The "Heavenly Length" of Schubert's Music by Scott Burnham - Ideas, Vol. 6, No.

1, 1999

6/2/15, 2:55 PM

Appearing in Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1999

A Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 199899, Scott Burnham is an associate

professor of music at Princeton University. While in residence at the Center, Professor
Burnham has been at work on a manuscript entitled Mozart, Schubert, and the Music
of Romantic Subjectivity. This essay was adapted from a lecture with music given at
the Center in November 1998.

eavenly length." The phrase first arose

in connection with Schubert's music in
the midst of Robert Schumann's justly famous
1840 review of Schubert's Symphony in C Major,
subsequently known as "the Great." In the annals
of writing about music, Schumann's essay is one of
the celebrated documents of the nineteenth century:
among other connections, it memorably relates
Schubert to the city of Vienna, the figure of
Beethoven, and Romanticism. The phrase
"heavenly length" is a favorite tourist stop in
Schumann's essay, the place for which it is best
known, the place one wants to see first off upon
visiting the essay, unless one would rather be pleasantly taken aback by
happening upon it in the course of rambling through the entire review. I will not
so ramble here, despite the numerous fascination on offer throughout the review.
Instead, I propose to reflect on what happened to that singular remark, how it has
colored the mainstream reception of almost all of Schubert's instrumental music,
and what we might ourselves discover upon reconsidering the issue of length in
this music, particularly as it occurs in the pieces he wrote during the last three or
four years of his life.
On the other hand, I cannot simply walk away from Schumann. The following
excerpt should give some flavor of his famed review:
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Here we find, besides the most masterly compositional technique, life in every
fiber; coloring down to the finest gradation; meaning everywhere; sharp
expression in detail; and in the whole a suffusing Romanticism such as other
works of Franz Schubert have already made known to us.
And the heavenly length of the symphony, like that of a thick novel in four
volumes by, say, Jean Paul, another who can never come to an end, and indeed
for the best reason, to give the reader something to chew on afterwards. How this
refreshes, this feeling of rich and ubiquitous abundance, so contrary to one's
experience with others, when one always dreads being let down at the end and is
often sadly disappointed.
Notice in these passages Schumann's emphasis on how we are left after listening
to Schubert. The experience of listening to his music stays with oneit is not a
thin, or a wavering, experience. Plenitude is clearly valued here.
In contrast to Schumanns ebullient praise, however, the more commonly voiced
perception has always been that Schubert's instrumental works are simply too
long, too repetitive. The acknowledged lengthiness of many pieces by Beethoven
is said to be justified by an often monumentalized process of development and
transformationBeethoven needs his great expanses in order to establish and
then complete a momentous global agenda. Schubert's lengthiness enjoys no
such global justification. In fact, it is often considered to be his telling flaw.
Some fifty years after Schumann's review, in 1892, Eduard Hanslick put the case
sharply when he said, "If truth be told, everything about this symphony except its
length may be deemed heavenly." About fifty years after Hanslick, the influential
English critic Donald Francis Tovey helped perpetuate the popular idea that
Schubert could not in fact handle large formsthat he substituted odd
digressions and even mere repetition for the type of consequential and evolving
substance one finds in the compositions of Beethoven and Brahms. For example,
Tovey comments on Schubert's finales: "The enormous sprawling forms of the
typical Schubert finales are the outcome of a sheer irresponsibility that has
involved him in little or no strain, though he often shows invention of the highest
order in their main themes."
Tovey's juxtaposition of thematic invention of the highest order with formal
irresponsibility brings us back to Schumann's famous phrase and, more
particularly, to its afterlife. For in referring to the great length of Schubert's
symphony as heavenly, Schumann begins a long tradition of apologizing for this
perceived flaw: yes, the music is too long, but it is heavenly. The notion of
heavenly length became a way to express the idea of beauty prolonged solely for
its own sake, to acknowledge the goodness of such beauty without fully
condoning the fact that it goes on for so long in Schubert's music. As Stravinsky
once quipped, in a perhaps unconscious trope of Schumann's remark: "So what if
I doze off occasionally when listening to Schubert, as long as I always find
myself in Paradise when I wake up?" (This is an interestingly ambivalent
comment: in effect he say that the puts him to sleep, but it's nice to wake up to.)
Or take Alfred Einstein's fervent declaration that "Schubert lives in the paradise
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of pure music making from which Beethoven was driven." This, too, is
ambivalent: though Schubert may be said to live in Paradise, it is Beethoven who
shares and expresses our human burden here below.
German musicologist Robert Werba considers the trope of heavenly length as
part of the quaint bric-a-brac of a now outmoded image of Schubert and his
world, an image that Werba captures in his phrase "die wienerische
Musizierseligkeit" (the blessed state of making and hearing music in Vienna).
Schubert is viewed as an innocent, blessedly plying his oar in the golden flow of
Viennese melody. Who could blame him for not knowing when to stop?
Outmoded it may be, but this image of Schubert dies hard: what has been cast off
in his biography is often sustained in treatments of his music. It is admittedly
hard to ignore those gemtlich elements in his music that so charm us, and it is
fun to think of them as distinctly Viennese. Even exceedingly sophisticated and
up-to-date analyses of Schubert's music still cling to the idea of Schubert's
lyricism as heavenly. Amid an ingeniously detailed analysis of Schubert's late
instrumental music, for example, Peter Glke points to the chaotic and disruptive
outbursts that often occur in the middle of movements such as the Adagio of the
String Quintet, and he observes that Schubert thus pays dearly for his "lyrical
paradise." Beauty is here figured as a kind of heavenly state that cannot be
sustained without a price. Or is it that beauty should not be sustained? For Glke
goes on to maintain that the presence of these same "disruptive forces" actually
protects Schubert from the suspicion of overindulging in sensuous beauty: in
other words, by including this often harrowing music, Schubert gets away with
something we basically disapprove of, something indulgent, dissipated, weak.
This attitude in turn motivates a ready response from the other side of the same
playing field, namely, why should we disapprove of Schubert luxuriating in
beauty? What puts both these views on the same field is that they both represent
Schubert's lyric beauty as luxuriating, paradisiacal; both sides allow the polarity
of beauty versus control, indulgence versus progress, leisure versus work, to
define their experience of the music.
In spite of the longstanding attraction of such views, I would submit that
Schubert's music is not about relaxed beauty, spun out at great length simply
because there is less teleological impulse, less closural gravity than in music like
Beethoven's. Schubert is not Beethoven on sabbatical, with a license to linger;
this is not some languishing diffusion or even a sublimely indifferent, Olympian
stasis. Instead, Schubert explores effects and worlds unknown to a Beethoven
his music puts into play a different physics. Thus, Schubert's pieces are not just
longer, they work differently. They constitute a different order of musical being.
If the lengthiness of Schubert's instrumental music cannot be justified in the way
that it can in Beethoven's musicwhere length seems necessary for the
completion of an imposing processhow can it be? One could argue that, in
Schubert, the great length is just there. In fact, it is more than just there
Schubert seems to want to make an issue of length; he seems to be telling us
something by the way he makes us always aware of the sheer length of his
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music. Before we can speculate on what his message for us may be, we need to
ask just how he in fact marks his music as being long.

