

157

160

cf. “Der Wanderer, ” beginning

cresc.

164

167

(continued)


cresc.

171

174

179

184

189


198

8va

203

207

8va

3

3

211

decresc.

215

sempre legato

cadences in A major, initiating the wanderer’s first search, a tonally indirect and vacillating transition to F major. But here at the development’s climax, this D-minor theme remains in D, deepening its own stillness by not responding to the pull of its penultimate chord to F. And when, in the echo of the first D-minor phrase, the cadential dominant of F major falls back to a D-minor chord a second time, the stage is set for yet another D-minor phrase. Only at this moment—with tonal motion stilled, the wanderer simply waiting—does the trill return. It returns on D, confirming D as tonic through sheer reiteration. Into this setting, now following the trill rather than preceding it, the opening theme of the sonata returns (ex. 9.4, mm. 188¤.). Its melody is intervallically exactly that of the opening strain, but in coming after the trill and beginning on the third degree of the scale, it is closer in feeling to the second strain, the one first heard in Gb major. Improvising a version of this passage in which the return of the theme begins instead with the tonic reveals at once how crucially the melodic emphasis on the third degree a¤ects its feeling. It still feels more like the song of the exiled protagonist, the lonely wanderer, than like the theme in its more choral, more angelic initial form. The texture, too, is soloistic, like that of the second strain’s first, still angelic occurrence. It is also similar to that of the theme’s return (also in minor and on the third degree) at the beginning of the development, only it is now accompanied by concentrated repeated chords rather than by fluid arpeggiations. The six-measure spans established through the first two D-minor phrases now incorporate both trill and theme. A second low trill on D ends in a descent to Bb, alluding to the home key without really going there, without changing the trill’s E to Eb, and without a harmonically realized modulation. The first strain, the theme in its original form with its melody centering on the Bb “tonic,” now returns in the same soloistic texture. The Gb in its harmonization keeps it at an allusive distance from D minor. The conclusion of a third trill rolls the Bb back up into the D, and the D-minor setting of the second strain comes back to frame the first. Under its last note (m. 203), the expected D-minor chord gives its place to the dominant of Bb, at first only in inversion. Only through a chromatic descent to yet another trill, echoed by still another, does this harmony regain the bass note F, its root, that it needs to set the stage for recapitulation.

252


The quiet chordal accompaniment of this passage, its predominantly still or only chromatically stepwise bass, and its slowly unfurling succession of six-measure phrases in D minor all contribute to an impression of hushed expectancy. The contrast with the constant exploratory harmonic motion and the more rhythmically and contrapuntally active textures of the preceding music only deepens and intensifies the stillness of this passage. This cessation of motion contrasts too markedly with all that has come before (fig. 9.1) to be a restful stillness; instead it is a stillness that awaits an epiphany. In the return of the first strain, opening like a window of memory upon the sonata’s beginning, it is as if the trill whose allure led to the protagonist’s exile has now returned to show him a way back, in a first intimation of that epiphany. This memory makes possible a further revelatory moment (m. 203), the moment when the home dominant takes the place of the Dminor chord at the end of the following phrase, bringing a yet quieter calm and an actual return to the opening theme in its original form. In the recapitulation, the most marked change from the exposition achieves an emblematic moment of integration of the disparate tonal regions of the sonata in measures 235 through 266 (an integration of this kind also marks the recapitulation of the A-Major Sonata). After beginning in Gb, as before, the second strain flows directly into F# minor and then to A major, bringing back the theme over a tonic rather than a dominant pedal. Perhaps the protagonist now grasps more fully the implications of his fascination with the trill, the F# minor that its Gb major, in the world of this sonata, necessarily implies. The reflective coda (mm. 336¤.) once again integrates first F# and then Gb, but now they are simple chromatic inflections, assimilated memories of disturbance rather than full reenactments of it. The final refrain, in its three short subphrases, reiterates one last time the idea of a melodic strain beginning on the tonic framing another one beginning on the third scale degree. Now the two strains share both harmony and texture, as if able at least to imagine belonging fully together. A final return of the trill still haunts the final cadence. As in the AMajor Sonata, a mysterious element, both alluring and disturbing, comes to rest through this gesture. But it still casts a shadow over the movement’s ending, one reflected in both the key and the melodic character of the movement that will follow.


253

figure 9.1

Sonata in Bb Major, D. 960: Diagram of the First Movement (Molto Moderato)

“Sonata Nomenclature”

Thematic material

Exposition

Development

First group

Second Transition group

A1 A2 A1

B1

C1

(1)∗

(2)∗

F#m →

FM

Principal key areas BbM GbM BbM

→

Individuation of Protagonist

Stage of narrative

Opening chorus

Closing theme B2

B1

C1

C2 —

(3)∗ FM

Quest for reinclusion Banishment of protagonist

A2

C#m continuous modulations

DbM

EM CM Abm Bm Dm

Quotation of “Der Wanderer” Memory and reflection in exile Way station; entrance to hallowed place

W I L D E R N E S S

∗ (1) Departure from tonic; (2) Establishment of dominant; (3) Departure from dominant; (4) Reestablishment of tonic

V Even though the Andante sostenuto is a new movement, the juxtaposition of its first C#-minor chord with the first movement’s final Bb-major chord is striking enough to compel us to hear it as a progression, one that echoes the unsettling moves to F# minor and C# minor within the first movement itself. But this new beginning, which introduces at the same moment the unadorned C#-minor harmony and its mournful, intensely simple melody, makes an even starker e¤ect than those earlier moves. A sense of loss, or even of a fall from grace, comes to its most intense expression at this moment. The distance of C# minor from Bb major is felt here with the greatest possible immediacy; this, like the Adagio of the “Wanderer” Fantasy, is the song of a Fremdling.

254


Recapitulation Retransition

First group

C3 A2 A1 A2

A1

A2

A1

Transition

Second group

Closing theme

B1

C1

B2

A1

BbM

BbM

BbM

Coda

(4)∗ Dm

V/Bb BbM

GbM BbM ↓ F#m

Bm

→

Epiphany

No man’s land; memory of beginning

At the end of chapter 3, I associated the opening of this movement with the stanza of “Der Wanderer” that so literally returns at the heart of the fantasy. Its accompanimental ostinato only deepens the association: it is a new variant of motive w, the long–short–short “Wanderer” rhythm, a variant that opens, time and time again, onto the empty space implied by its silence in every third beat. As in the Andantino of the A-Major Sonata, the melody that slowly rises into that space is made up of sighs—falling two-note gestures that recall the first movement’s beginning and also, more tellingly, the trill and its resolution. Indeed, this Andante’s first two melodic pitches, G# and F#, first come to the sonata through that trill, as its very first Gb and Ab. The trill has just come again as a lingering shadow in the first movement’s final gesture, one that reveals itself also to have been a foreshadowing of this Andante’s beginning.


255

As is widely acknowledged, the same three-phrased melodic arch comes twice, but in di¤erent and complementary, even opposite, harmonizations. The first phrase—the longest one of the three—rocks slowly over a tonic pedal, each of its sighing gestures filling two measures. For the second phrase the bass moves to a dominant pedal, and the succession of sighs quickens and rises, culminating on G# an octave higher than the melody’s beginning. It holds still there for an additional measure. Then, without mediation, the harmony suddenly shifts from the dominant of C# minor to the tonic of E major in first inversion, and the melody falls back, down through the G# octave to a gentle tonic E. Only in this third phrase does the harmony move, peacefully changing in each measure to articulate a simple cadential progression. Now the melody begins again, this time in E major. First comes the longer phrase, the slowly rocking one, over an E pedal; then the quicker ascent, a measure shorter than before, over the dominant of E; and finally the restful fall of the melody over cadential harmony, now back in C# minor. Two great, nearly identical melodic arches: the first beginning in C# minor and emerging into E, the second taking up this E major but then falling, finally, back to C# minor. What musical pattern could correspond more perfectly to the singing-in-exile of “Mein Traum”—to its pain turning to love, and its love to pain? Two codetta phrases bring this thematic complex to a somber close, and then the middle section begins with almost as little preparation (ex. 9.5a) as the opening of the movement. The music is suddenly in A major over a constant sixteenth-note ostinato; the melody distinctly recalls the opening theme of the first movement, both in the melodic shape and harmony of its antecedent and in the tonicization of the supertonic (here B minor) in its consequent. After the repeat of this first period as a figural variation (mm. 51–58) comes a harmonically exploratory continuation that touches again on B minor before moving on to D major, but then falling suddenly into Bb major, the key of the first movement (ex. 9.5b, m. 63). At first the allusion to Bb major holds no distinct echo of the first movement, but one soon comes to it. In measure 66 a cadential melodic resolution to Bb is diverted to Bn, just as in measure 45 of the first movement (see ex. 9.2). This withheld resolution recalls the precipitating crisis of the first movement, the moment when the Gb-major harmony that was first introduced by the trill returns catastrophically as F# minor. In the Andante sostenuto this first

256



Sonata in Bb Major, D. 960, Andante sostenuto

38

B b1

42

45

48

b. Mm. 57–75 (end of b 1 ) b2

57

decresc.

60

cresc.

(continued)


66


cresc.

70

cresc.

73

decresc.

memory of the catastrophe passes; instead of becoming an E# as it did in the first movement, the F in the bass of measure 66 (ex. 9.5b) falls to the E of measure 67 in a one-measure extension of the phrase, and the A-major melody of this middle section returns in measure 68.This return of the theme of this B section (making its underlying formal scheme a rounded binary with written-out repeats) introduces a further harmonic exploration: the antecedent comes as before, but the consequent (mm. 72¤.) answers it in the minor. A minor leads powerfully to C major before A major can return. Paralleling the varied repeat of the middle section’s opening period in measures 51 through 58, a similar variation of the second portion of its rounded binary form begins in measure 76. But this time the theme never

258


returns to complete the formal scheme; instead, the withholding through Bn of the Bb-major cadence in measure 83 extends itself into a further echo of the first movement, an actual return of the F#-minor harmony (see ex. 9.1a, m. 85). This harmony, which turns out to be a subdominant, is superseded by the dominant of C# minor in a transition back to the movement’s opening theme. This theme itself thus becomes linked to the first F#minor crisis in the first movement and so to the trill in which that F# minor has its origin. The measure of silence at the transition’s end makes the return of the theme feel at first as concentrated in its stillness as it was the first time. But the new ostinato, which draws the sixteenths of its upbeat figure from the accompaniment of the middle section, mitigates the austerity of the “Wanderer” rhythm of this movement’s opening by bringing some sense of mobility to a figure that was all but immobile before. It is from this heightened sense of mobility that the Andante’s most timestopping gesture arises, its sudden, breath-catching turn to C major. One can call this a transfixing moment in a musically literal sense: the leading tone, B#, is held in suspension instead of either resolving up to C# or immediately sliding down, as if it were a C, to B, as it did before (m. 14). The B# is literally transfixed as an illusory tonic, as if pierced through and held fast by the memory of a distant time or place. Is this tonality C major, or is it B# major? It begins as B#, as a prolongation of the leading tone of C# minor; but the ensuing return of E-major harmony after eight measures turns it into C major. The bass descends to B, and the first E-major phrase returns over a dominant pedal instead of the tonic pedal that accompanied it the first time. E major comes with more preparation than before because of the bass progression from C to B that now introduces it. It also arrives with more urgency because of the dominant pedal. The movement is nearing its end, however, and its melody must return again to C# minor. This melodic arch corresponds to the second of the two great arches in the first A section. The first of those arches ended before in E major, but in the return of the A section, C major has replaced E major in a turn so unexpected that it has the e¤ect of making a new beginning and thus displacing the completion of the first arch. The C#-major return of the first C-major phrase at the movement’s end redresses the imbalance arising from that withheld completion. By bringing back this Cmajor phrase in the tonic, it allows that phrase to take on the concluding


259

role that it could not assume the first time. At the same time, by coming immediately after the concluding phrase of the second arch, whose function it now mimics, this C#-major phrase amends, and in e¤ect replaces, the C#-minor phrase rather than merely following it. A transfixing moment thus returns as a transfiguring one.

VI The Scherzo begins by transforming into dance the theme of the first movement (ex. 9.6a). The repeat of its melody, now in the left hand, takes an unusual turn: it cadences in the subdominant.This sudden turn to the subdominant is only the first impatient move in a winged modulatory trajectory—it is a premature diversion, before the double bar, of the Scherzo’s tonal course. After the double bar, the music moves through a rapid series of modulations to Db major. Then, having arrived in Db, it suddenly stands still (ex. 9.6b, mm. 35¤.).The music has settled for the moment, with an expectant heightening of attention, in Db major, the key in which the slow movement ended—a key thus associated with the trill and with the crisis of subjectivity to which it leads, although it is here playfully integrated into Bb-major surroundings. In measure 47 the Db-major melody begins a second time, but this time its first subphrase culminates on the minor subdominant—notated as F#— rather than the major one to which it led the first time. The second culmination apes the first in a sudden accent on the first of three staccato, registrally highlighted chords and in two additional measures that mark time in ländler rhythm, allowing the highlighted harmony simply to resonate. The Gb-major–to–F#-minor sequence of these two high points recalls the emergence in the same order of these two harmonies as remote key centers— the first alluring, the second threatening—at the beginning of the first movement. Here they are playfully brought into relief and juxtaposed as equals, and an idiosyncratic but charmed and untroubled path is opened from F# minor back to Bb major. The last turn in this path, which leads back to the home key, is quietly exhilarating. Instead of resolving in any customary way, the diminished triad in measures 64 through 67 lets its bottom B slip back down to the A# from which it came, now as the root of a Bb-major triad,

260



Sonata in Bb Major, D. 960, Scherzo

Allegro vivace con delicatezza.

b. Mm. 35–72 IV = G 35

decresc. 41

iv (= f m) 48

54

sempre

60

(continued)

example 9.6

(continued)

67

cresc. un poco

c. Mm. 91–108 91

Trio.

