Rethinking Schumann

Rethinking Schumann

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Rethinking Schumann

E D ITED B Y

Roe-Min Kok Laura Tunbridge

1 2011

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rethinking Schumann / edited by Roe-Min Kok and Laura Tunbridge. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-539385-9; 978-0-19-539386-6 (pbk.) 1. Schumann, Robert, 1810–1856—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Music—19th century—History and criticism. I. Kok, Roe-Min. II. Tunbridge, Laura, 1974– ML410.S4R47 2011 780.92—dc22 2010012666

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Preface

A composer’s centenary is usually geared toward celebrating the artist’s achievements and investigating forgotten reaches of repertoire. It can also be a useful opportunity to take stock: to reflect on the state of existing views and to suggest new paths. The essays gathered here aim to rethink scholarly approaches to Robert Schumann (1810–56) on the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth. Whether the reader is familiar with Schumann studies or comes to it with little background, it is hoped that the ideas, perspectives, and directions offered will serve as departure points for a broad and continuing discussion of his work and times. Schumann and his works command an enviable amount of attention around the world. Regularly performed and recorded by major artists, ensembles, and orchestras, his music continues to speak to generations beyond his own. As may be expected, the scholarly bibliography on Schumann is vast and multilingual; it dates back to the early decades of the nineteenth century and shows few signs of abating. In particular, the steady stream of publications from the Robert-Schumann-Gesellschaft in Zwickau and the Robert-SchumannForschungstelle in Düsseldorf has made available not only information about Schumann’s everyday activities, but also, via the new complete edition (Neue Robert-Schumann-Gesamtausgabe), fresh insights into Schumann’s working methods by returning to the manuscripts and by disentangling the publication and reception history of each work. Moreover, like Mozart, Beethoven, and other select composers, Schumann also attracts nonscholarly writings, mostly in the form of biographies. Briefly put, the sheer amount and variety of available information on Schumann is nothing short of impressive—even intimidating. In many ways this volume is built on this array of collected knowledge. However, in taking up the challenge to rethink Schumann on the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth we have also tried to introduce themes and topics that have received rather less attention over the years but that promise to enhance our understanding of this major figure. Thus a hallmark of this volume is that it covers areas heavily researched and those markedly less so. Among the former, for example, is the reception of Schumann’s biography. The widespread and continuing fascination with the story of his life, and its connections to his music,

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is discussed, directly or indirectly, in several of the essays.1 Key to those discussions is often the status of the “late” music of the 1850s, the reevaluation of which has been a focal point of recent scholarship.2 Another topic of long-standing interest, Schumann and politics, receives fresh impetus in this volume, as do analytical approaches to the music, both in terms of repertoire and methods. Alongside these warhorse topics are themes of recent interest, highlighting the engagement by him (or via reception) with traditions outside of music: the visual arts, popular culture, childhood, film, and ballet.3 By definition these explorations entail interdisciplinary perspectives and frameworks of reference less often found in traditional Schumann scholarship. All in all, contributions in this volume insist on situating Schumann in the broader social and cultural histories of his own day and those of subsequent generations. The composer has long been associated with what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously termed in 1882 “untimeliness”; Schumann has conventionally been thought of as solitary and introspected, divorced from everyday reality and living solely in his imagination.4 However, our investigations show that contextualizing his work is fruitful; it helps produce a more carefully shaded portrait of the composer as a man of his time, engaged with the world around him to a greater extent than we tend to acknowledge. The first section, “The Political Sphere,” opens with four contributions—by Celia Applegate, James Deaville, Susan Youens, and Lily Hirsch—that shed new light on the extent of Schumann’s involvement with complex issues of nationalism and its social institutions, a subject of much debate in the past decade. Schumann traditionally is thought to have distanced himself from current political events, particularly those surrounding the uprisings of 1848–49; the first three essays demonstrate that this was far from the case in terms of his everyday dealings with local musical life, his transnational reputation, and his compositions. Applegate calls for a more nuanced, broader, and communitycentered picture of Schumann’s political outlook, comparing his sense of national identity to that of his supposedly more cosmopolitan contemporary Meyerbeer; Deaville explains Schumann’s institutional role in creating a national musical community within German-speaking lands; Youens presents a close reading of a late song by Schumann that reveals the extent to which his music can also be considered to bear political meaning. The Nazi reception of Schumann’s image and music, and how it compared with the reception of Mendelssohn, is the topic of Hirsch’s essay. The second section, “Popular Influences,” uncovers a new area in Schumann studies.5 Schumann is often thought of as an elitist, battling with the Philistines. Yet popular culture did not escape his notice or his works, and it found resonances with his life and music. Jon Finson explains the Maria Stuart Lieder as a manifestation of fashionable sentimentality; Roe-Min Kok considers the reception of the child Mignon in Requiem für Mignon against a backdrop of popular Catholicism and German folklore; and Nicholas Marston reminds us of

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Schumann’s engagement with visual arts, making a connection between popular artistic commentaries on Raphael’s well-known “Sistine” Madonna and Schumann’s Szenen aus Goethes Faust. Dana Gooley situates the musical language of Schumann’s early piano works within improvisational practices of his time, and Ivan Raykoff explores the effect of melodrama techniques on the seeming ability of Schumann’s music to speak. “Analytical Approaches” offers new work about the composer’s technicalcompositional prowess from the perspectives of nineteenth- to twenty-firstcentury concepts and methodologies. The number of analytical studies devoted to Schumann’s music from the 1830s still far outweighs those geared toward his later music, an imbalance that begins to be redressed here, through Harald Krebs’s and William Benjamin’s examinations of hypermeter in songs and choral music from the 1850s. On the other hand, Peter Smith and Julie Hedges Brown take different approaches to one of Schumann’s most famous pieces, the Piano Quintet, the former considering harmonic relationships, the latter the influence of the style hongrois. David Kopp places Schumann’s tonal practice in the context of mid-nineteenth-century theories of key, a thus far overlooked aspect. In the final section, “Twentieth-century Interpretations,” Schumann’s biography (or, more accurately, biographies) is revealed to dominate current-day understandings of the composer. These four essays discuss his posthumous life in creative works (including ballet, fiction, film, and visual art) and how he figures in interdisciplinary discourses about late style. Wayne Heisler demonstrates how ballets based on Schumann’s music continually refer back to the composer’s life, refracted through the lens of modernist aesthetics. David Ferris analyzes two fictional biographies of the composer and his wife from the 1990s, suggesting how forms of storytelling lead to different understandings of the couple, and Laura Tunbridge discusses how appearances of Schumann in twentieth-century compositions, films, and paintings seem to be linked to themes of childhood and mental illness. Scott Burnham approaches the idea of Schumann’s late style from the perspectives of cultural studies and literary criticism (rather than from a historical point of view), bringing in examples of modern artists’ late works in arguing for a subtext of death in the music of Schumann’s final period. A provocative reexamination of assumptions about a major romantic composer who played so many important roles in the society and culture of his day (and ours), Rethinking Schumann emphasizes interaction with other disciplines—literature, visual arts, cultural history, performance studies, dance, and film—allowing Schumann’s oeuvre and reception to be considered afresh from perspectives current in Anglo-American music scholarship. We may conclude that Schumann was very much a man of his time, informed by not just music, but also the culture and society around him. What is more, the composer’s reputation is revealed as having been shaped significantly by the passing of time, for example by changes in attitudes toward German romanticism and its history and by developments in musical scholarship and performance. Drawing on

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interdisciplinary approaches, this volume takes into account cultural and socialinstitutional frameworks, engages with ongoing and new issues of reception and historiography, and offers fresh music-analytical insights to assemble a portrait of the artist that reflects the different ways he has been understood over the past two hundred years. This book could not have come together without the patience and goodwill of our contributors and the unstinting support of Suzanne Ryan, Madelyn Sutton, and the rest of the production team at Oxford University Press. We gratefully acknowledge grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Manchester, and McGill University. Readers for the Press have offered invaluable feedback, and friends and colleagues—David Bretherton, René Rusch Daley, Annegret Fauser, Christopher Goddard, Claudine Jacques, Mikaela Miller, Gavin Osborn, Scott Paulin, Sylvia Heike Rieger, Steven Vande Moortele, and Nina Whiteman—generously provided assistance at various stages.

notes 1. For an overview, see Hentschel, “Robert Schumann in Musikgeschichtsschreibung und Biographik.” The most recent Anglophone contribution is Worthen, Robert Schumann. 2. For example, Der späte Schumann, ed. Ulrich Tadday, special issue of MusikKonzepte Sonderband 11 (2006); Tadday, Schumann Handbuch; Daverio, “Songs of Dawn and Dusk”; Tunbridge, Schumann’s Late Style. For a study that argues from the point of view of recently recovered sources, lost since World War II, see Kok, “Negotiating Children’s Music.” 3. Among these, the study of childhood was brought to attention by Kok’s dissertation, “Romantic Childhood, Bourgeois Commercialism, and the Music of Robert Schumann.” 4. Nietzsche, The Gay Science. See also Barthes, Camera Lucida, 70. 5. On use of the term popular culture in historical studies, see, for example, Brophy, Popular Culture, 16–17, 17 n. 44.

Contents

Contributors

I

The Political Sphere

1

Robert Schumann and the Culture of German Nationhood Celia Applegate

2

Organizing German Musical Life at Midcentury: Brendel, Schumann, and the Leipzig Tonkünstlerversammlungen and Tonkünstlerverein James Deaville

3

The Cry of the Schuhu: Dissonant History in a Late Schumann Song Susan Youens

4

Segregating Sound: Robert Schumann in the Third Reich Lily E. Hirsch

II

Popular Influences

5

At the Interstice between “Popular” and “Classical”: Schumann’s Poems of Queen Mary Stuart and European Sentimentality at Midcentury Jon W. Finson

6

Who Was Mignon? What Was She? Popular Catholicism and Schumann’s Requiem, Op. 98b Roe-Min Kok

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3

15

30 51

69

88

7

Entzückt: Schumann, Raphael, Faust Nicholas Marston

109

8

Schumann and Agencies of Improvisation Dana Gooley

129

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Contents

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Schumann’s Melodramatic Afterlife Ivan Raykoff

III

Analytical Approaches

10

Meter and Expression in Robert Schumann’s Op. 90 Harald Krebs

11

Hypermetric Dissonance in the Later Works of Robert Schumann William Benjamin

12

Associative Harmony, Tonal Pairing, and Middleground Structure in Schumann’s Sonata Expositions: The Role of the Mediant in the First Movements of the Piano Quintet, Piano Quartet, and Rhenish Symphony Peter H. Smith

157

183

206

235

13

Schumann and the style hongrois Julie Hedges Brown

265

14

Intermediate States of Key in Schumann David Kopp

300

IV

Twentieth-Century Interpretations

15

Choreographing Schumann Wayne Heisler Jr.

329

16

The Fictional Lives of the Schumanns David Ferris

357

17

Deserted Chambers of the Mind (Schumann Memories) Laura Tunbridge

395

18

Late Styles Scott Burnham

411

Works Cited Index

431 459

Contributors

Celia Applegate is professor of history at the University of Rochester. She has written extensively on German nationalism and national identity with particular attention to senses of places and practices of music. She is the author of A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (1990) and Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (2005), and co-editor with Pamela Potter of Music and German National Identity (2002). She serves as president of the German Studies Association and is a member of the editorial board of Oxford University Press’s book series on the New Cultural History of Music. William Benjamin, a music theorist and composer, received a Ph.D. in music from Princeton University in 1976 and has been a faculty member at the University of British Columbia since 1978. He has published in leading theory journals and essay volumes since the 1970s, with studies of works by several nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers, critiques of present-day analytical method, and contributions to the theories of harmony and meter. More recently, his scholarly work has shifted to the intersection of music theory, cognition, and aesthetics. In 2008 he was named a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at UBC’s Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies, where he is at work on a book project titled “Music in our Heads: Imagined Music as a Determinant of Musical Behaviour, Musical Values, and Musical Culture.” Scott Burnham is professor of music at Princeton University and served as chair of the Department of Music from 2000 to 2008. He is the author of Beethoven Hero (1995), translator of A. B. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven (1997), and co-editor of Beethoven and His World (2000). Other writings include “Schubert and the Sound of Memory” (Musical Quarterly, 2001), “On the Beautiful in Mozart” (Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, 2005), “Haydn and Humor” (The Cambridge Companion to Haydn, 2005), and “Novel Symphonies and Dramatic Overtures” (The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, 2007). James Deaville is associate professor for music in the School for Studies in Art and Culture of Carleton University, Ottawa. He has authored several books, contributed chapters for many edited collections, written for the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal

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of Musicological Research, 19th Century Music Review, and Echo (among others), and contributed to the new editions of the New Grove and MGG. David Ferris is associate professor of musicology at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. His research interests include musical biography, German Romanticism, musical analysis, and the relationship between text and music. He divides his time between the Schumanns and the life and music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. He is the author of Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis and the Genre of the Romantic Cycle (2000), and his work has appeared in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of Musicology, and Music and Letters. Jon W. Finson has published and lectured widely on the songs and symphonies of Robert Schumann. Most notably, he has authored books on Schumann’s First Symphony, Op. 38 (1987) and solo songs (2007). He has also edited an awardwinning edition of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony in its 1841 version (2003) and is slated to edit a volume of solo songs for the New Complete Edition of Schumann’s works. He is currently professor of music at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dana Gooley is the Manning Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University. His research interests include Franz Liszt, nineteenth-century music criticism, virtuoso performers and the public sphere, performance studies, and jazz. His book The Virtuoso Liszt (2004) discusses Liszt’s pianistic career in relation to the historical contexts of the 1830s and 1840s. He was a scholar-in-residence for the Bard Music Festival in 2006 and co-edited, with Christopher Gibbs, the essay collection Franz Liszt and His World (2006). He is currently writing a book about improvisation and improvisational values in nineteenth-century music and culture. Julie Hedges Brown graduated in 2000 with a Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University. Her research emphasizes nineteenth-century music, especially the history, biography, reception, and analysis of Robert Schumann and his music. She has delivered papers at numerous regional, national, and international conferences, and her previous publications have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and 19th Century Music. She has held teaching appointments at Tufts University, Case Western Reserve University, and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. A recipient of a Leylan Dissertation Fellowship, she has also received two Mellon grants, plus two research grants from Northern Arizona University, where she is currently assistant professor of musicology. Wayne Heisler Jr. is author of The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss (2009). His work also appears in The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, The Musical Quarterly, Opera Quarterly: Performance + Theory + History, and ECHO.

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His research interests include music for ballet and theatrical dance, gender and sexuality in music and dance performance, and music historiography. Heisler has been the recipient of grants from the German-American Fulbright Commission and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD). He is currently an associate professor and coordinator of historical and cultural studies in music at the College of New Jersey, where he teaches courses in music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including opera, ballet, musical theater, and popular music, as well as performance studies and music ethnography. Lily E. Hirsch is Assistant Professor of Music at Cleveland State University. She earned a Bachelor of Music magna cum laude from the Conservatory of Music at the University of Pacific in 2001. In 2006, she received a Ph.D. in musicology from Duke University. Her book A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League was published in 2010. Her work has appeared in Musical Quarterly, Philomusica, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She has also presented at the national conferences of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Her work on the Jewish Culture League has been generously supported by the German Historical Institute, DAAD, Leo Baeck Institute, and the American Musicological Society. Roe-Min Kok co-edited Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth (2006) and has contributed to Nineteenth-Century Choral Music, Gender-Handbuch Musik, Acta musicologica, Music & Letters, 19th-Century Music Review, The World of Music, Studien zur Wertungsforschung, and Robert Schumann: Interpretationen seiner Werke, among others. Her work focuses on the complex cultural fascination with childhood manifested in nineteenth-century Austro-German music, and on issues of identity and gender in postcolonialism vis-à-vis music. She is writing a book about cultural milieus associated with nineteenth-century children’s music, as well as one on Western classical music in colonies of the British Empire, 1890–1980. She is assistant professor of music at McGill University. David Kopp is associate professor in the Department of Composition and Theory at the Boston University School of Music. He is the author of Chromatic Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Music (2002) and has published articles in the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, and other periodicals. As pianist he has recorded for New World Records, CRI, ARTBSN, and Arsis (forthcoming). Harald Krebs obtained his Ph.D. in music theory from Yale University in 1980. He joined the music faculty at the University of Victoria in 1986, where he is professor and head of the theory section. He is the author or editor of several

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books, and has published widely on the tonal and rhythmic structure of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music in Canadian, American, and European journals and in numerous collections of essays. His book Fantasy Pieces: Metrical Dissonance in the Music of Robert Schumann (1999) won the Society for Music Theory’s Wallace Berry Award for a distinguished book in music theory. He is a frequent presenter at conferences, and has been invited as a guest lecturer at many universities throughout North America and Europe. He has served as vice president of the Society for Music Theory (2003–5) and as member of the editorial boards of the journals Music Theory Spectrum, Theoria, Canadian University Music Review, and Indiana Theory Review. Nicholas Marston is University Reader in Music Theory and Analysis in the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of King’s College. He has published widely on the music of Beethoven and Schumann, and on the music theory of Heinrich Schenker. He is a former editor-in-chief of Beethoven Forum, and his work on Schumann includes the Cambridge Music Handbook on the Fantasie, op. 17 (1992), as well as essays in The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, 19th Century Music, and other publications. Ivan Raykoff is an assistant professor of music and arts in context at Eugene Lang College, the New School for Liberal Arts, in New York, where he teaches courses on music history and aesthetics, music theory, and the intersections between music and the other arts, including film music. He studied piano at the Eastman School of Music and at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and received his Ph.D. from the University of California–San Diego in 2002. He is co-editor, with Robert Tobin, of A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest (2007), and he is completing a book on the image of the concert pianist in popular culture titled “Dreams of Love: Representing the ‘Romantic’ Pianist.” Peter H. Smith, author of Expressive Forms in Brahms’s Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet (2005), is associate professor at the University of Notre Dame. He has published numerous articles on Brahms and issues of formal and Schenkerian analysis. He is a longstanding member of the Board of Directors of the American Brahms Society and currently serves as vice president of that organization and on the editorial boards of Theory and Practice, Indiana Theory Review, and the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. Laura Tunbridge is senior lecturer in music at the University of Manchester. Her publications include Schumann’s Late Style (2007), The Song Cycle (2011), and contributions to The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, Cambridge Opera Journal, The Musical Quarterly, Music and Letters, and Journal of the Royal Musical Association.

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Susan Youens is the J. W. Van Gorkom Professor of Music at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles and eight books on Lieder, including Heinrich Heine and the Lied (2007), Schubert’s Late Lieder: Beyond the Song Cycles (2002), Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs (2000), and Schubert, Müller, and Die schöne Müllerin (1997).

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I T HE POLI T I C A L S P H E R E

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1 Robert Schumann and the Culture of German Nationhood Celia Applegate

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche observed, “It is characteristic of the Germans that the question ‘what is German’ never dies out among them.” Moving from Goethe’s “delicate silence” on the matter to Mozart’s and Beethoven’s indifference to it, Nietzsche worked his way eventually to Robert Schumann and the German question. Schumann’s “quiet lyricism and drunken intoxication with feeling,” he suggested, made him “merely a German event in music, no longer something European, as Beethoven was, and, to an even greater degree, Mozart.” With Schumann, he wrote, “German music was threatened by its greatest danger, the loss of its voice for the soul of Europe and its descent to something dealing merely with the fatherland.”1 Nietzsche’s observations always represent a provocation, and it is rarely a defense against them simply to call him wrong. At the least, though, it is worth noting that he wrote this passage in the mid-1880s, when the framing of the national question was proceeding much differently than it had been three decades earlier. Not only had the conservative or old right long since figured out how to turn German nationalism to support their own political agendas, but a new right, familiar to Nietzsche through the Bayreuth crowd as well as through his sister and her husband, Bernhard Förster, was developing a more populist politics of racial nationalism, which repelled him. Anything that may have been part of the genealogy of all this could only excite his criticism. Still, the question remains: In the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, in the three decades of his adulthood, did Schumann’s commitment to the state of Germany and its cultural health “threaten” the loss of “Germany’s voice for the soul of Europe”? How should one characterize, if not Schumann’s voice, then at least his attention to the national community? Should we regard him, as Nietzsche ultimately did, as interested only, or mainly, in a narrowly German culture, with deleterious long-term consequences? Or should we emphasize, as did a recent conference volume, his interest in and openness to the music of composers and cultures of

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many different nationalities, his reception in France or England or the United States, his enjoyment of his Dutch concert tour—if you will, his cosmopolitanism, or at the very least his identity as a European?2 I suggest that neither of these characterizations (the national or the cosmopolitan) is accurate as one choice between two mutually exclusive alternatives. The very notion that we face an either/or situation here reflects, in Nietzsche’s case especially, the powerfully negative influence of Richard Wagner’s polemic in “Judaism in Music” (and elsewhere), a work that attacked cosmopolitanism in the persons of its allegedly most prominent representatives, the Jews of Europe. Wagner, with no great originality, argued for the existence of only two kinds of art, authentic and inauthentic, produced by two kinds of artists, those rooted in a national culture and those lacking one.3 Nietzsche, eventually, responded to Wagner by praising cosmopolitanism, and the game of either/or was on, with Schumann’s reputation a mere pawn in the process. But regardless of whether, like Wagner, one disdains cosmopolitanism or, like Nietzsche, claims to admire it, the distinction between a nationalist and a cosmopolitan was not so clear-cut then or now, which is, among other reasons, why both Wagner and Nietzsche had to polemicize to persuade. Some theorists of nationalism have suggested, for instance, that nationalisms, just like processes of nation-state formation, show a great range of attitudes toward the world outside the particular nation in play. In his effort to imagine a new kind of narrative of the formation of modern China, Prasenjit Duara writes about the need to challenge “the notion of a stable community that gradually develops a national self-awareness like the evolution of a species (History).” He suggests instead that the history of communities, national ones in particular, be told as a process in which “various social actors—often different groups of politicians and intellectuals—” redefined the boundaries of community by a “deliberate mobilization within a network of cultural representations.” Duara’s analysis relies on a view of communities (national or otherwise) not as “well-bounded entities” but as marked by “various different and mobile boundaries that delineate different dimensions of life.” Some of these boundaries are hard and cannot be crossed without violating the integrity of the community; others are soft and easily crossed: “One or more of the cultural practices of a group, such as rituals, language, dialect, music, kinship rules or culinary habits, may be considered soft boundaries if they identify a group but do not prevent the group from sharing and even adopting, self-consciously or not, the practices of another.”4 All communities, he suggests, consist of a combination of hard and soft boundaries, each marking degrees of privilege and inclusion, intolerance and exclusion, group cohesion and the capacity to change. In a similar vein, theorists of cosmopolitanism have pointed to the existence of a kind of rooted cosmopolitanism, in contrast to the cosmopolitanism of statelessness or expatriotism.5 Kant himself wrote in Perpetual Peace that the condition of world citizenship had its foundation in ancient traditions of hospitality toward peaceful travelers and

Robert Schumann and the Culture of German Nationhood

5

hence was a condition more of “temporary sojourn” than permanent placelessness.6 The terms Duara and others propose for shaping our understanding of national communities provide an explanatory framework for the experience of German-speaking central Europe generally and for the activities of musical activists such as Schumann in particular. We should be able to find a way to understand both Schumann’s intense relationship to Germany and his place in European musical culture in more flexible, pre-Wagnerian terms. Schumann’s entire career fell into a period of transition in the German national movement, and like all transitional moments, however extended, it is difficult to characterize something that came and went. But that we must do if we are not either to consign Schumann, as Nietzsche did looking back, to a category of the “merely German” or, at the other end of the spectrum, to ignore the extent of real congruence between his attitudes and those of the nationalist movement. For Schumann was a nationalist of his era, but as with other national intellectuals at midcentury his sense of German community and identity lay in his efforts to create—and contribute to—a particular kind of community that he conceived of as both progressive and therefore necessarily national. This view of national identity as progressive and available to all Europeans, each in his or her own nation, characterized what historians have called the party of movement, the advocates of reform, renewal, even revolution in culture and society—a party that was European in scope and thus necessarily also cosmopolitan in their awareness of developments around them. And although Schumann was not one of the liberal reformers who actually gathered in Frankfurt and Berlin to try to formulate practical answers to this question “What is German?” in 1848–49, one cannot imagine a musical figure more in tune with the culture, that is to say with the underlying concepts, of liberal nationalism before it redefined itself in the presence of Bismarck (and that, of course, did not happen until the 1860s). Consideration of these deeper conceptions of nationhood, which underlay Schumann’s and the liberal nationalists’ consciousness of their own nationality and what it entailed and enjoined, helps to specify just how different was the community they imagined as the nation from other kinds of community. Moreover Schumann’s response to much of the musical culture of his time and his understanding of the national community, its potential and its problems, remained remarkably stable over the course of his life, suggesting that however great the shock of the revolutionary events of 1848–49, they did not lead either him or his fellow nationalists to discard hopes for musical and national progress. Schumann’s lifelong association with music journalism represents by far his strongest connection with the nationalist movement in midcentury Germanspeaking Europe.7 In the autobiographical statement he wrote in 1840 in the process of receiving the degree of doctor of philosophy at the University of Jena, Schumann described his journalistic work in Leipzig as part and parcel of the

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time of movement and change in Europe, an interesting way to characterize a period in German public life marked, on the surface, by super-controlling governments and passive subjects. It tells us of his consciousness not just of uprisings and artistic ferment elsewhere in Europe but, more important, of a growing mood of spiritual discomfort and activism at home among a small group of intellectuals—writers, scholars, publicists, and so on—who formed the core of a nascent political-cum-cultural opposition. In literary circles this phenomenon takes the name of convenience “Young Germany,” a notion inadvertently encouraged by the Diet of the German Confederation in 1835 (the year Schumann assumed full editorial responsibility for the Neue Zeitschrift), when it officially chastised a number of writers for allegedly belonging to a literary cabal. But this sense of things changing and needing to change went far beyond a nonexistent literary conspiracy to encompass an extensive, if dispersed, collection of people engaged in reforming public life, of which Schumann must certainly be regarded as part. Decades ago, insisting on the “single-minded devotion to the arts” of Schumann’s work, Leon Plantinga explicitly rejected any parallel between Schumann’s work and that of such writers as Heinrich Heine, Heinrich Laube, or Karl Gutzkow, let alone nationalist activists such as Ludwig Camphausen or Carl Welcker.8 But true though it may be that Schumann, as Plantinga points out, had none of Young Germany’s “nihilistic radicalism” and commented only rarely on political events, to separate him completely from a loose fellowship with a reformist oppositional mode in midcentury Germany would be a mistake—again, both before and after the revolutionary events of 1848. After all, he himself claimed, “Everything that goes on in the world—politics, literature, people—concerns me.”9 But beyond that we need to be wary of any effort to draw firm lines between cultural and political nationalism or nation building. Such lines impose on this generation a distinction that made only limited sense to them. Nineteenth-century Germans did distinguish between ethnographic and political types of group identity, as we do today, but as one historian has put it, “civic and cultural connotations were equally vivid in their minds when they conjured up the image of the nation,” and further, for “educated Germans,” “the idea of the cultural nation, immediately suggested political relations while that of statehood just as surely pointed toward some measure of cultural unity as well.”10 That said, Schumann’s overriding concern was with the state of cultural life among Germans, whether in terms of what they produced or in terms of what they consumed. Very early in his life he wrote, “True literature, literature, that is, which inspires passion in the soul of the public at large, can never flourish in a land ruled by bondage and slavery.”11 And to read the prospectus for the Neue Zeitschrift, written in 1834 and consisting in part of a critique of existing musical journals, is to read a critique of Metternich’s central Europe, its images drawn from a common store of liberal-reformist objections to the times: “What, then,

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are the few present musical journals? Nothing but playgrounds for ossified systems, . . . nothing but relics of aged doctrines to which adherence is more and more openly denied, nothing but one-sidedness and rigidity. . . . None is capable of promoting the true interests of music; none is able to fulfill the just demands made upon it.”12 Moreover for Schumann, as for the liberal, educated Germans who saw themselves as participants in the project of nation building, the all-important aspect of their work was its publicness, not its politics, and the publicness that concerned them was emphatically not that defined either by commerce or by state authority. This was instead the publicness that Jürgen Habermas dubbed the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit), that is, a space for the exercise of rationality and autonomous judgment. In eighteenth-century French salons and English coffeehouses, as Habermas argued, “opinion became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence.”13 In theory the public sphere was a neutral and accommodating space of communication, but in practice it meant much more than that to Germans. Reading and writing were not neutral activities, in either political or cultural terms, especially in a period marked by as much censorship as were the German states in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Since the eighteenth century both had worked to question the sovereignty of established authority and even to overthrow it; both were undertaken with more deliberation and sense of purpose than that with which we run our printing presses and web blogs today. And although censorship eased considerably after the failure of the revolutions in 1848, it did not end entirely, nor did the vital charge of the public sphere diminish. If anything, journalism and associational life became all the more important, given that action in the streets (which liberal nationalists had rarely advocated) had proven so ineffective and, in the view of many liberals, misguided. And Schumann certainly held a conception of Öffentlichkeit, or an activist public sphere. This is revealed by the way he took to the printing press with reformist, even revolutionary purposes in mind. The musical times were awry—an arid desert, “from which, even with the best of will, hardly a drop of the sap of life can be pressed,” or sometimes, on the contrary, a hothouse of quickly wilting but extravagantly colored plants—and someone had to do something about it.14 Although his sale of the journal to Franz Brendel mainly brought an end to his writing, it is no coincidence that when a moment he perceived to be of overwhelming importance came (the arrival of Brahms on his doorstep) it was to journalism he returned. “New paths” indeed. Moreover behind Schumann’s attitude toward Meyerbeer, who came to symbolize all that was wrong with the musical scene of his day, one finds the telling contrast between Öffentlichkeit, the public sphere, and mere publicity or fashion, commerce. Meyerbeer’s sins, quite apart from the musical particularities of his compositions, resided of course in his commercialism, but to put it slightly differently, in his failure to understand the public as anything but a marketplace,

8

The Political Sphere

wherein value is determined not by the autonomous judgment of the enlightened and free individual but by an irrational clamor of an unthinking crowd. Hence Schumann’s infamous, but from this perspective philosophically and politically considered comparison of Meyerbeer to the “performers in Franconi’s circus,” and his opera Les Huguenots as a “farce at a fair for the purpose of raising money and applause.”15 As conceived of at midcentury, the public sphere was peculiarly vulnerable to both commerce and autocracy, and Meyerbeer played the systems of both. But what exactly was either liberal or nationalist about this conception and use of the public sphere? The liberalism of it is clear enough. These men and women believed in freedom of speech, thought, association, and all that, but as the historian Brian Vick has shown, the implications of such beliefs for their understanding of the order of things in the world were extensive. Liberals believed that the course of history involved the advance of culture, a progress from merely organic institutions to new institutions that would be increasingly “infused with spiritual, moral, and intellectual self-consciousness.”16 All had in some way absorbed the Kantian idealist emphasis on the importance of the conscious mind, itself in a sense making the world. And they were nationalists, not because they paraded around with their German flags, but because they shared a belief that the advance of culture meant a transition from communities of people based merely on blood ties and extended kinship (these were unreflected institutions) to communities of people who were connected to places and capable of forming more and more complex and participatory states.17 These collections of people were marked, above all, by a community of mind, a “spiritual national unity,” in the words of the philosopher Jakob Fries, who was at the time of Schumann’s early career the most famous post-Kantian philosopher and who held a post at Jena, from which, in 1840, Schumann had wangled that honorary doctorate.18 Such communities also represented the eclipse of what was increasingly regarded as the artificiality and inauthenticity of cosmopolitanism, which created ties among people, to be sure, but ties that reflected only privilege and commerce, not authentic communal life. “Cosmopolitan community” was thus an oxymoron, sustainable only by people (aristocrats and so forth) so disconnected from genuine human bonds as to be incapable of full maturity—in Kant’s memorable phrase, “the ability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” Enlightenment (again Kant: “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”), progress, freedom, and nation thus all belonged together, in an unbreakable bonding—or so it was thought.19 But none of this, neither freedom nor progress nor the common consciousness and self-awareness that liberals believed to be the essence of nationhood, existed automatically: again, Fries, “Spiritual national unity and personality, a national intellect, are only formed from the scattered lives of individuals through public opinion.”20 National consciousness had, in other words, to be constructed,

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inculcated through activities in the public sphere, through speeches and meetings, through monuments, organizations, scholarship, education, and, yes, musical performance. And people had to be free to undertake such participation. Participating in the culture of nationhood took place in public, and the community of the nation in which people believed and which people helped to create was a living community, made real through action and consciousness. The degree to which Schumann shared such underlying assumptions, which one finds articulated in many different ways, depending on the person—from a belief in local self-government as a school for national citizenship to advocacy of involvement in associational life of all sorts—can be found in the texts of many an essay he wrote during his years of editorship and afterward. “Let us not be mere spectators!” he remembered had been their battle cry, “Let us lend a hand ourselves for the glory of things! Let us bring the poetry of our art into honor once again!”21 To quote again from the journal’s prospectus, Schumann wrote, “It seemed necessary . . . to create for the artist an organ which would stimulate him to effectiveness, not only through his direct influence, but also through the printed and spoken word, a public place, for him to express what he has seen with his own eyes, and felt in his own spirit, a journal in which he could defend himself against one-sided and false criticism.”22 At the same time, also in common with even the most ardent publicist, writing alone would not be enough to shape public opinion, a view he characteristically represented by posing a disagreement between Florestan and Eusebius on the usefulness of journalism altogether. “What is a musical paper compared to a Chopin concerto?” asks Florestan. “Away with your musical journals! It would be the victory, the triumph of a good paper, could it so advance matters that criticism would no longer be read.”23 Instead, as it had been for A. B. Marx a decade earlier, the gathering of a scattered community of conscious people had also to be achieved through a new kind of concert programming that would bind together the great artists of the past with those of present and future. The construction of an arc of historical continuity within the conscious national community was only conservatism in our retrospective view. Schumann called it “a sign of the enlightened artistic sensibility of our own era,” and as early as 1828 he was writing to a friend, “Every question once asked of the past, we will now put to the future, and we shall receive an answer.”24 For the 48er intellectuals in general, establishing and then sustaining these lines of continuity was a way of promulgating the core values that defined the national community, a way to make explicit their criteria for national authenticity. Moreover they tended to believe that only the authentic would or could survive; only the authentic was progressive in the truest sense of the word; and all authentic art was, by the very definition of authenticity, national, the expression of the most advanced and spiritually whole form of human organization, that of the nation. As the most famous liberal nationalist of all, not a German but an Italian, Giuseppe Mazzini, wrote in his 1844 Essay on the Duties of Man: “The

10

The Political Sphere

means [of working for the moral improvement and progress of Humanity] was provided for you by God when He gave you a country; when, even as a wise overseer of labor distributes the various branches of employment according to the different capacities of the workmen, he divided Humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth, thus creating the germ of nationalities.” Just as he believed that people who lived in true nations, not “disfigured” by “kings and privileged castes,” would exist in a state of “harmony and fraternity,” so too did he believe that all progress, in cultural as well as political and economic matters, was possible only when each person, “fortified by the power and affection of many millions, all speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies, and educated by the same historical tradition,” lived in such nations.25 The markedly utopian element in Mazzini’s thinking was not necessarily shared, at least not to that extent, by other liberal nationalists of his era, but his tendency to find something inherently disturbing about nonnational aggregates, whether in cultural life or, as he often railed against, in the “egotism of caste and dynasty,” did find echoes in many of his contemporaries, Schumann included. To return to Schumann’s suspicions about Meyerbeer, his criticisms often centered on the problem of eclecticism in Meyerbeer, which is to say, lack of stable national character: “Meyerbeer’s extreme externalism, his lack of originality and his eclecticism, are as well known as is his talent for dramatic treatment, preparation, polish, brilliancy, instrumental cleverness, also his considerable variety in forms. It is easy to trace in Meyerbeer Rossini, Mozart, Herold, Weber, Bellini, even Spohr, in short, all there is of music.”26 Felix Mendelssohn, a musician whom Schumann of course admired, shared the same cultural habitus of a kind of soft-bordered but nationally constituted musical world. Not surprisingly he had similar things to say about Meyerbeer, which likewise reflected the Mazzinian and liberal nationalist distrust of eclecticism as disfiguring and inauthentic. In a letter to a friend written in 1831, three years earlier than Schumann’s infamous review of Les Huguenots, Mendelssohn described Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable as having music that was “not bad at all: there is no lack of suspense, the right pungencies are fitted into the right places; there is melody to be hummed, harmony for the educated listeners, instrumentation for the Germans, contredances for the French, in fact, something for everybody—but there is no heart in it.”27 The search for music that would be heart-felt brings us in conclusion to a consideration of the distinctive sense of place that went along with the construction of the nation through public activity. The nationalists of midcentury central Europe were place-makers, by their activities attempting to redefine Leipzig and Frankfurt and Berlin and Breslau as integral parts of something they called Germany, not just seats of princes or centers of commerce. Place can be something of a hidden dimension in the study of nineteenth-century musical culture, but Schumann believed himself to be engaged at midcentury in a struggle over places, some of which he believed had in effect been won over (though always in danger of being lost) and some of which had not, but all of

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which were significant as sites of change and of resistance to it. The issue was not just people and music, in other words, but people and music in particular places. Musical improvement happened in these places, in cities, which had to be transformed from the places in which aristocrats, philistines, and Salonmenschen ruled to the sites of musical and cultural renewal. One could see all this as fairly banal. But at the risk of overinterpreting his geographical consciousness, one might regard Schumann as someone who was, in concert with the nationalizing project, trying to remake the map of central Europe from an assortment of commercial cities and Residenzstädte, dominated by court and purely commercial musical establishments, into a genuinely national network of true Bürgerstädte, cities of autonomous, self-governing, self-regulating citizens, in which a new kind of cultural life, neither courtly nor commercial but authentically national, would replace both the old and the degraded new or contemporary. If there was a capital in this mental map (and there really was not, because the mental geography of all Germans, nationalizing or not, was profoundly anticentrist), it was not Berlin or Frankfurt or Bonn but, of course, Leipzig. Schumann repeatedly referred to Leipzig as “musically healthy” and by extension to other musically healthy places as “Leipzigian.” Nor is it coincidence that Leipzig was the very center of liberal nationalism both before and after 1848, the hotbed of discussion and debate, and above all the site of the rapidly mythologized Battle of the Nations in 1813, which for most liberal nationalists was the ground zero of the nationalist project—that is, the point at which the old Germany came to an end and a new one began. Schumann’s consciousness of this national geography was a constant in his life and is nowhere better expressed than in his famous comparison of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, which begins with words that deliberately evoke the Battle of the Nations (Völkerschlacht) and the possibility of the defeat of France and all it symbolized: “Today I feel like a young warrior, who for the first time takes up his sword in a great cause. This small Leipzig, where questions of world importance [Weltfragen] have already been decided, is called upon to settle musical ones as well. Because here we see meeting, probably for the first time anywhere in the world, the two most important compositions of our time.”28 Geographically speaking, Meyerbeer was the ruler of a degraded and commercial urbanity, fatally tied to princes and their false glitter, against which a reformist, even revolutionary movement had to assert a new national urbanity, a nationalizing public sphere. Revolutions are, after all, first and foremost urban affairs. In this regard, at least, Brendel’s Neue Zeitschrift continued to represent a musico-geographical understanding of Germany very much in sync with Schumann’s own. Theodor Uhlig’s and others’ extensive reviews of Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète in 1850 carried forward, making even more explicit, Schumann’s depiction of two musical cultures—an artificial, outdated one and an authentic, progressive one—battling it out for dominance in the cities of Germany. “A false

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The Political Sphere

prophet,” declared Uhlig, “stalks through the regions of our disunited and unfree Germany.”29 In the post-1849 era the failure to transform the musical culture of German cities directly reflected the failed effort at political reform, and the clearest demonstration of this was the very public, very ceremonial relationship between Meyerbeer, the court Kapellmeister, and Friedrich Wilhelm IV, king of Prussia and himself a false prophet, once seen as the potential leader of German transformation but now revealed as its most implacable opponent.30 Schumann himself, when he spoke privately or wrote publicly about the state of cultural life in Germany after 1849, expressed discouragement and a sense of isolation that one finds in many of the nationalist liberals. The small band of like-minded people who would create a new national community through their activism and example now seemed smaller than ever, the threat of commercialism more widespread, and the power of the established and unfriendly institutions more implacable. “The revolution has scattered us in all directions,” he wrote to Liszt, referring literally, to be sure, to the temporary exodus of musicians from cities under siege and revolutionary disruption.31 But the phrase also resonates with a sense that all momentum toward the cultural renewal that prerevolutionary reformists had sought had been lost in the scattering of “genuine music-lovers [wahren Kunstmenschen].” “I have long known your zeal in the cause of good music,” he wrote to D. G. Otten in Hamburg in 1849, “. . . the news of which is carried, independently of newspapers, you see, by invisible spirits. . . . Such things should be discussed more in the press but rarely are, simply because most writers lack real knowledge or conviction—so things go, and so things will remain.”32 But despite this gloominess, he concluded with one of the stock phrases of the Burschenschaften, those nineteenth-century student associations who embodied the revolutionary and reformist zeal of liberal nationalism: “Vereint vorwärts [forward united], is my greeting to you. We must go forward, never abandoning our effort to bring to the fore all that which we know to be good and true [gut und echt].”33 Vereint vorwärts is not a bad summation of Schumann’s public activities in the 1850s. Even if the future seemed at least as likely to lie in the hands of the court favorites as of the “gute und echte” Kunstmenschen, and even if nothing in his final six years of life suggested that the princes of central Europe were any more inclined either to embrace political reform or a more progressive form of nationally minded cultural patronage, he nevertheless retained a kind of loyalty to the project of nationhood as conceived in the prerevolutionary decades—a project of consciousness raising and public activism, which many liberals still hoped would lead to the reformed world of which Mazzini spoke. Thus did Schumann the German live suspended between the old and the new, avatar of a liberalizing national community, which the failure of the revolution, had he only known it, had excluded from Germany’s future for nearly a century to come. Yet it is worth recognizing the coexistence of a national identity marked by soft boundaries and cosmopolitan awareness, not just out of fairness to

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Schumann but because any larger effort to explain how European musical culture did not simply break down into warring national camps in the course of the nineteenth century, despite the gradual eclipse of unabashed internationalists like Meyerbeer or Liszt, will founder without the acknowledgment of this middle ground.

notes 1. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 158–59. 2. Bär, Robert Schumann. 3. Richard Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. William Ashton Ellis, The Wagner Library, http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagjuda.htm (accessed July 24, 2007). 4. Duara, Rescuing History, 65–66, italics added. 5. Appiah, “Against National Culture,” 175–76. 6. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Kant: Political Writings, 106. 7. This association was, to be sure, less intense after he gave up the editorship of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, but he still remained a musician committed to music’s place in literary culture. 8. Plantinga, Schumann as Critic, 48. 9. Quoted in Taylor, Robert Schumann, 267. 10. Vick, Defining Germany, 22. 11. Quoted in Taylor, Schumann. 267. 12. Quoted in Plantinga, Schumann as Critic, 24. 13. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 30. 14. Quoted in Plantinga, Schumann as Critic, 14. 15. R. Schumann, On Music and Musicians, 194. 16. Vick, Defining Germany, 40. 17. One tool by which such communities could be formed was education; see Kok, “Of Kindergarten.” 18. Vick, Defining Germany, 39. 19. Kant, “What Is Enlightenment,” in Political Writings, 54–60. 20. Quoted in Vick, Defining Germany, 39. 21. R. Schumann, On Music and Musicians, 25. 22. Quoted in Plantinga, Schumann as Critic, 23. 23. R. Schumann, On Music and Musicians, 130. 24. Quoted in Grossmann-Vendrey, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, 151; Schumann to Wilhelm Götte, October 2, 1828, in R. Schumann, Jugendbriefe, 37–38. 25. Mazzini, An Essay on the Duties of Man, 59–60. 26. R. Schumann, Music and Musicians, 196. 27. Felix Mendelssohn to Karl Klingemann, December 10, 1831, in MendelssohnBartholdy, Letters, 184.

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28. R. Schumann, Music and Musicians, 193. 29. Uhlig, “Zeitgemässe Betrachtungen,” 168. 30. On the hopes and disappointments invested in Friedrich Wilhelm IV, see Barclay, Frederick William IV, 52–167. On Felix Mendelssohn’s brief and ultimately disappointing efforts to work with the king in what liberals hoped would be progressive directions, see Brodbeck, “A Winter of Discontent.” 31. Schumann to Liszt, May 31, 1849, in Schumanns Briefe: Eine Auswahl, ed. Karl Storck (Elberfeld: Wuppertaler Druckerei, 1905), 188–89. 32. R. Schumann, The Letters of Robert Schumann, 261–63. 33. Schumann to D. G. Otten, April 2, 1849, in Robert Schumanns Briefe, 254–55.

2 Organizing German Musical Life at Midcentur y Brendel, Schumann, and the Leipzig Tonkünstlerversammlungen and Tonkünstlerverein James Deaville

In the desire to document the rise of German national identity during the Vormärz, historians and musicologists have explored the various organizations that brought together musicians—more specifically, amateur singers—for the ostensible purpose of social interaction through collective performance. As such scholars as Dietmar Klenke, Friedhelm Brusniak, and Heinrich Lindlar have argued, however, associations like the Gesangvereine (choral societies) and festivals like the Niederrheinisches Musikfest (Lower Rhine Music Festival) were also politically charged.1 Perhaps their most subversive aspect is that such groups and events assembled individuals at a time when citizens normally did not gather, thereby providing a forum for the discussion of the latest political developments. Despite the activity of these and other scholars, arguably the most significant musician gatherings in Germany at midcentury, the Leipzig Tonkünstlerversammlungen (musicians’ assemblies) of 1847, 1848, and 1849, have remained all but unknown to scholarship (and that despite the indirect participation of Robert Schumann). In an important paper, Sanna Pederson has reported about the meetings’ political ramifications in light of the revolutions of 1848, yet the broader significance of these assemblies and the resultant Tonkünstler-Verein (musicians’ associations) for German musical life have yet to be explored.2 In this study I review varied documentation—correspondence of Schumann, reviews of the Versammlungen in the musical press, and the minutes (published and unpublished) from the core group’s meetings—to uncover the nature and significance of the meetings in general and in relationship to Schumann. As we shall see, on the one hand they represented the first attempt to gather German musicians for the purpose of having a dialogue about music, and as such established a precedent and laid a

15

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The Political Sphere

foundation for the national organization Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein and for the eventual unification of Germany through the Kulturnation.3 On the other, the meetings of the late 1840s provide the Schumann specialist with new perspectives on his activity and role in the Vereinswesen of his day: his relationship to the Tonkünstlerversammlungen was more involved than the silence of the secondary biographical sources would suggest. Pederson makes a strong case for the ideological and aesthetic background of the Tonkünstlerversammlungen in the Hegelian Weltanschauung of Franz Brendel, Schumann’s associate in Leipzig and his successor at the helm of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (henceforth NZfM) in 1845.4 As Pederson summarizes, Young Hegelians like Brendel and Arnold Ruge “set out to push philosophical idealism into the concrete realm of action.”5 For Brendel music making “was an . . . endeavour directed by the goals of the human spirit” that should be progressive and ultimately lead to freedom. Brendel’s musical assemblies of the late 1840s were a manifestation of this spirit of human progress; he argued in the call for such a meeting at the very beginning of 1847: A gathering of German musicians and friends of music . . . [would] create a hitherto lacking bond through lectures, discussions [and] acquaintances. [It would] collaboratively pursue the most important goals so that a true consensus might be reached and a collective will could oppose harmful influences.6

Brendel called upon the annual national meetings of scientists and philologists, beginning in 1822 and 1846, respectively, as models for how musicians can take concrete action.7 However, when we examine Brendel’s specific goals of having an influence upon the practical state of music, establishing for example standards for music teachers, Pederson’s assessment of the initial Tonkünstlerversammlung may appear overly politicized. First and foremost Brendel entered into the idea of a national gathering of musicians as a means for the reform of existing conditions, not for a revolution or an overthrow of the means of production; in doing so, he was (at least initially) advocating a goal not far removed from that which Schumann promulgated for much of his life.8 It was as political events took their course in 1848 that the typically cautious Brendel and the Tonkünstlerversammlungen took on the aggressively, overtly political position that Pederson has identified.9 In his introductory remarks to the assembly on August 13, 1847, Brendel makes it clear that he had entertained the idea of such a meeting for some time; it solidified in the summer of 1846 through a chance encounter in Leipzig with two colleagues, who agreed on the desirability of “a personal rapprochement of musicians and the unified and decisive action that will result from it.”10 There exists no evidence that Schumann was involved in the planning of the event, yet shortly before the assembly, in a letter dated August 8, Brendel received from the composer a series of proposals for public discussion (Figure 2.1 presents the text of the letter).

Dear Friend, Accept my hearty congratulations on the inauguration of your scheme, which must have entailed much care and trouble in the preliminary stages. I may be able to drop in for an hour or so, but more of that later. I have been defining my propositions more accurately this morning, and find that my chief difficulty lies in choosing a form of expression. If I had time to work them out in separate essays, this would certainly be best. But it would take time, a great deal of it, especially as I am past the alphabet stage. I think the most profitable way will be for me to give you a brief outline of my ideas, from which you can select anything you think suited for public discussion, mentioning my name or not, as you please [Author’s Note: Schumann appears to be presenting Brendel with a true alternative, yet the tone and detail of the arguments, as well as Brendel’s own actions in response, suggest that Schumann did want to be associated with the proposal.] [1] First, then, I think it desirable that a section should detach itself from the Convention to consider the protection of classical music against modern adaptations. The duty of this section would be to obtain information of all such publishers – that is, of all new editions of old compositions of importance; to see how far the original was left untouched, or whether unwarranted alterations had been made; and finally to report on the result of their labours at the next (as I hope) annual meeting of the Convention. [2] I should then like to propose that another section be formed for the research and restoration of corrupted passages in classical works, in the sense in which I dealt with it in my essay: On Some Presumably Corrupted Passages in the Works of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, vol. xv, p. 140). This section would, like the first, be required to search out and collect the necessary material to lay before the next meeting… The section given up to minute inquiry would render a very great service, for instance, by looking into Mozart’s Requiem, about which the grossest misconceptions are still current, for the existing version is not merely corrupt, but, except for certain numbers, spurious.

Figure 2.1. Robert Schumann, letter to Franz Brendel, Dresden, August 8, 1847, in The Letters of Robert Schumann, ed. by Karl Storck, trans. Hannah Bryant (London: John Murray, 1907), 256–58.

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The Political Sphere [3] I should next like to raise the question of the use of French for titles, also the

misuse of Italian for marks of expression, by Germans in their own compositions. I should be glad if you would move the abolition of French titles, and the rejection of such Italian expressions as may be rendered as well, if not better, in German. [4] Finally, the Convention should consider by what means their future meetings, which will become, it is to be hoped, an annual institution, may be made to benefit and encourage youthful composers especially. This end might be assured by a public invitation, issued by a section told off for that purpose, to composers to send in manuscripts of any important works (such as oratorios, masses, symphonies, string quartets), the best of which be selected for performance at the next general Convention; or again, by announcing a prize competition, or in some other way. These, my dear Brendel, are my suggestions, which I leave you to bring forward, either as your own or in any way you please. I feel how much easier it would be to say all this in a few rapid, forcible words than to write it. And now I want to ask you, if you are not too busy, to send me a line with the proposed programme for both days, the 13th and 14th; I should like to know how the day is to be divided, and also if anything will be done on Sunday. I may perhaps come for Saturday or Sunday. I was surprised to hear that you have chosen a president, as I think this should have been done in full council. But I may be mistaken.

Figure 2.1. Continued

Thus Brendel’s Tonkünstlerversammlung elicited the indirect participation of Schumann, who allowed his own ideas to be expressed in a national forum, not unlike in the days when he edited the NZfM; indeed, in the letter, to Brendel he suggests that a written format would have been preferable.11 Schumann’s seemingly ambivalent attitude toward the assembly—he sent in points of discussion, yet he did not attend meetings—reflects his problematic relationship with associations in general, a topic to which this study will return. And what were the proposals Schumann wished to have presented to his fellow German musicians? First, “the protection of classical music against modern adaptations.” As he explains to Brendel, this duty would be fulfilled by a committee that would review the accuracy of editorial practices in new publications of important older compositions. Second, “the research and restoration of corrupted passages

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in classical works,” which Schumann himself addressed in an essay in 1841 and which particularly concerns Mozart’s Requiem. Third, “the use of French titles, also the misuse of Italian for marks of expression, by Germans in their own compositions.” He asks Brendel to move “the abolition of French titles, and the rejection of such Italian expressions as may be rendered as well, if not better, in German.” Fourth, future meetings (which he hopes will become an annual institution) should “benefit and encourage youthful composers especially.” Schumann sees this as occurring through a public invitation for the submission of scores for performance at the next assembly or through a prize competition. These practical proposals correspond both to issues that Schumann advocated historically and at the time, and to Brendel’s overriding concern for the reform of existing musical conditions: the opposition of harmful influences on German music. The broader issues they outline are the preservation of the classical heritage, the establishment of a German musical nomenclature (thus a unifying musical language), and the promotion of the next generation of composers. Although these matters are not ostensibly political, we can see Schumann here using the opportunity to present an agenda appropriate for an assembly of German musicians, many of whom he personally knew. In fact upon examining the list of 141 participants (selectively presented in Table 2.1), we would have to call the first assembly at least quasi-Schumannian, given the names represented there, which included the sympathetic Alfred Dörffel, Ernst Gottschald, and Emmanuel Klitzsch.12 Moreover, these and other Schumann supporters figured prominently in the discussions at the first meeting.13 As already mentioned, the first meeting was primarily concerned with practical matters, which accounts for the large numbers of music pedagogues and music directors in attendance (Table 2.2).

Table 2.1. Leipzig Tonkünstlerversammlung participants, August 13, 1847 Name

Profession

Location

Gustav Albrecht C. F. Becker Herr Becker Fanny Bergas Robert Beyer C. F. Bierwirth Ferdinand Böhme Elisabeth Brendel F. X. Chwatal Constantin Decker August Dörffel M. C. Eberwein Heinrich Enke Gustav Flügel Robert Franz

Musiklehrer Organist Finanzsecretair Pianistin Tonkünstler Tonkünstler Gesangslehrer am Conserv. Pianistin Musiklehrer Pianist Musiklehrer Musiklehrer Pianist Componist Musikdirector

Leipzig Leipzig Freiberg Altona Leipzig Hamburg Leipzig Leipzig Magdeburg St. Petersburg Leipzig Dresden Leipzig Stettin Halle (continued )

Table 2.1. Continued Name

Profession

Location

Robert Friese N. W. Gade Carl Götze Herr Gotter Ernst Gottschald W. R. Griepenkerl Herr Haase Raimund Härtel Baron v. Haugk Moritz Hauptmann Ferdinand Heinze Heinrich Henkel Ernst Hentschel Friedrich Hofmeister August Horn Louis Kindscher Louise Kindscher Emmanuel Klitzsch Julius Knorr Herr Kunstmann Louise Lallemant Emil Leonhard J. C. Lobe Ignaz Moscheles Julius Mühling Gustav Nauenburg Louise Otto Louis Plaidy Gustav Rebling A. F. Riccius E. F. Richter Clara Riese A. G. Ritter Albert Robinson F. A. Roitzsch Heinrich Sattler

Buch- u. Musikhdlr. Musikdirector Hofopernsänger Präcentor n/a Professor Advocat [Music publisher] n/a Musikdirector Orchestermitglied Tonkünstler Musikdir. u. Seminarlehrer [Music publisher] Tonkünstler Seminarlehrer n/a Gymnasiallehrer Musiklehrer Kaufmann Pianistin Componist Professor Professor Musikdirector Gesangslehrer Schriftstellerin Lehrer am Conservatorium Musiklehrer Musiklehrer Musikdirector Musiklehrerin Musikdirector Tonkünstler Musiklehrer Organist

Heinrich Schellenberg Friedrich Schneider Gustav Siebeck Xaver Sipp Fritz Spindler N. Tautmann F. W. Tschirch Elise Vogel Ernst Wenzel A. Whistling C. F. Zöllner

Organist Kapellm., Ritter Musikdirector Orchestermitglied Musiklehrer Violoncellist Musikdirector Concertsängerin Clavierlehrer am Conserva. [Music publisher] Director des Gesangvereins

Leipzig Leipzig Weimar Leipzig Leipzig Braunschweig Leipzig Leipzig Leipzig Leipzig Leipzig Leipzig Weißenfels Leipzig Leipzig Dessau Dessau Zwickau Leipzig Chemnitz Leipzig Leipzig Leipzig Leipzig Magdeburg Halle Meißen Leipzig Magdeburg Leipzig Leipzig Leipzig Merseburg Stockholm Leipzig Blankenburg am Harz Leipzig Dessau Gera Leipzig Dresden Leipzig Liegnitz Leipzig Leipzig Leipzig Leipzig

This table includes all seven women in Brendel’s list. Overall, women represent only 5 percent of the 141 participants at the assembly.

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Table 2.2. Leipzig Tonkünstlerversammlung participants’ occupations, August 13, 1847 Musical Musiklehrer/in / Gesangslehrer Musikdirector Orchestermitglied Organist Tonkünstler Pianist/in Componist Cantor [Music publisher] Professor Violoncellist Kapellmeister Violinist Clavierlehrer Flötist Hofopernsänger Kammermusikus Buch- u. Musikhdlr.

Nonmusical 28 13 13 11 8 7 3 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Advocat Lehrer Oberlandsg. Auscultat. Kaufmann Procurator Präcentor Beamter Finanzsecretair Schriftstellerin

4 3 2 1 1 1 1 1 1

The designations of occupations are taken from the journal, except for the three music publishers, for whom Brendel has inexplicably not indicated any profession.

The participants assembled at 9 a.m. on August 13 in the hall of the Gewandhaus. After Brendel’s words of greeting and extended introductory remarks of justification for the Tonkünstlerversammlung and a brief welcoming address by the assembly chair (Vorsitzender), C. F. Becker, Brendel presented Schumann’s letter as the first item of business. Brendel read the entire letter and, as he notes, “stayed then with the first selected proposal.” Figure 2.2 presents his accurate rendering of Schumann’s proposal. He explained that Schumann did not intend the abolition of widely used technical terms like sonata and adagio, but rather of newly invented Italian expression marks and French phrases like “composé pour le Pianoforte et dedié.” The discussion, transcribed in the pages of the NZfM, favored the motion, with Brendel himself making the interesting distinction that “virtuoso compositions and ephemeral works can keep the French titles, [since] these pieces in part have their audience in all lands . . . , but truly German works that are intended for a German public should appear with German titles.”14 The final motion, abridged and reworked into a positive statement, reads, “German composers should provide German titles.”15 It passed with a significant majority. As a gloss to his transcript Brendel invokes the spirit of Schumann to make this issue one of political importance: composers will reveal themselves as German artists who identify with their Volk, for whom “the battles for the assertion of the awakening nationalism have not passed by without a trace.”16

Among the items for discussion, a proposal of Herr Dr. R. Schumann was listed as the first. Herr Dr. Schumann had sent to me several proposals with the comment that, if he himself were hindered from attending, I should take over their presentation. Since the proposer was not present, I accordingly opened the discussions, read the entire letter and stayed then with the first selected proposal: “Regarding the nature of French titling, the same regarding the misuse of Italian expression markings in compositions by German composers–and the abolition of all titles in French language and the removal of those Italian expression markings that can be expressed just as well, if not better, in German.” I noted here that Herr Dr. S. did not intend to abolish such words as sonata, symphony, allegro, adagio and the like, which–as technical expressions–have long ago made their home [here]. Rather, the proposer had in mind the ever more popular excess of newly invented Italian expression markings, as well as the “composé pour le Pianoforte et dedié” and so forth in titles. Unter den Gegenständen der Besprechung war ein Antrag des Hrn. Dr. R. Schumann als der erste verzeichnet. Hr. Dr. S. hatte mir brieflich mehrere Anträge mitgetheilt, zugleich mit der Bemerkung, daß, wenn er selbst zu erscheinen verhindert sei, ich den Vortrag derselben übernehmen möchte. Da der Herr Antragsteller nicht zugegen war, eröffnete ich demnach die Erörterungen, las zuerst den ganzen Brief vor, und blieb sodann bei dem zunächst gewählten Antrag stehen: “Ueber das französische Titelwesen, desgleichen über den Mißbrauch italienischer Vortragsbezeichnungen in Compositionen Deutscher Tonsetzer,— und Abschaffung aller Titel in französischer Sprache und Ausmerzung solcher italienischer Vortragsbezeichnungen, die sich eben so gut, wo nicht besser, in deutscher Sprache ausdrücken lassen.” Ich bemerkte hierbei im Sinne des Hrn. Dr. S., daß hier nicht die Abschaffung solcher Worte, wie Sonate, Symphonie, Allegro, Adagio u.s.w. gemeint sei, Worte, welche als technische Ausdrücke längst das Bürgerrecht erhalten haben, im Gegentheil daß hier der Hr. Antragsteller das neuerdings mehr und mehr beliebte Uebermaaß neuerfundener italienischer Vortragsbezeichnungen, so wie auf den Titeln das “composé pour le Pianoforte et dedié” u.s.w. im Auge gehabt habe.

Figure 2.2. Franz Brendel, “Die erste Versammlung deutscher Tonkünstler und Musikfreunde in Leipzig,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 27, no. 18 (1847): 108.

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The continuing discussion on the first day did not pick up on Schumann’s other points, but rather turned to questions of making unpublished music available in print or copies, of opposing mechanical reprinting of music by Gesangvereine and individuals, and of reforming the procedures for the testing of new organs. A late-afternoon concert included chamber music by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Flügel, in other words, an all-German concert (Table 2.3 presents the concert program). On August 14 the dialogue focused on music education, in particular the exclusion of second-rate compositions from music pedagogy and the establishment of examinations for music teachers. At the end of the second day’s discussions Brendel broached the topic of the desirability of performing early music; this was not directly taken from Schumann’s first two proposals, yet the issue would be identified with Schumann for anyone familiar with his thought. After a series of lectures about the current state of music teaching, opera, and music theory, the 1847 assembly concluded with a concert of German organ music, which included one of Schumann’s six fugues on Bach’s name from 1845, and a banquet. The 1847 Tonkünstlerversammlung merits this closer investigation because it was the assembly associated with Schumann. Not only did he indirectly address the gathering, but one of his proposals was the first point of business and it found broad support, his music was heard at both concerts (one of only five living composers on the programs), and a number of his friends and associates from Leipzig were in attendance. Schumann did not need to be present to leave a mark on this historically significant event, which would lead to two more Tonkünstlerversammlungen in successive years, even though current events led to a substantial truncation of the 1848 and 1849 assemblies. At the same time Brendel was able to accomplish his political agenda through open discussion of topics that would unite German musicians in efforts at reform and progress. It is interesting to note that, even though “Germany’s musical revolutionaries presented their most detailed and ambitious recommendations for bringing music into alignment with the new political order” at the second meeting, as Pederson argues, that gathering was severely curtailed.17 What had been announced as a larger assembly was reduced to one day (July 26, 1848) “because of the state of affairs” (“in Folge der Zeitverhältnisse”), so that the meeting was a “private one in a smaller, closed circle” (“eine Privatversammlung im kleineren Table 2.3. Concert program, Leipzig Tonkünstlerversammlung, August 13, 1847 J. S. Bach, Concerto in D Minor, performed by Ignaz Moscheles with quartet accompaniment Beethoven, Quartet in B-flat Major, performed by David, Hunger, Gade, Wittmann Schubert, Andante from Quartet in D Minor, performed by David, Hunger, Gade, Wittmann Gustav Flügel, Piano Sonata (manuscript), performed by Elisabeth Brendel August Riccius, “Waldweib,” performed by Frl. Vogel Schubert and Schumann, Lieder, performed by Frl. Agathe and Hr. Götze

24

The Political Sphere

geschlossenen Kreise”).18 The primary concern for Brendel at the second assembly was the continuation of the work in establishing a national organization.19 Brendel’s original intention for the 1849 assembly may have been for it to serve as the proper second Tonkünstlerversammlung, but political conditions did not improve to allow more than another one-day gathering, again in Leipzig, on July 26.20 The local musicians invited guests from afar, but Brendel’s report lists only twenty visitors. This was his last attempt to stage a large-scale Tonkünstlerversammlung, until the renewal of the idea in 1859, ostensibly on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the NZfM. What happened to Schumann’s participation in those assemblies of 1848 and 1849? I believe that two related developments mitigated his further involvement: the creation of city-based Tonkünstler-Vereine and the politicization of the gatherings. No scholar has yet noted the emergence of the Leipzig Tonkünstler-Verein out of the first assembly at the end of 1847 and Brendel’s intentions for it to carry on the work of the Versammlung in regular meetings during the year. According to his own assessment in early 1848 (Figure 2.3), the Leipzig society would be a chapter of a general or national musicians’ association (Allgemeiner Tonkünstler-Verein), which at first would consist of chapters in nearby cities such as Magdeburg, Dessau, Zwickau, and Dresden. This attempt to forge a national society of musicians seems to have had success, since the Leipzig chapter numbered almost fifty members within its first two months and by the middle of 1849 branches had been established in Leipzig, Berlin, Magdeburg, Dessau, Freiburg, Darmstadt, and Stettin.21 The NZfM published periodic reports on the activities of the Leipzig Verein, which drew on the minutes carefully maintained by the chapter’s secretary.22 These documents reveal a well-organized, active local society that was interested in meeting on a regular, at least monthly basis for the purpose of intellectual exchange through presentations, musical stimulation through performances, and actions to support the larger organization and the other chapters. The Tonkünstler-Verein in Leipzig held its meetings and concerts on a biweekly or monthly basis at least until the end of 1851. Here is where we will find the continuation of Brendel’s idea, which carried on beyond the collapse of the assemblies in 1849. The minutes of the Verein unfortunately do not always record programs of performances; however, those that do make it clear that the concerts featured works by Schumann.23 It was to the concept of the Verein and not the Tonkünstlerversammlung that Schumann objected in a letter to Brendel from late 1847, in which the composer rejected Brendel’s suggestion that he participate in the newly founded Verein: Please excuse me from joining your association, dear Brendel. You know that I have always treasured freedom and independence, have never joined an association, whatever its character, and will also never do so in the future. Everyone must be allowed to fulfil his responsibilities towards art in his own manner, and so allow me my own.24

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I still have to report on the creation of the Leipzig Tonkünstler-Verein, which has been in place since the end of last year as a chapter of the national one that has yet to be established. At the present it already has 47 members. Its goal is that of the national assembly, and its structure is essentially the same as well. Proposals are made and lectures are held… I want to express the desire that wherever possible similar associations form in other cities–I am thinking first of Magdeburg, Dessau, Zwickau and Dresden–before the next annual assembly. To that end, and to produce organizational unity, [they should] procure our by-laws in writing. The existence of the national Tonkünstler-Verein should in essence altogether depend upon such chapters, which are its main rationale. Noch habe ich zu berichten über die Errichtung des seit Ende vorigen Jahres bei uns bestehenden “Leipziger Tonkünstler-Vereins”, als eines Zweig-Vereins des allgemeinen, demnächst zu errichtenden. Dieser zählt bis jetzt bereits 47 Mitglieder. Sein Zweck ist der der allgemeinen Versammlung, und die Einrichtung im Wesentlichen dieselbe wie dort. Es werden Anträge gestellt, und Vorträge gehalten… Hier spreche ich den Wunsch aus, daß wo möglich noch vor der nächsten Hauptversammlung sich ähnliche Vereine an anderen Orten–ich denke zunächst an Magdeburg, Dessau, Zwickau, Dresden–constituieren und zu diesem Zweck, und um Einheit der Organisation zu bewirken, unsere Statuten abschriftlich von uns beziehen möchten. Die Existenz des allgemeinen Tonkünstler-Vereins, –dies ist der Grundgedanke dafür– beruht überhaupt wesentlich in solchen Zweigvereinen.

Figure 2.3. Franz Brendel, “Bekanntmachung, die zweite Versammlung deutscher Tonkünstler und Musikfreunde zu Leipzig im Jahre 1848 betreffend,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 28, no. 16 (1848): 95.

Schumann’s explanation that he did not join organizations as a rule is supported by research recently undertaken by Kazuko Ozawa.25 In tracking down Schumann’s actual relationships with contemporary societies, Ozawa has engaged in very detailed research, with the results summarized in Table 2.4. From her documents we can observe that Schumann was more broadly involved in Vereine of his time than previously thought. Still, few of these associations were initiated by Schumann himself, with the category “regular member” (ordentliches Mitglied) particularly underrepresented.

26

The Political Sphere

Table 2.4. Schumann’s relationship with contemporary societies 1. Founding member (Neue Zeitschrift, Abonnement-Concerte in Dresden, Chorgesangverein in Dresden) 2. Regular member (Verein zur Errichtung einer Gemäldegalerie in Dresden) 3. Extraordinary member (Düsseldorf Künstlerverein Malkasten) 4. Corresponding member (Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst in Nederland) 5. Honorary member (Euterpe-Verein, Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst in Nederland, Universitäts-Sängerverein zu St. Pauli Leipzig, Association Royale des Sociétés Lyriques d’Anvers, Städtischer Männergesangverein zu Düsseldorf, Dresdener Liedertafel, Akademie der Tonkunst in Wien, Konservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Musical Institute of London) Summarized from Ozawa, “Robert Schumann.”

The turn of political events in early 1848 caused the nascent organization behind the Tonkünstlerversammlungen, with Brendel at its helm, to enthusiastically embrace the revolutionary spirit of the times.26 As Laura Tunbridge summarizes, scholarship has established Schumann’s reluctance to participate in the rebellions around him, even in Dresden.27 His interiority may be exaggerated in the literature, as John Daverio argues, yet here the composer did withdraw from the political turmoil, which undoubtedly contributed to his nonparticipation in the revolutionarily charged Versammlungen of 1848 and 1849.28 As Pederson convincingly posits, the general disillusionment over the failure to accomplish true changes in the musical realm ultimately led to the collapse of the Tonkünstlerversammlungen shortly after the abbreviated gathering of 1849.29 In his published report on the assembly Brendel noted that one day was inadequate for such a meeting, and if conditions were to become more favorable for another Versammlung, two or three days should be set aside (which happened in 1859).30 However, a flicker of the original concept for the Allgemeiner TonkünstlerVerein persisted in the Zweigverein in Leipzig.31 Further research will be needed to determine whether the other local chapters survived after 1849 or whether the Leipzig Verein carried on its existence as an individual association, like the many local singing and orchestral societies of the first half of the century. The assemblies were not universally greeted with approbation. J. C. Lobe and the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung took issue with the need for and universality of the Tonkünstlerversammlungen in 1847 and 1848.32 It is true that Brendel was not able to gather musicians from across the country at the meetings, and the Vereine also largely established themselves in cities relatively close to Leipzig. Still, for the first time, German musicians came together not to attend or perform at a music festival like the Niederrheinische Musikfeste or those of the Gesangvereine, but rather to discuss the state of the art and how it could be improved. Here music participated in the nationalist Kulturnation movement, which encouraged the creation of associations and activities that instilled national identity through the identification and promotion of a common

Organizing German Musical Life at Midcentury

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German culture. The 1850s would bring forth such associations as the Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstgenossenschaft (in 1856) and the Deutsche Schillerstiftung (in 1859).33 That the endeavor for music did not survive the 1840s can be attributed in part to its creation only one year before the rebellions; the organization could not congeal enough to weather the politically tumultuous times. Nevertheless Brendel’s intention to create an Allgemeiner Tonkünstler-Verein through the annual Versammlungen and, more important, the local Zweigvereine (branch societies) deserves recognition as the first attempt to establish a national music society in Germany, a bold and far-sighted plan. The idea experienced a revival in 1859 with another Tonkünstlerversammlung in Leipzig, also engineered by Brendel but now with the support of Liszt.34 This assembly would lead to the creation of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein at the next meeting in Weimar two years later, an organization that would hold annual “assemblies” of musicians, later called “festivals,” for the next seventy-five years.35 In his enthusiasm for and involvement in the initial Tonkünstlerversammlung of 1847, Schumann himself recognized the value of this new vehicle for assembling German musicians and for addressing issues in music on a national level. In doing so he anticipated the organizing of German musical life that would occur through the activity of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein during the second half of the nineteenth century.

notes I would like to thank Roe-Min Kok, Celia Applegate, and Erika Reiman, who provided valuable comments on this essay. I am especially indebted to Sanna Pederson, who gave me access to and allowed me to quote from her important unpublished paper, “Vormärz Liberalism and the First German Music Conference,” which she delivered at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Minneapolis, October 27–30, 1994. 1. Klenke, Der singende deutsche Mann; Brusniak and Klenke, “Heil deutschem Wort und Sang!”; Lindlar, “Musik und Bürgertum.” 2. Pederson, “Vormärz Liberalism.” 3. Regarding music and the Kulturnation, see Applegate, “What Is German Music?”; various essays in Applegate and Potter, Music and German National Identity; Deaville, “The Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein.” 4. Two monographs have appeared about Brendel, both featuring extensive commentary regarding his aesthetic positions as a writer on music: Determann, Begriff und Ästhetik der “Neudeutschen Schule,” and Ramroth, Robert Schumann und Richard Wagner. Ramroth includes an exhaustive list of Brendel’s published articles. 5. Pederson, “Vormärz Liberalism,” 2. The Young Hegelians also counted David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach among their numbers. 6. Brendel, “Ein Vorschlag als Gruß zum Neuen Jahre,” 1–2: “Eine Versammlung deutscher Tonkünstler und Musik-Freunde zu begründen, um hier, wie dort, durch Vorträge, Besprechungen, Bekanntschaften ein bisher vermißtes Band zu knüpfen,

28

The Political Sphere

und gemeinschaftlich die wichtigsten Zwecke zu verfolgen, damit vielleicht . . . eine thatsächliche Uebereinstimmung erreicht würde, und ein Gesamtwille nachtheiligen Einflüssen . . . entgegenwirken könnte.” Unless indicated otherwise, translations are by the present author. 7. Ibid., 1. 8. The classic text by Leon Plantinga, Schumann as Critic, remains a valuable study of Schumann’s aesthetics, including his desiderata for the reform of musical conditions and institutions. 9. Brendel was also reluctant to embrace the new directions of Wagner and Liszt. See Deaville, “Die neudeutsche Musikkritik,” 57. 10. Brendel, “Die erste Versammlung deutscher Tonkünstler und Musikfreunde in Leipzig,” 96: “Ein persönliches Nähertreten der Tonkünstler und ein dadurch erzeugtes einheitsvolles und kräftiges Handeln.” 11. Whether out of courtesy or true involvement, Schumann’s letter also congratulates Brendel for his efforts on behalf of the Tonkünstlerversammlung and suggests that he might drop by the assembly for an hour or so. He never did turn up in Leipzig. 12. All three individuals were contributors to the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik who “promoted Schumann as a democratic composer” (Tunbridge, “Schumann as Manfred,” 567, referring to Pederson’s unpublished dissertation “Enlightened and Romantic Music Criticism, 1800–1850,” 251–59). 13. These discussions are recorded at the end of the second and throughout the following six installments of Brendel’s report about the Tonkünstlerversammlung. 14. Brendel, “Die erste Versammlung deutscher Tonkünstler und Musikfreunde in Leipzig,” 117: “Virtuosencompositionen, Modeartikel können die französischen Titel behalten. Diese Werke haben zum Theil ihr Publikum in allen Ländern . . . Aber ächt deutsche Werke, welche ein deutsches Publikum vor Augen haben, sollten mit deutschen Titeln erscheinen.” 15. “Da deutsche Componisten für deutsche Titel sorgen” (ibid., 118). 16. “Die Kämpfe für Geltendmachung der erwachenden Nationalität [sind] nicht spurlos vorübergegangen” (ibid.). 17. Pederson, “Vormärz Liberalism,” 6. 18. The general public was not invited, only members of the organizing committee and of the Leipzig Tonkünstler-Verein. Brendel, “Die TonkünstlerVersammlung zu Leipzig” (29, no. 17), 90. 19. Ibid. 20. Brendel’s comments regarding the third Tonkünstlerversammlung in his retrospective report in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik echo those from 1848. See “Die Tonkünstler-Versammlung zu Leipzig” (31, no. 19), 97. 21. Beginning in the fall of 1848 Brendel made a special point of publishing reports from the various chapters in the “Kleine Zeitung” section of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, usually in the first place under the rubric. The concept of the Allgemeiner Tonkünstler-Verein had advanced so far by mid-1849 that the “Bekanntmachung” for the third assembly appeared over the signature “Der Vorstand

Organizing German Musical Life at Midcentury

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des Allgemeinen Tonkünstler-Vereins” in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 31, no. 2 (1849): 12. Of course, Brendel served as the head of the board, so that any such communication should be regarded as representing first and foremost his own desires. 22. The autograph minutes of the Leipzig Tonkünstler-Verein have been preserved in the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum of Leipzig, under call number IN 395. They extend from October 16, 1848, to December 15, 1851, and encompass seventysix folios. 23. At the chapter’s “Musikalische Unterhaltung” on January 29, 1849, Frauenliebe und -leben was performed, and at the next concert, on February 26, 1849, an unidentified piano duet by Schumann appeared on the program. 24. Letter from Schumann to Brendel, late 1847, reprinted in Dahms, Schumann, 177: “Vom Beitritt zu Ihrem Verein entbinden Sie mich, lieber Brendel. Sie wissen, ich habe immer das Freie, Unabhängige geliebt, bin nie einem Verein, welcher Art er sei, beigetreten, und werde es auch künftig nicht. Es muss jedem gestattet sein, die Pflichten gegen die Kunst auf seine Weise zu erfüllen, und so lassen Sie mir die meinige.” 25. Ozawa, “Robert Schumann.” 26. See Brendel, “Fragen der Zeit. III” and “Fragen der Zeit. IV.” 27. Tunbridge, “Schumann as Manfred,” 558. 28. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 421–22. 29. Pederson, “Vormärz Liberalism,” 11. 30. Brendel, “Die Tonkünstler-Versammlung zu Leipzig,” (31, no. 24), 127. 31. The Archive of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, preserves a file titled “Konzertprogramme des Leipziger Zweigvereins” (GSA 70/235), which bears the dates 1847 and 1869–88 and thereby creates a bridge between the Allgemeiner Tonkünstler-Verein and the ADMV. It is not clear whether the Leipzig Zweigverein continued to exist after 1851 or was revived after the founding of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein. 32. See Lobe, “Tonkünstler-Versammlung”; Hinrichs, “Tonkünstlerversammlung!” Ironically the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung itself did not survive 1848. 33. See Deaville, “The Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein,” for a discussion of how these associations and the ADMV participated in the formation of the Kulturnation. 34. The most significant source regarding this event is the extensive and detailed report by Richard Pohl, Die Tonkünstler-Versammlung zu Leipzig. As a manifesto of the “New-german Party” Brendel’s opening speech, “Zur Anbahnung einer Verständigung,” has been recognized as a key document for the progressive movement in music. See above all Kleinertz, “Zum Begriff ‘Neudeutsche Schule’” and Edler, “Schumann und die Neudeutschen.” 35. Regarding the ADMV, see James Deaville, “Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein,” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, revised ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (New York: Macmillan, 2001), 1: 303–4; Deaville, “ ‘. . . Nicht im Sinne von Franz Liszt.’ ”

3 The Cry of the Schuhu Dissonant History in a Late Schumann Song Susan Youens

In several beautifully bleak late songs, Schumann foreshadows Mahler in certain moods: the austere textures, the individual voices interweaving in free counterpoint to produce bone-on-bone dissonances, and the abnegation of Romantic lushness in service to haunted scenarios all seem akin, despite obvious stylistic differences.1 Schumann’s fascination with these elements began, of course, much earlier, and there are works such as “Zwielicht” from 1840 in which his propensity to begin with a single line of pitches and then have subsequent countermelodies branch off from the main stem like leafless branches on one of Caspar David Friedrich’s trees in winter is evident. A decade and more after his Eichendorff cycle, Schumann again explores acerbic clashes between melodic lines crossing over and under one another in “Herzeleid” (Heart’s sorrow) to a poem by Titus Ulrich and “Warnung” (Warning) on a poem by Gustav Pfarrius.2 Here the sparse sonorities are part and parcel of chilling tonal symbolism in each song. For Ulrich’s Ophelia, Schumann postpones the arrival at the tonic E-Minor until Ophelia and the listener alike drown in it in the final measure. We hear the precise moment of death. In “Warnung” a bleak B-Minor predominates but with twice-repeated faint motion toward the relative warmth of relative major, as well as an even greater desire to stave off death in E-Minor, the same key as “Herzeleid.” And in Pfarrius’s poem we can discern political subtexts dimly visible through veils of folklore and inference. Postrevolutionary disillusionment is hinted at here, flanked on either side by unthreatening songs to texts from the same anthology. We draw closer both to greater understanding of Schumann’s late style and the aftermath of the 1848–49 revolutions throughout Europe when we peer more closely at this song. One can assume that when a composer selects three poems not grouped together by the poet from an anthology containing a total of fifty-one poems that he or she will at least have skimmed through the other works in the quest for composable texts; knowledge of the poet thus goes beyond the confines of

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31

the few works chosen for the musical setting. In the final order of his three Op. 119 songs, Schumann begins with Pfarrius’s ninth poem, “Die Hütte” (The hut); goes from there to the twenty-fifth poem, “Warnung,” in the center; and ends with the twenty-first poem, “Der Bräutigam und die Birke” (The bridegroom and the birch). The only one with a whiff of political gelignite is “Warnung,” and it matters, I believe, that this song is flanked on either side by harmless specimens that act as shields. Purely musical reasons of tonality and tempo might also have dictated the placement of “Warnung” in the center of the set, its “langsam” eeriness in B-Minor both preceded and followed by livelier Lieder in G-Major. Still, a composer’s ordering of works for publication often seems multiply determined, and considerations of subject matter surely play their part in such decisions. Reading Gustav Pfarrius’s slender volume of forest songs, one cannot help noticing this poet’s waltz back and forth between the innocuous (the majority of the poems) and the political (a potent minority), although he is not among the saber-rattling Tendenz-Dichter whose versified calls to action in the 1840s were part of the buildup to revolution. “Warnung” operates more covertly than its defiant brethren, recruiting folklore to the ages-old theme of the artist’s peril in oppressive times. To write “forest poems” in the mid-nineteenth-century Rhineland was in itself a nationalistic act. Teutonic forests are often depicted in post-Napoleonic verse as offshoots of the Hercynian woods described by Tacitus in his Germania or of the Teutoburger Wald in which Arminius’s army slaughtered the Roman general Varus’s forces in a.d. 9.3 This battle was famously one of the foremost historical rallying points for nineteenth-century nationalists, as we can see on Otto Geyer’s marble stairwell frieze at the Old National Gallery in Berlin, a patriotic chronology that begins with Arminius.4 For those who longed in Napoleon’s wake for the restoration of an earlier Reich’s glory, the holy groves of the Cherusci were reseeded in literature, where patriots communed, not with the fir and larch forests all around them but with the oak groves of yore. Arminius was a particularly useful symbol because he could be harnessed both to the ambitions of those who ruled Germany’s splintered realms and those desirous of pan-German unification. To find nationalistic sentiments cheekby-jowl with jovial legends of wood and stream in a volume such as this one was perhaps only to be expected in 1850. Nor can we be surprised to encounter coded references to the explosive history in the making that surrounded both the poet and the composer of “Warnung.”

Revolution and the Waldlieder Anthology Pfarrius begins innocently enough: the first poem, “Komm mit” (Come with me), is an invitation to leave the market tumult of citified life and breathe free in the forest. The first of the charming illustrations in this volume

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Figure 3.1. Georg Osterwald’s title page illustration for Gustav Pfarrius, Die Waldlieder (Cologne: M. DuMont-Schauberg, 1850).

(Figure 3.1) depicts a young man resting against a giant tree, his eyes closed, facing the reader as if to issue the invitation “Come with me” to everyone perusing his poems, although one can interpret closed eyes in other, less innocent ways as well (the willful refusal to see or dreams of German glory?).5 Continuing in the same vein, the persona recalls in the second poem, “Wie es den Sorgen erging” (How troubles went away), that his cares followed him into the forest, but the leafy beauty all around him soothed his distressed soul.6 As we wend our way through the anthology we realize that the “cares” invoked here have a political dimension and that the forest is site and symbol for a specific vision of Germany. But the ferocity of Heine’s “Die schlesischen Weber” (The Silesian weavers), for example, with its threefold curse against God, king, and country, was not Pfarrius’s wont even when he was at his most politically engagé. In “Daheim” (At home), a poem included in the augmented third edition of the Waldlieder

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in 1869, the poetic persona hymns his native country as lovelier than any Eldorado and then declares, “Kein Frevelwerk hab’ ich verrichtet, / Das aus der Heimat Schooß mich bannt” (I have done nothing criminal for which I am banned from my homeland). One cannot read poetry as autobiography, at least not without qualifications and cautions galore, but this assertion shortly before the achievement of German unification that he had done nothing to result in banishment or exile is noteworthy.7 Not for him the more radical strains of Hoffmann von Fallersleben, fired from his university job in the aftermath of his Unpolitische Lieder (Apolitical songs, 1841), or Ferdinand Freiligrath, sent into exile for such works as Glaubensbekenntnis (Confession of faith, 1844), or Gottfried Kinkel, sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau (with a friend’s help, he escaped).8 Schumann set Kinkel’s “Abendlied” (Evening song) to music on January 23, 1851, eight months before “Warnung” and, I would speculate, read the poetic persona’s self-admonitions to his heart to cast off sickness and fear in the knowledge of its creator’s plight.9 After all Schumann may have found “Ein geistlich Abendlied” (A spiritual evening song), Kinkel’s title, in the poet’s second edition of Gedichte (1850) courtesy of the composer’s friend Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter (the pseudonym of Peter Wilhelm Müller). Müller, who took part in the failed 1848 National Assembly at Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, shared Kinkel’s liberal republican sentiments.10 Schumann never read Pfarrius’s disavowal of participatory rebellion in “Daheim,” but he probably did read a more subtle expression of similar sentiments in the 1850 first edition. In the third poem, “Das Moos der Bäume” (The moss on the trees), the poetic persona engages in arboreal analogy to hint that revolution, whatever his undeniable patriotic fervor, was not his cup of tea. When winter sends its sharp spears to strike the trees (note the military language), the beleaguered residents of the forest cover themselves in moss as a shield. The poetic I initially laments his own lack of armor “in the stormy turmoil of the world,” but then concludes that what the moss is to the trees, the forest is to him.11 Surrounded by the sacral woodland that was his ideal of Germany, he could take refuge from the horrors of bloodshed in the streets. Whatever Pfarrius’s subsequent back-pedaling, it seems plausible to speculate that Schumann, liberal in his political sympathies, was attracted to this poetry in part because of the poet’s obvious patriotic sentiments. This volume would not have been possible without the new species of German nationalism born of the multifarious responses to Napoleon’s rule, a nationalism whose fatal consequences almost a century later (what Liah Greenfeld has called “the final solution of infinite longing”) Heine could foretell, but not the lesser poet.12 Pfarrius may not have scolded his fellow Germans for their lack of action as emphatically as a Freiligrath or a Heine, but he does call them to task in “Der deutsche Wald, das deutsche Herz” (The German forest, the German heart), the

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poem that immediately precedes “Der Bräutigam und die Birke” in the first edition. Schumann surely read it. Der deutsche Wald, das deutsche Herz, The German forest, the German heart, Sie sind einander eng verwandt, they are closely related to one another, Wie Ahnungsschauer, like premonitory shudders, the pain Sehnsuchtsschmerz, of longing, Wie Blätterfüll’ und Blumenland. like an abundance of leaves and the land of blossoms. In many different trees, In Baumgestalten mannigfalt, in shrub and stalk, bush and In Staud’ und Stengel, Busch und garland, Strauch Ergrünt der tiefe deutsche Wald,— the deep, German forest is greening— Nur selten kommt’s zu Früchten auch; but only seldom does it bear fruit. Images of ideas, rich and bold, Idee’ngebilde, reich und kühn, Der Freiheit Heimweh, Weisheit, Rath, of homesickness for freedom, wisdom, Im tiefen deutschen Herzen blühn,— counsel, blossom in profound German hearts— but only seldom do they become deed. Nur selten werden sie zur That; Und wie am schattenreichsten Baum And just as one cannot see the blessings of Ihr keinen Aerntensegen schaut, harvest under the trees in deepest shadow, So wird aus Sehnsucht und aus so one cannot build a weather-tight Traum empire from Kein wetterfestes Reich gebaut.13 dreams and desire. (First verse repeated)

Was this poem, one wonders, written before the outbreak of revolution and then published as a lament in the immediate wake of failure? Pfarrius is even more specific about revolutionary politics in “Winter und Frühling” (Winter and spring). After the contrast between winter’s deathly quiet and spring’s resounding joy at the beginning of the poem, we are catapulted without warning into what seems at first to be a different poem: a dialogue in which the first speaker is unidentified and the second is implicitly the poetic persona. It is as if we eavesdrop on a café conversation in medias res between two men arguing for and against censorship. Freedom of the press was, especially for the cultivated middle class, one of the most contentious issues of the day; according to the liberal statesman Christian Bunsen, it was “to the nineteenth century what spiritual freedom was to the Christian of the first century, and religious freedom to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is the political question of life and death in our time, the question that wrecks governments and reduces kingdoms to dust, or gives them the strength to rise.”14

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Winter und Frühling (stanzas 3–4 of 5)

Winter and Spring

“Das Böse wüthet ungezähmt, Seit frei die Presse!”—Nach Censur Verlangst du? deinen Geist beschämt Der Geist, der waltet auf der Flur:

“Evil rages unrestrained since the press became free!”—You want censorship? The spirit of the meadows puts your spirit to shame.

Ward je der Rose Glanz versehrt,

Was the rose’s brilliance ever diminished because the nettle blossomed next to it? Has the oak tree’s growth ever suffered because the sun also shone on the thorny bushes?

Weil neben ihr die Nessel blüht? Hat’s je der Eiche Wuchs beschwert, Daß ihre Sonn’ auch Dornen glüht?15

The Natur-Eingang is thus revealed as a metaphor for the opposition between the wintry silence of censorship and the joyous springtime voices of freedom for writers. But the development of the nature imagery makes it clear that if the second speaker unquestionably favors the abolition of censorship, he nevertheless admits that some of the voices raised in a liberated press are offensive. One thinks of the internal divisions between radicals and liberals among the revolution-minded— this was a prominent factor in the counterrevolutionaries’ ultimate victory—and can accordingly assign Pfarrius’s dialogue to a reactionary monarchist or absolutist averse to reform (the first speaker) and a liberal (the second speaker, the poet). Two more brief examples of Pfarrius in political mode culled from the 1850 volume will suffice. In “Schlummer im Walde” (Sleep in the forest) Pfarrius invokes a song that resounded on high throughout the entire space, “but when [he] offered it [his] hand, it was once again only a dream.” He is far from explicit about the matter, but one infers revolutionary ideals that came to naught when the uprisings were quelled and the singers of such bold songs were punished.16 Finally, the mightiest of the forest oaks in “Die Eiche” (The oak tree) boasts of its deep roots, its great age, its ability to withstand storms—but then, all of a sudden, it falls, struck down by “mere dwarves.”17 No one at midcentury would need much prompting to interpret these lines.

The Poet’s “Warnung” It is a terse poem that inspired Schumann’s terse setting. Warnung

Warning

Es geht der Tag zur Neige, Der Licht und Freiheit bot, O schweige, Vöglein, schweige, Du singst dich in den Tod;

The day is declining That offered light and freedom; be silent, little bird, you are singing yourself into death.

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Die Winde nächtlich rauschen, Die Blätter zittern bang, Den Feinden, die drin lauschen, Verräth dich dein Gesang;

The night winds stir, the leaves tremble in fear; your song betrays you to your enemies that listen therein.

Gluthäugig durch’s Gezweige Der finstre Schuhu droht:

The burning eyes of the screech owl glower their menace through the branches; be silent, little bird, you are singing yourself into death.

O schweige, Vöglein, schweige, Du singst dich in den Tod!18

This is a poem that, paradoxically, announces its coded language, inviting one to ponder what its symbols mean. In the German forest a “little bird” sings, and the poetic I urgently warns it to cease and desist, lest enemies hear it, lest the bird of prey that rules the woods discover where it is and kill it. Spies, overlords, suppression of song (poetry, creativity, free thought): if one read this poem on its own, without knowledge of its neighbors in the Waldlieder, without knowing the historical circumstances, one could still perceive political messages. The day of light and freedom is waning, we are told at the beginning, before the urgent imperative to be silent, the injunction reiterated as the refrain for the first and third verses. In the second stanza the threat is made even more explicit, with its enemies who traffic in betrayal, but it is not until the final stanza that we are told of the giant eagle owl or horned owl, with its ominous, glowing eyes. The poem is not illustrated in the edition Schumann knew but is accompanied by a wonderfully atmospheric engraving in the 1869 edition (Figure 3.2), complete with

Figure 3.2. Woodcut after the drawing of an unnamed Düsseldorf artist for Gustav Pfarrius, Die Waldlieder: Dritte, stark vermehrte Auflage (Cologne: M. DuMont-Schauberg, 1869), 37.

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spooky trees, a solitary human figure, and scudding clouds. How interesting that the illustrator hints at glowing eyes but does nothing so blatant as to depict either the tyrant of the woods or any explicit enemies. A brief avian disquisition: to symbolize the poet or the poet’s soul as birdlike is familiar from countless poems in many languages, but Pfarrius’s choice of the Schuhu (or Uhu) as his symbol for fatal power also has a long history in folklore and art. The feathers on this bird of prey’s head are vaguely hornlike, and legend therefore made it a diabolical creature, companion to witches and the Wild Hunt, its cry an announcement of impending death.19 In fact all owls—once wise Athena’s bird—became emblematic of evil in the Old Testament, where they inhabit Isaiah’s desert wastelands: But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it; and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness. (34:11) And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof; and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls. (34:13) There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay and hatch, and gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered, everyone with her mate. (34:15)

In a twelfth-century bestiary in the collection of Cambridge University owls are symbols of “the Jews who repulse our Savior,” and in the fifteenth century Konrad von Negenberg in Das Buch der Natur (The book of nature) distinguishes between Eule and Uhu, the former symbolic of evil people who hate the light of truth, the latter symbolic of sinful clerics.20 A similar symbolic vocabulary of evil in a religious context is visible in Hieronymus Bosch’s great and mysterious triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights; in one corner we see a gathering of birds bogged down in the swamp of vice and flanked on either side by the screech owl of death and the devil’s own horned owl.21 Was Pfarrius referring to this old symbolic equation between the devil, or his diabolical emissaries on earth, and the great bird of prey in “Warnung”? If these few examples culled from a larger repertory are in theological earnest, later writers and artists in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth would make owls the emblems of religious superstition—an evil of a different sort, in their view. An afrancesado artist in tune with the French Enlightenment ideas making their way into Spain, Goya surrounds his alter ego in The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters from Los Caprichos (first published in the Calle del Desengaño, or Street of Disillusion), with a swarm of owls. In two other engravings from the same collection the old witch who teaches a young witch to ride a penile broomstick in Pretty Teacher! from the same collection is accompanied by an owl flying overhead, and the man and woman struggling

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Figure 3.3. Francisco Goya, Can’t Anyone Untie Us?, from Los Caprichos. Reprinted with permission from Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Los Caprichos (New York: Dover, 1969), no. 75.

against the ropes binding them together in the engraving Can’t Anyone Untie Us? are straddled by a giant horned owl clearly representing the forces of the Church, which frowned on divorce (Figure 3.3).22 A few decades later Heine, no friend to Catholicism, would devise a “Verkehrte Welt” (upside-down world) in which “the calves roast the cook, the nags ride on men, and the Catholic owl fights for freedom of learning and the light of reason.”23 In a less tendentious tone the nameless narrator of the Grimm brothers’ tale “Die Eule” both mocks rustic superstition about owls as diabolical creatures and preserves the antique signification. When a giant horned owl takes up residence in a barn, the villagers send the town hero to do battle with it, but despite prayers to St. George, he cannot withstand the sight of the bewildered owl flapping its wings and uttering harsh cries. At the burgomaster’s instigation the villagers burn down barn and owl alike.24 A rich stew of connotations

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having to do with superstition born of religion, religion as superstition, evil, the devil, folklore, and more lurk in the background of this one image from “Warnung.” Owls become political animals too. The giant horned owl in stanza 3 of “Warnung” has multiple company in another poem by Pfarrius, “Warte Eulenpack!” (Just wait, you pack of owls!). Pfarrius created his own variation on the antique satirical theme of a parliament of animals in order to send up the revolutionary era’s debates regarding a constitution. The lion king, we are told, goes on autumnal maneuvers through the forest and comes to a place where there used to be a lake, now merely a swamp with frogs instead of fish. Indignant, the lion demands to know who deprived the fish of their rights. The horned owl—we are told he is a minister of state—takes out a document, since no official can do anything unless it is in writing, and replies that at the last session of the Reichstag it came about that the fish were to be represented by the frogs. “Don’t the fish have a voice and a place equal to those of the other animals?” the lion indignantly roars, and the owl takes out yet another document and declares that, yes, they do in theory, but it is an evil reality that those who are helpless cannot speak for themselves, hence are represented by “neighbor Big Mouth.” When the lion king insists that a mighty dam be built to restore his “pious fish,” the frogs, swollen with rage, cry out, “This violates the charter! What we achieved there in parliamentary session can here be nullified by the king’s mere word?— Just you wait, you pack of owls, you’ll pay for this! Quak, quak quak!” The king replies that whatever they accomplished in the Reichstag he will gladly complete, but he also tells them firmly that he is deputized to speak for those who cannot. There, with the assertion of the king’s absolute authority and veto power, the poem ends. No wonder it disappeared from the third edition in 1869, to be replaced by the assurance that the poet did nothing for which his native country might condemn him.25 Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s emphatic refusal to redeem his father’s half-hearted promise of a constitution—one of the most incendiary issues of the 1848 revolution—is the obvious backdrop to “Warte Eulenpack.” Not until seven years after his accession to the Prussian throne in 1840, and only after much foot-dragging, did he summon committees from the provincial diets in Prussia to meet as a United Diet in Berlin. The result was a mongrel mixture of absolutist ideas, the traditional representation of classes and privileges, and a very inadequate nod to modern constitutional principles, its main accomplishment being the provision of actors and a stage for the formation of an organized opposition. One notes the amphibians, mammals, birds, and aquatic creatures in Pfarrius’s poem and looks for analogies to the different players in the constitutional struggles, the liberal aristocrats, the urban and rural middle classes, the monarchy, and the conservatives in the king’s inner circles. Are the “pious fish,” recalling as they do an antique Christ symbol, emblematic of the conservatives who, like their monarch, propounded a “Christian state”?26

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One can rest assured that readers at midcentury would have been able to pin the tail on the donkey and identify the players in this parliamentary squabble without any need for prompting.

Schumann’s Spätstil Setting If one conjectures that Schumann might have been drawn to Pfarrius’s anthology in part by his own liberal ideals and his postrevolutionary musings, does he then turn his setting of “Warnung” into some sort of political statement? Not overtly so, but I would like to think that the cognoscenti would have recognized in this song a contemporary version of an antique theme: the menace to artists by governments fearful of art’s power to persuade, the subjugation of “the learned and eloquent” by the state.27 I hasten to add that if politics are implicated in Schumann’s reasons for gravitating to this poem and fashioning it in this manner, so too are purely musical considerations. The composition of “Warnung” coincided with Schumann’s organization in fall 1851 both of a Quartettkränzchen, or chamber music society, and a Singekränzchen, a private musical club devoted to singing early music, in particular Palestrina, Lassus, and Bach. Neither initiative lasted very long, but I would guess that the renewed exposure to earlier vocal polyphony had an effect on the centerpiece of Op. 119, composed in late September. “Warnung” is in neither modal counterpoint nor the stricter Baroque processes, but the stark exposure of the voices that cross one another in this song, its obsessive repetitions part and parcel of its eerie impact, seem the distillate of this composer’s lifelong contrapuntal interests. Of all Schumann’s late songs this is one of the best, devoid of all superfluity, every gesture maximally meaningful. The directional symbolism is inescapable: over and over we descend (Example 3.1), and there is more than a little resemblance between this descent and those that fill this song’s cousin in bleak mastery, “Herzeleid” (Example 3.2).28 Because a fall downward from the heights is the only figure given the pianist, we inevitably seek reasons in the poem for this obsession with falling motion and can devise several. For example, we might hear it as repeated defeat: no matter how many times the piano tries to assert the freedom of higher planes, it is dragged inexorably back down. In another Pfarrius-derived connotation we learn as the song wends its way that high F-sharp sounds a threat of death (a variation on a pitch far in advance of Wozzeck’s death scene), and one would be well advised to slip undercover, not to sing out from on high. And it is of chilling import that the principal pattern is so often elided with its own repetitions or variations in self-perpetuating manner, a prison from which one cannot escape. Over and over the same dilemma presents itself.

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Example 3.1. Robert Schumann, “Warnung,” Op. 119, no. 2, mm. 1–4.

Example 3.2. Robert Schumann, “Herzeleid,” Op. 107, no. 1, mm. 1–5.

That we might mark the importance of the fall from heights to depths reiterated throughout the song, Schumann first delineates it without harmonic underpinning in measure 1, falling from dominant pitch to dominant pitch in such a way as to emphasize off the beat the third and sixth degrees that define minor mode. Those same prolonged pitches lean on the second and fifth scale degrees as if the D and G were implied appoggiaturas, while the first and highest pitch is accented, both to tell the listener that it is a downbeat, not an anacrusis, and to set the downward slide into motion. The whole bar can be heard as an extended, embellished F-sharp in two registers, the lowest of which then creeps downward by chromatic degrees in the harmonized second measure before the entire pattern of the descent in measure 1 is repeated an octave lower. The imputation is that we could keep going into a bottomless pit, eventually falling off the edge of the known world, but after this hint we mostly hear the figure in its original register. In other words, we replay the same metaphor for downfall over and over, and one can hear the repetitions multiply, as reiterated warning, as obsession, and—the grimmest signification—as history repeating itself without humanity’s ever having learned anything from the recurring bleakness.

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Another way to hear measure 1 is as a broken delineation of a tonic sixfour chord, but Schumann passes through the tonic pitch without assigning it any durational or metrical stress (it falls at the exact midmeasure point, but is an eighth note followed by a quarter note), and he emphasizes the sixth scale degree in such a way as to veil any harmonic surety for his single line of pitches. From skeletal uncertainty in measure 1 we go to harmonically rich uncertainty in measure 2, to two diminished seventh chords in a row (on the raised fourth and sixth degrees, the latter an incomplete—minus its root— dominant ninth), hardly the firmest of anchors in the mist-enshrouded forest. One notes the unusual articulation markings by which the inner voices are to be made shorter (the conjunction of a staccato marking and a half note is not something one sees every day), and the outer voices are to be stressed as much as a piano marking in the wake of a decrescendo will permit. Only in the transit from measure 2 to measure 3 do we have a leading tone-to-tonic progression in the bass, the arrival at the first tonic chord elided with the falling figure’s new beginning and the inner voice’s suspension C-sharp to B, creating a dissonant smudge on the downbeat. That suspension is then immediately echoed in rhythmic diminution by the descent in the topmost voice as it sinks even lower. The entire sequence of events in measures 1–2 and its elision with measure 3 is an eerily quiet announcement of one of the song’s major sources of power. Again and again Schumann will inflect B-Minor without ever leaving it. We are both frozen in place and desperately unsure all at once. The small compound of gestures to which these twenty-nine measures are restricted is subjected to variation and warping; this is not an exercise in ground bass or cantus firmus. For example, the segment of measures 1 and 3 outlining scale degrees 1, 2, and 3 is inflected with multiple C-naturals, the lowered second degree, in measure 4 (“[der] Tag zur Nei-ge”), with various voices bringing out the B—C-natural fraction and the C-natural to D fraction. The harmonization is such as to suggest the briefest of emphases on the submediant harmony of G-Major, each chord marked tenuto. We hear in these alterations of what came before multiple imputations compressed into a small space. The heaviness of the Neapolitan pressing downward to tonic morphs indissolubly into the merest imputation of somewhere brighter, the “Tag” that is now vanishing. The rhythmic subtlety by which the “resolution” to G-Major happens on the last beat of measure 4 tells of something on the way out, slipping away even as we invoke it. It is a sad irony that we return to the B-Minor we never really left as the persona sings of the “Licht und Freiheit” (a slogan of the 1848 revolutions) once promised by the day and now ceding to darkness. The twofold falling figure, transposed a semitone upward in measure 5, returning to its original level in measure 6 is an elaboration of the semitone

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relationship between the sixth and fifth scale degrees (G, F-sharp) at the end of measure 1 and thereafter, and one notes as well the first appearances of another thumbnail signifier in this song: the grace notes that are Schumann’s launching pads for repeated return to the heights—from whence we are doomed to fall again and again. One thinks irresistibly of the citation from Schumann’s diary with which Graham Johnson introduces his recording of selected later songs: “The sky is strangely red: is it morning, is it evening? I do not know—but we must work to achieve light!”29 Here the “work” is evident in the quietly desperate vaults upward, but the optimism against all odds expressed in the quotation—and one notes the recognition of struggle—is not possible in this song, hemmed about by all-encompassing menace. Lest we somehow miss the importance of the “light and freedom” now vanishing, Schumann doubles the singer’s words “Licht und” in the piano, then sounds another in the series of downbeat dissonances that are such a hallmark of this song on the crucial first syllable of “Frei-heit.” In the crunch of leading tone on tonic, we can hear how bitter is the awareness of freedom’s loss. To live in fear is to live in a warped world. One register of the stresses induced by paranoia is the disjunction Schumann engineers between the singer’s phrases and the piano’s falling pattern from measures 1–2, the material from which the entire song is derived. The descent first heard in m. 1 shifts from conjunction with the first bar of the singer’s two-bar phrases, as in measures 3 and 5, to conjunction with the second half of the singer’s phrases, as in measures 8 and 10, the latter instance elided with the piano interludes between stanzas 1 and 2 and again between stanzas 2 and 3: it’s everywhere, it’s everywhere. What is so affecting about the first injunction to be silent (“O schweige, Vöglein, schweige” in mm. 7–8) is the cloaked tenderness of the changes wrought on the song’s basic musical idea (Example 3.3). The two chords from measure 2, with their deep bass underpinning, underlie the first words of the imperative “O schweige” in measure 7 but are now entirely diatonic. When the falling figure comes back around in measure 8 for the fifth time (the conjunction of those two numbers should be sufficient to make clear this song’s obsessive nature) the exact same pitches in the right hand—measure 1 with a grace note attached—are reharmonized to suggest D-Major in the piano and its skeletal dominant in the vocal line. The momentary hint, and it is no more than that, of the softer, brighter relative major paves the way for the tense return of the figures with all their original menace restored and then some. The subtle contrast between the soupçon of sympathy for the poet who must fall silent and the danger reasserted as chromaticism redivivus in B-Minor is then recycled in the second stanza, an exact duplicate of the first to different words. Bit by bit menace already invoked in the first verse is explained until full horror is achieved.

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Example 3.3. Robert Schumann, “Warnung,” mm. 7–11.

What the almost literal repetition of the same music for Pfarrius’s verses 1 and 2 also does is reinforce the equation in which song can lead to death. The culminating words “Tod” and “[Ge]-sang” are set to the same accented high F-sharp on the downbeat with which the entire song begins. The only difference between the setting of verse 1 and verse 2 is Schumann’s added doubling of the lowered second degree C-natural in measure 13 beneath the word “nächt-[lich],” an extra pinprick of dissonance compared to its prior manifestation at the word “Tag” in measure 4. Of such jeweled details is this song made. A truly remarkable compound of motives attends each cry of alarm at stanza’s end, including a premonition of Brahms’s famous “death motif ” of falling thirds. The figure we hear in the inner, or alto, voice in the right hand’s lower stratum in measures 10–11 (F-sharp, D, B, G-natural), beginning sforzando at the word “Tod,” prefigures the later composer’s falling thirds in the Heine song “Mondenschein,” Op. 85, no. 2, in the piano beneath the words “krankes Herz [und müde Glieder];” in “Feldeinsamkeit,” Op. 86, no. 2, at the words “mir ist, als ob ich längst gestorben bin,” and, most famously, in “Ich wandte mich” and “O Tod, wie bitter bist du” from the Vier ernste Gesänge almost half a century after Schumann’s deathhaunted song of warning (Examples 3.4–3.7).30 The massively octave-displaced, grace-noted leap upward in the left hand on the Monteverdi diminished fourth interval (A-sharp, D) so often associated with lament is a newly dramatic manifestation of the tenor voice in measure 2 and the “Licht und Frei-[heit]” pitches in measures 5–6, now reversed. (Just to cite examples from earlier nineteenthcentury Lieder, think of the bitter downward turn in the vocal line from F to C-sharp in the first phrase of Schubert’s “Der König in Thule” or the figure borrowed from Bach at the beginning of the same composer’s “Der Atlas,” a figure contained within F-sharp and B-flat.) The shifting voices in this interstice between the stanzas acts first to postpone the conjunction of voices to produce a root position tonic simultaneity, then to shroud it as a G-Major chord only ceding to B-Minor on the final eighth note subbeat of the bar, en route in passing motion that goes to the diminished seventh harmony on the downbeat of measure 2. When tonic on the downbeat finally happens in measure 12 it is elided with the returned falling figure. These iterations of menace could, we realize by now, go on and on and on.

Example 3.4. Johannes Brahms, “Mondenschein,” Op. 85, no. 2, mm. 1–6.

Example 3.5. Johannes Brahms, “Feldeinsamkeit,” mm. 26–28.

Example 3.6a. Johannes Brahms, “Ich wandte mich” from Vier ernste Gesänge, Op. 121, no. 2, mm. 44–48.

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Example 3.6b. Johannes Brahms, “Ich wandte mich” from Vier ernste Gesänge, Op. 121, no. 2, mm. 52–54.

Example 3.7. Johannes Brahms, “O Tod, o Tod, wie bitter bist du” from Vier ernste Gesänge, Op. 121, no. 3, mm. 1–2.

In the poem the warning to the little bird to hush is the same at the end of the first verse and the end of the poem, but Schumann knew to intensify it the second time around, in the presence of the great owl (mm. 25–28). Now the singer reiterates the high F-sharp of “death” and song’s “betrayal” over and over, including the naming of the owl. An accent on the downbeat is no longer sufficient for menace named openly; four times in a row we hear a sfp punch at the start of the piano’s falling figure, the former tonic pitch B now transformed into the dominant of E-Minor, harmonized as a ninth chord—yet another manifestation of B grinding against C-natural. Four times in a row we hear interlacing versions of the same compilation of pitches (mm. 21–24) before resolution to E-Minor: the threat of death, announced sforzando in measure 25 before shading back down to the tension-filled hush in which this song lives and breathes—just barely (Example 3.8). No wonder Schumann so explicitly recalled “Herzeleid,” composed on January 21, 1851, which begins with an exposed version of the “death” descending thirds and explores similar downbeat dissonances, intervallic motives, and deferred cadences.

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Example 3.8. Robert Schumann, “Warnung,” mm. 21–25.

