The Unfinished Piano Sonatas of Franz Schubert Javier ... - Ethesis

II The Sonata Year
sonatas for the piano; and the intellectual influence exerted by his wide range of literary
interests, and especially by Johann Mayrhofer.
The reappearance in Schubert’s life of Mayrhofer in the late summer of 1816
has already been mentioned briefly in the previous chapter. But it was during 1817 that
Mayrhofer’s poetry and personality would most notably influence Schubert and his
musico-intellectual development. Some ten years older than Schubert, Mayrhofer might
have represented a father-figure, while also providing an intellectual reference point for
the young composer. A high-minded, melancholy, even gloomy, intellectual, Mayrhofer
embodied in many ways the figure of the tormented and self-isolated poet. His œuvre is
dominated by a constant questioning of the meaning – or meaninglessness – of life,
showing a strong leaning toward the darker sides of existence. In Mayrhofer’s poetic
world, often subtly autobiographical, the mysteries of time and death are frequently
balanced by a deep love of Nature’s purity and its capacity for renewal, as well as by his
belief in life after death in a milde Land (‘gentle land’). 1 Mayrhofer was a poet troubled
by self-hatred, despair and a profound sense of unworthiness: a dunkle Lebensangst
(‘dark anxiety of life’) 2 that often found expression through mythological themes and
allegories. On the other hand, Mayrhofer’s fascination with the classics and especially
with Greek antiquity also proved helpful as a refuge and relief from his living anguish.
For him, Ancient Greece was a world – probably the only one – which kept his ideals
pure and untouched. All of these features are found in Mayrhofer’s poetry, where he
created a world far from that of other ‘lighter’ poets associated with Schubert’s early
years. It must also have been difficult for Schubert to separate Mayrhofer the poet from
Mayrhofer the person, and he seems to have represented a category of his own in
Schubert’s circle of friends.
From 1817 onwards, setting the poems that Mayrhofer provided took Schubert
to new intellectual depths, stimulating his imagination with a more radical approach to
the Lied. This radicalism, with which the composer experimented in some of the 1817
Mayrhofer settings, does not obviously go hand in hand with the instrumental works
composed during the same period. Whereas the songs demonstrate an adventurous and
innovative move forward, the development of Schubert’s command of purely
instrumental music seems to have progressed more slowly. It will be some years before
the composer can integrate his explorations within the Lied into the genre of the piano
sonata.
The sonata was a form which presented the composer with very different
challenges, especially as Schubert’s musical idiom would appear to contradict the
principles of traditional sonata form. His expansive thinking challenges traditional
structures; the soliloquy-like quality of his music runs against the formal pillars of, for
instance, Beethoven’s sonata-form movements; his ability (in the Lied) to suddenly
change the focus of attention puts musical continuity at risk; and his taste for
modulation (especially the juxtaposition of major and minor modes with its
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