T.W.

Adorno
Schubert
Translation by Dniel Pter Bir
Dniel Pter Bir 2002
All Rights Reserved

Tout le corps inutile tait envahi par la transparence. Peu peu le corps se fit
lumire. Le sang rayon. Les membres dans un geste incomprhensible se
figrent. Et lhomme ne fut plus quun signe entre les constellations.
Louis Aragon

Whoever crosses over the threshold between the years in which Beethoven and
Schubert died is grasped by a shudder that resembles the sensation of one who
emerges from the rolling masses of a cooling crater, which was pushed up from
below into a painfully delicate white curtain of light. This person stands in front
of the lava figures of the unprotected spread-out heights of dark plant webs,
finally recognizing the eternal clouds in their passage, those already close to the
mountain and nonetheless far beyond his head. Emerging from the abyss, the
person enters the surrounding landscape, which alone renders the craters
bottomless depth visible both by circumscribing it with outlines drawn by
powerful silence and by readily receiving the light, against which the glowing
mass had blindly hit just a moment before. Even if Schuberts music may not
hold the very power of active will that arises from the core of Beethovens
nature, the gullets and shafts that furrow through it lead to the same chthonic
depth from which such a will originates, making its demonic image apparent,
which the feat of practical reason is capable of mastering time and time again.
However the stars, which shine forth for Schuberts Music, with their inaccessible
glow, are the same to which that eager hand reached. Thus we must, in the
strictest sense, speak of Schuberts landscape. Nothing could more thoroughly
falsify the contents of his music than the attempt to construct him as a
personality. Unlike Beethoven, Schubert does not, from the outset, allow himself
to be understood as a spontaneous unity of a person; as an idea, which acts as a

1
virtual center, and organizes disparate elements. The greater the distance
separating the features of Schuberts music from a personal point of reference,
the better they establish themselves as signs of an intention that singularly
perseveres amongst the fragments of that deceptive totality of the human being
who wishes to exist as a self-defined spirit. Being immune to any kind of
idealistic synopsis, or even the hasty phenomenological investigation of "the
unity of meaning" taken aside, no more a closed system than a growing flower
driven with purpose toward an end does Schuberts music present the scene of
the unified dispositions of truth (Wahrheitscharakter) in Schuberts music. The
music does not itself produce these dispositions of truth but instead receives
them; and only in the process of being received by human beings can they be
expressed. It is, of course, not to be thought that the personal component of the
composition in Schuberts music is roundly eradicated. In the same way, the
commonly held concept, that Schubert, lyricist of his inner self, merely blocked
out reason as he, as a psychological being, expressed without much ado nor
caesuras what he just happened to feel in the moment, fails to capture the
reality. Equally misleading would be an interpretation in which one would extract
Schubert from his music and make him, in the pattern of Bruckner phraseology,
into a vessel filled with godly inspirations or even revelations. Not to mention the
talk of artistic intention stemming from a faulty psychological interpretation of
the production process that is confusingly mixed with indiscriminate metaphysics
in regard to the completed creation that always blocks any insight about art.
Both points of view are actually identical and, although they contrast greatly on
the surface, once one substitutes the other the one becomes invalid as well. Both
of them stem from a misconception of the lyrical, as they willfully accept
objective reality to be either a splinter of a true humanity or a fragment of
transcendent reality, thereby remaining faithful to the outrageous over-
estimation of art that prevailed in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, also the
lyrical, as a form of art, remains an image of the real, which is only different
from other images in that its appearance is tied to the very possibility of reality