But we do not end in E-Minor, nor do we stay there. The persona cancels the D-sharp leading tone in measure 26 and goes back to B-Minor, but over F-sharp in the bass. In one of Schumann’s famous endings that question the very category of endings, the singer may achieve tonic closure on the downbeat of measure 28, but the piano is not so sure that this is really the end of it all. Its low B in the left hand is a grace note; if the pedal blurs that low tone throughout the mist-enshrouded final two bars, the sustained pitches in the final bar are F-sharps with a lone D in the middle. “How to make the tonic chord un-final” might well have been Schumann’s assignment to himself in this song. After all, the danger is not over when these words and tones cease. “Villainy,” said the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp, “is what fuels the plots of fairy tales.”31 The villainy in “Warnung” is, I would conjecture, culled from the politics and history of the day, its air of myth and magic a semitransparent veil for stark realities. We know, in part thanks to John Daverio’s and Reinhard Kapp’s refutations of clichés about Schumann’s supposedly apolitical nature, that the composer was fascinated from a very early age by the history swirling all around him; no one reading his diary could doubt it for a minute.32 Daverio’s position on the question of Schumann’s political engagement was more cautious than Kapp’s, perhaps advisable given the paucity of evidence to support any notion of Schumann on the musical barricades. But it would be unreasonable

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to expect such a brilliant mind to exclude political immensities from his music, nor does he. Daverio points out that in the choral-orchestral ballad Des Sängers Fluch, Schumann both muses on the fraught questions of the day—unity, revolt, liberty, a new order—and alters Uhland’s poem such that the minstrel of the title lives on, rather than dying. It is my proposal that “Warnung” is likewise a gloomy contemporary meditation on the same postrevolutionary conundrums, conveyed not by massed forces but by the lone, disenchanted voice. That it is so compact, so quiet, only adds to its power.

notes 1. The first song in the Kindertotenlieder (“Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n”) and the second movement of Das Lied von der Erde (“Der Einsame im Herbst”) come to mind. 2. The long-lived Gustav Pfarrius (1800–1884) studied philology (his first foray into print was a critique of an edition of the fourth-century writer Quintus Smyrnaeus) and theology at the universities in Halle and Bonn. He became a Gymnasium instructor in Saarbrücken and, after 1834, in Cologne and published only two poetic works before the anthology Die Waldlieder, from which Schumann took his texts: an epic poem entitled Karlmann, ein Gedicht (Bonn: E. Weber, 1841) and Das Nahethal in Liedern (Cologne: Aachen, 1838). Between 1850 and 1869 he published six anthologies of poetry and of short stories. See Schanze and Schulte, Literarische Vorlagen, 323. See also Finson, Robert Schumann, 221–25 for an informative summary of Op. 119. 3. See, among many other sources, Demandt, Über allen Wipfeln; Detering, Die Bedeutung der Eiche seit der Vorzeit; Kuehnemund, Arminius; Ritter, Der Cherusker; Weyergraf, Waldungen. 4. See Wullen, Die Deutschen sind im Treppenhaus; Hildebrand, Das Leben und Werk des Berliner Bildhauers Otto Geyer. 5. Pfarrius, Die Waldlieder: Mit Illustrationen, 1–2. 6. Ibid., 3. 7. Pfarrius, Die Waldlieder: Dritte, 65–66. 8. See Schurz, Die Befreiung Gottfried Kinkels. Schurz fled to America and became a confidant of none other than Abraham Lincoln. 9. The two-against-three juxtapositions throughout “Abendlied” can be understood in one sense as a metaphor for the juxtaposition of things earthly and heavenly, but I wonder if it is also Schumann’s subtle register of conflicts as yet unresolved. If perfect peace resounds in triplets, the vocal line in duplets is not in accord. 10. See Schanze and Schulte, Literarische Vorlagen, 256. 11. Pfarrius, Waldlieder: Mit Illustrationen, 4; Waldlieder: Dritte, 17. 12. Liah Greenfeld, “The Final Solution of Infinite Longing: Germany” in Nationalism, 275–395. 13. Pfarrius Waldlieder: Mit Illustrationen, 40, Waldlieder, Dritte, 32. Heine would record the same exasperation with Germany’s inaction in the third stanza of “Zur

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Beruhigung” from his Neue Gedichte of 1844: “Wir sind Germanen, gemütlich und brav, / Wir schlafen gesunden Pflanzenschlaf, / Und wenn wir erwachen pflegt uns zu dürsten, / Doch nicht nach dem Blute unserer Fürsten” (Säkularausgabe, 114). Freiligrath’s famous poem beginning “Deutschland ist Hamlet! ernst und stumm” (Germany is Hamlet, earnest and mute) was also emphatic on the subject of German political torpor (Sämtliche Werke, 5:77–79). 14. See Bunsen, Nippold, and Bunsen, Christian Carl Josias Freiherr von Bunsen, 2:392; also cited in Legge, Rhyme and Revolution in Germany, 176. See also SchnellingReinicke and Illner, Petitionen und Barrikaden, 355, with its reproduction of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung no. 149 (November 1848); the despairing article from Cologne begins “Die Preßfreiheit ist in Berlin vernichtet.” 15. Pfarrius, Waldlieder: Mit Illustrationen, 53; Waldlieder, Dritte, 47. 16. Pfarrius, Waldlieder: Mit Illustrationen, 5, Waldlieder, Dritte, 7–8. 17. Pfarrius, Waldlieder: Mit Illustrationen, 6–7; Waldlieder, Dritte, 8. In the third edition the poetic persona of “Der Eichenhain” once again laments the loss of antique Teutonic glory—“Alas, the Valkyries left us,” he mourns—and beseeches the oak trees to tell him how long it will be before “true German sorrow” impels the hour of salvation. 18. Pfarrius, Waldlieder: Mit Illustrationen, 49; Waldlieder, Dritte, 37. 19. See “Eule” in Hoffmann-Krayer and Stäubli, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 2:1073–79. 20. See T. H. White, The Book of Beasts; Megenberg, Buch der Natur; Spyra, Das “Buch der Natur” Konrads von Megenberg. 21. See Glum, “Divine Judgment.” 22. See Goya y Lucientes, Los Caprichos, plate nos. 43, 68, 75. 23. Heine, Säkularausgabe, 115. In the same volume (157) one also finds an untitled, unpublished poem that begins: Die Eule studierte Pandekten Kanonisches Recht u[nd] die Glossa Und als sie kam nach Welschland, Sie frug: wo liegt Canossa? Die alten, matten Raben Sie ließen die Flügel hängen Sie sprachen: Das alte Canossa Ist längstens untergegangen. Wir möchten ein neues bauen, Doch fehlt dazu das Beste Die Marmorblöcke, die Quadern, Und die gekrönten Gäste.

24. Grimm and Grimm, “The Owl,” in The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 711–12. The Grimms were among the Göttingen Seven fired from their professorships in 1837, when they protested the Hanoverian king’s revocation of the liberal constitution his older brother had granted.

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25. Pfarrius, Waldlieder: Mit Illustrationen, 54–55. 26. See Nipperdey, Germany, 579–89. See also Sperber’s Rhineland Radicals and The European Revolutions. 27. I have borrowed this phrase from Po Chü-i’s ninth-century poem, translated by Arthur Waley and set to music as “The Red Cockatoo” by Benjamin Britten: Sent as a present from Annam A red cockatoo. Colour’d like the peach tree blossom, Speaking with the speech of men. And they did to it what is always done To the learned and eloquent. They took a cage with stout bars And shut it up inside.

28. See Laura Tunbridge’s perceptive discussion of “Herzeleid” in Schumann’s Late Style, 27–30. 29. Cited in Graham Johnson, “The Later Songs of Robert Schumann,” in The Songs of Robert Schumann (Hyperion CDJ33101, 1996), 1:5. 30. Roe-Min Kok has discovered other instances of deathly thirds in Schumann’s music; see her illuminating essay “Falling Asleep.” 31. Cited in Tatar, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, xxix. 32. See Daverio, “Einheit—Freiheit—Vaterland”; Kapp, “Schumann nach der Revolution.”

4 Segregating Sound Robert Schumann in the Third Reich Lily E. Hirsch

In the “Reich’s Orchestra,” the Berlin Philharmonic, Robert Schumann’s music was presented in only thirteen of ninety concerts conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler during the Nazi period (1933–45), while Beethoven’s was included in forty-four.1 In the main party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, 243 articles focused on Richard Wagner and 116 on Ludwig van Beethoven. Schumann featured in fewer than fifteen.2 Schumann clearly fell below Beethoven and Wagner in the regime’s hierarchy of musical masters. Indeed he was not even inducted into Regensburg’s Valhalla, a replica of the Parthenon originally completed under the auspices of King Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1841 to honor Germany’s cultural idols.3 Of major nineteenth-century German composers, the only ones missing from Valhalla are Schumann, the Jewish Felix Mendelssohn, baptized at age seven, and Johannes Brahms, who, no German nationalist could forget, was positioned as Wagner’s antithesis during the second half of the nineteenth century.4 Nazi leaders could have corrected this “oversight” in Schumann’s case, as they had when they “annexed” Anton Bruckner in 1937.5 But they did not, suggesting that there were some points of friction between the prevailing ideology and views of Schumann’s life and music. Writers in Nazi Germany readily acknowledged certain shortcomings that complicated Schumann’s reception as Aryan ideal. In his sizable Schumann monograph of 1941, Wolfgang Boetticher (1914–2002), who worked in the service of prominent Nazi officials, including Alfred Rosenberg, insisted that Schumann’s racial essence was predominantly Nordic, with the appropriate “severity” (Strenge), “longing” (Sehnende), and “Faustian depth” (faustische Tiefe). However, he also admitted certain so-called Eastern traits, thereby linking Schumann with the perceived inferior Eastern or Alpine race of Central Europe.6 Richard Eichenauer (1893–?), a Nazi Party member with no formal musicological training, likewise ascribed to Schumann a mix of both the Nordic and

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Eastern racial types.7 The founder of the Musicology Department in Cologne, Ernst Bücken (1884–1949), who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, expanded on this perceived duality when he suggested the following as a subtitle for his Schumann biography: “The Problem of the Artistic Double Nature.”8 Bücken was in part referring to Schumann’s later mental illness, which he explored in a chapter of his biography. As we will see, this illness was seen by some as a challenge to Schumann’s status in Nazi Germany.9 But this is only one side of Schumann’s reception during the Third Reich. As the Nazi sympathizer Karl Hasse (1883–1960) insisted in his politically motivated book on the German masters of 1934, despite Schumann’s perceived flaws Germans must learn to love him again. If not, the so-called land of music would be without part of its “German essence” (deutschen Wesens).10 Schumann was still a German composer and needed to be treated as such. The regime relied on its German artists to imagine the German nation and justify German supremacy. To protect this precious national resource they eliminated elements thought to be threatening to their cultural heritage. To this end, by means of the Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service of April 7, 1933, they dismissed Jews—defined at that time as any person descended from a Jewish parent or grandparent—from cultural institutions such as state-run music conservatories, opera houses, concert halls, and theaters. They also restricted Jewish involvement in the radio, press, and the Reich Chamber of Music and, with some degree of error, banned the music of Jewish composers, even of those deceased, such as Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Gustav Mahler. The regime’s cultural watchdogs could not allow Schumann to undermine this segregation of the arts by failing to fulfill expectations of the lofty Aryan. In this essay I examine how writers and musicologists sympathetic to the Nazi cause attempted to overcome Schumann’s contested reception history— how they emphasized aspects of Schumann’s biography and reception that corresponded to Nazi values (his anti-Semitism and nationalistic worldview) while downplaying those that did not—and the obstacles they encountered in so doing. Using German texts from the era I focus specifically on responses to Schumann’s relationship with Wagner, mental illness, ties to Heinrich Heine, and, inevitably, his association with Mendelssohn. In so doing I approach Schumann as a tarnished sonic emblem or “hardly hero.”11 Though there is significant literature on the “heroes” of Nazi cultural politics and their roles in Nazi ideology, as Pamela M. Potter has demonstrated in her work on Handel’s politicization, the “hardly heroes” can also offer significant insight into musical politics during the Third Reich, and may indeed offer more critical insight into Nazi values as well as the regime’s methods of musical appropriation.12 This essay contributes to Schumann scholarship—which has generally overlooked the composer’s standing in the Third Reich—as well as to secondary literature on music in Nazi Germany.

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Aryan by Association Nazi-era music scholars were quick to claim Schumann as Germany’s own during the Third Reich. In 1939 Friedrich Welter even heralded as “prophetic” Schumann’s recognition of “true German” Musikpolitik, in this way suggesting that the composer prefigured Nazi cultural policy.13 There was a basis for this manipulation in Schumann’s biography. For one, Schumann had criticized Mendelssohn based on perceived racial characteristics in his Marriage Diaries: Clara told me that I seemed different toward Mendelssohn; surely not toward him as an artist—you know that—for years I have contributed so much to promoting him, more than almost anyone else. In the meantime—let’s not neglect ourselves too much. Jews remain Jews; first they take a seat ten times for themselves, then comes the Christian’s turn.14

Boetticher capitalized on this anti-Semitism: he highlighted Schumann’s use of the term Jew as “insult” (Schimpfwort), and identified an anti-Semitic strain in Schumann’s reviews of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s music with its “annoying, grumbling and indiscreet rhythm.” Boetticher also noted Schumann’s valorization of the German Volk in the pages of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (hereafter NZfM), the journal Schumann founded in 1834.15 In most writings in this nationalistic vein, authors also highlighted the composer’s connections to iconic German artists, such as Beethoven and Bach. Bücken, for example, credited Schumann with inspiring the publication of the complete compositions of Bach, a task Schumann had hailed as a “national undertaking.”16 This emphasis on Schumann’s links to Bach and Beethoven, composers held in high esteem, was strategic. By highlighting Schumann’s reverence for Bach, writers used the untarnished reputation of a perceived greater German master to sanitize Schumann by association. Such an approach worked to a certain extent. However, authors such as Boetticher and Bücken confronted a dilemma when they sought in this way to connect Schumann to Wagner. Wagner and Schumann had regarded one another with skepticism. Despite having lived in Dresden at the same time, from 1844 to 1848, the two composers did not form a lasting friendship. Schumann was in fact put off by Wagner’s very personality. Of Wagner Schumann said, “He has the most amazing gift of the gab, and is always chock full of his own ideas; one cannot listen to him for long.”17 Wagner, for his part, seems to have recognized Schumann’s lack of sustained attention during their conversations: “I didn’t get any real stimulation from his company, and that he was too unreceptive to benefit from any serious views of mine was soon evident.”18 Musically their relationship suffered as well. Both composers regarded the other’s conducting as inadequate.19 In a letter to Mendelssohn of October 22, 1845, regarding Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Schumann went even further: “Wagner—though certainly a brilliant fellow and full of original, audacious ideas—can hardly set down (and

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think out) a four-measure phrase beautifully or even correctly.”20 Though he later retracted some of this censure, Schumann maintained a critical stance toward Wagner’s music dramas and in 1853 championed Brahms instead of his long-winded colleague.21 A greater challenge to their posthumous relationship, however, was Wagner’s recorded opinion of Schumann’s late style. In a later version of “Das Judentum in der Music” (Judaism in music), published in 1869 in NZfM (by then a Wagnerian mouthpiece), Wagner insisted that Schumann’s later works were marked by “sickliness” and suffered under the influence of a Jewish essence, a thinly veiled reference to Schumann’s relationship with Mendelssohn.22 Such criticism put Schumann and Wagner, who should both epitomize the Aryan ideal, at odds with each other and, worse still, associated Schumann with Jewishness. To right this wrong, Bücken distanced Wagner’s problem with Schumann from Mendelssohn and the Jews by attributing it instead to Schumann’s inability to keep up with Wagner’s progressive friends.23 In contrast, Boetticher, who discussed at length the relationship between the two composers, urged readers to recognize the friendship that he claimed did exist between the two men.24 He concluded his discussion by describing this friendship, once recognized, as “a marvelous symbol of the unity of the German Romantic.”25 The idea of an unacknowledged bond likewise attracted the German nationalistic composer and Nazi sympathizer Hans Pfitzner, who admired Schumann and publicized the Romantic composer’s nationalism and suspicion of Jews.26 In 1936 he described Wagner and Schumann’s relationship as Sternfreundschaft (literally “star friendship”), defined by Pfitzner as “the deep inner fellowship existing between two human beings, better between two men, but which cannot make itself felt during their lifetime.”27 Such formulations circumvented the realities of Schumann and Wagner’s relationship and provided a viable solution to the Wagner obstacle in Schumann’s reception. Of course some scholars simply ignored the controversy altogether. In his short article on Schumann, for example, Erich Valentin (1906–93) linked the two composers with no reservations, explaining how both had fought for Germanness in music.29 But Schumann’s dual nature, highlighted by Bücken, was still a clear obstacle. In the eyes of Richard Eichenauer the duality of Schumann’s core makeup (Nordic or Eastern) manifested itself in Schumann’s contrasting Davidsbündler characters Eusebius and Florestan, which Schumann himself had called his “double nature.”29 Bücken also connected this duality to the composer’s contrasting moods, which led eventually to a major affective disorder, attempted suicide, and hospitalization.30 Schumann’s mental instability was then, as now, a source of great fascination among scholars.31 During the Third Reich, however, it threatened the regime’s stance on mental illness and extreme policies regarding the insane.

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Mental Illness and Nazi Euthanasia The Nazi regime was generally hostile to “Jewish Freudian” psychoanalysis, which had become popular at the beginning of the twentieth century.32 In fact rather than attempt to rehabilitate the mentally ill, by the fall of 1941 Nazi scientists had embarked on a program of euthanasia.33 This program, a first step toward mass murder, had a connection to perceived ties between mental illness and the Jew. Many nineteenth-century psychiatrists, such as Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), Theodor Kirchhoff (1853–1922), and Richard Krafft-Ebbing (1840–1902), believed that the Jew was both degenerate and especially predisposed to madness.34 German science generally regarded Jewish insanity as a product of inbreeding, though the Italian Jew Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), in his Anti-Semitism and the Jews in the Light of Modern Science (1893), also credited it to the “residual effect of persecution.”35 Echoes of this link can be seen in the Nazi period’s exhibits of degenerate art and music, which further cemented connections perceived between the Jewish madman and artistic creativity. Such racial motivation combined with practical concerns after World War I. At this time, faced with military defeat, famine, and mass death, German medicine began to evaluate the relative value of supporting those thought to offer nothing to society. The first legislative step that arose from these attitudes toward the mentally ill was a law passed on July 26, 1933, that called for the sterilization “on a discretionary basis” of any person affected by the following illnesses: congenital feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, severe hereditary physical deformity, and severe alcoholism.36 In 1939 Hitler assigned Karl Brandt and Philipp Bouhler the task of organizing a new approach to those suffering from these disorders. The resulting program of adult euthanasia eventually evolved to include a social agenda by targeting people defined in racial and political terms as well.37 Had Schumann lived during the Nazi era his psychological disorder would have made him a potential victim of this euthanasia campaign. Not only that, but those involved with Schumann’s reception must have been aware of the supposed tie between madness and the Jewish artist. Wagner’s discussion of Schumann in “Judaism in Music” showed signs of this awareness when he identified in Schumann’s late style a “sickliness” and credited it to “Jewish” influence.38 To remove Schumann from this ideological minefield, nationalistic scholars relied on several techniques. Boetticher insisted that Schumann’s illness did not affect his creative power or the completion of his artistic mission.39 As the following discussion shows, the fate of Schumann’s Concerto in D-Minor for violin and orchestra, a late work composed in the last months of 1853, was significant to his claim. Out of respect for Schumann’s memory, Joseph Joachim, Clara Schumann, and Johannes Brahms had agreed to withhold this work from the public because

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they believed the composition shows signs of mental and creative weakness. During the Nazi era, however, Joachim’s nieces, the violinists Jelly d’Aranyi and Adila Fachiri, revoked this decision. They sought and found a publisher for the work in Wilhelm Strecker at the publishing house Schott Verlag. The work, whose existence had never been a secret, finally appeared in print in July 1937.40 True to the initial verdict, however, Schumann’s daughter Eugenie protested the publication. In 1938 Hans Pfitzner responded, insisting that the piece was not the work of mental illness. Rather, he said, it showed the true mastery of Schumann, who was able to compose “a great work of German music” even while sick.41 Ignoring Clara’s and Brahms’s roles in the original decision, other Germans chastised Eugenie for accepting the opinion of Joachim, who, as a Jew, was seen as “incapable of judging the work of a German master.”42 Yehudi Menuhin had originally obtained permission for the premiere performance of the work at the beginning of 1937. However, those responsible for cultural policy in the Third Reich could not allow a foreign premiere of the violin concerto with a Jewish violinist.43 Under the auspices of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture, henceforth RKK) and the propaganda campaign Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Happiness), they arranged the premiere performance on November 26, 1937, at the German opera house in Berlin as a political event—even concluding the event with the singing of the national anthem (Figure 4.1). In addition to the concerto, featuring the soloist Georg Kulenkampff, conductor Karl Böhm, and the Berlin Philharmonic, the premiere included the prelude to Act III of Wagner’s Lohengrin, Goethe’s hymn “Prometheus,” delivered by the actor Friedrich Kayssler, and speeches by Joseph Goebbels, president of the RKK, and Robert Ley, leader of the Deutschen Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front).44 Goebbels stressed in his speech the successful removal of Jewish influences and thus contamination as well as the German people’s renewed leadership in the area of German art.45 The concerto’s premiere symbolically supported this message by introducing the public to an accepted German replacement for Mendelssohn’s prohibited violin concerto.46 Still, Schumann’s concerto, said to display evidence of the composer’s “full creative powers” (volle Schöpferkraft), was presented at the premiere in a reworked version—though the revisions were concealed from the public—by Paul Hindemith, whose music had recently been banned by the Nazi regime.47 By December 20, 1937, the violin concerto was already available in Germany as a recording.48 Among others John Daverio has recently challenged the early verdict on Schumann’s late works. However, the reassessment of the violin concerto during the Third Reich had very different motivations and symbolic value.49 Had the period’s cultural leaders allowed the violin concerto to remain unpublished they would have given credence to the idea that Schumann’s artistic mission had been compromised. Publishing and premiering the concerto while blaming its earlier absence on “Jewish intrigues” served their larger goals.50

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Figure 4.1. Program from the premiere performance of Schumann’s Concerto in D-Minor for violin and orchestra, November 26, 1937. © Archiv Berliner Philharmoniker.

In his chapter on Schumann’s illness, “The Sick Genius” (“Der kranke Genius”), Bücken employed another strategy to address Schumann’s mental instability. First he described the reigning idea that only the healthy can produce works of genius—a significant challenge to Schumann supporters. However, he then countered this opinion by quoting Ernst Kretschmar’s Geniale Menschen (Highly gifted people) and the idea that the diabolical, related to the psychopathic element, is in fact “the essence of genius” (das Wesen des Genius).51 This pronouncement set the tone for Bücken’s discussion of Schumann’s illness and his rehabilitation as a genius. Such a resurrection was especially appealing during wartime, when a struggling hero held special meaning for ordinary Germans. At the founding of the Deutsche Robert Schumann-Gesellschaft (German Robert Schumann Society)

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in June 1943 the president of the Reichsschriftumskammer (Reich Chamber of Literature), Hans Johst, claimed that Schumann had been “a struggling soul” (eine kämpferische Seele) and “tragic spirit” (tragischen Geist), but also an exemplar of survival par excellence. Johst connected Schumann to the war effort and, by pointing out that “there is no peace in true art” (“Ruhe ist nicht in der wahren Kunst”), insisted that struggle was vital to success for all Germans.52 This highly politicized event included a Schumann festival directed by Pfitzner, which was repeated the following year with the help of the illustrious soprano and Nazi Party member Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.53 Bücken’s and Johst’s thinking in this regard recalls nineteenth-century valuations of struggle, a central theme in one of the greatest works of German literature, Goethe’s Faust: “for him whose striving never ceases / we can provide redemption.”54 Along these lines, in 1845 Franz Brendel, who had taken over the editorship of the NZfM in 1844, insisted that great effort is necessary for great art. In his formulation, Mendelssohn lacked the required internal turmoil, while Schumann, once nicknamed “Faust” at age seventeen, had experienced conflict and “subsequently digs deeper.”55 This rationale, which is evident in ideas of genius in the later nineteenth century, also made Schumann an authentic German hero of sorts. According to this logic, the genuine artist experienced turmoil and was thus in some ways necessarily abnormal. Such an artist therefore stood outside of normal society, and his or her art was autonomous, protected from everyday contamination or the “brutal facts of modernity.”56 In 1859 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species gave such beliefs even greater credibility. With his theory of evolution Darwin argued that a failure to adapt doomed a species to extinction. Applied to human society, his theory, for some, proved that evolution did not depend on mutual cooperation. Rather the human race was engaged in a “struggle for existence,” and only the strongest would survive.57 Struggle was therefore a valuable part of life. Though the progression from euthanasia to mass genocide continued without interruption, Schumann (or at least his reputation) benefited during the Nazi era from this earlier valuation of struggle, which endured in many discussions of Germanness in music from the period.58 Thus his mental instability was transformed from liability to virtue via the period’s notion of creative genius.

Schumann and the Jews Still more damaging than madness, however, were Schumann’s connections to the prominent Jews Heine and Mendelssohn. These connections not only challenged Schumann’s appropriation as Aryan ideal, but they also defied the categorization of Heine and Mendelssohn as Jews. In an attempt to confront Heine’s role in Schumann’s oeuvre and biography, Nazi officials considered rewriting Heine texts set by Schumann. Such a project

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would have paralleled similar efforts to rewrite Handel’s Israelite oratorios based on Old Testament texts. But in the case of Schumann, the Nazi musicologist Hans Joachim Moser (1889–1967), who worked in the Reichsstelle für Musikbearbeitung, an office of the Propaganda Ministry founded in 1941, claimed to have prevented this undertaking in his defense after the war.59 Though Moser may not have been the responsible party, there was indeed a directive in 1936 that allowed texts by Jewish authors to remain if set by prominent composers such as Schumann.60 With Heine and Schumann’s association still musically intact, the task of distancing Heine from Schumann fell to biographers. Some simply chose to ignore Heine by discussing Schumann’s Lieder with no mention of the Jewish poet. This was similar to the compromise reached in the case of Heine’s beloved “Loreley” poem, which Nazi-sponsored song books carried as “author unknown.”61 Others directly confronted the Heine controversy. Boetticher, for example, challenged his readers to trust Schumann: he must have had special reasons for setting Heine’s texts. However, to admit this, he explained, should in no way suggest Schumann’s “spiritual dependence” on Heine or his poetry. Boetticher also downplayed Schumann’s Heine settings by insisting that Schumann had valued Goethe above all other poets and by pointing out the “conspicuous” absence of Heine’s name from Schumann’s diaries.62 Taking a different approach, the music scholar Hasse argued that Schumann had at least ennobled Heine’s faulty texts.63 Yet another Nazi musicologist, Werner Korte (1906–82), criticized Schumann’s Heine Lieder, which, according to him, showed Schumann’s misunderstanding of the texts.64 Rather than faulting Schumann, Korte credited these “mistakes” to the composer’s “racial strength of character,” for how could Schumann have possibly understood the poetry of someone so foreign to his own essence?65 Such efforts to manipulate Schumann’s reception were complicated by the politics of the Berlin Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League), a segregated performing arts ensemble established by and for Jews in collaboration with the Nazis in 1933 (the organization was disbanded by the regime in 1941).66 In this Jewish organization the Nazi in charge, Hans Hinkel (1901–60), supported what he saw as Jewish culture and discouraged German culture, even banning presentations of Schumann’s music by 1937. In this way the League reversed the regime’s public standards of censorship. While the regime attempted to erase Heine as a Jew, inside the League he was seen as an appropriate figure. For that reason, even as other music by Schumann was prohibited, his Heine Lieder continued to be programmed.67 For example, the League’s Jewish members performed Schumann’s Dichterliebe to much acclaim in December 1935 and dedicated a special evening to Heine on December 26, 1934.68 The Jewish press also highlighted Heine’s cultural contributions, including his work set by great composers, such as Schumann.69 In her lectures in 1933 on Lieder for League audiences, the musicologist Anneliese Landau (1903–91) surely covered this history. She may also have shared her own opinion, published in The Lied:

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The Unfolding of Its Style (1980), that instead of Goethe, Schumann’s favorite poets were Heine (“In 1840 alone [Schumann] set music to 37 poems by Heine,” she points out) and the German lyric poet Eichendorff, whom the Nazi authorities never fully appropriated.70 Just as Korte had argued in the case of Schumann’s settings of Heine, Landau even claimed that Schumann had failed to grasp Goethe’s poetry, using as her evidence his setting of “Talisman.”71 Hinkel and his office encouraged Jewish culture within the League in part to stop Jewish appropriation of German culture and ensure a division between German and Jewish art. However, compounding the difficulties such a program entailed,72 Heine and Schumann undercut the regime’s circumscription of Aryan and Jew by remaining entangled sonically and conceptually. Mendelssohn was an even greater challenge, if not the challenge, given his many musical, personal, and professional intersections with Schumann. From 1835, when Mendelssohn arrived to conduct the Gewandhaus orchestra, until 1844, the two composers lived and worked in Leipzig and saw each other almost daily.73 Even after Schumann moved to Dresden in 1844 they maintained their relationship until 1847, the year of Mendelssohn’s death. Their similarities deepened this overlap: they shared a strong commitment to Bach and his musical tradition, loved great literature, and distrusted Meyerbeer, to name a few.74 With these common values it is no surprise that Schumann admired Mendelssohn as a person in addition to admiring him as a composer and musician of formidable skill.75 Schumann’s music and actions attest to this esteem; for example, he dedicated his three string quartets, Op. 41, to Mendelssohn and selected Mendelssohn to be the godfather to his daughter Marie.76 Mendelssohn likewise regarded Schumann highly, employed his orchestra to support Schumann’s compositional career, and asked Schumann to teach piano and composition at the conservatory he directed in Leipzig. During the Third Reich writers went to great lengths to explain away these many ties. Bücken tackled Schumann’s employment in 1843 at Mendelssohn’s Leipzig Conservatory. The fact that Schumann valued group solidarity but eventually left that post must be seen as evidence of Schumann’s creative detachment from the “formalism and unoriginal traditionalism” (Formalismus und unoriginellen Traditionalismus) of Mendelssohn, he argued.77 In 1937 Korte mentioned Schumann’s praise of Mendelssohn but insisted on “some unspoken separation,” most likely caused by “racial difference.”78 Hasse focused on the composers’ shared love of Bach, explaining that their relationships to Bach could not have been more different.79 However, it was Boetticher who devoted the most attention to Schumann and Mendelssohn’s ties, pointing out specific criticisms Schumann had reserved for Mendelssohn and suggesting a certain distance between the two composers, especially toward the end of Mendelssohn’s life. In his conclusion he took to task a Mendelssohn Society that had described Schumann and Mendelssohn’s relationship as “friendly” by suggesting that its members had neglected to consider certain details of this association.80 Regime authorities

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also took concrete steps to remove Mendelssohn more generally from the German cultural realm. While a number of Nazi authors disparaged the composer, often relying on the preliminary work of Wagner for their arguments,81 the regime banned his music and, on the night of November 9, 1936, destroyed the statue of Mendelssohn that stood in front of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus. Despite the regime’s best efforts, however, like Heine, Mendelssohn remained connected to Schumann in German culture and continued to challenge the Aryan-Jew division Nazi leaders sought to uphold. Though his reputation in Germany had shifted in the years before Hitler’s rise to power,82 Mendelssohn still figured prominently in Germany’s cultural life. Indeed the German public as a whole celebrated Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, Italian Symphony, and incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.83 To lessen this attachment regime officials aggressively solicited new music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 1938 this quest was entrusted to the Munich composer Carl Orff, after the commission was refused by Richard Strauss, Werner Egk, and Hans Pfitzner (though anti-Semitic, Pfitzner still viewed Mendelssohn as “a master of the first order”).84 But Orff ’s composition never earned widespread interest. The same is true of as many as forty-four different scores tested between 1933 and 1944 as replacements for Mendelssohn’s incidental music.85 Worse still, within the Jewish Culture League associates continued to celebrate Mendelssohn’s incidental music to the Shakespeare play. In the program notes for the Jewish organization’s full production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on December 2, 1936, Karl Wiener highlighted the admiration Mendelssohn’s incidental music had traditionally enjoyed, citing Schumann’s observation of 1843 that many attended the Shakespeare play only in order to hear Mendelssohn’s music.86 However, while the regime actively encouraged the performance of Mendelssohn’s music as Jewish within the League and even considered giving the Leipzig statue of the composer to the organization,87 League members generally celebrated the composer in this way as German. Indeed, to them Mendelssohn was the “purest German classicist.”88 Accordingly the regime’s attempts to separate Schumann as German from Mendelssohn and Heine as Jews failed. But were at least some of the regime’s efforts to segregate sound successful? Or is this even the right question? In many ways nationalistic authors were doomed to fail as soon as they based the categorization of composers solely on racial absolutes. The trope of inconsistency is often stressed in analyses of politics in the Third Reich, and there was indeed plenty of incoherence within Nazi policy. As Detlev Peukert explains, it often seems impossible to make sense of the “ragbag” of ideas that drove the regime and its supporters.89 Pamela M. Potter offers several examples from the cultural realm. The Nazis initially banned jazz, unwilling to tolerate its apparent sexual power, the unsuitability of its rhythms for marching, and its links with Africans, African Americans, Jews, and the United States. However, during the war Nazi soldiers often sought

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jazz out, sometimes on foreign radio stations, which would also inevitably broadcast anti-Nazi news reports. To curtail this potential exposure the regime eventually allowed some jazz on its radio programs. In another example, Nazi officials exempted certain Jewish musicians from the purges that prevented most Jews from performing in the Reich. For example, the Prussian minister Hermann Göring allowed the conductor Leo Blech and the singer Alexander Kipnis (both full Jews based on Nazi definitions) to continue practicing their respective crafts in order to maintain high artistic standards at the Berlin State Opera.90 These exceptions, though, only serve to reinforce the fact that the Nazi regime and its cultural watchdogs went to great lengths to uphold a consistent program of segregation in the arts. To claim Schumann as Aryan they employed scholarship, commemorative speeches, musical bans, and legislation and even considered revising Lieder set to texts by Heine. Ultimately audience reception as well as Schumann’s biography, beyond total Nazi control and manipulation, undercut these activities. The idea of inconsistency and incoherence therefore must be qualified. As in the case of Schumann, nationalistic thinking was quite consistent in principle. However, in practice the artificial categories on which this thinking was based proved untenable. In this regard Nazi policy, though consistent in theory, simply could not stand up to the reality of diversity, change, and variation inherent in people or the fluid nature of music reception and ascriptions of national orientation within it.

notes I am grateful to Pamela M. Potter for her invaluable feedback on this essay. I would also like to acknowledge the editors of this volume for their detailed comments. 1. Wackernagel and Furtwängler, Wilhelm Furtwängler. 2. Dennis, “‘Honor Your German Masters,’” 275. 3. See Gilliam, “The Annexation of Anton Bruckner.” See also Riethmüller, Die Walhalla, 16–17. 4. Riethmüller, Die Walhalla, 19. See Karl Hasse’s discussion of Brahms in Von deutschen Meistern, 104. 5. See Gilliam, “The Annexation of Anton Bruckner,” 584–604. 6. Boetticher, Robert Schumann, 159. Works at the turn of the century divided Europe into three racial types: Nordic, Eastern or Alpine, and Mediterranean. Following Joseph Deniker, Madison Grant described the Nordic race as “the white man par excellence.” These designations and valuations were still common in the 1930s. See Higham, Strangers in the Land, 154, 156; Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race, 145, 186. For information on Boetticher, see Most German of the Arts, 150–51. 7. Eichenauer, Musik und Rasse, 223. For additional information regarding Eichenauer, see Potter, Most German of the Arts, 179.

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8. “Das Problem der künstlerischen Doppelnatur”: Bücken, foreword to Robert Schumann. See also Potter, Most German of the Arts, 92, 248. 9. See, for example, Hasse, Von deutschen Meistern, 92. 10. Ibid., 103. Hasse taught music at the University of Tübingen and, in 1935, the Cologne Conservatory. He was a member of the Combat League for German Culture (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur), established in 1928. Alfred Rosenberg led the organization in its quest to defend “the value of the German essence [in the] midst of present-day cultural decadence” and promote every “authentic [arteigene] expression of German cultural life” (Steinweis, “Weimar Culture,” 405–6). Hasse was one of only a few professors who openly attempted to spread Rosenberg’s ideas before Hitler’s takeover. Kater, The Twisted Muse, 152. 11. I borrow this term from Guido Heldt, “Hardly Heroes.” 12. Potter, “The Politicization of Handel.” Much of this literature focuses on Wagner, though there is significant work on Beethoven and Bruckner. This work includes (but is hardly limited to) Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics; Vaget, “Hitler’s Wagner”; Gilliam, “The Annexation of Anton Bruckner”; McClatchie, “Wagner Research.” 13. Welter, Musikgeschichte im Umriß, 184. 14. See Nauhaus, The Marriage Diaries, 31. 15. Boetticher, Robert Schumann, 186, 269, 185. See also O. Schumann, Geschichte der Deutschen Musik, 287. 16. Bücken, Robert Schumann, 38. 17. Quoted in Alan Walker, “Schumann and His Background,” in Robert Schumann, 26. 18. Wagner, My Life, 319. 19. See Walker, “Schumann and His Background,” 26, specifically Schumann’s negative opinion of Wagner’s conducting of Fidelio on August 11, 1848. 20. R. Schumann, On Music and Musicians (1946), 250. 21. See Daverio, Robert Schumann, 332–34. 22. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 3:117. 23. Bücken, Robert Schumann, 24. 24. Boetticher, Robert Schumann, 272. 25. “Ein herrliches Symbol der Einheit der deutschen Romantik” (ibid., 279). 26. See Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 163. 27. Pfitzner, Sämtliche Schriften, 4:119. Translated in John Williamson, The Music of Hans Pfitzner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 48. 28. Valentin, “Robert Schumann,” 323. 29. Eichenauer, Musik und Rasse, 223. See also Ostwald, Schumann: The Inner Voices, 107. 30. Bücken, Robert Schumann, 5, 62–63. There have been numerous diagnoses of Schumann’s mental illness. Ostwald chronicles this history and concludes that the most comprehensive diagnosis is “a major affective disorder” (Schumann: The Inner Voices, 303). 31. In a footnote Boetticher lists myriad sources from the early twentieth century focusing on Schumann’s mental illness (Robert Schumann, 170).

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32. Gilman explains that Karl Jaspers was relieved of his position in 1937, and all followers of the “Jewish science” of psychoanalysis were exiled from the German scientific community (“The Mad Man as Artist,” 593). 33. See Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 80; Bryand, Confronting the “Good Death,” 20. For a history of the Nazi path toward the “good death,” see Bryand, 20–50. 34. See Gilman, “The Mad Man as Artist,” 589. 35. See Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 157. 36. Bryand, Confronting the “Good Death,” 26. 37. Ibid., 50. 38. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” 117. 39. Boetticher, Robert Schumann, 170. 40. Struck, Robert Schumann, 20–22. 41. Pfitzner, “Hans Pfitzner über Robert Schumanns Violinkonzert.” 42. See E. B., “Review of Concerto in D minor, for Violin and Orchestra, Arranged for Violin and Piano by Schumann,” Music and Letters 19, no. 3 (1938): 362. 43. Joseph Goebbels even threatened to close Schott Verlag if Menuhin was allowed to perform the official premiere of the work. Ulmann, Die veruntreute Handschrift, 70. 44. “Festfolge,” Archiv Berliner Philharmoniker, Berlin. See also “ ‘Kraft durch Freude’ statt kulturellen Snobismus,” Völkischer Beobachter, November 27, 1936, 1; Struck, Robert Schumann, 21–22; and Daverio, Robert Schumann, 16. 45. “‘Kraft durch Freude’ statt kulturellen Snobismus,” 1–2. 46. The musicologist Karl Blessinger (1888–1962), who joined the Nazi Party in 1932, made a similar connection between the two concertos in his Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Mahler (1939): And if today musicians and music lovers still regret that their favorite compositions, i.e., the Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, the Hebrides overture, the Violin Concerto, etc., have disappeared from the programme, we may first counter that it is infinitely more regrettable that highly significant works by German composers, such as the Schumann Violin Concerto, threatened to disappear completely because of Jewish intrigues. (42, translated in C. Brown, A Portrait of Mendelssohn, 496–97)

See also Struck, Robert Schumann, 22. 47. Hermann Killer, “Bekenntnis zum ewigen Deutschland,” 1. See Struck, Robert Schumann, 22; Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 42. 48. Struck, Robert Schumann, 22. 49. See Daverio, Robert Schumann, 17. 50. The regime similarly protected the legacy of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843). Like Schumann, Hölderlin was officially presented as protofascist, though his sanity deteriorated in 1805. See Unger, Friedrich Hölderlin, 129–31. Eugen Gottlob Winkler, in Der späte Hölderlin, focused on the poet’s late works, while ignoring his short problematic poems written during the actual period of insanity. Winkler described his last great hymns, such as “Patmos,” as the completion of Hölderlin’s artistic mission.

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51. Kretschmar, quoted in Bücken, Robert Schumann, 124. 52. Speech of June 1943, by Hans Johst, the president of the Reichsschriftumskammer (printed first in Musik im Kriege 3, no. 4 [1943]), reproduced in Lovisa, Musikkritik im Nationalsozialismus, 395. 53. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 163. 54. Goethe, Faust I and II (1984), 301. 55. Sams, “Schumann and Faust,” 543; Brendel, “Robert Schumann,” 333. 56. Botstein, “History, Rhetoric,” 5. 57. See Evans, “The Emergence of Nazi Ideology,” 38. 58. The “German character” at the time included Romantic “elements of struggle, heroicism, masculinity, intellectual depth, passion, and didacticism” (Potter, Most German of the Arts, 224). 59. Ibid., 244. 60. Kater, The Twisted Muse, 87. 61. Sammons, Heinrich Heine, 349. 62. “Eine geistige Abhängigkeit” (Boetticher, Robert Schumann, 108). See also 324–25. 63. Hasse, Von deutschen Meistern, 96. 64. Korte was also a composer and director. See “Teilnachlass Korte,” Universitätsund Landesbibliothek Münster, www.ulb.uni-muenster.de (accessed November 17, 2008). 65. Korte, Robert Schumann, 76. Other writers have also claimed that Schumann ignored or did not recognize the irony of Heine’s text. Debussy explained, “Schumann understood nothing about Heinrich Heine, or at least, that’s my impression. He might be a great genius, but he could never capture that fine spirit of irony that Heine embodies” (quoted in Daverio, Robert Schumann, 210). Daverio, however, argues that Schumann was not as insensitive as Debussy suggests. For further discussion of the Nazi response to Schumann’s Heine settings, see Youens, Heinrich Heine and the Lied, 208–10. 66. See L. E. Hirsch, A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany. 67. “Bei den Liedern konnte man noch Schumann singen, wenn es ein HeineText war.” Interview with Paula Lindberg-Salomon, who belonged to the founding circle of the League, in Broder and Geisel, Premiere und Pogrom, 177. 68. Nathan, “Hermann Schey in Kulturbund,” 13. See also R. M. “Aus dem jüdischen Vortragssalon,” review, Jüdische Rundschau, December 28, 1934, 11. 69. Friedland, “Heine-Kompositionen,” 175. 70. See Goebel, Eichendorff ’s Scholarly Reception, 1. 71. Landau, The Lied, 48–50. 72. See, especially chapter 2 of, Hirsch, A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany; Sponheuer, “Musik auf einer ‘kulturellen und physischen Insel.’” 73. Reich, “The Correspondence,” 207. 74. See Daverio, Robert Schumann, 326–27. See also R. Larry Todd, “Introduction,” in Finson and Todd, Mendelssohn and Schumann, 6–7. For differences between the composers, see Reich, “The Correspondence,” 206; Steinberg, “Schumann’s Homelessness,” 53, 66.

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75. For more information on Schumann’s views on Mendelssohn’s composition, see Plantinga, Schumann as Critic, 263–67. 76. Reich, “The Correspondence,” 206; Appel, “Actually, Taken Directly from Family Life,” 183. 77. Bücken, Robert Schumann, 52. 78. Korte, Robert Schumann, 86. 79. Hasse, Von deutschen Meistern, 93–94. 80. Boetticher, Robert Schumann, 262. 81. See Blessinger, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Mahler, 9; Gerigk and Stengel, Lexikon, 180; Moser, Kleine deutsche Musikgeschichte, 245. It should be mentioned that Moser departed from convention when he explained that the ban on Mendelssohn’s music since 1933 was the result of political “necessity” rather than an “absolute lack of value” in his work. 82. See Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, xxii–xxv; C. Brown, A Portrait of Mendelssohn, 492–93. 83. See also Levi, Music in the Third Reich, 71. 84. Pfitzner, quoted in Kater, Composers in the Nazi Era, 161. The Manchester Guardian reported on Orff ’s commission in “Atonal Music Condemned,” June 8, 1938, Wiener Library Archive, Leo Baeck Institute, New York. 85. See Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, 144–64; Levi, Music in the Third Reich, 72–73. 86. Karl Wiener, “Über Mendelssohns Sommernachtstraum-Musik,” in the program of December 1936, Fritz-Wisten-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. 87. For the excited report about the possibility of receiving the Mendelssohn statue, see the article “Um ein Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Denkmal,” Jüdische Rundschau 7 (October 1936): 5. The statue’s destruction was reported shortly thereafter in the Morning Post, November 14, 1936, Wiener Library Archives, Leo Baeck Institute, New York. See also Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, xx–xxi. 88. Nathan, “Reinster deutscher Klassicist,” 288. 89. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 39. See also Potter, “What Is ‘Nazi Music,’?” 436–38. 90. Potter, “Music in the Third Reich,” 95, 97. See also Levi, Music in the Third Reich, 47.

II POPULAR INFLUENCES

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5 At the Interstice between “Popular” and “Classical” Schumann’s Poems of Queen Mary Stuart and European Sentimentality at Midcentury Jon W. Finson

“Her face, her form, have been so deeply impressed upon the imagination,” wrote Sir Walter Scott in 1820, that, even at the distance of nearly three centuries, it is unnecessary to remind the most ignorant and uninformed reader of the striking traits which characterize that remarkable countenance, which seems at once to combine our ideas of the majestic, the pleasing, and the brilliant, leaving us to doubt whether they express most happily the queen, her beauty, or the accomplished woman. Who is there, at the very mention of Mary Stuart’s name, that has not her countenance before him, familiar as that of the mistress of his youth, or the favorite daughter of his advanced age? . . . . That brow, so truly open and regal—those eyebrows, so regularly graceful, which yet were saved from the charge of regular insipidity by the beautiful effect of the hazel eyes which they overarched, and which seem to utter a thousand histories—the nose, with all its Grecian precision of outline—the mouth, so well proportioned, so sweetly formed . . . . the stately, swanlike neck, form a countenance, the like of which we know not to have existed in any other character moving in that high class of life, where the actresses as well as actors command general and undivided attention.1

Thus does Mary Stuart make her dramatic entrance in The Abbot, tenth in the series of Scott’s Waverley novels that so captured the imagination of readers all over Europe and North America, with titles such as Guy Mannering (1815), Rob Roy (1818), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), Ivanhoe (1820), and over twenty other volumes. Just as we discover the vivid impression left by the ill-fated monarch on the nineteenth-century mind, so we also encounter the almost prurient physicality of Scott’s description. It bears no small kinship to the present-day 69

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tabloid obsession with “the royals” (the unfortunate Diana Spencer could substitute for the doomed Mary Stuart with small modifications and updating of language). Scott’s novels remind us in their widespread currency that some nineteenth-century literature (for instance, the writing of authors such as Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain) held very broad appeal. Those who did not encounter Scott’s tales as literature could find them dramatized as plays or rendered in song almost as soon as they appeared in print. Schubert was not alone in his settings of verse from The Lady of the Lake (“Ave Maria, Jungfrau mild!” and Ellen’s other songs). The epic poem comes down to us in forms as various as the widely popular sheet music for “Hail to the Chief ” (from Canto 19’s “Boat Song,” music often attributed to James Sanderson and published in 1812), Benjamin Carr’s Six Ballads from the Poem of The Lady of the Lake (also popular sheet music, 1810), and Rossini’s Donna del Lago (1819).2 Other entries from the “classical” canon based on Scott’s fiction from the first half of the nineteenth century would include Berlioz’s Waverley and Rob Roy overtures, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche, Flotow’s Rob Roy, and Marschner’s Der Templer und die Jüdin (based on Ivanhoe). Returning to the “popular” vein we would find Charles Gilfert’s settings in 1813 of “Allen-a-Dale” and “A Weary Lot Is Thine, Fair Maid” from the epic poem Rokeby. The list goes on almost endlessly.3 Our very sharp present-day distinction between “popular” and “classical” culture has come about comparatively recently,4 a byproduct of the divergence between these two cultural spheres begun in the nineteenth century and realized fully only after World War II. As late as the first half of the twentieth century “high-brow art” reached the general public via popular media (witness the regular broadcasts on a mainline network by Toscanini and the NBC Symphony until after World War II, or early television broadcasts of “middle- and highbrow” plays and operas during the 1950s). And many of us remember that chief among the encores recorded by great opera singers such as Nellie Melba (1861– 1931) and John McCormick (1884–1945) were such chestnuts as “Home! Sweet Home!” and “Annie Laurie,” respectively. Closer to the period and milieu that concern us, Jenny Lind (1820–87), who made her American debut under the auspices of P. T. Barnum, regularly included “Home! Sweet Home!” and “ ’Tis the Last Rose of Summer” (from Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies) in her recitals.5 So taken was Robert Schumann with “the Swedish Nightingale” after she participated with Clara in a Viennese concert on January 10, 1847, that he dedicated a volume of songs to her, Sechs Gesänge von Wilfried von der Neun, Op. 89 (a collection addressed at the end of this essay), partly because of her wide popular appeal.6 Neither was the composer immune to middle-brow blandishments of verse such as “My Heart’s in the Highlands” by Robert Burns (most famous in its setting by the wonderfully talented popular composer Henry Russell, author of “Woodman! Spare That Tree!”

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and “A Life on the Ocean Wave”). The Burns lyric appears, translated by Wilhelm Gerhard as “Hochländers Abschied,” in the third volume of Myrthen, Op. 25, along with many other poems by the Scottish poet sprinkled throughout Schumann’s output of solo and part songs. The composer’s encounter with Gerhard at an 1840 soirée in the home of Livia and Richard Frege in Leipzig probably accounts for much of his interest in Burns. There may well have been an underlying political motivation as well, beyond the general Romantic attraction that Scotland held for nineteenth-century middle-class European culture.7 This brings us full circle to Sir Walter Scott and his voluptuous description of Mary Stuart. Scott seems at first to surface little in Schumann’s diaries, in lectures he heard as a university student and then in the few novels he read as an adult.8 But Kazuko Ozawa reminds us that the composer’s father, August Schumann, made the family fortune by publishing pocketbook translations of foreign literature, “especially editions of works by Walter Scott and Lord Byron,” including Waverley. She continues, “One may assume that Schumann from childhood on was quite well acquainted with the entirety of Scott’s works . . . . . Among the plans for operas entered in [his] Project Book are to be found two Scottish subjects: The Last Stuart [Bonnie Prince Charlie] and also the history of Mary Stuart and her favorite David Rizzio, as related in Schiller’s play.”9 In short, the composer shared the general enthusiasm for the content of Scott’s novels, which lie a good deal above present-day paperback romances in literary merit but stand substantially lower than, say, Melville in philosophical content and psychological insight. Schumann also evinced the middle-class fascination with tragedies that overtook the high nobility, even as Americans (who abolished aristocratic titles over two centuries ago) do today.

Robert, Clara, and “The Poems of Queen Mary Stuart” At least as immediately relevant to the compositional history of Schumann’s Op. 135 was Clara’s shared fascination with royal tragedy and sentimental verse. The usual tale of the opus has the composer’s decline and fall parallel the doomed monarch’s. Thus we read in the redoubtable John Daverio’s account, “Brooding yet eloquent, the Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, Op. 135, were completed on 15 December [1852]. But although Schumann worked on this set, his last major contribution to the song literature, ‘with joy and trepidation,’ his joy would not last long.”10 At least Daverio continues with an accurate, if not entirely balanced account of the rest of December, during which the Schumanns celebrated the holiday season in exuberant style. The prize for the implacably bleak characterization of Op. 135 as a reflection of the composer’s deterioration goes to Eric Sams:

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One of the saddest entries in Schumann’s diary records his joy on completing these last five dismal songs. We can only conjecture what personal meaning he found in them. The first begins with ‘I am going away.’ The last ends ‘Save me.’ Soon after their completion came his mental breakdown, his attempt to drown himself in the Rhine, and his incarceration at the asylum at Endenich, where in July 1856 he died.11

Clara and Robert probably found the poems by Mary Stuart together in the local Kölnische Zeitung, where an unattributed translation by Gisbert Freiherr von Vincke of five appeared in preview on November 11 and 17, 1852. The couple apparently did not use Vincke’s anthology Rose und Distel: Poesien aus England und Schottland as their source.12 Clara entered the versions from the newspaper in the couple’s joint Copies of Poems for Setting,13 and along with a new purse, bracelets, soap, and considerable cash for the Yuletide came Robert’s settings to celebrate the season. According to Clara’s diary entry on Christmas day, “Robert gave me the gift of songs with texts by Mary Stuart, his first attempt at composition in a long time.”14 Op. 135 represented a multiply sentimental gesture, as a “song bouquet”—“a gift for specific people and groups of people addressing specifically designated occasions and purposes”15—as a composition in the female voice undertaken in honor of a beloved wife, and finally as a fashionably emotive cycle that had just appeared in the popular press. Only later did the piece assume a retrospective role in the narrative of its composer’s decline, after Schumann failed to secure a publisher for Op. 135 several times in 1853 and therefore offered it with Clara’s blessing to Carl Siegel in 1855 as the last complete work available to him in Endenich.16 But in all aspects, from creation to final sale, The Poems of Queen Mary Stuart tell Clara’s story at least as much as Robert’s. In fact during Clara’s residence in Baden-Baden (1863–73) after Robert’s death, she became well acquainted with Vincke’s closest friend and confidant, Gustav zu Putlitz.17 By the time the Schumanns had embarked on their joint project, the lamentable story of Mary Stuart had long since been a cottage industry. Michael Paulson exposes just the tip of the literary iceberg devoted to the Scottish monarch. Plays begin little more than nine years after her execution in 1587, logically enough in France with Antoine de Montchrestien’s La Reine d’Ecosse (written in 1596, published in 1601) and in Italy with Tommasso Campanella’s lost La tragedia della regina di Scozia (1598).18 In the seventeenth century, epic poems or dramas devoted to the subject appeared in Roman Catholic countries, mostly France and Spain, written by Lope de Vega (La corona tragica, 1627, epic poem), Charles Regnault (Marie Stuard, 1639, play), Juan Baptiste Diamante (La reina Maria Estuarda, Madrid, 1660, play), Manuel de Gallegos (La reyna Maria Estuarda, 1660, play), and Edme Boursault (Marie Stuard, 1683, play). In the eighteenth century we find works such as Vittorio Alfieri’s Maria Stuarda (1788), a possible influence on a drama Robert Schumann certainly knew: Schiller’s Maria Stuart, first presented in 1800 and published in 1801.19 And then

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of course there was Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda (1834), based directly on Schiller’s play and arrayed in a long line of the composer’s operas about the English and Scottish nobility, including Elisabetta, o Il castello di Kenilworth (after Scott, 1829), Anna Bolena (1830), Lucia di Lammermoor (after Scott, 1835), and Roberto Devereux, ossia Il conte di Essex (1837). So far as we know, Schumann attended no performances of these particular Donizetti operas,20 but as an alert editor of a music journal with far-flung correspondents, he must have noted them. With his well-documented proclivities for verse by British and Scottish poets and prose by Scottish authors, the composer was neither ignorant of nor disinterested in stories of this ilk.21 In parallel to the catalogue of major works—biographies, epic poems, dramas, operas—about Mary Stuart’s life runs an industry of humbler songs that reaches back at least into the eighteenth century. The nursery rhyme “Mistress Mary, quite contrary, / How does your garden grow” is often taken as an indirectly derisive commentary on Mary, Queen of Scots, Mary I, Queen of England, or both. As we shall see later, Henry Harington (1727–1816), a popular composer of glees, satirical catches, and sentimental songs in a modest vein, offered “A Latin Prayer Used by Mary Queen of Scots before her Execution” as a three-voice, single-sheet part song around 1790 (republished 1792 and 1795).22 Much closer to the period that concerns us we find Songs of Mary Queen of Scots, published around 1853 in the United States by Miller and Beacham (Baltimore) but almost certainly pirated from a British edition with lyrics written by “Mrs. Crawford” and music by George Barker (1812–76).23 Barker catered to a less august public in such widely current numbers as “The White Squall, a Celebrated Sea Song,” “Mary Blane,” and “I’ll Be Leaving Thee in Sorrow, Annie!,” the last sung by Christy’s Minstrels and published in London sometime in the 1850s.24 Crawford and Barker’s Songs of Mary Queen of Scots include five numbers based on actual historical events, but with no pretense to texts authored by the monarch. They begin with “The Royal Bridal of the Bride with her Maidens,” which depicts Mary’s wedding to the dauphin (later Francis II of France). In a preface (so typical of sentimental songs during the period, like those found in Schumann’s Kulmann Lieder, Op. 104) Crawford writes, “Her dress was very splendid, all the skill and resources of Parisian art having been called into requisition on this interesting and important occasion. Her robes were so brilliantly ornamented with diamonds and gorgeous embroidery, as to baffle description” (reminding us of the fascination in recent times with Princess Diana’s gowns, exhibited publicly in 2006 at Kensington Palace). Crawford and Barker’s third song, “The Captivity,” deals with Mary’s “escape . . . . from Lochleven Castle, and the subsequent defeat of her army at Langside,” then the “long and weary imprisonment of eighteen years,” during which she was “tried before Commissioners appointed under the Great Seal of England, (but without being allowed the assistance of counsel, or any proper facilities for conducting her defense) . . . . [she]

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was found guilty, and condemned to die.” Songs four and five in Barker’s set address a scandal attached to Mary during her rule of Scotland: her special favor toward Pierre de Chastelard, who had accompanied her retinue from France as her private secretary and became amorously obsessed with her. In February 1562 he was discovered hiding under her bed, subsequently arrested, and executed.25 The elaborate cover engraving that adorns Songs of Mary Queen of Scots speaks to this affair (Figure 5.1), and the last two songs in the set record the infatuation of “Chatelar” and then “Chatelar’s Farewell” on the morning of his death. Again we find a prurient interest in the private lives of royalty not

Figure 5.1. Cover engraving depicting Mary Stuart with “Chatelar.” By permission of the Music Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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unknown in modern times. All of these songs proceeded from Mrs. Crawford’s imagination, based on the historical record. The most relevant song for our purposes here, however, is Crawford and Barker’s second number, “The Embarkation or Farewell Dear France!,” prefaced in part, “It is recorded by Brantôme . . . . [that] she watched for several hours with tearful eyes, the slowly receding shores of France, . . . . exclaiming with prophetic correctness, ‘Farewell, dear France! You disappear from my sight; it is all over! Farewell, sweet France! I shall see you nevermore!’” Pierre de Brantôme (ca. 1539–1614) accompanied Mary when she left France for Scotland, and he reports her exclaiming tearfully: Adieu France . . . . c’est bien à cette heure, ma chere France, que ie vous pers du tout de veuë, puis que la nuit obscure & jalousie de mon contentement de vous voir tant queue j’eusse pû, m’apporte un voile noir devant les yeux pour me priver d’un tel bien. Adieu, donc, ma chere France, que ie vous pers du tout de veuë, ie ne vous verray jamais plus . . . . Adieu, la France, cela est fait, Adieu la France, ie pense ne vous voir jamais plus.26

Mrs. Crawford renders the utterance and scene as “Farewell, dear France! land of my love, farewell! / These weeping eyes my parting anguish tell,” and in the third verse she continues: “Farewell dear France! adieu thou pleasant shore! / I feel these eyes shall ne’er behold thee more.” Barker’s music is decidedly less eloquent, with the right hand of the piano doubling the voice, two simple chords, almost completely regular rhythm, and an unchallenging vocal line with just one appoggiatura on the word love (Example 5.1). The song epitomizes the genteel style of the mid-nineteenth century, with its mildly Italianate musical flavor and slightly elevated speech (“thee,” “thou,” and so forth). Henry Russell would have proceeded more adroitly and elaborately (his songs, though saccharine by our standards, are beautifully written), but he would have employed the same basic elements. At first glance Schumann’s Mary Stuart songs to Vincke’s verse would seem quite distant from George Barker and Mrs. Crawford’s sentimentally middlebrow efforts. Vincke (1813–92) had a considerable reputation: initially a jurist by profession, he later devoted himself exclusively to literature, serving on the board of the German Shakespeare Society and later as its president. In Rose und Distel he translated poetry by David Rizzio as well as by Elizabeth I. But the Schumanns would not have known Vincke to be the translator when they found the five texts in the Kölnische Zeitung; in Op. 135 they simply published this slice of middle-class culture the way they found it (Table 5.1). In his later anthology, Vincke gives the original languages for all the poems under their title in his first edition, and he also leaves a sketchy set of largely inaccurate notes on his sources. In fact we can attribute only one poem with relative certainty to Mary Stuart.27 Helmut Schanze and Krischan Schulte list the translations under her name, though skeptically, in their otherwise meticulous volume on the sources for Schumann’s song texts. But in a rare oversight they omit to

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Example 5.1. Beginning of Crawford and Barker’s “The Embarkation or Farewell Dear France!”

mention that Hans-Joachim Zimmermann provided a very thorough account of the probable origins of the verse over three decades ago.28 If the words to Mrs. Crawford’s “Farewell to France” appear somewhat familiar, for instance, Zimmermann determines that Vincke’s “Abschied von Frankreich” finds its origins in the self-same remarks of Brantôme used by the Victorian lyricist, though they came to Vincke by quite a different route. The German translator’s probable source was Jean Monnet’s Anthologie Françoise (1765), where the poem had been placed as a deliberate ruse by Anne-Gabriel Meusnier de Querlon (1702–80). He misrepresented it as appearing in “a manuscript by Buckingham,” before later admitting the imposture in a letter to Barthélemi Mercier. Meusnier de Querlon’s original French runs in part, “Adieu, plaisant pays de France, / O ma patrie, La plus cherie, / Qui as nourri ma jeune enfance! / Adieu, France, adieu mes beaux jours”—obviously based on Brantôme.29 Its plaintive tone held the same sentimental appeal for Vincke (and the Schumanns) as it had for Mrs. Crawford. Vincke’s source for “Nach der Geburt ihres Sohnes” was somewhat humbler: England und Schottland: Reisetagebuch (Braunschweig, 1852), a travelogue by Fanny Lewald. She discovered the verse as a piece of graffiti inscribed on the wall of an antechamber to the room in which Mary gave birth to her son James VI,

Table 5.1. Contents of Schumann’s Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart and Textual Sources for Translations in Giesbert Freiherr von Vincke’s Rose und Distel Title and Number in Schumann

Key

Vincke’s Source*

Original Source*

Language*

Probable Author*

1. “Abschied von Frankreich”

e

England und Schottland by Fanny Lewald (1852)

Anthologie Françoise ed. by Monnet (1765)

French

Anne-Gabriel Meunier de Querlon

2. “Nach der Geburt ihres Sohnes”

e

England und Schottland by Fanny Lewald (1852)

Lewald

Scottish

Anonymous graffiti in Edinburgh Castle

3. “An die Königin Elizabeth”

a

Beiträge zur neueren Geschichte by Friedrich von Raumer (1836)

British Museum Ms. Cotton Caligula

Italian

Mary Stuart (?) (manuscript in copyist’s hand)

4. “Abshied von der Welt”

e

England und Schottland by Fanny Lewald (1852)

Bodleian Library manuscript

French

Mary Stuart (autograph)

5. “Gebet”

e

Anecdotes of Some Distinguished Persons by Broadsheet; then The William Seward (1795–97; 1804 ed.) European Magazine 22 (1792)

Latin

Henry Harington

*After Hans-Joachim Zimmermann, “Die Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart: Gisbert Vincke, Robert Schumann, und eine sentimentale Tradition,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 214 (1977): 294–324.

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King of Scotland (and later James I of England). It was written in Scots: “Lord Jesu Chryst that Crownit was with Thornise / Preserve the Birth quhais Badgie heir is born.”30 Mary remembered very little Scots from her early childhood (she grew up speaking and writing French, knew a smattering of Italian, Spanish, and Latin, and learned English only as an adult),31 and she is unlikely to have authored the text of the prayer (though one of her retainers could have). Zimmermann, observing that Lewald was the only writer ever to attribute the text to Mary, concludes that we do not know who or even when it was written.32 Perhaps the best sentimental invention of all, however, appears in the prayer attributed to Mary “hours before her execution” in Rose und Distel (“Gebet” in Vincke’s and Schumann’s texts). History leaves a detailed account of Mary’s last moments (witnessed by many), and after declining absolution from the Protestant Dean of Peterborough on account of her resolute Roman Catholicism, she laid her head on the block, while repeating the words “In manuas tuas, Domine, confide spiritum meum” (Luke 23:46 and also Psalm 30:5 in the Roman psalter).33 “Gebet” alludes to the beginning of Psalm 30, “In te, Domine, speravi,” but the rest of the text does not continue along these lines. While Mary may well have recited psalms in Latin, her command of the language hardly sufficed to compose an original prayer. It appears in literary sources relatively late, first among William Seward’s Anecdotes of Distinguished Persons (1795), from there transmitted to James P. Andrews’s History of Great Britain (1796), and then to the fifth edition of Horace Walpole’s A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors (1806). Any of these sources might have been available to an ardent anglophile such as Vincke. But more interesting is the attribution in Seward’s Anecdotes, the apparent starting place of the translator’s text: “Immediately before her execution [Mary] repeated the following Latin Prayer, composed by herself, and which has been set to a beautiful plaintive air by that elegant composer, Dr. Harrington [sic], at the request of the EDITOR, as an embellishment to these volumes.”34 Henry Harington had actually set the poem first around 1790 in a broadsheet, whence it made its way into The European Magazine 22 (August 1792) and then, in an expanded version, into Seward. But where did Harington procure the text? Zimmermann relates that the British composer of popular glees and part songs possessed a large number of missals, breviaries, and books of hours. Among these we find a missal that “belonged to Mary Queen of Scots, [and] was presented to Lord Harington, of Exton, Ruthlandshire, by the Princess Elizabeth, Daughter of James the First,” according to the auction catalogue of Henry Harington’s estate. John Harington, first Baron of Exton, was Elizabeth Stuart’s tutor, and Henry Harington inherited his books. The composer most probably invented the “Death Prayer” based on the missal in his possession and then published it as authentic. It remained for Seward to incorporate the text with its reworked setting into his Anecdotes and to append a note connecting the

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Latin prayer to the hours preceding Mary’s execution.35 Of such fables is history sometimes made. This leaves the two sonnets that comprise numbers three and four in Schumann’s song cycle (4 and 5 in Rose und Distel). These appear in multiple sources available to Vincke, the first sonnet in Italian, the second in French. No version of the Italian sonnet “Il pensier che mi nuoce insieme e gioua” survived in anything but a scribe’s manuscript before Lewald, Seward, and others reprinted it. Zimmermann gives it the benefit of the doubt on account of its imagery, which resembles that in a letter Mary wrote to Elizabeth I in September 1568.36 However, this type of evidence is somewhat tenuous, and we really have nothing concrete to connect “An die Königin Elisabeth” directly to the imprisoned Scottish queen. Thus we are left with the fifth entry in Rose und Distel (no. 4 in Op. 135), translated from the French in one of Mary’s autographs now in the collection of the Bodleian Library. Zimmermann comments, “Since the Oxford manuscript is not an autograph copy of somebody else’s poem, its authenticity is thoroughly assured. The sonnet derives from the last years of Mary’s imprisonment and agrees with her declarations in letters and to her retinue upon the pronouncement of her sentence.”37 Vincke’s texts, then, have more in common with Mrs. Crawford’s than might seem at first to be the case. The popular lyricist made no pretenses about the fictitious nature of her lyrics, though she based them all on the history of Mary’s life. Whether Vincke suspected the dubious provenance of most of his Mary Stuart poems remains open to question. Zimmermann examines Vincke’s notes to his texts and finds them at best incomplete or inexact, at worst somewhat misleading.38 In any case, the translator collected them for their slightly sensational appeal as the ostensible products of a doomed monarch. Traced back to the authors who deliberately invented them or tried to pass them off as authentic, most are not of an entirely different order from Mrs. Crawford’s poems. A couple of Vincke’s translations have more literary merit than Crawford’s verse, others little more. But both collections participate in fashionable mid-nineteenthcentury sentimentality.

Schumann’s Settings Clara and Robert Schumann did not question the authenticity of the verse attributed to Mary Stuart in the Kölnische Zeitung. But if Robert’s settings and Clara’s delight in them are any indication, they too were drawn to the fashionable sentimentality of the subject matter (since it would be difficult to claim a place for this material amid great German literature). Of course it would be absurd to compare George Barker’s modest settings to Schumann’s (though a comparison of, say, Henry Russell’s Italianate setting of “My Heart’s in the Highlands” with Schumann’s folkloric “Hochländers Abschied” would yield

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different results, if we discounted the disparate styles). But Schumann does not indulge the folkloric that he deemed essential in settings of Burns for Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart.39 Instead Op. 135 bears the standard hallmarks of his late style for Lieder, which include a tendency toward unusual chromatic progressions, melodies that are not periodic, declamation of text that tends to efface regular poetic meter (where it exists), and irregular phrases. What Ulrich Mahlert so aptly calls the “quadratic style” no longer represents a given in Schumann after his Dresden years, though he could still employ it as an expressive tool when he wished to delineate uncomplicated personae or sentiments (see “Singet nicht in Trauertönen” from Op. 98a, for instance). Much depended on the text, its poetic structure, meter, syntax, and semantic content. Within the bounds of his less accessible late style, however, Schumann still catered to a public that needed recognizable touchstones, and in the Gedichte these sometimes take the form of quite familiar musical topoi. In “Abschied von Frankreich” the channel voyage reflected in lines such as “Mich trennt das Boot vom Glück so weit!” elicits a slow, stylized “wave” pattern from Schumann (Example 5.2a), not entirely unlike that in “Loreley” (Example 5.2b), a ballad from Op. 53 composed in April 1840. Schumann wrote other barcarolles, of course, though sunnier ones, such as the Venetian gondola song in the third volume of Myrthen, Op. 25, with text by Thomas Moore (of “ ’Tis the Last Rose of Summer”). In other ways “Abschied von Frankreich” exhibits the “irregularities” of the late style, but its topos at least offers instant recognition for anybody playing it at home (the piano part is not difficult). The much more structurally complicated sonnet “Abschied von der Welt” nonetheless elicits another readily accessible topos, an apposite funeral dirge cum plaint (Example 5.3a). These too appear regularly throughout Schumann’s output of songs, from “Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome” to “Der Soldat” to “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” (Example 5.3b), which, in its sparse texture, repeated-note melody, and halting progress, bears a passing resemblance to “Abschied von der Welt.” These two comparative examples show at a glance the difference between Schumann’s earlier and later approaches to setting text. The duple and duple-triple compound meters aside, the two songs distribute their texts differently, the later one irregularly in such a way as to efface meter, the earlier one regularly in such a way as to emphasize it. To be fair, this results in part from the structure of Vincke’s translation: lines of pentameter will always require more notes to accommodate extra syllables. Heine, on the other hand, deliberately produces a lyric in Langzeilenvers: “Ich háb’ im Tráum gewéi-nét.” But the choice of a dirge topos for “Abschied von der Welt” also regularizes the underlying phrase structure inherent in a march, far more than in some of the composer’s other settings from this period. The topoi in the Mary Stuart songs reveal Schumann’s concern for accessibility, even in the face of his later vocal style.

Example 5.2a. Beginning of “Abschied von Frankreich.”

Example 5.2b. Beginning of “Loreley.”

Example 5.3a. Opening of “Abschied von der Welt.”

Example 5.3b. Openings of “Ich hab’ im Traum,” stanza 3.

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This same concern for accessibility governed the semantic content and genre of text in both “Nach der Geburt” and “Gebet.” These are both prayers, and for this reason Schumann treats them as prose rather than adhering to the pentameter in the former and the dimeter (Vincke’s rendering of the original Latin tetrameter) in the latter. As preghiere they receive accompaniments built from block chords almost devoid of motivic content and therefore seem, by virtue of prosodic declamation and lack of pervasive lyricism, like something between recitative and arioso (see Example 5.4 by way of illustration). Only the variety of the harmony, with its fairly explicable secondary dominants, introduces a slight degree of complication. Again, however, the accompaniment would be unproblematic for a proficient amateur player and the vocal range undemanding for an amateur singer. If the verse proceeded from and appealed to middle-class sentimentality, the demands of the performance needed to fit the venue of the parlor.

Example 5.4. Beginning of “Gebet.”

Only the third number, “An die Königin Elisabeth,” demands more of singer and pianist than the limits of Hausmusik would suggest, the exception that proves the rule and also reveals the crossroads at which Schumann’s composition of Lieder stood in late 1852. Indicatively, this more technically difficult setting comes in response to one of Vincke’s two formally elaborate poems, a sonnet proceeding not from the tradition of German verse but from the family of Romance languages in which its exemplar was cast (Italian). The translation therefore falls in the traditional form: an octave subdivided into two quatrains, followed by a sestet composed of two tercets. Schumann handles the octave’s two quatrains logically enough in two parallel stanzas. But his treatment of the sestet departs from an outline of strict poetic structure to seize the drama of the sentiment, building in tension through the initial tercet but vivisecting the second one syntactically in order to emphasize the apothegm. Mary fears “naught from thee, Sister! But the rule of fate / Oft lacerates the sail in which we trust.”

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The composer addresses the last enjambed sentence with arioso. Before this point in the sestet, however, Schumann requires some vehemence from the pianist and places some fairly dramatic leaps in the vocal part (Example 5.5). This song, more than any other in the cycle, assumes an operatic mien that looks presciently toward the public Liederabend and the age of recordings by professional singers.

Example 5.5. Opening of the sestet from “An die Königin Elizabeth.”

The Interstice between Popular and Classical The songs in Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, then, lie at a juncture between several levels of culture. Most of the texts proceed from and appeal to a middle-class tradition of sentimentality, which includes an interest not only in tragic death but also in the fortunes and misfortunes of celebrities, both currents that suffuse popular culture today but express themselves with particular vividness in the mid-nineteenth century. With the exception of the two sonnets, Vincke’s translations are middle-brow—more elevated than Mrs. Crawford’s lyrics, but not entirely different in kind. Schumann’s settings, more finely wrought and sophisticated than the music of George Barker, still lie mainly in the domain

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of a loftier Hausmusik. Our quandary comes in what to make of this intersection between popular sentimentality and classical setting. Just raising this question disturbs some readers and even elicits protest. But acknowledging the conflicting currents of culture lies at the heart of understanding this music and its milieu. Schumann participated in the popular currents of his time in two ways (if we understand popular in its mid-nineteenth-century sense of catering to the middle classes, either commercial or intellectual, and not in its present-day sense of aiming toward mass culture with a wider range that includes the working classes as well—a phenomenon in its infancy during this period). Some of the composer’s pieces actually aim to be more widely accessible, while others employ popular culture in an almost modernist sense, as the raw material of ironic intellectuality. In his treasured biography of the composer, John Daverio offers a fine commentary on this quandary involving the first kind of middle-brow content in “Schumann and the Biedermeier Sensibility”: If Romantic music tends toward an esotericism that drives composers and their public even farther apart, then the music of Biedermeier culture is sustained by a variety of institutions, the choral society and choral festival chief among them, in which the gap between the producer and consumer is considerably narrower. . . . . Here Carl Dahlhaus’s analysis of that sensibility may help us assess Schumann’s ties with it. For Dahlhaus, Biedermeier culture combines conviviality, bourgeois self-display, and an educational function, all of which are in turn projected in actual musical technique. . . . . The convivial side of Schumann’s art during [his later] period is clearly reflected in his assiduous cultivation of unaccompanied choral music and his active engagement with the institutions that sustained it.40

Of course, the Dresden Liedertafel also occasioned in part the composer’s renewed interest in solo songs (since they too appeared on programs of choral societies). And to Dahlhaus’s list we could add “fashionable sentimentality,” especially in postrevolutionary Germany. We must count many other pieces among these Biedermeier works in Schumann’s catalogue. In the popular middle-class vein we encounter Album für die Jugend, “the locus classicus of Schumann’s pedagogically conceived Hausmusik of the later 1840s.”41 To this we could add the Drei Klaviersonaten für die Jugend, Op. 118, the Lieder für die Jugend, Op. 79, and the Sieben Lieder nach Elisabeth Kulmann, Op. 104 (the last with distinctly sentimental roots in the vast poetic literature on the death of children). To realize how deeply works in this family struck into the popular consciousness, we need only think of Op. 68’s “Fröhlicher Landmann, von der Arbeit zurückkehrend” (no. 10), which still serves as the very symbol of an idyllically uncomplicated agrarian life in the soundtrack for the opening of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz. All of these Schumann collections trace their roots to Kinderszenen, Op. 15, written as an adult

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retrospective, but with a nostalgic sentimentality also found in works like the Kerner Liederreihe, Op. 35. Such pieces were meant as comfort for both hearth and home, “to be found,” as Goethe once wrote in his review of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (a touchstone in Schumann’s Op. 79), “at least where sensible people dwell, on the sill under the mirror, or wherever else song- and cookbooks are wont to be placed, to be opened at moments of high or low spirits.”42 In seeking to account for this seeming preoccupation with sentimentally nostalgic poetry of modest quality during Schumann’s later years, Ulrich Mahlert writes in conjunction with Sechs Gesänge nach Wilfried von der Neun, Op. 89 (as mentioned earlier, dedicated to Jenny Lind), that it touched on a certain “post-March” dejection. According to Mahlert this “retreat into the idyllic” entailed the use of natural imagery focusing on the departure of spring (as opposed to the expectant progression from winter to spring), on autumnal scenes, and on valediction.43 This last theme also pervades the Elisabeth Kulmann songs and the Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart. It reinforced the popular sentimentality pervading western European culture of the time and connected to the tradition of which Zimmermann writes. The second sense in which popular culture enters into Schumann’s music has much more to do with the avant-garde process called “defamiliarization,” which we see increasingly in late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century art. It involves the construction of elaborate creations from commonplace objects. In Schumann’s music we find this, for example, in Papillons, Op. 2, where the composer molds a number of trivial pieces such as one might encounter at a dance into a larger, more sophisticated composite. The effect can fascinate but also disconcert (and it resulted in incomprehension in the composer’s day). How can one make high art out of quotidian material? This dilemma, which becomes acute in Mahler’s and Ives’s symphonies, among other works, lasts to the present day. It provides a certain frisson when we recognize that we are listening to revivalist hymns in the midst of a highly complicated and discordant symphonic texture (or simple Russian folksongs transformed into fashionably scandalous ballet, to recall Stravinsky’s Rite). Defamiliarization finds its place too in some Schumann songs, especially the Heine settings, such as Op. 24’s “Anfang’s wollt’ ich fast verzagen” (which quotes the familiar chorale “Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten”) or Op. 48’s “Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen” (with its frenetic reel). Whether it be the shock of defamiliarization or the disparity between sentimental poetry and exquisitely wrought, esoteric setting, the intrusion of popular elements into Schumann’s music and into all subsequent Western art music is perilous to ignore (just as it is equally shortsighted to overlook the classical culture in which many popular musicians are steeped by training). The tension created by juxtaposing the various levels in our multifaceted culture provides a source of aesthetic curiosity and pleasure. For this reason alone the Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart must represent more to us than just Robert Schumann’s melancholy swansong, “so deeply impressed [are they] upon the imagination.”

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notes 1. C. Johnson, ed., The Abbot, 187. 2. For “Boat Song,” see Fuld, The Book of World-Famous Music, 263. Six Ballads from the Poem of The Lady of the Lake (New York: Benjamin Carr, 1810). 3. See Finson, The Voices, 13–14. 4. See Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow; Hamm, Yesterdays, 1–88. 5. Hamm, Yesterdays, 76. 6. R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 3:340; hereafter cited as TB 3. See Margit L. McCorkle, Robert Schumann: Thematisch-Bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis, 391; hereafter cited as Verzeichnis. 7 . For the meeting with Gerhard, see TB 3, 176; for the catalogue of Burns settings, see Schanze and Schulte, Literarische Vorlagen, 43; for the general as well as political appeal of Scotland to Schumann, see Ozawa, “Robert Burns.” 8. R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 1:174; hereafter cited as TB 1. For Scott read in the 1840s, see TB 3, 398, 590. 9. Ozawa, “Robert Burns,” 550–2; translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 10. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 450. 11. Sams, The Songs of Robert Schumann, 273. 12. Ozawa and Wendt, Critical Notes [Op. 135], 408–10. 13. See Kaldewey, “Die Gedichtabschriften Robert und Clara Schumanns,” 99. 14. Litzmann, Clara Schumann, 3:269. 15. For the history of the Liederstrauss, see Schwab, Sangbarkeit, 145. 16. For the details of Op. 135’s publication history, see Verzeichnis, 561–62. 17. Putlitz, Gustav zu Putlitz, 3:199. 18. Paulson, The Queens’ Encounter, 115, 122. 19. The foregoing list from ibid., 122–65, 171. 20. For the Donizetti Schumann did hear in performance, see TB 3, 157, 340, 437. 21. See Whitton, “Robert Schumann.” 22. See Zimmermann, “Die Gedichte,” 321. 23. Sheet music in the Early American Sheet Music Collection of the Music Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, New Series, vol. 5, nos. 13–17; information on Barker from J. D. Brown, Biographical Dictionary, 50. 24. See, among others, the copy in the Lester Levy Collection of Sheet Music in the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of Johns Hopkins University, Box 068, Item O61b. 25. For the contemporary English reaction, see Weir, The Life of Elizabeth I, 140–41. 26. Quoted in Zimmermann, “Die Gedichte,” 309. 27. Ibid., 301–5. 28. Schanze and Schulte, Literarische Vorlagen, 419–20. 29. Zimmermann, “Die Gedichte,” 309. 30. Ibid., 310.

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31. Weir, Elizabeth I, 125. 32. Zimmerman, “Die Gedichte,” 311. 33. Weir, Elizabeth I, 379. 34. Reproduced in Zimmermann, “Die Gedichte,” 316. 35. Ibid., 321–22. 36. Ibid., 312. 37. Ibid., 315. 38. Ibid., 301–7. 39. Read his review of Hugh Pearson’s Burns songs in Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, ed. Martin Kreisig (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1914), 2:85. Joachim Draheim offers an insightful, if very brief account of Op. 135’s music in “Bedeutung und Eigenart.” 40. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 396–97. 41. Ibid., 407. 42. A reprinting of Goethe’s review appears in Fallersleben, “Zur Geschichte des Wunderhorns.” 43. Mahlert, “Rückzug in die Idylle,” 226–27.

6 Who Was Mignon? What Was She? Popular Catholicism and Schumann’s Requiem, Op. 98b Roe-Min Kok

Remember Mignon, that enigmatic child? Her youthful naïveté, difficult life circumstances, love of music, inability to express herself in ordinary speech, halfinnocent half-erotic attraction to Wilhelm Meister? Her tragic, mysterious end? “One of the strangest, most pathetic figures in the world’s literature,” writes James Sime, she sings songs that “are among Goethe’s lyrical masterpieces, remarkable equally for the depth of their meaning and the purity, sweetness, and grace of their expression”; she is “calm, gentle, self-possessed, she conceals a burning passion that in the end consumes her life; yet she is of so ethereal a nature that she seems to glide through the world as one who in no way belongs to it.”1 Much admired by literati, Mignon also dazzled generations of musicians. The psychological depth and richness of her poetic texts inspired settings by Reichardt, Beethoven, Hauptmann, Schubert, Gounod, Liszt, Hugo Wolf, and Berg, among others. Her death, however, drew no musical response, despite being similarly poetic. Not until Schumann’s Requiem für Mignon, Op. 98b, premiered in Düsseldorf on November 21, 1850.2 In a space of two years, eight reviews of the Requiem appeared in four major journals.3 Penned by critics as dissimilar as Barthold Senff, Theodor Uhlig, and Ludwig Bischoff, they were surprisingly united in their ambivalence. In this essay I explore one cultural milieu behind the Requiem’s problematic early reception, using the writings of the Cologne-based critic Bischoff as the lens through which to view and probe it.4 By far the longest and most detailed of the eight, his review questioned how faithfully Schumann had followed Goethe’s text, but also—the subject of the present essay—contested Mignon’s identity in death. Dissatisfied with Schumann’s Mignon, Bischoff proffered an alternative portrayal of the child that magnified her similitude to innocent angelic children, echoing an earlier move by the eminent Düsseldorf artist Wilhelm von Schadow 88

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in his controversial painting Mignon (1828). Bischoff also emphasized the child’s difficult life and untimely death, tropes found in midcentury literature, including fairy tales. In the heart of the Catholic Rhineland the angelic child archetype, tragic fairy tale narrative, and allegorical representations carried strong religious connotations. This essay contends that the reception of the Requiem was, to a considerable extent, colored by the religious revival of Catholicism in the Düsseldorf-Cologne region in the 1850s and the position within this culture of a requiem for a troubled young girl who died tragically. Based on points made by Bischoff and clues left by Schumann, I propose that the composer instead modeled his Mignon after another child archetype, puer senex (cryptic child) from Novalis’s Hymns to the Night.

1 “Then we would not like to conceal that the representation and the materials used do not seem to be right. Large chorus and full orchestra, the strong, heavily accented expression, do not correspond to the situation sketched by the poet [Goethe] in the sense of the entire figure.”5 So complained an anonymous critic of the Requiem. Admittedly the venture of translating literature, best-sellers in particular, into another medium is a risky one. There are issues of accuracy, of how closely or not the original should be followed. Questions abound as to how to strike just the right tone, how to walk fine lines between interpretive stances that are frequently open to debate. Alive, singing, dancing, and gesturing in articulate if arcane ways, Mignon attracted responses galore. But dead, the lingering mystery of her identity, clarified only during and after her interment in Goethe’s novel, rendered musical setting challenging. If turning her poetic utterances into song was a complex task (and some, such as Schubert, created multiple settings in attempts to capture her famously varied personality), embodying in music her lifeless being, still unfathomed but now silent, would have posed still more difficulties. In particular, her cultlike popularity among the reading and concert-going public could complicate the reception of musical works memorializing her.6 Mignon’s identity was a chief concern of Ludwig Bischoff in his review of Schumann’s Op. 98, comprising Op. 98a, nine songs in Lieder und Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and Op. 98b, Requiem für Mignon.7 Following publication of the entire opus and a performance of the Requiem by the Cologne Concert Society on October 21, 1851, Bischoff’s lengthy review appeared in two parts. Comments about the song cycle were published first, in Rheinische Musikzeitung 2, no. 19 (1851), followed by the Requiem in the next issue, no. 20. Bischoff began part I with a contentious preamble about the general quality of texts chosen by contemporary composers, before lauding Schumann’s pick: “Nevertheless the idea to set, finally, all the existing musical parts in Goethe’s

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Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, in a form for which the poet intended them, in fact, [in a form] for which the poet had certainly left numerous words and hints, is no ordinary one.”8 Bischoff launched next into a song-by-song description, focusing on Schumann’s characterization of personalities from the novel. The cycle includes four songs each for Mignon (nos. 1, 3, 5, 9) and the Harper (nos. 2, 4, 6, 8), along with one for Philine (no. 7). As is clear from his remarks, Bischoff, himself a pianist and conductor,9 had not only studied Schumann’s scores, but was familiar with Goethe’s text. Waxing animated about nos. 2, 4, 6, and 7 (less so about no. 8), he concurred with Schumann’s musical characterizations of the Harper and Philine. Amid those positive comments, his surprisingly negative reactions to Mignon’s songs stand out. In fact he disapproved of them all. Her first song, “Know you the land where the lemon blossoms bloom?” received the single longest critique of any song in the review. After praising the beauty of the melody, Bischoff detailed Schumann’s failure to portray the yearning of the young girl along the lines given in Goethe’s text, citing along the way other settings. No. 1. Know you the land? first set to music by Reichardt (and almost forgotten today), then Beethoven, Liszt and probably by many others, appears here once more in a new melody. In spite of that, one could opine that there can be only one [melody] for this song. The Schumann one is, in and of itself, beautiful as a melody: only it seems to us not to correspond with the ideal that was formed by the poet himself for the melody and performance, and was hinted at to others. Goethe had expressed emphatically how he wanted the song conceptualized and how he had conceived it in terms of sound. . . . The first entry of the question, which in the Beethoven is broad and solemn (as in Goethe’s conception) is here of the opposite character: [musical example]. We cannot approve that [in Schumann’s version] the second question “You know it, yes?” continues with the fourth line without [the] pause indeed required by the declamation. . . . How else, when according to Goethe this question would breathe mysteriously yet meaningfully and the urge of yearning first breaks forth with the “Oh there, oh there!” Schumann declaimed this “Oh there!” thus: [musical example] whereby one almost has the faint suspicion that the composer wanted to do something quite different from his predecessors. Now, this declamation is certainly new, but [it is] neither beautiful nor right. . . . Furthermore, we doubt whether chords like the following form harmonies with this g and e, that measure [portray] the musical expression for yearning. We cannot accustom ourselves to such strong spices, it spoils our enjoyment.10

The other three Mignon songs, nos. 3, 5, and 9, were also found wanting for various reasons. Schumann set no. 3 for Mignon only, but Bischoff thought it should have remained a duet between Mignon and the Harper, as stipulated by Goethe. Faulty characterization again surfaced in Bischoff ’s comments about Mignon’s no. 5, “Bid me not speak, let me be silent.” In charging that the setting was overly dramatic and scene-like (as opposed to lyrical and songlike), Bischoff

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made the point that Schumann’s version was too operatic to match the critic’s mental image of the young girl wistfully yearning for the afterlife. Finally, in comments about Mignon’s last song (no. 9) Bischoff cited a reason to which he would return in his subsequent review of the Requiem: “No. 9 Mignon’s ‘So let me seem till I become’ may be the least successful in the collection. The melody . . . does not breathe the transfiguration of the childlike gaze in the beyond, which adorns the lovely creature so beautifully in the poem.”11 Bischoff ’s complaints about Schumann’s Mignon settings may be summarized as follows: the composer did not follow musical descriptions and pointers provided by Goethe for characterizing Mignon. As a result, the composer’s Mignon disappointed the critic. Which leads us to the question: Who was Mignon in Goethe’s novel? Or, more precisely, who was Mignon for Bischoff? What were, for him, her defining characteristics? In his criticism of the songs, Bischoff highlighted a few of her qualities: yearning, innocence (“childlike gaze”), physical attractiveness (“lovely creature,” “adorn . . . so beautifully”), and otherworldliness (“breathe,” “transfiguration,” “the beyond”). Significantly he would again emphasize them in his appraisal of the Requiem. While these qualities are true of Mignon at various points in the novel, when seen in the context of her overall character (elaborated below), Bischoff ’s comments tended markedly toward an archetype in literature and visual art that presented children as innocent and angelic, especially after death.12 This archetype can be found in religious teachings and Romantic literature, poetry included.13 We see it in diary entries of the period as well. In one case from England, for instance, a widower wrote to his fiancée about his three-year-old son’s death from scarlet fever in early 1854: “Our darling is an angel in heaven! His pure little soul parted from his sweet form about 1/2 past 3 oclock [sic] . . . Heaven is indeed the home of such innocents.”14 If we extrapolate from Bischoff’s comments on song no. 9, he was basically chiding Schumann for not making Goethe’s Mignon sound more ethereal or angelic (“The melody . . . does not breathe the transfiguration of the childlike gaze in the beyond”). However, Bischoff’s version of Mignon was not the only one in Goethe’s novel, as a closer examination of Goethe’s child character reveals. When she first appears in the novel, Mignon is resilient, courageous, and tomboyish (book 2, chapter 4). Abducted by traveling acrobats while very young and trained to perform, she often rebeled at the risk of severe punishment. This markedly independent child keeps her own counsel, refusing to divulge her mysterious past (“Bid me not speak”) or sleep on anything resembling a bed (book 2, chapter 7). She is repeatedly mistaken for a boy—by Meister (book 2, chapter 4), the surgeon (book 4, chapter 10), and the Harper (book 7, chapter 4). Mignon runs up and down stairs; she likes sitting atop closets (book 2, chapter 7) and rejects feminine garb (book 2 chapters 8, 9; book 4 chapter 2; book 5, chapter 15). Moreover, in displays of truly unangelic fury and physical strength, she once bit Meister’s arm (book 5, chapter 12), slashed at bandits with her bowie knife (book 4, chapter 10), and saved little Felix from the mad old

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Harper’s murder attempt (book 5, chapter 13). Hardened by her difficult circumstances, the child’s tender side comes through most clearly in her relationships with three men; Meister (book 5, chapters 1, 13, 14), Felix (book 7, chapter 8; book 8, chapter 3), and the Harper (book 7, chapter 8). In short, Goethe’s Mignon is a flesh-and-blood figure, and very much so: mysterious background and unconventional behavior notwithstanding, she displays a spectrum of realistic human feelings, character flaws included. These attributes Bischoff seem to have sidestepped. Instead he spotlighted qualities she demonstrated toward the end of the novel. At a children’s birthday party charade directed by Natalie (book 8, chapter 2), Mignon was dressed up as an angel to show the other children that such apparitions were, in fact, real people in costume. After her identity was revealed, however, she inexplicably refused to change her attire and began speaking wistfully of her wish to be an angel, explaining the symbolism of the lily she carried and her wings. Accompanying herself with a zither, she then sang, “So let me seem, until I become” (Schumann’s song no. 9). Indeed Bischoff’s comment about Mignon’s “transfigured childlike gaze” in song no. 9 was based on her character at this point in Goethe’s narrative. As we shall see, it is this particular image of Mignon that dominates Bischoff’s review of the Requiem für Mignon.

2 The Requiem evidently stirred the critic’s creative juices, for Bischoff took the unusual approach of writing as though he were directing an imaginary performance. First, although Schumann had already appended to the score Goethe’s description of the Hall of the Past (book 8, chapter 8), the critic recommended adding Natalie’s description of the birthday party. Notably he left out Natalie’s rather more practical comments, presumably because they would have interfered with the image of Mignon as angel. The second volume [Op. 98b] contains the full score of the Requiem for Mignon. In order to facilitate understanding of the music, the Introduction of the Eighth Chapter of the Eighth Book of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is printed as the Foreword. We would also have added the description of Mignon’s dress as an angel from the second chapter of the same book: “She was clothed in a long, light white gown: there was a golden belt around the chest, a tiara in the hair, and a pair of large golden wings.”15

Next Bischoff conceived yet more preliminary materials: an entire prologue in memory of Mignon based on Natalie’s and the Abbé’s descriptions of her (book 8, chapters 2, 9), preceded by a few piano or harp chords, and three songs from Op. 98a. I would, however, go even further, were I to direct such performances; for it is unbelievable how a well-spoken word (that sets the listener in the mood

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required by the succeeding music) can create a conducive impression. In the present case I would begin, with a prologue, to remember Mignon rhapsodically, after a few piano or harp chords. Goethe’s words, partly from the Abbe’s speech, partly from Natalie’s narrative, would have to be used for this purpose. I would weave into this performance the songs from the first volume, “Bid me not speak, let me be silent,” “So let me seem, till I become,” and also the Harper’s “Who never with hot tears ate his bread,” and have these sung at the piano.”16

Bischoff ’s performance continued to stray from Goethe’s text and Schumann’s setting: The death of the lovely child would have to be mentioned; [we] should not forget a short description of the Hall of the Past, in which the Requiem would be sung, so that the usual ideas one would otherwise bring to these words would remain outside. This time the main idea of the poet, which must also penetrate the music that follows, that meaningful phrase on the scroll of the picture-column: “Remember to live!” would step before the soul of the listener. . . . The last words of the performer indicate to us the picture of the young girl with the broken heart, resting in her angel clothing on the sarcophagus. . . . Overall, Schumann has captured well the nuances of color in the painting; it is not the air of the vault and of the tomb that arises; [rather] it is the soft breath that drifts from the blue heaven over fallen blossoms, that weds sorrow with hope, death with life.17

A beautiful young girl in white gossamer gown, dead from a broken heart, lying in eternal rest in a pastoral landscape amid soft breezes and drifting pastel petals: this rounds off Bischoff ’s picture of Mignon. The image is reinforced in his discussion of the third number, a chorus that clearly touched him: One of the most beautiful numbers is chorus No. 3 . . .: “See the mighty wings! etc.” The symbolic pointing to eternity and life that the chorus holds in front of the children, the mention of the wings (which suggest more beautiful ones that are not yet displayed), the pure robe, the golden headband, are interwoven here into an antiphonal song with the lament of the children . . . after which, the chorus, as if moved by the truth of the children’s pain, only ventures to reply gently: “see the pure gown”; the nostalgic remembrance: “As we wreathed her head with roses,” that is expressed by both sopranos in tones, that evoked the picture of tears that roll pearl-like over fresh-blooming cheeks.18

To the critic’s ear, the quartet of children and accompanying chorus were in agreement with him; their music painted Mignon as tragic angelic heroine. Moreover Bischoff ’s sentimental stance and regretful words (“death of the lovely child,” “moved by the truth of the children’s pain”) call to mind two literary tropes that were combined with the angel archetype in the 1840s and 1850s:

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earthly suffering and pathos-filled demise.19 Certain characters in tales by Charles Dickens—Little Nell (The Old Curiosity Shop), Little Paul Dombey (Dombey and Son), and David Copperfield’s child-bride Dora, for instance—are virtuous children who endure all kinds of trouble before expiring in tear-inducing scenes. Folk and fairy tales also made use of this combination archetype. For example, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl (based on the Grimm brothers’ The Star Talers, although there the heroine does not perish) and The Little Mermaid both feature protagonists who undergo earthly trials and die under sorrowful conditions.20 They then ascend to heaven. In particular The Little Mermaid, written in 1837 and translated into German in the early 1840s, is surprisingly close in structure, color, and character to Mignon’s narrative. Table 6.1 charts parallels between the two characters and their stories.21 Whether

Table 6.1. Similarities between Mignon and the Little Mermaid Mignon (1796)

Little Mermaid (1837)1

Character: young girl in early adolescence (12–13 years old at first sight). Of noble ancestry, although this is not evident until after her death.

Character: young girl in early to mid-adolescence (10–15 years old). A sea princess.

From a beautiful, faraway land, seen as “exotic” From a beautiful, faraway land (under the sea), by others. exotic in human eyes. Childhood home a palazzo with lemon trees, Childhood home an underwater palace with red marble columns and statues, green hilly landscape. and blue trees, golden fruit, and flame-like flowers. Little Mermaid’s garden filled with sun-red flowers, rose-colored weeping willow, and a marble statue. Personal characteristics: “strange,” taciturn, independent, courageous, tender in love.

Personal characteristics: “strange child, quiet and pensive,” independent, courageous (visit to sea witch), tender in love.

Was lost at a body of water (mountain torrent near lake, where her hat was found).

Vanished from her father’s sea-kingdom and took up residence with the prince at his seaside palace.

Yearning an important characteristic: for Italy and her previous life.

Yearning an important characteristic: for human world and life, and prince’s love, for a human soul.

Voice is important element in her narrative: she communicates best in song but does not express herself well in words.

Voice is important element in her narrative: she sings with the loveliest voice of all, but sells it to the sea witch in return for human legs. Her muteness (i.e., inability to express herself in speech) may have cost her the prince’s love.

Falls in love with Wilhelm Meister. Fiercely protective of Meister: saves him from disasters (fires, bandits).

Falls in love with a human prince. Fiercely protective of prince: saves him from drowning and refuses to kill him in order to save her own life.

Serves Meister, loves him devotedly.

Serves prince, loves him devotedly.

Who Was Mignon? What Was She? Meister loves her as his child, without really understanding her love for him.

95 “He loved her as one would love a dear, good child, but it did not occur at all to him to make her his queen.” (52) He calls her “my mute child” (53) and “little foundling.” (51)

Meister yearns for the good, beautiful Amazon Prince loves the “holy” young girl whom he (Natalie) who saved his life after the bandit attack. thinks saved him from drowning (52). Meister is unaware of Mignon’s history.

Prince is unaware of Little Mermaid’s history.

Dances (the Egg Dance) for Meister as an expression of her love.

Dances gracefully for the prince to express her love.

Meister has boys’ clothing made for Mignon at her request.

Prince had “men’s clothes made for her” (51).

Heart seizure and eventual death probably triggered by realization that Meister loves and will marry Natalie.

Death comes the night after prince marries someone else.

Dies heartbroken.

Dies heartbroken (54–55).

Body embalmed and dressed as angel; chorus sings of her ascent into heaven, the reward for her goodness and innocent suffering.

Becomes beautiful transparent being with ethereal voice; does good deeds to “create immortal soul” so she may enter the Kingdom of God, as reward for her suffering and endurance. (57)

“Whom do you bring to our silent company?” questions the invisible chorus.

“To whom do I come?” Little Mermaid asks the transparent beings (56).

1. From Hans Christian Andersen, “The Little Mermaid,” in Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen, trans. Patricia L. Conroy and Sven H. Rossel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980), 34–58.

Andersen modeled his Little Mermaid after Mignon or other characters (such as Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine of 1811, or the legendary water spirit Melusine) is moot. The point is that Mignon as constructed by Bischoff shared a narrative trajectory and archetype with Andersen’s character: stoicism in the face of rejected love, martyr-like suffering, a pathos-filled death, and transformation into an angel. No wonder Bischoff avoided any mention of Mignon’s spunky individuality, so colorfully and convincingly conveyed in Goethe’s novel; it simply did not fit the archetype.22 Seen in this light, Bischoff ’s reproach of the Requiem’s final number is understandable. Schumann’s music in no. 6, a loud, merry call for the mourning children to return to normal life, must have disturbed the critic’s sensibilities. Gaiety and optimism for life (a reference to Goethe’s command “Remember to live!”) were expressly not part of the angelic child narrative: “Perhaps he [Schumann] went too far in the closing chorus No. 6 with the portrayal of the new upswing for life at the separation from the sarcophagus, and gave [us] melodies [that were] too cheerful in relation to the situation.”23 But nothing about this finale could have pleased the critic, it seems. As it happens, Schumann did tame the jubilance at the very end; the final seventeen measures are as spectacular as they

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are unexpected (mm. 103–19). Dropping suddenly into a piano dynamic, a fourmeasure cadential progression (I-IV-V 6/4–7) appears twice (with the subdominant emphasized throughout), followed by two measures reinforcing V 6/4–7, before a seven-measure-long tonic takes hold, marked either pianissimo or piano with diminuendo in all parts (Example 6.1 shows mm. 95–119). Bischoff opined that this conclusion did not “unify” or provide enough closure to the work. Finally the composer, perhaps with the right instinct that this is not the place for a thunderous, brilliant finale, lets the chorus quietly fade out, and leads us by this means again back to the softer, peaceful mood of the soul. It is exactly this that causes us to express a wish, the realization of which would lead to even greater unity of this requiem.24

Example 6.1. Schumann, Requiem für Mignon, Op. 98b, no. 6: “Kinder! eilet in’s Leben hinan!,” mm. 95–119.

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Example 6.1. Continued

Bischoff also disagreed with Schumann’s decision to end the work midway through the funeral ceremony in Goethe’s narrative. Schumann had chosen to conclude at the point in the text where the quartet and children were ordered to stop mourning and return to normal, everyday activity. In the novel the scene continues as follows: Mignon’s embalmed body was viewed by the assembled company, during which the Abbé noted her attachment to the Catholic faith, rolling up her sleeve to show the crucifix on her right arm. The Marchese realized with a shock that she was his long-lost niece. Mignon’s body was finally lowered into the marble sarcophagus, and a verse was sung by four young men. All these Schumann had omitted from his Requiem (for reasons I speculate about later). To rectify the situation Bischoff proposed extending Schumann’s setting: Namely, we would like to induce Schumann to give the whole [Requiem] the same conclusion which Goethe has given it, through [adding] a supplement to the whole work. A solemn instrumental movement would imply the gradual

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sinking of the sleeping angel in the sarcophagus and upon it the four youths can strike up their song. . . . In the last words the chorus would invade again, as stated by Goethe, and in their meaning the gifted composer would surely find the enthusiasm to strike the true character of a concluding chorus to Mignon’s Requiem, which would articulate harmonically—how we should rescue, for life, holy earnestness for joyful activity of life out of [our] pain over a beautiful extinct being?25

Bischoff ’s suggested ending, with its palpable pity over the departed child (“sleeping angel”) and plea for ceremonial music (“solemn instrumental movement,” “true character of a concluding chorus”) diverged markedly from Schumann’s. As John Daverio has pointed out, in Schumann’s conclusion, optimism for life and “the business of the living, that is, to go on living their lives to the fullest rather than losing themselves in maudlin lamentation,” were of paramount importance.26 However, there is more to this. In actualizing what Ehrhard Bahr has recently observed, that “Mignon’s death . . . is a celebration of life,” Schumann provided a key to his notion of Mignon.27 We shall return to this.

3 The value of Bischoff ’s review lies not so much in his opinion of Schumann’s Requiem, as in what it reveals about how he and his society construed Mignon in death, and how that affected reception of the work. Significantly, among contemporaries Bischoff was noted as a critic whose opinions frequently reflected mainstream sentiment, and his journal had considerable regional clout.28 His stated aim to “mediate between art and life” for the general public renders his writings a valuable source and indicator of popular reception at that time.29 In addition to the Rheinische Musikzeitung he also wrote for the Kölnische Zeitung and participated actively in the city’s musical institutions. In short, his was an influential and valued voice in the cultural life of the region where he lived for forty-four years. Bischoff ’s Mignon recalls an earlier depiction of her, in the visual arts.30 Some two decades before the Requiem’s premiere, another Rhineland Mignon had stirred controversy: a painting completed in 1828 by the renowned artist Wilhelm von Schadow. Seated in front of long drapes, Schadow’s Mignon muses wistfully, with dark flowing hair, disproportionately large wings, and fingers poised on a zither-like instrument resting on her knees (Figure 6.1). Her dress is long and white; her forehead and breast are encircled in golden bands; a graceful spray of lilies stands on her right.31 The painting—like Bischoff ’s preferred image directly drawn from Natalie’s description of the child dressed up at the birthday party charade—unleashed lively critical debate about, among other things, Schadow’s failure to capture Mignon’s colorful, many-sided character.32 As one particularly sarcastic reviewer wrote, “Why [has] our ingenious

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Figure 6.1. Wilhelm von Schadow (1788–1862), Mignon, ca. 1840. Oil on canvas, 119 x 92 cm. Photo: Ursula Gerstenberger. Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig. Photo credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York.

Schadow . . . conceived precisely this critical moment from Mignon’s picture-rich life, a moment in which even Mignon discards her entire individuality, in which Mignon ceases to be Mignon[?]”33 Why indeed? In an analysis of the debate, Cordula Grewe convincingly argues that Schadow, a Catholic convert who had recently been appointed director of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, had in his portrayal deliberately transformed Mignon into “an unmistakably Christian image” by purging her androgyny and decontextualizing her appearance in costume (by excluding Natalie, the children, and the party from the painting, as Bischoff would similarly do in his review). Under Schadow’s brush Mignon metamorphozed into a female angel, and ultimately into an allegory of Christian art, her startlingly lifelike feather wings expressing “strict Catholic devoutness,” in the words of a contemporary.34 There are further implications. The birthday party heralded Mignon’s end, as readers may have already surmised from Bischoff ’s suggestion to add it to the

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foreword of Schumann’s Requiem. In the novel Goethe seems to have staged Mignon’s funeral in such a way (her embalmed body frozen into sculpture) as to drive home his well-known preference for the aesthetics of classical antiquity, which shunned Romanticism’s “Catholicizing” tendencies.35 By casting a whiterobed, winged girl as the definitive image in his painting, however, Schadow in effect rewrote Mignon’s ending, so that she not only died a Christian, but also became an angel.36 Arguably it was Schadow’s stance that reverberated in Bischoff ’s review more than two decades later.37 Bischoff, too, essentially Christianized Mignon’s funeral with his suggestions for Schumann’s Requiem: among other things, mention of the child’s appearance in winged costume and of the death of Mignon, as well as alterations to the work’s inappropriately cheerful conclusion. Seen in this light, certain details in Schadow’s and Bischoff ’s interpretations of Mignon gain in religious significance. Flowers accompanying the child, a lily (book 8, chapter 2) and roses (book 8, chapter 8), were popular symbols of the Virgin’s chastity and love, respectively.38 Schadow elaborated upon the single lily in Goethe’s narrative; his spray contains three full blooms as well as buds. Perhaps he wanted to draw attention to Mignon’s purity and youth, with the lily buds in close proximity to a trinity of open blossoms. Bischoff, on the other hand, might have been thinking of the most popular Marian prayer, the rosary, when he repeated the mention of roses from Goethe’s text (“As we wreathed her head with roses”).39 “Tears that roll pearl-like” appear nowhere in Goethe, but perhaps Bischoff evoked the lustrous gem because it symbolizes religious salvation; pearls were frequently sewn onto Madonna statues’ clothing (and Schadow’s Mignon wears a headband studded with pearls).40 Little wonder that Bischoff greeted the harp’s appearance in no. 3 with delight: “Effective instrumentation [is also present], among which we point especially to the entry of the harp, which whispers suddenly over the pianissimo C-major triad of the trombones, horns, and bassoons.”41 Here, the harp as holy instrument buttressed Bischoff ’s belief in Mignon as angel.42 Eliding with the end of the children’s exclamation “See the mighty wings!,” its music might announce Mignon’s entry as angel,43 reminding audiences of her zither as well as newfound femininity (the instrument was gendered feminine in nineteenth-century thought). Last but not least, the critic’s injunction to Schumann, “The death of the lovely child would have to be mentioned,” if carried out, would recall the tragic circumstances of Mignon’s death; she “shot up, clasped her heart . . . and fell with a cry” (book 8, chapter 5). By adding this bit of Mignon’s story, missing from Schumann’s Requiem, Bischoff would complete the fairy tale narrative of a child who had endured a troubled life and met an untimely end filled with pathos, before finding release as an angel. While most of these elements are also hinted at or otherwise found in Goethe’s novel, the critic arguably magnified them beyond the proportions allotted by the author into a quasi–“Life of Mignon,” by Ludwig F. C. Bischoff.

