Tonal Ebb, Sunken II Chords, and Text-Music Correspondences in Robert Schumann’s Lieder

Abstract

In this article, I develop a special principle of tonal ebb to account for breaches of harmonic syntax in the normative tonal flow of common practice era music, with special reference to V going to II. Though typically forbidden, V—II progressions occasionally arise in a handful of special cases. Rarely, one may encounter a sunken II chord: this is my term for an apparent, diatonic II chord that arises from contrapuntal motion within V in major keys. To ground this rather abstract contrapuntal artefact and highlight its unique affective properties—namely, a pronounced sense of harmonic involution—I develop a conceptual model for the apparent V—II—V tonal formation by analogy to a special folding technique from origami. Owing to its voice leading properties, the sunken II chord is particularly well-suited to conveying a sense of “that which lies within” in purely musical terms. In this regard, it has a strong potential to be used as the musical element in the creation of musico-poetic meaning in song. I argue that Robert Schumann was sensitive to this effect—consciously or unconsciously—and that he used it in recurring and predictable ways in his songs to underscore moments of inwardness, introspection, or heightened subjectivity in the poetry. I proceed to investigate three songs from 1840 that feature a text-music correspondence involving a prominent sunken II chord in the music and some manner of inward turn in the text.