Schubert's early piano sonatas of 1815--1819: Problems of corpus, chronology and composer's intentions (Franz Schubert, Austria)

This dissertation investigates aspects of Schubert's early piano sonatas from the years 1815–1819, long the subject of scholarly debate and misunderstanding due to the fragmentary nature of the surviving autographs. Many of the fourteen or so sonata attempts of the period were left unfinished and the heterogeneous character of the sources suggests a “works-in-progress” nature to the corpus that has never before been so designated. As such, a re-examination of the twenty-five distinct sources for these “sonata experiments” serves as a central focus of the dissertation.; A combination of paleographic and style-analytical approaches are used to address these unresolved problems of corpus, chronology and composer's intentions. Chapter One provides a general historiographic survey of various chronological orderings of the sonatas, as well as theories regarding which individual movements Schubert intended to go together. Chapter Two presents a new approach to the reconstruction of Schubert's early piano sonatas through a comprehensive examination of the physical evidence of the extant autograph manuscripts and contemporary copies for each work with special focus on paper types and watermark analysis. Identification of discrete compositional stages proves to be key in assessing Schubert's intentions and the meaning of the corpus. Chapter Three examines Schubert's compositional process and revision strategies for the early sonatas by means of analysis of five works which exist in more than one version: D. 157, D. 279, D. 566, D. 567/568 and D. 575. Strategies emerge such as improving thematic coherence, expanding development sections by introducing new thematic material and modulatory sequences, reworking sections of pre-existing minuets and trios to create coherence rather than contrast within a movement, and transposing entire movements when assembling individual movements. The fourth and final chapter proposes a redating of the Sonata in A Major, Opus 120, D. 664, for which no autograph manuscript or contemporary copy survives, and long believed to be from either 1825 or 1819. The new date of 1817 is based principally on the documentary deduction of an “hypothesized set” of six sonatas from the summer of that year and stylistic comparisons of D. 664 with Schubert's operating procedures for sonata form in other sonatas of the period 1817–1819.