Schubert has never had a great reputation as a composer of dramatic genres. His many stage works received few if any performances during his lifetime, with no subsequent performance tradition, and his ballads and dramatic scenes have not traditionally ranked highly among his lieder. This volume, which began in part as papers delivered at the 2014 Oxford Lieder Festival, offers reappraisals of these, and furthermore proposes that our understanding of the less overtly dramatic songs and the instrumental works may likewise be enhanced when viewed through the lens of drama. Following an introduction by Laura Tunbridge, the volume presents 13 chapters grouped into three sections: stage and sacred works, lieder, and instrumental music (I deviate slightly from this structure in my review). While a number of the authors deal with explicitly dramatic genres either directly or indirectly, many perceive the drama in Schubert's music in a more abstract sense. The concept of drama has enjoyed a far wider purview in musicological discourse than merely where there is a tangible link to the stage, and as a metaphor drama pervades our everyday descriptions of music. Commonplace notions of melodic or harmonic ‘tension’, ‘climax’ and ‘resolution’, the ideas of ‘dialogue’ and ‘interaction’ between parts, and more involved concepts such as musical ‘narrative’, ‘action’ and ‘agency’ all share the vocabulary of dramatic exegesis, if indeed some are not drawn directly from it. Yet, although one can contrast literal with figurative conceptions of drama in music, it is not easy to maintain a categorical separation; we might rather think of them as poles on a spectrum. In what follows, I begin by discussing music for the stage and gradually work towards the figurative end of this spectrum.

Schubert's Claudine von Villa Bella, of which only the first act survives, is a prime example of an opera neglected by performers and scholars, but Lorraine Byrne Bodley makes a case for its historic importance, arguing that both Goethe's libretto and Schubert's music represent steps towards a German operatic tradition that would combine elements of Italian opera buffa and German Singspiel. Goethe sought to bring German composers closer to the Italian style, and Byrne Bodley shows how Schubert responded to the libretto by infusing his score with buffa characteristics. Although she seems tacitly to value the German traits over the Italian, as when she writes that buffa influences in the libretto are ‘redeemed in the intensity of Schubert's music’ (p. 33), she nevertheless places a welcome emphasis on those influences and thereby highlights the fundamental importance the Italian style had for the developing German one in the nineteenth century. Christine Martin explains in her chapter that a similar motivation to move towards a national style drove Schubert's writing in Fierabras. This largely followed the French model but displayed characteristics of the through-composition that would come to be a distinguishing element of German musical drama. Various techniques, from simple to subtle, were used to blur the boundaries between speech and song or to smooth over the transitions between them; at other times, as Martin persuasively demonstrates, sections of singing and passages of melodrama were overlaid with orchestral motives to represent either additional, pantomimic action occurring on or off stage or the emotional reactions of the characters to the dramatic action. Martin writes that the aim was to keep the plot moving forwards at all times, resulting in a ‘hybrid genre between opera and drama’ (p. 50).

Hybridity of genres, so to speak, runs as something of a theme through several chapters in the volume, in particular those that discuss the imprint of opera on Schubert's lieder, such as Marjorie Hirsch's discussion of the fragment ‘Gretchen im Zwinger’, D. 564. Following an overview of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century perspectives on the differences between lieder and arias, Hirsch gives an informative account that argues Schubert was prompted by both the subject and the non-strophic text to opt for an opera-like setting and, accordingly, to write music with an ‘aria-like lyricism’ (p. 111) rather than the sort of simple, sing-able melody expected of a lied. Drawing on a careful reading of the text, Hirsch further suggests that the operatic nature of Schubert's setting may have been a factor in his apparently abandoning it, in that he may have feared the structure and tense of the later verses would oblige him to resort to a rounded form that would cause the dramatic momentum to be ‘subsumed within a larger sense of stasis’ (p. 127). One work Schubert certainly did not abandon, although history has practically done so, is the monumental dramatic ballad ‘Adelwold und Emma’, D. 211, the focus of Susan Wollenberg's chapter. At 628 bars, this song – Schubert's longest – lasts close to half an hour in performance; its sheer length, its chivalric setting and its three characters (sung by the one part) lead Wollenberg to call it ‘profoundly operatic’ (p. 87). She points cogently to Schubert's use of motives as agents of characterization and cohesion, his associative use of keys and his fluid juxtaposition of styles and topics all as theatrical frames of reference that are blended with the more intimate conventions of the lied. Less convincing are Wollenberg's suggestions of possible sources of influence in Mozart operas and other canonical works, which seem a little tenuous in an otherwise compelling analysis; the footnoted caveat that these and Schubert's song ‘could derive from a common source rather than directly’ (p. 98) might have more profitably been placed in the main body of the text and given greater reflection.