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4 Mignon as angel seems to have been Bischoff ’s (and Schadow’s) solution to questions of identity raised by Goethe’s masterfully constructed mystery child or puer senex, literally “old boy (child).” As described by Reinhard Kuhn, puer senex is a cryptic child figure whose characteristics include inscrutability, wisdom, an inability to communicate—some do so through music—and premature death.44 While claiming to remain faithful to Goethe’s Mignon in criticizing Schumann’s Requiem, Bischoff ’s reading of Mignon actually mixed elements from the novel with popular visual and literary sources: Schadow’s painting, angel archetype, and fairy tale narrative.45 It is intriguing that Schadow and Bischoff, working some twenty years apart, would respond in such similar ways to Goethe’s fictitious figure. A significant factor in this continuity must have been the distinctive confessional culture of the Rhineland region in which both lived and worked.46 The trickle-down (if any) of religious overtones in Schadow’s painting into Bischoff ’s review would have coincided with a strong revival of Catholicism in the region beginning around 1850.47 At this time—that is, immediately prior to the premiere of the Requiem—Marian sodalities led by parish priests began to dominate community life.48 Dedicated to the Virgin, sodalities celebrated communion on her festivals and feast days. Like traditional brotherhoods before them, they had consecrated banners, marched together in processions, appeared as a group at members’ funerals, and held their own religious ceremonies. Moreover, members were held to high moral standards (chastity, frequent communion, and avoidance of taverns). Although open to all parishioners, sodalities tended to be divided by gender and marital status; membership encompassed entire villages and small towns and was popular even among urban dwellers. As a form of popular Catholicism sodalities were a strong cultural influence in the Rhineland. It is plausible that Schumann’s Requiem für Mignon was coolly received because it did not offer the religious-consolatory gestures that satisfied standards of popular morality as defined by such Marian sodalities.49 “The death of a child,” Pat Jalland reminds us, “was the supreme test of Christian faith,” a situation recognized in the impressive amount of consolation literature explaining such deaths in Christian terms.50 In addition, unexpected demise could be especially troubling because it allowed little time for spiritual preparation and contrition for past sins.51 Under these conditions Mignon’s sudden passing would have provoked considerable spiritual concern; here was a devout Catholic child who had kissed a crucifix fervently before breathing her last. Understandably, Catholic audiences (the majority of whom had probably marched in the funerals of fellow sodalites) expected the unfortunate child’s end to be justified and her send-off accomplished in unambiguously Christian terms. That is what Bischoff (and Schadow) achieved in their reinterpretations of Goethe’s puer senex. However, as we shall see, Schumann had a different notion of Mignon, one that affected musically his Requiem for her.52

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So how did Schumann envision Mignon? In a letter to Emanuel Klitzsch on December 19, 1849, about Op. 79, Lieder-Album für die Jugend (“Know you the land . . .?” is the album’s last song), Schumann provided a clue, if not a definitive answer to this question. Significantly, he cast Mignon not as angelic sufferer, but as contemplative and knowing in mysterious ways. She looks to the future: “Mignon closes [the Album], directing her gaze presciently towards a more active life of the soul.”53 Come what may, Schumann intimates, this child will continue to live, if in another, more spiritual domain. Among literary predecessors this image comes remarkably close to one by an author Schumann knew and admired. In Novalis’s Hymns to the Night (1799–1800), a miraculous child appears: “With divine fervor the prophetic eyes of the blossoming child looked toward the days of the future.”54 Like Mignon, this puer senex is predestined to die young. In the course of his brief life, however, he inspires much and many, from far and wide, including a minstrel who serenades him in homage. Visionary are the song’s closing lines: “In death eternal life becomes manifest, / You are death and at last make us well.”55 Novalis’s child perishes shortly thereafter. Following a period of mourning, however, he is resurrected to life everlasting in a burst of glory, surrounded by angels. Although Schumann left no other hints about his Mignon, given the tantalizing links between her and Novalis’s wondrous child, the latter part of this tale provides a helpful interpretive framework for the final number in Schumann’s Requiem. Two other elements Bischoff discussed will also be considered: Schumann’s decision not to set the entire funeral ceremony, and the thunderous final chorus with its dramatic closing cadential passage. What do these tell us about what Mignon and her end meant for Schumann? Intriguingly, by omitting the second half of her funeral (in which the Marchese recognizes her as his niece) Schumann was in effect withholding Mignon’s earthly identity in his work. He wanted her to remain, like Novalis’s unnamed child, a cipher to the last. In addition, by cutting short Goethe’s scene, Schumann also prevented the entombment of Mignon’s body, which has implications for the concluding chorus. The text of this final number—“Children, hurry to life! In the beauty of pure garments Love meets you with divine gaze and the garland of immortality! Up! We return to life! Up!”—underlines its overarching joy, so perturbing to Bischoff in its triumph. Triumphant it is, for it is no less than music of resurrection. Her redemption, mentioned by so many commentators, is only part of the story. Mignon returns—body and soul—not as a mere angel, but as Love incarnate to life perpetual in the kingdom of the spirit. Angels surround her in those final seventeen measures, bathed in musical references to the “softer, peaceful mood of the soul,” in Bischoff’s words.56 No martyr to be mourned, but herald of immortality in death—that is how Schumann envisioned Mignon. In this sense, his Requiem for her is an antirequiem; it does not lay her to rest, but infuses her with new life. In his funeral music she lives on—and on and on and on: an exulting, unexpected end for this enigmatic child.57

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notes 1. Sime, Life of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 142–43. 2. The work was composed in the summer of 1849 (see also Benjamin’s essay in this volume). Over twenty years later, in 1872, Anton Rubinstein set Songs and Requiem for Mignon from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre for solo voices and chorus with piano accompaniment. 3. Rheinische Musikzeitung, edited by Ludwig Bischoff (henceforth RMz); Signale für die musikalische Welt, edited by Bartholf W. Senff (henceforth SmW); Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, edited by Franz Brendel (henceforth NZfM), Die Grenzboten (henceforth Gb). The reviews are SmW 8, no. 49 (1850); SmW 9, no. 8 (1851); RMz 2, no. 17 (1851); *SmW 9, no. 44 (1851); *RMz 2, no. 19 (part 1, 1851) and 2, no. 20 (part 2, 1851); NZfM 35, no. 21 (1851); SmW 10, no. 2 (1852); Gb 11, no. 2 (1852). Asterisks denote those kept in Schumann’s folder of press clippings. For an overview and analysis of the reviews, see Kok, “Romantic Childhood,” 127–65. I thank Kazuko Ozawa for drawing my attention to them. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 4. For a comprehensive introduction to the Requiem, see Krummacher, “Requiem für Mignon.” With regard to reception, Krummacher and, more recently, Hansjörg Ewert focused on Theodor Uhlig’s surprisingly positive review, NZfM 35, no. 21 (1851). I say surprisingly, because pro-Wagner editorials by Uhlig dominated the journal between 1850 and 1852, a period during which Schumann’s works generally suffered under the pen of the music journalist, who died in 1853. See Thym, “Schumann in Brendel’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik”; Ewert, “Lieder, Gesänge und Requiem.” 5. Gb 11, no. 2 (1852): 258. “Dann mögen wir nicht verhehlen, dass uns die Darstellung und die dazu verwendeten Mittel nicht die richtigen scheinen. Großer Chor und volles Orchester, die kräftige, schwer accentuirte Ausdrucksweise entsprechen nicht der von dem Dichter im Sinne der ganzen Figur gezeichneten Situation.” 6. See Gille, Goethes Wilhelm Meister, for firsthand responses to the novel. Many focus on Mignon and Harper (see responses by Schiller, Schlegel, Novalis, Maria Mnioch, and Bettina von Arnim, for instance). 7. Ludwig Friedrich Christian Bischoff (1794–1867) was a leading music critic and, from 1850 to 1853, founder and editor of the Cologne-based Rheinische Musikzeitung. RMz’s stated aim was to reach “every educated person, not just the musician.” With its regional emphasis on the Rhineland and a marked bias against the New German school, it has been described as a literary voice for the conservative Rhenish school. See Curtis, Ludwig Bischoff. My analysis of Bischoff’s review of Schumann’s Requiem diverges considerably from Curtis’s reading of the same (253–54). 8. RMz 2, no. 19 (1851): 561. “Aber dennoch ist der Gedanke, allem in Göthe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren vorhandenen Musikalischen endlich einmal die Gestalt in Tönen zu geben, für welche der Dichter es bestimmt, ja, welche er selbst meistens mit einigen bezeichnenden Worten und Winken angedeutet hat, kein gewöhnlicher.” In “Requiem für Mignon,” Krummacher shows that Schumann did not actually set all the verse texts in the novel. 9. Curtis, Ludwig Bischoff, 11, 22–23.

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10. RMz 2, no. 19 (1851): 563. Nr. 1. Kennst du das Land? zuerst von Reichardt in Musik gesetzt und heute fasst vergessen, dann von Beethoven, von Liszt und wohl noch von manchem Andern, erscheint hier noch einmal in einer neuen Melodie, und doch sollte man meinen, es könne für dieses Lied nur Eine geben. Die Schumann’sche ist an und für sich als Melodie schön: allein dem Ideal, welches sich der Dichter von der Melodie und dem Vortrag dieses Liedes selbst gebildet und Andern angedeutet hat, scheint sie uns nicht zu entsprechen. Göthe hat es ausdrücklich gesagt, wie er das Lied aufgefasst haben will und wie er es sich in Tönen gedacht hat . . . Der erste Eintritt der Frage, der bei Beethoven nach Göthe’s Sinn breit und feierlich ist, hat hier den entgegengesetzten Charakter: [musical ex.] Dass die zweite Frage “kennst Du es wohl?” sich ohne Pause, welche die Declamation durchaus verlangt, an die vierte Zeile schließt und sich mit einer Steigerung in der Tonleiter und im crescendo wiederholt, können wir nicht billigen: wie anders, wenn nach Göthe’s Sinn diese Frage geheimnissvoll [sic] und doch mit Bedeutung hingehaucht wird und der Drang der Sehnsucht erst mit dem “Dahin! dahin!” ausbricht. Dieses Dahin! hat Schumann so declamirt: [musical ex.] wobei man fast auf den leisen Verdacht kommen könnte, als habe der Componist es durchaus anders machen wollen, als seine Vorgänger. Nun, neu ist freilich diese Declamation, aber weder schön noch richtig, . . . Ob dann ferner zu diesem g = und e = Accorde wie folgende: [musical ex.] Harmonien bilden, welche dem musikalischen Ausdruck der Sehnsucht angemessen sind, möchten wir bezweifeln. Wir können uns nun einmal an dergleichen starkes Gewürz nicht gewöhnen, es verdirbt uns den Genuss.

11. RMz 2, no. 19 (1851): 563. “Nr. 9 Mignons: ‘So lasst mich scheinen bis ich werde’ dürften die am wenigsten gelungenen der Sammlung sein. Die Melodie des letztern athmet nicht die Verklärung des kindlichen Blicks in das Jenseits, der in dem Gedicht das holde Geschöpf so schön ziert.” 12. On child archetypes see, for example, Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise, especially 76–77, 106–11. 13. DeVries, “‘Be Converted.’” See also poetry by Brentano, Mörike, Eichendorff, and Uhland quoted in Marjorie Hirsch, Romantic Lieder, 104–6. 14. Quoted in Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 126. 15. RMz 2, no. 20 (1851): 569. Das zweite Heft enthält die Partitur des Requiems für Mignon. Um das Verständniss [sic] der Musik zu erleichtern, ist die Einleitung des achten Capitels des achten Buchs von Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren als Vorwort abgedruckt. Wir würden auch die Beschreibung von dem Anzug Mignons als Engel, aus dem zweiten Capitel desselben Buchs hinzugefügt haben: “sie war in ein langes, leichtes weisses Gewand gekleidet: es fehlte nicht an einem goldnen Gürtel um die Brust, an einem gleichen Diadem in den Haaren und einem Paar großer goldner Schwingen.”

In Goethe’s novel the passage is: I chose Mignon to play the part of the angel, and on the appointed day, she was clothed in a long, thin white garment with a girdle of gold around her chest and a golden crown in her hair. I first thought I would omit the wings, but the women

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[sic] who dressed her insisted on a pair of big golden wings with which she could demonstrate her skill. (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 315)

16. RMz 2, no. 20 (1851): 569. Ich würde indessen noch weiter gehen, wenn ich dergleichen Aufführungen zu leiten hätte; denn es ist unglaublich, was ein gut gesprochenes Wort, welches den Zuhörer in die Stimmung setzt, die für die nachfolgende Musik verlangt wird, für einen förderlichen Eindruck macht. In dem vorliegenden Fall würde ich nach einigen Piano oder Harfenakkorden mit einem Prolog beginnen lassen, der rhapsodisch an Mignon erinnerte—Göthe’s Worte theils aus der Rede des Abbe’s, theils aus Nataliens Erzählung müssten dazu benutzt werden—in diesen Vortrag würde ich aus dem ersten Heft die Lieder: “Heiss mich nicht reden, heiss mich schweigen” und “So lasst mich scheinen bis ich werde”, auch des Harfners: “Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass”—verweben und diese am Klavier singen lassen.

Mahlert, Fortschritt und Kunstlied, 152–56, discusses musical relationships between Opp. 98a and 98b, with which John Daverio agrees. See Daverio, Robert Schumann, 436–37. 17. RMz 2, no. 20 (1851): 569–70. Der Tod des holden Kindes müsste erwähnt werden; ja selbst eine kurze Schilderung des Saales der Vergangenheit, in welchem das Requiem gesungen wird, dürfte nicht fehlen, damit die gewöhnlichen Vorstellungen, die man bei diesem Worte sonst mitbringt, dieses Mal draussen blieben und der Hauptgedanke des Dichters, der ja auch die folgende Musik durchwehen muss, das bedeutsame Wort auf der Rolle der Bildsäule: “Gedenke zu leben!” vor die Seele des Hörers träte. Wenn alsdann die letzten Worte des Vortragenden uns das Bild des Mädchens mit dem gebrochenen Herzen, ruhend in seinen Engelkleidern auf dem Sarkophage, zeigen, . . . Schumann hat den Farbenton des Gemäldes überhaupt getroffen; es ist nicht die Luft der Gewölbe und der Grüfte, die daraus emporsteigt, es ist der milde Hauch, der vom blauen Himmel auch über die fallenden Blüthen weht, der die Trauer mit der Hoffnung, den Tod mit dem Leben vermählt.

The “scroll on the picture-columns” was actually a scroll held by the effigy of Natalie’s uncle in the Hall of the Past. Also see Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 379. 18. RMz 2, no. 20 (1851): 570. Eine der schönsten Nummern ist der Chor Nr. 3 . . .: “Seht die mächtigen Flügel doch an! u.s.w.” Die symbolischen Hindeutungen auf Ewigkeit und Leben, die der Chor den Kindern vorhält, die Erwähnung der Flügel, welche schönere vorstellen, die noch nicht entfaltet sind, des reinen Gewandes, der goldnen Stirnbinde, sind hier mit den Klagen der Kinder . . . verwebt . . . worauf der Chor, wie von der Wahrheit des Schmerzes der Kinder ergriffen, nur leise zu entgegnen wagt: “seht das reine Gewand”—; die wehmüthige Erinnerung: “als wir mit Rosen kränzten ihr Haupt”, die von den beiden Sopranen [sic] in Tönen ausgesprochen wird, welche das Bild von Thränen, die über frisch blühende Wangen perlen, hervorrufen.

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19. Lerner, Angels and Absences, 82–125, especially 113–25. 20. See “The Star Talers,” in Tatar, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, 338–40. 21. Andersen, Tales and Stories, 34–58. 22. Although Mignon displayed a growing spirituality toward the end of her life (book 8, chapters 2, 3), up until the moment she died she was full of energy (book 8, chapter 5). 23. RMz 2, no. 20 (1851): 570. “Vielleicht ist er in dem Schlusschor Nr. 6 in Darstellung des neuen Aufschwungs für das Leben beim Scheiden von dem Sarkophage zu weit gegangen und hat ihm im Verhältnis zu der Situation zu heitre Melodien gegeben.” 24. RMz 2, no. 20 (1851): 571. Zuletzt lässt der Componist, wahrscheinlich in dem richtigen Gefühl, dass ein rauschend glänzender Schluss doch hier nicht an der Stelle sei, den Chor leise verhallen und führt uns dadurch wieder in die sanftere, ruhige Seelenstimmung zurück. Eben dies veranlasst uns einen Wunsch auszusprechen, dessen Verwirklichung unserer Meinung nach dies Requiem zu einer noch grössern Einheit abrunden dürfte.

25. RMz 2, no. 20 (1851): 571–72. Wir möchten nämlich Schumann bewegen, durch einen Nachtrag dem Ganzen denselben Schluss zu geben, den ihm Göthe gegeben hat. Ein feierlicher Instrumentalsatz würde das Versenken des schlafenden Engels in den Sarkophag andeuten und darauf die vier Jünglinge ihren Gesang anheben: . . . In die letzten Worte fiele der Chor wieder ein, wie es Göthe angiebt, und in ihrem Sinn würde der geniale Tonsetzer sicher die Begeisterung finden, den wahren Charakter eines Schlusschors zu Mignon’s Requiem zu treffen, welcher harmonisch ausspräche, wie wir aus dem Schmerz über ein erloschenes schönes Dasein den heiligen Ernst zu freudigem Wirken uns für das Leben retten sollen.

26. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 438. 27. Bahr, “Wallensteins Tod,” 172. 28. Bagge, “Prof. L. Bischoff.” 29. Curtis, Ludwig Bischoff, 25–27; James Deaville, “Ludwig Bischoff,” in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Personenteil, 2nd ed. (Kassel et al: Bärenreiter, 1999), 2:1683, 1685. 30. For depictions of Mignon in the visual arts, see Grewe, “Mignon als Allegorie des Poetischen.” 31. Schadow’s father, Johann Gottfried, made a copper engraving, Marianne Schlegel als Mignon, in 1802. There are a few similarities between this Mignon and his son’s: both wear a white dress, carry a zither-like instrument on their knees, and, most strikingly, have feathered wings. J. G. Schadow’s engraving is reproduced in Maaz, “Nicht unter Goethe und Raffael,” 133. 32. Grewe, “Beyond Hegel.” 33. M. [Romeo Maurenbrecher], “Gemäldeausstellung in Düsseldorf im August 1828,” Kunst-Blatt 9, no. 81 (1828): 323, quoted in Grewe, “Beyond Hegel,” 204.

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34. Seidel, “Ueber W. Schadow’s Mignon,” 280. 35. Grewe, “Beyond Hegel,” 191–92, 208. 36. Ibid., 208. 37. I have not found evidence that Bischoff knew Schadow’s painting. However, the RMz had a mandate to bring art and society closer together and regularly listed regional happenings in the other arts (see Curtis, Ludwig Bischoff, 54, and facsimile reproduction of an issue, 400–403). As a longtime denizen of the Rhineland, Bischoff must have been aware of Schadow, who besides being a highly prominent artist drew nationwide attention for turning the Düsseldorf Academy of Art into an internationally famous institution. While there Schadow nurtured the celebrated Düsseldorfer Malerschule, a group of Academy students with a unified style (Grewe, “Beyond Hegel,” 196). Schumann met with Schadow several times after his move to Düsseldorf. See Bernhard Appel, “Robert Schumann und die Malerei,” in Schumann und die Düsseldorfer Malerschule , 7–27. 38. Fulton, “The Virgin in the Garden,” quotes a medieval preacher: “These are [the flowers] with whose sweet perfume you filled the house of God, O Mary: . . . the lily of chastity, . . . the rose of love” (1). 39. On the rosary (from Lat. rosarium), see ibid., 1–6. 40. Matthew 7:6, Matthew 13:45. See Ferguson, Signs and Symbols, 43. Bridget Heal describes pearls on the Virgin’s clothing in The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 224–25. 41. RMz 2, no. 20 (1851): 570. “Dazu kömmt die wirksame Instrumentirung, in der wir besonders den Eintritt der Harfe bezeichnen, welche über dem im pianissimo ausgehaltenen C dur-Dreiklang der Posaunen, Hörner und Fagotte plötzlich daherrauscht.” 42. I Chronicles 13:8, Revelation 5:8. In his sermons St. Augustine explains the Ten Commandments in terms of the ten strings of David’s harp. See Ferguson, Signs and Symbols, 175–76. 43. A moment for “Lebende Bilder” perhaps? See Appel, “‘Mehr Malerei als Ausdruck der Empfindung,’” especially 259. 44. According to Kuhn, this archetype dates back to late antiquity and was popular in hagiographies of the Middle Ages (Corruption in Paradise, 24–30, also 234 n. 8). 45. On the religious significance of mythology (which included fairy tales), see Williamson, The Longing for Myth. Bischoff had studied with Friedrich August Wolf and August Boeckh, influential thinkers in the movement that established the status of German mythology. 46. Unlike Schadow, Bischoff ’s religious persuasion is unclear, but having been born in Dessau outside Berlin, he was probably a Protestant. However, over half his life was spent in the Catholic Rhineland, including the city known as “Holy” Cologne. 47. Sperber, Popular Catholicism; Sperber, “Roman Catholic Religious Identity”; Sperber, “The Transformation of Catholic Associations.”

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48. Information on sodalities is from Sperber, “Transformation of Catholic Associations,” 255. Marian worship at popular and elite levels of society had a long history in Cologne; see Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 207–61. 49. Op. 98b was composed before Schumann’s move to the Catholic Rhineland and its subsequent premiere there. On Schumann’s attitudes toward religion (including Catholicism and Protestantism) and the reception of his later Requiem, Op. 148, see Harwood, The Genesis of Robert Schumann’s Liturgical Works, 182–217. Tunbridge, Schumann’s Late Style, 59–68, discusses the reception of Schumann’s Mass, Op. 147 and Op. 148. 50. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 122. 51. Ibid., 59. 52. Despite its title, Op. 98b’s genre is open to interpretation. For an overview of Schumann’s experiments in genre at this time, see Ewert, “Die großbesetzten vokalinstrumentalen Werke,” 480. Harwood, The Genesis, 91 n. 81, finds that parts of Op. 98b share greater similarities with the death scenes in Manfred, Op. 115 and Szenen aus Goethes Faust, WoO 3 than with Schumann’s two Latin settings titled Requiem (Op. 148 and the last song in Op. 90). Harwood does not elaborate, but Daverio, Robert Schumann, 437, offers a few examples of allusions to WoO 3; these for him indicate the “inner unity of the entire Goethe project” and redemption for Mignon similar to that for Gretchen and Faust. 53. “Mignon schließt, ahnungsvoll den Blick in ein bewegteres Seelenleben richtend.” In R. Schumann, Briefe: Neue Folge, 324. Translated in Finson, “Schumann’s Mature Style,” 232. 54. “Mit vergötternder Inbrunst schaute das weissagende Auge des blühenden Kindes auf die Tage der Zukunft.” Novalis, “Hymnen an die Nacht,” in Samuel, Novalis Band I, 167. Translation from Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise, 46. 55. “Im Tode ward das ewge Leben Kund / Du bist der Tod und machst uns erst gesund.” Novalis, “Hymnen an die Nacht,” in Samuel, Novalis Band I, 167. Translation modified from Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise, 46–47. 56. For an interpretation that views Mignon’s suffering as symbolic of all mankind, see Janz, “‘Kennst du das Land.’” 57. Questions of Schumann’s religious persuasion aside (too complex to be given full justice here), he seems to have held a range of notions about death, of which his handling of Mignon’s death would be but one. I have established that in another work from 1849, the vocal duet “Wiegenlied am Lager meines kranken Kindes,” Op. 78, no. 4, Schumann demonstrated a clearly neoclassical sensibility about death; see Kok, “Falling Asleep.” Another death-related text Schumann set for chorus and orchestra in 1849 was Hebbel’s Nachtlied, Op. 108; I discuss it in Kok, “Schumann’s Choral Music.” Elsewhere in this volume Burnham explores Schumann’s late style with death as a subtext from a cultural studies point of view.

7 Entzückt Schumann, Raphael, Faust Nicholas Marston

In his envoi to the reader of The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866–67), Anthony Trollope observes the following: There are those who have told me that I have made all my clergymen bad, and none good. I must venture to hint to such judges that they have taught their eyes to love a colouring higher than nature justifies. We are, most of us, apt to love Raphael’s madonnas better than Rembrandt’s matrons. But though we do so, we know that Rembrandt’s matrons existed; but we have a strong belief that no such woman as Raphael painted ever did exist.1

We can but imagine what, if anything, Schumann might have made of Mrs. Proudie, Archdeacon Grantly, Obadiah Slope, and all the other characters who people Trollope’s fictional county of Barsetshire. But we do know that he shared the “strong belief ” to which Trollope refers. Twenty years before the novelist set down his view, Schumann’s diary entry for March 9, 1846, records an evening visit by his friend the Dresden painter Eduard Bendemann: We talked a great deal about painting, and I, as always, listened (gladly) with reverence. I asked whether he believes that Raphael’s Madonnas might have been painted from life, and whether anything historical is known about that. Bendemann ruled this out altogether: they must surely have been ideal [figures] of his imagination, which would explain why his Madonnas are so easy to recognize.2

So firmly entrenched is our image of Schumann as the most literary of composers that we easily ignore his familiarity with and great interest in the visual arts. Of the few writers who have explored this topic, Leon Botstein has noted his contacts with members of the Dresden and Düsseldorf Schools during his residence in those cities, and suggests that his stylistic development as a composer may partly have been driven by his artistic tastes and experience.3 In Botstein’s view, works such as the Märchenerzählungen, Op. 132, and the 109

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Märchenbilder, Op. 113, can perhaps be related to the small forms of the Düsseldorf painter Alfred Rethel, while Schumann’s turn to large forms such as oratorio and opera may have been a consequence of his enthusiasm for the “richly colored, spacious, scenic and narrative depictions” of Dresden artists such as Bendemann and Lessing.4 “Evident in the paintings with which Schumann was most familiar and that he most admired,” claims Botstein, “was a constant reference either to the past or to the flight from the moment—toward legend, myth, and, periodically, Christianity.” And beside his involvement with his contemporaries, he also venerated earlier painters, chief among whom was Raphael: “Schumann’s engagement with Raphael would be lifelong.”5 The point is borne out not only by Schumann’s diary entries but also in his music criticism. Already in February 1830 he was pondering a distinction between “universal” and “ideal” artists, placing Michelangelo in the former category along with Shakespeare and Mozart, and Raphael in the latter together with Schiller and Handel. An 1838 review contrasts the Six Caprices, Op. 4, by Ambroise Thomas, with a Divertimento by Carl Eduard Hering in terms of the eyes of a Raphael Madonna (Thomas) and the nut-brown hair of a Dutch head by Teniers, while in 1840 an entire heavenful of “Raphael’scher Madonnenaugen” (Raphael-like Madonna eyes) was evoked to describe the chorus “Ich harrete des Herrn” from Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang; later in that same year Schumann noted laconically that “Madonnas by Raphael and Murillo cannot remain hidden for long” as he predicted future worldwide fame for Mendelssohn’s setting of the prayer “Verleih’ uns Frieden gnädiglich,” which he had recently heard performed for the first time in Leipzig. Indeed one of the very last references to art in his Tagebücher mentions a visit in March 1852 to an exhibition of Raphael engravings in Leipzig.6 Of all Schumann’s remarks on painting, however, and on the Madonnas of Raphael in particular, none is so provocative and germane to the subject of the present essay as an 1833 entry in the “Denk- und Dicht-Büchlein of Master Raro, Florestan and Eusebius.” Here Schumann posits that “the educated musician can profit as much from studying a Raphael Madonna as can a painter from a Mozart symphony. And what is more: . . . to the painter, the poem becomes a picture, [while] the musician transposes the painting into tones.”7 Moreover during his years in Dresden (1844–50) Schumann would regularly have been able to contemplate in the original a picture that he would already have known from many reproductions. This was the so-called “Sistine” Madonna (Figure 7.1), one of the most famous of all Raphael’s works and a picture that many of his contemporaries regarded simply as “the most precious painting in the whole world.”8 Painted in 1512–13 as an altarpiece for the Benedictine monastery church of San Sisto in Piacenza, it had been installed in 1754 in Dresden, where Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, intent on elevating the cultural status of the city and indulging his passion for

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the visual arts, was instrumental in creating the collection of the Gemäldegalerie. Schumann would have seen the “Sistine” Madonna displayed on the wall of the Stallgebäude (subsequently the Johanneum), alongside stylistically related works, but in 1855 it was removed from its existing position and redisplayed in a heavy gold frame atop an altar-like base in a gallery of its own within the newly constructed building by Gottfried Semper (the Sempergalerie), recovering thereby—albeit now in a secular context—something of its original, sacred purpose.9 Indeed the painting had been an object of intense contemplation and veneration almost from its arrival in Dresden, inspiring not only countless copies but also quantities of poetry and prose. The librettist of Schumann’s Genoveva, Friedrich Hebbel, published his poem “Auf die Sixtinische Madonna” in 1851, opening with the thought that no human hand could have executed this painting; rather it must, like the rainbow, originate in some pledge or guarantee of the divine (“göttlich Unterpfand”). Julius Hübner, who was among Schumann’s artistic circle in Dresden, likewise published a “Sistine”-inspired sonnet in

Figure 7.1. Raphael, “Sistine” Madonna, Gemäldegalerie alte Meister.

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1857,10 and in July of the following year Trollope’s slightly younger contemporary George Eliot noted in her journal the extraordinary effect that this painting had on her: I sat down on the sofa opposite the picture for an instant, but a sort of awe, as if I were suddenly in the living presence of some glorious being, made my heart swell too much for me to remain comfortably, and we hurried out of the room. On subsequent mornings we always came in the last minutes of our stay to look at this sublimest picture, and while the others . . . lost much of their first interest, this became harder and harder to leave.11

By the time of her visit Eliot would have been able to assess not only Hebbel’s and Hübner’s rather overwrought poetic reactions to this extraordinary picture, but also a much lengthier and technically informative, if no less fulsome, commentary. Published in 1857, this was the work of Carl Gustav Carus (1789– 1869), royal physician, scientist, naturalist, psychologist, painter, and follower of the artist Caspar David Friedrich, who had lived and worked in Dresden from 1798 until his death in 1840.12 Carus presents his aesthetic credentials straightaway: he is writing only for those who know the artist and the picture well, and will therefore refrain from any kind of description in favor of addressing the painting’s “peculiarly profound conception” and its “inner organicism” (111). Before discussing the picture as a totality, he explores the individual figures: Madonna, infant Christ, Pope Sixtus II, Saint Barbara, and the two cherubs, which he likens to the Rückenfigur familiar in German landscape painting (not least the work of Friedrich), serving rather as a pair of ideal viewers to draw us, the real viewers, into the picture. As for the Madonna herself, Carus too clings to the view that this is an ideal representation rather than one taken from life (116). Turning to the organization of the whole, he identifies three factors that account for the extraordinary effect of the painting on the viewer: the “simplicity in the multiplicity of its parts”—in effect, the concentration on three main forms; the symmetry, which is in fact an imperfect symmetry, of the overall composition; and the visionary conception of the whole, by which, as he subsequently explains, he means Raphael’s goal of reproducing a vision (120). The principal technical means by which he achieved this goal was the unconscious departure from the conventional rules of perspective, whereby three perspectival horizons are simultaneously in operation, creating for the viewer the momentary “impression of a certain mystical but happy freedom from the bounds of reality” (126–27). Pursuing the distinction between vision and reality—between, in Schumann’s terms of March 1846, the ideal and the real—Carus notes that what we term “visionary” or “mystical” is marked precisely by “the abandonment of the normal laws of every mental process” (124). Tellingly he turns here to music in order to illustrate his point, quoting Mozart’s celebrated, supposed account

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(actually fabricated in 1815 by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz) of his compositional process: of that dream state during which his best ideas would come unbidden into his mind, and how, “provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself . . . and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my head, so that I can survey it in my mind, like a fine picture or a comely form at a glance.”13 In an essay on Rochlitz’s fraudulent publications, Maynard Solomon notes his drawing here on “a long-standing trope about Creation and creativity,” another manifestation of which is to be found in the literary and pictorial tradition, reaching back to Herder and Wackenroder in the mid-1790s, of “Raphael’s dream,” in which the “Sistine” Madonna appeared to the artist in a dream-vision.14 Carus is content to withhold comment on the likely truth or otherwise of this tradition, observing instead that all creation necessarily involves some kind of paranormal “vision” which need not take the form of an everyday dream (125). While for Herder, Hebbel, Hübner, and so many others, Raphael’s painting was the inspiration for poetry, a distinctive aspect of Carus’s commentary is that it transposes the relationship of these two arts (“To the painter, the poem becomes a picture”): both at the outset and conclusion of his commentary (111, 128–29), Carus cites the “Chorus mysticus,” the famous eight closing lines of Goethe’s Faust II (1831; Figure 7.2). The Madonna, of course, is the Ewig-Weibliche (“Eternal Feminine”); “Das Unbeschreibliche/Hier ist’s getan” describes Raphael’s achievement in representing “the most mystical, artistically most beautiful and sublime, humanly most significant” subject matter there could be; the painting, finally, is a demonstration of the ideal become real, of Gleichnis made Ereignis. As more than one recent commentator has observed, Goethe may have been using the word

Alles Vergängliche

All that must disappear

Ist nur ein Gleichnis;

Is but a parable;

Das Unzulängliche

What lay beyond us, here

Hier wird¢s Ereignis;

All is made visible;

Das Unbeschreibliche

Here deeds have understood

Hier ist es getan;

Words they were darkened by;

Das Ewig-Weibliche

Eternal Womanhood

Zieht uns hinan.

Draws us on high.

(Goethe, Faust: Texte, 464, II, 12104–12111)

(Goethe, Faust Part II, 239)

Figure 7.2. Goethe, Faust II, “Chorus mysticus.”

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Ereignis in its more archaic sense of Eräugnis, “something grasped by the eye.”15 Whether or not Carus understood the word in this sense in the late 1850s, the etymology is nonetheless pertinent to a context in which Goethe’s famous lines are transposed into the realm of art criticism while Raphael’s painting conversely becomes a commentary on Goethe.16 It goes without saying that Schumann could not have read Carus’s published commentary; by 1857 he was dead. But Carus, although careful to admit that the full significance of the “Sistine” Madonna had become clear to him only in the past few years, since the 1855 relocation and some restoration work in the following year, nevertheless emphasized at the outset that his familiarity with the painting reached back well over a half century (108–10). As for Goethe, Carus had known him personally and was a significant and influential disciple. He published a study of Goethe’s work and thought in 1843; earlier, in 1835, the third of his Briefe über Goethe’s Faust had presented an analysis of the “Chorus mysticus,” though without mention of the “Sistine” Madonna.17 And Carus was yet another of Schumann’s Dresden circle. The first mention of him in the Haushaltbücher dates from the end of December 1844, shortly after the Schumanns’ arrival in the city.18 On occasion Schumann took medical advice from Carus, but their contact during these years was mainly social, sometimes including the company of Bendemann. Indeed the Carus and Bendemann households were among the very last of whom the Schumanns took leave at the end of August 1850 as they set out for Düsseldorf.19 Among the compositions that Schumann took with him on that journey were his Faustszenen. The setting of the final scene had first occupied him in the second half of 1844 and was “completed as best I can” on December 23.20 He returned to the “Chorus mysticus” in April 1847 and finished orchestrating it that month, but shortly thereafter composed and scored a second version between late May and late July. What became part III of the work was completed only after a further addition (of no. 7/iv, “Gerettet ist das edle Glied”) in 1848, whereupon a private performance was finally given on June 25. The eventual parts I and II followed subsequently, in the period July 1849–May 1850. The Overture was composed in 1853, and the whole work was published posthumously, including both versions of the “Chorus Mysticus,” in 1858, the year of George Eliot’s swooning in the Gemäldegalerie.21 Schumann’s Faustszenen, then, belongs very much to the Dresden years, those years of association with Carus, Bendemann, and other artists. Critical opinion of the work has always been divided, though it is in any case hardly familiar through performance. It has attracted more scholarly notice over the past decade and a half, as Schumann’s late works in general have been treated to a thoroughgoing reevaluation. Unsurprisingly two constant strands in its reception have been the extent to which it forms a coherent whole, and the relationship of Schumann’s music to Goethe’s text:22 Schumann himself acknowledged the magnitude of the undertaking when he wrote to Mendelssohn on September 24, 1845, concerning the final scene: “The scene from Faust rests on my desk. I’m

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downright afraid to look at it again. Only because the sublime poetry of precisely this closing scene grips me so would I venture [to resume] work; I don’t know whether I’ll ever publish it.”23 But we need not allow the admittedly compelling image of the composer reckoning his powers against this extraordinary and intractable literary edifice to blind us to the possible relevance of other stimuli, not least visual, pictorial ones, including the complex skein of connections to Raphael’s painting outlined above. The work is, after all, called “Scenes from Goethe’s Faust.” Reception of Goethe’s drama had from the first been mediated by the pictorial representation of favorite scenes; Schumann would have known Peter Cornelius’s series of 1811–16 and also, perhaps, that of Delacroix (1828). Both of these, though, necessarily dealt only with the first part of the drama, the second not having been published until 1832. Among those who provided illustrations for both parts was Moritz Retzsch, and a detail from the eleventh of his 1836 line drawings illustrating Faust II is significant in the present context.24 In Goethe’s text, following his death Faust’s “immortal part” is borne upward by angels (before l. 11934), while the Mater Gloriosa “hovers into view” (“schwebt einher”: following l. 12031) some lines later. Retzsch’s illustration (Figure 7.3), the last of the

Figure 7.3. Moritz Retzsch, Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust: Erster und zweiter Theil (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1836), n.p.

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series, represents this “immortal part” as a small child placed in the arms of a centrally posed female angel; the reference to the Madonna with Child tradition in the visual and plastic arts is unmistakable. Also notable, as will become clear in relation to Schumann’s score, is the fact that the angelic harps are Retzsch’s invention; however clichéd they may be, they have no source in Goethe. A further indication of the extent to which specifically the “Sistine” Madonna was bound up with responses to the end of Faust II is demonstrated in one of Engelbert Seibertz’s engravings for an edition of the drama published in 1858 (Figure 7.4).25 Again a subtle re-vision of Goethe’s text is involved. Whereas in the drama the Mater Gloriosa encourages “a Penitent woman once known as Gretchen” to raise herself to higher spheres, whither Faust will follow her when he senses her (ll. 12094–95), Seibertz shows Faust and Gretchen already reunited,

Figure 7.4. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Eine Tragödie von Goethe. Mit Zeichnungen von Engelbert Seibertz. Zweiter Theil (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1858), facing 212.

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hand in hand, receiving the Mater Gloriosa’s benediction. Allowing for the reversed positions of foreground male and female, the composition of the three main figures again alludes very strongly to Raphael’s painting.26 Nonetheless it is Schumann the reader rather than Schumann the viewer who continues to claim attention. The very subtitle, for example, of John Daverio’s extended and extremely positive reassessment of the Faustszenen, “Faust as Musical Novel,” immediately indicates the tenor of his argument.27 Daverio is concerned to rescue the composition from the characteristic accusation that it is essentially fragmentary, marked by no “overriding sense for the whole” (367). For Daverio, “Schumann’s settings undeniably create the impression of a series of discrete fragments” (369), but these fragments work together to form “not a harmonious unity, but a heterogeneous totality, a system of musico-poetic fragments” (387), and this kind of “wholeness,” Daverio wants to persuade us, is most characteristic of the novel. It is ironic that in developing this “novelistic” defense against the charge of fragmentariness Daverio draws first upon one of the three factors that made Raphael’s “Sistine” Madonna so exemplary in Carus’s eyes: the presence of multiple symmetries. In Daverio’s scheme, Schumann’s seven numbered Szenen are reflected in the seven-part structure of the seventh scene (part III) itself, which, however, falls plausibly into three “principal sections” with no. 4 (the chorus “Gerettet ist das edle Glied”), at the center, thereby replicating the three-scene structure of both parts I and II (and mirroring the three-part design of the whole). This chorus, the “heartpiece” of the final scene, corresponds in Daverio’s reading to the fourth scene (part II, “Anmutige Gegend”), which “comes at dead center.” And since the fourth and final section of this scene gives us Faust’s great monologue ending with the key line “Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben” (l. 4727), Daverio regards it as an instance of the literary “mirror in the text” beloved of Jean Paul, Novalis, and others, providing “a condensed summation of the total narrative”—in this case, “the notion that the divine is only accessible through the reflective medium of art” (370).28 It should be obvious that the strictness of these symmetries is exaggerated; even Daverio admits that the relative lengths of the seven parts of part III “duplicate the proportions of the seven scenes” only “roughly,” and his subsequent acknowledgment that such symmetries are “essentially inaudible” (370) ought to remind us that to conceive the structure of the work in this way is essentially to visualize or spatialize it. Still, as Carus was clear to point out, it was precisely the constant imperfection of Raphael’s symmetries that gave his painting such force.29 Also, the well-attested textual cross-reference (“mirroring”) between Gretchen’s prayer to the Mater Dolorosa in part I, scene 2 (“Ach neige, Du Schmerzenreiche”: ll. 3587–88) and her plea to the Mater Gloriosa (“Neige, neige, Du Ohnegleiche”: ll. 12069–70) in part III, no. 6, if not strictly a “mirror in the text” in Daverio’s sense, can also be enriched by an appeal to Carus’s linking of Raphael and Goethe. In the former scene Gretchen prays before an

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unidentified picture (Andachtsbild: Goethe’s direction is retained in Schumann’s score) of the Mater Dolorosa; for Carus and, as I shall suggest, Schumann, Raphael’s painting—unidentified, literally unseen, visionary—“hovers” above the latter moment.30 In Daverio’s terms, the real, physical representation of the Mater Dolorosa is the earthly “reflective artistic medium” through which the unrepresentable divine is prefigured. Carus further emphasized the essential simplicity of Raphael’s design, with its concentration on three main forms. Moreover, in a further step in his connection of the painting with Goethe’s Faust, he conflates Raphael’s depiction of Sixtus II with Goethe’s Dr. Marianus, and though he does not actually name Gretchen, his description of St. Barbara as representing a picture of womanhood that has not yet reached the ideal state represented by the Madonna herself comes as close as one might to conflating those two characters also.31 In Daverio’s “novelistic” view, Schumann’s criterion in selecting the six scenes that comprise parts I and II of his work was to choose those which, “for him, captured the essence of the farflung action and [to set] them in the order in which they appear in the original drama” (367). Leaving aside the question of how one might hope to discern the “essence” of Goethe’s Faust in its entirety, Daverio’s claim is barely sustainable when one considers Schumann’s wholesale marginalization of Mephistopheles, for example, or the complete absence from his scheme of the wager between Mephistopheles and Faust. The import of Faust’s self-pronounced death sentence, “Verweile doch, Du bist so schön!” (l. 11582), near the end of Schumann’s part II, scene 6 is unintelligible from the context of Schumann’s composition alone; it requires detailed knowledge of both parts of Goethe’s drama. Rather than seeking to read some highly compressed narrative or dramatic continuity across Schumann’s composition, we may do better to approach it from a more spatial and visual perspective. Schumann was far from seeking somehow to distill the essence of Goethe’s “farflung action”; he sought instead what Carus discerned as an overall “simplicity in the multiplicity of parts,” foregrounding first Gretchen and then Faust against the host of characters among whom they move in Goethe’s play. In a recent essay Helmut Loos understands the total assemblage in religious allegorical terms: sin or guilt (Schuld) is central to both parts I and II in relation to the two principal protagonists, who in their dependence on one another become the “essential bearers” of part III; the “self-contained unity” of the whole rests upon the polarity between sin and redemption.32 The very idea of Faust and Gretchen as “bearers” of the final part brings to mind the compositional relationship of the three adult figures in the “Sistine” Madonna.33 By extension we might see the Faustszenen as indebted to the form of the triptych, albeit one whose central panel (part III) has been displaced to the right of its two flanking panels (parts I and II). A further painterly analogy would be to the genre of pendant canvases, as exemplified in the work of Caspar David Friedrich and

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others, each complete in itself but so placed in relation to the other(s) that it is enabled to signify beyond its frame without necessarily giving rise to the “self-contained unity” argued for by Loos.34 All of which brings us back to Daverio’s diagnosis of “heterogeneous totality” as opposed to “harmonious unity.” And if one seeks a musical means whereby a mid-nineteenth-century composer might hope to “signify beyond the frame,” then techniques of thematic and motivic transformation come easily to mind. Prior to Edda Burger-Güntert’s recent major study of the Faustszenen, one of the most thoroughgoing attempts to analyze the work from this perspective had been Donald Mintz’s 1961 study, concerning which Daverio cautions that this “argument for a network of . . . ‘symbolic’ or ‘interpretative’ cells is unconvincing largely because the neutral character of the cells mitigates their assumption of a referential role” (559 n. 134).35 Krummacher speaks merely of characteristic “melodic shapes” that are idiosyncratic to Schumann’s musical language.36 Meanwhile Daverio himself borrows Thomas Mann’s concept of Wagner’s Beziehungszauber, or “associative magic,” to characterize the elusive (and allusive) web of references and relationships that weaves throughout Schumann’s score, in particular “the increasing density of its allusions to the surrounding music” that characterizes “the central choral complex [‘Gerettet ist das edle Glied’] of the Schlussszene” (381). In elaborating this point he addresses one of the most sonically arresting moments in the entire work: the point at which Dr. Marianus, “in the highest and purest cell,” turns his “enraptured” (entzückt: following l. 11996) gaze toward “the Queen of Heaven,” the Mater Gloriosa (Example 7.1).

Example 7.1. Schumann, Faustszenen, III, no. 5: “Hier ist die Aussicht frei.”

Example 7.1. Continued

Example 7.1. Continued

Example 7.1. Continued

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Entzückt: between his noticing her and beginning his song in praise of the “Höchste Herrscherin der Welt,” there intrudes upon Marianus’s music a solo oboe, gorgeously accompanied by muted strings, harp, and horns and articulating a highly distinctive motive (bars 18–19) that will recur, unchanged, in bars 25–26 and 42–43. Daverio notes first its immediate derivation from “a neutral, declamatory gesture” in bars 7–8 of the introductory recitative passage, but also hears its connection to the moment in the preceding chorus when the Blessed Boys command “that Faust’s spirit shed its ‘flaky cocoon.’” His next move seems more obscure: “Just as Goethe’s Dr. Marianus, poised ‘in the highest, purest cell,’ serves as a foil to Faust brooding in his study at the beginning of the drama, so Schumann firms the connection between the two figures with a concise, but suggestive musical gesture” (381). The musical connection can hardly be doubted; nonetheless Daverio’s swerve here from a connection between music for Marianus, on the one hand, and the Blessed Boys, on the other, to a more general connection between Marianus and Faust seems forced. But is the more local motivic progenitor, in Marianus’s bars 7–8, really as “neutral” as Daverio claims? Marianus is speaking of the as yet unidentified female figures (“Frau’n”) who appear “schwebend nach Oben,” and it is these three words that are set to Daverio’s “neutral, declamatory gesture.” Immediately thereafter Marianus realizes that chief among these women is the “Himmelskönigin” (Heavenly Queen) herself. In Goethe’s text the first explicit naming of this main object of Marianus’s gaze comes more than thirty lines later, with the stage direction “Mater Gloriosa schwebt einher” (following l. 12031): note the recurrence of the verb schweben.37 Yet in Schumann’s score this direction appears (part III, no. 6, b. 33) as “Mater Gloriosa schwebt näher.” If this is not merely the result of error, its implications are considerable inasmuch as it suggests the extent to which Schumann has been “seeing” the scene through Marianus’s eyes: the Mater Gloriosa, already visible for some time, now comes more prominently into view. The site and vehicle of her first arrival on the scene is surely the oboe motive in Dr. Marianus’s song of praise. Whatever its precursors, I would argue that it is only here that this figure becomes marked for consciousness and attains a fixed, a “real” identity as a motive.38 Schumann succeeds in achieving what, for Carus and others, Raphael achieved in the “Sistine” Madonna: the representation, the realization of a vision. What in Goethe’s text is established only through a bald stage direction and Dr. Marianus’s exuberant report is rendered by Schumann as an aural event, an entry upon the stage of his music; das Unzulängliche—the insufficient, inaccessible—is made Ereignis/Eräugnis.39 In a recent arresting study of the reception of the “Sistine” Madonna, particularly in its relationship to mid-nineteenth-century Kunstreligion, Hans Belting notes that the repetitions of the word Hier in Goethe’s “Chorus mysticus” evoke “the spatial presence of a picture, as though we could see with our own eyes what in fact only takes shape in our imagination. Raphael’s painting, too, had only been the locus where viewers were profoundly moved by an inner image of their own.” Furthermore:

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Though an inanimate artifact, [the painting] appeared to the beholder as a living vision. Behind the thoroughly corporeal curtain that seems to be opening at the very moment the viewer steps in front of the picture, the Madonna approaches, floating on a heavenly cloud . . . . As in Faust, the “Eternal Feminine” was not the subject in the picture, but actually the embodiment of the look that the beholder directed towards the picture.40

This analysis of the psychology of viewing can lead us back to Schumann’s and Bendemann’s evening conversation in March 1846. Recent Raphael scholarship has sided against Bendemann (and Trollope) over the question whether the Madonnas were idealized figures of his imagination or drawn from life.41 Belting reminds us that the “real” woman, the woman we “really” see, is in either case “ideal,” arising from the projection of our own imagination onto the object viewed. William Blake had anticipated the point wonderfully already in 1810, the year of Schumann’s birth: When the Sun rises, do you not see a “round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea”? O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it.42

Schumann’s oboe motive in Dr. Marianus’s solo likewise evokes the presence of the Mater Gloriosa, “as though we could see with our own eyes what in fact only takes shape in our imagination.” And the motivic elusiveness—if such it be—of the Faustszenen reminds us that motivic and indeed formal relationships reside not so much in music as in the attitudes we bring to it: we are possessed of a Corporeal Ear, too.43 In exploring Schumann’s composition in the context of his own and the mid-nineteenth century’s reception of Raphael, and the “Sistine” Madonna in particular, I have wanted both to recognize his keen appreciation of the visual arts and to test his claim that “the educated musician can profit as much from studying a Raphael Madonna as can a painter from a Mozart symphony.” Perhaps nowhere in the Faustszenen is Schumann’s claim more powerfully illustrated than in his rapt music for Dr. Marianus. We should follow that enraptured gaze, for this is music that invites us not only to hear, but to see.

notes 1. Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, 860. 2. R. Schumann, Tagebücher (hereafter cited as Tb), 2:398. 3. Intersections between Schumann’s music and visual art have also been discussed in Kok, “Falling Asleep”; Tunbridge, “Euphorion Falls”; Appel, Schumann und die Düsseldorfer Malerschule; Hofmann, “Schumanns Einflussnahme.” 4. Botstein, “History, Rhetoric,” especially 35–39 (“German Romantic Painting and the Music of Robert Schumann”).

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5. Ibid., 9, 35. 6. R. Schumann, Tb, 1:230; R. Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften (1985; hereafter cited as GS), 2:280; 3:246, 284; Tb, 2:432, noted in Botstein, “History, Rhetoric,” 37. 7. GS, 1:42–43. More generally on the relations between painting and music in this period, see Morton and Schmunk, The Arts Entwined. 8. Börsch-Supan, “Where Did German Romantic Painting Thrive?,” 42. See also Werfelmeyer, “Raphael’s Sistine Madonna.” 9. For the historical detail in this paragraph I am indebted to Walther, Raffael, especially 1–2, 8–9, 27–31, and Brink and Henning, Die Sixtinische Madonna. 10. The indispensable source for the literary reception of the “Sistine” Madonna is Ladwein, Raffaels Sixtinische Madonna; see 103–6 (Hebbel) and 129–30 (Hübner). Ladwein observes that Hübner’s poem was the last to be written about the painting for some sixty years and that Hübner subsequently scorned this poetic tradition. In his role as director of the Dresdner Galerie Hübner succeeded Schumann’s acquaintance Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who held the position from 1846 and was in post when the “Sistine” Madonna was relocated to the Sempergalerie: see Ladwein, Raffaels Sixtinische Madonna, 107–8. Indeed the idea of displaying the painting entirely on its own originated in 1853 with von Carolsfeld: see Brink and Henning, Die Sixtinische Madonna, 87–88. 11. Harris and Johnston, The Journals of George Eliot, 325. Compare Goethe’s reaction on first encountering the Dresden collection, at that stage housed in the Johanneum, early in 1768: “The profound silence that reigned, created a solemn and unique impression, akin to the emotion experienced upon entering a House of God, and it deepened as one looked at the ornaments on exhibition which, as much as the temple that housed them, were objects of adoration in that place consecrated to the holy ends of art” (quoted in Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 15). For the original, see Goethe, Aus meinem Leben, 350. It would seem that Goethe did not encounter the “Sistine” Madonna on this occasion: see Goethe, Von Frankfurt nach Weimar, 663–64 (note to p. 121, 10, “die Gallerie”). 12. For the text of Carus’s account, see Ladwein, Raffaels Sixtinische Madonna, 108–29; specific page references are cited in parentheses. Carus’s painting of Schumann’s “ideal” and “universal” artists Raphael and Michelangelo is reproduced in Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 241. Carl Gustav Carus should not be confused with Ernst August Carus (1797–1854), a physician at Colditz Asylum and professor at the University of Leipzig; Schumann befriended him and his wife, Agnes, in the late 1820s. 13. Solomon, “Beethoven’s Creative Process,” 129. Solomon observes that this quickly became “the best known of all Mozart letters” after its first publication. 14. Ibid., 132. For Herder, Wackenroder, and “Raphael’s Dream,” see Ladwein, Raffaels Sixtinische Madonna, 32–39; Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece, 50–70. 15. For example, Goethe, Faust Part II (1994), lxxviii; Goethe, Faust: Kommentare, 814–15. All subsequent quotations and line numbering from Goethe’s text refer to Goethe, Faust: Texte. 16. Belting suggests, without offering supporting evidence, that Goethe’s lines were themselves a response to Raphael’s painting, but that, prior to its resurrection

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in Carus, this connection “very quickly fell into oblivion, so that the poetic work was preserved from any comparison with the painting” (The Invisible Masterpiece, 63). The possible allusions to the “Sistine” Madonna in pictorial representations of the closing scenes of the drama discussed below may, however, be taken to indicate the extent to which the painting was generally bound up with readers’ understanding of the end of Faust II in the first decades after Goethe’s death. This is not to say, of course, that other works of art have not been implicated in Goethe’s conception. Albrecht Schöne has proposed paintings by Titian and Benedetto Caliari as possible sources; see Goethe, Faust: Kommentare, 805. These suggestions reappear in Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, 342 n. 2, 488–89. 17. See Carus, Goethe. 18. R. Schumann, Tb, 3:377. 19. R. Schumann, Tb, 3:536. 20. Ibid., 3:376. 21. McCorkle, Robert Schumann, 627–29. 22. This is true of the major study by Burger-Güntert, Robert Schumanns “Szenen aus Goethes Faust.” See also Leven-Keesen, Robert Schumanns Szenen aus Goethes Faust. 23. R. Schumann, Briefe: Neue Folge (1904), 250; translation from Daverio, Robert Schumann, 366. 24. Retzsch, Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust, n. p. 25. Goethe, Faust: Eine Tragödie, facing 212. 26. As with Carus’s commentary on the “Sistine” Madonna, Schumann could not have seen the Seibertz engraving. Yet Burger-Güntert, in Robert Schumanns “Szenen aus Goethes Faust,” 169–70 and n. 100, reasons that the reuniting of Gretchen and Faust after death was of particular interest to Schumann and notes his proposal of a closing tableau showing their union before the Mater Gloriosa in a letter to Liszt of July 21, 1849. Burger-Güntert mentions in passing the “Sistine” Madonna as a likely influence on Schumann’s conception of the scene, but does not develop the point further. 27. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 364–87; specific page references are cited in parentheses. 28. Daverio misquotes Goethe here: “Am fest’gen Abglanz.” Robert Schumann, 370, emphasis mine. 29. Carus refers to “die Symmetrie (welche doch keine vollständige Symmetrie ist) in der allgemeinen Anordnung” (Ladwein, Raffaels Sixtinische Madonna, 120). 30. Opinion is divided as to whether or to what extent Schumann’s music reflects the textual cross-reference: compare, for example, Daverio, Robert Schumann, 383–84, with Burger-Güntert, Robert Schumanns “Szenen aus Goethes Faust,” 563–64 and n. 526. It is interesting to note in this connection that Herder’s “Sistine” Madonna poem is entitled “Das Bild der Andacht”; see Ladwein, Raffaels Sixtinische Madonna, 35–36. 31. Ladwein, Raffaels Sixtinische Madonna, 120–21: “So lösen sich hier . . . auch nur drei große Gestalten.” The discussion of the figure of St. Barbara appears on 119. 32. Loos, “Szenen aus Goethes ‘Faust,’” 388–89.

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33. And even more so what I have taken above to be Seibertz’s reworking of that painting (Figure 7.4), in which Raphael’s Sixtus II becomes Seibertz’s Faust and St. Barbara his Gretchen. Burger-Güntert, Robert Schumanns “Szenen aus Goethes Faust,” 527–28, notes (while rightly emphasizing its implausibility) a critical tradition, spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that identifies Dr. Marianus with Faust himself. Meanwhile we have seen that in Carus’s interpretation, Raphael’s Sixtus II becomes Goethe’s Dr. Marianus and his description of St. Barbara may easily be applied to that of Gretchen at the end of Faust II. 34. Recall that Schumann’s experience of the “Sistine” Madonna would have been in the context of stylistically related paintings. Although I have been unable to find precise details of its hanging during Schumann’s Dresden years, Walther, Raffael, 30–31, illustrates and discusses a “complex” arrangement of cross-referring paintings with the “Sistine” Madonna at the center which was adopted in the period 1816–32. 35. Burger-Güntert, Robert Schumanns “Szenen aus Goethes Faust”; Mintz, “Schumann as an Interpreter of Goethe’s Faust.” 36. Krummacher, “‘An Goethe vorbei’?,” 194–95. 37. Hübner’s poem “Die sixtinische Madonna” likewise begins “Sie schwebt herab!” (Ladwein, Raffaels Sixtinische Madonna, 129–30). 38. To the precursors mentioned by Daverio might, for example, be added the two-bar figure that breaks into the Overture at bars 111–12 (repeated in bars 115–16 and 123–24), as well as Gretchen’s concluding “Auf baldiges Wiedersehn” at the end of the “Scene im Garten” (part I, no. 1). But such is the elusiveness of Schumann’s writing that the precise status of such connections must remain largely subjective. And just as Carus attributed the “visionary” quality conveyed by the “Sistine” Madonna to Raphael’s unconventional treatment of perspective, so the “associative magic” shunning what Daverio calls “leitmotivic syntax” (381) may engender across the Faustszenen something like Carus’s “impression of a certain mystical but happy freedom from the bounds of reality,” as opposed to the “inner coherence and completeness” that Burger-Güntert, for example, hears arising from Schumann’s use of “delicate motivic ‘poetic fingerprints’” (Robert Schumanns “Szenen aus Goethes Faust,” 196). 39. Daverio’s claim (Robert Schumann, 381) that the oboe motive is “soon elaborated by other instruments and the voice as well” seems untenable; only in bars 43–44 (basses) does it migrate to another part and another pitch level. (Compare the much greater use made throughout of the cadential figure in the first cello at bars 8–9, and especially from bar 30: this motive remains unexamined by Daverio.) That the oboe motive is preserved so exactly in part III, no. 5 and remains so aloof from the supporting orchestral fabric sits well alongside Dr. Marianus’s description of the Mater Gloriosa as “unberührbar” (l. 12020). 40. Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece, 64, 65. 41. See, for example, Oberhuber, “Raphael’s Vision of Women,” in Raphael, 39–55. 42. Blake, “A Vision of the Last Judgement,” in The Note-Book, 135.

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43. In relation to this and the general concerns of this essay, it is not without interest to note an account given to Goethe by Zelter of an event staged in Berlin on April 18 (Good Friday) 1820 to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of Raphael’s birth. A catafalque bearing a copy of a portrait of Raphael was positioned beneath juxtaposed copies of the “Sistine” Madonna, the Madonna del Pesce, and Raphael’s picture of St. Cecilia with SS Paul, John the Evangelist, Augustine, and Mary Magdalene. A hundred-member choir performed a requiem by Zelter, a Crucifixus (probably the well-known eight-part setting) by Lotti, and a Gloria by Haydn. Between these last two items Zelter addressed the audience. Speaking of the Lotti work, he emphasized the transformation of sound into sight: while in the picture of St. Cecilia “the observing eye [becomes] an ear, so in this music does the ear by means of the inner imagination [become] a spiritual eye before which the eternal Cross wonderfully and gradually rises up whereby the sin and shame of the whole world is expiated.” Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Einführung, Kommentar, 509–10. For Zelter’s letter of April 19, 1820, see Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Text 1799–1827, 597–98. For a further exchange (June—July 1820) between Zelter and Goethe concerning the audibility of the music in the picture of St. Cecilia, see 620 and 624 in the same volume.

8 Schumann and Agencies of Improvisation Dana Gooley

In an often cited diary entry, Schumann wrote that he had initiated around 1845 a new mode of composition in which he worked out “everything” in his head before writing it out, in contrast to his early years when he wrote out his inspirations immediately as they came to him.1 He seems to have viewed this new practice, which followed upon an intensive recommitment to counterpoint, as a sign of maturity—a refining of concentration, compositional oversight, and contemplative depth. There is a long history of admiring these qualities as evidence of higher wisdom acquired by experience and labor, or a transcendence of the physical by the mental. Schumann imagined that this more thoroughly mental approach would guarantee a more direct transfer of spirit or fantasy to composition. In 1852 he recommended to an ambitious young musician, “Accustom yourself . . . to conceiving music freely in your imagination, without the help of the piano,” for it would enable him to produce music of “ever greater clarity and purity.”2 A possibility that apparently never occurred to Schumann is that in detaching his compositional activity from direct physical engagement with the piano, performance, and embodied sound, he may have been cutting off a vital source of inspiration. In his early years he had been an avid pianist, formulating and reformulating musical ideas at the piano and reveling in the unimpeded flow of improvisation. One early diary entry, written after an evening of improvisation, records his almost animistic sense of the piano as an extension or repository of his sentimental life and memory: When I think of my childhood or the year 1826 I fall upon A-minor tonalities etc.; when I think of last September harsh dissonances in pp. pp. are automatically unleashed. Whatever thoughts come in the moment will seek expression in tones. The heart has already felt each tone on its keys, just as the keys on the piano must first be touched before they sound. In the moments when one thinks of nothing or of trivial things, the fantasy becomes flatter and the playing paler; when one thinks of music itself, contrapuntal phrases and fugues come forth easily.3

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In a near inversion of his later stance, Schumann privileges here the affective immediacy of improvisational performance, the tactile connection to a keyboard that stores affective memories, and the continuity between improvisation and counterpoint. Although he is not discussing composition in this quotation, pianist-composers of his generation cultivated a symbiotic relationship between improvisation and composition and did not always make a hard and fast distinction between the two. In the keyboard-composer tradition from Bach to Stravinsky improvisation plays an integral role in testing and developing ideas as well as providing expansive, regenerative relief from the rigors of composition.4 Johann Nepomuk Hummel, writing about the free fantasy in 1825, saluted its ability to refresh and relax: “Though I was busy in the daytime giving lessons and usually composing at night, I took advantage of the twilight hour to give myself over to my inventions (my ideas, knowledge and feelings) with improvisation at the piano, here in the galant style, there in the strict and fugal style.”5 It is worth exploring why Schumann, who clearly knew Hummel’s treatise, ceased in later years to view the improvisation-composition relationship in this complementary manner. When he was coming of age in the 1820s improvisation was a pervasive practice among the pianist-composers he most admired. Leading postclassical pianists such as Weber, Meyerbeer, Moscheles, and Hummel all improvised both in public and private and were highly regarded for it.6 Talented teenagers of the 1820s such as Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Liszt were no less inclined to improvise in a range of contexts. The young Schumann was musically less precocious than all of these figures and possessed less of the rigorous theoretical and pianistic training that grounded improvisational skill. His diaries nevertheless show that he was improvising often in the years 1827–31, the period in which his somewhat erratic student life in Leipzig and Heidelberg gave way to serious piano studies, to intensive exercises in counterpoint, and to a resolution to pursue a musical career. Any attempt to reconstruct Schumann’s improvisational practices is essentially provisional due to the obvious shortage and uncertainty of documentation. There is potentially a large gap between what a treatise like Czerny’s Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Klavier (1829) prescribes and the actual practice of pianists around 1830, especially considering the archaic tone of parts of the treatise. Yet a consideration of Schumann’s improvisations offers an opportunity to consider what attitudes and thought processes extemporaneous playing might have stimulated in Schumann as pianist and composer, and what influence his improvisations may have left in his works. My goal here is to assemble some of the attitudes and practices of improvisation that he probably absorbed from the virtuoso pianist school of the 1820s, and to trace some of the possible consequences for his early piano compositions. Unlike most composers of his stature, Schumann’s early relationship with the piano was relatively amateurish, intuitive, and free of didactic mediation. He became a pianist before he had even learned to read music fluently. As he later

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confided to his first teacher, Friedrich Wieck, in the early years he “improvised a great deal and rarely played from music.”7 Although he attributed his tendency to improvise partially to his “complete lack of training, in listening, technique, and especially theory,” it was also clearly a source of intense pleasure and imaginative play. His diaries from 1828 forward are filled with short, clipped summaries of his activities of the day, and improvisation (fantasieren) comes up over and over again, sometimes on a nearly daily basis. He improvised most often in the evening hours, and sometimes at great length. “When I was in Switzerland,” he recalled in 1841, “I often improvised well into the night.”8 On one occasion he logged six solid hours of extemporaneous bliss. In July 1832, though playing piano somewhat less than earlier, he records having improvised “at length and overflowingly.”9 Schumann’s youthful improvisations appear to have been intense, rhapsodic, and passionate, providing an outlet for inchoate adolescent energies. Friedrich Wieck’s first impression of the young pianist was that he was an “enragé auf dem Piano,” suggesting an undisciplined, dramatically compelling sort of playing somewhat out of line with postclassical ideals.10 When Schumann jotted down memories of his teen years for a potential autobiography he listed urgency and impulsiveness as his strong points: “Free improvisation [many hours daily] . . . Overwhelming desire to play piano when I have not played for a long time . . . At my best in free improvisation . . . entraining fire of my playing” (ellipses in original).11 If Schumann’s earlier piano works incorporate so many esoteric and personal meanings, it may be partly due to this strong bond between the instrument and his fermenting subjective world. It is telling that many of his earliest attempts at composition, those preceding Op. 1, are not for solo piano but rather for voices, orchestra, choir, and four-hand piano, as though protecting a special private place for the solo piano. In several examples from Schumann’s teenage diaries his sense of exaltation and self-expansion during improvisation is linked with erotic fantasy. On July 13, 1828, returning from the home of his first love, Agnes Carus, he wrote, “She is probably sleeping now; I improvised well; for she lives in my fantasies together with the entire universe of tones.” During a trip to Milan his playing managed to attract the attention of his fellow lodgers, and soon his music was getting mixed up with socializing and flirting: “the Englishwoman—the beautiful woman—the husband—smiles—enquiries about me—piano-enthusiasm— improvisation—the other woman livelier, always looking round, red, like Agnes in Gera.” After a soirée at the Wieck residence in 1832 he went home and wrote, “[I] sat myself down at the piano, and it was to me as if flowers aloud and gods came out of my fingers, the thought streamed so out of me.”12 The source of inspiration in this case was the memory of a kiss he had just given a Dutch sweetheart, and the diary tells us his spontaneous bass line was C-F-G-C. A few years later, as he focused his erotic urges on Clara, he superimposed one of her melodies upon this bass to produce his Op. 4.

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Schumann’s improvisations also gave him the opportunity to demonstrate prowess in the university milieu of Heidelberg, where young men competed for social distinction and more often demonstrated masculine virtue in sword fighting. Though he had not yet settled on a career as a performer, he was reaping the social advantages of his special talent in the salons and becoming a local hero. Anton Töpken, a close companion during this period, left the most complete description of this: After social conversation there normally followed on his part free improvisation on the piano, in which he unleashed all the spirits. I will admit that these direct musical effusions of Schumann gave me a pleasure unmatched by any other great artist I heard. Ideas flowed to him in inexhaustible richness. Out of a single thought, which he made appear in all different guises, everything streamed and poured forth as if from within itself and thereby drew characteristic feeling to its depth and with all poetic magic, while at the same time with the clearly recognizable features of his musical personality, both the energetic and powerful side and his softly sweet, reflective-dreamy thoughts. . . . He had already charmed everyone in larger circles, who fundamentally counted on his appearing, with his free improvisations and would then have an opportunity to appear before the larger public.13

The improvisations clearly impressed audiences and opened up possibilities that his compositional achievements to date could not match. Töpken was repeatedly “astounded by this self-confidence in playing, this consciously artistic performance,” and Schumann was highly attuned to his effect upon listeners. Sometimes he reported a “good fantasy and little attention on the part of the listeners” or “little applause after a good fantasia,” while in better circumstances he would produce a “good fantasia and internal and external praise.”14 Even before his transformative experience hearing Paganini in concert (1830), Schumann’s experiences at the piano had brought about a self-consciousness concerning the performer’s power over audiences. With no particular provocation he reflected, “Passionate movements during piano playing inspire the audience just like the expressions and gestures of an orator.” A couple of weeks later he argued for the ethical advantages of music as performed, eventoriented art: “That is just the advantage of music and of acting: we can enjoy them collectively and are entranced or moved in the same moment; the other arts do not have this . . . not even poetry when it lacks its midwife, acting, which brings it to public life.”15 These are significant words in light of Schumann’s indecision as to whether he would become a poet or a musician. They also remind us that his earliest experiences improvising at the piano were accompaniments to “musical-declamatory” theater skits at his school.16 Paganini seemed to take the magnetic, self-aware element of performance to new heights and strengthened Schumann’s resolve to acquire or develop such entraining power. When his finger injury made this aspiration unattainable, Schumann sublimated

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his extroverted, improvisatory history into the personal mythology of Florestan, who was in John Daverio’s words “the rambunctious improviser, his persona a mixture of Paganinian virtuosity and Schumann’s inclinations in the same direction.”17 In spite of the absorptive pleasure Schumann took in improvisation, and its capacity to channel erotic and aggressive impulses, he did not throw himself into it without reservation or self-censure. As noted above, he harbored some guilt that he improvised for lack of more rigorous training. In his diaries he frequently congratulated himself on “good” or “beautiful” improvisations but sometimes judged them merely “conventional,” “decent,” or even worse: “at home very lame improvisation and frustration over my piano playing.” Extemporaneous playing, no matter how “free,” pleasurable, or preconscious, still needed to be observed and judged. And even as he enjoyed the benefits of impressing people, sometimes the “external praise” was out of sync with his “inner praise.” On one occasion Töpken’s perpetual raptures struck him as over the top or naïve: “[He] rants and raves ‘how I improvise’ and praises me and ‘just can’t believe it.’ ”18 This skepticism about the integrity of improvisation would gain the upper hand in his future development and eventually make him value complete distance from the piano. Schumann may be the first figure for whom improvisation was decoupled from the study of theory and composition. In the musical careers of Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Chopin improvising was just one of the range of skills that went into the mastery of pianism and composition and was not marked for special agencies. Performance, improvisation, and composition belonged to a continuum of musical practice.19 For Schumann, however, improvisation came first and “organically.” Only later, around 1831, did he pursue “theory” as a way of shifting his activities toward compositional productivity and achievement. This decoupling, which tends to polarize improvisation and composition conceptually (rather than see them as part of a continuum), made it possible for him to map improvisation onto subjective experience and psychological exploration.20 If the process of subject formation through Bildung involves some kind of oscillation between schaffen (creating) and bilden (shaping), for Schumann improvisation is all schaffen, calling forth a demand for correction, oversight, or, as he eventually decided, contrapuntal theory. But should we buy Schumann’s own account of his extemporaneous experiences? This is not a question merely of the sincerity of his private utterances; there may always have been an element of strategic revisionism to his reporting of his improvisations. The larger question is whether his improvisations should be correlated primarily with his interior creative world, which he documented and redocumented so richly in his writings and which has long served as the central anchor of Schumann studies. A diary entry such as “The fandango idea came upon me at the piano—that made me uncommonly happy” is normally treated as part of the Entstehungsgeschichte of a composition, in this case the

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Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor.21 But this entry might also be read as part of the history of postclassical improvisation, with its wide-open field of topoi and styles, including the Spanish dances exploited by Weber, Chopin, and Schumann in their published works. Besides opening another door to his subjective world, then, Schumann’s improvisations point to conventional practices of postclassical pianism, even if he submitted these conventions to the powerful empire of his imagination. Schumann’s recent biographer John Worthen has underscored Schumann’s taste for improvising, and persuasively argued that “what he wanted to be was a virtuoso, an improvising pianist who (incidentally) composed. And this was the ambition that Wieck had supported him in.”22 So completely does Schumann seem to embody the poetic sensibility of Romanticism that it is easy to forget his early investments in the tradition of postclassical pianism. One of his most enduring childhood memories, from 1818, was sitting behind the master Ignaz Moscheles at a concert; he later considered pursuing studies with him in Vienna. Before encountering Beethoven’s piano works he learned pieces by main representatives of the school such as Ries, Czerny, Field, Kalkbrenner, Moscheles, Cramer, and Weber. His dissatisfaction with the tutelage of Wieck provoked him in 1831 to seek out Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Kapellmeister in Weimar, as a potential alternative teacher. He may have been inspired by Hummel’s thorough and long-awaited treatise on pianism (1825), whose final chapter is devoted to the free fantasia. Thus while Schumann was discovering the compositions of the recently deceased Schubert and Beethoven and feeding on the riches of their styles, his living heroes were two keyboard titans of the 1820s who were famous for their brilliance in extemporaneous playing: Moscheles and Hummel.23 Two of the works Schumann took special efforts to master as he became serious about piano-playing were by these composers: Hummel’s concerto in A-Minor and Moscheles’s Variations on the Alexander March, both of them touchstones of “modern” bravura pianism and both adaptable to solo formats. On a good day he was pleased to find himself approximating the clean tonal ideal of stile brillante pianists: “Up early—my sobriety rewarded; played extremely well—soft pearly touch and pearl-like improvisation.”24 It is nonetheless difficult to imagine Schumann as a model postclassical pianist. Plenty of evidence, including the indiscipline that Wieck noted, points to a dramatic, Sturm-und-Drang type of musical personality. Unlike pianists of the stile brillante school, he seems to have used the pedal heavily.25 Wieck found his playing a little heavy, muddy, and monotonous and hoped to compensate by pushing for more “Paganinian” zing, wit, and sparkle.26 A revealing comment about his pianistic ideals comes from the year 1833, when he went to a Leipzig concert by the pianist Wilhelm Taubert. Taubert played Beethoven’s C-Minor concerto, which did not impress Schumann much, and finished with an improvised fantasy:

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His elegance and agility reveal themselves here more significantly than in the concerto. I did not hear beautiful ideas; nor that rapture that seems oblivious to itself, nor that genius that seems to work without a body—plenty of good and capable things, ripe and articulate things. It did not seem prepared, at most contrapuntal details.27

Schumann was clearly impressed by the technical competencies that allowed Taubert to form coherent thoughts in the moment; the demonstration of learning and mastery almost always emphasized in the reception of Hummel.28 But his negative comment that Taubert’s fantasy lacked flashes of revelatory genius and performative rapture registers a conception of improvisation as poetic inspiration unfettered by learning and rules. In the same set of notes he implicitly traced his own performative genealogy back to Beethoven, whose fiery improvisations were the stuff of legend. Schumann was bothered that Taubert, in the rondo of the concerto, played all thematic reprises the same way, an approach that was “certainly contrary to Beethoven’s fantastic performing manner.”29 In this “Kreislerized” vision of Beethoven’s playing, thematic returns and repetitions never sound the same, but should perpetually unfold new “poetic” dimensions of the theme. Schumann’s dynamic markings for the second strain of his Abegg theme (Example 8.1), if they

Example 8.1. Schumann, Variations on the name “Abegg,” Op. 1, mm. 17–32.

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reflect his own predilections, demonstrate his own instinct to vary repetitions in one way or another. A link between Schumann’s improvisational interests and his image of Beethoven appears to be clinched by the first movement of the Fantasie, Op. 17, whose title itself points to improvisational origins.30 The Fantasie not only includes a free-associative citation from “An die ferne Geliebte” but also alludes to Beethoven in its performance indication “Durchaus phantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen,” which closely echoes Beethoven’s indication for Op. 90: “Mit Lebhaftigkeit und durchaus mit Empfindung und Ausdruck.” Schumann’s performance indications in the early drafts of the Fantasie suggest a less explicit association with Beethoven. The original marking “Allegretto,” generic and unspecific, belongs more to the world of postclassical pianism and assigns responsibility to the performer to read fantasia codes off the score. This was first replaced with “To be played with strong feeling and completely freely throughout” (“Mit durchaus heftiger Empfindung and ganz frei vorzutragen”), thus still leaving much to the performer in the sense that an aurally transmitted sense of how to play “freely” is a precondition for a good performance. The final revision of this marking replaces “ganz frei” with “phantastisch.”31 Although these words are essentially synonyms, the differences are telling: they displace a performative quality with an aesthetic or characterizing “designation” by the composer. Schumann notably does not choose “phantasieartig,” which might invoke the conventions of the free fantasy, but “phantastisch,” with its broader, nongeneric implications. In sum the shifting performance indications reveal the gradual displacement of improvisation, performance-oriented thought toward composerly thought. Schumann’s interest in the improvisation-rooted keyboard fantasia style also found expression in his great admiration for Hummel’s sonata in F-sharp Minor (1819), which he described as “a truly grand, epic titan-creation.”32 Hummel’s sonata opens with a dramatically intense musical paragraph filled with dynamic and registral contrasts, harmonic surprises, and an alternation of hesitant and bold gestures, together with the specifically keyboardistic idiom of the arpeggios—all pointing toward the free fantasia style (Example 8.2). It is not surprising that Schumann would gravitate toward such music, which is not typical of a Hummel sonata and seems to emulate the improvisatory, stop-and-start rhetoric of Beethoven’s middle-period sonatas. At the opening of his Allegro in B-Minor, Op. 8, Schumann clearly picked up on Hummel’s sonata and reconfigured its rhythmic, motivic, and gestural elements. Yet he pushed it further toward the improvisatory by dispensing with bar lines and indicating “senza tempo” (Example 8.3). Music without bar lines is extremely rare in this period but does show up, for example, in Moscheles’s treatise on improvised preludes (Example 8.4).

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Example 8.2. Hummel, Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, first movement.

When Schumann’s allegro proper gets underway it announces no recognizable theme but simply offers up an impassioned figurative pattern in the brilliant style. The three-note motto is superimposed upon the figuration twice but then again abandoned to pure figuration until the arrival of D-Major, after a transition employing the simplest chordal progression. Overall the Allegro, though hardly rough-hewn, has an unfinished feel. Its lack of contrapuntal patterns, its reliance on sequential patterns, and the looseness of development suggest a closer relationship to the kind of thing Schumann

Example 8.3. Schumann, Allegro, Op. 8.

Example 8.4. Moscheles, 50 Préludes ou introductions dans tous les tons majeurs et mineurs, Op. 73 (Paris: Schlesinger, 1828).

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might really have improvised than the Fantasie, which by comparison looks detailed, worked over, and calculated even in its disruptions. The Allegro’s second theme, for example, adapts the three-note motive of the introduction in the manner of paraphrase, one of the central techniques of postclassical free improvisation. Joel Lester has noted a lower-level influence of Hummel’s sonata on Schumann. The double-note figures that conclude Hummel’s exposition resemble certain passages in Schumann’s Toccata, Op. 7 (Examples 8.5a and 8.5b). It matters little whether this resemblance is a matter of direct influence or coincidence, for it indexes a common vocabulary of conventional figures that lie at the heart of postclassical pianism. The Czerny Toccata in C-Major, for example, is arguably the more direct source for Schumann’s figures (Example 8.5c). Such figures are commonly ignored in musicology since they do not participate in thematic, harmonic, or formal process, but as Jim Samson argues they are central to the inventive and improvisatory practices of postclassical pianism: “The story of keyboard virtuosity is partly the story of such idiomatic figures. They are among the most transparent embodiments of instrumental thought available to us, and as such they document a medium-sensitive approach to composition. . . . For obvious reasons they involve the ancient craft of improvisation.” Idiomatic figures are part of a broader repertory of music-making conventions that Samson calls “musical materials,” which “can embrace everything from formal and generic schemata of various kinds to motivic and harmonic archetypes, and conventional figures, imbued with history.”33 Modern virtuosos differed most from earlier pianists (from Clementi back) in their systematic invention of figures that fit comfortably in the ambitus of the hand without disorienting shifts and finger crossings, and in the use of the pedal to work the notes into blended effects. Such figures, when practiced sufficiently in several keys, facilitated the immediate recall so indispensable to the course of a successful improvisation. Hummel’s double-notes are a good example. Clementi was famous for his clean parallel thirds but mainly in scalar passages where the hand shifts are awkward to manage. Hummel’s figures obtain a different sonority that, with a little help from the pedal, are more adapted to the hand in measures 2, 4, and 5. The main, alternating figure of Schumann’s Toccata, similarly, is based on a novel double-note pattern uniquely adapted to the shape of the right hand—much more so than the Czerny model. Postclassical pianists invented and elaborated figures above all in the étude, a genre they cultivated in droves. The étude was aimed at developing and sustaining the competences that would allow fluent playing of larger pieces and improvisations. In the hands of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt the genre was moving away from didactic and toward aesthetic goals, but there are didactic elements in the output of all three composers. Schumann, as he sought to master the piano, deliberately engaged the postclassical dialectic in which the study of figures and musical materials are complemented by the study of

Example 8.5a. Hummel, Sonata in F-sharp Minor, I, closing section of exposition.

Example 8.5b. Schumann, Toccata, Op. 7, mm. 1–3.

Example 8.5c. Czerny, Toccata, Op. 92.

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large-scale compositions and impromptu fantasia. In the pedagogical introduction to his Études after Caprices of Paganini, Op. 3, he states that the student need not play through any of the compositions whole, but could choose parts according to which technical problem he or she wanted to address. The goal of the étude is to address pre-performance capacities and generalizable keyboard command independent of individual works or “interpretation.” His pedagogical comments even include some exercises to help the pianist prepare to play the études—literally études for études.34 These exercises show Schumann experimenting with double- and triple-note figures based on a chromatically descending line. The chromatic line is often harmonized with a tritone-to-minor sixth figure just like the main figure of the Toccata (Example 8.6). It is thus not surprising that earlier incarnations of the Toccata bore the titles “Étude” and “Exercise fantastique en double-sons.”35 The romantic, fantastique tone of the Toccata is furnished by Schumann’s exploration of this standard postclassical pattern in chromatic space (Example 8.7).

Example 8.6. From pedagogical Preface to Études after Caprices of Paganini, Op. 8.

Example 8.7. Schumann, Toccata, chromatic figures.

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But postclassical antecedents can be found. Czerny’s treatise on preluding (separate from his treatise on improvisation) includes a prelude “in connected chords” (Example 8.8a) whose voicings and progressions are more or less identical to a segment of Schumann’s Toccata (Example 8.8b). And Kalkbrenner, in a treatise giving models for improvised preluding, offers a passage that moves halfway toward such chromaticism (Example 8.9).

Example 8.8a. Czerny, L’art de préluder mis in pratique pour le piano, Op. 300 (Paris: Schlesinger, n.d.).

Example 8.8b. Schumann, Toccata.

Example 8.9. Fréderic Kalkbrenner, Traité d’harmonie du pianiste (1849?).

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Although the Toccata harbors postclassical traces, Schumann made efforts to distance the work from whatever improvisational history it might have had. The melodic motive that arrives with the second key area seems motivated by a need for formal contrast and harmonic resolution, and for relief from the repetitive double-note figures, and it would be difficult to link such concerns to improvisational practice. In addition, after much experimentation with the ending of the piece Schumann settled on a poetic slow fade that aspires to cancel the memory of étude and bravura. In these ways the Toccata registers the growing authority of the work concept and Schumann’s whole-hearted investment in it. The point of emphasizing the postclassical horizon of the piece is not to reimagine it as a written-out improvisation, which it is not, but to locate its roots in the concrete, material practices specific to the composer-virtuoso tradition, including improvisation, rather than conceive of it as an emanation of pure imagination and composerly fantasy. Schumann articulated the work’s double horizon of reference both in the phrase étude fantastique, which is something of an oxymoron, and in the phrase double-sons (a pun on double-sens). In Schumann’s early piano works of the 1830s improvisational terminology appears in only two passages. In the mosaic-like finale of the piano sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, there is a short transitional passage that links the first period, a maestoso in A-Major, with a subsidiary idea in the secondary key E-flat Major (Example 8.10a, mm. 16–23). This transition returns later in transposition to rotate from E-flat back to A-Major, but this time it is marked “quasi improvisato” (Example 8.10b, m. 64). This marking offers no easy interpretation as a

Example 8.10a. Schumann, Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, finale, mm. 1–28.

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Example 8.10a. Continued

Example 8.10b. Schumann, Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, finale, mm. 61–76.

performance direction since it is also marked “marcatissimo,” leaving little room for rhythmic push and pull. Perhaps it is a sudden intrusion of the impetuous improviser Florestan-Paganini, come to ironize or undermine the heroic pretention of the maestoso; the staccato figure certainly resembles a Paganinian, crossstring spiccato gesture. Yet there are other, more traditional improvisational resonances in this passage. The enharmonic magic that moves so smoothly between A-Major and E-flat Major was a specialty of keyboard improvisers. Radically open-ended enharmonic transitions can be found, for example, linking the discrete sections of Kalkbrenner’s supposed improvisation, Effusio musica, as well as in the Chopin composition that has been considered especially close to improvisation, the F-sharp Major Impromptu. In the earlier occurrence of this transition

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(mm. 16–24) Schumann complements this stunning harmonic shift with a comparably radical inversion of the character of the leading sixteenth-note motive, which starts off decisive and martial (m. 16) but is transformed into something dreamy, uncertain, and perhaps a little coy (m. 24). In a sonata obsessed with doubles and polarities, the quasi improvisato passage explores a liminal space where opposites can be mediated. The second explicit reference to music of improvisatory character appears at the opening of the last section of Variations on the Name “Abegg,” Op. 1, which is marked “Finale. alla Fantasia.” Because this marking applies to music that lacks all traces of dramatic fantasia rhetoric or paraphrase, it demands an explanation that leaves Schumann’s Romanticism far behind and points more unambiguously toward the practices of postclassical pianism.36 The finale opens with an arc-shaped phrase that announces no theme or motive but simply unfolds a four-bar cadential chord progression over a dominant pedal (Example 8.11, mm. 1–4). This progression, which serves as a sort of theme for the finale, is immediately repeated twice with different brillante figurative patterns before the bass unfreezes and launches an extended progression toward a tonic cadence (mm. 5–12). The form of the finale is shaped by two reprises of the progression-theme (mm. 40 and 74), with intervening free-form digressions, and rounded off with a fade-out codetta. Each of the seven iterations of the progression-theme varies it with changes of figure, tempo, dynamics, and chord voicings, even superimposing a contrapuntal voice in the case of the first reprise. These variations, sometimes minute and subtle, give the impression that Schumann spent considerable time exploring the variative possibilites of this progression at the piano (see Example 8.11). With tonic 6/4 sonorities on the downbeats of bars 2 and 4, it creates a circular, quasi-hypnotic sense of time, and it can be repeated ad infinitum.

Example 8.11. Schumann, Variations on the name “Abegg,” Op. 1, finale, iterations of the chord progression.

Example 8.11. Continued

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Such experimental elaboration of simple harmonic progressions was standard practice for the pianist-composers of the 1820s and earlier. The progressions were part of the postclassical pianist’s bag of musical materials. Improvisations by postclassical pianists such as Moscheles and Meyerbeer were most often built on popular songs and comic opera melodies that took some sort of periodic form. But as an exercise for developing extemporaneous skill, the short nonperiodic chord progression served as an ideal vehicle. The ability to flesh out elementary patterns in variation was particularly important for improvising dance music at social salons, something we know Chopin and Schubert did and that Schumann probably did as well. Chopin’s Berceuse, originally entitled Variantes, appears to be closely related to his lifelong pursuit of improvisation—an extreme case of the short chordal progression as a vehicle for rich variative invention.37 Kalkbrenner, in his treatise on preluding and improvising, recommends that beginners start with simple elaborations of basic, closed harmonic progressions and gradually proceed to greater degrees of elaboration (Example 8.12). And as mentioned above, we know Schumann once had a heyday improvising obsessively on the cyclic bass C-F-G-C.

Example 8.12. Kalkbrenner, Traité d’harmonie du pianiste.

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Schumann was surely aware of the baroque practice of improvising variations on standard progressions, but we cannot assume that he based his keyboard improvisations on Baroque models. For all his interest in Bach, he did not obviously think of the Baroque master as a “variation” composer. His diaries from 1827 to 1831, when he improvised the most, only rarely mention specific pieces he improvised on, but the few he does mention are typical of postclassical pianism rather than Baroque practice. The complete list includes Himmel’s “An Alexis send’ich dich,” Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, the drinking song “O du lieber Augustin,” “the Field concerto,” and Schubert’s Sehnsuchtswalzer. We don’t know which motive from the Field concerto Schumann was using, but the other four themes were all familiar, indeed popular melodies in the German-speaking world. With the exception of the harmonic digression in the Schubert, they are harmonically elementary, mostly pivoting between tonic and dominant. The first strain of the Schubert waltz, for example, replicates the beginning of Kalkbrenner’s model progression of Example 8.12. A more striking commonality among these four tunes is that they are all in triple meter: the Schubert and Weber are of course waltzes, “O du lieber Augustin” is what we know today as “Three cheers for the bus driver,” and “An Alexis send’ ich dich” is given in Example 8.13.

Example 8.13. Himmel, melody of “An Alexis send’ich dich,” taken from A. W. Bach, Variationen für das Piano-Forte über den beliebten Gesang von Himmel (Berlin: Lischke, ca. 1818).

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Schumann’s strong gravitation toward simple triple-meter models in his improvisations favors an interpretation of the conclusion of the Abegg variations as some sort of stylization of his improvisational practices circa 1830. His choice of a waltz theme is completely atypical of concert variation sets of the time, but it is understandable for a pianist whose primary activities were in the salons rather than the public concert space. Although it is marked 6/8 and is thus not in triple meter, Schumann’s “alla Fantasia” finale is clearly to be heard as an acceleration of waltz theme in 3/4; its pace is no faster than Weber’s Invitation to the Dance. Other aspects of the finale suggestive of improvisational character include the relatively loose joints between the episodes and the reprises, the complete lack of thematic material, the extended passage of trademark chromatic figures in the second episode, which sound complex but fit under the hand conveniently, and the variative repetition of a short cadential formula in the coda. A sense of improvisatory freedom furthermore pervades the slow section that immediately precedes the finale. It opens with a citation of the Abegg theme, but instead of launching another variation it becomes an open-ended, improvisatory cantabile and dissolves into a cadenza. The potentially improvisatory history of the Abegg finale should not, however, take us to the conclusion that these variations are somehow less a “work.” For all its debts to the tradition of brilliant virtuosity, the piece arguably critiques the conventions of the virtuoso concert work.38 Its mysterious title, the density and detail of the first two variations, its relative compactness, and especially its quiet ending set it apart from contemporary concert variations and betray a will to “poeticize” within the variation-set format. The conflict Schumann felt between the pleasures and creative agencies of improvisation and the need to rein it in for the sake of compositional productivity points to larger tension in the Bildung-based model of subjectivity that was consolidating among the bourgeoisie in the 1830s. Improvisation establishes a situation of open-ended play and potentially violates ethical principles of thrift, economy, and efficient productivity that were increasingly enforced as norms of bourgeois behavior, perhaps most intensively in Schumann’s context. The moral economy of the German bourgeoisie promoted freedom and creative play, but at the same time insisted it must be disciplined, channeled toward productive and lasting ends—whether those products came in the form of scores and compositions or in the form of children, respectability, and household income.39 As moralists increasingly expressed a desire to control or channel experiences of subjective play and experimentation, they also reinforced the association of improvisation with creativity, transgression, and genius. The new fascination with improvisation manifested itself in a revival of interest in the Italian tradition of performed, extemporaneous poetry (which may lie in the subconscious of Schumann’s Florestan-Paganini amalgam). These improvisers, most of

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them of Italian origin, elaborated lengthy poems in rhyme schemes on subjects offered by the audience. Topics were usually derived from classical literature and drama, and the performance was normally accompanied by music. The literary historian Angela Esterhammer has traced the effect of this revival on early nineteenth-century literature. Byron, Mary Shelley, and Madame de Staël, among others, represented the Italian poetic improvvisatore as a figure of genius, but his status as a public performer playing for money also made him “an unstable agent potentially disruptive to gender, class, and economic systems.” According to Esterhammer the disruptive potential was strongest in the German context: The representation of the improviser as an inconsistent or unreliable agent, both in literature and in life, takes on its fullest dimensions in nineteenthcentury German culture. . . . The young protagonists are exposed in the process of their Bildung to a variety of theatrical experiences that include improvisational performance. But . . . these experiences of improvisation represent the kind of spontaneous, anti-establishment behavior that the young men must learn to sublimate if they are to assume appropriate social roles.40

Schumann not only internalized these literary representations of the improviser, but also encountered poetic improvisers in his own milieu. In Leipzig he heard a performance by the internationally renowned German-language improviser Maximilian Langenschwarz. Although he dismissed Langenschwarz as a “charlatan,” he probably shared the general admiration for the Jena professor of literature O. L. B. Wolff, who spent his early career performing virtuoso improvisations all over Germany and occasionally still made appearances.41 A particularly telling document of the suspicion directed toward improvisation in Schumann’s cultural milieu is Hans Christian Andersen’s novel The Improviser (1835). The novel is partly autobiographical. As a teenager Andersen was known to Copenhagen society for his brilliantly acted comic improvisations, landing him commissions to write Singspiel libretti.42 In 1833 the success of some of his books earned him a royal stipend to travel through Europe, and he charmed the salons everywhere with his irresistible manner of reading aloud his fantastic tales. The trip brought him to Italy, where he continued to visit the salons and began writing his novel, which was translated into many languages and marked his international breakthrough. Andersen’s trajectory bears certain direct parallels with the aspirations of the young Schumann. Andersen was both a writer and a performer, but his performer role—his ability to fascinate in the salons with his storytelling—to some extent overshadowed his status as writer. And like many aspiring poets, he was plagued by a sense that performance and improvisation were achievements of a lesser order; when a Copenhagen colleague criticized his singspiels he threw up his hands, lamenting “I am nothing but an improviser!”43 These tensions are at the center of Andersen’s novel, which is part Italian travelogue and part Bildungsroman. The Italian protagonist, Antonio, born into

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poverty and orphaned, is endowed with a natural capacity for extemporaneous poetic invention that soon lands him in the elite salons of Rome. Antonio’s problems stem from his incapacity to turn his improvisational genius to socially productive use. His traffic in salons lands him neither a profession nor a successful amorous partner, and his evasion of such stable commitments eventually has him running from the law. His personal growth in the novel depends on channeling his talents to ends that are both productive and public. At one of the novel’s critical moments his friend implores him, “You have glorious abilities, which must be developed, but that they must actually be, Antonio! Nothing comes of itself! People must labor! Your talent is a charming society talent; you may delight many of your friends by it, but it is not great enough for the public.”44 The fulfillment of this goal finally arrives when Antonio gives a splendid public improvisation at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, thereby raising money for indigent fishermen. There are striking resonances between Antonio’s trajectory and that of Schumann. In 1831 Schumann was twenty-one years old and had not a single published opus behind him. The Wiecks noticed that in spite of the strides he was making as a pianist, he was not getting anywhere with composition. At the end of May 1831 Clara urged him, “Dear Robert, I beg you—do produce something that’s finished.”45 The pressure from Wieck had its intended effect: by the end of the year Schumann had published the Abegg variations and Papillons, Op. 2. Ironically this was advice that Robert later turned back upon Clara. In a letter from 1838 he admonished her “not to improvise too much”: “Too much gets uselessly lost that way. Make up your mind to get everything down on paper at once.”46 Critical opinion about Schumann’s early works echoed the accumulating resistance to improvisation in the 1830s and 1840s. In an 1844 issue of the Neue Zeitschrift Carl Kossmaly wrote an essay on Schumann’s piano works as a whole and found fault with the relatively undirected flow of the early works: “The extravagance of which the composer is so particularly fond sometimes degenerates into bombast and complete incomprehensibility, as if the striving for originality occasionally loses its way.”47 Kossmaly’s judgment, though harsh, reflects Schumann’s own judgment of his early works as “too small and too rhapsodic to make any great impact”; his list of such works included the Paganini studies, the Abegg variations, Papillons, and the Allegro.48 The good news in Kossmaly’s critique was that Schumann had transcended his improvisational past in more recent works such as the Kinderszenen and the Humoreske, which sustained the listener’s attention with greater clarity in the flow of ideas.49 Hanslick, who idolized Schumann and inherited much from the Neue Zeitschrift perspective, stressed his transcendence of the early Sturm-und-Drang period and the clarification of formal and processual thought: “From this latter work [Op. 22] forward one sees a decisive clarification in Schumann’s music. The small forms

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broaden out, the earlier mosaic-like connection of ideas becomes development, poetic willfulness bows to the law of musical beauty. Schumann soon found the transition from genial rhapsode to mature master.”50 The consistency of this narrative is striking. It marks the definitive defeat of improvisatory values as represented in digressive figurative passages, discursive discontinuities, and variative repetitions of simple structures. At the same time it marks the triumph of the Bildungsbürger values of rational autonomy and economic productivity as the ideal telos of subject formation. Schumann’s compositions after the early, piano-centered phase consigned his wild youth—marked by travels, sexual experimentation, bouts of heavy drinking, and extensive pianistic improvisation—to the superseded past. For Schumann, then, the agencies of improvisation were both aesthetic and social. Musically it gave him a space to invent and experiment with figures, rhetorics, and forms of elaboration that fed directly into his early compositions. Socially it gave him a medium for experiments in masculine self-assertion— before his university peers, before his teachers, and before his prospective erotic partners. I have drawn attention to how he appropriated improvisatory practices of postclassical pianism and strove to recast them according to Romantic values of free association and mental caprice. Schumann’s history with improvisation, however, should be an occasion to question whether this transfer of values from performance to composition, from piano to mind, from postclassical material to romantic metaphor, always has salutary effects. The sense of abstraction or distance in late Schumann, which has led commentators to interpret it “in terms of mental or creative failure and exhaustion, of an inability to communicate with the outside world,”51 may stem precisely from his rejection of improvisatory orientation so central to his early creative years.

notes I would like to thank Kenneth Hamilton and Roe-Min Kok for their comments, advice, and insights on this essay. 1. R. Schumann, Tagebücher (hereafter cited as Tb), 2:402. Schumann’s “new manner” has been discussed most recently in Tunbridge, Schumann’s Late Style, 9, 104–7. 2. R. Schumann, Briefe: Neue Folge (1904), 356. Similar ideas are reiterated in Schumann’s Hausregeln notebook. 3. R. Schumann, Tb, 1:112: Wenn ich an den lezten September denke, so löst es sich wie von selbst in harten Misstönen auf pp. pp. Was einem gerade einfällt, sucht man mit den Tönen auszudrücken. Jeden Ton hat aber schon das Herz auf ihren Tasten gefühlt, wie die Tasten am Clavier erst berührt werden mussen, ehe sie klingen. In den Minuten, wo man an nichts oder Geringes denkt, wird auch die Fantasie matter u. das Spiel fader; wenn man an die Musik selbst denkt, so kommen leicht contrapunctische Sätze u. Fugen hervor.

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4. Employing a language uncomfortably reminiscent of gymnastic holism, Herbert Schramowski writes, “The character of the improvisation influence is not a work-oriented one but a stimulating one. . . . Improvisation fulfills a positive purpose with its relaxing and loosening tendencies, which for their part contribute to restoration of energies and the raising of mental and bodily activity and thus to a regeneration of the complex creative faculties” (“Der Einfluss,” 8). 5. Hummel, Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung, 461. 6. I borrow the term postclassical from Jim Samson, who uses it to describe the styles and practices of piano music from roughly 1800 to 1830 in Virtuosity and the Musical Work. A concentrated, provisional summary of postclassical practice is found on p. 17: A world of post-Classical concert music [was] firmly centered on the piano, and designed principally for performance in benefit concerts and salons. This was music designed to be popular, and happy to accept its commodity status. Its basic ingredients were a bravura right-hand figuration that took its impetus from the light-actioned Viennese and German pianos of the late eighteenth century and a melodic idiom, associated in its early stages with English and French instruments, that was rooted either in Italian opera, in folk music or in popular genres such as marches (including funeral marches), dance pieces, pastorales or barcarolles.

7. Worthen, Robert Schumann, 37. 8. Tb, 2:173–74: “So hab’ich in der Schweiz oft bis in die Nacht hinein phantasirt.” 9. Tb, 1:411. 10. Eismann, Robert Schumann, 1:44. 11. Ibid., 1:18. 12. Tb, 1:94 (“Jetzt schlummert sie wohl; ich fantasierte gut; denn sie lebte in meinen Fantasien u. der ganze Tonhimmel mit ihr, wie ihr doch so heilig seyd, ihr Töne”), 258, 400. 13. Eismann, Robert Schumann, 55. Töpken’s reminiscence is from September 30, 1856: Nach der gemeinschaftlichen Unterhaltung folgten dann in der Regel von seiner Seite freie Phantasien auf dem Klaviere, in denen er alle Geister entfesselte. Ich gestehe, dass diese unmittelbaren musikalischen Ergüsse Schumanns mir immer einen Genuß gewährt haben, wie ich ihn später, so große Künstler ich auch hörte, nie wieder gehabt. Die Ideen strömten ihm zu in einer Fülle, die sich nie erschöpfte. Aus einem Gedanken, den er in allen Gestalten erscheinen ließ, quoll und sprudelte alles andere wie von selbst hervor und hindurch zog sich der eigentümliche Geist in seiner Tiefe und mit allem Zauber der Poesie, zugleich schon mit den deutlich erkennbaren Grundzügen seines musikalischen Wesens, sowohl nach der Seite der energischen urkräftigen, als auch der duftig zarten, sinnend träumerischen Gedanken. . . . Er hatte bereits in weitern Zirkeln, die wesentlich auf sein Erscheinen berechnet, durch seine freien Phantasien alles entzückt und sollte nun auch Gelegenheit haben, vor dem grosseren Publikum aufzutreten.

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14. Tb, 1:203, 209, 297, 217. 15. Ibid., 1:110 (“feurige Bewegungen beym Clavierspiel entflammet den Zuhörer, wie überhaupt Mienen u. Gesten beym Redner”), 154 (“Das ist eben der Vorzug der Musik u. der Schauspielkunst, dass wir sie gemeinschaftlich geniessen können, in demselben Moment zugleich ergriffen oder entzückt werden; die anderen Künste haben dies nicht . . . selbst die Poesie nicht, wenn nicht die Schauspielkunst ihre Hebamme ware, die sie zum allgemeinen Leben bringt”). 16. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 22. 17. Ibid., 75. 18. Tb, 1:201 (“zu Hause sehr lahme Fantasie u. Zorn über mein Claverspiel”), 203 (“[Topken] sperrt Maul u. Nase auf, wie ich fantasire, lobt mich u. kann’s gar nicht begreifen”). 19. A link of improvisation with the study of harmony and counterpoint was already established in one of its early practical examples, A. E. M. Gretry’s Méthode simple pour apprendre a préluder en peu de temps avec toutes les ressources de l’Harmonie. 20. On improvisation as a channel of subjectivity, interiority, and the irrational, see Richards, The Free Fantasia. 21. Tb, 2:38: “Am Clavier kam der Fandangogedanke über mich—da war ich ungemein glüklich.” 22. Worthen, Robert Schumann, 37. For a more detailed chronicle of Schumann’s pianistic ambitions, see Macdonald, “Schumann’s Piano Practice.” Macdonald traces Schumann’s gradual alienation from the instrument and its social values starting in 1831. 23. On Hummel’s reception, see Sachs, Kapellmeister Hummel. Moscheles, visiting Karlsbad in 1816, “created quite a furore with his Alexander variations and fantasias” (Moscheles, Recent Music, 16). We can assume that Schumann heard the same repertory in 1818. 24. Tb, 1:300: “weicher Perlenanschlag u. Perlenfantasie.” 25. Worthen, Robert Schumann, 69. 26. Ibid., 54. 27. B. Bischoff and Nauhaus, “Robert Schumanns Leipziger Konzertnotizen,” 47: Seine Gewandtheit u. Fertigkeit stellen sich hier schon bedeutender heraus, als wie er’s im Conzert zeigen konnte. Schöne Gedanken fand ich nicht; auch jene Schwarmerei nicht, die sich selbst zu vergessen scheint, auch jenen Genius nicht, der ohne Leib zu wirken scheint—Gutes und Tuchtiges vieles, Jugendstarkes u. Verständiges. Vorbereitet schien nichts zu sein, höchstens contrapunctische Einzelheiten.

28. See the reviews of Hummel collected in Sachs, Kapellmeister Hummel. 29. Ibid., 45, emphasis added. 30. Schumann only settled on “Fantasie” after trying out other titles. The first movement, conceived before the others, was originally entitled “Ruines. Fantasie pour le Pianoforte.” See Marston, Schumann, 7–8. 31. The changes in nomenclature are discussed in ibid., 17.

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32. R. Schumann, Jugendbriefe, 80, letter dated November 6, 1829. 33. Lester, “Robert Schumann and Sonata Forms”; Samson, Virtuosity, 46–47, 35–36. 34. Macdonald, “Schumann’s Piano Practice,” 530, mentions similar exercises that Schumann devised for himself as he tried to master Chopin’s variations, Op. 2. 35. For a detailed history of the Toccata before its publication, see Boetticher, Robert Schumanns Klavierwerke, vol. 1. 36. Worthen, Robert Schumann, 56, claims that at a rehearsal for an 1830 concert Schumann improvised the Abegg variations in part and then did the same in the evening, but I have been unable to find confirmation for this. 37. Nowik, “Fryderyk Chopin’s Op. 57,” 25–40. 38. Mathias Hansen discusses the work in connection with Schumann’s attitudes toward virtuosity in “Robert Schumanns ‘Virtuosität.’” 39. On these virtues in German bourgeois culture, see Bausinger, “Bürgerlichkeit und Kultur,” 122; Münch, Ordnung, Fleiss und Sparsamkeit. 40. Esterhammer,“The Cosmopolitan improvvisatore,” 163, 161–62. Esterhammer develops the deviance theme in a follow-up essay, “The Improviser’s Disorder: Spontaneity, Sickness, and Social Deviance in Late Romanticism,” European Romantic Review 16, no. 3 (2005): 329–40. 41. Ignaz Moscheles encountered Wolff in Vienna in 1844: “There was an evening party at Court yesterday, where the Improvisator, Professor Wolff, of Jena, was the attraction. There was music as well” (On Music, 305). 42. Celenza, Hans Christian Andersen, 13–14. 43. Ibid., 25. 44. Andersen, The Improvisatore, 272. 45. Tb, 1:344. 46. R. Schumann and Schumann, Briefwechsel, 1:307, emphasis in original. Although Clara is not generally considered a voluble improviser, she did leave some unpublished preludes that are discussed in Goertzen, “Setting the Stage.” Eugenie Schumann left an interesting account of Clara’s pretour practice regime, which is strongly suggestive of improvisation: Scales rolled and swelled like a tidal sea, legato and staccato; in octaves, thirds, sixths, tenths, and double thirds; sometimes in one hand only, while the other played accompanying chords. Then arpeggios of all kinds, octaves, shakes, everything prestissimo and without the slightest break, exquisite modulations leading from key to key. The most wonderful feature of this practicing was that although the principle on which it was based was always the same, it was new every day, and seemed drawn ever fresh from a mysterious wellspring. (Busch, Memoirs of Eugenie Schumann, 17)

47. Kossmaly, “On Robert Schumann’s Piano Compositions,” 310. 48. Quoted from autobiographical sketches in Worthen, Robert Schumann, 64. 49. Kossmaly, “On Robert Schumann’s Piano Compositions,” 311–12. 50. Deutsche Musik-Zeitung, July 14, 1860, reproduced in Eduard Hanslick, Sämtliche Schriften (2005), vol. 1, book 5, p. 205:

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Von dem letzteren Werke an kann man eine entschiedene Klärung der Schumann’schen Musik wahrnehnen. Die knappen Formen erweitern sich, was früher musivisch sich aneinander fügte wird Entwicklung, die poetische Willkür beugt sich hinter das Gesetz der musikalischen Schönheit. Schumann fand bald den Übergang vom genialen Rhapsoden zum besonnenen Meister.

51. Tunbridge, Schumann’s Late Style, 2.

9 Schumann’s Melodramatic Afterlife Ivan Raykoff

In 1853, three years before his death, Schumann published three “declamation ballades,” or melodramas, for narrator with piano accompaniment. “Schön Hedwig” (Fair Hedwig), Op. 106, and “Ballade vom Haideknaben” (Ballad of the moorland boy), Op. 122, no. 1, are both settings of poems by Friedrich Hebbel; “Die Flüchtlinge” (The fugitives), Op. 122, no. 2, sets a German translation of a ballad by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Combining the speaking voice with musical accompaniment creates “a very peculiar effect,” Schumann wrote to his Viennese friend Carl Debrois van Bruyck. “It is a type of composition that is perhaps entirely novel, and so we are always grateful to those poets above all for inspiring us to new artistic paths.”1 This was not the only occasion when the composer felt he was exploring new creative genres and forms late in his career. In a letter to Franz Liszt in 1851 Schumann expressed some concern over how his recently composed Manfred would be categorized: “The whole thing should not be advertised to the public as an opera or Singspiel or melodrama, but rather as ‘a dramatic poem with music.’ That would be something completely new and unheard-of.”2 Despite Schumann’s claims to innovation, both Manfred and the declamation ballades fit into the larger historical context of melodrama already established in theater and opera by the mid-nineteenth century.3 The most famous uses of melodrama in opera include the grave-digging scene in Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805) and the Wolf ’s Glen scene in Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821); Beethoven’s Egmont (1810) and Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1842) are well-known examples of this technique in incidental music for theatrical plays. What was unusual about Schumann’s three pieces, it seems, was their reduction of melodrama’s orchestral underscoring to the piano alone, which removes them from the dramatic realm of opera and theater to the more poetic world of the Lied and the more intimate space of the salon. (Unbeknownst to Schumann, Schubert had already composed a recitation with piano accompaniment some two decades earlier.)4 Today Schumann’s declamation ballades remain obscure works, usually relegated to brief asides in discussions of his

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music; they are rarely performed or recorded,5 and they have received at best mixed appraisals from critics and scholars over the years. But these neglected pieces can provide a new perspective on the concept of “speaking through music” and on the significance of melodramatic effects in other cultural productions that incorporate music as an accompaniment to speech. The juxtaposition of music and the spoken word has long provoked aesthetic debates about the relationship between music and language in general, especially about the capacities of the speaking voice as opposed to the singing voice for conveying expressive meaning in a musical context. The concept of speaking through music is probably most familiar from opera, where the recitative functions as a special kind of singing approaching the natural rhythms and inflections of speech; in instrumental music a comparable declamatory quality is often labeled parlando (as opposed to cantando or cantabile, in a singing style). In melodrama, on the other hand, speech approaches song but rarely gets too close; vocal delivery may vary in pitch and dynamics, it may pause or wait for a musical gesture, but it remains firmly rooted in elocution. In melodrama the spoken text stands out from its musical context, privileging linguistic comprehensibility, while the music often retreats into a subservient role by providing an evocative accompaniment. In this regard melodrama seems to contradict the Romantic aesthetic hierarchy that asserts music’s ability to transcend spoken or written language and thus convey the “unspeakable” essence of things. Recent criticisms of Schumann’s declamation ballades still demonstrate a concern over this reversal of aesthetic priorities. Martin Cooper suggests that the piano writing is “merely ‘background’” in these works, “a role that music obstinately refuses to play and the melodramas are complete failures.”6 Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau believes that “no unified musical impression was achieved” in these works: “Spoken words and musical action never coalesce: they only exist in proximity of each other. It is as though Schumann looked to melodrama to escape from his difficulties in writing opera. But the tension between words and music . . . gives way to the supremacy of the spoken text, and the result is failure.” Nevertheless Fischer-Dieskau acknowledges the expressive intensity this technique can achieve, noting “the fascinating effect that the spoken word can have (more so than sung recitative) in moments of greatest dramatic tension.”7 Similar reservations were expressed in Schumann’s own time. Eduard Hanslick was diplomatic about the challenges of such a synthesis after hearing Clara Schumann and Marie Seebach perform the two Hebbel ballade settings in Vienna in 1856: “Although we are fundamentally opposed to the genre of melodrama—in which the music primly separates from the spoken word like oil from water, and the two arts interfere with instead of supplementing each other—in this case we were nevertheless able to enjoy a relatively unsullied impression.”8 Asserting the “purity” of art forms as a prerequisite for their aesthetic integrity and intelligibility, Richard Wagner disparages melodrama in his 1851 treatise Opera and Drama: “Indeed music would behave in relation to a

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staged literary drama almost exactly as it would if played to a painting in an exhibition, thus the so-called melodrama has been justifiably dismissed as a genre of the most unedifying mixture.”9 Publishing his declamation ballades in 1853, Schumann seems to have been countering a trend away from the melodrama, which had already outlived its appeal for other serious composers and critics. A more accommodating assessment of this union of word and tone comes from Goethe, writing about melodrama a few decades earlier, in 1815, around the time Beethoven and Weber were composing their classic examples: “It is now time to think of music, which in this context can be regarded as the sea upon which that artistically decorated boat [of drama] is carried, as the favorable breeze which gently but sufficiently fills the sails and willingly obeys all the sailor’s movements in whatever direction.”10 Goethe’s two metaphors for music capture the ambivalence of its role in melodrama: Is music the infinite and elemental “sea” upon which a dramatic text may float (around the same time Arthur Schopenhauer refers to the necessary subordination of words to “the inexpressible depth of all music”)?11 Or is it a brief and blustering “breeze” that merely serves every dramatic gesture the actor may make? In the end Goethe the dramatist praises the moderation of the composer “who did not try to hear himself, but rather tried to promote and support the performance with a chaste economy” in the musical accompaniment.12 This essay considers Schumann’s declamation ballades as a starting point for a further exploration of melodrama’s interplay of music, speech, and dramatic sentiment not on the theatrical or operatic stage, but in the more personal space of the salon and parlor—“in the sociable circles,” as Schumann puts it—where they were most often performed.13 It also explores melodrama’s inherent intermediality by examining how “speaking through music” occurs in other art forms that make use of Schumann’s music, particularly literature and cinema. These three pieces were followed by similar works for narrator and piano by Liszt and other Romantic composers who pursued this genre in subsequent decades,14 while melodrama as a compositional technique persisted to become one of the conventional modes of cinematic underscoring in the twentieth century. In this sense Schumann’s declamation ballades were indeed innovative and forward-looking works: they anticipate melodrama’s continuing evolution into one of the most popular and prevalent cultural forms, intersecting the realms of theater and Lieder and later literature and film.

Melodrama as Technique and Aesthetic First, to clarify terms. Melodrama in its broadest and most familiar sense refers to a theatrical, literary, and cinematic style or aesthetic characterized by dramatic action and overt sentimentality, but the term also has a more specialized definition: a

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compositional technique whereby a dramatic text is spoken over a musical accompaniment more or less precisely synchronized to the recitation of the words. Beyond its basic etymology, reaching back to the originating model of ancient Greek tragedy (melos, meaning “song” or “melody,” plus drama, or “theatrical action”), melodrama in both senses of the word has its modern origins in a specifically musical aspect of popular theater in eighteenth-century France. To appeal to wider audiences the plot of a typical mélodrame tended toward more sensational incidents and hyperbolic situations than the staid tragedies or clever comedies of classical theater, giving rise to the familiar association of melodrama with exaggerated behavior, intense emotions, and manipulative sentimentality. In such stories virtuous characters typically endure undue suffering caused by hardship, injustice, or catastrophe, then gain redemption through their brave endurance, some heroic deed or noble sacrifice, or a fortuitous twist of fate. Characters and conflicts are stereotypical: a villain thwarts the hero and threatens the heroine, a romantic impulse motivates the couple’s endurance or sacrifice, and a climactic moment of confrontation enables virtue to triumph over evil. These dramatic situations emphasize exaggeration and generate a surplus or excess of emotional effect, one frequently noted aspect of the melodramatic aesthetic. These eighteenth-century theatrical melodramas were further innovative because they incorporated newly composed musical underscoring to set the scene and mood, mark characters’ entrances and establish their personality types, enhance actors’ elocution and physical gestures, and facilitate spectators’ emotional involvement in the scene.15 In the nineteenth century these techniques of musical underscoring became standard practice in popular theater, with its formulaic conventions of “mood” and “action music,” musical cues collectively known as melos.16 Such incidental music “usually accompanies the most sentimental passages in the play,” explains a 1911 article about “old-school” melodramas, “following the hero and heroine most obstinately. But the villain too will also have his little bit of tremolo to help him along on his evil path.”17 From the realm of theater these practices easily evolved into the familiar manner of melodramatic accompaniment to action and dialogue in silent films, radio plays, television, and cinema of the twentieth century.18 The genre of the declamation ballade also contributed to this evolution in the late nineteenth century, “when it flourished in European drawing-rooms and recitals, before its gradual decline into the pit of the silent cinema,” as one commentator puts it.19 David Mayer notes the confluence of the piano as the primary instrument of domestic and amateur musical entertainment, including the “parlour and platform melodrama,” with technological developments of the era that enabled the wider public presentation of such works, especially the photographically imprinted magic lantern slides that were popular by the 1870s. “Now, in pre-cinema conditions, the reciter and his musical accompaniment stood to one side of the projector and declaimed,” Mayer writes.

