ABSTRACT
David Beach and Gordon Sly have shown in a compelling series of articles, Schubert's sonata forms are no less coherently crafted: their analyses demonstrate a motivic unity that underlies Schubert's innovative harmonic language and extended formal plans. The analysis that follows, then, proceeds from an environment of expanding assumptions about the motivic character of Schubert's music, and specifically an interest in the roles of motivic parallelism and motivic pitch classes within the context of sonata form. Although the piece to be explored, the first movement of the Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano D. 821, is hardly his most innovative from the perspective of tonal structure, its motivic design rewards close study. The relationship of the line to earlier, nested iterations of the A-B-C motive suggests an intriguingly symbiotic connection between the tonal form of the movement and its motivic structure. Motivic analyses have been most typically employed in the effort to discover and document the unity of musical works.
