Historical critiques of Schubert’s methods of development hold that he substitutes ‘genuine’ development with sequences of variation, blurring the boundary between musical progression (development via fragmentation) and additive expansion (repetition via sequence and variation; Adorno 1928, Salzer 1928). Recent appraisals of Schubert’s expansive developmental strategies suggest, alternatively, that the distinction between the two techniques is not as unambiguous as might be assumed (Burstein 1997, Hyland 2013, Martinkus 2018), and have begun to problematise this binary opposition. Building thereon, this chapter brings the continuity drafts and autograph scores for the Piano Sonatas D958, D959 and D960 into focus by paying particular attention to the changes made by Schubert in the final versions, which employ variation or varied repetition as part of an ongoing developmental process. It assesses the impact on formal function and syntax caused by the introduction of varied repeats at different levels of structure, from the individual bar to the full phrase, underlining the resulting amalgamation of sonata (discursive) and variation (recursive) techniques that these works articulate (Ivanovitch 2010). Ultimately, through close examination of Schubert’s compositional revisions, this chapter presents a fuller understanding of what constitutes development in a Schubertian context and the vital role of variation therein.

More than half of Schubert’s chamber works from 1824 to 1828 feature his preferred instrument, the piano. Yet in none of them does it function as an instrumental accompaniment, being instead an equal participant in a duo or trio chamber format. Especially in solo chamber works written for performance in recitals by befriended virtuoso instrumentalists, Schubert was perfectly willing to adapt the style brillant that flourished between 1820 and 1830. Based on the assumption that Schubert applied the style brillant solely for reasons of economy, his virtuoso chamber music has previously been considered to be of lesser value, mentioned only in passing. More recently, however, his turn to extroverted forms of expression has been described as a deliberate counterfoil to the introverted sublimation of his other ‘late’ works. This chapter considers the Fantasy in C Major (D934) and Variations in E Minor on ‘Trockne Blumen’ (D802) to show how Schubert discovered the sophisticated and outgoing mannerisms of the style brillant; it also discusses the development of ornamented variation techniques as an alternative to thematic development, and how this shift of emphasis between musical substance and figuration seems to anticipate the aesthetics of the Romantic arabesque.

There can be little doubt that the piano was one of Schubert’s instruments of choice, featuring not only in an array of solo pieces but also in chamber music and as an accompaniment to Lieder. Given the popularity of the instrument in Vienna during the early nineteenth century, this is perhaps not surprising. However, very little is known about Schubert’s own instruments, or which specific makers and models he preferred throughout his career. The instruments themselves underwent substantial change during Schubert’s lifetime, with preference moving away from the delicate touch and tone of late eighteenth-century models to the larger compass and more weighty tonal qualities of the instruments of the 1820s and 1830s, in part as a reaction to the demands of composers. By considering Schubert’s connection to specific instrument makers, the unique qualities of Viennese instruments and individual works for pianoforte by Schubert, this paper revisits what is known about the instruments he may have preferred, while also making observations about the connections between his keyboard music and the instruments that were available in early nineteenth-century Vienna.

Franz Schubert’s waltzes may seem small, but they bear more than meets the eye. Leopold von Sonnleithner tells us that Schubert ‘never danced, but was always ready to sit down at the piano, where for hours he improvised the most beautiful waltzes; those he liked he repeated, in order to remember them and to write them out afterwards’. The composer appears to have been inspired by the motion and joy he saw and caused, for certain waltzes communicate physical momentum and personalised interiority – reflections and echoes from the past.The effects expressed within Schubert’s waltzes arise from expectations elicited by their voice-leading, coupled with changes in texture, register, dynamics, metre and rhythm. This chapter will explore representative examples from Schubert’s Originaltänze, Valses sentimentales, Valses nobles, and the Zwanzig Walzer (Letzte Walzer) to demonstrate how they convey impressions of physicality and flow, perceptions of distance and disturbance, plus aspects of sonority and spatiality. In turn, these reflections and echoes offer insights regarding Schubert’s art and aesthetics, as well as the past they inhabited.

The word ‘Klavier’ occurs only twice in the texts of Schubert’s lieder, but both times in a prominent position – namely, in the titles of Christian Daniel Friedrich Schubart’s ‘An mein Klavier’ and Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Laura am Klavier’, both set to music in 1816 (respectively D342 and D388). The first poem deals with two figures – the narrative persona and his piano; the second with three – Laura, the piano and the narrative persona. In Schubart, the emphasis falls on the piano’s expressive potential; in Schiller, mainly on the impression it imparts. The two poems thus present the instrument in quite different, even antithetical, guises: introverted versus extroverted. Although Schubert turned to poems that were already a generation old (they were first published in 1785 and 1782, respectively) and had a different sound in mind compared to the two poets (this was an age of rapid evolution in keyboard instrument construction), the instrumental aesthetic displayed in Schubart’s and Schiller’s poems still applied with undiminished force in 1816. The antitheses marked by the poems Schubert chose with respect to the Klavier reveal the breadth of notions associated with the instruments that went by that name around 1800.

