Schubert ... the classicist?

[Mark]

A simple question: why does almost all of Schubert's music sound to me like the work of a dyed-in-the-wool classicist, while all the music history texts tell me he was a romantic? It's the exact opposite of the way I hear Beethoven: to me, he's a romantic, not a classicist. I admit that I sometimes hear some of the works by each of these great men as either romantic or classical (respectively), but in the main, it's how I've just stated. Indeed, it could be my general indifference to the classical period (excepting Mozart, Haydn and a handful of others) that stops me enjoying Schubert's music as much as I'm sure I would if I heard it as romantic.

How do you hear Schubert? As a classicist, or a romantic?

[ChamberNut]

I hear definite outright Romanticism in his later works, especially in his late piano works and very late chamber music.

[Chaszz]

In his two books "The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven", and "The Romantic Generation," musicologist and pianist Prof. Charles Rosen lays out the case for definitions of the Classical and Romantic Styles based on technical aspects of the music. These books are considered by musicologists to be authoritative statements on these matters. An important aspect of the distinction is that in Classical music, development sections modulate into keys that are 'sharp' to the original key of the piece, while Romantic composers could no longer creatively continue to compose within this tradition and began to use the 'flat' keys for development modulations. This irritated Beethoven who did not like the music of the early Romantics which grew up around him in his later years. It gradually broke down the hierarchy of the tonic and dominant chords which Beethoven championed and eventually led to the dissolving chromatic polytonal experiments of Liszt and Wagner, and still later to the atonalism of Schoenberg. Technically Schubert was among the first of the Romantics.

I agree with you that Beethoven sounds like a Romantic to my ears. I have argued on another site that if not a Romantic in the technical sense, he should be considered one in the wider sense of the emotions and ideals implicit in his music, in which he is clearly influenced by Romantic writers (Romanticism began much earlier in literature than in music) and by the democratic and individualistic fervor of his time. However, technically his music follows the Classical style and not the Romantic one. Professor Rosen's books may help you to understand this, but are not easy to follow unless you read music pretty well, because of all the score examples. I read music very poorly but have a little understanding of harmony and chords. I managed to get through these books, skipping many sections that dealt in detail with score examples, and picking up the general thrust of the arguments.

   

[val]

To me, Schubert is a romantic. In his chamber music, piano sonatas and Symphonies he uses structures and forms from the classic period, but in a very personal way, as we can see in the string Quartet in G major or the last piano Sonata.

Regarding his Lieder or choral works (Gesang der Geister über den Wassern) he was a complete romantic.

[marvinbrown]

A simple question: why does almost all of Schubert's music sound to me like the work of a dyed-in-the-wool classicist, while all the music history texts tell me he was a romantic? It's the exact opposite of the way I hear Beethoven: to me, he's a romantic, not a classicist. I admit that I sometimes hear some of the works by each of these great men as either romantic or classical (respectively), but in the main, it's how I've just stated. Indeed, it could be my general indifference to the classical period (excepting Mozart, Haydn and a handful of others) that stops me enjoying Schubert's music as much as I'm sure I would if I heard it as romantic.

How do you hear Schubert? As a classicist, or a romantic?

  Schubert to me is all about romanticism-  at the risk of being redundant that glorious 4th symphony that I have been hooked on for the past couple of days is all about emotion.  His two symphonies The Unfinished and the The Great also fit the bill as romantic pieces of music!!

  marvin 

[Florestan]

I hear definite outright Romanticism in his later works, especially in his late piano works and very late chamber music.

To me, Schubert is a romantic. In his chamber music, piano sonatas and Symphonies he uses structures and forms from the classic period, but in a very personal way, as we can see in the string Quartet in G major or the last piano Sonata.

Regarding his Lieder or choral works (Gesang der Geister über den Wassern) he was a complete romantic.

  Schubert to me is all about romanticism-  at the risk of being redundant that glorious 4th symphony that I have been hooked on for the past couple of days is all about emotion.  His two symphonies The Unfinished and the The Great also fit the bill as romantic pieces of music!!

  marvin 

Yes, yes and yes. Romantic through and through.

