Poet’s Love and Composer’s Love
Berthold Hoeckner
KEYWORDS: romantic lied, hermeneutics, analysis, Edward T. Cohn, Robert Schumann, Heine Liederkreis op. 24, multiple persona
ABSTRACT: This article proposes a modification of Edward T. Cone’s notion of a composer’s persona, which he developed in two significant variants in order to analyze and interpret the romantic lied. Specifically, I respond to Cone’s most recent article about Schumann’s Dichterliebe, “Poet’s Love or Composer’s Love,” which had assumed a “a unitary vocal-instrumental protagonist that is coextensive with the persona of the actual composer of the song.” Drawing on Novalis’s Romantic hermeneutics, my modification proposes a “multiple persona” with an independent poetic voice, exemplified in a reading of Schumann’s Heine-Liederkreis, Op. 24.
Copyright © 2001 Society for Music Theory
[1] Introduction
Example 1. Robert Schumann, Heine Liederkreis, Op. 24, No. 1
(click to enlarge and listen)
Example 2. Robert Schumann, Heine Liederkreis, Op. 24, No. 1: Melodic Contour
(click to enlarge)
[1.1] The opening song of Schumann’s Heine Liederkreis, Op. 24
(Example 1)(1) presents a man waiting for
the woman he loves. In this state of expectation, his life has turned upside down:
hopeful day-dreaming and nightly laments alternate. The chiasmus of “morgens/abends”
versus “Nacht/Tag” links the poem’s ending with its beginning and the simple present
tense keeps the speaker’s emotional ups and downs in a state of perpetual circularity.
The music seems simple and straightforward. A walking bass in the accompaniment
alternates with chords doubling the melody. Only in the second line from the end,
“träumend wie im halben Schlummer,” does the vocal line depart from the upper voice
of the chordal accompaniment to rise twice to a syncopated E5 (measure 30).(2)
The top notes of the three preceding phrases, B4,
[1.2] Given the guitar-like accompaniment, the protagonist of the song could
be a singer creating his own text and music, whose individual phrase endings are
punctuated with a half cadence and cadences to iii, IV, and I. While there is no
real progress in the text’s cycle of hope and disappointment, the gradually rising
vocal line appears directed towards the upper tessitura, without, however, reaching
the high tonic third, and falling instead back onto a cadence in the opening register.
When the accompaniment is finally freed from vocal constraints in the postlude,
it quickly regains, almost without effort, the register of the vocal line and finally
reaches
[1.3] Instead of projecting a single unified utterance, then, a subtle split occurs between the protagonist’s three creative selves, for what he says differs from what he sings, and what he sings from what he plays. Indeed, hearing the song as a multi-voiced utterance, which includes the poetry as an independent voice, captures very well the protagonist’s mixed feelings and unfulfilled desire. In isolation, his voices send contradictory signals, but taken together their incongruence carries the song’s message: while the poetic voice shows the lover in limbo, the linear drive of the music seeks to break this cycle. The vocal self, however, fails to do so, returning to the point from which it began, so that the music could enter into an endless loop, analogous to the situation in the poem. It is the instrumental self that takes up the unspoken cause of the voice by closing an octave above in the upper tessitura—in a different sphere, as it were. Despite the structural downbeat on the tonic in measure 36 (which moments ago had been the dominant of the preceding G major), the protagonist seems to continue wandering, and proceeds to an alternative ending in measure 45, suggesting that the upper register provides a qualitatively different closure than the cadence an octave below. In other words, the linear progression in pitch space is as important as the cyclical return of pitch class. As a result, the song both suggests closure and remains open—which would seem quite appropriate for the beginning of a song cycle.
[1.4] This hearing of the opening song from Schumann’s Op. 24 serves a twofold purpose. It serves first as the impetus for revisiting, reexamining, and refining the concept of a musical persona in the well-known and influential approach to the analysis and interpretation of romantic art song by Edward T. Cone. I will do this in the second part of the paper by exploring further the above analysis and by drawing on romantic hermeneutics, specifically the notion of a plural voice, which I will call multiple persona. This concept will then, in the third part of this paper, open up a venue from the analytical-hermeneutic model to a broader critical reading, which seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the interaction between poetry and music and cyclical structure in Schumann’s largely neglected first song cycle.
[2] The Composer’s Voice Revisited
[2.1] To speak of “voices” in the analysis of song goes back to Edward T. Cone’s 1974 book, which has had a significant impact on music criticism in the last two decades.(3) By using “voice” not merely in its narrower technical sense, Cone opened the door—at the time only a crack—to literary criticism, where the term can comprise the entire performative dimension of an artistic utterance. Meanwhile, that door has swung wide open,(4) with the Lied becoming the locus of increasingly esoteric experiments in the application of literary and critical theory analysis.(5) Yet Cone’s initial approach remains a truly elegant hermeneutic device and valuable pedagogical tool for approaching the romantic art song, and perhaps other hybrid genres as well.(6) An important modification of Cone’s model may be in order, however. In fact, it is inspired by Cone’s own attempt at refinement in an article on Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, entitled evocatively, “Poet’s Love or Composer’s Love?”(7)—a question which Cone settled in favor of the composer. Hence our focus on what is sometimes nicknamed “little Dichterliebe”; and hence the title of the present essay, which suggests that we move beyond Cone’s either/or logic and give the poetry a voice of its own, one that stands on an equal footing with the music.