In spring 1838, Franz Liszt made his first appearances before the Viennese public with a selection of his transcriptions of Schubert’s Lieder for pianoforte. The performances unleashed veritable storms of applause from audiences and critics alike; some of the rapturous reviews even claimed that the music of Schubert, who had died ten years earlier, only became intelligible through Liszt’s playing. Liszt’s transcriptions were meant to transfer Schubert’s piano writing effectively to the new generation of concert grands. Their formidable virtuosity, which was frequently criticised in later years, was only superficially an end in itself, however. Instead, Liszt viewed virtuosity as a vehicle for obtaining the maximum expression appropriate to the original and for capturing the emotive quality of Schubert’s music. His precepts as an editor of Schubert’s piano music were of a different nature. Unlike contemporary editions, the Schubert volumes that Liszt prepared for the Stuttgart publishing house Cotta around 1870 are exemplary in quality and indicate every editorial intervention, while also being devoid of the arbitrary additions common to the subjectively tinged performance tradition of his generation. This chapter provides a thorough study of Liszt’s approach to Schubert’s music, while also considering the reception of his adaptations and editions.

In contrast to many contemporary composers, Franz Schubert was neither a virtuoso at the piano nor on any other instrument. His relationship to the piano appears rather pragmatic, in that he turned to the instrument when he was in demand: as a song accompanist and for dance music at Schubertiaden, as a four-handed partner or as a page-turner at larger events. He certainly did not see himself as a pianist, but first and foremost as a ‘composer’.This chapter explores Schubert’s public and semi-public appearances as a pianist by evaluating the contradictory statements about the quality and the quantity of his piano playing. It is concerned with his musical education, explores his piano playing in his later years and highlights his public appearance as a pianist. The comparison of Schubert’s biography with those of Viennese piano virtuosos and other composers sheds new light on the rapid development of the musical tastes of the Viennese bourgeois society in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Finally, the question of whether and to what extent the fact that Schubert was not present in the public concert life of his time diminished his career as a composer of ‘great’ works is discussed.

From 1810 to 1830, Viennese piano construction evolved in an attempt to combine the special sonority of Viennese instruments with new advances in technology. One important factor was the possibility of varying the sound between full and reduced or dampened action. A particularly striking change of sound could be produced by the soft or una corda pedal, which shifted the hammer rail so that the hammers struck only one rather than the standard three strings of a triple-strung piano. Although detailed knowledge of which composers wrote which works for which instrument is lacking, hypotheses can be advanced regarding the influence of the action of certain instruments on compositional style. A comparison of works by two composers from different generations – one earlier (Beethoven) and another later (Mendelssohn, who had a predilection for Viennese instruments in his youth) – sheds light on several peculiarities of Schubert’s piano music. Beethoven’s late works and Schubert’s works of the 1820s both exploit this potential in order to coordinate sonority and structure. However, the two composers differ in one key respect: Beethoven tended to use the sonic contrasts he exploited (and meticulously notated) to articulate the work’s architecture, whereas Schubert used them to refine atmosphere and mood.

This chapter traces the sound of the Gothic across Schubert’s piano music. Its features are suggested through funereal imagery, doubles and distortions, yet their tangibility slips out of reach as soon as words come into the picture. The analysis confronts this paradox in pieces ranging from Schubert’s Grande marche funèbre in C Minor, D859, to his Fantasy in F Minor, D940, both for piano four hands, without reducing their depictions of death to a singular conception. It interprets these pieces vis-à-vis Gothic tropes in literature and the virtual arts, among them ghostliness and ambivalence, while allowing meanings to emerge in the gaps between presence and absence, sound and silence. In doing so, the chapter not only reassesses the associations of death in Schubert’s music, but offers ways of contextualising his artistic approach more generally. The Gothic is conjured, problematised, reimagined, yet in the end left to percolate within and beyond the nineteenth-century artistic imagination.

In the early 1820s, music critics called attention to an innovative feature of certain Schubert Lieder: musical imagery in the piano accompaniment that both unifies the song and creates dramatic immediacy. Writers hailed this aspect of ‘Erlkönig’ (Op. 1) and ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ (Op. 2) in particular. The two songs’ main musical motifs – racing triplet rhythms evoking a galloping horse and a whirling sixteenth-note pattern evoking a spinning wheel – do more than provide unity and vivify the represented scene, however; they also powerfully contribute to the expression of changing emotions. The outer and inner worlds of the song persona(e) converge in, and are projected through, the piano accompaniment. This chapter examines the nature of musical imagery in Schubert Lieder, different ways that the musical motifs evolve, and the interpretive significance of those changes. The motif might be placed in new contexts, altered from within, fragmented, interrupted, or sounded with greater or lesser frequency, to the point of disappearing. Paradoxically, it might even evolve in meaning by resisting change. Songs analysed include ‘Erlkönig’, ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, ‘Meeres Stille’, ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’, ‘Jägers Abendlied’, ‘Halt!’, ‘Gefrorne Tränen’, ‘Letzte Hoffnung’, ‘Im Dorfe’, ‘Der Wegweiser’ and ‘Die Stadt’.