97

cresc.

103

to be rejoined, a measure later, by the opening strain that e¤ortlessly restores to this Bb its tonic identity. This retransition thus recalls the moments in both the first and second movements when Bn takes the place of Bb in cadential progressions to divert the music’s tonal course into F#-minor and C#-minor territory (see ex. 9.2, mm. 45¤. in the first movement; and ex. 9.1a, mm. 83¤. in the second). Here, the shift from B back to Bb reverses those earlier progressions, literally correcting the Bn and thus recovering Bb major in the wake of a momentary recollection of F# minor. In the return of the Scherzo’s opening theme, the subdominant that has opened a way back into the Db/C#

262


region moves forward to begin the second phrase, so that the theme can cadence firmly, this last time, in the tonic. The Db major that arrives in the middle of the Scherzo is emphasized not only through its accented chords and its phrase-extending silences but also simply through its duration. The music remains unambiguously in Db for over twenty measures—longer here than in any other key, even the tonic. As I have suggested, the music returns to the enchanting but also dangerous C#/Db territory explored in the first two movements, but it makes no gestural reference to either of these movements until the shift from B to Bb in the retransition. Further gestural reference comes only in the Bb-minor trio. Here the opening, close-position Bb-minor chord, with its fifth in the top voice, recalls the disposition of the opening sonority of the slow movement, while the detached left-hand notes, parodying the ostinato of that movement, also recall the opening ascending third and the Gb-F trill motive in the first movement. Db-major and Gb-major chords now come a phrase later, gathering around the double bar; the shift from Bb minor to Db major in measure 97 (ex. 9.6c) has the same touching immediacy as the turn from C# minor to E major at measure 14 of the Andante. Soon after, a C-major chord leads directly into an Ab-major chord (mm. 104–105) in another veiled recollection of the coloristic alchemy in the slow movement that takes G# major, the dominant of C# minor, to C major. Like the Scherzo of the AMajor Sonata, this one thus draws together memories of the two preceding movements, surveying a divided realm in the hope of making it whole.

VII The juxtaposition of the finale’s struck G (see ex. 1.1a) to the quietly receding Bb-major ending of the Scherzo is certainly startling, but it is not the only unsettling juxtaposition brought by a movement’s beginning to the BbMajor Sonata. As I have argued, the first C#-minor chord of the Andante sostenuto, immediately following the final Bb-major chords of the first movement, is at least as disturbing, even though much more quiet. Perhaps the initially aggressive G that opens the finale and abruptly establishes the key of C minor responds to the memory of the sudden and stark G# that begins the slow movement’s melody in the same register.


263

Like that earlier beginning, this one is nonetheless subtly prepared by the ending and by earlier events of the preceding movement. From the very beginning of the Scherzo, the G enters into the melody instead of remaining in an inner voice as it did in the theme of the first movement. Toward its end, a tonicized C-minor harmony contributes its weight, in a strengthening of the supertonic as a predominant (mm. 81–82), to the final cadence. Finally, the diminutive coda of the Scherzo at last brings to a halt the movement’s nearly unceasing rhythmic activity through its simple, expiring chords—a halt so sudden and so brief as to require a more commanding, more arresting gesture before new motion can begin. The descent by thirds in the lowest voice of those chords takes its next, if surprising, step through the G that now announces the finale—just the sort of commanding, arresting gesture that is required. Like the beginning of the slow movement, the beginning of the finale may at first make the impression of an unsettling move away from the Bb major of the ending it immediately follows. But unlike that earlier beginning, this one almost immediately returns to the sonata’s home key. This new beginning resonates just enough with the slow movement’s beginning to make this into the finale’s first gesture of homecoming, a response to that earlier opening as an emblem of exile. Superficially the entire opening thematic complex of this finale makes an impression of tonal instability, but there is no deep-seated instability in its harmonic digressions. Every return to Bb major is both unambiguous and strongly confirmed through a perfect authentic cadence. The tonal instability is only a shadow play in which the nontonic keys of C minor, G minor, and Ab major serve as foils that ultimately only underscore the tonal message of homecoming that this finale seems intent on conveying. This movement is not merely in Bb major; it is concerned with bringing the music fully back to this key from the tonal journey—a journey that soon became exile— to which the Gb trill has given rise. The second theme (see ex. 9.1b) celebrates that homecoming in a joyous and dancing song. In contrast to the opening theme, this theme explores only one subordinate tonic: D, its diatonic sixth degree. With only one cadential interruption close to its beginning, this theme fills nearly seventy measures with a constant flow of even quarter notes and accompanying inner-voice sixteenths, while the o¤beat eighths keep stirring in the left hand,

264


coming to rest only in the refrains, in order to make them into quiet culminations. By so strongly emphasizing the diatonic sixth degree, this theme aligns itself with the movement’s first theme, but by avoiding the Db that would here correspond to the Gb of the first theme, the second theme is able to achieve a greater distance from the aura of the trill than the first theme could. Instead of a cadence, two measures of silence. Then a fortissimo F-minor chord (m. 156), coming as abruptly as this movement’s opening G. Then a violent succession of F-minor chords in dotted rhythm, leading, again abruptly, to a return of the Gb as a Gb-major chord that immediately overflows into swirling scales that especially dramatize it. The continuing violence of the ensuing stormy F-minor interlude has only two precedents in the sonata, both of them in the first movement and both closely linked with the trill: first, the shocking first ending of the exposition, which culminates so rapidly in the fortissimo return of the trill; second, the D-minor climax in the development, which occurs shortly before the trill returns quietly in almost its original form. The strongly emphasized Gbs in this passage of the finale (mm. 160–165, 174) still respond to the power of the trill, but both times they signal mastery over that power by incorporating the Gb into ascending chromatic progressions that contrast with its original descending resolution. After struggling upward from F minor into Db-major harmony, the episode accordingly calms and turns major, transforming the angry dotted rhythm into the sprightly gestures of a pastoral dance. The theme proceeds, in its return, fundamentally as before: two phrases that move from C minor to Bb major lead into a playful phrase based on a falling triadic pattern. But when that phrase veers once again to G minor, no struck G comes to the rescue. Instead the music continues in G minor (mm. 256¤.), in a turbulent development that makes the chromatic cadential figure its head motive, pitting it in double counterpoint against a variant of the opening theme. At first the turbulence stays close to G minor, but when swirling triplets come to the bass, the harmony also becomes unstable. Suddenly the music is back in Bb; the triplets billow gently in the right hand over the melody, now calm, in the left. Once again the home key beckons, as if from a distance rather than being fully present, but by this point the allusion has become more playful than imploring—more like being at home, remembering that one could once only long for it, than like being


265

example 9.7 Sonata in Bb Major, D. 960, Allegro ma non troppo, mm. 488–514 488

494

501

Presto.

508

cresc.

in exile again. After eight measures of becalmed tonic allusion, Gb major bursts in, bringing back the same double counterpoint heard in G minor at the beginning of this episode. Through its dramatization first of G minor and then of Gb major, this episode composes out the bass progression of the finale theme that the G always announces, the progression already brought subtly into play, so long ago, in the second phrase of the first movement. In the wake of this episode, the return of the G, although ostensibly exactly the same as before, seems becalmed—more a quotation than a full reenactment. This G returns only once again, after the entire second thematic complex has again come and gone. This last time, tellingly, it loses for the first time its forte-piano dynamic marking, retaining in that marking’s stead only a simpler and meeker

266


accent (ex. 9.7, mm. 491–492). This last return of the theme is no longer a real return but instead only a coda whose point of departure is the dissolution of that theme. Its first, C-minor strain trails o¤, the bass motion from G to Gb delayed by a beat. Now, this last time, the Gb itself comes forward as a bare octave to garner its own subphrase, aping the C-minor one. This equalizing juxtaposition of the Gb with the G gently reminds us of the force that the Gb has exerted upon this sonata’s tonal cosmos. It is because of the Gb, in a sense, that this movement began with a G. The Gb now descends, as always, to F, now also as a bare octave; but in the ensuing, extended subphrase over that home dominant, the Bb is kept at bay. B continues to take its place in a final, charming allusion to its subversive role throughout the sonata. Before the F can lead to resolution, it must return, one last time, to G. What especially distinguishes this last emphatic return of G is the F# that introduces it, an F# that—by coming so soon after the spelling out, through the theme’s dissolution, of the role of Gb—finally dispels the force of that Gb. The presto conclusion celebrates this final overcoming.

VIII A story of exploration, banishment, exile, and eventual homecoming—not a very di¤erent story from the one I have drawn from the A-Major Sonata or from the one that the text of “Der Wanderer” suggests for the “Wanderer” Fantasy. One could easily object that these pieces are too di¤erent from one another to exemplify any single narrative pattern, no matter how basic or shorn of detail. To this objection I would answer that the telling of this story is not a purpose of these pieces; they need only to engage the story’s patterns of tension and conflict—the personal conditions or psychological predicaments that it embodies—and to find new ways of exemplifying and resolving them. Creative artists of all kinds return to the same predicaments, and reenact the same stories, again and again: those stories and predicaments exemplify the domains in which they psychologically dwell. Whereas the A-Major Sonata culminates in its most warmly lyrical movement, the Bb-Major Sonata begins in this way. And although the slow movements of both sound far removed, both tonally and gesturally, from their


267

first movements, the Andantino of the A-Major Sonata introduces an aura of alienated desolation not yet encountered in its first movement, while the Andante sostenuto of the Bb-Major Sonata returns to dwell more deeply in a mood already experienced. The A-Major Sonata establishes two subordinate tonal strata besides its primary one of tonic and dominant. One of them, based on the lowered submediants of these keys, F major and C major, gives rise to music imbued with a sense of charmed, subjective exploration, of dreams and fantasies; the other, based on the proper submediants, F# minor and C# minor, suggests a scene not only of desolation but even of terror. The Bb-Major Sonata, in contrast, articulates only one subordinate stratum; it is based on Gb and Db, the lowered submediants of its own tonic and dominant. Unlike in the A-Major Sonata, a manifestation of this stratum— the trill—occurs in the very first phrase. But this stratum harbors two kinds of music: alluring Gb- and Db-major music, and desolate, even tormented, F#- and C#-minor music. Through this revelation of opposites in a single stratum, the Bb-Major Sonata binds joy to sorrow in a way that mirrors, even more closely than does the A-Major Sonata, the particular Schubertian psychology of “Mein Traum.” Whatever Schubert’s existential situation, whatever his sense of himself, he would have tended to find ways to articulate that sense in his work time and time again, as would any other artist, and to adapt this articulation to every new set of musical circumstances that he created for himself. It is, then, the creation of these ever-new musical circumstances that maintains our interest in the inevitable return of the same story. If “Mein Traum,” “Der Wanderer,” and Winterreise tell of how Schubert must have viewed his own existence, as I am convinced they do, then he could only meet the challenge of rediscovering and recreating himself through his music, by transforming into music the kinds of scenarios these texts portray. He would have needed to create for himself the home to which he never entirely found his way in actual life. And he would have needed to come home to it fully enough to be ready for the early death that he must have expected, whenever it might come.

268


Epilogue Telling, Retelling, and Untelling Schubert

I I have traced a compositional and expressive trajectory that draws Schubert’s instrumental music into the resolution of an imaginary narrative of his personal as well as his artistic life, a narrative that he could probably not bring to any fulfilled resolution by other means. The actual facts of Schubert’s life might well have made the determination and resolution of such an implicit narrative especially urgent for him. His was a life that was far more focused on the somewhat unstable allegiances of friendship than on those of family, a life that never fully established an independent home for itself, a life that left no record of any fulfilled love relationship, and, after 1822, a life that was consigned to recurring illness and untimely death. As a man without consistent family support, without a home he could call his own, without even the memory of fulfillment in love, and as a man a›icted with a life-threatening and socially stigmatized disease, Schubert is likely to have harbored potentially overwhelming impulses to represent himself, in at least some of his fragmentary imaginary narrations of his own life, as a Fremdling. His artistic vocation may well have intensified these impulses even as it created an arena for their resolution. Even if he did not yet know of his illness in November 1822, these factors encourage the attribution of autobiographical significance to Schubert’s choice of “Der Wanderer”—and, in particular, of its Fremdling stanza—as the basis of his first completed large-scale instrumental work after a threeyear hiatus. The “Wanderer” Fantasy engages itself with that imaginary nar-

269

ration both through the alienation of the stanza’s text and through its drawing of the text’s C#-minor setting into a tonal drama of strife-ridden conflict and exuberant C-major resolution. Thus Schubert not only inscribed one of his most famous songs into the fantasy; by doing so he also inscribed himself into it, and by finding a home for its Fremdling protagonist he carried an implicit narration of his own life to a first utopian resolution. As I argued in chapter 4, it requires no great imaginative leap to surmise a selfinscription of the same kind in the “Unfinished” Symphony of the month before.The Andante of the symphony draws its key and its theme, only somewhat less pointedly, from the preceding stanza of the same song. The character and course of the music of the symphony suggest a narrative that is even more powerful than the one suggested by the fantasy: one not merely of estrangement and homecoming, but of death and transfiguration.

