Schubert's Innovations in Sonata Form: Compositional Logic and Structural Interpretation

In his 1927 monograph Franz Donald Tovey outlines the defining features of the sonata-form practices of the Viennese Classic and of Schubert, pointing out where their respective procedural tendencies most noticeably part company. With earlier practice explicitly held up as exemplar, work is found wanting. In saying so, however, Tovey's comments are gracious as well as suggestive. when we find, Tovey writes, that some of the most obviously wrong digressions contain the profoundest, most beautiful, and most inevitable passages, then it is time to suspect Schubert, like other great classics, is pressing his way towards new forms. And later, weakness in the actual context is often indistinguishable from new power in some future art.' That Schubert forged a distinctive sonata style responsive to his own compositional impulses is generally appreciated; Carl Dahlhaus's distinction between Schubert's lyric-epic sonata and Beethoven's dramaticdialectic is but a succinct version of a common observation.2 But Tovey's having seized upon the idea very conception of the form departed substantively from the practices he had inherited from his Viennese predecessors is particularly striking.