[2.2] To recall: Cone’s concept of a composer’s “voice” is equivalent to the idea of a musical “persona,” a surrogate for the empirical composer, who projects “the illusion of the existence of a personal subject” behind or within a work of art.(8) As a “role” assumed by the artist, a persona (originally a “mask” in ancient theater) suggests for Cone “that all music, like all literature, is dramatic; that every composition is an utterance depending on an act of impersonation which it is the duty of the performer or performers to make clear.”(9) Since there are two performers in accompanied song, Cone heard the composer speak with a “double voice, through a musical persona that assumes a double guise”(10): an instrumental persona and a vocal-poetic persona. He called the latter simply “vocal persona,” because it expresses itself “at least as much by melody as by speech, and as much by tone-color as by phonetic sound.”(11) In other words, “the vocal persona adopts the original simulation of the poetic persona and adds another of his own: he ‘composes,’ not the words alone, but the vocal line as well.”(12) In the romantic art song, Cone argued, “the composer’s persona governs words as well as music. The words, that is, have become a part of the composer’s message, utterances of his own voice. In a sense, he composes his own text.”(13)
[2.3] The idea that the composer exercises complete creative control over the entire song, including the poetry, was the central problem of early nineteenth-century Lied aesthetics. Goethe’s preference for Friedrich Zelter’s simple strophic settings of his poems over Schubert’s elaborate through-composed Gesänge is the most well-known example.(14) Since Cone preferred the romantic Lied, he has sided with Schubert on this issue, which explains his ruling in favor of the composer in “Poet’s Love or Composer’s Love?”(15) Cone does so after revisiting an old problem that had preoccupied him in his book: whether or not protagonists of romantic art songs are conscious of their singing. Originally, Cone had assumed that they were not and that this would be the normal condition. Since many characters portrayed in poetic texts appear to be speaking, he proposed that “the musical components, vocal and instrumental, [stem] from the subconscious levels.” Although the protagonist is not conscious of singing or hearing the accompaniment, “his subconscious both knows and hears.”(16)
[2.4] Returning to the issue, Cone still finds this division useful when approaching the complexity of, say, Wagnerian opera, but no longer for cases like Schumann’s Dichterliebe. Since the protagonist of Heine’s poems is already portrayed as a singer who creates his own songs, Cone assumed that in Schumann’s cycle, “[t]he instrumental accompaniment directly conveys certain aspects of the musical consciousness of the vocal protagonist.” Quoting from his book, he finds it no longer necessary to posit
“a triad of personas, or persona-like figures, involved in the accompanied song: the vocal, the instrumental, and the (complete) musical.” According to that analysis, “the complete musical persona is to be inferred from the interaction of the other two”; I called it an implicit persona, or, “as the vehicle of the composer’s complete message
. . . the composer’s persona.”. . . But when the accompaniment proceeds directly from the imagination of the protagonist, a separate instrumental persona becomes superfluous, and therefore no complete musical persona is to be “inferred from the interaction of the other two.” Instead, my three original figures have collapsed into one: a unitary vocal-instrumental protagonist that is coextensive with the persona of the actual composer of the song. . . . My hope is that an interpretation based on the foregoing principles might result in a closer and more sensitive relationship between voice and accompaniment than would otherwise be possible. Singer and accompanist, instead of taking for granted that each of them represents a unitary agent (to adopt the jargon of my book), would try to hear the song-texture as composite; and they would determine to what extent their parts could be made to coalesce in order to project a single persona.(17)
[2.5] Through this radical simplification of his original conception, Cone hoped to account for the “essential identity” of the two musical components in the majority of songs. Created by the same consciousness, the musical personae are, in fact, unified—one voice.(18) But with his refined model Cone seems to have lost as much as he gained. True, if the protagonist of a song is, as in Dichterliebe, the singer of his own songs, it makes sense to locate words and music in a single mind. Yet by collapsing the vocal and instrumental personae into a “unitary vocal-instrumental protagonist,” Cone gives up a powerful tool for hearing the voice and the accompaniment as distinctly different utterances nevertheless, even when they are “inseparable components of a single invention.”(19)
[2.6] My proposal, then, is to keep the basic conception of Cone’s earlier model, while accommodating his later modification: to adopt the notion of a single creative mind, while still hearing independent voices. What is more, where Cone heard a complete musical persona constituted by instrumental and vocal personae, I hear a triple voice, which includes a poetic persona that remains on a par with the musical ones. Even when a poem has been molded into a through-composed song; even when its words have lost the rhythm of their original meter; and even when its text has been altered by the composer: the poetic text still remains an independent component of a song. Even sung, the words assume their own dramatic agency within what may be called a composer-poet’s multiple voice.
