Schumann and Romantic Distance Author(s): Berthold Hoeckner Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 55-132 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832063 Accessed: 01-10-2015 01:59 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832063?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of California Press and American Musicological Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Musicological Society. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann and Romantic Distance BERTHOLD HOECKNER In memoriamJ.B. and G.H. Philosophyis prose.Its consonants.Distantphilosophysoundslikepoetry-becauseeverycallinto the distancebecomesa vowel.On both of its sidesor, surroundingphilosophy,lies + [sic]andminuspoetry.Thus,in the distance everything becomespoetry--poem.Actio in distans.Distant mountains, distant people,distantevents,etc., everythingbecomesromantic,quod idem estfromthis resultsour essentiallypoeticnature.' WY Novalisgivesus in thesefewfragmentary phrasesamounts hat a "definition"of the where distance does not make to Romantic, all the difference, but the difference for all: "in the distance everything becomes ... romantic." This is a rather large claim. How could one possibly define the Romantic from a single perspective?As a pan-European phenomenon, Romanticism constitutes an unstable constellation of aesthetic categories (such as the arabesque and the fragment), poetic images and tropes (the blue flower, the wanderer, and the lost love), themes and genres (landscapepainting, the song cycle, and the gothic novel), figures of Some material for this article originated with my "Music as a Metaphor for Metaphysics: Tropes of Transcendence in Nineteenth-Century Music from Schumann to Mahler" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1994). An earlier version of section 5 was read at the Winter 1993 Meeting of the New York-St. Lawrence Chapter of the American Musicological Society. Having experienced scholarship as accumulativeand dialogic, I would like to express my gratitude to James Webster, Charles Rosen, Martha Feldman, Anne Robertson, Richard Cohn, John Daverio, and Philip Weller for their valuable comments on earlierversions of this study. Special thanks for superb assistancewith source materialsgo to Gerd Nauhaus (Robert Schumann Haus Zwickau), Matthias Wendt (Schumann Forschungstelle Diisseldorf), Linda Correll Roesner (New York), Leander Hotaki (Freiburg im Breisgau), Sarah Adams (Boston), the Handschriftenabteilung der Universititsbibliothek Bonn, the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library at Harvard University, and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Wien. 1. "Die Phil[osophie] ist die Prosa. Ihre Consonanten. Ferne Phil[osophie] klingt wie Poesie--weil jeder Ruf in die Ferne Vocal wird. Auf beyden Seiten oder um sie her liegt + und minus Poesie. So wird alles in der EntfernungPoesie-Poem. Actio in distans.Ferne Berge, ferne Menschen, ferne Begebenheiten etc. alles wird romantisch, quod idem est-daher ergiebt sich unsre Urpoetische Natur." Novalis, Das allgemeineBrouillon, in Schriften, ed. Richard Samuel and Paul Kluckhohn, 5 vols. (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960-88), 3:302. Translations are my own unless indicated otherwise. [Journalof theAmericanMusicological Society1997, vol. 50, no. 1] ? 1997 by the AmericanMusicologicalSociety. All rights reserved.0003-0139/97/5001-0002$2.00 This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 56 Journalof the American Musicological Society thought (irony and Witz), utopian ideologies (the united Christendom), nationalist fantasies (a unified Italy and Germany), and modes of social behavior (the autonomous artist, the salon, and the Davidsbund). In this larger context, any attempt to define the Romantic through distance would seem to dissipate. Romantic distance is primarily a poetic trope and an aesthetic category. No more. And no less. Novalis's use of distance captures the imagination of the musician: distant philosophy soundslike poetry. Dying away into the distance, prose turns into poetry, speech into vocalise, language into music. Distance, then, effects on a material level what has become a commonplace of romantic and romanticizing aesthetics: that "all art," as Walter Pater famously put it, "constantly aspires towards the condition of music."2That music reigned supreme in Romanticism hardly needs new confirmation, but it seems worthwhile to pursue how the new prestige of music grew in part out of the aesthetics of sound dying away in the distance. Therefore, the first section of this essay will demonstrate the deep affinity between Novalis's "definition" of the Romantic through distant sound and Jean Paul Richter'sAestheticsas well as his novel Flegeljahre,which, in turn, inspired Robert Schumann's own musical manifesto of Romanticism, Pa- pillons,Op. 2. "In the distance everything becomes ... romantic." Again, not everything. Yet with distant mountains, distant events, and distant people, Novalis chose to illustrate romantic distance with three archetypalexperiences: spatial distance in landscape, temporal distance in recollection of the past, and personal distance in separation from the distant beloved. While romantic distance has recently inspired musicological studies of what Richard Kramer has called "a poetics of the remote"-from Beethoven's An dieferne Geliebteto Franz Schreker'sDerferne Klang--the focus of this essay will remain on the music and aesthetics of Schumann as inspired by Jean Paul and, by extension, Novalis.3 Indeed, Novalis's three examples for romantic distance resonate with some of Schumann's most emphatically romantic piano compositions examined below in sections 3 to 5: "distant events" with the textuality of musical memory in the "Aria"from the Sonata in F Minor; "distantmountains" with the relation between music and 2. In Walter Pater, 'The School of Giorgione," in The Renaissance:Studies in Art and Poetry (The 1893 Text), ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 102-22, at 106. 3. See Richard Kramer,"A Poetics of the Remote: Goethe's Entfernte,"chap. 4 ofDistant Cycles:Schubertand the Conceivingof Song (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 85-101; Charles Rosen, "Mountains and Song Cycles," chap. 3 of The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995): 116-236; Peter Franklin,"Distant Sounds-Fallen Music: Derferne Klang as 'Woman'sOpera'?"CambridgeOperaJournal 3 (1991): 15972. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 57 landscape in "Wie aus der Ferne," the penultimate piece from Davidsbfndlertanze; and "distantpeople" with the attempt to overcome the separation from his beloved Clara in the Fantasie and the Novelletten. But how can we make the link between the Romantic defined through distance to romantic distance embodied in Schumann's music-in other words, from "philosophy" to "distant philosophy"? "Distant philosophy," or for that matter "distant prose," retains what the term they stand forpoetry--inevitably erases: namely, that poetry is a kind of prose, but transformed. Whereas the conjunction of "poetry"and "prose"appears to be a strict dichotomy, "prose" and "distant prose" seem closer: there remains a gap between the latter two, but the gap might be bridged. Such a bridge is of particularimportance when it comes to music, which Romantic aesthetics has tended to privilege as an untranslatable language: there is, as Carl Dahlhaus has shown, an inner kinship between the "music"of podsie absolueand the "language"of absolute music.4 Physically, distance makes music out of language, creating, metaphysically (not necessarily in a transcendental sense), the language of music. But a language it is, albeit a distant one. Distance may transform language into music, yet music remains under the spell of language, which must spell out its meaning when trying to bridge that distance. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, that task became more complicated, since it was on the level of language about music that the dichotomy between prose and poetry returned: in the opposition between "prosaic"analysis and "poetic" criticism. Because Schumann, as a very self-conscious music critic, struggled with this issue, section 2 will reexamine his strategies as a way of preparing our dealings with the distance between composition and commentary as well as analysis and criticism in his own works. Whether or not music is an untranslatablelanguage or a translatable"text,"however, this essay was written with the belief that the link between music and logos, either severed or sutured, continues to be the lifeline of musico-logy. 1. Defining the Romantic Through Distance: Novalis, Jean Paul, Schumann Novalis: actio in distans "Distant philosophy sounds like poetry." The quotation opening this essay derives from Novalis's Das allgemeineBrouillon (1798-99), a "poetic" encyclopedia that remained one of the great unfinished projects of early 4. Carl Dahlhaus, "Absolute Music and PoesieAbsolue,"in The Idea of AbsoluteMusic, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 141-55. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 58 Journalof the American Society Musicological German Romanticism. Practicallyconfined to the last decade of the eighteenth century, the so-called Frihromantik, or Jena Romanticism, emerged from the intense literary and critical activities of a close circle of young intellectuals and writers, including the brothers August Wilhelm Schlegel and FriedrichSchlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and Friedrichvon Hardenberg, alias Novalis. By the time the journal Athenaeum, the group's principal collective voice, ceased publication in 1800 after only three years, the Fraihromantik was effectively over, while Schiller and Goethe were still in the midst of their correspondence that would come to epitomize the Weimar Klassik. The life and work of Novalis reflect the rapid but radiant course of early German Romanticism. Das allgemeineBrouillon, a vast collection of more than a thousand entries of notes, responses to readings, and sketches testifies to Novalis's insatiable desire to transform knowledge into a unified system. Yet this grand project of poeticizing the world was thwarted not by his early death in 1801, but rather (like Friedrich Schlegel'sprogressiveUniversalpoesie) by its utopian universality.5Both Novalis and Schlegel sought to contain the unmanageable "universe"in the form of the literary fragment, a masterful miniature of pithy prose. Novalis's unedited notes of the Brouillon,while seemingly elliptical and cryptic by comparison, offer a rich mine of raw philosophical ideas and poetic visions. The opening quotation, one of many entries under the rubric Philosophie,juxtaposes two different ideas: the transformation of language into sound and the concept of actio in distans (action at a distance). In combining the two, Novalis arrived at a definition of the Romantic. The source for Novalis's idea of transforming language into sound was a 1791 treatise by Christian Gotthold Schocher, who proposed a new kind of declamation based on a "scale"of the vowels a, e, i, o, u, with the Umlaute i, 6, ti equivalent to half steps.6 Schocher's treatise resonates with early nineteenth-century manuals instructing mothers how to teach their children to read. The new pedagogy no longer treated language as a visual phenomenon but rather as an aural one--a tendency that coincided with efforts to eliminate dialects in favor of a universal German Hochsprache.7 Novalis appropriated Schocher's idea of a melody of vowels for his own notion of speech reasserting its original primacy over writing. The dichotomy between prose and poetry functioned within the context of a triadic 5. See Novalis, Werke,Tagebuicher undBriefeFriedrichvonHardenbergs,ed. Hans-Joachim Mihl and Richard Samuel, 3 vols. (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1978-87), 3:475. 6. Christian Gottlieb Schocher, Soil die Rede auf immer ein dunkler Gesang bleiben,und kiinnenihreArten, Gangeund Beugungen nichtanschaunlich gemacht, und nachArt der Tonkunst gezeichnet werden?(Leipzig: A. L. Reinicke, 1791), esp. p. 8; see Novalis, Schriften3:917. 7. See Friedrich A. Kittler, DiscourseNetworks1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens, foreword by David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 27-53. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 59 historical model in which prose represented a transitional stage from the "naive"and "natural"Golden Age to the poetic era of the future. Thus the music of pure vowels, which surrounds philosophical prose as "+ [sic] and minus poetry," not only is reminiscent of the childlike Ursprache,but also anticipates the universal language: "Our language--it was originally more musical and has only graduallybecome prosaic--so toneless. It has become now more a kind of Schall [mere reverberation]-Laut [noise], if one wants to debase this beautiful word. It needs to become song again. Consonants transform tone into Schall."8 Novalis may have encountered the concept of actio in distans, which sought to explain the attraction and repulsion of noncontiguous bodies, in Newton's theory of gravity. Kant later defined it in his treatise MetaphysischeAnfangsgrqnde der Naturwissenschaft(1786) as follows: "The action of one matter upon another outside of contact is action at a distance (actio in distans). This action at a distance, which is also possible without the mediation of matter lying in between, is called immediate action at a distance, or the action of matters on one another through emptyspace.'"9 Novalis's understanding of action at a distance was undoubtedly influenced by FriedrichWilhelm Schelling's 1797 Ideen zu einerPhilosophiederNatur, whose sequel Vonder Weltseelehe studied immediately upon its appearance in 1798. In the preface to Vonder Weltseele,Schelling gave an idealist reading of actioin distans:"Idealism,which philosophy is graduallyintroducing into all the sciences ... still seems intelligible to few. The concept, for example, of actionat a distance,which to many is still a stumbling-block, rests entirely on the idealist conception of space."'0 Inspired by this idealist fusion of natural science and philosophy, Novalis combined it with Schocher's system of articulation in order to create a "poetic" system of all sciences that would supersede a work of seminal importance to the Frfhromantik:Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Die Grundlagedergesammten Wissenschaftslehreof 1794-95. Thus Novalis noted, "Words are partly vowels-partly consonants--valid and invalid words. Application to scientific constructions. Substantial (vocalic) principles and sciences--accidental (consonantic) principles and sciences.""' 8. Novalis, Schriften3:283-84: "Unsre Sprache-sie war zu Anfang viel musicalischer und hat sich nur nach gerade so prosaisirt-so enttint. Es ist jezt mehr SchallengewordenLaut, wenn man dieses sch6ne Wort so erniedrigen will. Sie muf wieder Gesangwerden. Die Consonantenverwandeln den Ton in Schall."The distinction between "Ton" and "Schall"relates to the one by Schocher between "Lauten"and 'T6nen"; see ibid., 3:917. 9. Immanuel Kant, "MetaphysicalFoundations of Natural Science,"PhilosophyofMaterial Nature, trans. James W. Ellington, 2 vols. in 1 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 2:60-61 (emphasis added). 10. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Ideasfor a PhilosophyofNature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 272. 