ABSTRACT
Returning, finally, to the question posed by Budde: ‘Wherein lies the essence of Schubert?’,1 it is now possible to draw together the threads of the preceding discussion in order to tease out some answers. What follows will also draw further on the writings of Robert Schumann, which are so full of important insights into the qualities of Schubert’s ‘compositional persona’. Schumann was Schubert’s posthumous champion, evincing sympathy for his project in the instrumental music generally, and expressing intense enthusiasm for particular works: as John Daverio put it, for instance, Schumann gave ‘high marks to the “Death and the Maiden” quartet’.2 This raises the question of the alternative that Schubert provided to the Beethovenian model, so widely acknowledged as a powerful influence on later nineteenth-century composers. For nowhere in Beethoven’s instrumental music would they have found a work like the D minor Quartet of Schubert, D 810, or the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy, D 760. And when Schumann observed that latter-day composers exceeded their predecessors in their treatment of the sonata cycle, where ‘it was not enough to work out an idea in one movement, they concealed it in other guises and fragmentations’ in the surrounding movements,3 he was essentially describing the Schubertian paradigm contained most notably in D 810 and D 760, as well as in the piano sonatas.
