Why couldn't Schubert get his 'great' C-Major Symphony performed? Why was he the first composer to consistently write four movements for his piano sonatas? Since neither Schubert's nor Beethoven's ...piano sonatas were ever performed in public, who did hear them? Addressing these questions and many others, John M. Gingerich provides a new understanding of Schubert's career and his relationship to Beethoven. Placing the genres of string quartet, symphony, and piano sonata within the cultural context of the 1820s, the book examines how Schubert was building on Beethoven's legacy. Gingerich brings new understandings of how Schubert tried to shape his career to bear on new hermeneutic readings of the works from 1824 to 1828 that share musical and extra-musical pre-occupations, centering on the 'Death and the Maiden' Quartet and the Cello Quintet, as well as on analyses of the A-minor Quartet, the Octet, and of the 'great' C-Major Symphony.
When Schubert's contemporary reviewers first heard his modulations, they famously claimed that they were excessive, odd and unplanned. This book argues that these claims have haunted the analysis of ...Schubert's harmony ever since, outlining why Schubert's music occupies a curiously marginal position in the history of music theory. Analyzing Schubert traces how critics, analysts and historians from the early nineteenth century to the present day have preserved cherished narratives of wandering, alienation, memory and trance by emphasizing the mystical rather than the logical quality of the composer's harmony. This study proposes a new method for analyzing the harmony of Schubert's works. Rather than pursuing an approach that casts Schubert's famous harmonic moves as digressions from the norms of canonical theoretical paradigms, Suzannah Clark explores how the harmonic fingerprints in Schubert's songs and instrumental sonata forms challenge pedigreed habits of thought about what constitutes a theory of tonal and formal order.
This book explores the connections between art and life in the works of three giants of musical romanticism. Drawing on contemporary critical theory and a wide variety of 19th-century sources, it ...considers topics including Schubert and Schumann's uncanny ability to evoke memory in music, the supposed cryptographic practices of Schumann and Brahms, and the allure of the Hungarian Gypsy style for Brahms and others in the Schumann circle. The book offers a fresh perspective on the music of these composers, including a discussion of the 19th-century practice of cryptography, a debunking of the myth that Schumann and Brahms planted codes for “Clara Schumann’ throughout their works, and attention to the late works of Schumann not as evidence of the composer's descent into madness but as inspiration for his successors. The book portrays the three key players as musical storytellers, each in his own way simulating the structure of lived experience in works of art.
Schubert's late music has proved pivotal for the development of diverse fields of musical scholarship, from biography and music history to the theory of harmony. This collection addresses current ...issues in Schubert studies including compositional technique, the topical issue of 'late' style, tonal strategy and form in the composer's instrumental music, and musical readings of the 'postmodern' Schubert. Offering fresh approaches to Schubert's instrumental and vocal works and their reception, this book argues that the music that the composer produced from 1822–8 is central to a paradigm shift in the history of music during the nineteenth century. The contributors provide a timely reassessment of Schubert's legacy, assembling a portrait of the composer that is very different from the sentimental Schubert permeating nineteenth-century culture and the postmodern Schubert of more recent literature.
This compelling investigation of the later music of Franz Schubert explores the rich terrain of Schubert's impromptus and last piano sonatas. Drawing on the relationships between these pieces and ...Schubert's Winterreise song cycle, his earlier "Der Wanderer," the closely related "Unfinished" Symphony, and his story of exile and homecoming, "My Dream," Charles Fisk explains how Schubert's view of his own life may well have shaped his music in the years shortly before his death. Fisk's intimate portrayal of Schubert is based on evidence from the composer's own hand, both verbal (song texts and his written words) and musical (vocal and instrumental). Noting extraordinary aspects of tonality, structure, and gestural content, Fisk argues that through his music Schubert sought to alleviate his apparent sense of exile and his anticipation of early death. Fisk supports this view through close analyses of the cyclic connections within and between the works he explores, finding in them complex musical narratives that attempt to come to terms with mortality, alienation, hope, and desire. Fisk's knowledge of Schubert's life and music, together with his astute and imaginative attention to musical detail, helps him achieve one of the most difficult goals in music criticism: to capture and verbalize the human content of instrumental music.
Franz Schubert and his world Gibbs, Christopher H; Solvik, Morten
2014., 20141111, 2014, 2014-11-11, Letnik:
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eBook
During his short lifetime, Franz Schubert (1797-1828) contributed to a wide variety of musical genres, from intimate songs and dances to ambitious chamber pieces, symphonies, and operas. The essays ...and translated documents inFranz Schubert and His Worldexamine his compositions and ties to the Viennese cultural context, revealing surprising and overlooked aspects of his music.
Contributors explore Schubert's youthful participation in the Nonsense Society, his circle of friends, and changing views about the composer during his life and in the century after his death. New insights are offered about the connections between Schubert's music and the popular theater of the day, his strategies for circumventing censorship, the musical and narrative relationships linking his song settings of poems by Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten, and musical tributes he composed to commemorate the death of Beethoven just twenty months before his own. The book also includes translations of excerpts from a literary journal produced by Schubert's classmates and of Franz Liszt's essay on the operaAlfonso und Estrella. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Leon Botstein, Lisa Feurzeig, John Gingerich, Kristina Muxfeldt, and Rita Steblin.
This article examines closely the textual origins of Schubert’s Winterreise in order to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between Wilhelm Müller’s set of poems and Franz Schubert’s song ...cycle based on those poems. A study of the genesis of the poetry and the final arrangement of poems in both Müller’s and Schubert’s cycles illustrates a contrast between a work of hope and another of despair.
Alfonso und Estrella, the only opera composed by Franz Schubert without spoken dialogue, was created in collaboration with one of the composer’s closest friends, Franz von Schober. Despite the fact ...that a significant amount is known about the circumstances of the libretto’s origin, we can only surmise regarding the sources on which its creator relied. In the literature about Schubert, a number of assumptions are made about these sources — two books on the history of Spain published in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as well as a number of works by German romantic writers. This article discusses other books which in all possibility served as source materials: History of Spain by Alexander Adam (Adams Geschichte von Spanien seit der Entdeckung bis zur Thron-Entsagung Karls IV), published in Vienna in 1809, as well as a number of librettos that may have been known to Schober — first of all, Der Taucher by Samuel Bürde, written for Johann Friedrich Reichardt and published in 1811 in Berlin. Based on the analysis of the plot and the poetic text of Alfonso und Estrella, it is shown that Schober was most likely familiar with these sources and actively used them when creating his own libretto.
