Compositional Characteristics of Schubert's Art Songs

COMPOSITIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SCHUBERT’S ART SONGS
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Abstract
Franz Schubert's art songs presented during the Romantic period are considered unique and expressive in various ways. Scholars have been trying to assess the compositional characteristics of Schubert's art songs to highlight the importance of melody and composition in his romantic music. He excelled in numerous secular vocal works and completed symphonies, operas, and sacred music. In this paper, I plan to showcase some of the characteristics of Schubert's art songs and how he expressed them lyrically and melodically. The paper will specifically analyze some of Schubert's compositional characteristics, such as creativity, dialectic imagery and repetition, poetic interpretation, homophonic texture, tonality, and composing from different poetic artists. Franz Schubert's art songs are worth exploring because they provide a unique and beautiful perspective on the human experience while bringing to light the importance of melody and composition in romantic music. In addition, they provide depth understanding of techniques, practical applications, and performance guides for art song compositions to modern artists. Thus, the major reason that Schubert’s songs have been selected is because of his prowess in musical composition that many of his time’s counterparts did not possess. The analysis will consider the work of various scholars to clarify how they interpreted Schubert's art songs through articles and dissertations.
Introduction
Schubert was a transitional figure who focused on romantic art and seemed to have suffered, languishing in obscurity. His initial instrumental compositions tended to a classical approach. Schubert’s melodic and harmonic creation of his art songs rendered him a romantic composer. Franz Schubert's art songs are worth exploring because they provide a unique and beautiful perspective on the human experience while bringing to light the importance of melody and composition in romantic music. In addition, they offer a deep understanding of techniques, practical applications, and performance guides for art song compositions. In this assignment, Schubert's compositional characteristics of art songs are analyzed to highlight the importance of melody and composition in his romantic music. These features include numerous secular vocal works, completed symphonies, operas, and sacred music. The analysis will consider the work of many scholars to clarify how they interpreted Schubert's art songs through articles and dissertations. However, some scholars did not address Schubert's fingerprints, such as the violent nature of musical manifestation and the classicizing manner.[Boumpani, N. "Chapter 11: The Romantic Era." Manifold Apps.] [Lin, Yueh-Reng. The impact of the Lied on selected piano works of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms. University of Cincinnati, 2004.]
Creativity Component of Schubert’s Songs
Franz Schubert presented his songs with creativity and style, even though they lacked dramatic power. Schubert’s crafted his pieces with well-articulated tones and serene timbre. The artist’s piano sonatas exhibit a great wealth of technical finesse. This creativity reveals that Schubert went beyond satisfying his audience with charming ideas presented in conventional molds. Schubert’s art was influenced by the classical sonata forms of Mozart and Beethoven. Schubert’s fifth symphony portrays a great sense of Mozartean styles, where formal techniques and developments seem to be less harmonic but melodic drama. In the past few decades, one aspect of this music strategy, particularly the application of harmonic motives, has drawn much attention. A harmonic motive is a harmonic occurrence or development that reverberates throughout the movement and affects its central relationships, modulation techniques, and affective atmosphere. The word "motive" describes this recurrent phenomenon's state. It frequently emerges in the opening gesture of the movement. It is pursued throughout the composition to transform into something that contributes to the whole meaning and impact of the music. Schubert's early quartets consist of his first instrumental works produced between around 1810, when he was a teenager to about 1816 when he was about to start a career as a freelance composer. The overall structure of the first movements of many of these quartets reveals several problems related to large-scale design in aspects such as standards of sonata form. The early movements are characterized by a strictly unified and controlled motif structure that overlooks conventional thematic and tonal contrasts in the preliminary part of the form. In short, secondary keys or themes are missing, and the music is characterized by a single basic motive idea, to the exclusion of almost everything else.[McDermott, Liam J. "The Classical Sonata Forms of Franz Schubert's Great C-Major Symphony: Exploring Tonal Structure in the New Romantic Style." Ph.D. diss., The University of Western Ontario (Canada), 2022] [Crosby, Matthew Mark. "Franz Schubert’s Use of Harmony to Express the Texts in His Musical Settings of Franz Grillparzer’s Poetry." PhD diss., The University of Arizona, 2020.] [Black, Brian. "Schubert's Development of Harmonic Motives in his Early String Quartets." Music Theory Online 24, no. 3 (2018).]