[2.7] One can find a precursor for the concept of a multiple persona as an interpretive tool in early Romantic hermeneutics. Novalis formulated it in this entry on “Personenlehre” from his poetic encyclopedia, Das allgemeine Brouillon, from the late 1790s:
A truly synthetic person is a person who is several persons at once—a genius. Every person is the seed of an infinite genius. Though divided into various persons it is nevertheless also capable of being a single person. True analysis of a person as such produces several persons—a person can only break up, divide, and dissolve into several persons
. . . . Every personal utterance belongs to a certain person. All utterances of the person belong to the indeterminate (universal) personality and to one or several personalities at the same time. I.e. an utterance as human being, citizen, father, and writer at the same time.(20)
[2.8] The context for this passage is the early Romantic theory of the novel which was developed in Friedrich Schlegel’s famous essay on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.(21) Novalis’s approach to the constellation of characters in a novel literally pre-“figures” the hermeneutic circle. A reader understands the plurality of characters that constitutes the novel as a product of a single organizing mind.(22) Thus the creative genius and the congenial reader engage in reciprocal activities: while the former is synthetic, the latter is analytical.(23) Novalis works out the performative and interpretive dialectic of genius in another entry on “Menschenbildungslehre” (a term that resonates with the concept of education-as-formation in the eighteenth-century Bildungsroman). Here the musical dimension of the multitude of characters born out by a single narrating voice is most explicit:
In order to develop the voice, a human being has to develop several voices—through this his organ becomes more substantial. Similarly, in order to develop his individuality, he must assume several individualities and know how to assimilate—through this he becomes a substantial individual. Genius. Everything m a d e by man is human—or quod idem est a part of man—a human being. (Science, Art, etc.) (24)
Just as a human being divides only into viable entities that have a human face, so does a voice divide only into voices. The result is the paradox of several-persons-in-one, comparable to the Holy Trinity, which Cone had originally invoked in his book in order to illustrate the idea of a composite musical persona.(25)
[2.9] The often numerous characters of a novel sometimes appear in song, say when a singer and accompaniment represent different (separate) characters—lover and beloved, poet and brook. We should nevertheless distinguish between the complex plurality of many characters in a novel and the more limited number of voices dwelling in the creative consciousness of a poet-composer. And there is, of course, a difference between a “person” and a “persona.” The former does not imply the distinction, common today, between author and what Wayne Booth called “implied” author.(26) Still, even if we take into account the premises of idealist aesthetics, the religious implications behind Novalis’s secularized exegetic model of the Holy Trinity, and the specifics of a particular genre: the idea of a multiple voice still offers a powerful heuristic tool that helps us to conceptualize the often paradoxical plurality of voices emerging from a single source. Thus, if the protagonist of a song appears as a poet-composer who creates both words and music, we may conceive of his poetic, vocal, and instrumental voices as separate entities: as different artistic “selves” inhabiting the same creative consciousness.
[3] The Heine-Liederkreis Reheard
[3.1] Let us return, then, from the hermeneutic model to interpretive practice and explore further how the idea of a multiple persona might deepen our understanding of Schumann’s Heine-Liederkreis. The idea of this exploration, however, is not to produce more analyses in the manner of the above close reading of the first song, but to follow up on how the special condition of the protagonist as projected through the multiple personae affects the remainder of the cycle. Our view of other songs, therefore, is necessarily limited to looking at a few motives which tell, like Dichterliebe, the story of unrequited love. In both works, hopeful sentiments are dashed early on in the cycle, followed by various attempts to cope with the loss. Perhaps the most striking parallel between the two cycles is the ending: the disappointed lover’s wish to bury his songs, which nevertheless seem to come to life again in the last number with the recapitulation of earlier music. For Dichterliebe, Schumann selected sixteen poems from the more than sixty that Heine had grouped together in his Buch der Lieder under the title “Lyrisches Intermezzo.” The nine songs of the Heine-Liederkreis, on the other hand, are identical with a collection of nine poems simply called “Lieder,” which thus retain the narrative sequence of Heine’s original.(27)
Example 3. The “Dream Motif” in Schumann’s Heine Liederkreis
(click to enlarge)
Example 4. Robert Schumann, Heine Liederkreis, Op. 24, No.3, Prelude and First Stanza
(click to enlarge and listen)
[3.2] As suggested above, a subtle incongruence between vocal melody, accompaniment, and poetry, of the various voices in the first song of the Heine-Liederkreis initiates an open-ended structure. This has ramifications for the rest of the cycle. Recall Schumann’s repetition of the syncopated E5 in the vocal line, which highlights the verse “träumend wie im halben Schlummer” (measures 29–32). This melodic repetition seems to spill over into the following line of text, where one finds a corresponding reiteration of “träumend,” lacking in the original poem. This double repetition occurs over a transitional prolongation of G major—the local tonic before measure 28 and the global subdominant again after measure 33. It is partly responsible for a less than convincing return to D major and thus helps to motivate the piano prelude to complete the job. It embodies the in-between state of the dreamer, who hopes for the fulfillment of his desire for love. This “dream motive” is, of course, not a leitmotiv in the Wagnerian sense, but its variants permeate the cycle and support its narrative structure (see Example 3a). Indeed, the postlude can only partly fulfill the harmonic and melodic implications of the passage, since it involves neither the voice nor the text. This lack of agreement between the musical and poetic personae is analogous to the unfulfilled narrative desire for the denouement of the story, that is, the protagonist’s imagined union with the distant beloved. The resulting tension has reverberations throughout the cycle that I want to examine now.
