Schubert, one might argue, has had his day in the analytical sun. The past four decades of close exegesis of his music have resulted in a welcome and much-needed reappraisal of his instrumental forms, particularly his idiosyncratic harmonic and formal practices.Footnote ² The disparity between the composer’s popularity as a song composer during his lifetime and the neglect and misunderstandings colouring the posthumous reception of his symphonies, string quartets, and piano sonatas is now something of a distant memory, summoned either for the salacious quotations (such as the one at the beginning of this section) or to illustrate the distance separating modern Schubert scholarship from that of earlier generations. Schubert’s instrumental works have become some of the most frequently and skillfully analysed compositions in what might be called the music-analytic canon, contributing vitally to areas including sketch studies, performance practice, the new Formenlehre, gender theory, and the theory of emotion, to name but a few. They are also the primary catalyst for critical reflection on existing music-analytic theories leading to the development of new and sophisticated analytical approaches and theoretical models.Footnote ³ Schubert, as Suzannah Clark wrote in 2002, has become ‘the new pearl of wisdom’, and this recent ‘flowering of theoretical and analytical engagement … has’, as Lorraine Byrne Bodley noted, ‘placed [him] at the centre of mainstream music theory’.Footnote ⁴ What, therefore, is there left to say?

The opening epigraph, perhaps implausibly, goes some way towards suggesting an answer. Understanding Davison’s remarks necessitates an awareness of the impact of delayed posthumous dissemination on the reception history of Schubert’s instrumental music as well as a recognition of its continued relevance to scholarship today. The review dates from 1844 when Davison attended the sixth concert of the Royal Philharmonic Society on 10 June, during which Mendelssohn conducted Schubert’s overture to Fierrabras (D796), having failed to convince the orchestra to perform the ‘Great’ C-Major Symphony. Davison’s specific comments on the overture held it ‘literally beneath criticism’, but it is his complete dismissal of Schubert as a composer which is the most revealing element of his review: aside from some songs, he asks, what has Schubert written?Footnote ⁵ Of course, Davison was not to blame for what we might recognise as the sciolism of this remark, given that in 1844 not a single one of Schubert’s symphonies was available in print, and this very concert marked the première of an orchestral work by the composer in England. Schubert’s renown – his centrality – was that of a song writer, a fact that complicated and dominated his emerging reputation as an instrumental composer, leading, more often than not, to less-than-favourable reviews of his ‘new’ instrumental works.Footnote ⁶ Even when serious intellectual engagement with this music took hold (initiated by Robert Schumann’s 1840 review of the ‘Great’ C-Major Symphony in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik), it did so under the impression that this was the (perhaps misguided) work of an otherwise-disposed composer: these were the symphonies or string quartets of Franz Schubert, der Liederfürst.Footnote ⁷ Their unusual harmonic strategies were criticised as remote and illogical digressions, and their expansive dimensions were seen to betray Schubert’s inability to control the materials of his form.Footnote ⁸ John Hullah exemplified this nineteenth-century bias towards Schubert the songwriter:

Even into the twentieth century, Schumann’s championing of Schubert’s ‘heavenly lengths’ was construed as an apology – a thinly veiled attempt to defend the prolixity of Schubert’s instrumental idiom by emphasising the music’s expansive beauty.Footnote ¹⁰ And so, the perceived opposition between vocal and instrumental composition underwrote Schubert’s reception: for many authors, Schubert’s gift for melody was suited to Kleinigkeiten, but restricted his ability in large-scale form.Footnote ¹¹ Consequently, the widely celebrated lyricism of Schubert’s music is intimately bound up with the critical reception of the instrumental music.