Nevertheless, as time passed by, the harmonic motives of his string quartets continued to improve dramatically. The innovativeness in his harmonic motives resulted in some of the best poetic songs ever in the music sector. Trout Quintet is among the songs with spectacular harmonic innovations. The artist presented them in excellent movements in which the preceding sections end in the key of the subdominant section. This song reveals that Schubert’s practice was influenced by the Romantic technique characterized by relaxation instead of rising, followed by tension at the center of each movement. In these movements, the artist postpones the final resolution to the very end of the song. Schubert’s combination of romantic melody and classical forms renders his compositional style discursive.[Southern Illinois University. "Franz Schubert | LCIT | SIU." Liberal Arts College | SIU.]
Dialectic Imagery Component of Schubert’s Works
Furthermore, Schubert's settings of Goethe's poetry reveal a great sense of dialectic imagery and repetition, contributing to the development of art songs. How Schubert's contemporaries reacted to his work and how he influenced later composers manifests themselves in his career. His setting of ‘Sehnsucht’ portrays the different aspects of the poem and gender narratives. The work is in E major and presented in a slow-cut time. It seemed to have received a private performance during the lifetime of Schubert. The speaker’s voice in the song is unusual, and the tenor is a solo. Feeling overwhelmingly attracted to Goethe's ‘Sehnsucht’, Schubert placed the poem to music in six different contexts. He created his first music in 1815, which had two variants. One year after, he created the second and the third, with the fourth setting coming in 1815. His final two arrangements, including the well-known solo song that first appeared in 1826 and was released as a component of Op. 62, both duets followed Goethe's description of his characters. Schubert's troubles with this poem have been characterized as "heroic and full of love." It was as though he associated deeply with Mignon's position, the main character in "Sehnsucht," and how her pains, like his, were personal, a burden of grief unshared. For his numerous settings, Schubert spent more than a decade thinking about how to best capture the girl's spirit of sorrow in music. It should come as no astonishment that his final setting, which takes place in 1826, is his most straightforward and touching one. Because ‘Sehnsucht' flows in a single continuous stanza, Schubert ensures that his musical material constantly appears, only recalling the artist's opening melody when the text is repeated at the end.[Zhou, Xu. "Shande Ding: An Examination of His Compositional Style and Influences from Western Composers." Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 2020.] [Christian Schaffer et al. “The Hyperion Schubert Edition: A Goethe Schubertiad” 2022. -Records.co.uk.] [Ibid.] [Ibid, 13.]
The 'Sehnsucht' by Schubert has B-flat octaves in the opening and final postludes, which portray a somber dislocation. Although Mignon narrates about her great aloneness, the piano presents the discordant reality of loneliness. The artist uses performance indications to avoid losing emotion during translation. For example, he used such expressions when he translated ‘Sehnsucht’ to the male quintet. Essentially, male voices would space performers in a song, but it did not apply to Schubert because he focused on his emotions first. Furthermore, the part songs reveal expressive markings. Almost every measure contains a dynamic indication, ranging from fortissimo to pianissimo. The latter has gradual swells that transform phrases. He also uses poetic interpretations in Johann Mayrhofer's poem, which resonates around shared narratives, as revealed by the final four settings. For example, mortal limitation brings an interesting state of spiritual transcendence when presented with outward-seeking forces. The record is common in theological, scientific, philosophical, and medial contexts. As such, Schubert releases energized gestures during the poetic moments of corporeal death. He uses centrifugal harmonies, which act as chromatic mediants to connect diatonic limitations. Using the five voices of the quintet is instrumental in his work to add poetic rhythm.[Yuldashev, Ahmadjon, and Toshpulat Akbarov. "A Look at the Work of Composer Franz Schubert." Pindus Journal of Culture, Literature, and ELT 2, no. 3 (2022): 20-25.]
Homophonic Texture Component of Schubert’s Works
Schubert’s work portrays homophonic texture at the beginning of his piece, along with subordinate accompaniment parts. In most cases, the tenors and the bass start the phrase, while lower basses join the measure. Since Schubert was a romantic composer, he strived to make expressive melodies, although he did not retain phrase structures. Indeed, Schubert was in love with literature, so he internalized most of the poems he worked on. This aspect is revealed in his occasional mistakes in creating the poems. For example, he misrecalled some texts in the initial stanzas during the presentation of ‘Gruppe aus dem Tartarus.’ As a result, the stanza’s predicate was left out, changing the actual theme of the poem. This mistake differs from the normal deliberate alliterations and repeating phases used for expressive effects. The homophonic texture is a musical aspect in which a melody of timbre is played simultaneously by multiple instruments. When one instrument makes one note, the other makes a note in harmony. A key component of homophonic music is having one of its melodies of parts as the main element. Listeners are drawn to this ...