[3.3] After a stormy second song in B minor, in which the protagonist impatiently
awaits a rendezvous with his beloved, the third song in B major begins with a transformation
of the dream motif in the prelude. It thus returns to the premise of the yet unanswered
declaration of love that was behind the protagonist’s fluctuating utterance in the
first first song. Now a variant of the characteristic figure of the E lowered to
I was walking under the trees
alone with my grief,
when the old dreaming came
and crept back into my heart.
Example 5. Robert Schumann, Heine Liederkreis, Op. 24: Melodic relation between No. 2 and 3
(click to enlarge)
In Cone’s most recent model, these dreams would be integral to, and unified in,
the protagonist’s creative consciousness: music that he can hear. Yet the
prelude suggests that the complexity of the creative act is well explained by the
individual agency of the utterance. Here, composition is not necessarily a voluntary
act; the protagonist’s reminiscence seems to enter his heart like an involuntary
memory (“the old dreaming came”). The dreams lead a life of their own, just
as melodies with which we wake up are often impossible to get out of our ear during
the day. Indeed, the return of previous music is conspicuous: apart from the
dream motif in the prelude, the vocal line of the first stanza also draws upon the
initial gesture of the previous song, its former haste now shuffling along (see Example 5). Moreover, when the
protagonist refers to his dreams at the end of the stanza, the chordal accompaniment
breaks open and the “dream motif” literally “creeps into” his singing as a painful
exclamation on a non-syncopated high
A young girl came this way
and she sang it all day long.
It was then that we birds caught
the pretty, golden word.
Thus the potential disintegration that lurks behind the incongruence of multiple voices at the beginning of the cycle develops into a pathological condition of hallucinations, which are typical of the romantic individual, whose love-sickness is—for Heine at least—also a cultural malaise.
[3.4] Indeed, if the loss of love threatens the protagonist with the loss of
creative control and mental sanity, the fourth song, “Lieb’ Liebchen, leg’s Händchen
auf’s Herze mein,” captures quite graphically how the dreams that “crept” back into
his heart now wreak physical havoc on it. The off-beat accompaniment in the right
hand lacks the bass notes of the first song (a disturbed heartbeat, as it were)
and pounds against the dream motif that is no longer syncopated (see Example 3d). As a result, the
rhythmic disjunction between vocal and instrumental personae at the end of both
strophes is much more pronounced than in the first song (IV:15–17 and 35–37). What
is remarkable, therefore, is how much the first song functions as both a material
and a metaphorical matrix on which a central narrative strand of the whole cycle
is constructed. Thus the fifth song, “Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden,” restores the
simple figure of alternating eighth notes with the bass articulating the meter that
we heard in the accompaniment from the first song. But now its duple time is transformed
into the soothing rocking of triple time. This lends a feeling of calm and consolation
to the theme of farewell in the fifth song, very well-suited for what was originally
planned to be the last number of the first book of the cycle. The publisher eventually
followed Schumann’s wish to print it in one volume, but the internal division remains
visible in the tonal plateau reached between the fifth and sixth songs. But
as we will see below, the sense of closure and repose is illusory; it is merely
a stage in the protagonist’s ongoing journey, his restless “wandeln” and wandering.
