The "Heavenly Length" of Schubert's Music by Scott Burnham

"The Heavenly Length of Schubert's Music" by Scott Burnham
Appearing in Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1999
(Continued, Part 2 of 2)

his brings us to a signal effect of length in this music: how the sense of lengthiness readily translates into a sense of expanse, of space. The illusion of space lives in this music like a holographic image—it is there at every level, perceived from every angle. Not by accident are the many applications of landscape metaphors to this music; not for nothing did a friend of mine once wistfully observe that he would like to live in the Trio section of the G Major Quartet.

String Quintet in C, Opus 63.
(Courtesy of Dover Publications.)
The trope of the wanderer plays well in such readings—hardly a surprise, for it is a key theme in many of Schubert's songs, and the idea of the solitary self moving about a landscape captures something vital about the subjectivity of this music.

For these are not just spaces, they are subjectivized spaces, imaginary spaces. How does Schubert create such spaces? Sheer length itself is fundamental to this perception, but the way he gets in and out of these spaces is also crucial. Instead of the more involved and gradual transitions that can be heard in the music of most of his contemporaries, Schubert’s often sudden changes of key give us the sense of being instantly transported to another realm. According to Rosen, the intensity and rapidity of such a transition gives the subsequent music a relaxed sense. An oft-cited example is the transition to the second theme of the String Quintet, in which a tremendous current of chromatic energy moving inexorably toward G gives way at the last moment and sinks to E-flat.

What follows such a transition is, however, not always a relaxed space. The transition to the B section of the String Quintet's Adagio movement seems to energize the music, transporting us from a dreamlike realm into one of startling immediacy. But Schubert does not merely require the special effects of a striking change of key to work his magic. He can do remarkable things simply by the way he chooses to inhabit a key. He does not always sit squarely in a key but sometimes seems to be leaning to one side or the other. This gives the tonal space a charged, imaginary, bearing, what one could call the quality of a vision. Near the beginning of the slow movement of the G Major Quartet, for example, he sets up C major as an illusory key. It is made to sound like like a magic lantern projection emanating from the home key of E minor, to which it eventually must slip back. This key has a lien on it, if you will; it is not a free agent.

Later in the movement, the same thematic material is set up and departed from without this sense of lien. The result is an uncannily disembodied key, a weightless quiet realm, as if all the background noise that invades our lives were suddenly shut off and we found ourselves listening to a distant conversation from the other side of the planet.

It remains for us to piece together the above observations concerning Schubert’s formal repetitions, the nature of his themes, and the perceived effect of subjectivized, illusory realms. To help, we can turn to a few cogent sentences from Theodor Adorno's essay on Schubert, in which he coordinates these very issues:

[Schubert's] themes are apparitions of characters of truth [Wahrheitscharakteren]; the power of the artist is limited to capturing their image with feeling, and after [such a theme] has once appeared, citing it again and again … Schubert's forms conjure up that which has once appeared; they do not transform that which has been invented. Thus instead of developmental transitions, there are harmonic shocks, like changes in lighting, that lead us into a new realm, a new landscape, one that knows as little history as the one that preceded it.

For Adorno, the truth-value in this music is not in the development/evolution/growth of thematic material but in that material itself. "So unbildlich und real fällt sie in uns ein" [It invades us not figuratively but really]. Schubert's thematic landscapes register as characteristic truths that the music then attempts to conjure, to revisit, and yet they are also heavily marked as being illusory. We may say that they thus create a subjective truth, the truth of the vision. In this way, they resemble the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, whose landscapes, according to Joseph Leo Koerner, are crowded with natural detail and yet represent impossible vistas that seem to have come together expressly to address, or to place, the observing subject. This gives the observing subject a kind of solipsistic primacy; it suggests that the observing subject no longer needs to be comfortably situated in the same world as the thing observed; it suggests that the observing subject is looking out from inside itself (as through a window).

For Schubert, the commensurate propagation of such a vision is not some sort of evolutionary metamorphosis. For what does he do with such material? As Adorno says, he cites it "again and again."

ow there is a distinctly mechanical—or, if you will, inorganic—aspect to the kind of large-scale repetition we find in Schubert. Once we admit this, we see that there are similar mechanical/inorganic aspects at other levels of his music. Most striking of all are the mechanical repetitions at the micro level in his textures and even in his themes. At the thematic level, they often create a kind of blankness, as in many of the themes from the E flat Major Piano Trio, in which repeated notes figure incessantly. At the textural level, these repetitions are faster yet and create an uncanny effect, as in the tremolos of the opening theme of the G Major Quartet.

These ubiquitous iterations create a sense of atmospheric and/or psychic pressure. They are like so many phatic signals to the self, a constant crowding of sonar signals sent off to assure the self that it is still holding up. This is why they do not come off primarily as nervous, but rather as uncanny—they run deeper than surface nerves, the shakes, or some other physiological symptom: they seem rather to express the very state of the soul. The markedly high level of mechanical repetition in this music helps gather and focus subjectivity: phatic repetition becomes the modality of self-communication.

