Schubert's String Quartets

Franz Schubert's music has long been celebrated for its lyrical melodies, 'heavenly length' and daring harmonic language. In this new study of Schubert's complete string quartets, Anne Hyland challenges the influential but under-explored claim that Schubert could not successfully incorporate the lyric style into his sonatas, and offers a novel perspective on lyric form that embraces historical musicology, philosophy and music theory and analysis. Her exploration of the quartets reveals Schubert's development of a lyrically conceived teleology, bringing musical form, expression and temporality together in the service of fresh intellectual engagement. Her formal analyses grant special focus to the quartets of 1810–16, isolating the questions they pose for existing music theory and employing these as a means of scrutinising the relationship between the concepts of lyricism, development, closure and teleology thereby opening up space for these works to challenge some of the discourses that have historically beset them.

• Provides a comprehensive account of Schubert's complete string quartets, pairing the late quartets with much earlier examples of the genre
• Addresses a gap in the literature by placing Schubert at the very centre of developments in instrumental form in the early nineteenth century
• Applies both current music theoretical approaches and literary and philosophical concepts to the analysis of Schubert's string quartets