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breaking into (Einbruch) the image. Hence it becomes possible to define anew
the participation of subjective and objective aspects within Schuberts landscape
of the lyrical. The contents (Gehalte) of the lyrical are not produced: they are the
smallest elements (Zellen) of existing objectivity, which constitute these
contents images, after the long periods of objective stability, in their
authoritative right, have already fallen into decline. These images do not
penetrate into the soul of the human, which is open to the lyrical like rays of
sunshine into plant tissue. Artworks are never creatures. They are rather targets
in a shooting gallery that people hit: if the right one is hit, it tips over and allows
reality itself to shine through. The power that hits them is human, not artistic:
they are moved by human emotion. In no other way can the indifference of
subject and object in the lyrical configuration be comprehended. The lyric poet
does not immediately display his emotions in the creation. Rather, his emotions
are the means that draw truth, in its incomparably small crystallization, into the
creation. Truth itself does not sink into the artistic creation but is portrayed
within the creation, and the revelation (unveiling) of its image remains to be
done by people. The creator reveals the image. But the image of truth always
exists in history. The history of the image is its decay. It is the decay of the
illusion of truth containing all the contents (Gehalte) which it intends to display,
and the exposure of its transparence in regard to the dispositions of truth that
are intended with the creation and then first step forward amongst in its decay.
The decay of the lyric creation is, at the same time, the decay of the contents
(Gehalte) of its subject. These subjective contents (Gehalte) in the lyrical artwork
are, for all intents and purposes, only the artworks material contents
(Stoffgehalte). Within this material, the portrayed dispositions of truth
(Wahrheitscharaktere) are merely hit upon (getroffen): the unity between the
contents (Gehalte) of subject and material is a function of the historical moment,
and disappears. Not constant human feelings, (Grundgefhle) as natural stasis
would have it, but the remaining objective dispositions endure within the lyric
creation beyond any of the transient, perishable feelings that existed at the

3
artwork's origin. At the same time, the subjectively intended and reproduced
intrinsic values face the same fate as the created material forms, which time
erodes. It is the dialectical collision of the two forces: of the forms that are be
read from the stars for an illusory eternity, and the material contents of the
immanence of consciousness; the material contents themselves existing
absolutely as the non-derivable givens - destroys both forces and with them the
provisional unity of the work; it opens up the work as the stage of their
transience and reveals that, which from the images of truth arise to become the
fragile, cover of the artwork. Only today has the sense of landscape within
Schubert's music become evident, as today only the plumb - line (sounding lead)
(Lot) is able to measure the Luciferian vertical angle of Beethoven's dynamic
power. The dialectical liberation of Schubert's real contents occurs only after the
Romantic era, which he can hardly ever be counted as plainly belonging to. The
Romantic era read his work as a representational language of subjectively
intended meanings and suppressed the formal questions within his work by
means of banal critique. The romantic era dynamically exaggerated the
overpriced psychological messages, drawn from Schubert, and exhausted them
so quickly as only a bad infinity can be exhausted. Yet it neglected the better
part of his work: namely, its remainder with the hollow spaces of a subjectivity
broken free: the springs and bounds of the poetic surface are visibly fulfilled by
means of the metal that had previously encrusted itself under the clearly
intelligible expressions of the life of the soul. Within the work's dispositions of
truth, the animating subjectivitys downfall is made evident in the metamorphosis
of the person Franz Schubert into a repulsive object of petit-bourgeois
sentimentalism. This representation is actually found in literary form by Rudolf
Hans Bartsch in the figure of Schwammerl1, which secretly generally dominates
the Schubert-literature in present day Austria, and perfects Schuberts