II These, of course, are exactly the themes of “Mein Traum,” the one narrative of potential autobiographical significance that Schubert committed to writing, just a few months, as it happens, before composing the symphony and the fantasy. It is worth pausing here to reconsider, one last time, the question of ascribing autobiographical significance to “Mein Traum.” However we ultimately construe the story’s protagonist, Schubert identifies this protagonist as “I” and takes him from the home of the story’s beginning through two cycles of exile and homecoming, both homecomings made possible only by deaths. Of course, on the basis of biographical information alone, the so-called “external events” of Schubert’s life, one cannot read this story unambiguously as an autobiographical statement. Otto Erich Deutsch’s claim that it is “founded closely on fact” has been mostly, although not entirely, discredited.1 Maynard Solomon has made a nuanced and fascinating psychoanalytic interpretation of it, one too rich in speculative detail to be evaluated by anyone whose combined psychoanalytic expertise and knowledge of Schubert’s life does not match Solomon’s own.2 On the other hand, several Schubert scholars of Solomon’s generation seem as intent on explaining away “Mein Traum,” by imagining the possible situations that might have impelled him to write it, as he is on explaining it.3

270


In the end, however, we remain, and will probably always be, ignorant of the circumstances of the composition of “Mein Traum.” We know with certainty only the identity of its author. Whatever its circumstances of origin, it was Franz Schubert, not those circumstances, who determined just what episodes to include and just how they might unfold.Those episodes and their course—exile, failed homecoming, subsequent singing-in-exile, and final, death-haunted, transfigured homecoming—are the inventions (or, at the very least, the choices) of the same man who also chose, only months after writing them out, to base a revolutionary instrumental work on the song of an exile and who was later impelled to set not merely the first twelve but eventually all twenty-four songs of Winterreise’s exiled and death-obsessed protagonist. “Mein Traum” corresponds not so much with the events of Schubert’s life as with the expressive valences that the key texts of “Der Wanderer” and Winterreise confirm in his music. Too strange to be fact, “Mein Traum” is also, finally, too strange to be fiction. The supposition that, in the absence of corroborating outer fact, it mirrors an “inner reality” finds confirmation in Schubert’s subsequent quests, through his music, to alleviate his apparent sense of exile and his anticipation of early death. “Mein Traum,” in crystallizing an imaginary narrative of Schubert’s life, foretells the narrative journey on which he was soon to embark, probably without ever explicitly acknowledging it to himself, in his music.

III I view this trajectory as reaching a first culmination—through Die Schöne Müllerin, the first song cycle—late in 1823, after which it becomes subsumed in, although certainly not altogether eclipsed by, the “Beethoven Project” that John Gingerich has proposed.4 With Winterreise, the second song cycle, Schubert begins to turn away from Beethovenian models and to immerse himself more fully in the quest, through his musical, imaginary self-narrations, for an ultimate homecoming—a re-creation of himself through his art. Especially in the piano compositions of 1827 and 1828, echoes of “Der Wanderer” mingle with those of Winterreise to identify their Schubertian persona as a wanderer in search of a sense of self and a restful haven. Some readers may wonder how a tonal piece, which by definition ends

e p i log ue

271

by reaching home, can achieve any special sense of homecoming. But almost all tonal pieces also begin fully and unproblematically in a home key as well, while in significant respects some of Schubert’s do not. In every Schubert piece, to be sure, the identity of the tonic is clear from the outset, but in some cases—and notably in all three of the last sonatas—Schubert “problematizes” either the tonic or the material through which he articulates it. In each of these sonatas, the first response of the music to its own opening idea can be said to individuate a protagonist that is not at home in the opening key. Thus in the opening phrase of the C-Minor Sonata, the downwardrushing Ab-major scale sweeps C minor aside, interrupting the drive to the first cadence in order to introduce in this secondary key a new motive that is more generative in some respects than the opening motive for the ensuing music. I have characterized the opening phrase of the A-Major Sonata as inscrutable in its abstractness, presenting the tonic key as a domain that the protagonist, who is individuated by the following interrogating phrase, cannot lyrically possess. Most succinctly of all, the Gb trill beneath the BbMajor Sonata’s first cadence throws the serenity—or even the reality—of the opening Bb-major song into doubt and immediately gives rise to an exploration of Gb major as a virtual alternative to Bb. In the first impromptu of opus 90, whose date of composition is closer to that of Winterreise, the tonic identity of C minor is again immediately clear, but the stentorian power of the opening G overdetermines it, imbuing the tonic region more with the character of a scene of exile or imprisonment than of a potential haven. Such a haven is instead remembered, and return to it thus prefigured, in the Ab major of the first B episode: this key becomes the goal of the progressive tonal course of the cycle. Again, in opus 142 the first impromptu configures its F-minor tonic as a closed and inhospitable domain from which it moves away as soon as it can, but to which it eventually succumbs. It never even manages, despite repeated attempts, to confirm fully its secondary key of Ab major. Accordingly this Ab major returns, more fully realized, in the second impromptu, and the fourth impromptu dwells again at length in this key in what again feels, despite its close relation to the tonic, like an escape from the opening F-minor music. The fourth impromptu even returns for its coda to the Db major associated with Ab major in the second impromptu. On this interpretation, the downrushing F-minor scale that concludes the fourth impromptu, and hence the

272


set, might be heard as an attempt to dispel the inhospitable opening tonality of the cycle once and for all. In opus 90, on my account, cyclic organization is implicated not merely in the development of motivic potential but in the achievement, through a progressive tonal plan, of tonal resolution itself. Unlike most major-mode endings of minor-mode pieces, the final turn to the major in the first impromptu is indecisive, still in the minor’s shadow; the modal ambiguity of this ending suggests the impossibility of any full tonal resolution for this music in its opening key. The cycle, accordingly, comes to resolution only in what originally emerges—almost without preparation, then receding without any harmonically articulated retransition—as a subordinate key. In the later impromptus and the last sonatas, however, the opening key does itself eventually become home and does so, at least provisionally, by the end of the first piece or movement. With respect to tonality, at least, the cyclic interdependence of these pieces might therefore seem less essential to satisfactory resolution than it was in opus 90. But in the ways they make their opening keys problematic, the opening movements of all these pieces create tonal schisms between tonalities that are not merely contrasting but are gesturally or texturally dissociated. Such a schism separates the never altogether attainable Ab major and the seemingly closed o¤ tonic region in the F-Minor Impromptu, the suddenly introduced Ab major (as a pathway to a Db major enshadowed by its parallel minor) and the tonic of the C-Minor Sonata, the static, dream-laden C major and the tonic of the A-Major Sonata, and, finally, the alluring but dangerous Gb major-minor and the tonic of the Bb-Major Sonata. These dissociations remain in some respects unresolved at the ends of those opening movements, as my discussions of them have attempted to show. In the sonatas the keys explored in the slow movements even heighten or complicate the sense of dissociation. But the opposing keys always return in the remaining movements in less conflictual or even nonconflictual guises, in ways that forge new avenues of continuity within formerly divided tonal worlds. In some respects—most notably in the opus 90 impromptus and the last two sonatas—the finding of home that I am describing thus completes itself only in the final movement. In the minor-mode pieces—the opus 142 impromptus and the C-Minor Sonata—the narrative I propose is more aptly characterized as one of self-definition, of Schubert’s finding of himself and

e p i log ue

273

of continuity within his own experience, than as a tale of homecoming. In either case, the goals of such implicit narratives, in their Schubertian forms, are not su‹ciently prefigured from the beginning to be striven for; the protagonist must await their eventual and only gradual disclosure. It is accordingly not surprising that this music—in contrast to the famous Beethoven works that have traditionally been associated with heroic and triumphant narratives—can strike some listeners, for long stretches, as meandering or even static, as lacking in progressive, linear development.

IV Recent scholars, explicitly aware of the dominance of Beethoven in the critical traditions they have inherited, have sought increasingly to develop unprejudiced characterological terms and even analytic methods especially appropriate to Schubert’s music. Among the most sensitive of these are Godel, Hinrichsen, and Gingerich. All three make serious attempts to evaluate Schubert’s works in sonata forms on their own terms, to forge a space for them unclouded by the shadow of Beethoven. In all their accounts, however, any compelling logic in the succession of events in these works, any sense of truly functional di¤erentiation between these events and of why they occur in a particular order, sometimes all but vanishes. Both Hinrichsen and Gingerich fundamentally agree, as best I can ascertain, with Godel’s assertion that “the hierarchy of formal components of the classical sonata is dissolved into a democratic juxtaposition.”5 Contemplation, remembrance, associative richness, and even the dependence of the conscious on the unconscious have all finally found a rightful place in these accounts of Schubert’s music, but the evolution of the particular unresolved tensions and inner dramas so pervasive in the mental life that this music evokes has not. These three authors seek to supplant the view that Schubert’s sonata forms simply served as vessels into which he poured lyrical material not really suited to them. For all three, Schubert’s forms instead take on their own distinctive and independent lives as sca¤oldings for an associative play of harmonic, motivic, and textural ideas—an almost improvisatory succession evocative of dreaming, remembering, and other forms of psychic activity. But their formulations do not especially suggest, or even accommodate, the kinds of

274


“thematic,” pervasively recurring schisms in Schubert’s music that I have been exploring in this study. In the first movement of the Bb-Major Sonata, for example, Godel and Hinrichsen stress the ways in which Schubert prepares for and integrates the F#-minor transitional theme, but they do not especially acknowledge its disruptive dramatic e¤ect. This disquieting event appears for them to be “normal for Schubert,” simply participating, without residue, in the kind of motivic and tonal unfolding through which Schubert both develops and supplants the procedures of his forerunners in sonata forms. By contrast, my own account of this F#-minor theme suggests instead a combination of the views of these recent scholars with the views they attempt to leave behind. Perhaps Schubert’s material is at odds with its formal framework; but if so, then he exploits the tension between his forms and his material as an expressive e¤ect. The heart of the protagonist of this sonata is “in the wrong place”—in Gb major and F# minor instead of Bb major—and it comes to first full expression “at the wrong time”—in the formal interstices rather than in the more formally and tonally grounded principal and subordinate themes. Despite appearances, dominant and tonic actually retain their structural hegemony, but it is a strange, outside tonal region—a Fremde—that becomes the source of dynamism. The Fremde is perceived as such because of the tonal and formal background against which it comes into relief. Schubert did not simply pour his musical ideas into formal molds; he made these ideas struggle to find their own full voice and autonomy within them. Sonata forms might even be said to have become for him, in one sense, musical embodiments of the Viennese social conventions from which he sought liberation while seeking acceptance, recognition, and even fame within the society that endorsed those conventions. More basically, as articulations of fundamental tonal relationships, sonata forms might well have represented the kind of home for which he longed but to which he could only gradually find his way, even in his imagination. The formulations of Godel, Hinrichsen, and Gingerich apply more aptly to Schubert’s opening movements than to the subsequent course of his multimovement works. In the A-Major Sonata, for example, the static C-major dream sequence of the first movement’s development may linger in memory, at that movement’s end, as an unintegrated, quasi-independent episode. At the end of the Andantino, the C#-minor episode, the dream’s nightmarish

e p i log ue

275

opposite, may still seem to override in importance the theme that surrounds it. For these two movements, Godel’s and Gingerich’s terminology of juxtapositions and tableaux seems appropriate. I have suggested in the prologue that, even in the Scherzo, the A-major, C-major, and C#-minor passages all carry nearly equal weight. By now they all also carry specific memories that prepare for what in the finale will become, for all its lyric expansiveness, a systematic integration. Thus distinctive memories in the finale of the C-major and C#-minor music, the Fremdling’s dream and his ensuing nightmare, become integrated with, and hence subordinated to, a lyrically possessed tonic reality. The separate tableaux are no longer so independent; instead they weave together to suggest a narrative of integration, of the finding of a home hospitable enough to be a haven for the protagonist’s dreams and a refuge from his nightmares. As in the other two last sonatas, this concluding sonata rondo is in important respects more normative—more flowing, less marked by disjunctions—than the movements that precede it. Its development is full of sequential modulations, motivic fragmentations, and contrapuntal recombinations. Like those of the other two last finales, it thus exhibits much more of the “action-packed” character of a so-called classical development than does the first movement. The finale does the kind of integrative work that cannot yet be undertaken in the first movement. By some criteria we might not characterize any of Schubert’s mature works in sonata forms as fully cyclic, even the Eb-Major Trio or the A-Major Sonata.6 Virtually none of these pieces manipulates formal schemata, for example, to link one movement to another, and none of them exhibits the thoroughgoing and manifest motivic unification of a work like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. But in many of them—in particular, the ones I have discussed in this study—the separate movements are motivically interlinked to an extent that is far deeper and more elaborate than anyone, even Brendel, has hitherto acknowledged.The A-Major Sonata markedly exhibits such derivations throughout, but the other two last sonatas are scarcely less—even if much less conspicuously—motivically through-conceived, as I have shown in considerable detail. In the “Unfinished” Symphony and the last sonatas, the motivic recurrences marked for recognition are thus only isolated overt manifestations of an almost constant but mostly subliminal process, manifestations that have hitherto remained largely unrecognized as keys to subtle and elaborate systems of motivic relationships.

276


Rich and elaborate though they are in themselves, I have felt it necessary to develop intertextual contexts for these motivic webs to bring some specificity to their interpretation. It is only by weaving a network of associations that I have ventured to identify a distinctive, if implicit, line of autobiographical narrative in Schubert’s music: these associations occur not only within and between two groups of Schubert’s pieces from di¤erent compositional periods (1822 and 1827–28), but also between all those pieces, the poem “Der Wanderer,” the poetry of Winterreise, and Schubert’s own story, “Mein Traum.”

