This article assesses, from a process-oriented analytical perspective, the role of formal reinterpretation in Schubert’s music. The article builds on the work of Janet Schmalfeldt (in turn inspired by the analytical and philosophical processual approaches to form of Theodor W. Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus). It also draws on the form-functional approach of William Caplin, and the dialogical formal perspective of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy. The article’s first part considers some typical structural features of form-functional transformations and presents a threefold categorization of them: intrathematic (e.g., continuation ? cadential), interthematic (e.g., introduction ? P-theme), and multilevel transformations (e.g., transition ? contrasting middle). In addition to providing examples drawn from Schubert’s works for piano that illustrate these three types of form-functional transformations (D. 899 no. 3, D. 566/I), the second part of the article discusses instances of theme-type (D. 784/I) and exposition-space-and-type (D. 935/I) transformations and form-functional intertextuality (D. 958/I) between Schubert’s and Beethoven’s works. The article concludes with a detailed consideration of the Piano Sonata in B-flat, D.960/I, addressing aspects of large-scale formal implications related to a particular formal strategy in Schubert’s ternary P-themes: the “double-conversion effect,” a process of form-functional transformation that features the reinterpretation of formal functions not once but twice in a self-contained formal zone.
This study proposes an analytical methodology and theoretical framework that seeks to turn the textual multiplicity often associated with Bruckner’s large-scale works (a scholarly issue often referred to as the “Bruckner Problem”) into a Bruckner Potential. Because textual multiplicity does not sit comfortably with traditional notions of authenticity and authorship, Bruckner scholarship has operated under aesthetic premises that fail to acknowledge textual multiplicity as a basic trait of his oeuvre. The present study circumvents this shortcoming by conceiving formal-expressive meaning in Bruckner’s symphonies as growing out of a two-dimensional dialogue comprising 1) an outward dialogue, characterized by the interplay between a given version of a Bruckner symphony and its implied genre (in this case, sonata form); and 2) an inward dialogue, characterized by the interplay among the various individualized realizations of a single Bruckner symphony. The analytical method is exemplified through a brief comparison of two renditions of the slow movement of Bruckner’s First Symphony, WAB 101 and a detailed consideration of each of the surviving realizations of the slow movement of his Third Symphony, WAB 103.
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