# Did Schubert lack counterpoint?



## RogerWaters (Feb 13, 2017)

Schubert’s best music is undoubtably profound. However, i sometimes get the impression his music is quite ‘loose’, and not tied together into a taught, agile structure that I suspect comes from counterpoint. I sometimes crave from his music that which is absent, leaving my mind to unconsciously grope. It’s not the heavenly length of his works that this subtle sense of unfulfillment tracks (I have no such problem with Bruckner, for instance). Or possibly it is length combined with lack of counterpoint, as if there is a ‘rule’ which requires length to be anchored by a strong internal edifice for the brain to remain engaged? Longer the length, the tighter the edifice needs to be...

For instance, Schubert engages me the most in his ‘miniatures’ like the violin fantasie, impromptus, lieder, but I also love the piano trios and fantasie for two pianos (with the latter, i find the extra piano part provides a rich inner detail). His piano sonatas and late symphonies loose me. The late string quartets and quintet are in between. 

Possibly I am only addressing one kind of internal structure which Schubert may or may have ‘neglected’, as I understand there is a view that Schubert was not a master of large scale classical forms, i.e. a lack of development etc. 

Let’s call what i was referring to initially as vertical structure (counterpoint) and the latter view as horizontal structure (sonata form etx).

Interested in more learned views on Schubert’s possible shortcomings in his larger-scale works... :tiphat:


----------



## Haydn70 (Jan 8, 2017)

Towards the end of life, after looking at some scores of Handel oratorios, Schubert felt his technique was deficient. He said, “Now for the first time, I see what I lack”, and decided to study counterpoint formally. He arranged for lessons with composer and theorist Simon Schecter. He had only one lesson with him and died nine days later.


----------



## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Schubert has some music that's consistently contrapuntal — I'm thinking of two movements I'm currently playing, the finales of the piano sonatas D. 644 in A major and D. 784 in A minor — but the counterpoint is rudimentary. It's almost all in two parts and usually just scale figuration in contrary motion or arpeggiated triads against scale passages. It's effective in its way but wears thin. Schubert isn't where I tend to go when I'm hungry for counterpoint. 

But hopefully someone will offer some counterexamples to mine that are more complex.


----------



## RogerWaters (Feb 13, 2017)

Haydn70 said:


> Towards the end of life, after looking at some scores of Handel oratorios, Schubert felt his technique was deficient and that he needed to study counterpoint formally. He arranged for lessons with composer and theorist Simon Schecter. He had only one lesson with him and died nine days later.


Interesting, thanks.

The early deaths of Schubert and Mozart must surely prove there is no God.


----------



## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Schubert was a born melodist, gifted in writing music with song like melodies and harmony. So he pursued that well. It would have been interesting to see how he might write a little more counterpoint with his Romantic style but he died young.


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

"In spontaneity of genius Schubert resembles Mozart more than any other master who ever lived. His early education and training were different from those of Mozart, and musical ideas take different form with him. While Mozart was distinctly a melodist, counterpoint and fugue were at his fingers' ends, and his thematic treatment had all the freedom which comes from a thorough training in the use of musical material. Schubert had not this kind of training. He never wrote a good fugue, and his counterpoint was indifferent; but on the other hand he had several qualities which Mozart had not, and in particular a very curious and interesting mental phenomenon, which we might call psychical resonance or clairvoyance. Whatever poem or story he read immediately called up musical images in his mind. Under the excitement of the sentiment of a poem, or of dramatic incidents narrated, strange harmonies spontaneously suggested themselves, and melodies exquisitely appropriate to the sentiment he desired to convey. He was a musical painter, whose colors were not imitated from something without himself, but were inspired from within."
< A Popular History of the Art of Music: From the Earliest Times Until the Present / William Smythe Babcock Mathews / P.388 >


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

In the fugue from his four-hand fantasie 



, for example, Schubert seems to stack up contrapuntally-working melodies, and switch them between registers using invertible counterpoint, without building episodes of development through use of fugal techniques such as inversion, stretto, augmentation, etc.