V Anyone who finds the narrative that I have proposed convincing, who shares my belief that it—or something like it—deeply influenced Schubert’s compositional choices in the works considered here, is likely to assume that such a narrative must also be implicated in at least some of his other music, and especially in the music after Winterreise. In both the Bb-Major Trio and the C-Major Quintet, for example, one might feel the sway of the same psychic forces that a¤ect the Bb-Major Sonata. The F-Minor Fantasy for piano duet might well exemplify, or even intensify, the existential plight embodied by the opus 142 impromptus or the C-Minor Sonata. For myself, I would have to “take up residence” in any of these complex pieces over an extended period to consider the extent to which it articulates the same story. But I have mentioned, in passing, another work of this final period whose cyclic aspects exemplify this implicit narrative especially clearly. In the first movement of the Eb-Major Trio, the mysterious B-minor beginning of the second group can be taken, once again, to individuate a Fremdling protagonist.The theme of the C-minor Andante con moto is steeped in the aura of Winterreise, and when this Winterreise-haunted theme returns in the finale, it also subliminally evokes the memory of the B-minor theme from the first movement by returning in that key. That the final apotheosis of this trio, the concluding return of the same Andante theme in the tonic major, might represent a homecoming or rebirth for the winter wanderer is almost too obvious to require justification. There is one other piece from Schubert’s last period that exemplifies with

e p i log ue

277

extraordinary clarity the kind of characterological contrast and tonal stratification that I trace to the “Wanderer” Fantasy: the Moment musical in Ab Major, op. 94, no. 2. Even though it is only a single movement, and although it contains no clear thematic references to these Fremdling songs, I submit that this piece can serve as an emblem for my entire study. Despite its quintessentially Schubertian delicacy and stillness-in-motion, the opening theme of this piece teems with ambiguities (ex. E.1). Without the help of the score, can anyone who hears it tell whether it begins with an upbeat or a downbeat, or whether its meter is triple, as it initially seems, or duple, as it seems a few bars later? Is it song or dance? Is it headed anywhere? Will it remain in the major, or will it succumb—like the other Moment musical in Ab major (op. 94, no. 6) or the Eb-Major Impromptu—to its minor inflections? Will it ultimately prove serene or troubled? Because of these ambiguities, the calm of the opening is su¤used with doubt, as if the theme were asking if that calm—or the tenderness within it—could ever become real. Only the arrival of a second, or B, theme (m. 18) brings clarification. This theme leaves behind every ambiguity of the opening theme: it is clearly a solo song with a distinct accompaniment; clearly in a new key, toward which the opening theme headed at the last moment; clearly a parallel period, despite the di¤erent lengths of its two phrases; and also clearly derivative of the opening theme, with its opening semitonal upper neighbor figure. Because of its clarity, the new theme seems to embody something more real than the opening one, but the clarifications it brings come only at great cost. This new theme—conceivably the answer to the opening questions, the object of the initial search—is unambiguously sad; and its key, F# minor, is remote enough from the opening Ab major to imbue it with a sense of loss or even exile. Indeed, although it makes no clear reference to “Der Wanderer,” it once again approximates the character and tonality of the Fremdling stanza of that song closely enough to resonate with its memory. The ABA'B'A" form of this Moment musical—a kind of doubled ternary— is a Schubertian specialty. We have encountered it already in the C-Minor Impromptu and in the slow movements of the “Unfinished” Symphony and the C-Minor Sonata. Those of the String Quartet in G Major, D. 887, and the piano sonatas in C major (D. 840), D major (D. 850), and G major (D. 894) provide further examples. Instead of digressing in these movements to

278


example e.1 Moment musical in Ab Major, op. 94, no. 2, mm. 1–25 A Andantino.

5

9

14

D major 18

I

B

22

cresc.

V/g =f

new contrasting material—a C section—as Mozart or Beethoven would have done in similar circumstances, Schubert brings back the same contrasting material as before, but he often transforms it. Here in the second Moment musical the return of the B music is violent and disjunctive in ways that dramatize the tonal distance of its F# minor from the Ab major of the A sections (ex. E.2). After one anguished phrase, this B music reverts to its original quiet disposition. But then, for its final measures, it turns suddenly to the major (mm. 69¤.), in what feels like an epiphany, a transformative “moment musical.” The change to major both stills the pain of the B theme itself and brings it tonally closer (as Gb major) to Ab major. It illuminates a homeward path from B to A. Because Schubert’s authorship of “Mein Traum” corroborates and particularizes an implicit musical narrative of exile and homecoming so provocatively, it is tempting to search, as Arnold Schering did, for a piece that directly corresponds to it, or that “tells” it in musical terms. No piece comes closer to doing so than this Moment musical, which corresponds with the story not only in its ABA'B'A" form but also in a stratified tonal plan that makes the F#-minor B sections into potential musical realizations of its scenes of exile. The violent beginning of the second B section mirrors the father’s violence from which the narrator of “Mein Traum” flees into his second exile; the F#-major epiphany that concludes that section corresponds equally aptly with the narrator’s admission, as if by magic, into the circle around the dead maiden’s tomb. Other aspects of the composition, to be sure, do not find cogent parallels in the story: it is di‹cult to construe the ambiguities of the opening music, for example, as consistent with an evocation of home life or a happy childhood. They suggest, rather, the kind of existential malaise implied by the disjunctions that emerge so near the beginnings of each of the last three sonatas. In any case there is nothing to be gained from pursuing a Scheringian argument that Schubert intended the story as a secret program, whether prospectively or retrospectively, for a specific piece. This piece mirrors the patterns of exile and homecoming in the story closely enough to corroborate the notion that the seemingly distinct personae generated by this piece and by the story can both be identified as revelatory selfprojections of the actual person—Franz Schubert—who created them. Even though occurring within a single movement, the return of the B section of this Moment musical is already a manifestation of a cyclic impulse:

280


example e.2 Moment musical in Ab Major, op. 94, no. 2, mm. 54–69 54

B'

57

60

63

67

F major

an urge to revisit an experiential realm already once traversed but not yet fully integrated into the context in which it occurs, to experience it again in the hope of a cathartic and reconciliatory transformation of it. In the more extended and subtly cyclic explorations of his last piano music, Schubert returned again and again to the divided world glimpsed in this piece and laid open spaces within that world for further “moments musicaux” that

could illuminate paths to restore its continuity. Not only does the second Moment musical encapsulate these explorations in a single movement; by doing so in ways that so closely parallel the form and content of “Mein Traum” it o¤ers the clearest evidence we have of a correspondence between these musical explorations and the only known portrayal of that divided world in Schubert’s own words. It furnishes yet another link in the intertextual network that I have summarized at the end of the preceding section— a link that can virtually be taken, by itself, as a symbol of the entire network to which it belongs.

VI The accounts of Schubert’s late piano music presented here may seem to attempt just the sort of historically uncontextualized personal and psychological interpretation of Schubert against which Leon Botstein has inveighed.7 To that potential charge I propose two replies. The first is that the association of two of Schubert’s most sustained and original compositional projects with specific contemporary poems about exile, coupled with a unique story of his own in which he identifies himself as an exile, provides a more clearly defined historical context for an interpretation of this music than one can normally ever hope to discover for a corpus of instrumental music.The second is that the widely acknowledged repressiveness of Biedermeier Vienna makes the personal sense of alienation attested by Schubert’s strong attraction to poems and narratives of exile into a virtual certainty. These texts, in their evident power over Schubert, provide a justification for more personally nuanced interpretations than would otherwise be possible of his responses to the circumstances of his life, as well as of how his music came to reflect that life. In the last two decades, as is well known, the field of musicology has become much more open to explorations of so-called musical meaning. Sophisticated explorations of this kind have been drawn more to cultural than to personal meaning, and for good reason: cultural interpretation can draw on every aspect of a composer’s social and intellectual environment without having to attempt the reconstruction of the composer’s thoughts or feelings that any substantiation of personal meaning must entail; moreover, we

282


can usually presume cultural meaning to have wider import than personal meaning. But how does cultural meaning get into music? Why would Schubert undertake the expression in his music of the alienation and disa¤ection of his circle, as Gingerich so convincingly portrays him as doing? Why would he explore the Romantic wandering archetypes that William Kinderman hears as so pervasive in his music?8 Surely he did not set out, as another consciously formulated “project” such as the one Gingerich identifies, to make his music reflective of particular social or literary themes. It is rather his life itself—or, at least, his implicit narrations of it—that exemplified those themes and whose pervasive currents gave shape to his music, probably without his conscious acknowledgment. From all such narratives—be they personal, cultural, or even more purely technical—we return, in the end, to the music. In a sense, in developing accounts of the impromptus and last sonatas, I have carried out a kind of verbal performance of these pieces. But in another sense, a performance takes us in the opposite direction from any verbal exegesis: ideally it brings us back to the music as a fully lived experience in itself. As I have written elsewhere, musical experience thrives on the loss of meaning, on a kind of forgetting.9 This forgetting enables us to store aspects of ourselves in the music without having to define or even acknowledge them explicitly. It did the same, if I am right, for Schubert himself. When we return to the music and simply allow it to take on its own life by surrendering ourselves to it, it gives us back to ourselves—or, rather, our selves back to us. I can only hope that what I have written will have expanded and deepened an awareness of the scope of the particular kinds of forgetting—as well as of remembering— that Schubert’s music makes possible.

e p i log ue

283

Afterword

One only becomes aware of the kinds of musical recurrences I write about in this study, and of their potential expressive import, after becoming obsessed with the music in which they occur. In one way, the source of my obsession has been a common one: the combination of love and fear involved in preparing music for performance. But beyond these feelings lies something that has drawn me, from my student days onward, to Schubert more than to any other composer: an identification with his music strong enough to implicate it—even before I decided to become a professional musician— in my own self-definition. The sources of such identifications are perhaps always destined to remain mysterious, but in 1988 it felt almost overwhelmingly significant to me that, in the same AMS meeting at which I o¤ered my first explorations of a divided Schubertian persona, Maynard Solomon first presented in a musicological setting his soon-to-become-famous speculations about Schubert’s homosexuality. Years earlier, when I was listening to the last quartets and the C-Major Quintet almost every day, and weaving the slow movements of the last sonatas into my heart by playing them to myself almost every night, I was also waging war against my own homosexuality and feeling like a Fremdling on account of it. I do not explore Schubert’s possible homosexuality in these pages, but I do believe, and do say, that if he was homosexual, that aspect of his life could only have intensified the sense of himself as an outsider about which I write at length.

284

Perhaps nothing helped me more in dealing with my own feelings of this kind, at a time when I was all but consumed by them, than my sense that the Schubert of Schubert’s later music “knew who I was.” In a sense, the writing of this book is an act of gratitude, an attempt to repay this music for what it has a¤orded me.

a f t e rw o r d

285


Notes

Prologue 1. Susan Youens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 103; Ludwig Sto¤els, Die Winterreise (Bonn: Verlag für systematische Musikwissenschaft, 1987), 178–201; Richard Kramer, Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 151–187. 2. Sto¤els, 200. 3. Kramer, 164. 4. Youens, 24–28. 5. I return to the question of ascribing particular significance to “Mein Traum” in the epilogue. 6. His brother’s heading may conceivably have been intended to discourage any speculation about the autobiographical content of Franz’s story. 7. This translation is taken from Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Franz Schubert’s Letters and Other Writings (New York: Vienna House, 1974), 60. The entire story is given on 59–61. 8. See Elizabeth Norman McKay, Franz Schubert: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 84¤. 9. For a fuller interpretation of the story, see Maynard Solomon, “Franz Schubert’s ‘My Dream,’” American Imago 38 (1981): 137–154. 10. Kramer, 182. 11. In an article that appeared after this book had been drafted, William Kinderman explores this question from more a cultural than a biographical standpoint; see “Wandering Archetypes in Schubert’s Instrumental Music,” 19th-Century Music 21, no. 2 (1997): 208–222. His particular points and his articulation of them are di¤erent enough from my own to be complementary to, rather than in conflict with or essentially similar to, mine. He focuses especially on the way Schubert’s music, through its stark modal and

287

gestural contrasts, mirrors a dichotomy between inner and outer experience that is central to the notion of the Romantic wanderer, and thus embodies the existential situation of a lonely, searching subject confronted by an inhospitable world that cannot be mastered—a kind of existential homelessness. 12. Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 13. Admittedly, this new harmonization retains a link to the preceding one: the Neapolitan of C# minor (m. 41) is reinterpreted as the subdominant of A in measure 47. 14. It may strike some readers as far-fetched to hear the third and fourth chords as making a reference to motive b. But in measures 93–94 (see ex. 8.7), exactly the same rhythmic configuration links a passage dominated by motive a to a passage dominated by motive b. 15. Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, Studien zur Entwicklung der Sonatenform in der Instrumentalmusik Franz Schuberts (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1994), 26–28. “Circle modulations” are ones that return to their point of tonal departure. 16. Most recently, Richard Cohn has proposed a model that reconciles cycles of progressions by semitonal displacement with a diatonic framework of fifth-related functions (tonic, dominant, and subdominant) by subsuming to each of these functions a cycle containing the triad representing that function in a given key; see “As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert,” 19th-Century Music 22, no. 3 (1999): 213–232. Thus, in Bb major, the cycle consisting of the F-major, F-minor, Db-major, C#-minor, A-major, and A-minor triads (or keys) comprises the dominant region. In his account, the F# and the C# minor highlighted in the first movement of the Bb-Major Sonata belong, respectively, to the tonic and dominant regions, rather than to a separate region of their own, as in the account I will be developing. By divesting these keys, through these assimilations, of the alterity they possess in a diatonic conceptualization, his account also divests them of the dramatic tension with which I think they are imbued. 17. Susan McClary, “Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music,” in Queering the Pitch, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 205–233; the quotation is from 223. 18. Arthur Godel, Schuberts Letzte Drei Klaviersonaten (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1985), 242. 19. Alfred Brendel, “Schubert’s Last Sonatas,” in Music Sounded Out (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990), 72–141. 20. Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 21. Again, however, I have not attempted to work out exactly to what extent my use of the term protagonist corresponds to Cone’s. My use of the term, which strikes me as quite di¤erent from Cone’s, might be taken as the equivalent of “the persona’s selfdefinition,” and as something that therefore can evolve or even change quite abruptly in the course of a composition.

