For romantic composers, the creation of large-scale instrumental works presented a particular challenge: they sought to emulate Beethoven's powerful achievements all the while avoiding mere epigonism. Robert Schumann was well aware of this problem when he undertook his own first symphony, as is obvious from his review article of Schubert's Symphony in C Major (“The Great”), D. 944. As is well known, Schumann praises Schubert's work as a distinctly successful realization in the grand-scale genre, and considers him to be an important alternative to Beethoven. The composer-critic points repeatedly to the sense of monumentality and expansiveness in this work. For instance, he describes it as a “fat novel in four volumes by Jean Paul, never-ending” and marvels at its “refreshing sense of inexhaustible wealth.” But a very special sense of temporality emerges from Schumann's most often quoted comment about Schubert's symphony: the attribution to the work of divine or “heavenly length.” A deeply evocative and penetrating statement about Schubert's style, this comment does not refer simply to the music's temporal span (in the physical, clockwork sense), and there is of course no suggestion of boredom, as the qualifier “heavenly” makes clear enough. More profoundly, the description alludes to a very special psychological experience of temporality, the feeling of a broadening and stretching of time, phenomenological in nature.

The analytical literature provides us with various attempts to describe the special sense of time flow in Schubert's instrumental music in terms of the organization of musical parameters, such as harmony, motivic organization, phrase structures, and formal design. This chapter pursues this line of investigation and reexamines parameters already familiar: first, the use of sequence in sonata form (more specifically the presence of “thematic sequence” in the development, and of “developmental sequence” in the exposition); and second, the use of uniform grouping structures and accentuation patterns in the exposition's themes. My contribution lies in a closer examination of these parameters and of how their interaction weakens the differentiation of the main sections of the form, thus creating a sense of large-scale coherence that is distinct from the classics and that helps to project a typically Schubertian experience of temporality.