| Much as the path of a ray of light becomes deflected by the gravitational field around a giant object in space, our perception of Franz Schubert's large-scale instrumental works has been distorted by the gravitational pull of Beethoven. During the nineteenth century, attributes that were especially prominent in Beethoven's middle period---concision, motivic evolution, structural logic, and propelling dynamism---became the criteria by which Schubert's movements in sonata form were characteristically judged as diffuse, static, or excessively lyrical.;The core of this dissertation is an examination of various critical and analytical perspectives on Schubert's treatment of sonata form in his mature instrumental music. The first three chapters of Part One (dealing with the period from the 1820s to the 1920s) discuss early reviews of his sonata forms, the rise of misleading stereotypes about Schubert, the influence of Schumann's criticism in the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, and the crystallization of a Beethoven sonata-form paradigm. Part One concludes with an Epilog chapter that contemplates the letters of John Keats as an unexpected source of insights into Schubert's creative processes.;The four chapters of Part Two discuss Schubert reception from the 1920s to the present. Chapter 5 examines the ideas of two key early-twentieth-century figures, Heinrich Schenker and Donald Tovey, and analyzes a Schubert treatise by Felix Salzer. The following chapter discusses Schubert scholarship during the mid-twentieth century, when the prevailing intellectual climate was not favorable to the genesis of new ideas about Schubert's sonata forms.;Between roughly the early 1970s and the mid-1980s, scholars increasingly found evidence of Schubert's vast emotional range, his psychological acuity, his distinctive treatment of time and space, and his expansions and dissolutions of formal boundaries. Chapter 7 examines landmark articles by James Webster and Carl Dahlhaus, and probes the historical/philosophical ideas of Theodor Adorno. Part Two concludes with an Epilog chapter that discusses recent trends in music scholarship, describes a few recent discoveries in the exploration of Schubert's sonata forms, and offers some final thoughts about Beethoven, Schubert, time, space, motion, logic, and mystery. |
