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6. Schubert and Musical Aesthetics of the Early Romantic Era
- University of Michigan Press
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six Schubert and Musical Aesthetics of the Early Romantic Era Beethoven died in 1827, only a single year before Franz Peter Schubert (1797–1828). Both spent their most productive years in Vienna; however, their respective styles are light years apart. Schubert’s radical departure from the Classical style cannot be attributed to any unfamiliarity with the standard repertoire of the period. We know that he played string quartets with his father and two brothers as a child. We know, too, that, from the time he entered the Stadtkonvikt in 1808, he was immersed in the music of Haydn, Mozart, and lesser masters such as Leopold Kotzeluch and Franz Krommer.1 Similarly, Schubert received his musical training from Antonio Salieri (1750–1825), who, despite popular notions to the contrary, was a composer of distinction. Given Schubert’s intimacy with the scores of late eighteenth-century masters, it is hard to understand the unorthodox character of many of his works—particularly the early works. Among his twenty string quartets, the First, the String Quartet in B-›at, D. 18 (1812), is one of the most daring. The ‹rst movement opens with a plaintive introduction in C minor . The principal tempo arrives in the key of G minor, and a sonata-allegro form unfolds in that key. The last movement, however, is in the relative major, B-›at. The idea of beginning a piece in one key and ending in some other tonality—generally called “directional tonality”—was new.2 The First Quartet is ‹lled with distinctive melodies, intensity of feeling, textural variety, and genuine musical inspiration. The ‹rst movement includes effective sections of contrapuntal imitation placed as contrast to passages in which Schubert’s characteristic melodies are featured in a ho90 mophonic texture against a backdrop of nervously repeating chords in the lower stings. A similarly novel approach can also be seen in the well-known Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 114, known as the Trout Quintet (1819). The scoring is unusual, since it includes the double bass, an instrument that Schubert later included in his Octet in F major, D. 803 (1824) for clarinet, horn, bassoon, two violins, viola, cello, and bass. The presence of this instrument in the Quintet had important consequences for the piano part, which consists much of the time of a single line played by both hands in octaves. Furthermore , these melodies are generally pitched very high in the compass of the instrument. Schubert probably realized that the bass part was already amply covered by the cello and bass, and that he would be compelled to use the piano in an unorthodox manner in order to make his strange ensemble effective. The Trout Quintet is one of the ‹rst, fully revealing examples of Schubert ’s chamber music. The name of the piece derives from the fact that the fourth movement is a series of variations on Schubert’s song of 1817, “Die Forelle” (The trout). Schubert frequently used his own songs within chamber works: “Sei mir gegrüßt” (I greet thee) appears in the Fantasy for Violin and Piano, and the song “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (Death and the maiden) gives its name to the String Quartet in D minor, D 810. Clearly, lyrical melodies occupy a crucial role in all of Schubert’s music. The compositional draft of Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise (1827) reveals his compositional procedure: The two layers of ink (sepia and black) show that Schubert wrote the melodies ‹rst and the accompaniment afterward. Though motivic interplay among voices appears, it does so within the context of an essentially melodic conception. As a consequence Schubert’s orientation towards melody, the role of harmony is signi‹cantly altered. While melodic content may often be repeated with little or no modi‹cation, harmonies supporting the melodies are constantly changing. Two devices were important in enabled Schubert to achieve such great harmonic freedom: the structural interchange of parallel major and minor modes, and the arrangement of tonalities within formal structures in chains of thirds. The ‹rst movement of the Trout Quintet contains an example of a typical , Schubertian modi‹cation to Classical pattern forms. The structure is a sonata-allegro plan. The exposition contains the standard duality of themes (here accentuated by the fact that the secondary theme is introduced by piano solo—to compensate for the curious keyboard writing earlier mentioned). Tonal relationships are similarly conservative: the ‹rst Schubert and Musical Aesthetics • 91 [35.175.200.199] Project MUSE (2024-03...