# In what way was Schubert an "innovative composer?"



## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

I'm sure he was, but I wouldn't know how. I think I can hear it on the piano sonatas, for example, a dreamy looseness of form, a delicious tendency to wander. It sounds less formal and more liquid and spontaneous than Mozart and Beethoven, whose architecture is solid and firm. But maybe this isn't even innovation. Maybe it's just a dreamy, melancholic nature plumbing the depths of his personality.

He lived in the shadow of Beethoven, yet Schubert sounds different and individualistic, powerfully himself. If anyone has the time, maybe you could pen a couple of lines describing the ways Schubert was a musical innovator?

Thanks! :tiphat:


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

I can't pen a couple of lines, myself, but let me rob some from the 1980 New Grove:



> From the first the Schubert song was practically without ancestry; even before _Gretchen am Spinnrade_ he was writing passages which have no precedent. Songs there certainly were before his, and in his youth he modelled his own efforts on those of men such as Zumsteeg and Zelter. Many of Beethoven's and Mozart's songs, considered as music, are equal to his own earlier efforts. The miracle he achieved was to match with a reality of music poetry whose depths of human emotion would have appeared to the older composers as rendering it unsuitable for song.


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## NightHawk (Nov 3, 2011)

Great question, but New Grove beat me to it . Schubert established the core repertoire of Lieder, not only in that he wrote some six or seven hundred songs, but the sensitivity he showed in choosing worthy poems and the manner in which he set them - melodic lines that are so singable and yet are not simplistic supported and collaborated with by piano figurations that illuminate and explicate the text - even converse with the text. Their broad range of styles and economy of means within an early Austrian Romantic style is a tremendous achievement in western music.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

That's the truth about the lieder, I'd forgotten that. It was explained to me recently by Mahlerian that Schubert also was the first to make the piano part of lieder into a strong component of the song. Not just accompaniment anymore, but actually a psychological expression equal to the voice.

Thanks for that! :tiphat:


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## Vaneyes (May 11, 2010)

In spite of his inferiority complex re LvB (especially the symphonies), his Chamber and Lieder are top notch. :tiphat:


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## Guest (May 15, 2013)

NightHawk said:


> [T]he sensitivity he showed in choosing worthy poems and the manner in which he set them - melodic lines that are so singable and yet are not simplistic *supported and collaborated with by piano figurations that illuminate and explicate the text* - even converse with the text. Their *broad range of styles and economy of means* within an early Austrian Romantic style is a tremendous achievement in western music.


Hear hear, and well put! I shall now go and play and hum *Der Müller und der Bach* as a sort of 'Benediction on the house'.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

What about his chamber and instrumental music? I actually don't see him inhibited by Beethoven at all. His final words on the symphony and chamber music, and piano sonata, are as strong to me as Ludwig's, but they're _different_. They have a softer texture, without compromising on depth or meaning. They don't sound imitative or repressed at all: they sound confident and, bizarrely, even more unique and original than Beethoven's, though why I say that, I do not know...


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## linzjonz (May 16, 2013)

Technically Schubert was the master of modulation. If you want to find a way to move from one key to another very distant key and do it seamlessly in in the space of a bar or two then you just look through Schubert and you will find it somewhere.

And yes his contribution to Leider is undoubted but the instrumental contribution can't be understated. The string quintet is model for all the Bruckner Symphonies. He really established the romantic expansion of the classical forms. While Beethoven was the god worshipped by the later romantics if one of them was stuck for an idea Scubert was where they would go to steal one!


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Kieran said:


> That's the truth about the lieder, I'd forgotten that. It was explained to me recently by Mahlerian that Schubert also was the first to make the piano part of lieder into a strong component of the song. Not just accompaniment anymore, but actually a psychological expression equal to the voice.
> 
> Thanks for that! :tiphat:


Many of the lieder are still some of the most remarkable mini dramas, of a fully profound depth of understanding of the text, and conveying the fullness of that with the supporting accompaniment fully adding to the context.


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## Novelette (Dec 12, 2012)

Also Schubert's fabulous instrumentation in his operas and symphonic works.

He developed such a magnificent style of sonority, taking great advantage of the instruments' capabilities and idiosyncrasies. The same could, of course, be said for Weber, Haydn, and Cherubini, but I find Schubert's orchestration to be the most excellent of the group.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

As linzjonz says, it's the weird modulations that get to me. He is like Beethoven without all the fist pounding and head banging, but with even more experimental modulations. 

Welcome to the forum, by the way, linzjonz, unless you are a returning member. In that case welcome back.


