As Scott Burnham notes in summarizing Adorno’s seminal essay on Schubert, many qualities of Schubert’s sonata forms are in conflict with the mores of the formal genre: “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, it is Schubert’s treatment of repetition in sonata forms that emerged as a critical point of weakness.
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