A genius and a rebel, Franklin was, in his own words, “a Leader among the Boys, and sometimes led them into Scrapes”—captaining ships or canoes, and once, stealing the stones workers had gathered to build a home so that he could build his own wharf. This was “an early projecting public Spirit, tho’ not then justly conducted.” He longed to run off to sea, like his brother, and engage in adventures—the subject of his first poems. These adventures, like those of John Bunyan, he discovered through reading, and he spent all of his money on books.

Franklin's singularity led him to reject others’ opinions; his vanity gave him great ambition and thought for his place in the world. Both traits led to his love of disputation. Franklin's father's books of theological dispute, particularly the Boyle Lectures, directed Franklin in his “disputacious Turn.” He writes of himself and his “intimate” friend John Collins: “Very fond we were of argument, and very desirous of confuting one another.” After losing a quarrel with Collins about whether women should be educated, Franklin turned to the art of rhetoric. Franklin claims that the cause was unimportant to him at the time but that he was outmatched by Collins's rhetoric, which, he writes, served the “Advantage of [his] Antagonist.” His pious father advised him to write down his arguments in order to perfect his rhetoric, which initially serviced Franklin's vanity rather than the pursuit of truth. He meticulously imitated the Spectator, which he read “over and over,” to improve his writing, and he built a “Stock of Words” as an arsenal for verbal assaults and recriminations. He worked hard at learning new vocabulary, synonyms, and combinations of them, turning tales into verse in order to practice finding rhyming synonyms—then turning the verses back to prose. Foreshadowing his method for achieving moral perfection, Franklin initiated his own “Method” to correct his faults and make himself a “Master” of words, so that he might be a master in the “Arrangement of Thoughts.” Going beyond the petty world of Collins, Franklin became “extreamly ambitious” to become a great writer—and thinker.

Recent scholarship has strengthened Franklin's reputation as a principled Whig or “early modern liberal” by showing that he was from his youth a thorough American, a thoughtful republican, and an advocate for selfgovernance. Lemay, for example, directs readers to consider Franklin the political idealist, who risked his standing to support controversial candidates or causes. Franklin appealed to natural law and natural rights in his disputes in the 1730s, as in his 1749 Proposals, which teaches students “the first Principles of sound Politicks.” Franklin quotes the “great Mr. Locke,” who recommends students study Grotius and Pufendorf, “wherein he will be instructed in the natural Rights of Men, and the Original and [sic] Foundations of Society, and the Duties resulting from thence.” As a politician, Franklin appealed to natural rights as penman for the Pennsylvania Assembly, colonial advocate in Britain, and most famously, in the “self-evident” truths in the Declaration. But on this question of Franklin's principles, most scholars claim—often connected to a treatment of Franklin's philosophy—that Franklin rejected natural rights.

The confusion over Franklin's political principles stems from a lack of clarity about the meaning of natural right. Franklin took the same positions as Locke, who posited an a priori ground for an original social contract, and yet in the Essay (“Esteemed,” wrote Franklin, “the best Book of Logick in the World”) argued for ascending degrees of probability. Natural right, in one sense, refers to living the good life, or the life in accord with the natural order of man as a rational being, as distinguished from convention. Wisdom is the activity of this well-ordered soul. Franklin is certainly a philosopher of natural right in this sense. However, as he writes in 1735, while a love of truth may unite friends, it could never be a political teaching. Yet the positing of a human nature is also the basis for a political teaching of natural law, an appeal to nature an as authority, including a body of rights and duties that serves as a standard for positive law.

Natural rights in this second sense are a series of moral maxims, to which Franklin appealed in his disputes with the proprietors and the revolt from Britain.

Franklin's supposed deism was actually philosophical necessitarianism, which led him to relativism. He saw reason as antagonistic to all religious sentiment (a “Want of Religion”), not only to revealed religion. Desiring to hide this atheism from his readers, he presented himself more palatably as a deist, with the suggestive adjective “thorough.” Lemay writes, “Deism was a comparatively acceptable belief until the end of the eighteenth century, whereas the satire and materialism embodied in the Dissertation were shocking.” Franklin, however, in one of the most intriguing remarks in the Autobiography, claims that he abandoned necessitarianism: “I began to suspect that this Doctrine tho’ it might be true, was not very useful.” With this ambiguous statement, he relates his change of mind, in which he rejected Mandeville's teaching. This change is marked first by an inquiry into the social nature of man, recorded in his journal on his return voyage from London, and second by a serious examination of the chief ends of human language, which revealed what Franklin called the insinuating error of the Dissertation. The Dissertation and its necessitarian argument, he concluded, was itself an a priori argument that had infected his reasoning. He thus rejected its deterministic conclusions as the requisite foundation for his moral philosophy.

