Franz Schubert’s Cello Quintet in C Major, D. 956: “The Wanderer” Transcended

Marta Lambert

Schubert’s music brings tears to our eyes, without any questioning of the soul: this is how stark and real is the way that the music strikes us. We cry without knowing why, because we are not yet what this music promises for us. We cry, knowing in untold happiness, that this music is as it is in the promise of what one day we ourselves will be. This is music we cannot decipher, but it holds up to our blurred, over-brimming eyes the secret of reconciliation at long last.
— Theodor W. Adorno in “Schubert (1928)”

Music was the soul of Romanticism in the 19th century: the essence of the spirit transcended. Music not only represented expression, but was the expression itself. It was the spirit of its environment, and the vehicle for which humans could seek understanding of self amidst a civilization erupting with change. Franz Schubert, while composing on the cusp of Classical and Romantic styles, embodied Romanticism in his late works. He found refuge in the beauty of pain, longed for the past, and embraced loss as a necessary equal to triumph. Schubert died in 1828 living his last months amidst a Viennese society alienated from humanity, whose worldview, polluted with the residue of urban materialism, grappled with existential estrangement. Amidst the barren landscape of an insufferable and soulless world, the wanderer emerged: a spiritual theme of the people that permeated every art form in humanity’s nostalgia for a present of the past. The following essay will present an integrated approach to the role of “The Wanderer” in 19th-century literature, art, philosophy, and music, with a primary focus on Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major.

i. History, Society, Literature, and Visual Art

Life in the early 19th century was grueling and tempestuous. Following the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), Europe was in a state of recovery. The preeminent European leaders, so intent on compromise, established the Congress System, which suppressed liberal uprisings in order to maintain the status quo of dominant power. As a result, society suffered, and Vienna, whilst in the clutches of Klemens von Metternich, faced social downfall. Sanitary conditions were dire, there was an increase in poverty, no systematized water supply, antiquated hospitals, contaminated food supplies, and, as writer and poet Adalbert Stifter describes it, “disease breeding smog.”[1] In full, Stifter records his first impressions of Vienna, Austria, in a biographical sketch from 1826:

On one very beautiful October afternoon . . . they got out at Nussdorf and immediately looked to see whether they could see the thick smog which would always hover over the city, breeding diseases—but they did not find it; rather on the right were beautiful green mountains and on the left beautiful green meadows. Above them rose a sundrenched, gray and delicately chiseled tower—the spire of St. Stephen’s. Fashionably dressed figures were strolling by; carriages bearing attractive white numbers on their drivers’ seats criss-crossed, carrying beautiful men and women seated inside. The coachmen’s faces, owing to their especially fine appearance, betrayed not the slightest sign of the unhealthy air of the place.[2]

The smog Stifter refers to resulted from growing mechanization.[3] Vienna was simultaneously in the midst of materialistic progress and moral decline, a mechanization/urbanization that was outgrowing the intrinsic needs of the people. As alluded to in the excerpt, the growing disdain to city life yielded a dichotomy between nature and an urban existence. As stated by Leon Botstein, “Nature took on its all-too-familiar role as an emblem of innocence and simplicity. The urban emerged as the construct of a polar opposite: a man-made world that signaled artificiality and corruption.”[4] The world once crafted by the hands of humans was now run by machines, thus displacing sentiments of human belonging with estrangement.

The emerging polarity between human and machine, rural and urban, belonging and estrangement, yielded a society that wandered. This spiritual figure, “The Wanderer,” pervaded European culture, thus permeating literature, visual art, philosophy and music in varying capacities. The aforementioned Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868) was one of the most prominent literary figures of the 19th century. His work Der Nachtsommer (1857) narrates the transformation of a child coming of age as immersed in the beauties of nature. The story unfolds from the perspective of the main protagonist, Heinrich, who portrays detailed observations of everyday life, objects, interactions—depictions of the mundane. As indicated in this excerpt, Heinrich describes furniture, a marble floor, the objects, all at his own pace—the reactions of which are realistically captured in Stifter’s prose:

