Schubert's Sonata Forms and the Poetics of the Lyric

Abstract

Although recent scholarship has witnessed a welcome disavowal of the view that Schubert's formal and tonal designs in sonata form compositions bespeak the song composer's inability to master large-scale instrumental genres, it remains a commonplace to characterize Schubert's unorthodox practice as ““lyrical.”” Yet the historical, theoretical, and aesthetic bases of this lyricism have received little critical attention. A systematic and historically grounded approach to the notion of lyrical form in Schubert may be established by appealing to the rhetorical distinction between hypotaxis and parataxis, which pervaded late 18th-century discussions of both music and language. In particular, parataxis, a style that deliberately omits syntactical connections and relies instead on juxtaposition and parallelism, offers a suggestive technical link between Schubert's instrumental practice and the discursive techniques of contemporaneous lyric poetry. There are also aesthetic connections between idealist views of the lyric and the composer's own artistic beliefs, as confirmed by biographical documents. Schubert's approach to form was as much informed by these literary sensibilities as by the Classical compositional tradition. Like poets for whom the lyric served both as an Arcadian ideal of song and as an alternative to the prosaic realities of the present, Schubert evoked the lyric within the context of the sonata as a means of reunifying the dissociated sensibility of the Enlightenment. In so doing, he secured a place for the poetic imagination in instrumental music.

Form and Orbital Tonality in the Finale of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony

“…An attempt to explain this feature is central to Korstvedt's notion of schematic design: motivic development happens within theme groups, rather than as a technique that overrides inter‐thematic functions in Brahms's manner, with the result that themes appear self‐contained and motivically discontinuous. Viewed another way, this property evidences the relationship with Schubert stressed by Paul Bekker (): the organisation of sonata form as episodic, lyrical or paratactic, rather than as a dramatic, hypotactic Beethovenian principle, resonates strongly with Schubertian habits noted in literature from Adorno (; first published 1928) to Scott Burnham () and Su Yin Mak ().…”

Schubert and the Construction of Memory: The String Quartet in A minor, D.804 (‘Rosamunde’)

“…Mak's reading of parataxis on a large scale is on to this point. 89 In fact, often the conception is not that different from the parenthetical insertion or moments of static dreaming time commentators have read into Beethoven's late music. 90 Mark Evan Bonds has recently drawn attention to the historical growth of spatial representations of musical form, which depended on new conceptions of mapping time onto space.…”

“…94 Mak finds that 'Schubert's paratactic repetitions continually revisit the same subject from different perspectives', while Burnham claims Schubert 'gives us time to take in his themes, as if they were works of visual art we could inspect at our leisure, or landscapes through which we could wander'. 95 As these interpretations imply, landscape connects with a sense of spatiality derived from Schubert's use of large sequences and repetition which offers multiple perspectives o ft h es a m eo b j e c t ,t h en o t i o no fm o v e m e n t( or wandering) occurring within a larger objective framework, ideas of sunlight and shade resulting from the interplay of major and minor. Most particularly the sense of time suggested by landscape is different and distinctive.…”