Schubert, String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, D. 810/i (Allegro)

This is the first of three longer, more extended chapters (10, 11, and 12) devoted to special questions with regard to the applicability of Sonata Theory to post-Beethovenian composers and into the romantic era. The problem begins in earnest with the sonata forms of Schubert, which have been discussed by many recent analysts, resulting in a cascade of recent studies, articles, and books cycling around the same analytical issues and seeking to come to terms with Schubert’s difference from the sonata practice of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, with their more purposeful drives toward tonal resolution and cadential completion. This chapter responds to much of this scholarship in order to show that while Schubert often delays, occludes, or obstructs his pathways to certain action-zone goals—sometimes by “three-key expositions” and their local and later implications—those zones are still discernible, even while the vectors toward them are often more slack in their realization. This adaptation of Sonata Theory to a freer, “romantic” realization of the sonata is pursued through a close, phrase-by-phrase analysis of the first movement of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, read as a fatalistic, existential narrative of the imminence of death, a feature (as discussed in the historical backdrop) that resonates with aspects of Schubert’s own life after 1823. As such the chapter, a follow-up to chapter 9, also provides a second illustration of minor-mode-sonata issues laid out in chapter 8.