Hoeckner, Paths Through Dichterliebe (19th-Century Music 2006)

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Paths through DichterliebeReview by: Berthold Hoeckner19th-Century Music, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Summer 2006), pp. 065-080Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2006.30.1.065 .

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19th-Century Music, XXX/1, pp. 6580. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. 2006 by the Regents of the Univer-sity of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article contentthrough the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

My thoughts about the relationship between the narrativeand tonal structure of Dichterliebe were first inspired bythe unpublished paper The Dominant Relation as Meta-phor in Schumanns Dichterliebe, which Jeff Nichols gaveat the 1993 annual meeting of the American Musicologi-cal Society in Montreal, and whose basic idea has beenpercolating for almost a decade of my teaching the cyclein the classroom. Special thanks to Jeff Nichols, Richard

Cohn, Rufus Hallmark, Richard Kurth, and audiences atthe University of Notre Dame, the University of Oslo, andthe University of British Columbia for comments on ear-lier versions of this article.

1Translation adapted from Beate Julia Perrey, Schumanns

Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics: Fragmentationof Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),p. 88; and Heines Book of Songs, trans. Charles GodfreyLeland (Philadelphia: F. Leypoldt, 1864), pp. 10405.

Paths throughDichterliebe

BERTHOLD HOECKNER

ARMESNDERBLUM

Contemplate poem no. 62 from HeinesLyrisches Intermezzo, the collection fromwhich Schumann selected the poems ofDichterliebe:

Am Kreuzweg wird begrabenWer selber brachte sich um;Dort wchst eine blaue Blume,

Die Armesnderblum.

Am Kreuzweg stand ich und seufzte;Die Nacht war kalt und stumm.Im Mondenschein bewegte sich langsamDie Armesnderblum.

(At the cross-road will be buriedHe who killed himself;There grows a blue flower,The Poor-Sinners Flower.

I stood at the cross-road and sighedThe night was cold and mute.By the light of the moon moved slowlyThe Poor-Sinners Flower.)1

Heine laments. Heine provokes. He associ-

ates theArmesnderblum with the Ur-symbolof early Romanticismthe blue flower. It wascustomary to bury those who took their ownlife at the crossroads on the outskirts of a vil-lage. Since the blue Wegwarte (chicory) com-monly grows at the roadside in the temperateEuropean climate, it became the flower of the

In memoriam John Daverio

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poor sinner.2 As a central symbol of Romanti-cism, the blue flower became the archetype ofRomantic longing. In Novaliss novel Heinrichvon Ofterdingen the protagonist sees the flowerin a dream and sets out to find it, and thissearch leads him onto the road of self-recogni-tion.3 Heines Armesnderblum adds a bittertaste to that quest. His second stanza casts amorbid chill on the Romantic love affair with

the time between dusk and dawn, about whichNovalis sings so wonderfully in his Hymns tothe Night. If Romantic wandering can also endbadly, as in Schuberts and Mllers Winterreise,Heine goes a step further, toward death andsuicide. Worse: his poor sinner is no less thanthe Romantic poet himself. Heine even takespleasure in digging poetrys grave with poetryshelp. He drops the e at the end of Armes-nderblum (instead of -blume) so that the wordnot only echoes the act of killing oneself(brachte sich um), but also mimics the gestureof falling silent (bewegte sich stumm).

Amid such a bleak outlook, there is a glim-mer of hope. Heines suicidal fantasy feeds uponwhat it seeks to destroy. The last line of thepoem may stand for the death of Romanticpoetry, but it also becomes living proof of howpoetry may still grow from its own grave. Thisparadox survives, as it were, within theArme-snderblum, as the most poetic word of thepoem. Its remaining five syllables still animate,beautifully, the closing line of the two stanzas.Its masculine rhyme is softened by the sound

that prolongs the vowel in the last syllable: nolonger stumm, but -blum (as in bloom). The

Armesnderblum may symbolize the death oRomantic poetry, but it is also a sign of its soustill stirring. As such it holds the promise opoetrys resurrection.

I will argue in this article that Schumannmust have been fascinated by this paradoxwhich crystallizes in the last songs of the HeineLiederkreis,

op. 24 andDichterliebe,

op. 48.Both cycles end with the wish to lay their Liedeto rest, either by sealing them in a book (in op24) or by sinking them into the depths of thesea (in op. 48). But both cycles also refuse toclose this way. The Lieder come alive again fothe reader who picks up the book; they reemerge from the coffin that cracks open. Theopen ending of Dichterliebe, especially, has become the opening of Pandoras box in the analytical reception of the cycle. At stake is noless than the issue of the musics organic unityas a premise for formal, or formalist, analysis

Since the notion of unity in Dichterliebe habeen laid to rest in two recent studies by DavidFerris and Beate Perrey, I feel compelled torevive it and advance a new case for a coherentonal structure of the cycle, through whichSchumann creates a meaningful narrative.5

I do not intend to vindicate the aesthetics oorganicism or reinstate the paradigm of formalism. Still, the very claim to have found a coher

2In German folklore, the Wegwarte (ward at the way) isa symbol of fidelity and trust. It refers to the story of abride who turned into a flower while waiting at the road-side for her bridegroom who has been killed on the battle-field. Another name is Verfluchte Jungfer (cursed virgin),which originates with the legend of a virgin who suffersthe same fate after having rudely rejected Jesus at herdoorstep. The two tales explain the contrary associationsof the Wegwarte: the rare white blossoms for good people,the more common blue blossoms for bad ones. See C.Rosenkranz, Die Pflanzen im Volksaberglauben (2nd edn.Leipzig: G. Lang, 1896), p. 385; and Jacob Grimm, AndreasHeusler, and Rudolf Hbner, Deutsche Rechtsaltertmer(4th edn. Leipzig: Dieterich, 1899), vol. 2, p. 327.3On the circuitous journey as a mode of thought and amode of narration, see sections 4 and 5 in M. H. Abrams,Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Ro-mantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 197324.

4For the Heine-Liederkreis, op. 24, see my Poets Lovand Composers Love, Music Theory Online 7.5 (2001).5David Ferris, Schumanns EichendorffLiederkreis and thGenre of the Romantic Cycle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Perrey, Schumanns DichterliebeMilestones in the practice of close integration of musicand poetry include: Edward T. Cone, The Composers Voic(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press1974); Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); Richard Kramer, DistanCycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (ChicagoUniversity of Chicago Press, 1994); Patrick McCrelessSong Order in the Song Cycle: Schumanns Liederkreisop. 39, Music Analysis 5 (1986), 540. Reinhold Brinkmann, Schumann und Eichendorff: Studien zum Liederkreis Opus 39 (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1997). Con

turned his attention to Dichterliebe in his Poets Love oComposers Love? in Music and Text: Critical Inquiriesed. Steven P. Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992), pp. 17792.