11. Novalis, Schriften 3:300: "Die Worte sind theils Vocalen--theils ConsonantenGeltende und mitgeltende Worte. Anwendung auf Wissenschaftsconstructionen. Substantielle This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 60 Journalof theAmerican Musicological Society Novalis mapped this "phonetic" classificationonto philosophy: "distant philosophy sounds like poetry-because every call into the distance becomes a vowel." This "vocalic" philosophy is opposed to philosophy as prose, or "consonantic"philosophy. "Not until the philosopher appears as Orpheus"will history organize itself into a "true"and "meaningful"system of sciences.12When the philosopher becomes a musician, one might say, science sings. Shortly before Das allgemeineBrouillon breaks off, Novalis acknowledged actio in distans as a universal principle of poetic transformation: "All actions, even those of thinking, will be traced back to actio in distans."13 Jean Paul: beautiful infinity The Romanticis beautywithoutlimit,or beautifulinfinity,just as thereis a sublimeinfinity.... It is morethan an analogyto callthe Romanticthe undulatinghumof a vibratingstringor bell,whosesoundwavesfadeawayinto evergreaterdistancesand finallyarelost in ourselves,andwhich, although outwardlysilent,stillsoundwithin.In the samewaymoonlightis bothimage andinstanceof the Romantic.14 Thus Jean Paul Richter "defined"the Romantic in his 1804 Vorschuleder Asthetik. In October of 1798, he had met Novalis, who was then busily working on Das allgemeineBrouillon. They might have exchanged ideas. Notwithstanding the differences between Novalis's speculative esotericism and Jean Paul's more vivid and concrete imagery, they each placed distance at the heart of the Romantic. To be sure, Jean Paul's definition also relied on a quite different tradition. His notion of "beautiful infinity"was a paradox in terms of eighteenth-century aesthetics: for Burke and Kant, infinity belonged to the realm of the sublime, itself distinguished from the beautiful. Moreover, whereas Kant had associated the beautiful with definite boundaries (Begrenztheit),and the sublime with boundlessness (Unbegrenzt(Vocal)sitze und W[issenschaften]--accidentelle (consonant[ische]) Sitze und W[issenschaften]." The distinction between geltend and nicht-geltend,as well as substantielland accidentell, is analogous to the distinction between vowels, which sound independently, and consonants, which are dependent on vowels to be voiced. 12. Ibid., 335: "Erst dann, wenn der Philosoph, als Orpheus erscheint, ordnet sich das Ganze [of history] in regelmaliige gemeine und h6here gebildete, bedeutende Massen-in ichte Wissenschaftenzusammen." 13. Ibid., 472: "Alle Actionen, selbst die des Denkens werden auf die Actio in distans zurtickgefiihrtwerden." 14. Jean Paul, VorschulederAsthetik, in St~mtlicheWerke,ser. 1, vol. 11 (Weimar: Hermann B6hlaus Nachfolger, 1935), 77; translation (modified) from Margaret R. Hale, trans., Horn of Oberon:Jean Paul Richter'sSchoolofAesthetics(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973),61. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 61 heit),1'5Jean Paul's example for "beautiful infinity"-the dying soundforges their formal distinction into a contradictory closure within open form. His solution is a doubleending. Because the sensual perception of the dying sound is limited, it is projected through the power of imagination into an ideal infinity, so that it, "although outwardly silent, still sounds within." As a corollary to this suspension of the boundary between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds, Jean Paul also obliterates the difference between metaphor and event, or between the figurative and the real. The sound fading away is "more than an analogy"; like moonlight, it is both image and instance (Bild and Beispiel), both emblem and embodiment of the Romantic. Jean Paul spelled out this metaphysics of presence when he expanded on his understanding of the dying sound in his KleineNachschule zur fisthetischenVorschule(an accumulation of afterthoughts to his Vorschule which he did not preparefor publication until 1825, the year of his death): Music... is romanticpoetryforthe ear.Likethe beautifulwithoutlimit,this [romanticpoetry]is less a delusionof the eyes,of whichthe boundariesdo not fade awayas indeterminably as those of a dying sound. No color is as romanticas a sound,sinceone is presentat the dyingawayonly of a sound but not of a color;andbecausea soundneversoundsalone,but alwaysthreefold, blending,asit were,the romanticqualityof the futureandthe pastinto the present.16 In comparison with visual perception, then, the auditory is superior. This was one reason why romantic aesthetics considered music the most privileged of the arts, all of which should "aspire"to its expressiveness.Like the extension of tone into ideal space, the resolution of future and past into the present results in the unlimited expansion of time within a single instant of the temporal continuum. Jean Paul's notion of musical time as both moment and movement--a paradox that phenomenologists have wrestled with since Husserl--originates in the acoustics of specific instruments. The bell, for instance, is "calling the romantic spirits" because its sound reverberatesthe longest, just as the horn and the flute carryover long distances.17 Since distance narrows the gap between the phenomenal and noumenal, distant music--fading away or coming from afar--often evokes memories in Jean Paul's novels, as if he had composed out his own (and implicitly Novalis's) program of romantic distance--whether generally: 15. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft,ed. GerhardLehmann (Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1963), 134 (para. 23). 16. Jean Paul, Kleine Nachschulezur dsthetischenVorschule,in Sa'mtlicheWerke,ser. 1, vol. 16 (1938), 428. 17. Ibid. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 62 Journalof the American Society Musicological The distantbellsof the villagewerecalling,likebeautiful,dying-awaytimes, over into the darkshoutingof the shepherdsin the fields.'8 or specifically evoking memories of distant people or events: Suddenlyan old, familiar,but wonderfulchimingof the bellsat middayemanatedfromthe distance,an old soundingas fromthe starrymorningof his darkchildhood;... full of yearninghe thought of his distantparents,the still-lifeof his childhood-and the gentleWina.19 Often Jean Paul even joins landscape with sound, which - dying- holds distance and nearness in suspension: From the thunderstormhe turned again toward the multicoloredsunny - a breezefromthe eastcarriedthe sounds-swam with themto countryside the sun--on the floweringeveningcloudsthe little echo, the lovely child, repeatedquietlyhis playing.... heavyandslumberingthe sun swamon the sea--it was drawndown-its golden auraglowed awayin the endlessblue void--and the echoingsoundslingeredand died awayon the glow.20 Thus emblematic of the Romantic in Jean Paul's aesthetics and embodied in his novels, sound, both dying and distant, surely did not go "unheard" by one of his most avid musical readers, and certainly the most prominent: Robert Schumann. Robert Schumann:the dying sound 'The Romantic is beauty without limit, or beautifulinfinity, just as there is a sublime infinity." Schumann chose these lines as a motto for the Neue Zeitschriftfir Musik, only three weeks after his famous proclamation of a "young poetic future" in the editorial of the 1835 New Year'sissue (he had just taken over the journal as sole editor).21 These mottos have attracted little attention, although they had been announced as an integral part of the journal.22Schumann assiduously collected maxims, aphorisms, and striking phrases for this purpose in the so-called mottobook, a fascinating source of information about his reading habits, literary preferences, and 18. Jean Paul, Flegeljahre,in Simtliche Werke,ser. 1, vol. 10 (1934), 85. 19. Ibid., 272. 20. Ibid., 77. 21. Neue ZeitschriftffirMusik2 (1835): 25. The motto reappearssix years later in volume 14 (1841): 199. Schumann somewhat tempered his provocative formulation "junge dichterische Zukunft" for the Collected Writings, to become the usually quoted "neue poetische Zeit" (compare Neue ZeitschriftfiirMusik 2 [1835]: 3, with Robert Schumann, Gesammelte SchriftenuiberMusikundMusiker, 5th ed., ed. Martin Kreisig [Leipzig: Breitkopfund Hirtel, 1914], 1:38). 22. Under the rubric "Miscellen";see Neue ZeitschriftfiirMusik 1 (1834): 1. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 63 aesthetic views.23His choice of this very excerpt from Jean Paul's Vorschule is remarkablebecause he noted in the margin of the mottobook, "Definition des Romantischen" ("Definition of the Romantic").24 Jean Paul's "definition" not only epitomized Schumann's idea of a "young poetic future," but also encapsulated the aesthetic background of its first musical manifesto, the Papillons, Op. 2, inspired, in turn, by his favorite of Jean Paul's novels, Flegeljahre,itself the poetic pendant to the Vorschule.Indeed, it appearsthat Jean Paul's definition of the Romantic, as formulated in the Vorschule,left its mark on the ending of Flegeljahreand was, by extension, "composed out" in the ending of Schumann's Papillons. As is well known, Schumann'sown copy ofFlegeljahrebears annotations associating individual numbers of Papillons with passages in the novel's penultimate chapter.25Here, the main protagonists, the brothers Walt (a poet) and Vult (a musician), attend a masked ball with the woman they both love: Wina (see Fig. 1). The ball is the denouement of the novel, where Wina finally settles for Walt, after which Vult wanders off into the world. Schumann marked ten passages: most of these do not relate easily to musical details, let alone account for the two remaining numbers of the dozen in the cycle; moreover, it is unclear whether Schumann annotated his copy before or after he finished the work.26 If Schumann's marginalia fail to yield an explicit correspondence between Flegeljahreand Papillons, his choice of the novel's last sentence as the cycle's motto does: "Enchanted, Walt heard the vanishing sounds still speaking from afar: for he did not notice his brother vanishing with them. End of J. Paul's Flegeljahre."27 Although deleted from the published score, the motto provides access to the work's aesthetic subtext. 23. D-Zsch 4871-VIII 2 A3. For a study of the mottobook see the forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation by Leander Hotaki (UniversitditFreiburg im Breisgau). 24. Jean Paul's "definition"is excerpt no. 29 on page 5 in the ninth of the eleven "Hefte" of the mottobook. Personal communication from Leander Hotaki. 25. First mentioned in Wolfgang Boetticher, RobertSchumann:Einftihrungin Persdnlichkeit und Werk (Berlin: Bernhard Hahnefeld, 1941), 611-13. See also Edward A. Lippman, '"Theoryand Practice in Schumann'sAesthetics," this Journal 17 (1964): 310-45, esp. 31520. Schumann's copy of Jean Paul's Simtliche Werke(Berlin: G. Reimer, 1826-38) is in the possession of the Schumann Haus Zwickau. 26. For a recent attempt to establish one-to-one correspondences between the music and the annotations, see Jacques Chailley, "Zum Symbolismus bei Robert Schumann mit besonderer Berticksichtigung der Papillons op. 2," in Robert Schumann:Ein romantischesErbe in neuerForschung(Mainz: Schott, 1984), 57-66. For a cautious approach see GerhardDietel, "Die Papillons und ihr Programm," in "Eine neuepoetischeZeit"-Musikanschauungund stilistischeTendenzenim KlavierwerkRobertSchumanns(Kassel: Biirenreiter, 1989), 176-96. 27. "Noch aus der Ferne horte Walt entziickt die fliehenden T6ne reden: denn er merkte nicht, daf mit ihnen sein Bruder entfliehe. Schlui von J. Pauls Flegeljahren."Facsimile of this page on plate 8 in Wolfgang Boetticher, Robert SchumannsKlavierwerke:Neue biographische und textkritischeUntersuchungenTeil I, Opus 1-6 (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1976). This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions C oO r. ,,, oo CN 1 •,,,•, ,• :.•.:...• . i,- i•, ::•.•,• -, .:.•. -•t•":, .••,•'•,,•::.: • This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann and Romantic Distance 65 To facilitate the critical reception of his daring new work, Schumann advised his friends, family, and potential reviewers to read the ending of Flegeljahreas a key to understanding the unusual cycle. As he wrote to Friedrich Rellstab, music critic of the Vossische Zeitung and editor of Iris im Gebietder Tonkunst, Lessforthe sakeof the editorof Iristhanforthe poet andkindredspiritwith JeanPaul,I takethe libertyof addinga few words aboutthe origin of Papillons,sincethe threadthatconnectsthem is hardlyvisible.You will recall - dance of the masks-Walt -Vult -masks the last scene of Flegeljahre Wina--Vult's dancing--the exchange of masks- confessions- angerrevelations-running away-final scene and then the brother'swalking away.28 If, however, in a letter to Ignaz Castelli of the Allgemeiner musikalischer Anzeiger Wien, Schumann even quoted the last sentence of the novel, his original motto,29 why, then, did he abandon it before publication? His remarksto Henriette Voigt suggest a possible answer: If you ever have a free minute,pleasereadthe last chapterof Flegeljahre, where everythingstandsin blackand white even to the giant boot in F# minor(atthe endof the Flegeljahre I feel asthoughtheplay(to be sure)were over but the curtainnot fallen.)--I will mentionalso thatI haveset the text to the music, not the reverse--otherwiseit seems to me a "foolishbeginning."Only the last one, which playfulchanceformedas an answerto the first,wasinspiredbyJeanPaul.Anotherquestion.Arenot the Papillonsclear to you in themselves?I am interestedin learningthis.3o How sure was Schumann whether the Papillonswere clear "in themselves"? He had certainly been willing to publish them without the motto, but his assertion to Voigt that it was "foolish" to begin a composition with a text seems to mask his ambivalence about the matter, since his music was (and continued to be) at least partly inspired by texts.31Moreover, he repeatedly manifested curiosity about the correspondence between his musical language and the verbal responses to it. In directing his listeners to the ending of Flegeljahre,what did he expect them to find in Papillons? 28. Letter of 19 April 1832, in Robert Schumann,Jugendbriefe,ed. Clara Schumann, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1886), 167-68. See also the letter to his family, written two days before, in ibid., 166-67. 29. "Ew. Wohlgeboren erinnern sich vielleicht dieses fantastischen Larventanzesu. der Worte, die das Werk schliegen: Noch aus der Ferne herauf etc." Letter of 28 April 1832, in F. Gustav Jansen, ed., RobertSchumannsBriefe:Neue Folge (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Hirtel, 1904), 36. 30. Letter of 22 August 1834, in Jansen,Briefe:Neue Folge, 53-54. Translation (slightly modified) from Lippman, "Theory and Practice in Schumann's Aesthetics," 320. 31. Lippman, "Theory and Practice in Schumann'sAesthetics," 320, also points to Schumann's similar insecurity about the Bilder aus dem Osten. For a general discussion of the issue see Dietel, "Eine neuepoetischeZeit," 197-211. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 66 Journalof the AmericanMusicologicalSociety Worth pursuing is Schumann's hint to Voigt that only the last piece was actually inspired by Jean Paul. A trace of that inspiration might be found in the seemingly insignificant change he made by replacing the novel's "aus der Gasse herauf" (from the street) with the motto's "aus der Ferne" (from afar). Since this variant also occurs in the letter to Castelli, it may be more than a slip of Schumann's memory, to which Gustav Jansen attributed it.32 The alteration adds a more poetic flavor to the way Walt hears Vult's vanishing music: as distant music, thus highlighting its specifically "romantic"dimension. Indeed, the explicit invocation of "distance"suggests a reading of Papillons'sending that not only takes the usually neglected last chapter of Flegeljahreinto account, but also connects it with Jean Paul's definition of the Romantic in both the Vorschuleder Asthetik and, as we will see, the Kleine Nachschule. The last chapter ofFlegeljahreconcludes with a dream that Walt recounts to his brother during the night after the ball. As a fantastic tour de force overflowing with the mixture of allegories and symbols typical of Jean Paul's virtuosic style, the dream effectively resists easy interpretation and thwarts an unequivocal conclusion to the novel (Jean Paul had originally planned a continuation).33 In a dense stream of images, Walt "dreams"the changing relationships between the three protagonists played out at the ball. Schumann must have been struck by their eventual metamorphosis into "tones"-separating and uniting. Symbolizing separation and departure, flowers first become children engaged in the play of love (an image of the ball), and then stars, of which the departing star is further transformed into the fading evening glow: "'Stay with me, my child, when you leave me,' the staying child said. Then, in the distance, the departing child turned into a small evening glow; then into a little evening star; then, further into the countryside, into merely a shimmer of the moon without the moon; and, finally, further and further into the distance, it faded into the tone of a flute or a philomela."34Jean Paul's choice of the flute is not surprising: it is Vult's instrument. And "distance,"as another passage ofFlegeljahrehas it, "is the foil of the flute.35"But the puzzling alternative--"the tone of a flute or a philomela"--renders the passage ambiguous, which, after all, is only characteristicof a dream (Walt does not yet know the outcome of 32. Jansen, Briefe:Neue Folge, 492 n. 22. 