The fragment and the four-hand piano work are both important subjects in the reception history of Franz Schubert’s oeuvre. But the fragmentary works represent a composer struggling with established forms in the aftermath of Beethoven, while the four-hand repertoire suggests an untroubled output connected to semi-public social gatherings. This new collection of analyses of Schubert’s late piano music brings the two fields into closer contact. First, it covers a selection of both the solo sonatas and four-hand works from Schubert’s final three years. Second, the two authors explicitly embrace the fragment as an aesthetic category: it is transferred onto the completed works as a conceptual tool that can both depict the Romantic image of the Wanderer and bring forward a distinctly twentieth-century perspective onto Schubert’s work.

In a more metaphorical way this final joint contribution of Renate Wieland and the late Jürgen UhdeFootnote ¹ (the title of which translates literally as Schubert’s Late Piano Music: Traces of Its Inner History) represents the rare case of an academic ‘four-hand’ work. Their previous collaboration Denken und Spielen was one of the earliest efforts to connect analysis with a performative outlook.Footnote ² Uhde’s contributions to this book, which include examinations of the Sonata D. 840, plus the Grand Duo D. 812, the Fantasia D. 940 and Divertissement D. 823, for piano four hands, come from scripts originally used as radio features. Wieland complements these with a larger number of newly written analyses (including the Sonatas D. 845, D. 850 and D. 894, plus the three pieces of D. 946). Thus in a way her role changes from ‘Secondo’ to ‘Primo’ in this publication that alas remains in itself a partially fragmentary effort since the last three Piano Sonatas are missing and some chapters (notably the one on D. 840) cannot hide the more limited scope of their original purpose.

Wieland also contributes an introductory chapter (which contains some references to the last three Piano Sonatas) that provides the reader with a general outlook of the aesthetic ideas that unify the analyses. It firmly grounds the book within a hermeneutic tradition that depicts Schubert as a dialectic counterpart of Beethoven’s ‘intensive’ processual thinking.Footnote ³ There are references to established oppositions that consider the handling of musical time (active in Beethoven, more passive in Schubert; p. 11ff) and also of ‘organic form’ (accepted by Beethoven, questioned for the very first time by Schubert; for one of many examples see p. 212).Footnote ⁴ The equally established negative judgments that refer to Schubert’s mechanic recapitulations (p. 221) or weak Rondo movements (p. 17) also get their share in the discussion: these features are used to define Schubert’s style strictly ex negativo as a criticism of the organic premises that de facto still are used to describe it. The resultant rhetorical formulas constantly project a specific philosophy of failure as victory onto Schubert’s scores: ‘Schuberts Musik treibt den Willen zur Expansion in die Extreme, und reflektiert zugleich das Umsonst all dieses Werdenwollens’Footnote ⁵ (p. 10).

Wieland refers to passages in Schubert’s piano music that ‘defy all organic thinking’ (‘aller Organik spotten’, p. 50) but the paradigm of organic form nevertheless seems to be at the heart of her own analytical thinking. The annotated music examples highlight short units of breathing that basically obey to a rule of an inner crescendo followed by a decrescendo (in other words, they ultimately refer to Hugo Riemann’s model of the musical phrase). These units are notated within the music examples in a quite simple manner: brackets mark the borders of a unit of breathing, a notated ‘x’ above the score marks the point within this unit that is its agogic apex (often in the middle of the unit on a melodic high point, but also often at the very beginning). Some more commentary on this method of graphic annotation would have been helpful, even if the sketched demarcation of units and the location of the single accented apex are relatively self-explanatory (albeit not if – as at the very beginning of the Sonata D. 894 – this apex is positioned in the middle of a held chord; see the graph on p. 111).

The hermeneutic goal of all the analyses thus is to detect the ‘inner history’ of Schubert’s music (not only its structural premises but also its semantic pathways). Hence, there are frequent associations of a specific musical passage to a quotation from one of Schubert’s songs (or to citations taken from Goethe’s works) that are used to highlight the non-programmatic but poetic content of a particular moment. In a continuous reading, however, this can turn from an often-insightful illumination into a mannered manifestation of erudition. The very first analysis of the opening movement of the Sonata in A Minor D. 845 allows a concise summary in which certain aspects are discussed by the two authors (and always with an impressive level of precision and variability) while other aspects remain a little more neglected.

Wieland considers the opposition of sharp and flat keys to be at the heart of Schubert’s harmonic thinking (p. 10). The dominant, in particular, is no longer just a neutral agency that controls the usual formal course; it is also a kind of oppressor of less usual and more utopian harmonic regions. The motivic analysis of the opening movement of D. 845 concentrates on an opposition between neutral and longing gestures that is established in the very first bars. But these gestures colour the regular harmonic plan with a mood of resignation, while a harmonic counter-space (‘Gegenraum’) directed to the flat keys is marked by failed attempts to stabilize E-flat Major. The strength of this reading is that it can circumvent some of the usual debates that are concerned, for example, with the starting point of the movement’s secondary theme; instead the whole formal area is seen as part of a larger march section that gains momentum from the absent but announced entrances of flat keys. The obvious weakness of the reading is that it does not mention the structural importance that circles of minor thirds have in this movement (especially through the ‘false recapitulation’ in F-sharp minor in bar 146).