[Mark]

For sure, later Schubert sounds romantic. But it's his earlier works which sound most classical. Now, this is partly true with Beethoven, also - but so few of those 'in the know' would refer to Ludwig as a romantic, while they're quite happy to do so with Franz. Perhaps this has much to do with matters technical (I wouldn't know, having no musical training). Yet to me, even Beethoven's 'classical' works sound as though they're pregnant with the seed of romanticism; whereas Schubert's early classical pieces sound to me very plainly classical, with no hint of any forthcoming romanticism.

[Florestan]

Actually, what does it matter, anyway? What's in a name? 

[bassio]

I always thought of Schubert as one of the "early" Romantics, but I am still not exposed to his orchestral works.

For sure, later Schubert sounds romantic. But it's his earlier works which sound most classical.

Which compositions do you have in mind Mark?

I agree with you that Beethoven sounds like a Romantic to my ears. I have argued on another site that if not a Romantic in the technical sense, he should be considered one in the wider sense of the emotions and ideals implicit in his music, in which he is clearly influenced by Romantic writers (Romanticism began much earlier in literature than in music) and by the democratic and individualistic fervor of his time. However, technically his music follows the Classical style and not the Romantic one.

I totally agree. Technically speaking, I always believed that Beethoven is a Classicist who (even if he expanded the forms of music of his time and was quite the 'revolutionary') but he did not "cross the line" into the other side. As for 'emotionally speaking', this will be a totally different argument.

Beethoven's situation in his generation is very similar to Liszt's in the next. It is not surprising that Liszt walked in his footsteps.

And ditto, I highly recommend Rosen's "the Classical Style".

Another question Mark should have asked, and which is more difficult to answer, is "Who was the first Romantic, Beethoven or Schubert?".. this will raise some arguments. 

[lukeottevanger]

An important aspect of the distinction is that in Classical music, development sections modulate into keys that are 'sharp' to the original key of the piece, while Romantic composers could no longer creatively continue to compose within this tradition and began to use the 'flat' keys for development modulations. This irritated Beethoven who did not like the music of the early Romantics which grew up around him in his later years. It gradually broke down the hierarchy of the tonic and dominant chords which Beethoven championed and eventually led to the dissolving chromatic polytonal experiments of Liszt and Wagner, and still later to the atonalism of Schoenberg.     

What Rosen really emphasizes, though, is the Romantic predeliction for modulation to (usually flat) keys in mediant relationships to the tonic, which he suggests become a kind of substitute dominant - and this use of mediant modulation is something we see growing in importance in Beethoven, until we get a work like the Hammerklavier, which as Rosen shows, is 'all about' movement by mediant relationships. In this sense, Beethoven is actually very close indeed to the early Romantics around him, though his mediant modulations are perhaps more 'classically' prepared and 'justified' than those of the 'all-out' Romantics. Schubert, too, loves these mediant modulations very much, and they are an audibly Romantic feature of his music.

[Mark]

I always thought of Schubert as one of the "early" Romantics, but I am still not exposed to his orchestral works.
Which compositions do you have in mind Mark?

I was thinking of the first three symphonies and some of the early string quartets. Had I not known these were by Herr Schubert because I had the CD cases in my hand, I'd have probably attributed them to another, perhaps lesser-known composer who might more correctly be described as 'classical'.

[(poco) Sforzando]

What Rosen really emphasizes, though, is the Romantic predeliction for modulation to (usually flat) keys in mediant relationships to the tonic, which he suggests become a kind of substitute dominant - and this use of mediant modulation is something we see growing in importance in Beethoven, until we get a work like the Hammerklavier, which as Rosen shows, is 'all about' movement by mediant relationships. In this sense, Beethoven is actually very close indeed to the early Romantics around him, though his mediant modulations are perhaps more 'classically' prepared and 'justified' than those of the 'all-out' Romantics. Schubert, too, loves these mediant modulations very much, and they are an audibly Romantic feature of his music.

Yes, but he also emphasizes the fact that for the Romantics, movement towards the subdominant becomes "just another key," whereas in the Classical style, the subdominant is always reserved as an anchoring element following large-scale modulations from the tonic. I don't know also which edition of The Classical Style you have, because the second edition added a long chapter on the later music of Beethoven, and it's here that Rosen most decisively makes his case for Beethoven as a Classicist.

