What is the gothic? In his wide-ranging study of the ‘gothic imagination’ in the music of Franz Schubert, musicologist Joe Davies avoids easy answers to this question; the gothic, he writes, ‘resists neat categorization’ (p. 3). Instead, Davies treats the gothic as a congeries of unsettling sights, sounds and sensations, which form something greater and more profound than the sum of its parts. Among the most reliable signifiers of the gothic are ghostly apparitions, haunted castles, ruined cathedrals, spooky graveyards, ominous noises, grotesque deformations and uncanny doubles. Taken together, these tropes belong to a ‘gothic necropoetics’ that engages, often viscerally and uncomfortably, with its true subject: the spectre of death (p. 52).

In a swift introduction, Davies populates the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic universe with familiar exemplars from art and literature. Listen into the soundscapes of Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764): the protagonist Isabella is lost in an underground passageway, hearing noises – a step, a sigh, a clink and a clank – that may indicate the presence of someone (or something) else.Footnote ¹ Look at Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (1781): an incubus, perched atop a sleeping woman, looks right back at you; as if that were not sufficiently unnerving, a white-eyed horse pokes its head from behind a curtain. Gothic art such as this abounds in contradiction and confusion. Presence and absence, life and death, the real and the unreal: the gothic, Davies writes, is evoked through these ‘blurred temporal boundaries, fissures between past and present’ (p. 12). More than merely macabre, the gothic offers artists, writers and also musicians the opportunity to explore this netherworld beyond the here and now.

Save for a few ghoulish examples (‘Erlkönig’, ‘Der Zwerg’), Schubert’s best-known musical works might seem to partake of an aesthetics far removed from that of Walpole’s gothic novel or Fuseli’s nightmarish painting. Yet, as Davies points out, some of Schubert’s earliest compositions are enthusiastically gothic. ‘Der Vatermörder’ (‘The Patricide’) (D. 10) is a bloody shocker of a song. ‘Der Geistertanz’ (‘The Ghost Dance’) (D. 15) takes place at midnight (check!) in a graveyard (check!) outside a ruined abbey (check!). And the title of his first opera, Des Teufels Lustschloss (The Devil’s Pleasure Castle) (D. 84), promises all kinds of gothic horrors. Fast-forward to the final years of Schubert’s maturity, and observe how his contemporaries detected something odd, something unsettling, something gothic about the composer’s music. The publisher Artaria noted ‘the peculiar, often ingenious but rather strange procedures of [Schubert’s] creations’, while a critic described Schubert’s tendency to stuff his songs with ‘eccentricities, barely or not at all motivated’ and examples of ‘often rather wild goings-on’ (pp. 21, 25). (When these eccentricities are not complemented by the organizing forces of unity and regularity, ‘only bizarre, grotesque things will result’, the critic cautioned.)

Now fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and consider how the spectre of Schubert’s death haunts so much recent scholarship on the composer. The paradoxical nature of Schubert’s ‘late style’ (he died when most composers would have still been in their early style) has hardly stopped audiences from hearing his final works as reflections upon mortality. Are the late works self-portraits of a dying man? Indeed, their abundant ‘eccentricities’ and ‘wild goings-on’ (to borrow the words of that critic) invite such interpretations. But Davies signals an important note of caution here. He reads Schubert’s ‘gothic imagination’ as a kind of through-line that runs the course of the composer’s musical output, from beginning to premature end: ‘Markers of late style … dissolve within the soundworlds of the gothic, such that the strangeness of music from Schubert’s final years sits alongside that of songs composed in his early years’ (pp. 20–21). Schubert’s lifelong propensity to compose music on the subject of death need not be read biographically. Perhaps, as Davies argues, it is a result of his immersion in ‘a phenomenon that captivated the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century imagination’: the gothic phenomenon (p. 3).

Davies plants this seed early in his book, and the idea bears fruit across four analytical chapters that draw liberally on Schubert’s vocal and instrumental music and that dart back and forth along the timeline of his compositional output. The gothic, Davies shows, lurks in all these quarters. By the end of the book, the reader is primed to accept one of Davies’s cleverest and most challenging readings: a comparison of a famous moment in Schubert’s final piano sonata with the spine-tingling sounds from one of his earliest dramatic songs (pp. 153–5). Although the two compositions could not be more different in tone, style and genre, Davies detects traces of a gothic topos in both. ‘My end is my beginning’, the composer seems to whisper to us, as we absorb this revelation. How very gothic!