“Journal of a Voyage” (1726)

In London, Franklin had squandered his money. Rather than continue there or travel throughout Europe, in July 1726 he accepted an offer by Quaker merchant Thomas Denham to pay his fare back to Philadelphia. The notes of his “Journal of a Voyage” show a change from the thesis of the Dissertation. In these pages, Franklin clearly viewed his prior behavior as problematic. He decided that virtue was necessary after all, both in human relations and for individual happiness. Considering the first, he concluded that none could embrace a vicious way of life and maintain a good reputation. Considering the second, he questioned his proud opinion that he was self-sufficient.

Franklin's trip across the Atlantic was painfully slow; the ship did not reach Philadelphia until October 9—some three months. In preparation for the voyage, it stopped at several ports, where he and the crew observed castles and graveyards.

Since its founding in 1949, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has been a major force in shaping America's understanding of mental illness, ushering the shift back toward a biological perspective. This move was not simply the logical outcome of scientific progress, but rather an admission of failure to meet the nation's growing mental health problems and a hope for salvation through reductionism. To facilitate this shift, NIMH modeled, underwrote, and broadcast the new biological revolution in psychiatry. Fulfilling its mission to disseminate mental health information, starting in the 1950s NIMH disseminated press releases, radio spots, television programs, and most recently websites and podcasts to broadcast the message that mental illnesses are fundamentally physical ailments whose cure depends on scientific medicine. The messages NIMH conveyed about how mental illness should be approached had a dramatic disciplinary de facto effect; such messages helped steer psychiatry away from psychosocial and psychodynamic explanations and toward a neurological picture of the mind and mental disturbances.

At the outset, it is prudent to bear in mind Daniel Breslau's cautionary words: “The dramatic reversal of the relationship between the declining psychodynamic orientation and the ascendant biological and nosological approach is inexplicable with reference only to the rhetoric of science.” Although this claim is undoubtedly true, it is the argument of this chapter that rhetorical strategies nevertheless did significantly help advance the cause of biological psychiatry. Ostensibly just reporting the latest research, NIMH's messages increasingly suggested that brain science will solve the problem of mental illness.

Second Movements

There is surprising variety in the formal schemes employed by Schubert in his second movements. Of the dozen or so I have examined in some detail, I note four distinct types, though the last two I will mention are clearly related. The first formal type is often referred to as sonatina form, a sonata form without a development section, in other words, a statement of ideas followed by a restatement. The three that fall into this category were written toward the beginning of Schubert's “mature” period: the second movements of the “Trout” Quintet, the Octet in F Major, and the Symphony in B Minor. The first of these is a prime example of Schubert's occasionally employed scheme of transposing the key relationships of the statement or exposition in the restatement or recapitulation such that it ends rather than begins on the tonic. This movement was mentioned briefly in chapter 4 in the section on “transposition schemes” (type 3). Like the second movement of the “Trout” Quintet, the second movement of the Octet presents three ideas. However, here the restatement begins in the tonic, which leads to IV, then V (via ♭VII) to I. This leads us to the second movement of the “Unfinished” Symphony, where the motion to IV in the restatement is the goal of a long-range progression by descending thirds, where IV is introduced by I (= V of IV): I–vi–IV–V–I. This movement was also mentioned in chapter 4, in this case under the section titled “a unifying progression” (type 5). The second type, variations, appears in three of the movements I have examined, the second movements of the Quartets in A Minor and D Minor, and the A-Minor Piano Sonata, D. 845. The third type, ternary form, is what I naturally associate with second movements. Four examples are the second movements of the Piano Trio in B-flat Major, the Piano Sonatas in A and B-flat Major, and the String Quintet. I will single out the slow movement of the B-flat Major Sonata for examination below. The final type is what I call extended or compound ternary: A B Aʹ Bʹ Aʺ.

DURING the French Revolution, or at least in the eventful five years between the fall of the Bastille and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, there were no operatic querelles. The slight bathos of that statement points toward the idea that there were more pressing and interesting subjects for action and debate than the respective merits of different styles of opera – and this was certainly the case for some. Nonetheless, the notion that Frenchmen sternly put aside their frivolous aesthetic concerns after 1789 does not quite cover the facts. While previous querelles had occurred at a concurrence of an excitable political atmosphere and an artistic challenge that demanded a response, the turbulence of the Revolution came at a time of relative repose in the development of opera: the ‘revolutions’ effected by Gluck and others fifteen years earlier had thoroughly bedded in, and the political and cultural cycles were not precisely in alignment. At the same time, the rather self-conscious sense of regeneration after 1789 encouraged some to look back with a critical eye at the operatic querelles of preceding decades.

