Conclusion

Summary

When Schubert wrote to the publisher Schott in 1828, the final year of his life and two years after the publication of the Marche militaire, he indicated that his latest works were evidence of “my strivings after the highest in art.” He was referring to three operas, a mass, and a symphony—large-scale works whose sublime contents matched their ambitious scale. That same year another publisher, Probst, urged him to continue providing potential customers with a supply of “trifles.” It was understood that composers could move between “levels” of seriousness: Beethoven could tell Breitkopf that his marches were “easy and yet not too trivial,” just as Probst could ask Schubert for scores that were wellwritten by his own standards, yet accessible to amateurs. In the right creative hands, a piano duet could be infused with an expressivity that raised it beyond the pedestrian territory to which its title may have consigned it.

There is thus a sense that at the time the Marche militaire appeared, the purpose of certain genres placed them on a path toward an implicit canonicity even as seemingly discrete classifications could be permeated by less grandly sized works through their saving musical qualities. To be sure, a plethora of scores destined for greater prestige had yet to be written during much of the nineteenth century, long before canon and repertory as distinct terms became central to scholarly discourse. Joseph Kerman offered a differentation in 1983: “Repertories are determined by performers, canons by critics.” His useful if limited epithet, which does not take into account crucial actors like publishers and audiences, entered the musicological bloodstream in the decade after German scholars like Carl Dahlhaus considered the term Kanon as a category for musical works.

If nineteenth-century commentators had a sense of what qualified artworks for an as yet unnamed canonic distinction, the roster of candidates who created them was by turns concretized and shifting as the decades unfolded; some composers were always present, others vanished, while still others—Schubert among them—had to wait until after mid-century before they appeared with reliable regularity. Over time, the line up of players changed even if the standards by which they were judged remained in place.