However, the specific diminished seventh chord (F♯/A/C/E♭) that in a way outlines the formal-harmonic plan of this movement also contains chord members that can be used as tonal agencies of Wieland’s ‘flat-versus-sharp’ analysis: the F♯ then would represent the ‘wrong direction’ and the E♭ an ideal ‘right direction’ in the formal narrative. This reading could refine Wieland’s discussion in three ways: First, it allows the observation that the explicit reference (p. 27) to a conflict between Ich and Es in this movement is linked to the paradox that the German pitch letter Es (E♭) does represent its hermeneutic opposite. Second, and more substantial, it could describe the movement as an A-minor work that tries in vain (possibly with some implications of Beethoven’s works in that key) to be a C-minor work; the formal course early on establishes C minor (bars 64ff) not as a ‘negative event’ (major turns into minor) but as a ‘positive potential’ that tries to restart the circular movement of minor thirds. Third, this perspective could accumulate the many insightful single remarks Wieland attributes to specific chords, motives and rhythms into a more global frame, since the chromatic ‘alterations’ of the diminished seventh seem structurally even more important (but only insofar as they can represent the harmonic conflict of sharp and flat keys that Wieland has detected). A chord that preserves the E♭ but chromatically skips the F♯ (i.e. a F major seventh chord) is used in direct opposition to a chord that maintains the F♯ but chromatically skips the E♭ (i.e. an A minor chord with a sixte ajoutée) at the very beginning (bars 8f). This first example hints at the possibility of a less ‘Riemannian’ analysis (centred on tonic, dominant and subdominant functions) in favour of a ‘Neo-Riemannian’ reading of the whole movement (that would consider the importance of chromatic steps away from and back to a central chord).

Wieland’s analyses also establish a performative perspective in two ways: First, references to slight differences between current editions and the autograph inform the analyst as well as the performer about details of articulation and phrasing. Second, the design of each analysis is reminiscent of the act of slipping through the pages of a score in an imaginary conversation with a performer: a lot of details are mentioned, a solid view of the bigger picture emerges, but basically it is all about getting through the complete piece in one general tempo, with equal amounts of analytical consideration given to all four movements and to all parts within a movement. The analyses adopt the strictly diachronic path of a performance and therefore in a way embrace in themselves the archetypical figure of the Schubertian Wanderer. Even the printed examples take this image at face value and are provided with unusual generosity (some examples in fact are printed more than once in order to avoid any need of page-flipping).

This strategy of the single analytical run-through can create a tendency to say things twice (and even if it is another Schubertian trademark, it can produce a slight irritation for the attentive reader). A peculiar instance of this tendency is worth mentioning. In Wieland’s analysis of the Sonata D. 850 the expression of a ‘gesture of Laissez-faire’ (p. 85) is first attributed to the modification of the scherzo rhythm into the dance-like section in B-flat major that starts in bar 51; the very same expression is used later on to describe yet another modification of character: this time the theme of the finale evokes the impression of Laissez-faire in comparison to the resignative ending of the scherzo (p. 94). But since this ending is a variant of the dance-music from bars 51ff, the beginning of the finale would be a modification of a gesture of Laissez-faire into yet another gesture of Laissez-faire (the same verbal phrase is used both to denote the moment at which a specific texture is established, and for the subsequent moment at which the music deviates from this texture). There is a kernel of truth in this, however, since the emergence of a less elaborate and ‘low-style’ dance texture indeed can be felt as a topical quality in both of these formal moments.Footnote ⁶

This example perhaps tells us two things: first, Schubert’s generic transformations work in such a subtle way that in fact both depictions are fitting (and show that the analyst in her search for ever so slight variants of language is in a quite similar position to a composer who tries to question development in favour of repetition). Second, it brings to the fore the more serious problem that there still seems to be no established language that can depict in a direct and realistic rhetoric the more direct and realistic music of Schubert. In fact, Wieland describes the repetitive textures of the middle part of the third of the Piano Pieces D. 946 in terms that range from boredom to bedlam and show all the helplessness of a good modernistic taste confronted with proto-minimalist music (p. 187f).

The paratactic succession of analyses allows the suggestion that the book might be better read in single chapters than as a whole. It also allows the suggestion that some of its many valuable findings are hidden in parallel statements that connect some of the self-contained chapters. For instance, a multitude of references to an axial pitch (‘Achsenton’) that nearly always is the dominant tone in the respective harmonic context seem to indicate a peculiarity of Schubert’s thematic design. Whenever he aims at a more neutral opening (excluding unison or triadic textures) he restricts the space of the theme to such an axial pitch. Wieland also proves for more than one of Schubert’s slow movements that they establish four-note motives with stepwise movement that then also affect the following movements. Further investigation of the relationship between overt and covert motto-themes in Schubert’s late works seems to be indicated by this.

Such emphasis on detail naturally must be less evident in Uhde’s contributions, but their former function as purely aural radio introductions again adheres them to the chronological pathway. Uhde, however, is forced to maintain a more bird’s eye perspective. He manages this with admirable clarity, especially using topical images (‘Vocal Call’, ‘Dance’, ‘March’) to establish a grander narrative of musical sections. These images often refer to dualistic settings that separate reality from dream or direct from subjunctive language. The analysis of the Fantasia D. 940 shows that even the first entrance of the theme has to safeguard its dreamlike quality; not least, because the constitutive rising fourth of the theme is already part of the piano introduction (p. 242). The generic references to old forms (Overture, Fugue) and the new formal design of the Fantasia all are part of a scheme in which this unreal quality has to renew itself with each further entrance of the initial theme.

Uhde and Wieland clearly accept the concept of an ‘ideal’ subject that can be depicted as the protagonist of the more or less formalistic analytic details that add up to this subject’s triumphs and failures (and since the book represents a post-Adornian perspective especially his triumph not to end the works or movements in a predictably triumphal manner). An ideal reader for this book however might be harder to depict: in its technical language it is too ambitious for a wider public, and in its tendency not to ask specific questions, it is, perhaps, too general in its outlook to claim a major role in future scholarly debates. However, pianists and anyone interested in the works of Schubert analyzed therein should not hesitate to consult it.