1
Rudolf Hans Bartsch. Schwammerl: ein Schubert-Roman. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1912.

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destruction in the Dreimderlhaus2 as a concluding piece for all romantic illusions
about Schubert. This is because the human being must be so small, in order not
to further obstruct the vistas that he disclosed, which cannot let be really driven
out of his magic circle. On the contrary, he revives these perspectives as the
smallest periphery decoration: and in the same sense there is something fitting
in the presentation of the misfit Schubert; as an object of amusement for store
girls amongst themselves, and at the same time Schubert is presented as being
one of them who gets carried away with erotic helplessness. This suits the
genuine picture of his music better than the Vormrz dreamer of the Biedermeier
era who always sits at the brook in order to hear it babble. It is also absolutely
correct that the Dreimderlhaus shall be linked to Schubert, rather than to
Mozart or to Beethoven. The Biedermeier's socially-determined affinity to picture
postcards, which gives birth to the impulse of any attempts to make Schubert
into kitsch, proves itself in the work itself as a continuation of the existence of
the solitary individual that occupies the landscape of Schubert. Even if the
continued existence of the Schubertian form might eventually end, while the
Beethovenian and Mozartian forms silently continue without interruption - it will
however not be possible to determine the state of this continued existence
before such questions of form can be seriously answered - the strange, banal,
oblique and, in regard to the social order, highly inadequate world of the
potpourris guarantees his themes a second life. The features of the work that
the destruction of subjective unity scatters within the potpourri, shift together in
order to become a new unity, which is not able to legitimate itself as such, but
uniquely proves the preeminence of the characteristics as such by means of
abrupt confrontation. The potpourri guarantees the continued existence of the
theme as theme, in the sense that theme follows theme without having to accept
the obvious consequences that require change. No theme from the past could

2
Heinrich Bert (1858-1924) composed the operetta Das Dreimdlerhaus from pieces of
Schuberts music, with a libretto based on Bartschs novel.

5
stand such thematic proximity that has been simply deposited. Filled with terror,
rigor mortis hangs terribly over the opera potpourris of the nineteenth century.
But with Schubert the themes throng forward without coagulating into a figure
before the Medusa. Still, the randomly attempted assemblage sets the themes
opens up the path to their origin and, at the same time, for a back entrance into
the Schubertian form. This is because the potpourris, as a game of combination
and putting together, wish to happily find anew the lost unity of artworks. Only
such a unity was not a subjectively produced one that can never be brought
home from the carnival shooting gallery; the potpourris will be granted the
possibility of such a unity only when they arise from the configuration of the hit
pictures. In this sense it seems certain that a particular school of understanding
of Schubert has misspoken, as its conventional opinion about the lyrical is wrong.
This is particularly true in that sense that it sees Schubert's music as an organic
plant-like being that unfolds, without any consideration for any preplanned form
and practically every form that, perhaps bare, grows out of itself and refreshingly
blooms.
But it is precisely such a logical organic theory that is strictly denied within the
construction that stems from the potpourri. Such an organic unity would be
necessarily teleological in nature; every cellular element within it would make the
next cellular element necessary, and their interconnectedness would stem from
the moving life of subjective intention, which has died and the restitution of
which is definitely not consistent with the potpourri. Wagner's music, which
establishes itself on the premise of organization, by its very nature does not
allow for the potpourri; however the music of Bizet and Weber does, which
actually relates them to Schubert. The cellular elements that the potpourri layers
one upon another must be joined together by another principle than by that of
living unity. Even if we grant Schubert's music to be, in the larger sense, grown
rather than produced; its growth, fragmented through and through, and never
actually self sufficient, doesn't have the quality of a plant but rather that of a
crystal. By acknowledging the original configured isolation of Schubert's features,

6
including the constitutive fragmentary character of his music, the transition to
the potpourri, which preserves its elements, thus completely transfigures his
landscape. It is no coincidence that the Potpourri arose as a surrogate musical
form of the nineteenth century, to which the simultaneous miniature landscape
was formed as a bourgeoisie object to be used in any which way, as in the
formation of the genre postcard. Every one of these intentions pertaining to the
landscape (Landschaftsintentionen) merges within the motive, which will
suddenly spring up from history as though to cut these intentions with the force
of hedge clippers. Furthermore the fate of these landscape intentions exists in
history, but only as history is the scene of occurrence, history is never its object.
Therein is presented the idea of a timeless mythical reality that is demonically
deprived. In this way, potpourris are in themselves timeless. The complete
interchangeability of all thematic information is displayed there by the
simultaneity of all events, which move together being void of history. It is
because of such simultaneity that the contour of Schubert's landscape can be
recognized that is infernally reflected.
Every truly legitimate deprivation of aesthetic contents (sthetischer Gehalte) will
be inaugurated by artworks in which the disclosure of the image is to such an
extent successful so that the translucent power of truth is not limited to the
image but penetrates into objective reality.
Such a transparence, for which an artwork pays with its life, is suited for the
crystals of Schubert's landscape. This is where fate and reconciliation rest un-
separated side by side: the potpourri will destroy the ambiguous eternity of both
so that it can be recognized. It is the landscape of the previous death in the
past. No more is the transition between the occurrence of the first and the
second of Schubert's themes constitutively controlled by history is life the
intentional object of his music. The question of hermeneutics, which Schubert
poses in such an urgent way, was until now only pursued within the polemic
against romantic psychological interpretation and not with the necessary focus.
The critique of all musical hermeneutics rightfully destroys every interpretation of