33. For different approaches to the dream see Peter Horst Neumann, Jean Pauls "Flegeljahre" (G6ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1966), 103-16; Heinrich Bosse, "Der offene der Flegelfahre,"Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft2 (1967): 73-84; Peter Schluda Maurer, Wunsch und Maske: Eine Untersuchungder Bild- und MotivstrukturvonJean Pauls Flegeljahren (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1981), 152-58; and Gustav Lohvol. 2 (WUirzburg: mann,Jean Pauls "Flegeljahre" gesehenim Rahmen ihrerKapiteliiberschriften, Konigshausen und Neumann, 1995), 262-322. 34. Jean Paul, Flegeljahre,478-79. 35. Ibid., 270. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumannand Romantic Distance 67 the ball). Since Vult had compared Wina with the tone of a philomela earlier in the novel, the departing glow-become-tone could stand for both Vult and Wina: Vult leaving his brother, and Wina leaving Vult.36 For all three of them, however, nightfall symbolizes the irreversiblechange from adolescence to adulthood. Then comes dawn, but doubled-the new couple, Walt and Wina: Facingdawn, anotherdawn arose.Upliftingthe heart,both were rushing towardeachotherlikechoirs,with soundsinsteadof colors,as if unknown, radiantbeingswould sing theirjoyfulsongs frombehindthe earth.... Now the choirsof dawnwere thunderingtowardeachother, and every thunderboltignited a more powerfulone. Two suns were to arise,in the soundof morning.Behold,when they wantedto come, the soundbecame softerand softer,then quiet everywhere.Amorflew fromthe East, Psyche fromthe West,and they met in the middleof the sky. And both suns were rising-they were only two soft tones, two tones dying and awakeningto eachother;perhapsthey sounded:"Youand I."37 The difference between dusk and dawn in the dream holds a special place in Jean Paul'sview of the Romantic; it could well be that a passage as prominent as this one in Flegeljahremay have prompted him to specify the aesthetic implications of this difference in the Kleine Nachschule,in the very section (quoted above) that had begun "Music ... is romantic poetry for the ear." He continues: To the eye, beautywithoutlimit appearsbest as moonlight,this wonderful light of the spirit,which is akinneitherto the sublimenor to the beautiful, andwhichpenetratesus with a painfullonging,likeaneternitythatcannever dawnon earth.Therefore,the eveningglow is romantic,but the dawnsublimeor beautiful.Andbotharebannersof the future:the formerannouncing the most distant,the latterthe nearest,future.Thusa boundlessgreenplain is as romanticas distantmountains;whilenearmountainsandthe desertare sublime. The realmof the Romanticis, in fact,dividedinto the morningrealmof the eye andthe eveningrealmof the ear,andin thisit comparesto its relative, the dream.38 Again, Jean Paul maps poetic images onto aesthetic categories, associating dawn with the old dichotomy between the sublime and the beautiful, and evening glow with the new aesthetics of the Romantic. Its dying color inhabits the realm of the ear and that of the dream, just as in Flegeljahre's dream the evening glow mutated into the tone of the flute. 36. Cf. ibid., 201. See Neumann, Jean Pauls "Flegeljahre,"111. 37. Jean Paul, Flegeljahre,479. 38. Jean Paul, Kleine Nachschulezur iisthetischenVorschule,429. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 68 Journalof the American Society Musicological Flegeljahredoes not end with the dream, however, but ratherwith Walt waking up to hear, enraptured, how his brother fulfills it: playing his flute, Vult goes away. Thus the novel literally closes on a romantic "note," not only with sound dying away-Romanticism as defined in the Vorschulebut also with moonlight metamorphosing into sound: Romanticism as refined in the Nachschule.Was Schumann aware of the connection? He knew the Vorschuleas early as 1828,39 drawing the motto from it for the Neue Zeitschriftin 1835. It is not certain when he read the Nachschule,but it has not been noted previously that Schumann marked in his own copy the very passage that follows up on the motto (see Fig. 2). Thus we can safely assume that he understood the complementary connection between the passage he marked and the motto he took from the Vorschule.Yet one may reasonably speculate that he also understood how the dream in Flegeljahre embodied the distinction drawn in the Nachschule between-sublime or beautiful dawn on the one hand and romantic dusk on the other. Indeed, given the musical symbolism of the dream and its aesthetic implications, the ending of Papillons appears in a new light. It begins when the unexpected return of the first number suspends the music of the Finale, the so-called Grofivatertanz(see Ex. la). Since Walt is the protagonist of the passage Schumann had marked in the previous chapter from Flegeljahreas number "1" (See Fig. 1), and since Schumann names Walt first in the narrative sequence offered to Rellstab, one can safely associate Walt with the first number of Papillons.But Walt's music is only his mask--a papillonlike the "psyche fluttering up over the withered body."40The difference is important in light of the ball's ending and its symbolic replay in the dream. The ball ends, to recall, with Vult first trading his mask with Walt, then taking the last dance with Wina, and finally pressing her into a declaration of her love--to Walt's mask. Thus the return of the first number in the Finale is a double reminiscence: both of the past and of Walt. Moreover, when the last dance returns in the left hand in measure 31, both tunes seem to dance together, as if representing varying constellations (because Vult is wearing Walt'smask): Wina and who she thinks is Walt, or Wina and who she does not know is Vult. Since the two tunes die away together over a tonic pedal to which Schumann added the six strokes of the clock announcing the end of the ball at dawn (see Ex. Ib), he might have heard this ending through the symbolism of the dream: "two tones dying and awakening to each other; perhaps they sounded: 'You and I.'" The "perhaps" points to the ambiguity of this "You and I." What the two tones/tunes do depends on the double meaning of Walt's mask: whereas the love between Wina and Walt is awakening, the love between Wina and Vult is dying. 39. See Robert Schumann, Tagebficher,vol. 1, 1827-1838, ed. Georg Eismann (Leipzig: VEB, 1971), 124. 40. See the letter to Henriette Voigt in Jansen, Briefe:Neue Folge, 54. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions It . I'en ~i~:'-::l-:::::::-l:--~iii:/~ ~M..i-i ~ ~~ c ~-.:-:i~a-~:~:'Ii~'' _:-:?::i:::-i---.:-: ii~ji~:: L~'i::,r :;-:i-::::: iiii~~iliii I?: BMxi'm tits pup -ii~i~ii~iiii~i-i:~~~~-n ~a jii~;a,~i -M'I_~-:~i B~pg'.'':i-?:':' l':::::-::?::: iW 'si~s,~i :i~~i-'i:-Bi:.:i:?;-::::~:ii-i~::?::iii---i--i:.~:.:-:::iiil-i-:i-i~ii~j?Z: i:s ~i : :,:.:?:-:-: "If Zap ~i~Z~ ~~~l two W Oft Mo ?'OIIJ Fun,:;i SmA, yjays wall; un; unalvion MA login, pm o Anv~n MO tnW owna Vorchule,vol. 45 ofJean Figure 2 Excerpt of Schumann's copy ofKleine Nachschulezur aisthetischen Reproduced with the permission of Robert Schumann Haus Zwickau. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 70 Journalof the American Musicological Society Papillons, Op.2, no. 1 andno. 12, "Finale" Example1 RobertSchumann, (a) In an earlier version of the ending, preserved in one of Schumann's sketchbooks, he closed here by adding a chromatic descent over two and a half octaves in the bass, colorfully harmonized with ascending chords in the right hand (see Fig. 3).41 The rejected ending was just as daring and experimental as the final version is "poetic":after a general rest in measure 73, the melody outlines the tonic triad rising to a held A, which mirrors, suspended, the tonic pedal from before. A sustained arpeggio of the dominant seventh chord follows, with the keys gradually lifted so that it terminates in a single held A. In light of Schumann's motto or the last sentence of Flegeljahre,the passage can only be Vult's departure, but heard, like the ending of the ball, through the auralimagery of Walt'sdream: a flute fading away into a single tone. Thus, in terms of Jean Paul's aesthetics, the two tunes awakening at dawn are sublime or beautiful, like their closure on the tonic. But dying at dusk, far in the distance, the tone ofVult's flute is sublime and beautiful, or romantic, like its open ending on the dominant. The novel ends, but the story goes on. This doubleness persists through Schumann's final measure, when, beneath Vult's distant dominant, the wind wafts the waltz rhythm back to close nearby on the tonic. How fitting, then, that Hugo von Hofmannsthal concluded his littleknown essay on Jean Paul with a reference to the doubleness of nearness and distance, foretelling what would returnto us again and again from Jean Paul's forgotten novels: "to make what is closeso distant, and bring what is distantsoclose,that ourheartcouldembracethemboth.'"42 Schumann'sversion of this embrace became the ending of Papillons-a model of his musical Romanticism to which he, too, would return again and again. 41. Boetticher's transcriptionin RobertSchumannsKlavierwerke1:74 is inaccurateon several counts. Note especiallyhis unwarrantedinterruption of Schumann'schromatic line in the thirteenth measure from the end, where Schumann writes c# and not d. An edition of the Wiede Sketchbooks by Matthias Wendt is in preparation. 42. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "Blickauf Jean Paul,"GesammelteWerke,ed. Bernd Schoeller (Frankfurt:Fischer, 1979), 8:434-37, at 437 (original emphasis). This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumannand Romantic Distance 71 Example 1 continued (b) 47 54t poco - vp--p- g, r A., 61 ------dim --------- - • a - - - - - - - oco- i i,__ ----- ~ r . --- -----r _ pIill - - - - - - - -. ---- 69 86 r~ •l~ ------ - - ---....---- ma P ritardando 6 rr This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions e Fine 40 - ::::Mim-: ~ ":i-s-:iow-::s-i;. Figure 3 . Earlier ending of Papillonsfrom the Wiede Sketchbook. Reproduced with the permis This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumannand Romantic Distance 73 2. A "HeavenlyGuest"and "DistantAnalysis" Schumann's 1840 review of Franz Schubert's Great C-Major Symphony, a work he had discovered in Vienna in the composer's large NachD. lass944-of unprinted music and whose performance and publication he had arranged in Leipzig-is probably best known for its comparison of the symphony's "heavenly length" to novels by Jean Paul. Framing the review with a report of his trip to Vienna in search of Schubert, Schumann closes in on the meaning of the symphony by describing his impressions of the city and their relevance for understanding the work: Often when I contemplated [the city] from the heights of the mountains, it occurred to me how Beethoven's eye had doubtless strayed restlessly across those distant Alps time and time again, how Mozart may often have pursued dreamily the course of the Danube, ... and Father Haydn may often have gazed at St. Stephen's steeple. ... and if now this whole charming landscape stands alive before us, strings also will be set into motion inside us that otherwise would not have begun to sound. On hearing the Symphony of Schubert, with the bright, blossoming romantic life it contains, the city again arises before me more distinctly than ever, and again I find it perfectly clear how such works can be born precisely in these surroundings. I will not attempt to give the Symphony a foil; different times of life choose too differently in the texts and pictures they attribute to music: the youth of eighteen often hears an international event in a composition, where the adult sees only a provincial incident, while the musician has thought of neither the one nor the other and just has produced no more than his music as he found it in his heart. But that the externalworld ... often takes hold of the inner life of the poet and musician we must indeed believe, and that in this Symphony there lies hidden more than mere beautiful song, more than mere sorrow and joy as music alreadyhas pronounced them hundreds of times, indeed that it leads us into a region we nowhere can remember having been before: to acknowledge this we have only to hear such a symphony. Here is, besides masterly musical technique of composition, also life in every fiber, the most subtle shading of color, meaning everywhere, the most acute expression of each single idea, and, finally, a Romanticism poured over the whole, which is known from elsewhere in Franz Schubert. And the heavenly length of the Symphony, like a thick, four-volume novel, for example by Jean Paul, who can also never come to an end, and for the best reasons: to allow for later re-creation by the reader.43 After a general appraisal of the work's overall form, Schumann concluded: It will not give us or others any pleasure to analyze the separatemovements; one would have to copy the entire symphony in order to give an idea of its pervasive novella-like character.Yet I cannot take leave without a few words 43. Schumann, GesammelteSchriften 1:462-63; translation (modified) from Lippman, "Theory and Practice in Schumann's Aesthetics," 325-26. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 74 Journalof theAmerican Society Musicological about the second movement,which speaksto us in such touchingvoices. Thereis a passagein it wherethe hornis callingas if fromafar;this appears to me as if it hadcome fromanothersphere.Hereeveryoneis listening,as if a heavenlyguest were creepingthroughthe orchestra.4 According to Edward Lippman, Schumann's review betrays a striking ambivalence toward external (literaryor cultural) influences on the creation of music as well as their relevance for its reception - an issue that had been of concern not only for the composer, but for the critic as well.45My reading of Schumann's rich and complex review, however, will focus on the larger interpretive implications of the two poetic fantasies that frame the excerpts given above: the image of the distant Viennese landscape that allegedly inspired Schubert's symphony, and the image of the distant, "heavenly," guest that the symphony inspired in the critic. These images are, of course, romantic clich6s,46but in the context of Schumann's self-conscious criticism they resonate with Paul Ricoeur's notion of hermeneutic "distanciation." To be sure, poetic "distance"appears remote from Ricoeur's rather prosaic notion of "distanciation," despite the obvious metaphorical connection. Yet Ricoeur's theory of interpretation may help us to draw closer to the critical framework of Schumann's interpretive practice. To summarize: Ricoeur's Hermeneuticsand the Human Sciences,an ambitious attempt to combine Hans-Georg Gadamer's historical hermeneutics with its subsequent critique by Jiirgen Habermas, proposes four different forms of "distanciation."47In spoken language he already perceives a distance opening up between the "saying"and the "said,"between "event" and "discourse," or between the Saussurianparole (speech) and langue (language). A further distanciation occurs, once spoken discourse becomes fixated as a written text: "What the text signifies no longer coincides with what the author meant; henceforth, textual meaning and psychological meaning have different destinies."48From this, a third form of 44. Schumann, GesammelteSchriften1:464. 45. Lippman, "Theory and Practice in Schumann's Aesthetics," 325-42. 46. As in this passage from one of the most frequently read novels of early Romanticism, Ludwig Tieck's 1798 Franz SternbaldsWanderungen:"Suddenlythey heard from the distance the touching play of intricate horns out of the forest; standing still they strained to hear whether it was imagination or reality; but a melodic singing flowed toward them through the trees like a rippling rill, and Franz thought that the spirit world had suddenly opened up, that perhaps, without knowing it, they had found the great magic word" (ed. Alfred Anger [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966], 221-22). 47. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneuticsand the Human Sciences:Essayson Language, Action, and Interpretation,ed., trans., and introd. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 131-44 (chap. 4, 'The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation"). For a recent discussion of Ricoeur's notion of distanciation in the context of music historiography, see Gary Tomlinson's Music in RenaissanceMagic: Towarda Historiographyof Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 24-27. 48. Ricoeur, Hermeneuticsand the Human Sciences,139. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 75 distanciation results: the inevitable "decontextualization"of the text from the original cultural and historical conditions of its production, so that, as a "closed"or "proposed"world of its own, it becomes open to a potentially unlimited number of interpretations. In its fourth form, finally, distanciation takes place between the text and its reader. Ricoeur describes it as a changing dialectic between distanciation and appropriation (Aneignung).49 In the nineteenth century, appropriation was guided by the premise of historicism, which sought to overcome cultural distance and historical alienation. With the shift toward phenomenological, and later structuralist,analysisin the twentieth century, however, this historical distance was no longer an obstacle, but the very condition for an explanation of the text as a world of its own. While Ricoeur welcomes both the liberation from historicism, which sought the world "behind" the text (such as the author's intentions), and the advances of phenomenology and structuralism, which sought to explain the closed world "in" the text, he proposes that interpretation nevertheless renew the original dialogic relationship between the reader and the text: 'To understand is to understand oneselfin front of the text."50Ricoeur insists, however, that the reading subject has no more control over the text than the authorial subject it replaces: 'The matter of the text becomes my own only if I disappropriate myself, in order to let the matter of the text be."'' Moreover, this "distanciationof the selffrom itself ... implements all the strategies of suspicion, among which the critique of ideology is a principal modality. Distanciation, in all its forms and figures, constitutes par excellencethe critical moment in understanding."52 Where, then, does Schumann stand with respect to Ricoeur's theory?As an acutely self-conscious critic, Schumann not only used different strategies, but also perceived their limitations. Initially, he sides with the romantic hermeneutics of congeniality: in the distant view of the Viennese landscape he looks for the authorial intention behind Schubert's symphony, suggesting "how such works can be born precisely in these surroundings." But by remarking that "different times of life choose too differently in the texts and pictures they attribute to music," he also admits the possibility that music is open to multiple readings, even if these are relative to the original vision of the authorial subject. Furthermore, with his assertion that music "leads us into a region we nowhere can remember having been before," Schumann would seem to subscribe to the aesthetics of autonomy, to what Ricoeur considered the work as a proposed world of its own, accessible through phenomenological or structural analysis. Yet 49. 50. 51. 52. See ibid., 182-93. Ibid., 141 and 143 (original emphasis). Ibid., 113. Ibid. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 76 Journalof the American Society Musicological Schumann feels uneasy about analyzing the symphony as a self-contained whole. Instead, he offers his own subjective response, which emerges in Ricoeur's terms vis-a-vis ("in front of") the musical text. It is the poetic vision of the distant horn call as a "heavenly guest" that seems to have descended from that very "region we nowhere can remember having been before"-the realm of absolute music. Thus Schumann rehearses and reflects upon various interpretive approaches: the historicist and psychological search "behind,"the phenomenological investigation "within," and the listener's response "in front of" the musical text. But where is "the critical moment" in his own understanding?To answer that question, we need to observe how Schumann situated himself within the two interpretivemodes that emerged in early nineteenth-century German writings about music: formalist analysis and poetic, or hermeneutic, criticism. (The latter is often referred to as "musical hermeneutics," which is distinct from "hermeneutics" as the general theory of interpretation.) As an attempt to translatethe untranslatableinto words, E. T. A. Hoffmann's famous 1810 review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony inaugurated, as it were, modern music criticism. Combining technical and literary language, Hoffmann both carriedon the rationalistictradition of the Enlightenment and followed the impulse of the emerging Romanticism: the former seeking to determine the musical material of the composition, the latter to make explicit its poetic idea.53 The difference between "prosaic" analysis and "poetic"criticism counts among the most enduring legacies of early nineteenth-century writings about music, having persisted through Hanslick and Hausegger, Kurth and Kretzschmar, to Babbitt and Boretz -to say nothing about its far-ranging institutional implications. Not surprisingly, nineteenth-century theories of interpretation reflected the dualism: while Friedrich Schleiermacher distinguished between the more objective "comparative"method and the more intuitive "divinatory"one, so did Wilhelm Dilthey between scientific "explanation" and historical "understanding."54More recently, the revival of hermeneutic criticism (in search of music's cultural meaning) has sought to unburden present-day musicology from the legacy of formalism (in search of music's autonomous structure). The relationship between the two approaches continues to be negotiated in both interpretive practice and theory--as it was in the early nineteenth century.55 53. For a general survey of the "opposing principles"in music analysis, see the introduction to Ian Bent, ed., MusicAnalysisin the Nineteenth Century,vol. 2, HermeneuticApproaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1-27. 54. For a brief introduction see ibid., 3-4 and 8-13. On the relationship between explanation and understanding see Ricoeur, Hermeneuticsand the Human Sciences,145-64. 55. See Joseph Kerman, "How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out," Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 311-31; Lawrence Kramer, "Haydn's Chaos, Schenker's Order; or, Hermeneutics and Musical Analysis: Can They Mix?" 19th-CenturyMusic 16 (1992): 3-17; This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumannand Romantic Distance 77 Soon afterhis NeueZeitschriftfar Musikhad rolledfreshlyoff the press in 1834, Schumanndefended himself against the reproachof having "emphasiz[ed]and extend[ed]the poetic side of music at the expenseof its scientificside":"Wehold it as the highestkind of criticismthat which itself leavesan impressionsimilarto the one createdby the subjectthat stimulatedit."56 The criticalstancebehind this statementwas Friedrich Schlegel'sfamousfragmentbeginning,"Poetrycan only be criticizedby Poetry."57In a footnote, Schumanngave an exampleof how to approach suchcreativecriticism:"Inthis sense,JeanPaulcould possiblycontribute more to the understandingof a Beethovensymphonyor fantasiathrough a poeticcounterpart(evenwithouttalkingaboutthe symphonyor fantasia alone) than a dozen criticswho lean their laddersagainstthe colossusto takeits exactmeasurements."58 Schumann,of course, did not completelyshun analysis.In his wellknown 1835 articleabout Berlioz'sSymphonie fantastique,he offered,on the one hand, a poetic counterpartof the symphonyin a poem by Franz von Sonnenberg(whichappearedin the introductoryinstallment)and,on the otherhand,the most detailedtechnicalanalysisof a majorsymphonic worksinceHoffmann'sreviewof the Fifth.59In fact,Schumann'sreviewof the Symphoniefantastique seemsto haveenjoyedits laterstatusasa textbook classicprimarilyfor its wealthof analyticaldetail,andnot for its more adventurouspoetic introduction,which he eliminatedfromthe versionthat appearedin his Collected Writings.As LeonPlantingahasnoted, Schumann moved from his extravagantearlywritingstowarda "sogradually away bererstyle of the later 1830s and the 1840s."60Despite that tendency,or preciselybecauseof it, Schumannremaineduneasyaboutthe relationship betweentechnicalanalysisand poetic criticism.His reviewof Schubert's C-MajorSymphonywouldhaveprovidedan opportunityto refinethe critical model of the Berliozarticle.But Schumann"distanced" himselffrom analysis. Why? Accordingto SannaPederson,Schumann,in his latermusiccriticism, struggledto maintainhis rapportwith a generalaudiencein promoting high-qualitymusic without having to demonstrateits intrinsicqualities through"amorespecialized,technical,andprofessionalstancethatcut off and the ensuing "Counterpoint"between Scott Burnham ("The Criticism of Analysis and the Analysis of Criticism") and Lawrence Kramer ("Criticizing Criticism, Analyzing Analysis"), in 19th-CenturyMusic 16 (1992): 70-76 and 76-79 respectively. 56. Neue ZeitschriJftfirMusik2 (1835): 42. Translation from Leon Plantinga, Schumann as Critic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 72. 57. As quoted in Plantinga, Schumannas Critic, 74. 58. Ibid., 72. 59. Neue Zeitschriftfr Musik 3 (1835): 1-2. For a recent translation of the complete review see Bent, Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century 2:166-94. 60. Plantinga, Schumannas Critic, 78. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 78 Journalof the AmericanMusicologicalSociety His earlypoetic criticismhad successfullyestablishedan most readers."61 imaginarypublicforumin quite a revolutionaryway: by staginga fictive dialogue among differentsubjectivepersonae,Florestanand Eusebius, thus steppingout of the very privatespaceso valuedby romanticsensibilities.In the reviewof Schubert,however,Schumann's"illusionof representingpublicopinion"appearsunderpressureboth from"thegrowing consumptionof popularmusic"by a wideningmiddleclassless willingto plumbemotionaldepths,and from the increasingspecializationof music Schumann'satprofessionalsmoreinterestedin purelytechnicalmatters.62 to strike a middle in the review ground appearsambiguous,howtempt ever:he speakswith his own personalvoice, but one that appearssubtly authoritative;he invokes the objectivityof the score and proposes its study,63but omits it from the reviewas being "no pleasure"for the critic and the reader;he refrainsfrom a literaryextravaganza,but allowsfor a poetic moment at the end. That moment standsout becauseSchumann, touchedby the music, sought to touch the reader.Insteadof "validating autonomousmusic"by explicitlyanalyzingits intrinsicqualities,he fell backon poetic paraphrase,which realized"the opportunity[the music] affordedforsometypeof metaphysical revelationor sublimeexperience."64 Schumannthus proved susceptibleto the "dilettantish"picking and choosingthat has stigmatizedmusicalhermeneuticsto this day. Surelyhe knew this passagefrom Flegeljahrein which Vult, the Kenner,ridicules Walt,the Liebhaber: "How, then, do you listen?Forwardsandbackwards, or only to what is rightin frontof you?The folk, like cattle,only hearthe present,but not the two poles of time;only musicalsyllables,no syntax.A good hearerof the word memorizesthe antecedentof a musicalperiod,in orderto graspbeautifullythe consequent."65 One anda halfcenturieslater, Theodor Adorno describedpreciselythese two modes of listening,in a radiobroadcastentitled"BeautifulMoments":whereas"structural listening"anchorsthe particularin the whole, "atomisticlistening"seizesupon favoritepassages.66Thus Schumann'sindulgencein what may be calleda of the moment"amountsto a breakingof the hermeneutic "hermeneutics circle,"spinning"not only betweenthe whole and the part, but also be61. Sanna Pederson, "Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800-1850" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995), 86. 62. Ibid., 81-86, at 85. See also the section "Declining Audience Sophistication" in Leonard B. Meyer, Styleand Music: Theory,History,and Ideology(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989): 208-17. 63. See Schumann'scomments after his general observations about the form of the work: "This will appearto everyone who will study the symphony more often." Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften1:463. 64. See Pederson, "Enlightened and Romantic GermanMusic Criticism,"86 and 42-43. 65. Jean Paul, Flegeljahre,181-82. 66. Theodor W. Adorno, "Sch6ne Stellen," GesammelteSchriften,vol. 18 (Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 695-718, at 695. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 79 tween the objective and the subjective, between the comparative and the divinatory, between explanation and understanding, between the material and the psychological, in short, between analysis and criticism.67Moreover, the distance opening up between artwork and beholder resonates with WalterBenjamin'sdistinction between "trace"and "aura":"The trace is the appearanceof closeness, however distant what left the trace behind. The aura is the appearanceof a distance, however close what created it. In the trace we get hold of a thing, in the aura the thing gets hold of us."68 Benjamin's distinction has hermeneutic implications. The goal of analysis is to be "close"to, to grasp, the music. But the distant aura of art, like that of nature, grasps us: "If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, this means breathing the aura of those mountains, of this branch."69If, in turn, Schumann's eyes followed the distant mountains of the Alps, the Danube, and St. Stephen, he wanted to "breathe"the aura of Vienna and, by implication, that of Haydn's, Mozart's, Beethoven's, and Schubert's music. And as a critic, he wanted to let his readers "breathe"that very aura. Had it involved any "pleasure,"Schumann, in closing his review, might have "traced"the entire symphony--literally tracking its text by copying it. But he did not even analyze that horn call in the second movement, which occurs during the transition leading from F major to the re-entry of the main theme in A minor (see Ex. 2). Here the horn enters when the thematic material has decayed into the basic pulse of alternating quarter notes in the horn and strings; the sustained half notes of the latter are composed as an echo between lower and upper strings. For six bars (mm. 151-56), the harmony rocks back and forth between the V7 of F major and the V6 of D minor, until the latter eventually resolves into the Neapolitan sixth that pulls the cadence to the A-minor tonic. Until the G in the horn is tied over to form a suspension with this Neapolitan, however, it belongs to neither key. This gestural and harmonic in-between state suspends time and space and expands-as the horn call is dying away-into a small eternity. In the parallel passage, this magic has disappeared (mm. 319-32): a direct move from A major to A minor; a quick arrivalon the dominant; pervasive sixteenth-note figures binding the passage into the figuration of 67. See Hoeckner, "Music as a Metaphor for Metaphysics," 17-19. On the hermeneutic circle see Bent, Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century2:4-8. 68. "Spur und Aura. Die Spur ist Erscheinung einer N~he, so fern das sein mag, was sie hinterlieB. Die Aura ist Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah das sein mag, was sie hervorruft. In der Spur werden wir der Sache habhaft; in der Aura bemichtigt sie sich unser." Walter Benjamin, GesammelteSchriften,ed. RolfTiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhiuser, vol. 5, pt. 1 (Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 560. 69. Walter Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,"GesammelteSchriften,vol. 1, pt. 2 (1974), 471-508, at 479; cf. 440. