Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1, 1999
6/2/15, 2:55 PM
Page 1 of 5
The "Heavenly Length" of Schubert's Music by Scott Burnham - Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1999
6/2/15, 2:55 PM
Here we find, besides the most masterly compositional technique, life in every
fiber; coloring down to the finest gradation; meaning everywhere; sharp
expression in detail; and in the whole a suffusing Romanticism such as other
works of Franz Schubert have already made known to us.
And the heavenly length of the symphony, like that of a thick novel in four
volumes by, say, Jean Paul, another who can never come to an end, and indeed
for the best reason, to give the reader something to chew on afterwards. How this
refreshes, this feeling of rich and ubiquitous abundance, so contrary to one's
experience with others, when one always dreads being let down at the end and is
often sadly disappointed.
Notice in these passages Schumann's emphasis on how we are left after listening
to Schubert. The experience of listening to his music stays with oneit is not a
thin, or a wavering, experience. Plenitude is clearly valued here.
In contrast to Schumanns ebullient praise, however, the more commonly voiced
perception has always been that Schubert's instrumental works are simply too
long, too repetitive. The acknowledged lengthiness of many pieces by Beethoven
is said to be justified by an often monumentalized process of development and
transformationBeethoven needs his great expanses in order to establish and
then complete a momentous global agenda. Schubert's lengthiness enjoys no
such global justification. In fact, it is often considered to be his telling flaw.
Some fifty years after Schumann's review, in 1892, Eduard Hanslick put the case
sharply when he said, "If truth be told, everything about this symphony except its
length may be deemed heavenly." About fifty years after Hanslick, the influential
English critic Donald Francis Tovey helped perpetuate the popular idea that
Schubert could not in fact handle large formsthat he substituted odd
digressions and even mere repetition for the type of consequential and evolving
substance one finds in the compositions of Beethoven and Brahms. For example,
Tovey comments on Schubert's finales: "The enormous sprawling forms of the
typical Schubert finales are the outcome of a sheer irresponsibility that has
involved him in little or no strain, though he often shows invention of the highest
order in their main themes."
Tovey's juxtaposition of thematic invention of the highest order with formal
irresponsibility brings us back to Schumann's famous phrase and, more
particularly, to its afterlife. For in referring to the great length of Schubert's
symphony as heavenly, Schumann begins a long tradition of apologizing for this
perceived flaw: yes, the music is too long, but it is heavenly. The notion of
heavenly length became a way to express the idea of beauty prolonged solely for
its own sake, to acknowledge the goodness of such beauty without fully
condoning the fact that it goes on for so long in Schubert's music. As Stravinsky
once quipped, in a perhaps unconscious trope of Schumann's remark: "So what if
I doze off occasionally when listening to Schubert, as long as I always find
myself in Paradise when I wake up?" (This is an interestingly ambivalent
comment: in effect he say that the puts him to sleep, but it's nice to wake up to.)
Or take Alfred Einstein's fervent declaration that "Schubert lives in the paradise
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ideasv61/burnham.htm
Page 2 of 5
The "Heavenly Length" of Schubert's Music by Scott Burnham - Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1999
6/2/15, 2:55 PM
of pure music making from which Beethoven was driven." This, too, is
ambivalent: though Schubert may be said to live in Paradise, it is Beethoven who
shares and expresses our human burden here below.
German musicologist Robert Werba considers the trope of heavenly length as
part of the quaint bric-a-brac of a now outmoded image of Schubert and his
world, an image that Werba captures in his phrase "die wienerische
Musizierseligkeit" (the blessed state of making and hearing music in Vienna).
Schubert is viewed as an innocent, blessedly plying his oar in the golden flow of
Viennese melody. Who could blame him for not knowing when to stop?
Outmoded it may be, but this image of Schubert dies hard: what has been cast off
in his biography is often sustained in treatments of his music. It is admittedly
hard to ignore those gemtlich elements in his music that so charm us, and it is
fun to think of them as distinctly Viennese. Even exceedingly sophisticated and
up-to-date analyses of Schubert's music still cling to the idea of Schubert's
lyricism as heavenly. Amid an ingeniously detailed analysis of Schubert's late
instrumental music, for example, Peter Glke points to the chaotic and disruptive
outbursts that often occur in the middle of movements such as the Adagio of the
String Quintet, and he observes that Schubert thus pays dearly for his "lyrical
paradise." Beauty is here figured as a kind of heavenly state that cannot be
sustained without a price. Or is it that beauty should not be sustained? For Glke
goes on to maintain that the presence of these same "disruptive forces" actually
protects Schubert from the suspicion of overindulging in sensuous beauty: in
other words, by including this often harrowing music, Schubert gets away with
something we basically disapprove of, something indulgent, dissipated, weak.
This attitude in turn motivates a ready response from the other side of the same
playing field, namely, why should we disapprove of Schubert luxuriating in
beauty? What puts both these views on the same field is that they both represent
Schubert's lyric beauty as luxuriating, paradisiacal; both sides allow the polarity
of beauty versus control, indulgence versus progress, leisure versus work, to
define their experience of the music.
In spite of the longstanding attraction of such views, I would submit that
Schubert's music is not about relaxed beauty, spun out at great length simply
because there is less teleological impulse, less closural gravity than in music like
Beethoven's. Schubert is not Beethoven on sabbatical, with a license to linger;
this is not some languishing diffusion or even a sublimely indifferent, Olympian
stasis. Instead, Schubert explores effects and worlds unknown to a Beethoven
his music puts into play a different physics. Thus, Schubert's pieces are not just
longer, they work differently. They constitute a different order of musical being.
If the lengthiness of Schubert's instrumental music cannot be justified in the way
that it can in Beethoven's musicwhere length seems necessary for the
completion of an imposing processhow can it be? One could argue that, in
Schubert, the great length is just there. In fact, it is more than just there
Schubert seems to want to make an issue of length; he seems to be telling us
something by the way he makes us always aware of the sheer length of his
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ideasv61/burnham.htm
Page 3 of 5
The "Heavenly Length" of Schubert's Music by Scott Burnham - Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1999
6/2/15, 2:55 PM
music. Before we can speculate on what his message for us may be, we need to
ask just how he in fact marks his music as being long.
Page 4 of 5
The "Heavenly Length" of Schubert's Music by Scott Burnham - Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1999
6/2/15, 2:55 PM
shape, project a sense of lengthiness. Charles Rosen has discussed how the
motivic content of Schubert's themes often explores a space around a center. This
is a way of breaking down motivic energyhis motives grope out into the
surrounding space; they do not build up potential energy and replicate
themselves implacably throughout the piece (as happens, for example, in
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony) The result is a slower sense of temporal unfolding.
In short, whereas a Beethoven can make us forget how long some of his music is,
Schubert seems to want to remind us at every turn. He gives us time to take in
his themes, as if they were works of visual art we could inspect at our leisure, or
landscapes through which we could wander.
(More, to Part 2 of 2)
Ideas
American Characters | Poe's Raven | Schubert's Music | Icon or Altarpiece? | Moral Knowledge in the
Modern University | Contemporary Czech & Slovak Poster Design | Director's Desk
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ideasv61/burnham.htm
Page 5 of 5