Davison’s comments, then, open up a host of questions regarding the perceived dichotomy between vocal and instrumental composition in the reception of Schubert’s music, a dichotomy captured by Carl Dahlhaus’s notion of the Stildualismus underpinning the history of nineteenth-century music and exemplified by Beethoven and Rossini.Footnote ¹² The fact that Schubert traversed the instrumental/vocal boundary by imbuing his instrumental compositions with the quality of lyricism means that he straddles both sides of that opposition uneasily.Footnote ¹³ His marginalisation is further underwritten by the disciplinary remnants of Beethoven’s centrality to the formalisation of music theory in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has long been acknowledged that Beethoven’s middle-period works proved vital to two of arguably the most influential music-theoretical paradigms: Adolf Bernhard Marx’s theory of musical form, and Heinrich Schenker’s hierarchical theory of voice-leading and underlying structure.Footnote ¹⁴ In 1994, Charles Rosen recognised that this ‘has unnaturally restricted analysis by limiting it almost entirely to methods of examination relevant to [Beethoven’s] music.’Footnote ¹⁵ Around the same time, Scott Burnham, in his influential Beethoven Hero, placed this into a specifically Schubertian context:

While the analysis of Schubert’s harmonic and formal idioms has now largely broken free of its Beethovenian inclinations, there nonetheless remains a distinct ‘logic of alterity’ in the adopted interpretative metaphors and gender categorisations which sustain the antithetical positions of these two composers.Footnote ¹⁷ Partly in response to the issue to which Rosen and Burnham gave voice, subsequent scholarship transformed Schubert’s ‘otherness’ into a positive attribute by focusing on what Lawrence Kramer terms Schubert’s desire to ‘represent deviation as affirmation, as positive difference rather than default, as desirable lack rather than insufficiency’.Footnote ¹⁸ Even here, Schubert’s music is understood as exposing an absence (of logic, of dynamism), even if that absence is a self-conscious one. Thus, celebrating Schubert’s difference still comes at a price, a tacit understanding that in their indifference to key concepts such as teleology and dialectical synthesis these practices represent a retreat into subjectivity and a negation of formal responsibility rather than a re-negotiation of it.Footnote ¹⁹

In the analytical realm, the ramifications of this took the form of a rich, and richly contested, scholarly debate: the [un]suitability of Schubert’s lyrical idiom to Classical sonata form. This was given extended consideration in Felix Salzer’s 1928 essay, ‘Die Sonatenform bei Franz Schubert’, which was the first direct engagement with the notion of the lyric in Schubert’s instrumental music and remains one of the most detailed analytical accounts of the phenomenon.Footnote ²⁰ But Salzer’s view had pre-echoes in the work of earlier writers such as Daniel Gregory Mason:

This argument centred on the idea that lyricism is primarily associated with vocal genres, and the descriptor ‘lyrical’ often taken to denote ‘any passage whose purpose is relative relaxation away from dramatic pressure and whose content is relatively melodic rather than merely motivic’, thus, shunning the drama and motivic derivation of the Classical sonata.Footnote ²² Its amalgamation into the realm of serious instrumental music therefore amounts to a clash of aesthetic priorities: as Donald Francis Tovey put it, ‘Schubert’s large instrumental forms are notoriously prone to spend in lyric ecstasy the time required ex hypothesi for dramatic action.’Footnote ²³ How lyric themes behave was also seen as inimical to sonata form. According to Salzer, the lyric reveals a tendency to proceed by repetition; it lacks developmental strategy and organic inevitability, and its internalised perspective tends towards recollection and retrospection rather than goal-orientation. These qualities – symptoms of the self-containment and self-sufficiency of Schubert’s themes – contravene what Salzer, following Schenker’s teachings, calls the sonata’s ‘improvisatory element’ which is thereby conspicuously absent from Schubert’s sonatas.Footnote ²⁴ Thus, paradoxically, Salzer argues that ‘the stable forms of lyricism represent dissipation rather than order, and that improvisation is an agent of discipline rather than freedom’.Footnote ²⁵ Schubert’s lyrical themes, in other words, are simply too stable to give way to rigorous motivic development and instead proceed via expansion.Footnote ²⁶ This results not only in a dissipation of order, but also a distinguishing lack (of dynamism, of drama, of development, of shape). Instrumental lyricism, under Salzer’s model, ultimately represents an absence of form.Footnote ²⁷

