Schubert's Late Music: History, Theory, Style eds. by Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton (review)

The volume of essays under review contains twenty-one contributions divided into four parts. As reflected in the title, the editors' professed aim is to investigate Schubert's late music from a variety of perspectives. Cambridge University Press produced its usual attractive volume, although there was a problem with the binding just before chapter ten in my copy. There are also several errors in the text (e.g., "Adorno's 1828 essay" [p. 13] instead of "1928") and in the examples [(p. 197: the G–B sharp in the right hand of m. 175, ex. 10.2, is the most regrettable; it should be B–D sharp, of course)], but nothing too shocking.

When opening a volume of essays, especially one that includes so many contributions, readers expect certain things: disparities and contradictions between the various points of view, a weaker guiding line than the one that a book arguably—hopefully—draws, and a certain imbalance in the quality of the writing and in the strength of each author's arguments. One also presumes that the volume's editors will have intervened to secure a not-too-tenuous common thread and to establish a comprehensive view of the collective topic.

In Schubert's Late Music, this topic proves surprisingly elusive. As is typical with a collection of essays, the volume evolved from a conference, "Thanatos as Muse? Schubert and Concepts of Late Style," which took place at Maynooth University in October 2011. Less typically, it is the first of two volumes that the conference spawned; Rethinking Schubert, published in 2016, also edited by Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton, is the other. Although it seems misguided to regard the volume under review as a prequel to Rethinking Schubert, the former feels incomplete without the latter. It is therefore worth quoting its introductory sentence: "The time is propitious for a re-evaluation of Schubert scholarship" (Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton, "Introduction. Rethinking Schubert: Contexts and Controversies," in Rethinking Schubert, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton [New York: Oxford University Press, 2016], 1). The need for "reevaluation," in this reviewer's opinion, is possibly Schubert scholarship's most fetishized narrative—indeed, in Schubert's Late Music, we are told that Adorno "taught us to rethink Schubert" (p. 111)—and cherished even more, perhaps, than narratives on wandering, alienation, or memory. Yet, although there are several very good articles and some excellent ones in this volume, much is left un-re-evaluated: analytical techniques are often Schenkerian in form or spirit (Eric Wen, Lauri Suurpää, Richard Kramer), the time-honored narratives just mentioned are reinforced, and the pervasive hermeneutic impulse often goes unchecked (more on that below). A neo-Riemannian perspective is conspicuously absent, despite David Kopp's presence on the conference's program. (Rethinking Schubert, on the other hand, did include an essay by Suzannah Clark, entitled "Schubert through a Neo-Riemannian Lens").

Of course, Schubert's Late Music's stated goal is not to rethink Schubert. On the contrary, as the dust jacket claims, "Schubert's late music has proved pivotal for the development of diverse fields of musical scholarship." Schubert's late music, in other words, has led us to rethink ourselves. Yet, as the title of Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen's essay, in Rethinking Schubert, asks—"Is there a late style in Schubert's oeuvre?"—the answer given in Schubert's Late Music is far less satisfactory and far more piecemeal than the one offered by Hinrichsen. More importantly, no sooner is the question put than the discussion becomes centered on death. That death should be an important aspect when considering lateness is understandable, but the issue of Schu bert's untimely death receives the lion's share of the contributors' musings to the detriment of other important issues. For instance, why Schubert's supposed...