7
music as a poetic reproduction of intrinsic psychological contents. Yet the critique
of hermeneutics is not legitimated to eliminate the point of reference to the
objective contents of truth (Wahrheitscharaktere) that are hit upon and to
replace the inferior subjective view of art with a belief in its blind immanence. No
art has itself as its own subject. Its symbolic intention occurs not in abstract
separation of its material concretion. It is in its origin inseparably connected to
history, in order to cut away from it by means of history.
In history, the changing contents (Gehalte) emerge from the work, and alone the
work, that has become silent, exists for itself. If Schubert's work, which today is
more eloquent in a manner of total deprivation than in the works of any of his
contemporaries, doesn't need to be fossilized, it is simply thanks to the fact that
its life doesn't fit the fleeting subjective dynamic power of conforming
representation. Within its origin, the inorganic, precipitous, fragile life of rocks is
already present, and death itself has fallen too deeply within Schubert's work
that it would need to fear death. It is useless to consider, from this point of view,
Schubert's psychological reflection and the experiences with death as well as the
countless reported anecdotes about the death premonitions, which have so little
value as the anecdotes about times of weakness. The choice of texts can be
more highly valued. Their power brings the landscape of Schubert in motion,
even if it is quickly buried under the landscape's mass. It is to be remembered
that the two large song cycles employ poems that continuously present the
image of death before the listener, who wanders among these pictures with the
same small steps as the Schubert who wanders in the Dreimaederlhaus. The
brook, the miller and the dark winter solitude, which in the twilight of the
parhelion frighten as in a dream, are the signs of Schubert's landscape: the dried
out flowers are this landscapes sad decoration. The objective symbols of death
destroy these signs, and the signs feeling returns to the objective symbols of
death. In this way will Schuberts dialectic be constituted: this dialectic sucks up
(saugt) the fading images of existing objectivity with the power of subjective
inner warmth in order to find these images again in the smallest cells of musical

8
concretion. The allegorical image of Death and the Maiden perishes within this
dialectic; not to be lost in the feelings of the individual, but rather that after the
images demise, it can be lifted out of the musical character of sadness in order
to arise after its demise to be saved (gerettet sich zu erheben). This dialectic is
of course changed qualitatively. But this change is only successful at the primary,
smallest level. In the larger realm death is all prevailing. The cyclical nature of
the both song cycles disposition was alone able to prove this: the cyclical
intercourse (Umgang) of the songs is that of the timeless cycle between birth
and death as blind nature dictates. The wanderer traverses this cycle from one
end to the next. Never was the category of the wanderer mentioned, with its
determining respect (Dignitt) for the structure in Schuberts work. While this
category really allows for deeper insight into Schuberts mythical content, it
completely distances itself from the palpable symbolism of Wagner and takes to
be true, what is only seemingly invoked in this symbolism. When psychoanalysis
expropriates travel and wandering for objective symbols of death as archaic
residue, both are found conveniently in this landscape of death. The eccentric
structure of any landscape, in which any center would be just as near, is
revealed to the wanderer, who circles around this center without progressing
forward. Every development is its complete reverse opposite: the first step is as
near to death as the last, and the points of disassociation (dissoziierte Punkte)
will be searched for by circling around amongst the landscape but will never be
given up: for Schubert's themes wander not unlike the Miller or he who in winter
was left by his lover. The themes do not experience history; rather they
experience the detour of perception: every change that happens to them is a
change of light. This explains Schubert's tendency to develop the theme twice or
three times in different works in various ways; the most memorable being the
repetition of such a former melody as in the theme of the Piano Variations, in the
variation theme of the Quartet in A-minor, and in the Rosamunde music. It
would be foolish to explain such a thematic reoccurrence by referring to the
insatiable musical performer (Musikant) who could have found a hundred other