The historiographical picture emerging from this suggests that the narrative of alterity in Schubert’s reception results not only in marginalisation (which has largely been addressed), but also in a misguided perception of absence or loss: a loss of formal responsibility tied to a lyrical condition that leads ultimately to a negation of form.Footnote ²⁸ Schubert’s music, it seems, offers us not more, but tangibly less. It encourages us to reflect on loss as an aesthetic concept, to experience the self-conscious absence of goal-direction and to bask in the sonorous beauty of the present moment without consideration of its relationship to an idea of the ‘whole’.Footnote ²⁹ As such, it offers us not so much an alternative to Beethoven’s music, as the loss of its defining aesthetic:Footnote ³⁰

But what if we were to reverse this comparison? What would be the result of replacing the centre (Beethoven/dynamism) with the margins (Schubert/lyricism)? Schubert, after all, resides at the very epicentre of the move towards a lyrical conception of form in the nineteenth century and his contributions are therefore fundamental rather than peripheral. Foregrounding – centring – these would open up the possibility of defining the lyric based on what it is, rather than continuing to define it by what it is assumed to lack. Equally, it would allow an interpretation of Schubert’s music qua Schubert, a call made by many Schubertian scholars before me.Footnote ³² This process, then, is less a de-centring of Beethoven than it is a reframing of Schubert as central to the development of nineteenth-century lyric form.Footnote ³³

To do this, we need to shift the perspective of enquiry, to consider the lyric not as a negation of form, but as a distinct formal category in itself – a palpable presence, rather than a perceived absence. We need, moreover, to move beyond its role as topic, mood, or melodic descriptor to a consideration of its aptitude as a category of form with specific and identifiable temporal associations and significations. The work of scholars such as Carl Dahlhaus, James Webster, Hans Joachim-Hinrichsen, Robert Hatten, Poundie Burstein, Julian Horton, and, most crucially, Su Yin Mak is central in this regard because it lays the foundations upon which a more developed concept of lyric form can be advanced for Schubert’s music.Footnote ³⁴ Although distinct in methodology and focus, this body of work extends the remit of the lyric beyond the consideration of theme types and phrase construction which characterised the work of Salzer and, to an extent, Theodor Adorno, thereby disentangling the lyric’s affective characteristics from its formal functions.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, similarly motivated, this study takes up the challenge obliquely bequeathed by the work of these authors: to set out the criteria for a definition of Schubert’s lyric form.

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To that end, this study is underpinned by two interrelated convictions. First, that the lyricism of Schubert’s music extends to aspects of form and articulates the dialectical condition of lyric teleology.Footnote ³⁶ I regard these terms not so much in the traditional way as thesis/antithesis, but rather as forming a kind of oxymoronic synthesis, which I attempt to deconstruct in the ensuing chapters. Second, that Schubert’s chamber music for strings is representative of this condition in a special way since it was there that the young Schubert first gave voice to some of his most characteristic formal innovations which were brought to new heights of sophistication in his last three quartets and the Quintet in C, D956. This dual focus is reflected in the two chapters comprising this book’s Part I: Chapter 1 considers the conditions under which the lyric can be said to possess a dialectical nature, and Chapter 2 attends to the history and reception of the quartets, uncovering the historical and ideological reasons for the neglect of the earliest works. The centrality of the quartet to this study is symbolic of the immense personal and creative importance the genre held for Schubert at the extremities of his artistic life: as well as providing the medium through which his development as a composer of sonata forms can be traced, it is also the site of Schubert’s transition from a composer of Biedermeier Hausmusik (1810–16) to the monumental achievements of his so-called Beethoven Project (1824–8).Footnote ³⁷ The pre-1816 quartets in particular are crucial in identifying lyric teleology’s formal markers; consequently, each of the analytical chapters couples an early work with a later one, permitting a more robust understanding of the compositional affinity they share with the quartets of the last years.

