In this book, Steven Vande Moortele offers a comprehensive account of operatic and concert overtures in continental Europe between 1815 and 1850. Discussing a broad range of works by German, French, Italian, and other composers, it is at once an investigation of the romantic overture within the context of mid-nineteenth-century musical culture and an analytical study that focuses on aspects of large-scale formal organization in the overture genre. While the book draws extensively upon the recent achievements of the "new Formenlehre," it does not use the overture merely as a vehicle for a theory of romantic form, but rather takes an analytical approach that engages with individual works in their generic context. steven vande moortele teaches music theory and analysis at the University of Toronto. His research interests include theories of musical form, the analysis of large-scale instrumental music from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and the works of

The first movement of Schubert's String Quintet, D. 956, is among the early nineteenth‐century repertoire's clearest examples of what Janet Schmalfeldt has called ‘form as the process of becoming’. In this article we show how the governing formal principle of the movement's exposition is the conflation of distinct and typically consecutive formal functions. The result is an extraordinary chain of form‐functional overlaps, requiring the analyst to engage in a process of constant retrospective reinterpretation that ends only with the unambiguous closing group. Our aim is not only to revisit some familiar analytical questions about Schubert's Quintet from a form‐functional perspective, but also to provide a test case showing the applicability of form‐functional thinking to early nineteenth‐century music. We begin by presenting a form‐functional overview and cadential plan of the exposition and then home in on three passages that pose particular analytical challenges: the introduction/main‐theme/transition complex (bars 1–59), the transition/subordinate‐theme complex (bars 60–100) and the closing‐group/subordinate theme complex (bars 100–138). The article concludes by proposing certain ways in which Schmalfeldt's idea of retrospective reinterpretation may be further refined.

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In this essay I analyse the form of Wagner's overture to Der fliegende Holländer (1841) as part of a constellation that also includes the composer's published programme for the overture as well as the stage action and a few key musical events in the opera. To that end, I use analytical tools inspired by the ‘new Formenlehre’ (William Caplin's theory of formal functions and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's theory of sonata form) in conjunction with aspects of narrative and intertextuality. I argue that Wagner's innovative use of musical form in the overture functions as a background against which events in the opera are thrown into relief, so that both can be understood as two essentially different versions of the same narrative. In the overture, sophisticated manipulation of the conventions of musical form generates a symphonic narrative, while changes to the narrative in the opera are articulated by the reworking of aspects of that same musical form at crucial moments in the drama. Both the overture's form and the opera's dramaturgical design gain in significance through an intertextual dialogue that Wagner sets up between his opera and the model of Weber's Der Freischütz (1821).

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