9
melodies from his rich melodic invention, expressing itself until boredom.
Unchanged, the themes meet only the wanderer but they reencounter the same
passages, which are without time and revealed as unconnected and detached, in
a different light. This model concerns itself with not only the repeated use of the
same theme in different pieces but with the constitution of Schuberts very
forms. Even within these forms the themes remain without any dialectical
history. Even if Schuberts variations never affect the structure of the theme, as
do Beethovens, but brush by and circumvent the theme, it is in this way that the
circling wanderings is Schuberts form that would not give these themes an
accessible foreground center. No, this center manifests itself by its very power to
bring everything that appears to its attention. It is in this way that the
Impromptus and Moments musicaux are constructed as well as the works in
sonata form. Not only do these works separate themselves from the Beethoven
Sonata in terms of the established negation of all dialectical developments of the
themes, but also just as much by the repeatability of the themes unchanged
characters. In the first A minor Sonata basically two ideas are presented in the
movement and they dont stand next to each other as first and second theme.
Rather, both are retained much more in the first as well as in the second
thematic group. This is not to be ascribed to the economy of motivic use, which
would order the material for the sake of unity, but it is to return of the same
amongst an extended diversity. Here one can seek for the origin of such an idea
of Attunement (Stimmung), as this ideal once held importance within nineteenth
century art and landscape painting. Attunement, or mood, (Stimmung) is that
which changes within what timelessly stays the same without allowing change to
have any power over it. That which stays the same can only disintegrate in order
to transform attunement into illusion. In this sense, the authenticity of Schuberts
attunement, which is based on perspective, hangs on to and cannot be divided
from the authenticity of identical contents (Gehalte) which this attunement
circles around, and when this attunement escapes the downfall of mood-art
(Stimmungskunst), it is thanks to the affected dispositions (Charaktere)

10
themselves. The solitary element itself can be repeated but the subjectively
produced element, which by necessity passes in time, can not. Not the
repetitions themselves endanger the forms in the works of Wagner and
Schumann; but rather simply the repetition of the unrepeatable that alone has
the right to exist within the place of the form, from where the inner-temporal
subjective dynamic arises. This is different with Schubert. His themes are
appearances of the dispositions of truth, and the artistic power is limited simply
to affecting the image of these dispositions of truth with emotion and, after this
image appears, to cite it again and again. Nonetheless, no citation comes at the
same time, and that is why the atmospheric mood changes. Schuberts forms are
forms of adjuration of that which appeared only once and not of the
transformation of that which was found. This grounded a priori captured the
sonata completely. Therein, harmonic movements of mediation come instead of
developed movements of mediation as changes of light and lead to a new
landscape area, which knows as little development as the part before. In the
development sections the themes are connected by means of the motive in order
to hit the dynamic signals with its smallest components but the irrevocable
themes are progressively revealed. This is where, in retrospect, themes will be
once again taken up, which have past by but are also not yet of the past. And
over everything lies the thin crackling cover of the sonata, which covers the
expanding, growing crystals in order to be soon broken. A true formal analysis of
Schubert has not yet been accomplished even though the form stands perfectly
clear in the programmatic sense. It would have to follow a dialectical course,
which would prevail between the prefixed scheme of the sonata and Schuberts
second crystal-like form. The idea presented in such a form first proves and
strengthens this form over and beyond the deceptive dynamic of the sonata.
Nothing could strengthen the themes more than the compulsion (Zwang) to have
control over a form that does not let the themes exist as themes. The most
founded difference between idea and invention, which should not be allowed to
be separated by the border line (Mainlinie) between grace and will, but which