Schumann structured the key sequence of the cycle around a double trajectory of
falling fifths partly alternating in mode: D–b–B–e–E (first part); E–A–d–D (second
part). If the motion by fifths suggests a downward motion through tonal space,
however, hearing the trajectory as the result of stepwise voice leading reveals that
Schumann exclusively chose triadic connections that produce an exclusively upward
motion, something that David Lewin has recently called “upshift” voice-leading.(29)
According to Richard Cohn, “the intermediate resting point, E major, is exactly
half-way between the two D-majors in terms of semitonal motion.” Thus D+ up to E+,
via b, B, and e, requires a total of six semitones upward: A–B (2 semitones), D–
Example 6. Robert Schumann, Heine Liederkreis, Op. 24, No. 5 mm. 81–93
(click to enlarge and listen)
[3.5] On the tonal plateau in the middle of the cycle, then, two songs of farewell
and departure are juxtaposed, but their emotional and gestural character could not
be more different. The fifth song articulates the point in the emotional journey
at which the protagonist seems ready to leave the site of his sad memories behind,
not without a sense of sweet nostalgia, which emerges from the strophic stanzas
1, 2, 4, and 7 (the last being a recapitulation of the first). These stanzas give
a sense of closure: the long tonic pedal with which they begin is rounded off by
the emphatic tonic cadences on the “Lebewohl” salutes, whose repetition is lacking
in the original poem, but supports here the musical refrain. At the same time, feelings
of anger and pain disrupt the reconciliatory retrospective, suggesting restlessness
and failure to leave the past behind. Given the link to the accompaniment of the
opening song, the melodic profile of the strophic stanzas is conspicuous in its
gradual ascent to E5, by now surely a referential pitch in the cycle. A liminal
remainder and reminder of the dream motif, this E5 returns almost obsessively, piercing
the ear at the emotional highpoint of the song, which occurs toward the end of
the section in which the fifth and the sixth stanzas are elided. Here the voice
dwells on E5 for nearly six measures, briefly touching on F5 as if in utmost strain
(see Example 6). At no point,
however, is the E5 supported by more than a fleeting tonic sixth chord, let alone
prepared by a root-position dominant. While the many cadences on E4 emphasize closure
with the “Lebewohl” refrain in the lower register, the frequent, but unstable, E5
remains a reminder of a melodic pitch, which, in the overall trajectory of the cycle,
was to go somewhere else: to
[3.6] After this ambiguous sense of closure, we will finally examine the second half of the cycle. Here our newly-gained sense for the protagonist’s multi-voicedness will help to elucidate the disturbing interplay of musical and verbal irony, itself the trope of incongruence between literal and figurative meaning. Following the false farewell at the end of the first part of the cycle, the sixth song, “Warte, warte wilder Schiffsmann,” stages the actual departure in a sarcastic address to the once revered woman. The poem is all hyperbole, which culminates in characterizing her as the union of biblical Eva and mythological Eris (the goddess of discord):
Apples brought all our calamity,
with them Eva brought death.
Eris brought the flames of Troy,
you brought both, flames and death.
The overstatement in the poetry correlates with a variety of musical figures: disjunct octave leaps and excessive runs in fast tempo, abrupt registral shifts (measures 52–53 and 99–103), repetition to the point of ridicule (measures 24–31 and 78–90); tritones in the melody set to alternating dominant seventh chords a semitone apart (measures 36–40 and 44–48), vocal ellipsis (measures 55–65), and more. Since verbal irony often manifests itself as a deliberate deformation of a “normal” way of speaking, these musical devices, too, deviate sharply from the previous “tone” of the cycle. Thus the tritone leaps function as a caricature of the “dream motif,” which is blown out of proportion in the final verse (“Du bracht’st beides, Flamm und Tod”). Here the motif’s characteristic repetition ends climactically on a rising unresolved seventh, whose A5 is even the highest sung pitch of the entire cycle (see Example 3e). In sharp contrast to the extreme intensity of the vocal part, the piano then tapers off in the postlude with a sense of understatement, suggesting that the ironic interplay between voice and accompaniment are far from presenting an integrated persona, but one on the verge of complete disintegration. Perhaps the ultimate irony emerges when the grave matter of the song is sharply thrown in relief against its diminutive attribute “Liedchen.”
[3.7] In the seventh song, as a striking contrast, the protagonist, now traveling on the Rhine, peacefully contemplates the play of water. The vocal line, which follows the strophic arrangement of the poem, blends seamlessly into a self-sufficient lyrical piano piece, reminiscent of a suave barcarole. As the speaker paints a romantic idyll, poetry and music seem to be in perfect harmony. But the apparent integration of the poetry and music is illusory—just like the surface of the water. It does not at all reflect the gradual change of mood that leads in the last stanza to an analogy between the beloved and the river’s bright surface but deadly depth:
Delightful on the surface, treacherous at heart,—
river, you are the image of my beloved.
She also has a friendly nod,
and an innocent and gentle smile.
At the end of the poem, however, Heine’s notorious ironic reversal is not made explicit: the sinister part of the analogy—the beloved’s inner wickedness—has to be inferred. And there is no hint of it in the music either. Since Schumann had sometimes been criticized for such apparent lack of a musical response to Heine’s poetic irony, Cone felt the need to stand up for the composer:
Schumann’s Dichter inhabits a different world from that of his poetic original: a world in which words give way to music as the primary vehicle of expression, in which to speak is to sing. . . . We should therefore not expect the personality of Schumann’s Dichter to be the same as that of his purely poetic original.(31)
Example 7. Robert Schumann, Heine Liederkreis, Op. 24, No. 7, mm. 33–48
(click to enlarge and listen)
This defense, however, loses its raison d’etre when we allow for poetry
to retain its own voice. Because the poem’s irony remains in effect, the composer
may choose not to match it musically. On the contrary, in “Berg und Burgen schaun
herunter,” the irony unfolds precisely between the sarcasm of the poem and the enchanting
lyricism of the music. As with the river, the harmful implications of the words
lurk below the bright surface. Had E5 not been such an important pitch in the cycle,
one might not even notice how much the voice dwells on it here, moving so smoothly
to
[3.8] The music thus amplifies the verbal irony with its own means (as in the sixth song); or irony emerges only in contradiction with the text (as in the seventh song). The eighth song of the Heine Liederkreis resorts to yet another device, that of parodia sacra. Moving furthest beyond the expressive realm of the cycle, it produces the ironic effect by a shift in style. Withdrawn from the world and looking back on the burden of unfulfilled love, the protagonist seeks refuge in religion, which is not born out by the poem, but insinuated by the music, which sets it to the melody of the chorale “Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten” and thus gathers, like a congregation, all his different voices into a unified utterance.
