Compositional Characteristics of Schubert’s Art Songs

COMPOSITIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SCHUBERT’S ART SONGS
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Compositional Characteristics of Schubert’s Art Songs
Schubert was a transitional figure who focused on romantic art and seemed to have suffered, languishing in obscurity. His initial instrumental compositions tended to a classical approach. Schubert’s melodic and harmonic creation of his art songs rendered him a romantic composer. Franz Schubert's art songs are worth exploring because they provide a unique and beautiful perspective on the human experience while bringing to light the importance of melody and composition in romantic music. In addition, they offer a deep understanding of techniques, practical applications, and performance guides for art song compositions. In this assignment, Schubert's compositional characteristics of art songs are analyzed to highlight the importance of melody and composition in his romantic music. These features include numerous secular vocal works, completed symphonies, operas, and sacred music. The analysis will consider the work of many scholars to clarify how they interpreted Schubert's art songs through articles and dissertations. However, some scholars did not address Schubert's fingerprints, such as the violent nature of musical manifestation and the classicizing manner.[Boumpani, N. "Chapter 11: The Romantic Era." Manifold Apps.] [Lin, Yueh-Reng. The impact of the Lied on selected piano works of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms. University of Cincinnati, 2004.]
Franz Schubert presented his songs with creativity and style, even though they lacked dramatic power. Schubert’s crafted his pieces with well-articulated tones and serene timbre. The artist’s piano sonatas exhibit a great wealth of technical finesse. This creativity reveals that Schubert went beyond satisfying his audience with charming ideas presented in conventional molds. Schubert’s art was influenced by the classical sonata forms of Mozart and Beethoven. Schubert’s fifth symphony portrays a great sense of Mozartean styles, where formal techniques and developments seem to be less harmonic but melodic drama. Trout Quintet is among the songs with spectacular harmonic innovations. The artist presented them in excellent movements in which the preceding sections end in the key of the subdominant section. This song reveals that Schubert’s practice was influenced by the Romantic technique characterized by relaxation instead of rising, followed by tension at the center of each movement. In these movements, the artist postpones the final resolution to the very end of the song. Schubert’s combination of romantic melody and classical forms renders his compositional style discursive.[McDermott, Liam J. "The Classical Sonata Forms of Franz Schubert's Great C-Major Symphony: Exploring Tonal Structure in the New Romantic Style." Ph.D. diss., The University of Western Ontario (Canada), 2022] [Southern Illinois University. "Franz Schubert | LCIT | SIU." Liberal Arts College | SIU.]
Furthermore, Schubert's settings of Goethe's poetry reveal a great sense of dialectic imagery and repetition, contributing to the development of art songs. How Schubert's contemporaries re...