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 80 Journal of the American Musicological Society Example 2 Franz Schubert, Symphony in C Major, D. 944, "Andante con moto" 1441. Fl. pp b. _ _ __ _ 1. Ob. pp Cl. (A) 1. _fin_ pp Cor. a2 (C) Tbn. Vi. dmP a 1dim. pp" dim. PP dim. div. Vc. Cb. P t~ This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumannand Romantic Distance 81 Example2 continued 150 Cor. (C) dim. dim. vi. VVc. dim. dim. Cb. Ob. ' =1•1. Cor. (C) P Tr. (A)- -_ VI. _ ____F1:d [semprestacc.] II Vla. S[semprestacc.] ' Cb. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 82 Journalof the American Musicological Society the surrounding sections; and finally, the clarinettaking over the horn part, no longer calling from afar. Nor did Schumann further pursue the link to the horn calls at the opening of the symphony and in the final movement (mm. 577-613). Such a simple analytical(or as Schleiermacherwould say, "comparative") exercise might have disturbed the poetic aura that he needed in his review to envoice the horn with the divine presence of a "heavenly guest." As a distant caller, disembodied from the orchestra, the horn became for him the transcendent "other"- a visitor from that "region we nowhere can remember having been before." Given Schumann's claim that "this symphony... had an effect among us like no other afterthe ones by Beethoven," perhapshe did, subliminally, remember.70Perhapsthat visitor was Beethoven, whose alternating chords in the first movement of the Fifth (second half of the development, mm. 210-27 and 233-39) seem to hover--nameless, but with a divine aura-over Schubert. Perhaps Schumann, visiting the graves of the two composers, heard Schubert (re)do that "desirablemoment" he himself wished to have: "looking into the face of a great man, grasping his hand."71 Thus, on the level of language about music, the poetic moment with which Schumann "takes leave" of the virtual analysis of Schubert's symphony parallelsNovalis's vision of philosophical prose dying away into distant philosophy. Analysis is prose; criticism is poetry-or distant analysis. The expression reminds us that criticism grows, or should grow, out of analysis;that analysisand criticism are deeply relatedmodes of musical perception.72 As a composer, Schumann knew that one needs to know the notes. But as a critic, trying to address a wider audience, he did not want to detach the work, through phenomenological or structuralanalysis, from both the author and the reader. Instead, he suspended the interpretive dialectic between distanciation and appropriation to follow the impulse behind the latter: "the actualisation of meaning as addressed to someone."73 Feeling for his readers,Schumann felt addressedby the "heavenlylength of the Symphony" that would, like a novel by Jean Paul, "allow for later recreation by the reader."Incomplete, the work creates the dialogic situation that is the premise for interpretation as appropriation, which "releases something like an event, . . an event in the present time."74This "event" is the moment of understanding. Thus, if a critical impulse lies behind Novalis's distant philosophy and Schumann's distant analysis, it isparadoxically-that poetic distance can undo prosaic distanciation by 70. Schumann, GesammelteSchriften1:464. 71. Ibid., 1:460. 72. On that point see David Lewin's "Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception,"Music Perception3, no. 4 (1986): 327-92, esp. part 5, "Perception and the Productive Modes of Behavior." 73. Ricoeur, Hermeneuticsand the Human Sciences,185. 74. Ibid. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 83 overcoming -momentarily- the gap between the saying and the said, between speech and writing, between author and text, between composition and commentary, between one reader or listener and another. This is how we might understand why Schumann chose his "heavenly guest" to speak for the "heavenly length" of Schubert's symphony. 3. Distant Events and the Textuality of Musical Memory I lefton the 21st. Witha melancholyheart,I took leaveof the wholeprecious home with a long, silentlook down fromMoslermountain;the autumnal morningwasshininglikea milddayin spring,andthe illuminatedworldwas tenderlyandcheerfullysmilingon my beautiful,lonelywandering.The momentof separationfromlovedones, andof farewell,givesour soulthe gentle melancholicminorchord,whichis seldomheard.All the bellsof pastchildhood, the present,and the futureflow into onechord-the shiningfuture would like to driveoutthe past, andso tender,undefinedfeelingsaregently fightingin our breast.... The eveningwaswonderful,andthe soulwas as it is on a still Friday;beforeAltenburgI sat down for a few hoursand rested peacefully,andfollowedthe settingsun with my eyes, andthe imageof the sijleHeimath[sweethome]appearedshyandtenderbeforemy eyesandsank like the partingand reddeningsun, like its last ray,still and stillerinto the gravesof the past.Theresestoodbeforeme andsangsoftly:sweethome.And whileI wasdozingoff in the evening,everyminuteof the dayandof thepast was darklywaftingby again,andlikethe gentleecho of the soul, I heardthe sounds melting and dying away and the last one tremblingsoftly: sweet home.75 Thus the eighteen-year-old Schumann reworked a letter to his mother for his diary, shortly after leaving home to continue his studies in Leipzig. In resorting to literaryreverie as an antidote for homesickness, Schumann and his self-indulgent nostalgia may strikeus today as hypersentimental;but for the young composer in searchof his vocation as a "romantic"artist, life was literature. Slipping into romantic imagery, he endowed a real event with a poetic aura: the wanderer, the gaze into the distant landscape, the dying sound. The relationship between the images is dynamic: the experience of spatial distance (Schumann'sgaze on the setting sun) conjuresup the memory of distant music (a Lied sung by his sister-in-lawTherese). In an earlier letter from 31 August 1828, Schumann had suggested to his mother, "Have Therese sing to you Reissiger's song sifle Heimath; I warble it to myself all the time."76 The song in question, the first of Carl Gottlieb Reissiger's Opus 50 published in the same year (see Fig. 4), was in fact 75. Schumann, Tagebiicher1:126-27. See also letter of 24 October 1828, in Schumann, 38-40. Jugendbriefe, 76. Letter of 31 August 1828, in Schumann, Jugendbriefe,34. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions eLt, le reI to hq (/r h. ile•i ./Fie IL fSl-Iim j.. -W Ab. A- . . . - I _--- ..i .. t• ,o.,. ,•, - - I??/- .. . . . . __ -: . _----•. . . : -.l • - - o 1 lit ...- MR__wo_ -- Figure 4 l "w•. - _- _• -l . _ Carl Gottlieb Reissiger, "Heimweh," Op. 50, no. 1. Courtesy of the Eda Kuhn Loeb M This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions #4w __ __~T._-~L~1T L_ r -t J.3 ilfid/f "01' M./ i//i/i /i.cf S/h//f/i li, /Ar/' /I /ertn// o/fw, 1r /,,.,dc i-///, fl, , Im ,ti hI Id t .InS/itrdt tnat/ e*ir/et zi/ der/'nh ,Ai' He'rIH,.'rotrrt i/t im//rh " it ,/' , er/,/fl,///" I e m, e ,",e.'.', _ . 1oriir' /d pI/•t// // derd ir bednr,. l Hf fle, b o 1.4"ifh pow/fCe.,i .4p•t/ .i l,.t, lI/t/ ,h/rrSdr:!lr eih//I,- ler' /','" / -' I /,4,•... ,.., ,-,s /s,/// fbe, /? . .Its ye, Hl,.w t/i..u r//vn .1•<der'/''/rtn/, h /1/ rd/" d'e bedivlp t, 97 Figure 4 continued This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions s,.,. 86 Journalof the American Musicological Society entitled "Heimweh" ("Homesickness"), but Schumann referredto it with the words from its adagio envoi, stfle Heimath, which seem to have remained in his ear. The fate of these words will concern us. Manfred Hermann Schmid has drawn attention to the striking connections between Reissiger's "Heimweh" and Schumann's "An Anna," one of the young composer's early efforts in the genre of the Lied between 1827 and 1829 (see Ex. 3a below)." The two songs share the same meter, a somewhat generic accompaniment of repeated eighth-note chords, and chromatic passing notes that provide the touch of sentimentalityprescribed in Reissiger's performance indication (mit Geflihl). These parallels hardly suffice to establish an intertextual relation, but more direct melodic allusions (discussed below) suggest that Schumann was indeed influenced by Reissiger's song when composing "An Anna" on 31 July 1828, four weeks before he told his mother to have Therese sing Reissiger's song to her. After Johannes Brahms incorporated Schumann's early songs in the 1893 supplement of the Gesamtausgabe,it became public knowledge that Schumann reworked "An Anna" as the slow movement of his Piano Sonata in F0 Minor, Op. 11 (as he did with another early song, "Im Herbste," for the Sonata in G Minor, Op. 22).78 In the sonata, Schumann gave the now textless song the title "Aria"and made a number of changes. Besides the transposition from F major to A major, immediately notable is the melody moving to the lower register in the middle section, where it is accompanied by arpeggiations in the right hand. Schumann also smoothed out the transitions to the flat submediant of the middle section by substituting the song's blunt V-I cadences with progressions employing semitonal voice leading. That the Aria appears more "refined" results from Schumann's growing awareness of the potential of the piano, as well as his greater experience as a composer. Keeping the melody and form of the vocal model largely intact, however, the sonata movement retained much of its original identity and character:indeed, the Aria had literally become a "Song without Words." Schmid therefore discussed it in connection with Schumann's June 1835 review of Mendelssohn's Liederohne Worte,Opp. 19 (1834) and 30 (1835), quoting the following passage: Who has not once sat at the pianoin twilight(a grandpianowould already sound too courtly)and in the midst of fantasizingsung to himselfa soft melody?If one canfortuitouslyconnectthe melodywith the accompaniment in the handsalone,andif one is mainlya Mendelssohn,then the most beautifulsongswithoutwordswill comeinto being.It would be easier,however, if one would set texts to music in the firstplace,eliminatethe words and 77. Manfred Hermann Schmid, Musik alsAbbild:Studienzum Werkvon Weber,Schumann und Wagner (Tutzing: Schneider, 1981), 71-89. 78. For a general introduction to the F #-Minor Sonata see Gregory W. Harwood, "Robert Schumann's Sonata in F-Sharp Minor: A Study of Creative Process and Romantic Inspiration," CurrentMusicology29 (1980): 17-30. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 87 presentthe resultto the world.Yetthis wouldnot be the rightthing, but, in fact, a kindof fraud[eineArt Betrug].79 Schmid insisted that a text could no longer be added to the Aria: its now wordless expression had become part of a purely musical remembrance (musikalischeErinnerungshaltung) in which Schumann transformed into sound the memories described in the letter to his mother. Schumann, thus acquitted, would not be guilty of "fraud."'This music," according to Schmid, "is not graspable"(ungreifbar), but grasps the listener through its specifically romantic tone-the tone from afar.80Schmid concluded that this "metaphysicaltrait" of the Aria is apparent "without having to know its real subject, the song."81 To summarize Schmid's conclusion: the text left no trace on the musical memory. While Schmid offers fascinating information about the Aria's layers of sources, his interpretation places the piece too securely in the category of absolute music. Has the song--the "realsubject"-really become obsolete in the Aria? Or is not the sonata movement, in a literal sense, more equivocal, shot through with other voices, half-heard and half-remembered? How, then, did the composer hear the Aria, and how do we hear it now, knowing what lay behind it? At issue is what might be called the "textuality"of musical memory in a Song without Words -one that originated as a song. Clearly, Schumann felt ambivalent about this textuality, as is evident from the two alternativeorigins of melody he imagined for this new genre. Whereas the origin in improvisation is difficult but authentic, the origin in stripping a song of its text is facile but fraudulent-or, to use Schumann's phrase about Papillons,"a foolish beginning" (see his letter to Henriette Voight quoted above). He alluded to the problem in the continuation of his review of Mendelssohn, which is not quoted by Schmid: "Still, one could test how definitely music can express feelings by asking the poet (who would not be told about his own words) to lay a new text under his song. If the new text were to coincide with the old one, then this would be yet another testimony to the sureness of musical expression."82 Schumann's"experiment"betrays a deep concern about the relationship between musical and linguistic expression.83His hypothetical tone seems 79. Schumann, GesammelteSchriften1:98. Schmid, Musik als Abbild, 84. 80. Schmid, Musik alsAbbild, 84. 81. Ibid., 84 and 87: "Das Gehorte ist nur Erscheinung. Diesen 'metaphysischen'Zug der Aria spuirtman, ohne den realen Gegenstand, das Lied, kennen zu miissen"; and 86: "Diese Erinnerung beschreibt Schumann hier noch, einige Jahre spiter komponiert er sie. Was im Tagebuch in Worte gefa&ftist, wird durch die Aria in Musik verwandelt. Die Aria ist musikalische Erinnerung-Musik fiber Musik." 82. Schumann, GesammelteSchriften1:98. 83. Schumann did not meet Mendelssohn personally until later in 1835 and could not have known the latter'sbelief in the greater definiteness of musical over verbal expression, laid down in his famous 1842 letter to Marc-AndreSouchay. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy,Briefe This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 88 Journalof the American Musicological Society to call into question "the sureness of musical expression," precisely because of his uncertainty about successfully setting words into music and then putting music (back) into words. Moreover, if we replace in the review the word "poet" with "critic,"the experiment encapsulates what had become one of Schumann's major challenges during the time he was working on the sonata: the task of the critic, who "lays a new text" under the music for his readers. As noted earlier, Schumann was an extraordinarilyselfreflective critic, enjoying both the benefit and the burden of being a composer himself. Thus his view of the alternative origin of Songs without Words may well have been informed in part by his own compositional experience. Strikingly, however, the Aria exemplifies not just one but both possible origins of "melody," and thus falls, uneasily perhaps, between two kinds of musical memory: with words and without. Let us firsttrace the words. Reissiger's simple and strophic song matches the one-dimensional mood and frequent internal repetitions of its poetry. The word Heimath occurs six times in the first strophe and twenty-eight times altogether in the five strophes, including the repetitions of the last line. If Schumann remembered "Heimweh" sung by his sister-in-law and also "warbl[ed] it to [himself]," the song would indeed have gone around in his head for days, perhaps weeks. Thus Schumann may have been inspired to set the phrase "siiBe Heimath" in Justinus Kerner's poem "An Anna" (a soldier's farewell to his bride from the battlefield) to the same "sweet" 2-1 appoggiatura that Reissiger used in the adagio envoi of his song (see Ex. 3a).84 The appoggiatura is prefigured in measure 9 of Reissiger's song, setting the refrainlikefifth line--"In der Heimath wohnt die Liebe"--and thereby also repeating "Heimath" through all five stanzas. Schumann may have "heard"more: the four-note turn at the beginning of Reissiger's envoi saturates the melody of "An Anna": the figure recurs transposed in measure 4, it shapes the opening of the D -major middle section in measure 16, and it blends into theAbgesang of Schumann'souter sections, when the melody descends from f" to a' ("du stisses Leben, denk' ich dein"). In Reissiger's song, the corresponding descent from f#"to b' in the third measure had "Heimath" only in the first stanza, but the related descent in measure 11 carriedthe word throughout the song in the equally refrainlike sixth line, "In der Heimath wohnt die Lust." In short, Schumann's ostensibly arbitrarymelodic allusions to the song that he had been "warbling"to himself may well have been guided by the very word ringing in his ears and reverberatingin his "soul":Heimath. aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1847, ed. Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Carl Mendelssohn Bartholdy, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1875), 346-47. 84. Justinus Kerner,AusgewfihltepoetischeWerke,vol. 1, Die lyrischenGedichte(Stuttgart: Cotta, 1878), 24-29. "An Anna" is part of a cycle of six poems called "Episteln," letters exchanged between a soldier and his bride, Anna. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Example 3 Robert Schumann, "An Anna" vs. Piano Sonata in F# Minor, Op. 11, "Aria" m.30 (a) An Anna Andante _ p Nichtim _- Tha- le der siis-sen Hei- math beimGe- Introduzione m. 22 sorto voce (c) Aria m.41 -r'- L 7- rienuo - - - - - - - - - - - SRechte - - - - - Rechte p semplice This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions mur 90 Journalof the American Musicological Society If Schumann had originally sought to recapturethe mood of Reissiger's Heimwehin his own "An Anna," he may no longer have cared much for the poem's sentimental content when reworking the song into the Aria half a decade later. Yet his "setting" of the word "Heimath" in the Aria would suggest otherwise. The most marked moment in this respect is the return of the song's first occurrence of "Heimath" in the third section: in "An Anna," the melody reaches the tonic third immediately, but the Aria postpones that melodic "resolution"until the end (see Ex. 3b). Here, in a coda added by Schumann, the opening phrase returns twice (see Ex. 3c). First stated in the original register, the melody finallytouches the tonic third c."' on "Heimath." Thus the Aria's "vocal" line "resolves" into the A-major tonic triad, suggesting that "siife Heimath" are the last words to be heard, not sung but "sweetly" transfigured.Moreover, unlike the song, the melody of the Aria ends on the fifth scale degree. This segment of the melody is echoed once again: first hidden in the accompaniment's middle register and then - finally- leaving its last three notes dying away alone. One could hear this ending with Schumann's letter to his mother in mind: his poetic account of Therese singing Reissiger's song first transformed into "An Anna" and then into the Aria. "And like the mostdistant echoof the soul, I heard the sounds melting and dying away and the last one trembling softly: sweet home."85 Did Schumann hear these words? If so, they must have struck himby his own critical standards-as "a kind of fraud":a Song without Words created by stripping a preexisting song of its text. So long as "An Anna" remained unpublished, Schumann had of course no reason to fear detection of its "fraudulent"appropriation in the sonata, let alone any deeply hidden private association. Nor would naming its slow movement after a vocal genre have necessarilyaroused the listener'ssuspicion; after all, "airs" were part of the eighteenth-century suite.86 More importantly still, in the sonata's fantasia-like Introduzione, the melody of the Aria already emerged, sottovoce,from the many rising seconds that prefigure the characteristicanacrusisof its incipit and graduallyapproach its entrance on e'/e" in measure 22 (see Ex. 3b). Tentative and fragmentary, as well as severed at its seams, however, this is not yet the sweeping line that Schumann brings under a single slur in the Aria by smoothing out the double dotting and suturing the segments. Melody in the process of creation? The sottovocemelody never returnsin the firstmovement, even when the introduction reemerges in F minor during the development (mm. 26879). Its later return as the Aria does not obey the rationale of reprise, but 85. Quoted here from the letter, which has "the most distant echo" (emphasis mine) instead of the diary's "gentle echo." 86. The title of the slow movement (Andantino) of his G-Minor Sonata, Op. 22, does not allude to its vocal origin. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumannand Romantic Distance 91 of reminiscence: followstheirrationality no longervoluntary composition but involuntary memory, which appears, as the performance marking has it, senza passionema espressivo.If, then, according to his review of Mendelssohn, Schumann himself had produced a fraudulent Song without Words, he might have wanted to conceal that very fraud by having the Aria originatein the introductionof the sonatafromimprovisation:fromsitting "at the piano in twilight ... and in the midst of fantasizing [singing] to himself a soft melody"-surely a method of composition he cherished.87 Thus "created"in the first movement, this sottovoce,this soft voice, is "re- membered"in the second.Caughtbetweenthe aestheticsof vocaland absolute music-between song and sonata-the Ariadescendedfrom song, but appears to havesprungfrommusicalone.Forthe listener,the Ariawas instrumental music, its metaphysicsa logocentrismwithout logos. purely But in Schumann's "soul," the words "stife Heimath" may still have died away with their melody. And now that we know those words, might we not hearthem as well? 4. Distant Mountains and the Musical Landscape Standingthus on the verytop of the mountain,recognizingnothingin the cold clouds,andgazingupon immenseoceansof fog, I felt an inexpressible melancholyandthoughtI was the only humanbeingon earth.88 Thus Schumann recalled an impression from his "Italian Journey" in a letter he drafted in Mantua on 27 September 1829. His experience of the sublime landscape is archetypally romantic (as painted, for instance, in Caspar David Friedrich's famous Der Wandereriiber dem Nebelmeer). Numerous descriptions of Alpine journeys by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, among them Lord Byron, could have provided the traveling student with the vocabulary--already a cliche--for his own 87. See Schumann's letter to Clara Wieck from 11 February 1838: "I have done almost nothing but compose for four weeks, as I alreadywrote you; it just flowed; I always sang along while composing-and then I was most of the time successful." In The CompleteCorrespondenceofClara and RobertSchumann,ed. Eva Weissweiler, trans. Hildegard Fritsch and Ronald L. Crawford, 2 vols. (New York and Frankfurt:Peter Lang, 1994, 1996), 1:102 (translation modified). 88. Siegfried Kross, ed., Briefeund Notizen Robertund Clara Schumanns(Bonn: Bouvier, 1978), 23: "Cosi stando nella somma cima della montagna e niente conoscendo delle nuvole fredde e guardando in immensi oceani delle nebbie io senti una malinconia indicibile e mi credesti il solo della terra uomo." No attempt has been made to render Schumann's rather broken Italian in translation. Descriptions of this kind from journeys through southern Germany abound in Schumann's early diaries. To pick one example from his journey to Heidelberg: "Riidesheim was mirrored in the waves, which the moon magically transfigured.On the other side, in the distance, was the St. Roch Chapel-my heart was completely filled." Schumann, Tagebiicher1:51. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 92 Journalof the American Society Musicological impressions of the mountains. But for the young composer, personal experience nourished his inclination toward aesthetic reflection, and vice versa. Thus "mountaintops" had figured prominently in an aphorism that he had jotted down in his diary for his Jean Paulesque treatiseDie Tonwelt: Aus dem Tagebuchder hell. Caecilia, written the year before. In it, Schumann made an explicit association between music and landscape on the grounds of their ability to express the inexpressible: "In human beings reposes a great, immense Something which no tongue can proclaim, because it is too unearthly; but we feel it on high mountains, or during the sunset, or when hearing soft sounds.""89 In a monograph-length chapter of his book The Romantic Generation, Charles Rosen has recently documented the affinity between landscape painting and music in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aesthetics.90 Drawing upon a variety of literary sources, theoretical texts, and landscape descriptions, he reappraisesthe romantic genre of the song cycle and concludes, climacticallyperhaps, with a discussion of Schumann's Davidsbzndlertanzeas a song cycle without words. We will take an alternative route toward that same goal, namely, the cycle's ending with a piece entitled "Wie aus der Ferne" ("As from afar").While crossing Rosen's path, however, we will pursue different sources closer to Schumann's environment--sources that deal specificallywith the relationship between the temporal and spatial dimensions of romantic distance. Finally, new evidence about the musical origins of Davidsbzindlertfinzewill take us a surprising step beyond our goal. Within the larger shift from imitative to expressive aesthetics in the late eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries, the increasing prestige of instrumental versus vocal music paralleledthat of landscape versus history painting. At issue in music was the status of verbal language, in painting, the position of the human subject within the world on the canvas. Traditional history painting--depicting heroic, tragic, or fateful moments in history, mythology, and religion--had served the collective needs of a particular community involved with that moment in a direct or allegorical way. But the representationof nature in landscape painting became both a reflection of and a foil for individual experience. According to Rosen, landscape was now experienced through a "double time scale," in which the "long-range time" of naturalhistory merges with the "fleeting sensation of the moment" that belongs, as it were, to the personal history of the beholder.91 89. Schumann, Tagebuicher1:99 (29 July 1828). For the text of the treatise see Frauke Otto, RobertSchumannalsJean Paul-Leser(Frankfurtam Main: Haag und Herchen, 1984), 67. See also the letter from 2 October 1828 to Wilhelm G6tte, in Schumann,Jugendbriefe,36; and the diary entry from Schumann's journey to Munich, in Schumann, Tagebacher1:65: "Beautiful view--melancholy--and deep longing for a great Something." 90. "Mountains and Song Cycles," in Rosen, The RomanticGeneration,124-236. 91. Ibid., 135-42, at 139. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumannand Romantic Distance 93 In this sense, Schumann'sexperience of loneliness facing the Alps speaks to his isolationfromthe humancollective,thus makinghim susceptibleto sublimenature.Such isolation being overwhelmedby incommensurable, hadits traumaticside,namelymelancholy;butthe absenceof humanaction from nature made room for a different experience of landscape. On 16 May 1832, the almost twenty-two-year-old Schumann copied into his diary this excerpt from the Kunstblatt, a forum for the discussion of current aesthetic issues: Whathas been takenreallydeeplyoutof natureis more deep and universal thanthe artisthimselfknows;forit alsoawakensresponsesin suchsphereshe couldnot know:it opensfor everybodydifferentperspectiveson life, just as nature,becomeslost in those pereverybody,in meaningful,characteristic spectives,togetherwith differentimagesand feelings,when the landscape opens towarda beautifuldistance.92 The passagemay have caught Schumann'seye becauseit describeshow natureelicits from the beholdera sense of being lost. When landscape "openstowarda beautifuldistance,"it createsa doubleopening:without andwithin.Yetthis openingcan be filledwith individualmemory,replac- ing or superseding the collective commemoration of history painting. To illustrate how landscape triggers personal memories, Rosen cites from Louis Ramond de Carbonnieres's 1789 Observationsfaitesdans lesPyrindes a passage describing the descent from the glacier above the circus of Gavarnie during sunset: I took pleasurein thisvaguereverieso nearto sadness,arousedbythe images of the past;I extendedon to Naturethe illusionthat she had causedto be born, by uniting with her, in an involuntarymovement,the times and the eventsof which she had stirredup the memory;I ceasedto be isolatedin these wild places;a secretand indefinableintelligenceestablisheditself between them andme; and alone,on the banksof the torrentof Gedro,alone but underthatskywhichsaw allthe agesflow awayandwhichencompasses all the climates,I abandonedmyselfwith emotionto a securityso sweet,to this profoundsentimentof coexistenceinspiredby the fieldsof one's own country.93 If, in this proto-Proustian experience, landscape stirred up the mimoire involuntaire,music did so as well. Let us juxtapose Ramond's visual feast with this passage from the 1785 "empfindsam"novel Andreas Hartknopf by Karl Philipp Moritz: Everyonewill havenoticedat leasta few timesin theirlife that some otherwise utterlymeaninglesstone, heard,say, in the distance,has a quite wonderfuleffect on the soul if the mood is right; it is as though a thousand 92. Schumann, Tagebiicher1:390. The Kunstblattwas the supplement to the Morgenblatt fir gebildete Sta'nde. 93. Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 151-52. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 94 Journalof the American Society Musicological memories,a thousanddim ideashadawakenedallat oncewith thistone and melancholy.94 transportedthe heartinto an indescribable the thousand a memories: here music and landindescribable, Melancholy, scapes converge in Poesie,which August Wilhelm Schlegel capturedin Novalis's and Jean Paul's spirit as "music for the inner ear, and painting for the inner eye, but half-heard music, but painting fading away."'9 It is not simply landscape and music, then, that are poetic, but distant landscapes and distant music. For early nineteenth-century composers and music critics, the elective affinity between distant landscape and distant music went both ways: from landscape to music and vice versa. Let us consider first the "musical"experience of a distant landscape in this little-known passage from CarlMaria von Weber's unfinished novel TonkiinstlersLeben: The contemplationof a landscapeis to me the performanceof a piece of music.I feelthe whole,withoutdwellingon the detailswhichproduceit; in a word, the landscapeis movingwithinme, strangelyenough,in time. It is a successivepleasure.... WhilestandingstillI look fixedlyinto the distance, this picturealmostalwaysconjuresup a parallelmusicalimagefromthe relatedspiritworldof my fantasy,one whichI mayperhapsthen takea fancy to, secure,and develop.96 Weber's transformation of sight into sound is inverted by Franz Brendel, Schumann'ssuccessor as editor of the Neue ZeitschrizftfirMusik,in his tribute to Schumann's early works for piano: Schumann'scompositionscan often be comparedwith landscapepaintings in which the foregroundgains prominencein sharplydelineatedclearcontourswhilethe backgroundbecomesblurredandvanishesin a limitlessperspective;they maybe comparedwith a mistylandscape,in whichonly here and therea sunlitobjectstandsout. Thus the compositionscontaincertain principalpassages,then otherpassagesthat should by no meansstandout clearly,and are intendedonly to serveas background;some passagesare points lit by raysof sunlight,othersfadeawayin blurredcontours.To this innerpeculiaritycorrespondsthe exteriorone thatSchumannis veryfondof playingwith the constantlydepressedpedal,so that the harmoniesdo not emergewith particularclarity.97 94. Quoted in Dahlhaus, The Idea ofAbsoluteMusic, 61. 95. See AthentiumsfragmentNo. 174, in KritischeFriedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, Jean-JacquesAnstett, and Hans Eichner, vol. 2 (Munich: Schoningh, 1967), 193. 96. Carl Maria von Weber, Simtliche Schriften,ed. Georg Kaiser (Berlin: Schuster und Loeffler, 1908), 452. For an alternative translation see Carl Maria von Weber, Writings on Music, trans. Martin Cooper, ed. John Warrack(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 324. 