Davies compiles the building blocks of Schubert’s gothic style throughout the introduction and first chapter (a study of Schubert’s ‘songs of the grave’). In ‘Leichenfantasie’ (‘Funeral Fantasy’) (D. 7), for example, Schubert draws upon the ombra topic to convey the eeriness of a haunted graveyard. Friedrich Schiller’s poem abounds in unsettling noises (rattling gates, creaking hinges, whirring ropes and the heavy thud of a swaying coffin), which Schubert dutifully translates into musical sound effects: hollow octave doublings, grumbling tremolos, diminished harmonies and startling dynamic outbursts that ‘dissipate as quickly as they materialize’ (p. 27). This is all rather straightforward, but more nuanced readings of more sophisticated songs lie just around the corner. ‘Schwestergruss’ (‘Sister’s Greeting’) (D. 762), like ‘Leichenfantasie’, features octave doublings, but their static repetition in dactylic rhythms invites a more sensitive interpretation from Davies. ‘The fixation on a single sonority … resonates with themes of circularity, of sounds appearing, undergoing change, then looping back on themselves, common to gothic discourse’, he writes (p. 38). Octave doublings sound in ‘Totengräbers Heimweh’ (‘Gravediggers’ Homesickness’) (D. 842), too; they accompany the titular gravedigger as he stares downward into the pit of his handiwork. Now, the ‘low tessitura and empty textures frame this encounter with death as a point from which there is no return’ (p. 50). Davies notes a greater degree of ‘psychological depth to the portrayal of the gothic’ in this song, even as it borrows from a shared lexicon of musical tropes (p. 44).

Davies broadens his conception of the gothic considerably in his third chapter, a study of Schubert’s ‘songs of the night’ (p. 89). This is a very wide net to cast in a book focused on the ‘gothic imagination’, and some unfortunate bycatch does find its way into the chapter. (Davies devotes a page to Schubert’s ‘Nacht und Träume’ (‘Night and Dreams’) D. 827 – but try as I might, I fail to hear anything gothic in its delicate tranquillity.) Yet it is also undeniable that nighttime lends itself exceptionally well to gothic storytelling. As Friedrich Schiller wrote (in a passage quoted by Davies), ‘darkness is frightful … Superstition places all ghostly phenomena in the midnight hour, and the realm of the dead is conceived as a realm of eternal night’ (p. 93).Footnote ² Night brings darkness, and darkness conceals the appearance of things. Faced with an absence of visual evidence, the imagination conjures alternative realities (and worst-case scenarios) for what might be out there.

Consider the opening of Schubert’s ‘Nachtstück’ (‘Nocturne’) (D. 672). A dominant-seventh chord, marked forte and spelled thickly with seven notes, interrupts the prevailing pianissimo of the piano introduction (bar 3). What was that? Who, or what, made that noise? The piano offers no answers, only more uncertainty. Chromaticism weakens the grip of any tonal centre that tries to assert itself, while dotted rhythms hearken back to French overture style, blurring the boundaries between past and present. This thoroughly gothic conception of night, frightening and obscure, soon yields to something transcendentally Romantic. A harper enters the shadowy forest scene and sings an arioso announcing his imminent death (bar 18). Lush arpeggiations create a sense of peace, serenity and acceptance: no scary outbursts here. Night brings darkness, but darkness can, to a Romantic poet, offer relief from the burdens of finite existence. ‘Nachtstück’, like other songs that Davies explores in this chapter, juxtaposes these competing visions of the dark: the spooky, the sublime. The pendulum between these poles swings back and forth, Davies explains, ‘leaning further to the past in some instances, while in others juxtaposing or dissolving the boundaries between the gothic and Romantic facets of the night’ (p. 101).