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ent musicopoetic structure in Dichterliebe as-sumes that there is a secret to be solved and apuzzle to be put together. This assumptionseems to ignore the premise of Romantic herme-neutics that the meaning of an artwork cannotbe exhausted by a single interpretation or re-duced to the authors intention. Worse, suchan assumption would retreat from a modernhermeneutics of suspicion that unmasks the

formation of meaning as driven by readers (orlisteners) agendas. In light of such caveats, Ifind it prudent to turn for advice and inspira-tion to Schumann himself, for he was a highlyself-conscious critic, whose writings reflect hisexperience as a composer and his knowledge ofperformance.

Since Schumann worried that the dissectionof musical compositions would turn them intodead bodies, he sought to reconcile his respectfor the living artwork with his keen interest incompositional structure.6 In his criticism, hecombined analytical and poetic modes in order

to remain close to the condition of makingmusic. As the first major modern writer aboutmusic, Schumann knew that both hermeneu-tic analysis and performance involve feelingand understanding; that both strive to be capti-vating as well as plausible; and that interpre-tive conviction is more likely to persuade anaudience than interpretive coercion. Hence Iacknowledge that demonstrations of structuralcoherence, invocations of authorial intentions,or connections to historical and social contextshave no greater (and also no lesser) claim oncommunicating some truth about a composi-

tion than music making itself. If the close par-allel between analysis andAuffhrunginformsmy interpretation of Dichterliebe, it is becausethe cycle is as much a story about love as it isabout telling that story through song.

Fragment and Whole

David Ferris and Beate Perrey construct theircase against unity in Dichterliebe on threecounts: (1) previous analyses of the cycle were

based on the ideology of organicism; (2) thepublishing history of the cycle suggests an openconcept of the work; and (3) the musical struc-ture embodies the Romantic aesthetics of thefragment. Ferris ties these three points togetherin passage from the introduction to his book:

[John] Daverios list of the three possible types ofcyclic coherencenarrative, tonal structure, andmotivic recurrenceencompasses the definitions of

virtually all the scholars who have written on thesong cycle in recent decades. In all three cases, co-herence is understood as something that Schumannhas consciously and deliberately created, which isimmanent to the cycle in a definite form. Accordingto this model, our role as analysts is to uncover therelationships that make the songs of the cycle co-here and explain how the cycle is a complete whole,and it is for this reason that studies that are based onthe premise of coherence are largely indistinguish-able from those based on organic unity. I believethat the notion of such definitive coherence in thesong cycle is chimerical and that any coherence thatwe do perceive is more the result of the inevitablerelationships and similarities that we would expectin a group of songs that set the same poets texts andwere composed at the same time.

There is evidence that as Schumann arrangedgroups of songs into cycles he carefully consideredhow to emphasize the relationships among them.Schumann sometimes spent more time deciding onthe order and even on the contents of a cycle than hespent composing the songs in the first place. But thefact that he typically began the process of arrangingthe songs into a cycle after he finished composingthem and, even more important, so often changedhis mind as he engaged in this process makes it clear

how mutable the order and contents of his songcycles are. The order of the songs in a publishedcycle reflects the aesthetic choices that Schumannmade as he considered how to convey the variouslevels of poetic and musical meaning most effec-tively, but this does not mean that he has created aunified tonal structure or a consistent narrative dis-course. On the contrary, the complete cycle is asfragmentary and open-ended as the individual songsof which it is comprised, and its ultimate coherenceand meaning are re-created anew by each individuallistener. Perhaps this is why the attempt to definethe genre of the song cycle has been so maddening.7

6On Schumanns struggle with an aesthetics of musicalcriticism and analysis, see Leon Plantinga, Schumann asCritic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 5978.

7Ferris, Schumanns EichendorffLiederkreis, pp. 2324; seealso pp. 16667. In his second chapter, Ferris deals withthe problems of an organicist reception of Dichterliebe,



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Suspicion about organic unity has beenaround in musicology for a while. JosephKerman argued this point a quarter of a centuryago precisely in regard to Schenkers analysisof the second song of Dichterliebe.8 There iscertainly nothing wrong with any ongoing vigi-lance against musical analysis that finds unitybecause it looks only for unity; and that looksfor unity because it assumes that unity is there.

To be sure: the perception of musical coher-ence is always already implicated in ones mu-sical training, which is itself already implicatedin ones musical aesthetics. We should recog-nize that there is no way out of this conun-drum. Yet Ferris feels the need to explain howwe can account for relationships that we dohear in Schumanns song cycles, not becausewe are looking for relationships, but becausethese are jumping out at us.

Ferris explains the inevitable relationshipsin these cycles as the result of the composersetting poems by a single poet often in a matter

of days. Moreover, Schumann continued tomake what Ferris calls aesthetic choices(what I take to be the composers intentions),and the most striking of these choices weremade as Dichterliebe made it into print.9 Be-tween 24 May and 1 June of the Liederjahr1840, Schumann selected and set twenty songsfrom Heines Lyrisches Intermezzo. The nextday he offered them to Bote & Bock as Gedichtevon Heinrich Heine: 20 Lieder und Gesngeaus dem lyrischen Intermezzo im Buche derLieder fr eine Singstimme und das Pianoforte

(henceforth 20 Lieder und Gesnge).10 After thepublisher turned him down, Schumann waiteduntil 1843 to make another effort with Breitkop& Hrtel, and then with Bhme & Peters, whoaccepted. At this point he took out four songsand added the title Dichterliebe, which appearedin 1844 as op. 48. If Schumann, by eliminatingfour songs, made an aesthetic choice to convey the various levels of poetic and musica

meaning most effectively, why does Ferrideny that the composer created a unified tonastructure or a consistent narrative discourse?

Before addressing this question, let me summarize a similar argument by Perrey, who relies on two hitherto unknown letters from thepublication history of op. 48. In the letter toBote & Bock from 2 June 1840, Schumann wrotethat he wanted to see the collection, whichforms a whole, appear unseparated.11 And in aletter to Breitkopf from 6 August 1843, he offered a cycle of 20 songs, which form a wholebut each of which is also self-contained.12 In

light of Schumanns insistence on publishingall twenty songs, Perrey maintains that therelation of a presumably authoritative scoreand its substantially divergent sketches mayrather, be thought of as indicative of a compositional procedure that opposes, rather thanaims to achieve, systematic unity. The learnedurge to systematize, which seems so prevalenin most enquiries into Dichterliebe, exhibits ageneral and possibly excessive solicitude foharmoniousness and, above all, coherence.1

As Perrey puts it succinctly, Dichterliebe canbe viewed, I believe, as demonstrating the op

posite of wholeness and still be aestheticallyentirely convincing.14 Moreover, for Perreythe fact that Schumann cut four songs showsthat the original version was already a constellation of fragments.