When I entered this room I thought vividly, I could say with a certain longing, of my father. There was nothing more of marble here; it was like our ordinary rooms but was furnished with antique pieces of furniture such as my father owned and loved. . . . Above all, a writing desk attracted my attention because it was not only the biggest, but probably the most beautiful article of furniture in the room. Four dolphins which had the lower part of their heads on the floor with their bodies stretching up in a curled position bore the body of the desk. . . . however, my companion told me that they were carved of linden wood and made to resemble yellowish green metal by a medieval process that no one was able to duplicate anymore.[5]

Heinrich’s realistic and earnest observations prompt a familiarity in the present by virtue of reminiscences of the past. He remarks of a “longing for his father,” antique objects that filled “our ordinary rooms,” and antiquated medieval processes of beauty. Even in this short excerpt, themes of “The Wanderer" are illuminated through ordinary objects, the meaning of which is interpreted in the present through a lens of the past; a nostalgia for what once was.

Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Mists (ca. 1818) also embodies themes of a wandering world, but in a different light. The painting depicts the wanderer perched atop a rock with his back turned. The relationship of the wistful character in rugged surroundings evokes sensations of contemplation, freedom, consciousness, a confrontation of nature’s vastness . . . but there is no one else in sight. He is a single wanderer; free but alone. Given Vienna’s sociopolitical context, one finds the subject matter of the painting unsettling. Charles Rosen explains: “. . .’pure’ landscape in paint—or in verse or prose—now attempted to render the sense of natural, not human, history, the visible evidence of past time in the personal sensation. . . . The picturesque landscape with ruins of the eighteenth century was replaced by landscape as itself a progressive ruin—the process of corruption and renewal in Nature.”[6] The wanderer juxtaposed with mysterious mists and rugged rocks casts the image of an outside world that is “indifferent to civilization.”[7] The innerlichkeit, or the inward spirit of humanity, the dreams of a wandering society, exists only to be rejected by the apathy of an inhospitable world of progress.

ii. Music of Franz Schubert

The thematic ideologies of “The Wanderer” pervading literature and visual art extended to music as well—particularly to works of Franz Schubert. Two of Schubert’s first compositions to convey “The Wanderer" were the “Wanderer” Fantasy, or the Fantasy in C Major for Piano, op. 15, D. 760, composed in 1822, and the lied entitled Wandrers Nachtlied II from 1823. The text of the latter originates from the second of two poems written in 1780 by German Romantic poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The poem was not transcribed in the traditional sense, but rather engraved by Goethe’s hand into the wall of his frequently visited wooden cabin at the top of Kickelhahn—the region which is referred to as “Goethe Country” in the modern world. Of all the early 19th-century Romantic poets, Goethe was Schubert’s favorite.[8] With more than 70 settings of his poetry in Schubert’s output, Wandrers Nachtlied II was set to music as Opus 96, No. 3, D. 766, and within the same year was followed by Die schöne Müllerin (op. 25, D. 795)—the first song of which is entitled “Das Wandern" (Wandering), with texts by Wilhelm Müller.

As is evident in the titling and ideological implications of the aforementioned works, “The Wanderer” became a significant element of Schubert’s compositional voice. What is most compelling, however, is Schubert’s incorporation of wandering ideology into purely instrumental works that bear no programmatic reference. Substantial research and recent publications have explored Schubert’s evocation of memory, reminiscence, shifting temporality, and recollection, as seen in articles of Walter Frisch, Scott Burnham, John Gingerich, Charles Fisk and John Daverio.[9] I will present an analysis of the first two movements of Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, D. 956, addressing harmonic, motivic, and textural allusions as coinciding with ideologies of “The Wanderer” already embodied in 19th-century literature and art. The analysis exhibits a similar undertaking to the one inspired by Walter Frisch’s presentation of Schubert’s G-major String Quartet, D. 887,[10] an approach that codified a “logic of reminiscence,”[11] or as one could otherwise describe it: a theoretical interpretation of the empirical.

iii. Franz Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, D. 956: Allegro ma non troppo and Adagio

Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major begins from a moment of stasis that organically gathers with chromaticism, only to recede. The brooding opening statement yearns, only to meet its opposite, an innocently carefree response of elegant poise. The circular motion spins out yet is supplanted with the rhythmic “ping” (mm. 9–10) of a snappy motive consisting of a sixteenth note and a dotted half note. This material is then repeated, tonicizing the supertonic with the addition of the second cello, thus not only adding depth to the overall sonority, but shifting the perspective of what it once was. Within the first 20 measures, Schubert presents the most seminal structural elements of the entire quintet: the chromatic semitone, rhythmic “ping” motive, inner-outer relationship, and shifting of perspective.