11
rather cuts through them both, is fixated in the example of Schubert. Idea and
invention both respond to the form-objectives (Formobjektivitten) in the same
dialectical manner. Invention pushes through with the constructive power of this
form-objectives existence by means of the subject and then disintegrates the
subject through the affirmation of the person, which the form itself again
produces. Idea disperses the form by means of disassociation, whereas the idea
preserves the form objective's constitutive dignity, which in the larger sense has
already elapsed but is preserved in the smallest remains, as the form
communicates through a subjective intention. Invention constructs in the
dimensions of the never-ending task and strives to establish totality. Idea
represents the figures of truth (Figuren der Wahrheit) and is rewarded through
the final success at the smallest level. This first establishes a clear picture of the
image that is encountered. It is encountered like the hitting of the shooting
gallery target by the shooter and encountered like a representation shooting into
the real, just as a photograph is a good shot when it really looks like a person.
Schuberts ideas are such good shots in regard to their immortal prototype. The
eternity of this prototype still preserves the traces, as though these ideas were
always there and simply covered up. Simultaneously the human being breaks
into the region of truth so completely executed as only a marksman with focused
eyes. Both ways of encountering happen only in the moment, lit up with
lightening quickness. This does not happen in extended time: times smallest
particle stands for times own suspension. As a sign of being hit, the hole stands
in the forms foreground, which will be aimed at, and at the same time,
Schuberts themes are asymmetrical, allowing the unreachable true form to shine
through by means of an early disdain for the architecture of tonality. Through
this irregularity the themes successfully establish the autonomy of the
encountered images above the abstract will to the pure immanence of form.
Within the framework of subjective intentions and its historically existing stylistic
correlation legitimate fragments are nonetheless produced: in this way the work
must remain a fragment. The Schubertian finale renders fragmentary the

12
disposition of his musical material. The circular movement of the song cycles
hides that which in such a temporal succession of timeless elements would have
to be evident, as soon as this temporal succession would attempt to approach
the developmental time of the sonata. The fact that the finale of the B minor
symphony could not be written, can be considered in connection with the
Wanderer-fantasy. Not that the whole hearted dilettante fails before the
unstructured ending, but the question of Tartarus whether it is not yet
completed rules far and wide above Schuberts region and amongst this region's
music grown mute. This is why Schubert's remaining, successful finales are
perhaps the most powerful signals of hope that exist in his work. Of course, none
of that is to be found in the Wanderer fantasy. Even in the summoning adagio,
its bright forest-green pulls itself to a dark acherontic canyon. The hermeneutics
of death penetrates so many images of Schuberts music and touches upon but
does not exhaust the objective disposition of the music. Deaths emotional
disturbance alone is the door to the underworld, down into which Schubert slips
down; for it is the emotional disturbance of death which is imitated in Schuberts
landscape, sorrow for the deceased human being, not human sadness of the
bereaved. The hermeneutic word fails in front of this door, which just now tried
to follow the transitional passage to death. No more metaphors can hinder the
way through the woods of frost patterns wherein the sudden sprouting crystals
fall over like dead dragons. The bright world above, from which once and again
the way to this kingdom begins, is nothing more than an agency for perspective.
In the same way, perception of the third dimension first puts forward the first
and second: this is so thin a plant-like covering as the organic dialectical sonata
which exists above Schuberts second form. In his choice of texts his blind
inclination to comply with mythological poems, without distinguishing much
between Goethe and Mayrhofer, drastically represents the failure of all words in
such a place below (Tiefenraum). Therein, the word yields the subject matter but
does not have the power to illuminate this subject matter. The wanderer follows
these empty falling words and not their illuminated intention into the depth, as