At first I almost wanted to give up
and I believed I could never bear it.
Yet I have born it;
but don’t ask me: how?
The tone of the hymn would seem to answer the question “Nicht wie?” (set to a half-cadence), which is repeated at the end of the quatrain and calls, cleverly, the sincerity of the parody into question. And indeed, when the half-cadence resolves into the D major of the last song, a different answer emerges. At the point of utmost distance and alienation, the protagonist’s instrumental identity suddenly breaks out into the emphatically pianistic idiom that brushes the questionable pietism aside. (The beginning of last song is reminiscent of Schumann’s first Novelette, Op. 21.) Leaving behind the different ironic variants of aggressive attack, subtle sarcasm, and religious regression, the protagonist’s original emotions “erupt” to re-collect his scattered creative selves into one genuine voice:
With myrtles and roses, lovely and fair,
with fragrant cypresses and spangled gilding
I would adorn this book like a shrine
wherein to bury my songs.
[3.9] The passionate call for the burial of his songs together with his love
parallels the final song of Dichterliebe, where the songs are buried at the
bottom of the ocean, only to rise from their grave in the famous postlude (itself
a recapitulation of the postlude from the twelfth song, where flowers gave voice
to the unspeakable sorrow of the silent protagonist). As has often been noted,
Dichterliebe closes in
Example 8. Robert Schumann, Heine Liederkreis, Op. 24, No. 9, mm. 49–62
(click to enlarge and listen)
[3.10] Nowhere, perhaps, is this look more poignant than in vision of pastness
becoming presence, or distance becoming nearness, during the fourth stanza, when
the music returns to the first song. Only now, in a final transformation of the
dream motif, both musical personae and the voice of poetry come together, suggesting—unequivocally—how
the dream of requited love might be fulfilled. Only now, the non-syncopated double
gesture B4–E5 leads directly to an
[3.11] True, the protagonist’s hope is that his sad story, by being told, will
ultimately be undone; that by closing the gap between the first and the last song,
it will overcome the emotional and physical distance between him and his beloved. True also, that his wish remains the very dream that it was from the very beginning.
As in Dichterliebe, the illusion is only fleeting, the conceptual and corporeal
unison of the three voices breaks apart. The final stanza wants to retreat from
the achieved
Berthold Hoeckner
Department of Music
University of Chicago
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago IL 60637
b-hoeckner@uchicago.edu
Footnotes
1. This article is based on my “Spricht der Dichter oder der
Tondichter? Die multiple Persona in Robert Schumann’s Heine-Liederkreis op. 24,”
in Schumann und seine Dichter: Bericht über das 4. Symposion am 13. und 14 Juni
1991 im Rahmen des 4. Schumann-Fests Düsseldorf, ed. Matthias Wendt, (Mainz:
Schott, 1993): 18–32. I would like to thank Kofi Agawu, James Webster, Richard Cohn,
and Larry Zbikowksi for their insightful comments during the gestation of this complete
English revision. Translations for the songs are adapted with modifications from
Eric Sams, The Songs of Robert Schumann, 2nd ed. (London: Eulenburg,
1975): 36–48.
Return to text
2. Vocal pitches are thus taken to be sung by a female voice,
a practice not at all untypical for Schumann, as many of his songs including
Dichterliebe were premiered by women. If sung by a tenor or baritone, the registral
shift would of course take place an octave lower, but still maintain the difference
between a low and a high vocal register. [Ed.: The accompanying MIDI files
realize the vocal part in the male register.]
Return to text
3. Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1974).
Return to text
4. See Edward T. Cone, “The World of Opera and its Inhabitants,”
in Edward T. Cone, Music: A View from Delft, ed. Robert P. Morgan (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 125–138; the series of articles by Fred Everett Maus, James Webster, Marion A. Guck, Charles Fisk, and Alicyn Warren in College
Music Symposium 29 (1989), including Cone’s responses, grew out of a special
session on Cone’s work at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society
in Baltimore. See also Peter Kivy, “Opera Talk: A Philosophical ‘Phantasie,’”
Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991), 63–77 with a reply by David Rosen: “Cone’s
and Kivy’s ‘World of Opera,’” Cambridge Opera Journal 4 (1992), 61–74; Carolyn
Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Return to text
5. See Richard Kurth’s “Music and Poetry, a Wilderness of Doubles:
Heine-Nietzsche-Schubert-Derrida,” 19th-Century Music 21 (1997): 3–37, which
responds to Lawrence Kramer’s “The Schubert Lied: Romantic Form and Romantic Consciousness,”
in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. by Walter Frisch (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1986): 200–37.
