Since the publication of R. Gjerdingen's Music in the Galant Style (2007), schemata theory has provided a highly explanatory analytical framework for eighteenth-century music, understanding composition as the deployment of conventionalized harmonic–melodic formulas. Scholarship has largely confined this approach to the eighteenth century, often overlooking its potential continuity into the nineteenth century.

Subsequent studies by authors such as J. Rice (2015) and V. Byros (2012) have expanded Gjerdingen's original catalogue of schemata, thereby opening the possibility of applying this analytical perspective to early Romantic repertories. This paper explores the extent to which harmonic transformations associated with early Romanticism may be understood as the reconfiguration of schemata inherited from the eighteenth century, as well as the extent to which nineteenth-century music contributed new harmonic–melodic procedures to the existing schematic corpus.

At this point, the following questions arise: Is it possible to understand the harmonic transformation leading to early Romanticism as a transformation of specific formulas or schemata inherited from the eighteenth century? Is it feasible to conceive that nineteenth-century music contributed new harmonic–melodic procedures to the preexisting corpus of schemata?

These questions are too broad to be addressed within the scope of a single paper. Instead, this study focuses on a single schema characteristic of the chromatic harmony of the Biedermeier period in order to assess both the continuity in the use of such formulas throughout the nineteenth century and the pedagogical value of this analytical methodology. This schema has been termed Dubbio, reflecting the ambiguity of both its conception and its resolution. The procedure consists of the use of a pedal tone over which an alternation occurs between consonances (a major chord, with or without a seventh) and a diminished chord.

Through analytical examples drawn from works by L. van Beethoven (Symphony nº 7 Op. 92), L. Spohr (Overture Der Alchymist), R. Wagner (Rienzi and Tristan und Isolde), C. Franck (Sonata in A) o C. Debussy (Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune), this paper demonstrates a gradual yet coherent transformation of the Dubbio schema within nineteenth-century practice. The results suggest that schemata-based analysis offers a productive methodological tool for accounting for passages of tonal instability and for tracing long-term continuities between eighteenth-century compositional practice and nineteenth-century harmonic language.