That is not to deny that many of the formal fingerprints explored in this study are also detectable in other genres – the ‘Unfinished’ and ‘Great’ C-Major symphonies would provide fertile ground for an investigation of Schubert’s lyric teleology in the public sphere as well as its influence on later nineteenth-century symphonism. But the symphonies do not display the same concentration of episodic construction across Schubert’s career as do the quartets, and thus what is relevant in a symphonic (or piano-sonata) context is not necessarily transferable to Schubert’s quartets. For instance, Horton’s comparative analysis of the thematic syntax of Schubert’s Fifth and ‘Unfinished’ symphonies sees no trace of the episodic design or extreme juxtapositions of the ‘Unfinished’ in the earlier work, concluding that ‘if Schubert’s great innovation in sonata practice was the incorporation of lyric elements, then in a symphonic context this interpenetration occurs as part of the shift of symphonic priorities after 1822’.Footnote ³⁸ While this is borne out by Horton’s analytical evidence, the same conclusion cannot be drawn in the case of the string quartets. On the contrary: if the stylistic chasm dividing the early and late symphonies is a symptom of the comparative lack of lyric elements pre-1822, then in the string quartets, stylistic differences mask formal affinities. Thus, while acknowledging the difference in style and assuredness between the quartets of Schubert’s youth and his full maturity, yet in this generic context there are fundamental formal fingerprints of the lyric perceptible across the early–late divide which justify their treatment as a defined and delimited corpus of works in this study.

Furthermore, since many of the musical features defining Schubert’s lyric teleology are concentrated in opening movements, my analyses give special focus to the first movements of these works, with passing mention to other movements where relevant. Although such prioritisation might lead to disenchantment for some readers, it is necessary for a thick analytical exploration of the concepts central to the book’s thesis and thus I hope can be forgiven. Similarly, I do not confront the questions of interpretation and performance raised by my analyses despite their attraction: how would a performer, if so moved, articulate in performance the kind of stratified formal design I develop in Chapters 4 and 5? Is the parataxis of this music something to be brought out in performance, or should a performer aim for a more coherent, or linear, reading, one which establishes a single interpretative pathway, so to speak? And what might paratactic (or for that matter hypotactic) performance equate to and is it even desirable to adopt such terms in the realm of performance studies? Jeffrey Swinkin’s work addresses these questions, among others, and his consideration of paratactic performance presents a complementary side of the Adornian reading of Schubert presented in the analytical chapters of this study.Footnote ³⁹

My focus remains the explication and demonstration of Schubert’s development of a lyrically conceived teleology which brings together matters of form, expression, and musical temporality in the service of fresh intellectual engagement. At base, lyric teleology describes a condition whereby lyric material serves a developmental or teleological function. I first developed the idea that the repetitive and paratactic tendencies of Schubert’s music can be understood as functionally teleological (rather than tautological) in my doctoral dissertation, wherein I posited that teleology can productively be disrobed of its specifically Beethovenian connotations and understood in a more fundamental light as ‘ascribing to music a sense of directed purpose’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Here, that idea is further developed in relation to the lyric by disassociating teleology from the need to sound dynamic, instead considering how lyrical material and processes can articulate purpose and direction.Footnote ⁴¹ Moreover, I bring the concept into dialogue with a growing body of scholarship seeking to understand better nineteenth-century form and syntax, thereby situating my work within the burgeoning field of the new Formenlehre.Footnote ⁴²

A basic premise upon which my conception of lyric teleology rests is that a good deal of what we have come to accept, indeed celebrate, in Schubert’s lyric idiom is ill-fitting for understanding how lyric form is articulated in his instrumental works. Specifically, the lyric is all-too-frequently viewed as occupying one side of a binary opposition, on the other threshold of which looms the daunting figure of Beethoven, or, more accurately, an idealised version of Beethoven’s ‘heroic’ style. Such accounts serve ultimately to maintain Schubert’s alterity with respect to Beethoven: the lyric is pitted against the dramatic, stasis against the improvisatory impulse, repetition against development, and parataxis against hypotaxis, in an attempt to define Schubert’s distinctiveness. In maintaining these antithetical categories, we problematically enshrine Schubert’s status as ‘other’ in the Beethovenian narrative and needlessly restrict our understanding of the lyric (and indeed of Beethoven). Indeed, we deny the possibility that the lyric idiom can express its own dialectical identity in Schubert’s hands. Consequently, the understanding of ‘lyric’ pursued in this study does not always imply lyrical melodies, but is just as relevant to short, motivically driven thematic groups which are nonetheless underpinned by the episodic or paratactic structures associated with lyric discourse. In other words, the lyrical melodies of Schubert’s music and its episodic or paratactic designs are two sides of the same coin: the difference is one of kind, not type.

