Schubert's Last Sonatas - Extramusical Connotations and Suggestions of A Narrative

Extramusical Connotations and Suggestions of A Narrative

Schubert's mature music often manipulates the listener's sense of time and forward movement. Passages creating such an effect appear frequently in the last sonatas, mainly in the first and second movements. Two harmonic devices are employed in the sonatas to create this effect:

• Tonal detachment of passages or complete movements from their home-key surroundings. These passages are often introduced by sudden, "magical" harmonic shifts that closely juxtapose the home key (or a closely related key such as the dominant) with the new, distant tonality. Two examples of this procedure, from the opening movement of the B-flat Sonata, are shown on the right.
• Creation of tonal stasis by rapid oscillation between two contrasting tonalities. Such a device appears in the development sections of the A major and B-flat sonatas, opening movements.

Harmonic manipulations of this kind create a sense of standstill, of arrest of time and motion; they often suggest a feeling of detachment, of entering a new dimension, independent of the preceding material, such as the realm of dreams and memories (if the preceding material is conceived as reality); some tonally detached passages may convey a feeling of an alienated, inhospitable environment, an exile (if the preceding material is conceived as home).

The emotional effect of these passages is often further enhanced by textural and/or cyclical devices, such as a sudden shift of musical texture, concomitant with the shift in tonality; the use of mechanically repetitive accompanimental patterns, such as ostinati and repeated chords, in the tonally remote or oscillating passages; and the allusion to previously stated material, which appeared earlier in the piece, in tonally detached passages. Schubert's frequent use of similar harmonic, textural and cyclical devices in his settings of poems depicting such emotional states, only strengthens the suggestion of these psychological connotations.

Extramusical connotations of this kind have sometimes been used as a basis for the construction of a psychological or biographical narrative, attempting to interpret the musical program behind Schubert's last sonatas. Charles Fisk has suggested that the sonatas portray a protagonist going through successive stages of alienation, banishment, exile, and eventual homecoming (in the A major and B-flat Sonatas), or self-assertion (in the C minor Sonata). Discrete tonalities or tonal strata, appearing in complete musical segregation from one another at the beginning of each sonata, suggest contrasting psychological states, such as reality and dream, home and exile, etc.; these conflicts are further deepened in the ensuing slow movements. Once these contrasts are resolved at the finale, by intensive musical integration and the gradual transition from one tonality to the next, a sense of reconciliation, of acceptance and homecoming, is invoked. Fisk's hypothetical narrative is grounded on the basis of the ample cyclic connections within the sonatas and their unique tonal design, as well as their musical similarities to songs such as Der Wanderer and the Winterreise song cycle; and on biographical evidence concerning Schubert's life, including a story written by Schubert (Mein Traum – My Dream). Fisk suggests that the sonatas convey Schubert's own feelings of loneliness and alienation; by their striving towards musical and tonal integration, the writing of these works offered Schubert a release from his emotional distress, particularly deepened after finishing the composition of the lonely, depressive and hopeless songs of Winterreise, during the preceding year.

It is often suggested that the Last Sonata, in B-flat major, is a farewell work in which Schubert faces his own death (somewhat analogous to the myths surrounding Mozart's Requiem); this is usually ascribed to the relaxed, meditative character which dominates the two opening movements. Death scenes are also associated, somewhat more explicitly, with the more tragic C minor Sonata; Charles Fisk, for example, mentions ghosts and a 'dance of death', in the outer movements. However, when judging from a biographical point of view, the notion that Schubert felt his imminent death at the time of composing the last sonatas is questionable.