I find this assertion problematic. Schumann

responding in particular to Arthur Komars Schenker-in-spired analysis in The Music of Dichterliebe: The Wholeand Its Parts, in Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score;Historical Background; Essays in Analysis; Views andComments, ed. Arthur Komar (New York: W. W. Norton,1971), pp. 6394; and David Neumeyer, Organic Struc-ture and the Song Cycle: Another Look at SchumannsDichterliebe, Music Theory Spectrum 4 (1982), 92105.8Joseph Kerman, How We Got into Analysis, and How toGet Out, Critical Inquiry7 (1980), 31131, see pp. 32331. Recently the debate has flared up again, stirred byRobert Morgans article The Concept of Unity and Musi-cal Analysis, Music Analysis 22 (2003), 750, which wasmet with a host of responses in the second and third(double) issue of vol. 23 of Music Analysis.9Rufus Hallmark, The Genesis of Schumanns Dichterliebe:A Source Study (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979),pp. 12327; and Perrey, Schumanns Dichterliebe, pp. 11621.

10For a facsimile of the autograph of the twenty-song version with title page, see Robert Schumann, DichterliebOpus 48: Liederkreis aus Heinrich Heines Buch Der LiederFaksimile nach dem Autograph in der Staatsbibliothekzu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz, ed. Elisabeth Schmiere(Laaber: Laaber, 2006).11Perrey, Schumanns Dichterliebe, p. 117.12Ibid., p. 119.13Ibid., p. 121.14Ibid.



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letters certainly confirm that the 20 Lieder undGesnge are a viable version. Yet it does notfollow that the edition letzter Hand consti-tutes a compromise of his artistic vision, evenif the cuts might have been prompted by exter-nal constraints.15 Although we should regardeach version of the cycle on its own terms, thecomparison between the two offers some ex-planations for Schumanns choices during the

publication process. I will discuss these choicesin greater detail later on, since Perreys argu-ment against unity in Dichterliebe is less tex-tual than aesthetic. Like Ferris, she holds thatthe work exemplifies the idea of disunity, itselfbased on the Romantic aesthetics of the frag-ment. Both authors find disunity because theylook for disunity, and they look for disunitybecause they assume that disunity is there.

Most compelling in this respect is Perreysreading of Heines Lyrisches Intermezzo as asignature of modernity.16 Heine debunked theromanticizing view of Romanticism in favor of

its modernist traits. His critique reached backto the roots of Romanticism, turning such linesfrom Goethes Sesenheimer Lieder as In deinenKssen welche Wonne! into In den Kssenwelche Lge!17 Such ironic twists questionedthe aesthetic premise of Erlebnislyrik as anauthentic expression of human experience.Heine distrusted any claims on poetic truth asa way of life and as a way of apprehending theworld. His parodies were not only an indict-ment of Romantic poetry but also aimed at itsvery corethe Volkston. While Achim vonArnim and Clemens Brentano had collected

the folk songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn(1805) [to] heal the great rupture of the world,Heines monumental Buch der Lieder (1827)sought to reopen this very rupture.18 He mas-

tered the form of the folk songits four-versestanzas with three-feet linesin order to un-mask how urban literati had fancied this Ur-melody as an authentic expression of the Ger-man language and soul. Heine had to embracethe tone and the lore of the folk in order toshun its romanticizing appropriation.

According to Perrey, Heines Die Roman-tische Schule (1833) not only contains a mor-

dant pronouncement against Romanticisms in-tegrity, but also discloses at the same timean affinity, and even an identification, with amovement that he polemically rejects.19 Thepoet did this most effectively through his de-vice of the Stimmungsbruch (the breaking ofmood), which Adorno described famously asHeines wound.20 And this wound was self-inflicted. The blows Heine thrust at poetry hithome, heavily. As a result of this division, thepoets mtier became a melancholic pastime.In Freuds sense, Heines self-hatred and self-destruction are symptoms of the poets ongo-

ing struggle to overcome his inability to mournthe death of poetry at the crossroads of Roman-ticism and modernism. The fruit of this struggleis theArmesnderblum.

Such emphasis on Heines modernism is ul-timately a critical intervention into the pre-vailing musicology of the Lied. It inflicts, as itwere, a wound upon the traditional receptionof Dichterliebe as a paradigm of Romantic song,in which music shapes the meaning of the po-etry. Instead of reading Heine in terms ofSchumann, we are asked to listen to Schumannin terms of Heine. This inversion precipitates

the shift from a Romantic hermeneutics to amodern one. Perrey is no longer interested inthe hermeneutics of congeniality, identifica-tion and intentionality, which deals with a cen-tral subject and a single meaning. Instead, shepromotes a hermeneutics of alienation, con-flict and difference, which deals in decenteredsubjects and multiple meanings. Hence her fo-cus on the modernist seeds in those categoriesof Romantic aesthetics that speak of disunity:fragmentation, irony, and reflection. And hence

15For a recent assessment of the different versions, seeGerd Nauhaus, DichterliebeUnd Kein Ende, in Dasletzte Wort der Kunst: Heinrich Heine und Robert Schu-mann: zum 150. Todesjahr, ed. Joseph A. Kruse (Stuttgartand Kassel: Metzler and Brenreiter, 2006), pp. 193206.16Part II of Perrey, Schumanns Dichterliebe, pp. 69107, isentitled Heines Signature of Modernity: The LyrischesIntermezzo.17Ibid., p. 85.18Ibid., p. 81, citing Achim von Arnim and ClemensBrentano, Von Volksliedern, in Des Knaben Wunderhorn:Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Heinz Rlleke (Stuttgart: Reclam,1987), p. 403.

19Perrey, Schumanns Dichterliebe, p. 87.20Theodor W. Adorno, Die Wunde Heine, in Noten ZurLiteratur: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, ed. RolfTiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 95100.



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her musicopoetic analyses seek to demonstratethat the songs of Dichterliebe are the very ex-emplars of this fragmentation, irony, and re-flection.