The importing of dramatic modes of representation from opera and other stage genres into lieder is further exemplified in the use of musical topics. Focusing on Winterreise, Clive McClelland discusses Schubert's use of the tempesta topic, which had had a long history of inspiring terror and awe in the depicting of storms in opera, whether genuinely meteorological or figuratively raging in the breast of a distressed individual. The topic employed a combination of rhetorically emphatic features usually set at a rapid tempo in a flat minor key. Not only do most of McClelland's examples show Schubert quite clearly perpetuating this conventional dramatic effect, the strength of the tempesta tradition also affords an insight into Schubert's reading of Müller's Winterreise text even when it makes little or no mention of the weather; in ‘Rückblick’, for example, the topic stands for the wanderer's ‘anger at rejection’ (p. 164). Contrasting with the violent imagery of tempesta, but no less intended to inspire awe and terror, was the topic of ombra, reserved, in McClelland's words, for ‘the creeping horror’ of such phenomena as ‘ghosts, incantations, oracles, and walking statues’ (p. 151). A characteristic feature of ombra is the use of chromaticism, which Susan Youens examines as part of Schubert's portrayal of Hades in ‘Gruppe aus dem Tartarus’, D. 583. In an astute analysis accompanied by highly engaging prose, she describes how Schubert's song is packed with chromaticism: bold leaps, scalar passages, shorter chromatic lines embedded within larger ones and even the contorted effect of the latter two moving in opposite directions. Like McClelland, Youens situates this topical chromatic writing within a long pedigree, yet this recognition feels somewhat negated by her avowal that she ‘would love to think’ (p. 196) Schubert was directly inspired by a single work, Mozart's Don Giovanni, whose damnation scene she describes at length in her chapter.

One indicator of drama can be the presence of different personae, and even when only one is actually present, another can reasonably be inferred. This is exemplified in the assumed presence of the love object in Schubert's serenades ‘Ständchen (“Horch, Horch! die Lerch”)’, D. 889, and ‘Ständchen’ from Schwanengesang, D. 957, analysed in one of two chapters by James William Sobaskie. He argues that Schubert portrays the serenading lover's attempts at persuasion through a ‘dramatic strategy’ (p. 135) in five phases – approach, appeal, breakthrough, settling and closure – with melodic gestures that ‘aspire’ (p. 147) to and eventually reach a higher pitch before descending to a resting point. Correlating these dramatic and musical processes makes intuitive sense insofar as rising pitch is frequently equated with rising tension. Some inconsistency, however, in where Sobaskie locates the phases of this dramatic strategy in each song (in one case combining two without explanation) raises questions about its transferability. His detailed and thorough analytical work is also sometimes compromised by overstatement; for example, although a dominant pedal withholds the tonic chord in most of D. 889's introduction, few listeners will hear ‘urgency’, ‘restlessness’, ‘insistence’, or an ‘anxious state’, let alone ‘experience impatience’ or perceive ‘mounting suspense’ (p. 137–9), during these blithe eight bars.

In his other chapter, Sobaskie examines Schubert's Mass in A-flat major, in which he uses the hermeneutic method of Edward T. ConeFootnote ¹ to posit a subtextual dramatic persona who, following the sections of the Mass ordinary, evolves ‘from penitent, to adherent, to believer, to initiate, to anticipant over the course of the liturgical setting’ (p. 55). Schubert composed the Mass, in Sobaskie's view, to appeal to the Romantic sense of subjectivity; accordingly, the persona projects a monologue that ‘elicits self-identification and empathy’ (p. 80) in listeners. This, we are told, is a noteworthy innovation of Schubert's, for ‘the incorporation of a subtextual dramatic monologue within a Mass setting could not have occurred any earlier in Vienna, or anywhere else for that matter’ (p. 55). It is startling that this claim is so assuredly about production rather than reception, when we can be far less certain of such devices being incorporated by composers than being constructed by analysts. Moreover, Cone's own use of Schubert in establishing his method arguably constrains Sobaskie's choice of repertoire when applying it. Indeed, it has been suggested elsewhere that Cone's hermeneutic apparatus was, despite its implied near-universality, developed principally to theorise the experience of ‘Romantic music and its attendant aesthetic of emotive communication’.Footnote ² From that perspective, Sobaskie's chapter would seem to be less an examination of historical evidence than a back-projection of a comparatively recent school of thought onto the music of precisely the period for which it was conceived.

