Le 1er juillet 2017
de 15h00 à 15h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 4
Séance - Approaches to Schubert's Sonata Forms
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Brian Black
During the last few years of his life, Schubert created a number of highly original sonata-form movements that radically reinterpret the form’s conventional elements and processes. In each case, the underlying cause of these innovations is the music’s concentration on one overriding issue—what might be called a “motive,” but in a broader sense than usual. This motivic idea arises from the voice leading of a specific, marked harmonic event and is expanded upon to become a dominant force in the form, affecting thematic structures, key relations and the general manner in which the movement unfolds.
From the perspective of William E. Caplin’s theory of formal functions, these movements are unconventional on all levels of their structure. Furthermore they challenge common notions about lyricism in Schubert’s sonata forms, specifically that his lyrical impulse is primarily melodic and divides the structure into “closed song forms” across the main and subordinate themes. In the later sonata forms we will look at—The String Quintet in C major D. 956, and the String Quartet in G major, D. 887—the initial impulse is harmonic and the resulting thematic structures are dynamic in character and open outwards to the movement’s overall process of motivic development. At times such movements even approach the abstraction of Beethoven’s late sonata forms, a situation that is at odds with the traditional view of Schubert as primarily a melodist who was most comfortable in established lyrical forms.