Jumping now to the second thematic group (m. 58), one experiences Schubert establishing the key of E-flat major by means of its relative minor key, C minor. The key itself deserves attention. E-flat major is the chromatic mediant of C major; the root of E-flat major is a semitone down from the third of C major, and its third serves as the root of the dominant (G major). In typical 18th-century sonata-form fashion, the second thematic group would usually modulate to the dominant, but this is not the case here—or at least not entirely. Upon further analysis, the interaction of this delicately sentimental cello duo revolves around the note g, the dominant of the work’s main key. The two cellos begin in unison on g, with the second cello descending out of the texture by semitone only to land on e-flat. The note g is stated and repeated as a suspended tone a total of 10 times in a phrase that is 22 measures long. Perhaps the repetition of g is a reminiscent nod to the traditional tonal relationship of 18th-century sonata form, Schubert thus symbolically and aurally providing the g as a temporal axis of the past and the present. Regardless, the in-betweenness of e-flat to the home key and the dominant by means of a chromatic mediant relationship shifts the dialectical nature of sonata form. The keys of C major and E-flat major are distantly related yet so connected, thus replacing the progress of the dialectic with a wandering key “lost in thought.”

The material is repeated with a violin duo, and the texture of the instruments is reoriented on yet another axis of perspective. The pizzicato, initially in the viola, is now given to the second cello, which generates cyclical motion in conversation with the viola and first cello. The three-part rhythmic texture is organic, and gives the suspended melodic line a reason to transform.

The recapitulation of the opening material (m. 267) returns in C major, as is expected; however, it is not a direct replica. Schubert repeats the main theme but in a different guise. The material is remembered either transformed by virtue of the development, or reinterpreted by virtue of memory. The entrances of the themes are reversed between the first cello and the first violin, and the latter is the main instigator in the textural change with the addition of eighth- note arpeggios on every beat. However, the rhythmic ping returns in the same voicing on both repetitions of the theme, thus proving to be a pillar of recognition in this “logic of reminiscence.”

The second theme returns played not by a cello duo, but by the first cello and viola. One would expect the second theme to return in C major, or E-flat major for that matter, but it does not. Instead Schubert chooses C major’s mirrored chromatic counterpart of A-flat major, the flattened submediant. Similarly to what it did in the initial statement of the second theme, the melody still revolves around its third, which in this case is the note c, the root of the tonic sonority of the overall piece, and the appropriate recapitulatory key in traditional sonata form. Schubert again reorients the tonal perspective, thus creating the allusion of returning to the home key, but as seen from an alternate universe.

The first movement of Schubert’s String Quintet is vast, yet unified by its generative elements: the chromatic semitone, rhythmic motive, exploration of the outer and the inner, and shifting perspectives of tonality. The protean structures interact to create a dynamic narrative of temporality that is self-referential within manipulation of the classical sonata-form paradigm. Schubert yearns for expression beyond form, and does just that.

The Adagio movement of Schubert’s String Quintet lies at the heart of fragile profundity. The opening material is deeply introverted, and speaks to the notion of inner dialogue, of consciousness and of hope. The key of E major is not only significant in its diatonic major-mediant relationship to C major, but also in its aesthetic. According to William Kinderman, “For Schubert as for Beethoven, E Major often served as a key of exalted lyricism, and even celestial contemplation.”[12] The latter of these is readily exemplified in the opening texture of the Adagio.

A three-part texture emerges, generated by the slow unfolding of pizzicato in the second cello. The first violin pleads in fragmented utterances while the inner three voices levitate in a haze of harmony. The voices interact in a collective consciousness of the innerlichkeit, within a texture that swings between moments of dynamic urgency that painfully retreat back into the cycle of static motion. Where have we heard this before?