Symptomatic of this approach is Perreystake on the first song of Dichterliebe (Imwunderschnen Monat Mai), which begins andends on the unresolved seventh of the domi-nant seventh of F minor, but cadences twice to

A major in the middle. Charles Rosen takesthis as a perfect example of Friedrich Schlegelsfamous definition of the fragment as a littlework of art, complete in itself and separatedfrom the rest of the universe like a hedgehog.21

Although Rosen suggests that the fragmentpoints beyond itself and projects into the uni-verse precisely by the way it cuts itself off,Perrey faults him for holding on to the Roman-tic ideal of aphoristic completeness and organiccoherence. Instead she champions MauriceBlanchots idea that fragments are destinedpartly to the blank that separates them, thus

causing them to persist on account of theirincompletion.22 This insistence on incom-pletion inspires Perrey to argue that Imwunderschnen Monat Mai does not have atonal center and that this lack is symptomaticfor the lack of tonal coherence in Dichterliebeas a whole:

Sehnen und Verlangen as a sentiment paramountto Romanticism has been seized structurally in itspurest manifestationthrough lack itselfin thefirst song of Dichterliebe. Without a tonal centreand by forgoing formal closure, it widens thewounded agony sensed in Heines Sehnen byvirtue of its fragmentary form. . . . Song 1 does not,as has been assumed in previous studies, provide astable basis on which all other songs can rely, nor isit forcibly connected to Song 2. Instead, it opens upthe structure of Dichterliebe into a constellation ofphantasmal dialogues.23

But the rejection of organicist approachesneed not lead to throwing out the baby (some

form of tonal coherence in Dichterliebe) withthe bathwater (the prevailing paradigm of musical analysis). In a response to Perreys analysis of Im wunderschnen Monat Mai,Yonatan Malin has suggested that the repeatedA-major cadences present at least an illusion ostability. For Malin, this illusion is in fact awonderful example of what Perrey herself callsthe fragmentation of desire. The poet subli

mates his desire in images of springtime, inwhat seems to be a stable A major. Desire thendestabilizes the key and creates fragmentationin the song and in the poetic self, as it reemerges at the end of each stanza.24 The songin other words, fluctuates between the illusionof fulfillment and actual fragmentation. I wilnow try to show how this pertains to the entirecycle.

Tonal and Narrative Paths

My point of departure is Fred Lerdahls analy

sis of Dichterliebe in his book Tonal PitchSpace. Lerdahl offers a graph of a regionajourney through the song cycle (see fig. 1)which he describes as follows:

The unit of analysis is the tonic of each song, andthere is no attempt to organize the sequence into prolongational hierarchy. Beginning in f (the firssong, Im wunderschnen Monat Mai, is ambiguous between prolonging V/f and I/A), the circlmoves back and forth within one fold of the spaceThe sequence gradually descends down the fifth axiuntil, at Ich hab im Traum geweinet, it crossethe seam to the adjacent fold [see shaded arrow infig. 1] and then continues to descend until c ireached [see arrow in fig. 1]. The cycle has come fulcircle and in a sense could begin again, with the I othe D coda, pivoting as V/f [see the shaded boxearound A and f ]. It is tempting to ascribe narrativesignificance to this pattern, but Heines elusive poetry does not offer an easy interpretation. At thleast, the stark Ich hab im Traum geweinet signals a change in mood that conforms to the crossingfrom one fold to the next.25

21See Perrey, Schumanns Dichterliebe, p. 174, citingCharles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 48, citingSchlegels fragment no. 206 from the journalAthenaeum.22As cited in Perrey, Schumanns Dichterliebe, p. 177; cf.Rosen, The Romantic Generation, pp. 5157.23Perrey, Schumanns Dichterliebe, p. 224; see also p. 177.

24Yonatan Malin, Review of Beate Julia PerreySchumanns Dichterliebe and Early Romantic PoeticsFragmentation of Desire, Music Theory Spectrum 28.(2006), 302.25Fred Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 138.



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F

F c

g A

A f

A f

D b

G e

C a

d

B g

e E

B

E c D

26For further evidence of Schumanns engagement withWeber, see Bodo Bischoff, Monument fr Beethoven: Die

Entwicklung der Beethoven-Rezeption Robert Schumanns(Kln-Rheinkassel: C. Dohr, 1994), pp. 36993; see alsoHubert Moburger, Poetische Harmonik in der Musik Rob-ert Schumanns (Sinzig: Studio, 2005), pp. 13940.

Lerdahls hermeneutic restraintor reluc-tance to respond to Heines elusive poetryleaves ample room for further exploration.Lerdahl derives his regional journey ofDichterliebe from the conception of key rela-tionships in Gottfried Webers Versuch einer

geordneten Theorie der Tonkunst from 1817/21 (see fig. 2). Schumann notes in his diariesthat he studied the Versuch, so he was cer-tainly familiar with Webers diagram.26 Webercombines the vertical orientation of fifth rela-tions in major and minor keys with the hori-zontal orientation of minor third relations, as-signing a node to each major and minor key.The most prominent feature in the tonal struc-ture of Dichterliebe is a double trajectory offalling fifths through major keys and their rela-tive minor keys, starting with A major and F

minor in the first song. This double trajectoryappears as a shaded box in the second column

27Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space, chap. 3 and p. 140. About

the relationship between tonal and event space, see alsoPatrick McCreless, Syntagmatics and Paradigmatics: SomeImplications for the Analysis of Chromaticism in TonalMusic,Music Theory Spectrum 13 (1991), 14778.

Figure 1: Regional journey in SchumannsDichterliebe from Fred Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch

Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),p. 139, shadings added.

C a A f F d D b B g

F d D b B g G e E c

B g G e E c C a A f

E c C a A f F d D b

A f F d D b B g G e

D b B g G e E c C a

G e E c C a A f F d

C a A f F d D b B g

F d D b B g G e E c

B g G e E c C a A f

E c C a A f F d D b

A f F d D b B g G e

D b B g G e E c C a

Figure 2: Table of key relationshipsreproduced from Gottfried Weber,

Theory of Musical Composition, trans. JamesF. Warner (Boston: Wilkins, Carter, and

Company, 1846), p. 320, shaded box added.

of my reproduction of Webers chart.Lerdahls graph deviates from Webers re-

gional map in a number of ways that I will

address in due course. The most fundamentaland important aspect of Lerdahls appropria-tion of Weber is that the key sequence ofDichterliebe isnot governed by a prolongationalhierarchy determined by a single tonic (whichwas the main premise of Komars Schenkeriananalysis). As a result, Schumann transformstonal space into event space, where discreteevents are connected in real and directed time,as in performance.27 This actual sequence of



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events transforms the abstract relations of thetonal space into the palpable progression of ajourney, whose processes, patterns, and rela-

tionships create the tonal and narrative pathsthrough Dichterliebe. These paths share twoessential properties: (1) the wavering betweentwo emotional states; and (2) the experience ofa growing spatial and temporal distance thatmust be overcome. Of course, taking the tonicof a song as a primary unit of analysis results ina relatively global perspective on the cycle, butthe larger structure does relate to details withinthe songs, some of which I will include in myanalysis.

