The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert

Offers a major new contribution to understanding Schubert's creative approach and the gothic imagination more generally.


This book illuminates Franz Schubert's engagement with gothic discourse at the intersection of music, literature and the visual arts. Ideas of the gothic provide a framework for contextualizing the myriad ways in which Schubert's music evokes the blurring of past and present, life and death, and for situating strangeness in relation to a cross-disciplinary phenomenon that captivated the imagination of the time.

The study traces the gothic from Schubert's early songs, where its presence is well established, to the instrumental music of his final years. These dialogues speak to shifting associations across chronological boundaries; their traces undergo change, returning in altered contexts - from fleeting disturbances, a rhythmic shudder or a tremolo figuration, to prolonged outbursts and disjuncture. The gothic is at times linked explicitly to death, as in Schubert's graveyard settings, and at other times implied through doubles and distortion, nocturnal imagery, or hybridity and metamorphosis.

The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert offers new interpretations, grounded in close reading of musical and poetic material, that move beyond the ghostly and macabre towards a world wherein death, the sublime and grotesquerie are intricately entwined. The book therefore provides for a major new contribution to understanding Schubert's creative approach and the gothic imagination more generally.