I would like to argue that both the large-scale repetitions and the micro iterations in this music emanate from this same phatic impulse. The extraordinary example of the Adagio from the String Quintet will help this point by analogy. In reviewing the score—and listening to the music—we can notice the sharply defined contrast between the sustained singing of the three inner voices (the inner trio) and the succinct gestures of the two outer voices (the outer duo), gestures which serve to mark the time. Two senses of time merge here: a diffuse time sense, verging on imperceptibility, and a concentrated time sense utilizing some of the smallest units of temporal perception. Each taken by itself would be nowhere. Suspended together, however, each allows the other its particular effect: the inner trio allows the outer duo to sound expressive, and the outer duo allows the inner trio to sing comprehensibly. The space between them is charged in the way that consciousness itself is charged: our sense of "eternal presence" versus our sense of the "discrete present" moment. One without the other would be like shutting one eye and losing a dimension.

This passage offers a fisheye, analogical, version of the kind of subjectivity I am tracing here, for I think that the large-scale repetitions in Schubert work with the micro iterations in just this way: when we take in, for example, the tremolo at the beginning of the G Major Quartet, we are also conscious of those large repeated expanses to come. There is no such thing as the one without the other—they are part of the same impulse, and their juxtaposition creates a singular kind of consciousness.

hat sort of consciousness is this? Many have heard a tragic awareness of Death in this late music, including Adorno, who talks unabashedly about Schubert's "landscape of Death." And not just Schubert's own death—as if that were not enough—but Death itself, with a capital D. Can we connect this perception of Death with what I have been saying about macro and micro repetitions? Well, remember that these repetitions share a mechanical and inorganic quality; in their often blank replication of content, they enact a physical oscillation rather than a living pulse. And yet this inorganic quality ultimately serves the organic: it is the primary way in which the organic is in fact sustained. Put in rather melodramatic terms, in Schubert's music there is a continuous interface of the mechanical, inorganic world of Death and the human, organic world of Life and Beauty. Paradoxically, Death serves here to prolong Life, for like the flickering of images on film, the flickering that brings still characters "to life," Death is the ubiquitous flickering that animates Schubert's music, from the quivering tremolos in its closer confines to the great reiterated spaces of its uncannily beautiful landscapes. This is music shot through with an awareness of the void; it is defined by the void, brought to life by the void.

This helps us get at the nature of beauty in Schubert's music, its special poignancy and special strength. Above all, this beauty bears repetition, in the double sense that it can be repeated and must be repeated. It is useful to remember Adorno's claim about the truth character of Schubert's themes and how this entitles them to be repeated: those repetitions are replications of the self as Truth, as the only available truth. Because if you cannot subsume what stands outside (like a Beethoven arguably can), you can only face it, you can only repeat what you know. You can only repeat yourself, repeat your Self.

At the end of his essay, Adorno writes that upon listening to Schubert, we weep and know not why. And, indeed, the world created in Schubert's music is at times almost unbearably beautiful. Maybe this is because we are hearing not just Beauty but beauty as an act of survival. Schubert's "heavenly length" is an existential declaration.

"Heavenly length." We are back with Schumann's phrase, and we may now take another view of the plenitude he so valued in Schubert's C Major Symphony. We may perceive it as the plenitude of the gathering self, holding together a world unto itself, a self constructed over against the void, a self-construction impossible without the void, and thus a self-construction possible only after the Enlightenment, for this existential sense of a void outside the self may well be one of the inevitable results of the post-Enlightenment understanding of interiority, of inwardness, as the fundamental condition of subjectivity. Perhaps the void is that great space out there that answers this newly sounded space within.

The end of the first movement of Schubert's C Major Symphony provides us with one last example of what I am calling the plenitude of the gathering self. At the moment of climactic closure, the broad, spacious theme from the very opening of the movement returns. Even here, in Schubert's most extroverted "heroic" mode, we do not hear the soaring triumph of the individual subsuming the world; nor do we hear the defiant, gnashing sound of the defeated individual: it is not about simple victory or defeat. I like to think of this ending as the view from the ramparts of the solitary self, bearing up yet again.

Maybe this is the bottom line in Schubert's late instrumental music, this the message that he goes to such great lengths to realize, this the experience that Schubert, and Schubert alone—or should I say, Schubert Alone—offers us: the center holds.

And yet, stepping back, relaxing the argument a bit for the sake of the music itself, do we not still take in some more than lingering sense of that good old Viennese Musizieren, of Biedermeier Gemütlichkeit? That sense hasn't gone anywhere, has it? All this existential talk of the void hasn't banished this perception, cannot chase it away. Its simple daylight remains. And when we consider that this fraught music can also simply flow on as the sound of Gemütlichkeit, that it can be heavenly the way a Viennese torte can be heavenly—well, then, one finds oneself in a fantastically singular place indeed. It is a place where those solitary steps along the edges of existence become the steps of a lilting melody, where careless joys and joyless cares are somehow held aloft, suspended each with each in mortal song.

That is Schubert's lyricism. We could do worse than to call it "heavenly." After all, memento mori never had it so good.

Further Reading

Theodor Adorno. Moments Musicaux (Musikalische Schriften IV) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982) [In German; contains his essay "Schubert"].

John Reed. Schubert: The Final Years (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1972).

Charles Rosen. Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Robert Schumann. On Music and Musicians (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969) [contains his review of Schubert's C Major Symphony].