Like Sobaskie, Lauri Suurpää also infers dramatic personae and plots where none would conventionally be thought to reside: in the slow movements from two of Schubert's piano sonatas. In D. 958/ii, a force striving for the primacy of the home key is designated a protagonist, while an antagonist, appearing initially in the guise of a three-chord motive, seeks to undermine it. In D. 960/ii, an antagonist is the agent of ‘a deeply tragic expression’, represented by the key of C-sharp minor, whereas a protagonist attempts to deny closure in that key and instead steer the music towards ‘nontragic’ major keys (p. 295). Insofar as they constitute threads of cohesion drawn through Suurpää's readings, the dramatic narratives can be helpful hermeneutic devices. However, some readers may find them nonplussing in that they already seem to be conveyed in essence by the detailed technical analyses on which they are erected. In these, Suurpää regularly ascribes dramatic agency not to the protagonist or antagonist but to ‘the music’ itself and its elements, which vary in tangibility. To be sure, these ascriptions are in the service of the narrative he presents, but statements such as ‘the music follows the false path’ (p. 289), ‘roving harmonies appear’ (p. 286) and ‘the tonic minor gradually breaks forth from the nontragic E major environment’ (p. 295) employ tropes familiar enough in music-analytical writing that one may wonder what is gained by personifying them further. Fred Maus has observed that in much descriptive prose about music, the identity of perceived dramatic agents not only shifts but is frequently left undetermined and is sometimes conflated with actions themselves. Rather than regard this as narrative incoherence, he considers it to be faithful to an individual's listening experience, and goes on to suggest that ‘music can be dramatic without imitating or representing determinate characters at all’.Footnote ³ Suurpää's chapter could perhaps have anticipated such arguments with a more developed rationale for positing the continuous opposition of two explicit personae.

Even without imagined personae, music is often said to project a plot or narrative, which for Brian Black arises from ‘the continuity of a coherent chain of events moving irresistibly to a final denouement’ (p. 233). In instrumental music, this has generally been identified in the teleological trajectories epitomized in Beethoven's sonata-form works, but Black argues, with reference to Schubert's Impromptu in C minor, D. 899/1, that motivic-thematic treatment can produce dramatic unity by other means than the fragmentation and rhythmic acceleration characteristic of teleological processes. Making the simple but insightful observation that ‘[d]rama itself rarely consists of incessant action’ (p. 238), he demonstrates how what are typically regarded as Schubert's lyrical structures can themselves contribute to a potent dramatic structure. Even while they maintain a steady four-bar rhythm, processes of thematic variation involving rhythmic and textural intensification can still produce a powerful build-up of energy towards a climax. In addition, Black shows how motivic relationships between themes become a source of dramatic conflict, while the different ways Schubert modulates to other keys affect the progress of the narrative. By contrast, Joe Davies argues that drama in the slow movements of the String Quintet in C major, D. 956, and the Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959, stems not from ‘the smooth unfolding of a linear narrative’ but from moments of ‘stylistic disjuncture’ (p. 303). ‘Styles’, for Davies, broadly mean expressive, topical or characteristic qualities, the striking juxtapositions of which he suggests reflect the contemporary fascination with the aesthetic of the grotesque. In the Quintet movement, the unison trill leading into the central section creates a powerful rupture between ‘lyrical dreamworld’ and ‘nightmarish reality’ (p. 308), while later allusions to this trill uneasily cause the movement to end as an ‘unresolved conflict’ (p. 312). In the Sonata, Davies suggests that the opposition of styles gives rise to an ‘increasingly antagonistic’ (p. 317) relationship between fantasy and lyricism that is, again, not properly resolved. Such oppositions are indubitably integral to one's experience of these works, although in interpreting them Davies confusingly mixes the metaphor of drama with other frames of reference such as those of time and landscape that are de rigueur in Schubert scholarship. Consequently, one is left without a systematic explanation of how he believes stylistic disjuncture should relate specifically to the concept of drama.

