Recurring Hauntings and Trauma in Schubert's ‘Unfinished’ Symphony

Abstract

Schubert's interest in Gothicism is explored in numerous songs written between the 1810s and early 1820s and, in recent years, has served as an aesthetic agenda that some scholars have applied to his instrumental music. One notable exception is the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony (D. 759, 1822), a work whose thematic presentation and form have been frequently related to states of terror and horror, but rarely correlated further to Gothicism and never consistently so across the two completed movements. In light of this relative neglect, this article offers a Gothic reading of the symphony, finding correspondence with Gothic signifiers of ghostly hauntings and the ‘problem of closure’, and draws upon relevant literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory. As I show, the concept of psychoanalytic trauma – a concept widely deployed in current literary criticism to scrutinize repetitive patterns such as hauntings and circular temporality in Gothic literature – is especially instructive in terms of helping construct a richer understanding of the symphony.