On Terminology and Intentionality

Regarding immanent musical criteria, a litany of modifying adjectives—clear, direct, explicit, intact—typically attends the demarcation of self-quotation (and quotation in general) from broader fields of study (allusion, borrowing, intertextuality, memetics) that subsume it. Such qualifiers, however, are not as determinative as one might wish. Just how exact or obvious (as opposed to near or apparent) the relationship must be in order to warrant quotational status remains elusive, dependent on each diagnostician's handling of a vocabulary inadequate to the minute parsing that such comparisons warrant. Even indicating that a quotation is literal does not guarantee that it is a clone as is the case, for example, with any reprise mark (what eighteenth-century German theorists called Wiederholungszeichen).

There is no entrenched, unerring methodological scaffolding—whether limited to Schubert's oeuvre or more expansively applied to other repertories— that can guarantee a conclusion, which will always be uniformly satisfying. As an example, one writer found a “virtual quotation” in the “melodic, harmonic, registral, and textural disposition” of measures 159–60 (and thereafter) in the first movement development from the Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960, which was “almost identical” to the start of “Der Wanderer,” D. 493, op. 4, no. 1; whereas another author, considering the same music, “recognized at once” a different opening: the “Szene aus Goethe's Faust,” D. 126, was among “the number of self-quotations and self-allusions, which must on some occasions at least have been conscious and deliberate.” (The connection to D. 126 was presumably an instance of “self-allusion” since the intervals and rhythms of its six-note idea are inexact in relation to the sonata, unlike those of “Der Wanderer.”) These analyses occurred during a period when the vocabulary itself was undergoing changes. Self-borrowing, a oncefavored term, was being supplanted, while the prestige of intertextuality in literary studies jumped the disciplinary fence, even as its original promulgators had taken a dim view of self-quotation on the rare occasions that they mentioned it.