While the first and third chapters of Davies’s book are devoted to Schubert’s songs, the second chapter (‘Doubles and Distortions’) and the fourth (‘Grotesquerie’) are limited to the composer’s instrumental music, specifically his solo and chamber works. The analytical vignettes in these chapters are dazzlingly (and sometimes dizzyingly) intertextual: one piece of music is reminiscent of another, which is reminiscent of another, and another and so on. The network of allusions help to forge a ‘constellation of gothic tropes’ and ‘a shared vocabulary in the absence of textual cues’ (pp. 44, 56). Pieces of similar design belong to a ‘nexus’ of interrelationships; their ‘soundworlds intersect’ (pp. 64, 147). To map out just one example: a brief examination of the opening measures of Schubert’s Grande marche funèbre (D. 859) segues into a parallel reading of his Impromptu in C minor (D. 899/1). Both works draw upon a ‘lexicon of sounds doubled and split into multiple layers’, as do two very early piano fantasies (D. 9 and D. 48) (pp. 59–60). The Piano Sonata in A minor (D. 784) joins the Impromptu in ‘a nexus of pieces that evoke gothic tensions between (physical) presence and (textural) absence’; ‘echoes’ of D. 784 find their way into another Piano Sonata in A minor (D. 845), which ‘foreshadows’ parts of the Impromptu while simultaneously ‘recalling’ one of the graveyard songs discussed in the previous chapter, ‘Totengräbers Heimweh’ (pp. 64; 59–64). Sometimes Davies’s intertextual methodology takes on a gothic quality, as when he describes traces of one song ‘lurking in the shadows’ of another (p. 69). In these cases, his labyrinthine analytical journeys – populated with faint echoes, eerie resemblances, ghosts of earlier works and premonitions of future ones – emulate the conventions of gothic storytelling that are his main subject.

Because it emerges through ‘hybridity and metamorphosis’ (or ‘the overflow of heterogeneous elements’, in the words of E.T.A. Hoffmann), the art of the grotesque invites similar intertextual engagement (p. 125).Footnote ³ For example, Davies shows how ‘stylistic juxtapositions’, an ‘emphasis on opposites’, and ‘material … fused in contradictory ways’ underpin Schubert’s Klavierstücke in E-flat minor and major (D. 946/1–2), thus situating the pair of works within an aesthetics of grotesquerie (p. 133). The stylistic allusions range widely: a danse macabre, a ‘distorted funeral march’, ‘traces of the tarantella style’, a ‘chorale-like interjection’, a lullaby and a ‘gentle barcarolle’ all make appearances, as do the ‘stabbing gestures’, ‘tremolos in low register’ and ‘sforzandi interjections’ that the reader by now associates with the gothic soundscape (pp. 131–3). Described in such a way, the works begin to resemble a kind of Frankensteinian monster – a grotesque pastiche, messily cobbled together from the remains of dead things.

To be sure, Schubert’s stylistic juxtapositions and abrupt transitions are oft-remarked features of his style: we may know them as outbursts of a ‘volcanic temper’ (Hugh Macdonald) or the outgrowths of ‘crystalline’ forms (Theodor Adorno).Footnote ⁴ Rather than ascribe such compositional fingerprints to the personal predilections of a singular composer, Davies situates them within a broader cultural movement – one inhabited by Friedrich Schlegel, for whom grotesquerie arose when ‘paradoxes are thrust together’, ‘woven as bizarrely as possible into a monstrous human tragicomedy’ (p. 124).Footnote ⁵ It is a cultural movement also inhabited by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who, upon visiting Strasbourg Cathedral, described its gothic architecture as a ‘misshapen, curly-bristled monster’ and as ‘undefined, disorganized, unnatural, patched-together, tacked-on’ (p. 8).Footnote ⁶ And it is a cultural moment inhabited by the artist Carl Blechen, whose haunting Gotische Kirchenruine (1826) is reproduced on the front cover of Davies’s book (p. 8). The painting depicts a pilgrim sleeping in the ruins of a cathedral; its walls are overtaken by a hungry, verdurous nature, and its floor crumbles to expose a shadowy crypt below. It is all there: a sense of time outside of time, the juxtaposition of opposites (grey stone, green life) and the spectre of death. The cavernous space overwhelms our tiny pilgrim, for he (like Schubert) is but a small part of the vast gothic scene.