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Recurring Hauntings and Trauma in Schubert's ‘Unfinished’ Symphony
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2023
Abstract
Schubert's interest in Gothicism is explored in numerous songs written between the 1810s and early 1820s and, in recent years, has served as an aesthetic agenda that some scholars have applied to his instrumental music. One notable exception is the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony (D. 759, 1822), a work whose thematic presentation and form have been frequently related to states of terror and horror, but rarely correlated further to Gothicism and never consistently so across the two completed movements. In light of this relative neglect, this article offers a Gothic reading of the symphony, finding correspondence with Gothic signifiers of ghostly hauntings and the ‘problem of closure’, and draws upon relevant literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory. As I show, the concept of psychoanalytic trauma – a concept widely deployed in current literary criticism to scrutinize repetitive patterns such as hauntings and circular temporality in Gothic literature – is especially instructive in terms of helping construct a richer understanding of the symphony.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
I would like to express my gratitude to Benedict Taylor and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their immensely helpful feedback and suggestions, which have improved this article enormously. Additionally, I would like to acknowledge Colin Cheng for a valuable discussion on an earlier draft of this article, which I presented at the 56th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association (2020) and Birmingham Music Analysis Conference (BrumMAC, 2021).
References
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3 Peter Gülke describes this phrase as ‘an oracular, whispering unison’; Michael Spitzer says that it ‘ticks every box for distant threat and mystery’; while for Davies, it ‘impart[s] a mysterious tone to the movement’. Gülke, Peter, Schubert und seine Zeit (Regensburg: Laaber, 1991): 197Google Scholar; Spitzer, Michael, ‘Mapping the Human Heart: A Holistic Analysis of Fear in Schubert’, Music Analysis 29/1 (2010): 149–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 164; Joe Davies, ‘Interpreting the Expressive Worlds of Schubert's Late Instrumental Works’ (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2019): 105. On liminal features in particular, see Schroeder, David, ‘Polarity in Schubert's Unfinished Symphony’, Canadian University Music Review 1 (1980): 22–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar (esp. pp. 27–8); Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 109; Kurth, Richard, ‘On the Subject of Schubert's “Unfinished” Symphony: Was bedeutet die Bewegung?’, 19th-Century Music 23/1 (1999): 3–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Spitzer, ‘Mapping the Human Heart: A Holistic Analysis of Fear in Schubert’, 165.
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8 Clive McClelland discusses extensively the way musical gestures of the ombra are conventionally used in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stage works to evoke the category of the ghostly; see this author's ‘Ombra and Tempesta’, in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): 279–300. A locus classicus of Schubert's use of similar gestures to depict a ghostly presence can be found in the last stanza of ‘Der Wanderer’ (D. 489, 1816) where the lyrics refer to the ‘Geisterhauch’.
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11 On Schubert and Gothicism, see n. 7.
12 The translation is my own.
13 See my discussion below in the section titled ‘Unfinished Hauntings and the Second Movement’.
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19 See n. 4.
20 Fisk, Returning Cycles, 99.
21 The literature on the embodiment of this duality in Schubert's instrumental music is extensive: see, for instance, Wollenberg, Susan, ‘Schubert and the Dream’, Studi Musicali 9/1 (1980): 135–50Google Scholar; McClary, Susan, ‘Pitches, Expression, Ideology: An Exercise in Mediation’, Enclitic 7 (1983): 76–86Google Scholar; Kinderman, William, ‘Schubert's Tragic Perspective’, in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Frisch, Walter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986): 65–83Google Scholar; Fisk, Returning Cycles; Black, Brian, ‘Remembering a Dream: The Tragedy of Romantic Memory in the Modulatory Processes of Schubert's Sonata Forms’, Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music 25 (2005): 202–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Taylor, Benedict, ‘Schubert and the Construction of Memory: The String Quartet in A Minor, D.804 (Rosamunde)’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139/1 (2014): 41–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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23 Similar readings of tremolo in Schubert's music are suggested in McCreless, Patrick, ‘Probing the Limits: Musical Structure and Musical Rhetoric in Schubert's String Quartet in G Major, D. 887’, Music Theory and Analysis 2 (2015): 1–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hirsch, ‘Schubert's Reconciliation of Gothic and Classical Influence’, 149–70; and Guez, Jonathan, ‘The “Mono-Operational” Recapitulation in Movements by Beethoven and Schubert’, Music Theory Spectrum 40/2 (2018): 227–47Google Scholar, here 238.