97. Franz Brendel, "Robert Schumann mit Ruicksichtauf Mendelssohn-Bartholdy und die Entwicklung der modernen Tonkunst iiberhaupt,"Neue ZeitschriftffirMusik 22 (1845): 89-90. Translation adapted from Franz Brendel, "Robert Schumann with Reference to Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the Development of Modern Music in General," trans. Jiirgen This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 95 For both Weber and Brendel, then, the creative transformation of music into painting, or the comparison between them, hinges on the experience of distance that dissolves space into time and vice versa, such that ontological "space"and "time" become a psychological fusion of "space-time" -the realm of romantic synaesthesia. Any early nineteenth-century aesthetician would have recognized the transgressive nature of such a transformation in light of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's both canonical and controversial 1766 essay Laokoon;or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry, which posited that painting captured best the essence of an ongoing action in a single instant, whereas the domain of poetry (including music) depicted best such action in succession.98 Given its rigidity, Lessing's distinction between the temporal and the spatial is a useful point of departure for discussing more concretely how distance broke down that distinction in a musical composition. Brendel compared Schumann's piano music and landscape paintings in conjunction with the Fantasiestiicke,Op. 12, notably "Des Abends" and "In der Nacht," and the analogy is apt given that night and twilight tend to confound our sense of space and time. But his image is equally if not more fitting for the first half of'"Wie aus der Ferne," the penultimate number of Schumann's 1838 Davidsbiindlertanze,Op. 6, published in two books of nine dances.99 The most direct invocation of distance in "'Wie aus der Ferne" is the echo of the opening melody in the lower register (see Ex. 4).100 The sense of depth, moreover, results from layers added to the melody and its echo: a bass pedal and a sustained voice pulsating in the middle register. Executing this texture on the piano requires those permanently lifted dampers that Brendel and others observed when they heard Schumann playing.'0 Therefore the overall impression of 'Wie aus der Ferne" Thym, in Schumann and His World, ed. R. Larry Todd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994): 317-37, at 322-23. 98. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon:An Essayon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). See especially sections 3 (pp. 19-22) and 12 to 16 (pp. 66-84). The currencyof Lessing's view is evident from Johann Georg Sulzer'sAllgemeine Theorieder Schinen Kuinstein einzeln, nach alphabetischerOrdnung der Kunstwiirterauf einanderfolgendenArtikeln abgehandelt,2d ed. (Leipzig: in der Weidmannschen Buchhandlung, 1792; reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1994), 224, which has under the entry Augenblick: "The moment of an event, which the history painter has chosen to represent. Because in a painting no sequence of events takes place, but everything stands still, only a single indivisible point in time from a story can be presented in a painting." 99. Schumann revised the work in 1850/51 in part by taking out the "poetic"inscriptions and references to Florestan and Eusebius, his musical and literary double persona. 100. See Peter Kaminsky, "Principles of Formal Structure in Schumann's Early Piano Cycles," Music TheorySpectrum11 (1989): 222. See also Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 232. 101. Thus Otto Lorenz recalled: "Schumann's playing received its peculiar sound through his almost constant use of the pedal, though in such a carefully discrete way that no This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 96 Journalof the American Society Musicological easily compares to Brendel's image of a landscape with a blurred harmonic background against which melodic shapes stand out like sunlit objects. But representation of distance in the piece appears to exist primarilyon the surface, as spatial distance. Indeed, in sketching some fundamental aspects of how we experience time and space in music, Robert Morgan noted that in music "variationsin texture ... produce an effect that is unmistakenly 'spatial' in quality."'02 Schumann thus seems to "imitate," or to "paint,"with sound. In his essay "On Some Relations Between Music and Painting," Adorno remarked about such imitation: Musicthat"paints"... nearlyalwayssuffersa loss of temporalorganization, [andthereby]lets go of the synthesizingprinciplethroughwhich, alone,it assumesa form approachingspace.... The moment one art imitatesanother, it becomesmore distantfrom it by repudiatingthe constraintof its own material,andfallsinto syncretism,in the vaguenotion of an undialectical continuumof artsin general.... The artsconvergeonly where each pursuesits immanentprinciplein a pureway.103 Primarily a reaction against Debussy and Stravinsky, Adorno's stance is a remote reflex of Lessing, who drew a strict boundary between the arts. Thus Adorno claimed, "In a picture, everything is simultaneous.... The more emphatically a painting presents itself, the more time is stored up in it."104 By rejecting the purely impressionistic depiction of space in music, Adorno advocates what Morgan has called "logical space" or conceptual space in music, which is essentially a "spaceof relationships"that draws on the notions of pitch space, harmonic space, or formal space.105Morgan illustrates this "logical space" with Heinrich Schenker's conceptualization of tonal space: "a space that is at once unique, in that it encompasses the particular set of structural-temporal relationships found in that single work; and general, in that these relations are shown to derive from and exist within the unchanging space of the background."106Adorno posits a similar paradox: when the "synthesizing principle"connects diachronically different motivic, thematic, and tonal events (what Morgan described as "a disturbing mixture of heterogeneous harmonies occurred."One evening, Alfred Ddrffel heard Schumann improvising his Nachtsticke in an earlystage: "It alwayssounded as if the pedal was half depressed; so the shapes became blurred.But the melody was distinct, as it is, for instance, appropriatefor the second number." Quoted in Gustav Jansen,Die Davidsbindler:Aus Robert Schumann'sSturm und Drang Periode(Leipzig: Breitkopf und Hirtel, 1883), 72 and 74. 102. Robert P. Morgan, "MusicalTime/Musical Space," CriticalInquiry 6 (1980): 52738, at 528. 103. Theodor W. Adorno, "On Some Relationships Between Music and Painting," trans. Susan Gillespie, Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 66-79, at 67. 104. Ibid., 69 and 75. 105. Morgan, "MusicalTime/Musical Space," 532, 529. 106. Ibid., 532. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann and Romantic Distance Example 4 Ferne" 97 Robert Schumann, Davidsbhindlertfinze,Op. 6, Book 2, no. 8, "VWieaus der ausderFerne . = 126 WVie 8. , i --~P 10 br L-~ bI • bC b br 15 Af Ar+• I , ,Ir . . . " [LI-:• ,+ .. .. , . .:• 7" - •• ••-- + +'- 1-i . _• • - , U_ sf fi .I ", ,. ,,5+.0,•, 19 . - . ... i A f.,t i •• , 1..•I•I+R - . .. 15r ... • - lWm .... --M?Il Man""%% PI+••r I 2., I , I I l . m " '" I +••''">, .' ', -. " -t , ,. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions • l • • --.--- ', - , , 98 Journal of the American Musicological Society Example 4 continued P 2 'r , 32 r , rit. p 42v J.h JJ . This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumannand Romantic Distance 99 Example4 continued 47ritard. , . •-A --. ..* =I IM.._.N do not last in properrenditionsevenor fifteenminutes,but only one last,whichredeemsit. The illusionof frozentime-that movementslikethe theseremarksbyBrendel,), upBeethoven, itaswere,inthe time isstoredtting comfixed set of synchronicm and Mendelssohn:ts of frozSchumann foilast, wforhich redeems illucussion it. The likethe 107. Ibid., 529. For one recent alternativeto a Schenkerianconception of musical space, see Fred Lehrdahl's 'Tonal Pitch Space,"Music Perception5, no. 3 (1988): 315-49. 108. Theodor W. Adorno, "Uber die musikalischeVerwendung des Radios," Gesammelte Schriften15 (1976), 369-401, at 376. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 100 Journalof the American Musicological Society The strengthof Beethoven'sgenius,however,is confirmedin that, afterthe most powerfulstruggle,afterattendingto the mostdiversifiedaspects,he is, in the end, ableto developanoverridingperspectivethatcontrolstheseparts andforgesthem into a unity. Beethovencreatedthe most richlystructuredtotality;he was led in this directionby historicalnecessity.109 For Brendel, this historical necessity eventually led Beethoven from the "highest peak" attained in the genre of the symphony to the more "characteristic," often word-based, music of his late style, which the younger generation of composers, including Schumann, emulated by creating "selfcontained tone paintings" that captured definite (i.e., poetic) sentiments "in a smaller frame.""11From this point of view, Beethoven would be a history painter, one who does not merely representa heroic "moment"- for instance in his cantataDerglorreicheAugenblick, Op. 136, written for the Vienna Congress in 1814 and often dismissed by embarrassedcritics as a casual work--but who actuallypresentshis own heroism in the "Eroica": what Wagner called Beethoven's unerhiirteTat, his "unheard-of deed.""' Today, however, we tend to look upon Beethoven's musical heroism with an ambivalent mixture of admiration and resistance- admiration for the music, but resistance to its formalist, universalist, and nationalist reception.112To be sure, we no longer believe, as Brendel did, in the "historical necessity" of such heroism, nor do we uncritically endorse the cultural values attached to it. The critical move, then, is to differentiate, as Scott Burnham put it, between Beethoven's hero and Beethoven Hero.13a In terms of Ricoeur's hermeneutic theory, we can "distance"ourselves from Beethoven Hero as a figure too invested with ideologies of different kinds. But we may "appropriate"Beethoven's hero to understand Schumann's music as non-heroic-not "anti-heroic,"since Ricoeur's interpretive dialectic is not the historical dialectic that the Hegelian Brendel invoked when he portrayed Schumann and Mendelssohn as heirs to the "subjective"and "objective"Beethoven, respectively.114Thus, if Beethoven "mastered"the tension within the "'Romantic Hero of Sensibility': the urge to be subsumed in a greater organic whole struggl[ing] against the urge to be passionately individual and self-assertive"; if he created "the 'superclosure' 109 Brendel, "Robert Schumann with Reference to Mendelssohn-Bartholdy," 318-19. 110. Ibid., 319-20. 111. Richard Wagner, GesammelteSchriften und Dichtungen, 2d ed. (Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1887), 1:147. 112. See Scott Burnham, BeethovenHero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 113. See ibid., 162-68, for Burnham'sown ambivalence about the slippage between the two. 114. See Mark Evan Bonds, "Sinfoniaanti-eroica:Berlioz's Harold en Italie and the Anxiety of Beethoven's Influence,"Journal ofMusicology10 (1992): 417-63; Sanna Pederson, "On the Task of the Music Historian: The Myth of the Symphony After Beethoven," Repercussions2 (1993): 5-30; and Brendel, "Robert Schumann with Reference to MendelssohnBartholdy," 334. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 101 effect of the 'organicallyunified musical masterpiece,' " so that "there is no world beyond the piece, no fading horizon, no vanishing point of perspective,""15then Schumann's Romanticism painted a different picture in "Wie aus der Ferne":a world beyond the piece, a fading horizon, and a vanishing point of perspective. "Wie aus der Ferne" is run on from the B-minor 'Trio" of the preceding "Mit gutem Humor" (a scherzo by definition of its programmatic title), thus thwarting the expected return of its A section in G major. When the 'Trio" gradually loses momentum and sinks into the lower register, it leaves F# dying away both as sustained note and as syncopated repetition; this will be the most pervasive gesture for the next fifty measures, the first half of "Wie aus der Ferne." Its unmarked beginning seems odd, yet appropriate for a musical representation of a distant landscape. The impression is that of a painting without a frame, which of course suits the boundlessness of its subject. Schumann traversesthe boundary between the "formal"scherzo and the following musical painting by invading the Trio with three F # octaves, hammered out against the pianissimochords, rising to A, and eventually turning into the transitional F# pedal. The gesture belongs to what Peter Kaminsky has called a network of "cross reference between movements" in Davidsbiindlertfinze,in which the threefold F #s establish "the surfacemotivic relationship"between Book 1, no. 3, "Etwas hahnbiichen" ("A bit rough"), and the Trio of "Mit gutem Humor.""6 In "Etwashahnbiichen,"the repeated F# s occur in measures 7-8, emphasized rather markedly with three consecutive forte signs. With the return of the opening section, they appear first in the left hand followed by the right hand (Exx. 5c1 and c2). The origin of this enigmatic gesture may have remained undetected thus far because Schumann concealed it so cleverly. Its source, however, seems to hold the key to the remarkabledouble invocation of musical distance in "Wie aus der Ferne"and Schumann'snew, nonheroic, vision of musical form. As is well known, Clara Wieck was the primary inspiration for Davidsbfindlertiinze,which Schumann began on 20 August 1837, "less than a week after receiving Clara's'yes' " that sealed their engagement."7 His letters to his fianc&espeak warmly of her presence in the work: There are manywedding motifs in the Tiinze--I wrote them in the most wonderfulstateof excitationthat I can everremember.I'll explainthem to you sometime. My Clarawill findout what'sin the Tanze;they arededicatedto her more than anythingelse of mine-the story is a bachelor'sparty,and you can 115. Burnham,BeethovenHero, 121. Burnham here draws on Peter Thorslev, TheByronic Hero: Typesand Prototypes(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 116. Kaminsky, "Principlesof Formal Structure,"219 and 220. 117. See John Daverio, RobertSchumann:Herald of a 'Cew PoeticAge" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 158. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 102 Journalof the American Society Musicological imaginethe beginningandthe end. If everI was happyat the piano,it was when I composedthem. I thinkthey Youhaven'tlookeddeeplyenoughinto myDavidsbiindlertiinze; arequitedifferent fromCarnavalandareto the latterasfacesareto masks.But I canbe mistakensinceI haven'tforgottenthemyet. One thing I know:they wereconceivedin joy while the otherone was often difficultandpainful.lls Commentators to date have located Clara'smusical involvement with the cycle in the "Motto by C.W." taken from the Mazurka in her Soireesmusicales,Op. 6. This was surely not the first instance of Schumann's borrowings from her compositions: the theme of her Romance varide, Op. 3 became the theme for his Impromptus,Op. 5; the "Scene fantastique"from her Quatre Pidcescaracteristiques, Op. 5, no. 4 inspired motivic connections to the F#-Minor Sonata; and the "Valse allemande" in Carnaval took its opening gesture from Clara's 1835 Valsesromantiques,Op. 4 (markedx in Exx. 5a' and b; see also Ex. 6). Given that Robert and Clara exchanged musical ideas to the point that, in Nancy Reich's words, "it is often difficult to determine the origin of many musical ideas they shared,"ll9 we may hear Clara's Valses-varying in mood, key, and gesture, and organized as a cycle (the opening dance returns at the end) -as a creative response to Papillons. But they may well have inspired Schumann to write his own cycle of "dances." Aside from the "Motto by C.W.," one trace of that inspiration seems to have been Clara's first waltz, which Schumann had already used in Carnaval. In Davidsbiindlertinze, however, Schumann alludes more obliquely to the opening figure of the waltz. The repeated F#s and the following descent to A (later to A#) in "Etwas hahnbuchen"change the eighth notes in Clara'sextended upbeat into quarternotes, but because Schumann preserves the metric position in triple time, the connection remains audible (Exx. 5c0 and c2). Moreover, he realizes the harmonic implications of the original figure, beginning on the third scale degree, differently: as a V-i (F /b). He thus begins, as in the "Valseallemande"from Carnaval, on the fifth scale degree, but unlike in Carnaval he keeps the melodic scale intact. Strikingly, Claraherself makes an unusual move to an F0 pedal as the dominant of B minor in the middle section of her waltz.120 While she expands the descent from F# to A# in measures 17-20, her gesture of "hammering 118. Letters of 31 December 1837, 6 February 1838, and 19 March 1838, in Weissweiler, CompleteCorrespondence, 1:76, 94-95, and 130. 