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It is therefore no accident that ballad melodramas provided the subject matter for early silent motion pictures. Because the first dramatic films on serious subjects rarely exceeded a running time of ten minutes, their compressed plots adapted more easily to film than those of full-length stage melodramas. Such brief films readily lent themselves to projection in music halls and variety theatres, where the ballad-based films were accompanied by incidental orchestral or piano music and live declamation.20

Today we take for granted the seamless synthesis of background music and spoken word that pervades many of our technologically mediated art forms, forgetting its origins in traditions of nineteenth-century melodrama and declamation predating the high-art Wagnerism that film music scholarship usually privileges.21 Considering their narrative content, Schumann’s declamation ballades fit the paradigm of the melodramatic aesthetic proposed by the film scholar Linda Williams: “a dialectic of pathos and action” enabling “dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths.” Hedwig’s tale, Schumann’s first ballade setting (Op. 106), is one of pathos or deep emotional feeling, whereas the fugitives’ scenario (from Op. 122) exemplifies action, “the spectacular rescues, chases, and fights that augment, prolong, and conclude pathos.” The ballade of the moorland boy, the most complex and compelling of these three works, conveys both “the paroxysm of pathos and the exhilaration of action.” Williams summarizes, “If emotional and moral registers are sounded, if a work invites us to feel sympathy for the virtues of beset victims, if the narrative trajectory is ultimately more concerned with a retrieval and staging of innocence than with the psychological causes of motives and actions, then the operative mode is melodrama.”22 The three poems also illustrate certain narrative paradigms that the literary scholar Peter Brooks identifies as characteristic of the early French mélodrame. Hebbel’s “Schön Hedwig” relates a conversation between a beautiful orphaned servant girl and her master, a dashing and chivalrous knight, who interrogates her virtues and suddenly decides to make her his bride. According to Brooks, “the admiration of virtue” is a primary topic of the theatrical genre, and “the expressive means of melodrama . . . correspond to the struggle toward recognition of the sign of virtue and innocence”—themes that easily apply to the representation of Hedwig as a faithful, good-natured, hard-working, long-suffering tender maiden. Brooks notes, “The play typically opens with a presentation of virtue and innocence, or perhaps more accurately, virtue as innocence. We see this virtue, momentarily, in a state of taking pleasure in itself, aided by those who recognize and support it.”23 Schumann’s setting of Hebbel’s poem conveys these moral aspects of character through musical means. The opening majestic fanfares in D-Major depict knightly power, while the plaintive “song without words” texture for Hedwig’s entrance (m. 28) conveys her beauty and delicacy, the music establishing these two protagonists as idealized figures of masculinity and femininity.

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When the knight grasps Hedwig’s hand and asks her three questions, the underscoring changes to recitative-like music with chordal punctuations for the characters’ verbal and physical gestures (beginning in m. 37). Strategic silences play an important role in building dramatic tension and allowing the reciting voice to stand out ominously or expectantly from the musical accompaniment; a Große Pause marks the climax of the tale, when the knight asks a fourth question—“Do you love me?”—and Hedwig hesitates to admit her true feelings before the entire assembly (Example 9.1).24 In the typical melodramatic narrative, Brooks writes, “confrontation and peripety are managed so as to make possible a remarkable, public, spectacular homage to virtue, a demonstration of its power and effect.”25

Example 9.1. Robert Schumann, “Schön Hedwig,” Op. 106 (1849), mm. 67–78.

If Hedwig’s tale represents pathos, the turbulent mood of “Die Flüchtlinge”— evident in both the poet’s verses and the composer’s music—conveys spectacular action through its relentless energy. Shelley’s poem depicts a stormy sea that imperils the elopement, on her wedding night, of another bride and the man she really loves as they flee her jilted groom and her very upset father. In the second stage of the theatrical-melodramatic format Brooks describes, “there swiftly supervenes a threat to virtue, a situation . . . to cast its very survival into question, obscure its identity, and elicit the process of its fight for recognition.” This scenario of an abandoned wedding also fits

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the topos of the interrupted fête, the violated banquet which . . . represents the triumph of villainy, the fall, eclipse, and even expulsion of virtue. . . . For the greater part of the play, evil appears to reign triumphant, controlling the structure of events, dictating the moral coordinates of reality. Virtue, expulsed, eclipsed, apparently fallen, cannot effectively articulate the cause of the right.26

Tremolos, running chromatic figures, and sforzando chords convey the dramatic tension of the scene, much like “hurry music” would do in the accompaniments for silent films a few decades later (Example 9.2).27

Example 9.2. Robert Schumann, “Die Flüchtlinge,” Op. 122, no. 2 (1852), mm. 1–9.

Hebbel’s “Ballade vom Haideknaben” conveys both the pathos and the action that Williams theorizes for the melodramatic aesthetic. In this sinister tale a young boy is murdered for the money he carries on an errand across the moors. The story’s action comes through the violence of his own imagined and then actual murder, its pathos from the boy’s premonition of death and the helpless fear he feels when confronted with his own tragic fate. The dramatic climax occurs in stanza 18, where the poem’s rapid rhythm and fragmented phrases of dialogue convey the physical struggle between the boy and his killer (see text and translation in Figure 9.1), but the closing gesture of the ballad is equally disturbing because of its detachment and moral ambiguity. The narrator, addressing the listener directly, explains that a raven and a dove both witnessed the event, but that their reactions to the murderous assault were quite

1

Der Knabe träumt, man schicke ihn fort Mit dreissig Thalern zum Heideort, Er ward drum erschlagen am Wege Und war doch nicht langsam und träge.

The boy dreamt he was being sent off to the moorland village with thirty silver coins, and that on the way he was beaten and robbed even though he was neither slow nor idle.

2

Noch liegt er im Angstschweiss, da rüttelt ihn Sein Meister, und heisst ihm, sich anzuzieh’n Und legt ihm das Geld auf die Decke Und fragt ihn, warum er erschrecke.

Still sweating in fear, he was shaken awake by his master, who told him to get dressed, and put the money on his blanket, and asked him why he was afraid.

3

“Ach Meister, mein Meister, sie schlagen mich tot, Die Sonne, sie ist ja wie Blut so rot!” “Sie ist es für dich nicht alleine, Drum schnell, sonst mach’ ich dir Beine!”

4

“Ach Meister, mein Meister, so sprachst du schon, Das war das Gesicht, der Blick, der Ton, Gleich greifst du”—zum Stock, will er sagen, Er sagt’s nicht, er wird schon geschlagen.

“Ah master, my master, so you spoke in my dream, that was your face, your look, your voice, and soon you’ll grab”—the stick, he meant to say, but he didn’t, he was already being beaten.

5

“Ach Meister, mein Meister, ich geh’, ich geh’, Bring’ meiner Mutter das letzte Ade! Und sucht sie nach allen vier Winden, Am Weidenbaum bin ich zu finden.”

“Ah master, my master, I’m going, I’m going, bid my mother a final farewell, and if she searches all over for me, she can find me by the willow tree!”

6

Hinaus aus der Stadt! Und da dehnt sie sich, Die Heide, nebelnd gespenstiglich. Die Winde darüber sausend, “Ach, wär’ hier ein Schritt, wie tausend!”

Out of the city he goes, and there it stretches, the foggy grey ghostly moor, the wind whistling across it. “Oh, if only one step were a thousand!”

7

Und Alles so still, und Alles so stumm, Man sieht sich umsonst nach Lebendigen um, Nur hungrige Vögel schiessen Aus Wolken, um Würmer zu spiessen.

Everything so quiet, everything so mute, in vain one looks around for a living thing, only hungry birds dive down out of the clouds to skewer up worms.

8

Er kommt an’s einsame Hirtenhaus, Der alte Hirt schaut eben heraus, Des Knaben Angst ist gestiegen, Am Wege bleibt er noch liegen.

He comes to a lonely shepherd’s hut, the old man just stares out at him, the boy’s fear grows even greater, so he still stays close to the path.

9

“Ach Hirte, du bist ja von frommer Art, Vier gute Groschen hab’ ich erspart, Gieb deinen Knecht mir zur Seite, Dass er zum Dorf mich begleite!

“Ah shepherd, you’re a pious man, I’ve saved four farthings for your farmhand to stay by my side and accompany me to the village.”

10

Ich will sie ihm geben, er trinke dafür Am nächsten Sonntag ein gutes Bier, Dies Geld hier, ich trag’ es mit Beben, Man nahm mir im Traum drum das Leben!”

“I want to give him them so he can enjoy a good beer next Sunday, but all this money here, I carry it with dread, since in my dream I was killed for it!”

11

Der Hirt, der winkte dem langen Knecht, Er schnitt sich eben den Stecken zurecht, Jetzt trat er hervor—wie graute Dem Knaben, als er ihn schaute!

The shepherd beckoned the lanky farmhand who was already cutting himself a walking stick, and now he appeared—how the boy shuddered when he saw him!

12

“Ach Meister Hirte, ach nein, ach nein, Es ist doch besser, ich geh’ allein!” Der Lange spricht grinsend zum Alten: Er will die vier Groschen behalten.

“Ah, master shepherd, oh no, no, it’s really better if I go alone!” The tall one grinned to the old one: “He wants to keep his four farthings.”

“Ah master, my master, they’ll beat me to death, look how the sun shines red like blood!” “It’s not shining like that just for you alone, so hurry up or I’ll make you get up!”

Figure 9.1. Translation by author of Friedrich Hebbel’s ballade set by Robert Schumann as “Ballade vom Haideknaben,” Op. 122, no. 1.

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13

“Da sind die vier Groschen!” Er wirft sie hin Und eilt hinweg mitverstörtem Sinn. Schon kann er die Weide erblicken, Da klopft ihn der Knecht in den Rücken.

“Here, take the four farthings!”—the boy throws themdown and hurries away in distress. He can already see the willow tree when the farmhand taps him on the back.

14

Du hältst es nicht aus, du gehst zu geschwind, Ei, Eile mit Weile, du bist ja noch Kind, Auch muss das Geld dich beschweren, Wer kann dir das Ausruh’n verwehren!

“You’ll never make it, you’re going too fast. Haste makes waste! You’re only a child, and that money must be weighing you down, who can refuse you a bit of rest?”

15

Komm’, setz’ dich unter den Weidenbaum, Und dort erzähl’ mir den hässlichen Traum, Ich träumte—Gott soll mich verdammen, Trifft’s nicht mit deinem zusammen!

“Come, sit down here under the willow tree where you can tell me about your terrible dream. I also had that dream—I’ll be damned if it’s not the very same as yours!”

16

Er fasst den Knaben wohl bei der Hand, Der leistet auch nimmermehr Widerstand, Die Blätter flüstern so schaurig, Das Wässerlein rieselt so traurig!

He takes the boy firmly by the hand, the boy doesn’t resist any more, as the leaves whisper so eerily and the water trickles so sadly.

17

Nun sprich, du träumtest—“Es kam ein Mann”— War ich das? Sieh mich doch näher an, Ich denke, du hast mich gesehen! Nun weiter, wie ist es geschehen?

“Now what did you dream?”—“There came a man”— “Was it me? Have a closer look, I think you’ve seen me before! Go on, how did it happen?”

18

“Er zog ein Messer!”—War das, wie dies?— “Ach ja, ach ja!”—Er zog’s?—“Und stiess”— Er stiess dir’s wohl so durch die Kehle? Was hilft es auch, dass ich dich quäle!

“He took out a knife!”—“Like this one here?”— “Oh yes, like that!”—“He drew it?”—“And stabbed”— “You mean he slashed your throat just like this? Oh, what’s the use of me torturing you!”

19

Und fragt Ihr, wie’s weiter gekommen sei? So fragt zwei Vögel, sie sassen dabei. Der Rabe verweilte gar heiter, Die Taube konnte nicht weiter!

And do you wonder what happened next? Then ask the two birds that were sitting nearby: the raven lingered rather cheerfully, the dove could not bear it.

20

Der Rabe erzählt, was der Böse noch tat, Und auch, wie’s der Henker gerochen hat. Die Taube erzählt, wie der Knabe Geweint und gebetet habe.

The raven will tell what else the villain did, and how the hangman avenged the deed. The dove will tell how the boy had wept and prayed.

Figure 9.1. Continued

divergent—the former experiencing the exhilaration of violence, the latter a paroxysm of pathos. “Haideknaben” is also well-served by the melodramatic techniques Schumann employs here instead of resorting to a conventional Lied setting.28 As Graham Johnson asserts, “It was not only the blood-thirsty aspect of the poem that rendered it impossible for singing voice and piano. The whole point of the poem is the speed of its narrative, and the laconic manner of its delivery. . . . [A] setting for the singing voice would, by its very nature, have slowed it down unacceptably.”29 A short introduction presents the primary motive of the piece, a descending six-note chromatic line in twisting counterpoint with itself. This melancholy gesture appears throughout the ballade to accompany the boy’s dejected pleas (in stanzas 3 and 5, mm. 10–11, 17) and references to his ill-omened nightmare (stanzas 10 and 15, mm. 39–41, 63–64), or to depict the sighing of the wind over the moors (stanza 6, mm.

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24–25). There is some choppy musical punctuation for dramatic moments, along with the diminished-chord cadences that underscore the master’s punishing blows (stanzas 2–4, mm. 8–9, 14–16) and the quick repeated chords that accompany the farmhand’s aggressive questioning (stanza 18, mm. 82–89). Familiar musical signifiers include a beckoning horn-call figure when the boy spots the shepherd’s house on the moors (stanza 8, mm. 27–28), chorale-style writing to represent the old man’s “pious” nature (stanza 9, mm. 29–32), and tremolo effects for moments of impending danger (stanza 16, mm. 70–77). Curiously, Schumann advised his publisher that “Schön Hedwig” could be performed “just as well as a stand-alone piece without the declamation.” The same suggestion was printed on the title page of the “Haideknaben” score, and both Op. 122 ballades were advertised “für Declamation mit Pianoforte (oder für Pianoforte allein).”30 Can these pieces realistically stand alone as coherent musical works without the poetic recitations? One obstacle to musical unity would be the frequent silences between musical phrases, where the unaccompanied voice recites alone. Perhaps this was merely a marketing ploy to sell a set of pieces in an unusual and “entirely novel” format to amateur pianists, who could silently read the lines to themselves as an imaginary interior monologue while they played the musical part, but it might also suggest that, in the composer’s view, the solo piano could be an equal partner to the voice in terms of its speaking capacity. In a number of Schumann’s works this “voice of the piano” is not only a familiar metaphor but an actual effect analogous to speech: there are moments when the music does seem, literally, to stop singing and to start saying something to the listener. Consider, for example, the declamatory passage in the middle of “Der Dichter spricht” (The poet speaks) from Kinderszenen, Op. 15 no. 13, or the recitative in the Scherzo of the Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11.31 In Roland Barthes’s description of the parlando effect in Schumann’s piano music, “someone declares himself ” in the fourth movement of Kreisleriana, Op. 16, perhaps through the passages low in the bass that punctuate each melodic phrase (Example 9.3). When a singing melody finally emerges in measure 12, following a short recitative-like passage and a long-held silence, its expressive lyricism seems a revelatory transformation of the preceding utterances. There, as in Kreisleriana’s sixth movement, “what is spoken intensifies until it is sung.”32 Even in the Lieder Jonathan Dunsby hears “the unfathomable eloquence of Schumann’s piano voice, which usually does, indeed, have the last wordless word.”33

Literary and Cinematic Effects This concept of speaking through music continues to circulate in descriptions of Schumann’s piano writing well into the twentieth century, inspired

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Example 9.3. Robert Schumann, Kreisleriana, Op. 16, no. 4 (1838), mm. 1–13.

by the eloquence of the instrument’s voice in his piano works and Lieder. A 1908 biography of Schumann asserts, “No one can hear the Carnaval well rendered by a talented performer . . . and not be impressed by a feeling that therein the piano speaks a word language, tender, dreamy, and, in a way, daring, yet entirely free from mere display or even show of the virtuosity which it demands to render it adequately.”34 Similarly a passage from a short story by the American writer August Derleth captures this idea of the piano’s articulate power: He began then, lovingly, with Schumann’s “Vogel als Prophet.” . . . But the way Joel Merrihew played it made it sound like a question that came to life and haunted the room; it was something in the tonal quality of the music, something in the way he lingered over certain notes, something that seemed like a question lying far back in his mind, a question he could ask only in music.35

Here the metaphor of the piano’s voice conveys a sense of interiority and intimate communication, as if the instrument’s sound itself were a dramatic actor speaking directly to the listener to convey an expressive message or mood.

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Literature presents another context for the musical technique of melodrama, one not usually considered in histories and studies of the genre. As Brooks notes, “Even though the novel has no literal music, this connotation of the term melodrama remains relevant. The emotional drama needs the desemanticized language of music, its evocation of the ‘ineffable,’ its tones and registers.”36 The following two examples of speaking through music in literature, both incorporating Schumann’s piano music, date from 1912 and 1924, near the beginning and the end of the era of silent films, when live musical accompaniment for onscreen drama was standard practice. These two examples also incorporate music notation directly into the literary text, a rare phenomenon that approximates the role of musical underscoring for a melodramatic monologue, although here the music can be “heard” only in the reader’s own imagination. In this sense they also reflect Schumann’s innovation in transferring the technique of melodrama from the orchestral realm into the more intimate and personal space of solo piano playing. “Träumerei,” a short story by the American romance novelist Myrtle Reed published in 1912, is melodramatic in both its technique and aesthetic.37 A music critic sits bored at a symphony concert until he notices, across the hall, a beautiful woman he had once loved. At that moment the orchestra begins to play an arrangement of “Träumerei” from Kinderszenen (Op. 15, no. 8). Two short excerpts of the piano score serve as a legible musical soundtrack for the scene, enabling the reader to read and hear the music that accompanies the man’s interior monologue: “Träumerei! Anything but that! Oh, God, this needless pain! And he thought he had forgotten!” With these words the melody reaches up to the high A of the second phrase (m. 6 in the piano piece), in melodramatic correlation to the pain he feels at seeing his former lover again (Figure 9.2). Following this moment of recognition is a flashback scene triggered by the music, a temporal transitional device that would become a familiar practice in scoring for sound films three decades later. The man had listened to this woman play “Träumerei” on the piano years before; he had embraced her and “covered her face with burning kisses that were almost pain,” but their romantic bliss was short-lived because of “a misunderstanding.” No music notation accompanies the text of the story here, but a reader familiar with the piece can hear the middle section of “Träumerei” (mm. 9–16), with its modulations into minor and the momentarily dissonant appoggiaturas of its melody, underscoring this reference to their fleeting bittersweet affair. Here too the man’s nostalgic daydream carries him away from the public space of the concert hall back to the private space of their romantic encounter (“He stood again in a little room”), a scene change that coincides with an implied transition from the orchestral arrangement of “Träumerei” to its original piano solo.

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Figure 9.2. Excerpt from Myrtle Reed’s short story “Träumerei,” in The White Shield (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 170.

Reed’s prose seems to provide a literal correlate to the harmonic progression of the music itself, especially at the point when the opening phrase comes back in the original F-Major (m. 17): “With a deeper throb of pain than any he yet had known, the buried love came back, strong and sweet, as in those dear days when the whole world seemed aglow with love of her.” The dramatic highpoint occurs as he walks nervously to her seat in the hall and whispers, “Forgive me—come out a minute—I want to speak to you.” At this point the music would be approaching the G dominant-seventh chord marked with a fermata (m. 22), a moment of suspended animation and

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expectant resolution: “Hardly knowing what she did, she followed him into the dimly lighted, deserted foyer.” The final two measures of the piece, closing in the home key, accompany the happy ending to this tale, as the two lovers reaffirm their devotion “with the last strain of that wordless lovesweet song.”38 A comparable example of a melodramatic literary setting of Schumann’s music is found in Arthur Schnitzler’s 1924 novella Fräulein Else, which incorporates quotations from Carnaval, Op. 9, into the story of a young woman’s psychological breakdown.39 To help her father avoid financial ruin from an unfortunate gamble on the stock market, Else must procure a large sum of money from an old family friend, Herr von Dorsday, who is vacationing at the same resort she is visiting. Dorsday agrees to provide the money in exchange for the opportunity to look at Else’s naked body for a few minutes. Faced with this scandalous request and her repressed sexual impulses, Else grows increasingly hysterical as she debates her own morals and her family’s reputation through an exhaustive interior monologue. Finally one evening, naked beneath her white fur coat, Else enters the hotel’s music room, where a pianist is playing for the guests, disrobes to reveal herself to Dorsday, and faints in a delirium. Here, as in Reed’s “Träumerei,” solo piano playing sets the melodramatic scene in the more intimate circles of the parlor or musicroom.40 Approaching this climactic moment in the story, Schnitzler places three excerpts from the Carnaval score directly into the text, where they serve as a kind of musical underscoring to Else’s impetuous actions and her fevered mental soliloquy, her speaking (to herself) through music. The first two excerpts are from the “Florestan” movement, perhaps the author’s intertextual reference to Schumann’s own depiction of split personality through his famous pairing of imaginary characters (Florestan representing the masculine side, Eusebius the feminine). This gender play informs Else’s thoughts when she hears the pianist playing “Florestan” in the music room: “She plays beautifully. Why she? Perhaps it’s a he. Perhaps it’s a woman virtuoso?”41 The third excerpt the reader sees and “hears” after Else enters the music room is from the movement titled “Reconnaissance,” which accompanies Dorsday’s recognition of her nakedness as well as the startled notice of the handsome young filou (swindler) Else lusts after (Figure 9.3). At moments of climactic action or emotional crisis in the theatrical melodrama, words can fail while the music still plays, and physical gesture takes over the task of expressive communication. The clearest demonstration of this effect is the tableau vivant, a static arrangement of characters in various poses, fixed and frozen in place for the spectator’s gaze—often just before the curtain falls—to emphasize a scene’s dramatic import. As Brooks explains, these posed moments depict “emotions and moral states rendered in clear visible

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Figure 9.3. Excerpt from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Fräulein Else, in Desire and Delusion, Three Novellas by Arthur Schnitzler, trans. Margret Schaefer (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), 251. Reproduced with the kind permission of the publisher.

signs . . . meaning-full though unspeakable. . . . In the silence created by the ‘gapping’ of the traditional language code, mute gesture appears as a new sign making visible the absent and ineffable.”42 This sublimation of the spoken word into mute but expressive gesture with musical underscoring occurs at the tableau-like moment of Else’s disrobing as the pianist plays “Reconnaissance.” Here Else expresses herself through the language of physical gesture: “I’m ready. Here I am. I’m perfectly calm. I’m smiling. Do you understand my look?” As she stands naked, Else’s spectators also seem to be transfixed in a moment of shock as they read her revealing

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pose: “Dorsday is opening his eyes wide. Now he finally believes it. The filou is standing up. His eyes are gleaming. You understand me, handsome fellow!”43 This scene elucidates Roland Barthes’s notion of the “somathemes,” or “figures of the body,” that characterize Schumann’s piano music. Else’s pose may be momentarily still, but it trembles with an inner intensity (“wonderful chills up and down my body”) conveyed through its musical underscoring. Barthes asserts, “The Schumannian body . . . sometimes makes a meditative gesture, but does not assume meditation’s bearing, infinite persistence, and faint posture of subsidence. This is a pulsional body, one which pushes itself back and forth, turns to something else—thinks of something else; this is a stunned body (intoxicated, distracted, and at the same time ardent).”44 Inviting a link to the theatrical tradition of melodrama, Barthes writes, “Schumann’s music goes much farther than the ear; it goes into the body, into the muscles by the beats of its rhythm, and somehow into the viscera by the voluptuous pleasure of its melos.”45 Turning finally to popular cinema we reach the twentieth-century apotheosis of melodrama as technique and as aesthetic. Song of Love, the 1947 Hollywood account of Robert and Clara Schumann’s relationship, is a prime example of a film melodrama incorporating Schumann’s music along with the intertwined tropes of romance, struggle, tragedy, and redemption that constitute the standard melodramatic paradigm. The romantic aspect is prominent in Schumann’s love affair with the celebrated pianist Clara Wieck; the dramatic conflict arises from her domineering father’s resistance to their marriage, culminating in an acrimonious court battle; the sensational element comes with the rumored attraction between Clara and her husband’s talented protégée, Johannes Brahms; the tragic story with Schumann’s gradual descent into madness and his climactic suicide attempt and institutionalization; the sentimental epilogue with the devotion to his music and his memory that Clara demonstrates for the next forty years of her life.46 Melodrama as speaking through music also plays an important role in Song of Love. In one scene the Schumanns’ family physician finds Robert composing some disquieting music on the piano in his darkened study. “Strange sort of melody,” the doctor observes. “Perhaps it’s the dissonances, but it’s not at all like your usual things.” The piece is “Verrufene Stelle” (Cursed or Haunted Place) from Waldszenen (Op. 82, no. 4), which was published with two stanzas from a poem by Hebbel as an epigraph in the score (Example 9.4). This piece, like many of Schumann’s later works, has invited speculation about whether its peculiarities indicate something about the composer’s increasingly unbalanced mental state at the time of its composition. According to Song of Love’s musical director, Bronislau Kaper, “It is used [in the film] to divulge the first signs of Schumann’s mental collapse. Through its oddness, Schumann’s mental disintegration is brought into dramatic significance.”47

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Example 9.4. Robert Schumann, “Verrufene Stelle” from Waldszenen, Op. 82, no. 4 (1849), mm. 1–11.

The inclusion of poetic verses above the musical score makes this piece an obvious example of program music. “[Schumann] clearly felt it was important to couple the baneful mood of the poem to his piece of music, it serving to create an effect which the music itself could scarcely attempt on its own,” Eric Jensen asserts.48 This combination of text and music almost invites a melodramatic rendition, which is how the piece is presented in the Song of Love scene. The doctor simply reads the first stanza aloud: The flowers here grow stone-tall, Snow-white as if they were dead; One single in the midst of all Alone blooms scarlet red.

Robert then begins to play the piece, accompanying the doctor’s recitation with music in the manner of a declamation ballade: The red is not the reddish tan Of sun, nor morning glow; Her roots drank from the blood of a man Which drenched the earth below.

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While he continues to play, Robert explains to the doctor why he chose these verses as his inspiration: “The idea—one flower, drenched in blood, singled out, standing alone. It’s horrid in a way, but it happens to people too sometimes, you know.” Here the poetic recitation transitions smoothly into the delivery of the dialogue itself, while the piano music continues playing as diegetic underscoring. Song of Love is an unusual film in that all of its soundtrack music is diegetic, or source music, ostensibly performed or perceived by characters within the story itself. This fact raises the possibility, with one scene in particular, that the actors were moving, gesturing, and reciting their lines with deliberately synchronized timing and inflections over the musical selections prerecorded by the pianist Artur Rubinstein for the film’s soundtrack. The scene begins with Robert alone in the music room, playing the “Arabeske,” Op. 18, on the piano. As the music changes to minor (at m. 16), the scene changes as well: Clara arrives home to find Bertha, the housekeeper, forlorn at the prospect of Johannes packing his bags and moving out of the house. For each of Clara’s questions to Bertha, the music rises accordingly: “Who?” at measures 26–27, “Packing?” at measures 30–31. The soundtrack recording then cuts to the slower middle section of the piece in minor (mm. 144–168, Example 9.5) as Clara hurries to Johannes’s bedroom upstairs to persuade him to stay. Clara is solicitous and resistant to his departure, Johannes resigned and evasive about why he’s leaving. In the musical underscoring here each of the eight-bar phrases corresponds to an emotional appeal from Clara, while Johannes’s responses tend to be spoken in the short pauses between phrases; the music’s harmonic changes also seem to mirror their dialogue: (mm. 144–52, in A-Minor) “Johannes! What do you think you’re doing?” Clara asks as he packs his suitcase. “Well, you know how it is, Clara,” he replies, “I would have to someday.” (Same phrase repeats) “Of all the idiocy!” she exclaims, taking the shirts back to the dresser. Johannes tries to explain: “Clara, I can’t impose on you forever.” (mm. 152–60, phrase begins in F-Major and cadences in E-Minor) “Johannes, please don’t talk like that. You sound foolish!” Clara protests. (Same phrase repeats) “Now stop that!” she demands, placing her hand on the pile of folded clothes. Johannes responds helplessly, “Please, Clara—.” (mm. 160–68, the first minore phrase transposed to E-Minor) Clara tries to reason with him: “You’ve stayed with us through all the hard times, now things get better. . . . It’s a silly time for you to leave.”

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At Tempo I (m. 168) Clara’s cajoling continues more gently until Johannes finally confesses, “I love you, Clara,” at the conclusion of this section (mm. 200– 208): “I’ve loved you, I suppose, from the first day I came here, from the first moment when you walked into the room, and I was playing, and Robert was listening.” With the slower coda (mm. 209–23, played through twice on the soundtrack recording) Johannes reveals his true feelings and Clara sadly realizes that he cannot stay: “We’ll miss you, Johannes. We’ll miss you terribly.” Example 9.5. Robert Schumann, “Arabeske,” Op. 18 (1839), mm. 144–72.

These relatively precise correspondences between speaking and music qualify this scene as another instance of the melodramatic technique, and the sentimental dialogue makes it an example of the melodramatic aesthetic as well. Because the structure of this entire scene precisely matches the form of the musical composition as edited for the film, it can even be read as a projection of Robert’s own imagination as he plays the “Arabeske” alone in his study. As another example of speaking (to himself) through music, the dialogue between Clara and Johannes may be all in his head, in the manner of a fantasy or flashback scene, or as inner voices that speak to him privately through the music itself. “Schumann is truly the musician of solitary intimacy, of the amorous and imprisoned soul that speaks to itself, ” as Barthes puts it.49 Melodramatic is an appropriate term for these various literary and cinematic applications because it suggests both the intensity of emotional feeling as well as

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the means of creating it, the synthesis of melos and expressive dramatic action. The ability of Schumann’s music to communicate on a deep level of personal feeling reflects these intricate connections between language and music, the voice of the body or instrument, and the power of the declamatory effect. Through such long-established techniques for moving and being moved by musical language, Schumann’s “speaking” moments continue to exercise their mysterious appeal.

notes Special thanks to Jacqueline Waeber and Dana Gooley for their very helpful comments on this essay. An early version was read at the conference Music and the Melodramatic Aesthetic held at the University of Nottingham in September 2008. 1. R. Schumann, letters to Carl Debrois van Bruyck, December 17, 1852, and May 8, 1853, in Briefe: Neue Folge (1904), 363, 372: Noch habe ich zu einer andern Dichtung von Hebbel Musik geschrieben, zur Ballade “Schön Hedwig,” aber nicht durchcomponirt, sondern als Declamation mit Begleitung des Pianoforte. Es macht in dieser Weise eine ganz eigenthümliche Wirkung. Es ist eine Art der Composition, wie wohl noch nicht existirt, und so sind wir immer vor Allen den Dichtern zu Dank verbunden, die, neue Wege der Kunst zu versuchen, uns so oft anregen.

See also letter to Friedrich Kistner, December 17, 1852, 478. Already in 1845 Schumann had written in his diary, “Idee: Gedichte zu Deklamation und Pianoforte” (Idea: poems for declamation with piano). R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 3:384. 2. R. Schumann, letter to Franz Liszt, November 5, 1851, in Briefe: Neue Folge, 350: “Das Ganze müsste man dem Publikum nicht als Oper oder Singspiel oder Melodram, sondern als ‘dramatisches Gedicht mit Musik’ ankündigen. Es wäre etwas ganz Neues und Unerhörtes.” John Daverio mentions “Schumann’s development of a number of arguably ‘new’ genres” around this time (Daverio, Robert Schumann, 389–91). Laura Tunbridge notes, “the declamation ballades were not entirely without precedent, . . . falling somewhere between the orchestral melodramatic music to Byron’s Manfred, the declamatory style of some of the late Lieder, the unaccompanied choruses published as Romanzen und Balladen (Opp. 67, 75, 145 and 146) and the four choral ballades” (Schumann’s Late Style, 54). 3. For a comprehensive study of the history and theory of music and melodrama, see Waeber, En musique dans le texte. Waeber discusses Schumann’s declamation ballades and the “concert melodramas” by Liszt and others (247–98). See also Strehk, “Eine ‘Art von Composition,’ ” and Jensen, Schumann, 299. 4. Schubert’s “Abschied von der Erde” (Farewell to the earth, D. 829) is more like a spoken version of a conventional strophic Lied, and can easily stand alone as a piano solo without the recitation. This short melodrama dates from 1826 but was not published until 1873, almost two decades after Schumann’s death. Waeber, En

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musique dans le texte, also discusses works by Zumsteeg and Weber as early models for the declamation ballade. 5. There are two sets of recordings currently available: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with pianist Christoph Eschenbach, Robert Schumann: Lieder, vol. 6 (Deutsche Grammophon, 1975–79, CD reissue 1995), and Christoph Bantzer with pianist Graham Johnson, The Songs of Robert Schumann, vol. 10 (Hyperion, 2007). 6. Cooper, “The Songs,” 112. 7. Fischer-Dieskau, Robert Schumann, 169. 8. Hanslick, Sämtliche Schriften (1995), 203: “Obwohl grundsätzlich gegen dies melodramatische Genre eingenommen, in welchem sich die Musik vom gesprochenen Worte spröde sondert, wie Oel vom Wasser, und eine Kunst die andere beeinträchtigt, anstatt sie zu mehren,—konnten wir uns doch diesmal eines verhältnissmäßig sehr reinen Eindrucks erfreuen.” 9. Wagner, Oper und Drama, 111–12: “Zu einem auf der Bühne dargestellten Literaturdrama würde sich eine Musik allerdings fast ebenso verhalten, als ob sie zu einem aufgestellten Gemälde vorgetragen würde, und mit Recht ist daher das sogenannte Melodrama als ein Genre von unerquicklichster Gemischtheit verworfen worden.” Two decades earlier, in 1831, Wagner himself had composed a melodramatic setting of Gretchen’s prayer “Ach neige, du Schmerzenreiche” (one of his “Seven Compositions for Goethe’s Faust,” Op. 5). For a nuanced interpretation of this famous quote and Wagner’s attitudes toward declamation as distinct from melodrama, see Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 405–10. 10. Goethe, “Proserpina: Melodram von Goethe, Musik von Eberwein,” in Ästhetische Schriften, 19:711: “Nunmehr aber ist es Zeit, der Musik zu gedenken, welche hier ganz eigentlich als der See anzusehen ist, worauf jener künstlerisch ausgeschmückte Nachen getragen wird, als die günstige Luft, welche die Segel gelind, aber genugsam erfüllt, und der steuernden Schifferin bei allen Bewegungen, nach jeder Richtung, willig gehorcht.” 11. Schopenhauer, The World, 1:264. 12. Goethe, “Proserpina,” 715: “Auch darf man wohl zuletzt noch die Mäßigkeit des Komponisten rühmen, welcher sich nicht selbst zu hören, sondern mit keuscher Sparsamkeit die Vorstellung zu fördern und zu tragen suchte.” 13. R. Schumann, letter to Kistner, December 17, 1852, in Briefe: Neue Folge, 478: “Es ist etwas, wie noch nicht existirt und von sehr eigenthümlicher Wirkung, wie sich das in geselligen Kreisen kundgab, wo wir die Ballade manchmal aufführten.” On the significance of private performance venues as opposed to public concerts for both Robert and Clara Schumann’s musical careers, see Ferris, “Public Performance,” 351– 408. In an 1836 review Schumann differentiates between salons (“where now and then the head of a famous artist disappears behind aristocratic shoulders”) and conversation-heavy “tea parties,” on the one hand, and private performances for “the most cultured circles, who give the artist the attention he deserves,” on the other. R. Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften (1888), 1:203. Ferris cites other contemporary reviews that appreciate the value of musical performances in these “small,” “private,” and “intimate” social circles (374). See also Fellinger, “Die Begriffe Salon,” 132–33. 14. Zelm, “Zur Entwicklung des Konzertmelodrams.”

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15. Pygmalion, Rousseau’s scène lyrique, first performed in 1770 with music composed by Horace Coignet, is generally considered the earliest example of this technique in a theatrical work. This combination of dramatic declamation and music was widely imitated and developed in subsequent decades, most notably by the Czech composer Georg Benda. 16. For an overview and specific examples of the relationship of music, dialogue, and drama in nineteenth-century theater, see Pisani, “Music for the Theatre.” Pisani explains, “In the early decades of the nineteenth century, music served a prominent role in the production of nearly every dramatic genre, whether for tragedy, comedy, burlesque, English opera, ballet, melodrama, pantomime, hippodrama, or spectacle” (72). For an extensive collection of standard melos from the second half of the nineteenth century, see Mayer and Scott, Four Bars of ‘Agit.’ 17. O’Neill, “Music to Stage Plays,” 88. 18. On the evolution of musical underscoring from nineteenth-century opera and theater into twentieth-century cinema, see Neumeyer, “Melodrama.” Neumeyer explains: Synchronized scores for silent films were more often than not a mishmash of quotations from nineteenth-century concert or keyboard repertoire, popular or commercial musics of varying styles, original motivic or developmental treatments, and melodramatic transition or characterization cues that had acquired the force of topical categories (such as “hurry,” “misterioso,” or “dramatic maestoso”). (64)

Largely through the influence of Max Steiner and other European émigré composers in Hollywood, the techniques of melodrama evolved to become “a ubiquitous practice in American film music” (66). Similarly Anne Dhu Shapiro asserts, “The functions of music in melodrama were transferred very directly into music for the early silent film. . . . It may well be that the published cue sheets for early silent film hold some of the best evidence for what sort of music was used for late nineteenthcentury melodrama, especially for those which were made into silent films.” Shapiro, “Action Music,” 66. 19. Editor’s note in The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, 326 n. 2. 20. Mayer, “Parlour and Platform Melodrama,” 218–19, 224–25. 21. Paulin, “Richard Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity,” 58–59. 22. L. Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 42, 49, 69. 23. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 25, 28, 29. 24. For a further analysis of this piece and its synchronization of music and recitation, see Andraschke, “Annäherungen an Schumanns ‘Schön Hedwig,’” 65–72. See also Strehk, “Eine ‘Art von Composition.’” 172–83. 25. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 25. 26. Ibid., 29, 31. 27. For example, “Hurry Music (for mob or fire scenes)” by John Stepan Zamecnik, in Sam Fox Moving Picture Music (Cleveland: Sam Fox Publishing, 1913), 1:19.

Schumann’s Melodramatic Afterlife

179

28. The dramatic mood of “Haideknaben” resembles Goethe’s “Der Erlkönig,” which became one of Schubert’s most famous songs. While Schubert does not resort to a melodramatic setting here as Schumann does with Hebbel’s poem, a “speaking through music” quality is evident in the conversational interplay of the four characters (narrator, child, father, and Erlking), and the song concludes with a dramatic declamatory gesture: “In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.” 29. G. Johnson, CD liner notes to The Song of Robert Schumann, 40. Schumann dedicated his Op. 122 melodramas to Carl Debrois van Bruyck, a Viennese composer who had previously sent Schumann his own setting of the “Haideknaben” ballade for singing voice, oboe, and piano. “To some extent you’re to blame for my setting of ‘Haidenknaben,’” Schumann wrote to van Bruyck, “since without your setting, the poem’s suitability for music might have passed me by.” (“Sie haben gewissermaßen auch Schuld an der Composition des ‘Haideknaben,’ denn ohne die Ihrige wäre sie mir vielleicht als musikalisch behandlungsfähig entgangen.”) Letter to van Bruyck, November 18, 1853, in Briefe: Neue Folge, 383. Johnson suggests, “This is as back-handed a compliment as one might hope never to receive. What Schumann means here is that the younger composer’s song had shown him how impossible the poem was to set conventionally, and as a result he had reverted to that ‘idea,’ first mooted in his diary eight years earlier, that he should make a melodrama out of the poem” (37). 30. “Diese Composition kann auch ohne Declamation als selbständiges Clavierstück ausgeführt werden.” See Ozawa-Müller, “Aufführungspraktische Notate,” 99, 103. 31. In Schumann’s music “the speech and song modes of enunciation play a central role,” Kofi Agawu asserts. “In speech mode, the instrument speaks, as if in recitative. . . . Song mode departs from the ‘telling’ characteristic of speech. The impulse to inform or deliver a conceptually recoverable message is overtaken by an impulse to affect, to elicit a smile brought on by a beautiful turn of phrase” (Music as Discourse, 101, 99). 32. Roland Barthes, “Rasch,” in The Responsibility of Forms, 299–300. 33. Dunsby, “Why Sing?,” 119. Similarly, Beate Perrey notes: The “voice of the piano” becomes an analytical issue closely bound up with this idea of the singing voice. This also raises the question of meaning with respect to the “piano’s voice” in the wordless preludes, interludes and postludes. In Dichterliebe certainly, the piano does not merely form a supportive accompaniment to the voice, but rather keeps disrupting and contradicting it, remains silent or speaks to itself once the singing voice has ceased. (Schumann’s Dichterliebe, 6)

34. Patterson, Schumann, 188. 35. Derleth, “The House of Moonlight,” 217–18. “Vogel als Prophet” is from Schumann’s Waldszenen (Op. 82, no. 7). 36. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 14. 37. Reed, “Träumerei,” 167–72. 38. Linda Williams draws an analogy between melodramatic structures and harmonic progressions in terms of the tension and release of tonality in large musical

180

Popular Influences

forms: “Primed by the beginning tonic of the original theme—the register of the original space of innocence—the narrative wants to return to this point of origin and teases us throughout all subsequent development with the haunting threat of its loss” (“Melodrama Revised,” 73). 39. These musical quotations did not appear in the original publication of the novella (in the October 1924 edition of Die Neue Rundschau) but rather in the book edition subsequently published by Paul Zsolnay; some later editions reproduce them in different places in the text. Leventhal, Echoes in the Text, 86. 40. Leventhal notes “the significant contrast between public and private realms of music-making in Schnitzler’s own life in music as well as in two of his most admired novellas,” where performances of Schumann’s music take place in more intimate social settings than the public stage or concert hall (ibid., 106). 41. Schnitzler, Fräulein Else, 249–50. 42. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 62, 73, 79. 43. Schnitzler, Fräulein Else, 251. 44. Barthes, “Rasch,” 300, 307. 45. Barthes, “Loving Schumann,” in The Responsibility of Forms, 295. 46. In just its first eighteen minutes Song of Love presents a common narrative arc of the mélodrame as theorized by Brooks, with a “recognition of error by those set in the position of judges” that enables a “confirmation and restoration” of virtue, in this case through the court decision permitting Robert and Clara’s marriage (Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 31, 32). See also Tibbetts, Composers, 45–56. Similar narrative threads of romance and mental illness run through two German feature films on Schumann’s life, Träumerei (1944) and Frühlingssinfonie (Spring symphony, 1982). 47. Cited in Tibbetts, Composers, 54. 48. Jensen, “A New Manuscript,” 84. 49. Barthes, “Loving Schumann,” 293.

III A NALY TIC A L A PP ROAC H E S

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10 Meter and Expression in Robert Schumann’s Op. 90 Harald Krebs

It has long been recognized that metrical conflict, or metrical dissonance, is a central component of Robert Schumann’s musical style.1 By metrical dissonance I mean conflict against the primary meter as it is represented by the bar lines and the time signature. Such conflict takes two basic forms: displacement dissonance, which involves the association of congruent but nonaligned durational layers (Examples 10.1a–b), and grouping dissonance, which arises from the association of different groupings of pulses, that is, the association of incongruent layers. Grouping dissonance is illustrated in Example 10.2a, where a duple layer is superimposed on the metrical 3-layer. The grouping dissonance continues in the later measures of the same song that are shown in Example 10.2b, but those measures Example 10.1a. Displacement dissonance in Dichterliebe, no. 10.

Example 10.1b. Displacement dissonance in Dichterliebe, no. 11. 4

4

2

2

2

mf

4

2 4

4

183

2

2 4

2

Example 10.2. Grouping and displacement dissonance in “Es leuchtet meine Liebe,” Op. 127, no. 3 (1840). (a)

Phantastisch, markirt.

2

2

mf

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

Es

f

(3

3

3

leuch - tet mei ne 2 2 2

3

(b)

Lie 2

3 15 3

Da

2

3

3

be in 2

3

-

der Rie 2

3

3

3

kommt

3

2

3

(3)

2

3)

2

3

se

3

der Wild

2

2

-

2

(3

3)

nis, 2

die 2

2

2

2

sf

2

2

2

(3)

3

ban

-

2

2

3

ge Jung

2

2

2

2

3

-

2

frau 2

2

2

3

2

(3

2

2

3

flieht. 2

2

2

2

2

2

2

sf

2

2

2

2

2

2

3)

2

sf

2

2

2

2

2

(2)

Meter and Expression in Robert Schumann’s Op. 90

185

also contains displacement dissonance; nonaligned duple layers result from two equally valid parsings of the eighth notes in the piano part. Such metrical dissonances are more prevalent in Schumann’s oeuvre as a whole than in that of any other early nineteenth-century composer. Their frequency, however, plunges precipitously in Schumann’s music beginning in 1850. Metrical dissonance still plays a major role in his compositions in the late 1840s and in a few works of 1850; in the Piano Trios in D-Minor and F-Major (1847), in the Manfred Overture (1848), and in the Third Symphony (1850), for instance, one still finds extended passages of obvious metrical dissonance. In the music after 1850, however, metrical dissonance virtually disappears; the metrical dissonances that do occur in the late music are generally short in duration and more subtle than in earlier instances. Metrical dissonance is undeniably a powerful expressive feature of Schumann’s music before 1850. The frequent, extensive, and violent conflicts against the notated meter and the subsequent resolutions of these conflicts infuse this music with obvious curves of tension and relaxation that no performer and no listener can miss. By abandoning metrical dissonance, then, Schumann deprived his music of a highly effective expressive device. His music did not, however, become less expressive after 1850, nor did he lose interest in his last years in the exploration of expressive meter that had occupied him so intensely in his earlier music. Rather Schumann changed his focus from one level of meter to another; he turned to deep-level meter—meter beyond the level designated by the bar lines, or hypermeter—as a source of expressive impact. Numerous music theorists, including Edward Cone, Carl Schachter, Jonathan Kramer, and William Rothstein, have written about hypermeter—meter at a level higher than the bar.2 The theory of hypermeter is based on the observation that bars in tonal music are often grouped into approximately equivalent higher-level units, within which the bars function in a manner analogous to beats within a single bar. To use the technical terminology coined by Cone and further developed by Kramer, Schachter, and Rothstein, the bars are hyperbeats within larger hypermeasures.3 The most common hypermetric grouping is that of four bars, subdividing into two-bar segments; the odd-numbered bars are accented, as would be the first and third beats of a bar of quadruple meter.4 Hypermeter is in general less obvious than surface-level meter, for there are no notational signs that lay out the hypermetric structure for us. Several factors, however, prevent us from groping in the dark as we analyze hypermeter. The existence of a four-bar norm is helpful; one can begin by searching for four-bar units, although one should always be prepared to accept deviations from this norm (for example, regular hypermeter in three- or five-bar units, or irregularities within a basic four-bar hypermeter). Furthermore certain musical features provide clues for hypermetric analysis. Parallelisms between musical passages constitute one such feature; once one has assigned hypermetric beats to a particular passage, subsequent corresponding passages should logically be analyzed in the same manner. Harmony

186

Analytical Approaches

is another important consideration. Hyperdownbeats, like surface-level downbeats, are usually associated with harmonic change—often, indeed, with significant harmonic resolutions and arrivals. It is unlikely that a bar with a downbeat function would continue a harmony established during the preceding bar. Normal four-bar hypermeter is not in itself expressive but merely functions as a backdrop for other, more expressive aspects of music. Deviations from a hypermetric norm established within a given work, however, can generate profoundly expressive effects. Richard Cohn has studied the dramatic use of hypermetric fluctuations in the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.5 Most investigations of expressive hypermeter, however, have focused on Lieder. One reason for this focus probably lies in the fact that the expressive meaning of any musical feature, including hypermetric irregularity, can be recognized and described more easily in the presence of a poetic text than in purely instrumental music. Another possible reason that expressive hypermetric irregularity in Lieder has been dealt with relatively frequently has to do with poetic structure. The poetic texts of most nineteenth-century Lieder are regular in rhythm and line length and accordingly suggest a regular hypermetric structure. Composers often match the poetic regularity with unbroken four-bar hypermeter; it is common in Lieder for two poetic lines to correspond to a four-bar hypermeasure. When composers set rhythmically regular poetry to hypermetrically irregular music, however, the effect is striking indeed; the irregularity becomes particularly prominent against the foil of the regular poetic rhythm. The relative salience of hypermetric irregularity in Lieder may be another reason authors have gravitated toward this genre in their discussions of expressive hypermeter. Among the relevant earlier writings are articles by Carl Schachter, William Rothstein, and Frank Samarotto addressing songs of Schubert and Beethoven; Ulrich Mahlert’s analysis of Schumann’s Kulmann songs, Op. 104 (he does not use hypermetric terminology but draws attention to a few deviations from expected four-bar groupings); and my own investigations of the songs of Josephine Lang.6 The present essay, too, focuses on expressive hypermeter in song. Hypermeter was not an expressive element in Schumann’s early songs. As early as 1835 Schumann had evinced a theoretical interest in hypermetric irregularity; in his review of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, he praised the flexible association of even- and odd-numbered proportions of measures (i.e., juxtaposition of hypermeasures of four bars and of odd numbers of bars).7 In his own compositions of the 1830s and 1840s, however, for all of their violent assaults on the bar line, he rarely deviated from four-bar hypermeter. Examples 10.1b and 10.2b illustrate the encasement of strong metrical dissonance within four-bar hypermeasures that is typical of Schumann’s music before 1850. It was only in his last years that he began to experiment with and to employ for expressive purposes the kind of higher-level metrical flexibility that he had noticed many years earlier in his French contemporary, while at the same time virtually abandoning metrical dissonance. It is beyond the scope of this essay to demonstrate in detail this change in Schumann’s metrical practice. My intention is to investigate a set of late songs

Meter and Expression in Robert Schumann’s Op. 90

187

that illustrates Schumann’s transition from one type of expressive meter to another, namely the cycle Sechs Gedichte von N. Lenau und Requiem, Op. 90. Schumann composed this cycle in August 1850, just prior to his move from Dresden to Düsseldorf, in homage to the poet Nikolaus Lenau. Schumann was under the impression that the poet had just died (he actually lived two weeks longer).8 John Daverio refers to the cycle as “in many ways represent[ing] the crown jewel of Schumann’s second year of song [i.e., 1850].”9 It is indeed a wonderful work. Each of the seven songs is strikingly beautiful, and the cycle as a whole is supremely moving. It begins with a suitably cheerful setting in E-flat Major of one of Lenau’s cheeriest poems, then moves through the pensive mood of the second through the fifth songs to the deep melancholy of the sixth. After the latter song’s closing reference to death, the seventh song, “Requiem,” opens out into heavenly regions. It is a setting of “an old Catholic poem,”10 referring to the final homecoming of the weary spirit. Schumann asks the pianist to play with a harp-like tone and writes an arpeggiated piano part that evokes that instrument. After the bleak E-flat Minor of the sixth song, the return in the final song to the E-flat Major of the cycle’s beginning beautifully expresses a sense of homecoming after an arduous journey through life. There is much to say about the tonal structure and the musical and poetic cohesion of the cycle,11 but I turn now to the metrical aspects of the work. It is striking that the first two songs of the cycle are dominated by the types of metrical conflict that Schumann had favored in his earlier years; these songs use metrical dissonance to a greater extent than any others from 1850. It appears that Schumann consciously placed at the opening of his cycle two songs that looked back at the metrical devices that had been so significant in his earlier music. In the first song, “Lied eines Schmiedes” (Example 10.3), displacement dissonance prevails. The pianist’s hands delineate consistently nonaligned halfnote layers, separated by a quarter-note beat (as shown by the 2s in the piano staff at the beginning of the example). During the brief piano introduction the listener would be hard put to determine which of the two hands is on the beat; most listeners would likely guess that the left-hand layer is metrically aligned. Once the vocal line enters, the poetic accents quickly make clear that the righthand half-note layer is metrically aligned and the left-hand layer displaced. This metrical state continues throughout the song. Consistent displacement often functions as an expression of tension and conflict in Schumann’s music, but here, as Jon Finson has pointed out, the combination of nonaligned half-note layers is simply onomatopoeic, suggesting either the sound of the blacksmith’s hammer or the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves.12 Just as the first song of the cycle is dominated by displacement dissonance, the second song, “Meine Rose” (Example 10.4a), is preoccupied with grouping dissonance. In “Meine Rose” the eighth-note pulse is grouped into threes as well as into twos, resulting in the consistent assailing of the notated six-eight meter by a rival three-four meter. As in the first song, the piano introduction

Example 10.3. Displacement dissonance and hypermetric structure in “Lied eines Schmiedes,” Op. 90, no. 1. 1

4 Ziemlich langsam, sehr markiert

2

3

1.Fein Röß- lein ich be - schla - ge dich, 2.Trag dei - nen Herrnstets treu dem Stern,

2

2

2

2

5

2

2

2

4

2 etc.

2

2 etc.

1

fromm, Bahn

und wie hell glänzt

sei frisch und der sei - ner

3

2

und hell

der komm, vor - an,

4

wie glänzt

der komm! vor - an.

Example 10.4a. Grouping dissonance in “Meine Rose,” Op. 90, no. 2. Langsam, mit innigem Ausdruck

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

Dem hol - den Lenz - ge -schmei - de 2 2

p

Mit Pedal (3 3

3

3

3)

3

3

3

5

der Ro- se, mei-ner Freu - de, 2 2

3

3

3

2

3

die schon 2

3

ge -beugt und blas - ser (2) 2 2

3

3

vom 2

3

Meter and Expression in Robert Schumann’s Op. 90

189

Example 10.4a. Continued 9

hei 2

-

ßenStrahl

3

der

3

Son 2

nen, 2

3

2

3

Reichich den Be - cher 2

3

3

12

Was - ser 2

aus dunk - lem, tie - fen

2

Bron 2

nen. 2

2

pp

3

3

3

15

3

3

(3

p

2

3

2

2

3

2

3)

Du Ro - se m ei - nes H er 2

3

3

zens!

3

is metrically deceptive. The right hand’s attacks clearly organize the eighthnote pulse into twos, and the three-eighth-note layer that one expects in sixeight time is not clarified until the vocal line enters in measure 3. Schumann’s placement of stressed syllables on the fourth and first eighth notes of the sixeight bars finally renders the three-eighth-note layer perceptible.13 The piano intermittently articulates the antimetrical duple layer during the vocal portion of the first strophe (mm. 3–14), so that grouping dissonance continues; in measures 3, 6–9, 10–11, and 12 the duple layer is created by a combination of vocal attacks and durational accents in the piano part. The remainder of the vocal portion consists of two restatements of the same music—in the key of flat VI (mm. 14–27), then again in the tonic (mm. 37–50), with a retransitional passage in measures 27–36 to lead from flat VI through V back to the tonic; the metrical state therefore remains constant in most of the song.14

190

Analytical Approaches

The consistent metrical dissonance of this song, like that in the first song, has a text-expressive motivation. In the first strophe, the lyric I describes how a rose, faded by the hot sun, can be revived with water. In the second strophe, the lyric I expresses the wish that he could pour out his soul to the suffering beloved, and that this outpouring could bring about the same joyful resurrection as the watering of the rose.15 There is no indication that the lyric I actually does pour out his soul, let alone that the beloved reawakens to joyful ardor; it is only a wish. Schumann’s virtually unremitting use of grouping dissonance suggests that he interpreted the poem as implying an unresolved tension between the two individuals. It is significant that the only prominent resolution of grouping dissonance coincides with the poet’s most vivid expression of the wish for reconciliation: during the aforementioned retransitional passage in measures 32–34 (Example 10.4b). Here the desired resurrection of love seems within touching distance, but the resumption of continuous grouping dissonance at the return of the opening suggests the quashing of this short-lived hope. The first two songs, both rich in metrical dissonance (albeit of different types), differ significantly in hypermetrical structure. “Lied eines Schmiedes” is reminiscent of the music of Schumann’s earlier period not only in its incessant

Example 10.4b. The retransitional measures of “Meine Rose.” 29

Könnt' ich dann auch 1

2

3

3

nicht

2

2

3

se - hen

2

2

3/

2

3

dich 4

3

2

3/

3

3

33

freu

1

-

dig

auf

2

er - ste

-

hen! 3

2

3

3/

3

3/

3

4

2

3

cresc.

3

3

Meter and Expression in Robert Schumann’s Op. 90

191

use of metrical dissonance but also in its adherence to four-bar hypermeter. The only disruptions occur at the ends of strophes; as the numbers above the vocal staff in Example 10.3 reveal, the final bar of each strophe is a fourth hyperbeat, and the first bar of the following strophe has the same hypermetric function (the first vocal downbeat is definitely a hyperdownbeat). Such disruptions between strophes are common in strophic songs; the ends and beginnings of successive strophes rarely mesh into a continuous hypermeter. Schumann’s use of hypermeter in this song, then, is not in any way distinctive or expressive. In “Meine Rose,” on the other hand, Schumann adds a more substantial hypermetric disruption to the pervasive grouping dissonance (see Example 10.4c). Example 10.4c. Hypermetric analysis of “Meine Rose.” Langsam, mit innigem Ausdruck

4

1

Dem hol - den Lenz

p

1

2

- ge - schmei - de

3

4

Mit Pedal

2

5

3

der Ro- se, mei-ner Freu - de,

4

die schon

2

1

9

hei

-

ßen Strahl

1

3

der

ge - beugt und blas - ser

3

2

Son -

nen,

2

1

vom

4

4

Reichich den Be - cher

3------------------

192

Analytical Approaches

Example 10.4c. Continued 12

1

2

Was - ser

3---------------------

aus dunk - lem, tie - fen

(3)------------------------------------------------------------4

15

(3)------------------------------------------------------4 p

2

Bron - nen.

pp

1

1

Du Ro - se, mei - nes Her - zens!

3

4

The introduction of this song is not a mere vamp, as is that of “Lied eines Schmiedes”; such a vamp, once the vocal line enters with a clear downbeat, can be swept under the rug as a hypermetric upbeat gesture. But in the introduction of “Meine Rose” the piano presents a melodic line that establishes an unambiguous four-bar hypermeter. If this were a piano solo we would have no trouble hearing the hypermeter as shown between the piano staves in Example 10.4c. A sign of the validity of this hypermetric interpretation of the piano part is the association of the hyperdownbeats with important harmonies—for example, the return of the tonic in measure 5 and the expressive dominant ninth chord in measure 9. It might be possible to interpret the vocal line as simply riding the piano’s hypermetric wave and joining into its four-bar hypermeter. But Example 10.4c shows an alternative interpretation of the vocal hypermeter: if the vocal line were detached from the piano part, we would likely interpret its hypermeter as shown by the numbers above the vocal staves. This analysis is determined to a large extent by the main stresses of the poetry (“Dem holden LENZgeschmeide, / der Rose, meiner FREUde, / die schon gebeugt und BLASser / vom heissen Strahl der SONnen”); in my vocal analysis strong hyperbeats (1s and 3s) are coordinated with these stresses.

Meter and Expression in Robert Schumann’s Op. 90

193

It is noteworthy that the two analyses are contradictory; the vocal hyperbeats never correspond to those of the piano. Most bars are in fact strong beats in one instrument and weak beats in the other. This hypermetric misalignment between voice and piano, which continues through most of the song, has an expressive function: like the pervasive grouping dissonance it evokes the idea of tension between two individuals. Significantly Schumann resolves the misalignment at the point where the lyric I imagines the resurrection of wilted love; this passage consists of two undisturbed four-bar hypermeasures (see the numbers in boldface in Example 10.4b). In “Meine Rose,” in short, Schumann is not merely recalling his earlier metrical practices, but is, for expressive reasons, using in conjunction with them the kind of higher-level metrical conflict that was to characterize his late style. In subsequent songs of the cycle—those, that is, in which expressive meter is an issue at all16—hypermetric conflict is more prevalent as an expressive device than is metrical dissonance; metrical dissonance never again assumes the prominent role that it plays in the first two songs. The third song illustrates this preponderance of hypermetric irregularity (Example 10.5). Metrical dissonance in this song is restricted to a few hemiolas (see mm. 5 and 12) and a few dynamic accents on relatively weak beats in the piano part (see mm. 4, 11, 13, and 28). A large part of the song, however, is characterized by hypermetric irregularity. In the first half there are numerous hypermetric irregularities within the individual parts; neither the vocal line nor the piano part parses into regular four-bar hypermeasures. There is no difficulty locating the first hyperdownbeat in the piano part; the initial eighth-note figure sounds like an anacrusis, causing measure 2 in turn to emerge as a downbeat. The second hyperdownbeat in the piano part, however, is already more difficult to find. Because measures 4–5 correspond to measures 1–2, the desire to label similar bars in a similar manner would impel one to assign upbeat function to measure 4 and downbeat function to measure 5. Measure 6, however, gives a strong impression of downbeat function as well, since it contains the piano part’s first resolution to tonic harmony. One could consider measures 5 and 6 to be successive downbeats,17 or one could demote measure 5 from downbeat to upbeat status, allowing measures 2–5 to coalesce into a four-bar hypermeasure. I have adopted the latter strategy in Example 10.5, as shown by the numbers within the piano staff.18 If we accept measure 6 as a hyperdownbeat, measures 6–9 fall into place as another four-bar hypermeasure; notice that the corresponding passages measures 1–2 and 9–10 then fulfill the same hypermetric functions. The attempt to maintain four-bar hypermeasures in the piano part encounters an obstacle at measures 13–14. Measure 14 should be a hyperdownbeat but does not sound like one because it continues the harmony of measure 13; because measure 13 introduces a new harmony it sounds more like a downbeat than does measure 14. If we accept measure 13 as a hyperdownbeat, we have two three-bar

Example 10.5. Hypermetric analysis of “Kommen und Scheiden,” Op. 90, no. 3. 4

Mit inniger Empfindung

1

So oft

p

4

sie kam,

cresc. 3 fp

2

1

er -

Mit Pedal 5

2

schien

mir

die

Ge - stalt

so

4

8

1

3

3

4

er - ste Grün im Wald .

3

1

Und was sie sprach,

4

cresc.2 fp

1

2

drang

3

mir zum

wie das

2

1

2

12

lieb - lich

4

Her - zen ein,

süß wie des

4 ------------------------------------------------------

3

15

pp

Früh - lings er - stes Lied. 5

p

Und 1

als

Leb 1

-

wohl

sie 2

Meter and Expression in Robert Schumann’s Op. 90

195

Example 10.5. Continued 19

wink - te mit 3

23

der

Hand,

war's, 4

ob 1

der

letz - te 2

zurückhaltend

Ju - gend - traum mir 3

schwand. 4

im Tempo 1

2

zurückhaltend

27

[1

2]

3

4

1

fp

hypermeasures in measures 10–12 and 13–15 (m. 16 is definitely a downbeat bar, given the strong harmonic resolution at that point). An alternative analysis (this is the analysis shown in the piano part of Example 10.5) would regard measures 10–15 as a single expanded hypermeasure. Either way there is no logical manner of dividing measures 10–15 into four-bar units. Note that measures 10–15 constitute a modified second strophe (compare the first strophe, mm. 2–9). Schumann has compressed the two four-bar hypermeasures of measures 2–9 into two three-bar hypermeasures, or into a single six-bar hypermeasure.19 We return to the opening of the song to consider the completely different hypermetric implications of the vocal line (see the numbers above that line in Example 10.5). The opening vocal measure sounds like an anacrusis, and measure 4 like a downbeat (not only because it follows after an anacrusis, but also because it suggests resolution of the dominant harmony of m. 3 to the tonic). Measure 7 appears to be the second vocal downbeat; among the factors that support this

196

Analytical Approaches

analysis are the strong poetic accent on “LIEB-lich,” the new E-flat Minor harmony (new to the voice part, that is), and the attainment of a high point (the initial note of m. 7 is the highest vocal pitch thus far). If measure 7 is a downbeat, measures 4–6 form a three-bar hypermeasure. The vocal hypermeasure beginning in measure 7 is longer; measure 11, corresponding to measure 4, is the next vocal hyperdownbeat and delimits the four-bar hypermeasure, measures 7–10. The location of the next vocal hyperdownbeat is ambiguous. Measure 15 is a candidate because of the strong statement of dominant harmony (within the prevailing dominant key). Measure 16, however, with its resolution to the tonic of that key, appears to supersede the downbeat function of measure 15, so that measures 11–15 become a five-bar hypermeasure. Measure 17, with its strong durational accent following an obvious anacrusis, appears to be another downbeat, resulting in successive downbeats. I do not claim that this rather convoluted hypermetric analysis of the first half of the song is the only possible one, but I do assert with some confidence that no analysis of measures 1–16 could result in regular four-bar hypermeasures, or in consistent hypermetric alignment of the two instruments. The analysis of measures 1–16 proposed in Example 10.5 manifestly does not feature hypermetric coordination of voice and piano. Most of the measures that I have designated as vocal downbeat bars, or as candidates for this status, do not coincide with the piano downbeats mentioned earlier. The initial vocal hyperdownbeat (m. 4), for example, is two bars removed from the piano’s first downbeat (m. 2). The second vocal downbeat bar (m. 7) acts as a second hyperbeat in the piano part. Measure 11 similarly gives the impression of being a downbeat in the voice but a second hyperbeat in the piano. Both the hypermetric irregularity and the nonalignment of the two instruments are resolved in measures 15–17. At measure 15 there a feeling of hypermetric amalgamation of the two instruments; I have indicated this merging in Example 10.5 by showing only a single layer of hypermetric numbers between the vocal and right-hand piano staves beginning at measure 15. Furthermore, after the successive downbeats of measures 16 and 17, the music parses for a time into regular four-bar hypermeasures; measures 17–20 and 21–24 are convincing four-bar hypermeasures in both voice and piano. Thus the hypermetric irregularity of the opening is resolved into perfect regularity at measure 17. In the postlude irregularity returns. Measure 25 is an acceptable hyperdownbeat.20 Measure 29, four bars thereafter, however, does not make sense as a downbeat since it continues the harmony of the preceding bar. It seems more reasonable to think of measures 25–30 as an expanded hypermeasure—expanded, specifically, by the repetition of the first two bars.21 The final bar of the song, which constitutes the final resolution to tonic harmony, then emerges, appropriately, as a downbeat. No listener can absorb all of these details of hypermetric structure (especially in the first half of the song). What is readily perceptible, however, is the change around measure 17: a shift from confusion to clarity and from nonalignment to

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197

Table 10.1. Binary Oppositions in “Kommen und Scheiden” Arrival

Departure

Spring Life

Fall/winter Death

alignment. This change has a profound expressive effect. Schumann coordinates the shift in hypermetric structure with an important dividing line in the poem: the boundary between the sections that respectively address the titular concepts of Kommen (arrival) and Scheiden (departure). The first two couplets of Lenau’s poem (set in mm. 3–9 and 10–16, respectively) describe the sensations associated with the beloved’s arrival, sensations akin to those engendered by the coming of spring. The third couplet (mm. 16–24) contrasts these feelings with those triggered by her departure; it was as if the last dream of youth had vanished. Table 10.1 shows the binary opposition that the poem implies: if the beloved’s arrival is associated with spring and life, her departure must bring winter and lifelessness. Schumann, interestingly, matches the portion of the poem that addresses the positive side of the opposition with hypermetric irregularity, and the negative portion with regularity. In this song, then, hypermetric irregularity suggests a positive life force rather than tension and strife. The hypermetric rigidity of the second part of the vocal portion, on the other hand, seems to evoke death, a metaphorical rigor mortis. The returning flexibility of the postlude can then be interpreted as a nostalgic meditation on what has been lost. In conclusion, let us look at the emotionally most highly charged song of the cycle, “Der schwere Abend.” The text is the most desolate of the Lenau poems that Schumann selected for this opus. The lyric I remembers a silent, sultry, starless night, with dark clouds hanging down, during which he walked in the garden with his beloved—a night that, like their love, was made only for tears. He recalls that as he bade farewell to the beloved, he wished that both of them were dead. To create a sense of tension and anxiety appropriate to this poem, Schumann uses some metrical dissonance of both types. At the beginning of the first two strophes (mm. 2–6 and 22–26 in Example 10.6a) there is obvious two-against-three grouping dissonance between voice and piano, in the form of the superposition of duplet and normal quarter notes. There is also some displacement dissonance. Displacement of triple layers by two quarter notes occurs sporadically in the vocal portion of the song; see, for example, the third-beat dynamic accent in measures 8 and 28,22 the third-beat density accents in measures 14–15 and 34–35, and the third-beat accents of harmonic change in measures 48–49. This displacement dissonance comes into its own in the postlude. In measures 59–60 the attacks of the left hand are displaced from the downbeats (articulated by the right hand) by two quarter notes. The displaced 3-layer predominates in measures 61–66, where the entire texture is shifted by two beats in relation to the bar lines. This displacement

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aptly suggests the discord between the two lovers, a connotation for displacement dissonance that Schumann had already explored in Dichterliebe ten years earlier (Example 10.1 shows a relevant excerpt of that cycle).23 Even more central than metrical dissonance to Schumann’s expressive strategy in “Der schwere Abend,” however, is hypermetric irregularity.24 It will be helpful to consider a hypothetical hypermetrically regular setting of Lenau’s poem before looking at the hypermeter in Schumann’s actual song. Since the

Example 10.6a. Hypermetric analysis of “Der schwere Abend,” Op. 90, no. 6.

4

p

7

1

2

3

Die

dunk- len

Wol - ken

hin - gen

1

2

1

4

2

her -

4

1

3 p

ab so bangund schwer,

2

3 pp

4

wir bei - de trau - rig

sf 3

4

1

2

dim.

p

gin - gen

im

3

4

sfp

sf

14

Gar - ten 1

hin

und her. 2

p

3

4-----------------------------1//

p

pp

4

1-----

Example 10.6a. Continued 22

2

1

So

heiß und stumm, so

(1)------------

2

4

3

und stern- los wardie Nacht,

trü - be

3 pp

2

1

4

1

2

sf 3

sf

29

3 p

so ganz wie uns - re

f 4

1

2

dim.

p

Lie - be

zu Trä - nen nur

3

4

1

sfp

ge - macht. 2

3

p

37

Und 4--------------------------------1//

4

1

3

2

4

pp

45

als

ich muß - te schei - den, 1

2

3

und gu - te Nacht dir bot, 4

1

2

3

wünscht 4

1

200

Analytical Approaches

Example 10.6a. Continued 54

ich

be - küm - mert 2

bei - den

3

im

Her - zen uns den Tod.

4-------------------------------------------5

1

p

p

60

2

3

4

1

2

3

4

1 pp

f

f

poem is perfectly regular in rhythm, an obvious setting (using the musical ideas of Schumann’s song) would have been the regular, predictable one shown in Example 10.6b. The two lines of each couplet, rhythmically virtually identical, are here consistently associated with similar vocal rhythms; compare, for example, the vocal rhythms assigned to the lines “Die dunklen Wolken hingen” and “herab so bang und schwer” (mm. 2–9). The result of this strict correspondence between poetic and vocal rhythm is that each line of the poem coincides with a four-bar hypermeasure. Schumann’s song (see Example 10.6a) differs markedly from this hypothetical setting. The vocal line occasionally departs from the regular rhythm that the poem suggests; these departures have a significant effect on the hypermeter. Whereas Schumann sets the first line of the poem in a manner close to what one would expect, his setting of the second line involves an abrupt acceleration; at “[her]-ab so bang und” (m. 7), the expected two bars of duplets (corresponding to those at mm. 3–4) are compressed to a single bar by the replacement of duplet quarter notes with eighth notes. Similar accelerations occur at measures 27 and 58. These accelerations result in contractions of the expected four-bar hypermeasures. At “herab so bang und schwer,” for instance, a hypothetical four-bar

Meter and Expression in Robert Schumann’s Op. 90

201

Example 10.6b. Hypothetical hypermetrically regular version of “Der schwere Abend.” 1

4

2

Die dunk - len Wol - ken

10

2

1

be i - de

18

1

2

heiss und

26

ganz

34

wie

als

- te

2

be - küm - mert

her

Lie -

im

und

zu

schei

-

3

bei - den

den,

nur

4

im

gu

-

So

so

4

3

ge

- macht.

3

te Nacht

di r

1

2

uns

4

Nacht,

2

Her - ze n

4

her.

3

war di e

1

und

und

2

Tr ä - nen

4

3

hi n

1

wir

3

2

stern - lo s

4

schwer,

2

Gar - te n

4

3

- ab so bang und

1

be

2

1

4

3

uns - re

muss

gen

trü - be

2

ich

1

ic h

-

2

1

42

gin

1

4

3

stumm, so

1

hin - gen

3

trau - rig

4

3

bot ,

Und

4

wünscht

3

4

de n Tod.

hypermeasure is contracted to three bars (see the numbers above the vocal line in Example 10.6a). Conversely Schumann at times expands harmonies, and therewith hyperbeats and hypermeasures. At the end of the first strophe, for example (mm. 17–18 of Example 10.6a), he stretches a potential single bar into two bars. The iv and V triads at this point could easily have occurred within a single bar, whereby four-bar hypermeter would have been maintained (as is shown in

202

Analytical Approaches

m. 17 of Example 10.6b). Schumann’s elongation results in a five-bar hypermeasure (mm. 14–18 of Example 10.6a). Another type of hypermetric irregularity occurs at the joint between the first two strophes. As shown in measures 16–17 of the hypothetical setting (Example 10.6b), Schumann could have progressed seamlessly from the first strophe to the second by stating the initial dominant of the second strophe during the final weak hyperbeat of the first strophe. Instead he resolves the dominant corresponding to that of measure 17 of Example 10.6b to the tonic to close the first strophe on a hyperdownbeat (see mm. 18–19 in Example 10.6a). The second strophe then begins, like the first, with an upbeat bar, resulting in a discontinuity between the strophes. As was mentioned in connection with “Lied eines Schmiedes” (Example 10.3), such discontinuity is common in strophic songs, but it could have been avoided here had Schumann wished to do so. Clearly, all of these hypermetric irregularities have an expressive impact; the unpredictable changes in hypermetric duration create a perfectly appropriate mood of disquiet and anxiety that is completely absent from the hypothetical regular version. The fairly traditional hypermetric devices of contraction, expansion, and discontinuity between strophes are trumped in terms of expressive impact by a misalignment of voice and piano even more striking than those described in the second and third songs of the cycle. For both harmonic and rhythmic reasons the piano introduction sounds like an upbeat-downbeat gesture; this effect arises from the V-I resolution during these measures and from the motion from relatively short durations during the dominant harmony to a long duration as the tonic arrives. Hence I label the first two complete bars of the song hyperbeats 4 and 1, respectively, and continue counting 2, 3, and 4 in the following bars of the piano part (as shown by the numbers between the piano staves in Example 10.6a). The vocal line, however, also begins with an upbeat-downbeat gesture, misaligned with that of the piano, and the vocal setting of the first line clearly suggests a four-bar hypermeasure with a downbeat at “dunklen” (as shown by the numbers above the vocal staves in mm. 3–6 of Example 10.6a). A further example of nonaligned upbeat-downbeat successions occurs in measures 5–7; the piano reiterates its initial dominant-tonic gesture in measures 5–6, and the voice follows in measures 6–7 with an anacrustic leap of a sixth that also expresses a dominant-tonic motion. The sense of nonalignment of voice and piano is exacerbated at the beginning of the second strophe (mm. 19–23), where, after the piano’s upbeat-downbeat gesture, Schumann makes us wait a bar longer than before for the vocal echo. Schumann does at times allow the voice and piano to merge into a single hypermetric scheme. I have shown these alignments in Example 10.6a with single series of hypermetric numbers between the vocal and the treble piano staves. The first two instances of alignment are at measures 10–19 and 30–39, that is, at the ends of the first two strophes; both of these strophes move from a state of hypermetric nonalignment or dissonance to a state of alignment or con-

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sonance. In the final strophe (mm. 39 to 59) voice and piano align throughout, so that the song as a whole describes the same progression from nonalignment to alignment as does each of the first two strophes. The hypermetric misalignment in “Der schwere Abend” aptly expresses the meaning of the text. Lenau’s poem is about two individuals who are physically together but spiritually apart; what better way musically to represent this situation than to allot independent hypermeters to two apparently collaborating instruments? Schumann’s resolution of the hypermetric conflict in the third strophe has an expressive function as well. This resolution coincides with a pivotal moment in the poem: the lovers’ farewell. Along with the concomitant modulation to the relative major, it arouses in the listener the expectation of a last-minute reconciliation and a happy ending. The cataclysmic postlude, with its restoration of misalignment (albeit on a lower metric level), is all the more effective after this hopeful moment. In 1835, when Schumann commented on the hypermetric freedom in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, he acknowledged that such freedom was alien to the Nordic temperament and that it tended to arouse feelings of discomfort in listeners accustomed to regularity.25 In Op. 90 we find Schumann beginning to liberate himself from his own northern proclivities, and succeeding brilliantly in channeling the expressive possibilities of hypermeter. What I wrote in Fantasy Pieces with reference to Schumann’s use of metrical dissonance is just as true with respect to hypermetric structure in this cycle and in later works: “The moves from one metrical state to another in Schumann’s music . . . contribute greatly to the impact of his works; the resulting waves of tension and relaxation cannot fail to bear us as listeners with them, in fact to move us.”26

notes 1. I have discussed this aspect of Schumann’s style in detail in Krebs, Fantasy Pieces. Examples 1 and 2 are adapted from Fantasy Pieces, 163 and 168. 2. See Cone, Musical Form; Schachter, “Rhythm and Linear Analysis”; J. Kramer, The Time of Music; Rothstein, Phrase Rhythm. For a concise introduction to the concept of hypermeter, see Krebs, “Hypermeter and Hypermetric Irregularity.” 3. Cone, Musical Form, 79. 4. It is important to note that, although many phrases in tonal music are also four bars long, hypermeasures are not equivalent to phrases. Hypermeasures are metric units, whereas phrases are formal units. In this essay I deal exclusively with hypermeasures, not phrases. 5. Cohn, “The Dramatization of Hypermetric Conflicts.” 6. Schachter, “Rhythm and Linear Analysis,” 17–22; W. Rothstein, “Beethoven with and without ‘Kunstgepräng,’ ” 166–69; Samarotto, “Multiple Voices”; Mahlert, “ ‘. . . die Spuren einer himmlischen Erscheinung zurücklassend,’” especially 129, 139; Krebs, “Hypermeter and Hypermetric Irregularity,” 27–29.

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7. R. Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften (1914), 1:74. 8. Laura Tunbridge in Schumann’s Late Style, 16, and Jon Finson in Robert Schumann, 200–201, describe the origin of the cycle and its relation to Lenau’s death. 9. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 440. 10. The poem is a translation of a lament for Abelard, ascribed to Heloise; see ibid., 440; Finson, Robert Schumann, 200. 11. For discussions of these topics, see Tunbridge, Schumann’s Late Style, 17–18; Finson, Robert Schumann, 201–08. 12. Finson, Robert Schumann, 202. 13. The increase in perceptibility of the 3-layer is shown in the example by the emergence in m. 3 of the 3-layer from its initial enclosure within parentheses. 14. A brief resolution of grouping dissonance is discussed below. In the postlude Schumann abandons the three-against-two grouping dissonance in favor of a distinctive new dissonance: the sequence of two falling diminished fifths in the melody in mm. 52–53 creates a five-eighth-note layer, dissonant against the metrical triple layer. 15. I have applied a masculine pronoun to the lyric I because the poet was a man, who wrote many of his poems with a beloved woman, Sophie von Loewenthal, in mind. 16. The fourth, fifth, and final songs of Op. 90, wonderful compositions though they are, are less interesting from a metrical standpoint than the first three and the sixth, and are not discussed here. 17. For an explanation of this concept, see Rothstein, Phrase Rhythm, 58–63. 18. My decision privileges harmonic arrival over parallelism as a criterion for downbeat status. 19. Schumann eliminates one of Lenau’s rhymes to facilitate this compression; “Und was sie sprach drang mir zum Herzen ein” (mm. 10–13) should rhyme with “süß wie des Frühlings erstes Lied im Hain,” but Schumann omits the words “im Hain.” Such drastic tampering with the poem is rare in Schumann’s Lieder. 20. It may appear inconsistent to label m. 25 a hyperdownbeat, in light of the earlier labeling of similar bars (mm. 1 and 9) as upbeats. The harmonic context, however, necessitates a reassessment of the hypermetric function of this material. If the harmony of m. 25 were to resolve to the tonic in m. 26, the latter measure would sound like a downbeat. Measure 26, however, contains a neighboring IV6 triad, with the result that m. 25 sounds more strongly accented than m. 26. The harmonic situation is the exact opposite of that in the apparently corresponding earlier measures, where a IV triad leads to a stronger V harmony. This harmonic change in mm. 25–26 justifies the hypermetric relabeling of this material. 21. This expansion by repetition is shown in the example by the use of square brackets around the second statement of hyperbeat numbers 1 and 2. 22. The dynamic accents on the second beats of mm. 8 and 28 result in displacement by one quarter-note pulse; this displacement, however, is not as significant in the song as a whole as the displacement by two quarters. 23. I discuss the expressive function of displacement dissonance in Dichterliebe in Fantasy Pieces, 162–63.

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24. Finson mentions the “uneven groupings” in “Der schwere Abend” and contrasts the irregularity of this song with the “quadratic symmetry” of the somewhat similar Liederjahr song “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” (from Dichterliebe); see Robert Schumann, 207. 25. R. Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften (1914), 1:74. 26. Krebs, Fantasy Pieces, 114.

11 Hypermetric Dissonance in the Later Works of Robert Schumann William Benjamin

Basic Concepts and Definitions Hypermeter is the phenomenon of meter applied to the pulse articulated by a continuous stream of downbeats.1 It treats these downbeats just like the beats within bars, in this way producing a cyclic succession of variously strong and weak bars no different in principle than the beats within bars themselves. Like the bars themselves, hyperbars are real only when we hear accents at their onsets, but the accents that generate hyperbars are normally of a different kind from those that generate bars. Ordinary meter typically results from dynamic accents, agogic accents, accents of melodic discontinuity (leap accents), and accents produced by harmonic change. Accents of these kinds often reinforce hypermetric downbeats, but they do not normally create hypermeter on their own. Instead hypermeter typically has its accentual basis in the music’s grouping structure.2 It is thus a function of the grouping structure but, as I will now explain, does not collapse into the latter. This difference in accentual foundation between ordinary meter and hypermeter has been a source of great confusion in music theory for well over a hundred years, and remains one to some extent.3 Consider, for example, the phrase pair that opens the vocal line of the sixth movement of Schumann’s Der Königssohn, a work I return to below. This is presented in Example 11.1. Example 11.1. Der Königssohn, no. 6, mm. 9–16, vocal line.

206

Hypermetric Dissonance in the Later Works of Robert Schumann

207

It seems perfectly natural to regard the successive downbeats of this melody as being iambically organized, that is, to hear even-numbered measures as relatively strong. The leap accent to the downbeat of measure 10 (the second measure of the excerpt) and the agogic accents on those of measures 12 and 16 support this reading, as does the striking chromatic note in the bass on the downbeat of measure 12 (see Example 11.3). Measure 14 complicates matters, since its downbeat is part of a rising motion to a local registral and dynamic climax on the downbeat of measure 15. Despite this complication, it make obvious sense to understand the music as implying a textual prosody that highlights four syllables, as follows: “Der König und die KÖnigin, sie stehen auf dem THROne; da glüht der Thron wie MORgenroth, wie steigende Sonn’ die KROne.” From this point of view, the measures of Example 11.1 really are weak, strong, weak, strong, and so on, and reading the two phrases as a Riemannian period seems the logical next step. But this has nothing to do with a hypermetric reading, the results of which exactly oppose these. From the point of view of hypermeter as I understand it, the music’s groups organize its measures in twos and fours. At the two-bar level, therefore, there are hypermetric downbeats at the beginnings of measures 9, 11, 13, and 15, while at the four-bar level the hypermetric downbeats are at measures 9 and 13. This does not mean, however, that we are calling the same thing by two different names (groups and hypermeasures). This is easily seen: the two-bar group of measures 9 and 10 begins with an upbeat and ends with the third quarter of measure 10; the corresponding hypermeasure begins on beat 1 of measure 9 and ends with the fourth quarter of measure 10; they are different in extent. More generally and importantly, the accent that characterizes the group is contingent on its specific content, which in this case determines an emphasis on the downbeat of measure 10, while the accent that characterizes the hypermeasure is a function of the property of being the first downbeat of the group, thus determining emphasis on the downbeat of measure 9. These first-downbeat-of-the-group accents are what substantiate hypermetric downbeats, if they (the accents) are regularly spaced. From a hypermetric standpoint, then, the measures of Example 11.1 scan as strong, weak, strong, weak, and so on at the two-bar level, but this in no way contradicts the group-determined reading given above. In what follows, please understand strong to be hypermetrically accented, though not necessarily strongly emphasized by other kinds of accent. The subject of this essay is hypermetric dissonance. I use this term to describe passages in which there is doubt, for some number of measures, as to which of two ways of creating hyperbars is the best one. That is, both ways seem quite plausible because there are two convincing ways of grouping the music at some level, but they contradict one another. For example, in Figure 11.1 a succession of bars is grouped in twos in two ways, each relying on reasonable criteria, but the two ways are incompatible because according to the way appearing above

208 S

Analytical Approaches W S

S

W

S

W

S

W

W

S

W

S

W

S

W

Figure 11.1. Hypermetric dissonance in the abstract.

the staff, the odd-numbered bars are strong, whereas on the other view represented below the staff, strength attaches to even-numbered bars. The astute reader will see, upon reflection, how this way of viewing metric dissonance differs from the well-known ideas expressed in Krebs.4 In the cases investigated by Krebs, there is a notated meter, more or less clearly asserted by accentual phenomena, and one or more pulse trains, similarly asserted, that are either (1) commensurable with one of the notated meter’s component pulse trains but displaced with respect to it (“displacement dissonance”), or (2) distinct from any of the notated meter’s component pulse trains though ultimately commensurable with one of more of these (“grouping dissonance”). In some of Krebs’s examples a case could be made that the dissonant pulse trains are independently metric, in the sense of containing their own hierarchy of strong and weak beats, and that it is feasible to perceive the notated beats and downbeats in these examples as dissonant with respect to their inferred counterparts; however, this is not normally the case. Normally the dissonant trains are received as systematically applied syncopation. And in virtually all cases, of course, Krebs is discussing meter at the notated level. By contrast, the following discussion is exclusively of hypermeter, and because hypermeter must always be inferred and depends less on accent than on grouping, all my examples are instances of a sort of aural illusion: they allow for hearing the same passage in two equally cogent hypermetric interpretations, each of which can impose itself on the other as its governor. So simple is the situation depicted in Figure 11.1 that it is easy to forget that its presentation masks three procedural difficulties. First, if both interpretations are plausible, perhaps the sensible approach is to deny the existence of hypermeter. Let’s be clear what’s at issue here. If each of two hypermetric interpretations is convincing, this must be because there are two equally plausible grouping structures at the same level. Perhaps in such cases it is better to say that the music is, in effect, too continuous to be segmented at the level in question, and that the asserted groups lack enough salience to be taken seriously, on their own or as a basis for hypermeter.5 Second, as noted above, a downbeat can be strongly accented without being hypermetrically strong. The same observation applies to a succession of 4/4 bars in which the second beats have dynamic accents. One can speak of these beats as syncopated without wanting to assert that, in all or even most cases, there is a shadow 4/4 meter starting a beat later than that which is notated.6 In the same

Hypermetric Dissonance in the Later Works of Robert Schumann

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way, one might note a persistent conflict between hypermetric downbeats at some level and syncopated downbeats at the same level, without wanting to claim a coexistence of hypermeters.7 The third and final procedural question has to do with deciding between ambiguity and conflict. Perhaps one would like to say that two hypermetrical interpretations are possible, that neither is obviously wrong, without claiming that one can hear both at the same time. But for a conflict, for dissonance to be experienced as such, one must indeed hear both interpretations at once, in some sense. The situations I discuss in this essay, then, are those in which these procedural difficulties are not at issue because three conditions apply. The propriety of two distinct groupings at the same level is not at issue (which cancels the first difficulty); neither hypermetric accent is better accounted for as a syncopation (canceling the second); and there are circumstances that impel one to hear both hypermeters at the same time (the third). Of these three conditions the first two arise from the particulars of each case, but the third demands a more general account. For this, refer to Figure 11.2. The subconditions outlined in the table in Figure 11.2 require some explanation. First I deal with the basic constraints, which are listed in the top portion of the table, and apply to all contexts. 1. We can spontaneously experience each of two hypermeters on its own. Each relies on a grouping that presents itself without special effort on our parts, though we can choose to relegate one grouping to the background while concentrating on the other. 2. The two hypermeters, A and B, are at the same level. They both group the same number of bars, starting at different points.

Basic constraints 1. We can spontaneously experience each of two hypermeters on its own. 2. The two hypermeters, A and B, are at the same level. Cumulative experience 3.1 We start by hearing A, but eventually it breaks down. 3.2 As a result, we notice B, which has weak spots but does not break down. 3.3 We understand B as the controlling hypermeter, but retain an impression of A as its dissonant counterpart.

Hypermetric modulation 4. As A, which unequivocally begins the music, begins to weaken, B insinuates itself more and more, eventually taking over.

Fundamental requirement 5. We experience some aesthetic gain through the coexistence, in our consciousness, of A and B.

Figure 11.2. Circumstances that permit hearing two hypermeters at once.

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Then, corresponding to the left side of the midportion of the table, there are the following subconditions: 3.1. We start by hearing A but eventually it breaks down. Let us say that A is more salient for us as the music starts. We follow the music according to A and try to keep it going, but at some point we are forced to give up on A because the groupings no longer support it. 3.2. As a result we notice B, which has weak spots but does not break down. We are able to hear the passage as a whole in terms of B, though in certain places grouping does not correspond very well to B. 3.3. We understand B as the controlling hypermeter, but retain an impression of A as its dissonant counterpart. Because A impressed itself upon us more strongly at first, we remember it even as B takes over in our consciousness, especially during B’s weak spots, interpreting A as dissonant to B for as long as we bear them both in mind. The source of dissonance here has to do with a chronology of impressions, with the lingering effects of a strong first impression on a somewhat weaker but more coherent second impression. It may be said to arise out of cumulative experience. The right half of the midportion of the table deals with a form of hypermetrical dissonance that is perhaps more integral to the music’s design and less dependent on our impressions. Its subcondition is this: 4. As A, which unequivocally begins the music, begins to weaken, B insinuates itself more and more, eventually taking over. In such cases there is a transitional period of hypermetric coexistence in which neither hypermeter is unequivocal. Both may be doubted, but neither can be forgotten or discounted. Here, one may speak of hypermetric modulation as the source of dissonance.8 One might posit varieties of hypermetrical dissonance additional to those described by subconditions 3.1–3.3 and 4, but these two seem to me of special importance. What they have in common, perhaps with others, is that one is, for a time, actually hearing both hypermeters at once, rather as one hears voices in a polyphonic texture, because there is really no way to avoid it while making the best possible sense out of the music. This leads me to observe, in amplification of condition 5, expressed in the bottom portion of the table, that hypermetrical dissonance arises only where a fundamental condition is met. 5. We experience some aesthetic gain through the coexistence, in our consciousness, of A and B. We aren’t after all forced by cumulative experience, or by a modulatory shift in the music, to hear A and B at once. We could still choose to hear A here and B there, or only one of the two where it suits us. But we conclude that there is some added aesthetic

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value in listening to the music as involving the coincidence of A and B in certain of its passages even though there are more direct or simpler ways to listen to it. As always it’s a separate question whether, as analysts, we can account for this aesthetic gain, but the challenge is there in any case.

Analyses I turn now to examples that illustrate these two possibilities in direct fashion. The first is taken from the still rarely played third piano trio, Op. 110, from 1851. Example 11.2 presents part of the principal theme of the first movement, a sonata-allegro.

Example 11.2. Piano Trio No. 3, Op. 110, first movement, opening.

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Example 11.2. Continued

Given the absence of melodic activity in measure 1, and the crescendo to an Sf at the downbeat of measure 2, I find it most natural to hear measure 2 as a strong measure, which means discounting measure 1 as a preparatory measure, of the type often encountered in songs. In fact measures 2 and 3 are convincingly articulated as a strong-weak pair by the onset of an idea in the violin, which I have labeled X, on the downbeat of measure 2. Measures 4 and 5 are more problematic, since measure 4 begins as a near repeat of measure 3, but they may nonetheless be heard as bound together by the contrasting idea Y, in which the appoggiatura figure Bb, A in measure 4, is imitated by G, F-sharp in measure 5. These four bars comprise a compound idea that is reinitiated by the cello in measures 6–7, whereupon two-bar fragments, based on X, appear in the violin, in measures 10–11 and 12–13, respectively. We seem to be dealing with a typical sentence, and the dynamic markings that accent the downbeats of measures 2, 6, 10, and 12 tell us that it is in every way a proportionally and perhaps hypermetrically standard sentence. So far we have noticed a hypermeter, that we can call A, in which even-numbered measures are strong. But something goes awry at measure 13, where the

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fragmentation intensifies, since there can be no doubt that, being sequentially imitated by measure 14, measure 13 is also a strong measure, and that from measure 13 until the cadential tonic is reached in measure 25 there is a sequence of strong-weak pairs. If we now go back over the course of the music thus far, we need to admit that some of our decisions were a little dismissive of contrary evidence. In the first place, while grouping in the bass line is ambiguous, agogic accents at odd-numbered downbeats in that part clearly suggest a conflicting hypermeter (B), indicated in the example with dotted-line brackets under the music. And what about the slur in the violin that pairs measure 6 with measure 5, or the falling fifths in that instrument that group measure 8 with measure 7? What about measure 8, in fact? Is it not a point of half cadence? Do these data not suggest that B might be present in the melodic line, if only latently, right from the start? Perhaps, then, we should reconsider the role of measure 1 and consider its downbeat to be strong, along with those of all subsequent odd-numbered bars. This is far from easy to do until we get to measure 6 and hear it as an imitation of measure 5, and it becomes hard again in measure 9. But it makes for a result that has no breaking points over the entire course of the theme. If it is simpler to hear odd-numbered bars as strong, why not leave it at that? Precisely because it is so mechanical, and thus unmusical, a way to hear a passage that is always changing its mind about how its bars affiliate with one another; because meter, as Chris Hasty has emphasized, is rhythm, and not the product of working at the slicer in a deli.9 The real choice is between hearing the theme as hypermetrically dissonant—with an at first latent but foundational two-bar hypermeter starting in measure 1 and continuing throughout, and a dissonant two-bar hypermeter starting in measure 2 and petering out in measure 13—and hearing it as nonmetrical above the level of the bar. This is an aesthetic decision. I will not defend my way of making it here, but will deal with the issue in subsequent examples. Example 11.3 returns to a work discussed in Example 11.1; like the third piano trio it was composed in 1851 and is only very rarely performed. This is Der Königssohn, a ballad for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, on a text by Ludwig Uhland (modified by Moritz Horn). The excerpt is from the finale, in which a prince, unable to inherit a share in his father’s kingdom because of his status as third-born son, arrives to claim another throne by virtue of courageous deeds. This number, in Schumann’s best heroic-populist vein, opens with a sixteenmeasure period that modulates to the dominant.10 Well-wrought as it is, the music might not escape the charge of triteness were it not for the masterful handling of hypermeter in the next pair of phrases, spanning measures 16–27. Before discussing this, however, some attention to the larger formal context is needed for the light it may shed on what the aesthetic purposes of the structure I am about to describe may be, other than complexity for its own sake.

Example 11.3. Hypermetric intrigue in Der Königssohn, no. 6, first section.

Example 11.3. Continued

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Analytical Approaches

This piece is a large-scale bar form, AAB, of which Example 11.3 presents the first of the two Stollen, the first A. As just indicated, the first sixteen bars are a modulating period, very typical of classicizing Romanticism in its proportions and character. At measure 17 we begin what looks to be a middle section, with sentence-like proportions, except for its expanded and strangely unbalanced continuation phrase in measures 21–27. This interpretation of 17–27, as a middle section, would seem to be confirmed by the return of the opening motive over a root-position tonic in measure 28. But measures 28–45 are not, as it turns out, a reprise. Instead they offer another continuation to the opening sixteen measures, this time in the form of a sixteen-measure sentence that is oriented toward the subdominant. In effect, then, measures 17–45 are a two-part continuation section, not a middle section. Schumann naturally avoids any authentic cadence in such a section, saving it for the subsequent cadential passage—in this piece, for the Abgesang, or large B section. But in his late work, in shorter movements that do not fully stabilize secondary keys, he also avoids the tonic harmony within extended continuations, on hypermetrically strong downbeats, even if it is in first inversion. How, then, to explain the root-position tonic harmony at measure 28? This is where hypermetric considerations become important. I pointed out that the first continuation begins at measure 17, but this completely overlooks the very strong effect of elision at measure 16, where the orchestra sings out the opening motive on the dominant. And in fact measures 16 and 18 are much more convincing as strong bars than are measures 17 and 19. It will not do, however, to forget about measures 17–18 and 19–20 as hyperbars, for if we do, we not only overlook the voice’s groups, but also distort the effect of measure 20. Measure 20 is clearly weak throughout the texture, since right there the orchestra changes its mind, deferring to the voice and reverting to the placement of hypermetric downbeats on odd-numbered bars, to wit, measures 21 and 23. In effect measure 20 in the orchestra sounds like the third, weak bar of a three-bar group, indicated by a dotted-line extension (under m. 20) of the bracket below the music, and by the use of “3.” Just at measure 21, however, the voice does the very same thing, treading water for a bar, and adopting in measure 22 the orchestra’s way of doing things since measure 16, its even-numbered strong bars. In effect we have a crossing of hypermetric patterning between voice and orchestra, hardly what we might have expected given the music’s conventional stance at the outset. By measure 24 the listener is apt to be confused precisely because there really is no way of forgetting about either of the two conflicting hypermeters. This result is tantamount, by our definition, to a condition of hypermetric dissonance. Here, however, the eventual outcome allows us to speak of a hypermetric modulation, because it is the new hypermeter, initiated with the elision in measure 16, that wins out—both in the voice and in the orchestra: clearly measures 24–25 and 26–27 are strong-weak pairs in the texture as a whole. This unanimity

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of effect comes about because there is an elision within the orchestra part itself in measure 24, whereby measures 24 and 25 constitute a new group, one that overrides the backward-referring group of 23–24. In this way the orchestra bends once again to the voice’s authority in measure 24, for the first time since measure 15. Something more is afoot, however. Although it is true that two pairs of bars are needed here to stabilize the new hypermeter—after all, we could hardly know that the new hypermeter, with even-numbered strong bars, had won out if the phrase were to end in measure 25—it was not necessary to write measures 24–27 as Schumann wrote them. Having only one line of text left over, he might have confined it to two bars, like all the other lines thus far, and given the remaining two bars to the orchestra. Instead he slows down the rate of text delivery by a factor of 2. The result is that the expansion of phrase length in measures 21–27 from four to seven measures also entails the possibility of making hypermeter at the four-bar level more salient, for the first time, than the two-bar kind we have been following. Schumann might have acted on this possibility by beginning the next stanza with another four bars that set one line of text, but this would have slowed down the music in an intolerable way, producing a recessive effect that would have acted to further prepare an immediate reprise, rather than promoting the desired continuation. Schumann hit upon the happy stratagem of maintaining tension by introducing a hypermetric conflict at the four-bar level. The four-bar unity of measures 24–27 has already been accounted for in terms of the slower rate of text setting in these measures, but it is evident as well in the progression of four whole notes in the bass and the strongly dominant-oriented motion they trace, which in fact leads to a half-cadential V in measure 27. This grouping is indicated with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 placed over the vocal staff. There is nothing out of the ordinary about emphasizing the four- over the two-bar level in the approach to a cadence. What is less ordinary, however, is the fact that, from measure 24 to measure 33, it is possible to form convincing four-bar groups every two measures. Measures 28–31 work as a four-bar group that begins with the head-motive on the tonic and ends with a plagal ornamentation of the IV (in mm. 30–31); measures 30–33 constitute the first vocal phrase of the next stanza, beginning on the IV and prolonging it via a cadence on its major mediant, the E-Major chord of measure 33. Both groups are indicated with numbers, the first above the vocal staff, the second below the piano part. There remains one group of four bars not yet accounted for: measures 26–29. But Schumann has somehow contrived to clinch the desired effect (that these bars, too, should group together). He does this by imitating the dissonant diminished fifth in measure 27 with a diminished fourth in measure 29, a parallelism that, to my ear, is just strong enough to make measures 26–29 into the desired four-bar group (indicated below the piano part).

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Analytical Approaches

As a result of what I’ve just described we have a succession of four-bar groups beginning in measure 24 and another such succession beginning in measure 26. If we interpret these groupings as inducing conflicting hypermeters, neither of which clearly predominates—until around measure 32, where the group formed by the content of measures 28–31 has no successor—we have the preconditions for asserting the presence of hypermetric dissonance at the four-bar level. It is precisely this dissonant condition that undermines the metric weight that measure 28 would have if it were the downbeat of an unchallenged hypermeter. But the real point here is that the strength of the tonic chord in measure 28 is thus undermined as well. So disturbed is its stability by rhythmic circumstances that we wonder, even at the downbeat of measure 28, if it is not just a V/IV, which is what it turns out to be. The downbeat of measure 28 remains a hypermetric downbeat, but as such it is not as untroubled, or as stable, as we might expect it to be, considering it as we might have done in first coming upon it, as the beginning of a reprise. One aesthetic reason to hear this hypermetric intrigue is, therefore, that it enables us to feel Schumann’s intent for the harmony in measure 28, which is that it should not sound like a return, but as something that pushes onward to further continuation. In general, though, it is difficult to sustain hypermetric dissonance at the four-bar level, where the conflicting hyperdownbeats are two notated bars apart. Why? For the simple reason that this forces the music to make every second bar strong, and such a situation is almost indistinguishable, except in unusual circumstances like those adduced in this example, from ordinary hypermeter at the two-bar level. For this reason hypermetric dissonance at the four-bar level is more effective when the conflicting meters are separated by only one bar, as in Figure 11.3. An example of this occurs in Example 11.4, which is a piano reduction of the last half of the third movement of the motet for double men’s chorus, Verzweifle nicht im Schmerzensthal. This was composed in 1849 as an a cappella work and later supplied, first, with a simple organ accompaniment, then with a symphonic accompaniment that mostly doubles the vocal parts.11 I will begin by discussing the passage from measure 68 to measure 91. My first take on this passage is that it consists of four-bar hyperbars, with downbeats at measures 68, 72, 76, 80, and so on. In effect I hear the last three quarter notes of measure 67 as an upbeat to the downbeat of a hyperbar. Similar three quarter-note upbeats occur to subsequent hyperdownbeats, for example to those at measures 72 and 76. The content of the first two hyperbars, measures 1

2

3

4

1

1

2

3

4

1

Figure 11.3. Four-bar hypermetric displacement dissonance at the distance of a bar.

Example 11.4. Verzweifle nicht im Schmerzensthal, Op. 93, no. 3, second half.

Example 11.4. Continued

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68–71 and 72–75, can be heard as phrases ending in half-cadences, or as the basic ideas of an eight-measure presentation phrase. I prefer the second interpretation because these two blocks of material are so similar. Adopting the second interpretation, we can say that a continuation begins in measure 76, preceded by the characteristic upbeat figure. This takes us through two more hyperbars and various tonicizations, leading to the subdominant harmony in measure 83. A cadential action then begins on the hyperdownbeat at measure 84, leading to a half-cadential dominant at measure 91. So far, so good. Or is it? Measure 91 is clearly not a hyperdownbeat, this being due only at measure 92. At the same time it is clearly a strong measure, the beginning of a dominant pedal that initiates a second, more extensive cadential action, one that brings the movement to a close. Perhaps, then, measure 91 is strong only by virtue of elision, a case of the weak cadential measure of a hyperbar being made strong by tiling a new beginning over it. But this interpretation does not stand up under scrutiny, since it is clear that measure 89, supposedly the second of the hyperbar’s four bars, is stronger than either measure 88 or measure 90, the first and third. One need only imagine the music through to measure 91, beginning with the three quarters of upbeat in measure 83, to hear that it is impossible to sustain the established hypermeter through these measures. It begins to dissolve at measure 86; by measure 88 it is lost, and by measure 89 we are ready to hear measures 89–90 as a strong-weak pair and thus prepared for what turns out to be a new hypermetric downbeat at measure 91. From measure 91 to the end, a new four-bar hypermeter is sustained, with the final hypermetric downbeat in the last measure of the movement, the first hypermetric downbeat to present a tonic harmony, in any inversion, since measure 72. We seem to be dealing with an instance of hypermetric modulation somewhere in measures 84–91. But if that’s what it is, it is nonetheless a clumsy instance of the technique when compared with its artful deployment in Der Königssohn. In my experience, though there is clumsiness in some of Schumann’s very late works, it is rare even there, and nonexistent in the music composed in 1849. What may first appear to be clumsy is usually the result of mishearing by the listener or performer and can be expunged by achieving a better understanding of the score. Returning to the case at hand, consider the opening measures of the excerpt in Example 11.4. The first seven bars, measures 52–58, are as idiosyncratic a phrase as Schumann ever penned. Almost seeming to call up the ghost of a late Renaissance part song, Schumann has switched over to 3/2 time, writing against the alla breve signature and in opposition to the preceding music, in which a hypermeasure of two 3/4 bars, and thus of 6/4, is the norm. Figure 11.4 documents various tempo and metric relations in measures 46–58, the first six measures of which represent the end of the music that precedes Example 11.4. Because of a protracted acceleration in the first half of the movement, the

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quarter note reaches 176 by measure 46, and then remains at 176 over the bar line at measure 52. As a result the implied 3/2 bars that follow are exactly as long as the preceding 6/4 hyperbars. There is thus a double dose of metric conflict beginning at measure 52, the 3/2 conflicting both with the notated alla breve and with the preceding 6/4. There is also clearly a new hypermeter beginning at measure 52, with a time signature of 6/2, consisting as it does of two 3/2 bars. Consider now where we stand at the downbeat of measure 58, the last bar of Figure 11.4. We have just heard two hyperbars made up of 3/2 bars, that is, two 6/2 hyperbars. Our strongest expectation for this downbeat must therefore be that it will initiate another such hyperbar. A second, weaker expectation is that the music will present only a single bar in 3/2. And then there is a third, less likely possibility, that we might revert to the preceding 6/4 hypermeter, that is, to pairs of bars in 3/4. In fact none of these possibilities is realized, and we get instead a single cadential bar in cut time, making measure 58 one of the odder half-cadences in tonal music, both rhythmically and melodically. Is there a warrant for this waywardness? I believe there is. Measure 59 is plausibly viewed as the beginning of a new subsection: the dynamic shifts from ff to p, there is a new textual beginning, and the motive from measure 52 is resumed in a lower register. Interestingly it is the same motive exactly, but because it is canonically imitated in measure 60, at a distance of two beats (one bar), it no longer produces the effect of triple time inferable at measure 52. The most direct way to take in what happens, beginning at measure 59, is that a four-bar model extends through measure 62 and is then sequenced, with some modification, in the next four bars (mm. 63–66). This model-sequence pair serves to prolong dominant harmony with a linear progression of a descending fourth—F4 in measure 59, Eb4 in measure 60, Eb5 in measure 63, Db3 in measure 64, Db5 in measure 66, C5 in measure 67—and the V harmony that initiates the passage at measure 59 returns forcefully at measure 67. It then anchors the immediately following music by recurring at the downbeats of measures 71 and 75. All of this adds up to a very

= 176 6/4 hypermeasure 46

52

Quarter-note remains at 176, but beat shifts to half-note at 88; one bar of 3/2 equals preceding 6/4 hypermeasure; new beat and new hypermeasure are both at one half the old tempo.

is the perceived meter

6/2 hypermeasure

Figure 11.4. Metric and tempo relations in mm. 46–58 of Verzweifle nicht.

single cadential bar, in 2/2 time

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strong case for hypermeter at the four-bar level, with downbeats at measures 59, 63, 67, 71, and 75. Let us call this hypermeter B. Note, however, that B conflicts with the prima facie case, presented earlier, for what we should now call hypermeter A, which has hypermetric downbeats at measures 68, 72, 76, and so on, that is, one bar later than B. Interestingly, A persists quite strongly through measures 80 and 84 but, as noted above, breaks down thereafter. B, in the meantime, fades a bit at measures 79 and 81, though not enough to disappear from consciousness. And B then reasserts itself, strongly at measure 87 and overwhelmingly at measures 91, 95, 99, 103, 107, and 111, continuing right through to the last bar of the movement, where we find the root-position tonic chord. In this case, then, hypermeter B proves to be foundational. It carries through unbroken from measure 59 to the end of movement. But hypermeter A cannot be dismissed on that account. It is too strong to be erased from consciousness in the region where it was noticed, and noticed first, and thus persists there as a dissonant counterpart to B. The foundational quality of B is not merely a matter of its persistence, but also derives from the fact that B’s harmonic effect is stronger than that of A. Where the two hypermeters come most clearly into conflict, the hyperbars of A begin on root-position tonics (in mm. 68 and 72), while those of B begin on dominants (in mm. 67 and 71). In effect they are tonal inverses of one another. But to begin a hyperbar on I is to accent I, and that is something Schumann avoids, as a rule, for long stretches of music preceding a final cadence. In B there is no tonic chord on any hypermetric downbeat anywhere in this entire passage until the final bar, where a cadential I occurs. Remarkably there has not been one for the entire 115 bars of this movement, excepting those in A, of course. The net effect of the combination of A and B is very much like that of Krebs’s displacement dissonance, in which two 4/4 meters are heard, the second starting one quarter after the first (D4 + 1).12 A situation of this kind might be represented schematically, as in Figure 11.5. Part of the aesthetic gain obtained in hearing this type of hypermetric dissonance in this music is that the hypermetric level can now be heard as a higher level projection of the musical surface, in which rhythms of the type schematized in Figure 11.5 abound, for example, in measures 70, 71, 73, 75, 76, and so on. It may be objected that all this talk of A as “first” and B as “second” is mere analytical artifice. After all, we hear B first, at measure 59, and A second, at measure 68. One might reasonably argue, on this basis, that A is an epiphenomenon, unlikely to be noticed to a degree consistent with calling it an independent hyper-

4 Π4 w

> q q q

> qw q q

q

> qw q q

Figure 11.5. Displacement dissonance (D4 + 1), after Krebs.

q

> qw q q

q

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meter. Perhaps, in other words, A is better understood as syncopation within B. This raises a problem endemic to all analysis of metric dissonance or conflict: Is there a clear dividing line between syncopation within a single meter and displacement dissonance between two meters (see note 6)? I rather doubt that there is, but in the present case I would argue for the reality of displacement dissonance between hypermeters. The reason is that, as B is initiated at measure 59, it is already being shadowed by an incipient form of A. Recall that the length of measure 59 is a surprise. Because of the preceding, implied 3/2 music, and the expectation that this will continue, the first beat of measure 59 does not sound unequivocally, as it comes upon us, like a first beat. It still has something of the quality of a third beat (in 3/2), especially because the harmony does not change over the bar line from measure 58 to measure 59. This has the paradoxical effect of making the canonic imitation at measure 60 sound as if it might be the real beginning of a new subsection, with measure 59 acting to prepare it. This impression is buttressed by what happens at measures 63–64, four bars later. Measure 63 can certainly be looked at as the beginning of the sequence to measure 59’s model, but demands the admission that it is a strange beginning for all that. In the first place, the motive from measure 59 is sequenced in a peculiar way, with the drop of a ninth from beat 1 to beat 2; then there is the change of dynamic, not at the start of measure 63, but on its second beat. Finally there is the harmonic rhythm, which ties measure 63 to what precedes it, and measure 64 to what follows. These factors conspire to suggest that one might hear measure 64 as the start of a sequence to a model beginning in measure 60. But this is nothing but an argument for A’s starting at measure 60 rather than at measure 68, and I have indicated this possibility in Example 11.4 by beginning the brackets that denote A at measure 60, although using dotted lines until measure 68, where A seems to me, at least arguably, to predominate. If this reasoning persuades, it justifies a claim that B and A coexist from measure 59 to approximately measure 86. An argument can be made for the predominance of one or the other, in this or that stretch of the music, but neither can be dismissed at any point until A fades out after measure 84. Although B proves to be foundational, for the reasons adduced above, A is never to be confused phenomenologically with mere syncopation. There remains one further twist to the metrical intrigue that plays itself out here. Once A is abandoned there is a danger of the music’s sounding metrically impoverished. Indeed, I find that it does when it is performed without any change of tempo at measure 91. In my opinion a noticeable increase in tempo is demanded at this point. The slowing of the harmonic rhythm, to a rate of roughly one harmony every two bars, seems to demand it. But this slowing also has a metrical side effect. Beginning at measure 95, if a sufficiently fast tempo is taken, the whole note emerges as the tactus, and the emergent time signature is 2/1. Schumann composed a number of his most effective finales using this as the implicit time signature. While he usually notates the music in a fast 2/2 time, the perceived beat is in fact the whole note, two of which fill out the perceived bar. I

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call these Schumann’s “whole-note finales.” They are found in many works, for example, the first part of Das Paradies und die Peri, the Symphony No. 2, and the Requiem für Mignon. I discuss the last-mentioned work presently. Applying the concept of four-bar hypermeter to a 2/1 time signature generates a hyperbar lasting eight notated (2/2) measures, with a count every two measures, as shown in Figure 11.6. Four bars after the final dominant pedal is reached, in measure 91 of Example 11.4, on the second beat of bar 95, a melodicharmonic group starts to unfold, lasting eight notated measures. This is succeeded by a parallel group, which ends with the climactic secondary dominant of measure 111. If these groups are viewed in terms of 2/1 time, their first downbeats occur on the downbeats of measures 97 and 105, respectively. Accordingly, I have labeled these points with a 1, understanding the music in terms of fourdouble-bar (or four-breve) hypermeter. As this very broad level of hypermeter emerges, B coexists with it. Significantly, though, the 1s of B and those of the new, higher-level hypermeter do not coincide, as can be seen from their placement in the example. This is not really an instance of hypermetric conflict such as we have been looking at, since the two hypermeters are on different time scales. Nevertheless the conflict between them is apperceptible. Its resolution comes exactly at measure 111, where the four-breve hypermeter folds into B and disappears. I have shown this as the 4 of the former becoming a 1, in the manner of an elision, although this is really a theoretical fiction meant to show that one hears this point as a 1 and only as a 1. This brings me to my final example, from another work composed in 1849 and one I believe to be unarguably a masterpiece. This is the Requiem für Mignon, Op. 98b, Schumann’s foremost contribution to the genre of musical wisdom literature inaugurated by The Magic Flute. Setting a scene that comes near the end of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, the funeral rites for the muse-like young woman known as Mignon, Schumann’s music is a thrilling clarion call to reject depression, stagnant memory, and the longing for death, and, by engaging in a creative embrace of life, to cultivate joy and take on the challenge of change.13 “Kinder!” the music proclaims, “Eilet in’s Leben hinan!” (Children! Hasten [back] into life!) This might be termed the very motto of Schumann’s later career, one that enabled years of stunning productivity after the miseries of the mid-1840s. Example 11.5 presents measures 25–49 of the choral finale (movement 6). At measure 30 the text I cited is homophonically declaimed. Several factors point

1

1 w 1

w

2 w

w

3 w

w

4 w

w

1 w

Experienced foreground meter = 2/1

Figure 11.6. Four double-bar hypermeter in Schumann’s “whole-note finales.”

