5 - The Temporality of Lyric Teleology: Once More between Sonata and Variation in Schubert’s Quartets

Summary

Chapter 5 brings questions of musical time front and centre in order to explore and explicate the diverse temporal modes that co-exist in Schubert’s quartet movements. The static nature of the lyric mode is first considered via a reading of the Andante con moto from the Quartet in D, D94, which furnishes an example of the ways by which Schubert progressivises lyric time. The chapter then considers Schubert’s prominent amalgamation of sonata and variation impulses and its implications for the sense of time articulated by his music since the temporal perspective articulated by variation form is typically understood as being one of retrospection in contrast to the sonata. The role of variation as a technique of expansion is explored via the Quartet in G Minor, D173, and the chapter culminates in a reading of the late G-Major Quartet, D887. The analyses pursue two related ends: first, to analyse the movements’ formal syntax afresh by bringing their variational structures into dialogue with form-functional theory, and second, to demonstrate the role played by ambiguity and form-functional multiplicity in the movements’ generation of competing manifestations of musical time.