The Romantic Sublime in the Late Works of Franz Schubert

Abstract

The composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828), his friends, later generations of composers and musicians, and today’s artists have described his late music (1824-28) as arousing a wide scope of emotions, often extreme in their juxtaposition. Evoking feelings of serenity but also terror, his music encompasses both transcendent moments of repose and “eruptions of ferocity.” These mixed affects suggest the aesthetic of the sublime, described by Edmund Burke as the feeling of “delightful horror.” While Schubert’s late music elicits characteristics associated with this aesthetic, scholars, in contradistinction to their studies of Beethoven’s music, have seldom called Schubert’s compositions sublime. This dissertation reconsiders the composer’s late works via the aesthetic of the sublime and submits that Schubert expanded upon previous conceptions of the aesthetic via key themes in German Romanticism and his own musical innovations, whether formal, generic, harmonic, or stylistic. To be sure, Burke’s definition of the sublime remains only one of several different formulations of the aesthetic: as a philosophical concept, the sublime evolved considerably from the earliest surviving text on the subject by Longinus of Greek Antiquity to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century disputations of Kant, Schiller, and others. To account for the extensive range of affects, concepts, and ideas associated with the sublime over the course of its transformations, I borrow Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblance” to create a nexus of key characteristics affiliated with the aesthetic. Rather than follow a more restrictive, empirical methodology that would be limited by surviving records of the composer explicitly invoking das Erhabene, this study is organized around a group of themes, ideas, and events and figures that were historically or inherently understood to invoke or have strong affinities with the sublime, such as liminality, the French Revolution, and, in the case of music, Beethoven’s symphonies. At the same time, my approach takes into account Romantic themes that reflected developments in aesthetic thought, such as landscape, subjectivity, and infinity. Through case studies of Schubert’s late music from the song cycle Winterreise, through the chamber music for piano duet and String Quintet in C Major, and the “Great” Symphony, this dissertation draws upon literary theory, art history, philosophy, and critical theory to supplement musical analysis and propose new ways of interpreting Schubert’s late music through salient features of the sublime. Furthermore, this study proposes that Schubert’s late music requires us to modify our understanding of the aesthetic in order to accommodate features of a “Romantic” sublime. Through this more capacious framework for understanding the Romantic sublime in the late works of Franz Schubert, this dissertation offers a way to synthesize recent themes in Schubert studies, including landscape, subjectivity, his sonata forms, and his Beethovenian anxiety of influence. By interpreting Schubert’s late music through the aesthetic of the sublime, this study challenges the assumptions and biases of genre, form, and gender that underly aesthetics and enlarges the scope of music that may be considered capable of expressing the sublime.