13
his human suffering will be the means of this observed descent, which does not
lead to the bottom of the soul, but to the vaulted cellar of his fate. I want to
kiss the ground / to penetrate ice and snow, with my hot tears, until I see the
earth. The harmony, with its downward pull, shows the correct principle of the
musical depth of nature. There, nature is not a meaningful object of a human
beings interior natural feeling but the images of nature are similes of the
chthonic place of depth itself, which are per se as inadequate as the poetic word.
Not without reason are Schuberts atmospheric moods, which not only circulate
but also collapse, connected to the harmonic shifting; the transparence of the
modulation, which allows the light to fall from varying depths onto the same
object [aufs Gleiche]. Like apertures in a camera, these sudden modulations,
being devoid of all development and never mediating, adjust the light from
above: the introduction of the second thematic group in the first movement of
the B-flat major sonata: the violent chromatic movement as in the E-flat major
trio, and lastly in the beginning of the second movement in the C-major
symphony: the bridge sections of the sonata model have been transformed
completely in the sense of creating the perspective of leaking light into the
harmonic depth. In each of those three pieces in a major key the second
thematic group appears to be directed toward the minor, which signifies
meaningfully the movement into darkness; for the symbolic quality of the key
types still bears undiminished meaning for Schubert. The demonic function of
depth is realized in Schuberts altered chord. In the landscape divided between
major and minor this function exists ambiguously like mythic nature itself as it
points upwards and downwards simultaneously; its shine has faded and the
expression, which is charged with the configuration of Schubertian modulations,
is an expression of fear. It is the fear of the deathly recognition of the world and
of the annihilating recognition of the mere human being itself. In this way, the
mirror of the Doppelganger will become the tribunal, judging people of on the
ground of their sadness. Only because modulation and alteration are
interspersed within the idiom of harmonic order is their exploitation allowed to

14
attain such power in their historical hour. Just as in a game of opposition in the
natural world above, do modulation and alteration undermine such an order; the
collapse of which would integrate modulation and alteration in the impartial
stream of a subjective dynamic. It was first Schoenberg who regained the power
inherent in Schuberts harmonic principle with the insistent certainty of
fundamental steps by abolishing this principle for good. Schuberts harmony
reaches its deepest place in the pure minor of sorrow, in which the counterpoint
still follows below as a plastic shadow of the melody. If the emotional
disturbance (Affect), was the door to descent, the earth itself, of which arrival
point is already reached, is the bodily appearance of death in front of which the
sinking soul recognizes itself as the female, inescapably involved in its connection
to nature. In the last great allegoric poem of the German language in the image
by Matthias Claudius of Death and the Maiden, the Wanderer arrives at the
landscapes center of gravity. There the creature minor steps forth. But as with a
child caught doing a nasty deed, in which help follows punishment, consolation
follows grief in the same manner, as the base German maxim states. The rescue
happens with the smallest step: in the transformation of the minor to the major
third. They move so closely to one another so that the minor third reveals itself
after the appearance of the major third as its shadow. It is thereby not
astonishing that the qualitative difference between sorrow and consolation, to
which, in Schubert's concrete formation, a true answer exists, is overlooked by
means of a mediating treatment, as the nineteenth century attempted to find a
formula for Schuberts general conduct with the term of renunciation. But the
appearance of reconciliation, which stems from resignation, has nothing to do
with Schuberts consolation, which displays hope that the force of natural
entanglement would actually finally reach its limit. Even if Schuberts sorrow
drags down to the ground and even if the wanderer himself drowns without hope
in the afterbirth: Consolation stands staunchly over the dead and warrants the
dead that hope remains that the depraved magic circle of nature will not be the
dead ones place for eternity. Here is where time gets ignited (entzndet) in