So, I ask: is the lyric – understood as something more than a cantabile melodic style – really inimical to the dramatic? Does it, by definition, shun thematic development and teleology? Or, alternatively, do these categories acquire new meaning via their manifestation in Schubert’s music and therefore call for new understanding? One could go further: can the lyric in fact embody the dramatic, indeed, can it subsume its ‘other’ within a paratactic formal design? Likewise, in its ultimate denial of large-scale teleological resolution, does the lyric in fact intensify the processes whereby such synthesis is pursued? Perhaps such questions are ultimately of little consequence: of course, there is nuance and contradiction to be found in music to which the label ‘lyric’ applies, and no single monolithic definition can do justice to the rich complexity of the music of this, or any comparable, composer. But these questions suggest that there remains a need for fresh contemplation of the relationship between lyricism, development, and teleology in Schubert’s instrumental music that moves beyond the basic dualisms that currently characterise it towards a more complex, multifaceted concept of lyric form defined dialectically. Under this definition, lyric teleology is a supremely progressive phenomenon.Footnote ⁴³

The pairing of lyricism and teleology in this way might initially seem rather crude and my calls for lyric elements to articulate a teleological trajectory might seem mistaken at best (at worst, a violation). They might even be viewed as ‘arrogantly turn[ing a sphere of expression] into the opposite of what it conceives itself to be through the way it is examined’.Footnote ⁴⁴ And this might be especially felt in the setting of a study of the string quartet, a genre frequently understood as a private conversation between four players. Adorno confronted a similar problem in his 1957 essay ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’ which also considers the lyric in relation to an extraneous, and traditionally oppositional, concept: society. Adorno recognised that this had the potential to make his readers/listeners uncomfortable since the intimacy and solitariness of the lyric genre seem more suited to contemplation in a hermetically sealed environment, an abstracted reality unconcerned with the vicissitudes of sociological or cultural context.Footnote ⁴⁵ But such expectations, Adorno posits, are themselves socially constructed:

Similarly, as the ensuing chapters will demonstrate, it is possible – indeed, desirable – to acknowledge a sense of teleology in Schubert’s lyric forms without imposing an extraneous logic of hypotaxis or Beethovenian dynamism on the works. The teleology to which these works give voice is not confined to Beethovenian accounts of the phenomenon, nor indeed to dubious (or at least out-moded) idea[l]s of organic unity. On the contrary, this class of teleology stands as a critique of those very ideas, gaining substance and significance through the ways it departs from that model.

In defining the lyric as a category of form, Chapter 1 submits three central propositions, each of which forms the basis of one of the analytical chapters in the book’s second part. Chapter 3 considers the hegemony of cadence in the articulation of closure and explores Schubert’s persistent manipulation of the parameters of closure at traditionally significant junctures in the sonata. Chapter 4 explores parataxis’s juxtaposition of ostensibly unrelated propositions, revealing the ways by which these quartets pursue a kind of synthesis distinct from tonal resolution. And the final analytical chapter, by focussing on the diverse temporalities generated by Schubert’s lyric forms, offers a way of reimagining teleology. Taken together, these analytical case studies demonstrate that recognising lyric teleology as a dialectical phenomenon gets beyond any overly reductive understanding of the lyric as confined to one side of a constructed dualism, instead appreciating how Schubert’s practices are defined as much in relation to Beethoven’s as against them.

