Foreword

Summary

I first encountered Franz Schubert when I was five. An easy, bare-bones piano solo transcription of the song ‘Ständchen’ rested against the music desk of our old Köhler upright piano in the living room. My mother, intent on teaching it to me by rote, played it slowly and only a few notes at a time. I stopped her after many bars of this process and asked why the music was so sad. She paused and answered cryptically: ‘Schubert died of a broken heart.’ Whether she knew the truth of Schubert's tragic end or not, her words hung in the air merged with the sounds that issued forth from that old, out-of-tune upright, and unknowingly she cemented a notion that the music's sadness was connected to something beyond the notes.

My mother's response, even if only poetically true, aligns well with hermeneutic readings that link Schubert's awareness of his own mortality to depictions of death in his music. Not surprisingly, I gravitated towards these narratives as a performer and as a teacher, finding in them satisfying entry points for engaging with Schubert's music.

Joe Davies's seminal book, The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert, turns away from biographical considerations to a cross-disciplinary, multisensory exploration of death and the gothic at the intersection of music, literature, and the visual arts. Davies's breadth of erudition and depth of insight is striking for its balance of analytical/critical commentary that is grounded in musical engagement while still being accessible to a wide audience. In a book for scholars, performers, and readers outside the discipline of music, Davies guides us on a revelatory journey through a lesser-known village in Schubert country and opens new vistas for Schubert analysis, interpretation, and performance.

Public fascination with the gothic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sets the stage for Schubert's preoccupation with death, the macabre, and the strange. Davies observes that these gothic tropes, appearing as early as Schubert's 1810 Schauerballaden, extend throughout his oeuvre to the later instrumental and piano works of his final years. Through case studies, Davies identifies a non-linear ‘constellation of ideas’ that intermingle, fragment, loop, and metamorphose in sonic estuaries of gothic Romanticism, the sublime, and the grotesque.