In her chapter, Anne M. Hyland suggests that dramatic content may be located in what she calls ‘“inter-generic dialogue”: the merging or interaction of features characteristic of disparate genres within a single form’ (p. 205). Focusing on the early Overture for String Quintet, D. 8, she argues that by borrowing thematic material and structural principles from the Overture to Cherubini's Faniska and his own ballad ‘Hagars Klage’, D. 5, Schubert brought his Quintet ‘into dialogue’ (p. 226) with orchestral and dramatic vocal genres. Her emphasis on a holistic compositional practice is a salutary corrective to the genre-focused tunnel vision that formal theory often suffers from, although it is unclear to what degree ‘inter-generic dialogue’, which she also glosses as ‘generic cross-fertilization’ (p. 208), is meant to have specifically dramatic resonances. While the term ‘dialogue’ does already enjoy good standing in the sonata theory of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy,Footnote ⁴ which Hyland draws on, there it is not specifically characterized as a component of drama. In the context of the present volume Hyland's chapter might have been enriched by deeper reflection on the agency that the term implies. Moreover, much of her argument is centred on Schubert's treatment of keys, cadences and formal conventions. Why these features should necessarily be treated as a source of drama per se is not directly addressed.

Finally, Xavier Hascher's response to the book's theme is, curiously, to regard music as poetry, concentrating on the first movement of the Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959. Reading Goethe's and Novalis's writings on organicism, Hascher states that the metamorphoses of an ‘organic germ’ may be thought to confer onto the whole and parts of an artwork ‘a poetic character’ (p. 269), because just as all parts of a flowering organism grow from a single seed and are not shaped by external influences, so ‘poetry – and music as a form of poetry – is … exclusively concerned with itself’ (p. 268). How drama fits into this is unclear: Hascher cites first Goethe's distinction between the literary genres of drama and novel, and then Novalis's assertion that a novel ‘must be poetry through and through’ (p. 277). These references imply that music (qua poetry) should not be equated with drama – an odd suggestion to make in this volume. However, Hascher is more concerned to describe how Schubert's Sonata directs the listener onto a metaphysical plane of experience that supposedly captures the Romantic poetic ethos, but getting readers to agree with his interpretations of the music is necessarily going to be constrained by their personal predispositions to such ideas. For instance, Hascher claims that a harmonic deviation in the second theme represents the music ‘in search of some lost thought – hidden as it were in the depths of music's own memory’ (p. 259), and that the ensuing change of key ‘translates aurally into temporal distance and a move into some undefined past’ (p. 260). These are purely subjective responses to the music, even if they do tap into common themes from recent writing on Schubert.

If I have said more about the chapters treating drama figuratively than those dealing with literally dramatic genres, it is not because of any inherent merits or shortfalls in them. Rather, the relationship of music to drama is much thornier when the latter is used as a metaphor, and a number of those chapters could be more grounded in methodological or ontological arguments on the subject.Footnote ⁵ In addition, many authors throughout the book frequently fall back on a casual use of the term ‘dramatic’, which can seem to mean little more than ‘exciting’, ‘surprising’ or ‘interesting’; in those cases, it is often difficult to know exactly how their claims about ‘dramatic’ qualities or effects relate to actual drama in the theatre. Perhaps that is a pedantic, positivist quibble, but systematically breaking down the relationship between music – whether Schubert's or anybody else's – and the dramatic metaphor is surely necessary if one is to refine it as understood in common parlance. A further indication of an uncritical perspective on the subject is that ‘drama’ always seems to have positive valence in this book, something which does not inhere in the term as it relates to literal drama. Yet that is entirely understandable, for this is first and foremost a book about Schubert, and one which seeks, on the one hand, a favourable reappraisal of his works that have not so far enjoyed much acclaim and, on the other, a deeper appreciation of those which could be enhanced by fresh perspectives. In this sense, the volume abundantly succeeds. Its authors are all compelling guides who take us intelligently and without exception into the masterly details that make all of Schubert's music so worthy of our renewed attention.