ABSTRACT
Music is an art form that seems to aspire to the condition of memory, which may be why some romantics wished for their various arts to aspire to the condition of music. Whereas Charles Fisk's account focuses on Franz Schubert's individual dilemma, John Daverio links Schubert to romanticism, John Gingerich positions Schubert in the Biedermeier, and Walter Frisch places Schubert more generally yet, as a sonic authority on the human faculty of memory. The music seems to move inward, an effect made possible in part through Schubert's ingenious deployment of the functional potential of the subdominant. Schubert intensifies this effect by prolonging the subdominant with its own minor subdominant, hinting not just at depths but at mysterious depths. By channeling the inherently progressive energy of melody and harmony inward, Schubert is able to invest the surface of his music with a compellingly opaque materiality, such that we attend to it and not through it.