288

n o t e s t o pag e s 1 2 – 2 2

Chapter 1 1. Susan McClary takes a similar view of this impromptu in her article “Pitches, Expression, Ideology: An Exercise in Mediation,” Enclitic 7 (1983): 76–86. Schubert’s first sketch of the impromptu does not yet include the opening G, but instead simply begins with the monophonic melody. Some might wish to argue that Schubert’s inclusion of the G as an afterthought diminishes its importance: that it is not as compositionally essential as my account makes it. But one could just as plausibly argue the opposite: that the G is implied, or even necessitated, by the way the music unfolds, and that therefore it is more than a mere introductory gesture. The sound of the melody, as Schubert first imagined it, did not require the G; but it is possible that its ensuing course, as Schubert realized it, made the opening G essential. 2. See section III below. 3. John Reed, The Schubert Song Companion (New York: Universe, 1985), 495. 4. Susan Youens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise (New York and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Richard Kramer, Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Ludwig Sto¤els, Die Winterreise. Band I: Müllers Dichtung in Schuberts Vertonung (Bonn: Verlag für systematische Musikwissenschaft, 1987). 5. Edward T. Cone, “Schubert’s Beethoven,” Musical Quarterly 56, no. 4 (1970): 779–793. 6. Alfred Einstein, Schubert: A Musical Portrait (New York: Oxford, 1951), 287. 7. Joseph Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets (New York: Norton, 1979), 371. 8. I should also mention here the finale of the Octet, the menuetto of the String Quartet in A Minor, and the Andante un poco moto of the String Quartet in G Major, as well as “In der Ferne” from Schwanengesang of 1828—all somber, mysterious openings like that of the impromptu. 9. Alfred Brendel, “Schubert’s Last Sonatas,” in Music Sounded Out (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990), 124. 10. Arthur Godel, Schuberts Letzte Drei Klaviersonaten: Entstehungsgeschichte, Entwurf und Reinschrift, Werkanalyse (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1985), 247–248. “Sie machen sich ihre Aufgabe schwer, indem sie nicht einfach konsequent zu Ende führen, was in den vorangehenden Sätzen aufgebaut wurde, sondern indem sie gleichsam den Zusammenhang verlassen, und von ‘aussen’ hinzutretend einen Neuansatz wagen.” 11. Brendel, 75. 12. These motivic connections are noted on pages 118, 105, and 110, respectively. 13. Konrad Wol¤, “Observations on the Scherzo of Schubert’s B-flat major Sonata, op. posth.” Piano Quarterly 92 (1975-76): 28–39. 14. The left-hand figuration of these measures, finally, shares certain features with that of the finale theme: the left thumb plays repeated Gs in measure 14, thus anticipating

n o t e s t o pag e s 2 5 – 33

289

the melodic motive of the finale; in the following measures this G alternates with F and Eb, just as it does in the finale’s accompaniment. 15. Franz Schubert, Drei grosse Sonaten für das Pianoforte, D958, D959 und D960 (Frühe Fassungen). Faksimile nach den Autographen in der Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, Nachwort von Ernst Hilmar (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1987). 16. Alfred Brendel, Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 62. Chapter 2 1. Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms (New York: Norton, 1980), 321. 2. Ivan Waldbauer, “Recurrent Harmonic Patterns in the First Movement of Schubert’s Sonata in A Major, D. 959,” 19th-Century Music 12, no. 1 (1988): 64–73. 3. Some readers are likely to doubt the importance of this return. In response to such potential doubt, I can begin only by referring to my own first awareness of it. I noticed it as a teenager, and observed it again every time I listened to a recording that I had acquired of the sonata. It always stood out for me with the quality of a distinct recollection of the Adagio. 4. In each case, a chromatic deflection from E to Eb initiates the modulation by transforming the V chord of F (major or minor) into the iv chord of G minor. This recurrence has been observed by Ludwig Sto¤els; see his Die Winterreise: Band I, 360. 5. The translation is from Philip L. Miller, The Ring of Words: An Anthology of Song Texts (New York: Norton, 1973), 251. 6. Miller, 251. 7. Miller, 251–252. 8. See Arthur Godel, Schuberts Letzte Drei Klaviersonaten (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1985), 161–165. 9. The subphrase containing the focal progression (mm. 9–12) begins as a restatement of the movement’s opening phrase—as if to initiate the consequent portion of a sixteenmeasure period—and fundamentally changes only its last measure (cf. m. 12 with m. 4), replacing the semicadence of the first subphrase with the already described activity and hesitation around Db. While the second subphrase (mm. 5–8, the four-measure continuation of the antecedent phrase) builds from the first, becoming rhythmically and contrapuntally denser as it reconfirms and tonicizes the dominant, what would have been the fourth four-measure subphrase, while recalling rhythms from the second subphrase, immediately reduces harmonic and contrapuntal activity. Heard in the context of the entire theme, measure 13 ought to begin a new full sub-phrase like the three already heard. The fermata clarifies the situation of measure 13 within the structure of the theme by inhibiting the perception of measures 9 through 14 as a single six-measure unit and by thus suggesting the ending of one subphrase and the subsequent beginning of another.

290

n o t e s t o pag e s 35 – 4 8

10. Schubert here changed Müller’s text slightly.The original reads: “Und ist’s mir denn entgangen” (And has it then happened to me). 11. The C in measure 13 is a passing tone; the actual resolution from Db to C occurs in measure 14. 12. Another, even if somewhat fainter, echo is the arpeggiated melodic descent from the third scale degree in even eighth notes (m. 21). This is, admittedly, of the dominant rather than of the tonic triad. It may feel significant only because it occurs in the context of another, more explicit reference. 13. Measure 55 did not exist in the first draft. 14. This F-major phrase ends, incidentally, with exactly the same harmonic progression (F major: viiI–ii–ii6–V7–I) as the last line of “Das Wirtshaus.”

Chapter 3 1. In a recent article, Maynard Solomon argues that Schubert may have come to regard the “Unfinished” as a completed work; see his “Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony,” 19th-Century Music 21, no. 2 (1997): 111–135. 2. Some observations about this role: In the song the focal progression, a kind of refrain following every climax, is the emergence of a half cadence in the relative minor for every occurrence of the culminating line from which the song derives its title. Sung to the last syllable of this line, “sei mir gegrüsst,” the leading tone of the V of vi never resolves properly, but instead vanishes, like the illusory presence of the loved one, through a chromatic descent into the home dominant itself. By introducing the song into the Fantasy in Ab Major, Schubert makes the unresolved V of vi of this “refrain” into the C-major triad itself, the underlying tonic triad. When, near the end, the opening of “Sei mir gegrüsst” is recalled in C major (mm. 655¤.), this refrain comes in A minor, thus recalling the key of the Allegretto, the second movement (mm. 37–351). The culminating leading tone of this refrain is now G#, the enharmonic equivalent of the Ab; here it is resolved as if it were an Ab. The highlighting of this refrain in relation to the C-major tonic near the end of this fantasy makes explicit the reinterpretation of its focal G# as an Ab, thus helping to explain the curious juxtaposition of its A-minor Allegretto and the Ab-major song-variations in its earlier course. 3. Whereas this fugal opening feels like a recapitulation in the “Wanderer” Fantasy, in the F-Minor Fantasy the fugue follows an actual recapitulation of the composition’s opening theme, building instead upon its powerful successor—what William Kinderman calls its “dark-hued second subject”—to a conclusion as tragic as that of the “Wanderer” Fantasy is triumphant. See William Kinderman, “Schubert’s Tragic Perspective,” in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 65–83. 4. Christoph Wol¤, “Schubert’s ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’: Analytical and Ex-

n o t e s t o pag e s 5 0 – 6 2

291

planatory Notes on the Song D. 531 and the Quartet D. 810,” in Schubert Studies: Problems of Style and Chronology, ed. Eva Badura-Skoda and Paul Branscombe (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 143–171. 5. This description of the transition from the first movement is taken from my “Questions about the Persona of Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy,” College Music Symposium 29 (1989): 19–30. Peter Gülke describes this transition in a way that seems quite consistent with my own description in his Schubert und seine Zeit (Regensburg: Laaber, 1991), 204, as a movement from one aesthetic “Ufer” (shore) to the other, a transition so extended in comparison to all those in the first movement that one might well forget what has gone before (i.e., in that first movement) (“dass es wohl vergessen machen könnte, was zuvor geschah”). According to Gülke, the first, quasi-sonata movement becomes demoted to a mere introduction (“der ‘Einbruch’ der ‘Wanderer’-Strophe das Vorangegangene fürs erste zur vorbereitenden Introduktion herabstuft”). 6. Augmented sixths also occur prominently at climactic moments within movements. See mm. 152–153, 160–161 (here in inversion, as a “pseudo four-two”), 210–213, 359–363, 704–708 (the climax of the entire fantasy). 7. In Gülke’s formulation it is a fundamental harmonic tension between the poles of C major and C# minor–E major rather than a fundamental tonality (“eher als von einer Grundtonart könnte man hier von einer Grundspannung sprechen: zwischen den Polen C und cis bzw. E”); Schubert und seine Zeit, 203. 8. See also Gülke, Schubert und seine Zeit, 202, where he claims that in the song’s ending, the “traumatic weight” of the C#-minor stanza cannot be entirely reckoned with. 9. In fact, the exact harmonies of this cadence, in the same A minor, occur in the song: at the end of the fifth stanza, an E-major setting of a hallucinatory text about the land of which the protagonist dreams, the music pulls back into this A-minor semicadence for his doubt-filled question: “O Land, wo bist du?” (O land, where are you?) 10. Gülke may be right in claiming that no full integration of the fantasy’s “aesthetic subject” is possible, in view of the enormous disparity between the C#-minor desolation of the song and the C-major exuberance of the outer movements; see Schubert und seine Zeit, 205. Nonetheless, one surely cannot claim that the fantasy is a tragic piece or that full tonal integration and closure into C major are not fundamentally achieved. 11. For a full presentation of this terminology, see William Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Function for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 3. 12. William Kinderman also hears motivic echoes of “Der Wanderer” in this development, although he does not note the emphasis in this movement of C# minor. See his “Schubert’s Piano Music: Probing the Human Condition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 164. 13. Of the passage’s fifty-five measures, this gesture fills twenty-four.

292

n o t e s t o pag e s 6 3 – 7 9

14. John Reed, in The Schubert Song Companion, cites only three besides “Der Wanderer”: “Genugsamkeit” (D. 143), which like “Der Wanderer” ends in E; “Der Jüngling und der Tod” (D. 545), which ends in F, and “Mahomets Gesang” (2) (D. 721). No other key of less than six sharps or flats is represented by so few songs except G# minor, which has none (F# minor has only five). Chapter 4 1. Peter Gülke, Schubert und seine Zeit (Regensburg: Laaber, 1991), 197. 2. The poem is by Marianne von Willemer, revised by Goethe.The translation is taken from John Reed, The Schubert Song Companion (New York: Universe, 1985), 396. 3. See William Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Function for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 3. 4. Edward T. Cone makes fundamentally the same point in his “Schubert’s Unfinished Business,” in Music: A View from Delft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 201–216. On page 205 he writes: “At mm.6–8 the F#, as an extended dominant, gives the opening phrase the feeling of an upbeat. It exerts a similar influence over the first subject proper, for that theme is twice interrupted by its recall, in mm. 20–21 and 28–30. Only on its third appearance, mm. 34–37, is the dominant integrated into the prevailing progression and allowed to proceed to a perfect cadence on the first strong downbeat of the movement. At the same time the passage introduces a 5–#7–8 melodic formula that will play a crucial role in what is to follow (it is most clearly heard in oboe I, mm. 35–38).” 5. For a provocative discussion of horn calls as evocative of distance and memory, see Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 116–122. 6. Gülke, 198: “verstummt es jählings, wie angesichts eines Grauens, als welches das erste Tutti des Orchesters nach einer Generalpause hereinbricht.” 7. In both cases suggestive of a German sixth of E minor, but in neither case resolved as one. 8. Cone, 206–207. 9. The original coda is reproduced on page 55 of the Norton score: Franz Schubert, Symphony in B Minor (“Unfinished”), ed. Martin Chusid (New York: Norton, 1971). 10. Gülke, 199. 11. The contrasting tutti passage in the first group of the Andante (mm. 33–44) grows from this movement’s opening motto, but in doing so it again recalls a motivic element from the first movement (see ex. 4.2), the dotted upper neighbor figure that in measure 18 introduces Fn , negating B minor’s dominant in its attempt to move away from it to D major. Later, the rhythm of this motive characterizes the second theme (see ex. 4.4,