Lerdahl follows the top-down orientation inWebers grid, which suggests a spatial sense offalling or descending through successive fifths.While the image of falling comes with a host ofpowerful associations, I have changed this ori-entation from left to right and put the relativeminor keys below the major keys (see fig. 3).This change of orientation offers additionalmetaphorical possibilities, or in cognitive terms,a different source for cross-domain mapping.28

The most important gain is the intuitive linkbetween the horizontal orientation and the pass-ing of time. This sense of temporal unfoldinghelps to explore how the tonal progression of

the songs along the double trajectory mighthave narrative significance.

One of the questions often raised aboutDichterliebe is whether the cycle constitutes alinear story or a nonlinear constellation ofchanging emotional states, that is, whether theorder of songs follows the logic of the timelineor the impulses of free association. What speaksfor a nonlinear constellation is the fortuitousway in which memory can take recourse topast events, often confusing them with the

Figure 3: Horizontal orientation of the double trajectory.

present. This confusion is symptomatic of themental condition of the speaker, who is distraught with the loss of his beloved. But since a

performance of the cycle places the songs themselves in an unchanging temporal order, it wilbe useful to distinguish between the story andthe telling of the story, or the narrative.29 Whilethe events of the failed love affair belong to thepast that may be accessed at random, the telling of the story takes place in the presenthrough the performance of each song, one byone. This timeline of storytelling is essentiafor my analysis and will serve as its main guiding principle. Such a guideline will be usefuprecisely because the poet telling the story andits protagonist are the same person, and it often appears as if the narrator is reliving andreenacting the events of the past in the presentIn fact, this slippage between story andstorytelling in performance is a salient featureof Dichterliebes alluring complexity.

Let us begin, then, with the group of the firsfour songs, starting with Im wunderschnenMonat Mai, whose oft-noted tonal ambiguityreflects how the poets feelings for his belovedfluctuate between his hope for acceptance andhis fear of rejection. The cycle thus opens simultaneously on both strands of the major and

minor trajectory (as shown by the double-headedarrow in fig. 4). The fear voiced in the first songresolves in the second song, which ends on ahopeful note in A major. Indeed, in the exuberant third song, Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taubedie Sonne, everything seems well as the poeexults in the carefree confession that he nolonger loves the rose, lily, dove, and sun, but

28For an exemplary analysis of conceptual blending in asingle Lied, see Lawrence Zbikowski, The Blossoms ofTrockne Blumen: Music and Text in the Early NineteenthCentury,Music Analysis 18 (1999), 30745.

29Ferris, Schumanns EichendorffLiederkreis, pp. 20408reviews this narratological distinction and takes issue withanalyses along those lines by Christopher Lewis, TextTime, and Tonic: Aspects of Patterning in the RomantiCycle,Intgral: The Journal of Applied Musical Though2 (1988), 3773 (at 4750); and Barbara Turchin, RoberSchumanns Song Cycles: The Cycle within the Song,this journal 8 (1985), 23144.

A D

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rage.31 This inner struggle is indicative of agrowing emotional crisis, which is reflected inmultiple crossings between the major and mi-nor strands of the double trajectory, startingafter no. 4 and ending with the drop down tono. 8 (see fig. 5).32 The poet is now consumedby his angry and sad feelings, which push himdeeper into despair along the line of minor keys:in A minor, D minor, and G minor. The eighthsong, Und wsstens die Blumen, bemoansthe beloveds ignorance about her heartbreak-ing behavior and illustrates the actual breakingof the heart in the last stanza. Here the nervous

fluttering of thirty-second notes in the pianoruptures, leading to an outburst in the postlude,whose wildly angular sixteenth-note tripletsare reminiscent of the frantic opening ofKreisleriana. The ninth song, Das ist ein Fltenund Geigen, picks up on the maddening driveof these triplets as they turn into the poetsrecall of the distorted dance music from thebeloveds wedding to another man. The per-petual circling torments the poet, but the move-ment eventually runs its course and leads tothe remembrance of the beloveds song, whosememory triggers great grief in the tenth song,Hr ich das Liedchen klingen. Thus, afterthe three crossings during the moment of cri-sis, the sequence of three songs in minor (adg) appears as the negative correlate of the ini-tial series of songs in major (ADG), both withrespect to the mode change and to the narra-

30These tears are qualitatively different than those in thesecond song, which I read as the tears of potentialnot

actualdisappointment. For an analysis of the waySchumann deals with the Stimmungsbruch, see V. KofiAgawu, Structural Highpoints in SchumannsDichterliebe,Music Analysis 3 (1984), 15980.

A D G

fFigure 4: The first four songs.

only the little, dainty, and pure onehis love.And yet, the happiest moment in Dichterliebeis also the shortest.

The fourth song, Wenn ich in deine Augenseh, ends with a paradigmatic case of HeinesStimmungsbruch: when the beloved tells thepoet that she loves him, he must weep bit-terly because he realizes that she is not tellingthe truth.30 Despite the break, the initial posi-tive feeling is reason enough to place the songwithin the opening progression through majorkeys: ADG. The first change to a song with aminor tonic comes in the fifth song, Ich willmeine Seele tauchen, in which the poet re-members kissing his beloved in the past(einst). This indicates that the relationship isover and the memory of the kiss is tinged witha lament for her loss. While no. 5 invokes tem-poral distance, the sixth song (in E minor) dwellson the experience of spatial distance. The poetdescribes how the image of Cologne Cathedralis reflected in the waters of the Rhine, fromwhich his imagination moves inside the cathe-dral to a painting of the Virgin Mary, whosefeatures remind him of his beloved. Because ofthis sorrowful sense of temporal and spatialdistance, these two songs pick up the strand ofminor keys on the double trajectory implied in

the opening song of Dichterliebe.The return to the trajectory of major keystakes place with the seventh song, Ich grollenicht, in C major. This is an attempt by thepoet to convince himself that he does not holda grudge. But Edward Cone pointed out longago that Schumann amplifies the two state-ments of Ich grolle nicht in Heines poem byrepeating them six times in his songa suresign that the poet can barely control his out-

D G C

b e a

Figure 5: Multiple crossings between majorand minor trajectories as symptom of an

emotional crisis.

