Compositional Characteristics of Schubert’s Art Songs

COMPOSITIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SCHUBERT’S ART SONGS
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Compositional Characteristics of Schubert’s Art Songs
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.]
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. 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.[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] [Southern Illinois University. "Franz Schubert | LCIT | SIU." Liberal Arts College | SIU.]
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.[Zhou, Xu. "Shande Ding: An Examination of His Compositional Style and Influences from Western Composers." Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 2020.]
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.
Using poetic interpretations, Schubert's work on Johann Mayrhofer 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.]
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.[McKee, Brian G...