Return to text
6. In this respect my aim differs from the article by Juergen
Thym and Ann Clark Fehn, “Who Is Speaking? Edward T. Cone’s Concept of Persona and
Wolfgang von Schweinitz’s Settings of Poems by Sarah Kirsch,”
Journal of Musicological Research 11 (1991): 1–31. Thym and Fehn
convincingly demonstrate
the limitations of Cone’s approach in complex cases such as von Schweinitz’s cycle,
a male composer setting autobiographical poems by a female poet. Ruth Solie has
addressed the same problem in “Whose Life? The Gendered Self in Schumann’s Frauenliebe
Songs,” in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. by Steven Paul Scher, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992): 219–40. Other recent innovative studies of the
nineteenth-century Lied include the fifth chapter, “Song,” in Lawrence Kramer,
Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984); Kofi Agawu, “Theory and Practice in the Analysis of
Nineteenth-Century Lied,” Music Analysis 11 (1992): 3–36; Rufus Hallmark, ed., German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schirmer, 1996);
Deborah Stein and Robert Spillman, Poetry into Song: Performance and Analysis
of Lieder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Reinhold Brinkmann,
Schumann und Eichendorff: Studien zum Liederkreis Opus 39 (Munich: Edition
Text + Kritik, 1997); and most recently Lawrence Zbikowski, “The Blossoms of ‘Trockne Blumen’: Music and Text in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Music Analysis 18 (1999): 307–345.
The stimulating book by David Ferris, Schumann’s “Eichendorff Liederkreis”
and the Genre of the Romantic Cycle (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), however, could not be taken into account after the completion of this
article.
Return to text
7. Edward T. Cone, “Poet’s Love or Composer’s Love?”
in Music and Text: Critical
Inquiries, ed. by Steven Paul Scher (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 177–92.
Return to text
8. The Composer’s Voice, 3. In the Continental tradition,
the equivalent concept is that of the “aesthetic subject.” See, for instance, the
first chapter of Carl Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music,
trans. by Mary Whittall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
Return to text
9. The Composer’s Voice, 5.
Return to text
10. Ibid., 16.
Return to text
11. Ibid., 9–10.
Return to text
12. Ibid., 23.
Return to text
13. Ibid., 18.
Return to text
14. Thus Goethe wrote to Zelter: “I feel that your compositions
are, so to speak, identical with my songs; the music, like gas blown into a balloon,
merely carries them into the heavens. With other composers, I must first observe
how they have conceived my song, and what they have made of it.” Quoted in
Cone,
“Words into Music: The Composer’s Approach to the Text,” Music: A View from Delft,
115.
Return to text
15. “In the poem, it is the poet who speaks, albeit in the
voice of a persona. In the song, it is the composer who speaks, in part through
the words of the poet.” The Composer’s Voice, 19.
Return to text
16. “Poet’s Love or Composer’s Love?” 177, quoting
partly from The Composer’s Voice, 36.
Return to text
17. “Poet’s Love or Composer’s Love?” 181, quoting from
The Composer’s Voice, 17–18. Note that the song’s “actual” composer is not the
“empirical” composer, i.e., Schubert or Schumann.
Return to text
18. Ibid., 185–87.
Return to text
19. Ibid., 185. See Stein and Spillman, Poetry into Song,
97ff., for other cases where the accompaniment might be thought of as an entirely
separate persona.
Return to text
20. Novalis, Schriften, eds. Paul Kluckhohn, Richard
Samuel, Hans-Juergen Mähl (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960ff) 3: 250–1 (fragment No.
63): “Eine ächt synthetische Person ist eine Person, die mehrere Personen
zugleich ist—ein Genius. Jede Person is der Keim zu einem unendlichen
Genius. Sie vermag in mehrere Person[en] zertheilt, doch auch Eine zu seyn.
Die ächte Analyse der Person, als solcher bringt Personen hervor—die Person
kann nur in Personen sich vereinzeln, sich zertheilen und zersetzen
Return to text
21. See Willy Michel, “Der ‘innere Plural’ in der Hermeneutik
und Rollentheorie des Novalis,” Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, eds. Jochen
Hörisch and Ernst Behler (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1987): 33–50, esp. 44–47. Michel
also discusses the sociological implications of Novalis’s theory of roles.