31Edward T. Cone, Words into Music: The ComposersApproach to the Text, in Music, a View from Delft: Se-lected Essays, ed. Robert P. Morgan (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 12122. The essay appearedfirst as chap. 1 of Sound and Poetry, ed. Northrup Frye(New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), pp. 315.

The passage pertaining to Schumann is reprinted in Komar,Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score, pp. 11718.32Turchin sees the onset of a crisis only with no. 7. See n.29 above.



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Figure 6: Three songs in minor counteractthree songs in major.

D G C

b e a

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d

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Tritone

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Figure 7: Tritone distancebetween no. 1 and no. 11.

beloved saying ich liebe dich also touches onB on the first syllable of lie-be.

The flowers allusion has a bittersweet tasteFor the G major is soon inflected toward Gminor, and then, via the German sixth, to thedominant that sustains the drawn-out postludebefore it reaches the tonic B major. Hence thesense of closure in the postlude has an air ofambivalence. On the one hand, it is a peacefuresponse to the agonizing postlude of no. 10 inG minor (its immediate neighbor on the strand

of minor keys). On the other hand, its way oweaving a melody into soft arpeggios harps backto the first song of the cycle. Indeed, the moment of reprieve proposed by the flowers andthe lingering sense of return and reconciliationin the postlude turn out to be an illusion, foDichterliebe does not end here. There is something unreal about the way the song approacheB from without (the reversal on the major trackand from within (through the German sixth)As a song, no. 12 is like the flower song embedded in it: a fantasy. Its sense of an ending merelysprings from the poets imagination. Closure is

wishful thinking, a daydream.I will digress here in order to consider the

original 20 Lieder und Gesnge and speculatewhy Schumann may have taken out four songsTo be sure, invoking conscious choices by anauthorial subject has routinely raised red flagin poststructural theories of interpretation, fearful of reducing an artworks meaning to thedeliberate portion of its design. And of courseone does not have to appeal to the composerintentions to validate the analysis, or use theanalysis to prove some pre-compositional planning that will once and for all settle the meaning of a work. Nevertheless, evidence oSchumanns compositional choices in creatinga sensible succession of songs can enrich, rathe

tive position on the double trajectory (see fig.6). What seemed well in the beginning has nowbeen effectively undone.

As the poet relates his story, he descendsfurther into depression, prompting a new at-tempt to pull himself out. In the eleventh song,Ein Jngling liebt ein Mdchen, he changesfor the first time to the third person to tell thestory of unrequited love as an old story thathappens all the timeeven though it is clearfrom the last stanza that it has just happenedto him. The jaunty rhythm appears to put agood face on the tale, and the boisterous ca-dence in the postlude strains to leave the whole

affair behind. The poets second attempt to dis-tance himself from his own experience occursin the trajectory of major keys exactly a tritoneaway from the opening A major (see fig. 7).What is more, this tonal distance appears tofacilitate a change in direction, leading in thetwelfth song to the first ending of the cycle.

Against the downward thrust of deepeningdespair, the twelfth song, Am leuchtendenSommermorgen, marks a decisive turn by tak-ing one step up the circle of fifths, from E

major to B major (see fig. 8). This reversalmarks a qualitative change in the poets strat-

egy for coping with the situation: not throughangry accusation (as in no. 7) or sarcastic bit-terness (as in no. 11), but through forgiveness.Details from the interior of the song supportthis qualitative change, notably the magic mo-ment where the flowers speak to the poet andadmonish him not to be angry with their sis-terthat is, with his beloved. The hauntingshift to G major for this song within thesong (mm. 1718) refers back to no. 4, not justin key but also in gesture. Fittingly, the flowersask for forgiveness by invoking the very songwhere trust was broken for the first time. Theirrecitation on B (with a characteristic leap up toD) cites the opening of no. 4 (see fig. 9). Strik-ingly, the very line in that song that cites the



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Figure 8: Reversal on the tonal path.

wenn ich in dei ne Au - gen seh

sei uns - rer Schwes - ter nicht b - se

Figure 9: Song no. 4 and the flowerssong in no. 12.

Figure 10: The place of no. 4a Dein Angesicht(E) and 4b Lehn Deine Wang (gV/g) on the tonal path.

than delimit, the dramatic dimension of theperformance of both versions. This is becausethese four songs stood originally at the twomain nodes of the narrative. Songs 4a and 4bcame after the song in which the poet recog-nizes that I love you is a lie. And songs 12a

and 12b had their place after the first ending ofthe cycle.

Tonally, the first pairDein Angesicht (no.4a in E major) and Lehn Deine Wang (no.4b in G minor)jumps ahead to the secondnode (see fig. 10). As a result, these two songsanticipate the keys of nos. 10 and 11 as theirpoems conjure up of a vision of the dead be-loved and anticipate the poets gushing tears.However, the ending of no. 4b on the dominant(the only such ending among the twenty songs),loops back to the end of no. 3. From here thetonal path would have continued by droppingdown to the relative minor of Ich will meineSeele tauchen.

The second pairEs leuchtet meine Liebe

(no. 12a in G minor) and Mein Wagen rolletlangsam (no. 12b in B major)also creates aloop. But this time the two keys hover aroundthe same node (see fig. 11). Both songs rein-force the sense of finality and the desire toreach closure expressed in Am leuchtenden

Sommermorgen. The first song, Es leuchtetmeine Liebe, looks at the unhappy affairthrough the lens of allegory and fairy tale, andits ending in the tonic major (with the third, B,in the top register) clearly points back to theflower song in no. 12. The second song, MeinWagen rollet langsam, picks up on the fallingarpeggios of no. 12, but the mood is more sub-dued. The staccato chords that rip through thearpeggios sharpen the contrast between illu-sion and reality, while the long postlude ech-oes the drawn-out ending of no. 12.

Thus the four omitted songs were unques-tionably part of an intricate overall tonal de-sign and narrative plan. By taking them out,Schumann may have wanted to avoid the du-



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Figure 11: The place of no. 12a Es leuchet meine Liebe (g/G)and 12b Mein Wagen rollet langsam (B) on the tonal path.

33Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space, p. 138.

plication of keys and poetic motifs. He alsobypassed the early appearance of stronger moodsand eliminated the drastic specter of the deadbeloved. During the process of revision,Schumann may have been concerned that thegreater complexity of the 20 Lieder und Gesngewas more confusing. His changes streamlinedthe tonal path and tightened the narrative pro-gression.