Example 11.5. Requiem für Mignon, finale (no. 6), mm. 25–49.

226

Example 11.5. Continued

227

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Analytical Approaches

Example 11.5. Continued

to this bar being the first bar of a hypermetric four (as is indicated by the numbering over the piano reduction)—the beginning of a new line of text, the subito piano, the arrival on a dominant pedal, the change in register and orchestration, and the modified repetition of the content of the four measures that begin here, four bars later. But try to keep counting by fours from this point and one will soon encounter an extra bar, specifically at measure 38, where there is a halfnote rest preceding the words “begegn’ euch.” The obvious solution is to delay the hypermetric count by one measure, beginning it at bar 31, on the word “eilet,” as is indicated by the numbering over the soprano part. I will call the first interpretation A, because it seems the most obvious one, and the second B. These labels appear in the figure, just before measure 30. B eliminates the problem at measure 38, which becomes a 4, and works nicely through measure 43, which is clearly a 1. In line with the procedure I have been advocating, one should now see if either A or B can be extended backward from where I located their first 1s, that is, from measures 30 and 31, respectively. Unfortunately neither can be. In the immediately preceding bars a striking subdominant turn, reminiscent of the Missa Solemnis, sets the words “und dem Kranz der Unsterblichkeit!” The word “Kranz” seems the obvious candidate for downbeat status, but five bars separate it from “Kinder,” at measure 30, and six from the other putative hyperdownbeat, on “eilet.” Here again we face an aesthetic choice, between abandoning hypermeter and doing something creative to save it. As readers will no doubt have noticed, I

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prefer the latter option. In this instance, however, a tactic is required that demands some leniency in applying the idea of hypermeter, or, to put a more positive slant on the matter, some imagination. This tactic consists in viewing this movement as another of Schumann’s “whole-note finales,” last movements in which the implicit tactus is the whole note and the implied time signature is 2/1, a measure of which is actually a compound of two notated 2/2 bars. But there is a twist in the way this metric must be applied to make sense of the present context. Because of shifts in the rate at which textual accents occur, as well as of the harmonic rhythm and the rate of motivic repetition, the music shifts several times, and in different ways, from ordinary four-bar (= four-wholenote) hypermeter to four-double-bar (= four-breve) hypermeter, beginning with the former and ending with the latter. In effect, with the exception of two spots, one of which (discussed above) is at measure 30 and the other at measure 95, there is no superposition of conflicting hypermeters. Instead hypermetric intrigue arises here by way of the artful juxtaposition of hypermeter at two different levels. The tremendous feeling of allegiance to life that pervades this movement comes in part from Schumann’s highly imaginative deployment of the process of counting in fours. Instead of allowing the fours to plod predictably along, he begins with regular four-bar hypermeasures, switching into the four-double-bar kind and back out of it for specific emotional effect. For example, the switch to the faster count regularly occurs in connection with the text I quoted above. It thus symbolizes but also enacts the act of rushing, and it stimulates a physical rush in the body of the listener who feels what is going on. By the same token the switch to the slower count occurs, in a remarkably skillful manner, in connection with intimations of heaven and immortality in the text. Table 11.1 shows where and how the switching back and forth occurs. The actual count that reflects it is shown in Example 11.5. Table 11.1 should be largely self-explanatory once the complete score is consulted. The only region requiring more explanation is perhaps in the neighborhood of measure 93. Example 11.6 presents the relevant passage. Measures 91–92 are a 4 at the level of the breve, which makes measure 93 a 1. But at that point, despite the intoning of “Unsterblichkeit,” the presence of a strong textual accent on the downbeat of every notated measure suggests a switch to the faster hypermetric scheme. At the same time the persistence of the V/V harmony from the preceding passage suggests delaying the switch until measure 95, where the tonic six-four arrives. This has the nice consequence of producing a very convincing final perfect authentic cadence, since the requisite tonic occurs on a 1 at measure 103. One might therefore speak of this second interpretation as A. In fact it was this interpretation that occurred to me upon first looking at the closing measures. Nevertheless, I think Schumann intended for us to hear measure 93 as a 1. We can call this way of hearing B. It has the advantage of fitting more smoothly with the preceding music. If measure 93 is a 1, we proceed directly

Table 11.1. Hypermetric Juxtaposition in the Finale of the Requiem für Mignon m.

Level of hypermeter

230

Feature(s) provoking the shift

Special rhythmic and textual circumstances

1

four-whole-note

9

four-breve

Rates of harmonic rhythm and motivic repetition are halved; likewise the rate at which textual accents occur (at m. 17)

Passage deals with “Unsterblichkeit”

29

four-whole-note

Harmonic rhythm doubled; likewise the rate at which textual accents occur (at m. 30), to one per bar

Switch occurs on a 3, with hypermetric displacement dissonance at m. 30; switch prepares for “Kinder! eilet ins Leben hinan!”

43

four-breve

Rates of harmonic rhythm and occurrence of textual accents halved

Elision at m. 49, where a 4 is reinterpreted as a 1; passage deals with “Unsterblichkeit”

65

four-whole-note

Rates of harmonic rhythm and occurrence of textual accents doubled, to one per bar

At “Kinder! eilet in’s Leben hinan!”

85

four-breve

Motivic repetitions at two-bar intervals clarify the count in spite of static harmonic rhythm and very widely and irregularly spaced textual accents

Passage deals with “Unsterblichkeit”

93

four-whole-note

Textual accents now occur at one per bar

Persistence of V/V harmony from m. 87 though m. 94 makes it possible to hear a switch at m. 95, where tonic 6/4 occurs, but this makes mm. 93–94 a hypermetrical 5 at the level of the breve

105

four-breve

Textual accents every two bars

Four-whole-note level peters out at m. 111

Example 11.6. Requiem für Mignon, finale (no. 6), mm. 91–113.

B:

A:

2

3

3

4

1

4

1

231

2

2

3

4

1

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Example 11.6. Continued

1

2

3

4

from the 4 at measure 91, making the switch to a faster metric at measure 93. If we wait until measure 95 to hear the switch, measures 93–94 must be heard as an anomalous 5 in the slower metric. Even more persuasive, to me, is the fact that A fades out where the 3–4 of measures 109–110 are repeated as measures 111–112. B is, in effect, an interpretation that flows smoothly all the way through the movement, allowing for the seven shifts described in Table 11.1.

Concluding Remarks In closing, I want to stress my intention to avoid overgeneralizing. Though Schumann is in no sense a composer addicted to the four-bar phrase—many of his phrases, however one defines phrase, are lengthy constructs—he is a composer for whom hypermeter at the four-bar level is an essential tool. But there are in most of his late works, some more than others, passages that resist hypermetric counting entirely. And there are other aspects of rhythmic intrigue in the late works, such as changing time signatures (not always notated) and extreme syncopation, though the latter is much less prevalent than in the composer’s earlier music. If there is a generalization I feel comfortable making it is that in his later music with texts—and at least 80 percent of the later music falls into this category—Schumann succeeded in moving largely outside the orbit of his earlier Lied framework. He created an approach to setting text that allowed for fluidity in the rate at which the text is delivered, thus accommodating longer, more philosophical texts; that permitted a wide range and more sudden changes of intensity, thus facilitating dramatic expression; and that was able to serve as a

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vehicle for religious as well as secular, and collective as well as individual, utterance. He did this while respecting the human ear’s difficulty in operating without direct reference to a remembered tonal center. In effect, it was by relying on rhythmic innovations, more than on chromatic expansion, that he created a new style for ambitious, texted works, a style touched by some of the same impulses as those underlying the work of Berlioz and Wagner but responding to those impulses in a manner more consistent with practices familiar to most musicians, including skilled amateurs. In a word, it is rhythmic life that makes Schumann’s late music—and especially the late vocal music, which rarely strays from well-traveled harmonic paths—so wonderfully new.

notes 1. The term hypermeter was coined by Cone in Musical Form and Musical Performance, although its coiner actually argues there against extending meter uncritically to higher levels. Subsequent theorists who employ the term, and there are many, usually conceive of it as involving a regular recurrence of strong and weak measures, all of the same length. Examples are found in Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory, 20–25, 99–104; Benjamin, “A Theory of Musical Meter,” 403–13; Rothstein, Phrase Rhythm, chapter 1. 2. I make this point in Benjamin, “A Theory of Musical Meter.” Because it has not been taken up by theorists in general, I attempt to make it more simply and clearly here. 3. Confusion was sowed by Hugo Riemann, who understood meter as supervening on group structure, but in an inverted way: for him, every group is, by definition, iambic, or end-accented. In our own time many theorists have been influenced by Lerdahl and Jackendoff ’s strict dualism, by which meter and grouping are viewed as essentially distinct and independent dimensions of rhythmic structure. 4. Krebs, Fantasy Pieces. 5. The effect might be, for example, that of musical prose, in the Wagnerian sense. See Rothstein, Phrase Rhythm, chapter 8. 6. The shadow common-time meter, with accented second beats as downbeats, might fail for the simple reason that one could not perceive the preceding (notated) first beats as fourth beats. As noted above, in Fantasy Pieces Krebs makes little distinction between dissonant pulse trains that are metrically self-sufficient and those that are not. 7. Schumann’s early piano music is replete with instances of accents being continuously and consistently displaced at a fixed distance from the tactus, without thereby acquiring the status of a secondary tactus. The Impromptus, Op. 5, and the Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6, provide examples on almost every page. 8. No reference is intended to Elliott Carter’s term “metric modulation,” which is really a technique of tempo modulation. 9. Hasty, in Meter as Rhythm, makes a detailed argument for meter as arising from a complex cognitive process, involving memory, expectation, and projection—a fully

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phenomenological process because temporally situated rather than spatially retrospective. 10. John Daverio in “Schumann’s Ossianic Manner” has identified the style of the orchestral ballads Schumann composed in 1851–53 as Ossianic, but this would seem to apply to the more heraldic or bardic sections of these works, including the Abgesang of this movement, and not to lyrical passages like the one cited. 11. The edition of this work, in the Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, edited by Brigitte Kohnz and Matthais Wendt, contains an extensive work history. 12. The concept of displacement dissonance is discussed, along with the complementary concept of grouping dissonance, in Krebs, Fantasy Pieces, 31–39. 13. For other aspects of the Requiem, see Roe-Min Kok’s essay in this volume.

12 Associative Harmony, Tonal Pairing, and Middleground Structure in Schumann’s Sonata Expositions The Role of the Mediant in the First Movements of the Piano Quintet, Piano Quartet, and Rhenish Symphony Peter H. Smith

Many of Robert Schumann’s compositions are framed by tonal pairing, in which two keys, usually a third apart, intertwine throughout a work. Perhaps the most famous instance arises in “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” the first song of his song cycle Dichterliebe, where the keys of Fs and A intermingle to such an extent that it is difficult to determine the boundaries between the keys or indeed even which of the two keys functions as the song’s governing tonality. Such tonal pairing may likewise be found, with varying degrees of intensity, in many other of Schumann’s songs and also in his shorter instrumental works, as has long been recognized.1 Traditionally critics and scholars have argued that, although tonal pairing may function successfully in such small-scale compositions, the technique fits less comfortably with Schumann’s large-scale instrumental forms. In particular, the kaleidoscopic wavering between keys associated with tonal pairing might seem incompatible with the overarching tonal momentum characteristic of sonata form. The contradiction would appear especially glaring in the exposition, where contemporary formal theories have taught us to listen for a clear and directed opposition between two tonalities.2 Tonal pairing nevertheless plays an important role not only in Schumann’s songs and character pieces, but in his larger forms as well. In some of his sonata-form expositions, for instance, the key of the secondary area may be foreshadowed as a tonicization within the first key area, the home key may be tonicized within the secondary area, and other cross-references to these two keys likewise may appear throughout the movement.

235

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As a result, in some of these sonata forms, as with some of the shorter works, it is not always easy or completely possible—or indeed even desirable—to distinguish the boundaries of the two keys. It is in part perhaps a result of this penchant for tonal pairing that Schumann’s handling of tonality in sonata contexts either has met with criticism, by scholars such as Charles Rosen, or has been largely ignored. Even defenders of Schumann’s sonata forms, such as Joel Lester, seem to suggest that these movements lack an overarching tonal trajectory and instead center on “novel tonal drama[s]” not well accounted for by either traditional or Schenkerian methods of analysis, with their emphasis on hierarchical and teleological concepts of tonality.3 I argue instead that there is no contradiction between Schumann’s proclivity for tonal pairing and his deft handling of large-scale form. On the contrary, the interaction between tonal pairing and tonal momentum in many of his sonata forms lies at the heart of their musical drama. This may be seen in the three works that form the focus of this essay: the first movements of the Piano Quintet, Piano Quartet, and Rhenish Symphony. The expositions of these movements form an appropriate focus of study for a number of reasons. First, as a group they demonstrate the same variety of construction that Lester hears among Schumann’s sonata designs overall, but within a subcategory of compositions that hew somewhat more closely to eighteenth-century precedents. They therefore demonstrate that even when we find Schumann in a more conservative mood, he avoids a schematic conception of sonata form in favor of the formal spontaneity more often associated with the classical style. Second, all three movements exemplify ways that Schumann finds a home for his personal harmonic sensibility even in contexts in which the radical edge of that sensibility softens in response to the demands of a more traditional formal conception. It is not the case that Schumann abandons his compositional persona in these movements and falls into an epigonistic mode of invention. Rather the strategies of tonal pairing that Rosen disparages and Lester champions in sonatas of more idiosyncratic design resonate in these movements, even if in less overt ways.4 Third, these expositions demonstrate Schumann’s rightful place within the sonata tradition in the sense that they exhibit a breadth of expository strategies derived from the eighteenth century. His conception of traditional sonata form, like that of his more radical extensions of that form, was emphatically not the textbook recipe that eventually was to take hold in the Formenlehre tradition. Even in this selective sampling we see Schumann flexibly engaging conventions of the main expository types cultivated by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert: a two-part exposition with medial caesura and contrasting secondary theme in the quintet, the Haydnesque alternative of a continuous exposition in the quartet, and in the symphony a Schubertian three-key exposition.5 We will see that tonal pairing works in the service of the diverse exigencies of these three formal types rather than at cross-purposes, as Schumann’s critics

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often claim. In the quintet Schumann intertwines the tonic with fIII to achieve a large-scale shift from Ef Major to the flat-side realm of Ef Minor/Gf Major. This tonal pairing interacts organically with the form in the sense that the darkness of the flat-side reorientation highlights the arrival of the medial caesura’s IIn (V/V) by allowing this IIn to manifest a sudden turn to the bright sharp-side world of the dominant, thereby forcing Ef “to sink below the horizon,” in Tovey’s apt metaphor for this traditional sonata practice.6 By contrast, the diatonic continuity of a I-iii pairing in the quartet creates a web of associative connections across tonic and dominant areas in the service of the breathless sweep of a continuous exposition. Finally, analysis of the symphony reveals a pattern of tonal imbrications involving yet another I-iii pairing. Harmonies that were once structural pillars return as subsidiary entities in subsequent formal sections, while previously salient embellishing harmonies emerge as pillars. These reversals intertwine tonic and mediant in a manner reminiscent of the tangled tonal hierarchies in Schumann’s songs and piano works. Here, however, they serve yet another essential sonata function: to counterbalance a tendency toward self-contained lyricism in the middle section of the symphony’s three-key exposition.

The Two-Part Exposition of the Piano Quintet Let us begin with what formal theory has taught us to think of as the most representative expository type: the two-part layout exemplified by the quintet. It will be helpful first to survey the large-scale organization of the exposition before we engage details of tonal pairing as they interact with the movement’s sonata trajectory. To this end, Table 12.1 outlines some of the exposition’s main formal divisions and tonal articulations. It also tracks the contrast between passages of heroic extroversion and dreamy lyricism through which the tonic area instantiates a characteristically Schumannesque expressive duality. In particular the Florestan-like exuberance of the initial statement of the main theme and its return in the dominant (mm. 17–26) contrasts sharply with the lyrical Eusebian transformations that follow. The exposition nevertheless manifests a number of traditional features in its large-scale organization and in that sense reflects a quintessential nineteenth-century reinterpretation of classical sonata practice. Most obviously the exposition follows the particulars of a two-part design of tonic and dominant key areas, with this main tonal division articulated by a medial caesura and the subsequent entrance of a contrasting second theme. Similarities with traditional practice extend beyond these general design characteristics to engage time-honored patterns of middleground voice leading. The exposition’s main I–IIn–V Stufengang coordinates with its formal design in a manner characteristic of the eighteenth century, as Figure 12.1 illustrates. Moreover Schumann marshals his tonal resources in the service of a classical-style

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Table 12.1. Schumann, Piano Quintet, Op. 44, I, Formal Outline of Exposition Measure Numbers

Formal Function

Harmonic Orientation

Tonic Key Area 1–9 9–17 17–26 27–30 31–34 35–42 43–50 51–56

Main theme (1a): Florestan Sequence based on 1a: Eusebius Standing on V based on 1a: Florestan Lyrical development of 1a: Eusebius Continues and merges into transition Transition To arrival of IIn and medial caesura Caesura-fill

In Ef: I I to V (tonicized) V (tonicized) fIII (tonicized) i i to fIII (tonicized) Ger. 6/5 to IIn (V of Bf) IIn (V of Bf)

Dominant Key Area 57–73 73–78 79–95 95–98 99–108

Second theme (2a) Caesura-fill returns Second theme (2a) Caesura-fill returns Motion to closure

In Bf: I to V (tonicized) V I to V (tonicized) V Ger. 6/5–V-I

Nearly identical to standing on V of mm. 17–26

I (transformed back into V for exposition repeat)

Codetta 108–116

polarization of key areas: the motion to Bf is hardly surreptitious but rather is dramatized as part of the formation of a large-scale dissonance with the tonic. The tonicizations of Gf within the tonic area (mm. 27–30 and 39–42) participate in an overarching shift from Ef Major to Ef Minor, as I previously noted. This reorientation in turn helps to mark the arrival of the large-scale IIn (V/V) since it allows that arrival (m. 44) to articulate an abrupt shift from the darkness of a six-flat Ef/Gf tonal pairing to the tense sharp-side world of Bf. Indeed because F is itself locally tonicized, Schumann carries us a step beyond the dominant in the tonicizing motion clockwise on the circle of fifths, just as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven often do. The arrows on the clock faces above the graph in Figure 12.1 illustrate this dramatic leap to the sharp side. Both the brightness of the F harmony and the emphasis it achieves through its own leading-tone chromaticism (En)—not to mention the sumptuous prolongation it receives— emphatically reorient the form around the subsequent Bf as local tonic, thereby expressing the very sonata-style impulse that Rosen and others have found lacking in Schumann. It is important to recognize that this dramatic polarization is a necessary consequence neither of the mere presence of a medial caesura nor the entrance of a new theme, nor even a large-scale I–IIn –V progression. Rather, as in the masterpieces of the eighteenth century, the quintet’s formal character arises from the interaction of its tonal structure and design, in all their details, and not from aspects of one or the other dimension considered superficially or in isolation. Consider, for a moment, the exposition of the first movement of Schumann’s

Middleground Structure in Schumann’s Sonata Expositions

239

Figure 12.1. Schumann, Piano Quintet, Op. 44, I, graph of mm. 1–57.

A-Major String Quartet as a counter-example. Its middleground progression follows a similar trajectory, as the graph in Figure 12.2 indicates. Likewise its design articulates a two-part exposition with tonic area (m. 8), medial caesura (m. 45), and second theme (m. 46) all in ready view. The character of the quartet’s tonic-dominant relationship, however, stands worlds apart from the large-scale dissonance projected by the quintet. The tonal instability of the quartet’s tonic area, the brevity of its modulation to V, the internal emphasis its second theme places on the local subdominant—an A tonicization that echoes the overall A tonic—and the strong motivic connections between its main and second themes give rise, not to a large-scale dissonance, but to what Lester describes as “a tonal/thematic interaction [between tonic and dominant material] lasting until the end of the movement.”7

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Figure 12.2. Schumann, A-Major String Quartet, Op. 41, no. 3, I, graph of mm. 1–46.

The comparison highlights two salient attributes that are often undervalued in critical responses to Schumann’s instrumental music: the resourcefulness and flexibility of the composer’s approach to sonata composition. When his material lends itself to supple interaction with traditional sonata practice, he is quite willing to engage that practice. He is fully capable of creating a polarization of tonic and dominant when he deems it appropriate to the formal context. By the same token Schumann is far from a slave to tradition and is unafraid to develop idiosyncratic strategies in the context of “higher forms,” as Lester’s analysis of the string quartet and other works demonstrates. Sympathetic engagement with Schumann’s sonata practice reveals that he was neither an epigone, who attempted to force progressive content into incompatible old patterns in a piece like the quintet, nor a composer whose less traditional sonata strategies in the string quartet and elsewhere betray a lack of insight into eighteenth-century conventions. One aspect of the quintet that illustrates Schumann’s deft integration of traditional and progressive characteristics is the interaction that develops between tonic and mediant harmonies across the exposition. As I noted at the outset, this tonal pairing reflects a compositional approach more often associated with the composer’s “progressive” character pieces for piano from the 1830s rather than the reputedly more “conservative” chamber works of 1842.8 Yet rather than work against the traditional process of polarization in an awkward mix of progressivism and epigonism, the pairing contributes to that polarization, as closer scrutiny of the exposition reveals. The quintet’s Ef/Gf interaction begins in the passage that follows the emphatic dominant expansion of measures 17–26. The exposition articulates a clear hierarchy of harmonic relationships through to this point: the opening phrase expands the tonic, the sequential passage that follows carries us from tonic to dominant, and the dominant clearly controls the expansion that follows. The graph in Figure 12.3 illustrates this clarity, which is plain to the ear both

Figure 12.3. Schumann, Piano Quintet, Op. 44, I, graph of mm. 1–25.

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from the synoptic perspective of the graph and from the perspective of less final moments of perception during real-time performance. Following the dominant expansion, however, the exposition begins to suggest associative harmonic connections that complicate the notion of a clear prolongational hierarchy. Consider the initial tonicization of Gf in measures 27–30. This tonicization falls within further expansion of the dominant and thus has a relatively shallow structural status, as indicated in the graph of Figure 12.1. Indeed the Gf tonic does not even function as a quasi-independent Stufe, but rather arises as a byproduct of a contrapuntal 5–f6 motion within the prolonged dominant. The Gf tonicization nevertheless causes the return of the structural tonic at measure 31 to sound like a vi chord and thus causes the two harmonies to intertwine: is Gf fIII/Ef (or fVI/ Bf) or is Ef vi/Gf? From the perspective of the whole, Ef remains the controlling harmony and Gf functions as embellishment of Ef’s dominant. But in the local context Ef has been made to sound like a harmony that is subsidiary to Gf. The process of tonal pairing continues with the more forthright progression to Gf that follows immediately after the equivocal return of Ef. The overarching middleground motion extends from the opening tonic Stufe to the arrival on IIn at measure 44. In this sense the second Gf harmony in measures 39–42 remains subsidiary like the first, despite its new status as a foreground Stufe: it functions as upper-third of Ef. Yet the second tonicization of fIII is thematically parallel to the first and therefore forms a strong associative connection with it. The Ef chord in measure 31 falls within a Gf key orientation, at least at its point of entry. But the subsequent cadential progression in Ef (mm. 31–34) and the repetition of that progression (mm. 35–38) work to convince us again of Ef’s tonic status and middleground significance. The 6/3 position of the second Ef tonic (m. 35), however, reemphasizes Gf, and the progression then almost immediately shifts back to orientation around fIII. In the dimension of associative hearing, Gf eventually comes to frame Ef, and earlier perceptions of Ef as a subsidiary vi chord thereby receive retrospective support. Thus even as the synoptic perspective of my graph in Figure 12.1 indicates a straightforward hierarchy of harmonic relationships, the moment-to-moment listening process intertwines Ef and Gf, causing us to question which harmony might function locally as tonal referent. Although this decentering of harmonic relations is less intense than in many passages of tonal pairing in Schumann’s character pieces or songs—not to mention passages of dual tonic emphasis in Wagner and other later nineteenth-century composers—something of the same tonal sensibility informs the beautiful Eusebian development of the quintet’s main-theme material.9 Note the contrast with the function of the A/E pairing in the A-Major string quartet—Lester’s tonal/thematic interaction—where tonic and dominant intertwine in a relationship that displaces tonal polarity as a driving force for the

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exposition. Schumann does not develop his strategies artificially in these movements but rather in conjunction with the totality of their forms. In the quintet the pairing enhances a polarity that arises organically from the tonal stability and thematic contrast of the key areas. In the quartet pairing substitutes for polarity in response to the instability and integration of the formal sections. The quintet’s Ef/Gf pairing further resonates in a broader motivic interaction between Gn and Gf that is also crucial to the evolution of the form. Mixture and the Gn/Gf dichotomy continue to have a significant impact on sonata-style articulation both in the passage of caesura-fill that prepares the entrance of the second theme (mm. 51–56) and in the final tonal delay that leads to closure at the end of the Bf key area (mm. 99–108).10 In the first instance we find a process of linkage of which Brahms could be proud. Continuity arises when the entrance of the caesura-fill picks up the thread of the transition’s Gf–F neighbor, even as it reinterprets the function of the chromaticism. As Figure 12.4 traces, Gn becomes the neighbor in measures 51–56, while Gf/Fs still remains present in its new role as embellishment of the structural voice leading. The melodic idea of the caesura-fill then becomes the basis for the sentential second theme, complete with the theme’s emphasis on F, Fs, and Gn in both the statement and repetition of its basic idea. The optimistic, upward striving of the theme, with its rising F—Fs motions to G and beyond, beautifully reverses both the transition’s “dark” Gf–F neighbors and the topvoice resolution of Gn to F across the entrance of the second theme, as arrows indicate in Figure 12.4. The second instance of Gn/Gf development contributes to continuity at the other end of the Bf area. Schumann engages similar methods of linkage in both locations, as a means of confronting one of the central challenges of sonata composition in his day: how to satisfy a proclivity for self-contained lyricism, especially in secondary material—the lyrical second theme in the reification of nineteenth-century Formenlehre—while nevertheless attending to the larger exigencies of an ongoing sonata dynamic. The circular organization of the quintet’s second theme compounds the challenge. Schumann exploits circularity to beautiful effect in his songs and character pieces, but a circular construction would appear to be incompatible with the larger tonal sweep of sonata form. The initial statement of the theme culminates in a tonicization of F, whose arrival at measure 73 overlaps with a return of the material of the caesura-fill. The caesura-fill’s immediate reinterpretation of the local F tonic as V/Bf carries the form back to where it had been at the end of the transition, and the circular process does indeed continue with a repetition of the second theme (m. 79). How will Schumann break out of this potentially endless loop and reengage the larger sonata trajectory? Just as the second theme reaches the threshold of what threatens to be an excessively repetitious third statement, the pattern breaks, at measure 99, with a sudden con fuoco intrusion that recalls the Gf emphasis earlier in the exposition.

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Figure 12.4. Schumann, Piano Quintet, Op. 44, I, graph of mm. 42–65.

As Figure 12.5 indicates, Gf once again enters as a byproduct of a 5–f6 motion above Bf, as it had in the tonic area. Remarkably, however, and in further development of the Gf/Fs dialectic, it pushes upward to Gn and onward to A rather than downward to F as it had at the medial caesura. Gf nevertheless again participates in the dramatic, sonata-style articulation of a large-scale tonal goal: the chromatic intrusion helps to delay resolution of the secondary area’s F dominant and thus helps to dramatize closure on Bf when that closure eventually arrives at measure 108. Figure 12.5 charts the voice leading of this delay and highlights the melodic play of Gn and Gf that creates linkage across the boundaries between caesura-fill, con fuoco material, and codetta.

The Continuous Exposition of the Piano Quartet The exposition of the piano quartet exhibits a similar blend of traditional and progressive characteristics. The movement is noteworthy for its extensive delay of the dominant Stufe that more typically enters around the midpoint of a sonata exposition. There is nevertheless ample precedent for the procedure Schumann adopts here: the quartet follows eighteenth-century conventions of

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Figure 12.5. Schumann, Piano Quintet, Op. 44, I, graph of mm. 95–108.

continuous rather than two-part exposition.11 It includes neither a medial caesura nor a second theme, in contrast to the clear bipartite design of the quintet. Schumann instead follows Haydn’s characteristic practice and composes across the shift from tonic to dominant key areas. The secondary material remains centered on its own local V as part of this continuity, until the long-delayed resolution to Bf finally arrives at the exposition’s point of closure (m. 119). These traditional Haydnesque conventions remain fresh in part through their interaction with a more characteristically Schumannesque tonal dialectic between tonic and mediant, which serves as a red thread of unification across the various sections of the exposition. Here the focus is on diatonic relationships among tonal pairs, which serves Schumann’s strategy of formal continuity, in contrast to the modal mixture of the quintet, where articulation takes precedence. In place of the contrast between flat- and sharp-side orientations of the polarized articulation in the quintet, the quartet exploits the invariance of Ef Major and G Minor to create continuity across the key areas. Thus we see again that tonal pairing functions as an inherent component of the form: classical and Schumannesque characteristics work in consort rather than as the contradictory impulses of a fundamentally flawed formal conception. A preliminary overview again will facilitate our engagement with details of Schumann’s tonal dialectics as essential formal components. Table 12.2 provides a summary of the exposition’s main sectional divisions and tonal articulations.

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Table 12.2. Schumann, Piano Quartet, Op. 47, I, Formal Outline of Exposition Measure Numbers

Formal Function

Harmonic Orientation

Introduction 1–12

Foreshadows main theme (1a)

In Ef: I to V

Tonic Key Area 13–26, 26–35 35–51

(A) Main theme (1a) (B) Based on 1a

52–64

(A’) 1a returns

Transition merges into 64–76 76–80 80–88 Expansion Section 88–92 92–96 96–103 103–107 107–120 Introduction 121–136

Transition Leads to Arrival of IIn, but medial caesura? Sequence: model (based on material from transition) Sequential Rep. 1 Sequential Rep. 2 Based on 1a Motion to closure (based on material from transition)

In Ef: I–ii–V–I I to V (tonicized) with subsidiary tonicization of iii I with closure iii (tonicized) with Ef emphasis III as V of C IIn (V of Bf) In Bf: V V/Bn G as V/C and then tonicized V/G (IIIs) iii–iv–V–I In Ef: V–I–V (Ger. 6/5 of D)

Note that although the tonic area closes at measure 64 and a transition immediately ensues, no decisive articulation emerges thereafter to divide the exposition in the manner of a two-part pattern. The closest the form comes to a medial caesura is the arrival at measure 88 on F, a locally tonicized harmony as in the quintet, but V/V or IIn in the larger expository scheme. Yet rather than treat this arrival as a turning point in the form, Schumann prepares it unceremoniously and then forges onward with a sequential passage that eschews both the tonal stability and melodic profile of a second theme. The bulk of the nontonic material, in other words, functions as an expansion section, as is typical for a continuous exposition. Once F finally resurfaces on the foreground at measure 115 the time for a medial caesura has long passed and the sonata-style emphasis on this large-scale harmonic arrival functions in the service of Bf closure rather than Bf initiation. The first hint of G’s importance as a harmony paired with the tonic arises within the second main section of the tonic area (mm. 35–51). As the graph in Figure 12.6 illustrates, this phrase tonicizes the mediant within a larger tonic expansion, which eventually progresses to the dominant at measure 51. Several characteristics of this transient G tonicization reward closer scrutiny, as they will emerge as broadly motivic throughout the exposition. First, observe the prominence of melodic interactions between Ef and D, as Schumann enters,

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expands, and exits the mediant tonicization. Brackets in Figure 12.6 highlight this Ef–D motivic dyad as it appears in various functional configurations. Second, note that although the graph depicts the Ef entrance at measure 47 as an offshoot of the tonic Stufe, the local harmonic context makes this “tonic” sound like VI of G-minor. Ef and G already begin to intertwine in the sense that the mediant emphasis forces us to hear a foreground manifestation of the middleground tonic as a subsidiary chord within the local G tonicization. From the synoptic perspective of the graph, the music has rearticulated the overriding structural Ef at measure 47 with the G harmony functioning as embellishment. But the moment-to-moment progression raises some doubt about which harmony we are to perceive as the local tonal referent. This tonal duality resurfaces on a larger formal level as the close of the tonic area at measure 64 overlaps with the onset of the transition. A full close on an Ef tonic might threaten to obstruct formal progress just when the exposition needs to forge ahead in the sonata dynamic. Schumann again remains responsive to broader sonata exigencies through the continuity provided by linkage technique. Just as the motivic D–Ef dyad is about to fulfill the melodic imperatives of closure at measures 63–64, a disruptive shift back to D and a jolting syncopation open the formal process to continuation. The abrupt tonicization of G that accompanies this disruption solidifies a motivic connection with the tonic area’s G-Minor phrase, with its own Ef –D interactions highlighted by brackets in Figure 12.7. Moreover the transition’s subsequent pairing of tonic and mediant further intensifies the relationship. At the moment it enters, there is no question that we hear the G harmony of the transition as subsidiary to Ef: the form has just concluded an

Figure 12.6. Schumann, Piano Quartet, Op. 47, I, graph of mm. 36–57.

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Figure 12.7. Schumann, Piano Quartet, Op. 47, I, graph of mm. 64–88.

expansive tonic area unequivocally oriented around Ef on the middleground. But the subsequent return to Ef in the transition (m. 68) raises similar questions of local tonal priority encountered within the primary theme group. Does this Ef connect to the Ef of the tonic area’s closing cadence and thus function as an offshoot of the opening tonic Stufe? Or is it subsidiary to the G Stufe and thus related to the previous Ef articulation only associatively, as graphed in Figure 12.7? The parallelism of D–Ef dyadic statements in measures 64 and 68 encourages an aural connection between the two Ef articulations. Yet the eventual incorporation of Df in this second Ef flourish and the dominant function it implies—note the parallelism with the V/G orientation in measure 64—weakens the connection, or at least momentarily holds tonal interpretation in abeyance. The harmonic interpretation shown in the graph of Figure 12.7 comes into full focus only retrospectively as Ef resolves to Af and Af emerges as a fII chord in a further extension of G Minor. This first phase of the transition thus provides a reversal of previous harmonic relationships between Ef and G, following the conventions of tonal pairing. The tonic area retains Ef’s structural connection at measure 47 with the Ef tonic Stufe even as it suggests a subsidiary function for this Ef as VI/G. The transition, by contrast, does indeed articulate Ef as a subsidiary VI/G even as this VI/G nevertheless maintains an associative connection with the tonic area’s closing structural Ef chord. Moreover echoes of the sound, if not the function, of the Ef tonic continue to reverberate as the G emphasis extends further into the transition. Note that the double neighbor configuration

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bracketed in the bass of Figure 12.7 reengages both the Ef–D motivic dyad and the reinterpretation of Ef as VI in the local G context. G continues to function as a locus of tonal activity throughout the remainder of the transition in its foreground capacity as V/C, as Figure 12.7 indicates. Interactions with Ef, however, fade from the foreground as the G prolongation eventually yields to V/Bf at measure 88. Ef and G nevertheless both continue to play significant roles in the prolongation of V/Bf that governs the remainder of the secondary area. It is in this prolongation that we hear the Ef–G tonal pair work in the service of the relentless sweep of a continuous exposition: emphasis on these motivic harmonies across both key areas contributes to formal continuity and dominant delay, in contrast to the articulated polarity of flat- and sharp-side orientations in the quintet. The first part of the quartet’s V/Bf prolongation unfolds sequentially in three stages, as labeled in Figure 12.8. The third stage of measures 96–103 tonicizes G Minor, and the gradually increasing tension of the rising sequential transpositions culminates in a dramatic arrival on V/G. Although a structural G tonic never reemerges, the emphasis on the key of G reawakens the motivic train of thought established by the Ef–G pairing earlier in the exposition. Similarly the prolonged middleground F dominant returns on the musical surface at measure 115 via a preparatory Ef—now reinterpreted as iv of Bf—and this Ef receives emphasis in measures 107–111 through its own applied dominant. There is no question of a prolongational connection of this Ef with the opening Ef Stufe, notwithstanding the hint of tonicization. The Ef here falls within prolongation of the overriding F dominant on its way to Bf, as indicated in Figure 12.8. Yet it seems suggestive nevertheless that Ef as expanded harmony here and G as a key in the immediately preceding passage retain their salience in these later stages of the exposition, following their earlier motivic interactions. Observe that the arrival on V/G in the sequential passage also progresses to a local V-I motion in Bf via an Ef–En–F bass line (mm. 103–105), similar to the approach to closure. Moreover both of these progressions recall the initial Ef–G interaction in the tonic area, as Figure 12.9 summarizes.12 Indeed Ef and G continue to function as motivic harmonies even beyond the close of the exposition. Ef returns along with the movement’s introductory material in measures 123–135 following the Bf cadence, and the development progresses from an initial tonicization of D Minor to a brief G-Minor statement of main theme material in measures 144–148.13 The development’s G-Minor passage has an obvious surface transience and therefore fulfills a clearly subsidiary role in the structural hierarchy. The Ef of the introductory material, however, raises similar questions of tonal priority we have encountered in previous passages that involve these motivic harmonies. The expository close on Bf achieves some strength despite its brevity, as a consequence of its long delay. An argument can be made on the basis of this delayed fulfillment in support of Bf’s structural priority in relation to the

Figure 12.8. Schumann, Piano Quartet, Op. 47, I, graph of mm. 88–119.

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Figure 12.9. Schumann, Piano Quartet, Op. 47, I, bass line parallelisms.

more expansive Ef that follows, as outlined in Figure 12.10.14 The notion of a structurally superior Bf receives additional support in the “floating,” indeed introductory (i.e., tense and preparatory) character of the Ef harmony. Likewise the foreground rearticulation of Bf at measure 134 joins the previous Bf to form a frame around Ef, and it is this second Bf, not Ef, that propels the form onward to the D Minor that initiates the development. These characteristics notwithstanding, it is important to acknowledge that the initial arrival on Bf at measure 119 is both short-lived and immediately destabilized through syncopated repetition. Moreover, Schumann refuses to confirm the Bf resolution with a codetta and instead immediately reinterprets the harmony as V/Ef on the foreground. The Ef return of the introductory material initially sounds like an expository repeat, and the parallelism with the front edge of the opening tonic Stufe raises the question of whether,

Figure 12.10. Schumann, Piano Quartet, Op. 47, I, graph of mm. 119–136.

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despite all the efforts of the exposition, the movement might remain under the control of the tonic on later levels of the middleground. The form has struggled to arrive at its dominant pole in favor of Ef/G interactions, and once it finally articulates Bf it appears immediately to slip back into the orbit of the tonic. If pushed to make an either/or decision regarding harmonic relationships here, I would come down in favor of a subsidiary role for the local Ef tonicization as suggested in Figure 12.10. I nevertheless believe that it is equally important to acknowledge the musical impact of the abruptness of the Bf articulation, the relative expansiveness of the Ef that follows, and the resulting tension between structure and embellishment that animates the form here as elsewhere in the movement.15 I hasten to add that the destabilization of the dominant goal in favor of a foreground turn back to the tonic hardly disqualifies the exposition as an effective reinterpretation of classical practice. It is true that both the absence of a codetta and the tonic return undercut the solidity of the dominant. But the resulting brevity of articulation corresponds with the spirit of mobility that underlies the idea of a continuous exposition. Moreover such brevity reflects a sensibility of compositional economy in the harmonic dimension fully in, rather than against, the spirit of the sonata style. And the practice of following the exposition with a tonic rearticulation before the main business of the development gets under way has ample precedent in earlier composers, as does the return of introductory material and the momentary illusion of an expository repeat.16

The Three-Key Exposition of the Rhenish Symphony Our final example, the first movement of the Rhenish Symphony, further illustrates the range of Schumann’s sonata practice by providing an instance of his engagement with a three-key exposition. The movement’s secondary area falls into two parts, the first of which tonicizes the mediant before the form progresses to the dominant, as Table 12.3 indicates. The most distinctive thematic idea of this two-part second group enters with the first section, following Schubert’s standard practice. The Bf material that follows has the more generic character of a codetta and indeed arrives at the point of closure in the dominant at measure 165. The buildup to this codetta in measures 134–164 likewise features the urgent push toward closure that often characterizes the later stages of secondary material. Paradoxically and characteristically, an expressive tension arises between design and structure in the three-key context: the more arresting thematic material—the G-Minor theme that initiates the secondary area—corresponds with an area of transience in the tonal structure. It nevertheless makes perfect sense that the arrival of the structurally more significant V corresponds with the onset of less distinctive thematic ideas, since Schumann has delayed the arrival of that V until the exposition’s

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Table 12.3. Schumann, Rhenish Symphony, Op. 97, I, Formal Outline of Exposition Measure Numbers Tonic Key Area 1–21 21–57 57–77 77–94

Mediant Key Area 95–101 102–110 111–127 127–133 Dominant Key Area 134–165 Codetta 165–183

Formal Function (A) Main theme (1a) (B) (A’) 1a returns Transition (based on material from B section of tonic area: compare mm. 77–91 and 25–43) Second theme (2a) 2a Based on 1a 2a Motion to closure

Harmonic Orientation In Ef: I I–iii (tonicized)–ii–V I G: iv–Ger. 6/5–V

In G: i III (tonicized) III–V/v–v v (tonicized)–V–i In Bf: V I

final structural cadence. Motivic liquidation conventionally functions in tandem with harmonic structure to create moments of closure in sonata and other formal contexts. Somewhat more difficult to interpret is the relationship between the G and F Stufen that fall within the exposition’s overriding I-V framework. Does the exposition articulate a I-iii-V bass arpeggiation with a strong correspondence among tonal structure, key scheme, and thematic design, as illustrated in Figure 12.11a? Or does the tonal trajectory follow the I—IIn–V paradigm that we have observed in the quintet and quartet, as depicted in Figure 12.11b? The difference of interpretation centers on the relative structural priority of either iii or IIn, that is, of either the G Minor of the lyrical theme or the F harmony that governs the subsequent drive toward Bf closure. Lauri Suurpää offers an interpretation in which the prolongation of IIn achieves sufficient structural weight to form the main stepping-stone from tonic to dominant, despite the emphasis G receives through tonicization and thematicism. In support of his argument he cites, in addition to F’s vast prolongation, similar situations in Schubert and Brahms where nontonicized IIn harmonies take precedence.17 But Schumann’s G-Minor passage is more stable tonally than many second themes in three-key expositions of these composers: for example, in the first movements of Schubert’s String Quintet and Brahms’s Second Symphony. Schumann’s theme features its own i-III-V-i bass arpeggiation in measures 101–133 as a complement to its thematic stability, as illustrated in Figure 12.12. The Schubert and Brahms themes, by contrast, float among

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Figure 12.11. Schumann, Rhenish Symphony, Op. 97, I. (a) Graph of exposition with bass arpeggiation. (b) Graph of exposition with emphasis on IIn.

multiple keys and thus only weakly articulate an apparent secondary tonal center within an expository I—IIn–V progression. Furthermore Schumann prepares the entrance of his G Stufe with a prolongation of its dominant, which is itself prepared by an augmented-sixth chord as goal of a transition—all conventional signs for a medial caesura. These formal markers provide a more substantial articulation for G than is often the case for the second key in a three-key exposition, where abrupt or unprepared modulations occur frequently. The Rhenish’s exposition presents us with a not uncommon interpretive challenge arising from the complex set of factors that may influence tonal-formal interpretation. There are multiple ways a formal section and its governing harmony might achieve salience, and if we force ourselves into a decision about competing claims, we may enter into a seemingly arbitrary elevation of one set of criteria over another. This multivalence, however, in no way reflects a weakness of the form. On the contrary, the complexity allies the form of the Rhenish with the ethos of sonata style generally and with the expressive possibilities of the three-key design in particular. The alternative I-iii-V interpretation, for instance, finds a motivic justification in the parallelism it forms with the similar progression that governs the internal organization of the tonic area. The exposition articulates two main arpeggiation patterns: the first, a lower level I-iii-V-I progression within the main theme group (Figure 12.13), and the second, the I-iii-V motion that forms the basis for the exposition’s three-key plan, as I have just described. (I use the term arpeggiation pattern here, rather than Schenker’s Bassbrechung, because the larger progression moves through root, third, and fifth only if we accept G as a structural harmony, an interpretation that is less than certain, as Suurpää’s I—IIn–V reading and my graph of Figure 12.12 suggest.) The lower level arpeggiation provides the first hints of the Ef–G pairing that will contribute to

Figure 12.12. Schumann, Rhenish Symphony, Op. 97, I, graph of mm. 57–135.

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Figure 12.13. Schumann, Rhenish Symphony, Op. 97, I, graph of mm. 1–57.

continuity across various formal levels. Here on the lower level there is really no doubt about the relative structural priority of G and F, as indicated in Figure 12.13. G is not only tonicized, but it also receives three solid V-i articulations (mm. 25–27, 33–35, and 42–43). Moreover its prolongation governs some twenty measures. F, by contrast, stretches across only several measures and enters without the added weight of tonicization. Regardless of how one interprets the second, larger scale arpeggiation pattern, however—as a structural I-iii-V progression or embedded within a I—IIn–V motion—it seems not only plausible, but indeed desirable to hear a parallelism between the harmonic action on the two structural levels. That is, even if we accept Suurpää’s reading—and there are certainly good reasons to do so, not least the energy that accrues with the expansion of IIn as a contrast to the more languid and brooding character of the G-Minor theme—we should remain open to the possibility that two instances of the same compositional idea might manifest a contrast of internal structural relationships. To adhere strictly to requirements for structural parallelism as a filter for identification of motivic parallelism would result in an impoverished interpretation. Better for us to follow Carl Schachter’s advice on such matters and consider this a both/and rather than either/or situation.18 The pairing of Ef and G emerges as the exposition progresses from the tonic area’s internal arpeggiation onward to the exposition’s larger motion to the dominant. Schumann highlights Ef in its capacity as a subsidiary VI chord several times within the first G tonicization, as indicated in Figure 12.13.

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This reinterpretation occurs almost immediately after the exposition articulates the front edge of the G tonicization at measure 27, while the sound of the Ef structural tonic is still fresh. Ef, moreover, receives emphasis at measure 29 through an applied V4/3 chord, strengthening the possibility for an associative connection with the structural Ef harmony the form has just exited. Ef returns yet again after the passage has settled more firmly into G in the deceptive V-VI progression in measures 38–39. Note that here there is no structural connection with the main Ef Stufe, in contrast to the V-VI progressions in the mediant within the tonic area in the quintet and quartet (mm. 29–31 and 46–47, respectively). In those movements the return to Ef as VI/G picks up the thread of the main opening tonic and participates in a structural I-V progression. In the symphony VI/G remains subsidiary by virtue of a subsequent V-i motion in G. Now a skeptic might dismiss the idea of associative connections among these structural and embellishing Ef sonorities as a case of analytical wishful thinking. It is not at all unusual for VI to appear as a generic harmony; might the VI/G chords simply arise as a consequence of conventional harmonic progression without any larger motivic significance? Admittedly the potential to hear extraprolongational connections tangling Ef and G is more delicate in this context than in the quintet and the quartet. I nevertheless believe that the possibility for such subtle harmonic connections exists here, and moreover that these connections initiate a pattern of motivic interaction that extends across larger formal levels. The transition (Figure 12.12), for instance, marks the arrival of V/G at measure 87 with multiple statements of an Ef augmented-sixth chord coordinated with a return of the melodic idea from the G-Minor passage within the tonic area (compare mm. 84–91 and 36–43). The resulting emphasis on the Ef–D dyad in the bass recalls the similar function the dyad fulfills within the tonic area and also foreshadows its prominence in the top voice of the G-Minor theme, as brackets in Figures 12.12 and 12.13 indicate. To summarize: the two motivic harmonies intertwine in the manner of a tonal pair in the sense that G of the tonic area is subsidiary to Ef but articulates its own subsidiary Ef harmonies that form associative connections with the Ef Stufe. Moreover this harmonic intertwining occurs on multiple formal levels: within the tonic area and across the tonic area into the secondary material. The larger motion to G recalls the internal emphasis on Ef of the more local G tonicization, even as this second G itself remains subsidiary to Ef as its upper third, at least when heard according to Suurpää’s I–IIn–V middleground interpretation. It is also the case that Schumann appears unwilling to abandon G even after the form has progressed to the exposition’s main IIn harmony. The expansion of this IIn includes its own deceptive motion at measure 152 to G Minor or vi in the local Bf context, with a viio7/G harmony providing a hint of tonicization to strengthen the association. There exists a parallelism here with the situation

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Figure 12.14. Schumann, Rhenish Symphony, Op. 97, I, motivic connection of Bf passages.

within the tonic area, where the modulation to G highlights the recently exited Ef by means of a V-VI progression at measure 39. Similarly and across a still larger formal level, the development begins at measure 185 with an immediate outburst on G (subito fff ), which functions as V/C but nevertheless enters via a preparatory Fs and thus recalls the deceptive progression within the third section of the exposition. Finally, it might even be possible to hear an associative connection between the Bf tonicization within the G-Minor lyrical theme—the third in the G–Bf– D–G Bassbrechung in measures 101–133 of Figure 12.12—and the exposition’s goal Bf dominant.19 The hint of an associative relationship between these otherwise generic harmonies is encouraged by the motivic repetition of melodic fragments common to both, as Figure 12.14 highlights. Schumann’s concept of form here and throughout appears to be organized around tonal imbrication: past tonal areas and structural harmonies linger associatively in subsequent regions, even as those regions anticipate key areas and Stufen still to come. In the process of this imbrication harmonies that were once structural pillars return as subsidiary entities, while salient embellishing harmonies emerge as pillars. These reversals of perspective serve to intertwine the harmonies in a manner reminiscent of the more overt ambiguities and tangled hierarchies of tonal pairing in Schumann’s piano works and songs. Here, however, they fulfill an inherent function in the sonata context: they serve to integrate the disparate sections of the three-key exposition and thus help to sustain a larger formal trajectory across the subdivisions of the form.

Conclusion Schumann is scarcely the only nineteenth-century composer whose sonata forms have faced harsh criticism, even as pieces such as the piano quintet, piano quartet, and Rhenish Symphony remain among his most popular instrumental works. Indeed, for an influential writer like Charles Rosen, much of the history

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of post-Beethovenian instrumental composition centers on an irreconcilable tension between the new stylistic proclivities of Romantic composers and their desire to compose in a form whose principles of organization—at least as defined by Rosen—were inextricably bound to late eighteenth-century modes of musical thought. Even Schubert is judged to have composed sonata forms that are “mechanical in a way that is absolutely foreign to his models. They are used by Schubert as molds, almost without reference to the material that was to be poured into them.” Only with late works such as the C-Major String Quintet and G-Major String Quartet does Rosen allow that “Schubert returns to classical principles in a manner almost as striking if not as complete as Beethoven.”20 What is noteworthy with respect to my exploration of Schumann’s sonata practice is the prominence of passages of tonal pairing in the expositions of both of these Schubert masterpieces. Rosen comments only briefly on the movements, noting, “What is remarkable is the rebirth of the classical conviction that the simplest tonal relationships can alone provide the subject-matter of music.”21 An analysis of any detail, however, could scarcely fail to acknowledge the tonal dialectics of both movements’ secondary themes.22 The first part of the quintet’s two-part second group intertwines major and minor versions of the tonic with tonicizations of both fIII and the dominant in a highly complex tonal pairing, or “tripling,” to be more precise. The interplay between En and Ef that emerges as this tripling unfolds indeed may be heard as a consequence of a foundational tonal relationship: the mixture introduced in the very opening measures of the movement where Schubert contrasts En of the initial tonic with Ef of a disquieting common-tone diminished seventh chord.23 This integration of detail with the large-scale design clearly exemplifies what Rosen hears as a newfound formal integrity in Schubert’s late works. The general recourse to pairing and the organic interaction of that pairing with the movement’s form, however, is in no way alien to Schumann’s strategy in the piano quintet, where, as we have seen, mixture also plays a significant role. Similarly the secondary area of Schubert’s G-Major quartet vacillates between an Fs harmony, with a foreground V/B function, and the D tonic that eventually comes to govern the material on the middleground. This pairing of a tonic and its IIIs (V/vi) is precisely the harmonic relationship that has received justifiable praise from numerous critics and scholars in the context of “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” from Schumann’s Dichterliebe.24 Yet when Schumann engages tonal pairing in a sonata context, Rosen and others inevitably judge the results to be a failure. We are left to ponder the je ne sais quoi that allows harmonic dialectics to succeed in Schubert’s sonata forms, while in Schumann the very presence of the technique is felt to betray either compositional willfulness or, worse, a lack of insight into the exigencies of sonata composition. The same contradiction is evident in contrasting responses to Schumann and Brahms. And here again I refer to Rosen’s writings, which, despite their many salutary contributions, offer in this area what amounts to an unhelpful

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summation of long-standing negative attitudes about Schumann’s sonata forms.25 Whereas Rosen hears “a continual disparity between traditional form and musical idea” in Schumann, he judges sonata form to be “a congenial outlet for [Brahms’s] gifts.” Brahms was among sonata form’s “most influential exponents,” according to Rosen, and indeed was still able to widen its harmonic range and “more than any other composer, [exploit] the possibilities of overlapping sections, the ambiguities of the boundaries of sonata form.”26 Yet Brahms, like Schubert and Schumann, engaged tonal pairing throughout his compositional career as part of this harmonic expansion in both two-part and three-key expositions. In the three-key exposition of the Bf-Major String Sextet of 1862, for instance, a pairing of F and A governs the harmonic structure of the second theme. These harmonies function locally as I and IIIs of the F Major that emerges as a structural harmony only at the arrival of the exposition’s third formal area. The F-Minor Clarinet Sonata’s (1895) second theme, by contrast, exploits tonal paring not to allude to a harmonic goal that remains on the horizon, but rather to sustain an opening tonic that refuses to recede to the background until the third part of the three-key design. Indeed the tonic area itself is marked by the pairing in its anticipation of the Df Major of the second theme. In still another late work, the finale of the G-Major String Quintet of 1891, a tonal pairing of tonic and mediant colors harmonic relations not just in the movement’s two-part exposition but also across the entire form.27 Again, it is not clear why these strategies may be admitted as part of what is generally understood to be a successful revitalization of sonata practice in Brahms, while for Schumann they reflect either a failure to understand the exigencies of traditional instrumental forms or a willful attempt to force nineteenth-century compositional strategies onto those forms.28 More recent Schumann scholarship thankfully has made some headway in overturning the received wisdom. Joel Lester, John Daverio, and Julie Brown, among others, have engaged with Schumann’s sonata forms sympathetically, and their positive reassessments can only be welcomed both for the insights they provide into individual works and for the space they clear for fresh engagement with a repertoire that has all too easily been neglected in light of its negative reception history. Also relevant to my concerns is the more nuanced view of Schumann’s stylistic development that has emerged recently among Schumann scholars. The mutual importance of tonic-mediant pairings in works from the chamber year like the piano quintet and quartet (1842), on the one hand, and a late work like the Rhenish Symphony (1850), on the other, provides evidence of compositional consistency across what have traditionally been viewed as distinct style periods. Indeed one of Schumann’s most thoroughgoing essays in tonal dialectics, the A-Minor Violin Sonata, Op. 105, also dates from the late period (1851). The point here is twofold. First, as Julie Brown has cogently argued, strategies like tonal pairing, which traditionally have been praised as masterful innovations

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in the songs and piano music of the 1830s, resonate in the reputedly more conservative works of 1842. Rather than erect a wall between a compositionally “progressive” approach of a fruitful early period and a supposed conservative retrenchment in subsequent large-scale instrumental works, Brown traces stylistic continuities as a source for what she regards as the compelling reinterpretation of traditional forms that Schumann achieved in the chamber year.29 Second, she suggests that the much-maligned late works also may reflect some of these very same strategies, a point borne out by my analysis of the Rhenish exposition here and of the A-Minor Violin Sonata elsewhere.30 If we are prepared to appreciate popular and frequently performed works like the piano quintet and quartet—and why should we not be?—then why should we close our ears to late works, which on close examination can be seen to employ many of the same strategies with similar success? To do so would be to fall into the same trap as that unfortunate sophomore immortalized in Schoenberg’s “New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea,” a student who, through uncritical acceptance of entrenched attitudes about Schumann’s reputed compositional shortcomings “will never listen to the orchestra of Schumann naively, sensitively, and open-mindedly.”31 Certainly a creative spirit as brilliant as Schumann’s deserves at least that much.

notes An abridged version of this essay was read at the 2008 annual meeting of the Society of Music Theory in Nashville, Tennessee. The author wishes to thank Poundie Burstein, Frank Samarotto, and the editors of Rethinking Schumann for the critical feedback they provided while the manuscript was in preparation. 1. Robert Bailey coined the term tonal pairing and the related term double-tonic complex. For a representative discussion of these concepts, see his “An Analytical Study of the Sketches and Drafts,” in Prelude and Transfiguration, 113–46. Further analytical applications and an extensive bibliography may be found in Kinderman and Krebs, The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality. 2. The most influential of these sonata theories oriented around the idea of “large-scale dissonance” or “tonal polarity” remains Rosen’s Sonata Forms. 3. For Rosen’s negative assessment of Schumann’s sonata practice, see The Romantic Generation, 699–710. He expresses similar negative conclusions in The Classical Style, 451–60 and Sonata Forms, 365–408. Lester’s welcome and worthwhile defense appears in “Robert Schumann and Sonata Forms.” For additional positive reevaluations, see Daverio, Robert Schumann; Daverio, Crossing Paths; J. H. Brown, “ ‘A Higher Echo of the Past.’” 4. The less overt character of the pairings also distinguishes them from the intense challenges to tonal centricity Bailey and others have attributed to the double-tonic complex in Wagner. I nevertheless believe that Schumann’s tonal dialectics here and elsewhere participate in the broader nineteenth-century trend toward pairing even if, in his chamber music, he ultimately remains committed to monotonality.

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5. I adopt much of my terminology (two-part exposition, medial caesura, etc.) here and throughout from Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory. 6. Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis: Symphonies and Other Orchestral Works, 12. 7. Lester, “Robert Schumann and Sonata Forms,” 194. 8. Here I develop a thesis argued persuasively by Julie Hedges Brown: that there are significant elements of continuity of compositional approach among the 1842 chamber music and the works of the previous decade, notwithstanding the long critical tradition that hears a conservative retrenchment accompany Schumann’s turn to traditional instrumental forms. See her “ ‘A Higher Echo of the Past.’” 9. A further parallel with Schumann’s practice of tonal pairing arises in the mediation of a third harmony in the process; as Lester highlights, Schumann’s tonal dramas often involve a nexus of harmonies rather than a pairing of just two tonics. Ambiguity in the relationship between Ef and Gf engages associative connections involving Cf, which easily functions as a pivot between the keys, both in the traditional sense of a common link for a pivot-chord modulation and in the expanded sense of a mediating harmony between two, more broadly intertwined tonal areas. Cf first enters prominently within the Gf cadential progression as a local IV chord at m. 28. It then returns twice, in mm. 34 and 38, precisely at moments when cadential resolution to Ef would have the potential to confirm Ef’s return as controlling tonic. In the first instance, in m. 34, the association of fVI/Ef with the previous IV/Gf is subtle yet audible. In the second, the relationship comes into sharper focus: the fVI/ Ef becomes IV/Gf as pivot for the modulation to Gf. 10. For a discussion of caesura-fill, see Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 40–45. 11. The dichotomy of these exposition types sits at the foundation of Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory. See especially the overview of the continuous type they present in chapter 4, 51–64. 12. As noted by J. H. Brown, “ ‘A Higher Echo of the Past,’” 197–98. 13. Emphasis on G Minor extends beyond the bounds of the first movement as well: immediately after the Ef close of the first movement, the mediant reemerges as key for the scherzo, whose main theme continues to highlight the D–Ef motivic dyad. 14. For a discussion of the complex relationship between structural priority and durational emphasis, see Schachter, “Rhythm and Linear Analysis: A Preliminary Study,” 290–98. 15. J. H. Brown has even less confidence in the articulative strength of the Bf resolution. She develops an insightful analysis of the quartet movement based on what she calls the “monopolizing” Ef tonic here and throughout the exposition (“ ‘A Higher Echo of the Past,’” 187–205). 16. Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata serves as the locus classicus for the return of introductory material; his F-Major String Quartet, Op. 59, no. 1, exemplifies the illusion of an expository repeat. For discussion of sonata forms that touch back on the tonic at the beginning of the development, see Adrian, “The Ternary-Sonata Form,” and “The Function of the Apparent Tonic.”

Middleground Structure in Schumann’s Sonata Expositions

263

17. Suurpää, “The Undivided Ursatz,” 71. More specifically, he cites analyses of these Schubert and Brahms movements by Beach, “Schubert’s Experiments,” and Schachter, “The First Movement of Brahms’s Second Symphony.” 18. Schachter, “Either/Or,” 176–79. For a provocative exploration of tensions between structural description and motivic parallelism in Schenkerian scholarship, see Cohn, “The Autonomy of Motives.” 19. Suurpää suggests just such a connection in the parallel passage in the recapitulation. He hears the Ef tonicization that enters at m. 471 as part of the recapitulation’s C-Minor transposition of the secondary material, as an associative reference to the Ef structural tonic that Schumann forgoes at the beginning of the recapitulation and delays until the point of closure at m. 527 (“The Undivided Ursatz,” 73). 20. Rosen, The Classical Style, 456, 459. 21. Ibid., 459. 22. As Rosen does for the quintet in his somewhat more detailed discussion in Sonata Forms, 257–58. 23. David Beach posits a motivic relationship between the opening En–Ef juxtaposition and the En–Ef interplay in the second theme and elsewhere in the exposition in “Schubert’s Experiments,” 13. I discuss the interaction among C, Ef, and G and its relationship to middleground structure in Smith, “Harmonic Cross-Reference,” 159–62. 24. As for instance in Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 41–48. Insightful analyses of the Schubert movement may be found in Beach, “Schubert’s Experiments,” 16–18; Beach, “Harmony and Linear Progression,” 7–13; Burstein, “Lyricism, Structure, and Gender.” 25. See note 3 for the relevant citations. 26. Rosen, Sonata Forms, 368, 395. 27. I analyze the formal influence of this tonal pairing in Smith, “Brahms’s Motivic Harmonies,” 88–100. For a discussion of the overlap of F-Minor and Df-Major key areas in the clarinet sonata, see Smith, “Brahms and the Neapolitan Complex.” 28. The contradiction perhaps accounts for Rosen’s tendency to exemplify his criticisms of Schumann with the composer’s more radical departures from eighteenth-century practice and remain silent about compositions with less radical formal designs like the movements I have analyzed here. In short it seems that he discusses more extreme examples because they most easily can be made to support his negative critical (pre-?) judgments. Rosen might respond that he confronts the movements he does because they represent Schumann’s most characteristic contribution to the sonata tradition. According to this argument, if we are to engage Schumann, then we should do so on his most quintessentially Schumannesque terms. But an alternative argument could just as convincingly stress the notion that what is most characteristic of Schumann is his range of formal strategies, of which movements exhibiting decentered tonal dramas constitute just one type. In this regard Lester’s demonstration of both the variety and individuality of Schumann’s sonata constructions is highly relevant. 29. J. H. Brown, “ ‘A Higher Echo of the Past.’”

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30. Smith, “Harmonies Heard from Afar.” The connection between earlier and later works also suggests the possibility of Schumann’s commitment to key-specific tonal pairs. Just as Ef and G intertwine in the (early) quintet and quartet and the (late) Rhenish, so too do A Minor and F Major interact in both the A-Minor String Quartet of 1842 and the A-Minor Violin Sonata of 1851. A concise discussion of A-F pairings in multiple chamber works appears in Roesner, “The Chamber Music.” The topic of key-specific pairs in Schumann is complex, as these pairings may very well range across multiple genres (songs, character pieces, chamber music, symphonic music, etc.), but with the possibility for distinct patterns of usage based on the local generic or formal context. A comprehensive study is urgently needed. 31. Schoenberg, “New Music,” 114.

13 Schumann and the style hongrois Julie Hedges Brown

From the late eighteenth century onward, evocations of Hungarian Gypsy music found an increasingly prominent place in Western art music. Termed the style hongrois, this folk reference first became popularized in Vienna and surrounding regions. Gypsy musicians, the main performers of Hungarian music, became established in the café music scene, their repertory and idiosyncratic playing styles constituting an important type of vernacular music making, and arrangements of Hungarian Gypsy dances became a very successful form of commercial Hausmusik among amateur musicians. Classical composers from Gluck to Beethoven began adapting traits of Hungarian Gypsy music into their works, and by the mid-nineteenth century the style hongrois had become such a familiar aspect of Western art music that its appearance in compositions often solicited little if any comment from contemporary critics. (More obvious usages in the work of Liszt and Brahms are often exceptions in this regard.) For twentieth- and twenty-first-century audiences, the cultural origins of the style hongrois seem even more remote, a distance that in recent years has prompted new scholarship, most notably by Jonathan Bellman, highlighting the influence of Hungarian Gypsy music on Western composition.1 While traits of Hungarian Gypsy music became integrated into Western art music (what Catherine Mayes has called a “domestication of the foreign”), Bellman has also suggested that various nineteenth-century composers poeticized the style hongrois, adapting it in ways that encoded their music with meanings that resonated with cultural stereotypes of the Gypsy Other.2 These subtexts could be positively inflected, for example by celebrating what many Europeans saw as Gypsies’ innate musicality, or the supposed freedom in which they moved and thought; or these subtexts might evoke negative associations: deceitfulness, thievery, the demonic, and other stereotypes that society had long associated with the Gypsy.3 For example, Bellman suggests that Caspar’s revelry number in Weber’s Der Freischütz, “Hier im ird’schen Jammerthal,” subliminally reveals the hollow nature of Caspar’s friendship

265

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with Max by invoking the style hongrois. Gypsies do not figure as characters in the opera, but, Bellman argues, the music would have prompted Weber’s audiences to make Gypsy associations, like supposed falseness of character and links with the demonic.4 Bellman also brings attention to the pronounced presence of the style hongrois in Schubert’s late works (written from 1823 on), suggesting that perhaps in these last difficult years Schubert identified with the Hungarian Gypsies, “whose mistreatment, ostracism, defiance, and reputed reliance upon music as the expression of their sorrows had resonances in his own life.”5 Bellman also highlights unique treatments of the style hongrois in the music of Liszt and Brahms. The influence of the style hongrois on Schumann has barely been raised. John Daverio has suggested that although Schumann was “less of a connoisseur of the style hongrois than Schubert (or Brahms, for that matter),” he nevertheless “made some notable contributions to it as well.” Daverio cites the 1840 “Zigeunerleben” for small choir, Op. 29, no. 3, and the late Phantasie for Violin, Op. 131, a work whose bravura qualities and Hungarian Gypsy elements perhaps influenced Brahms’s later Violin Concerto. Taking his cue from Bellman, Daverio also perceives within the late Phantasie a poetic use of the style hongrois, since both this style and Schumann’s late music are “emblems of exclusion.”6 Although Daverio does not elaborate on the Phantasie in this regard (the essay emphasizes Brahms), he nonetheless opens an important hermeneutic window for understanding some of Schumann’s music. I would like to widen this window by exploring the influence of the style hongrois on Schumann’s compositional development. As Daverio intimates, Schumann participated in this style in various ways. Recognizing its commercial viability, he wrote various Gypsy-inspired works meant clearly for the amateur marketplace: the 1840 “Zigeunerleben” cited by Daverio; a “Zigeunerliedchen” from his Lieder für die Jugend, Op. 79 (1849); an “Ungarisch” for four hands found in the BallSzenen, Op. 109 (1851); and a “Zigeunertanz” in his third Clavier-Sonaten für die Jugend, Op. 118 (1853).7 Yet Schumann also imbued the style hongrois with his own poetic colorings. In three finales that I will explore (those concluding the A-Major String Quartet, Op. 41, no. 3, and E-flat Major Piano Quintet, Op. 44, both 1842, and the 1835 F-sharp Minor Piano Sonata, Op. 11), Schumann combines this stylistic reference with a highly unusual format: a refrain-based “parallel” form featuring sustained tonal ambiguity and multiplicity, with tonic definition treated only as an end-oriented goal (the only three movements in Schumann’s output to behave wholly in this way). By resisting conventional forms and by wandering through multiple harmonic landscapes that defy any sense of a true tonal home, these finales evoke Gypsy stereotypes common in Schumann’s day: a people seen as distant from sociocultural norms, exploring the unknown through their peripatetic lifestyle. An 1837 entry in the Austrian National Encyclopedia described the Gypsies as “unfamiliar with all the benefits of civilization”: “[They] do not like to settle down;

Schumann and the style hongrois

267

most of them follow their overpowering partiality to the wandering life, and roam with their tents through the land, where they prefer to seek out unbeaten paths and gloomy mountain ravines.”8 Such an image could be doubly spun: for the state the Gypsy figure often appeared threatening and uncontrollable, a violator of boundaries; but for many late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists this same figure became idealized, a model for artistic freedom and innovation. (The latter explains the double meaning that the French term for Gypsy, Bohémien, later assumed.)9 Schumann, himself perceived by his contemporaries as a frequent transgressor of boundaries, seems to have supported the latter perspective. In the finales cited above, the highly irregular treatment of form suggests that Schumann saw within the style hongrois a pathway for experimentation, a musical style offering a degree of latitude in the treatment of more traditional forms.10 Schumann’s expressive use of the style hongrois was probably most inspired by Schubert. Schumann’s admiration for his predecessor is well known, and he also knew a number of Schubert works inflected with the style hongrois: the Grand Duo Sonata, Op. 140; the F-Minor Moment Musical from Op. 94; the Symphony in C-Major, D. 944; the Sonata in D-Major, Op. 53; the F-Minor Impromptu from Op. 142—all were reviewed by Schumann in his journal. Although remarking little on the idiom, Schumann clearly recognized its presence. In an 1843 review of Mendelssohn’s A-Minor Symphony, Op. 56 (mistakenly confused as the “Italian” as opposed to the “Scottish” symphony), he likened its “original folk tone” to Schubert’s C-Major Symphony, with this distinction: where the “graceful, civilized character” of Mendelssohn’s music “places us under Italian skies,” Schubert’s symphony suggests “a wild gypsy-like bustling of folk” (“ein wildes, zigeunerisches Volkstreiben”), a description echoing a common European image of Gypsy music and dance as wildly unencumbered in its expression.11 We might ask why Schumann neglected to mention this Gypsy quality in his famous 1840 review of Schubert’s symphony. Was this stylistic reference so common by then that it merited no special remark? Yet Schumann suggests that while Mendelssohn’s symphony is “less foreign,” the Gypsy character of Schubert’s music represents one among “other distinctions,” the symphony showing a “richer power of invention.”12 Elsewhere Schumann makes clear that the Hungarian Gypsy idiom could conjure up deeper, even inexpressible feelings and images, offering access to the unknown. In a diary entry of August 20, 1831, he evokes the impressions made on him by Schubert’s Divertissement à l’Hongroise, Op. 54 (1824), the composer’s most famous essay in the style hongrois: Yesterday, Celia [Clara’s Davidsbündler name] was unwell and ill tempered; at least I can now tell her about the world’s loveliest vulgarities [die schönsten Grobheiten] without being misunderstood, which of course

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Analytical Approaches

succeeds so rarely. Franz Schubert’s Hungarian Divertissement seemed to put her back in order a bit. If I might put it into words, I could probably say: I comported myself appropriately at a traditional Hungarian wedding and stamped my feet much; but spare me, Florestan, from having to somehow convey the yearning, the melancholy of this song and all of the lovely forms flying by as if in a dance. Eubebius thought that the pedal point at the end is like the blessings of the priest—and then they pull away, with tambourines sounding noisily on and on into the far-off distance, further and further away.13

The music, Schumann suggests, could function on multiple levels: as an outward manifestation of a peasant folk culture, eliciting proper responses in specific settings, but also as a referent for deeper, ineffable emotional states, evoking the melancholy and mystery that Europeans also attached to Gypsy life.14 Hence Schumann’s paradoxical statement, “die schönsten Grobheiten.” In this inexpressible quality, the style hongrois, especially in the hands of a master like Schubert, could serve not merely as musical prose but as poetry, an embodiment of romantic yearning and romantic distance, sounding eternally into the infinite expanse. In other words, the style hongrois seemed capable of surpassing mere public, collective experience (in the form of a wedding rite, for example) and offering access to the solitary world and emotional states of the romantic wanderer, a wayfarer whose song (Schumann implies) could be that of the Gypsy.15 In the finales cited above, Schumann went on to inject the style hongrois with similar and other expressive qualities that accompanied experimentation of a particular sort. To begin exploring these aspects, let us turn to the 1842 A-Major String Quartet, Schumann’s last completed work in this genre and the culmination of a prolonged desire to write in the string quartet medium. By this time the quartet was considered old-fashioned, a seeming relic of the past. As Schumann lamented in early May 1842 (just weeks before beginning his own Op. 41 quartets), the “[string] quartet has come to an alarming standstill.” Its revival, he believed, depended on composers who not only understood their artistic heritage (especially the quartets of “Mozart, Haydn, and another,” those whom Schumann called the “fathers” of the genre), but also enriched it by transforming classical forms anew. In late May 1842, for example, he was encouraged by one such quartet whose author, Hermann Hirschbach, “wishes to be called a poet above all by avoiding stereotypical forms,” a direction indicated, Schumann notes, in “Beethoven’s last quartets.”16 In the finale of the A-Major String Quartet Schumann followed his own compositional directive, drastically rethinking the formal functions of classical rondo form. Accompanying these formal experiments is the style hongrois, a folk reference that for Schumann seems to have connoted freedom from established norms.

Schumann and the style hongrois

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“Avoiding Stereotypical Forms”: The Finale of the A-Major String Quartet The formal irregularities of Schumann’s A-Major quartet finale have elicited much commentary from recent scholars. For example, as Daverio and I have both discussed, the movement presents a sectional rondo form not once but twice (the central refrain dovetails the two halves):17 A B A C A D A B A C A D A ® Coda

Represented Differently:

ABACAD A B A C A D A ® Coda

The large-scale repetition creates an unusual “parallel” form, a structure developed in Schumann’s earlier experimental piano music but one that he now revives within the conservative genre of the string quartet.18 Hans Kohlhase and Anthony Newcomb have also remarked on the atypical refrain. Instead of a theme with periodic phrasing, Schumann writes one that is additive and sequential in nature (Example 13.1). The main idea comprises a brief cadential gesture (ii65-V7-I) that appears six times in three different keys: A-Major, F-sharp Minor, then D-Major.19 Finally, as Kohlhase and Newcomb have also stressed, Schumann reverses the functions of refrain and episode. Because subsequent refrains preserve the modulatory nature of the opening theme (Figure 13.1), they appear more unstable and transitional in nature. The episodes, on the other hand, serve ironically as “islands of stability” or “focal points” (Schwerpunkte); each features symmetrical periodic phrasing and a rounded-binary form (though with varying patterns of repeats). Indeed, as Newcomb observes, the disparity between refrain and episode increases as each new episode reveals an ever more stable structure.20 Example 13.1. Schumann, String Quartet in A-Major, Op. 41, no. 3, finale, mm. 1–16: the opening refrain and beginning of the first episode.

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Example 13.1. Continued

I would like to suggest that these collective formal irregularities may have been inspired by the style hongrois. Although no one to my knowledge has ever written about this reference, aspects of Hungarian Gypsy music saturate the refrain, illustrated by the following traits: pronounced syncopated rhythms, especially the fiery fourth-beat emphasis and the stomping alla zoppa pattern introduced in measure 2 (short-long-short); pervasive dotted rhythms that evoke the verbunkos, a Hungarian military recruiting dance; short repeated

Schumann and the style hongrois

271

SHARP-SIDE KEYS

A

B

A

C

A*

D

mm:

1

15

35

49

65

73

keys:

A -f # - D

A —E

E - c# - A

f # (D-b) f #

f #- A

F

SHARP-SIDE KEYS

FLAT-SIDE KEYS

mm:

keys:

A

B

A

C

A*

D

A

113

127

147

161

177

185

225

F-d-F

C—G

G-e-C

a (F-d) a

a - C - [V] E — A

=> Coda 235

A - f #- A

* truncated returns

Figure 13.1. Schumann, String Quartet in A-Major, Op. 41, no. 3, formal overview of the finale.

phrases and abrupt tonal shifts (albeit ones that emphasize major over the more common minor mode); and a molto vivace tempo that reinforces the furious Gypsy character. Subsequent statements, especially the second and third refrains, only amplify the intensity by transposing the theme into ever higher registers. The second episode (C, mm. 49–64) continues the reference, stressing syncopation by continuously pelting the fourth beat with fp accents. Its narrow-range melody also emphasizes repeated notes in triplets, evoking a frenzied tremolo effect common to the cimbalom, a dulcimer-like instrument used in Hungarian Gypsy bands. Although other episodes veer from the style hongrois character, they too share some of its traits: the first episode (B) also stresses the fourth beat, and the third episode (D), a lyrical gavotte more characteristic of a Bach suite movement than an ungaresca,21 nevertheless emphasizes drone fifths, occasional melodic triplets, and anapest rhythms (short-short-long), traits also found in Hungarian Gypsy music. Overall the medley-like arrangement of the movement, with its abrupt and mercurial shifts in mood, is also common to the style hongrois. The finale’s pervasive Hungarian Gypsy character and striking formal innovation may each be notable in its own right. But what makes the movement especially compelling is Schumann’s use of the two in conjunction with one another, a blending that illuminates the significance of each. The Gypsy-inflected refrain, for example, initiates a surprising reversal of formal functions that distances the music from conventional rondo practice. In this regard the movement also evokes perceptions of Gypsy communities as set apart from the practices and conventions of settled bourgeois life (or, as the Austrian National Encyclopedia put it, “unfamiliar with all the benefits of civilization”). The finale’s

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tonal construction also recalls the wandering life that, despite large numbers of settled Gypsies, Europeans associated with this people. Because refrains modulate constantly, the movement unfolds without a well-established tonal home. Indeed although the opening refrain begins in A-Major (the putative tonic), its conclusion in D-Major suggests that A functions merely as V (a hearing influenced by the preceding movement: we have just heard an Adagio in D-Major). Moreover, unlike Classical rondos that coordinate tonal and thematic returns, here A-Major surfaces in an unpredictable fashion, sometimes initiating refrains (the first and last ones), at other times terminating them (the second, third, and final refrains), perhaps disappearing altogether (the fourth and fifth refrains), and even appearing within episodes (the first appearance of B and the last occurrence of D). Thus the so-called tonic, if one can yet call it that, behaves in a migratory manner, surfacing in unexpected ways. One might argue that Schumann adumbrates the A-Major tonic by treating it as the tonal axis between its upper and lower fifth-related keys: where the opening refrain modulates from A-Major to D-Major (or I to IV), the second refrain counterbalances with motion from E-Major to A (or V to I). Yet little time is spent within the tonic itself, and its tonal control seems always in question. If anything the symmetrical movement around A-Major foreshadows a lengthy tonal journey that emphasizes sharp-side keys (mm. 15–72; see Figure 13.1), then flat-side keys (mm. 73–180), before returning to the sharp side once again (mm. 181–292). Indeed to underscore the shift to flat-side keys the finale presents a near juxtaposition of vi or F-sharp Minor (mm. 49–68) with fVI or F-Major (mm. 73–126). To further our sense of roaming, Schumann adapts his parallel form in a new way: instead of initiating the thematic recapitulation at its original pitch level (the case in his earlier parallel forms), it begins at a point distant from it: F-Major–D-Minor (m. 113–126) instead of A-Major–F-sharp Minor–D-Major, a move that draws the subdominant inflection of the opening refrain into more remote flat-side regions.22 Although commentators frequently criticize Schumann’s penchant for repetition, here the restatements play a crucial role in propelling the tonal journey. The parallel repetition transposes much of the first half up a minor third (compare mm. 123–180 with mm. 11–72), enabling a prolonged stay on the flat side. This pattern, combined with sequential statements of the refrain in the first half, allows the Gypsy-inflected main theme to roam through continually changing harmonic landscapes. Given the almost dizzying array of keys and the lack of a stable tonal “home,” the music projects a palpable sense of longing—Sehnen to use Schumann’s word, a state characteristic of the wanderer trope and one reinforced here (as in Schubert’s Divertissement à l’Hongroise) by the style hongrois. Because of this tonal wandering, unequivocal tonic definition occurs ultimately as an end-oriented event, another subversion of tonal practice. Only in the coda does the movement become definitively grounded in the A-Major tonic.

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273

Dramatizing this tonal clarification, the music finally breaks free of the finale’s rigid block-like construction, presenting the first sustained development of material in the movement (beginning at m. 235). The coda now opens up the movement’s basic idea (a cadential idea that previously has maintained its closed nature for thirty-four statements!). Two swells each carry the music from the original predominant harmony (ii65) to an expected but undelivered cadence, measures 252–253, which returns us to ii65, and measures 278–279, where a strong ˆ5-1ˆ bass motion nevertheless brings a lowered seventh that alters the expected tonic chord into V7 of IV. By delaying a stable, root-position A-Major chord by almost fifty measures (m. 282), the coda throws the tonic into relief in a way that the original cadential gesture never could. Even more surprising, Schumann syncopates this chord as a sforzando accent on beat four and provides it with no cadential preparation. Thus in a final act of irony and defiance, the movement technically ends without full closure, a fitting conclusion given that the refrain’s cadential gestures have previously served largely to confuse tonal focus. In the finale of the A-Major quartet Schumann injects new life into classical rondo form (and hence also the string quartet) by avoiding stereotypical procedures. As Newcomb remarks, the piece thus empowers once again the form whose conventions it “mocks,” for the “attentive listener is forced to move beyond static recognition of formal schemata to dynamic questioning of formal procedures.”23 The style hongrois seems to facilitate this renewal by bringing with it various connotations attached to the Gypsy: a fierce independence from established norms, an “overpowering partiality to the wandering life” (to echo the Austrian National Encyclopedia), and a prolonged sense of Sehnen. To provide further evidence that the quartet’s treatment of form and tonality derived much of its meaning, if not its inspiration, from the style hongrois, I would like to explore two other, related finales: that ending the F-sharp Minor Piano Sonata, Op. 11, a piece composed in the mid-1830s, and the finale of the E-flat Major Piano Quintet, Op. 44, a work that, as I shall argue, uses the quartet finale (which preceded it by two months) as a springboard for further innovation. Both movements combine the same sort of refrain-based parallel form with sustained tonal multiplicity and tonic obscurity found in the quartet finale—the only other movements in Schumann’s output to do so—plus Schumann inflects each with the Hungarian Gypsy idiom. This correspondence suggests that the association between the style hongrois and formal experimentation is more than merely accidental.

“Earlier Efforts”: The Finale of the F-sharp Minor Piano Sonata, Op. 11 Composed in 1833–35 (revised further in 1836), the F-sharp Minor Piano Sonata provides a definitive prototype for the A-Major quartet finale. Though not

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highlighting ties between the two works, detailed analyses by Charles Rosen, Linda Correll Roesner, and Hubert Moßburger, among others, clarify aspects of the sonata that resonate with the later quartet: a large-scale refrain-based “parallel structure,” as Rosen observes (Table 13.1), though one also evoking sonata form elements (e.g., a “second group of themes” in mm. 25–49 and a thematic “recapitulation” that, unlike the Op. 41, no. 3 finale, begins by restating the opening theme at its original pitch level, mm. 190–205), and what Roesner has called a “mosaic-like approach to composition,” which was received less than enthusiastically by critics.24 The finale also betrays a similar interest in sustained tonal confusion and harmonic distance. The opening theme (Example 13.2a) blurs tonal focus: it begins in F-sharp Minor but consistently orients itself toward A-Major, the key confirmed by all cadences (mm. 4, 8, and 16). Schumann also avoids coordinating tonal and thematic returns: subsequent reprises occur mostly at different pitch levels. Indeed, indicating the interest in tonal distance, tritone relationships dominate the movement, illustrated, as Rosen shows, by the appearances of the refrain (Figure 13.2). As in the A-Major quartet finale, definitive arrival in the tonic key occurs only at the end; because the final refrain transposes the theme down a minor third, F-sharp finally receives the cadential confirmation originally reserved for other keys (mm. 381–96, now emphasizing the major mode). By freeing itself from normative practice, the sonata ultimately becomes, Moßburger suggests, “poeticized,” embodying Schumann’s 1830 comment that where “prose = limitation, poetry = boundlessness of form.”25 What commentators have not remarked upon are the style hongrois aspects of the finale. The heavily textured main theme features percussive chords, a melody that moves primarily in thirds (sometimes in sixths), jangling grace notes (third phrase), minor shadings, and a tonal slipperiness (F-sharp Minor or A-Major?). Although notated in triple (rare in the style hongrois), Schumann’s articulation actually implies duple meter, alternating pairs of staccato eighths (an articulation common to the style hongrois) with pairs of slurred eighths. Indeed all

Bars

1–16 50–65 190–205

F# minor/A major C minor/Eb major F# minor/A major

Tritone Tritone

Tritone

239–54 381–96

A minor/C major D# minor/F# major

Tritone

Figure 13.2. Rosen’s analysis of the finale from Schumann’s Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11: tritone relations underpinning appearances of the refrain. (From Charles Rosen. Sonata Forms, revised edition. Copyright © 1988, 1980 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.).

Table 13.1. Rosen’s Analysis of the Finale from Schumann’s Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11: Formal Overview Bars

Theme

Key

Bars

Theme

Key

1–16 17–24 25–32 32–38 39–42 43–49 50–65 66–73 74–85 86–97 98–114 114–125 126–34 134–42 142–59

A B C1 D C1 C2 A B D C3 C4 E F G H

190–205 206–13 214–21 221–27 228–31 232–38 239–54 255–62 262–75 276–87 288–304 304–15 316–24 324–32 332–50

A B C1 D C1 C2 A C1 D C3 C4 E F G H

F# minor/A major A minor ® Ef major ® C major C major C major C major (ii over V) C major ® A minor A minor/C major Ef major Ef major ® C minor C minor ® Ef major Ef major Ef major Ef major 19 bars of modulation ® Bf minor

160–76 177–89

I Transition

F# minor/A major A minor ® Ef major Ef major Ef major E major (ii over V) Ef major ® C minor C minor/Ef major Ef minor ® A major A major ® F# minor F# minor ® A major A major A major A major 18 bars of modulation ® F# minor F# minor V of F# minor

351–67 368–80 381–96 397–end

I Transition A Coda

Bf minor V of Ef minor Ef minor (D# minor)/ F# major F# major

From Charles Rosen. Sonata Forms, revised edition. Copyright © 1988, 1980 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., p. 382. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Example 13.2. Comparison of Themes. (a) Finale of Schumann’s Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, beginning of the main theme (mm. 1–11). (b) Finale of Schubert’s Grand Duo Sonata in C-Major, Op. 140 (D. 812), beginning of the main theme (mm. 1–12); based on the edition found in Franz Schubert, Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, Serie VII: Klaviermusik, Abteilung 1, Werke für Klavier zu vier Händen, Band 2, BA 5514 © Bärenreiter-Verlag. Used with permission. (c) Finale of Schumann’s String Quartet in A-Major, Op. 41, no. 3, beginning of the gavotte melody from the third episode (D, mm. 73–80).

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Example 13.2. Continued

subsequent reprises exaggerate this pattern by consistently thumping the first note of the slurred pair with a sforzando accent, creating an overall stacc.–stacc.–sf pattern, evoking the Hungarian anapest. In the subsequent lyrical theme (C, m. 25) the bass line stresses a Lombard rhythm (short-long, in a now perceptible triple meter), and the melody borrows a pervasive alla zoppa rhythm from the preceding B idea. To prepare the subsequent reprise of the main theme (at m. 50, later at m. 239) Schumann subsequently transforms the lyricism of C into a more frenetic, style hongrois–inflected statement (what Rosen calls C2): the

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melody and bass line return in thick chords spanning an octave or more and underpinned by incessant sforzando accents (one per beat). To appreciate these Hungarianisms we can compare the movement with the finale of Schubert’s Grand Duo Sonata in C-Major, Op. 140, one of many late works singled out by Bellman as imbued with the style hongrois, and one whose main theme strongly resembles Schumann’s refrain (Example 13.2b). Like the sonata theme, Schubert’s melody features driving eighths in a similar staccato-slurred duple pattern, creating an anapest-type rhythm also reinforced with a recurring accent. Schubert’s theme also highlights the same opening ˆ 2, ˆ 2ˆ 3) ˆ and a similar arched contour melodic ascent (perceived initially as 1(ascending and descending through an octave in largely stepwise motion, with a ˆ Like Schumann’s refrain, the theme middle leap from pitches heard as 5ˆ and 8). presents ornamental figures (here grace notes and trills) and a rounded-binary form (aa’ba”). Especially striking is Schubert’s similar blurring of relative keys: introduced by a sustained pedal on E, the theme strongly implies A-Minor throughout, though full cadences consistently confirm C-Major (mm. 12 and 45) or its dominant key, G-Major (m. 20). The treatment of key nonetheless highlights crucial differences. Despite some equivocation, Schubert’s theme ultimately confirms the tonic key, C-Major, before modulating. Thus Schubert establishes the home key as a definitive point of departure, against which the following sonata form can orient itself. Schumann’s theme, however, provides no such tonal landmark. It consistently distances us from the home key, both at the outset and in subsequent tritone-related statements, a far more radical treatment of tonal norms. Ultimately Schumann draws different implications from his Gypsystyled theme, ones that resonate with the later quartet finale: the home key serves not as a point of departure but as a longed-for, distant goal, whose anticipation the style hongrois, with its attendant associations of wandering and desire, seems to amplify.26 As many know, Schumann’s sonata was deeply tied to Clara: he borrowed ideas from her music, fell in love with her the year he completed it (1835), and subsequently stated that works like the sonata reflected “the struggles Clara cost [him].”27 I would like to suggest that Schumann’s treatment of F-sharp Minor as an end-oriented goal reflected his own distance from a personal goal: betrothal to Clara. As Roesner has shown, the original version of the finale more closely resembled sonata form by shifting “expositional” materials originally oriented largely around A-Major (mm. 66–158 in the final version) into the realm of F-sharp Minor in the recapitulation. Roesner notes that documentary evidence suggests that on April 13, 1836, Schumann sent the first three movements to the publisher but held onto the finale to make further revisions, most notably by delaying true tonic arrival until the end.28 Combined with biographical details from the spring of 1836, this evidence is telling. As Daverio has suggested, in February Schumann still seemed hopeful that

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Friedrich Wieck would accept his offer of marriage to Clara, yet on March 1 Schumann angrily noted, “[Wieck is] carrying on like a madman and forbids Clara and me to have contact under pain of death” (an enforced separation that lasted until August 1837).29 If Schumann’s revisions were indeed influenced by Wieck’s rebuffs, we might envision Schumann himself as the Gypsy Other, the persona non grata marginalized by Wieck, in search of a now seemingly distant beloved. Schubert composed his Grand Duo sonata in 1824, but the work appeared only in 1838, when Diabelli published it as Op. 140. Thus Schumann’s sonata derived its Gypsy-styled theme independently of Schubert. Nevertheless, reviewing Schubert’s work in June 1838 perhaps reminded Schumann of his earlier sonata, especially since Diabelli’s firm dedicated the work to Clara (something she found disturbing but that Schumann saw as “tender and poetic”).30 Significantly Schumann’s encounter with the Grand Duo coincided with a time of string quartet composition: two started in early April and June 1838, and the beginnings of two others by June 1839.31 Although none was completed, these quartets—along with Schubert’s music and its evocation of Schumann’s Op. 11—perhaps planted the seeds for the finale of the 1842 A-Major quartet. Other events also highlighted the F-sharp Minor Sonata in subsequent years: a new edition appeared in 1840; Clara played the work in late 1841 (“perhaps the first time in years . . . it delighted me anew! I consider it one of Robert’s most magnificent works”); and just weeks after completing the A-Major quartet Schumann began corresponding with Carl Koßmaly about writing a review of his earlier piano repertory, prompting thoughts of youthful works like Op. 11.32 All of the above suggests an unmistakable relationship between the early sonata and later string quartet, providing additional evidence that Schumann saw within the style hongrois an outlet for formal experimentation of a particular kind. The links between the two works also belie the common notion that Schumann’s music of the early 1840s broke cleanly from the music of his past. As Schumann wrote to Koßmaly in 1843, “In earlier . . . efforts most often lie the seeds of the future.”33 That Schumann potentially saw his Op. 11 sonata as foundational for future work is suggested by yet another tie to the quartet finale. In the latter the gavotte melody of the third episode (D) recalls the main theme of the sonata (and hence also Schubert’s theme; Example 13.2c).34 Yet the melody also distances itself from this prototype, transforming its spirited Gypsy character into a lyrical court dance with “tamer” pastoral associations. In so doing the gavotte acknowledges the past while also clearing space for a new Hungarian Gypsy theme that initiates another unusual refrain-based parallel form. In this regard the gavotte, and the movement as a whole, enact Schumann’s dictum that tradition is best sustained by using earlier contributions as a point of departure for further innovation. In the E-flat Major Piano Quintet, Op. 44, begun two months after the string quartet, Schumann continued his artistic journeying.

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The “Seeds of the Future” in the Finale of the E-flat Major Piano Quintet, Op. 44 Points of Departure and New Directions Despite many irregularities in the quintet finale (or perhaps because of them), commentators have tried squaring its structure with Classical norms. Almost invariably they label the movement a “sonata-rondo” with extensive coda, a reading prompted largely by the recurring refrain (A in Figure 13.3) and the thematic recapitulation that begins at measure 137.35 Yet at this precise moment the music reveals tremendous distance from the opening G-Minor tonic, for it begins in G-sharp Minor, then quickly switches to D-sharp Minor, a tonal remoteness that problematizes the notion of a recapitulation. Schumann clearly seems to have modeled the quintet finale on the quartet finale (which in turn modeled itself on the earlier sonata finale).36 He adopts once again a refrain-based form that falls largely into a parallel design (the shift to D-sharp Minor in m. 149 makes the parallel restatement almost wholly sequential; compare mm. 149–220 with 1–85; mm. 86–136, sometimes called the “development,” lie outside the parallelism, however). Schumann also stresses once again nontonic returns of the refrain. At the outset the theme begins in a

PART I of the FINALE (refrain-based parallel form)

“EXPOSITION”?

“DEVELOPMENT”? [2nd group?]

mm. Keys:

A

B

A*

B*

C

A*

D

1

22

30

38

43

78

86

g

Eb

d

Bb

(G) ----

b

B

G

A

B

A*

B*

C

A*

137

157

165

173

178

213

B

bb

Gb

(Eb) - - - - Eb

g

g#®d#

--

C’ 115

- - - V/E® V/g#®

[Sequential Repetition of mm. 1–85]

“RECAPITULATION”? * truncated returns

Figure 13.3. Schumann, Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44: formal overview of the refrain-based parallel form (mm. 1–220).

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well-established G-Minor, but then we hear either full or truncated returns in D-Minor (mm. 30–37), B-Minor (mm. 78–85), G-sharp and D-sharp Minor (mm. 137–156), and B-flat Minor (mm. 165–172), before returning once again to G-Minor (mm. 213–220). Because of these shifting keys, Schumann once again blurs the identity of the tonic, and indeed, like the earlier finales, true tonal resolution—which in the quintet must ultimately crystallize around E-flat Major—becomes much delayed, until well into the extensive coda. As before, these anomalies are projected largely through the style hongrois, especially in the main theme, whose appearances bind the structure together (Example 13.3). The theme is heavily textured, featuring double stops in the violins and a propulsive tremolo accompaniment evocative of cimbalom playing. Schumann accents each note of the minor-mode theme in a sempre marcato style. The Hungarian anapest reinforces this heavy peasant character, beginning and ending each of the five phrases and often appearing with a sforzando accent. The theme’s four-square phrasing, exact repetition of ideas, and straightforward rhythms also strengthen the folk-like character.37 Despite clear ties to the earlier finales, the quintet movement takes things further. While featuring a tonal multiplicity that also contrasts sharp- and flatside keys, the quintet travels more extensively around the circle of fifths (Figure 13.4a). Indeed to generate greater distance Schumann now frames his parallel form with a symmetrical chromatic pitch structure (Figures 13.4b–c). In the first half, long-range motion from G-Minor to B-Minor (mm. 1–85) becomes

Example 13.3. Schumann, Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44, finale: beginning of the opening theme (mm. 1–12).

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Example 13.3. Continued

balanced in the second half by similar motion from D-sharp Minor to G-Minor (mm. 149–220), creating a transpositional symmetry that divides the octave by major third (one that must assume enharmonic equivalence): g–b–d-sharp– g. Nested symmetrical motion occurs around E-flat as well, emphasizing the same tonics but in their parallel-mode versions: E-flat–G–B–E-flat (Figure 13.4c). This chromatic symmetry, very unusual for its time, ultimately enables an even more ambitious tonal narrative than that found in the earlier finales. As many have noted, the quintet finale features a progressive key scheme: it opens strongly in G-Minor but ends in E-flat Major, the home key of the piano

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quintet. The unusual parallel form developed in Schumann’s earlier finales accommodates this strategy perfectly. Because it stresses nontonic returns of the refrain within a lengthy chromatic journey, the parallel form sets in motion the gradual subversion of G-Minor. To make the transfer of tonal control more a) the journey around the circle of fifths (contrasting sharp- and flat-side keys)

A

A*

B

B*

A*

C SHARP-SIDE KEYS

. . .

D

-- C¢

MOVING TOWARD

g

Eb

d

Bb

(G) - - - - G

b

g # ®d #

B

bb

Gb

(E b) - - - - E b

g

B

- - - V/ E ® V/g # ®

. . . . . . FLAT-SIDE KEYS

* truncated returns b) symmetrical pitch space around G minor

A

B

A*

B*

C

A*

1

78

g

. . . . . . . .

d#

. . . . . . . .

b g

149

213

* truncated returns c) symmetrical pitch space around E b major

A*

B*

B

g

E

. . . . .

G

b

B

. . . . . E

g

22

d#

157

C

A*

A

43

178

* truncated returns

Figure 13.4. Schumann, Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44, finale, harmonic aspects of the parallel form. (a) The journey around the circle of fifths (contrasting sharp- and flat-side keys). (b) Symmetrical pitch space around G-Minor. (c) Symmetrical pitch space around E-flat Major.

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obvious, Schumann pairs G-Minor with E-flat Major at both ends of the form, then gradually recasts their hierarchical relationship. At the beginning G-Minor underpins the refrain (mm. 1–21), a substantial theme evoking a rounded binary without repeats (aa,baa). This formal stability clearly projects any E-flat flavorings as VI, both in the theme’s contrasting middle section (b, mm. 10–11) and in the brief pedal idea that follows (B in Figure 13.3, mm. 22–29). By the end of the parallel form, however, the tables have turned. E-flat Major now returns with idea C (mm. 178–212), a lengthy episode that modulates from its initial tonicized key only to return and make it the goal of a climactic push toward cadential closure. Thus E-flat receives much dramatic emphasis here. G-Minor returns with the final refrain (mm. 213–220), but its presence is now quite diminished. The theme returns in truncated form (aa), and a decrescendo undermines the impact of its tonal return, creating a G-Minor fade-out effect. Thus although the parallel symmetry completes itself, the shift in tonal emphasis leaves the music open to further exploration. Departing from earlier examples, Schumann now treats the parallel structure as part of a broader formal plan. Subsequent materials shift focus entirely (Figure 13.5). A series of E-flat-centered closing passages (mm. 221–248, 287– 318, and 372–427) surround two fugatos: the first based on the finale’s Gypsyinflected theme (A, mm. 249–274), the second based famously on the first movement’s main idea (mm. 319–371). Because of this cyclic return, Kohlhase describes the second part of the movement as doubly oriented: measures 221– 318 provide a coda to the finale, measures 319–427 a coda to the entire quintet.38 Although this second part seems to occupy a different world, I would argue that it continues a pattern introduced in the parallel form and evocative of the Gypsy wanderer trope: namely, a pattern of continuously shifting perspectives. In the first part the parallel form ends by returning us once again to G-Minor,

PART II (doubly-oriented coda)

CLOSING IDEA #1

(1st appearance)

FIRST FUGATO (based on main theme of Finale, A)

mm:

221

249

keys:

Eb

g CODA TO FINALE?

C¢

Eb

SECOND FUGATO (based on main theme of first movement)

(cf.115) 275

® V/c

CLOSING IDEA #2

287

Eb

CLOSING IDEA #1 +

EXTENSION

(2d Appearance)

319

372

402

Eb

Eb

Eb

CODA TO QUINTET?

Figure 13.5. Schumann, Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44, finale: formal overview of the second half (doubly oriented coda).

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yet the hierarchy of tonal relations has changed dramatically. The effect is spirallike, imbuing the tonal return with new meaning. The parallel form also brings a series of thematic returns, yet refrains surface in different keys, propelling us further around the circle of fifths and ultimately down the path of changing key relations. By disavowing the hegemony of the “double return,” Schumann’s treatment of key bears closer resemblance to Baroque practice (e.g., ritornello form and fugal procedure) than Classical rondo practice. In this regard the fugatos of part 2 provide an appropriate complementary response: each forces us to hear familiar themes from new harmonic perspectives. Indeed, as we shall see, the fugatos generate these new perspectives by building on subdominant shadings established in previous movements.

The Double Fugatos and Plagal Commentaries In the first fugato (mm. 249–274) a fugal transformation of the Gypsy-styled main theme restores the key of G-Minor. By the end, however, the passage undercuts its tonal control via a plagal move: the final harmony, an emphatic G chord (m. 274), now functions not as tonic but as V of C-Minor, the subdominant of G-Minor and the relative key of E-flat Major. This transformation arises from the fugato’s unusual harmonic structure, which balances the opening tonic-dominant statements (mm. 249–256) with subdominant-tonic presentations (given in stretto, mm. 257–62).39 This harmonic symmetry paves the way for C-Minor to assume control, for a second subdominant statement now appears (mm. 263–266), the final entry of the fugato and its culminating moment: the subject occurs forte, the goal of the crescendo begun with the first subdominant statement; the entry is doubled, appearing in both the piano and violin; and all parts are active, making these bars the most expanded in register and the texturally thickest yet. The following episode confirms the transformation in tonal perspective by treating as its goal a G chord that functions not as tonic but as V of C-Minor (m. 274), a tonal capitulation that ultimately assures the primacy of E-flat Major. In all, the fugato provides a new slant on the earlier parallel form, using nontonic returns to undermine the control of G-Minor. The fugato’s plagal orientation also magnifies an aspect of the original Gypsy theme, which opened with an emphatic full measure of C-Minor harmony (m. 1). Thus the initial phrase and its subsequent repetitions (mm. 6, 14, and 18) consistently began with a weak subdominant upbeat, a flavoring enhanced by an internal tonicization of C-Minor (mm. 11–13). The first fugato reconfigures this plagal element by now collapsing G into C-Minor as V. Shay Loya has identified in Liszt’s style hongrois works the importance of various plagal elements: for instance, passages that generate ambivalence between I/V and IV/I functions, and the related phenomenon of resolving a perceived tonic into a subdominant tonality (“subdominant directionality”).40 Schumann also

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Analytical Approaches

linked subdominant elements with the style hongrois, at least in 1842. We have already seen strong subdominant elements in the finale of the A-Major quartet (an opening theme that modulates to IV, anticipating subsequent flat-side keys, and a coda that prevents final closure by turning an expected tonic into V of IV). In the piano quintet Schumann expands this practice, not just within the finale but throughout the entire work. As we shall see, each movement begins with a theme that highlights IV at the outset. Moreover in the second and third movements episodes in the subdominant minor also bring passages saturated with elements of Hungarian Gypsy music (mm. 92–109 in the slow movement, mm. 123–196 in the scherzo). Because the slow movement also foreshadows the “subdominant directionality” of the finale’s first fugato, I would like to focus attention there.41 Cast as a sectional rondo form (ABACABA), the slow movement evokes Schubert’s Divertissement à l’Hongroise by presenting a funeral march in C-Minor, the very key that in Schumann’s finale definitively subverts G-Minor. Unlike Schubert’s theme, however, Schumann’s march stresses the subdominant: outlining the chord in its melody, the theme opens with a full measure of F-Minor harmony over a C pedal, a coloring reinforced in the theme’s middle section by a tonicization of F-Minor (mm. 11–18). The following episode in C-Major (B, mm. 30–61) recalls these plagal shadings, presenting a lyrical theme ˆ 4ˆ lower-voice motion. over a C pedal with 1All of these “flat” elements receive full expression in the central F-Minor episode (C, mm. 92–109), a turbulent Agitato inflected with the style hongrois; it features numerous syncopated sforzandi accents, pervasive triplets, staccato articulation, and rapid sixteenth-note string licks. Especially striking is how this subdominant episode comments on the movement’s initial subdominant emphasis. The agitated Gypsy theme traces the march’s opening gesture, punning its pitches by transforming their harmonic function from iv-i in C-Minor to i-V in F-Minor (Examples 13.4a–b). This metamorphosis will have telling consequences. Example 13.4. Schumann, Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44, comparison of themes in the slow movement. (a) Opening of the funeral march theme (mm. 1–4). (b) Opening of the Agitato Gypsy theme (mm. 92–94).

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Illustrating the powerful effect of this Gypsy-flavored Agitato, subsequent materials return in ways that bear its influence. The march tune recurs considerably altered (mm. 110–132), no longer solemn but restless and impassioned. Adopting frenzied tremolos and sforzandi accents the passage continues the triplet eighths of the Agitato while also interjecting fragments of the Gypsy theme into the second bar of each phrase (mm. 111, 115, 119, etc.). The triplet eighths continue into the reprise of B, also straining its original sense of repose (mm. 133–164); moreover this episode returns transposed down a fifth, a tonal shift from C-Major into the major subdominant, F-Major. Last, the final reprise of the march theme (mm. 165–193) begins not in C-Minor but the subdominant key of F-Minor, and while a shift to C-Minor prevents closure in F (mm. 171–173), the subsequent tonicization of (and cadence within) F-Minor now sounds like a tonal return (mm. 177–180). Most strikingly F-Minor coloring thwarts tonal closure at the movement’s end. The theme’s final phrase is unable to cadence, stuck momentarily on a first-inversion C tonic chord (mm. 185–186). Suddenly a dynamic surge brings an emphatic dissonance foreign to C-Minor but diatonic to F-Minor: over a G pedal, the notes D-flat–F pass into C-Major harmony (mm. 187–188). The effect is remarkable: a Phrygian inflection of C-Minor, combined with the resolution into major tonic harmony, suggests a possible function of C as V of F-Minor, a “subdominant directionality” presaged by the Agitato’s pun on the march tune. And while the following bars stabilize the C-Major triad, this Phrygian approach prevents full closure in the tonic key. As a result the last cadence of the movement is the earlier one, tonicizing F-Minor (m. 180). In all, the growing presence of the subdominant drastically alters conventional procedures in this movement. Given the Agitato’s influence in this regard, the movement seems to link the style hongrois once again with experimental harmonic practice. By preventing full closure the subdominant colorings also leave boundaries open, suggesting the possibility of further exploration. Ultimately the movement’s transformation of tonic function becomes spun once again by the finale’s first fugato: reorienting the plagal thrust now toward C-Minor (the relative key of E-flat Major), the fugato cinches the tonal capitulation of G-Minor and hence facilitates the tonal autonomy of E-flat Major. In the finale the second fugato continues the pattern of evolving perspectives, most obviously by transforming the first movement’s main theme into a fugal subject, while also subduing the finale’s main theme into an accompanying countersubject (mm. 319–371). Critics have pointed out various motivic elements that prepare this cyclic return.42 But also striking is how this second fugato builds on, while also surpassing, a web of plagal associations built across the entire quintet. Like the main themes of the second and final movements, the theme—in its original appearance at the outset of the quintet—also highlights the subdominant (Example 13.5a): its opening leap to D-flat turns the initial tonic into V7 of IV. Yet instead of destabilizing E-flat, here the subdominant

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inflection prolongs it, with motion from I to IV balanced by motion from viio7 to I, the whole underpinned by an E-flat pedal. Significantly this opening progression and tonic pedal characterize all of the E-flat themes in the quintet, including the scherzo’s main theme (Examples 13.5b–c, though V7 replaces viio7). Example 13.5. Schumann, Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44, comparison of harmonic structure in the E-flat Major themes. (a) First movement, opening theme (mm. 1–3). (b) Third movement, opening scherzo theme (mm. 1–8). (c) Last movement, idea “B” (mm. 22–25).

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Nevertheless, given the tonal procedures of the slow movement and the finale’s first fugato, it is surely significant that the theme ultimately expunges this subdominant inflection by transposing it down a fourth (Example 13.6a). That is, in a symbolic protection of the tonal sovereignty of E-flat Major the theme rids itself of the subdominant inflection that ultimately compromises the tonal control of its third-related keys: C-Minor in the slow movement and G-Minor in the finale’s first fugato. In so doing the theme’s opening gesture now becomes a dominant-prolonging idea. This functional transformation first occurs in the opening movement, when the main theme returns eight bars later in varied form (mm. 17–25; see Example 13.6b). But the real tour de force occurs much later, with the theme’s contrapuntal transformation in the finale’s second fugato, a passage that, unlike the first fugato, stresses only tonic-dominant entries of the subject. In the fugato’s climactic conclusion (mm. 355–371) a sixteen-bar dominant pedal underpins eight statements of the subject’s head motive in augmentation (Example 13.6c); each occurs two bars later and a fourth higher than the last (thereby emphasizing each scale degree of E-flat Major), with the entire series framed by statements beginning on B-flat (mm. 355 and 369). Indeed as evidence of its capacity to define (versus destabilize) the E-flat tonic, the final gesture delivers the authentic cadence ending the fugato. In this way the fugato does not merely cinch E-flat by reviving the theme that originally established this key, it responds to previous moments by definitively conquering the plagal tendency (and its association with the style hongrois) that brought about the downfall of its third-related keys, C-Minor and G-Minor. Thus the fugato brings us to a new summit, affording a fresh vantage point on earlier harmonic processes. Example 13.6. Schumann, Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44, reincarnations of the first movement’s main theme: expunging the subdominant inflection. (a) Abstracted transformation. (b) First movement, varied return of the main theme (mm. 17–21). (c) Finale, climactic conclusion of the second fugato (mm. 355–371; reduction).

