On performance, analysis, and Schubert

Authors

  • Janet Schmalfeldt Tufts University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-6377.2002.56136

Keywords:

musical form as process, formal functions, philosophical and musical notions of becoming, omnibus progression, false recapitulation, symmetrical division of the octave

Abstract

An introductory critique of my own 1985 essay about the performance-analysis relationship sets the stage for a portrayal of the Performer as the individual most especially in charge of shaping our perceptions of form within the first movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in A Minor, Op. 42 (D845). Ideas about form as process in Beethoven's music, about Schubert's personal and professional status in 1825, and about the interplay between formal and motivic conventions and transformations will be brought to bear upon the question of how performers and analysts alike might approach an understanding of Schubert's formidable work.

Author Biography

  • Janet Schmalfeldt , Tufts University

    is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Tufts University. She holds a Ph.D. in Theory from Yale Utiiversity and an M.M.A. in piano performance from the Yale School of Music; she completed a B.A. as well as a Bachelor of Music degree at Lawrence University. She has taught at McGill University and at Yale, where she served as Director of Undergraduate Music Studies (1990-94) and, in the spring of 1993, was awarded the Yale College Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities. She is the author of Berg's "Wozzeck": Harmonic Language and Dramatic Design and has published articles on the relation of analysis to performance, on Berg's Piano Sonata Op. 1, on aspects of cadence, form, and voice leading in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, and on an ideology that she has identified as the "Beethoven-Hegelian tradition." Her work-in-progress develops philosophical and analytic perspectives on form as process in early nineteenth-century European music.

    During the years 1993-95, Janet Schmalfeldt served as the President of the New England Conference of Music Theorists. She was elected Vice-President of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) in 1995; in November of 1999, she completed her two-year term as SMT President.

    In the role of pianist, Prof. Schmalfeldt's appearances in Montréal included a performance of Beethoven's Fourth Concerto with the McGill Symphony as well as regular chamber and solo recitals, one of which was broadcast by the CBC. While teaching at Yale, she presented a solo recital and performed Mozart's Piano Concerto, K. 271. With the Tufts Symphony in the spring of 1997, she and Lois Shapiro performed Mozart's Concerto in E-flat for Two Pianos, K. 365. For the 1999 annual meeting of the New England Conference of Music Theorists, held at Harvard University, she presented Schubert's Sechs Moments musicaux and accompanied baritone Richard Lalli in a performance of Schubert songs and Robert
    Schumann's Dichterliebe. In the fall of 2002, she performed Schubert's Winterreise, with Mr. Lalli at the Goethe-Institute in Boston, and Beethoven's Fourth Concerto with the Tufts Symphony.

    It was with her greatest pleasure that Prof. Schmalfeldt served in the spring of 2002 as a visiting teacher in Brazil within two seminars on Analysis for Performers-at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, under the kind supervision of Prof. Cristina Capparelli Gerling, and at the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro-UNIRIO, as especially organized by Ingrid Barancoski. The article published here is a somewhat more formal version of the paper Prof. Schmalfeldt presented in Porto
    Alegre, in Rio, and in Salvador.

References

SCHMALFELDT, Janet. On performance, analysis, and Schubert. Per Musi. Belo Horizonte, v.5/6, 2002. p. 38-54.

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Published

2025-03-19

Issue

No. 05 e 06 (2002): General Topics

Section

Articles

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How to Cite

“On Performance, Analysis, and Schubert”. 2025. Per Musi, no. 05 e 06 (March): 38-54. https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-6377.2002.56136.