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<jats:p>In this close reading of the first page of Adorno's "Schubert," one aim is to highlight the sheer intensity of Adorno's literary ambition, generating a visual poetics that contributes to the text's striking, and daunting, narrative complexity. With reference to the French poet Louis Aragon, Adorno situates Schubert within a distinctly surrealist landscape--a strategic move that is rhetorically as provocative as it is hermeneutically and methodologically risky. I briefly follow up some of this modernist imagery in Schubert's Winterreise, envisioned here as a nondevelopmental, glacial compositional canvas across which the wanderer wanders with a single idea in mind, forever repeated in subtle variations, affecting atmosphere (Stimmung) but not essence: in Winterreise, as Adorno's text suggests, the mind is lost in its own idea, accommodating the pre-human or post-human experience: life-in-death in the midst of an apocalyptic landscape.</jats:p> <jats:p>A second aim of this paper is to respond to Adorno's stylistic provocation: do we need poetry in music criticism, or indeed criticism as poetry? Do we need allegories of death and Utopian landscapes to talk about music? As will be argued, "Schubert" is a text whose author does not deny that his subject matter--Schubert--is, in fact, wholly fictional. Moreover, as Adorno goes on to describe Winterreise as a journey in search of an inner, and de-centered, self, and as we see this journey slowly unfold before our eyes, it becomes more than usually apparent that Adorno's true subject matter is the admission and expression of emotion. With great poetic acumen, his pen traces like a seismograph the rhythmic pulsations and shockwaves traversing Schubert's landscape. Adorno's essay begins with a fully imagined and powerfully articulated landscape, and as he goes on to render "Schubert's landscape" visible, his text takes on a geography that informs us about the structure of the very selves it describes: first Schubert's; then Adorno's; and finally, possibly, our own.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article situates Adorno's "Schubert" in the context of the 1928 centennial, showing the originality of his position on the issue of Schubertian kitsch (as represented by Heinrich Bert&amp;#x8e;'s operetta Das Dreimaderlhaus). This is related to Adorno's attitude toward organicism, characterized by a critique that was relevant on both the political and the theoretical level. His antiorganicist vision of Schubert's music is compared to the nationalist stance of a Richard Benz, typical of right-wing readings of German cultural greatness, and also to the analytical a prioris of two pupils of Schenker, Felix Salzer and Otto Vrieslander (as shown in their perception of the exposition of the Bb-Major Sonata). Finally, Adorno's attitude toward Schubert is related to his commitment on behalf of a "Schoenbergian politics," which led him to view both Schoenberg's and Schubert's music as an alternative to a musical canon shaped by a shared belief in organicism.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Adorno's essay on Schubert opens by invoking a fraught move across the threshold that separates the death of Beethoven from the death of Schubert. He goes on to read Schubert's music through a series of dichotomies whose opposite terms are distinctly Beethovenian: Schubert's themes are self-possessed apparitions of truth rather than inchoate ideas that require temporal evolution; his repetitive, fragmentary forms are inorganic rather than organic, crystalline rather than plantlike. Above all, Adorno develops the idea that Schubert's music offers the repeatable truth of a landscape rather than the processive trajectory of a teleological history. Schubert's themes, like landscapes, are forms of permanence that cannot be fundamentally altered but can only be revisited.</jats:p> <jats:p>With special emphasis on Schubert's G-Major String Quartet, this article inflects Adorno's view of Schubert's landscapes by considering how these "truths" also present themselves as illusory and inward (e.g., how some of Schubert's thematic areas can be heard to project a visionary interior space in the way that they suddenly introduce a markedly different realm or the way that they obliquely inhabit their tonal centers). It is then argued that Schubert's music is thus steeped in an existential consciousness for which subjectivity is the only knowable truth. And this truth bears repeating, in the double sense that it can be repeated and it must be repeated.</jats:p>

<jats:p>AdornoÕs view of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy is of flawed music. He regards the finale as yet another compositionally disastrous failure by Schubert to know how to round off a sonata or symphony. But he is clearly intrigued by the slow movement's acts of negation and alienation. This article investigates these two crises. First, what is actually--if one may dare ask such a thing--wrong with the finale? That it is all empty mock-fugue and sequence and passage-work? And thus it lacks truth-content? That Schubert is not really composing this finale; it is somehow composing him? Here I investigate analytically what Adorno's "temporal series of atemporal cells" means. Second, how does the slow movement move us from lightness into despair? Death for Schubert, Adorno tells us, is not about pain, but mourning, something Schubert takes us right inside--or to use Adorno's image, through a portal to the underworld (29). I believe that this landscape is also nested within the slow movement of the Wanderer Fantasy. If, as always with variations, the task of the analyst is not so clear here, the task of the (rightly) evidence-bound hermeneut probably is.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Conceived as a commentary on four responses to Adorno's 1928 essay, "Schubert," by Esteban Buch, Jonathan Dunsby, Scott Burnham, and Beate Perrey, this article explores some of the implications of Adorno's essay as they center on notions of hybridity, the interstitial and especially the provisional. It urges a critical strategy that is self-critical, that seeks to name without naming, and that draws on rigorous formal analysis without presenting its outcomes as ends but as means toward various narrative ends.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Adorno's "Schubert" textually reenacts what he recognizes in Schubert's music, repeating himself but with subtle differences, as though he were holding up a cut gem to light and turning it to see the differences manifested in its facets. Adorno's ideas about this music are less developed than juxtaposed, often paratactically, so as to constitute what Benjamin termed a constellation. What Adorno hears in Schubert is a kind of reciprocity toward otherness. Schubert's "landscape," for Adorno, is grounded in the realm of the cultural imaginary; it represents for him a declaration of love, defined by the difference between subject and object that engenders embrace, rather than domination. The aesthetic truth of Schubert's music doesn't emerge through development, except, ironically perhaps, in the "successful" failure of his developments. Instead, it's articulated in a virtual instant, as in the shape and turn of a melody (and distinctly not in its working out).</jats:p> <jats:p>The Schubert melody is like the imagined perfection of landscape--as though, like "nature," it were always already complete. The C-minor Andante of the Piano Trio in Eb (op. 100, D. 929) is a case in point. The opening melodic statement in the cello and the folklike second theme in the violin, for the most part, can only be repeated, not improved upon, though Schubert tries--the melodic perfection of the opening statements, the first theme especially, becomes unambiguously evident only when the movement ends. We need everything that follows the initial statements to realize what we first heard: a melody (more than a theme) complete in itself, perfect, and on that account acoustically utopian--a semblance of happiness embedded in the sad honesty of C-minorÕs pensive melancholy.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Drawing on published and unpublished sources, this article traces the changing ways in which Schoenberg made his sketches, fragments, and the creative process in general integral aspects of both his identity as a composer and the reception of his music. One side of this story is Schoenberg's well-known concern for how posterity would view him, evident in his obsession with demonstrating his stature as a genius and defining his place in history as the first to break with tonality and as the inventor of "the method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another." But as significant for the present context are the ways that, beginning in the first decade of the century, he started to make his Nachlass known through the dissemination of manuscripts, sketches, and fragments, and by means of discussions of the creative process and compositional techniques in his voluminous writings. Schoenberg's interjection of the act of composition into public musical discourse has clear origins in the nineteenth century, but it also has important implications for the blurring of boundaries between the work, the creative process, the artist, and the audience, a characteristic of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and now a fundamental feature of our cultural life.</jats:p>