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## peeyaj (Nov 17, 2010)

Everyone knows that I worship the ground Schubert walked on.  I'm going to quote Dvorak:



> The tendency of the romantic school has been toward short forms, and although Weber helped to show the way, to Schubert belongs the chief credit of originating the short models of pianoforte pieces which the romantic school has preferably cultivated.....*But Schubert created a new epoch with the lied,* as Bach did with the piano and Haydn with the orchestra. All other song-writers have followed in his footsteps, all are his pupils, and it is to his rich treasure of songs that we owe, as a heritage, the beautiful songs of such masters as Schumann, Franz, and Brahms. To my taste the best songs written since Schubert are the 'Magelonen-Lieder' of Brahms; but I agree with the remark once made to me by the critic Ehlert that Franz attained *the highest perfection of all in making poetry and music equivalent in his songs.*


and wiki:



> While he was clearly influenced by the Classical sonata forms of Beethoven and Mozart (his early works, among them notably the 5th Symphony, are particularly Mozartean), his formal structures and his developments tend to give the impression more of melodic development than of harmonic drama. This combination of Classical form and long-breathed Romantic melody sometimes lends them a discursive style: his 9th Symphony was described by Robert Schumann as running to "heavenly lengths". His harmonic innovations include movements in which the first section ends in the key of the subdominant rather than the dominant (as in the last movement of the Trout Quintet). Schubert's practice here was a forerunner of the common Romantic technique of relaxing, rather than raising, tension in the middle of a movement, with final resolution postponed to the very end


I love U Schubert!!!! ^_^


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Thanks for the replies! I think some of the 'poems' he set were probably not up to his music, except that he made them so. And I never heard much of Schubert as an opera composer, other than what a pal of mine who's most likely Peeyaj's biggest rival in Schubert's corner told me, which is that Schubert wasn't a true theatre man: his drama was for small gatherings and mainly chamber music or song. I maybe misrepresenting what I was told here, but that's how I understood it.



linzjonz said:


> Technically Schubert was the master of modulation. _*If you want to find a way to move from one key to another very distant key and do it seamlessly in in the space of a bar or two then you just look through Schubert and you will find it somewhere.*_
> 
> And yes his contribution to Leider is undoubted but the instrumental contribution can't be understated. The string quintet is model for all the Bruckner Symphonies. He really established the romantic expansion of the classical forms. While Beethoven was the god worshipped by the later romantics if one of them was stuck for an idea Scubert was where they would go to steal one!


Thanks linzjonz, and welcome to the forum.

This is the kind of thing I was wondering about, as well. That Schubert seemed able to float from one key to a distant key with original ease. I compare this to walking from O'Connell Street to Capel Street without taking any connecting streets. Just a superhuman leap across space, but without making any of it seem unnatural. I believe Beethoven did similar, but left footprints as he went, but with Schubert it all seems so much more organic and less calculated. To me, anyway. He reminds me more of Mozart than Beethoven, in his discretion and endless facility for making great music...


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

Three-key expositions, the use of trombones (Great C Major symphony), use of certain keys (i.e. a flat, g flat, d flat).


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Andreas said:


> Three-key expositions, the use of trombones (Great C Major symphony), use of certain keys (i.e. a flat, g flat, d flat).


Hey Andreas,

Mozart used trombones to great effect in _Don Giovanni_, especially in the graveyard scene, where "Mozart introduces his three trombones, and by such means gives to the scene a touch of horror the equal of which can scarcely be found in all music" (W.R. Anderson, in the _Musical Companion_, edited by A.L. Bachman). According to the same article, Mozart's use of trombones here "foreshadow in the most definite terms the birth of the modern orchestra." He states also that trombones first were prominently used in a symphony in Beethoven's Fifth.

I'm not contradicting you, by the way, but I'm interested in how Schubert's use of trombones was innovative...


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

Kieran said:


> Hey Andreas,
> 
> Mozart used trombones to great effect in _Don Giovanni_, especially in the graveyard scene, where "Mozart introduces his three trombones, and by such means gives to the scene a touch of horror the equal of which can scarcely be found in all music" (W.R. Anderson, in the _Musical Companion_, edited by A.L. Bachman). According to the same article, Mozart's use of trombones here "foreshadow in the most definite terms the birth of the modern orchestra." He states also that trombones first were prominently used in a symphony in Beethoven's Fifth.
> 
> I'm not contradicting you, by the way, but I'm interested in how Schubert's use of trombones was innovative...


I think trombones were primarily used for specific, fanfare-like effects, probably like the Mozart example you cite. Or of course in church music. Beethoven used them in the 5th and 9th, but only in the finales, again for a special effect (victory/triumph, turning from minor to major). In Schubert's Great C Major, however, they take part in the musical process in a much more natural way, so to speak. They don't stand out and make a point, they are integrated into the orchestral whole. They're not just exclamation marks anymore.


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