The rhythmic motive utilized by the first violin’s poetically fragmented utterances is a mutation of the “ping” rhythmic motive in the first movement, thus broadening the temporal landscape of memory between movements. The pizzicato in the second cello harkens back to its first appearance in the second theme. While the metric subdivisions are reoriented from duple to triple, the basic feel between beats 1 and 4 in the second theme, and beats 1 and 3 of the Adagio, is strikingly of a parallel quality. Furthermore, the overall texture is analogous. The pizzicato functions as a generative force of circularity, which is responded to in part by a quickened rhythmic statement (mvmt. I: duples/triples in the second theme(s); mvmt. II: first violin utterances), all of which is fused together by suspended tones of minimal intervallic and rhythmic movement (mvmt. I: cello and violin duos in the second theme; mvmt. II: inner three voices). While the opening statement of the Adagio is more introverted compared to the darker sonority of the second theme of the Allegro ma non troppo, the elements comprising the textural landscape, the underlying architecture, are products of the past in the present. The allusions of inner consciousness, the reflection, or wandering, is created through an understanding of the present through its past. In tandem with this ideal, Scott Burnham asks, “What is being remembered in the music?” In response, he says, perhaps we hear “. . . the sound of memory, not the sounds of memories.”[13] A compelling answer, one that I respond to with: how does the “sound of memory” structurally function within the unfolding narrative of a musical work? The “sound of memory” inevitably co-exists with and inhabits the same world as its opposite: the sound of presence. Memory does not exist unless it occurs in a present moment; this duality coalesces within Schubert’s allegorical sound world of the second movement.

Amidst the cosmic memory of the Adagio there is a confrontation with reality: a grotesquely nefarious modulation to its Neapolitan of F minor (m. 29). The blissfully suspended haze of natural beauty is bulldozed by the Phrygian inflection of death—of urbanization. Chaos ensues within a ff texture of accented syncopations, tormented triplets, trills, and a wailing first violin line. The musical landscape is developed with unnatural shapes and structures amidst an inner lament of despair—a dreamworld of memory fractured by reality. Alas, nearing the end of the B section, the urbanized structures dissolve into a numbness of despondency. The ppp dissipates into distant murmurs of the rhythmic motive—the memory returns. Schubert modulates back to E major with material transfigured. The trauma of the Neapolitan, a semitone away from E major, was built up only to be dismantled, thus surrendering to the cosmic spell of E major.

In summary, the Allegro non ma troppo and Adagio movements of Schubert’s String Quintet are shifting temporal landscapes of the past and the present: “the sound of memory.” As exemplified in both movements, Schubert utilizes the semitone to navigate the shapeshifting soundscape of perspective, thus realizing the present by means of the past. The rhythmic motive appears and disappears, only to be recollected and anticipated as a figure of mystery. Schubert’s customization of sonata form serves the spectrum of expression and nothing less. The moment-to-moment and retroactive existence of themes, inner and outer exploration, suspended atmosphere of the cosmos, catastrophic collision of the Phrygian mode, and penetration of human consciousness through harmony are organically presented, thus creating a logic for reminiscence within an expansive work of “heavenly length.”[14]

iv. Concluding Thoughts

The overarching sociopolitical context of a society battling symptoms of colliding, antithetical worlds was embodied in cultural artifacts of literature, art, philosophy, and music. The qualities of internal searching, “subjective interiority,”[15] “temporality of pastness,”[16] and “pull of what is no longer”[17] were inherent in Schubert’s String Quintet as “The Wanderer,” the zeitgeist of Schubert’s early-19th-century world. Schubert confronted and deeply probed the human condition, thus reconciling the socioeconomic and political tragedies of his time in music. The quintet, while not bearing any programmatic connection, identifies with the needs of life, and thus offers a temporary home for a humanity ever wandering. As remarked by Schubert scholar Dr. L. Michael Griffel, “It’s music that is transfigurational, that takes you out of yourself and momentary personal considerations of your own troubles. Like life itself, like the fact that you were born and given a chance to have a life, that music is there for the taking. Because it is given to us.”[18] In other words, the music given to us empathizes as a representation of will, illusion, an alternate realm of escape that was otherwise impossible to achieve in the corporeal world.[19] A natural corollary of this is a confrontation with mortality, one that Schubert knew all too well, and perhaps resonated into the spirit of the String Quintet, having written it two months before his death in 1828. The music, in its exploration of inner and outer worlds, reminiscence, and “The Wanderer” seeking life amidst impending death, exists as an embodiment of the sublime. It embraces the spirit of the time, “The Wanderer,” and teaches us what we will never know: a greatness beyond calculation that transcends all. It addresses existence in opposition to Beethoven’s goal, not ever seeking a means to an end, but accepting that loss is just as important and necessary as overcoming. So, in the end, who is “The Wanderer”? We are. The singularity existing among the collective species of wanderers, transcending time through our art, “. . . knowing in untold happiness, that this music is as it is in the promise of what one day we ourselves will be.”[20]

[1] Cited in Leon Botstein, “Realism Transformed: Franz Schubert and Vienna,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16.