24 This reading of the syncopated figure in the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony as ‘secondary group-based’ rather than any commonplace accompaniment pattern resonates with Hascher's claim that ‘in Schubert's mature works, an accompaniment always relates to the overall fabric of a piece’. In specific terms of the syncopated figure in this symphony, he explains that ‘the accompaniment to the second theme is a conventional syncopated orchestral formula, which nonetheless has thematic importance within the symphony’; Hascher, ‘Narrative Dislocations’, 132.
25 On evaded cadences, see Caplin, Classical Form, 101–6.
26 On the notion of the ‘spiral’ in Romanticism, see M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971): 159, and Marshall Brown, The Shape of German Romanticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).
27 See also Eugenia C. DeLamotte's perceptive discussion of this circularity or what she calls ‘the double terror of boundedness and boundlessness’ of the Gothic genres in Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990): 94–6.
28 Fisk, Returning Cycles, 100.
29 Hascher, ‘Narrative Dislocations’, 141–2.
30 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 206.
31 A similar reading is suggested by Hascher, ‘Narrative Dislocations’, 139, who hears ‘the whole of the development section … as a huge central crisis’.
32 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 221.
33 I am reminded of the Bleeding Nun from Lewis's The Monk, a ghostly figure that repeatedly haunts the character Raymond in his nightmares. See also Alexandra Maria Reuber's insightful psychoanalytic investigation of Raymond's recurring nightmares in ‘Haunted by the Uncanny: Development of a Genre from the Late Eighteenth to the Late Nineteenth Century’ (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 2004): 87–91.
34 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–74): vol. 18: 13.
35 Freud, Sigmund, ‘Remarks on the Theory and Practice of Dream-Interpretation’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. Strachey, James (London: Hogarth, 1953–74): vol. 19: 118Google Scholar.
36 Susan Youens, for instance, notes that ‘the Hörnerklang, or the sound of distant horn calls summoning the protagonist away from where he is … into the recesses of memory, is a quintessentially Romantic image’; Retracing a Winter's Journey: Schubert's Winterreise (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991): 151–69. The association between the gesture of a horn call and halcyon memories is most tellingly revealed in Schubert's ‘Der Lindenbaum’ from Winterreise (D. 911, 1827). For more in-depth discussion on this association, see Rosen, Charles, The Romantic Generation (London: Harper Collins, 1996): 116–24Google Scholar.
37 Fisk offers a similar reading of horn call and memories in Returning Cycles, 92.
38 On ‘inwardness’ in Schubert's music, see Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 3: 61–118; Schmalfeldt, Janet, In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011): 133–58Google Scholar; and Bretherton, ‘The Musico-Poetics of the Flat Submediant in Schubert's Songs’.
39 See, for instance, ‘Frühlingstraum’ and ‘Im Dorfe’ from Winterreise, and ‘Kriegers Ahnung’ from Schwanengesang.
40 McClary, Susan, ‘Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music’, in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Brett, Philip, Wood, Elizabeth and Thomas, Gary (New York: Routledge, 1994): 205–33Google Scholar, here 225.
41 Caplin argues that normally, a gesture like this, given its ‘being-in-the-middle’ function within sequential repetitions, should not be understood as articulating a PAC. However, he explains with regard to this music in question, ‘here it seems to do just that, namely to bring a semblance of closure to the theme. In other words, we can hear the harmonies in mm. 49–52 as not only sequential … but also as cadential, with V7 of II representing a chromatic alteration of VI, a substitute for the initial cadential tonic’; Caplin, William E., ‘Beyond the Classical Cadence: Thematic Closure in Early Romantic Music’, Music Theory Spectrum 40/1 (2018): 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 12)).
42 See Caplin's discussion of the ‘one more time’ technique in Classical Form, 103.
43 Gülke, Schubert und seine Zeit, 198. Cited and translated in Fisk, Returning Cycles, 94. In Hepokoski and Darcy's reading, this pause significantly evades the EEC at which the restatement of the secondary theme is supposed to terminate (Elements of Sonata Theory, 183). Steven Vande Moortele, on the other hand, contends in a more recent study that the secondary theme in fact features ‘the sentence of the loop type’, explaining from a Caplinian standpoint that because ‘cadences within loops are “incapable of serving as structural goals” … there is no evaded EEC at m. 62 either’; Moortele, Steven Vande ‘The Subordinate Theme in the First Movement of Schubert's “Unfinished” Symphony’, Music Theory & Analysis 6/2 (2019): 223–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 224.