The tonal and narrative function of the extrasongs in the original conception of the cyclecontributes to our understanding of what fol-lows in both the 20 Lieder und Gesnge and

Dichterliebe. Since daydreams tend to dissi-pate in the face of reality, the poets desire toreach closure at the end of no. 12 turns out tobe delusive. There is no way he can climb upthe circle of fifths beyond B. The fact thatthere is no song in F major suggests a gap thatcannot be crossed, like an abyss without abridge. Hovering around B with songs 12a and12b after the first ending conveys very wellhow the poet gets stuck after hitting a wall.This realization has a disastrous effect on hisnarrative, turning daydreams into nightmares.Indeed, no. 13, Ich hab im Traum geweinet,in the starkly somber E minor, is the mostdevastating song of Dichterliebe and perhapsall of Schumann. At this point in Lerdahls

regional journey, the progression of keycrosses the seam to the adjacent fold and thencontinues to descent until c is reached.33

Here I part ways with Lerdahl. True, E minor expresses a qualitative change, but we donot have to conceptualize this change as a moveacross the seam. Assuming that the poet cannot get past the gap of the missing F-majorsong and is thrown back in the opposite direction, he appears to land on E minor by fallingback on the minor trajectory and skipping ovethree steps as shown in fig. 12. The failed firsending only precipitates the descent into de

pression and results in a tumble down the circleof fifths. This fall is a collapse in the truessense. It constitutes the first move, in successive songs, of more than one position. As suchit is a cornerstone of my analysis, a centrapiece in the puzzle of the interlocking tonaand narrative paths. Take it away and the analysis itself will collapse.

As a consequence of the collapse, Ich habim Traum geweinet plunges to the lowespoint yet on the strand of minor keys. Sincethe tumble elides (literally: collapses) four stations on the minor trajectory into one, the third

Figure 12: Gap and collapse.



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effort of the poet to pull out of his depressionby getting away from the strand of minor keysis also the most spectacular. In utter contrastto the devastation in no. 13, the two songs thatfollow (Allnchtlich im Traume and Ausalten Mrchen winkt es) speak of dreams andfairy lands in a lighthearted, almost noncha-lant, manner. If Lerdahl had strictly adhered tothe spelling in Webers map, the keys of thesesongs would have been C and F , but he usestheir enharmonic equivalents instead (comparefigs. 1 and 2). However, if we accept Schumannsnotation of these songs in B major and E major

as enharmonic equivalents for C major and F major, and if we locate them on the main tra-jectory of major keys, then their relationship tono. 13 changes dramatically, opening up verydifferent hermeneutic prospects. In fig. 13, thesubstitution of C and F with B and E takes usto a place before the beginning.

Figure 14 suggests an explanation. It shows apattern whereby the poets ongoing efforts topull out of his deepening depression respond togrowing stretches on the strand of minor keys.Once we include the three keys elided by thecollapse to measure the depth of the fall, wecan see why the third effort to pull away fromthe strand of minor keys has to be qualitativelydifferent: the precipitous fall prompts the poets

most astonishing attempt to cope with his loss.No longer merely suppressing his anger or re-sorting to sarcastic mockery, as before, he nowlands himself deeply on the sharp side of thecircle of fifths. Now, ostensibly intending toassuage his sorrow by moving up a major thirdto the next major key in the cycle, C , the poetin fact leaps to the enharmonic equivalent ofthis key, B, to the place and time of dream andwonderland, at the utmost remove from theearlier (or, vis--vis the first song, later) troublesof his broken heart.

Other factors support this hearing. A small

but momentous detail is the change from B inno. 12 (mm. 1718) to C in no. 13 (m. 2), whichseems to foreshadow the enharmonic move.Recall that B is the recitation tone of the flowersong in the poets daydreams, and that C is theflat sixth that articulates the sighs over thepainful visitations of the beloved in no. 13. Inrelation to B, the former lifts up; the latterpulls down. A birds-eye view of the enharmonictransfer reveals a striking symmetry on thetrajectory of major keys around the missingsong in F major. When counting the keys elidedby the collapse on the major strand of the tra-jectory, C and B are exactly a tritone awayfrom F major. Since the F-major gap proved tobe an obstacle for a stepwise ascent through

Figure 13: Return to the time before the beginning.

Figure 14: Three efforts to deal with a deepening depression.

b e

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E

c f b e

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third effortsecond effortfirst effort

collapse



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tritone

EB

gap tritone

collapse

collapse

Figure 15: Jumping over the gap of the absent song in F major.

the circle of fifths, fig. 15 illustrates how itappears as if the distance of the tritone makesit possible for the poet to jump over the verygap that prevented his earlier return to the be-ginning.

The enharmonic transfer from C to B alsothrows into relief the two endings ofDichterliebe, the postlude that concludes no.12 and the recapitulation of that postlude atthe end of no. 16. Between these two endings,the last four songs emerge as a distinct group.The first song of this group, no. 13, exhibits astrong affinity with song no. 4, the last song in

the opening group of four. Most importantly,both songs share a similar poetic structure,which builds up toward a Stimmungsbruch:34

Ending of Song No. 4Doch wenn du sprichst: Ich liebe dichSo muss ich weinen bitterlich.

(but when you say: I love you!then I must weep bitterly.)

Ending of Song No. 13Ich hab im Traum geweinet,

Mir trumte, du wrst mir noch gut.Ich wachte auf und noch immerStrmt meine Thrnenfluth.

(I cried in my dream,I dreamed that you still loved me.I woke up, and stillthe flood of my tears is streaming.)

These two moments are pivotal in the poetstelling of his story. The former relates the on-

34In the three steps leading to the Stimmungsbruch in no.

4, Schumann intimates a sense of change in lines 5 and 6(the third step). In no. 13 there are only two preparatorystates, so that the devastating break comes with a bigunresolved climax in the third of the three stanzas.

set of his weeping; the latter speaks of his ongoing flood of tears. While his beloved is physically present in no. 4, she appears to him in adream in no. 13. Initially, she says I love youbut doesnt mean it; later she appears to meanwell, but it is not real. This uncanny similarityand dissimilarity between the two songs maywell be expressed through the relationship between their tonics, G major and E minor, whichform a hexatonic pole in neo-Riemannianterms.35 In both songs, the Stimmungsbruchexposes the fault line between appearance andreality, leading to a break in the poets narra

tive. Put differently, no. 4 is the end of thebeginning; no. 13 is the beginning of the end. Ifwe hear no. 13 as the point of departure for thereturn to a time before the beginning of thecycle, fig. 16 shows how the two songs flankthe ending and the beginning of the cycle fromboth sides. Seen this way, they are equidistanfrom the very seam through which one couldconnect the last song with the first through thedominant relation.