Analysis of addressee and writer–recipient relationships is a common methodology for the interpretation of written correspondence of ‘great’ composers. By contrast, when a musical text is the object of study, music philologists and performers alike tend to neglect such a contextual perspective when attempting to reveal its meaning – as if composers had no particular audience in mind when they wrote their piano music. This chapter attempts a characterisation of Schubert’s pianistic audience in Vienna as reflected in contemporary Viennese pianoforte treatises. The first part presents evidence to support such a geographically focused source selection – the distinctly nationalist stance of the Viennese pianoforte scene in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna. The second part compiles a brief genre history of the Viennese pianoforte treatise – both produced in Vienna and imported from abroad – during Schubert’s lifetime. The third part deduces several common principles from this fascinating corpus of sources and reads selected passages from Schubert’s works through this lens, exemplifying how some of the traditional ‘problems’ can be resolved in the context of early nineteenth-century Viennese pianism.

Schubert was fond of writing four-hand music to be played by two pianists sitting on the same piano bench. His thirty-four compositions in this medium range from the earliest extant composition in his hand (a Fantasy penned in 1810) to his Rondo in A Major finished in the summer of 1828. No composer ever approached the piano duet with the seriousness Schubert did, and his corpus of four-hand pieces stands as the apex of the genre. The four-hand configuration seemed ideally suited to his temperament, as it was a congenial form of music-making that was emblematic in Biedermeier culture as an activity of friendship and sociability. It is thus not surprising that these works were a staple in his Schubertiads and ranked among his most successful publications during his lifetime. But the four-handed configuration was also a critical medium for the transmission and reception of much of his orchestral and chamber music. The many piano transcriptions of Schubert’s instrumental music arranged for four-hands issued by publishers over the course of the nineteenth century allowed any two decently practised amateur pianists a chance to get to know his music by reproducing it in the domestic space of the bourgeois parlour.

Schubert’s piano music and songs contain several examples where triplets are notated alongside dotted rhythms. Editors, writers and performers disagree about the performance of these rhythms, which exist in keyboard music from at least the late Baroque to the early twentieth century. This chapter surveys evidence from the long nineteenth century, drawing on previous literature and introducing new lines of enquiry. It situates the problem as it applies to Schubert within a broader view of the meaning of notation through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggesting that many aspects of rhythmic notation remained unfixed during the period.A broader range of evidence than previously considered is documented, including contradictory passages from performance tutors and other literature, anomalous notation in the music of several composers, different versions of Schubert’s works and rhythmic alignment in a range of sources. A study of engraving practice offers insight into the rhythmic presentation of published sources. Finally, early recordings demonstrate that rhythmic performance continued to be controversial into the twentieth century.Because of the scant and sometimes contradictory nature of the evidence, it is not possible to arrive at definitive solutions to the performance problems. Nevertheless, this chapter draws some distinctive conclusions from the sources.

This chapter gives a practical guide to the creative process through step-by-step description of the composition of a short piano miniature, from initial idea to final score.

This chapter demarcates two eras of piano composition – pre-Debussy and post-Debussy – by taking as its focal point a comment made by the pianist Marguerite Long that since Debussy no one has heard or played the piano in the same way as it was played before. As crude as these delineations are, the goal is to emphasise the truly transformative nature of his approach to thinking about the piano in its entirety – as a technological machine, a source of unlimited and variegated sonority, and a catalyst for freeing the human imagination. While taking into consideration the pianistic tradition that Debussy was born into and the one that he was propelled towards – spurred on by the innovations of his contemporaries at the piano, including Gabriel Fauré, Emmanuel Chabrier, and Maurice Ravel – this chapter highlights Debussy’s uniquely refined sense of how the piano might be made to sound anew. By the turn of the twentieth century he was beginning to establish his status as a trailblazer at the keyboard. It would be up to his immediate successors, particularly the French composers Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, to extend the expressive potential of his engagement with the sensual, dramatic, and formal potentials of sound into a dimension that exploited aspects of acoustics and resonance.

Amy Beach was a prolific composer for the piano and an accomplished concert pianist. This chapter explores her works for solo piano, encompassing her lifespan: from those composed as a young child to her Improvisations, op. 148, written in her late sixties. Beach wrote fluidly for the piano, with her intimate knowledge of the instrument coupled with her secure compositional skills culminating in a fantastic repertoire for piano. Her pieces include simple, pedagogic works; intricate character pieces; works in generic forms; and virtuosic works requiring advanced piano technique. This chapter sets out Beach’s prodigious oeuvre for solo piano chronologically, in the context of Beach’s life, exploring how her personal circumstances symbiotically influenced her compositional output. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of her few pieces for organ, piano duet, and two pianos.

This chapter deals with the design and construction of keyboard instruments and covers topics such as Mersenne’s Law, keyboard compass, scaling, plucking and striking points, string tension, case and soundboard proportion and structure, as well as technical descriptions of harpsichord, clavichord, and piano mechanisms, including the so-called “English” and “Viennese” hammer actions. Early English, Nuremberg, Berlin, and Vienna wire gauges are compared.