Exploring Tonal Substitutions in Schubert's Late Sonata Forms

Abstract

In his sonata-form movements, Schubert's characteristic remote modulations often received negative reactions from contemporary critics; compared to the Beethovenian standard, Schubert's formal designs seemed inefficient, arbitrary, and meandering. While more recent scholarship has shed the negativity of those early appraisals, there remains at times an outwardly imposed sense of mystery surrounding Schubert's music. Among the scholars whose work has contributed to the undoing of that mystification, Richard Cohn has developed a model for triadic harmony based on parsimonious voice leading that accounts for many aspects of nineteenth-century harmonic practice. Here, focusing specifically on Schubert's late works, I expand some of Cohn's techniques to the level of large-scale form, exposing consistent modulatory strategies in Schubert's execution of sonata form that reveal a specific dialogue between Schubert's sonata practice and earlier approaches.