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

"... The rewriting of the main theme at the opening of the recapitulation, however, reveals that Schubert had Mozart's famous C major Quintet in mind all along. The recapitulation, in which the detached mounting arpeggio that is a principal element of Mozart's opening now appears (introduced at the end of Schubert's development and continued into the reprise), allows us to see that two other elements of Mozart's structure were already present in Schubert: the decorative and expressive turn is found in both works at the fourth bar of the opening phrase, and Mozart's eccentric five-bar rhythmic structure has been retained but adapted by Schubert to a ten-bar structure. The rhythm, and this is typical of Schubert, is basically similar to his classical model but stretched out to be twice as long. In addition, Mozart shortens a later appearance of his main theme in the exposition to the more orthodox four-bar groups (the fifth bar of each original phrase overlapping with the next), and Schubert obediently follows suit in the counter-statement of his main theme by shortening his ten bars to seven-bar groups (actually eight-bar overlapping phrases). Essentially, even in the last of his great instrumental works, we can see that Schubert retained the conventional Viennese models (Mozart's above all) and increased their size, giving them the greater sense of space that was Schubert's most extraordinary innovation, and which would have a signal effect on the future history of music in the work of both Brahms and Bruckner."
< Schubert the Progressive: History, Performance Practice, Analysis / Brian Newbould / P. 5 >


----------



## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

EdwardBast said:


> Schubert has some music that's consistently contrapuntal - I'm thinking of two movements I'm currently playing, the finales of the piano sonatas D. 644 in A major and D. 784 in A minor - but the counterpoint is rudimentary. It's almost all in two parts and usually just scale figuration in contrary motion or arpeggiated triads against scale passages. It's effective in its way but wears thin. Schubert isn't where I tend to go when I'm hungry for counterpoint.
> 
> But hopefully someone will offer some counterexamples to mine that are more complex.


I can't say it's necessarily contrapuntal, but one thing that has always impressed me about the G major sonata is the amazing independence of the two hands in the finale. A good performance almost needs each hand to be operated by a different brain!


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

There are also passages of his part-writing that don't seem to deal much with conventional style counterpoint. In this passage of the D.960 sonata, essentially the same chords are played in both hands: 













There are circle of fifths progressions in the D.804 quartet, -but the technique utilized is, in essence quite like that of the fugue from the four-hand fantasy:


----------



## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

*Did Schubert lack counterpoint? *

No. His style was built on different elements, and he composed some of the best music ever written. Don't complain about what is possibly not there - listen to what _is_ there.


----------



## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

RogerWaters said:


> Interesting, thanks.
> 
> The early deaths of Schubert and Mozart must surely prove there is no God.


No more than the fact that they lived proves God's existence.

I'll have to admit though that Schubert has always been something of a "blind spot" for me. I've never delved very deeply into his work apart from the last two symphonies, the Wanderer fantasy and the Winterreise song cycle. I think I may start listening to the piano sonatas. So, I'll check this thread to see what those who are knowledgeable about Schubert have to say.


----------



## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

I don't know about counterpoint. But if you want your Schubert with needlepoint, there's always _this_ album:


----------



## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

I feel that Schubert is a main proponent of the Classical era overall, who mainly ignored and opposed the Romantic vision even though there's some 20-30 years of new musical inspiration and direction there in his ouevre. If counterpoint was an aspect of the Classical period, I don't know if it was an emphasized-enough aspect during the study and development of that period.


----------



## Eclectic Al (Apr 23, 2020)

Yes: one should listen to Schubert (and others) because of what is there, and not what isn't
Yes: it is interesting to consider the aspects of a composer's works, including what elements are lacking?/weaker?/de-emphasised?