This chapter intends to look at ways in which the absence of querelles was rationalised during the Revolutionary years. Before that, it is necessary to ask briefly what might or might not have changed in the structure and mechanisms of French operatic life after 1789. The Académie Royale de Musique remained so called until the summer of 1791, and this continuity symbolised the way that it avoided rapid or violent repurposing as some sort of Revolutionary institution. There were those who condemned opera as an inappropriately elitist, expensive or trivial spectacle, but so there had been before the Revolution, too; what was noticeable, from the occupation of the theatres by the Paris crowd on 12 July 1789, up to the decision of the Terror-era government in 1794 to grant a subsidy to the Opéra, was a willingness of the Revolutionary authorities to take over and work with the established structures of national culture, rather than attempting to create their own.

WHY was it, asked François-Benoît Hoffman in 1821 in the pages of the Journal des Débats, that the French argued about music at such length and with such ferocity? The Italians certainly quarrelled about the merits of individual musicians, but were of one accord about what constituted good music; the Germans, essentially reasonable people, were content with a marriage of Italian vocal melody and their own notions of harmony. But the French could not allow any aspect of opera to go undisputed: not only was there no generally accepted national school of thought about music, but some commentators seemed positively to revel in turning against their own and stirring up dissent. ‘Do you wish to pass for a fine connoisseur? Pitilessly vilify all French composers, and treat everyone who applauds them as asses.’ In a way, Hoffman conceded, this was a function of the unparalleled sophistication of French intellectual life, but if the result was constant strife, it was a poor measure of superiority.

Hoffman thought he had an explanation for why this happened. There was really hardly any substance to these disputes, he argued; they were not even disputes about words, which in a highly literary culture had the potential to gain real momentum. Instead, they surely resulted from the fact that every musician was differently gifted. Some were particularly adept at melody, others at the more savant technicalities of harmony; very few married all the various aspects of musical creation in equal measure. Given the competitive nature of their trade, they tended therefore to transform these accidents of nature into aesthetic principles and to encourage their supporters to rally round. There were no differences of principle at stake, since the most mélodiste composer acknowledged the central importance of harmony, and no harmoniste argued against the existence of melody. ‘If you ask any of them individually what qualities constitute a masterpiece, they will all tell you that correct expression of the words, beautiful melody and beautiful harmony make up a perfect work.’ Rather, it was all a question of self-esteem and professional jealousy.

My interest in the music of Franz Schubert and others dates back to my youth when I would play my parents’ records—the old 78s—over and over. There were only a few recordings: Mozart's Symphony no. 40, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and Schubert's “Unfinished” Symphony (which perhaps explains my fondness for the minor mode!), plus short works by Wagner, Khachaturian, and Shostakovich. That was my musical universe, except for the radio, until my seventh-grade year, when I was fortunate to be enrolled in a music appreciation course. Now skip ahead to the 1980s, when I had a term leave from my teaching duties at the Eastman School of Music. This is when I began to study in depth works by Schubert, particularly the late chamber music. The results of this work over the years are the articles listed under my name in the bibliography. This project draws on this material, while adding much that is new, and presents it in a different way.

There has been quite a swell of interest in Schubert's music in recent years, resulting in several books and articles that are listed in the bibliography. Some of these works—here I am thinking of Suzannah Clark's Analyzing Schubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Susan Wollenberg's Schubert's Fingerprints: Studies in the Instrumental Works (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011)—are written from a very different perspective than mine. The primary value of Clark's book, at least from my perspective, is her survey and critique of the biographical and theoretical literature about Schubert and his music from his time to the present. She draws on numerous contemporary sources in her observations, but she does so without presenting a coherent concept of the music. Wollenberg's book, on the other hand, focuses more on the music and offers numerous musical examples. Its value—again, from my perspective—lies in the observations the author makes about the characteristics of Schubert's style (e.g., modal mixture, portrayal of violence, construction of themes, etc.). The work that is closest to mine is David Damschroder's Harmony in Schubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Like this work, Damschroder's is divided into two parts, the first outlining the author's approach and the second presenting a series of analyses. However, there are significant differences.