he most obvious way Schubert does so is by repeating big chunks of

material quite literally, or repeating them with only one parameter
changed, as, for example, with a change of key. This gives his large-scale forms
a relaxed and spacious quality; they are not in a hurry, not always charging
around getting things done. Especially striking is when he does this in so-called
development sections; this strikes not a few critics as creating a kind of
decompression at precisely the wrong moment in the life process of the sonataform movement.
It is not just his treatment of form, though, that is marked as longSchuberts
themes taken by themselves are notable for their sheer length of utterance. What
could be more exquisitely and fluidly romantic than the opening of the Violin
Fantasy? It draws its first breath over eighteen slow measures, its theme arising
and coalescing from the texture, like a subject taking shape.
But even when Schubert puts together a more obviously sectionalized theme, he
manages to underline the quality of lengthiness, of sheer extent. Most themes in
and around the Classical style rely on the notion of paired phrases as a means of
comprehensible articulation. This can be a wonderfully simple mechanism, by
which an initial phrase calls forth an answering phrase, as in the opening of
Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. A more complex examplemay be found in the
slow movement of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, where a movingly expressive
theme unfolds over the same underlying structure. In the theme from the slow
movement of his String Quintet, Schubert is clearly working with phrases, but he
sets them up one after the other in great parallel stretches. This type of parallel
construction of phrases is more paratactic than hypotacticmore additive than
hierarchicaland thus, at the level of its construction alone, such a theme will
sound longer. And although there are interim arrivals, intermediary cadences, he
does not close the circuit by returning to the opening tonic harmony until after
fourteen long bars.
(These interim arrivals are in fact on the wrong keys [F-sharp and A]; the real
arrival [on E] sounds locally like an added extension! Once again, length is
placed at the foreground, for Schubert makes what would be the normative
syntactic arrival sound like an addition to the length of the passage.)
Another significant factor here is the 12/8 meter (twelve notes per bar, heard as
four beats containing three eighth notes apiece), a compound meter which at this
slow tempo makes each beat into a space that can be filled. This is an
emblematic meter for Schubert; it gives him something like a canvas. (He fills
the spaces of the canvas quite floridly when the theme returns at the end.)
And even the notes themselves of Schubert's themes, their motivic content and
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shape, project a sense of lengthiness. Charles Rosen has discussed how the
motivic content of Schubert's themes often explores a space around a center. This
is a way of breaking down motivic energyhis motives grope out into the
surrounding space; they do not build up potential energy and replicate
themselves implacably throughout the piece (as happens, for example, in
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony) The result is a slower sense of temporal unfolding.
In short, whereas a Beethoven can make us forget how long some of his music is,
Schubert seems to want to remind us at every turn. He gives us time to take in
his themes, as if they were works of visual art we could inspect at our leisure, or
landscapes through which we could wander.
(More, to Part 2 of 2)
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Comments to: lmorgan@ga.unc.edu

Revised: December 1999
nationalhumanitiescenter.org

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