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Analytical Approaches

Example 13.6. Continued

Schumann as Gypsy Wanderer In his 1858 biography of Schumann, Wasielewski held out generous praise for the quintet, extolling its “rich power and originality of invention.” Though supplying no particulars, nor commenting on the Hungarian Gypsy aspects of the work, he nevertheless captured its continuously shifting perspectives with a metaphor by now familiar to us: “In a sense this work offers an image of a wanderer, who—pulled by the rich, blooming scenery extending across the mountain slope—climbs higher and higher to enjoy from the summit a final sweeping view while contemplating the path left behind.”43 The marriage diary of Robert and Clara Schumann provides a striking parallel experience, one that Wasielewski could not have known. During a vacation in August 1842 (just weeks before composing the quintet) Robert and Clara made several hikes in the Erzgebirge region of Bohemia. On August 11 Schumann writes, “We climbed the Schlossberg. It was very straining for Clara, also myself. The reward at the top is great, however.” On the following day they climbed the Milischauer, a “beautiful giant mountain” whose ascent made for a day that, Schumann writes, “will remain unforgettable.” He continues:

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The ascent took place in already great heat and caused me much trouble. . . . Finally it was climbed. At the top one is addressed by lovely commemorative sayings [Gedenksprüche], and the comfortable facilities offer protection from storms and heat. And then the marvelous panorama! One should even see beyond Prague. But on mountains I don’t like to slurp over particulars, but prefer to let the whole thing wash over me. Then one feels God’s beautiful world. I would have liked to remain up there easily for a week.

As for the Schlossberg, climbed the previous day, Schumann notes that it “lies at one’s feet like a mole-hill.” The higher perspective afforded by the Milischauer then becomes a metaphor for artistic development, for Schumann continues: “So it is also in life and in art. Only when one is on greater mountains does one perceive the smallness of those previously conquered, and if only yesterday one imagined themselves to stand high, then on the following day one feels how with effort and exertion they can reach even higher.” Taking his leave late in the day, Schumann returns these accomplishments (both figurative and literal) to a distant realm, one that initiates through its departure a state of infinite romantic yearning: “Towards 5 o’clock we left the beautiful giant mountain, which bid us farewell for a long time and finally shrouded itself (again) in total darkness.”44 The piano quintet seems to enact this idea of artistic journeying. Composed just weeks after their Bohemian trip, the quintet manipulates tonal and thematic returns so that they continually yield new perspectives. But perhaps the climbing metaphor could be extended further, such that Schumann himself becomes a heroic Gypsy wanderer, building upon past accomplishments by continually seeking out new possibilities from the style hongrois. Indeed at the outset of their Bohemian trip a chance encounter with an acquaintance from Zwickau reminded Schumann of his youth: “Lovely hopes were placed on me [then], as I again noticed from the conversation with him; they have only just been partly fulfilled. It again occurred to me how much there remains for me to do.”45 With the composition that followed Schumann reached a new artistic summit, creating what Wasielewski called “undoubtedly the most significant chamber artwork” since those of Beethoven, an opinion echoed by many others.46 But if the E-flat Major Piano Quintet is the “beautiful giant” Milischauer, the A-Major String Quartet is surely the Schlossberg, and the F-sharp Minor Piano Sonata a smaller mountain yet.47 For it seems clear that the quintet took as its point of departure the finales of these earlier works. And suffusing each of these pieces is the style hongrois, which seems to have opened for Schumann new avenues of formal experimentation. Thus Schumann must also be counted as one who uncovered new expressive effects from this musical idiom.

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notes A portion of this essay was presented as a paper entitled “The style hongrois and Schumann’s Formal Experiments of 1842” at the 2007 national meeting of the American Musicological Society, among other venues. I would like to thank Jonathan Bellman for his input on an earlier version of this conference paper. 1. Bellman, The Style hongrois in the Music of Western Europe. A summary of many ideas in this book appears in Bellman, “The Hungarian Gypsies.” More recent large-scale studies include Loya, “The Verbunkos Idiom”; Mayes, “Domesticating the Foreign.” For a lexicon of the style hongrois, see Bellman, The Style hongrois, 93–130. Loya has expanded Bellman’s lexicon, considering additional structural and harmonic features, especially in relation to Liszt’s style hongrois practices (141–52). For more on the emergence of this style, see Bellman, The Style hongrois, 47–68; and Mayes, “Domesticating the Foreign,” chapters 2–3. 2. As Bellman notes, “[In the nineteenth century,] the style hongrois ceased being merely a superficial reference to the musical style of Gypsy entertainers, and instead became an evocation of something much more immediate and powerful, with powerful extra-musical associations” (The Style hongrois, 65; see also 130). 3. For an overview of Gypsy stereotypes propagated in literature and culture of the time, see ibid., 69–92. 4. Ibid., 144–46. 5. Ibid., 161. For a chronological list of Schubert’s music using the style hongrois, see 225–26. 6. John Daverio, “Brahms, the Schumann Circle, and the Style hongrois,” in Crossing Paths, 213–14, 239–40. For a discussion of performative aspects of Brahms’s music in the Hungarian Gypsy idiom, see Bellman, “Performing Brahms.” Bellman has also drawn attention to the “Zigeunertanz,” the third movement in Schumann’s Sonata for the Young, Op. 118, no. 3, citing its decorative triplets as a trait of the style hongrois (The Style hongrois, 116, 118). Roe-Min Kok shows that unlike several other movement titles in the Op. 118 sonatas that Schumann adjusted under pressure from his publisher Julius Schuberth, “Zigeunertanz” was unchanged from the beginning (“Negotiating Children’s Music,” 111). 7. Most of these works date from what Anthony Newcomb has described as Schumann’s Hausmusik stage of piano composition (1848 on), when interest in accessible, amateur music composition became a particular focus; see Newcomb, “Schumann and the Marketplace,” 270–75. The style hongrois permeates these works to varying degrees, with a more biting Hungarianism found in the Opp. 109 and 118 pieces, and a more restrained character in the others. 8. Österreichische National-Encyklopädie (Vienna, 1837), 6:247, cited in Bellman, The Style hongrois, 78–79. 9. See Bellman, The Style hongrois, 90–92. As George Sand stated in the concluding pages of her novel La Dernière Aldini, “Gaily let us dispense with wealth, when we have it, let us accept poverty without worry, if it comes; let us keep above all our liberty, enjoy life all the same, and long live the Gypsy!” (cited in Bellman, 69).

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10. Shay Loya has recently made a similar argument for Liszt, suggesting that the style hongrois—what he terms the “verbunkos idiom”—influenced Liszt’s modernist treatment of tonality and form. By arguing for this “transcultural” influence (a cue he takes from Mary Louise Pratt), Loya counters postcolonial arguments that insist on viewing European constructions of otherness solely as “orientalist appropriations” furthering imperial ideologies. For his critique of this argument, and of the critical reception of Bellman’s work, see Loya, “The Verbunkos Idiom,” 113–22. 11. On this latter point, see Bellman, The Style hongrois, 85–86. 12. Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, review of May 15, 1843, in R. Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften (1914), 2:132. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Denn daß durch die ganze Sinfonie ein eigentümlicher Volkston weht, ist schon mehrfach ausgesprochen worden,—ein ganz phantasieloser Mensch nur wird dies nicht merken. Das besondere reizende Kolorit ist es denn auch, das, wie der Franz Schubertschen Sinfonie, so der Mendelssohnschen eine besondere Stelle in der Sinfonieliteratur sichert. Das herkömmliche Instrumentalpathos, die gewohnte massenhafte Breite trifft man in ihr nicht, nichts, was etwa wie ein Überbieten Beethovens aussähe, sie nähert sich vielmehr, und hauptsächlich im Charakter, jener Schubertschen, mit dem Unterschiede, daß, während uns die letzere eher ein wildes, zigeunerisches Volkstreiben ahnen läßt, uns die Mendelssohns unter italienischen Himmel versetzt. Darin liegt zugleich ausgesprochen, daß der jüngeren ein anmutig gesitteter Charakter innewohnt, und daß sie uns weniger fremdartig anspricht, indes wir freilich der Schubertschen wieder andere Vorzüge, namentlich den reicherer Erfindungskraft zusprechen müssen.

On the style hongrois aspects of Schubert’s symphony, see Bellman, The Style hongrois, 105, 120, 167–68, 170. For Schumann’s 1840 review of the symphony, see Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, review of March 10, 1840, in R. Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften (1914), 1:459–64. Schumann also recognized the Hungarian Gypsy idiom in Weber. In an October 1842 review of Loewe’s oratorio, Johann Huß, Schumann expressed disappointment in the gypsy chorus opening part 2, arguing, “Euphony and charm should never be lacking, even when gypsies are the singers. Weber knew how to do this better in Preciosa” (2:103). For a discussion of style hongrois elements in Weber’s Preciosa, see Bellman, The Style hongrois, 138–44, 163. 13. R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 1:363–64. Zilia war gestern unwohl und verdrießlich; ich kann ihr doch jetzt wenigstens die schönsten Grobheiten von der Welt sagen, ohne mißverstanden zu werden, was freilich w[e]nig klingt. Das Ungarische Divertissement von Franz Schubert schien sie etwas aufzuräumen. Wenn ich etwas in Worten ausdrücken dürfte, so könnt’ ich wohl sagen: daß ich ordentlich auf einer ungarischen Bauernhochzeit mir war u. viel mit den Füßen stampfte; aber wenn ich das Sehnen, diese Wehmuth, diesen Gesang u. all die schönen Gestalten, die wie im Tanze vorbeifliegen, zeigen soll, so erlaß mir das, mein Florestan! Eusebius meinte: die Pedalstelle am Schluß wäre der Segen des Priesters—dann ziehen sie fort, mit Tambourins, lärmend u. immer fort u. immer fort in die ferne Weite—immer fort.

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Tambourines are more accurately associated with the Turkish style in Western European art music, a style that shared ties with the style hongrois but that nevertheless remained distinct from it (Bellman, The Style hongrois, 11–16). Nevertheless composers frequently mixed the two in a kind of pan-exotic referencing (47–68). For example, in Schumann’s 1840 choral piece, “Zigeunerleben,” the score indicates an ad libitum role for the triangle and tambourine. 14. On this latter point, see Bellman, The Style hongrois, 75–79. 15. For work detailing the literary and sociological aspects of the wanderer trope in the nineteenth century, including the ability to intuit meaning incapable of being expressed in words, see Gramit, “Schubert’s Wanderers.” On Schumann’s responsiveness to the notion of romantic distance in Schubert and in general, see Hoeckner, “Schumann and Romantic Distance.” 16. Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, reviews of May 3, 1842, June 8, 1838, and May 17, 1842, in R. Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften (1914), 2:71, 1:333, and 2:74. Die Gattung [Quartett] an sich eine so edle ist, eine höhere Bildung der Kämpfenden vorausetzt, dann, da in ihr ein bedenklicher Stillstand eingetreten war. Es ist noch nicht lange her . . . daß Haydn, Mozart und noch Einer lebten, die Quartetten geschrieben: sollten solche Väter so wenig würdige Enkel hinterlassen, diese gar nichts von jenen gelernt haben? Man sieht es, er [Hirschbach] will ein Dichter genannt sein, er möchte sich überall der stereotypen Form entziehen; Beethovens letzte Quartette gelten ihm erst als Anfänge einer neuen poetischen Ära, in dieser will er fortwirken.

17. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 253; J. H. Brown, “ ‘A Higher Echo,’” 99–114. 18. On parallel forms in Schumann’s earlier piano sonatas and Fantasie, see Roesner, “Schumann’s ‘Parallel’ Forms”; Rosen, Sonata Forms, 369, 380–83. 19. Kohlhase, Die Kammermusik Robert Schumanns, 1:160; Newcomb, “Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies,” 171. 20. Newcomb, “Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies,” 172–73; Kohlhase, Die Kammermusik Robert Schumanns, 1:161. 21. Indeed as Hermann Abert and Kohlhase have both noted, the episode— labeled “Quasi Trio” by Schumann—strongly recalls the gavotte from the sixth French Suite of J. S. Bach. Abert, Robert Schumann (Berlin: Harmonie Verlagsgesellschaft für Literatur und Kunst, 1903), 90; Kohlhase, Die Kammermusik Robert Schumanns, 1:70. 22. Earlier parallel forms include the finale of the F-sharp Minor Sonata, Op. 11 (which I also discuss below), the original finale of the G-Minor Sonata, Op. post., and the outer movements of the Concert sans orchestra, Op. 14. See Rosen, Sonata Forms, 369, 380–83; Roesner, “Schumann’s ‘Parallel’ Forms,” 265–78. Roesner also argues for parallel structures in the outer movements of the Fantasie, Op. 17, although the parallel repetition in each restates material found not at but near the opening of the movement. The finale represents the one instance in which the parallel repetition begins at a different pitch level: V of D-Minor

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instead of V of C-Minor, a transposed pitch level that nevertheless is closer to the tonic than that found in the finale of Op. 41, no. 3. For a more detailed harmonic analysis of the A-Major quartet finale, see J. H. Brown, “‘A Higher Echo of the Past,’” 106–14. 23. Newcomb, “Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies,” 174. At the same time Schumann also honored his heritage in the spring of 1842 by studying the string quartets of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. See R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 3:210, 212–13. 24. Rosen, Sonata Forms, 369, 381–82; Roesner, “Studies in Schumann Manuscripts,” 341–42. Joan Chissell similarly remarks that “the subject matter generally is episodically strung together,” an element making “Schumann’s inexperience with larger forms . . . all too apparent” (Schumann: Piano Music, 28). Schumann’s contemporaries echoed such remarks. In an 1836 review of the sonata Moscheles commented that although the work is “rich in images,” with each segment displaying “its own colors and contours,” they nonetheless “return unchanged” and “don’t blend themselves into a whole” (“Pianoforte-Sonata,” 137: “Das Ganze ist bilderreich, in so fern jede Periode bestimmte Farben und Contouren hat, aber sie kehren unverändert zu keiner höheren Blühe entfaltet wieder, und verschmelzen sich nicht zu einem Ganzen.”). Similarly Liszt commented on the “grand originality” of the work yet noted a “particular uncertainty of the whole,” where the overall effect is “often broken and disturbed.” The principal musical idea, though “complete in itself,” was “not sufficient for understanding all of the details” (review of Schumann’s piano works, Opp. 5, 11, and 14, Gazette musicale, November 12, 1837, reprinted in Burger, Robert Schumann, 160). Das Finale der Sonate Schumann’s ist von großer Originalität. Nichtsdestowenigen und trotzdem die Logik in der Entwickelung der Hauptidee nicht fehlt und der Schluß von hinreißender Wärme ist, wird die allgemeine Wirkung dieses Satzes oft unterbrochen und gestört. Vielleicht ist es die Länge der Entwicklung, die eine gewisse Unsicherheit über das Ganze breitet. Vielleicht auch, daß es nothwendig gewesen wäre den poetischen Gedanken besonders anzugeben. Für das Verständnis aller Einzelheiten ist nacht unserer Ansicht der ausschließlich musikalische Gedanke, so vollständig er an sich ist, nicht ausreichend.

Critics have also targeted the block-like construction of the A-Major quartet finale, suggesting that the movement evokes musical types not typical of the sonata cycle. For example, A. E. F. Dickinson has called it a “loose-limbed movement” that resembles a “well-organized ballet movement rather than a finale” (“The Chamber Music,” 149–50). John Gardner suggests that the movement behaves “as relaxedly sectional as any Strauss waltz” (“The Chamber Music,” 208). And John Daverio has likened its “mosaic-like succession of miniature character portraits” to the “manner of the Novelletten” (Robert Schumann, 253). For alternative sonata-form readings, see Roesner, “Studies in Schumann Manuscripts,” 329–41; Moßburger, Poetische Harmonik, 174–84. The differences in interpretation between Rosen, Roesner, and Moßburger indicate the less than straightforward nature of this refrain-based parallel form.

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25. Moßburger, Poetische Harmonik, 209, 437; Schumann, Reisetagebuch III (1830), cited in Moßburger, 437. Moßburger also provides a quantitative analysis of key relations and tonic presence in this movement (172–84). Schumann recognized his breaks from tradition in this work. In a letter of September 7, 1838, to Hermann Hirschbach he cited the “numerous and new forms” found in works like his Op. 11 sonata, ones supposedly arising not from a regulated, intellectual approach to composition but from a freer, more intuitive one: “I do not think about form any more while composing; I just do it.” Briefe: Neue Folge 1904), 137: “Sie kennen nichts von meinen größeren Compositionen, Sonaten (unter Florestan und Eusebs [sic] Namen erschienen), da, glaube ich (wenn Sie es nicht schon an den kleineren sehen), würden Sie sehen, wie viele und neue Formen darin. An Form denk ich nicht mehr beim Componiren; ich mach’s eben.” 26. Although Schubert’s Grand Duo finale does not reveal a parallel form like that of Schumann’s Op. 11, I have discussed elsewhere Schubert’s influence on Schumann in this regard. See J. H. Brown, “Higher Echoes of the Past in the Finale of Schumann’s 1842 Piano Quartet,” 534–42. 27. Letter of September 5, 1839, to Heinrich Dorn, in Briefe: Neue Folge (1904), 170. On the biographical significance of the sonata, see for example Moßburger, Poetische Harmonik, 211–15; Daverio, Robert Schumann, 143–46. 28. See Roesner, “Studies in Schumann Manuscripts,” 74–76, 337–41. Although not applying any biographical interpretation here to Op. 11, Roesner elsewhere discusses other works that delay tonal arrival for similar reasons. See Roesner, “Schumann’s Parallel Forms,” 273–78 (on the Op. 17 Fantasie), and “Tonal Strategy (on the C-Major Symphony, Op. 61).” 29. Letter to Clara of February 13, 1836, in R. Schumann, Jugendbriefe, 268; letter of March 1, 1836, to Karl August Kahhert, in R. Schumann, Briefe: Neue Folge (1904), 68, cited and translated in Daverio, Robert Schumann, 147–18. 30. See letter begun New Year’s Eve, 1837, segment dated January 5, 1838, in R. and C. Schumann, Briefwechsel, 1:73; also available in English as The Complete Correspondence of Clara and Robert Schumann, 1:76. In his review of the Grand Duo sonata Schumann remarks not on the finale’s Gypsy-inflected theme, nor its resemblance to his own sonata theme, but rather on the “symphonic” aspects of the work, including its “reminiscences” of Beethoven in the second and fourth movements; for Schumann, the latter evoked the finale of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, probably because of its furious dance-like character and opening pedal on V of A (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, review of June 5, 1838, in Gesammelte Schriften, 1:328–30). 31. See the letter to Joseph Fischof of April 3, 1838 (Briefe: Neue Folge [1904], 118); the diary entry of June 15, 1838 (Tagebücher, 2:58); and letter to Clara of June 13, 1839 (Briefwechsel, 2:571; The Complete Correspondence, 2:246). These quartet attempts also coincided with Schumann’s attendance at string quartet rehearsals led by Ferdinand David, concertmaster of the Gewandhaus orchestra, and with a series of articles by Schumann on the string quartet published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1838. On this see Daverio, “‘Beautiful and Abstruse Conversations,’” 213–15.

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32. Letter to Koßmaly of September 1, 1842, Briefe: Neue Folge (1904), 220. Koßmaly’s essay appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1844; for a translation, see Koßmaly, “On Robert Schumann’s Piano Compositions (1844).” On the 1840 edition, see Harwood, “Robert Schumann’s Sonata in F-Sharp Minor,” 17. For Clara’s response, see R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 2:189: “Es mochte wohl seit Jahren das erste Mal wieder sein, daß ich Roberts Fis moll Sonata spielte—sie entzückte mich von Neuem! Ich halte sie für eines der großartigsten Werke Roberts.” 33. Letter to Carl Koßmaly of May 5, 1843, Briefe: Neue Folge (1904), 227: “Ja gerade in den Versuchen liegen oft die meisten Keime der Zukunft.” For a summary of the reception history that posits a stylistic divide between these periods, see J. H. Brown, “Higher Echoes of the Past in the Finale of Schumann’s 1842 Piano Quartet,” 511–15, and “‘A Higher Echo of the Past,’” 42–64. 34. My thanks to Walter Frisch for pointing out this resemblance. 35. For instance, see Chissell, Schumann, 162–63; Dickinson, “The Chamber Music,” 153–54; Gardner,“The Chamber Music,” 233–38; Kohlhase, Die Kammermusik Robert Schumanns, 1:162–66; Reininghaus, “Zwischen Historismus und Poesie,” 43; Talbot, The Finale, 96–98. Commentators have also asserted other so-called sonataform elements: mm. 43–77 (C) as the secondary theme group, and mm. 86–136 as a “development” section. However, critics too often fail to qualify their reading by detailing the surprising departures from sonata-rondo practice; Talbot and especially Kohlhase are notable exceptions in this regard; see also J. H. Brown, “ ‘A Higher Echo of the Past,’” 118–21. 36. For a more detailed analysis than what follows here, see J. H. Brown, “ ‘A Higher Echo of the Past,’” 115–48. 37. Bellman has drawn my attention to a “cognate” of this theme found in another piano quintet: the finale of Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F-Minor, Op. 34. There the main theme also begins on the half bar, suffuses itself with anapest rhythms, and features a detached articulation (here staccato), simple rhythms (though Brahms incorporates ornamental figures as well), and much repetition of ideas. With its many repeated notes in sixteenth-note rhythms, the accompaniment also evokes cimbalom playing (Bellman, personal communication). 38. Kohlhase, Die Kammermusik Robert Schumanns, 2:94. 39. Harmonically symmetrical fugatos apparently provoked Schumann’s interest in 1842, for the finale of the Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 47, also opens with such a fugato, one with critical ramifications as well. On this, see J. H. Brown, “Higher Echoes of the Past in the Finale of Schumann’s 1842 Piano Quartet,” 525–33. 40. For an overview of these practices, see Loya, “The Verbunkos Idiom,” 146–49. According to Loya, Liszt’s “grand Hungarian project” began in the 1840s after several concert tours in Hungary (one in late 1839 and two in 1846) and culminated during his Weimar period (1848–61) with the composition of the Hungarian Rhapsodies and other large-scale works. Thus it is difficult to assert Liszt’s influence on Schumann’s plagal practices in the 1842 quintet. Liszt’s well-known remark in 1848 that the quintet was too “Leipzigerisch” itself suggests a lack of identification on his part. On this episode, see Daverio, Robert Schumann, 391–92.

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41. The slow movement also provides the basis for much of the finale’s materials, as Kohlhase has shown (Die Kammermusik Robert Schumanns, 1:71, and “Robert Schumanns Klavierquintett,” 167). 42. See, for example, Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis: Chamber Music, 154; Kohlhase, Die Kammermusik Robert Schumanns, 2:96; Daverio, Robert Schumann, 257–58. 43. Wasielewski, Robert Schumann, 177: Birgt es seine so reiche Kraft und Originalität der Erfindung, einen so kräftigen und kühnen. . . . So gewährt dies Werk gleichsam das Bild eines Wanderers, der durch die blühend reiche, am Bergeshange sich ausbreitende Landschaft dahinziehend, immer höher steigt, um sich auf der Spitze des Gipfels umschweifenden Blickes noch einmal der Betrachtung des zurückgelegten Weges zu erfreuen.

44. R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 2:238: Am Donnerstag früh stiegen wir auf d. Schloßberg. Es strengte Cl.[ara] sehr an, auch mich. Die Belohnung oben aber ist groß. . . . Freitag d. 12te wird mir unvergeßlich bleiben, wir fuhren nach d. Milischauer . . . Die Besteigung geschah in bereits großer Sonnenhitze u. machte mir viel zu schaffen. . . . Endlich war er erstiegen. Hübsche Gedenksprüche reden oben einen an und die behagliche Einrichtung schützt gegen Sturm u. Hitze. Und dann das herrliche Panorama! Man soll sogar über Prag hinaussehen. Doch schlürfe ich auf Bergen nicht sowohl das Einzelne, als lasse lieber das Ganze auf mich einströmen. Da fühlt man denn Gottes schöne Welt. Ich hätte gleich eine Woche lang oben bleiben mögen. Der Schloßberg liegt wie ein Maulwurfhügel zu den Füßen. So ist’s auch im Leben u. in der Kunst. Die Kleinheit der überwundenen Berge sieht man erst auf größeren, und wähnte man sich schon gestern hoch stehen, so fühlt man am folgenden Tag, wie man mit Mühe u. Anstrengung noch höher gelangen kann. G[e]gen 5 Uhr verließen wir den schönen Bergriesen, der uns noch lange nachwinkte und zuletzt sich (wieder) ganz in’s Dunkel einhüllte.

Schumann used mountain imagery as a metaphor for artistic progress in his criticism as well. For example, an 1836 review of W. Schüler’s piano concerto criticizes the composer’s desire to return to “older simplicity” in the rondo movement. Schumann comments, “We are not friends of backward steps. . . . Thus let us go forward, friends! We want to look back from the summit, not before” (Gesammelte Schriften [1914], 2:312: “Vom Rondo gesteht der Komponist in einem der Partitur beigelegten Briefe, daß er damit einen Rückschritt zur alten Simplizität bezwecke. . . . Wir sind keine Freunde von Rückschritten. . . . Also vorwärts, Freunde! Auf dem Gipfel wollen wir uns umsehen—eher nicht.”). 45. R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 2:235: “Schöne Hoffnungen, wie ich wieder aus dem Gespräch mit ihm merkte, wurden auf mich gesetzt; sie sind nur erst zum Theil erfüllt; es fiel mir wieder ein, wie viel mir noch zu thun übrig bleibt.” After leaving Zwickau in the fall of 1828 to continue studies in Leipzig, Schumann—himself a young, melancholy “wanderer” newly separated from home—captured this new stage of life and the alternative perspectives it brought with similar mountain

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imagery: “I left on the 21st. With a melancholy heart, I took leave of the whole precious home with a long, silent look down from Mosler mountain; the autumnal morning was shining like a mild day in spring, and the illuminated world was tenderly and cheerfully smiling on my beautiful, lonely wandering” (1:126–27, cited and translated in Hoeckner, “Schumann and Romantic Distance,” 83). 46. Wasielewski, Robert Schumann, 177: “Es ist ohne Bedenken sogar als das bedeutendste, seit Beethoven’s Erscheinung entstandene Kunstwerk im Kammerstyl zu bezeichnen.” 47. Though not linking Op. 11 with the 1842 works, Wasielewski also resorted to mountain imagery to describe the sonata’s shortcomings: despite its “laborious struggle with form,” the sonata nevertheless formed “a kind of mountain border in Schumann’s productive activity, whose narrow passes had to be forcibly broken through to prepare an orderly bed for the stream of ideas” (ibid., 108). For additional critical reactions to the sonata’s shortcomings, see note 24.

14 Intermediate States of Key in Schumann David Kopp

Among mid-nineteenth-century composers Schumann is perhaps less celebrated for harmonic imagination, particularly the advanced use of chromaticism, than, in their respective times, Schubert, Liszt, or Wagner. Much recent theoretical work on this repertory tends to bypass Schumann. Yet Schumann certainly wrote some harmonically adventurous music, and his harmonic practice and use of chromaticism are in fact consistent with what I have called midnineteenth-century common-tone tonality.1 But his musical innovations with respect to harmony may best be associated with other factors. Charles Rosen, in The Romantic Generation, has written insightfully about Schumann in this regard. Though Rosen does not address Schumann’s harmonic practice in a dedicated discussion, the topic surfaces throughout the book, with a common thread: more than for any other composer, Rosen often remarks on Schumann’s distinctive and unconventional use of key. Keys may appear in unusual formal placements or interact with form in novel ways; they may overlap, or tonal boundaries may be indistinct; there may be what is commonly called “ambiguity” of key, with the presence of multiple tonic possibilities of varying degrees of clarity and stability. It appears from Rosen’s examples that Schumann was tinkering with, undermining, and expanding the boundaries of the perceived role of key in defining musical coherence and meaning. In all of these discussions it is assumed that we know exactly what is meant by key. Key is such a familiar concept that it may seem silly to question it. But is there a universal and invariant idea of what constitutes a key, and the ways key identification impacts the significance of musical content? Is our twenty-first-century sense of key akin to that of the mid-nineteenth century? Like so many basic theoretical concepts whose meaning we may feel that we intuitively grasp, the notion of key is in fact a complex one that has developed significantly over time, involving a number of constituent ideas that are not always compatible.2 A quick survey of familiar theorists either whose work was widely read in Schumann’s time (Gottfried Weber) or who were actively engaged with Schumann’s music (A. B. Marx) or who were known to Schumann and whose ideas in later publications reflect the

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music of the time (Moritz Hauptmann and Simon Sechter) will reveal a variety of takes on what makes a key. Weber, the widely influential theorist whose Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst first appeared in 1817, frames his initial discussion of key in terms of perception: “When our ear perceives a succession of tones and harmonies, it naturally endeavors to find amidst this multiplicity and variety . . . a relationship to a common central point.” Thus for Weber the essential aspect of the key is the referential, organizing power of the tonic, which the mind naturally seeks out. “The ear everywhere longs to perceive some tone as a principal and central tone, some harmony as a principal harmony, around which the others revolve . . . such a predominance of a principal harmony over the others, we call a KEY (Tonart).” Weber mentions both the tonic note and the tonic chord, although the ensuing discussion focuses almost entirely on the harmonic aspect, identifying the tonic note as the principal chord’s fundamental rather than as the focal tone of the diatonic scale. While he observes that the dominants supply character and the full complement of notes to the key, it is the tonic triad in its relationships to all of the other chords that defines it. Weber’s discussion of the diatonic scale directly follows: it is the “scale of the key,” its representation but not its source.3 Adolph Bernhard Marx’s treatise Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, first appearing in 1837, takes an opposite tack. There is in fact no dedicated discussion or definition of what makes a key in the entire treatise. Rather, during an introductory discussion focusing on the scale, Marx quietly brings in the term as a synonym: “The sharps or flats incident to the scale or key in which a composition has been written, are merely placed at the beginning of the piece . . . and are called the signature of a scale or key.” In a subsequent discussion of keys he notes the fifth-relation of scales; identifies tonic, dominant, and subdominant as the first, fifth, and fourth scale degrees; and directly associates the relationship of these tones with the corresponding relationships of keys—completely bypassing the level of chords. Moreover, tonic and dominant cadential functions are generated prior to the introduction of chords, not from the scale, but from “tonemasses” comprised of all of the tones belonging to the corresponding harmonies drawn from the first two and a half octaves of the overtone series. In time Marx does introduce the three principal triads, but significantly he associates only the tonic triad with the home key. His subdominant and dominant triads represent their own keys; they are “domesticated” in the new key in their subservient roles to the tonic but never fully shed their tonic identities: “We can consider these two chords as reminiscences of F and G major, or as borrowed from those keys.”4 Thus while for both Marx and Weber the tonic taken in relation to the other principal triads is the sole determinant of key identity, Marx goes further. His conception of key identity is particularly fluid: even in the perfect authentic cadence, which later theorists would understand as necessary to define the key, Marx sees the simultaneous presence of multiple keys.

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Simon Sechter, the diatonically oriented Viennese theorist known for teaching counterpoint to the chromatically adventurous Schubert and Bruckner, provides another contrast. His principal treatise, Die Grundsätze der musikalischen Komposition, published in 1853–54, completely forgoes any mention whatsoever of key. Sechter’s harmonic entity is exclusively the scale (Tonleiter). The diatonic triads and seventh chords are harmonies of the scale; their roots are identified as scale steps (Stufen), whether with Arabic or Roman numerals. While Sechter identifies principal triads of the scale on the first, fifth, and fourth scale degrees, only the degrees themselves receive the names tonic, dominant, and subdominant; the chords are merely associated with them (e.g., der Dreiklang der Tonica). Scale names (C dur, A moll) stand for key names; modulation, as with Marx, occurs between scales.5 Thus Sechter’s theory of harmony operates effectively, and remarkably, without any explicit notion of key whatsoever. For Schumann’s Leipzig colleague Moritz Hauptmann, though, the notion of key was very important—perhaps the central, defining concept of his entire theory. His treatise Die Natur der Harmonik und der Metrik was published in 1853, but its harmonic outlook is conservative, attuned to the music of previous decades. The theory has been well documented in a number of recent publications, so I will just summarize relevant points here.6 Like Weber, Hauptmann posits the tonic triad at the center of the key. But Hauptmann goes well beyond Weber to require not only the additional presence of the dominant and subdominant triads, but also the tonic’s individual relationships to them, and theirs to it, to generate the key. The traditional scale is completely absent in his discussion; Hauptmann represents the diatonic set as the union of the three principal triads arranged in thirds, shown for example as F–a–C–e–G–b–D for C-Major. He defines the tones of the key not as degrees of the scale, but in their roles within the principal triads, possessing root-, third-, and fifth-quality. Key identity is thus conveyed by the interrelationship of the three principal triads as well as by the perceived status of the constituent notes within all chords. This manner of thinking spawns a mode of harmonic analysis that incorporates not only directed motion between chord roots but also the linkage of chords by qualitative change of common tones, a signal aspect of mid-nineteenth-century style. Hauptmann’s key is thus a dynamic and complex system whose configuration imbues every note with meaning in relation to its local context. It exists within an idealized, hierarchic formulation of tonal relations, in which the dialectic process is repeated on three clearly defined levels: first, among the three elements of the triad to produce the triad; second, among the three principal triads to produce the key; third, among the key and those of its upper and lower dominants, and further extensions, to produce key relationships. I am not suggesting that Hauptmann was the first to define key as more than merely the product of the tonic and/or the scale. But the contrast of his formulation with those of his well-known and influential predecessors is striking.7

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Present-day conceptions of key still vary, but most integrate aspects of all of these theories.8 Schumann, interestingly, admired Marx’s work as “the best of its type,” perhaps for its practical, nondoctrinaire approach,9 although I will suggest below that aspects of Schumann’s harmonic practice have greater affinity with Marx’s conception of key over the others. Because all of the treatises mentioned here are oriented toward either composition or speculative theory rather than analysis, the question of what it means to be “in” a key is not always directly addressed. However, we can draw reasonable inferences based on the definitions above. One thing is clear: key may seem on first thought to be a straightforward enough concept, but at least in the mid-nineteenth century there was hardly a consensus on its source or nature, and by extension on what, if anything, would constitute ambiguity of key.

“Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” Schumann’s song “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” which opens Dichterliebe, is perhaps the locus classicus for study of tonal ambiguity in his music. Rosen addresses this issue in the song in sensitive analytic detail early on in The Romantic Generation, and Deborah Stein, in her recent analysis anthology, Engaging Music, chooses the song to exemplify tonal ambiguity for all music.10 The song’s indeterminacy of key has inspired a long tradition of commentary since its own time, and I will not attempt to recount the entire history here.11 Neither will I try to provide an analysis of the complete musical and textual content of the song, but will instead concentrate on the aspect of key, which then may be taken in relation to other factors. Here is a brief summary of “Monat Mai” from this perspective: Two identical sung passages are framed by three similar oscillating progressions in the piano—a prelude, interlude, and postlude—each articulating an apparent iv6-V7 Phrygian half cadence in Fs Minor, with leading tone Es prominently left unresolved in the voice (Example 14.1). Between these progressions the two vocal passages each state a ii6-V7-I perfect authentic cadence in A-Major twice, followed by sequential tonicizations of B-Minor and D-Major. Both the Fs Minor and A-Major progressions begin with identical material: a B-Minor 63 chord with a Cs–B appoggiatura figure in the upper part. Stein recounts the traditional explanation of harmonic ambiguity apparent on the surface: in response to shifts of meaning and reference in the text, the song seems to alternate keys, from Fs Minor to A-Major and back, but Fs Minor, in its formal position at the beginning and end, is never established because its tonic never appears, whereas A-Major, in the middle, is established cadentially but never conclusively in the larger context of the song. In this analysis, because each tonic supplants the other in turn, ambiguity exists at the level of the song as a whole. What is the key of the piece? Do we, in fact, hear the song with Weber’s ear, seeking out first one tonic, then

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another, recognizing the Mehrdeutigkeit (multiple meaning) of the B-Minor 63, and ending up unfulfilled, on a half cadence, with no clear answer?12 The dramatically and formally strong arrivals to D-Major at the ends of the vocal sections contribute to the mix. If this is a strong secondary tonal focus, to what is it subordinate, since its functional status is similar in both keys, as Stein’s analysis, among others, shows? Example 14.1. “Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai.”

Example 14.1. Continued

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Kofi Agawu has argued that analyses that promote the recognition of ambiguity in music are for the most part a misguided “retreat from theory.” He maintains that there must always be one preferred, reasoned interpretation for “concrete musical situations” that may only ostensibly be understood in multiple ways, either by identifying one option as correct or by situating multiple options at different hierarchical levels.13 Were we to follow Agawu for the sake of argument, defining the tonal structure of “Monat Mai” as ambiguous, and leaving it at that, would come up short; in his view either the question must be resolved in favor of one or the other tonics, or the two keys should be seen as occupying different structural tiers. Agawu praises the Schenkerian approach because to him it provides a technical, theorybased means of resolving the issue in such cases. Rosen, for his part, cites the Schenkerian analytic “insistence” on an A-Major tonic for all of “Monat Mai,” observing that “the contrast of F sharp minor and A major is only a surface opposition.”14 Nonetheless he observes that the usual formal and harmonic syntax of classical tonality is “turned on its head” here: the Cs dominant seventh chord at the end of the song becomes “the stable pivot around which everything turns,” while the root position A-Major triads of the vocal phrases become increasingly unstable contextually—an apparent paradox, given A-Major as tonic. Looking to Schenkerian analyses for clarification reveals a less monolithic approach than one might imagine. Schenker’s own analysis covers only the first eight bars, up to the initial cadence on A-Major. Its purpose, as an example of an Ursatz that begins on a Stufe other than the tonic, transcends the piece. Interpreting the Cs Major-Minor seventh sonority as a tonic variant, Schenker shows a descending Urlinie from Cs to tonic A paired with a variant Bassbrechung beginning on the third (Cs) rather than the root. He treats the distinctive Es as merely a local dissonance moving to Fs in the B-Minor 63 within the dominant prolongation (Example 14.2a). Fs Minor is thus completely subsumed within A-Major, fulfilling Agawu’s first condition by defining one correct alternative. Although we do not have Schenker’s word on the rest of the song, it is reasonable to assume that he would generalize this local structure to the whole. On the other hand, two well-known analyses in the North American Schenkerian tradition, by Arthur Komar and David Neumeyer, come to much different conclusions, both aberrant as strict Schenkerian theory, as David Ferris has shown.15 Komar proposes an unusual neighbor-chord configuration for the song’s background, in which an A-Major tonic is flanked by dependent Cs seventh chords of linear derivation, “occup[ying] the external locations usually assigned to the tonic triad, while the latter is relegated to the middle position”—thus the likely source of Rosen’s paradoxical statement (Example 14.2b).16 Notably, Komar analyzes the song’s distinctive Es as functioning on a much higher level than Schenker’s, directly prolonging the tonic’s EN as a chromatic upper neighbor. Komar’s analysis, then, would seem to approach Agawu’s second condition by relegating the two keys to different hierarchical levels, although like Schenker Komar assumes that the only true key is A-Major; the rest derives from voice leading.

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Example 14.2. Schenkerian approaches to analyzing “Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai.” (a) Schenker, bars 1–8. (b) Komar, entire song. (c) Neumeyer, entire song plus beginning of next song. (d) Meeùs, bars 1–8.

Neumeyer’s contrasting solution is to treat “Monat Mai” as a structural prelude, without its own Ursatz, formally linked to the normative structure of the next song in the cycle, “Aus meinen Tränen sprießen,” which is clearly in A-Major.17 Within “Monat Mai” itself, though, Neumeyer admits to a “bias toward one key orientation,” namely Fs Minor, since favoring A-Major

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“would make the close simply gratuitous—or worse, not just ‘open,’ but inexplicable.” Accordingly, he presents the Cs Major-Minor seventh sonority as the sole structural focus of the first song, which connects directly, if unconventionally, as an anticipatory middleground prolongation to the A-Major background structure of the following song (Example 14.2c).18 In this way Neumeyer’s analysis, more than Komar’s, satisfies Agawu’s second condition by designating Fs Minor and A-Major as operating at different hierarchical levels. Moreover, the two analysts’ harmonic levels operate at different formal levels: Komar’s (apparent) Fs Minor and A-Major exist at the levels of the phrase and the song, whereas Neumeyer’s Fs Minor and A-Major exist at the levels of the song and the hypersong. There is some common ground, though. Komar begins his discussion of “Monat Mai” by presenting the typical arguments for primacy of both Fs Minor and A-Major, neither fully convincing. He then states, “For now, I shall assume A major as tonic, and proceed to examine some of the other aspects of the song.” Description of voice-leading details of the individual phrases leads to the deduction of the background structure just described. Later, discussing the overall “form” of the cycle, Komar states that “the Cs7 chord raises doubt about the key of the first song, and it is only the clarity of A major in Song 2, along with numerous similarities between Songs 1 and 2, which relieves that doubt.” Thus Komar provides no formal proof at all of an A-Major tonic: his voice-leading diagrams assume their tonic a priori, and his eventual justification is purely by association. Neumeyer addresses this issue by formally linking the two songs. Nonetheless he admits, “If obliged to do so, I would think of the first song, taken by itself, as in both fs and A—an indefinite harmonic relation of the third. (It has, however, been the argument here that the first song should not be taken by itself).” In fact Komar and Neumeyer, unlike Schenker, both informally recognize the presence of both keys in “Monat Mai” and take pains to state this—hardly the dogged insistence on A-Major cited by Rosen. Yet the need to demonstrate the requisite formal unity obliges them to reach beyond the song’s boundaries, as well as the boundaries of proper Schenkerian theory, for their solution. Of late their procedures have been challenged. Ferris has argued against the pervasive tendency in our time to seek organic unity in Schumann’s song cycles (through key schemes or song pairing, for example) as an essential part of their nature, when in fact the concept was largely absent from the aesthetic milieu in which they were written. Beate Perrey has championed the integrity of the Romantic fragment, bringing analytic evidence to bear. Both writers dismiss Komar’s and Neumeyer’s approaches as inappropriate to the music, advocating for analysis of “Monat Mai” as an individual work.19 Without engaging the larger issues they discuss here, but given all of the evidence, it seems preferable to me as well to analyze the harmonic content of “Monat Mai” without reference to the later songs in the

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cycle, and I agree with Ferris’s commonsense observation that each song sets an individual poem and thus constitutes an individual work. Further analysis of the song also done in Schenker’s name leads to a thoughtprovoking conclusion. Nicolas Meeùs’s more recent voice-leading analysis does not consider the Cs Major-Minor seventh chords to be dominant sevenths at all, but simply ornamental sonorities (“broderie”) dependent on the B-Minor 6 20 3 chords that surround them (Example 14.2d). This view is attuned to nineteenth-century chromatic practice, in which these sonorities may act as common-tone chords similar in nature to common-tone diminished seventh chords, with the root of the source chord serving as common tone.21 Consequently Meeùs sees the seventh chords on Cs as even less stable or structurally significant than the B-Minor 63 chords. With its dominant no longer in the air, Fs Minor thus disappears from the analysis. This interpretation is reinforced at the beginning of “Monat Mai” by repetition, since there are two complete neighbor progressions. (Meeùs does not address the two later occurrences of the progression, each of which successively suppresses one of the B-Minor chords.) Although this explanation of the progression’s structure challenges and supplements established views, it cannot fully explain the progression’s meaning on its own; Schumann’s age would hardly have disallowed the dominant-seventh quality of the chord on Cs, which has fascinated its audience ever since. Two recent studies of Schumann’s songs go perhaps furthest of all in their appraisal of key in “Monat Mai.” Perrey considers the nature and distribution of tonicizations in the song, detects no structure imparting coherence to the whole, and concludes, “In this sense, Song 1 is not constructed around a centre. It has no tonal ground.”22 Jon Finson finds that the harmonic effect of the music mirrors the irony of the text: “The tonal basis . . . is a sham: the home key, like love itself, does not exist.”23 Thus for Perrey and Finson all keys implied in the song are equally illusions. Details of analysis aside, this is a very intriguing conclusion, for if the music is not in a key, then where does it exist tonally? It is written in a familiar tonal style and is certainly coherent in tonal ways. I will propose one possible answer below. Let us further investigate the contextual and stylistic aspects of the end of the song. Given the music to that point, the potential multiple meaning of the postlude’s terminal Cs Major-Minor seventh chord bypasses the typical dominant seventh–augmented sixth “ambiguity,” in which B would tend either down to As, or, as Ax, up to Bs. Instead, in this context this chord may be heard with triple implication: along with the potential to resolve cadentially as V7 to Fs Minor, or to the B-Minor chord with root B as common tone (the only resolution actually heard), it could also proceed, if not resolve cadentially, as a common-tone harmony directly to A-Major with its root, Cs, as common tone (Figures 14.1a–d).

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Figure 14.1. Four possible resolutions for the major-minor seventh chord on Cs at the ends of the piano phrases of “Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai.”: (a) as V7 to Fs Minor; (b) as Ger+6 to Bs (C) Major; (c) with common tone B to B-Minor; (d) with common tone Cs to A-Major.

The effect would be that of the upper sharp mediant in a descending majorthird chromatic third relation, a common enough nineteenth-century progression.24 This resolution remains unrealized in the song but does bridge the transition into the next song, after an initial hint of Fs Minor (see Example 14.2c).25 Thus the prominent Es, not B, is multivalent in this chord: tending upward either as leading tone or as chromatic lower neighbor of Fs, or downward toward EN in A-Major, with Gs acting as leading tone, as in Komar’s analysis, but on a more local level.26 By the end of the song the half cadence of the introduction has acquired this expanded potential. This is not so much a matter of ambiguity, though, as it is of complexity. At this point the music belongs to both keys, as many of our analysts have observed despite their different perspectives, without either tonic being in command. Determining a “true” tonic would deny the full sense of the music, since both are present. Nor is the music “in” both keys alternately, with conflicting, competing tonics tugging away at our ears, as Weber might have it. There is little disjunct quality to the harmony, and the final chord projects stability even if not providing a sense of completion. Both interpretations, either of one single tonic or of two coexisting tonics, impose an aspect of choice onto the perception of key, whereas the impression at the end of the song, as Rosen notes, is ironically one of equilibrium. Neumeyer stated that if he were to consider “Monat Mai” structurally independent of the next song, he “would think of [it] . . . as in both fs and A—an indefinite harmonic relation of the third,” further commenting that nineteenth-century composers would occasionally “mingle” the relative modes as they did the parallel modes.27 His remark does not give us much fuel for analysis, though; how would one go about specifying an indefinite harmonic relation in order to analyze mingled modes? Rosen, favoring A-Major, makes a stronger claim, observing that “Schumann treats the relative minor here and elsewhere as a variant form of the tonic, using it rather for a change of mode and not of tonality.”28

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This represents a potential resolution of the issue, favoring one key without denying the other. But how would this assertion be supported formally as theory? We can readily envision the type of “variant” relationship that Rosen describes obtaining between parallel modes: mode mixture, in which the tonic scale degree or key-note remains constant while elements of the scale change, with one mode as ground-state. We may also be comfortable going beyond the “variant” concept to model instances of nineteenth-century harmonic style involving freer modal interpenetration, assuming a unified mode with common tonic pitch class, incorporating both major and minor diatonic sets and variable scale degrees, without needing to distinguish the modes or define dependence relations in which certain scale degrees or chords are considered versions of others—more along the lines of Neumeyer’s mingling. How natural it might seem, then, to extend an analogy to the relative-mode relationship for Schumann’s song, among other works. However, imagining a similar relationship for relative modes turns out to be altogether different. Whereas parallel modes share the same tonics and roots of primary triads, relative modes’ tonics and primary triads do not correspond at all. How could pitch class Fs, for example, be a variant tonic of A? Moreover, how could a Cs dominant seventh chord, containing leading tone Es, be a variant of a dominant seventh with root EN? From the Weber-Hauptmann perspective this makes very little sense because keys are defined fundamentally by their tonics and their constituent chords. Perhaps the Marx-Sechter perspective, which appealed more to Schumann, could shed light here. What relative modes do share, from our point of view, is the same scale. For Marx key and scale were synonymous; for Sechter the scale was the key. Thus focusing on the shared scale might better explain the harmonic situation of “Monat Mai.” We could imagine the scale as the background for the song, either with a primary tonic and “variant” with shifted tonic, or with a variable tonic, neither with precedence over the other. However, this idea does not fully correlate with the nineteenth-century perspective. Notwithstanding the primacy of the scale in determining the key, each scale is still associated with and named after a single tonic, from which scale degrees and principal triads are determined. While relative-mode scales could conceivably be associated by key signature, there is no mechanism by which to associate primary chords, which are linked to scale degrees. A change of tonic would occasion a complete change of scale name and scale degree associations. Moreover, the shared-scale approach itself turns out not to be as straightforward as we might assume. For in the opinion of theorists in the mid-nineteenth century, the basic form of the minor scale was the harmonic minor, not our “natural” minor. Weber, Hauptmann, Marx, and Sechter all concur on this point.29 Both Marx and Hauptmann devote discussions to proving that the harmonic minor scale is primary, not the version with lower seventh degree, as might be assumed from key signature or minor-mode principal triads. Sechter,

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who lists all three familiar versions of the minor scale, presents the harmonic minor first, even calling it the “natural” form. The justification for all four theorists is the primacy of the major dominant triad, harmony taking precedence even for the scale-oriented theories. Thus from all of their perspectives relative modes do not share a basic scale. We can infer that for the mid-nineteenth century, and most likely for Schumann, the distinctive Es5 in “Monat Mai” does not represent a variant or raised scale degree of Fs Minor, but rather its natural seventh degree. Es is exactly what distinguishes Fs Minor’s diatonic set and scale from those of A-Major. Following the logic of all of the theories cited above, Fs Minor and A-Major, having different scales as well as different tonics, must be different keys, not variants of the same key, despite their close relation. This would imply that Schumann is exploiting their difference, not their similarity, in his song.30 Accordingly, the terminal Es undercuts a sense of A-Major as the sole tonic, or a unary mixed mode as the harmonic basis, for “Monat Mai.” How else might one conceive of key in this piece? Historically, Weber’s illustrations of Mehrdeutigkeit convey a sense of the presence of multiple keys, but go no further than providing coincident alternate chord labels. Using a more contemporary model, one might imagine a simple double-tonic solution, with Fs Minor and A-Major forming a key-complex.31 This approach, however, would trace how different tonics organize different parts of this short song rather than focusing on their simultaneous presence and, more important, the process of their shifting relationship as the song progresses. We are accustomed to thinking of keys as definite states of harmony in which a tonic actively organizes pitch-class relations. From Weber to our own time, for example, theorists have characteristically represented keys as nodes within harmonic networks or Tonnetze, showing motion from key to key as directed moves from one node to another. But what if we were to think of the path from one node to another not as a binary switch from one tonic state to another, but as a continuum? Nodes would represent the clear, unmitigated predominance of a single pitch-class as tonic. Along the continuum would be intermediate—not ambiguous—states in which more than one pitch class exerts some tonic force. Thus music could, at times, be understood to be at some specified position between keys rather than in them. This could satisfy Agawu’s demand for a definite, theory-backed analytical observation, without resorting either to choosing between alternatives or to hierarchical differentiation. This approach also has some affinity with the conception of key advanced by Schumann’s preferred theorist, A. B. Marx. Remember that even within diatonic progressions Marx perceived the simultaneous presence of multiple keys whose tonics are the roots of their constituent chords, in active relation to the tonic of the prevailing key. Motion from key to key would, in his view, involve a reorientation of the relative prominence of keys in relation to the shift in tonics. Thus Marx’s key resembles less a fixed state than a combination of qualities in proportion. For the approach

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suggested here—certainly a conceptual leap past Marx—it would pose a definite challenge, well beyond the scope of this essay, to determine exactly where on the continuum specific harmonic situations would lie between keys, according to the proportional strength of related tonics. One might begin by imagining a minimal range of intermediate states—closer to one tonic or the other, for example, or at a midpoint between the two. The process of key orientation in “Monat Mai” could, for a start, be explained something like this. The music begins by most strongly implying Fs Minor through a Phrygian cadence, although the progression’s oscillation, along with the absence of resolution, also frames the B-Minor 63 to cadentially imply both Fs Minor (as iv6) and A-Major (as ii6); thus the music is between the keys but closer to Fs Minor. With the latter potential of the B-Minor 63 realized at bars 5–6, the pendulum moves strongly toward A-Major during most of the vocal section, then back somewhat toward Fs Minor at the sequential arrival to D-Major at bar 12, which in its similar functional status exists between the two keys, not to mention that the next step in the B-Minor–D-Major sequence would be F s Minor. In the next iteration of the piano’s music, the initial B-Minor 63 is suppressed in favor of elision of the D-Major triad at bar 12. This, however, retains the opening bass note and thus preserves some of the neighbor-chord effect on the ensuing Cs seventh chord. The harmonic process repeats for the second stanza, although the pendulum moves somewhat less this time toward either extreme, given the background of the first time around. In the postlude the original relationship is reversed; the B-Minor 63 chord is now surrounded (for good) by the Cs seventh chord, which gains substance and implies both keys in the many ways described above. By the end of the postlude, then, the music has come to an intermediate, stable, and balanced point between the two keys. Seen in this way, the tonal basis of the song is not Finson’s “sham” for lack of a clear tonic, nor is it indefinite ambiguity or conflict requiring resolution, but rather a dynamic process shaping the course of the music in interaction with other factors.

String Quartet, Op. 41, no. 1, Movement I Another classic example of indeterminacy of key in Schumann is the String Quartet, Op. 41, no. 1 in A-Minor, particularly its outer movements. An analysis of the quartet that focuses on this aspect of the music is a highlight of Linda Roesner’s recent essay on Schumann’s chamber music.32 Roesner speaks of “tonal duality” rather than ambiguity, noting that Schumann himself referred to the first movement as being in two keys. The movement begins with a slow introduction plainly in A-Minor, followed by the main part completely in F-Major. A minor returns as tonic only later in the quartet. Hence from a formal

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standpoint one might conclude that most of the first movement is “apparently in the wrong key.”33 If this were indeed the case, the situation would be even more serious than that, because the music would also be in the wrong mode. But while the music of the F-Major section has harmonically striking content, neither the tonic nor the mode is seriously subverted; the music does not imply tonal instability while it is in F-Major, as “wrong key” music often does; nor does it tend noticeably toward A-Minor. At this level, although harmony sits unconventionally within the form, there is no apparent tonal ambiguity: each key commands its domain and is right in its place. However, within the body of the movement, particularly in the exposition, Schumann does play with the perception of related keys—tonic and dominant—by exploring the area between them. Roesner describes the exposition’s unusual formal and tonal structure: its first theme area is a self-contained “‘song form’ . . . with a beginning in the tonic, a modulatory middle, and an ending in the tonic. It comes to an abrupt halt. . . . The rest of the exposition is built on . . . permutation, variation, and logical extension . . . of the main thematic idea,” which give “the impression of a lengthy transition. . . . The second tonal area is not reached until the very end of the exposition. . . . Schumann in effect negates the Classical tonal hierarchy by greatly subordinating the second (contrasting) tonal area; he denies it its own theme.”34 Roesner’s analysis is on the mark, but it raises a question: If the second tonal area is not reached until the very end of the exposition, what is happening up to that point? Is the music firmly in tonic F-Major until then, switching over at the last moment? Or might it be making its way in some manner from F-Major toward C-Major? Analysis supports the latter explanation. The “abrupt halt” Roesner mentions, a perfect authentic cadence in F-Major, occurs at bar 75. Following is the bridge, a short four-entry fugato episode based on the transformation of a motive from the theme. The first three entries—tonic F-Major in the viola, dominant C-Major in the cello, and tonic F-Major again in the second violin—imply a fourth entrance in C-Major and an orderly transition to the key of the dominant. Unexpectedly the first violin enters instead in subdominant Bb Major at bar 88, tipping the tonal balance back toward the tonic key. A short transitional passage leads to a half cadence on a neutral-sounding G-Major triad at bar 99, giving the impression of another abrupt halt. Schumann scrupulously avoids FN, and thus the impetus of a dominant seventh, in this passage: Fs in the preceding diminished seventh chord leads directly to G, while a connecting scalar fragment in the viola in bar 100 traverses a scale segment from E down to G, missing only FN. Following the half cadence at bar 101 is a conspicuously punctuated C-Major 63 chord at the beginning of what would be, formally, the second theme area. The chord sounds as if it is initiating or continuing cadential motion. In this harmonic and formal context the G-Major 35 –C-Major 63 progression of bars 99–101

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bar: 99

101

105 109

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113

117

121

125

Figure 14.2. String Quartet, Op. 41 no. 1, I: harmonic process in the first part of the exposition’s atypical second theme area.

could equally represent V/V-V6 on its way to F-Major or V-I6 on its way to C-Major. The music is, unambiguously, right between the keys at this point. This sense is only confirmed by the result: a pair of sequences that confirm neither key but gradually orient toward C-Major (see Figure 14.2). The first sequence tonicizes first D (major 53) at bar 109, then E (minor 63) at bar 117, with the soprano ascending chromatically from C. The next harmonic step would be F, but E-Minor arrives in first inversion. This attenuates any drive toward F, while avoiding E in the bass, which could associate with the C-Major 63 of bar 101, as well as in the melody, instead signaling change by moving E to an inner voice. At this point the process reverses direction, descending to a D-Minor 63 at bar 121, and finally, picking up where it left off at bar 101, another C-Major 63 at bar 125. This time the chord does initiate extended cadential motion toward C-Major, which finally arrives at bar 137, just in time to close the exposition with the movement’s main theme. Roesner concludes, from the point of view of the Classical formal process, that the absence of new material at this juncture represents a significant devaluation of the second theme area. One might construe this event differently, and more positively, however, viewing it as the end result of the essential and gradual harmonic process of transformation of F-Major into C-Major. The principal theme, brought to be in the key of the tonic, now fully inhabits the key of the dominant.

Kreisleriana, Op. 16, no. 4 Rosen’s crowning example of tonal “ambiguity” in Schumann’s music is the fourth piece from Kreisleriana, which, he observes, plays a pivotal role in the

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tonal scheme of the entire work.35 The music of the fourth piece seems to oscillate unpredictably and unsystematically between Bb Major and G-Minor, two keys prevalent in several pieces both before and after this one, without ever settling on either key, even at the end. The music moves through a series of unsettled two-bar phrases with occasional, intensifying one-bar phrase pairs. There are three sections to the piece: the first (bars 1–11) slow and mostly sequential; the second (bars 12–23) faster and more cadential; and the third (bars 24–27) a Example 14.3. Kreisleriana, no. 4.

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Example 14.3. Continued

highly truncated version of the first. (Example 14.3 shows the score.) Virtually every phrase of the first section projects its own tonal center. Rosen observes that the opening phrase “is clearly in Bb major,” followed by repetitions in Eb Major and C-Minor; then, “with the freedom of an improvisation,” the music returns through F-Minor to the key of Bb, at which point Schumann “tries the experiment of imposing a radical harmonic ambiguity on the sense of tonality” (to be discussed below). What Rosen does not mention, though, is that none of these “keys” is really established. All of the phrases begin and end inconclusively on different inversions of the same dominant chord; after each phrase the music always moves “deceptively” to another dominant chord, which initiates a similar, quasi-sequential process. For each of the first four phrases the chords appear in different pairs of inversions: V43–V7/BbM; V7–V43/EbM; V42–V65/Cm; viio42–viio7/Fm (Figure 14.3). This adds to the inconclusive, wandering impression of the music. Having begun, as Rosen describes it, “in the middle of a phrase,” and moving quasi-sequentially by phrase with no apparent focus, these opening measures project little evidence of tonic, although the local tonal structure is definite: a series of descending fifths with the interpolation of a relative mode shift. The tonal impression so far is one of indeterminacy, not ambiguity. Beginning with the F-Minor passage the phrases are bounded by diminished seventh chords and move measure by measure, clearly intensifying. The next

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B b : V43

bar:

1

V7 E b : V7

V43

2

4

c: V42

V65

5

f: viiº42

viiº7

6

Figure 14.3. Kreisleriana, Op. 16, no. 4: dominant/diminished seventh chord inversions at the beginnings and ends of the first four phrases.

step repeats an inversion pair for the first time, with viio42–viio7 now in Bb Minor. (Rosen does not mention the changed mode, not yet a complete return to the original.) The sequential pattern then breaks and harmonic rhythm stops as the music ornaments this last dominant, transformed by bar 8 into V7/Bb Major, recalling the first phrase. Only here does Bb Major emerge as the probable tonic for the music to this point, although it still has not been firmly established. Moreover, while all of the phrases so far may appear cadential (they are “in keys” to Rosen), each phrase in fact prolongs a single dominant chord by means of filled-in arpeggiation in both its melodic and bass lines. (Figure 14.4 shows this process for bars 1–2.) In their slow, motivically and harmonically rich elaboration, however, these phrases come to represent more than just single chords. At the same time, they embody less than full-fledged keys. Schumann’s phrases thus exist harmonically between the two levels. The quasi-sequential construction of the opening eight measures also lends itself to this intermediate state. Here, then, we may imagine another nineteenth-century continuum: a softening of the hierarchical boundaries between chord and key. Rather than thinking habitually in terms of Weber/Hauptmann-style structured dependence relationships, we might again take as a point of departure Marx’s less rigid conceptualization, in which chords and scales do not inhabit different formal levels and key identity need not be cadentially determined.36 By bar 8 the pattern produced by the series of dominants takes shape. Following the initial move to the subdominant side of the opening chord in bar 3, the relative mode shift from Eb Major to C-Minor orients harmony to the predominant side, whence it proceeds by descending fifth back to its starting point (Figure 14.5). At this point the music recapitulates the complete opening phrase, now more clearly in Bb Major than at the beginning. But the

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B b : V43

V7

Figure 14.4. Kreisleriana, Op. 16, no. 4: dominant seventh chord prolongation in the first phrase, bars 1–2.

progression into the following phrase, with melodic Eb moving stepwise down to D as it did in bar 2, now leads elsewhere. From V7/Bb Major, harmony now proceeds not to V7/Eb Major as before, but rather to V65/G-Minor. In Hauptmannian terms, the melodic D at the end of bar 9, originally heard as third against root in the bass, is now heard as root against third in the bass. This initiates the radical moment identified by Rosen: the bass continues alone, stating the by now familiar two-measure melody in G-Minor, but instead of repeating scale degree 4 at the end (here C as seventh of V 7), the line proceeds down a step at bar 11 to a final Bb. With no harmonization to provide context, the last three notes of the line, Eb–C–Bb, could be equally interpreted as the bass of vii o43–i6 continuing in G-Minor, or of V43–I returning to Bb Major. With clear affinities to both tonics but no clear indication of which tonic to favor or what should come next, the music at bar 11 rests mysteriously, but not ambiguously, in between the two keys. The second section begins in bar 12 with a series of four similar two-measure phrases, each beginning on a root position Bb Major triad, but with

b.4

b.6

b.5

b.2 Figure 14.5. Kreisleriana, Op. 16, no. 4: progression of roots along the circle of fifths in the first four phrases of the opening.

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g: V bar: 11

13

B b: I 15

g: V43

g: V

17

19

Figure 14.6. Kreisleriana, Op. 16, no. 4: chords at phrase beginnings and endings in the first four phrases of the second section.

three different endings, while the music again oscillates between Bb Major and G-Minor. Each phrase also begins and ends on a melodic D (Figure 14.6), the pitch class previously given prominence in bars 2 and 9. The first harmonic arrival is to a strong half cadence in G-Minor at bar 13, while the second arrival is to an imperfect authentic cadence in Bb Major at bar 15. This is the first authentic cadence in the piece, but not enough in this context to define a tonic. The third phrase, implying another arrival to Bb Major, moves deceptively from V65/Bb Major to V43/G-Minor at bar 17, and the fourth phrase continues in the same direction, repeating the strong half cadence in G-Minor at bar 19. This part of the section’s structure, two strong half cadences in the relative minor framing an authentic cadence in the relative major, recalls the structure of “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai.”37 However, the phrase-ending relative-minor dominants fare differently here: D-Major is followed in bars 13 and 17 by Bb Major. This is the chromatic mediant relationship by descending major third that was only implied in the song (see Figure 14.1d) and is realized in the transition to the next. While these are not strong cadential arrivals here, neither are they disjunct progressions. Both display the hallmark of the nineteenth-century chromatic mediant relation, the common tone in the soprano (circled in Figure 14.6). Moreover, Schumann brings out these common tones in two ways. First, they are the only connections between phrases in either of the outer voices that preserve register; all of the other junctures in the soprano and bass have signifi cant leaps of between a seventh and a tenth. Second (if the phrasing marks in the Breitkopf edition are to be trusted), Schumann asks the pianist to conspicuously connect the common Ds: in bar 13 by beginning and ending the slurs on the same note (which he indicates nowhere else in the section in either hand) and in bar 17 by the ritardando and literal tie of the note from one chord into the next. With the half cadences both implying G-Minor and

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bridging to Bb Major, the D-Major triads or dominant sevenths that end most of the phrases come to point between the two keys. Following the last half cadence on D-Major, in bar 19, the section continues with two one-measure phrases arriving to new goals, Eb Major and V/C-Minor, which function similarly in both Bb Major and G-Minor. The section ends at bar 23 with a third statement of the strong half cadence in G-Minor, again on a root position D-Major triad with D in the melody. The melodic D has by this point assumed heightened significance in its repeated appearances as the common tone between the Bb Major triad–dominant seventh (as third), G-Minor triad (as fifth), and D-Major triad–dominant seventh (as root), appearing prominently at crucial phrase beginnings and ends throughout the song. Its strongest local meaning, as root, comes to predominate in this section, with arrivals to D-Major at bars 13, 17, 19, and 23. Common tone D also appears in completely new contexts at the dramatic climax of the section. The two one-measure phrases, which intensify through increased rhythmic activity in the melody, harmonic motion to the sub- and predominant areas, and a chromatically rising melody, culminate in a tonicization of C-Minor into bar 22. Here D appears first as fifth of a G-Major triad, then is held into the next beat and doubled in the melody as a prominent dissonant ninth above bass C, while the inner voices, subito pianissimo, complete a G dominant seventh, resolving at the next beat to a C-Minor triad. This chord represents yet another intermediate state accessed by Schumann: dominant and tonic superimposed, sandwiched temporally between the dominant that precedes it and the tonic that follows.38 From the end of the second section into the third and final section there is a final chromatic-third juxtaposition of dominants: V/G-Minor melts into V43/Bflat Major, initiating a restatement of the first two phrases of the piece. These proceed as at the beginning, except that Schumann alters the very end of the second phrase. Originally ending on V43/Eb Major, it now extends through to a final cadence, with Eb Major reinterpreted as a Neapolitan harmony: N6-V leading to a clear final arrival on D-Major. Rosen expresses his strong preference for Schumann’s original ending, which contained only the open fifth D-A, over his revision, whose added Fs, in his opinion, erases the extraordinary sense of unresolved dissonance in the original. No matter which ending one prefers, the strong tonicization of D at the end of the piece is the culmination of the emphasis on common tone D, bringing an aura of conclusion to the piece. As member of both the Bb Major and G-Minor triads and tonic of neither, its associated triad and seventh chord potentially resolving to either, the pitch class uniquely defines and inhabits the area between the two keys. Schumann’s revision, recalling the earlier D-Major triads, projects an impression of half cadence whose implications are by now familiar. The original version, on the other hand, reinforces its ultimate position between the keys through the introduction of one more

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intermediate state, brought on by a true instance of tonal ambiguity. The open fifth on D, while more likely an incomplete dominant D-Major triad, could, especially in the presence of the Neapolitan sixth, also represent a D-Minor triad, the tonic of a key related in new ways to both Bb Major and G-Minor. Thus this ambiguity of meaning—major or minor—results in an intermediate functional state for the interval, between dominant and tonic: a much more fitting and compelling finish for a piece that has spent so much of its time “in between” in many ways. Indeed this analysis has identified four types of intermediary state in the fourth piece of Kreisleriana: harmony existing (1) between keys, (2) between hierarchical levels of chord and key, and (3) between functions of dominant and tonic, along with (4) the simultaneous presence of dominant and tonic chords. In the foregoing analyses I have attempted to develop some first steps toward an alternative mode of explanation for aspects of the role of key in Schumann’s harmonic practice that would otherwise be branded as ambiguous or problematic to specify. I have also tried to demonstrate that, in the nineteenth century, there was a wide variety of views on what key entails and how it organizes harmonic musical content—including some ideas, such as Marx’s, that still have the power to stimulate and broaden our own understanding. Thinking about key in new ways may help to provide fresh insight into some of the most ineffable moments in Schumann’s music.

notes 1. Kopp, Chromatic Transformations, 1–3. 2. The topic has lingered somewhat under the radar of contemporary historians of music theory. For example, the compendious Cambridge History of Western Music Theory does not treat key as a separate topic past its origins in the seventeenth century, although it comes up regularly in the context of other discussions of related concepts, such as mode, harmony, and, most relevantly, Brian Hyer’s essay on tonality. Hyer defines key, or more accurately “keyness,” as relations governing the pitch-class content of the scale “responsible for the orientation of the music toward the referential tonic.” Key, for Hyer a component concept of the much broader notion of tonality, is pervasive in the background of the essay but receives little direct treatment (“ Tonality,” 728). 3. Weber, Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst, 1:256, 261. 4. Marx, Die Grundsätze der musikalischen Komposition, 33, 48, 75, 98. 5. Sechter, Die Grundsätze der musikalischen Komposition, 1:11–12, 101. 6. Hauptmann, Die Natur der Harmonik und Metrik. Recent introductory discussions of his theory in English appear in, for example, Harrison, Harmonic Function, 218–34; Klumpenhouwer, “Dualist Tonal Space”; Kopp, Chromatic Transformations, 51–60.

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7. A more integrated nineteenth-century formulation appears a few years after Hauptmann in the 1861 treatise Vereinfachte Harmonielehre of Johann Christoph Lobe, who was active in Weimar and Leipzig. Lobe begins with the scale, but then observes that the triads on the first, fourth, and fifth degrees are together responsible for the sense (Gefühl) of the key (14–15). 8. Schenker’s model of tonal coherence appears to have more in common with the scale-oriented theories, particularly Sechter’s. However, its monotonal orientation minimizes key as a medium of harmonic change; Schenker dismissed most keys apart from a piece’s tonic as “illusory” (Schenker, Der Freie Satz, 5, 11). 9. Moßburger, Poetische Harmonik, 238. 10. Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 41–48; Stein, Engaging Music, 78–80. 11. David Ferris mentions an 1845 review of the song that addresses the structural and tonal indeterminacy. Ferris, Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis, 51. 12. For a discussion of varieties of Mehrdeutigkeit in Weber and other theorists of the time, along with an analytic application, see Saslaw and Walsh, “Musical Invariance.” 13. Agawu discusses an instance of possible dominant seventh as opposed to augmented sixth meaning in Schumann’s “Am leuchten Sommermorgen” from Dichterliebe, to demonstrate that contextually aware and stylistically informed analytical judgment naturally leads to determining “which of [the] competing meanings is the more plausible” (“Ambiguity in Tonal Music,” 95). 14. Rosen, Romantic Generation, 47. 15. Ferris, Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis, 25–58. 16. Komar, “The Music of Dichterliebe.” 17. Neumeyer, “Organic Structure.” 18. Furthermore, due to the restrictions of the Schenkerian model, in which lower level phenomena cannot connect over the boundaries of higher level events, the A-Major of the first song cannot relate to the A-Major of the second. Even within “Monat Mai” Neumeyer rejects the idea of A-Major as a hierarchically inferior neighbor to the Cs seventh sonority. 19. Ferris, Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis; Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe. 20. Meeùs, “Robert Schumann,” 31. 21. This type of common-tone resolution of the dominant seventh chord was documented by Hauptmann’s student Karl Friedrich Weitzmann, who outlined resolutions of the dominant seventh chord to all diatonic degrees of the major and minor scales supporting major or minor triads, and in one treatise systematically described potential resolutions of the dominant seventh to any of the twelve degrees of the chromatic scale. See Bowman and Weitzman [sic], Bowman’s-Weitzman’s Manual, 186; Weitzmann, Harmoniesystem, 40. 22. Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, 168. A critique of Perrey’s analysis appears in Yonatan Malin’s review of Schumann’s Dichterliebe in Music Theory Spectrum. 23. Finson, Robert Schumann, 63. 24. Weitzmann also documents this particular dominant-seventh resolution. For the classification of chromatic mediants, see Kopp, Chromatic Transformations, 8–17.

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25. This transition is analyzed briefly by Rosen (Romantic Generation, 53) and in more detail by Ferris (Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis, 54). 26. An extra aspect of dual meaning obtains in this chromatic third relationship, since the note’s harmonic meaning as Es within the Cs chord is at odds with its linear meaning as FN moving to EN within the tonic A-Major triad. This apparent paradox, probed by Hugo Riemann, is further discussed in Kopp, Chromatic Transformations, 80–82. In my view this is not an instance of ambiguity, since both meanings exist simultaneously and together lend the chromatic third relation its distinct quality. Ferris notes that Komar shows “the direct voice-leading relationship between the E s of the Cs harmony and the EN of the A major harmony, a progression that both defies the rule of strict counterpoint and also destroys our sense of harmonic syntax” (Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis, 52). Were this a piece in an earlier style, perhaps, but this progression is emblematic of nineteenth-century chromatic harmony, in which harmony and counterpoint do not always exist in the perfect equilibrium we associate with late eighteenth-century style. 27. Neumeyer, “Organic Structure,” 104. 28. Rosen, Romantic Generation, 47. 29. Weber, Versuch., 264–68; Hauptmann, Die Lehre, 17–19; Marx, Grundsätze, 149–50; Sechter, Grundsätze, 1:55–57. 30. For a direct theoretical implementation of the “variant” approach we may advance chronologically to 1893 and Hugo Riemann’s function theory as outlined in Vereinfachte Harmonielehre. In Riemann’s theory both Fs Minor and B-Minor could potentially be interpreted within A-Major as Parallelklänge, or relative chords, of tonic A-Major and subdominant D-Major, respectively. The Parallelklang of dominant E-Major is Cs Minor; the Cs Major-Minor seventh chord could be understood as a chromatic alteration. However, it is unclear that Riemann himself would have analyzed Schumann’s song in this manner. 31. The concept of double-tonic complex was introduced by Robert Bailey in Prelude and Transfiguration. 32. Roesner, “The Chamber Music,” 123–47. 33. This, for example, is Alan Walker’s conclusion, expressed in Robert Schumann, 202. 34. Roesner, “The Chamber Music,” 125. 35. Rosen, Romantic Generation, 673–77. 36. We do, of course, routinely identify one type of intermediate state between chord and key: tonicization, in which the root of a cadentially established chord becomes a local pitch center subsidiary to the more global tonic—still involving a hierarchical dependency. What is described here is a different quality of state, not involving a change of pitch center or a hierarchical relationship, but rather a gradation of identity situated somewhere between a progression of chords and a succession of keys. 37. As in “Monat Mai,” the D-Major–dominant seventh chord may be heard at the half cadence to imply G-Minor, but it also has the potential, especially given the

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context of the piece so far, to resolve as chromatic mediant by descending major third directly to Bb Major. 38. Other instances of this technique in Schumann include the retransition of Widmung, at bar 29, where the bass note of the tonic enters a beat early below the dominant, and at bar 128 in the first movement of the Fantasy, Op. 17, as analyzed by Rosen (Romantic Generation, 108).

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IV T W ENTIET H -C EN T URY I NTERPRE TAT I O N S

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15 Choreographing Schumann Wayne Heisler Jr.

Since the late nineteenth century, a defining tendency of Western theatrical dance—ballet, modern, postmodern, and contemporary—has been the choreography of music that was not originally composed for dancing. An innovation commonly attributed to the American dancer Isadora Duncan (who danced to scores by Schubert and Chopin, among others), the choreography of non-dance music continued in the first decades of the twentieth century by artists as distinctive as Michel Fokine and Vaslav Nijinsky, Loie Fuller and Ruth St. Denis, Léonide Massine and Martha Graham, to name but a few. Indeed dance and choreography in the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented multiplicity of technique, style (both choreographic and musical-choreographic), and aesthetics and employed diverse musics: Western art music (symphonies, chamber music, song) from across several centuries, jazz, popular (pop, rock, standards) and non-Western traditions. Still two points highlighted by the dance scholar Stephanie Jordan suggest unified, or at least overlapping goals in twentieth-century dance. First, that “the use of strong existing scores that had not been composed for ballet provided the new dance with depth and alternatives to the cliché rhythms and short dance and mime numbers of traditional ballet music,” and second, that although many twentieth-century choreographies do not eschew narrative, they “could also be plotless and therefore, in a fundamental sense, [be] ‘about’ . . . music.”1 Robert Schumann did not compose ballets, nor is he usually identified as one of the “serious” composers who has had a prominent place in dance. Yet dancers and choreographers of various stripes have turned to Schumann’s music over the past century. Ballets with music from across Schumann’s oeuvre include Carnaval (Fokine, 1910); Papillons (Fokine, 1912); Martha Graham’s 1926 Novelette (from Schumann’s Op. 21); Schumann Concerto (Bronislava Nijinska, 1951, to the Piano Concerto in A-Minor); Evening Dialogues (Jonathan Watts, 1974) and Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze” (George Balanchine, 1980), both choreographed to the Davidsbündlertänze; Hans van Manen’s Four Schumann Pieces (1975, to the String Quartet in A-Major, Op. 41, no. 3);

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Schumann Songs (Colleen Cavanaugh, 2004, to Frauenliebe und -leben); and Uwe Scholz’s Schumann’s 2nd Symphony (2006). Approaching choreography and dance from the perspective of a particular composer can reveal much about his or her reception at various times and places. As regards the “Schumann ballets,” one constant is references to and themes drawn from the composer’s biography. In Nijinska’s Schumann Concerto, created for the Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Schumann’s Romantic milieu and romantic trials are evoked by the Gothic backdrop—a “desolate cliff ” when the curtain goes up, “ancient ruins, overrun with moss and weeds and grass” in the third and final movement—as well as by the principal dancer-characters: a ballerina (Clara?) and her lover, who, at the beginning, “holds his arms out to her longingly” but, as the final curtain falls, “stands facing us with outstretched arms.” Schumann’s propensity for masking and exploring alter egos is the subtext of van Manen’s choreography of the String Quartet, Op. 41, no. 3 for Four Schumann Pieces. Premiered by the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, Four Schumann Pieces is less of a story ballet than a character study, in that “it shows a man who stands alone but who is surrounded by [ten] persons he would wish to know”—suggesting, perhaps, that the subject of this ballet is “pieces of Schumann.” Watts’s Evening Dialogues for the Joffrey City Center Ballet in New York resonates with Stephanie Jordan’s exploration of dialogues between dance and music, and particularly the notion that a ballet could be “ ‘about’ its music” (and, by extension, the music’s composer). Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze are “played throughout [Evening Dialogues] to inspire and accompany the dancers by vulnerable and susceptive young persons who listen and respond. They care deeply about what they hear and react with fervor to the intensity of concentration of the short, vivid dance pieces. Their dances express the joy and disappointments of love and youth,” thus bringing us back to Schumann as archetypal Romantic (and romantic).2 Despite the often fundamental differences among the choreographers and dancers who have taken a shine to Schumann, they consistently treat this composer’s biography as an essential ingredient in the experience of his scores. Indeed the relationship between man, composer, and music seems to be indissoluble, as is also shown by the reception of Schumann on the part of musicians, audiences, critics, biographers, musicologists, and theorists across history. One might say that dancing to Schumann’s music is to dance also with Schumann— that is, the biographical, imagined-to-be-real Schumann. In this essay I focus on two of the Schumann ballets: the German dancer and choreographer Heinrich Kröller’s Carnaval, premiered by the ballet of the Vienna Staatsoper on June 7, 1922, with orchestrations by Otto Singer,3 and George Balanchine’s Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze,” premiered by the New York City Ballet on June 19, 1980, with pianist Gordon Boelzner. In addition to the fact that these two ballets have in common music by Schumann originally conceived for solo piano, they are further united in their choice of scores that

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have implicit connections to the biography of their composer, who represented progressiveness and thereby served as something of a spiritual authority for Kröller’s and Balanchine’s respective artistic visions. Although Kröller (1880– 1930) was, and remains, virtually unknown outside of central Europe, he was a prominent dancer and choreographer in his time and served as ballet master at the opera houses of Munich (1917–30), Berlin (1919–22), and Vienna (1922– 27).4 As Reinhard Kapp has recounted, “the ‘anti-Romantic’ mood of the 1920s caused a breach in [Schumann] reception,”5 a situation that apparently did not, however, apply to the reception of Carnaval by dancers and choreographers. In the wake of Fokine’s Carnaval ballet, first performed in St. Petersburg in February 1910 and then by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in western Europe (beginning in Berlin in May 1910 and followed shortly thereafter by a run in Paris), several other companies took up Schumann’s score.6 In the second decade of the twentieth century Carnaval was part of the ballet repertory at the Stockholm Royal Opera, where Fokine took an appointment after leaving the Ballets Russes; Nijinsky choreographed Carnaval with Ravel’s orchestration of several numbers (“Préambule,” “Valse allemande,” “Paganini,” and “Marche des ‘Davidsbündler’ contre les Philistins”), a version that was premiered in London on March 2, 1914. Adolph Bolm’s Ballet Intime staged a reworked version of Carnaval in the late 19-teens and 1920s.7 Despite Diaghilev’s growing distaste for Romantic music, particularly of German vintage, and his acrimonious relationship with Fokine after the choreographer’s departure from his company, Carnaval (for which Diaghilev owned the rights) was revived by the Ballets Russes a number of times during the same period.8 Following the summer 1922 Viennese premiere of Kröller’s Carnaval, his version was staged in Munich (October 1922) and then again in Vienna during the 1928–29 season. Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze” was Balanchine’s last major choreography and is still revived occasionally. It is noteworthy that Balanchine’s attraction to Schumann predated the 1980 Davidbündlertänze ballet and was reportedly spurred on by Stravinsky,9 whose neoclassical scores form the foundation of the choreographer’s reputation as a formalist and modernist, particularly in musical circles. Balanchine’s (and Stravinsky’s) attention to the quintessentially Romantic Schumann can be attributed to the awakening of appreciation for the composer in the 1970s, evidenced by a proliferation of live performances and recordings, as well as academic, critical, and popular reception,10 but also in dance by Watts’s and van Manen’s ballets, outlined above. In some ways Kröller’s Carnaval and Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze are apples and oranges. A follower of Fokine, Kröller was at the height of his career in 1920s Europe, whereas Balanchine was a Russian American modernist who, by 1980, had become a living legend. Each used different compositions by Schumann, one orchestrated (Kröller) and one in its original piano instrumentation (Balanchine). And although Carnaval and the Davidsbündlertänze were

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composed in relatively close proximity (1834–35 and 1837, respectively) and are related in terms of extramusical inspiration (Schumann’s Davidsbund, the Society of David), they present differing perspectives: character studies of the composer’s allies in the former and compositions by Schumann’s alter egos, Florestan and Eusebius, in the latter.11 Differences aside, these compositions share some common ground. In Carnaval and the Davidsbündlertänze Schumann demonstrated once again his fondness and aptitude for miniatures, what Roland Barthes conceived as “intermezzi.”12 (In the lukewarm reviews of Kröller’s Carnaval, what one critic regarded as the questionable “artistic value” of Schumann’s score owed to its being a chain of miniatures.)13 Equally conspicuous is Schumann’s evocation of dancing in both works: Carnaval features what John Daverio termed “generic fluidity,”14 including dance music as well as character pieces, while in the Davidsbündlertänze Florestan and Eusebius explicitly present an entire collection of dances. This brings me back to my earlier point regarding the prominence of Schumann’s biography in ballets featuring his music. Schumann’s strong literary orientation—as a reader, writer, and musician—is undisputed. Especially suggestive for Schumann as a (posthumous) ballet composer of episodic works such as Carnaval and the Davidsbündlertänze is what Daverio (following Barthes) understood to be the “imagistic essence” of his music, which unfolds like “the discontinuous succession of frames in a film.”15 Or, in terms of a less anachronistic “imagistic” medium, a ballet, which at the very least is equally reliant on what is seen as on what is heard. In dance and dance music, wrote Schumann, art “is most sensuously and blatantly allied with life.”16 Clearly, when it came to Schumann’s music Kröller and Balanchine thought so, too. Summarizing Schumann reception, Kapp identified two Schumanns: Schumann “the regressive, conservative and conservationalist,” and Schumann “the progressive, ‘Schumann-our-contemporary.”17 As we shall see, both Kröller and Balanchine embraced the latter, “progressive” Schumann, despite their differences in technique, style, aesthetics, time, and place. Kröller’s Carnaval has not been performed for eight decades, but his scenario and choreographic notes have survived.18 I concentrate on his scenario, which takes up Schumann’s personal and artistic battle against the Philistines as an allegory to assert modern ballet in the context of the conservative culture of theatrical dance in interwar Vienna. As for Balanchine, Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze” was filmed in 1981 under the choreographer’s supervision. Indeed it might seem odd that Balanchine, a formalist-modernist who is virtually synonymous with dance neoclassicism, would punctuate his career with a ballet to a score that is saturated with extramusicality, and particularly ties to the life of its composer. As my interpretation suggests, however, Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze is something of a meta-ballet, in which the choreographer confronts extramusical and extrachoreographic narrative to

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explore the legacy of dance modernism—including his own—and ultimately allies it with Schumann’s legacy.

In Fokine’s Footsteps The motivation behind Heinrich Kröller’s 1922 appointment as ballet master in Vienna was defined by no less a figure than Richard Strauss, codirector (with conductor Franz Schalk) of the city’s Staatsoper and its dance company from 1919 to 1924, as “reform and modernization” of the ballet.19 The choice of Carnaval conformed to Strauss’s reform strategy of using scores by “serious” composers—those of concert, chamber, and solo genres, like Schumann, rather than specialist ballet composers—in order to bring the Viennese troupe up to speed with trends in early twentieth-century ballet and modern dance. (Among the most popular ballets in the Vienna Ballet’s repertory up to this time were those that featured music by the native specialist composer Joseph Bayer [1852– 1913].) Indeed the Vienna Ballet, like most opera house dance companies, seemed stuck in the past when measured against organizations such as Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Notably the ballets programmed by Strauss and Kröller included those with scores from the Austro-Germanic sphere, the supposed epitome of serious European art music, for example, arranged and reworked music by Gluck (Don Juan, 1924) and Beethoven (Die Ruinen von Athen, 1924)—musical overhauls that were overseen, it should be noted, by Strauss—as well as Strauss’s original dance scores (the 1922 Austrian premiere of Josephslegende and 1924 “Comic Viennese Ballet” Schlagobers). Strauss thereby effectively inserted himself into the line of past “German masters,” and into ballet’s present and future, too. In fact for its June 1922 premiere in Vienna, Kröller’s Carnaval was the curtain-raiser for a postpremiere performance of Strauss’s Josephslegende.20 It must be emphasized that the choice of Schumann in 1920s Vienna was less an omen of his nationalistic reception in German-speaking Europe during the 1930s than it was a continuation of the modern cachet Schumann had acquired following the choreographies of Carnaval by Fokine (1910) and others.21 The dance historian Susanne Rode-Breymann has profiled the conservatism of Vienna’s dance culture in the interwar years, during which time modern ballet was overshadowed by classical dance at institutions such as the Staatsoper on the one hand, and modern or “free dance” (freier Tanz) in smaller, nontraditional venues on the other.22 Not even the legendary Ballets Russes managed to gain a foothold in the Austrian capital, before or after World War I. As I have discussed in other contexts, Strauss’s “unforgettable impressions” of Diaghilev’s enterprise fueled his plans for the Vienna Ballet during the years of the composer’s codirectorship of the Staatsoper.23 And alongside Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Diaghilev’s company was one of Kröller’s formative influences. Although employed at the Dresden Opera as a first solo dancer from 1907 to 1915, Kröller

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Table 15.1. Carnaval Schumann, Carnaval: Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes

Kröller, Carneval: Tanzszenen auf die Schumannsche Musik

Fokine, Carnaval: PantomimeBallet in One Act

“Préambule” “Pierrot” “Arlequin” “Valse noble” “Eusebius” “Florestan” “Coquette” “Réplique” “Sphinxes” “Papillons” “A.S.C.H.–S.C.H.A. (Lettres Dansantes)” “Chiarina” “Chopin” “Estrella” “Reconaissance” “Pantalon et Colombine” “Valse allemande” “Paganini” “Aveu” “Promenade” “Pause” “Marche des ‘Davidsbündler’ contre les Philistins”

Introduction Scene 1

Introduction Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 2

XXXXXXXXXXXX Scene 3

Scene 3 XXXXXXXXXXXX

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 4 Scene 6

had almost certainly witnessed Fokine’s Carnaval firsthand when Diaghilev’s company staged it during a week-long residency in Munich, Kröller’s hometown, while on tour in 1912.24 A common interpretation of Schumann’s Carnaval is as a musical manifesto of his futuristic, antiphilistine artistic vision, a vision to which Strauss and Kröller were sympathetic in the context of the Vienna Ballet. In Table 15.1 I include an outline of the movements of Schumann’s Carnaval to show the relationship between the musical numbers and the scenes in Kröller’s and Fokine’s versions. While both ballets are in one act, I have designated scene changes based on details of the plot and dances. Like Fokine, Kröller set Carnaval in Schumann’s nineteenth-century, Biedermeier milieu, in which the attendees at a masked ball—“a group of citizens who consist of several old bourgeois gentlemen and ladies and of a number of young shy men and overly well-mannered girls”25—come into contact with characters from the commedia dell’arte. In both Fokine’s and Kröller’s ballets, Schumann’s “Préambule” is the site for unveiling this atmosphere, detailed by Kröller as “an old-fashioned ballroom. Refined affectation. Older ladies and fat

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Philistines fill the corners and regard themselves as guardians of the situation. Everyone in bourgeois ball attire.”26 Under watchful eyes young couples dance politely, until they are interrupted (at the Animato section of the movement) by a group of carnival characters who “come storming into the bourgeois crowd and carry the young people off into the adjoining ballrooms, while the outraged elders escape to the side rooms.”27 In the context of the conservative dance culture in Vienna at this time, the conception of this Carnaval was of course satirical; one might say that the reform-minded Strauss and Kröller were assuming the role of a behind-the-scenes commedia, whose intent was to rattle the tradition-bound bourgeois audience of the Vienna Ballet. Lawrence Kramer argued that in Carnaval Schumann “challenge[d] established forms of social, intellectual, and sexual authority” through “a presiding metaphor of carnival festivity.” That is, through carnival masquerade, “the reveler is free to identify with any or all of [the piece’s] figures” in a “free play of identification.”28 That Schumann indulged in such carnivalesque play is evidenced by the connections between life and art that he habitually explored in his compositions. Inspired by Jean Paul, his favorite writer, the composer was drawn to masked balls, classic settings for identity play, as witnessed by the Abegg Variations, Op. 1, the Op. 4 Intermezzi, and of course Carnaval.29 More specifically, the latter famously is inhabited by alter egos of Schumann and his real-life intimates. The composer himself appears as the split but complementary Florestan and Eusebius, and as the creator of Papillons, Op. 2, coyly alluded to (“Papillon?”) in the “Florestan” movement; Clara Wieck is referred to as Chiarina; Ernestine von Fricken, to whom Schumann was engaged, was the ultimate inspiration for Carnaval and its anagrammatic “Asch” motives. The quotations of and allusions to other composers’ music in Carnaval are on a certain level an act of masquerade, too. Schumann originally penned the music at the beginning of Carnaval for his Scènes musicales sur un thème connu de Fr. Schubert (which became the Sehnssuchtswalzer, Op. 9, no. 2), and there are movements named for Chopin and Paganini. Schumann also used the popular “GroßvaterTanz,” designated as “Thême du XVIIème siècle,” in Carnaval’s finale, the “Marche des Davidsbündler contre les Philistins.”30 The allure of Schumann in the years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, when Fokine was creating his Carnaval ballet, owed in part to the symbolic suggestiveness of masquerade in the composer’s music and life.31 In addition to Carnaval’s richly intertextual score, an important source for Fokine and Léon Bakst (coauthor of the scenario and creator of the original costumes and sets) was Alexander Blok’s 1906 symbolist play The Puppet Theatre, which undoubtedly inflected what Lynn Garafola characterized as the ballet’s overall “ironic tone.”32 A fundamental parallel between Blok’s play and Fokine’s ballet (with its grounding in Schumann’s score) is the ball setting with plenty of masking and doubling, centered around the presence of the commedia and three pairs of lovers (or would-be lovers): in Carnaval, Florestan and Estrella, Eusebius

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and Chiarina, and Pantaloon/Pierrot and Columbine. As regards Pierrot, Blok and Fokine and Bakst portrayed him as a loner, alienated from Columbine and society, which in turn is represented by the ball.33 Significantly, for the role of Pierrot at the St. Petersburg premiere of Carnaval Fokine cast the Russian actor and director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940?), an enthusiast of symbolism who had also created the role of the clown in Blok’s Puppet Theatre.34 But by the 1920s the symbolism of Blok, Meyerhold, and the pre–World War I Ballets Russes had run its course and might well have come across as dated, even nostalgic, in interwar Vienna. While certainly not dispensing with Pierrot, Kröller’s Carnaval was more didactic than symbolic in tone, arguably owing to his and Strauss’s reform agenda in Vienna. Kröller’s commedia troupe was “the embodiment of gaiety and a carefree nature. Impetuous, racing, they move[d] through the ballrooms with the utmost merriment and sensuality.”35 Here Pierrot (and the commedia generally) continued to function as a marker for the disparity between the sensibilities of artists and the tastes of the bourgeois masses, but Kröller reimagined the performance of Fokine’s self-pitying clown as “an amorous pas de deux” between Pierrot and his newly invented female counterpart, Pierrette.36 Moments such as Pierrot and Pierrette’s pas de deux smack of choreographic display: dance for show. As a critic for the Neue Freie Presse opined following the Viennese premiere of Kröller’s Carnaval, the choreographer ignored the representation of “psychological states” (of the Davidsbund characters) in favor of “fifteen apparently unconnected ball scenes” (that is, the entirety of scenes 1–3, if the “Valse allemande” and “Paganini” are counted as one number given the return of the “Valse” at the end of the latter).37 This impression of disconnectedness is supported by the dances that immediately follow “Pierrot” in Kröller’s ballet. “Arlequin” is an “eccentric, wild, grotesque” solo, at the climax of which “the other carnival characters chase [Arlequin] away to create a space for the ‘Valse noble’ featuring Prince and Princess Carnaval.”38 Comparison with the parallel scene in Fokine, which again highlights Pierrotas-symbol, is instructive: “Harlequin bounces in, notes the melancholy Pierrot, and taunts him for not joining in the fun the music calls for. Unmercifully the energetic Harlequin pokes at the helpless clown, who falls to the floor. The irrepressible Harlequin leaves in disgust.” Thereafter Fokine’s “Valse noble” serves as the denouement to a whole scene complex—“Pierrot,” “Arlequin,” “Valse noble” (see again Table 15.1)—rather than as another in a series of numbers: “Couples from the ball dance through the anteroom again. Pierrot looks at them and takes himself off before he can be chided once more.”39 The episodic quality of Kröller’s Carnaval owes something, of course, to the form of Schumann’s score, which Kröller approached under the influence of Fokine’s choreographic reforms generally, rather than in deference to the specific details of the latter’s Schumann ballet. In Kröller’s 1922 essay “Moderne Choreographie,” penned while he was ballet master at the Berlin Staatsoper in anticipation of his choreography of Strauss’s Josephslegende for its German

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premiere, Kröller aligned himself closely with Fokine. “New training in movement must come about in order to attain the utmost expressiveness,” wrote Kröller. “Above all value is placed on expression, not on mere technical brilliance.”40 Assuming a reasonable level of consistency between Kröller’s writing and his actual choreographic work, it is unlikely that the motivation behind his Carnaval was straightforward dance display; indeed the tendency of ballet toward virtuosity for its own sake was a sticking point for Fokine and Kröller alike (as well as for many others in the early twentieth century) and one of the targets of Strauss’s “reform and modernization” in interwar Vienna. As Kröller bluntly put it, “A story, expressed in pantomimic gesture with occasional dances inserted in between is no longer possible.”41 Employing the critical keyword expression from Fokine’s manifesto on the “new ballet,” Kröller was at the same time laying bare an affinity with Schumann, whose goals as spiritual leader of the antiphilistine Davidsbund and its related organ, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, were to “erect a barrier against convention” by championing visionary art over frivolous, if entertaining, virtuosity.42 Kröller’s intent in this regard is clear given the emphasis he placed on the composer’s alter egos, Florestan and Eusebius.

Florestan, Eusebius, Schumann Nowhere is Schumann’s presence felt more strongly in Kröller’s Carnaval than in its focus on Florestan and Eusebius, who overshadow Pierrot, the focal point of Fokine’s ballet. (In Fokine’s Carnaval Pierrot even lurks in the shadows to watch the dancing in the scenes in which he is not an active participant.)43 Like Fokine, Kröller introduced Eusebius and Florestan in that order alongside the pieces for which they are named. (In Table 15.1 I label their entry as the beginning of the second scene.) According to Kröller’s scenario, in “Eusebius” we meet “a young man in bourgeois costume” who, from stage left, “wanders in despairingly and, mockingly laughed at by the carnival onlookers, whom he does not notice, expresses through a character dance rapturous, unrequited love for a society lady who is among the attendees at the ball.”44 The lady is Chiarina. Florestan is then introduced in his namesake number that follows, entering stage right as a similarly “unhappy, but ardently despairing young man in love.”45 Thus Kröller’s Florestan and Eusebius conform to Schumann’s conception of them as impassioned and introspective personas, respectively. While in Fokine’s “Coquette,” a longing Eusebius returns to watch Chiarina dance, here Kröller reintroduces Colombine, who plays a decisive role. Colombine stands in the middle of the stage between Florestan and Eusebius and tells them that they should take their romantic yearnings in stride. She then leads them, in “Réplique,” to the rest of the carnival personages, who enthusiastically welcome them. In his scenario sketch for Carnaval Kröller initially

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characterized Florestan and Eusebius as “Verliebte” (love-struck ones). In the context of the “Réplique” movement, however, Kröller crossed out “Verliebte” and replaced it with “Belehrte,” learners, like apprentices, here more in the sense of recruits.46 (Neither Fokine nor Kröller choreographed Schumann’s “Sphinxes,” which, as Augenmusik outlining Schumann’s three musical anagrams—S. C. H. A., As. C. H., and A. S. C. H.—are also not usually realized in musical performances.)47 Kröller’s “Coquette” sets the stage for the next scene, in which the central action and message of his ballet unfolds. As the choreographer stated in the introduction to his scenario, “The carnival characters attempt to win over the bourgeois youth. Their primness and dignity relents to a free, unaffected joy. They are overtaken by a new spirit.”48 And indeed, beginning in the “Papillons” and “A.S.C.H.–S.C.H.A. (Lettres Dansantes)” movements (scene 3 in Table 15.1), everything has changed. We are introduced to young women from the ball who, dancing in two groups, are converts to the world of the carnival.49 The degree to which Kröller departed from the symbolism of Fokine’s Carnaval cannot be overstated, as further evidenced by Kröller’s “Papillons.” Having observed the episode with Eusebius, Florestan, and their beloveds from the periphery, Fokine’s Pierrot emerges onstage in pursuit of Papillon, a butterfly/ giddy young girl with whom the sad clown imagines he might find love at long last. As recounted by Bronislava Nijinska, who danced Papillon in Fokine’s ballet early on, Pierrot bounds after her and “thinking the butterfly to be on the ground, he covered it with his white hat, and then clapping his hands he jumped with joy.”50 Sadly there is nothing under the hat when Pierrot peeks under it; his “butterfly” has gotten away and he retreats, inconsolable. As a ubiquitous symbol of masking and unmasking, of metamorphosis and rebirth (or at least its possibility), butterflies were alluring to Schumann; recall the pregnant near quotation of his Op. 2 Papillons in the “Florestan” movement of Carnaval.51 Such poetics were too juicy for Fokine, the Ballets Russes, and their milieu to go untapped. In Kröller’s Carnaval, however, there is no butterfly or elusive girl. Rather “Papillons” and its paired “A.S.C.H.–S.C.H.A. (Lettres Dansantes)” movement are the kickoff to a dance celebration that reinterprets the theme of transformation. Following the corps of bourgeois-turned-carnival women in “Papillons” and “Lettres Dansantes,” the onlookers summon a “passionate” solo dance by one of these women, Chiarina, in her namesake movement.52 In “Chopin” Eusebius and Florestan, who are Schumann’s masks and embody masking per se, are unmasked in the sense that they are presented as newly won carnival revelers. Their conversion is further commemorated in “Estrella” by a solo en pointe by the prima ballerina (“Spitzentanz der Prima”), who is joined by the first danseur and the carnival corps in “Reconnaissance.” Relegated to the role of a supporting character, Pierrot returns in Kröller’s “Pantalon et Colombine” as part of the love-triangle scene between himself, Pantalon, and Columbine. A masked member of the old bourgeoisie, Pantalon has changed sides, perhaps out of necessity in his pursuit of Colombine. At any rate, the

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antics of Pierrot, Pantalon, and Columbine provide a comic divertissement in the festivities and a reminder of the release that the carnival has to offer.53 Once again a celebration is in order: the entire corps of carnival revelers—veterans and new recruits—dance (in “Valse allemande”), punctuated by Florestan taking center stage (in “Paganini”).54 The climax of Kröller’s Carnaval is the clash between the ball society—again, a satirical displacement for Vienna’s old guard—and the carnival personages (scene 4). Kröller’s “Aveu” serves as a transition to the “battle formation . . . against the Philistines” during “Promenade,” at the end of which the carnival rebels leave the scene.55 “The angry old Philistines are outraged,” and in preparation for battle they “huddle secretly” (in “Pause”).56 The confrontation then occurs during the ultimate movement, the “Marche des ‘Davidsbündler’ contre les Philistins,” in which the Davidsbund is, of course, the carnival coalition, Strauss and Kröller’s reform representatives. As previously mentioned in relation to the connection between masquerade, quotation (“Papillon?”), and allusion (Chopin, Paganini) in Schumann’s Carnaval, a marked musical feature of the climactic “Marche” is the invocation of the well-known “Großvater-Tanz.” Masquerade in Schumann is less a case of disguise than it is the tease of the possibility of concealment; Schumann is holding a mask, not wearing it.57 Indeed the meaning of the “Großvater-Tanz” has always seemed to be rather clear-cut. For Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski, who penned the first book-length biography of Schumann (1858), the “Großvater-Tanz” represented the “spiritual contest between youthful aims and the Philistines of art.”58 More specifically, in an 1844 review essay on Schumann’s piano works, the music critic, composer, and Davidsbündler Carl Koßmaly characterized the tune as “the old-fashioned, narrow-minded and genuinely philistine motive,” which “introduces a grotesque contrast and produces a genuinely comic rococo effect.”59 Kröller’s interpretation of Carnaval and its irreverent commentary on ballet culture in Vienna was consistent with these readings in ways that were both intended and (probably) unintended. Regarding the latter, contemporary reviews of Kröller’s ballet were preoccupied with Otto Singer’s orchestral arrangements. One critic deemed the orchestrations a “distortion” in that they resembled “military or circus music” and therefore might well have accentuated Schumann’s strange and witty “Großvater-Tanz,” as well as Kröller’s sardonic deployment of it.60 Schumann’s parodistic tone in Carnaval’s finale is mirrored in the finale to Kröller’s ballet, in which the Philistines protest against the carnival in vain: “Their vitriolic outbursts do not come to anything. The young bourgeoisie remain with the carnival group, the old (who at the end appear closer and closer, clamoring in an eerie, greenish light) must give in to the radiant merriment of youth and the carnival.”61 This stage direction gives a sense of the overall modern, expressionist flavor of the decor and costumes for Kröller’s ballet, which were designed by the artist Richard Seewald and the fashion designer Otto HassHeye, respectively, but which, unfortunately, have not survived. According to

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the disparaging remarks of the Neue Freie Presse critic, the costumes “contrasted strangely with the primitivism of the overly stylized stage [with] walls in all colors of the rainbow and deliberately askew perspectives.” In conclusion, he sarcastically deemed this ballet “the dawn of a new art form.”62 Ultimately Kröller retained an important aspect (or at least an aspect of the spirit) of Fokine’s earlier ballet. Ostensibly a direct result of Fokine’s aforementioned casting of the role of Pierrot with Meyerhold, who was committed to “destroy[ing] the footlights” in the theater, the antiphilistine rebels made their way out into the audience at the premiere performance of Fokine’s Carnaval in St. Petersburg, as if the ballet itself had become a communal event—a carnival.63 Kröller stopped a few steps shorter, or rather his Philistines did: in a Neue Sachlichkeit-esque moment, the Philistines face the Viennese audience as if everyone were gazing into a mirror. In short the Viennese are now aligned explicitly with the adversaries in Carnaval, whose composer is the herald of the end of the Vienna Ballet’s past. “You are either with Schumann (and Strauss, and Kröller) or against them,” reads the unwritten invitation as the curtain falls to end this Carnaval.

Florestan, Eusebius, Balanchine In her review of a 2003 revival of Balanchine’s Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze” by the New York City Ballet for the twentieth anniversary of the choreographer’s death, the dance critic Anna Kisselgoff designated this ballet as the choreographer’s “final and angriest statement about the artist’s alienation from society” and proposed that “as slayers of philistines, George Balanchine, the arch-objectivist, and Robert Schumann, the arch-Romantic, had something in common”: “Both fought an uphill battle against conservatives in their respective fields of dance and music. . . . It took Balanchine 40 years to educate a public and dancers to appreciate dance for dance’s sake, never subordinate to music or story but equal to music in its formal values.”64 However poetic this equivocation may sound, by 1980, the year of the premiere of his Davidsbündlertänze, Balanchine clearly had already won the fight. As the dance scholar Roger Copeland argued, “among the fabled ‘New York Intellectuals,’ a passion for Balanchine is de rigueur” owing to “the promise of instant access to a realm of ‘pure’ wordless physicality” through such canonic, plotless Balanchine ballets as Concerto Barocco (1941), The Four Temperaments (1946), and Agon (1957).65 But lest we forget Balanchine’s popularity with his less objectivist work, there are such enduring ballets as the story-driven A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962) and the spectacular Vienna Waltzes (1977)—and what could be more appealing to the “Philistines” than the Nutcracker, which Balanchine made a classic beginning with the 1954 premiere of his choreography?66

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Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze are not so much seething as they are studied and contemplative. This late ballet presents a dual engagement with musical-choreographic formalism on the one hand, and extramusical narrative—dance for the sake of something else—on the other. As illustrated in the work of Stephanie Jordan, Balanchine’s signature “music visualization” involves a complex interplay between movement and rhythm, meter, form, harmony, dynamics, texture, and instrumentation. Here I extend Jordan’s contention that Balanchine visualized music heard and music seen (that is, printed music, including rests in the score) to Schumann’s extramusical references, likewise printed in the score, that are an integral part of the musical text.67 Indeed Balanchine took seriously all aspects of Schumann’s score, beginning with the composer’s written dedication at the head of the first page to a friend, Walther von Goethe, himself a composer and the grandson of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “from Florestan and Eusebius.”68 That Schumann credits the composition of the Davidsbündlertänze to both of his alter egos, whom he described in terms of a struggle between his “objective” and “subjective” selves, the “form and shadow,”69 is analogous to the coexistence of musical-choreographic abstraction and Romantic story in Balanchine’s ballet. In contrast to his prevailing image as an “arch-objectivist,” then, Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze suggests that the Doppelgänger quality of ballet is less a conflict than it is a balancing act. Again, Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze was filmed in 1981, the year after its premiere. The ballet’s costumes and sets, designed by Rouben Ter-Arutunian, reach beyond the score itself to evoke the milieu of Schumann and this music. As Susan Au summarized, the stereotypical Balanchine ballet is “plotless” and “neoclassical,” “danced in simple leotards and tights, without scenery, as though to dispense with anything that might distract the viewer from the dancing.”70 For the Davidsbündlertänze, however, Balanchine replaced his trademark costume-less dancers with ones in Romantic garb. The four couples who people this ballet recall the epoch in which Schumann composed his music; the women, for instance, wear flowing, gauzy dresses, distinct in color but similar in cut, reminding the dancer and critic Deborah Jowitt of the “swirling flocks of identically dressed females” in high Romantic ballets such as Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty.71 The men’s waistcoats evoke their nineteenth-century counterparts, too. The backdrop to Balanchine’s dancers is likewise Romantic, littered with Gothic images taken from canvases by the German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). As shown in Figure 15.1, for example, Balanchine lifted the mysterious cathedral and craggy trees in the background directly from Friedrich’s Klosterfriedhof im Schnee (Cloister cemetery in the snow, 1817–19), although the time of day and weather are fluid in the ballet. Incidentally, this same landscape also seems to have inspired Balanchine’s ballroom chandeliers, which strike one as a hybrid of light fixtures and flying creatures of the night and/or mossy nests.

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Figure 15.1. The Romantic milieu in Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze,” New York City Ballet. Dancers (left to right): Maria Kowroski and Nilas Martins, Heléne Alexopoulos and Philip Neal, Jennie Somogyi and Arch Higgins. Photo by Paul Kolnik. Choreography by George Balanchine. © The George Balanchine Trust.

Representing an essential version of Schumann’s Romantic world, the costumes and scenery of Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze are striking given the choreographer’s objectivist leanings. One might view the coexistence of Romanticism at its subjective best (Friedrich) with Balanchine’s schooled dances as a symbol for the complexity of Schumann himself: Florestan and Eusebius, “objective” and “subjective,” “form and shadow.” That the composer is on some level the subject of this ballet is, after all, revealed in its formal title: Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze.” This title is also suggestive with regard to the role of the pianist. As mentioned earlier, Stravinsky encouraged Balanchine to take up Schumann, but ultimately it was a particular pianist, Walter Gieseking, and his interpretation of the Davidsbündlertänze that inspired this ballet.72 In his choreography Balanchine places the pianist, his long-time collaborator Gordon Boelzner, onstage, effectively making him a character in the ballet, if not a dancer. The pianist is not an accompanist; he wears formal concert attire and plays without a score. Thus Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze is as much a piano recital with dancers as it is a ballet, for Schumann, his music, and the piano have equal footing with the dancing couples (see Figure 15.2). Is Boelzner Gieseking? Is he the pianist-composer Schumann? This ballet is pregnant with hermeneutic possibility, but as further consideration of the dancer-characters and individual scenes reveals, ambiguity of meaning is itself meaning.

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Figure 15.2. Heather Watts and Jock Soto (Couple No. 4) with the piano in George Balanchine’s Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze,” New York City Ballet. Photo by Steven Caras. Choreography by George Balanchine. Choreography © The George Balanchine Trust.

Like Schumann’s score, Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze implies a narrative, but it is not a linear one; Balanchine intimates romantic involvements and, by the end, the threat of unrequited love. I list in Table 15.2 the individual movements of Schumann’s two-part composition, along with the initialed signatures that appear at the foot of each piece (“F.” = Florestan, “E.” = Eusebius), where applicable. Over the course of the first four numbers in Balanchine’s ballet, we are introduced to four couples, who each dance a pas de deux.73 In “Lebhaft” (no. I/1), Couple No. 1 is courting: he pursues her onto the stage, she balks, and throughout their dance she continually withdraws before contact can become partnership. Appropriate to the descriptor at the head of piece no. I/2, “Innig,” Couple No. 2 enters starry-eyed, a mark of new love. They are so love-struck that they process onstage as if in a trance, not actually commencing to dance until the B section of Schumann’s music. (At the return of the A section their dancing breaks off and they drift away again.) Representing a later relationship stage, perhaps consummation, Couple No. 3 enters with virile leaps and frolics throughout “Mit Humor” (no. I/3); they enjoy the dance and one another. Rounding out the four pairs, Couple No. 4 is comfortably passionate and impetuous in “Ungeduldig” (no. I/4). They are the opposite of Couple No. 1; whereas the first woman repeatedly repels her suitor, Couple No. 4 has an electromagnetic charge that keeps them connected almost constantly.

