The epilogue draws together the book’s main aims: to define and explore the formal tendencies of Schubert’s lyric teleology; to revive analytical engagement with the composer’s pre-1816 string quartets, and to reflect on analytical methodology. It also considers paths not taken and questions not asked in an attempt both to rationalise the contribution made by the book and to contextualise its findings. Finally, it addresses the lingering question of how impactful Schubert’s instrumental lyricism was, and whether it can be perceived in the music of later nineteenth-century composers. To this end, the chapter considers the music of Brahms (whose debt to Schubert is well documented), Bruckner (who knew Schubert’s music intimately and whose compositions were the subject of similar criticisms of formal redundancy and seemingly disjunctive and self-contained themes), and Chopin (in whose early work we see formal strategies akin to those of Schubert’s lyric form). These correspondences suggest that Schubert’s lyric teleology can be understood as prescient of a distinct turn to Romantic form, and provide recommendations for further study.

One of the most striking aspects of Clara Schumann’s songs is the way they flow. They tend to move in four-bar phrases, but each four-bar phrase is connected seamlessly with the one that follows it. One way that she creates this feeling of seamless continuity is by weakening or avoiding cadences at the ends of musical sections and the poetic stanzas associated with them, fusing together adjacent sections and stanzas by softening, smudging or even erasing the musical and poetic punctuation marks at the end of them. This chapter considers how and why she does this. Through a close analysis of two representative songs – ‘Warum willst du and’re fragen’, Op. 12 No. 11, and ‘Ich hab’ in deinem Auge’, Op. 13 No. 5 – it highlights the strategies that she uses to join together sections and stanzas, as well as the various ways that those strategies relate to the poetry. In so doing, the chapter not only reveals a crucial hallmark of Clara Schumann’s song aesthetic, but also ponders a question that has been largely neglected in recent studies of romantic form: how do musical and poetic closure relate to one another?