1 In this article ♭VI refers to the key or chord whose keynote or root lies a major third below the home keynote, regardless of the mode of the home key and any accidental required by the key signature (thus, for example, C major is ♭VI in relation to the keys of E major and E minor). Furthermore, this article is solely concerned with tonicizations of ♭VI and cases where a harmony is classed as ♭VI in relation to the home key, rather than with fleeting surface occurrences of ♭VI or instances where a harmony acts as ♭VI only in relation to a secondary key.Google Scholar

2 Kramer, Richard, Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994), 186.Google Scholar

3 Taruskin, Richard, The Oxford History of Western Music, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), iii: The Nineteenth Century, chapter 34.Google Scholar

4 Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, iii, 69.Google Scholar

5 Thomas, J. H., ‘A Subconscious Metaphor?’, Music Review, 43 (1982), 225–35 (pp. 225–8); Susan McClary, ‘Pitches, Expression, Ideology: An Exercise in Mediation’, Enclitic, 7 (1983), 76–86 (pp. 79–80); Thomas Keith Nelson, ‘The Fantasy of Absolute Music’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1998), chapters 3–4; Christopher Wintle, ‘Franz Schubert, Ihr Bild (1828): A Response to Schenker's Essay in Der Tonwille, Vol. 1’, Music Analysis, 19 (2000), 10–28 (p. 21); Brian Black, ‘Remembering a Dream: The Tragedy of Romantic Memory in the Modulatory Processes of Schubert's Sonata Forms’, Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music / Intersections: Revue canadienne de musique, 25 (2005), 202–28 (p. 204). Nelson's Ph.D. dissertation, which was supervised by McClary, discusses Schubert's use of ♭VI in detail. However, in my opinion his definition of ♭VI is overly broad, with the result that he finds the harmony in a vast number of songs and with a multitude of poetic associations. Meanwhile, his analytical approach relies heavily on Roman-numeral harmonic analysis and pays insufficient attention to contrapuntal aspects and is thus, I would argue, unable to distinguish satisfactorily between this multitude of uses. Nevertheless, Nelson's dissertation has influenced much of the work on ♭VI that has followed, including my own.Google Scholar

6 The core triadic transformations of neo-Riemannian theory are the ‘Parallel’ (P), ‘Relative’ (R) and ‘Leading-tone exchange’ (L). P transforms the mode of a triad by changing the third but keeping the root and fifth unchanged (for example, C major becomes C minor, and vice versa); R transforms a triad to its relative (for example, C major becomes A minor, and vice versa); and L substitutes the root of a major triad for its leading note, or the fifth of a minor triad for the note a semitone higher, while retaining the other two pitches (for example, C major becomes E minor, and vice versa). These transformations can be combined: for example, a PL transformation combines a P transformation and an L transformation in that order (for example, C major becomes A♭ major, but not vice versa). The P and L transformations are considered ‘maximally smooth’ as they involve minimal voice-leading work, requiring just one pitch class to move by a semitone. Hexatonic cycles are discussed in Richard Cohn, ‘Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Progressions’, Music Analysis, 15 (1996), 9–40, and in Cohn, Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad's Second Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chapter 2.Google Scholar

7 The term ‘idealized voice-leading’ is said to have originated from Godfrey Winham. See Cohn, Audacious Euphony, 6, n. 7.Google Scholar

8 ‘Am Fenster’ (D.878), which is cast in F major, comes close to presenting a complete hexatonic cycle, departing from it only by substituting A♭ major (♭III) for the ‘hexatonic pole’, D♭ minor (♭vi). On hexatonic poles, see Cohn, ‘Maximally Smooth Cycles’, 19–20.Google Scholar

9 Nelson writes that the Rogue ♭VI ‘behaves as the vehicle of injecting a painful jab, a moment [of] anxiety into otherwise pleasant circumstances, or simply a recurring, even playful obstacle that blocks progress to conclusion’, but quickly concludes that ‘it would be difficult, and provide very little explanatory power, to construct a theoretical ideal type’. Nelson, ‘The Fantasy of Absolute Music’, 428–9.Google Scholar

10 I consider a further example of the ‘Rogue ♭VI’ at length in David T. Bretherton, ‘The Shadow of Midnight in Schubert's “Gondelfahrer” Settings’, Music and Letters, 92 (2011), 1–42.Google Scholar

11 Capell, Richard, Schubert's Songs (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1928; repr. 1957), 209.Google Scholar

12 Youens, Susan, Schubert's Late Lieder: Beyond the Song-Cycles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 90.Google Scholar

13 Here and throughout I give the register of vocal notes as they are written in the score, irrespective of the register in which they might be sung in performance.Google Scholar

