Conference Booklet - Music - National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Harry White (University College Dublin)
Death and the Maiden: Woody Allen and the Late Schubert
Schubert‘s string quartet in G major, D. 887 (1826) is pivotally engaged by Woody Allen in his
film, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) as a semantic code for death, guilt, remorse and crime
itself. Given Schubert‘s own decisive encounters with German romantic poetry through the
agency of his song settings, and given too the long reception history of these settings in the
popular imagination, Allen‘s reading of the late instrumental music represents a significantly
neo-romantic interpretation of Schubert in the dominant art form of our own day. Although this
reading enjoys a number of interesting precedents in neighbouring art forms (including Samuel
Beckett‘s radio play All that Fall [1952]), the context in which it appears in Crimes and
Misdemeanors is an exceptionally arresting one. In particular, this context discloses a strategic
sequence of contrasts between European and American modes of culture in which the rhetoric
of Schubert‘s quartet is strikingly re-configured.
Scott Messing (Alma College)
What Late Style? Schubert’s Marche militaire and the Lure of Reception
The Marche militaire No. 1 was printed in Vienna in 1826, five days before Schubert wrote to two
German publishers offering his latest works to a new market. The date of the march‘s creation is
not certain, but to judge from one firm‘s letter to the composer a month before his death in 1828,
what was still desirable from his pen was ‗anything easily understandable à 4 mains.‘
More than any other instrumental work of Schubert, the march‘s subsequent
efflorescence signals a far greater discontinuity between its endearing and enduring pleasures,
and the transcendent heights and stygian depths that we often accord music attributed to the
twilight of the composer‘s career. A ubiquitous presence after the middle of the 19th century,
the march became stitched into the public consciousness: a work whose tenacity had few rivals
in the popular imagination and was out of all proportion to its content.
Because of the work‘s distinct historical fingerprints, there exists the possibility of
harnessing a reception study onto its slender musical shoulders and of offering a narrative that
illuminates the culture that enshrined its otherwise humble dimensions. For this presentation ,
only a sketch can outline the paths by which the work acquired its place in the repertoire
through a consideration of its many arrangements along with the institutions, performers, and
venues that nurtured them. All contributed to the work‘s dissemination, even as its intrinsic
musical values, so remote from those that typically adhere to a definition of a late style, were
not decisive in securing its stature. Its gestures nevertheless were ones to which Schubert
remained loyal throughout the 1820s.
The omnipresence of the Marche militaire did not slacken despite Adorno‘s novel
contention in 1928 that the world that includes Schubert‘s military marches ‗has as little to do
socially with bourgeois, indeed parochial strumming as it ever has with the naïve affirmation of
existence.‘ Instead, contemporary technologies provided reincarnations of the work that seemed
to realize Adorno‘s dreaded concern a decade later: the twinning of ‗vulgarization and
enchantment.‘