44 See also the corresponding music in the recapitulation, bars 280–289.
45 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 183.
46 Glenn Stanley, ‘Schubert Hearing Don Giovanni: Mozartian Death Music in the “Unfinished” Symphony’, in Schubert's Late Music: History, Theory, Style, 193–218, here 194.
47 Stanley, ‘Schubert Hearing Don Giovanni’, 194.
48 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 183; Hascher, ‘Narrative Dislocations’, 138; Davies, ‘Interpreting the Expressive Worlds of Schubert's Late Instrumental Works’, 114.
49 Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 12.
50 Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 27.
51 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 62, original emphases.
52 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4.
53 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4.
54 See also Hascher's analysis of the motivic connection between the two in ‘Narrative Dislocations’, 138.
55 Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 13. Cited in Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 64 (emphasis Caruth's).
56 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 64.
57 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 64, emphasis original.
58 Spitzer, ‘Mapping the Human Heart’, 168.
59 Spitzer, ‘Mapping the Human Heart’, 167.
60 Spitzer, ‘Mapping the Human Heart’, 167.
61 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 311.
62 Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 29–30.
63 Miller, J. Hillis, ‘The Problematic of Ending in Narrative’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33/1 (1978): 3–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 4.
64 See Massé, Michelle A, ‘Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors, and Things That Go Bump in the Night’, Signs 15/4 (1990): 679–709CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 689.
65 Muriel Watkins Stiffler, ‘The German Ghost Story as Genre’ (PhD diss., The University of Iowa, 1991): 23. The works cited by Stiffler include Friedrich Schiller's Der Geisterseher (1789), Kleist's Das Bettelweib von Locarno, and Hoffmann's Das Majorat (1817).
66 Rebecca Martin, ‘The Spectacle of Suffering: Repetition and Closure in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel’ (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1994): 11.
67 Claudia Stumpf also draws together the problem of closure in Gothic literature and psychoanalytic trauma: ‘The possibility of further reversals of fortune remains present even at the close of the novel. Repetition compulsion, including its uncanny forms, has not been fully mastered or worked through … The marks of trauma in this text remain to (and perhaps beyond) the end of the book’; Claudia Stumpf, ‘The Road of Excess: Writing Trauma in Sentimental and Gothic Texts 1745–1810’ (PhD diss., Tufts University, 2015): 65–6.
68 See Martin, ‘The Spectacle of Suffering’, chap. 4; and Clason, Christopher R., ‘Narrative “Teasing”: Withholding Closure in Hoffmann's “Elixiere Des Teufels”’, Colloquia Germanica 42 (2009): 81–92Google Scholar.
69 Schubert, ‘Mein Traum’, in Schubert: A Documentary Biography, ed. Otto Erich, trans. Eric Blom (London, 1949): 226–8, emphasis mine.
70 Maynard Solomon, ‘Franz Schubert's “My Dream”’, American Imago 38/2 (1981): 137–54, here 146.
71 See Fisk's concise review of this reception in Returning Cycles, 111–13.
72 Fisk, Returning Cycles, 86.
73 On the ‘years of crisis’, see Dürr, Walther und Litschauer, Walburga, Franz Schubert, Jahre der Krise 1818–1823 Arnold Feil zum 60. Geburtstag (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1985)Google Scholar.
74 A concise discussion of the reception of the unfinished status of the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony is provided in Solomon, Maynard, ‘Schubert's “Unfinished” Symphony’, 19th-Century Music 21/2 (1997): 111–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
75 Martin, ‘The Spectacle of Suffering’, 181.
76 See n. 74.
77 See Martin, Rebecca, ‘“I Should like to Spend My Whole Life in Reading It”: Repetition and the Pleasure of the Gothic’, The Journal of Narrative Technique 28 (1998): 75–90Google Scholar.
78 This characterization of Gothic narratives as ‘anti-bildungsroman’ is borrowed from Berthin, Gothic Hauntings, 67.
79 Gingerich, John M., Schubert's Beethoven Project (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 232CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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