Response to Mike Cheng-Yu Lee

Abstract

[1] I celebrate Mike Cheng-Yu Lee's recorded performance of the first movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata, Op. 42 (D. 845; 1825)-and, indeed, his rendition of the entire sonata-as one of the most compelling interpretations of a piano work by Schubert that I have heard. With Mike Lee's essay in this volume, we witness an enactment of the kind of performance-analysis relationship to which I hope we now all aspire-a flow of communication that runs in both directions, from performer to analyst and vice versa, but with both, in this case, embodied in just one very fine musician. Whether Lee's performance intuitions about Schubert's movement have influenced his analytic decisions, or whether it was the other way around, is a question that I suspect Lee would not easily be able to answer. Whatever the case, here is a performer who has been able to tell us why he plays the movement as he does. In general we don't ask or expect that kind of explanation from performers; and so, when they provide such full and convincing answers, we can only be impressed and enlightened.[2] In the wake of Lee's performance, it is tempting to say, Why bicker about our differing analytic views? If a persuasive performance of Schubert's sonata has been Lee's essential goal, as it has been for me in the past, then, given his success, what would be the point of challenging Lee's analysis? With that perspective in mind, I shall try mainly to address certain remarkably similar views about Schubert's first movement that Lee and I share, as well a few differing outlooks that might be relevant to performance. I draw here from an article I wrote that was published in a Brazilian journal (Schmalfeldt 2002); much expanded, this essay has become the point of departure for chapter 5 in my book, In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music.[3] First and foremost, let us consider Lee's courageous challenge to the 20th-century "one-tempo-only" performance attitude-a challenge that he substantiates through his study of the "non-duple" tempos in the slow introductions of Schubert's symphonies. Lee's conclusions promote unexpected support for my long-held view that Schubert invites us to hear the opening of his Op. 42 sonata as invocative of a "slow" introduction, such that the passage only retrospectively becomes the main theme. (Lee and I agree that the modulatory passage initiated at measure 26 can only be regarded in retrospect to have become the transition to the subordinate group.) But can we really regard this opening passage as genuinely "slow"? If, on the one hand, pianists observe both of Schubert's poco ritardandos, including the one at measure 3, then at what moment has there been the establishment of a stable tempo-slow or otherwise-to resume?! I do not propose, strictly speaking, that a classical "slow introduction" is at hand; but Schubert's markings encourage a marvelously reflective, even hesitant, and certainly introduction-like, performance; and that is what Lee's non-duple performance of measures 1-10 conveys.[4] Like Peter H. Smith (Smith 1995, 273-74), Mike Lee regards the entire opening passage as fundamentally dominant-prolonging-another argument in favor of the passage as introductory. Here I shall dare to disagree. As one of my long-distance colleagues has vehemently asserted to me in private, Schubert "always" establishes the tonic at the beginning of his sonatas' first movements. Might this be Schubert's exceptional case? If, as Lee insists, a structural tonic does not arise until the downbeat of measure 26, then he weakens my claim that an "Introduction becomes MT," because there will have been no initiation of a cadential progression to justify the idea of main-theme closure-only dominant prolongation throughout. (The same holds for the opening of Haydn's B-Minor String Quartet, Op. 33, No. 1, which Carissa Reddick discusses in this volume.) By contrast, I hear the implication of tonic harmony in measures 1-2. …