Introduction

In his paper “The Mental Hospital and the Zoological Garden” (1965), the psychiatrist and historian Henry E. Ellenberger drew a provocative parallel between the histories of these two institutions. He pointed out a chronological synchronicity in the emergence of the appearance of a recognizable modern version of the asylum and the zoo: both were products of the era of the French Revolution and its aftermath. There was even a certain overlap in the personnel who oversaw these developments. Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), best known as an alienist famed for striking off the chains of the inmates at Bicêtre, was a member of the commission that in 1792 drew up a blueprint for a new Menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

Ellenberger, moreover, discerned a certain structural homology between the asylum and the zoo. One shared feature was a category that Ellenberger designates “Authorities.” In the case of the asylum, these Authorities were the alienists who provided medical direction of the establishment. In the Paris Menagerie, the zoologist possessed a comparable status. Corresponding to the asylum patients were the animals housed in the Menagerie. Both may be seen as subject to—perhaps even constituted by—the gaze of the presiding Authority. The asylum and menagerie also shared a third, often overlooked yet significant, category: the lay staff who were responsible for the daily running of these institutions. The care and control of asylum patients was largely delegated to attendants drawn from a variety of backgrounds but with little or any in the way of specialist training. Still less is known about the keepers who performed a similar indispensable role in the menagerie, seeing to the daily needs of the animals.

Ellenberger also parenthetically notes that in respect of the role of the public there is, however, a divergence. While the public was largely excluded from the nineteenth-century asylum—in contrast to the voyeurism of earlier epochs—part of the rationale for the reformed post-revolutionary Menagerie was that it should be open to the citizenry. Such a populist ethos was in explicit contrast to the elitism of the old royal menagerie at Versailles.

IN 1734 Jean de Serré de Rieux published an updated edition of his poem La Musique, twenty years after its first appearance. The new version contained numerous textual amendments, all serving to make the pacific message of the work even more obvious: some criticisms of both the French and the Italian schools were smoothed over, and passages emphasising international concord and cooperation were interpolated. Even more than in 1714, the result was a poem that told the story of music in terms of harmonious cohabitation, in which everyone had had something to contribute, and which would go forward toward fresh glories if people could only set aside their rivalries. It is not known what prompted Serré de Rieux to rework La Musique at this point, but the timing was apt. In the previous year the first production of an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau had reconfigured and intensified the debate over the course of music.

The premiere of Hippolyte et Aricie in October 1733, produced when Rameau was fifty and after he had acquired a reputation as a church musician, as a composer of chamber and instrumental music and, most prominently, as a theorist of music, has generated its own mythology. His enemies had long worked to prevent him climbing onto the dramatic stage, wrote Hugues Maret in the eulogy he delivered to the Dijon Academy in 1765, the year after Rameau's death: ‘they combined and conspired to make him fall off it with infamy’. On the first night of Hippolyte et Aricie, ‘the curtain had barely risen, when a dull noise began to form in the parterre, which, growing little by little, announced to Rameau a failure of the most unequivocal nature’. Even those who were more positively inclined to the music, Maret continued, were so stupefied by it that they kept silent. This notion of a sudden, startling assault on the sensibilities of the Parisian audience is generally followed in more recent accounts: Graham Sadler, a leading modern scholar of Rameau, wrote that Hippolyte et Aricie ‘burst upon an unsuspecting public’. It should be emphasised, however, that there was no great evidence in purely contemporary sources in 1733 of unusual levels of emotion, or even particularly attention, being generated by the premiere (although there was some, as we shall see).

This entire book has been about the characteristics of Schubert's mature instrumental style, presented either directly, as in the opening chapters, or indirectly, through a series of analyses. Some of these characteristics appear only in his late works, while others are found, to a lesser extent, in his earlier works, as well. I will summarize my observations briefly in the following paragraphs, beginning with his treatment of form.

It seems that one area that occupied Schubert throughout his career was striving to find solutions to formal/tonal organization, particularly in relation to sonata form. We can see this in some of his earlier works, like the Symphony no. 2 in B-flat Major, D. 125 (1815). The exposition from the first movement of this work has the unusual formal/tonal scheme of theme 1 (B♭)–theme 2 (E♭)–theme 1 repeated (F); the recapitulation answers with theme 1 (E♭)– theme 2 (B♭)–theme 1 (B♭). Later this type of construction would manifest itself in the three-theme/three key exposition in the first movements of such works as the Piano Trio in E-flat Major, the Piano Sonata in B-flat Major and the String Quintet in C Major. As important as this innovation may be, Schubert's most radical and pervasive innovation in this area is the idea of transposing the key relationships from the exposition into the recapitulation to end, rather than begin, on the tonic. This led to some extreme examples, like the second movement of the “Trout” Quintet, but more frequently appeared in movements where the key scheme of I to V from the exposition was answered by IV to I in the recapitulation (the “subdominant recapitulation”), as in the first movements of the Symphony no. 5 (1816) and the “Trout” Quintet (1819). What I find particularly fascinating is that Schubert seems to have combined this procedure with the traditional practice of beginning the recapitulation in the tonic key in some of his late works, like the first movements of the Octet, the String Quintet and the Quartet in G Major. In all these movements, the recapitulation begins on the tonic, but this tonic is soon transformed into V of the subdominant, from which point the remainder of the recapitulation proceeds in large part as a transposition of the exposition.