n o t e s t o pag e s 8 0 – 1 0 3

293

m. 44). In its recurrence in the Andante, this figure retains neither the chromatic poignancy of measure 18 nor the dancing lightness of the later theme. Instead it becomes insistently exuberant, as if in an attempt to make real something that could never become so in the first movement. 12. Cone, 209. 13. Gülke, 199–200. 14. See, for example, Michael Steinberg, The Symphony: A Listener’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 482; and Susan McClary, “Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music,” in Queering the Pitch, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 205–233. 15. The pull of the C#-minor undercurrent again makes itself felt in the ensuing forte episode, a development of the opening refrain (mm. 33¤.). After rising from E major to its dominant, the intensifying harmony rises a step further, culminating in a C#-minor half-cadence with its leading tone in the melody (mm. 41–44). Instead of resolving up to its tonic, this B# slides quietly down to B to reintroduce the opening motive of the theme. Melodically, this progression reenacts the C-to-B progression of measures 14–15. But unlike that earlier C, the B# of this new passage feels unresolved. As if in response to this withheld resolution, the returning phrase of the theme turns out to be its second phrase, the phrase that provisionally tonicizes C# minor. Here the return so soon to this key (in mm. 48–49) comes as a delayed resolution of the B# in measure 44. This phrase, originally the second phrase of the theme, concludes as it did the first time, with the C again intruding upon the momentary C#-minor tonic to draw the music back to E major. Thus this time the C is implicated in two disengagements from C# minor rather than in only one. In compensation, the ensuing cadential garland comes not once but three times, and even the final refrain is repeated. 16. See Brian Newbould, Schubert and the Symphony (London:Toccata Press,1992), 201. 17. If the second group, in its recapitulation, followed its earlier course, it would bring a return, in measure 252, of the imitative texture of measures 111¤., now in F rather than D. Instead, the leading motive of the second group turns back on itself over the F-major harmony, which moves on, as a Neapolitan, to the dominant seventh of E. The ensuing resolution of this dominant seventh chord is deceptive, bringing back the C#minor triad (m. 256). Once again, this triad calls forth the intrusive C, whose gesture of resolution this last time comes twice in succession. In this extended cadential passage, the harmony associated with this C is finally allowed to resolve first as a dominant seventh, to the F-major triad in measure 252, before it returns as a German sixth in measures 257 and 259. The F-major harmony thus intervenes, this one time, between the C dominant seventh and the B dominant seventh that every time has immediately followed it, as if to signal a final quieting of the disturbance brought by the C, and of the memories it stirs of the first movement. In the subsequent deceptive resolution of the dominant seventh to the C#-minor chord, the relationship between first and second

294

n o t e s t o pag e s 1 0 4 – 11 0

themes reaches its most overt expression. A progression originating in the first phrasegroup of the first theme (mm.13–15), and coming there as a first dramatic disturbance, now reveals its full significance by bringing hitherto withheld closure to the second group. 18. Arnold Schering, Franz Schuberts Symphonie in H-Moll (“Unvollendete”) und ihr Geheimnis (Berlin: Kleine Deutsche Musikbücherei, 1938), 15. 19. The best-known biographical studies of Schubert in English—those of Alfred Einstein, Maurice Brown, John Reed, Brian Newbould, and Elizabeth Norman McKay— show no awareness of it. It is even absent from Martin Chusid’s bibliography for the Norton score of the symphony (see n. 9 above), an edition that incorporates “critical commentary” and “some possible answers to important questions about the work that have arisen during the past hundred years” (from the preface to the first edition). It probably owes its absence there to the ridicule Otto Erich Deutsch casts upon it in his article “The Riddle of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony,” which Chusid does include on pages 91–99. Although Peter Gülke notes it in his bibliography for Schubert und seine Zeit, he makes no mention of it in his discussion of the symphony. 20. Arnold Feil, “Orchestermusik,” in Franz Schubert, ed. Walter Dürr and Arnold Feil (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1991), 214–241; the discussion of Schering’s analysis is on 234. 21. Maynard Solomon, “Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony,” 19th-Century Music 21, no. 2 (1997): 111–133; see 130, n. 55. This article appeared after I had drafted my entire book; I regard it as only corroborating the account of the symphony that I propose here. 22. Solomon, 129. 23. Schering, 19: “wie eine phantastische Schilderung dessen, was der Jüngling als ‘Wanderer,’ d.h. als aus dem Vaterhaus verstossener ‘Fremdling’ in der Ferne erlebte oder zu erleben sich ausmalte.” Schering, 20: “die Hinwendung zu einem neuen, tatenfrohen Leben, zu den Freuden des Diesseits, zu dem Entschlusse, das Schicksal um jeden Preis zu meistern (Schussfuge).” The sentence continues: “das scheint unmittelbar, das zu sein, was Schubert seiner Symphonie nicht mehr anvertrauen konnte und um dessentwillen er nach wenigen Takten den Versuch eines Scherzos aufgab” (this appears to be exactly what Schubert could no longer entrust to his symphony and because of which he gave up his attempt at a scherzo after a few measures). Schering overstates his case with the scherzo, much of which exists in a piano sketch. Chapter 5 1. See Richard Kramer, Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 16–17. Kramer also seems to imply that the withholding of op. 90, no. 3, from publication was related to its unusual key. He further argues, subtly and convincingly, that the choice of such a key is intrinsically related to the

n o t e s t o pag e s 111 – 115

295

character of the music. In my view, there is no reason why Schubert’s choice of Gb major for this piece cannot reflect, at once, both the character of this impromptu in itself and the deepening of this character through its dramatic and tonal relationship to that of the preceding impromptu. 2. William Kinderman sensitively discusses Schubert’s dramatic o¤setting of major and minor both in “Schubert’s Tragic Perspective,” Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 65–83; and in “Schubert’s Piano Music: Probing the Human Condition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 155–173. 3. See especially Walther Dürr, “Klaviermusik,” in Reclams Musikführer: Franz Schubert, ed. Walther Dürr and Arnold Feil (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1991), 304: “ein Zyklus hat Schubert nicht gestalten wollen: die Tonartenfolge schliesst das aus” (Schubert did not wish to create a cycle: the sequence of keys precludes that). 4. Susan McClary, “Pitches, Expression, Ideology: An Exercise in Mediation,” Enclitic 7 (1983): 76–86. 5. Christopher H. Gibbs, “The Presence of Erlkönig: Reception and Reworkings of a Schubert Lied” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1992), 195–199. 6. Edward T. Cone, “Schubert’s Promissory Note,” in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 13–30. 7. No. 3 was first published in 1823, no. 6 in 1824, and the other four in 1828. See Walther Dürr and Andreas Krause, eds., Schubert Handbuch (Kassel: Bärenreiter-Metzler, 1997), 433. 8. The hammering long note in the melody (ex. 5.3, m. 80), supported by its minor triad, preceded by its hammering leading tone (m. 79), supported by the dominant harmony of that triad, can easily arouse the memory of the similar melodic and harmonic gestures that introduced that middle section (ex. 5.2, mm. 82–83), as well as its return in that impromptu’s coda. 9. Within the final return of the theme, an elision occurs that can seem awkward if its contribution to the final articulation of the dramatic role of the Cb is not understood. In place of the cadential tonic that would have occurred in the theme’s sixteenth measure (now m. 70) comes a subdominant chord in first inversion, supporting a melodic leap up to Cb in place of the Gb tonic. The melody rises from this Cb through Db and Dn to recover the Eb goal, again over subdominant harmony, of the preceding phrase. The melodic fall from this Eb to the Db of the following measure incorporates Ebb, as it did before in the concluding phrase of the theme. The tonicized subdominant is thus realized this last time without recourse to the upwardly striving subphrases that have preceded it before. At the same time, it incorporates the chromatic melodic motion most associated with the establishment and negation of Eb minor, as if to give expression to a lingering uncertainty, a residual striving that the subdominant harmony still needs to bring to rest.

296

n o t e s t o pag e s 1 2 2 – 13 8

Chapter 6 1. Quoted in Leon Plantinga, Schumann as Critic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 223–224. The quotation is from the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 9 (1838), 193. 2. Plantinga, 223. 3. Alfred Einstein, Schubert: A Musical Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 284–285. 4. Walther Dürr, “Klaviermusik,” in Walther Dürr and Arnold Feil, Reclams Musikführer: Franz Schubert (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1991), 304–305. 5. The manuscript is in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. It is briefly discussed by Dürr in Reclams Musikführer, 302–303, and by Andreas Krause in Die Klaviersonaten Franz Schuberts: Form, Gattung, Aesthetik (Basel, London, New York: Bärenreiter, 1992), 79–80. 6. Schubert, letter of 21 February 1828 to the publisher Bernard Schott in Mainz, as included in Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Franz Schubert’s Letters and Other Writings (New York: Vienna House, 1974), 134–135. 7. Einstein, 284–285. 8. For reasons explained at the beginning of chapter 3, I apply the term mature to the instrumental music beginning with the “Unfinished” Symphony of late 1822. Since the impromptus come near the end of this period, from 1822 until his death in 1828, consideration of the sonata works of that period should su‹ce to determine what kinds of movements and procedures he would be likely to have incorporated into a piece of this kind in 1827. 9. The Sonata in A Major of 1817 for violin and piano, D. 574, has a scherzo as its second movement. Several of the early string quartets also experiment with the order and character of movements. 10. In the String Quartet in D Minor (“Death and the Maiden”), D. 810, composed in 1824; the Piano Sonata in A Minor, D. 845, composed in 1825; and of course in two of the three fantasies, the “Wanderer” Fantasy, D. 760, composed in 1822, and the Fantasy in C Major for violin and piano, D. 934, composed in 1827. 11. In the Piano Sonata in A Minor, op. 42 (D. 845), the actual moment of recapitulation is deliberately, and very dramatically, obscured. 12. Again, one exception to this pattern is the first movement of the Piano Sonata in A Minor, D. 845, in which a new theme marks the first strong tonic arrival, initiating the transition to the second theme, and becomes itself transformed into the second theme. In this same movement, the first theme later appears in an alternating interchange with the second, and returns as well to dominate motivically the development. 13. Again, the quotation is from NZfM 9 (1838), 193. As this portion of the review is not quoted by Plantinga, the quotation here is taken from Konrad Wol¤, ed., Schumann on Music and Musicians (New York: Pantheon, 1946), 119.

n o t e s t o pag e s 1 4 1 – 15 4

297

14. Peter Gülke, Schubert und seine Zeit (Regensberg: Laaber, 1991), 301–302. 15. The audible relationship is only that between measure 83 and measure 5, not between measure 83 and measure 4. A more recognizable reference to the afterbeat in its original (m. 4) form is established at measure 88. 16. The opening melodic Eb of the Ab-Major Impromptu not only neighbors the closing F just heard, when these pieces are performed together, but also realizes the suppressed implication of a further descent from the descending figure, F to E, which is so prominent in those closing measures. Implicitly, motive z thus links the ending of the first impromptu to the beginning of the second. At the same time, the sarabande rhythm of the new beginning, which will persist throughout the second impromptu, carries the echo of the accented o¤beat chord that has every time jolted the enigmatic basic idea of the first impromptu and that has infiltrated the contrasting idea (see ex. 6.1, m. 5; ex. 6.5, m. 118). 17. The translation is from Plantinga, 224. The German text, from the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 9 (1838), 193, reads as follows: “Was das dritte Impromptu anlängt, so hätte ich es kaum für eine Schubert’sche Arbeit, höchstens für eine aus seiner Knabenzeit gehalten; es sind wenig oder gar nicht ausgezeichnete Variationen über ein ähnliches Thema. Erfindung und Phantasie fehlen ihnen gänzlich, worin sich Schubert gerade auch im Variationsgenre an andern Orten so schöpferisch gezeigt.” 18. The translation is from Wol¤, 119. 19. Even the first impromptu of opus 142 may have a partial source, as well, in that same Minore interlude. Not only does that impromptu begin with the same emphasis of 5 in minor (see ex. 6.1), and then of its upper neighbor in measure 4, it then continues, in measure 5, with the same upward leap of a fourth, from 5 to 8, that in the third measure of this Minore I responds to the falling fourth in its second measure. 20. In measures 94 (see ex. 6.4) and 207 of the first impromptu, for example, just as the major finally reemerges from the minor of the quasi-trio, or in measure 121 of the third, where the Gb momentarily reintroduces a shadowy memory from the agitated Minore variation into the serene concluding coda. This motive also recalls the color of both the retransition (see ex. 6.6, mm. 27–29 et sim.) and the final cadences (ex. 6.6, mm. 36–38, as well as 44–46 et sim.) of the second impromptu. 21. Einstein, 284–285; Brian Newbould, Schubert: The Music and the Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 343–344. Chapter 7 1. These variations, although without opus number, were published in 1807. It is therefore very unlikely that Schubert did not know them. 2. See Walther Dürr, “Klaviermusik,” in Walther Dürr and Arnold Feil, Franz Schubert (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1991), 289.

