Talk:String Quartet No. 15 (Schubert)

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[edit] Analysis of the Last Movement

I greatly trimmed down the following paragraph. It was rambling, too colloquial, and uncited. If there is anything good in there that I deleted and can be cleaned up with citations added feel free to re-add it.

The finale continues the preoccupation of the first movement in an extended and ambiguous movement that might be sonata or rondo, might be G major or minor. The opening theme is more extreme, more rapid, in its exchanges of major and minor chords than was that of the first movement; its rhythms are tarantellaish, as with that of the previous quartet — which the movement resembles but only in some ways, and the movement has a capricious quality. The rhythms drag everything along with them, if not in all voices than constantly in the background, with such compulsion and for so long that when, in the second half of the first episode — or in the third theme group of the sonata form (which is it..?), which starts in B minor (and returning in E minor in what is effectively a recapitulation) ... things come to a screeching halt, the playful 6/8 being partially superseded by an imposing theme in dotted halfs and quarters in 3/4 — the effect is immediate (and at the least, attention-grabbing).

This could be a rondo with a lengthy first episode (wandering through D major and B minor, then G major and E minor when it returns) and a developmental central episode, as in the preceding quartet; or a sonata form whose main theme returns before the development and not after it, as in Brahms' first symphony. The second makes more sense, but the question, if it even matters, remains open! The structure is (for all that) tight, the central section acting — again as with the previous quartet — much more as a development than as an occasion for further episodic material, with much development of the third theme in particular — and after the recapitulation of part of the main theme and of the first episode, in the coda, the opening, fff, increasingly frenetic, seems to decide on a mode and to stay there.

DavidRF 03:22, 7 April 2007 (UTC)