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Table 15.2. Davidsbündlertänze Signatures Book I: 1. Lebhaft (Lively) 2. Innig (Heartfelt) 3. Mit Humor (etwas hahnbüchen) (With humor [somewhat outrageous]) 4. Ungeduldig (Impatient) 5. Einfach (Simple) 6. Sehr rasch (und in sich hinein) (Very quick [and to oneself]) 7. Nicht schnell (Mit äußerst starker Empfindung) (Not fast [With extremely strong feeling]) 8. Frisch (Cheery) 9. Lebhaft (Lively)

Book II: 1. Balladenmäßig (Ballad-like) 2. Einfach (Simple) 3. Mit Humor (With humor) 4. Wild und lustig (Wild and cheerful) 5. Zart und singend (Tender and lyrical) 6. Frisch (Cheery) 7. Mit gutem Humor (In good humor) 8. Wie aus der Ferne (As from the distance) 9. Nicht schnell (Not fast)

“F. und E.” N/A “F.” “F.” “E.” “F.” “E.”

“F.” N/A, but preceding the piece: “Hierauf schloß Florestan und es zuckte ihm schmerzlich um die Lippen” (Hereupon Florestan stopped and his lips trembled painfully) “F.” “E.” “F.” “F. und E.” “E.” “F. und E.” N/A “F. und E.” N/A, but preceding the piece: “Ganz zum Überfluß meinte Eusebius noch Folgendes; dabei sprach aber viel Seligkeit aus seinen Augen” (Quite redundantly Eusebius added the following; therewith great happiness shone in his eyes)

Schumann’s dances present the composer himself as subject in a predictably masked, or nearly masked, mode, as witnessed by the quiet signatures of Florestan, Eusebius, or both at the end of fourteen of the eighteen numbers. And, as shown in Table 15.2, two of the unsigned dances—the closing pieces of each book—are headed with quasi–stage directions for Florestan and Eusebius, respectively: at the end of book I Florestan “stopped and his lips trembled painfully,” while Eusebius “redundantly” added the final number of book II as “great happiness shone in his eyes.” Consistent with the composer’s statements about Florestan and Eusebius, as well as his musical characterization of them in compositions such as Carnaval, Florestan supplies music “with humor (somewhat outrageous),” “impatient,” “very quick,” and “cheery,” while Eusebius is more “simple,” moderate, “with extremely strong feeling,” “tender and lyrical.”74

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Yet as Kisselgoff observed in her review of the 2003 revival of Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze, the choreographer’s “originality . . . is to avoid identifying a specific couple consistently with either personality.” That is to say, the individual pieces are about these (and aspects of Schumann’s) personalities only insofar as they were created by themselves/himself. The identity and/or character of Balanchine’s four couples, then, requires some interpretation. Kisselgoff insisted on the “wider scope” (that is, beyond Schumann’s biography) of Balanchine’s ballet, which she described as “a meditation on aspects of love.” Still she (inevitably) identified allusions to Schumann’s relationship with Clara, including the “innig” Couple No. 2, whom she labeled the “Clara and Schumann figures.” Balanchine’s biographer Bernard Taper also highlighted the interface between the Davidsbündlertänze ballet and Schumann’s life, “the inner and fantasy life as much as the historical life, in relation to his wife, Clara.” Taper was careful, though, to specify that “it was not a narrative or a biography, but a meditation on Schumann’s life—or, more precisely, a meditation by Balanchine on the meditation Schumann himself had expressed in the suite of eighteen piano pieces. . . . Intensely dramatic as the ballet was, its drama was not tied to biographical narrative or plot.”75

Balanchine: Drastic or Gnostic? Balanchine was ambivalent toward such hermeneutic ventures, as made abundantly clear in statements by and anecdotes about the choreographer. To cite but one close observer: Merrill Brockway, who directed the 1981 filming of Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze, relayed the choreographer’s declaration “If it has a story, it will tell itself; if there is no story, there’s nothing to say.”76 Proclamations such as this have fed opponents of Balanchine’s plotless formalism and perceived coldness—a coldness that has had its share of champions. Indeed many commentators have towed Balanchine’s antinarrative line. For Stravinsky Balanchine’s classicized dances conformed to the Apollonian principle that the composer privileged.77 Peter Martins, who was famous for dancing the role of Apollo, announced, “What [Balanchine] wants to convey is so obvious and . . . clear in the steps. . . . Interpretation is already in the pure dance-design.”78 Stravinsky’s fondness for the Apollonian Balanchine aside, the dance scholar Roger Copeland critically characterized dance à la Balanchine as an art that “holds interpretation in check, the . . . link to some lost, pre-verbal, Dionysian paradise.”79 The issues at the heart of the partisan debates surrounding Balanchine (and twentieth-century dance generally) are familiar in musical circles as well and have been framed in a variety of ways: programmatic versus absolute, hermeneutics versus analysis, Dionysian versus Apollonian, “new” musicology versus “old,” et cetera, et cetera. Drawing on the writings of the philosopher Vladimir

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Jankélévitch, Carolyn Abbate employed the terms drastic and gnostic when arguing for the source of musical meaning: Is it “in” works (gnostic) or does it issue from performance (drastic)? For Abbate the dichotomies listed above are two sides of the same coin: reading music as a sociocultural text and dissecting it as an abstract art form are both mystifying acts that engage in what she terms the “cryptographic sublime.”80 Returning to Balanchine, one could say that he wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. Through his analytic approach to scores— what is “music visualization” if not a kinetic means of music analysis?—Balanchine traded in musical code-breaking, but did not require, nor want, his dancers or audiences to do so. Nevertheless having waged this “battle” (as Kisselgoff called it) throughout his career, with the Davidsbündlertänze Balanchine took a more diplomatic approach to the challenge that decoding music (and dance) poses. As Abbate put it, “One could say it is built into the business, untranscendable, and one must decide whether to make peace with that or not,”81 an imperative of which Balanchine was acutely aware, as evidenced by this late ballet. The choreographer’s choice of Schumann, a composer whose extramusical circumstances are just as well-known as his music, and a composition that is ripe with data for analytic and hermeneutic elucidation seems too easy. Indeed in the dances that follow the introduction of the four couples in the first four numbers, Balanchine’s ballet teases the audience with the presence of meaning while stopping short of handing over the decoder key. Schumann’s (or rather Eusebius’s) “Einfach” (no. I/5) witnesses the return of Couple No. 1, whose second pas de deux features austere toe dancing and clean, effortless lifts. Theirs is a textbook partnership in classical dance (we have yet to see their Florestanesque passion), suggesting a relationship that is not loveless but a bit habitual—a textbook marriage? As for Couple No. 2, their earlier reverie has subsided; in “Sehr rasch” (no. I/6) they reenter together, but their pas de deux is derailed and they have to search for one another again. Eventually this number becomes two simultaneous solo dances rather than a duet. Although Couple No. 2 come back together briefly in the music’s coda, in the end they exit separately on opposite sides of the stage. Despite his proximity to Balanchine’s admonitions—“If it has a story, it will tell itself; if there is no story, there’s nothing to say”—director Merrill Brockway ventured the interpretation that the four couples in Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze” are “aspects of the same couple.”82 Brockway’s reading is grounded in the way the couples represent states of or stages in a romance more than they embody distinct romances, although the second performances of Couple No. 1 and No. 2 arguably build on the initial ones, whereby these couples begin to come into focus as characters in their own right. Such character development is not, however, evident with Couple No. 3 and No. 4, who are virtually interchangeable, at least from a narrative perspective. In no. I/7, “Nicht schnell (Mit äußerst starker Empfindung)” Couple No. 3 and No. 4 are paired

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for a pas de quattre, or rather two simultaneous but meshed pas de deux. Here the two pairs are almost always mirror images or echoes of each other: a woman and a man, each with four legs. Balanchine then rounds off book I of the Davidsbündlertänze with a third appearance by Couple No. 1 and No. 2. Overlapping with the exit of Couple No. 3 and No. 4, Couple No. 1 dances a lively pas de deux, “Frisch” (no. I/8), that provides contrast with their earlier, more serious encounters in courtship and marriage. Couple No. 2 emerges before “Frisch” is over and sets position on its final chord. Their intimate dance in “Lebhaft” (no. I/9) provides further evidence for Brockway’s Doppelgänger interpretation, but unlike the two pairs in no. I/7, here the woman and man from a single couple mirror one another. Their movements in turn correspond to the antiphony between the bass and treble registers of the piano and ultimately suggest that the subject of this ballet is a person (but who?) as well as a couple. As in their earlier dance in “Sehr rasch,” Couple No. 2 loses each other, but only momentarily, ending up with arms entwined and locked together. Again, Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze is organized in two books of nine numbers each, but, as shown in Table 15.3, Balanchine divides the music in a way that cuts across the two books. Beginning with the third piece in book II the dancers are broken up from their now familiar pairings and recombined, which again supports Brockway’s exegesis (he was, after all, an insider to Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze) of the four pairs of lovers as a single couple. The woman from Couple No. 1 dances a solo to “Mit Humor” (II/3), followed by “Wild und lustig” (II/4), in which the men alone from Couple No. 1, No. 3, and No. 4 dance a pas de trois in the music’s A section, punctuated by the entry of the women from the same couples at B. In this section Balanchine gives us a stylized ball (a ballet-ball) at which Woman No. 4 and Man No. 1, Woman No. 3 and Man No. 4, and Woman No. 1 and Man No. 3 partner. Each dancer eventually leaves, however, with their original partner, suggesting that their brief repairings were harmless dalliances and that each of these couples has now developed into something more unique than a composite. But where is Couple No. 2? In retrospect, they have been marked choreographically and, by extension, in terms of narrative since the ballet’s onset. Unlike the other couples’ dances, those of Couple No. 2 are tenuous: their first two, “Innig” (no. I/2) and “Sehr rasch” (no. I/6), are really only brief dreams of a true pas de deux, and in their third, “Lebhaft” (no. I/9), they move more or less as one, becoming literally entangled by the end. Couple No. 2 has tended toward stasis. That they are special becomes even more apparent in “Zart und singend” (no. II/5), when the scene darkens to night and Woman No. 2 dances a lone, lyrical pas. This is echoed in the A section to “Frisch” (II/6), when Man No. 2 solos—the only male solo in the ballet. His dance is interrupted at the onset of the B section as the scene blackens, Friedrich’s cathedral disappears, and spooky lights flash behind the curtains framing the stage. (Think Carl Maria von Weber’s stage directions for the Wolf ’s Glen scene in Freischütz.) Enter five mysterious

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Table 15.3. Balanchine’s Parsing of Davidsbündlertänze Nos. I/1–I/4

Introduction of Couple No. 1–Couple No. 4

Nos. I/5–I/7

Couple No. 1, Couple No. 2, Couple No. 3 and No. 4 together

Nos. I/8, I/9, II/1, and II/2

Couple No. 1–Couple No. 4

male figures, who form a half circle around the back of the stage. They do not dance; dressed in black, these apparitions float upstage and threateningly brandish giant quills, thus seeming to embody the adversaries—critics—with whom Schumann felt at odds, even tortured by. (Rather than any one critic, though, they probably represent the adversarial forces that any misunderstood, Romantic visionary must face.) The critics drift away just as abruptly as they came, and by the da capo repeat of the beginning of “Frisch” it is dawn, the cathedral is once again visible, and all four couples return for a dance with various partners that bridges this number with “Mit gutem Humor” (II/7). Now for the elephant in the room: Is Couple No. 2 Robert and Clara? Supported by their having been set off from the other three couples, as well as the scene with the haunting critics, the troubled exchange of Couple No. 2 in the trio of “Mit gutem Humor”—Is he unfulfilled? Unhappy? Will he leave her?— makes their identity seem obvious enough. It might be going too far to point out that the composer was himself also a writer and critic, and thus that the men in black are Schumann, too. More tenable is the notion that the adversaries are a figment of Man No. 2’s and the composer’s imagination, and that they represent the alienation and paranoia that came with the latter’s legendary slip into madness. Such interpretations are a bit tawdry and, as might be expected, Balanchine does not make the connection between the Schumanns and Couple No. 2 so obvious. To begin with, the choreographer did not attempt to strike a physical resemblance between the Schumanns and Couple No. 2, cast originally with the blondes Karin von Aroldingen and Adam Lüders. Nor did he keep them in the spotlight for one of the most provocative moments in Schumann’s score: the interpolation of “Innig” (I/2), which the love-struck Couple No. 2 originally danced, in “Wie aus der Ferne” (no. II/8). Paralleling their two simultaneous pas de deux in “Nicht schnell (Mit äußerst starker Empfindung)” (I/7), Couple No. 3 and No. 4 dance “Wie aus der Ferne,” until they are replaced by Couple No. 1 at the recall of “Innig.” From a hermeneutic standpoint the internal and external quotations in Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze are loaded, begging to be read. One might interpret the return of Couple No. 1 alone here as a generic gesture to the beginning, thus signaling cohesiveness in the ballet (and score).83 But by avoiding a uniform recapitulation (music and dancers) Balanchine only leaves us with what Schumann did: the vague simile “wie [as, like, not authentically]

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aus der Ferne.”84 Balanchine is equally coy when it comes to the other quotations in the Davidsbündlertänze, such as the motto from the Mazurka, Op. 6, no. 5 by Clara at the head of the “Lebhaft” movement that begins the entire cycle. Since it is danced by Couple No. 1, could this woman be another Clara? Balanchine’s ambiguity prevents the scales from tipping toward either objective or subjective sides, the form or shadow, drastic or gnostic. Although there is no break between books I and II in Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze (as shown in Table 15.3, he merges the two halves), the ultimate number, “Nicht schnell” (no. II/9), is set apart, a breach that is accomplished in the 1981 filmed version by a brief but decisive darkening of the screen following “Wie aus der Ferne.” Following this blackout pause Couple No. 2 returns for one last pas de deux in “Nicht Schnell,” which, conforming to the inscription about Eusebius at the piece’s head—that he issued this music “redundantly”—is surplus choreographically, but not superfluous in terms of narrative. The man drifts away from the woman and becomes smaller and smaller as he backs up and is swallowed in a diminishing spotlight: no feet or legs, now no torso, no head, then no “Schumann.”85 Amid the subdued tone of this final dance and its disintegration Schumann’s biography drops with a thud. The effect, though, is not sad, much less tragic; it is rather comforting, in homage to the “great happiness that shone in [Eusebius’s] eyes” as he added the slight finale. Couple No. 2 is Robert and Clara because we recognize them, because we believe them to be Robert and Clara, and because we need Schumann in his Davidsbündlertänze.

Conclusion “Can we love Schumann’s music without all this baggage?” So questioned Laura Tunbridge in a review of two recent biographies that attempt to strip away some of the mythology from this composer-as-man—most notably the nature of his physical and mental ailments (syphilis, schizophrenia, and/or pneumonia?), leading to a demise that is still not totally understood. Tunbridge pondered further “whether, without the speculations over the meaning of [Schumann’s] diaries, the nature of his relationships, and his poetic flights of fancy, people will be as willing to engage with his compositions.”86 Considered in the context of Schumann’s posthumous role as a composer for dance, such a separation would be undesirable, if it is even possible. For there is a certain degree of inevitability in Kröller’s and Balanchine’s Schumann ballets. Interpretive latitude notwithstanding, could there be a Carnaval without Philistines, the commedia, a hapless Pierrot, or Ernestine von Fricken? Or a Davidsbündlertänze that casts away Florestan and Eusebius (and Schumann)? These figures are not a choice; one would have to purposefully, and unlovingly, suppress them.

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Admittedly neither Kröller nor Balanchine reveals anything we do not already know—or think that we know—about Schumann and his music. In these ballets we meet once more with an old friend, or love, an encounter that is premised on familiarity and validation rather than discovery or surprise. Despite Schumann’s habitual affinity for masquerade, alter egos, Doppelgänger, and romantic and Romantic despair, it is a testimony to his immortal authenticity as a mortal musician that artists as distinct as Kröller and Balanchine would end up painting essentially the same picture of him: progressive, lovelorn, universal, part of us. Still both Kröller’s Carnaval and Balanchine’s Davidsbündlertänze offer fresh contexts for our relationship with the composer, and thus inspiration to go on playing, listening to, studying, writing about, and choreographing Schumann.

notes All translations are mine unless otherwise specified. 1. Jordan, Moving Music, 5, 4. 2. Balanchine and Mason, Balanchine’s Complete Stories, 560–61, emphasis added; 269–70, 225. 3. The title of Kröller’s ballet is alternately spelled Carneval and Karneval. I use the most common spelling, Carnaval, except in citations of the source materials from Kröller’s ballet, i.e., Heinrich Kröller, Carneval: Tanzszenen auf die Schumannsche Musik, Nachlaß Heinrich Kröller, Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich. Hereafter, Kröller, Carneval. 4. Kröller resigned his Berlin post to take up the one in Vienna, all the while retaining his position in Munich. For an extensive overview of Kröller with a focus on his activities in Munich (which overlapped significantly with his work in Vienna), see Pia Mlakar and Pino Mlakar, “Heinrich Kröller, der große Ballettmeister von 1917–1930,” chapter 6 of Unsterblicher Theatertanz, 2:74–110. For shorter surveys, see Mlakar and Mlakar, “Kröller, Heinrich,” 4:63–64; Beaumont, Complete Book of Ballets, 751–52. 5. Kapp, “Schumann in His Time,” 241. 6. For the St. Petersburg premiere of Fokine’s Carnaval the music was orchestrated by a collective of musicians that included Anton Arensky, Alexander Glazunov, Anatol Liadov, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Nicholas Tcherepnin, whereas K. N. Konstantinov alone supplied the orchestrations for Diaghilev’s production. As Humphrey Searle pointed out, “Most companies . . . use their own orchestral version of Carnaval, and there is no universally accepted orchestration of it” (Ballet Music, 93). 7. See Mawer, The Ballets of Maurice Ravel, 10, 79 n. 2, 250–51, 284. 8. Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 93, 197, 249. 9. See Merrill Brockway’s liner notes to Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze,” Balanchine Library, Nonesuch Records VHS, 1995.

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10. Kapp, “Schumann in His Time,” 241. 11. For a discussion of the differences between Schumann’s Carnaval and Davidsbündlertänze, see Tunbridge, “Piano Works II,” especially 86–87. 12. See Daverio, “Piano Works I,” especially 68–71. The reference to Barthes is from his essay entitled “Rasch,” anthologized in The Responsibility of Forms, 299–312. 13. M. S., “Theater, Kunst und Musik: Operntheater,” Reichspost (Vienna), June 9, 1922, 7: “Man mag über den künstlerischen Wert des Schumannschen ‘Karneval’, der sich als eine Sammlung von einer Anzahl sich in kleineren Formen bewegenden Klavierstücke darstellt, verschiedener Ansicht sein.” 14. Daverio, “Piano Works I,” 68. 15. Ibid., 70–71. 16. From the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 2 (May 12, 1835), translated and quoted by Daverio in “Piano Works I,” 71. Incidentally, Schumann was referring to stylized social dances rather than ballet. 17. Kapp, “Schumann in His Time,” 241–42. 18. Kröller, Carneval. 19. See Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Strauss and Strauss to Hofmannsthal in letters dated January 4 and 7, 1919, respectively, in Strauss and Hofmannsthal, A Working Friendship, 317–22, especially 318, 321. 20. On Kröller’s Don Juan and Ruinen von Athen, see Heisler, The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss, chapter 3. Prior to Kröller’s work with Carnaval, Hofmannsthal had conceived of a ballet sketch entitled Divertissement, which he described in a letter to Strauss dated February 2, 1920 as “just like Schumann’s Carnaval . . . [with] opportunity for real dances: pas de deux, pas de quatre and small ensemble dances, of gay as well as elegiac character” (Strauss and Hofmannsthal, A Working Friendship, 333–35). See also Asow, Richard Strauss, 3:1444–45. The Divertissement was not taken any further and Strauss never jotted down any music for it. In chapter 4 of The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss I discuss the role of Hofmannsthal’s Divertissement in the genesis of Strauss’s Schlagobers ballet, to which the Divertissement is more closely related than it is to Kröller’s Carnaval. 21. See Kapp, “Schumann in His Time,” 241. 22. On the conservative nature of ballet in German-speaking Europe generally, and Vienna particularly, see Rode-Breymann, Die Wiener Staatsoper, 62–77. On Kröller’s goal to promote modern ballet as a counterbalance to strict classicism and modern dance, see Mlakar and Mlakar, Unsterblicher Theatertanz, 2:90. 23. See Hofmannsthal to Strauss, January 7, 1919, in Hofmannsthal, Sämtliche Werke, 259; Heisler, The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss, chapter 3. 24. See Mlakar and Mlakar, Unsterblicher Theatertanz, 2:88; Mlakar and Mlakar, “Kröller, Heinrich,” 63–64. In the 1922 Vienna Ballet season, Kröller also choreographed Rimsky’s Scheherazade, which had become a Ballets Russes classic.

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25. Kröller, Carneval: “Bürger, die aus mehreren alten spiessigen Herren und Frauen und aus einer Anzahl von jungen schüchternen Männern und überwohlerzogenen Mädchen sich zusammensetzt.” 26. Kröller, Carneval: “Altväterische Ballsaal. Preziöses Getue, ältere Damen und feiste Philister halten die Ecken besetzt und fühlen sich als Herren der Situation. Alles in bürgerlicher Balltracht.” 27. Kröller, Carneval: “Beim Rhythmuswechsel . . . stürmt eine Gruppe von Carnevalsgestalten mitten in die bürgerliche Gesellschaft herein, entführt die jungen Leute tanzend in die anstossenden Säle, während die empörten Alten in die Nebenräume fliehen.” 28. L. Kramer, “Carnaval, Cross-Dressing,” 305–6. 29. On Jean Paul’s profound influence on Schumann, particularly through the unfinished novel Flegeljahre: Eine Biographie (Years of indiscretion: A biography, 1805), see Daverio, Robert Schumann, 79–87. See also Reiman, Schumann’s Piano Cycles; Leon Plantinga’s classic Schumann as Critic. I have been unable to determine whether or not Kröller consulted Flegeljahre, but suffice it to say that there are similarities between Jean Paul’s masquerade scenes and Kröller’s Carnaval libretto. 30. For a discussion of Schumann’s quotation of and allusion to music, literature, and extramusical imagery as a phenomenon of carnivalesque masking, see Todd, “On Quotation in Schumann’s Music.” 31. On Schumann reception in the Symbolist era, see John Daverio and Eric Sams, “Schumann, Robert,” in Grove Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ subscriber/article/grove/music/40704 (accessed January 21, 2009). 32. On the influence of Blok’s Puppet Theater on Fokine’s Carnaval and Petrouchka, see Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 29–30. On relationships between Carnaval and Petrouchka, see Wachtel, “The Ballet’s Libretto,” especially 25. Consider, too, a meaningful parallel between Blok’s play and Fokine’s 1911 ballet Le spectre de la rose, which could hardly have been accidental. Blok: “I [Harlequin] am off to breathe of your [the world’s] springtime / Beyond your golden window!” He jumps through the window. The far-away view seen through the window, turns out to be painted on paper. The paper rips and Harlequin falls headlong into the void. All that one can see through the rip in the paper is the sky turning brighter. (“The Puppet Theatre,” 196) Spectre: “The dream cannot last. The waltz melody fades. The girl goes to her chair and sits as before, her arm limp at her side, pointing to the rose on the floor. The spirit of the rose hovers gently over her head in farewell and in a continuous movement rushes toward the window. He disappears into the oncoming dawn at the high point of a leap that seems never-ending.” (Balanchine and Mason, Balanchine’s Complete Stories, 615)

33. In Blok’s The Puppet Theatre, Pierrot sits “somewhat apart, by the window, . . . in a white loose shirt and pantaloons. He has no eyebrows or moustache and looks dreamy, upset and pale as all Pierrots.” Later, in the ball scene, “a disconsolate Pierrot sits in the center of the stage on that same bench where Venus and Tannhäuser

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usually kiss” (Blok, “The Puppet Theatre,” 182, 189). According to Balanchine’s synopsis of Fokine’s Carnaval: Pierrot, the sad clown, pokes his head into the room. He steps into the room carefully, lest anyone hear or see him, his long, loose sleeves flapping dejectedly at his sides. He moves with slow melancholy; he seems to be saying that he is the only one in the world who will not dance and enjoy himself at the ball. Aware of his ugliness and awkwardness, he is filled with self-pity. (Balanchine and Mason, Balanchine’s Complete Stories, 104).

It is noteworthy that the alienated character of Pierrot in both Blok’s play and Fokine’s ballet resembles the clown in Schoenberg’s nearly contemporary Pierrot Lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot, 1911), which also has ties to literary symbolism through Albert Giraud’s 1884 source text. 34. Pierrot was danced by Adolph Bolm and Alexis Bulgakov in subsequent Ballet Russes productions of Carnaval in the West. 35. Kröller, Carneval: “Die Carnevalsgruppe, die Verkörperung der Fröhlichkeit, Leichtlebigkeit. Ungestüm, brausend, in grösster Heiterkeit und Sinnenlust ziehen sie durch die Säle.” 36. Kröller, Carneval: “Auf dem eroberten Feld tanzen Pierrot und Pierrette einen verliebten pas de deux.” 37. R., “Theater- und Kunstnachrichten. Operntheater,” Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), June 10, 1923, 8–9: Das mitteleuropäische Musikgefühl . . . lehnt sich vollends gegen die pantomimische Ausdeutung dieser ‘Scènes mignonnes sur quatre Notes’ auf, die keine Handlung illustrieren, sondern Seelenzustände, und zwar solche schmerzlichster Art, künden wollen. . . . Nichts von alledem hat Heinrich Kröller . . . für seine Choreographie verwendet und schon dadurch seinen oft bewährten und gerühmten Geschmack bekundet. Es sind fünfzehn scheinbar zusammenhanglose Ballszenen, die eine bunte Gesellschaft von Harlekin und Kolombinen unter Führung von Prinz und Prinzessin Carnaval zu burlesken und sentimentalen Gaukel- und Gebärdenspiel zusammengeführt.

38. Kröller, Carneval: “Herren-Solo, exzentrischer, toller Grotesktanz. Arlequin wird von den anderen Carnevalsgestalten verjagt um Raum zu schaffen für den ‘Valse noble’ von Prinz und Prinzessin ‘Carneval.’” 39. Balanchine and Mason, Balanchine’s Complete Stories, 104. 40. Kröller, “Moderne Choreographie,” 18: “Zur Erreichung höchster Ausdrucksfähigkeit muß dazu eine neue Art Bewegungsschule kommen. . . . Es wird Wert vor allem auf Ausdruck, nicht auf blosses Brillieren mit Technik gelegt.” 41. Kröller, “Moderne Choreographie,” 18: “Es ist hier nicht mehr eine Handlung, ausgedruckt in Gesten-Pantomimik, mit dazwischen eingelegten Gelegenheitstänzen möglich.” 42. See Fokine’s “Five Principles for the New Ballet,” in Beaumont, Michel Fokine, 144–47. For the affinities between Fokine and Kröller, see Mlakar and Mlakar,

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Unsterblicher Theatertanz, 2:90–91; Mlakar and Mlakar, “Kröller, Heinrich,” 63–64. Schumann quoted in Daverio and Sams, “Schumann, Robert.” 43. See the Kirov Ballet’s 1986 production of Fokine’s Carnaval on Ballet Miniatures: Egyptian Night, Carnival [sic], Romeo and Juliet, The Kirov Ballet and Choreographic Miniatures Ballet Group, Immortal DVD, 2007. 44. Kröller, Carneval: “Ein junger Mensch der Ballettgesellschaft (bürgerliche Tracht) irrt verzweifelt herein und drückt, von der Carnevalgesellschaft, die er nicht bemerkt, spöttisch belächelt, in einem Charaktertanz schwärmisch unglückliche Liebe zu irgendeiner Dame der bürgerlichen Ballgesellschaft aus. Linke Bühnenseite.” 45. Kröller, Carneval: “Ein anderer, ebenso unglücklich, aber leidenschaftlich verzweifelt verliebter junger Mann der Ballgesellschaft. (Rechte Bühnenseite).” 46. Kröller, Carneval: “Die Colombine von früher (Mitte) erklärt den beiden Verliebten: ‘Seid nicht so dumm, glaubt mir, man kann dergleichen auch leichter nehmen. . . . Colombine führt die beiden Belehrten [Florestan and Eusebius] der Carnavalsgesellschaft zu, die sie jubelnd aufnimmt.” 47. A well-known exception to this is Rachmaninoff; see, for example, his 1929 recording of Carnaval, released on Robert Schumann Piano Works, Andante Great Composers series, CD, 2002. On Rachmaninoff and the “Sphinxes,” see also Slavoj Žižek, “Robert Schumann: The Romantic Anti-Humanist,” in The Plague of Fantasies, 192–212, especially 207. For an overview of Schumann’s use of anagrams in Carnaval, see Daverio, “Piano Works I,” 72–75. 48. Kröller, Carneval: “Die carnevalistische Gruppe versucht die bürgerliche Jugend zu gewinnen. Ihre Steifheit und anerzogene Würde weicht einer freien ungezwungenen Freude. Neuer Geist ist über sie gekommen.” 49. Kröller, Carneval: “2 Gruppen der früheren weiblichen jungen Ballgäste, die nun zur Carnevalsgesellschaft übergegangen sind.” 50. Nijinska, Early Memoirs, 287. 51. On the connection between Schumann’s Op. 2 and Jean Paul Richter’s Die Flegeljahre, an inspiration for Schumann’s exploration of masked identities, see L. Kramer, “Carnaval, Cross-Dressing,” 312–13. 52. Kröller, Carneval: “Leidenschaftlicher Solo-Charaktertanz, der die Neubekehrten zu toller Lebenslust auffordert.” 53. Kröller, Carneval: “Komisches Liebeswerben Signor Pantalones, früher einer der Spiesser der älteren Ballgesellschaft, um Colombine und komische Eifersucht Pierrots der um Colombine bangt.” 54. In contrast to the divertissement that is Kröller’s “Pantalon et Colombine,” the love triangle in Fokine’s Carnaval is extended through the “Valse allemande,” “Paganini,” and “Aveu” movements. See Balanchine and Mason, Balanchine’s Complete Stories, 105. 55. Kröller, Carneval: “Schlachtordnung Aller gegen die Philister. Alle ab.” 56. Kröller, Carneval: “Die verärgerten alten Philister sind empört. . . . Die Philister drücken sich heimlich.” 57. Or, as Daverio put it in relation to the idea that Schumann was a musical cryptographer, “Schumann behaves less like a cryptographer that an excitable child

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who gives himself away during a game of hide-and-seek by giggling from behind the sofa or under the table” (“Piano Works I,” 73). 58. Wasielewski, The Life of Robert Schumann, quoted in Todd, “On Quotation in Schumann’s Music,” 84. 59. Carl Koßmaly, “Ueber Robert Schumann’s Claviercompositionen,” originally appearing in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 46 (1844), translated by Susan Gillespie as “On Robert Schumann’s Piano Compositions,” 314. For a discussion of the “Großvater-Tanz” in other works by Schumann, including Papillons, see Todd, “On Quotation in Schumann’s Music,” 84–91. 60. M. S., “Theater, Kunst und Musik,” 7: “Eine Verfälschung des Gedanken- und Empfindungsinhaltes der Originalmusik. . . . Der Klavierklang war denn auch zuweilen derartig vergröbert, daß man, trotz des prächtigen Spieles der Philharmoniker, manchmal Militär- oder Zirkusmusik zu hören vermeinte.” The critic for the Neue Freie Presse stated bluntly, “Das mitteleuropäische Musikgefühl sträubt sich gegen die Instrumentierung ausgesprochener Klaviermusik,” but allowed that “‘Chopin’ und ‘Reconnaissance’ schien uns am besten getroffen” (R.,“Theater- und Kunstnachrichten,” 8–9). 61. Kröller, Carneval: “Doch ihre giftigen Ausbrüche vermögen nichts mehr auszurichten. Die jungen Bürgerlichen bleiben bei der Carnevalsgruppe, die Alten (am Schluss immer vorne in grünlich phantastischem Licht zeternd erscheinen) müssen der leuchtenden Fröhlichkeit der Jugend und des Carnevals weichen.” 62. R., “Theater- und Kunstnachrichten,” 8–9: “Die Entwürfe stammen von Otto Haas-Heye, Berlin, und kontrastieren seltsam mit der Primitivität der verstilisierten Bühne. Wände in allen Regenbogenfarben und absichtsvoll windschiefe Perspektiven: eine neue Kunst dämmert herauf.” 63. Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 30. 64. Kisselgoff, “Balanchine and Schumann.” 65. Copeland, “Between Description and Deconstruction,” 104. 66. For an overview of Balanchine that highlights his diversity, see Au, Ballet and Modern Dance, 143–46. 67. For a demonstration of Balanchine’s dialogue with scores, see the documentary Music Dances: Balanchine Choreographs Stravinsky, dir. Stephanie Jordan, George Balanchine Foundation, VHS, 2002. 68. “Walther von Goethe zugeeignet von Florestan und Eusebius.” 69. From Schumann’s diary entry dated June 8, 1831, quoted in Daverio and Sams, “Schumann, Robert.” 70. Au, Ballet and Modern Dance, 143–44. 71. Jowitt, “In Pursuit of the Sylph,” 206. 72. See Brockway’s liner notes to Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze.” Gieseking recorded the Davidsbündlertänze in 1942. 73. In the 1981 filmed version the four couples are danced by Suzanne Farrell and Jacques d’Ambroise, Karin von Aroldingen and Adam Lüders, Sara Leland and Ib Andersen, and Heather Watts and Peter Martins. Note that Leland replaced Kay Mazzo, who had danced in the 1980 premiere.

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74. On the shifts of mood that are aligned with Florestan and Eusebius, whose “poetic additions” also account for unexpected events in the music, e.g., the cadencing in C-Major at the end of both books against the cycle’s overall B-Minor tonic, see also Tunbridge, “Piano Works II,” 87. 75. Taper, Balanchine, 373. While Schumann’s love for Clara provides the backdrop to pieces as diverse as his Impromptus, Op. 5, Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, Concert sans orchestre, Op. 14, and Fantasie, Op. 17, Tunbridge’s summation of the Davidsbündlertänze supports Taper’s reading: “The Davidsbündlertänze, perhaps more than any other of Schumann’s works, express love and hope for their union” (“Piano Works II,” 86). 76. Brockway, liner notes to Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze.” 77. See Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 99–100. 78. Quoted in Newman, “Dancers Talking about Performance,” 63. 79. Copeland, “Between Description and Deconstruction,” 104, emphasis added. 80. Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic,” 524. 81. Ibid., 527. 82. Brockway, liner notes to Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze”. 83. On the role of quotations in the Davidsbündlertänze as markers of structure, e.g., the interpolation of “Innig” in “Wie aus der Ferne” as a cyclic gesture, see Tunbridge, “Piano Works II,” 87–88. 84. For a classic exploration of the concept of distance in the Romantic imagination and the conceit of the representation of distance in Romantic music, see Hoeckner, “Schumann and Romantic Distance.” 85. Based on her experience of a live performance, Kisselgoff interpreted this moment as Schumann’s “mental breakdown, symbolized by farewell into a watery grave” (“Balanchine and Schumann”). 86. Tunbridge, “Schumann: A Lover’s Guide,” 145, 155.

16 The Fictional Lives of the Schumanns David Ferris

We do not know exactly when Robert Schumann first met Friedrich Wieck and his daughter Clara, but it must have been between March 25, 1828, when he arrived in Leipzig to study law, and August 15 of the same year, when Wieck’s name appears in Schumann’s diary for the first time. Berthold Litzmann suggests that the meeting might have occurred on the evening of March 31, when Clara played a Hummel piano trio at the home of Ernst and Agnes Carus.1 The Caruses, like Schumann, had moved to Leipzig only recently, and he already knew the couple well. In fact he was in love (or at least infatuated) with Agnes, an amateur singer for whom he had composed his first songs in the summer of 1827. J. D. Landis recreates the scene that evening in his novel Longing. As Clara walks into the Caruses’ drawing room with her father and his fiancée, Clementine Fechner, she hears Agnes singing Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” accompanied by a pianist who is playing so passionately that he “seemed desire itself.”2 Afterward, when Agnes introduces the pianist to her newly arrived guests as Herr Robert Schumann, Wieck asks how the two had met. Agnes replies that he had been a patient of her husband, a medical doctor. Schumann and Clementine then have the following exchange: “But you look so . . . robust,” Clementine said to Herr Schumann. “Madness,” he responded. “I beg your pardon.” Clementine was immediately flustered. “How dare you . . . I meant only . . . Forgive me if …” “No no no no no.” Herr Schumann reached out his hand toward Clementine, only to have it grasped, though not withdrawn, by Agnes. “I didn’t mean you are mad. I meant I went to see Dr. Carus for madness. Mine, Fräulein Fechner.” (57)

Agnes interrupts to explain that Schumann “isn’t really mad,” but perhaps “disturbed,” and Schumann offers that his symptoms consisted of “Insomnia. Dreams. Night sweats.” A little later in the conversation Clara’s father changes the subject to Schumann’s piano playing:

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“You play the piano well,” he said to Herr Schumann. “You are, I assume, self-taught?” “No.” ....... “Are you saying, Herr Schumann, that you do not play the piano well or that you are not self-taught?” “Yes,” he answered. Her father had the sense not to ask which but to say simply, “Would you like me to teach you?” “What a splendid idea,” said Agnes. “Why?” asked Herr Schumann. Her father was confused. “I’m sorry. To which one of us are you speaking?” “Neither,” answered Herr Schumann. “You really are quite mad,” said Clementine. “If I am, it’s not because I ask the question ‘Why?’” “Are you asking it of the universe?” asked Clara’s father. “Now that would be mad!” Herr Schumann looked right at Clara and said, “I ask it of you—why have you not said a word?” “She is not comfortable speaking,” her father said. “Is anyone?” asked Herr Schumann. Is anyone? What a splendid question. Clara felt she spoke constantly. But rarely within hearing. “Most people never stop talking,” said Clementine. “Exactly!” exclaimed Herr Schumann, who added, “That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said this evening.” “Thank you.” Clementine actually appeared to curtsy. (59–60)

In Janice Galloway’s Clara, Robert Schumann first enters the story about three years later, at which point he is living in the Wieck household. Galloway, unlike Landis, does not give a specific date for her scene, and there is no historical evidence that it ever took place. But through a combination of the cues Galloway provides in her story and the information available in the documentary record, we can narrow it down to the first few months of 1831.3 Clara and her father are in the midst of planning a concert tour to Paris. Schumann sits reading as Friedrich Wieck shows Clara where Paris is on the map, and he enters the conversation after Wieck makes a joke about storming the gates: No one understands it save the lodger. He doesn’t laugh, but lifts his eyes from his book at least. He looks up. You think they have a sense of humour in Paris? Wieck asks. The young man says nothing. It’s somewhere you’ve been? One of your student haunts? No, the boy says. He’s pink. Not Paris. Paris isn’t—then he stops in midsentence, done.

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Not what? Wieck asks. Not. Switzerland. Switzerland, Wieck says. Paris isn’t Switzerland? No, I didn’t travel to Paris. I travelled to Switzerland. He coughs. Italy. Parts of Italy. Ha! Wieck’s eye fixes on the boy’s face. He’s in the mood for a joke. You avoided Paris on purpose! Every musician in the world holds the opinion Paris is what matters, what counts. But not you. Perhaps you think the Swiss more refined? That cow population is a greater indicator of a country’s worth? No, the boy says. Not at all. But in his opinion—in the opinion of some of his more travelled friends too—Paris was—overrated. His neck colours darker in the silence. What I mean, he says, stammering, is that a German way of thinking musically, independent of Paris, is something to consider. Dresden is as beautiful as Paris, Hummel says, and Weimar is just as— Hummel? Wieck says. Hummel? His eyebrows go up an octave. The young man stops.4

The Robert Schumanns in these two scenes could not be more different from one another. They share a difficulty in communicating, but whereas for Galloway’s Schumann the problem is apparently emotional, for Landis’s it is intellectual, or perhaps philosophical. We might initially suppose that Galloway’s Schumann is simply cowed by the overbearing and sometimes violent personality of Wieck, who is not only Schumann’s landlord, but his piano teacher as well. As the story goes on, however, it becomes clear that Schumann’s inability to express himself is an essential part of his character. Ten years later he cannot even tell his wife that he loves her (229). Likewise, in the case of Landis’s Schumann, we may suppose that we are simply seeing a cocky adolescent who has read too much Romantic literature and is intoxicated—with champagne, with his piano playing, and with his love for an older woman. But it turns out that the difficulty this Schumann has in communicating is essential to his character as well—not because he is emotionally incapable of expressing himself in words, but because it is the overriding philosophical concern of his life, a concern that drives and ultimately destroys both his love and his art. Landis’s Schumann not only reads Romantic novels; he is the hero of one.

Truth of Fiction Longing, published in 2000, and Clara, in 2002, appeared at a propitious moment in Schumann scholarship. During the 1980s and 1990s a wave of primary documents became widely available for the first time. Most significant, complete

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critical editions were published of Robert’s diaries, and of the correspondence between Robert and Clara. This material had long been available piecemeal, in unreliable editions and bowdlerized versions, but now that scholars had unfettered access to it they began to rethink many aspects of the Schumanns’ biographies. Further momentum for this rethinking came from the expansions and realignments that were taking place within the field of musicology; in particular there was a renewed focus on the music of the nineteenth century and an interest in the role that women have played in the history of music. One result of this growing interest in the Schumanns has been a steady stream of biographies about both of them, which began in the late 1990s and has not shown any signs of abating.5 Landis and Galloway, like other writers who have been drawn to the Schumanns in recent years, have immersed themselves in the newly enlarged body of primary documents and have read the major biographical studies that have been written over the past century and a half. What distinguishes them is the published results of their research, which are not scholarly biographies but biographical novels. Longing and Clara take their place within a long tradition of fictionalizing the lives of Robert and Clara Schumann.6 The reasons the Schumanns have proven so alluring to novelists are obvious. They left behind an extensive body of letters and diaries that offers an unusual degree of insight into their thoughts and feelings. Both of them were powerful and fascinating personalities who can be transformed into literary characters with seemingly little effort. And the story of their lives encompasses a variety of major literary themes. But if the historical Schumanns have much to offer novelists, what can the fictional Schumanns offer to scholars? The most obvious answer to this question would seem to be that they have little or nothing to offer. The raw material of scholarship is the documentary record, in whatever form that may take, and although scholars shape this material by interpreting it and giving it meaning, they eschew the speculation and invention that is at the heart of the literary enterprise. Laura Tunbridge rightly observes that in “explicitly fictionalizing a subject’s life story [one] fills in the blanks of an otherwise incomplete portrait, supplying colors that were not necessarily ever there.”7 But if the goal is to reconstruct the subject’s personality and to explain the subject’s words and actions, then the biographer is faced with the same problem as the novelist. In reading the biographies of John Daverio and John Worthen, for example, one is confronted with two Robert Schumanns who differ from one another at least as much as Galloway’s Schumann differs from Landis’s. Each of these biographers is faithful to the documentary record, but each views it from a different perspective. The Schumanns that they end up with have a great deal in common, to be sure, but they also diverge in ways that are incompatible. We find a good illustration of this divergence in Daverio’s and Worthen’s respective treatments of a crucial turning point in Schumann’s life: the summer

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of 1844. In June Schumann gave up the editorship of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and then in November he sold the journal to Franz Brendel, ending his career as a music journalist. Within a few weeks the Schumanns left Leipzig, where they both had lived for many years, and moved to Dresden. Also in June, after nearly a year in which he did not complete a single composition, Schumann began to work on his Szenen aus Goethe’s Faust, which was the most ambitious project he would ever undertake, and which would occupy him, on and off, for nearly a decade. Finally, the summer of 1844 marked the beginning of a lengthy period of ill health for Schumann, which would drag on at least through the end of the following year and then continue sporadically for the rest of his life. According to Daverio, Schumann “came perilously close to total nervous collapse” in the summer of 1844. Relying on letters and diary entries, he describes a man who was so debilitated by anxiety and depression that he could not bear to listen to music; suffered from a host of physical symptoms, including dizziness, headaches, lack of appetite, muscle weakness, and insomnia; developed an array of phobias; and at one point was “practically confined to his bed.” Daverio regards Schumann’s decision to sell his journal, which coincided with the onset of this illness, as a mistake. He writes, “Ostensibly a means of allowing for increased concentration on compositional projects, it turned out to be a cipher for withdrawal.” He also interprets the Schumanns’ “sudden uprooting from their longtime home in Leipzig” in negative terms. It was motivated in part by their “dissatisfaction with its musical establishment” and of Robert’s “intense disappointment over being snubbed as Mendelssohn’s successor at the Gewandhaus,” but “the most compelling reason [for the move] lay with the composer’s precarious physical and mental state.” Yet Robert’s “depressive phase” would continue through the end of 1846, and whatever complaints the Schumanns may have had about Leipzig’s musical life, they sorely missed their “circle of cultured and musical friends” once they left.8 For Worthen the same documentary sources tell a completely different story. Schumann suffered “a single day of melancholy” and a solitary hangover during the summer of 1844. Otherwise his mental health was fine, and his musical productivity was at a high point. He began to feel ill in August, but the symptoms were physical, not psychological. The dizziness and insomnia that he reports were probably the result of circulatory problems, and his digestive symptoms, which Daverio attributes to anxiety, were actually the result of hemorrhoids and constipation. His inability to listen to music “was apparently a neurophysical phenomenon” that would recur twice more, in 1846 and 1854. Worthen interprets Schumann’s occasional references to “melancholy” throughout the years 1844 and 1845 as the result, and not the cause, of his various physical illnesses. He believes that Schumann decided to sell the Neue Zeitschrift in order to have more time to compose, and he suggests that the Schumanns’ increased financial security in the wake of their tour to Russia may have encouraged him to give it up at this particular point. As for the move to Dresden, his doctor’s advice

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apparently provided the impetus, but Schumann’s professional disappointment with Leipzig was the primary reason. This was not a sudden decision, but one that was made deliberately “over a period of some months.” Schumann was well aware that the musical life in Leipzig was superior to that in Dresden, as a letter that he wrote in November testifies. That he “could so clear-headedly spell out all the musical advantages of Leipzig” and still decide to leave does not indicate that Schumann was making an impulsive mistake, but that he wanted to get away from the busy musical life he led there, in the hopes that the peace and quiet of Dresden would give him more time to compose.9 Daverio’s Schumann withdraws from the world because he is depressed, and he is driven to a series of impulsive decisions that only exacerbate the mental and emotional problems he is suffering from. Worthen’s Schumann wants to rid his life of the many distractions that are making it difficult for him to devote himself to his composition. This desire is the guiding premise that leads him to a calculated series of rational choices. Although Schumann is beginning to suffer from a variety of physical symptoms at this point in his life, he is otherwise a satisfied person, at the height of his creative powers, and in full command of his mental faculties. It is possible for Daverio and Worthen to present such contradictory accounts of this moment because they are not simply recounting the events of Schumann’s life, but are each creating a coherent biographical narrative, and it is the narrative that gives meaning to the events. In recent decades the significance of narrative in the field of history has become the subject of intense debate, following a period during which it was largely regarded as an obsolete mode of historical discourse. According to Roger Chartier, after 1960 the practice of history was governed by the dual paradigm of structuralism and statistical quantification, as historians sought to place their discipline on a more scientific footing. The “object of historical knowledge” was no longer the actions of individuals, but the structures and systems that organize societies, and this kind of information is more readily represented in the form of “serial data” and statistics than it is in the form of a narrative. Chartier describes the late 1980s as a time of “epistemological crisis,” as the certitudes of the structuralist paradigm were shaken and the work of several French historians and philosophers “forced historians to recognize, willingly or not, that history belongs to the literary genre of the narrative, understood in the Aristotelian sense of the ‘emplotment of represented actions.’”10 Narrative, in other words, was no longer regarded merely as an expedient mode one might choose when discoursing about history, but as the inherent form of historical discourse, a form that history shares, not with science, but with literature. Hayden White has argued that history employs the very same narrative forms, or “plot structures,” as literature—epic, romance, comedy, tragedy, satire—and that it is through the choice of one literary form or another that historians give meaning to their discourses.11 He acknowledges the claim of structuralist historians that historical narratives are not scientific accounts of historical events, but

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disagrees with their conclusion that narrative history is thus incapable of expressing truths or representing reality. Rather, White concludes “that the truths in which narrative history deals are of an order different from those of its social scientific counterpart.” It is an order of truth that finds its fullest development in fiction, but to reject such truths as “merely imaginary constructions” would be to deny “that literature and poetry have anything valid to teach us about reality.”12 Among historical genres it is biography that depends most heavily on the discursive form of narrative for its meaning and that approaches most closely to literary truth. The genre of biography, much like the genre of the novel, tells the story of its hero’s life and constructs its plot out of the events of that life. Biography and fiction also share a concern with the thoughts and emotions of their characters. They typically represent the world from the perspective of the individual and, at least since the nineteenth century, sometimes even strive to recreate the subjective consciousness of their characters. But if the narrative discourse of biography has a great deal in common with that of the novel, the story that biography tells is different in kind. In biography, as in any other historical discourse, the events that are recounted are “real,” which is to say that there is documentary evidence that they actually occurred. As they turn these events into a narrative, biographers may well “produce an imaginary discourse about real events,” as White puts it,13 but the reality of those events, the documentary record of their hero’s life, confronts them with constraints that novelists do not face. As they turn the facts of a life into a narrative, biographers inevitably employ literary techniques, but they must be careful not to cross the line into fiction, or they risk implausibility. Virginia Woolf eloquently described this problem more than eighty years ago, in an essay about the so-called new biography of Lytton Strachey and Harold Nicolson: And here we again approach the difficulty which, for all his ingenuity, the biographer still has to face. Truth of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible; yet he is now more than ever urged to combine them. For it would seem that the life which is increasingly real to us is the fictitious life; it dwells in the personality rather than in the act. . . . Thus, the biographer’s imagination is always being stimulated to use the novelist’s art of arrangement, suggestion, dramatic effect to expound the private life. Yet if he carries the use of fiction too far, so that he disregards the truth, or can only introduce it with incongruity, he loses both worlds; he has neither the freedom of fiction nor the substance of fact.14

What the novelist has to offer, then, is the freedom to present the “truth of fiction.” It is not simply that Galloway and Landis each turn the Schumanns into fictional characters, but that each turns the story of their lives into a fictional narrative, within which they can explicitly address the universal themes that biographers can only hint at. In reading about the fictional Schumanns we may not learn anything new about the facts of their lives, but we add a literary dimension to the meaning of their lives.

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Clara Galloway prefaces her book with what appears to be a cross between the title page for a volume of music and a concert program. It begins with the title of Robert Schumann’s song cycle—“Frauenliebe und -leben Op. 42 / Woman’s Life and Love / a revised edition of eight songs with piano accompaniment”— continues with a list of several other compositions, and concludes with “Finale / Concerto for lone piano / Work in progress” (3). Galloway continues to allude to Frauenliebe und -leben in arranging her book, which consists of eight chapters that borrow their titles from the songs of the cycle. The implication seems to be that there is a parallel between Adelbert Chamisso’s idealized narrative of a generic woman’s life and Galloway’s story of Clara Schumann’s life, but the relationship between the cycle and the novel turns out to be ironic. The life in Chamisso’s cycle of poems begins when the woman first catches sight of her beloved, is shaped by the major events of domesticity—courtship, engagement, marriage, pregnancy, and motherhood—and ends when her husband dies. Chamisso’s widow does not literally die along with her husband, and in fact the final poem is a kind of postscript that reveals that the cycle is being narrated to the woman’s granddaughter, presumably many years after her husband’s death.15 But in the penultimate poem, in which she describes his death, the woman proclaims that his absence has left her world empty, and so she is no longer living, and will withdraw into herself. And because the story she is telling to her granddaughter ends at this point, her years of widowhood are left as a void. Galloway transforms this domestic life story into a kind of feminist Bildungsroman, which tells the story both of Clara Schumann’s musical education and of her emotional development. Although Galloway’s story ends with the death of Clara’s husband, as in Chamisso’s cycle, this is not the end of Clara’s life, either literally or metaphorically, but the beginning of her mature career as a full-fledged musician. The years of Clara’s marriage are thus presented as a transitional and transformative phase. The fifth chapter, “Helft mir / Help me,” which portrays the early years of the Schumanns’ marriage, provides an especially stark example of the contrast between the novel and the song cycle. In Chamisso’s poem the bride is calling on her girlfriends to help her prepare for her wedding, but also to encourage her as she somewhat nervously takes on her new role as a wife. Galloway’s Clara is already married when the chapter begins, and she has idealistic hopes for what marriage should be: that it “must mark people, and mark them for good. That it ennobles those who live righteously and rigorously within its strictures, woman as helpmate and man as master. . . . And everything, anything, the world itself achievable through love, much love, a boundlessness of love” (193). But she gradually finds herself overwhelmed by her sense of inadequacy, her frustrations, and her fears. She does not know how to be a good wife, she feels torn between her urge to perform and her husband’s expectation that she stay at home, and then she

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becomes pregnant and is frightened by the mystery of childbirth. She is worried about her husband, who gets completely lost in his work and often seems to be ignorant of her existence. He suffers from a variety of physical symptoms whose origin is unclear; he has insomnia, which results in some confusing and disturbing nighttime scenes; he sometimes lapses into alcoholism; and he has occasional bouts of paranoia. In the chapter, then, unlike the poem, the title is a literal cry for help, although part of Clara’s problem is that she does not know whom to cry to; she feels that she is all alone. The chapter ends in late 1842, with a fictional conversation between Clara and Dr. Moritz Reuter, who in real life was a close friend of the Schumanns and one of Robert’s doctors. Robert is still suffering from intense physical symptoms: powerful headaches that “made a dark, hollow singing noise in his ears,” followed by lethargy so severe “that he could not stand or get out of bed without coaxing” (240). As she has throughout the chapter, Clara worries that she is somehow to blame for her husband’s condition and that he does not love her any more. Although Robert insists he does not want to see a doctor, Clara summons Reuter, but then at the last minute she feels guilty about ignoring her husband’s instructions and ends up speaking with Reuter herself. Clara asks him if Robert’s symptoms might be the result of his disappointment with marriage and family life. Reuter assures her that this is not the case, that Schumann has always suffered from “periodic malaise.” Clara then asks how she can help him and thinks, but does not say, that she wishes Robert would agree to let her perform more, so that she could earn enough money for the family and give him more freedom to compose. Reuter, misapprehending what is really bothering her, suggests that if Robert refuses to take medicine, she might try mineral baths, and she might play for him. She again thinks, but does not say, that he would certainly not want to hear her play, since “noise, any sound, grated at his nerves so he snapped at her, shut doors, became more distant still,” and she simply tells Reuter that what Robert wants is to compose and that he is “downhearted” when he cannot do this. Reuter insists that when Robert composes, “when the ideas carry him along, he stays awake and thinks too wildly,” and so composing “will lead only to more malaise, another bout of his melancholia.” He concludes by reassuring Clara that she herself, and the home and family that she shares with Robert, are the best things for him (242–44). Although intended to console Clara, Reuter’s words alarm her, since they mean that she is powerless to change her husband’s condition, “that this thing that happened to him, that happened to both of them, was simply what happened and had to be endured” (245). This revelation turns out to be the first stage in Clara’s emotional development, or Bildung, as a wife: she is learning that she must accept the limits of “the boundlessness of love.” Galloway, like virtually all of the Schumanns’ biographers, bases her depiction of their early married life primarily on their so-called marriage diaries, which provide an extensive written record of their first three and a half years

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together. At several points in this chapter she reproduces actual passages from the diaries, and elsewhere the diaries serve as the source for her fictional Clara’s thoughts and words. The worries that Galloway’s Clara cannot get herself to reveal to Reuter in the climactic scene with which the chapter ends, for example, can be found in a lengthy diary entry from the beginning of November 1842, which begins as follows: An indescribable melancholy has overcome me in the last few days. I think that you no longer love me as you did before, I often feel so clearly that I cannot satisfy you, and when you are tender, it sometimes seems to me that I must attribute it to your good heart, which does not want to hurt me. And now, along with this grief, come many sad thoughts for the future, which often do not leave me for days at a time, and which I cannot banish, so you must sometimes be lenient with me. Oh Robert! If you only knew how my heart is always so full of love, how I cherish you, how I would like to show you a life that is always rose-colored, how I love you endlessly!

Clara then laments the fact that her husband has to work for money and that he will not allow her to earn anything. Whenever she has to ask him for money, she feels as if she is “robbing him of the poetry of his life.” If only she could work herself, he would be free to dedicate himself to his art, which to her is “something tender, poetic, I would like to say sacred,” and she could spare him “all of the prose, which certainly can never be absent from married life.” She concludes by asking Robert to excuse her “emotional outpourings” and then writes, “Give me a kiss, so that you are not angry with me, and if you can, never stop loving me just a little bit, your love is my life.”16 Clara’s heartfelt expression of her fears and desires makes this one of the most revealing passages in the Schumanns’ marriage diaries, but it is difficult nevertheless to know how we should read it, and what it really means. As with other entries, the lack of contextual information makes it difficult to determine Clara’s intent, a problem that is exacerbated by the hybrid nature of the diaries. In the inaugural entry, written the day after the Schumanns’ wedding, Robert describes them as “a true friend, to which we confide everything, to which we open our hearts.” But he also stipulates that each week they will read what each other has written, so they are not so much a private diary as a mode of communication between husband and wife. Unlike letters, however, which can provide a more or less complete record of the correspondence between two people, the marriage diaries are obviously just a partial record, and we have no way of knowing the content of the conversations to which they either explicitly or implicitly refer. Finally, Robert writes of the diaries that “a true history of all of the joys and sorrows of married life should be written here, which we will still enjoy in our old age.”17 The Schumanns thus understood that the marriage diaries would be an enduring historical record, and this presumably constrained their desire to open their hearts too completely. It may explain, for example, why Robert almost never

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refers to his ill health, his melancholy, and his bouts of drinking in the marriage diaries, but does so in his so-called household books (Haushaltbücher), which mostly consist of an accounting of his personal expenses but which he undoubtedly regarded as a private document that only he would read. The varying and sometimes conflicting functions of the marriage diaries have led different biographers to interpret their contents in different ways. Berthold Litzmann ignores the heartfelt opening of Clara’s entry of November 1842 and puts the emphasis wholly on the Schumanns’ precarious financial situation. Clara’s entry provides evidence that Robert’s unreliable health was causing the couple to have “grave worries about the future [because] as their life had now been arranged, the burden of earning a living rested on his shoulders, despite the fact that Clara suffered from the ‘dreadful’ thought that her husband ‘was compelled to work in order to earn money.’ ”18 Daverio, like Litzmann, omits any mention of Clara’s emotional opening words, but his interpretation of the entry as a whole implies that we should read them more as a rhetorical flourish than as an expression of her inner feelings. He reads the entry as a carefully constructed argument that was presented as part of an ongoing debate between the Schumanns “over the financial management of their household”: But in spite of Clara’s mollifying rhetoric—she lives only for Robert (whom she loves infinitely), she regrets having to “tear [him] away from his beautiful dreams,” her entry is a shrewdly but gently phrased reminder that artist couples must tend to the practical side of their relationship. If Schumann sometimes lost himself in fanciful reveries, Clara was on hand with the Goethean admonition that married life has its prose as well as its poetry.19

There is clear evidence that the Schumanns debated about household finances during the early years of their marriage, in particular about the question of whether Clara should earn part of the family’s income by performing and touring, and on several occasions they presented their arguments to one another in the pages of the marriage diaries. In fact, in the entry preceding the present one, written in October, Robert presents an even more carefully constructed argument that the status quo must be maintained, however problematic it may be. He begins by reporting that Clara performed at the Gewandhaus at the beginning of October, and then writes that it “often worries” him that he “often hinders her studies” because she does not want to disturb his composing. Robert acknowledges that “the publicly performing artist, even if he were the greatest,” needs to always keep practicing in order to maintain his technique, and he admits that it is his fault that Clara does not always have the time to “increase that mechanical security to infallibility, so to speak.” Clearly, however, it cannot be otherwise: Clara certainly sees that I have a talent to cultivate, and that I now have the greatest energy and must make use of my youth. Artist marriages must be this

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way, we cannot have everything together, and the main thing is always the remaining happiness and we are certainly truly happy, that we have each other, and understand each other, understand each other so well, and love each other from our whole hearts.20

It is certainly plausible to read these two entries together as a kind of rhetorical thrust and counterthrust. Robert argues that Clara must sacrifice her practicing—and by implication her performing career as well—so that he will be free to compose. Clara responds that, on the contrary, if only she could work, then Robert would have more artistic freedom, since he would not have to worry so much about earning a living. Likewise we could read the beginning of Clara’s entry as a response to the end of Robert’s. He assures her that their love for one another is what makes them truly happy, regardless of their conflicts about their careers. She responds that she is actually not happy at all, and she is not even sure that he loves her. Interpreting the entries in this way, we can read Clara’s emotional outpouring simply as calculated melodrama, intended to rouse her husband from his poetic reverie and face the fact that they have a problem. By transforming Clara’s diary entry into the unspoken thoughts of her fictional heroine, Galloway is clearly reading it as a sincere expression of her feelings— ironically, feelings that the fictional Clara cannot articulate, either to Robert or to anyone else. It is perhaps not surprising that a biographical novelist such as Galloway would look for any scraps of evidence she can find that might potentially give insight into Clara Schumann’s inner life. But the two different readings of the entry—either as genuine or as rhetorical posturing—are not necessarily incompatible. The Schumanns were not engaged simply in an abstract debate about the problems of artist marriages, after all, but in a real-life struggle about how they, as a couple, should live their lives. Even if we accept Daverio’s interpretation of Clara’s diary entry as a premeditated piece of rhetoric, the sentiments she expresses presumably reflect how she actually felt. Galloway is not the only one who takes Clara’s words at face value. Nancy Reich pairs the opening of the November 1842 diary entry with another passage from a year earlier, in which Clara expresses a similar sentiment, and concludes that, “in the face of all evidence to the contrary, she had recurrent fears of losing Robert’s love.” Reich observes that the marriage diaries contain “no response to these fears,” and she comments that “they seem to have subsided as her career took on larger dimensions.”21 Reich’s implicit connection between Clara’s insecurity about her marriage and her frustrations about her career is psychologically compelling, and it helps to explain why she would express her fears about her husband’s love in a diary entry that is primarily concerned with Robert’s work. Raised as a child prodigy whose life goal was to become one of the greatest virtuosos in Europe, Clara undoubtedly derived a large part of her identity from her piano playing. Suddenly finding herself deprived of the opportunity to perform, and often even to practice, would be a serious blow to her sense of self, and it is not surprising that she doubted her worthiness as a wife. At the time Clara wrote the entry she had

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recently performed at the Gewandhaus, and a few months before that she had taken her first tour as a married woman, to northern Germany and Denmark. But these small victories probably just reinforced her sense of hopelessness about resuming her full-time career. From Robert’s point of view, the tour was a disaster, and he was not likely to agree to another one. And his comments in the October diary entry about Clara’s lack of practice time, and in particular his awkward distinction between mechanical “security” and “infallibility,” hint ever so subtly that her performance at the Gewandhaus did not go well. Clara’s feelings of insecurity about her performing career were undoubtedly exacerbated by the feverish pace of her husband’s composing. Robert wrote his three string quartets in a period of six weeks in the summer of 1842, completed his piano quintet in three weeks in October, and was already at work on his piano quartet at the time Clara wrote her diary entry in November. Not only would Robert’s industriousness make her own inactivity all the more apparent to her, but it actually prevented her from working, since she could not practice when he composed. And Robert’s working habits apparently made him more self-absorbed and moody, and thus less loving toward his wife. He tended to work at night, in a state of great excitement, and then become tired, depressed, and sometimes ill afterward. Clara describes how these various issues connect to one another in a diary entry of January 28, 1841, written two days after Robert finished composing his first symphony in a four-day burst. She writes that she “absolutely did not play now,” in part because she was ill from the first trimester of pregnancy and in part because of Robert’s composing. She complains that she “unlearned everything, and became completely melancholy about it.” Then she writes, with a tone of defensive ambivalence, “Robert has been very cold towards me for several days, although the reason is a very welcome one, and nobody can share more sincerely in everything he undertakes than I. Still, this coldness occasionally hurts me, which I deserve least of all.”22 All of these same complaints—the lack of an opportunity for her to practice and the resulting decline in her playing, her melancholy, and her feeling that Robert does not love her—recur in the diaries in the fall of 1842, when Robert was again hard at work composing during the night and then complaining that he had “sleepless nights” and felt “unwell,” “melancholy,” and “dreadful.”23 In her fictionalized depiction of the Schumanns’ marriage Galloway imagines how difficult and overwhelming this situation would have been for Clara and reconstructs her inner journey as she learns to accept her situation, and ultimately to prevail over it, by taking control over her marriage and her family as her husband’s health, and his behavior, become increasingly erratic. The interrelation between Clara’s emotional development as a wife and her artistic development as a musician becomes a recurring theme for Galloway. These two aspects of her heroine’s life frequently come into conflict, as they did for the historical Clara Schumann, but in the end it is by applying what she has learned as

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a performing musician that Galloway’s Clara resolves the difficulties that her marriage presents to her. According to Galloway, it is the peculiar tension, so integral to musical performance, between expressivity and artifice, between spontaneous emotion and technical control, that teaches Clara how she must live her life. Robert first notices that Clara has managed to balance these opposing forces in her piano playing at the end of the third chapter, when he hears her perform at the Gewandhaus, and at that moment he realizes that she has become a woman. The situation that Galloway describes in the second half of the chapter is dramatic enough to be a literary invention, but it is actually based quite closely on the situation that the historical Schumanns faced in the summer of 1837. Clara’s father had successfully prevented the lovers from communicating with one another for a year and a half, and their faithfulness was apparently wavering on both sides. Clara decided to publicly perform three of Robert’s Études symphoniques as a message to Robert that she still loved him, and she managed to get word to him through their mutual friend, Ernst Becker, that he should make sure he was in the audience. Robert understood Clara’s message, and again using Becker as a go-between he proposed to Clara by secret letter and received her assent by the same means. When he met with Friedrich Wieck to formally ask for his daughter’s hand, however, he was rudely rebuffed, and within a few weeks Clara and her father were en route to Vienna for a concert tour. In Galloway’s retelling of this story, Robert knows that Clara is in love as soon as he hears her play: It filled out her playing, opened it into something wide, ripe, warm. Had he not been such a musician, he might have thought she played only to him. But he knew too much. That’s the trick of Art, he thought—to offer intimacies to a roomful of strangers. Play well, play like this, and every clot in the audience thinks it speaks only to them. . . . He watched her eyes scan the crowd, pick him out, move on. . . . Afterwards she wrote in her secret diary. I felt nothing, her own words, I felt dead inside—and he believed her. Yet he recalled her face that night, its momentary pause just for him. Then its turning again to the crowd, acknowledging the applause, and the shine in her eyes. She was two people, his Chiara, Chiarina. Maybe more than two. It occurred to him, then, occurred as no more than a passing observation, that he hardly knew her. She had become a woman, someone who was learning to experience pain and not show it. A woman with sweat on her breastbone, who performed physical work before the public gaze. A woman—he heard them saying it as they left the hall—a woman with a soul as great as a man’s. (138–39)

As Galloway imagines Robert’s response to Clara’s playing, she actually conflates two different concerts. Clara’s concert at the Gewandhaus, which was her final performance in Leipzig before she left for Vienna, was on October 8, 1837. But the concert at which she played Schumann’s études was several weeks earlier, on

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August 13, at the Buchhändlerbörse. About the Gewandhaus concert Robert left a description in his diary only of Clara’s gaze: “Evening concert, at the door, Clara with a look as only a blessed bride [could give]—a glance that could strengthen your weaknesses for years to come.”24 In her account of the concert Galloway moves the gaze from the entrance of the theater to the stage, but more significantly she transfers the meaning of the gaze to Clara’s piano playing. In his diary Robert describes seeing in her eyes that Clara was now his, but in Galloway’s novel he describes hearing it in her playing. The earlier concert is mentioned in a letter of May 2, 1838, in which Clara describes to Robert why she decided to program his études and how she felt as she played them: Did you admire my courage for playing something of yours in August?— Don’t you realize that I played it because I knew of no other way to show you a little bit of my inner feelings? I couldn’t do it secretly, so I did it publicly. Do you believe that my heart hadn’t trembled? In my heart, so many sighs flew to the gallery where you sat—I thought (don’t think me arrogant) that from my playing you should have seen, should have felt, what was going on within me. See Robert, I thought that, and so I overcame my trembling and shaking—I did not play your work to the audience, no, to you!25

Galloway does not make any direct reference to this passage, but we can read her description of Robert’s thoughts, as he listens to Clara play, as an implicit response to it. Robert “might have thought she played only to him,” and not to the audience, but he knows better. Musical performance, by its very nature, tricks the listener into believing that it is private, that it “speaks only to them,” but in fact it communicates to everyone equally and anonymously. Conversely the performer may give the impression that she is baring her soul and revealing her innermost feelings, but this too is artifice. The performer can use her inner feelings to animate her playing and bring it to life, but she is always exercising her conscious control and channeling her feelings through the music. This is why Clara becomes “two people” for Robert: she is both his “Chiarina” and also a “woman” who is performing “before the public gaze.” The historical Robert Schumann wrote a brief description of his actual feelings as he listened to Clara’s August 13 performance in a letter of February 11, 1838, written three months before Clara’s letter cited above: I will not forget how you played my etudes, how you turned them into pure masterpieces—the audience could not appreciate it—but one person sat there, and, as his heart pounded from other feelings, he bowed down before you, as an artist, in the complete essence of his being—I will never forget how in the passage [here he inserts two measures of score], you strike the appoggiatura with the left hand.26

In Robert’s account, as in Clara’s, it is the seemingly private nature of the musical performance that is emphasized: he felt as if he were the only one in the audience

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who could appreciate it. But the historical Robert at least alludes to the duality that Galloway’s fictional Robert understands so well. Although he was gripped by “other feelings” as he listened, what impressed him most powerfully was Clara’s artistry, and by the end of his account he is remembering the technical details of her playing. Still, there is no evidence that the historical Robert ever reached the conclusions about musical performance that Galloway attributes to his fictional counterpart. She is indulging her freedom as a novelist to have the character she has created speak for her and reveal the deeper meaning of a historical event, a meaning that the historical agents who actually participated in the event, and bore witness to it, did not understand at the time. Because Galloway focalizes the scene through Robert’s perspective—as opposed to the majority of the book, which is focalized through Clara’s—she never tells us what Clara was thinking as she performed in Robert’s presence. But many years later, as Galloway’s Clara struggles to learn how to be a loving and supportive wife, the “trick” of music—that it is a carefully controlled expression of emotion that creates the illusion of an unmediated outpouring—proves to be of great importance to her. At the end of chapter 6 it is 1846, Clara is pregnant with Emil, her fourth child, and Robert is again suffering from debilitating physical symptoms and erratic behavior. Clara decides that she must take control of her marriage: Like a general, someone to be reckoned with, she had learned a set of tactics that would stand this marriage, this stability upon which all else rested, in solid stead. And the tactics were these. If he was excitable, she would engineer that they withdrew from company; if he was moody and withdrawn, she would ensure they surrounded themselves with books and home; if he was melancholy, she would sit it out, be patient, wait and see. If they ran out of money and she could no longer work at all, and when the new baby came—well. The tactical set was not complete yet, but it was begun and that was something. Containment and fortification. One might survive on such things. (291)

The “tactical set” that Clara describes in this passage consists of a complex series of layers that involves not only keeping her own feelings in check, but also controlling Robert’s, and making sure that their private struggles remain out of the “public gaze.” In the final years of their life together, as the crisis in Düsseldorf comes to a head, Clara’s attempt to juggle these different tactics becomes increasingly difficult. The chorus members are starting to complain about Robert’s conducting, and Clara suspects that Tausch, Robert’s assistant, is plotting against him in the hopes of taking over his job. During a house concert, which was intended to smooth over the growing rift with the chorus, Robert suddenly interrupts Clara as she plays his piano quintet and insists that Tausch take her place. As she stands up from the piano and hears whispering in the audience, “her face burned,” and so she makes sure to “concentrate on her face, refusing to let it register shame, surprise. Refusing to let it register anything at all.” Afterward, as

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Tausch offers an embarrassed apology and his hope that Robert soon feels better, she replies, “My husband is quite well. . . . Too fast and too loud. I played poorly. My husband, rest assured, is well and looking forward to the new season” (365–66). Eventually Robert becomes incapable of conducting rehearsals, and the chorus refuses to sing under him. Several members of the orchestra committee come to the Schumanns’ house to announce their “reluctant decision that Dr Schumann should rest and relinquish the choir on a permanent basis to Herr Tausch.” Clara decries this as “a vile intrigue and an infamous insult!” but Robert calmly proposes “another solution,” that Tausch simply replace his wife as rehearsal pianist, since “her work has been poor of late, placing a strain on everyone, as I am well aware.” After Clara manages to kick the committee members out of her house and she is left alone in the hallway, she can feel that “the struggling rose in her chest, a tide of terrible sobbing that she would not let break. A few moments, minutes perhaps—let nothing show—and she was ready” (372–73). Galloway makes an explicit connection between the almost superhuman control that Clara exhibits in these fictionalized scenes and the discipline that she has learned as a musician. In a brief prologue at the very beginning of the novel an obviously mature Clara Schumann is looking at her reflection in the water of a washbowl as she prepares for a performance of some sort: So far as can be managed, this face is blank. Inscrutable. As it should be. A pianist must develop more than technique, more than musicianship, more, even, than luck. She needs the capacity to deny fear. Passion one might take for granted: its control is the medium through which all else flows. That every emotion evoked by music is created through containment is a commonplace. For all the shimmering detail of this reflection, then, the depth of her training is the only thing that shows. It’s something she is proud of, something for which she is thankful every day. (5)

Clara’s ability to keep her face from revealing her emotions derives from her ability to face an audience—“she’s faced thousands before now”—and to deny her fear and control her passion, which is how she has learned to express emotion through music. On this day, however, “there will be only a handful” of people and “there will be no stage,” so they will be “close enough to see stitching on her sleeves, to smell her if they choose, to test her solidity” (5). It is only at the end of the book that we realize that the performance Clara is preparing for is not a concert, but her husband’s funeral. She is hoping that she will have the strength to master her grief and not make a public show of her feelings. At the end of the prologue she is patient, as she will be so often throughout the book: “For now, she must only wait, rehearse the habit of mental discipline, prepare.” At the very end of the book we have come full circle, and Clara is in Robert’s room in Endenich, hours after his death. She notices his music sitting on the piano and she considers playing for him, but instead she

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opens the window and looks out at the world. She sees a road heading toward the mountains: It leads to Köln and Düsseldorf, Essen, Holland. North. Koblenz and Heidelberg lie south, and west is France. East, where the shadows fall, are Zwickau, Leipzig, Dresden. Borders. She imagines a pattern of roads spread onwards, their connections and tributaries ravelling out to the sea. A breeze ruffles his music. The pages turn and fold. She has nothing to do but wait. (423)

The list of cities and the geographic imagery in this passage are a cue that Clara is thinking about performing, since this is how Galloway has referred to Clara’s concert tours throughout the book. As with Galloway’s narrative, Clara’s life has come full circle. The emotional discipline that she learned as a musician has enabled her to prevail over the difficulties of her marriage, and now that it is over she has become a mature woman, whose tumultuous life experience will presumably add to the emotional depth and richness of her piano playing.

Longing If Galloway tries to reconstruct Clara Schumann’s inner life realistically, or at least plausibly, by writing a modern version of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, Landis turns to the genre of the early Romantic novel, and in particular to the works of Robert Schumann’s two favorite authors, Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffmann, to reconstruct Robert’s inner life by recreating the fictional world that gave rise to his self-image and his worldview. In fact the character Landis calls Robert Schumann does not appear to be simply a fictionalized version of the historical Schumann, but more of a hybrid character, who combines elements of the historical Schumann and the fictional Johannes Kreisler, Hoffmann’s alter ego. Kreisler, much like Landis’s Schumann, behaves so eccentrically that people often believe he is mad, and both characters are seized by the fear that they really will become insane. Julius Hitzig, Hoffmann’s friend and biographer, claims that Kreisler would have ended up succumbing to mental illness, just as Schumann did, and was saved from this fate only by the fact that Hoffmann never managed to write the projected third volume of his second novel, Lebensansichten des Katers Murr.27 The two fictional characters also share a propensity to speak in riddles and to use irony and sarcasm, so that it is often difficult for people to understand the true meaning of what they say. And both spend much of their lives longing for a woman who is unattainable and sublimate their longing in their music. Despite the obvious parallels between Landis’s Schumann and Hoffmann’s Kreisler, it is not entirely clear if the one character is deliberately modeled on the other, or if Landis is simply reflecting an affinity that was created by the historical Schumann himself and that has since been perpetuated by his biographers.

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Schumann, of course, created his own alter egos, Florestan and Eusebius, who were intended to represent the two contrasting sides of his character, but their personalities—the one passionate and fiery, the other poetic and dreamy—display the obvious influence of Kreisler’s split personality as well. When he published his music criticism under the names of his fictional alter egos Schumann was again following Hoffmann, who republished some of his reviews in Kreisler’s name and thus blurred the boundaries between the author and his fictional character. We can regard Schumann’s fascination with Kreisler, who became an archetype of the Romantic musical genius, as an example of what Ernst Kris calls “enacted biography,” in which the way one lives one’s life is influenced by the biographical models of one’s professional class.28 Longing is presented as a series of short scenes, each preceded by the name of a city, a date, and an epigraph, which creates the appearance of a scholarly biography that adheres scrupulously to the documentary record. Primary documents, such as letters, are interspersed throughout the narrative. Frequent digressions, and even footnotes, provide historical and sometimes philosophical context for various characters and events in the story. But before the book begins Landis offers an author’s note that reveals the biographical apparatus to be an illusion: “The epigraphs are archival. The characters are historical. The dates of events and correspondence are, when verifiable, authentic. The rest is fiction masquerading as fact, and the reverse.” The “reverse” in the last sentence casually hints that our difficulty in separating fact from fiction throughout the book is not simply because Landis is making things up and pretending that they really happened. Rather it is because there is no clear distinction between objective reality and subjective perception. This philosophical notion is familiar to us from the Romantic writers whom Landis is emulating. And, as with those earlier novelists, Landis uses the very form of his book to embody this theme. We can find one possible model for Landis’s fictitious biographical trappings in Kater Murr, which begins with an editor’s foreword, signed by Hoffmann, that purports to explain how the book came to be and why it actually consists of two completely different stories—one the autobiography of Murr, the other the biography of Kreisler—which abruptly alternate back and forth without apparent reason: After careful enquiry and investigation, the editor finally learned the following: as tomcat Murr wrote his life and opinions, without ado he tore apart a printed book that he discovered in his master’s house, and innocently used the pages, partly as backing and partly as blotting. These pages remained in the manuscript, as if they belonged to it, and were mistakenly printed as well.29

Landis perhaps found an even more suggestive model in the writings of Jean Paul, who also wrote novels that disguise themselves as biographies and manipulated the confusion between fact and fiction in an even more pervasive and

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fantastical way. As in Longing, Jean Paul’s narratives are often interrupted by lengthy digressions, which are usually concerned with history, philosophy, or the art of writing, and they include numerous footnotes, which may give the source for a quotation, explain an allusion, or even comment on the story. Jean Paul also inserts himself into virtually all of his novels, as both the narrator and as a character, and his frequent intrusions into the narrative appear to shatter the fictional illusion. In his first novel, Die unsichtbare Loge, which is subtitled Eine Lebensbeschreibung, he suddenly announces that he will “present a new person to the reader,” the tutor and godfather of his hero, Gustav, and he then admits that he himself is this person. As he tries to reassure the reader about this potential conflict of interest, he explicitly addresses the apparent blurring of fact and fiction: One must not think that I became the tutor in order to become the biographer, i.e., that I cleverly endeavored to teach into [hineinzuerziehen] Gustav everything that I again copy out [herauszuschreiben] of him in the book. In that case, first of all, I could merely invent and otherwise lie to myself, like a novel manufacturer [Romanen-Manufakturist]; and secondly, I would certainly not have a biography.30

Although Hoffmann and Jean Paul create the impression that they are biographers rather than novelists, they obviously expected their readers to understand that this impression is false and that the heroes of their books are fictional characters. Since the hero of Longing, along with virtually all of the other characters, is a historical figure, Landis’s readers really cannot tell what is fact and what is fiction. This uncertainty is generally considered a weakness of the biographical novel as a genre, and it has irritated some of Landis’s readers,31 but for him it is evidently one of the primary reasons for writing the book. Whereas Galloway, like most biographical novelists, tries to disguise the fictional material in Clara by making it as realistic as possible and seamlessly integrating it into the historical material that it is based upon, Landis seems to go out of his way to make sure that his readers are always thinking about the uncertain status of his discourse. Accounts of actual historical events alternate with scenes that seem too implausible or too anachronistic to be real. And while Landis, unlike Jean Paul, consistently maintains the role of an objective third-person narrator, his tone swings back and forth wildly, from historical explanation, to storytelling, to ironic commentary, and sometimes to sexual descriptions that seem disturbingly intimate for a work of biography. Landis’s dialogue is often based on historical documents and sometimes incorporates actual quotations from letters and diaries, but he does not seem to make any effort to reconstruct the actual voices of his historical characters, who often speak in a playful and ironic tone that seems more postmodern than Romantic and that gives the impression that they are simply speaking for Landis himself. Longing, like Clara, ends with Robert Schumann’s death, but Landis makes it clear, in a characteristically explicit way, that he too regards the Schumanns’

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marriage as an intermediate stage, and not as the conclusion of his story. Landis divides his book into five parts, the first three of which take us from Robert Schumann’s birth in Zwickau on June 8, 1810, to the Schumanns’ wedding in Schönefeld on September 12, 1840. The fourth part of the book is already set apart by its peculiar title, “Marriage: An Interlude.” It is the only part that is not divided into scenes that are each labeled with a date and a geographical location. Instead, after a single heading, “September 12, 1840–March 4, 1854,” there are eighty-three pages of continuous text. The heading is a bit misleading, since the second date is not actually the last day of the Schumanns’ marriage, which continued until Robert died on July 29, 1856, but rather the day that Robert left for Endenich and thus the day that their physical life together ended. The heading is also misleading because it implies that the story will pick up where the preceding part left off, but as the text begins Robert is already in Endenich, looking back on his life. Landis thus presents the Schumanns’ marriage not as a chronological narrative, but as a fragmentary memory, which flits from one scene to another as if through free association. But if the genre seems to be shifting unexpectedly, from scholarly biography to confessional memoir, the tone of the writing and the narrative voice remain confusingly the same. Although the section is focalized through Schumann’s perspective, Landis continues to write in the third person and continues to intersperse ostensibly historical digressions within the narrative. Toward the very end of the section Schumann relives his attempted suicide and his departure for Endenich. The memory of the flowers that Clara had given him, which he held in the carriage as he set off, triggers another memory, of holding flowers as he sat in the carriage that took them to their new home on their wedding night (372).32 And so the interlude of their marriage ends at the moment of its beginning, and it is only at the end of the fourth part of the book that the story finally picks up where it had left off at the end of the third part. But of course it does not continue, because the interlude is over. Part 5, titled “The Breakdown Dialogues,” begins on March 10, 1854, in Endenich, and once more we return to the format of the first three parts of the book: a series of scenes that are each labeled with a date and a geographical location—although with the exception of a single scene, the location is always Endenich—interspersed with several “primary documents.” The result of this peculiarly circular structure is that the years that Robert and Clara were physically together become a dream-like interruption of the more grounded reality of their separation. Landis appears to be turning things inside out, since it is when they were apart that they were dreaming of and longing for the reality of being together. But that, of course, is precisely the point. Landis portrays love as the desire to become completely one with another person, a desire that can never really be satisfied, and so the state of longing is reality. Robert muses on this strange truth when he thinks back on his marriage: “He’d longed for her when they were apart. Once they were together always, and

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he might satisfy his longing when he wished, his longing only grew. It was a desire not merely to enter her but somehow to envelop her while at the same time to find himself contained, wholly, within her” (307). It is not, in other words, the desire for physical union with another person that defines love, but the longing to actually become that person. When Schumann is in Endenich he transfers that longing to Brahms and continues to love Clara through him. At the beginning of the fourth part of Longing he remembers a visit from Brahms, when he imagined that his friend had become his wife: “What he remembers is putting on the glasses of his beloved friend Johannes and seeing Clara, walking beside him on the Endenich road, indistinguishable from Brahms until he gave the glasses back and Clara disappeared. And so did Brahms—into the train on his way back to her he embodied” (291). At another point in the novel Robert realizes that in his love for Clara, Brahms has become him. Brahms tells Schumann that he has taken over the running of their household while Clara is on tour. Schumann thinks to himself that Brahms is now her husband, and though it gives him “great sadness” to realize that his own marriage is effectively over, he feels that he has been replaced not “by this boy he loved but by his own absence” (401). In fact the only time that Schumann shows any sign of jealousy toward Brahms is when Brahms describes in his letters to Schumann how he himself longed for Clara while she was away on tour. “Note,” Schumann says to his doctor in Endenich, Franz Richarz, “the theme of longing. In every letter he writes of longing” (398). It is longing that defines love, and so it is in longing for Clara that Brahms becomes a rival. On the other hand, his physical contact with Clara enables him to become the medium for Schumann’s own longing, and thus for Schumann’s love. Landis’s depiction of the Schumanns’ marriage, and of Brahms’s role in it, is not based on historical evidence, but on the Romantic fiction that Schumann read. The notion of love as an eternal state of longing that can never be satisfied is a central theme of Hoffmann’s Kater Murr, where it is exemplified by Kreisler’s unrequited love for the elusive Julia Benzon. When Landis turns Brahms into a Doppelgänger, he recalls Jean Paul, who coined the term to describe the pairs of characters in his novels who either share or exchange their identities.33 The historical Schumann regarded the Doppelgängers in Jean Paul’s novels as reflections of the duality within the author’s own personality. In a diary entry from 1828 he refers to the Doppelgängers from each of Jean Paul’s five major novels: Jean Paul is reflected in all of his works, but always in two people: he is Albano and Schoppe, Siebenkäs and Leibgeber, Vult and Walt, Gustav and Fenk, Flamin and Victor. Only the unique Jean Paul could combine two such different characters in himself; it is superhuman: but he is certainly that—he always unites such sharp contrasts, if not extremes, in his works and in himself—and he is certainly alone in this.34

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This passage seems quite suggestive when we look ahead to Schumann’s creation three years later of his own Doppelgängers: “two of my best friends, whom, however, I have never seen before.”35 The characters of Florestan and Eusebius may be modeled on Hoffmann’s alter ego, but “the Jean Paulian pedigree of Schumann’s friends as a contrasting pair is unmistakable,” as Daverio observes.36 The fictional Schumann in Longing is obsessed with Doppelgängers throughout his life, and as with the historical Schumann, this fascination originates in his reading of Jean Paul’s novels. On November 15, 1825, the day after Jean Paul’s death, Landis imagines the fifteen-year-old Schumann reflecting on the fact that Vult and Walt, the twin protagonists of Die Flegeljahre, “were exactly who Robert was singly within himself, the gentle poet who dreamed his life away and the passionate artist who lived his life away” (36). As we can see from this passage, the theme of Doppelgängers plays a large role not just in Schumann’s love life, but in his musical life as well. In the fictional world that Landis creates, music, like love, enables us to lose our identity and become another person. Landis presents one pair of musical Doppelgängers in the form of a memory that Schumann has in Endenich. He remembers a party that Mendelssohn gave in honor of Liszt when the pianist was visiting Leipzig. After improvising a set of variations on a Hungarian folk song, Liszt asked that his host play something as well. Although Mendelssohn insisted that he had “prepared nothing to play,” he reluctantly agreed. As he was about to touch the keyboard, however, he noticed that Liszt had left his gloves on the piano, and he hesitated, intimidated, as if Liszt had “let his hands themselves remain on the piano.” But then: Mendelssohn did the unthinkable. He reached out toward Liszt’s gloves and touched one of them with the tip of a finger and brought that finger to his lips and kissed it. Thus did Mendelssohn become Liszt. He smiled broadly. He pushed back the bench to attain the exact angle of Liszt’s attack. He raised his chin. He even tried to toss his hair, but it was thick, dark, Jewish hair and could not wave like Liszt’s, it hardly moved at all, so that Mendelssohn once more postponed his playing by putting a hand behind his neck and moving his hair up and down, up and down, quite like the classicist attempting one of the signal flourishes of the romantics. Only then did he play. He played every note Liszt had played. First the simple Hungarian folk song. Then each variation upon it, not only note for note, but gesture for gesture. (304)

This reads like a fantastical scene from a Jean Paul novel, but it is actually based on an episode from the 1898 memoir of Max Müller, the son of the poet who wrote Die schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreise. Müller had been a student in Leipzig nearly sixty years earlier, when Liszt made his first visit to the city in

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March 1840. He describes a “matinée musicale” that the Mendelssohns gave in Liszt’s honor, during which the famous virtuoso “played first a Hungarian melody, and then three or four variations, one more incredible than the other.” Afterward, just as in the passage from Longing, Liszt asked Mendelssohn to play something, and Mendelssohn demurred. Finally persuaded, Mendelssohn “sat down and played first all of Liszt’s Hungarian Melody, and then one variation after another, so that no one but Liszt himself could have told the difference.” Müller adds: “Mendelssohn could not keep himself from slightly imitating Liszt’s movements and raptures.”37 It is not surprising that this anecdote has some implausible elements. Given the long period of time between the event and Müller’s recounting of it, we would expect such a story to become embroidered and exaggerated in his memory. But because the anecdote appeared in a nonfictional memoir, it has become an accepted fact of Mendelssohn’s biography.38 In another scene in Longing Landis has Schumann suggest that music has the power to create a connection between lovers who are physically separated, and even to conjure the spirits of the dead. The modern reader may be skeptical of the fictional Schumann’s belief in the supernatural, but there is documentary evidence that the historical Schumann believed in it as well. In a letter of July 13, 1833, he proposed to Clara Wieck that they should both play the adagio from Chopin’s variations on “La ci darem la mano” at exactly the same time and “think very deeply, yes exclusively,” of each other. Schumann believed that this would enable their “Doppelgängers” to “meet in spirit” above the gate of the Thomaskirche.39 Twenty years later Schumann became obsessed with table-tipping, a kind of séance that had become quite fashionable at the time. In a letter of April 25, 1853, to his friend Ferdinand Hiller, he reports that he had been in contact with Beethoven’s spirit, who had tapped the rhythm to the opening of the Fifth Symphony on the table.40 Both of these episodes from Schumann’s life are relevant to the fictional scene that Landis creates. On September 12, 1836, Chopin visits Schumann in Leipzig. He has just seen Clara Wieck, with whom Schumann had been denied any contact for several months. Robert asks if Clara had spoken of him, and Chopin replies, “Perhaps through her music.” Robert then asks if he was “in her music”: “Perhaps,” repeated Chopin. “She is in mine.” Robert went to the piano and played what he had written of his Fantasie. He wanted the music to draw Chopin to him and in so doing to bring him in contact with Clara, who but hours before had perhaps touched Chopin’s hand and been in his eyes and in the breath he swallowed. When Robert had finished the piece, Chopin said only, “Like Beethoven.” (235)

Landis’s Schumann tells Chopin that he has composed Clara into the first movement of his C-Major Fantasy, and so in playing the piece he hoped to

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conjure her physical presence. But he has also composed Beethoven into his piece, and apparently the signals somehow crossed and he conjured Beethoven’s spirit instead. Schumann explains that he has “woven in” a song from Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte because it is “our story.” He has also included five falling notes as a musical cipher for Clara’s name, “so she may hear herself inside the music, as I hear her inside myself.” Schumann then recites the epigraph from Friedrich Schlegel that he placed at the beginning of the Fantasy: “Through all the notes that sound within the earth’s resplendent dream, one whispered note alone sounds for the secret listener.” He explains that Clara is his “secret listener,” and that both the musical quotation and the musical cipher are intended as messages to her (235). If Landis’s description of Mendelssohn’s becoming Liszt is fact masquerading as fiction, then his conversation between Schumann and Chopin is an example of fiction masquerading as fact. We know from a letter to Heinrich Dorn, Schumann’s former composition teacher, that Chopin’s visit did occur and that Landis’s date is authentic. Schumann reports that Chopin played “a lot of new etudes, nocturnes, and mazurkas” and presented him with “a new ballade,” but he does not mention playing the C-Major Fantasy for Chopin.41 He had composed the first movement of the Fantasy just two months before Chopin’s visit, however, and he referred to the work in his diary just three days earlier, so it is plausible that he would have played it for his guest and then explained to him the musical quotations and allusions that he had composed into the piece.42 Because we have no documentary evidence that such a conversation occurred, however, it is fiction. That Schumann actually intended the musical allusions, regardless of whether or not he ever mentioned them, is also plausible, but because we have no documentary evidence for this either, it too must be regarded as fiction. Schumann’s fictional conversation with Chopin was created by Landis, but his fictional quotation of Beethoven’s song cycle and his secret musical message to Clara were created by twentieth-century scholars. Landis has thus reversed the usual relationship between the scholarly biographer and the biographical novelist: rather than taking an event or a statement that has been verified by scholars and then speculating as to what the historical subject might have thought and felt, he is taking a scholarly speculation and then providing an event that would verify it if it had actually occurred. Ironically, we do have documentary evidence that Schumann quoted from Beethoven in his C-Major Fantasy, but from the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony, not An die ferne Geliebte, and in the third movement, not the first. Schumann mentions the quotation in a letter of December 19, 1836, to the publisher Carl Friedrich Kistner. Hermann Erler, who published the letter in 1887, parenthetically asserts that at some later point Schumann “completely removed” the “intended reminiscence” from the piece, although he offers no evidence for this. Apparently subsequent scholars have mostly agreed with Erler’s conclusion,

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since the quotation has rarely been mentioned in the extensive literature about the Fantasy, and Charles Rosen is the only one who has tried to identify it. The quotation from An die ferne Geliebte, which has been of far greater interest to scholars, was first mentioned in print in 1910, in the second edition of Hermann Abert’s biography of Schumann, as both Nicholas Marston and Anthony Newcomb have pointed out. After he researched the history of the musical quotation in the Fantasy, Newcomb “was forced to wonder whether the Beethoven reference was made by Schumann or created by a more recent critical tradition.” Newcomb suggests the possibility “that for Schumann and for the musical culture of the nineteenth century, the quotation was not there—or at least that it was not for them part of the content and meaning of the piece.” He remains one of very few Schumann scholars who has publicly entertained such doubts.43 Rosen claims that the reason there is no documentary evidence for the quotation is that it was a part of oral tradition during the nineteenth century. His proof is that it was pointed out to him by his teacher, Moriz Rosenthal, who was a student of Liszt, the dedicatee of the Fantasy. Rosen writes, “Rosenthal learned of it from Liszt—it would be astonishing if Liszt had not remarked on it.” According to Berthold Hoeckner in a private conversation Rosen added that Liszt “in turn ‘knew’ it from Schumann himself.”44 Rosen’s logic is circular, however. If Liszt was aware of the quotation, then it would be “astonishing” if he had not mentioned it to his student, and it would be likely that he “knew” it from Schumann. But the fact that Rosen learned of the quotation from Liszt’s student does not prove this. It is also plausible that Rosenthal read of the quotation in Abert’s book, and if this were the case, it is extremely unlikely that Liszt had known of it. When Landis has Schumann tell Chopin that he has composed “these falling five notes” of Clara’s into the Fantasy so that she “may hear herself inside the music,” he is making an obvious reference to the “Clara theme,” which several twentieth-century musicologists have heard embedded in Schumann’s piano music.45 Although the theory that Schumann consciously used such musical ciphers has been discredited in recent years, scholars continue to argue that there are other means by which he composed Clara into the first movement of the Fantasy. Linda Roesner claims that the key of the movement, C-Major, was “almost certainly chosen for its symbolic content: C for Clara.” Hoeckner argues that the theme of the “Im Legendenton” section of Schumann’s movement is modeled on the theme from Clara’s Op. 3 Romance variée (which Schumann had already used as the basis of his Op. 5 Impromptus). Rosen hears Clara in the Beethoven quotation itself, since Schumann’s intention is “to have Beethoven’s distant beloved refer to Clara.”46 On several occasions in his correspondence with Clara, Schumann describes their forced separation as the inspiration for the first movement of his C-Major Fantasy. On March 19, 1838, nearly two years after he composed it, he told

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Clara that the movement was “a deep lament for you.” Then, on April 21, 1839, shortly after the Fantasy was published, Schumann wrote, “You can only understand the Fantasy if you imagine yourself back in that unhappy summer of 1836, when I was separated from you.” Both of these quotations speak to the inspiration for the Fantasy, but they do not necessarily imply a direct musical reference to Clara or a secret musical message. In a letter of June 9, 1839, Schumann again calls Clara’s attention to the movement and suggests that the “whispered note” (leiser Ton) in the epigraph by Schlegel might refer to her: “Write me what you think about in the first movement of the Fantasy. Does it suggest many images to you? I like the melody [here he inserts the right hand melody of mm. 65–67] the most. Is it possible that the “tone” in the motto is you? I almost believe it.”47 Rosen interprets the note (or tone) as a reference to the quotation from An die ferne Geliebte, and he sees Schumann’s comment as evidence that the quotation represents Clara: “It is not Schumann’s music that refers to Clara, but Beethoven’s melody, the ‘secret tone.’” Daverio, too, suggests that Schumann’s comment to Clara is a subtle attempt to “direct her attention” to the Beethoven quotation.48 In fact the correspondence between Robert and Clara during the spring of 1839 provides evidence that Schumann did not intentionally allude to An die ferne Geliebte as a secret musical message to Clara, and that neither he nor Clara was even aware that he had made the allusion. First of all, it is clear from the correspondence that Clara had neither seen nor heard the Fantasy until she received a newly published copy on May 22, 1839, so if Robert did intend a secret message to her when he composed the work in 1836, it was a message that he was content to leave undelivered for nearly three years. Second, it is striking how many times both of them mention the piece in the correspondence— including references to specific musical passages, descriptions of Robert’s feelings when he composed it and of Clara’s when she played it, and even a brief account of a musical program that she heard in the second movement—and yet neither of them ever refer to the Beethoven quotation, and Robert never suggests that there is a secret in the music that he hopes Clara will discover. The quotation that Rosen and Daverio both cite does not “direct” Clara to the Beethoven quotation, but to an earlier melody, which Robert takes the trouble to notate in the middle of his letter, as we have seen. One week later Clara refers back to this melody: “It is certainly strange that my favorite passage in the first movement of the Fantasy is also yours! I like to linger on that passage, it is so pleasant, so peaceful!” She goes on to answer Robert’s question about the “images” that his music brings to mind, but says nothing about a distant beloved, or even about the first movement. Rather, she describes the second movement as “a victory march of warriors who are returning from battle,” followed by “the young girls from the village, all dressed in white, each with a wreath in her hand, crowning the kneeling warriors before them,” and finally herself as one of the girls, crowning Robert, her “dear warrior

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and conqueror.”49 Hoeckner argues that Schumann’s question was an attempt “to seek confirmation . . . of the poetic vision that had inspired his music,” and he assumes that “the composer’s original poetic vision was indeed Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte.”50 If this were true, then Clara’s response would have been rather disappointing, and yet Robert never responds or points her in the right direction. It is interesting to contrast this exchange between Robert and Clara with another, from several months later, about a different Beethoven allusion in a different piece of Robert’s. Marston cites this later exchange in order to explain the difference between musical quotation and musical allusion. In a letter of November 25, 1839, Clara writes that she has discovered a passage in Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata that she recognized from one of Robert’s pieces, and she jokingly calls him a “musical thief.” Robert replies on December 1 that after pondering for a while he finally figured out which piece of his she meant, an unpublished sonata movement in B-flat, and insists that he had not stolen from Beethoven, but had quoted him plainly at the beginning of the piece, thinking she would recognize it. Two days later Clara writes that she had always recognized the quotation Robert mentioned; the “theft” she had in mind comes from the middle, “so that one could scarcely notice it.” Finally persuaded that Clara is in fact referring to an allusion that he was unaware of, Robert insists that she show it to him and writes that he always enjoys discovering such things in his compositions.51 As Marston points out, this exchange demonstrates that a musical allusion need not be “consciously intended: a work may allude or even quote behind its author’s back, so to speak.”52 Equally significant, it shows that Robert and Clara enjoyed sharing their discovery of such allusions, whether intended or not, and it begs the question of why they would not have shared their knowledge of the allusion to An die ferne Geliebte if either of them had been aware of it. The persistent belief that Schumann intentionally quoted from Beethoven’s song cycle in his Fantasy in order to send a secret musical message to Clara, despite the lack of any compelling evidence, derives from the widely held assumption that much of Schumann’s music, especially for piano, is a kind of private diary, in which he expresses his innermost feelings but disguises them through the use of secret musical codes and allusions. Two corollaries that have followed from this premise are, first, that there is often a direct correspondence between the circumstances of Schumann’s life and the meaning of his music and, second, that the meaning is often hidden beneath the musical surface, waiting for scholars to discover it. Hoeckner, for example, describes the twentieth-century reception of the Fantasy as follows: “The precise nature of the lament for Clara and the homage to Beethoven remained obscure until they were heard to coalesce in Schumann’s alleged reference to Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte in the coda of the first movement.” Even Marston, who first suggests that “there is no certainty that Schumann was alluding to the Beethoven

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work,” asserts soon after that the fact “that Schumann did not admit to a reference . . . in no way excludes the possibility that he was well aware of one,” and finally concedes, “Given its autobiographical suitability, it is difficult to believe that the allusion was not consciously intended.”53 For Marston, and for the other scholars who believe that Schumann deliberately quoted from Beethoven’s song, the proof is in the coherence of the biographical narrative that they have constructed. Although there is no documentary evidence for the musical quotation, the narrative fit is so perfect that it must be true. Landis turns the assumption that Schumann intended his music as a secret form of communication into a central theme of Longing, and even derives the title of his first part, “The Secret Listeners,” from the Schlegel epigraph that Schumann placed at the beginning of the Fantasy. Ultimately the ostensible conflation between Schumann’s art and his life becomes another means by which Landis questions the distinction between imagination and reality. In the years before their marriage, when they are physically apart from one another, music becomes the medium through which Landis’s Robert longs for Clara, just as Brahms becomes his intermediary when he is in Endenich. It is for this reason that he does not care if the true meaning of his music remains obscure to most listeners. It is not surprising that Landis’s narrative includes the same concert, of August 13, 1837, that Galloway depicts in Clara, where Clara performed three of Robert’s Études symphoniques as a secret message to her lover. But Landis’s Robert, unlike Galloway’s, is unhappy that Clara is performing his music in public, because he is afraid that it will “embarrass him and mock the intimacy they had shared” (240). He sits in the back of the hall and turns his face away from her “because he could not bear the thought that the reunion of their eyes might be shared by the people between them” (241). During a piece by Liszt, Clara “missed a beat, one beat, a momentary lapse he could see went undetected by the audience, [but] it was for him like an eternal moment that lasted long enough for the two of them to enter and be reunited.” Even Clara’s mistakes are secret, and the secret provides him with an “inlet to her soul.” Then she plays Robert’s music: There he stayed, and grew, when she played his études, moving from the simple theme he’d taken from Baron von Fricken into perfect resonances of musicians they had loved together, Paganini, Mendelssohn, Bach, the history of their love in music, which of all the arts provided best a cloister of creation shared. He didn’t care that those around him seemed puzzled by the music. He enjoyed their consternation. The less his art was grasped, the freer he was to write it as he wished. It might be a musician’s job to please an audience; a composer’s was to please himself. (241–42)

Aside from the fanciful details, the thoughts that Landis places in Robert’s head as he hears Clara play his music are consistent with the historical accounts in the

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Schumanns’ correspondence, which I have already cited. Galloway, as we have seen, goes beyond the existing record of Robert’s actual response to Clara’s performance and has her fictional character articulate in his thoughts Galloway’s own opinion about the way musical meaning is communicated. Given the dramatic and emotional circumstances that surrounded this performance, it is not surprising that Robert heard his music as a private affirmation of Clara’s love for him, but this was in many ways a unique moment in their lives. And so Galloway is perhaps justified in implicitly arguing that Robert’s limited perspective on the performance at the time it took place (or at least shortly afterward) does not necessarily reflect the larger role that music played throughout the Schumanns’ lives together. Landis, on the other hand, takes the historical Robert Schumann’s response to Clara’s performance of his études at face value, because this response is typical of Landis’s fictional Robert Schumann, a character who calls into question the status, and even the efficacy, of human communication. The feelings that Landis’s Robert experiences during this scene are indicative of his broader attitude toward his music, an attitude that parallels his love of verbal riddles and irony. Just as the audience at Clara’s concert “seemed puzzled by his music,” the people he engages in ordinary conversation often find it difficult to understand the meaning of his words. In a later scene in Longing, when Robert is alone in Vienna in 1839, he writes a letter to Clara in which he complains that the secret of his love and his music have “banished” him and rendered him “unable to take pleasure in communicating with people who did not know the secrets he carried within him” (263). According to Landis, Schumann’s inability to clearly articulate his thoughts is sometimes mistaken for a sign of madness, as we saw in Clementine Fechner’s initial reaction to him, in the scene that I cited at the beginning of this chapter. But as Landis subsequently explains, Schumann’s attempt to transform his thoughts into music actually does lead to madness, and to death. In his epilogue Landis refers to the autopsy that Dr. Richarz performed on Schumann the day after he died, and to his conclusion that “the progressive organic disease” that Richarz believed responsible for his psychosis, and ultimately for his death, was the result of “overwork.” Landis paraphrases Richarz’s conclusion to mean that “Schumann was killed by his music” (445). In the novel itself Schumann has a conversation with Richarz that explains how his music drove him mad. He describes a hallucination in which he is pursued by Nemesis, the Greek goddess of divine retribution. Richarz asks whether the goddess had just been in Schumann’s mind, or had actually appeared. Schumann replies: “In the form of a woman, then. A goddess. And she did actually appear. Whether it was in my mind or in the world itself is a question no man can answer.” “Of course not. Only you can answer that.”

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“I meant, whatever happens in anyone’s mind is indistinguishable from what happens in the world. One’s mind in the world. Those who give expression to it are what we call artists.” “You needn’t condescend to me, Herr Schumann. I am a champion of artists.” “Is that why you have so many of us here in Endenich?” “There are so many here in Endenich because they believe what you do.” (410)

What Landis’s Schumann believes is that our perception of the external world— what actually appears—is mediated by our consciousness, and thus it is not possible for any one person to know with absolute certainty where their imagination leaves off and reality begins. We can read Richarz’s response to mean that because artists give expression to their imagination, and thus to the uncertain status of reality, artistic creativity is a form of madness. But if artists are mad because they are expressing what the rest of us perceive, then all of us must be mad. And in fact, in an earlier conversation with Schumann, Richarz suggests that this is the case. Schumann reports that he had just written a letter to Brahms, in which he addressed him familiarly, as du: “I called Brahms du. What do you think of that?” “I make it a policy not to get involved in discussions concerning du and Sie. I’ve seen too many lives wasted in consideration of that distinction.” “She calls him du.” “And I’ve read too many novels with that line in them. I’m quite serious Herr Schumann—no du and Sie.” “But she won’t let him call her du.” “Do you think that would be proper?” “What business is that of yours?” “Do you deliberately make my point for me, Herr Schumann?” “Somebody must.” “But I did so myself. Several times.” “This is Endenich, doctor. What’s said here has no reality until it’s confirmed by others.” “Endenich is no different from the world.” (395)

Here Landis’s Schumann suggests that if madness is characterized by an inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, then it is only the responses of others that confirm the reality of what mad people think and say. If, as Richarz replies, this is the case not only at Endenich, but in the rest of the world as well, then we must all be mad. And the strongest evidence of this universal madness is found in the ambiguity of human communication. Landis expresses this idea in several different ways throughout his book. The title of the fifth part, “The Breakdown Dialogues,” is a double entendre, referring both to the fact that the dialogues take place after Schumann has had a psychotic breakdown, and also to the fact

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that there is a virtual breakdown in communication between Schumann and his doctor, since both continually speak in riddles and puns and thus frequently misunderstand one another. But these conversations are not so different from many of the conversations that take place earlier in the book, when Schumann is sane. Perhaps the most powerful way that Landis makes his point, however, is through the ambiguity of his own writing. He presents his undifferentiated mix of fact and fiction in a bewildering array of narrative tones of voice, so that we often cannot tell whether he is being ironic, reflective, factual, or witty. The difficulty that his characters so often have in reading Schumann is reflected in our own difficulty in reading Landis.

Biographical Novels and Scholarly Biography Paradoxically perhaps, what is most valuable about biographical novels such as Longing and Clara is the fact that they are fiction. If we read them as if they are simply fictional biographies we deny them the literary freedom that gives them their raison d’être, and we will inevitably be disappointed. They are novels, and just as we would not read Hoffmann’s Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr to find out what the life of Johannes Kreisler was really like, or Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre to learn something about Wilhelm Meister’s biography, so we should not read the novels of Landis and Galloway to find out the historical facts of the Schumanns’ lives. If that is our purpose, we would do much better to choose a scholarly biography, which will be both more accurate and more comprehensive by its very nature. But history is only half of what we want from biography. We also want to know something about life, to know what a life adds up to. This is why biography has always existed in a generic netherworld, halfway between history and literature, or as Virginia Woolf would say, between truth of fact and truth of fiction. This is also why biographies, even the very best of them, so often leave us with a slight pang of dissatisfaction. Because they must write as historians and remain faithful to the evidence that survives, biographers are rarely free to fully answer the question: What did his life, or her life, really mean? By crossing over the line and writing in the literary realm, biographical novelists such as Galloway and Landis can confront the question head-on. This does not mean, of course, that the genre of the biographical novel is in some fundamental way preferable to the scholarly biography. On the contrary, neither Landis nor Galloway could have written their novels had they not first read a shelf of biographies. The genres are complementary: they each serve a different purpose and they each contribute something that the other does not. To illustrate the distinction between the two genres, let us briefly consider the question of Schumann’s mental illness, which has become somewhat of a controversial subject in recent years. Among the primary documents that became

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available to Schumann scholars in the 1990s are his complete medical records from the years in Endenich.54 Now there is documentary evidence to support what had long been suspected—that Schumann suffered from syphilis—and a number of biographers have concluded that this is the most likely cause both of the mental illness that resulted in Schumann’s hospitalization in 1854, and of his death two and a half years later.55 From a historical standpoint, the appearance of this new documentary evidence is deeply satisfying to biographers. The historical goal of biography is to answer as many questions about a subject’s life as possible, and any evidence that bears on the diagnosis of Schumann’s final illness and the cause of his death represents an enormous increase in the state of our knowledge. From a literary standpoint, however, this likely diagnosis is problematic. If the evidence was inconclusive before now, at least it pointed in the direction of a life that was not only coherent, but that had a meaning that resonated with universal themes of madness and creativity. If Schumann’s mental illness was caused by an organic disease that first manifested itself only several months, or at most a year, before his suicide attempt in February 1854, then how does it explain the rest of his life? It is not simply that we have turned Schumann into a symbol of Romantic and artistic madness and are loath to let him go again. Different parts of the documentary record of his life appear to be at odds with one another. Schumann expressed his fear of madness on several occasions; he behaved in ways that his contemporaries regarded as eccentric (at the very least); and he frequently described, in great detail, physical, psychological, and emotional symptoms that are consistent with mental instability. As a creative artist, he sometimes composed music that seems intended to represent or emulate a state of madness, and sometimes wrote about his music in these terms. But if he was suffering from tertiary syphilis in the last years of his life, then there is no connection between any of this and the fact that he died in a mental hospital. His death has become coincidental; it no longer provides any meaning for his life.56 Beate Perrey has recently argued that “those biographers who had a particular investment in Schumann’s madness inevitably ended up reading Schumann’s life backwards.” She finds it interesting how “Schumann’s future—his death, his madness—comes to shadow his past: how this end is seen to have shaped his whole life, and made to explain his beginnings, his being and his becoming.”57 To the extent that biographers allow their knowledge of Schumann’s end to distort their interpretation of the documentary evidence from the earlier stages of his life, Perrey is right to chide them. But as they turn the events of Schumann’s life into a narrative, biographers must present the life as a coherent whole, not as a series of apparently random events. Schumann’s biographers are “emplotting” his life and, as Hayden White explains, the plot of any narrative, whether literary or historical, “imposes a meaning on the events that make up its story level by revealing at the end a structure that was immanent in the events all along.”58

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The apparent disconnection between Schumann’s life and his death depends upon one historical fact—the diagnosis of his final illness—but it is a fact of such signal importance that no biographer can ignore it. Novelists, on the other hand, are not only free to omit any mention of the diagnosis, but they are often better off doing so because it creates a more plausible and, in fictional terms, a more truthful story. If we consider Schumann’s life from a literary perspective, then it cannot possibly be a coincidence that he ended his life in a mental hospital. He was fascinated with madness on a variety of levels and for a variety of reasons, and this fascination profoundly affected both his life and his work. The fact that he ultimately suffered from psychosis is thus of great significance in understanding his life, regardless of the physiological cause. Galloway and Landis each find a different meaning in Schumann’s mental illness, and each use different literary techniques to express that meaning, but in the process neither of them has to distort the documentary record in any significant way. Galloway presents her novel as a memory that Clara Schumann is having shortly after Robert’s death. Because Clara would have had no idea that Robert had syphilis, and would not have been able to see any link between the disease and his psychosis in any case, it would be incongruous for Galloway to introduce the diagnosis into her story. On the other hand, it is likely that Clara thought there was a physiological connection between her husband’s final illness and the various symptoms that he suffered during their years of marriage, because this is what Richarz’s diagnosis suggested. Throughout the book Clara does not know how to interpret her husband’s behavior. She wonders if she is somehow responsible, if it is what normally goes on within a marriage, if it is the inevitable result of his creative impulses, or if it is a symptom of the euphemistic melancholia that he has long suffered from. It is entirely plausible that the historical Clara Schumann had similar thoughts. From her perspective, there probably was a continuity between the earlier symptoms and the final illness, and a sense in which Robert’s 1854 breakdown was a culminating moment that gave meaning to all that came before. And this is as much a part of the Schumanns’ biography as the medical hypothesis that Robert Schumann died of syphilis. Because Landis takes on the narrative persona of a biographer, it is far more plausible for him to explicitly discuss the diagnosis of Schumann’s illness than it is for Galloway. In his epilogue he notes that Richarz’s “autopsy achieved no definitive explanation for the physical deterioration and eventual death of Robert Schumann,” and he gives a list of the “numerous posthumous explanations” that have been put forth over the years, a list that includes syphilis and ends with Richarz’s own explanation: overwork (445). For Landis, the uncertainty that has surrounded the diagnosis is of far greater significance than the question of which specific diagnosis is correct because the contingency of historical reality is a central theme of his book, a theme that he explores in part through the question of Schumann’s madness. As Laura Tunbridge has pointed out, “Landis begins with Schumann’s end”—a prologue in which he is lying in

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his bed in Endenich, “alternately lucid, dreamy, cheeky, and mad”—so that we cannot help but read the entire novel with Schumann’s madness in mind. In fact there are enough references to madness throughout the book that this would be difficult in any case. But so many of these references are ironic, hyperbolic, or self-referential that it is hard to recognize in them “symptoms of his final illness.”59 Rather, Landis uses the relationship between Schumann’s lifelong fascination with madness and his actual descent into madness to question the very definition of the concept. If anything, it is Landis’s portrayal of Schumann conversing rationally with Richarz and Brahms in Endenich that should raise eyebrows. Worthen wonders how it is that Landis has Schumann remain “sane, undamaged and wholly articulate,” even though he is familiar with, and even quotes from, Richarz’s medical reports.60 And yet there is nothing inaccurate about Landis’s portrayal. He may not describe Schumann’s most disturbing behavior in grisly detail, but he does refer to it, and even includes actual accounts from Richarz’s daily log that describe Schumann as completely out of touch with reality (415). Schumann, like most people suffering from mental illness, apparently did not behave irrationally all of the time. Worthen himself writes that there were times in Endenich when “Schumann could appear normal.”61 In fact this is one of the most disturbing things about mentally ill people, as anyone who has spent time with them can attest. One moment they might seem completely insane, and the next they are carrying on a rational conversation. One wonders whether or not they really are mentally ill, and then begins to question the nature of mental illness altogether. In Schumann’s case such questions may cause consternation among his biographers, but I am sure that he himself would have found them fascinating. The fictional stories that Landis and Galloway tell about the Schumanns rely on the same documentary sources and the same biographical themes as the many scholarly biographies that have been written about them. But Landis and Galloway both turn the Schumanns into three-dimensional literary characters and invent a fictional world within which these characters live and interact in order to accomplish their varied literary ends. Galloway uses the faint glimpses of Clara Schumann’s personality that her letters and diary entries reveal to reconstruct her inner life as she grows into a mature woman and an accomplished musician. Landis uses the books that Robert Schumann read to recreate his inner mental world, and in the process he creates a fictional meditation that questions the distinction between fiction and biography, and ultimately between life and art, sanity and madness, reality and fantasy. It is, of course, impossible to know how much the fictional Schumanns who appear in these two novels resemble their historical counterparts. But the literary insights that they offer reflect back upon the historical characters who serve as their models, and so the fictional lives of the Schumanns enable us to see their actual lives in a new light.