With Schubert, for example, if someone sought to re-engineer his inspirations by adding a stronger contrapuntal element, would it improve them or would it damage the overall effect? I suspect it is the latter, and you would have lost a unique voice and pulled it in a more generic (possibly more stylistically proper or impressive?), less individual, direction. Is there a danger that Schubert just becomes a version of Mendelssohn (say) - who I do like a lot, by the way.


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Eclectic Al said:


> Yes: one should listen to Schubert (and others) because of what is there, and not what isn't
> Yes: it is interesting to consider the aspects of a composer's works, including what elements are lacking?/weaker?/de-emphasised?


I agree counterpoint wasn't quite "essential" in the 19th century; at least not to the extent it did in the earlier centuries. Sechter (who wrote 5000 fugues) and Cherubini (who wrote an 8-voiced quadruple fugue) were "experts" of 18th-century counterpoint, but that didn't necessarily make them "great composers" in the sense Schubert was. Chopin, for example, wrote expressive music with "harmonic thinking", (there's counterpoint in his music, as some people have pointed out, but just not the sort of "thoroughly-logical stuff" found in the 18th century).

All the "harmonists" of the 18th century were taught counterpoint from a young age. Compare Gluck with, for example, Bach, Zelenka, Mozart, Michael Haydn, etc. It seems that they had not many ingenious ways to "think harmony" beyond the "realm of counterpoint".
I'm talking about this sort: Missa sancti hieronymi (1777)




 (13:24 and 14:34) 




 (5:32 and 7:15)
Franz Xaver Richter (1709~1789; a member of the Mannheim school who is credited with the "invention" of the fugal symphony) - Kemptener Te Deum in D-major (1742):





I'm inclined to think that the practice of prioritizing "harmony" before "counterpoint" was one of the things that made Romantic harmony possible. This is probably why, to some (ex. janxharris), the harmony sounds less "pedantic" than that of the 18th century. Chopin may not have realized it himself, but it also had significant influence on his own music. I feel this even in "Romantic contrapuntal works" such as the Die meistersinger, the finale from Bruckner's 5th, Metamorphosis, etc.



hammeredklavier said:


> "Throughout most of the eighteenth century, only counterpoint was taught to young composers, and any knowledge of harmony was informally picked up by experience or by reading the few theorists who tried to deal innovatively with the subject. Counterpoint was absolutely fundamental. Beginning with harmony was an early nineteenth-century novelty, introduced, I think, by the Paris Conservatoire. Chopin attributes what he thinks of as Berlioz's clumsiness to the newfangled system of music instruction. He himself, Having grown up in a backwater like Warsaw, had studied the old-fashioned way. He insists that counterpoint must precede the study or harmony, or else the harmonic movement will have no inner life-it will be laid on from the outside, as he says, like a veneer.
> As we see from Chopin's remarks, the idea of putting part writing (counterpoint before chords (harmony) is not surprisingly modern idea-it is the old traditional way, and Chopin deplored its disappearance. It was the late eighteenth-century development of large harmony areas, of modulation, in fact, that made the teaching of harmony independent of counterpoint. The same stylistic development also gave Rameau's theory of classifying chords by their roots an importance it did not have when it appeared in the early eighteenth century: his theory became of central importance to musical education in early nineteenth-century France. Berlioz seemed to think naturally in Rameau's terms. He chose the harmonies often because of the roots and then employed the inversion which sounded most expressive.
> It seems to me that Chopin's claim of a failure on Berlioz's part is partly true-and nevertheless that this failure accounts for much of that is powerful and original in Berlioz's music. Until the nineteenth century, music education began with what is called species counterpoint. In this exercise the student is given a simple phrase of long, even notes like part of a Gregorian chant, called a cantus firmus, and is asked to write another phrase of long, even notes that could be played or sung with it. The first species is one note of the countermelody for one note of the cantus firmus; the different species then advance in rhythmic complexity, the last being a free rhythm against the original cantus firmus. The student advances from two voices to three-, four-, and five-part counterpoint."
> < The Romantic Generation, by Charles Rosen, P. 552~553 >
> ...