298

n o t e s t o pag e s 155 – 1 8 0

3. See Arthur Godel, Schuberts Letzte Drei Klaviersonaten (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1985), 248–249. See also the notes by Harris Goldsmith for Richard Goode’s recording of the C-Minor Sonata (Nonesuch 79064). Of the development Goldsmith writes: “Although full of the quintessential Schubertian moodiness, this working out is again ‘Beethovenian,’ in the thoroughgoing way that the sonata’s materials are broken up, digested, combined, and sometimes transformed beyond immediate recognition.” 4. See Edward T. Cone, “Schubert’s Beethoven.” Musical Quarterly 56, no. 4 (1970): 779–793. Also Godel, 248–249. 5. Alfred Brendel, “Schubert’s Last Sonatas,” in Music Sounded Out (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991), 72–141; the quote is on 138. 6. Andreas Krause, Die Klaviersonaten Franz Schuberts: Form, Gattung, Aesthetik (Basel, London, New York: Bärenreiter, 1992), 217. 7. Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, Untersuchungen zur Entwicklung der Sonatenform in der Instrumentalmusik Franz Schuberts (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1994), 322–323. 8. As in Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, Schubert’s melody begins on middle C, an octave lower than in Beethoven’s variations. It then shifts up an octave through the ascending scale that highlights E natural in the third measure. 9. Through this Gb the second theme might be said to appropriate and, to an extent, to master the memory of the harsh, threatening F# within the first theme. 10. This theme is an elaboration of the same melodic kernel, 1–7–1–2–3–4–3 (first heard in mm. 14–15), that is the basis of the second theme. 11. Although this gestural dramatization of Db arises quite suddenly, the several tonicizations of Db in the preceding theme have prepared for it, as has the harmony that mysteriously colors every melodic turn to Ab in the delicate C-major return of the theme just preceding this proclamation of Db (mm. 85, 87, 89). Enharmonically respelled, that D#–F#–Ab–C chord becomes the dominant seventh of Db, and the reemergence of Db indirectly realizes this implication. Within its immediate context this chord engenders an attenuating haze, imbuing the fading of C major with a darkening color. 12. At the same time, this closing theme—in its emphasis through repetition of the sixth and then the fifth scale degrees, and in its highlighting of these degrees through augmented sixth chords—recalls the closing theme of the first movement. By completing a melodic descent to the tonic, in contrast to the cadence on the third degree of the earlier closing theme, it brings this memory, also, to rest. 13. The dominant of Db subsides uncannily into a C-minor chord in second inversion, recalling a progression characteristic of the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet; it occurs in the closing theme (both exposition and recapitulation) of the first movement of the quartet. 14. John M. Gingerich, “Schubert’s Beethoven Project” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1996).

n o t e s t o pag e s 1 8 0 – 2 0 3

299

Chapter 8 1. Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms (New York, London: Norton, 1980), 321. 2. Arthur Godel, Schuberts Letzte Drei Klaviersonaten: Enstehungsgeschichte, Entwurf und Reinschrift, Werkanalyse (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1985), 247–248. 3. Ivan Waldbauer, “Recurrent Harmonic Patterns in the First Movement of Schubert’s Sonata in A Major, D. 959,” 19th-Century Music 12, no. 1 (1988): 64–73. 4. Maurice J. E. Brown, Schubert: A Critical Biography (New York: St. Martin’s, 1966), 303. 5. As it happens, the sudden modulation in measure 27 was an afterthought; it does not occur in Schubert’s first version of this exposition, or even in his second; see Franz Schubert, Drei grosse Sonaten für das Pianoforte D958, D959, D960 ( frühe Fassungen), Faksimile nach den Autographen in der Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, Begleitebder Text und Kommentar von Ernst Hilmar (Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1987). In these early versions, the arpeggio that breaks the gestural pattern in measure 27 simply reinforces the A-major triad, and the ensuing flight of harmonic fancy begins in A instead of E major, continuing through F major and Db major to return to A, exactly as it does in the recapitulation. Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen argues convincingly that Schubert only introduced the sudden modulation, the dominant of E in measure 27, after composing the recapitulation, and that he made the change in order to align exposition with recapitulation—to allow the second theme to arrive functionally in the same way, from its own dominant prolongation, in both places. In Schubert’s original conception of the exposition, the dominant key of the second theme comes without preparation; the dominant harmony of A major simply becomes the tonic of E as the second theme begins. Hinrichsen reasonably takes Schubert’s retention of this version of the transition until the final stages of his work on this movement as evidence for the weakening of the tonic-dominant axis in his tonal thinking. The final version restores the polarity between the tonic of the first theme and the dominant of the second to an extent; in both versions, however, the modulatory flight of fancy, the chain of descending major thirds that dominates the transition, plays no functional role in establishing its harmonic goal. 6. Rosen, 287–291. 7. Alfred Brendel, “Schubert’s Last Sonatas,” in Music Sounded Out (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990), 86. 8. Edward T. Cone, “Schubert’s Unfinished Business,” in Music: A View from Delft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); see especially 212–214. 9. See Godel, 166–167. 10. See Brendel, 126–127. He summarizes the emotional character of the Andantino as one of “desolate grace behind which madness hides.” 11. Brendel, 112. He places the two variants of the motive that I am comparing here—

300

n o t e s t o pag e s 2 0 4 – 2 2 1

from the first and second movements, respectively—side by side, as his examples 72 and 73. 12. A return of the basic idea like that of measures 9–12 is “expected” at m. 27 but never occurs; instead measure 27 parallels measure 13 (see ex. 8.4). 13. I have twice come across this characterization in liner notes for recordings: first in Rosen’s notes for his own recording (Epic LC 3855), in which he proposes this characterization as a simple fact, and later in Kurt Oppens’s notes for Richard Goode’s 1978 recording (Nonesuch 78028). Oppens mentions in passing that Artur Schnabel called this movement an “unearthly barcarole.” 14. Alfred Brendel, “Schubert’s Piano Sonatas, 1822–1828,” in Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 57–74; see especially 67. 15. Robert S. Hatten, “Schubert the Progressive: The Role of Resonance and Gesture in the Piano Sonata in A, D. 959,” Intégral 7 (1993): 38–81. 16. Martin Chusid has observed this, along with several of the other cyclic recurrences of rhythmic motives in this sonata, in his short article “Cyclicism in Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A Major, D. 959,” Piano Quarterly, no. 104 (1978–79): 38–40. 17. See especially Edward T. Cone, “Schubert’s Beethoven,” Musical Quarterly 56, no. 4 (1970): 779–793; and Charles Rosen, The Classical Style (New York: Norton, 1971), 456–458. For a recent example of the unquestioning assumption of Cone’s and Rosen’s conclusions, see William Kinderman, “Schubert’s Piano Music: Probing the Human Condition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 162. 18. In an article that appeared after this entire account had been drafted, William Kinderman beautifully describes the way this F#-major passage in the Rondo embodies “a vision of the slow movement theme glimpsed through the veil of the rondo theme.” See his “Wandering Archetypes in Schubert’s Instrumental Music,” 19th-Century Music 21, no. 2 (1997): 208–222; the quotation is from the final page of the article.

Chapter 9 1. See chapter 3, sections VI and VII. 2. Brendel does recognize the derivation but does not comment on it; see “Schubert’s Last Sonatas,” in Music Sounded Out (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990), 110. 3. The quote is from Brendel; see chapter 1, n. 11. 4. Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms (New York: Norton, 1980), 249. 5. Joseph Kerman, “A Romantic Detail in Schubert’s ‘Schwanengesang’” in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 48–64.

n o t e s t o pag e s 2 2 1 – 2 4 1

301

Epilogue 1. See Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Franz Schubert’s Letters and Other Writings (New York: Vienna House, 1974), 59n. 2. Maynard Solomon, “Franz Schubert’s ‘My Dream,’” American Imago 38 (1981): 137–154. 3. John Reed takes up Maurice Brown’s conjecture that it may have been the product of a party game; see John Reed, Schubert (London: The Master Musicians, 1987), 94; and Maurice J. E. Brown, Schubert: A Critical Biography (New York: St. Martin’s, 1966), 115–116. If so, we have apparently lost touch since Schubert’s time with how much fun a party can be. More recently Elizabeth Norman McKay has advanced a bizarre hypothesis that may nonetheless, for some, account more plausibly for the strangeness of the story. She suggests that it could be the product of an opium-induced reverie, one that might have arisen under the influence of the writings of Novalis; see Elizabeth Norman McKay, Franz Schubert: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 126–129. For additional support of Reed and McKay, see Brian Newbould, Schubert: The Music and the Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 180. 4. John M. Gingerich, “Schubert’s Beethoven Project” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1996). 5. Arthur Godel, Schuberts letzte drei Klaviersonaten (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1985), 242. 6. See, for example, James Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony and the Idea of the Classical Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially 175–176, 179–182. 7. Leon Botstein, “Realism Transformed: Franz Schubert and Vienna,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15–35; see especially 19. 8. William Kinderman, “Wandering Archetypes in Schubert’s Instrumental Music,” in 19th-Century Music 21, no. 2 (1997): 208–222. This article, published after my entire book had been drafted, strikes me as fundamentally in agreement with much of what I have explored here. It o¤ers, among other insights, yet more characterizations of cyclic aspects of the A-Major Sonata, consistent with and yet di¤erently worded than my own. This is one work on whose cyclic nature increasingly many writers—among them Chusid, Waldbauer, Brendel, Hatten, and Kinderman—have come to agree. I myself discussed cyclic aspects of the finale in my paper “Schubert’s Last Finales,” presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society at Oakland, California, in 1990. Kinderman cites this paper in his “Schubert’s Piano Music: Probing the Human Condition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 155–173, but he does not mention it again in the article in 19th-Century Music. 9. Charles Fisk, “What Schubert’s Last Sonata Might Hold,” in Music and Meaning, ed. Jenefer Robinson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 179–200.

302

n o t e s t o pag e s 2 7 0 – 2 8 3

Index

Italic page numbers denote music examples and figures. alienation theme in A-Major Sonata, 221–222, 235–236 in Bb-Major Sonata, 78, 242, 267 in C-Minor Sonata, 192, 203 and late instrumental music, 7–8, 23 in “Unfinished” Symphony, 111–112 and Viennese social restrictions, 282 in “Wanderer” Fantasy, 6, 60, 66–67, 69–72, 112 in Winterreise, 5–6, 28–29 See also “Fremdling” theme “Auf dem Flusse,” 52, 53, 192 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 115 Bb-Major String Quartet (op. 130), 29–31, 30 C-minor sonatas (op. 10, no. 1; op. 13), and Schubert’s C-Minor Sonata, 180, 191, 299n8 G-Major Sonata (op. 31, no. 1), and Schubert’s A-Major Sonata, 228, 232–235 influence of, 29–31, 203, 271, 299n3 and Schubert’s sonata form, 148, 274–277

Thirty-two Variations in C Minor, 180, 181–184, 183, 185, 190 “Waldstein” Sonata, and Schubert’s CMinor Sonata, 180 Botstein, Leon, 282 Brendel, Alfred, 35, 216, 222 on A-Major Sonata, 221, 222, 300n10, 301n11 on Bb-Major Sonata, 63 on C-Minor Sonata,181 on sonatas, cyclic elements, 20–21, 32, 33, 36 Brown, Maurice, 295n19, 302n3 Burnham, Scott, 12 Chusid, Martin, 295n19, 301n16 Cohn, Richard, 288n16 Cone, Edward T. on A-Major Sonata, 217 on C-Minor Sonata, 180 The Composer’s Voice, 22 on protagonist concept, 288n21 on Schubert compared to Beethoven, 29, 31 “Schubert’s Promissory Note,” 136

303

Cone, Edward T. (continued) on “Unfinished” Symphony, 103, 104, 293n4 cyclic elements, 3, 5, 42 A-Major Sonata, 2, 13–16, 204–205, 218, 229–230; finale, 227, 233–235; Scherzo, 225–227 as atypical of Schubert, 12 Bb-Major Sonata, 237–241 C-Minor Sonata, 191–202 Impromptus, op. 90, 115–125, 137–138 Impromptus, op. 142, 146–148, 159– 163, 171–172, 177–179 impulse toward, 21–22, 280–282 in late fantasies, 61–62 in late keyboard compositions, 38–41 in late sonatas, 1 in Moments musicaux, 137 motivic vs. formal, 276–277 and overcoming alienation, 23 in “Unifinished” Symphony, 81–85, 100–110 in “Wanderer” Fantasy, 61, 64–68, 113–114 in Winterreise, 4 See also homecoming theme “Death and the Maiden.” See Quartet, strings, D Minor (D. 810) death theme, 44–46, 53, 196–197, 203 Deutsch, Otto Erich, 270, 295n19 “Der Doppelgänger,” 222 dramatic tension, 19, 274 Dürr, Walther, 142, 180 “Einsamkeit,” 53, 192 Einstein, Alfred, 29, 141–143, 159, 178, 295n19 “Erlkönig,” 127, 129, 130, 133–135 “Erstarrung,” 187, 192 Fantasy, piano, C Major (D. 760), “Wanderer,” 60–72, 64, 65, 67, 292nn5–7,10, 297n10 Adagio, 64, 66–67, 78–79, 254

304

index

Allegro, 63–66 and A-Major Sonata, 2–3, 234 and Bb-Major Sonata, 62–63, 78–79, 237–240 and cyclic impulse, 3, 11, 113–114 and Impromptus, op. 90, 140 and last instrumental works, 21–22, 72–80 motivic unification in, 61–63 Scherzo, 67 and Schubert life narrative, 269–270 and “Unfinished” Symphony, 112– 114 variations in, 66–67 See also “Der Wanderer” Fantasy, piano four hands, F Minor (D. 940), 62, 277 Fantasy, violin and piano, C Major, (D. 934), 61, 297n10 father relationship, 9, 134, 280 Feil, Arnold, 111–112 form manipulation, and cyclic organization, 20, 278 “Fremdling” theme, 8, 28–29, 287n11 in Ab-Major Impromptu (op. 90, no. 4), 74–77 in Bb-Major Sonata, 79, 254 critical approaches to, 274–277 and late instrumental music, 21, 23 and “Mein Traum” story, 134, 280 and Schubert’s life narrative, 8, 269–270 in “Wanderer” Fantasy, 7, 71–72, 112 See also alienation theme; homecoming theme “Gefror’ne Tränen,” 50–52, 51, 192 Gibbs, Christopher, 134 Gingerich, John, 203, 271, 274–277, 283 Godel, Arthur, 274–277 on Beethoven’s influence, 299n3 on C-Minor Sonata, 47, 180 on formal procedures, 19 on Schubert’s finales, 32, 37, 204 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: “Erlkönig,” 129, 133–135