14 The D.827a version of the song can be found in Franz Schubert, ‘“Nacht und Träume” (Erste Fassung)’, Neue Schubert-Ausgabe, ed. Walther Dürr (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1975), iv/2b, 267–8.Google Scholar

15 Schenker, Heinrich, ‘Franz Schubert: “Ihr Bild” (Heine)’, Der Tonwille, 1 (Vienna: A. J. Gutmann, 1921), 46–9.Google Scholar

16 Chusid, Martin, ‘Texts and Commentary’, A Companion to Schubert's Schwanengesang: History, Poets, Analysis, Performance, ed. Chusid (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 90–155 (p. 130).Google Scholar

17 Lewin, David, Studies in Music with Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chapter 6.Google Scholar

18 Wintle, , ‘Franz Schubert, Ihr Bild (1828)’, 21.Google Scholar

19 Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Schubert’, trans. Jonathan Dunsby and Beate Perrey, 19th-Century Music, 29 (2005–6), 3–14 (p. 10). Originally published as Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Schubert’, Die Musik, 21 (1928), 1–12.Google Scholar

20 Adorno, ‘Schubert’, trans. Dunsby and Perrey, 12.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 13.Google Scholar

22 Schachter, Carl, ‘Motive and Text in Four Schubert Songs’, Aspects of Schenkerian Theory, ed. David Beach (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 61–76 (p. 76).Google Scholar

23 Schubert uses the German augmented-sixth chord with relative frequency when modulating out of ♭VI, but in most cases it is placed in root position and resolves to a dominant-functioning tonic chord in second inversion, so that the bass outlines a motion ♭. Examples include ‘Der Flug der Zeit’ (D.515), ‘Der Neugierige’ (no. 6 from Die schöne Müllerin, D.795) (considered below), ‘Mein!’ (no. 11 from Die schöne Müllerin, D.795), ‘Bei dir allein’ (D.866, no. 2) and ‘Glaube, Hoffnung und Liebe’ (D.955).Google Scholar

24 Nelson, , ‘The Fantasy of Absolute Music’, 496.Google Scholar

25 Stein, Deborah and Spillman, Robert, Poetry into Song: Performance and Analysis of Lieder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 127.Google Scholar

26 Like Stein and Spillman's reading, David Beach's, Lawrence Kramer's and Youens's interpretations of the potential ‘yes' and ‘no’ answers take their cue from the question at the end of the poem, ‘Does she love me?’, rather than the protagonist's earlier stated intention to ask the stream if his heart has lied to him. See Beach, David, ‘An Analysis of Schubert's “Der Neugierige”: A Tribute to Greta Kraus’, Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes, 19 (1998), 69–80 (p. 75); Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 140–1; and Susan Youens, Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 42, 83.Google Scholar

27 Feil, Arnold, ‘Two Analyses’, trans. Walter M. Frisch, Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Frisch (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 104–25 (p. 108; original emphasis).Google Scholar

28 Youens, Susan, Retracing a Winter's Journey: Schubert's Winterreise (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 255.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., 253.Google Scholar

30 Youens, , Retracing a Winter's Journey, 258.Google Scholar

31 Feil, , ‘Two Analyses’, 112–15.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 115.Google Scholar

33 Pears, Peter and Britten, Benjamin, Schubert: Winterreise (Decca CD 466 382-2, 2000; recorded 1963).Google Scholar

34 Youens, Retracing a Winter's Journey, 255.Google Scholar

35 Youens, Retracing a Winter's Journey, 264.Google Scholar

36 E♭ major (I) is replaced by its parallel minor, E♭ minor, which moves to its own relative major, G♭ major, which in turn is treated as the dominant of C♭ major (♭VI).Google Scholar

37 Suzannah Clark has similarly argued (in relation to instrumental music) that one must be attentive to how the harmony is actually presented at the surface of Schubert's music. See Clark, Analyzing Schubert (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 195.Google Scholar

38 Schenker, ‘Franz Schubert: “Ihr Bild”’, 49 fig. 9.Google Scholar

39 Schenker, Heinrich, Free Composition, trans. and ed. Ernst Oster (New York: Pendragon Press, 1979), 132–3. See specifically § 310(a) and the commentary in § 310(d) on fig. 153, ex. 2.Google Scholar

40 Steven Laitz has made a similar observation about the ‘submediant complex’, ♯ or –♭, which he finds to be prevalent in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions, but which is missed by traditional Schenkerian analysis. See Laitz, ‘Pitch-Class Motive in the Songs of Franz Schubert: The Submediant Complex’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1992), 113–19, 336–7.Google Scholar