Schubert a Classicist or Romanticist? Hard to say, and much depends on your definition. Remember he died only one year after Beethoven. I hesitate to make emotion the sole or dominant criterion, as if there's no emotion in Classical composers. But part of the Classical style as epitomized in Haydn and Mozart, I would say, is an attitude of urbanity, high comedy, ironic detachment, etc., that starts to break down in Beethoven. A sense of tragedy is rarely heard in Haydn, perhaps more in those of Mozart's C minor works (the sonata and piano concerto) that seem to look forward to Beethoven. But with Beethoven the surfaces become rougher, the comedy coarser, and the tragic makes its appearance in works like the first movement of the 5th and 9th symphonies, as well as the whole of the Appassionata.

As for Schubert, certainly his earlier absolute music is Classicist, and he produces his most successful imitation of Beethoven in the C minor piano sonata. The expansiveness of some of his late absolute works, however, sounds new and original (the C major quintet, Bb sonata, first movement of the Unfinished). The use of a cyclical theme in the Wanderer Fantasie is probably a new technique. And nothing but nothing that I know in earlier music prepares the way for perhaps Schubert's most fantastical episode, the middle section of the slow movement of the late A major piano sonata.

Schubert's emphasis on Lieder, too, is more a Romantic than a Classicist trait. His two long song cycles, Winterreise and Schoene Muellerin, are foreshadowed by LvB's An die Ferne Geliebte. But song cycle is a genre that properly belongs more to Romanticism; you will not find any examples of it in Mozart or Haydn.

[lukeottevanger]

Yes, but he also emphasizes the fact that for the Romantics, movement towards the subdominant becomes "just another key," whereas in the Classical style, the subdominant is always reserved as an anchoring element following large-scale modulations from the tonic. I don't know also which edition of The Classical Style you have, because the second edition added a long chapter on the later music of Beethoven, and it's here that Rosen most decisively makes his case for Beethoven as a Classicist.

That's the one I've got. Of course, I was talking about mediants, not subdominants, but this same sense of classical balance in Beethoven (as opposed to their somewhat more arbitrary use by the romantics) applies to them too - as I said before

In this sense, Beethoven is actually very close indeed to the early Romantics around him though his mediant modulations are perhaps more 'classically' prepared and 'justified' than those of the 'all-out' Romantics

which chimes with what you say about subdominants

[ChamberNut]

I was thinking of the first three symphonies and some of the early string quartets. Had I not known these were by Herr Schubert because I had the CD cases in my hand, I'd have probably attributed them to another, perhaps lesser-known composer who might more correctly be described as 'classical'.

I agree with you there, Mark. 

[Josquin des Prez]

A simple question: why does almost all of Schubert's music sound to me like the work of a dyed-in-the-wool classicist, while all the music history texts tell me he was a romantic?

It's because you are listening to juvenile works as if they were representative of the composer's mature style. They aren't. Beethoven was 25 when he published his first "classical" set of piano trios (opus 1). At the same age, Schubert was already well into his "late" period. Beethoven early works aren't more "romantic", they are just more mature.

The solution? Don't listen to juvenillia. Problem solved.

[Bonehelm]

The most obvious proof that he's a romantic: lieder.

No classical composer would compose songs just to express their feelings, would they? 

[Dancing Divertimentian]

I would say Schubert is a romantic as Brahms is a romantic. Both confine their musical expressions in classical structure but still find room to expand and experiment.

And yes, more so mid-Schubert on than early Schubert.

[zamyrabyrd]

On the chapter on Beethoven, Charles Rosen starts out with the composer's deep disappointment in the 1820's about the new trends in music and that his own is hardly played or even paid attention to. In word and deed, Rosen writes that the early Romantics reacted against Beethoven.

Though Schubert may have regarded his elder with awe, and even was a pallbearer for Beethoven's funeral, the sprawling, though beautiful, lines in his longer works bear little resemblance to the short, even minimalist themes used by Beethoven. Shift to the subdominant had something to do with the difference between Beethoven and the Romantics but that was hardly all of it. The variations of his last piano sonata are a case in point, exposed structure moving towards utter abstraction. The thread of Beethoven's motivic developments had to wait to be taken up by Brahms later in the century.

Oddly enough, though not generally considered a major work by Beethoven, "to the far beloved" song cycle was taken up and imitated by the Romantics. When the "sonata" was finally described by academics in the 19th century, it ceased to be a vital form. This is an essential difference between the Classical and Romantic composers, quite apparent if one wants to compare Beethoven and Schubert.

ZB