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notes 1. Litzmann, Clara Schumann, 1:13. However, in a letter of April 13, 1838, Schumann writes that his earliest memory of Clara is from the summer of 1828 (R. Schumann and Schumann, Briefwechsel, 1:148). 2. Landis, Longing, 52–53. All further references to this book are in parenthetical citations in the text. 3. Galloway, Clara, 80–84. There is one factual inaccuracy in the chronology Galloway presents. She writes that Clemens Wieck, Clara’s half-brother, was born just before Christmas 1830, but he was actually born in 1829. 4. Galloway, Clara, 81–82. All further references to this book are in parenthetical citations in the text. 5. Among the recent biographies of either or both Schumanns are Kühn, Clara Schumann, Klavier; Daverio, Robert Schumann; Held, Manches geht in Nacht verloren; Reich, Clara Schumann; Jensen, Schumann; Rauchfleisch, Robert Schumann; Beci, Robert und Clara Schumann; Köhler, Robert und Clara Schumann; Payk, Robert Schumann; Worthen, Robert Schumann. 6. According to Laura Tunbridge, the tradition already began with Schumann’s contemporaries (“Schumann as Manfred,” 556–57). 7. Ibid., 561. 8. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 294–97. 9. Worthen, Robert Schumann, 249–59. 10. Chartier, On the Edge, 13–16. The French writers he refers to are Michel de Certeau, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Rancière. 11. H. White, Metahistory, 7. 12. H. White, The Content of the Form, 44. 13. Ibid., 57. White refers to historical narratives in general, and not just to biography. 14. Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography” (1927), in Collected Essays, 4:234. 15. In the song cycle Schumann omits this final poem. 16. R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 2:251. This and all further translations are mine. 17. Ibid., 2:99–100. 18. Litzmann, Clara Schumann, 2:54. 19. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 246. 20. R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 2:249–50. 21. Reich, Clara Schumann, 84. 22. R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 2:144. 23. R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 3:226, 227, 229. 24. R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 2:37. 25. R. Schumann and Schumann, Briefwechsel, 2:164. 26. Ibid., 1:98–99. 27. Hitzig, Aus Hoffmann’s Leben, 2:145. Some modern scholars have cast doubt on Hitzig’s claim. See, for example, Hartmut Steinecke, “Kommentar,” in Hoffmann, Sämtliche Werke, 5:889–1051, especially 971; Jeremy Adler, introduction to Hoffmann, Life and Opinions, vii–xxxi, especially xxx.

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28. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations, 82–83. 29. Hoffmann, Sämtliche Werke, 5:12. 30. Jean Paul, Werke: Erster Band, 107. 31. See, for example, the decidedly mixed customer reviews on Amazon.com. Many of the negative ones criticize the very elements that are most closely modeled on Jean Paul and Hoffmann: the scholarly apparatus, lengthy digressions, frequent footnotes, references to historical figures and events, convoluted style, and long-windedness. Amazon.com, “Customer Reviews: Longing,” www.amazon.com/Longing-JD-Landis/product-reviews/1905005059/ref=cm_cr_pr_fltrmsg?ie=UTF8&showVie wpoints=0 (accessed October 25, 2009). 32. That Clara gave Robert flowers as he left for Endenich is documented in her diary. See Litzmann, Clara Schumann, 2:302. Robert’s subsequent memory of their wedding night is fictional. 33. The term first appears in his 1796 novel Siebenkäs, where he defines it in a footnote as a person “in whom one sees oneself.” Jean Paul, Werke: Zweiter Band, 66. 34. R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 1:82. 35. Ibid., 1:344. 36. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 74. 37. F. Max Müller, Auld Lang Syne (New York, 1898), as excerpted and reprinted in Mendelssohn and His World, ed. Todd, 253. Landis displaces the story from Liszt’s first visit to Leipzig, in March 1840, to his second visit, in December 1841. Interestingly, Müller remembers, “though vaguely,” the presence of several well-known musicians, but writes, “I doubt whether Schumann and Clara Wieck were present.” 38. See, for example, Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, 392–93. 39. R. Schumann and Schumann, Briefwechsel, 1:7. 40. R. Schumann, Briefe: Neue Folge (1886), 313. Wasielewski, Schumann’s friend and first biographer, cites this letter and also describes a similar scene when he himself visited Schumann in May 1853. Wasielewski, Robert Schumann: Eine Biographie, 4th ed., 486. For a recent discussion, see Tunbridge, Schumann’s Late Style, 1–2. 41. R. Schumann, Briefe: Neue Folge (1886), 67. See also the entry in his diary: R. Schumann, Tagebücher, 2:25. 42. However, Nicholas Marston argues that Schumann first added the Schlegel epigraph to the verso of the title page when he prepared the Stichvorlage in 1838, which would make it impossible for him to have recited the epigraph to Chopin a year and a half earlier (Schumann, 21). 43. Erler, Robert Schumanns Leben, 1:103; Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 102; Abert, Robert Schumann, 64; Marston, Schumann, 36; Newcomb, “Schumann and the Marketplace,” 295. 44. Rosen, Romantic Generation, xii; Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute, 96. 45. The main proponent of this argument is Eric Sams, in “The Schumann Ciphers,” 395. The most cogent critique of Sams’s theory that Schumann used an elaborate system of musical ciphers is Daverio, Crossing Paths, 65–102 (the Fantasy is mentioned on 70 and 80).

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46. Roesner, “Schumann’s ‘Parallel’ Forms,” 274; Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute, 104; Rosen, Romantic Generation, 103. 47. R. Schumann and Schumann, Briefwechsel, 1:126, 2:495, 562. 48. Rosen, Romantic Generation, 103; Daverio, Robert Schumann, 153. 49. R. Schumann and Schumann, Briefwechsel, 2:577–78. 50. Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute, 96. 51. R. Schumann and Schumann, Briefwechsel, 2:798, 808, 812, 822. 52. Marston, Schumann, 35. 53. Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute, 95; Marston, Schumann, 36–37. 54. These records have now been published in complete form. See Appel, Robert Schumann in Endenich. 55. The first biographer to definitively attribute Schumann’s death to tertiary syphilis is Daverio, Robert Schumann, 484–85. When Reich revised her biography of Clara Schumann a few years later, she too described syphilis as the most likely cause (Clara Schumann, 129–30). More recently Worthen has argued not only that Schumann’s psychosis was caused by syphilis, but that he never suffered from any other form of mental illness (Robert Schumann, 365–69). There is not complete consensus among Schumann biographers, however. See, for example, Jensen, Schumann, 327–30; Rauchfleisch, Robert Schumann, 164–70. 56. We could view Worthen’s argument, that Schumann never suffered from mental illness to begin with, as one way to try to solve this problem of narrative coherence. 57. Perrey, “Schumann’s Lives,” 5. 58. H. White, Content of the Form, 20. 59. Tunbridge, “Schumann as Manfred,” 562. 60. Worthen, Robert Schumann, 467 n. 15. 61. Ibid., 374.

17 Deserted Chambers of the Mind (Schumann Memories) Laura Tunbridge

In the middle of Adieu Robert Schumann, R. Murray Schafer’s 1978 homage to the composer, comes a new sound. Adieu is a piece for soprano, tape, and orchestra constructed from quotations from Kreisleriana, Carnaval, Kinderszenen, and various songs, along with excerpts from Clara’s diary detailing her response to Robert’s final illness. Suddenly, amid all this recomposed material, is heard a piano from the mid-nineteenth century. It plays the E-flat Major theme Schumann wrote just before his 1854 suicide attempt, the one claimed to have been dictated to him by the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn. Schafer requests that the playback should be “very soft and distant-sounding, perhaps with the bass filtered off ” (Example 17.1). The recorded melody on its antique instrument is at a remove from the surrounding events. The hallucinating Schumann, it implies, inhabits another realm. Schafer’s manner of presenting Schumann’s music is shared by a number of late twentieth-century works. Take, for example, Wolfgang Rihm’s chamber opera Jakob Lenz (1977–78), in which an orchestrated quotation from Kinderszenen’s “Kind im Einschlummern” appears as the backdrop to a kind of aural hallucination, sung by children, as the hero descends into madness, or Francis Dhomont’s acousmatic melodrama Forêt profonde (1994–96), which combines fragments of Kinderszenen with words from Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment as a means to prove the unsettling nature of fairytale realms.1 While it could be argued that quotations of any kind can retain an identity separate to their new surroundings, it seems that Schumann’s music is frequently associated, on a deeper level, with a sense of detachment from the rest of the world.2 In the works just mentioned, the association is emphasized by the persistent presence of two filters routinely used by artists to see the everyday in new ways: children, or the memory of childhood experience, and the mentally ill.

395

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Example 17.1. R. Murray Schafer, Adieu, Robert Schumann. © Copyright 1978 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 16520. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Conductor's note: The recorded piano need not synchronize exactly with the orchestra as indicated. The pauses may be contracted or expanded ad lib.

sotto voce pp ,

Voice

An - gels Flutes

Clarinets

Violin 1 (pp) Violin 2

Viola (pp) Leise, innig

Recorded piano

= ca 52

p

START TAPE

Tugging a little harder on the loose thematic threads of childhood and mental illness in portrayals of or responses to Schumann’s music over the past thirty years unravels a number of issues surrounding the composer’s recent reception.3 Although my concern here is primarily with musical responses to Schumann’s Kinderszenen, many of my themes can be introduced by consideration of the use of another piece by Schumann in a film, Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), and of what may be a portrayal of the composer in a 2007 painting by the Leipzig-based artist Neo Rauch.4 Bergman’s quasi-autobiographical story, set at the beginning of the twentieth century, is told through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, whose idyllic childhood as part of a theatrical family, the Ekdahls, is destroyed by his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage to the austere Bishop Edvard Vergérus.5 Music is used

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Example 17.1. Continued A tempo = ca 66

p

Voice He

said

that

an - gels were dic- ta- ting

Fl. pp Cl. pp Vln. 1 pp

Vln. 2 pp

Vla.

Pno.

frequently throughout the film—including excerpts from Vivaldi, Chopin, Offenbach, Verdi, Britten, and newly composed and traditional songs—but the most prominent composer is Schumann; there are excerpts from the second movement of his Fourth Symphony, “Du Ring an meinem Finger” from Frauenliebe und -leben, and, most important, the Piano Quintet in E-flat Major. In the film’s prologue shots of the river and Alexander’s toy theater are accompanied by the second movement’s lyrical theme. With the arrival of the “March” section, however, Alexander begins to explore his curiously deserted family home. He moves, slightly tentatively, from overfurnished room to overfurnished room (apparently modeled after the paintings of Carl Larsson), before turning the key in the lock to his grandmother’s chambers. The music falls silent as he realizes that no one is there and gleefully jumps beneath the covers on her bed.

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Example 17.1. Continued

,

Voice mu- sic tohim.

(freely)

,

p

He got up andwrotedownthetheme

Fl. poco f Cl. poco f l.v.

Tri.

p solo

Vln. 1 p espressivo Vln. 2 become sul pont.

Vla.

Vc.

,

pizz. con sord.

p

Pno.

Schumann’s presence in Fanny and Alexander seems at first to be as little more than title music, although those aware of the composer’s unfortunate relationship with fast-moving rivers may anticipate the role the river will play in Bergman’s story. (It turns out that Vergérus’s first wife and children drowned; Schumann unsuccessfully attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine.) Others may be reminded, through the coincidence of Schumann’s music and locked rooms, of visitors watching the composer through the peephole in the door to his room at Endenich.6 Whether or not the scenario accurately reflects Schumann’s treatment in the asylum, it has persisted in imaginings of the composer’s final years.7 The threat of incarceration looms in Bergman’s film much as it has been detected in Schumann’s nervousness about the presence of an insane asylum in Düsseldorf.8 Alexander’s mischievous turning of the key to access his grandmother’s room is

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made sinister by Vergérus, who locks his stepson in the attic as punishment for lying and subsequently confines Alexander and his sister to a room with barred windows. Then there are the other bedridden characters in the bishop’s residence: his pregnant wife and an invalid relative. Although Alexander and his sister are eventually liberated and given sanctuary in the puppet emporium home of their grandmother’s friend Isak Jakobi, someone is kept locked away there, too: Isak’s nephew Ismael—intelligent, musical, and, perhaps most significant, insane. The film’s complicated narrative was described by Bergman as “not so much a chronicle as a Gobelin tapestry, from which you can pick the images and the incidents and the characters that fascinate you.”9 Focusing on the appearances of Schumann’s quintet reveals a connection between this music and the pleasures and perils of a child’s vivid imagination. In the continuation of the scene described above, Alexander hides under the table to observe, eyes wide, his grandmother’s room come alive: a statue beckons, and Death drags his scythe over the carpet.10 The next appearance of the lyrical theme from the quintet accompanies a disturbing dream Alexander has (mostly about separation from his mother) after he has been rescued from Vergérus’s house. Later it is heard played on a music box as the extended Ekdahl family is reunited and Uncle Gustav contemplates his new baby. This final conversion of one of Schumann’s mature pieces into tinkling bells serves to remind us of the extent to which childhood experiences and fantasies, though innocent on the surface, can also access dark, disturbing reaches of the mind. It is as an indicator of this ambivalence perhaps that Schumann becomes the ideal accompaniment for Bergman’s tale: privy to Alexander’s fantasies and fears, he is the father figure who can provide charming musical accompaniment to family celebrations but who also understands why a child may be scared when the lights go out. So, too, is the father portrayed in Neo Rauch’s painting Vater (2007; Figure 17.1). Rauch treats his canvases almost as stage sets, cluttered with props familiar from his childhood—kitchens, barracks, workshops, nurseries—and painted, as can be seen in Vater, in a disorientating variety of styles, from romantic portraiture to cubism, surrealism, and pop art. In so doing Rauch hopes to set in motion a string of associations, but as several critics have noted, their meaning is not easily decipherable.11 The significance of figures in Rauch’s paintings is similarly obscure. Some are portraits of the artist at different stages of his life. In Vater the oversized but adolescent pater familias is supposedly Rauch as a young man (and, according to his dress, transplanted to a different century). The small adult man cradled in his cartoonish yellow hands is said to be the artist’s father, who died in a car crash when Rauch was a baby and who the artist has since tried to imagine being his own age.12 But it could be Schumann.13 One of Rauch’s stated aims is to evoke “misplaced memories,” and the musical association, whether intended by the artist or not, is a resonant one.14 It may be geographically derived, extending a Leipziger lineage from nineteenth-century composer to twenty-first-century painter. As

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Figure 17.1. Neo Rauch, Vater © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin and David Zwirner, New York. Photographer: Uwe Walter.

such it plays into a complicated discourse surrounding the status of fathers in postwar German culture.15 In 1963 the psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich famously described the phenomenon of the “fatherless generation,” metaphorically, if not literally, orphaned by what seemed like the suppression—or repression—of knowledge about their parents’ wartime activities.16 Over the next decades there were increasing attempts to confront and reconcile with the past, both politically and culturally.17 While in many ways these engagements with what Marianne Hirsch has called “postmemory” were personal quests—attempts to fill in the blanks of parental biographies—they raised questions about national father figures, such as the status of artists from the Nazi canon.18 As Lily E. Hirsch discusses elsewhere in this volume, Schumann’s position in the Third Reich’s pantheon of national heroes was not entirely secure. Awareness of his final illness and his association with Jews such as Heine and Mendelssohn

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put him among the ranks of “hardly heroes.”19 As did the fact that Schumann’s achievements were judged greatest in smaller scale genres that belonged to intimate and domestic spheres. His music was associated with the innig aspects of the German psyche: with hearth and home and thus, on a certain level, with nostalgia for times past, such as personal recollections of childhood.20 When the Nazi Sturmbannführer Ludwig Kessler claimed he found piano music consoling at times of stress because his mother used to play him Schumann, we assume he means works such as Kinderszenen. The “softer” side of Schumann was perhaps one reason for his allure for composers in the 1970s and 1980s as they, too, began to revisit Germany’s musical past.21 Some quoted Schumann directly, but others endeavored to capture a Schumannian spirit while keeping within their own musical language, such as the “fugitive visions” of Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies for piano or György Kurtág’s Homage à R. Sch. (both from 1980), which borrows the instrumentation of the Märchenerzählungen, Op. 132.22 These are musical postmemories, you might say, negotiating with the past on the composers’ own terms. Another approach was to create quasi-biographical portraits of the composer. Mauricio Kagel’s Mitternachtsstük (1981–86; the misspelled title comes from Schumann) combined spoken fragments from Schumann’s diaries and extracts from Jean Paul’s novels Siebenkäs and Die unsichtbare Loge—Mumien with conventional and unconventional instruments to create “atmospheric descriptions of unreality” (“atmosphärische Beschreibungen der Unwirklichkeit”) or Schumann’s “physical dreams” (“physischen Träumen”).23 Mention of a branch results in one being shaken, the writing of a letter is conveyed by rubbing the skin of the bass drum, iron chains rattle in the night—naturalism in some ways more unsettling than the declaimed narration. A still bleaker portrait is painted by the sparse orchestration of Wilhelm Killmayer’s Schumann in Endenich (1972, for piano, harmonium, and percussion): the composer is no longer accompanied even by characters from novels, but left all alone. It is possible that Killmayer’s and Kagel’s focus on spaces Schumann inhabited, especially the mental space of fantasy and insanity, stemmed from an awareness of the physical presence of the asylum at Endenich, which opened as a museum in 1963. Rihm explored similar territory in his Schumann “Charakterstück” Fremde Szenen I–III (1982–84).24 The program note describes Rihm’s music as existing in deserted chambers, strewn with medical instruments (“medizinisches Gerät”), in which “freely formed and abrupt conventions . . . stand together as if in a hurriedly and restlessly furnished interior—the residence of last choice” (“Frei Geformtes und unvermittelte Konvention stehen beieinander wie in eilends und rastlos möblierten Interieurs, die Aufenthalt als Letztes nahelegen”).25 Rihm is someone again who, in the Fremde Szenen, considers himself to be channeling Schumannian practices and energy rather than explicitly quoting from pieces (despite the work’s roots in the Second and Third Piano Trios). He has compared his approach to historical sources to the Austrian painter Arnulf

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Rainer’s practice of Übermalung, or “overpainting.”26 Rainer tends to take a preexisting image, or a collage of images, and then literally paint over them. A more resonant comparison with the scenario of the Fremde Szenen, though, might be to the paintings of Anselm Kiefer. Parsifal, from 1973, is a series of paintings that almost seems to illustrate Rihm’s deserted chambers (Figure 17.2). The beams and the walls framing the space at once draw us into and repel us from the empty attic. These are huge paintings—about three meters high, and the largest is four meters across—encouraging the viewer to feel a strong physical relationship to the canvases, as if one could walk onto a stage set (and there are props from Parsifal visible, such as a blood-spattered sword). But it is not just the content of the picture that is significant. Two of the paintings were done in oil and blood, on paper lain on canvas (an incursion of the real perhaps comparable to the disturbing timbral effects of Kagel’s Mitternachtsstük). The paint is so thick that the image seems to hover between realism and abstraction. Almost indecipherable against the swirling grain of the wooden boards are fragments of text: “Höchsten Heiles Wunder! Erlösung dem Erlöser!” (“Miracle of the highest salvation! Redemption to the redeemer!”) arches over a chalice in one of the paintings, and elsewhere is found a roll call of players from the Parsifal saga: Gurnemanz, Titurel, Amfortas, Klingsor, and Kundry. Fal parsi, the initial name for the character of Parsifal, is scratched into

Figure 17.2. Anselm Kiefer, Parsifal III © Tate, London 2009. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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a windowpane. Alongside these mythic heroes are inscribed the names of the Baader Meinhof gang, whose leaders were imprisoned in 1972. In other words Kiefer literally writes history into this painting, from the titular reference to Wagner’s famous opera, with all its historical and nationalist associations, to the tension between representational and abstract art, or between different generations of German heroes, from “Hitler’s ultimate cultural hero,” Wagner, to a terrorist cell that claimed to see little difference between the current capitalist establishment and the Nazi regime. Kiefer’s painting, Andreas Huyssen points out, “is emphatically about memory, not about forgetting.”27 In this context the room itself takes on new significance. Attics are usually the places where people store the things they do not use anymore but cannot bear to throw away. A receptacle for memories, you might say.28 Childhood is the usual candidate, and in one of the panels of Kiefer’s triptych there is an empty cot (which may represent Parsifal’s infancy or the birth of the artist). While the ghosts haunting the attic of Parsifal are probably of a more ideological nature than those that troubled Alexander in the Bergman film, the coincidence of recurring images such as these helps establish tropes of memory and loss on which new compositions responding to Schumann as man and musician also draw. Consider again, for instance, the two pieces mentioned at the start of this essay: Rihm’s chamber opera Jakob Lenz and Francis Dhomont’s acousmatic melodrama Fôret profonde. Though composed almost twenty years apart, in contrasting media, and on different continents, both these works represent three different aspects of Schumann reception: the association of his music with childlike purity, the corruption of the same, and the complicated relationship between music from the German Romantic tradition and twentieth-century history. Rihm’s Jakob Lenz is based on an unfinished story by Georg Büchner (published posthumously in 1839). The twelve scenes of the opera chart the final decline of the poet and dramatist Lenz (1751–92), a contemporary of Goethe’s who suffered a major breakdown in 1777, subsequently coming under the care of the minister Johann Friedrich Oberlin.29 In the seventh scene Lenz has escaped to the mountains, and while there he composes a poem; he heard voices that remind him of his beloved, Friederike Brian, who he fears will die. In the Interlude (Example 17.2) there is what Rihm describes in the score as “a sort of dream vision,” in which children sing a two-part canon (about how Lenz’s heart, once so warm, is now so poor), under which can be heard a version of the last seven bars of the penultimate number of Kinderszenen,“Kind im Einschlummern” (Example 17.3). The Schumann reference in the Rihm is not exact; it breaks off in measure 162, where what should be an F-sharp is flattened, and with that dissonance the children predict Lenz’s departure as, in the distance, he is heard still urging that Friederike be saved. According to Alastair Williams, the brief appearance of Kinderszenen in Jakob Lenz indicates the poet’s descent into madness; it is as if Schumann’s music is a

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Example 17.2. Wolfgang Rihm, Jakob Lenz. © Copyright 1978 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 18066. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Eine Art Traumbild rit.

156

Langsam

sehr leise

Kind 1 Im

tief - sten Her

- zen war sehr leise

ihmwarm, jetzt

Kind 2 (Vc. Pos.)

Im

rit.

tief - sten

Her - zen

Langsam (Vc.)

ff

pp

p

(Halz)

rit.

159

*)

1 ist

es ihm

so

eng,

so arm!

So

2 war

ihm

warm, jetzt

ist

es

ihm

so

eng,

so arm!

rit.

hallucination, half heard accompanying a vision of childish innocence and consolation, maybe even a promise of redemption.30 It is striking that the piece Lenz hallucinates is not one of Schumann’s late works, but one composed long before, and associated with childhood. On one level the invocation of “Kind im Einschlummern” is historically appropriate in terms of choosing music from Büchner’s lifetime (well, almost: Büchner died the year before Kinderszenen was composed). On another level, though, it is historically inappropriate: the

Example 17.2. Continued fff

162

ganz in der Ferne

L Ret- ten!

1 ** )

arm!

Er

will

ge - hen

arm!

Er

will

ge - hen

2 So

*) hier kann 1. Sopran das Kind ablösen **) hier kann 2. Sopran das Kind ablösen

Example 17.3. Robert Schumann, Kinderszenen Op. 15, no. 12. rit.

p

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Twentieth-Century Interpretations

diatonicism of the Schumann jars against the atonal backdrop of the preceding cello tremolando passage. A similarly disorientating effect is achieved by the use of Kinderszenen in Dhomont’s Forêt profonde. Here Schumann’s music can give an unexpected sense of tonal gravity and occasionally also a sense of meter. In the first section, “Chambre d’enfants” (The nursery), for example, metallic sounds and piano and toy piano chords combine with ambient noise—birds, children’s voices, and croaking frogs; an F-sharp—C-sharp chord recurs, and an initial center on A shifts up to B about halfway through. At the end there is a IV-V-I cadence on G, heard in low piano chords; a standard cadential progression, perhaps, but also the final chords of the last piece of Kinderszenen, “Der Dichter spricht” (The poet speaks). We might assume that he is about to tell us a fairy tale: the children’s voices, at first seeming like the sounds at a playground, quiet down, and the frogs might, if we are lucky, become handsome princes. Yet the stories the following sections recount are not entirely reassuring. Forêt profonde is in thirteen sections (like Kinderszenen) and includes further modified samples and quotations from Schumann’s score, woven into a tapestry that includes excerpts from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” radio interviews with Holocaust survivors, and two texts by the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim: The Uses of Enchantment, a Freudian reading of fairy tales, and an account of Bettelheim’s internment in Buchenwald.31 Thus versions of Goldilocks and Sleeping Beauty, spoken nearly simultaneously in multiple languages, are overlain with Bettelheim’s interpretations of their hidden meanings. Sleeping beauty—the subject of section 7, “Wall of Thorns”—becomes a tale of the end of adolescence: at the age of fifteen the princess, while exploring a forbidden chamber in the castle, fulfills the bad fairy’s curse by pricking her finger on a distaff; she falls asleep for one hundred years, protected by a wall of thorns, and wakes only on being kissed by a prince. According to Bettelheim, the father’s attempt to protect his daughter from “the curse” is a battle against her sexual maturity—in other words, her starting to menstruate.32 There are obvious sexual implications in the princess ascending a spiral staircase to discover a locked room, and we might assume that her being pricked refers to intercourse, but apparently the real point of her extended sleep is that it allows her to mature until she is ready for sex and marriage. Bettelheim suggests that the sleep also lets the princess indulge in adolescent introspection, a narcissism broken only by the prince’s kiss. So while, in this instance, trauma can have happy consequences—the curse is a blessing in disguise—Dhomont’s presentation of fairy tales in Forêt profonde emphasizes their role in providing enabling narratives to explain sometimes disturbing early experiences.33 They are not as innocent as they seem. Still more disturbing to any notion of childish innocence is the inclusion of Bettelheim’s biography in section 9, “Furious Forest”; despite having survived Buchenwald, he committed suicide twenty years later. The inclusion of

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Schumann’s Kinderszenen in this regard might be seen again as part of an attempt to somehow reconcile oneself to history, particularly to the horrors of the Holocaust.34 Finally, a more redemptive aspect of Schumann’s music is offered. In the tenth section, “Musique de chambre,” the sounds of a cello lesson are superimposed with fragments from the fourth movement of Kinderszenen, “Bittendes Kind” (Entreating child). Appearing as they do over the background of the straining young musicians—far from any kind of real chamber music, one might think—it is difficult to tell if the hyperreal quotations from Schumann are what the students are heading toward, or if the music is in some ways trying to escape from them. Dhomont might be playing with assumptions about what is music or musical and what is not, something highlighted throughout Forêt profonde by the combination of ambient sound, musical fragments, and spoken texts.35 Schumann’s presence in the mix both provides a sense of history and, particularly when combined with Bettelheim’s interpretations of stories from our childhood, encourages thoughts about what his music means in the present, about how he is remembered. Increasingly in the 1990s composers began to treat Schumann less as a free-floating signifier for Romantic madness and more as a figurehead whose achievements should be memorialized. Henri Pousseur’s Dichterliebesreigentraum (1995) functions as both analysis and recomposition of Schumann’s famous cycle.36 Aribert Reimann and Hans Zender have both offered transcriptions and new versions of preexisting works.37 Perhaps reflecting developments in Schumann scholarship as a whole, these composers have engaged more seriously with the late music, without the shadow of Schumann’s biography necessarily falling on their scores. An exception is my final example, Heinz Holliger’s Romancendres for cello and piano (2003). Holliger reflects on the status of Schumann’s final years by “reconstructing” the Cello Romances (1853) and charting their destruction by Clara forty years later. From one angle, Romancendres represents a desire to rewrite history, to reevaluate, in musical terms, Schumann’s achievements. Yet there lingers a memory of those deserted chambers of the mind. The first movement presents Schumann’s youth, but the title is followed by a sinister parenthesis: “Aurora (Nachts).” It was at night, the program note explains, that “the ailing composer heard angelic choruses and miraculous ethereal music that turned demonic in the morning.”38 Of the second movement, “R(asche)S Flügelschlagen,” it is claimed, “In the end, Schumann is said to have hopped across the ground like an ungainly, flightless bird. The strokes of his broken wings are audible in the music. But these wing-strokes (‘Flügelschläge’) are also meant literally, for the interior of the piano (‘Flügel’ in German) is struck in a great many ways.”39 The parenthetical treatment of Schumann’s nocturnal hallucinations and a sense of him, with broken wings, retreating into the interior of the piano suggests that the composer’s illness continues to keep him at a distance from the rest of the world.40 Or at least, as is apparent from

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the Holliger, he remains there (apart) in our memories, even when we attempt to rewrite his history.

notes Earlier versions of this paper were given at the Universities of Central England and Bangor. I am grateful to Holly Watkins for sharing with me her 2005 paper, “Confronting the German Past: Kiefer, Rihm, Henze.” 1. See A. Williams, “Swaying with Schumann,” 380. 2. Berthold Hoeckner discusses metaphors of distance in Schumann’s music in the context of nineteenth-century poetics in “Schumann and Romantic Distance.” For more on the significance of quotation, see Todd, “On Quotation in Schumann’s Music”; Reynolds, Motives for Allusion; Newcomb, “The Hunt for Reminiscences.” 3. Further examples of references to Schumann’s music by other composers are discussed in Frobenius, “Robert Schumann”; Hiekel, “The Compositional Reception of Schumann’s Music”; Pwyll ap Siôn, “Quotation in Nyman’s Neurological Opera,” in The Music of Michael Nyman, 115–46. 4. There are three versions of Fanny och Alexander: a script, published in 1979; a five-hour television production that premiered in Sweden on Christmas Day 1982; and a shorter film released commercially soon afterward. The story remains basically the same in all three versions; here, though, I am referring to the television series. 5. According to Bergman the assertion that Fanny och Alexander (which at the time it was made he said would be his last film) was autobiographical was “not quite true,” though he deliberately chose the actor Bertil Guve for the role of Alexander because he looked like his younger self. See Cowie, Ingmar Bergman, 338. Frank Gado lists the similarities between the films and Bergman’s relatives in The Passion of Bergman, 497–98. 6. See Tunbridge, “Schumann as Manfred,” and Schumann’s Late Style, 212–13. 7. Richarz’s establishment was relatively enlightened. For further information about Schumann’s treatment there, see Peters, “Erläuterungen zum Endenicher Krankenbericht Schumanns.” 8. Robert Schumann, letter to Ferdinand Hiller, November 19 1849, in R. Schumann, Briefe: Neue Folge (1904), 323. The letter is discussed in Ostwald, Robert Schumann, 230–231; Daverio, Robert Schumann, 439–40; Jensen, Schumann, 233–34. John Worthen debunks claims about the composer’s nervousness as “selfironic” in Robert Schumann, 308. 9. Quoted in Cowie, Ingmar Bergman, 338. 10. Apparently, as a child Bergman imagined that a marble Venus came alive in his grandmother’s apartment (Gado, The Passion of Bergman, 495). 11. See, for instance, Hell, “Wendebilder”; Mullins, Painting People, 140; Peter Schjeldahl, “Paintings for Now: Neo Rauch at the Met,” The New Yorker, June 4, 2007; Gary Tinterow, “Seeing through Smoke,” and Werner Spies, “In the Prohibited Zone of Happiness,” in Hannemann and Tinterow, Neo Rauch, 5–6, 7–10.

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12. See the video of Rauch’s tour of his 2007 exhibition, Para, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, at www.viswiki.com/en/Neo_Rauch. 13. Roberta Smith suggests this in “Curious Time Travel through Art and History,” New York Times, June 15, 2007. 14. See note 12. 15. Particularly given Rauch’s heritage it is important to differentiate between responses in East and West Germany, but there is no space to do so here. 16. Mitscherlich, Auf dem Weg zur vaterlosen Gesellschaft. 17. In “An Inability to Mourn?” Friso Wielenga argues that the process began much earlier. For an overview of the Historikerstreit of the late 1980s, see Knowlton and Cates, Forever in the Shadow of Hitler?; Kailitz, Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit. For more on the notion of finding a “usable past,” see Huyssen, “Anselm Kiefer,” 28. 18. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames, and “Surviving Images.” Michael Schneider explores the rise of Vaterliteratur in the 1970s in “Fathers and Songs.” Caroline Schaumann explores the female perspective in Memory Matters. 19. See Heldt, “Hardly Heroes.” 20. Max Ernst’s 1937 painting The Angel of Hearth and Home (housed in the Staatsgalerie Moderne Kunst in Munich) suggests an alternative side to such nostalgia: storm clouds roll menacingly behind a strange half-human, half-avian beast and its sidekick—more angels of the apocalypse than by the fireside. 21. For more on musical neo-Romanticism, see Tillmans, “Postmodernism and Art Music,” 75–91. 22. See Sallis, “The Genealogy”; Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 212–13. 23. Mauricio Kagel, program note to Kagel by Mauricio Kagel, trans. Richard Toop (Hänssler Classic, 2004), 20–23; Heile, The Music of Mauricio Kagel, 134. 24. Wolfgang Rihm, “Fremde Blätter (über Robert Schumann) [1984],” in Ausgesprochen, 1:233. 25. Wolfgang Rihm, “Fremde Szenen I–III, Versuche für Klaviertrio, erste Folge (1982–1984),” and “Fremde Blätter (über Robert Schumann) [1984],” in Ausgesprochen, 2:333, 1:233; translation from A. Williams, “Swaying with Schumann,” 395. 26. Discussed in A. Williams, “Swaying with Schumann,” 383. 27. Huyssen, “Anselm Kiefer,” 26. 28. For a meditation on the significance of a house’s spaces, see Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. 29. The year before he had completed the play Die Soldaten, much later used as the basis for Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s opera of the same name (1965); it was also a source for Berg’s Wozzeck. 30. A. Williams, “Swaying with Schumann.” 31. For extended discussion of Dhomont’s work, see Rubin, “Forêt Profonde.” 32. Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 225–36. 33. Dhomont was born in Paris in 1926; he moved to Provence in 1950 and to Montreal in 1979. No information about his wartime experiences is available, and his turn to Bettelheim seems to stem primarily from an interest in psychoanalysis: Forêt profonde is the second work of his Cycle profondeur and was preceded by Sous le regard d’un soleil noir, which uses writings on schizophrenia by R. D. Laing.

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34. Rubin observes the telling transition from storytellers to Holocaust survivors in “Forêt Profonde,” 94. 35. Dhomont has written of the frisson caused by attempts to conciliate the “hedonism of the sonic signifier with the weight of the musical signified” (“Is There a Québec Sound?,” 27). 36. See Pousseur’s essay, Schumann, le poète. 37. On Reimann’s transcriptions, see Mahlert, “Schumanns Sechs Gesänge op. 107.” Zender’s works include the Schumann-Phantasie (1997) for large orchestra, a “composed interpretation” (“komponierten Interpretation”) of the Op. 17 C-Major Fantasie for piano. 38. Roman Brotbeck, “Heinz Holliger and the Year 1853,” trans. J. Bradford Robinson, Heinz Holliger: Romancendres (ECM Records, 2009), 16. 39. Ibid., 16. 40. Kurtág uses parentheses in his movement titles to different ends in Homage à R. Sch.

18 Late Styles Scott Burnham

Late styles. The plural stands as tribute to John Daverio and his view of Schumann, gathering and consolidating a number of styles in his later years.1 And with late styles I mean as well to encourage thought about artistic lateness as a broad plurality rather than a marked singularity. The word late names various relations to time and commands a range of connotations that begin and end in an awareness of death.2 This awareness figures heavily into how we construe lateness and late works, the investment we make in them. (Consider, for example, the magic realism of the phrase opus posthumous.) Like that keener attention I pay to the final pages of a long novel, a palpable shift in perception inevitably attends the discovery that the artist died shortly after creating the work in front of me. I experience a prickling of the senses; a stir in the air from a door left open, a door that a moment before did not exist. Or sometimes the fact of the artist’s death is actually composed into the work, with remarkable effect: think of that eerie moment when The Art of the Fugue suddenly ceases, shortly after the BACH motive begins to be woven into the tapestry, as if Bach had just then undertaken to weave himself into a much larger tapestry. Most groups who record The Art of the Fugue overcome any organicist scruples about wholeness in their urge to stage this moment, simply letting the music STOP midphrase—the enforced closure of death trumps the minor closures we achieve in art. And even in those cases of lateness where death is not pushed to the forefront of our consciousness, it remains a potent and inescapable backstage prompter, feeding us lines of thought as we survey artistic creations at the end of someone’s life. If we accept death as the keynote, the Grundstimmung of our preoccupation with late styles, where do we go from there? There are as many attitudes toward death as the world is wide. But I think we may arrange the furniture a bit; we can make a first pass at aesthetic, late-style attitudes toward death by constructing a continuum whose extremes are either an accepting embrace of death or an unreconciled discomfort with death.

411

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Twentieth-Century Interpretations

Dances with Death I begin with the unreconciled end of things—dark, refractory visions of mortality. Bob Dylan is in the midst of a late period; his 1997 song “Not Dark Yet” can help us get our eyes used to the darkness. Here is the refrain that lies in wait after each verse: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there.” The song’s steady trudge seems to know the pace of a growing twilight shadow, and when Dylan lets his voice trail off at phrase endings we hear something beyond a sigh— perhaps a rattling rehearsal of his own last breath? With these things, Dylan invites us to attend to a rhythm that is almost always drowned out by our daily doings: the rhythm of death approaching. Some artists tap into a darkly visionary vein in Western culture, one that configures death as part of an ancient, titanic menace, what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke called “das alte Schlimme.”3 Think of Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, painted in the 1820s, during the last years of his life, a period of exile. The staring eyes of Goya’s Titan are both terrified and terrifying in their mute unthinking ferocity. Or consider the horror of the cursed House of Atreus, undone by generations of incestuous violence. Goethe’s agelessly enigmatic characters Mignon and the Harpist carry this burden of ancient fatality with them, encapsulated in the Harpist’s lament: “Wer nie sein Brot mit Thränen aß, wer nie die kummervollen Nächte / auf seinem Bette weinend sass, der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte!” (He who never ate his bread in tears nor spent care-laden nights in bed weeping—he knows you not, O heavenly powers!)4 To know the powers of the gods is to be crushed by them. These days we generally don’t go in for such mythologizing of our terrors, though there are compelling exceptions, such as the treatment of unspeakable violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, touted by some as the great American novel of the twentieth century. Rather we seem to be in an age that is freshly recognizing death in a more mundane, personal fashion. Take as witness a number of recent novels about death, aging, and loss, written by artists clearly in their later years. Some of these are sharply despairing, caught up in the very throes of pain, no morphine in sight. Philip Roth’s 2006 novel Everyman commences with the funeral of the protagonist—after all, the first thing to know about Everyman is that he will die. But the main action of the novel unscrolls through the protagonist’s final months and offers little by way of palliative emotional care. As one of Roth’s elderly sufferers puts it, “The dependence, the helplessness, the isolation, the dread—it’s all so ghastly and shameful. The pain makes you frightened of yourself. The utter otherness of it is awful.”5 This does not strike the redemptive note. Or take William Gaddis’s last novel, Agapé Agape, published in 2002, some four years after the author’s death. Here the protagonist is actually thrashing on his final sickbed, feverishly ruminating about a book he wishes to write, a sweeping critique of modernity. The opening goes like this:

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No but you see I’ve got to explain all this because I don’t, we don’t know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, why I’ve brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and organized when I get this property divided up and the business and worries that go with it while they keep me here to be cut up and scraped and stapled and cut up again my damn leg look at it, layered with staples like that old suit of Japanese armour in the dining hall feel like I’m being dismantled piece by piece, houses, cottages, stables orchards and all the damn decisions and distractions I’ve got the papers land surveys deeds and all of it right in this heap somewhere, get it cleared up and settled before everything collapses and it’s all swallowed up by lawyers and taxes like everything else because that’s what it’s about, that’s what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist.6

Other recent late works thematicizing loss, aging, and death include Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memoria de mis Putas Tristes (Memoir of my sad whores), the story of a nonagenarian’s troubled encounter with the urges but also the deeper emotions of youth, as well as a number of memoirs of staggering personal loss, such as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Donald Hall’s Without, a collection of elegiac poems chronicling the illness and passing of his wife. Like long photographic exposures, these works pitilessly record the accumulating details of dying and of living with loss. And they refuse to domesticate these details within some sort of reassuring narrative. But reassurance has a long lease in human affairs. So let’s move to the other end of the continuum: to the welcome acceptance of death. The poet Friedrich Hölderlin, born the same year as Beethoven (1770) and widely celebrated for the poems and fragments of his “late period,” conjures Death with the striking image of a goblet brimming with “dark light,” the quaffing of which will bring on “sweet slumber.” These lines are from his 1803 (or 1805) poem “Andenken” (Remembrance). Note the striking combination of brevity with a Latinate intricacy of syntax: Es reiche aber, Des dunkeln Lichtes voll, Mir einer den duftenden Becher, Damit ich ruhen möge; denn süß Wär’ unter Schatten der Schlummer. Nicht ist es gut Seellos von sterblichen Gedanken zu sein.

Or, in the English of a recent translation:

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But someone reach me A fragrant cupful Of dark light, that I might rest; it would be sweet to drowse in the shade. It is no good to let mortal thoughts rob you of your soul.7

The poem’s final line, rendered more literally: “It’s not good to be left soulless from mortal thoughts.” This last admonition will return for us. In February 1922, four years before his death at age fifty-one, the poet Rilke experienced a remarkable surge of creative activity, producing most of his Sonnets to Orpheus. These poems develop a vision of this world as the other side of the beyond. The Orphic impulse is to be at home in both realms, in what Rilke calls the Doppelbereich. Rilke asks the poet to absorb Death, to ingest Death. This is like learning to breathe underwater: you have to stop fighting it. Nur wer die Leier schon hob auch unter Schatten, darf das unendliche Lob ahnend erstatten. Nur wer mit Toten vom Mohn aß, von dem ihren, wird nicht den leisesten Ton wieder verlieren. Mag auch die Spieglung im Teich oft uns verschwimmen: Wisse das Bild. Erst in dem Doppelbereich werden die Stimmen ewig und mild. Only he who has lifted his lyre also among the shades may boundless praise render foreknowing. Only he who has eaten poppies with the dead, will never again lose even the softest of sounds. Though the pool’s reflection often blurs before us: know the image. Only in the double-world do voices become eternal and mild.8

Perception grows sharper in the Doppelbereich: the poet thus sensitized retrieves the lightest, mildest voices. The poem itself hovers delicately, like a reflection on the water or an elusive fragrance in the air. And yet what a cogent concentration

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of craft! In the first stanza, note how Lob gathers the phrase “Leier schon hob” and, in the second, how Ton gathers “Toten vom Mohn” (there is a Leier in the Lob, and there are Toten in the Ton!). And at the end: the word Stimmen gathers Spieglung, Teich, and verschwimmen. These words—Lob, Ton, Stimmen—gently throb with concentrated significance. In these instances Hölderlin and Rilke invite us to accept death. It becomes a welcome part of the weight of our experience: we are not enjoined to jettison it like so much ballast to be thrown overboard in a panic or a rage. These two extremes—acceptance and alienation, integration and nonintegration—find their translated counterparts in critical takes on late style. For the readiest example, consider critical reactions to the phenomenon known as “late Beethoven.” Everyone agrees that there are puzzling contrasts in this music, but they tend to be interpreted in opposite ways. A powerful early twentieth-century interpretation of such contrast holds that Beethoven created the conditions for a coincidentia oppositorum, opposites brought together in a mystic vision radiating from some central experience (J. W. N. Sullivan), or, at the least, that he promoted a sense of unity in diversity or multum in parvo (as argued by Martin Cooper).9 The primary analytical mandate stemming from this belief has been the search for ways to unite the disparate shards of human reality heard in the late music. Pitch proves time and again to be the most dependable agent of coherence in this effort, especially when its agency is concealed to some degree— thus Carl Dahlhaus speaks of a subthematic realm, and Deryk Cooke (in the ne plus ultra of such approaches) seeks to demonstrate the Unity of all five Late Quartets in an abstract four-note figure (now that’s very parvus, and think of the multum that results!).10 Another, rather different tradition dates from Theodor Adorno’s engagement with the late style.11 For writers operating within this tradition, the contrasts in Beethoven’s late works are heard to be the means of a critique of the composer’s earlier style, or perhaps of music itself, or, more recently, of our own analytical methods. These latter approaches do not attempt to analyze away the apparent discontinuities of this music in the name of underlying unity, but instead hear the disjunctions as offering a distinctly different kind of critical payoff, as in Adorno’s sense of the late style as the sound of the subject absenting itself, or Daniel Chua’s sense of the String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 130 as profiling the “impossibility of closure,” that most Beethovenian of musical values.12 These days we are not inclined to resolve contradictions. And late works can be understood as a special invitation to celebrate intransigence and resistance, to work “against the grain,” as in the subtitle of Edward Said’s posthumous book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. Here are some muchquoted lines from Said’s book: This is the prerogative of late style: it has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds

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them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.

We may accept this, in part, as a description of Said’s own frame of mind, his own late style. And we are ready to privilege Said’s voice here, grant him authority on this topic, as one who knew that death was near. For more than ten years he peered at the steady approach of death, in the form of leukemia. But it also describes a state of mind capable of living with contradiction, a state of mind beyond both shame and false modesty. As Said puts it, “Lateness is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present.” This means living with the past in the present, bringing all times to bear. Said’s friend (and the editor of his final book) Michael Wood offers this elaboration about lateness, death, and a resulting multitude of temporal perspectives: But death does sometimes wait for us, and it is possible to become deeply aware of its waiting. The quality of time alters then, like a change in the light, because the present is so thoroughly shadowed by other seasons: the revived or receding past, the newly unmeasurable future, the unimaginable time beyond time. With such moments we arrive at the conditions for the special sense of lateness that is the subject of [Said’s] book.13

A focus on last things, on death, forces a search for origins as well, brings both ends of the temporal spectrum upward and outward, adding a special dimension to the present. This is why late styles can seem to inhabit a singular realm: they are no longer concerned with being timely but seem tuned to a different quality of experience. I will call this realm, this experience, untimely. Said’s book offers an encompassing vision of this untimely aspect of late styles, and I shall turn back to him a number of times in what follows.

Aesthetic Symptoms of the Untimely As a critical category within which to survey late works, the notion of the untimely can be quite inclusive. Some of Said’s reviewers chide him for restricting himself to cases of unresolved tension.14 After all, each of us has favorite autumnal and serene late works that seem to rise above and redeem the “inevitable predicament.” What about the transfixed beauty of Mozart’s “Ave verum corpus,” we may ask, or the shimmering language of Shakespeare’s late romances, the deeply consoling sounds of late Brahms? These are works that, in the words of Michael Wood, “have settled their quarrel with time.”15 Wood’s formulation suggests a harmony and resolution beyond time. And thus we can place these works as well under the umbrella of the untimely.

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And here’s another step toward a plurality of untimely late styles: it is possible to be untimely and late without being old, or actually facing mortality. Said liberates “late style” from the confines of an artist’s chronological age or putative “final maturity.” The Greek poet Cavafy, for example, is said to possess an “always-late style,” with its “scrupulous, small-scale declarations, which seem coaxed out of a pervasive obscurity.”16 Operating out of obscurity is a condition of exile. Self-imposed exile is withdrawal, and it is easy to discern the traces of withdrawal in the late projects of many artists. Withdrawal from the subject, as in Adorno’s view of late Beethoven. Withdrawal from society, as in Richard Wagner’s view of Beethoven’s deafness, an infirmity that sealed him off from the world and ensured the creative isolation that led to the late-period works.17 Withdrawal from the present, through a fascination with the past, a reaching back to older styles in order to make something new. Think of Mozart’s fascination with Bach, or Beethoven’s with Bach and with Palestrina. When Beethoven self-consciously looks to the past to replenish his art, he looks just as self-consciously to the future. This puts his art out of time, into its own untimely place, a place in which different temporal periods stand in constellation with each other. There is a more directly material sense of temporal juxtaposition in some late-style musics. Think of the gradual increase in rhythmic animation within the “Arietta” movement of Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Op. 111, from the stately dotted eighth notes to the oscillating stasis of all those ecstatic trills. We find an even more astonishing example of direct temporal juxtaposition in the theme-and-variation finale of Op. 109. The last variation culminates with the simultaneous sounding of three different time scales: cascading thirty-second notes, a middle-voice trill, and the theme on high, in widely spaced chisel strokes. (Beethoven returns to the original theme after all this sublime commotion, which has the effect of drawing the genie back into the bottle.) The temporal plenitude within Op. 109’s final variation reminds me of a passage found in Said’s lecture notes for a course he taught at Columbia: “Conversion of time into space . . . Opening up of chronological sequence into landscape the better to be able to see, experience, grasp and work with time.”18 And Said’s passage reminds me in turn of the temporal landscape in another notable late work: the Adagio from Schubert’s String Quintet in C, composed in 1828, the last year of his life. Here a different kind of plenitude arises, that of sheer expanse. Schubert’s theme is put together with long parallel phrases. Within each phrase a stepwise melody in the middle strings moves so slowly as to obscure a sense of pulse, which is provided instead by quiet dotted utterances in the first violin and pizzicato quarter and eighth notes in the cello. The 12/8 compound meter in such a slow tempo makes each beat into a space that can be filled—or not. In the next iteration of the theme, for example (beginning at m. 15), the dotted violin figures lose both dot and bow, becoming dry pizzicato double and triple stops; this and the drop in dynamics expose the middle strings,

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which now carry the reverberant trace of vast emptiness. The opening theme returns after the stark contrast of a hyperdramatic B section, its spaces now astir with dialoguing arabesques in the outer voices (beginning at m. 64). Like Rilke’s Orpheus, we seem to have crossed the River Styx and are now aware of mysterious ministrations from the other side. The opening of Schubert’s Adagio paradoxically gains its fullness of expression from having its individual voices about as pared down as can be imagined. Such paring down is another symptom of lateness and the untimely. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick memorably characterized a strain of late works in which “the bare outlines of a creative idiom seem finally to emerge from what had been the obscuring puppy fat of personableness, timeliness, or sometimes even of coherent sense.”19 (The puppy fat image is striking: think of the delightful puppy fat on display in so many first novels, or in pieces such as Beethoven’s Op. 1 trios, especially the finale of Op. 1, no. 1.) Contrast this with the spare cogency of the Rilke sonnet cited above, or the Latinate concentration of Hölderlin’s poetic syntax. The composer Alexander Goehr, in a recent essay on late style, wrote that late artists sometimes “pare away the sensuality and energy which characterizes their work, and perhaps at the cost of some of its purely bodily vitality, move nearer to an imaginary state of anonymity, to an apparent involuntary renunciation of the right of authorial control and the consequent freedom from the need to communicate their meaning by means of logical argument.”20 Sometimes this means a preoccupation with abstraction, or with utterances that seem impersonal. Bach composes The Art of the Fugue as a series of abstract contrapuntal studies without the local color of specified instrumentation—like so many thoughts free to clothe themselves in any available language. Goethe closes his novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (the late-period pendant to Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) with pages of aphorisms, as though the narrative impulse were returning to an originary seedbed of thought, unencumbered by the timeliness of plot. And sometimes abstracting one quality or another leads to a renewed sense of the elemental. Take the case of the British landscape painter J. M. W. Turner. Already famous for his treatment of sunlight, in his late paintings Turner seems to bring light to the foreground, until it becomes the engulfing subject of the painting. I’m thinking of paintings such as Norham Castle, in which the figures of a castle and a cow seem to float between two brilliant flood plains of light (Figure 18.1). Other late paintings, explicitly following the precepts of Goethe’s color theory, would seem to demonstrate color as the direct effect of light. As one critic puts it, describing the effect of these canvases, “Colour does not merely depict colour. Colour is colour.”21 Painted representation is transcended by a direct presentation of the materiality of painting. This property even forms part of the title of one of Turner’s most famous paintings: Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—the Morning after the Deluge—Moses writing the Book of Genesis. In this painting light not only creates the content, it dictates the form (a swirling

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vortex) and profiles the symbolic figures (the coiled serpent, Moses). “The sun is God”—so Turner supposedly said on his deathbed. Even if he didn’t, to believe so is a late styling, one that invites us to eliminate all but the elemental, to apprehend light as both symbol and the “directly material.” And what a symbol: light as a central quality from which all else emanates; light as the first great cosmic impulse, before life itself. Of course many are prepared to think of Beethoven’s late music in something like these pared-down, elemental terms. Alexander Goehr again: Beethoven’s late “melody and harmony is barer, simpler and more attenuated, and the rhythmic drive less sustained and more frequently interrupted.” But there is a countering tendency. “At the same time, there is a greater syntactic complexity, an increase in the degree of interrupted continuity and even fragmentation, reflecting, if anything, a greater ambition and power of concentration.”22 Richard Kramer speaks of a paradoxical renewal of Art through a “consuming exhaustion” in the late projects of Bach and Beethoven, citing Christoph Wolff ’s speculation that Bach, at end of life, may have found it difficult to invent new musical subject matter and chose instead to concentrate on exhausting a single musical idea, as in The Art of the Fugue.23

Figure 18.1. Joseph Mallord William Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise © Tate, London 2009.

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Twentieth-Century Interpretations

This process of moving inward is matched in many late styles by an equally untimely process of moving outward—to different cultures or genres, often again for the sake of stylistic renewal. This can involve material perceived as exotic, as in Goethe’s turn to Persian poetry in his late collection of poems known as the West-Östlicher Divan. Or artists will juxtapose different genres, or, in a related process, they will deploy loosely episodic narrative structures. The great works of Goethe’s later years feature notably wide-open episodic structures: one need only compare the far-flung scenes (in both space and time) of Faust, part II to the more cohesive narrative trajectory of Faust, part I, or compare the interpolation of tales and aphorisms in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre to the more straightforward plot line of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Beethoven’s late-style preoccupations are germane here. As for his use of multifarious genres, think of all those vocal incursions in his late instrumental music—recitative, cavatina, arietta—or his attempt to merge archaic forms with modern forms: fugue as a first movement in Opp. 131 and 111, fugue as a finale in Opp. 101, 102, 106, 110, and 130. The finale of the Ninth Symphony, as described by Nicholas Cook and others, stands as one of the great gallimaufries of modern Western culture (featuring pastiche; recitative; a congregational hymn that can be hummed under the breath or thundered into the cathedral vaults; a Turkish march; several fugues; a sacred instrumental cantata, with trombones; a music hall kick line; a vocal motet; and a rousing conclusion that transforms the orchestra into a gigantic calliope).24 From any given moment to the next in Beethoven’s late music one encounters unintegrated, even breathtaking juxtapositions: in the finale of the Ninth we fall from the throne of God to the sound of a croaking contrabassoon; in the A-Minor String Quartet the willed sublimity of the Heiliger Dankgesang gives way to a bluff march; in Op. 135 we hear the parade of naïve to demonic (in the scherzo and trio) to holy quietude (in the slow movement) to childlike patter (at the end of the finale); and every postmodern music analyst has put on the feedbag at the smorgasbord of musical contrasts that is the first page of Op. 132. Some of Beethoven’s contrasts seem to find the very boundaries of subjectivity: listening from the last page of the Cavatina of Op. 130 into the first page of the Große Fuge finale we move without transition from the intensely personal and vulnerable to the impassively impersonal, from the human to the superhuman. Once embarked upon the Overtura of the Große Fuge we then move from the superhuman back to the human (mm. 17–25) and even to the stunted and subhuman (mm. 26–30). In this way Beethoven leaves jagged fault lines hanging in the air, without much in the way of moral tampering. Such radical juxtapositions bring to mind a related symptom of the untimely: the technical poetic procedure known as parataxis. Originally invoked to characterize the additive technique of epic diction (e.g., the Homeric hexameter), parataxis now refers more broadly to cases of “non-dialectical discourse.” In

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musical terms, one thinks more of Schubert than of Beethoven: remember those long parallel phrases in the Adagio from the String Quintet? Schubert’s fabled heavenly lengths are aided and abetted by paratactic construction.25 Parataxis plays well as a late-style strategy: it undergirds the juxtapositional impulse to hold things in apposition; it underwrites the refusal to resort to hypotactic narrative trajectories. We can speak of parataxis at the most local levels of musical phrasing, or we can speak of it in the most expansive terms, as in the case of Beethoven’s late music looking toward both past and future, holding different temporal eras in a paratactic constellation. As a poetic device that can work to disable temporal hierarchy, parataxis is perhaps the very structure of the untimely. Hölderlin’s late poem “Hälfte des Lebens” is famously paratactic; the two stanzas dissonate with each other, as a kind of freeze-dried Verdichtung of two states, two seasons “without synthesis.”26 Mit gelben Birnen hänget Und voll mit wilden Rosen Das Land in den See, Ihr holden Schwäne, Und trunken von Küssen Tunkt ihr das Haupt Ins heilignüchterne Wasser. Weh mir, wo nehm’ ich, wenn Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo Den Sonnenschein, Und Schatten der Erde? Die Mauern stehn Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde Klirren die Fahnen. With its yellow pears And wild roses everywhere The shore hangs in the lake, O gracious swans, And drunk with kisses You dip your heads In the sobering holy water. Ah, where will I find Flowers, come winter, And where the sunshine And shade of the earth? Walls stand cold And speechless, in the wind The weathervanes creak.27

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The rich alliteration and assonance from the end of the first stanza (“tunkt,” “Küssen,” “nüchtern”) are countered by the barren connotations and metallic sounds of the second stanza’s conclusion (“sprachlos,” “kalt,” “klirren”). Nothing is resolved, and yet the constellation of images and sound has a monad-like self-sufficiency. The overripe, almost cloying flow of the first stanza is followed by the fragmented clauses of the second, as the “ihr” of the first moves to the “ich” of the second. During the address to “ihr Schwäne” the diction flows; as the subjectivity draws into the “ich” the diction stutters in anxiety—the winter stanza is full of questions (lots of “weh und wo”). Or, perhaps better, we move into a kind of frozen, cracked expression in the second stanza, as the liquid, flowing profusion of the first stanza freezes into blocks of sound in the second (we hear this process in all those w clauses at outset of the second stanza). At the end we are left with empty weathervanes: creaky, clattery signs, confused by the wind—these are the least personal communicants. There is no puppy fat here. Instead we have “particulars charged with the most concentrated significance.”28

Schumann’s Late Styles John Daverio encourages us to take in Schumann’s late styles as a heterogeneous plurality, drawing our attention to all the compositional personae Schumann inhabited in his last years of productivity: lyric poet, music director, storyteller, ecclesiastic, collector, pedagogue, Davidsbündler.29 There’s no single defining trend or body of work to hang on to here, no “late quartets” to epitomize the period. This is part of our problem with late Schumann, our tendency not only to deny him the same late laurels we grant to others, but to sprinkle much of what we say about his later music with the confectioner’s sugar of condescension. I would like to begin to tug on a thread that cuts across some of Daverio’s categories, showing up in song (the lyric poet), sacred music (the ecclesiastic), and instrumental music for connoisseurs (the Davidsbündler). The general theme is—what else?—Death; the specific thread involves images of rest or renewal. The Latin word for “rest” is requies, known to us for centuries in the accusative form requiem because we are always making it the object of a plea: Grant us rest. A perhaps surprising number of requiems show up in the last few years of Schumann’s output: the end of the incidental music to Byron’s Manfred (1848–49); the Requiem for Mignon (1849); the last song in the Lenau cycle, Op. 90 (1850); and of course the Requiem itself, Op. 148, completed in 1852.30 Much of this music offers reassurance and serenity. The opening movement of the Requiem features simple harmonies and stepwise melody in the rich key of D-flat. In the very first bar we hear a dissonant smudge (the inner-voice B-flat between beats 3 and 4), an oddly consoling inward pang. This is not the stabbingly expressive dissonance of a chroma but something more gentle, whose edge has been worn away, an ancient pain perhaps, a now accepted condition of existence (Example 18.1).

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Example 18.1. Robert Schumann, Requiem, mm. 1–3. Langsam

= 82

pp

Soprano Re- qui- em ae- ter- nam pp

do- na e

-

is

Re- qui- em ae- ter - nam do- na e pp

-

is

Re- qui- em ae- ter - namdo- na e pp

-

is

Re- qui- em ae- ter- nam

-

is

Alto

Tenor

Bass

Langsam

Piano

do- na e

= 82

pp

The very last page of the Requiem features a return to the atmosphere of the first movement, with a special touch. Again the text implores “Grant them rest,” but with a new observation: “quia pius es”—“because you are compassionate.”31 The move to the subdominant at these words is almost unbelievably touching in its suggestion of unguarded human faith, the faith of a child in a loving parent. Like Brahms after him, Schumann ends his Requiem with the promise of blessedness after death. About a year after composing the Requiem Schumann completed the set of five short piano pieces known as Gesänge der Frühe (Songs of Dawn) in the fall of 1853. I will argue, as have others, that these pieces also treat the theme of death, but in a much less explicit or transparent fashion. A more complex experience is on offer here, one that beckons toward renewal. The autograph of the Gesänge der Frühe originally carried the inscription “An Diotima.” This is a reference to Hölderlin’s Diotima, a descendant of Socrates’ interlocutor in the Symposium and a figure of renewal. She appears in Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion and in several of his poems. Everyone has his or her own ideas about which of the Diotima poems these pieces draw on. I myself like to think of the end of the poem “Menons Klage um Diotima.” After a long and bitter lament about lost youth, the poem’s final stanzas tack into some warming breezes, working up to a gusty crowd of perhaps hallucinatory images that culminate in the wish to be “Where songs are true, where spring seasons remain beautiful for longer, and another year of our soul begins anew” (“Wo die Gesänge

Example 18.2a. Robert Schumann, Gesänge der Frühe, I, mm. 1–26. Im ruhigen Tempo

= 73

pp

Piano

6

11

16

cresc.

21

f

dim. ten.

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Example 18.2b. Robert Schumann, Gesänge der Frühe, I, mm. 27–39. 27

f

f

p

32

36

zurückhaltend

pp

wahr, und länger die Frühlinge schön sind, / Und von neuem ein Jahr unserer Seele beginnt”; see Examples 18.2a–b).32 The opening movement of the Gesänge der Frühe arguably stages the break of dawn—for some, the dawn of the hereafter.33 The first thing to notice is the risingfifth motive that punctuates the piece at different transpositions. Schumann composed a more explicit sunrise around 1850, in Scene 4 of his Scenes from Goethe’s Faust. There too rising fifths herald the dawn (and the sun appears via an astonishing harmonic trope of the fiat lux moment in Haydn’s Creation). In the Gesänge the rising-fifth motives initiate parallel phrases that form part of a large-scale harmonic motion down by thirds (D-b-G). The chord progressions within each phrase are not remarkable: they move largely by fifth. This sequence of parallel phrases is interrupted by an “arrival” six-four sonority in bar 27, marking a return to D and the initial motive (this is presumably the moment of sunrise); then the movement concludes with a contrapuntal peroration on the rising-fifth motive. Note the quality of the dissonances: there are many seconds sprinkled into the middle voices, and not always the expected ones, such as chord sevenths. And, like the dissonance at the outset of the Requiem, they are mostly diatonic, not chromatic.

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They create a sense of dissonance as a pervasive condition of the sound world of this piece, not reserved for cadences or for isolated expressive nuances. Daverio noticed the special dissonance here, observing that the inner voices are often out of phase with melody and bass, “like the overlapping and clashing of sonorities in a great, reverberant space.”34 The combination of conventional, even banal harmonic progression with this sense of untimely clashing creates an elegiac space that retrieves the past as a series of echoes, not always in phase with the present. And there’s more to the resigned, elegiac effect of this music: the parallel phrases (which can be read as paratactic, a not uncommon formal strategy in Schumann’s music of this period)35 enact a falling harmonic sequence that drifts down by thirds into the plagal subdominant, G. While this is happening the melodic patterns also drift down slowly, and they interlock between phrases to create a long linear descent. (To hear this, sing the melody of mm. 6–8, omitting the last beat of bar 8, and then skip to the melody of mm. 15–17.) What is the effect of all this? We can admire the melodic design as part of the complex, interlocked motivic world of late Schumann, a refinement of craft. Not a note is wasted. But why all the descending motion? We are supposed to be hearing a sunrise. The falling motion needs to be heard against the grain of the rising fifth and the rising sun. Consider again that rising-fifth motive. It’s not just a rising fifth, of course, but a rising fifth and then some—a fifth with a step above. Sing Schumann’s next pitch and you will discover that there is a conflation of rising and falling embedded in the very head of the theme: the rising fifth D-A is shadowed by a descending fifth B-E. Now in terms of the overall process of the movement, the slow falling I have been tracing is interrupted (as if short-circuited) with the “arrival” six-four, like an outbreak of light. But this outbreak is set within the overall conditions of a melancholy sunset— remember the gentle, out-of-phase dissonance within diatonic harmony suggesting the reverberation of time past; remember the parallel and descending phrases. All this creates a paradox: we are conjuring a sunrise from a sunset sensibility. “Wir alle fallen.” So wrote Rilke, in a poem called “Herbst” (Autumn). But Schumann takes things further. The sun seems to rise because we fall. There is a rising and a falling zugleich. Every sunset is also a sunrise, if viewed from a different perspective. The conflation of sunset and sunrise is powerful: our human thresholds are metaphorically defined by light. (We speak of coming to the light of this world, as a birth metaphor; a common near-death experience involves seeing light at the end of a tunnel.) This conflation arises at the transfiguring moment in Schumann’s late fairy-tale oratorio, Der Rose Pilgerfahrt (1851). As she dies into eternal life, the eponymous rose seeks to reassure her earthly family with the words “Das ist kein bleicher, schwarzer Tod, das ist ein Tod voll Morgenroth!” (This is no faded, black Death; this is a Death full of the light of dawn!) The climactic move of the final Gesang brings us once again into the special space of this paradoxical experience (see Example 18.3). The melodic wave crests on a high D in measure 34, resolving a six-bar dominant pedal point, but it is

Example 18.3. Robert Schumann, Gesänge der Frühe, V, mm. 26–40. 26

( ) f

f

( )

28

p

30

32

cresc.

34

f

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Twentieth-Century Interpretations

Example 18.3. Continued Verhallend

36

38

nach

und

nach

pp

harmonized locally with the subdominant, G.36 Thus we are again presented with the sunrise-sunset conflation: we hear climactic melodic resolution but with plagal harmony; we are arrested not by the sanguine six/four but by the poignant plagal. As the sound ebbs away from that high D we hear yet another plagal resolution, taken within the compass of a rising and falling arc of melodic half notes, ascending in slow thirds through subdominant to tonic, topping out on the A, and then receding though the triad to its final rest on the third of the key. The last thing we take in is the grace-note leading tone, haunting remnant of a would-be cadential dominant, dying into tonic oblivion. Its simultaneity with the tonic it will resolve into, or be absorbed by, is the sound of individual subjectivity quietly blazing away on the threshold of dissolution. Here we are in the untimeliest space of all, poised on the threshold between worlds. Schumann does not need to do anything exotic to achieve these effects. What could be more enchantingly simple than that final arc, like a child tracing a rainbow? There is an unassuming quality to the Gesänge der Frühe; as art, they do not seem directed toward posterity; they do not present sealed enigmas to be opened only by later generations. They do not presume to do such things. In fact I’m the one who has been doing all the presuming here, taking these disarming pieces and reading them as expressive of an achieved perspective on the end of things. My engagement with Gesänge der Frühe is an act of late styling.

Coda: Late Styling Why do we choose to construe late styles in the ways I have tried to illustrate here? Our constructions of late styles acknowledge our need to address mortality,

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our need to accept the unacceptable. They allow us to imagine untimely spaces, to find our place of exile, to stand apart, alone, aware (remember the solitary glory of that leading tone, suddenly caught by the light of the setting sun). They allow us to experience temporal plenitude, the fullness of time, fully conscious. Remember Hölderlin’s warning: “Nicht ist es gut, seellos von sterblichen Gedanken zu sein.” It’s not good to be left soulless from mortal thoughts. Our constructions of late styles style our later lives so that we will not be left soulless.

notes 1. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 459–81. 2. Cf. Michael Wood, “Lateness doesn’t name a single relation to time, but it always brings time in its wake,” and also Wood’s superb gloss on the word late in his introductory essay to Said, On Late Style, xi. 3. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, book 1, sonnet 8, p. 30. 4. Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, book 2, chapter 13, pp. 119–20. On Mignon as enigmatic child, see Roe-Min Kok’s essay in this volume. 5. Roth, Everyman, 91. 6. Gaddis, Agapé Agape, 1–2. 7. Santner, Friedrich Hölderlin, 264. 8. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, book 1, no. 9. English translation modified from “The Rilke Website,” www.picture-poems.com/rilke/poemindex.html. 9. Sullivan, Beethoven; Cooper, Beethoven, 420. 10. Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven, especially chapter 12, “Subthematicism”; Cooke, “The Unity of Beethoven’s Late Quartets.” 11. Theodor Adorno, “Spätstil Beethovens,” in Moments Musicaux, 13–17. 12. Chua, The “Galitzin” Quartets, 244. 13. Said, On Late Style, 148, 14, xi. 14. See Edward Rothstein, “Twilight of His Idols,” review of Said’s On Late Style, New York Times, July 16, 2006. 15. Said, On Late Style, xiii. 16. Ibid., 147. 17. Richard Wagner, monograph entitled Beethoven (1870), in Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, 9:61–126. On the pervasive influence of Wagner’s view, see Knittel, “Wagner, Deafness.” 18. Reported by Michael Wood in Said, On Late Style, xii. 19. From her 2003 book Touching Feeling, cited by John Updike in his essay “Late Works,” The New Yorker. August 7 and 14, 2006, 64. 20. Goehr, “The Ages of Man,” 28. 21. Bockemuhl, J. M. W. Turner, 92–93. 22. Goehr, “The Ages of Man,” 27. 23. R. Kramer, “Lisch aus, mein Licht,” 81. 24. Some of these ingredients are listed by Cook in Beethoven, 92. 25. The notion of parataxis is getting a lot of attention in music theoretical writings lately. On parataxis from a broadly philosophical viewpoint, see Spitzer, Music

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as Philosophy, 30. Su Yin Mak theorizes the lyrical in Schubert as (among other things) a paratactic phenomenon in “Schubert’s Sonata Forms.” Laura Tunbridge brings the concept to Schumann’s music in Schumann’s Late Style, 170–71. 26. As described in Tunbridge, Schumann’s Late Style, 170. 27. Santner, Friedrich Hölderlin, 189. 28. Michael Hamburger’s introduction to Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments (London: Anvil, 2004), 41, cited in Tunbridge, Schumann’s Late Style, 175. 29. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 459–481. 30. Other death-related texts set by Schumann in his later years include Nachtlied, Op. 96, no. 1 (1850), a song setting of Goethe’s Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’; Nachtlied for chorus and orchestra, Op. 108, on a text by Hebbel (1849); and “Wiegenlied am Lager meines kranken Kindes,” Op. 78, no. 4. On Schumann’s understanding of death in the last, see Kok, “Falling Asleep.” See Kok’s and Benjamin’s essays in this volume on Mignon’s funeral in Requiem für Mignon, Op. 98b. 31. The word pius tends to imply “dutiful” when applied to humans, “compassionate” when applied to gods. 32. Santner, Friedrich Hölderlin, 176. 33. See, for example, Heinz Holliger, in the CD liner notes to Robert Schumann: Kreisleriana, Nachtstücke, Gesänge der Frühe, Geister-Variationen, András Schiff, Teldec 0630–14566–2, 1998. 34. Daverio, Robert Schumann, 481. 35. Again, see Tunbridge, Schumann’s Late Style, 170–71. 36. This wonderful effect was emphasized by Michael Friedmann in “Schumann’s Late Vision: The Gesänge der Frühe, Op. 133,” a stimulating paper presented to the Princeton University Department of Music on October 19, 2001.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “f ” and “t” denote figures and tables, respectively. Abbate, Carolyn, 346 Abert, Hermann, 382 accents agogic, 207, 213 dynamic, 207 produced by harmonic change, 207 Adorno, Theodor, 415 Agawu, Kofi, 306 Albrecht, Gustav, 19t Alfieri, Vittorio, 72 alla breve, 221–22 alla zoppa, 270, 277 Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstgenossenschaft, 27 Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (ADMV), 27 Allgemeiner Tonkünstler-Verein, 26, 27 Andersen, Hans Christian Improviser, The, 150–51 Little Match Girl, The, 94, 94–95t Andrews, James P. History of Great Britain, 78 anti-Semitism, 53 Arensky, Anton, 350n6 arietta, 47, 417, 420 arioso, 82, 83 Aroldingen, Karin von, 348 Au, Susan, 341 authenticity, 9 Bach, J. S. Art of the Fugue, The, 411, 418, 419 Bakst, Léon, 335 Balanchine, George, 331 Agon, 340

as arch-objectivist, 341 Concerto Barocco, 340 Florestan and Eusebius, 340–45 Four Temperaments, The, 340 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 340 Nutcracker, The, 340 Robert Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze, 329–32, 340–45, 343f, 344t parsing of, 346–49, 348t romantic milieu in, 341, 342f Sleeping Beauty, 341 Stravinsky, 345 Swan Lake, 341 Vienna Waltzes, 340 Barker, George, 83 “Embarkation or Farewell Dear France!, The,” 75, 76f “I’ll Be Leaving Thee in Sorrow, Annie!,” 73 “Mary Blane,” 73 Songs of Mary Queen of Scots, 73, 74, 74f “White Squall, a Celebrated Sea Song, The,” 73 Barnum, P. T., 70 Barthes, Roland, 172, 332 Battle of the Nations (1813), 11 Becker, C. F., 19t, 21 Becker, Ernst, 370 Becker, Herr, 19t Beethoven, Ludwig van, 51, 333, 417 “Andenken,” 413–14 “An die ferne Geliebte,” 381–84 Egmont, 157 Fidelio, 157

459

460 Beethoven, Ludwig van (continued ) F-Major String Quartet, Op. 59, no. 1, 262n16 Große Fuge, 420 Hammerklavier Sonata, 384 Heiliger Dankgesang, 420 temporal juxtaposition in late-style music, 417 Bellman, Jonathan, 265, 266 Benda, Georg, 178n15 Bendemann, Eduard, 109, 110, 124 association with Schumann, 114 Bergas, Fanny, 19t Bergman, Ingmar Fanny and Alexander, 396 Berlioz, Hector, 70 Symphonie fantastique, 186, 203 Bettelheim, Bruno, 406–7 Uses of Enchantment, The, 395, 406 Beyer, Robert, 19t Beziehungszauber, 119 Bierwirth, C. F., 19t biography, narrative discourse of, 363 Bischoff, Ludwig F. C., 88, 103n7 review of Requiem für Mignon, Op. 98b, 89 characterization of personalities, 90–91 Schadow’s painting, 98–99 Bishop, Henry “Home! Sweet Home!,” 70 Blake, William, 124 Blessinger, Karl Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Mahler, 64n46 Blok, Alexander Puppet Theatre, The, 335, 336 Boelzner, Gordon, 330, 342 Boetticher, Wolfgang, 51, 53, 54 Böhm, Karl, 56 Böhme, Ferdinand, 19t Boieldieu, François-Adrien La Dame blanche, 70 Bosch, Hieronymus Garden of Earthly Delights, The, 37 Botstein, Leon, 109, 110 Bouhler, Philipp, 55 Boursault, Edme, 72 Brahms, Johannes, 51, 55, 260, 423

Index “Feldeinsamkeit,” 44, 45f “Mondenschein,” 44, 45f Vier ernste Gesänge, 44, 45–46f Brandt, Karl, 55 Brantôme, Pierre de, 75 Brendel, Elisabeth, 19t Brendel, Franz, 7, 22f, 25f, 58, 361 Allgemeiner Tonkünstler-Verein and, 26, 27 Neue Zeitschrift and, 11 Robert Schumann letter to, 17–18f Tonkünstlerversammlungen, 15–27 Brian, Friederike, 403 Britten, Benjamin “Red Cockatoo, The,” 50n27 Brockway, Merrill, 345–47 Brooks, Peter, 161, 168 Brown, Julie Hedges, 260–61 Bruckner, Anton, 51 Brusniak, Friedhelm, 15 Bruyck, Carl Debrois van, 176n1 Bücken, Ernst, 52–54 “Sick Genius, The” Burger-Güntert, Edda, 119 Burns, Robert, 70 Byron, Lord (George Gordon) Manfred, 423 Requiem for Mignon, 423 Campanella, Tommasso La tragedia della regina di Scozia, 72 Camphausen, Ludwig, 6 Caras, Steven, 343f Carr, Benjamin Six Ballads from the Poem of The Lady of the Lake, 70 Carter, Elliott Night Fantasies, 401 Carus, Agnes, 131 Carus, Carl Gustav association with Schumann, 114 Briefe über Goethe’s Faust, 114 on Faust II, 113–14 on “Sistine” Madonna, 112, 113, 117–18 Cavafy, Constantine P., 417 Cavanaugh, Colleen Schumann Songs, 330

Index censorship, 7 Chamisso, Adelbert, 364 Chartier, Roger, 362 Chua, Daniel, 415 Chwatal, F. X., 19t cinematic effects, in melodrama, 167–76 citizenship, 4–5 Cohn, Richard, 186 Coignet, Horace, 178n15 Cologne Concert Society, 89 community boundaries of, 4 cosmopolitan, 8 stable, 4 Cone, Edward T., 185 Cook, Nicholas, 420 Cooke, Deryck, 415 Cooper, Martin, 158, 415 Copeland, Roger, 340 Cornelius, Peter, 115 cosmopolitanism artificiality of, 8 distinguished from nationalism, 4 inauthenticity of, 8 Crawford, Mrs. “Embarkation or Farewell Dear France!, The,” 75, 76f Songs of Mary Queen of Scots, 73, 74, 74f cultural identity, 6 culture, of German nationhood, 3–13 ethnographic identity, 6 group identity, 6 nihilistic radicalism, 6 Czerny, Carl Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Klavier, 130 L’art de préluder mis in pratique pour le piano, Op. 300, 142, 142f Toccata, Op. 92, 139, 140f Dahlhaus, Carl, 415 Dante, Alighieri Divine Comedy, 406 d’Aranyi, Jelly, 56 Darwin, Charles On the Origin of Species, 58

461 Daverio, John, 26, 47, 56, 71, 117–19, 123, 133, 187, 260, 266, 278, 332, 379, 411, 426 on Schumann biography, 360–62 Decker, Constantin, 19t Delacroix, Eugène, 115 Derleth, August, 167 Deutsche Robert SchumannGesellschaft, 57–58 Deutsche Schillerstiftung, 27 Dhomont, Francis Forêt profonde, 395, 403, 409n33 Kinderszenen in, 406–7 Sous le regard d’un soleil noir, 409n33 Diaghilev, Sergei Ballets Russes, 333 Diamante, Juan Baptiste, 72 Dickens, Charles, 70, 94 Didion, Joan Year of Magical Thinking, The, 413 displacement dissonance, 208 in Dichterliebe, 183f in “Es leuchtet meine Liebe,” 184f in “Lied eines Schmiedes,” 187, 188f Donizetti, Gaetano, 73 Anna Bolena, 73 Elisabetta, o Il castello di Kenilworth, 73 Lucia di Lammermoor, 70 Maria Stuarda, 72, 73 Roberto Devereux, ossia Il conte di Essex, 73 Dörffel, August, 19t Duara, Prasenjit, 5 view of community, 4 Duncan, Isadora, 329 Düsseldorf Academy of Art, 88, 107n37, 398 Dylan, Bob “Not Dark Yet,” 412 Eberwein, M. C., 19t Eclecticism, 10 Egk, Werner, 61 Eichenauer, Richard, 51 Eliot, George, 111, 112 Enke, Heinrich, 19t Erler, Hermann, 381–82

462 Ernst, Max Angel of Hearth and Home, The, 409n20 Esterhammer, Angela, 150 Fachiri, Adila, 56 Fallersleben, Hoffmann von Unpolitische Lieder, 33 fatherless generation, 400 Fechner, Clementine, 357, 386 Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich, 158 Flotow, Friedrich von, 70 Flügel, Gustav, 19t Fokine, Michel, 329, 331, 333–37 Carnaval, 333–37, 334t Förster, Bernhard, 3 Franz, Robert, 19t Freiligrath, Ferdinand Glaubensbekenntnis, 33 Friedrich, Caspar David, 30, 112, 118, 335 Klosterfriedhof im Schnee, 341 Fries, Jakob, 8 Friese, Robert, 20t Fugue, 420 Fuller, Loie, 329 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 51 Gaddis, William Agapé Agape, 412–13 Gade, Niels W., 20t Gallegos, Manuel de, 72 Galloway, Janice Clara, 358–59, 364–74, 388, 390–91 Frauenliebe und -leben in, 364 Garafola, Lynn, 335 Gerhard, Wilhelm, 71 German musical life (at midcentury), organizing, 15–27 Gesangvereine, 15, 23 Geyer, Otto, 31 Gieseking, Walter, 342 Gilfert, Charles, 70 Glazunov, Alexander, 350n6 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 333 Goebbels, Joseph, 56 Goehr, Alexander, 418, 419 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von delicate science and, 3

Index Faust I, 420 Faust II, 58, 113f, 116, 116f, 420 Carus’s review of, 113–14 Mater Dolorosa, 117, 118 Mater Gloriosa, 115–17, 119, 123, 124 Mignon, 88–102 as angel, 92–94, 101 funeral, 100, 102 “Kinder! eilet in’s Leben hinan!,” 95–98, 96–97f otherworldiness, 91–92 painting of, 98–99, 99f physical attractiveness, 91 similarities between The Little Match Girl and, 94–95t yearning, 90 West-Östlicher Divan, 420 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), 89–90, 225, 388 Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 418, 420 Goethe, Walther von, 341 Göring, Hermann, 62 Gotter, Herr, 20t Gottschald, Ernst, 19, 20t Götze, Carl, 20t Goya, Francisco Can’t Anyone Untie Us?, 38, 38f Los Caprichos, 37, 38f Saturn Devouring His Son, 412 Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, The, 37 Graham, Martha, 329 Novelette, 329 Greenfeld, Liah, 33 Grewe, Cordula, 99 Griepenkerl, W. R., 20t grouping dissonance, 208 in “Es leuchtet meine Liebe,” 184f in “Meine Rose,” 187–89, 188–89f Gutzkow, Karl, 6 Gypsy music, 265 (see also style hongrois) defined, 266–67 Haase, Herr, 20t Habermas, Jürgen, 7

Index Hall, Donald Without, 413 Hanslick, Eduard, 158 Harington, Henry, 73 Härtel, Raimund, 20t Hasse, Karl, 52, 63n10 Hass-Heye, Otto, 339 Hasty, Christopher, 213 Haugk, Baron V., 20t Hauptmann, Moritz, 20t, 301 Die Natur der Harmonik und der Metrik, 302 Hebbel, Friedrich, 157, 161 “Auf die Sixtinische Madonna,” 111 “Ballade vom Haideknaben,” 163–65, 164–65f Heine, Heinrich, 6 “Die schlesischen Weber,” 32 role in Schumann’s oeuvre and biography, 58–59 Säkularausgabe, 49n23 “Wie es den Sorgen erging,” 32 Heinze, Ferdinand, 20t Henkel, Heinrich, 20t Hentschel, Ernst, 20t Hering, Carl Eduard, 110 Himmel, F. H. “An Alexis send’ ich dich,” 148, 148f Hindemith, Paul, 56 Hinkel, Hans, 59 Hirsch, Lily E., 400 Hirsch, Marianne, 400 Hitzig, Julius, 374 Hoeckner, Berthold, 382, 384 Hoffmann, E. T. A. as biographer, 374, 376 Lebensansichten des Katers Murr, 374, 375, 378, 388 Hofmeister, Friedrich, 20t Hölderlin, Friedrich, 64n50, 413, 415 “Hälfte des Lebens,” 421–22 “Menons Klage um Diotima,” 423 Holliger, Heinz Romancendres Aurora (Nachts), 407 “R(asche)S Flügelschlagen,” 407 Horn, August, 20t Horn, Moritz, 213

463 Hübner, Julius, 111 Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, 130, 134 Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, 136, 137f, 139, 140f hypermetric dissonance, 185–86, 206–33 in abstract, 207–8, 208f basic constraints, 209, 209f cumulative experience, 209f, 210 defined, 206 in Der Königssohn, 206, 206f, 213–17, 214–15f in “Der schwere Abend,” 197–202, 198–201f, 203 difficulties in interpretation, 208–9 four-bar, 185–86, 213–25, 214–15f, 219–20f, 222f, 223f at the dissonance of bar, 218, 218f fundamental requirement, 209f, 210–11 hypermeters at the same level, 209, 209f irregularity in, 186 in “Kommen und Scheiden,” 193–97, 194–95f, 197t after Krebs, 223–25, 223f in “Lied eines Schmiedes,” 187, 188f, 190–91, 202 in “Meine Rose,” 191–93, 191–92f modulation of, 209f, 210 in Requiem für Mignon, 225–32, 226–28f two-bar, 211–13, 211–12f in Verzweifle nicht im Schmerzensthal, 218–22, 219–20f metric and tempo relations in, 222–23, 222f improvisation-composition relationship, 130 Jalland, Pat, 101 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 345–46 Jaques-Dalcroze, Emile, 333 Jaspers, Karl, 64n32 Joachim, Joseph, 55, 56 Johst, Hans, 58 Jordan, Stephanie, 329, 341 Jowitt, Deborah, 341 Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League), 59, 61

464 Kagel, Mauricio Mitternachtsstük, 401, 402 Kalkbrenner, Fréderic Traité d’harmonie du pianiste, 142, 142f, 147, 147f Kant, Immanuel Perpetual Peace, 4 Kaper, Bronislau, 172 Kapp, Reinhard, 47, 331 Kayssler, Friedrich, 56 Kessler, Ludwig, 401 key, 300 identification of, 301, 302 indeterminacy of, in Schumann “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” 303–13, 304–5f, 307f, 310f Kreisleriana, Op. 16, no. 4, 315–22, 316–20f String Quartet, Op. 41, no. 1, Movement I, 313–15, 315f as perception, 301 Kiefer, Anselm Parsifal III, 402–3, 402f Killmayer, Wilhelm Schumann in Endenich, 401 Kindscher, Louis, 20t Kindscher, Louise, 20t Kinkel, Gottfried, 33 “Abendlied,” 33 “Ein geistlich Abendlied,” 33 Gedichte, 33 Kipnis, Alexander, 62 Kirchhoff, Theodor, 55 Kisselgoff, Anna, 340, 345 Kistner, Carl Friedrich, 381 Klenke, Dietmar, 15 Klitzsch, Emmanuel, 19, 20t, 102 Knorr, Julius, 20t Kohlhase, Hans, 269 Kolnik, Paul, 342f Komar, Arthur, 306, 308 Königswinter, Wolfgang Müller von, 33 Konstantinov, K. N., 350n6 Korte, Werner, 59, 60 Koßmaly, Carl, 151, 279, 297nn32, 33, 339 Kraepelin, Emil, 55 Krafft-Ebbing, Richard, 55 Kramer, Jonathan, 185

Index Kramer, Lawrence, 335 Kramer, Richard, 419 Krebs, hypermetric dissonance after, 223–25, 223f Kreisler, Johannes, 388 Kretschmar, Ernst Geniale Menschen (Highly gifted people), 57 Kris, Ernst, 375 Kröller, Heinrich Carnaval, 329–37, 334t Krummacher, Friedhelm, 119 Kulenkampff, Georg, 56 Kulmann, Elisabeth, 85 Kulturnation movement, 16, 26 Kunstmann, Herr, 20t Kurtág, György Homage à R. Sch, 401 Laing, R. D., 409n33 Lallemant, Louise, 20t Landau, Anneliese Lied: The Unfolding of Its Style, 59–60 Landis, J. D., 360, 388, 390–91 Longing, 357, 374–88 Lang, Josephine, 186 Langenschwarz, Maximilian, 150 Larsson, Carl, 397 late styles, 411–29 attitude toward death, 411–16 Beethoven’s, 415 coda, 428–29 Schumann’s, 422–28, 423–25f, 427–28f untimely late styles, aesthetic symptoms of, 416–22 Laube, Heinrich, 6 Lenau, Nikolaus, 187 Leonhard, Emil, 20t Lessing, Karl Friedrich, 110 Lester, Joel, 139, 236, 260 Ley, Robert, 56 Liadov, Anatol, 350n6 liberal nationalism, 5 liberals, 8 Lind, Jenny, 70, 85 Lindlar, Heinrich, 15 Liszt, Franz, 27, 157 Litzmann, Berthold, 357, 367

Index Lobe, J. C., 20t, 26 Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, 26 Vereinfachte Harmonielehre, 322–23n7 Lombroso, Cesare Anti-Semitism and the Jews in the Light of Modern Science, 55 Loya, Shay, 293f Lüders, Adam, 348 Mahler, Gustav, 30, 52, 85 Mahlert, Ulrich, 80, 85, 186 Mann, Thomas, 119 March, Alexander, 134 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia Memoria de mis Putas Tristes, 413 Marschner, Heinrich August Der Templer und die Jüdin, 70 Marston, Nicholas, 382, 384–85 on distinction between musical quotation and musical allusion, 384 Martins, Peter, 345 Marx, A. B., 9, 300 Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, 301 Massine, Léonide, 329 Mayer, David, 160 Mayes, Catherine, 265 Mazzini, Giuseppe Essay on the Duties of Man, 9–10 McCarthy, Cormac Blood Meridian, 412 McCormick, John, 70 Meeùs, Nicolas, 309 Melba, Nellie, 70 melodrama, 157–76 aesthetic priorities in, 158–59 confluence of the piano, 160–61 defined, 159–60 etymology of, 160 literary and cinematic effects in, 167–76 as technique and aesthetic, 159–67 Mendelssohn, Felix, 10, 51, 52, 58 A-Minor Symphony, Op. 56, 267 Lobgesang, 110 Midsummer Night’s Dream, 157 Schumann’s critique on, 53 Mendelssohn Society, 60

465 Menuhin, Yehudi, 56 metrical dissonance. See displacement dissonance; grouping dissonance; hypermetric dissonance Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 7–8, 52, 53 Le Prophète and, 11 Les Huguenots and, 8, 10 Robert le Diable and, 10 Schumann’s critique on, 10 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 336 Mintz, Donald, 119 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 400 Monnet, Jean Anthologie Françoise, 76 Montchrestien, Antoine de La Reine d’Ecosse, 72 Moore, Thomas Irish Melodies, 70 “Tis the Last Rose of Summer,” 70 Moscheles, Ignaz, 20t, 134 50 Préludes ou introductions dans tous les tons majeurs et mineurs, Op. 73, 138 Moser, Hans Joachim, 59 Moßburger, Hubert, 274 motivic parallelism, 256, 257–58, 258f Mozart, Wolfgang Amadé, 417 “Ave verum corpus,” 416 Requiem, 19 Mühling, Julius, 20t Müller, Max, 379–80 Müller, Peter Wilhelm. See von Königswinter, Wolfgang Müller musical quotation and musical allusion, distinction between, 384 national consciousness, 8–9 national identity, 5 nationalism and cosmopolitanism, distinction between, 4 nationalists, 8 nation-building, 6, 7 nationhood, 3–13 Natur-Eingang, 35 Nauenburg, Gustav, 20t Nazi euthanasia Schumann’s mental illness and, 55–58 NBC Symphony, 70

466 Negenberg, Konrad von Das Buch der Natur (The book of nature), 37 Neue Freie Presse, 340 Neumeyer, David, 306, 307–9 Newcomb, Anthony, 269, 273, 382 Nicolson, Harold, 363 Niederrheinisches Musikfest, 15, 26 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3–4 Beyond Good and Evil, 3 Nijinska, Bronislava, 338 Schumann Concerto, 329 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 329 Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg] Hymns to the Night, 89, 102 Oberlin, Johann Friedrich, 403 Öffentlichkeit, 7–8 Orff, Carl, 61 Osterwald, Georg, 32f Otten, D. G., 12 Otto, Louise, 20t overpainting. See Übermalung Ozawa, Kazuko, 25, 71 parataxis, 421, 429n25 pastiche, 420 Paul, Jean, 378–79 as biographer, 374, 375–76 death of, 379 Die Flegeljahre, 379 Die unsichtbare Loge—Mumien, 376, 401 Siebenkäs, 401 Paulson, Michael, 72 Pederson, Sanna, 15, 26 Perrey, Beate, 308, 389 Peukert, Detlev, 61 Pfarrius, Gustav, 48n2 “Der Bräutigam und die Birke,” 31 “Die Hütte,” 31 Die Waldlieder: Dritte, stark vermehrte Auflage anthology, revolution and, 31–35 “Daheim,” 32–33 Georg Osterwald’s title page illustration for, 32f “Komm mit,” 31–32

Index “Schlummer im Walde,” 35 “Wie es den Sorgen erging,” 32 “Winter und Frühling,” 34 “Warnung,” 30, 31, 35–40 “Warte Eulenpack!,” 39 Pfitzner, Hans, 54, 56, 58, 61 Plaidy, Louis, 20t Plantinga, Leon, 6 political identity, 6 Potter, Pamela M., 52 Pousseur, Henri Dichterliebesreigentraum, 407 Propp, Vladimir, 47 public sphere. See Öffentlichkeit Quartettkränzchen, 40 Querlon, Anne-Gabriel Meusnier de, 76 Rainer, Arnulf, 401–2 Raphael’s “Sistine” Madonna, 110–13, 111f, 116, 123 Carus’s review of, 112, 113, 117–18 Rauch, Neo, 396 Vater, 399–400, 400f reality and vision, distinction between, 112–13 Rebling, Gustav, 20t recitative, 82, 123, 158, 162, 166, 420 Reed, Myrtle “Träumerei,” 168–70, 169f White Shield, The, 169f Regnault, Charles, 72 Reich, Nancy, 368 Reich Chamber of Music, 52 Reichskulturkammer (RKK), 56, 57f Reimann, Aribert, 407 Residenzstädte, 11 Rethel, Alfred, 110 Retzsch, Moritz, 115 Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust: Erster und zweiter Theil, 115 Reuter, Moritz, 365 Riccius, A. F., 20t Richarz, Franz, 378, 386 Richter, E. F., 20t Riemann, Hugo, 233n3, 324n26 Riese, Clara, 20t

Index Rihm, Wolfgang Fremde Szenen I–III, 401–2 Jakob Lenz, 395, 403–6, 404–5f Rilke, Rainer Maria, 414–15 “Herbst,” 426 Sonnets to Orpheus, 414, 418 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nicolai, 350n6 Ritter, A. G., 20t Rizzio, David, 71, 75 Robinson, Albert, 20t Rochlitz, Johann Friedrich, 112 Roesner, Linda Correll, 274, 278, 382 on tonal ambiguity in Kreisleriana, Op. 16, no. 4, 315–22, 316–20f on tonal duality in String Quartet, Op. 41, no. 1, Movement I, 313–15, 315f Roitzsch, F. A., 20t Rosen, Charles, 51, 236, 258, 259–60, 382 Romantic Generation, The, 300, 303 Rosenberg, Alfred, 51, 63n10 Rosenthal, Moriz, 382 Rossini, Gioachino Donna del Lago, 70 Roth, Philip Everyman, 412 Rothstein, William, 185, 186 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Pygmalion, 178n15 Ruge, Arnold, 16 Russell, Henry, 70, 79 “Life on the Ocean Wave, A,” 71 “Woodman! Spare That Tree!,” 70 Said, Edward On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, 415–16 St. Denis, Ruth, 329 Samarotto, Frank, 186 Sams, Eric, 71–72 Sanderson, James, 70 “Boat Song,” 70 Sattler, Heinrich, 20t Schachter, Carl, 185, 186, 256 Schadow, Wilhelm von, 88–89, 98, 99f Schafer, R. Murray Adieu Robert Schumann, 395, 396–98f Schanze, Helmut, 75

467 Schellenberg, Heinrich, 20t Schiller, Friedrich Maria Stuart, 72 Schneider, Friedrich, 20t Schnitzler, Arthur Fräulein Else, 170–71, 171f Scholz, Uwe Schumann’s 2nd Symphony, 330 Schramowski, Herbert, 153n4 Schubert, Franz “Abschied von der Erde,” 176n4 Die schöne Müllerin, 379 Die Winterreise, 379 “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” 357 Sehnsuchtswalzer, 148 temporal juxtaposition in late-style music, 417 Schulte, Krischan, 75 Schumann, August, 71 Schumann, Clara, 55, 158, 278, 335, 360, 390. See also Galloway, Janice; Landis, J. D. Copies of Poems for Setting, 72 Schumann, Robert Abegg, Op. 1, 135f, 145, 145–46f, 335 “Abendlied,” 33 “Abschied von der Erde,” 176n4 affective immediacy of, 130 agencies of improvisation, 129–52 Album für die Jugend, 84 Allegro, Op. 8, 136, 137, 138f anti-Semitism, 53 “Arabeske,” Op. 18, 174–75, 175f as Aryan, 53–54 association with Mendelssohn, 60–61 autobiography of, 5–6 “Ballade vom Haideknaben,” Op. 122, no. 1, 157, 163–65, 164–65f on Chopin, 9, 381 Ball-Szenen, Op. 109 “Ungarisch,” 266 Carnaval, 334t “Arlequin,” 334t, 336 “A.S.C.H.–S.C.H.A. (Lettres Dansantes),” 334t, 338 “Aveu,” 334t, 339 Cello Romances, 407 “Chiarina,” 334t, 335–38, 371

468 Schumann, Robert (continued ) “Chopin,” 9, 130, 133, 134, 139, 144, 147, 329, 334t, 335, 338, 339, 380–82 “Coquette,” 334t, 337, 338 “Estrella,” 334t, 336, 338 “Marche des ‘Davidsbündler’ contre les Philistins,” 331, 334t, 335, 339 “Paganini,” 132–34, 144, 151, 331, 334t, 335, 336, 339 “Pantalon et Colombine,” 334t, 338 “Papillons,” 334t, 338 “Pause,” 334t, 339 “Pierrot,” 334t, 336–40 “Préambule,” 331, 334, 334t “Promenade,” 334t, 339 “Reconnaissance,” 170, 171, 334t, 338 “Réplique,” 334t, 337–38 “Sphinxes,” 334t, 338 “Valse allemande,” 331, 334t, 336, 339 “Valse noble,” 334t, 336, 353n38 choreographing, 329–50 in Clara (novel), 358–59, 364–74 Clavier-Sonaten für die Jugend, Op. 118, 84, 266 correspondence with Clara, 360, 382–84 critique on Mendelssohn, 53 critique on Meyerbeer, 10 Davidsbund and, 332, 339 Davidsbündler, 54 Davidsbündlertänze, 332 death of, 114, 389 Der Königssohn, 206, 206f, 213–17, 214–15f Der Rose Pilgerfahrt, 426 Des Sängers Fluch, 48 Dichterliebe, 183f, 235 “Ich hab’ im Traum,” 80, 81f “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” 235, 303–13, 304–5f, 307f, 310f; Komar, 306, 307f; Meeùs, 309; Mehrdeutigkeit (multiple keys), 312–13; Neumeyer, 307–9, 307f; Schenker, 306, 307f “Die Flüchtlinge,” Op. 122, no. 2, 157, 162–63, 163f Divertissement à l’Hongroise, Op. 54, 267–68, 286

Index documentary evidence for quotation, 381–82 Entstehungsgeschichte, 133–34 “Es leuchtet meine Liebe,” Op. 127, 184f Études after Caprices of Paganini, Op. 3, 139, 141 Études after Caprices of Paganini, Op. 8, 141 exaltation, 131 in Fanny and Alexander, 398 Faustszenen, 114, 117–19, 119–22f fictional lives of, 357–91 Florestan and Eusebius, 9, 54, 332, 337–40 Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, Op. 135, 71–72, 77t, 80, 83 “Nach der Geburt ihres Sohnes,” 76 Genoveva, 111 German national movement and, 3–13 Gesammelte Schriften, 293n12, 294n16 Gesänge der Frühe (Songs of Dawn), 423–28, 424f, 425f, 427–28f as Gypsy wanderer, 290–91 “Haideknaben,” 165–66 Hausmusik, 265 identity as a European, 4 illness, 372, 389 image of Beethoven in performance, 134–36 industriousness, 367–68, 369 integrity of improvisation, 133 Intermezzi, Op. 4, 335 Kinderszenen, 84, 401 in Forêt profonde, 406–7 in Jakob Lenz, 403–6, 404–5f “Träumerei,” 168–70, 169f Kölnische Zeitung, 72, 75, 79, 98 Kreisleriana, Op. 16, no. 4, tonal ambiguity in, 166, 167f, 315–22, 316–20f Kulmann Lieder, Op. 104, 73 late styles, 422–28 letter to Brahms, 387 letter to Emanuel Klitzsch, 102 letter to Franz Brendel, 17–18f letter to Kistner, 381 Lieder, Op. 107 “Der schwere Abend,” 197–203, 198–201f

Index “Herzeleid,” 30, 40, 41f “Kommen und Scheiden,” 193–97, 194–95f, 197t “Lied eines Schmiedes,” 187, 188f, 190–91, 202 “Meine Rose,” 187–93, 188–92f Lieder für die Jugend, Op. 79, 84, 266 Liederreihe, Op. 35, 85 Lieder und Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Op. 98a, 89 Marriage Diaries, 53 Märchenbilder, Op. 113, 110 Märchenerzählungen, Op. 132, 109, 401 marriage diaries of, 365–68 melodrama, 157–76 mental illness, 55–58 meter and expression in Op. 90, 183–203 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 6–7, 11, 53, 151–52, 361 Öffentlichkeit and, 7 Papillons, Op. 2, 85, 335 participation in Tonkünstlerversammlungen (1848 and 1849), 24 Piano Quartet, Op. 47, 119–36, 238–40, 240f, 244–52, 246t, 247f, 248f, 250f, 251f Piano Quintet, Op. 44, 237–44 Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44, 280–89, 280–84f, 286f, 288–90f Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, 136, 137f, 143–45, 143–44f, 273–79, 274f, 275t, 276–77f Piano Trio No. 3, Op. 110, 211–13, 211–12f Poems of Queen Mary Stuart, 69, 71–85, 74f “Abschied von der Welt,” 80, 81f “Abschied von Frankreich,” 80, 81f “An die Königin Elizabeth,” 82–83, 83f “Gebet,” 82, 82f “Loreley,” 80, 81f popular and classical, interstice between, 83–85 postclassical pianism, 134 prowess, 132

469 relationship with contemporary societies, 25–26, 26t relationship with Jews, 58–62 relationship with Wagner, 53–54 Requiem für Mignon, Op. 98b, 88–102, 225–32, 226–28f, 230t, 231–32f, 422–23, 423f response to Clara’s performance, 370–72, 386 on reversal of aesthetic priorities, 158 “Schön Hedwig,” Op. 106, 157, 161–62, 162f, 166 Schubert, Franz, reviews of works by F-Minor Impromptu from Op. 142, 267 F-Minor Moment Musical from Op. 94, 267 Grand Duo in C-Major, Sonata, Op. 140, 267, 276f, 278, 279 Sonata in D-Major, Op. 53, 267 Symphony in C-Major, D. 944, 267 Sechs Gedichte von N. Lenau und Requiem, 187 Sechs Gesänge von Wilfried von der Neun, Op. 89, 70 self-consciousness, 132–33 self-expansion, 131 sensibility of Romanticism, 134 Sieben Lieder nach Elisabeth Kulmann, Op. 104, 84 “Sistine” Madonna and, 110–11 Sonata in D-Major, Op. 53, 267 Songs of Mary Queen of Scots, 73 String Quartet in A-Major, Op. 41, no. 3, 269–73, 269–70f, 271f, 276f String Quartet, Op. 41, no. 1, Movement I, tonal duality in, 313–15, 315f Spätstil setting, 40–48 style hongrois, use of, 265–91 Symphony no. 3 (“Rhenish”), Op. 97, 252–58 Szenen aus Goethe’s Faust and, 115, 361 Tagebücher, 293n13, 298n44 in Third Reich, 51–62 ties to Heinrich Heine, 58–59 Toccata, Op. 7, 139, 140–42f, 141–43 “Ungarisch,” 266

470 Schumann, Robert (continued ) Vereint vorwärts and, 12 Verzweifle nicht im Schmerzensthal, 218–23, 219–20f, 222f Waldszenen, Op. 82, no. 4, 172, 173f “Verrufene Stelle,” 172, 173f “Warnung” and, 30, 35–40, 41f, 43–44, 44f, 46–47, 47f “Zigeunerleben,” 266 “Zigeunertanz,” 266 “Zwielicht,” 30 Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth, 58 Scott, Alicia “Annie Laurie,” 70 Scott, Walter, 71 Abbot, The, 69 Bride of Lammermoor, The, 69 Guy Mannering, 69 “Hail to the Chief,” 70 Ivanhoe, 69 Lady of the Lake, The, 70 Rob Roy, 69, 70 Rokeby, 70 Waverley, 70, 71 Sechter, Simon, 301 Grundsätze der musikalischen Komposition, 302 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 418 Seebach, Marie, 158 Seibertz, Engelbert, 116 Semper, Gottfried, 111 Senff, Barthold, 88 Seward, William Anecdotes of Distinguished Persons, 78 Shakespeare, William Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 61 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 157 Siebeck, Gustav, 20t Sime, James, 88 Singekränzchen, 40 Singer, Otto, 330 Sipp, Xaver, 20t Solomon, Maynard, 112 Song of Love, 172–74 Soto, Jock, 343f Spencer, Diana, 70 Spindler, Fritz, 20t

Index Stein, Deborah Engaging Music, 303 Steiner, Max, 178n18 sterilization, 55 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 70 Strachey, Lytton, 363 Strauss, Richard, 61 Josephslegende, 333 Schlagobers, 333 Strecker, Wilhelm, 56 structural parallelism, 256 Stuart, Mary, 70–72 Abbot, The, 69 style hongrois, 265–91 in Mendelssohn’s works, 267 in Schumann’s works, 267–68 Sullivan, J. W. N., 415 Suurpää, Lauri, 253, 257 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius Germania, 31 Taubert, Wilhelm, 134 Tautmann, N., 20t Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Nutcracker, The, 340 Sleeping Beauty, 341 Swan Lake, 341 Tcherepnin, Nicholas, 350n6 Ter-Arutunian, Rouben, 341 Thomas, Ambroise Six Caprices, Op. 4, 110 tonal pairing, 235 Tonkünstler-Vereine, 15, 24 Tonkünstlerversammlungen (August 13, 1847), 15, 16 concert program, 23t participants, 19–20t participants’ occupations, 21t Tonkünstlerversammlungen (July 26, 1848), 23–24 Tonkünstlerversammlungen (1849), 24 Töpken, Anton, 132, 133 Toscanini, Arturo, 70 Trollope, Anthony Last Chronicle of Barset, The, 109 Tschirch, F. W., 20t Tunbridge, Laura, 26, 349, 360, 390

Index Turner, J. M. W. Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—the Morning after the Deluge—Moses writing the Book of Genesis, 418–19 Norham Castle, Sunrise, 418, 419f Twain, Mark, 70 Übermalung (overpainting), 402 Uhlig, Theodor, 11–12, 88 Ulrich, Titus “Herzeleid,” 30, 40, 41f Valentin, Erich, 54 van Manen, Hans Four Schumann Pieces, 329, 330 Vega, Lope de, 72 Verbunkos, 270 Vick, Brian, 8 Vienna Ballet, 333 Vincke, Gisbert Freiherr von Rose und Distel: Poesien aus England und Schottland, 72, 75, 77t, 78 Vogel, Elise, 20t Völkerschlacht. See Battle of the Nations (1813) Völkischer Beobachter, 51 Wagner, Richard, 51, 119 “Das Judentum in der Music,” 4, 55 Lohengrin, 56 Opera and Drama, 158–59 relationship with Schumann, 53–54 Tannhäuser, 53–54 view of Beethoven’s deafness, 417 Wald, Teutoburger, 31 Walpole, Horace Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors, A, 78 Wasielewski, Wilhelm Joseph von Robert Schumann, 298n43

471 Watts, Heather, 343f Watts, Jonathan Evening Dialogues, 329, 330 Weber, Carl Maria von, 347 Der Freischütz, 157, 265–66 Invitation to the Dance, 148, 149 Weber, Gottfried, 300 Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst, 301 Weitzmann, Karl Friedrich, 323n21 Welcker, Carl, 6 Welter, Friedrich, 53 Wenzel, Ernst, 20t While, G., 426 Whistling, A., 20t White, Hayden, 362–63, 389 Wieck, Clara. See Schumann, Clara Wieck, Friedrich, 131, 357, 358, 370 Wiener, Karl, 61 Wilhelm IV, Friedrich, 12 Williams, Alastair, 403 Williams, Linda, 161 Wolff, Christoph, 419 Wolff, O. L. B., 150 Wood, Michael, 416 Woolf, Virginia, 363 Worthen, John, 134 on Schumann, 360, 361–62 Young Germany, 6 nihilistic radicalism, 6 Zender, Hans, 407 Zimmermann, Hans-Joachim, 79 Zöllner, C. F., 20t Zsolnay, Paul, 180n39 Zweigvereine, 26, 27