----------



## RogerWaters (Feb 13, 2017)

Eclectic Al said:


> Yes: one should listen to Schubert (and others) because of what is there, and not what isn't


Does this extend to Nicki Minaj? Cardi B? In my opinion, it's a bit of a vapid statement to say 'one should listen to a composer because of what is there' when what one wants to understand better is what arguably _isn't _there. When it comes to Cardi B, I would think it's much _more_ important to focus on what is there over what isn't, because not much _is_ there in the first place. However, when it comes to an artist like Schubert, one would never _get_ to critical analysis by focusing on what is there, because he is so rich. However, surely it is not unreasonable to probe and prod and improve one's understanding of this composer or that. Sometimes this involves critical analysis. I think Schubert's reputation will survive!



Eclectic Al said:


> With Schubert, for example, if someone sought to re-engineer his inspirations by adding a stronger contrapuntal element, would it improve them or would it damage the overall effect? I suspect it is the latter, and you would have lost a unique voice and pulled it in a more generic (possibly more stylistically proper or impressive?), less individual, direction. Is there a danger that Schubert just becomes a version of Mendelssohn (say) - who I do like a lot, by the way.


Schubert has an emotional depth that Mendelssohn completely lacks, to my ears. Why would the addition of counterpoint have ruined this? Is there some formal reason or is this purely a matter of finite energy?


----------



## RogerWaters (Feb 13, 2017)

hammeredklavier said:


> "... The rewriting of the main theme at the opening of the recapitulation, however, reveals that Schubert had Mozart's famous C major Quintet in mind all along. The recapitulation, in which the detached mounting arpeggio that is a principal element of Mozart's opening now appears (introduced at the end of Schubert's development and continued into the reprise), allows us to see that two other elements of Mozart's structure were already present in Schubert: the decorative and expressive turn is found in both works at the fourth bar of the opening phrase, and Mozart's eccentric five-bar rhythmic structure has been retained but adapted by Schubert to a ten-bar structure. The rhythm, and this is typical of Schubert, is basically similar to his classical model but stretched out to be twice as long. In addition, Mozart shortens a later appearance of his main theme in the exposition to the more orthodox four-bar groups (the fifth bar of each original phrase overlapping with the next), and Schubert obediently follows suit in the counter-statement of his main theme by shortening his ten bars to seven-bar groups (actually eight-bar overlapping phrases). Essentially, even in the last of his great instrumental works, we can see that Schubert retained the conventional Viennese models (Mozart's above all) and increased their size, giving them the greater sense of space that was Schubert's most extraordinary innovation, and which would have a signal effect on the future history of music in the work of both Brahms and Bruckner."
> < Schubert the Progressive: History, Performance Practice, Analysis / Brian Newbould / P. 5 >


I'm a bit lost. Does this relate to counterpoint (what I perhaps naively called 'vertical structure') or dexterity with classical development ('horizontal structure')?


----------



## RogerWaters (Feb 13, 2017)

hammeredklavier said:


> "In spontaneity of genius Schubert resembles Mozart more than any other master who ever lived. His early education and training were different from those of Mozart, and musical ideas take different form with him. While Mozart was distinctly a melodist, counterpoint and fugue were at his fingers' ends, and his thematic treatment had all the freedom which comes from a thorough training in the use of musical material. Schubert had not this kind of training. He never wrote a good fugue, and his counterpoint was indifferent; but on the other hand he had several qualities which Mozart had not, and in particular a very curious and interesting mental phenomenon, which we might call psychical resonance or clairvoyance. *Whatever poem or story he read immediately called up musical images in his mind. Under the excitement of the sentiment of a poem, or of dramatic incidents narrated, strange harmonies spontaneously suggested themselves, and melodies exquisitely appropriate to the sentiment he desired to convey. He was a musical painter, whose colors were not imitated from something without himself, but were inspired from within*".