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Schuberts music and the successful finale comes already from another sphere as
the sphere of death. Indeed it is also from another sphere than that of
Beethovens necessity. Because in opposition to Beethovens immanent,
demanded, oppressive, categorically comprehensible but unreachable material
joy is Schuberts joy a perceived (vernommene), confused, final but certain and
immediately produced echo. Only once does this echo cause a large dynamic.
This occurs in the ascent of the Finale in the C major symphony. As with real
voices, the brass melody strikes into in the image of music and explodes this
image in a way that music, from the basis of its true nature, has hardly ever
been destroyed. Otherwise the joy in Schubert comes in other curiously
perplexing ways. The great four-hand Rondo in A major expansively sings with a
sturdy well-being as long as its own corporal duration allows, and differs so
much from the Beethovenian heights of intellect as good food differs from the
immortality postulated by practical reason. The extension of the Schubertian
movements is equally part of that joy, and the word of Godly length continues to
assert itself even to a greater extent as it ever intended. When the themes
timelessly exist together in the landscape of death, the consoling music fills the
recovered time, far away from the deathly end, with the anticipated stability of
eternity. The repeatability of the Schubertian solitary element springs from its
timelessness, but transforms itself in time to its material fulfillment. However
such a fulfillment therein does not need the large movements throughout, or
even the pathos of the large form at all. Rather, this fulfillment keeps itself in the
region underneath the sanctioned forms of bourgeois musical practice. For such
a Schubertian world of true joy, of dances and military marches, of indigent four-
hand piano playing, of hovering banality and slight drunkenness, is as
inadequate for the bourgeois as for the petit bourgeois music making, never
naively affirming existence [Dasein] itself. Whoever wants to adhere to
categorize Schubert as a simple music-maker (Musikant) should, after all,
consider that the music-maker, of whom one could speak of, would be a socially
declassed person akin to the tramps, to jugglers and magicians on the rove

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rather than to the metaphorical simplicity of the craftsman. This is also why the
joy of Schuberts marches is insubordinate, and the time that they establish is
not the time of the souls development but rather of the movement of masses.
The sudden manifestation of Schuberts joy no longer knows any form. Ready to
be used, this joy approaches the lower empirical reality and almost allows itself
to be utilized by breaking out of the realm of art. He who found the music to
express such an anarchic joy could not but have been a dilettante. When would
revolution not seem to the high state official to be anything but a product of
dilettantism? Such is an amateurism of repeated beginnings, and its seal is the
independent organization that arises from its outset. With Schubert, organization
remains compositional technique, but the image trembles. Nowhere does truth
draw nearer than in Schuberts folklore, which has a completely different
meaning than in the music of anyone who troubled with folklore after him.
Schubert did not attempt to correct the lost proximity through the unreachable
distance: for him the transcendental distance is reachable in the closest
proximity. This lies at the front door like Hungary and is simultaneously so far
away as the unintelligible Hungarian language. This is where the secret stems
from, which not only trickles throughout the Ungarisches Divertissement through
the F-minor fantasy and throughout the secondary movements of the A-major
Rondo, but also into the finely parted ramifications throughout all of Schuberts
work, moving up to come within reach and then vanishing again like a phantom
in the C-sharp-minor theme in the finale of the A-minor Quartet. The language of
this Schubert is that of dialect, but this is a dialect without ground. This dialectic
has the tangibility of a homeland, yet it is not a homeland of here but a
remembered homeland. Nowhere is Schubert farther away from the earth than
in that place where he adduces it. The earth opens itself in the images of death;
but when faced with the nearest proximity, nature eliminates itself. This is why
no passage leads from Schuberts music to frivolous genre and homeland art
(Genre- und Schollenkunnst), but merely one passage leads from here to
deepest depravation and one passage to the but barely addressed reality of the

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liberated music of a transformed human being. With its seismograph-like
irregular lines, Schuberts music transcribes the message of the human being's
qualitative transformation. This music is rightly answered by crying: crying of the
poorest sentimentality in the Dreimdelhaus, that is no different from the crying
coming from the devastated body. Faced with Schuberts music, the tears fall
from the eyes without first asking the soul. This music penetrates our being in
such a immediate and real way. We cry without knowing why. Because we have
not yet become like that which this music promises, and because, in unnamed
happiness, this music must be just like it is in order to reassure us that we will
once become like this. Although we cannot decipher this music, in front of the
fading, tear-flooded eye the music holds the ciphers of finite reconciliation.

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