Return to text
22. Ibid., 41–43.
Return to text
23. Ibid., 43. Novalis, Schriften, 2: 589. “Zentripetalkraft—ist
das synthetische Bestreben—Centrifugalkraft—das analytische Bestreben des Geistes—Streben
nach Einheit—Streben nach Mannichfaltigkeit—durch wechselseitige Bestimmung beyder
durch Einander—wird jene höhere Synthesis der Einheit und Mannichfaltigkeit selbst
hervorgebracht—durch die Eins in Allem und Alles in Einem ist.”
Return to text
24. Novalis, Schriften 3: 290 (fragment No. 282): “Um
die Stimme zu bilden muss der Mensch mehrere Stimmen sich anbilden—dadurch wird
sein Organ substantieller. So um seine Individualität auszubilden muss er immer
mehrere Individualitäten anzunehmen und sich zu assimilieren wissen—dadurch wird
er z[um] substantiellen Individuum. Genius
Return to text
25. See The Composer’s Voice, 17–18. According to Michel,
“Der ‘innere Plural’,” 44, Novalis formulates the paradox of one person in a such
a way that the text has the effect of a palimpsest with a religious subtext: “Darunter
scheint das denkfigurale Säkularisat der Trinitätslehre durch.”
Return to text
26. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1961), 70ff. Maus discusses the relevance of the
concept to Cone’s persona in “Agency in Instrumental Music and Song,” College
Music Symposium 29 (1989), 32–33; see also Cone’s approval under “Responses,”
College Music Symposium 29 (1989), 77–78.
Return to text
27. “Lieder” appear together with “Traumbilder,” “Romanzen,”
and “Sonette” in the first part of the Buch der Lieder, entitled “Junge Leiden.”
Schumann probably used the first edition from 1827. See Rufus Hallmark The Genesis
of Robert Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1979), 16. Barbara Turchin,
Robert Schumann’s Song Cycles in the Context of the Early Nineteenth-Century
“Liederkreis” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1981), 262ff, points out that
an early reviewer in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung criticized the unevenness
of the Heine-Liederkreis, stemming in part from the “light” character of
the first song. Recent analytical studies of Schumann’s song cycles include: David
Neumeyer, “Organic Structure and the Song Cycle: Another Look at Schumann’s Dichterliebe,”
Music Theory Spectrum 4 (1982): 92–105; and Patrick McCreless, “Song Order
in the Song Cycle: Schumann’s Liederkreis op. 39,” Music Analysis 5 (1986):
5–28.
Return to text
28. As the anonymous reviewer in the Allgemeine Musikalische
Zeitung 44 (1842), 33, remarked: “The beautiful quiet song flies by like a dream
image, in order to transport again into dreaming” (Der schöne ruhige Gesang schwebt
vorüber wie ein Traumgebild, um aufs Neue ins Träumen zu versetzen).
Return to text
29. See David Lewin, “Some Ideas about Voice-Leading between
PCSETS,” Journal of Music Theory 42 (1998), 18–20.
Return to text
30. Personal communication by Richard Cohn. See also his article
on triadic connections and voice-leading directionality “Square Dances with Cubes,”
Journal of Music Theory 42 (1998), 283–96. In this context, it will be useful
to point out that in Dichterliebe the trajectory of voice leading between
triads is upward for the most part, but Schumann seems to imbue the succession of
keys with a more complicated double trajectory that emerges from the tonal ambiguity
of the first song (
Return to text
31. Cone, “Poet’s Love or Composer’s Love,” 185. Kofi Agawu,
“Structural ‘Highpoints’ in Schumann’s Dichterliebe,” Music Analysis
3 (1984), 159–80, examines other responses by Schumann to Heine’s ironic reversals.
Return to text
32. As for instance in the otherwise outstanding recording
by Brigitte Fassbänder and Irving Gage (DGG 15 519 - 2). For a discussion of the
relevance of the concept of persona for performance see Stein and Spillman, Poetry
into Song: Performance and Analysis of Lieder, 93–100.
Return to text
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2001 by the Society for Music Theory. All rights reserved.
[1] Copyrights for individual items published in Music Theory Online (MTO) are held by their authors. Items appearing in MTO may be saved and stored in electronic or paper form, and may be shared among individuals for purposes of scholarly research or discussion, but may not be republished in any form, electronic or print, without prior, written permission from the author(s), and advance notification of the editors of MTO.
[2] Any redistributed form of items published in MTO must include the following information in a form appropriate to the medium in which the items are to appear:
This item appeared in Music Theory Online in [VOLUME #, ISSUE #] on [DAY/MONTH/YEAR]. It was authored by [FULL NAME, EMAIL ADDRESS], with whose written permission it is reprinted here.
[3] Libraries may archive issues of MTO in electronic or paper form for public access so long as each issue is stored in its entirety, and no access fee is charged. Exceptions to these requirements must be approved in writing by the editors of MTO, who will act in accordance with the decisions of the Society for Music Theory.
This document and all portions thereof are protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. Material contained herein may be copied and/or distributed for research purposes only.
Prepared by Brent Yorgason and Tahirih Motazedian, Editorial Assistants