This is all very poetic (and potentially questionable - at least if Schubert never reported on his own subjective psychological processes for posterity). However, is the comparison implicitly saying that Mozart never had harmonies suggest themselves, nor melodies appropriate to a sentiment he desired to convey?!


----------



## Machiavel (Apr 12, 2010)

Could say the same thing about beethoven dissonance and chromatism. Thats why I always put mozart and brahms above him.


----------



## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

Machiavel said:


> Could say the same thing about beethoven dissonance and chromatism. Thats why I always put mozart and brahms above him.


But Beethoven has very striking and interesting examples of use of dissonance and chromatism. I'm thinking for example in passages of great works such as Op. 55, Op. 92, Op. 101, Op. 125, Op. 132 and Op. 133. I don't know about the "true" dissonances Brahms wanted to hear, nor if that actually meant something; but there are dissonances in the music of Beethoven.

_"Although the harmonic style of the common practice period remained a basic framework, the history of music from Mozart's time to the present shows a constant increase in harmonic density, or the amount of chromaticism and frequent chord changes present. The opening bars of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony demonstrate the power of chromaticism to enhance the emotional effect.

The first eight notes of the theme are resolutely normal in their outline, the triad of E flat major, the tonic chord of the movement. But the ensuing two notes lead violently away from this harmonic stability, with the 10th note a totally unrelated C sharp. This sudden shift completely upsets the harmonic structure and gives unmistakable notice that a long, complex movement will be necessary to right the imbalance. Not until the coda of the movement is this opening theme allowed to follow the expected harmonic outline dictated by the style of the times."_ - *Source here*.

_"The first movement [of Op. 92] opens with the longest introduction of any of Beethoven's symphonies. As in earlier opening-movement slow introductions, Beethoven brilliantly outlined important key areas, and highlighted scalar and chromatic motives found throughout the rest of the first movement. (...) Chromaticism is the third defining feature of the first movement. As with the use of silences, ascending and descending chromatic lines, often in the bass, lead towards and away from the different sections and key areas."_ - *Source here*.

_"One thing to notice is Beethoven's use of dissonance in the Pathétique. Composers have always used chords that sound wrong (using one wrong note to create the dissonance) and then followed them with a single note or simpler chord containing the right note (this is called resolving the chord) as a neat way to build up tension. The listener may not be conscious of what's happening, but his ears are cringing in anguish until they get relief from the dissonance. Anyway, though the earliest composers knew perfectly well how to do this, Beethoven made it a regular feature of his works, and dissonance thereafter became a major way for composers to work directly with the listener's emotions. In the Pathétique, you'll hear some pioneering examples of the technique in the slow introduction."_ - *Source here*.

_"The development section [of the first movement of the Eroica symphony] (m. 154), like the rest of the movement, is characterized by harmonic and rhythmic tension from dissonant chords and long passages of syncopated rhythm. Following various thematic explorations and counterpoint, the music eventually breaks into a 32-bar passage (mm. 248-279) of sforzando chords including both 2-beat and 3-beat downward patterns, culminating in crashing dissonant forte chords (mm. 276-279). Commenters have stated that this "outburst of rage ... forms the kernel of the whole movement", and Beethoven reportedly got out in his beat when conducting the orchestra in Christmas 1804, forcing the confused players to stop and go back."_ - *Source here*.


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Allerius said:


> _"One thing to notice is Beethoven's use of dissonance in the Pathétique. Composers have always used chords that sound wrong (using one wrong note to create the dissonance) and then followed them with a single note or simpler chord containing the right note (this is called resolving the chord) as a neat way to build up tension. The listener may not be conscious of what's happening, but his ears are cringing in anguish until they get relief from the dissonance. Anyway, though the earliest composers knew perfectly well how to do this, Beethoven made it a regular feature of his works, and dissonance thereafter became a major way for composers to work directly with the listener's emotions. In the Pathétique, you'll hear some pioneering examples of the technique in the slow introduction."_ - *Source here*.