As such, this book is less a study of Schubert’s quartets per se than it is an attempt to open up space to allow these works to challenge some of the discourses (analytical, aesthetic, historiographical, ideological) that have surrounded and epitomised them. Attending to Schubert’s quartets involves not only rethinking the composer’s instrumental lyricism, but also confronting the calcification that has surrounded some of the most basic (and arguably most treasured) concepts in which our discipline trades. Teleology is just one such phenomenon. In 1987, Janet Levy exposed the covert value judgments that often accompany the explicitly or implicitly organicist vocabulary employed in musicological scholarship, urging her reader to ‘be aware of covert values, of the surreptitious biases that limit and block inquiry’.Footnote ⁴⁷ As well as the organic metaphor, she summons the valuing of economy, the reverence of idiomatic writing and originality, and the high position of chamber music as inherently economical in means as defining values and challenges the ‘cherished absoluteness that they seem to have acquired’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The analytical chapters that make up Part II of this book seek to interrogate such values, chief among them the concepts of closure (Chapter 3), synthesis (Chapter 4), and unidirectionality (Chapter 5). Ultimately, in attending to the lyric teleology of Schubert’s quartets, this study seeks not to grant his music an ill-fitting Beethovenian accolade, but rather to open up genuine inquiry into the limitations that have begun to surround such values, indeed, how Schubert’s music, by virtue of its innate lyricism, can lay bare and transcend such limitations.

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The assumed dichotomy between these two composers is, of course, not so strict, so absolute, ‘so pristinely dualistic’, in Hepokoski’s memorable parsing.Footnote ⁴⁹ No Schubertian work is irreducibly lyrical, paratactic, retrospective.Footnote ⁵⁰ Likewise, Beethoven was not only the composer of dramatic, dynamic forms, but (as the Missa Solemnis, Adagio of the Quartet in E♭, Op. 127 or the Heiliger Dankgesang ably attest) he was also moved to the mellifluousness and depth of the lyric. The persistent treatment of Beethoven and Schubert as opposites in respect of the lyric represents not only an over-simplification of their individual idioms, but also of the progress of music history. As Dahlhaus recognised, the turn towards lyricism in the early nineteenth century, particularly that of composers such as Schubert and Mendelssohn, was a response to such works as Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 74, Piano Trio Op. 97, and the Piano Sonatas Opp. 78 and 90.Footnote ⁵¹ In these works, Beethoven began a softening of the motivic rigour associated with his middle-period style, making room ‘for a lyrical emphasis which permeated whole movements, instead of being limited to their second subjects’.Footnote ⁵² Moreover, Beethoven’s late style, as James Webster points out, ‘relaxed the teleological drive of his developments and codas, and favored “weak” structural cadences.’Footnote ⁵³ Beethoven’s music therefore briefly opened doors, but the imperative to explore what lay beyond them was felt only in later generations, beginning with Schubert.

Thus, Schubert did not abandon the axioms established in Beethoven’s music, but drew on and enriched them in his development of lyric form. He also went a step further in confronting a compositional problem which exercised a generation of Romantic composers: ‘how to integrate contemplative lyricism, an indispensible ingredient of “poetic” music, into a symphony without causing the form to disintegrate or to function as a mere framework for a potpourri of melodies’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although this has traditionally been considered in the symphonic context, this study maintains that the string quartets articulate this same basic concern.

Schubert’s innovation in bringing the vocal to bear on the instrumental in his sonatas was therefore not indicative of a crisis in the history of the sonata, the result of which was the inevitable disintegration of the concept of sonata form in the nineteenth century, as Arnold Whittall maintained.Footnote ⁵⁵ Rather, it announced that the lyric was no longer auxiliary, but had perforce become a foundational stylistic and formal building block; dynamic form and lyric contemplation were to come together in Schubert’s articulation of lyric teleology. Consequently, the opposition of vocal and instrumental inherent in Dahlhaus’ Stildualismus (which for so long dictated the reception of Schubert’s instrumental music) coalesces in Schubert’s lyric form, which becomes the vanishing point of its associated dualisms.

More is therefore at stake in this venture than a mere repositioning of an already familiar term: in acknowledging the lyric’s status as an autonomous formal category with identifiable processes and temporal implications, this book confronts some of musicology’s most tempting, but also most damaging, legacies. Ultimately, the development of the lyric in Schubert’s music encompassed not merely a change of idiom or style, nor even one of emphasis, but a fundamental transformation of the status of the lyric itself. The question remains how Schubert did this and to what end.