More than half of Schubert’s chamber works from 1824 to 1828 feature his preferred instrument, the piano. Yet in none of them does it function as an instrumental accompaniment, being instead an equal participant in a duo or trio chamber format. Especially in solo chamber works written for performance in recitals by befriended virtuoso instrumentalists, Schubert was perfectly willing to adapt the style brillant that flourished between 1820 and 1830. Based on the assumption that Schubert applied the style brillant solely for reasons of economy, his virtuoso chamber music has previously been considered to be of lesser value, mentioned only in passing. More recently, however, his turn to extroverted forms of expression has been described as a deliberate counterfoil to the introverted sublimation of his other ‘late’ works. This chapter considers the Fantasy in C Major (D934) and Variations in E Minor on ‘Trockne Blumen’ (D802) to show how Schubert discovered the sophisticated and outgoing mannerisms of the style brillant; it also discusses the development of ornamented variation techniques as an alternative to thematic development, and how this shift of emphasis between musical substance and figuration seems to anticipate the aesthetics of the Romantic arabesque.

Chapter 6 starts with the understanding of the advent of the Nights as “a major event for all European literature,” a point that Borges and others argue passionately. In order to see the impact of this event we need to differentiate the Romantic craze of William Beckford in his Vathek, Episodes, and “Long Story,” his translators, and also his admirers from others. Beckford was phenomenal in working across at least three cultures along with Arabic: French, English, and Jamaican. His infatuation and reproduction of the Nights is unique, but we have to place it in context of a raging discussion run by many, but especially Schlegel, of the grotesque and Arabesque. His writing and personal penchant to challenge everything presents him as a filiate who belongs to a specific genealogy in the Nights. His approach is different for instance from the Brontës whose writings bear the marks of a contained infatuation. They are the bridge for twentieth-century shifts in reading and response. A “murky sensualism” which Maxime Rodinson associates with “the Western bourgeoisie” prepares for the dialectic of rapprochement, engagement, and detachment that present the twentieth century and after as more experimental but also no less involved in substantiating the Nights in architecture, painting, enactment of medieval travels, and the practice of parody and pastiche in a postmodernist anxiety and search for distinction.