ABSTRACT
The extreme disruption of almost abnormally serene moods by the introduction of violent contrasts as found in the later piano and chamber works of Schubert – notably in the slow movements of the A major Piano Sonata, D 959, the G major Quartet, D 887, and the String Quintet, D 956 – might seem an anomaly in an otherwise relatively evenly balanced instrumental style. The opposite is true. These are certainly the most acute manifestations of the type; but violence was endemic in Schubert’s music. As Hugh Macdonald put it, this ‘represents a side of his art remote from the familiar lyrical Schubert’.1 The discussion in this chapter will explore, among other aspects, the ways in which that lyrical side of Schubert’s art acts as an enabling element in releasing and illuminating the ‘streak of violence and distemper in the music’ that Macdonald identified in Schubert’s instrumental writing.2 Macdonald’s examples range from the earliest works (the String Quartet in B@, D 36) to those of Schubert’s last year (the B@ Piano Sonata, D 960); his interest is primarily in the ‘momentary gathering of tension which has a distinctly volcanic feeling’, but his discussion extends to cases of ‘prolonged climactic hysteria’.3 As those last two quotations show, the vocabulary used by Macdonald to describe incidences of the phenomenon draws on both geological and psychiatric discourse.