Goldsmith, Harris, 299n3 “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” 221 Grob, Therese, 9 ground bass pattern Beethoven’s use of, 182 in “Unfinished” Symphony, 85–88 Gs, opening, 25–28, 38 Gülke, Peter on C-Major Fantasy, 292nn5,7,8,10 on F-Minor Impromptu (op. 142, no. 1), 154–155, 157 on “Unfinished” Symphony, 85, 91–93, 102, 295n19 “Gute Nacht,” 28, 52, 192 Hartmann, Fritz von, 8 Haslinger Publishers, 115, 142 Hatten, Robert, 225 Haydn, Josef, 115 “Drum Roll” Symphony, 31 and sonata form, 148 Hinrichsen, Hans-Joachim, 274–277 on A-Major Sonata, 300n5 on Bb-Major Sonata, 17, 18 on C-Minor Sonata, 181 Ho¤mann, E.T.A., 166 homecoming theme, 5, 7 in “Mein Traum,” 10–11, 111, 270– 271 and tonal compositions, 271–273 and tonality, 20 homeless wandering. See alienation; “Fremdling” theme homosexuality, 8, 284 illness and A-Major Sonata, expression of, 222, 223 and “Mein Traum” story, 135 and Schubert’s life narrative, 8, 60, 269 Impromptus cyclic elements in, 2 tonal network, and homecoming theme, 272–274

Impromptus, piano, op. 90 (D. 899), 39, 115–140 as cycle, 123–125, 124, 273 —no. 1, C Minor, 26–27, 128–129, 131 cyclic elements in, 1, 125–126 and “Erlkönig,” 127–130, 133–134 five-part form of, 278 and no. 2, 135–136 opening G, intertextuality of, 27–28, 31, 32, 135 and “Der Wegweiser,” 28–29 and Winterreise, 132–134, 140 —no. 2, Eb Major, 41, 59, 118, 121 cyclic elements in, 46, 122 and no. 1, 135–136 and no. 3, 39, 41, 42, 115–120, 137– 138 —no. 3, Gb Major, 41, 59, 116, 119 and A-Major Sonata, 225 cyclic elements in, 122, 296n8 and no. 2, 39, 41, 42, 115–120, 137–138 —no. 4, Ab Major, 73, 75–76 and earlier impromptus, 123 and “Der Wanderer,” 72–74, 77, 123, 140 Impromptus, piano, op. 142 (D. 935) as cycle, 141–148, 146–147, 159, 166, 178 and sonata form, 141–145, 148, 179 —no. 1, F Minor, 142, 148–159, 149– 150, 153, 154, 156, 158, 161–162, 174 and Rosamunde, 298n19 and sonata form, 142–143, 154, 158– 159 —no. 2, Ab Major, 1, 159–166, 160, 164, 170, 177 and sonata form, 142–143 —no. 3, Bb Major, 144, 166–172, 167, 178–179 —no. 4, F Minor, 171–178, 173, 175–177 and rondo form, 144, 178

index

305

improvisatory quality, in A-Major Sonata, Scherzo, 13. See also tonal networks “In der Ferne,” 289n8 “Die junge Nonne,” 157, 158 Kerman, Joseph, 30, 241 key organization A-Major Sonata, 17 Impromptus, op. 90, 120 late fantasies, 61–62 major vs. minor, 69; C-Minor Impromptu, 132; Impromptus, op. 90, 115–123; impromptus, and Winterreise, 122 remote keys, use of, 7, 17, 19 Kinderman, William, 283, 287n11, 291n3, 292n12, 296n2, 301n18, 302n8 Kramer, Richard, 4, 11, 28, 295n1 Krause, Andreas, 181 Kupelweiser, Leopold, 8 “Der Leiermann,” 5, 7, 189, 203 life narrative, in music, 8–11, 60, 269– 270, 271, 283, 284 “Der Lindenbaum,” 187, 192 major vs. minor. See key organization; tonal networks mature work, defined, 297n8 McClary, Susan, 19, 289n1, 294n14 McKay, Elizabeth Norman, 295n19, 302n3 “Mein Traum” (story), 8–10, 60 and A-Major Sonata, 236 and Bb-Major Sonata, 242, 256, 268 and C-Minor Sonata, 203 reconciliation in, 9, 60 and second Moment musical, 280, 282 and Schubert life narrative, 8–11, 133– 135, 270–271 and “Unfinished” Symphony, 111–113 and “Wanderer” Fantasy, 113–114 memory, and Impromptus, op. 142, 154, 157, 163–165, 170–171

306

index

Moments musicaux, piano, op. 94 (D. 780) Ab Major (no. 2), 278–282, 279, 281 as cyclic works, 137 motion by thirds, 17, 19 motivic unification, 276–277 and cyclic procedures, 6 “Wanderer” Fantasy, 4, 60–63 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 115 Müller, Wilhelm, 5, 133–134 narrative quality Bb-Major Sonata, 267 musical expression of, 282–283 urgency of, 269–274 after Winterreise, 6 Neapolitan harmony, 66, 130, 155, 288n13 Newbould, Brian, 178, 295n19 Novalis, 302n3 Oppens, Kurt, 301n13 pleasure garden, in “Mein Traum” story, 9, 134–135 progression by thirds. See motion by thirds protagonist concept, 7, 22–23, 155. See also self Quartet, strings, A Minor (D. 804), 166– 169, 289n8 Quartet, strings, D Minor (D. 810), 62, 196, 234, 297n10 Quartet, strings, G Major (D. 887), 278, 289n8 Quintet, piano and strings, A Major (D. 667), “Trout,” 60, 61 Quintet, strings, C Major (D. 956), 277, 284 Reed, John, 28, 293n14, 295n19, 302n3 Romanticism, 11, 133, 166, 196–197 Rosamunde, incidental music (D. 797), 166–171, 168, 172, 298n19 Rosen, Charles, 204, 216, 241, 293n5, 301n13

salvation, in “Unfinished” Symphony and “Wanderer” Fantasy, 60. See also homecoming theme Schering, Arnold, 111–113, 280, 295n23 Schnabel, Artur, 301n13 Die schöne Müllerin, 6, 271 Schumann, Robert, on Impromptus, op. 142, 141, 142, 154, 159, 166, 178 Schwanengesang (D. 957), 289n8 “Sei mir gegrüsst,” 61, 291n2 self concept/assertion of, 6, 12, 57; in AMajor Sonata, opening, 235; in CMinor Sonata, 192 and Schubert’s life narrative, 270–273, 283 sexual orientation. See homosexuality Solomon, Maynard, 112, 270, 284, 291n1 Sonata, arpeggione and piano, A Minor (D. 821), 20 Sonata, piano, A Major (D. 664), 60 Sonata, piano, A Major (D. 959), 204–236 Allegro, 204–218, 208–209, 211–214, 272 Andantino, 13, 80, 218–225, 219, 223, 224, 227–228, 232 and Bb-Major Sonata, 17–18, 38, 253, 255, 263, 267–268 and Beethoven, G-Major Sonata (op. 31, no. 1), 228, 232–235 critical approaches to, 275 cyclic elements in, 2, 204–205, 220, 227–228, 229, 230, 233 and Gb-Major Impromptu, 225 opening, compared to Rondo, 204–205 opening, vs. Viennese tradition, 235 Rondo, 38, 204–205, 206, 207, 209, 227–233, 229, 231, 234–236 Scherzo, 13–18, 14–15, 58, 225–227, 227, 236 and “Wanderer” Fantasy, 2–3 Sonata, piano, A Minor (D. 537), 204–205, 206 Sonata, piano, A Minor (D. 845), 297nn10–12

Sonata, piano, Bb Major (D. 960), 32–37, 58, 237–268 and A-Major Sonata, 17–18, 253, 255, 263, 267–268 Andante sostenuto, 78–79, 237–241, 238–239, 254–260, 257–258; “Wanderer” key in, 62–63, 78, 237, 241 critical approaches to, 274–277 finale, Allegro ma non troppo, 26, 239, 264–267, 266; and Beethoven Bb-Major String Quartet (op. 130), 29–31; and C-Minor Impromptu, 35; and C-Minor Sonata, 32, 35 opening G, intertextuality of, 27–28 Molto moderato, 34, 241–254, 243, 244–246, 249–251, 254–255 Scherzo, 260–264, 261–262 tonal progression in, 17 trills in, 33, 36, 241–242, 247, 252, 253, 272 and “Der Wanderer,” 248, 249, 255 Sonata, piano, C Major (D. 840), 278 Sonata, piano, C Minor (D. 958), 180– 203 Adagio, 39, 40, 42–44, 47–57, 54, 55, 80, 191–193, 196, 197, 200, 201; cyclic elements in, 47–50, 53; five-part form in, 278; and “Gefror’ne Tränen,” 50–52, 51; and other Winterreise songs, 52–53 Allegro, 180–191, 183, 185, 188–189, 197 and Bb-Major Sonata, 32, 35 finale, Allegro, 38–39, 40, 57–59, 196– 202, 198, 199, 201 Menuetto, 193–196, 194–195, 197 and Winterreise, 187, 192 Sonata, piano, D Major (D. 850), 278 Sonata, piano, G Major (D. 894), 278 Sonata, piano and violin, Ab Major (D. 574), 297n9 sonata form, 274–277 and Impromptus, op. 142, 141, 145, 148, 154, 158–159, 179

index

307

sonata form (continued) and Schubert’s life narrative, 275 song cycle. See Die schöne Müllerin; Winterreise Spaun, Joseph, 8 Sto¤els, Ludwig, 4, 28, 290n4 “Suleika I” (D. 720), 88–90, 89, 140 Symphony, B Minor (D. 759), “Unfinished,” 60, 81–114 Allegro moderato, 81, 85–100, 86–87, 92–93, 94–97; development, 93–99; first theme, 90–91; recapitulation and coda, 99–100; second theme, 91–93 Andante con moto, 81–85, 82–84, 101– 102, 102–108, 270; cyclic elements in, 100–104; five-part form of, 111, 278; recapitulation and coda, 109–110 and “Mein Traum” story, 111–113 “Wanderer” key in, 110–113, 294n15 syphilis, 8. See also illness text, in relation to music, 42–46, 68–71, 88–90, 133–135, 269–270 tonal networks, 18–19 in A-Major Sonata, 7–8, 210, 226; Scherzo, 13–17 as atypical of Schubert, 12 in Bb-Major Sonata, 268 and diatonic conceptualization, 288n16 and homecoming theme, 273–276 in Impromptus, op. 90, 123–125 in late fantasies, 61–62 sonata form, and Impromptus, op. 142, 146–147 in “Unfinished” Symphony, 110 in “Wanderer” Fantasy, 7–8 Trio, piano, Bb Major (D. 898), 277 Trio, piano, Eb Major (D. 929), 2, 3, 61, 277 “Trout” Quintet. See Quintet, piano and strings, A Major (D. 667)

308

index

“Unfinished” Symphony. See Symphony, B Minor (D. 759) Viennese society, 275, 282 walking tempo, 28 “Der Wanderer” (D. 489), 2, 4, 7, 68–72, 70–71, 78–80, 79 and Bb-Major Sonata, 248, 255 song text, 68–69 See also Fantasy, piano, C Major (D. 760); “Wanderer” key “Wanderer” Fantasy. See Fantasy, piano, C Major (D. 760) “Wanderer” key (C# minor), 63, 68, 80 and A-Major Sonata, 3, 7 in Bb-Major Sonata, 62–63, 237–240 and “Unfinished” Symphony, 110–113, 294n15 “Der Wegweiser,” 5, 28–29, 42–46, 43, 135, 192, 193 Willemer, Marianne von, 293n2 Winterreise and C-Minor Impromptu, 132–135 and C-Minor Sonata, 50–53, 192, 196, 203 as cycle, 3–4, 6 cyclic elements in, and text, 41–46 and Eb-Major Trio, 277 and “Erlkönig,” 133 and impromptus, 2, 122, 140 and later works, 1, 3, 21 text changed by Schubert, 291n10 themes and motives in, 3–6 walking motion in, 28 and “Wanderer” Fantasy, 3–6, 72 See also titles of songs “Das Wirtshaus,” 43, 42–46, 53, 192, 291n14 Wol¤, Christoph, 62 Wol¤, Konrad, 33, 35 Youens, Susan, 4, 8, 28

Designer: Compositor: Music Setter: Text: Display: Printer/Binder:

Steve Renick Integrated Composition Systems Rolf W. Wulfsberg 11/14 Bembo Bembo Edwards Brothers, Inc.

Returning Cycles: Contexts for the Interpretation of Schubert's Impromptus and Last Sonatas

Returning Cycles: Contexts for the Interpretation of Schubert's Impromptus and Last Sonatas (California Studies in Nineteenth Century Music)

Mozart's Piano Sonatas: Contexts, Sources, Style

The Returning

The Returning

Cycles

Returning Injury

Returning Injury

Returning Home

Cycles

Cycles

Cycles

Returning Tides

Semantics for Opaque Contexts

Returning Home

Returning Home

Returning Home

Returning Tides

Returning to the Source

Cycles: The Science of Prediction

Returning to Study for a Research Degree

Returning Tides

Returning Home

Returning Tides

The Cycles of American History

Expert Resumes for People Returning to Work

Business Fluctuations and Cycles

Algebraic cycles and motives

Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible

Understanding Mozart's Piano Sonatas

Theory of Limit Cycles

Returning Cycles: Contexts for the Interpretation of Schubert's Impromptus and Last Sonatas