One thing about some of the sources you cite is that they're not authentic; they're not peer-reviewed, published journals, books, or articles, but stuff like obscure wikipedia pages, fan-made blogs, (I talked to you about this before); it's best to take them with a bit of a "grain of salt":



hammeredklavier said:


> This sort of obscure wikipedia pages tend to be not visited by many people, so they're not properly "peer-reviewed". The stuff (presumably written by biased fans, who are almost "cultists") only holds as much value as private fan-made websites or blog-posts. (btw, Beethoven is the only major classical music composer who has a fan wikipedia page dedicated solely to his "musical style".)


Regarding that example of the Pathétique sonata, I certainly think that Beethoven utilized diminished seventh chords expressively in an appropriate context, but the claim "dissonance thereafter became a major way for composers to work directly with the listener's emotions" is clearly exaggerated. It's one thing about these articles (including the wikipedia article on "Beethoven's musical style"); the authors always subtly try to make it seem like Beethoven "invented" all "the stuff", with vague-sounding, unsubstantiated claims.*** -their fancy ways of saying the same old thing: "Beethoven is always about drama and emotions, whereas the earlier composers are not". 
Just think about that statement for a minute. Composers before Beethoven didn't use dissonance to convey emotions directly to the listener?






Here are some other things said in the article:


> "Haydn wrote over a hundred symphonies, and in part was able to do so because the symphony in his day (he taught both Beethoven and Mozart, so "his day" isn't so remote from them)"
> "Item 3 is the first movement of Beethoven's piano concerto in B-flat, Op. 19. Although this is called his Piano Concerto No.2, it was written earlier than #1 (Beethoven performed it in 1795, but after he completed the one known as #1 in 1797, he revised #2) and is the closest to Mozartian of his concerti."
> "The Pathétique is often thought of as the first modern piano sonata."


The fact is that Joseph Haydn never actually taught Mozart. And Beethoven's 3rd concerto doesn't exhibit any less "Mozartian" influence than his first two. (the 3rd movement even quotes that of Mozart's K.388/406)
Also looking at the excessively informal style of language ("Dah, dah dah dah arrrrrgh AHHHHH, dah, dah dah dah arrrgh AHHHHH, etc.!"), you can clearly tell it's a fan-made article. If you want us to take you seriously, you shouldn't really cite that sort of stuff as your sources.

***:
For example, they always like to cite Benedict Taylor regarding Beethoven's use of "cyclic technique", but they'll never mention the fact Taylor also said: https://www.cambridge.org/core/book...-cyclic-form/EF586221A63CED34F6A22761783653D0
"The very term 'cyclic form' is confusing. Hans Keller was exaggerating only a little when he described it as 'one of the most senseless technical terms in the rich history of musicological nonsense'. In fact, it is almost obligatory for commentators to offer some brief apology for their continued use of the term. Charles Rosen, for instance, states that '"cyclical form" is an ambiguous as well as a vague term', whilst James Webster, in his influential study of Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony, prefaces his text with a disclaimer on the unsuitability of the terms 'cyclic' and 'through-composed', before going on to use them nevertheless."


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

RogerWaters said:


> I'm a bit lost. Does this relate to counterpoint (what I perhaps naively called 'vertical structure') or dexterity with classical development ('horizontal structure')?


I think it can relate to both the vertical and the horizontal ; for example, the fugue can be about melodic variation and motivic development as much as it is about counterpoint.


----------



## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

hammeredklavier said:


> One thing about some of the sources you cite is that they're not authentic; they're not peer-reviewed, published journals, books, or articles, but stuff like obscure wikipedia pages, fan-made blogs, (I talked to you about this before); it's best to take them with a bit of a "grain of salt".


You have a point regarding the third source I cited, but the others - Encyclopedia Britannica, the School of Music of the University of Rochester, and Wikipedia - are good enough for this informal discussion IMO. I'll try to have in mind your criticism the next time I quote information from other sites, but I think that you should consider also that it's not my point to write a doctoral thesis here at TC.


----------