[2] Ibid., 15.

[3] William Kinderman, “Wandering Archetypes in Schubert’s Instrumental Music,” 19th-Cenutry Music 21, no. 2 (1992): 208.

[4] Botstein, “Realism Transformed,” 17.

[5] Adalbert Stifter, Indian Summer, trans. Wendell Fyreb (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 54.

[6] Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 147.

[7] Kinderman, “Wandering Archetypes in Schubert’s Instrumental Music,” 209.

[8] Jane K. Brown, “The Poetry of Schubert’s Songs,” in Schubert’s Vienna, ed. By Raymond Erickson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 186.

[9] See bibliography for specific references.

[10] Walter Frisch, “‘You Must Remember This’: Memory and Structure in Schubert’s String Quartet in G Major, D. 887,” The Musical Quarterly 84 no. 4 (Winter 2000): 582–603.

[11] Scott Burnham, “Schubert and the Sound of Memory,” The Musical Quarterly 84, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 655.

[12] Kinderman, “Wandering Archetypes in Schubert’s Instrumental Music,” 215.

[13] Burnham, “Schubert and the Sound of Memory,” 658.

[14] The coining of this phrase was made in reference to Schubert’s “Great” C-major Symphony, D. 944, but the phrase is also applicable here.

[15] John M Gingerich, “Schubert’s annus mirabilis and the String Quintet,” in Schubert’s Beethoven Project (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 324.

[16] John Daverio, ""One More Beautiful Memory of Schubert": Schumann's Critique of the Impromptus, D. 935,” The Musical Quarterly 84, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 605.

[17] Burnham, "Schubert and the Sound of Memory,” 655.

[18] Dr. L. Michael Griffel, Doctoral Class “Schubert: The Final Decade” via Zoom at The Juilliard School, Tuesday, December 8, 2020.

[19] A concept summarized from the philosophical writings of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872).

[20] Theodor W. Adorno, “Schubert (1928),” trans. Jonathan Dunsby and Beate Perrey, 19th-Century Music 29, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 14.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. “Schubert (1928).” Translated by Jonathan Dunsby and Beate Perrey. 19th-Century Music 29, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 3–14.

Botstein, Leon. "Realism Transformed: Franz Schubert and Vienna." In The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, edited by Christopher H. Gibbs, 13–35. Cambridge Companions to Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Brown, Jane K. “The Poetry of Schubert’s Songs.” In Schubert’s Vienna, edited by Raymond Erickson, 183–213. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992.

Burnham, Scott. "Schubert and the Sound of Memory." The Musical Quarterly 84, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 655–663.

Daverio, John. “'One More Beautiful Memory of Schubert’: Schumann's Critique of the Impromptus, D. 935." The Musical Quarterly 84, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 604–618.

Fisk, Charles. “Schubert Recollects Himself: The Piano Sonata in C Minor, D. 958.” The Musical Quarterly 84, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 635–654

Frisch, Walter. “‘You Must Remember This’: Memory and Structure in Schubert’s String Quartet in G Major, D. 887.” The Musical Quarterly 84, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 582–603.

Gingerich, John M. “Schubert’s annus mirabilis and the String Quintet.” In Schubert’s Beethoven Project, 302–336. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Griffel, Dr. L. Michael. Doctoral Class “Schubert: The Final Decade” via Zoom at The Juilliard School. Tuesday, December 8, 2020.

Kinderman, William. "Wandering Archetypes in Schubert's Instrumental Music." 19th-Century Music 21, no. 2 (Autumn 1997): 208–222.

Rosen, Charles. The Romantic Generation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Stifter, Adalbert. Indian Summer. Translated by Wendell Fyreb. Bern: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006.