Book contents
- Schubert’s Piano
- Schubert’s Piano
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Music Examples
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and Conventions
- Introduction
- Part I The Piano in Schubert’s World
- Part II Instruments and Performance
- Part III Sound and Musical Imagery
- 8 Schubert as Balladeer
- 9 The Piano and Musical Imagery in Schubert’s Lieder
- 10 Franz Schubert, Death and the Gothic
- 11 Una Corda: Beethoven’s and Schubert’s Exploration of the Piano’s Sonority as a Structural Resource
- Part IV Understanding Schubert’s Writing for the Piano
- Select Bibliography
- Index
10 - Franz Schubert, Death and the Gothic
from Part III - Sound and Musical Imagery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: aN Invalid Date NaN
- Schubert’s Piano
- Schubert’s Piano
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Music Examples
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and Conventions
- Introduction
- Part I The Piano in Schubert’s World
- Part II Instruments and Performance
- Part III Sound and Musical Imagery
- 8 Schubert as Balladeer
- 9 The Piano and Musical Imagery in Schubert’s Lieder
- 10 Franz Schubert, Death and the Gothic
- 11 Una Corda: Beethoven’s and Schubert’s Exploration of the Piano’s Sonority as a Structural Resource
- Part IV Understanding Schubert’s Writing for the Piano
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter traces the sound of the Gothic across Schubert’s piano music. Its features are suggested through funereal imagery, doubles and distortions, yet their tangibility slips out of reach as soon as words come into the picture. The analysis confronts this paradox in pieces ranging from Schubert’s Grande marche funèbre in C Minor, D859, to his Fantasy in F Minor, D940, both for piano four hands, without reducing their depictions of death to a singular conception. It interprets these pieces vis-à-vis Gothic tropes in literature and the virtual arts, among them ghostliness and ambivalence, while allowing meanings to emerge in the gaps between presence and absence, sound and silence. In doing so, the chapter not only reassesses the associations of death in Schubert’s music, but offers ways of contextualising his artistic approach more generally. The Gothic is conjured, problematised, reimagined, yet in the end left to percolate within and beyond the nineteenth-century artistic imagination.
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- Schubert's Piano , pp. 201 - 218Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024