Inquiry Into Schubert's Romantic Music Style And Piano Impromptu

With the appearance of Western romantic music time in the 19th century, piano music developed into its heyday. Theme, image, and style characteristic of romanticism first appeared in the musical sketches composed by Franz Schubert's (1797-1828) who was the pioneer of romantic piano music and one of the founders of romantic music. Notably, Shubert's impromptus created around 1827 greatly influence later creations of romanticism.This paper, based on Shubert's impromptus, depicts Shubert's whole life, analyzes the characteristics of piano impromptus, and reports the writer's own playing experiments. The present study aims to further explore the romantic style imbedded in impromptus and arrive at perfect unity and distillation of music connotation and playing skills.The research content and framework of the present study are as follows:Introduction proposes the rationale, research questions, and research methods. Then a detailed review of related literature is given.Chapter I (Approaching Shubert) describes Schubert's whole life, the living backgrounds of his time, and his main works. The backgrounds of the age will imprint on every composer and his works, inevitably including Schubert and his masterpieces.Chapter II (Comprehending Shubert) is devoted to the appearance and characteristics of romantic music style. Shubert, as one of the pioneers and founders of European romantic music, directly created the main characteristics of the romantic music time in his lyric style. Based on an introduction of Shubert's living society and his own characters, this section elaborates the causes of the appearance of romantic style and describes Shubert's romantic works.Tracing back to the origin of the genre of impromptus, Chapter III (Probing Shubert) reports the development, creation process, and contributions of Shubert's impromptus. By analyzing 8 works, the writer discusses the characteristics of the structure of musical form, application of sound, tune mode, theme and melody, variation, and rhythm of Shubert's piano impromptus.Chapter IV (Tapping Shubert) describes the writer's own experiences in playing Shubert's impromptus from 3 aspects: level and dynamics of style, variety of tone change, and flexible utilization of footboard.Finally, based on the previous discussions, Concluding Remarks summarizes the inspirations and enlightenments the writer has got from the present study of Schubert's impromptus.The present research adopts inductive method, exemplification, and practice to make an elementary analysis on Shubert's living background, his life, his master pieces, and the writer's own playing experiences, aiming to enlarge and deepen people's understanding and appreciation of Shubert's impromptus which is the treasure of Western piano music.