Here lies the crux of Dichterliebe. Is this Vrelation between the last and the first songreal or not? The last song begins in C minor to

summon with greatest resolve the most imposing forces and resourcesgiants and huge coffinsto bury the Lieder of the unhappy storyonce and for all. But the grandeur of the projecand grandiloquence of its announcement areeffectively undone in one of Schumanns mosingenious compositional moves: the recapitulation of the postlude from the twelfth song. Athe end of the last song, the poet harks back tothat first effort to climb up the circle of fifth

35For a suggestive association between hexatonic polarity

and Freuds concept of the uncanny, see Richard CohnUncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age,Journal of the American Musicological Society57 (2004), 285323.



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e B E c A/f A D G

BeginningofEnd

diatonic polarity

/D

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Endof

Beginning

E

c

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f

with the hope of forgiveness and consolation.But now this beautiful song without wordsseems to put the poet in the position to start allover again. The simple fact that the D5 thatends the last song can become the C5 thatbegins the first is the strongest argument forDichterliebe as a tonal unity, governed by atonal center. If the concluding D tonic turns

into the dominant of one of the two impliedtonics of the first song, F minor, fig. 17 goeseven further by suggesting that the E major ofsong 15 might also resolve to the other im-plied tonic of the first song, A major. Thistwofold link would reconnect both strands ofthe double trajectory, driven by both Bangenand Hoffen, fear and hope. Yet if the last dis-charge of tonal tension through falling fifthswould return us this way to the beginning,why did Schumann change the key of thepostlude from C major to D major?36

Schumanns preference may be just a nota-tional convenience, but the alteration does in-vite more hermeneutic speculation. Heard inD, the postlude (whose renotated meter of 64time suggests a more measured and reflectivetempo) takes the poet to a very different placeon the tonal path of Dichterliebe. In Lerdahlsgraph, this D major is located on the strand ofmajor keys, a location that results from thecrossing of the fold to E minor at no. 13 andcrossing back later (see fig. 1). A different sce-

Figure 16: Hexatonic and diatonic polaritiesaround the beginning and end.

36Already in the twenty-song autograph Schumann notedthat in a marginal note: ?NB: Hier ist besser Des Durvorzuzeichnen (?NB: D major is preferable here). See Hall-mark, The Genesis ofDichterliebe, p. 110.

nario emerges if we hear the change from C

minor to C major merely as a change of mode

and not as a change of key, and then hear theenharmonic move from C to D as a return tothe equivalent place at the other end of thedouble trajectory. In fact, Webers map sug-gests the closeness of parallel keys on a givendouble trajectory by lining them up across eachfold, without which they would merge into asingle tonic. Support for this view of the modalmixture in no. 16 comes through song no. 9,which starts out in D minor but ends in Dmajor. Hence the enharmonic change from C

to D in the final song moves us exactly to thepoint low in the double trajectory, from whence

the cycle could start over again in B major andG minor, the enharmonic equivalents of thefirst song (see fig. 18). This return suggests thatthe attempt to go back to a time before thecycle was illusory, like the dreams and fairytales conjured up in song nos. 14 and 15. As thelast line of no. 15 has it, the illusion evaporateslike empty foam. The return to D is a returnto reality, which only makes obvious that thepoet cannot turn the clock back.

To conclude, then, I submit that the endingof Dichterliebe is about dimming the differ-ence between dream and reality. This slippage

emerges from the way the poet continues withhis story after the first ending in no. 12. Afterthe collapse, his narrative takes place in bothreal and imaginary space. The poet stages areturn to the beginning and at the same timecontinues along a path that descends. Being intwo places at once reflects on the poets mentalcondition in the face of his loss. His daydreamsare an expression of his despair. After the firstending, his depression continues in the form ofa regression, yet the regression only leads deeperinto depression. As return and nonreturn, thetwo enharmonic moves pronounce the mean-ing of Dichterliebe (and the 20 Lieder undGesnge) as one that fluctuates between closedcircle and open cycle, between Classical and

Figure 17: Connecting the end and beginningof the double trajectory.



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Figure 18: Illusory return and return to reality.

Romantic form, and between whole and frag-ment. This meaning resonates with the waySlavoj Zizek imagines how absent melodies inSchumanns music exemplify modern subjec-tivity: The modern subject emerges when itsobjectal counterpart (in this case, a melody)disappears, but remains present (efficient) in itsvery absence: in short, the subject is correla-tive to an impossible object whose existenceis purely virtual.37 This paradox might ex-plain the impossible, but efficacious, simulta-neity of the enharmonic return and nonreturn.The question whether Dichterliebe reaches clo-sure remains impossible to answer. We dontknow whether the poet returns to A major andF minor, or goes on with B major and G

minor, because they sound the same.This position between closed circle and open

cycle resembles the disposition between whatFreud called compulsory repetition and the pos-

sibility of working through the trauma of loss,or between melancholia (whose fixation on thelost object hinders healing) and mourning(which leaves the lost object behind). Whilethe closed circle prevents healing, the open-ended cycle fosters forgetting and forgiveness.

As an expression of Heines wound, the tonadisposition of Dichterliebe puts the poet onthe fence between the two. When the conception of different keys on a tonal map clasheswith the perception of their sameness in soundthe composer can convey his poets paradoxical double experience of wholeness and fragmentation. This is how Schumann knew theirony of Heines poetic suicide at the crossroads of Romanticism and modernism. He knewthat there grows the

Armesnderblum.

Abstract.

The article advances a new case for a coherent tonaand narrative structure of Schumanns Dichterliebeop. 48. Based on a map of key relations by GottfriedWeber, the hermeneutic analysis follows Dichter

liebes tonal path along a double trajectory of majokeys and their relative minor keys, whose progression through tonal space is understood as occur

rences in event space. A comparison between Dichterliebe and its original version, 20 Lieder undGesnge, shows how the tonal and narrative pathpertain to both. The hermeneutic analysis demonstrates a slippage between story and narrative awell as reality and illusion, whereby Schumann responds to Heines irony, creating a tonal and narrative structure that is both circular and cyclical, bothwhole and fragment.Key words: Schumann, Dichterliebe, op. 48, Heinetonal structure, narrative, Gottfried Weber

37Slavoj Zizek, Robert Schumann: The Romantic Anti-Humanist? in The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso,1997), p. 204.

gd

A D

f b

G

e

C

a

F

d

B

g

E

c

A

f

D

b

G

e

C

a

F B

1/2 3

51 6

117

8 9 10

4

13

12E

c

B

g

15

16

14

DC16

return to reality

illusory return

16

l

Documents

Hoeckner, Paths Through Dichterliebe (19th-Century Music 2006)