Schubert, Gluck and the Bi‐rotational Form of the <i>Tragic</i> Symphony, D. 417

ABSTRACT Franz Schubert's early bi‐rotational sonata forms have previously been explored for their affinities to the symphonic overture (Chusid 1962 and Hyland 2019). Schubert's youth is also marked by a fascination for the music of Christoph Willibald Gluck. This article argues that these influences coalesce in Schubert's Fourth Symphony, D. 417, with its first movement exhibiting an overture‐like bi‐rotational structure and containing allusions to several of Gluck's works. The opening movement also contains several other aspects which are characteristic of Schubert's particular use of the bi‐rotational type 1–2 hybrid form (Hyland 2021), such as developmental form‐functional activity being embedded into the exposition and a second rotation beginning with a return to an off‐tonic primary theme. The Fourth Symphony was the only symphony to which Schubert gave a title – the Tragic . The fact that the allusions to Gluck in the opening movement are all derived from operas on subjects drawn from Greek myths or tragedies indicates a possible reason for this. However, the tragic was also central to German aesthetics and philosophy in the early nineteenth century, and in the second section of the article I suggest how these contemporary ideas permeate this symphony. A particular aspect of this involves the reconciliatory understanding of tragedy which obtained at the time, and which sheds new light on the major‐mode endings of the work's outer movements.