119. Nancy B. Reich, Clara Schumann:TheArtist and the Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 231. 120. Surely the constellation of B and C and F# is central to DavidsbUndlertanze.Further investigation is needed to determine whether there are more connections. Some similarities between motivic gestures spring to the eye: for instance, the octaves in Schumann's Book 2, no. 4 relate to the section beginning in measure 57 of the Valses.And the dotted rhythms in Book 1, no. 9 are reminiscent of the grace notes in Clara'sscherzandowaltz in B61major (beginning in m. 89). This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumannand Romantic Distance Example5 (a) Clara Wieck, Valsesromantiques,Op. 4 (a') (a (a) - m. m. 173 173 fII I FF•N I I I OP ,, r . .9 . sf [sf1 (c) Robert Schumann, Daridsbndlertnze, (C) .I ,•,, m. m.7/75 7n5 5 iL. 9 ?M. f -rWg• ,. --------r 76 sf p. 6 ("Etwas hahnbnde")chen") • r . F I M. . 35 ("Wie aus der Fee")twashahnb Schumann,Dasidblendlertnze (c) Robert This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 103 104 Journalof the AmericanMusicologicalSociety out" the F0s in the retransition to the first section (mm. 21-24; see Ex. 6), may have rung in Schumann's ears--loudly enough, as it were, to intrude into "Etwas hahnbtichen"and, more distantly, into the Trio of "Mit gutem Humor" (see Ex. 5d). This intrusion helps to assert the new tonal area, linking the B-minor Trio with the B-major "Wie aus der Ferne," which seems to prolong F# endlessly. This prolongation compares to the unlimited perspective in Brendel'slandscapepainting, and the more animatedmiddle section, touchingon F major,standsoutasa passage"litbyraysof sunlight" (mm. articulated 17-34; seeEx.4). Thefleetingly form,however,is difternary ferentfromthe one projectedby the precedingscherzo,whichit truncates. BecauseF neverdescendsin the firstpartof "WieausderFerne"(even thoughtherearecadencesto thetonic),closureis deniedat the end.The "structural"listener is deprived of a last measure that would "redeem"the first and create an image of completeness. This lack of closure may indeed indicate the "loss of temporal organization," lamented by Adorno for "musicthat paints."Yet Adorno's rhetoric is problematic: the "loss of temporal organization" does not correspond to a lack of musical logic in the conceptual space of Schumann's cycle. In Schenkerian terms, extended pedals, like the F# dominant pedal, often articulate in the foreground a background prolongation. What looks like an infinitely extended "painted" background on the surface of "Wie aus der Ferne" corresponds to the underlying shift in the tonal background: from the G tonic of the Scherzo to a B tonic in the Trio. Moreover, in the abstract- inner- "spaceof relationships,"the move from G to B duplicates Schumann'sextension of Clara'smotto from G to B at the beginning of the cycle.121In the sensual space of the surface, on the other hand, the shift seems to be triggered by the repeated F#s from outside: from "Etwashahnbiichen" and, by extension, Clara's"Valse."Clara, as it were, inhabits both spaces: inner and outer. Through this combination of logical space and painted space, music and painting converge in "Wie aus der Ferne"-not, however, through the antithesis of extremes, which Adorno's negative dialectic dogmatically posited, but as their synthesis.122Instead, music and painting, time and space, merge in the distance of a common vanishing point. This merging of inner and outer space marks the moment of the cycle that is most "poetic" in August Wilhelm Schlegel's sense: "music for the inner ear, and painting for the inner eye, but half-heardmusic, but painting fading away." After the seemingly infinite expansion into the distance of 121. For other "synthesizing"uses of the motto see both Kaminsky, "Principlesof Formal Structure,"217-24; and Rosen, The Romantic Generation,223-24 and 229-32. 122. Cf. Adorno, "On Some Relations Between Music and Painting," 67: "In their contradiction, the arts merge into one another." This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumannand Romantic Distance Op. 4, beginning Example6 ClaraWieck,Valsesromantiques, Andante ritenuto Allegro IFEl i 1• L A -- A - S-- f 1 23+• .. -"F ii . A IJ ' . . g • +J 2.,E. ,. J J J ,J , This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 105 106 Journalof the American Society Musicological Example6 continued musically painted space, a temporally distant past emerges in measure 51 with the unaltered return of the second number ofDavidsbiindlertlinze,"Innig" ("Deeply felt")-the voice of Eusebius (see the end of Ex. 4). Apparently at a late compositional stage, while preparing the Stichvorlagein September 1837, Schumann decided to cut the sheet that contained the piece, pasting its first part (to become Book 1, no. 2) in an earlierplace in the manuscript (fol. 2v; see Fig. 5) and marking it with a "0." The second part, a coda (from mm. 74 to the end of Book 2, no. 8), he pasted right after "Wie aus der Ferne" (fol. 9r), telling the engraver to insert the music marked"0" before the coda (see Fig. 6).123 Since Schumann often shuffled pieces around in his cycles, the procedure becomes indicative of his conception of large-scale form. Thus the reemergence of Eusebius is, as Rosen put it, "a genuine return of the past--not a formal return, or a da capo or a recapitulation, but a memory."124Reminiscence is not produced by a predetermined structure or "abstractpattern";125it does not result from the coercive construction of form that forces a reprise to happen voluntarily. Instead, Schumann's musical "gaze"into the distance conjures up a musical memory in the manner of the mimoireinvoluntaire.To use the words Schumann copied into his diary, the compositional subject "becomes lost . .. together with different images and feelings when the landscapeopens toward a beautiful distance." But much is gained with that loss in distance: lost, the self opens up toward the other--Clara's distant voice. Nearby, her repeated F#s had interrupted the Trio, causing a change of perspective as its sound waves, in Jean Paul's terms, "fade away into ever greater distances and finally are lost in ourselves, and ... although outwardly silent, still [sound] within." Within, 123. Personal communication from Linda Correll Roesner. See also her article "The Sources for Schumann'sDavidsbindlerttnze, Op. 6: Composition, Textual Problems, and the Role of the Composer as Editor," in Mendelssohnand Schumann:Essayson TheirMusic and Its Context, ed. Jon W. Finson and R. Larry Todd (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984): 53-70. See especially the structure of the manuscript on page 55. 124. Rosen, The Romantic Generation,233. 125. Ibid., 235. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 74? _. ~s--l-00-A O ....... ....~?_?-i .: OW4*ob: :' ........ ................ OW AA ::81 44Vs- Figure 5 40-i "It Vienna, Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, MS A-281, fol. 2v (by permission of the Gesells This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 9 tA -44 I" I'M --""NNW __n . ...... - -- - ------ Z= At-' C "~G 1 Oil* ~ of Figure 6 Vienna, Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, MS A-281, fol. 9v (by permission of the This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 109 then, FO finally descends to A# to become an inner voice that even continues across the augmented second a~'-g', just as Clara's variant of the opening waltz did when returning in the A6 -majorscherzandothat prepares the reprise of her first number in measure 201 (cf. Exx. 5a2, mm. 173-75, and 5e). The return of No. 2 in Davidsbindlertfinze, however, endows Clara'sprocedure with a distinctly poetic aura. As a distant memory flashing back closely, it is the most magical moment of the cycle: not a "mask," as Schumann said, but a "face"- Clara's face. "Wie aus der Ferne," however, does not end with Eusebius, whose vision of Clara vanishes. Fleeting and fleeing, her "half-heard"music accelerates after measure 67 (nach und nach schneller)and transforms into that of Florestan exuberantlyclosing this number. (It was signed "F. und E." in the first edition.) If the mood swing toward the more passionate recalls, however remotely, the octave cascades from the middle section of "Mit gutem Humor," distant reminiscence turns into a distant recapitulation that would seem to bring the whole opus to a more "formal"close. Still, even here the cycle does not end. There is another piece, which extends the progression from G major to B minor (the cross-referential relationship that Kaminsky called P) to C major. Again, Schumann took this from Clara'sOpus 4: his pivotal introductory dominant seventh on G is the same one that she had used to return from the hammering F 0s to the concluding C-major section of her opening waltz (Ex. 6, mm. 24-25). Just as Clara herself had composed out the chromatic decent from G through E that is inherent as an inner voice in the six-bar motto of her cycle (Ex. 6, mm. 1-6), Schumann finallyleads the f#' he had left hanging at the end of"Wie aus der Ferne" (itself extending the G major of "Mit gutem Humor") to e', which becomes the third of the C major of his final waltz. In Clara'scycle, the return to C completes the ternaryform of her first valse,and rounds off all her valseswith a virtuosic coda (from m. 291 to the end). Yet Schumann's ending in C (a key of symbolic significance as the Fantasie, Op. 17 will show) expresses formal closure differently. Labeled a "superfluous" addition,126 his coda is neither dazzlingly brilliant nor self-assertively Beethovenian, but rather a bachelor's blissful dream. 5. Distant People: Exchanging Voices with the ferne Geliebte Schumann conceived his Fantasie, Op. 17 during the summer of 1836 as a part of a musical fund-raiser for the planned Beethoven monument in Bonn. The Fantasie has since enjoyed perhaps the richest reception of any 126. "Quite superfluously Eusebius added the following; but in doing so his eyes spoke with much blissfulness"("Ganz zum Oberfluf meinte Eusebius noch Folgendes; dabei sprach aber viel Seligkeit aus seinen Augen"). Number 9 has a similar programmatic note, but one that accentuatesthe painful: '"ThenFlorestan came to a conclusion and his lips twitched painfully" ("Hierauf schlof Florestan und es zuckte ihm schmerzlich um die Lippen"). This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 110 Journalof the AmericanMusicologicalSociety romantic piano work, having become, in a sense, a monument to Romanticism. Interpretations of the first movement, especially, have drawn upon quintessential categories of romantic aesthetics: fragment, Witz, and arabesque.127Romantic distance, however, embracesthese categories in a special way, bringing to light striking new evidence for Schumann's public homage to Beethoven, as well as for his private "lament"for Clara in the first movement. In it, moreover, Novalis's varieties of distance--distant mountains, distant events, distant people--coalesce. Schumann's letters to Clara Wieck leave no doubt as to the Fantasie's personal dimension: I havealso completeda fantasyin threemovementswhich I had draftedin detailin June[18]36. Thefirstmovementof it is possiblythe mostpassionate I haveeverwritten- a deeplamentfor you--the othersareweaker,but have nothingto be ashamedof. The Fantasie(of whichyou know nothing),which I wrote duringour unhappyseparationand which is excessivelymelancholy... it is dedicatedto Liszt. You can only understandthe Fantasieif you imagineyourselfbackin that unhappysummerof 1836, when I was separatedfromyou.128 As a motto for the first edition, Schumann chose a quatrain from a poem by Friedrich Schlegel: DurchalleT6ne t6net Im buntenErdentraum Ein leiserTon gezogen Fiir den der heimlichlauschet. Throughall the sounds In earth'smany-coloreddream Theresoundsone soft long-drawntone For the one who listensin secret.129 127. In the epilogue to The ClassicalStyle,2d rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 451, CharlesRosen spoke of the Fantasie as "the monument that commemorates the death of the classical style." Recent articles on the Fantasie include John Daverio, "Schumann's'Im Legendenton' and Friedrich Schlegel'sArabeske,"19th-CenturyMusic 11 (1987): 150-63 (a revised version appearsas "Schumann'sOpus 17 Fantasie and the Arabeske"in his NineteenthCentury Music and the German Romantic Ideology (New York: Schirmer, 1993), 19-47; Nicholas Marston, " 'Im Legendenton': Schumann's'Unsung Voice,' " 19th-CenturyMusic16 (1993): 227-41; and Linda Correll Roesner, "Schumann's'Parallel'Forms," 19th-Century Music 14 (1991): 265-78. Nicholas Marston, Schumann:Fantasie, Op. 17 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), gives a useful overview of the work's genesis, analysis and criticism, and reception. The most recent interpretation is by Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation,100-112. 128. Letters of 19 March 1838, 25 January 1839, and 21 April 1839. Eva Weissweiler, ed., Clara und Robert Schumann:Briefivechsel,vols. 1-2 (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/ Roter Stern, 1984, 1987), 1:126, 2:368, and 2:495 (cf. idem, CompleteCorrespondence 1:129, 2:32, and 2:166). For Schumann's reading "Passioniertestes"see Marston in "Comment and Chronicle,"19th-CenturyMusic 15 (1991): 166, which was confirmed by Gerd Nauhaus (personal communication to the author). Marston suggests that "it was Clara who inspired the first movement and Beethoven who inspired the other two" (Schumann:Fantasie, 8). 129. KritischeFriedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe 5 (1962), 190-91. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann and Romantic Distance 111 Upon publication of the work, Schumann wrote to Clara: Writeto mewhatyouthinkaboutthefirstmovementof theFantasie.Doesn't it stimulatea lot of imagesin you?This melody I likethe most. I supposethatyouarethe "tone"referredto in the motto. I almost believe it.130 While Schumann'shumorous "almost"should send up a red flag, we shouldnot exclude,in light of the earlierletters,what NicholasMarston hascalledClara's"veryreal'presence'in the composition."13' Still,the precise natureof the lamentfor Claraandthe homageto Beethovenremained obscureuntil they wereheardto coalescein Schumann'sallegedreference to Beethoven'sAn dieferne Geliebtein the coda of the first movement (Ex. 7). Opinions, however, vary. Charles Rosen testifies that he learned of the Beethoven reference from his teacher Moritz Rosenthal, a pupil of Liszt, who in turn"knew"it fromSchumannhimself.'32AnthonyNewcomb,on the otherhand,remainsmore skeptical,noting that the referenceappears in the Schumannliteratureonly in 1910 with the secondedition of Her- mann Abert's Robert Schumann (it was lacking in the first).'33Newcomb thus felt forcedto wonderwhetherthe Beethovenreferencewas madeby Schumann or created by a more recent criticaltradition.The possible Beethoven 130. Letter of 9 June 1839, in Weissweiler, Briefivechsel 2:562 (cf. idem, CompleteCorreThe passage is difficult to spondence2:237). The facsimile is reproduced from the Briefivechsel. read because the ink spreads around the stems (suggesting eighth-note and sixteenth-note flags). Since a' appearsto be crossed out, we seem to have a variant (parallelto mm. 45-46) of the later version. Lr1~ I, . 131. Marston, Schumann: Fantasie, 38. On 11 June 1839, Clara wrote to Schumann: "Neulich hab ich Alkan Deine Fantasie vorgespielt, er war entziickt, doch so wie ich versteht Dich Keiner-kann auch nicht sein!" Weissweiler,Briefiechsel2:566 (cf. idem, CompleteCorrespondence 2:241). The last remarkis somewhat elliptical, but Clara seems to be saying, "Recently I played your Fantasie to Alkan. He was delighted, but nobody understands you like me-which can only be that way and no different." See also her enthusiastic response to the Fantasie in the letter from 23 May in Briefiechsel 2:532 (CompleteCorrespondence 2:205). 132. In private conversation with the author and during public lectures. 133. Hermann Abert, Robert Schumann, 2d rev. ed. (Berlin: Harmonie Verlagsgesellschaft flir Literatur und Kunst, 1910), 64. See Anthony Newcomb, "Schumann and the Marketplace,"in Nineteenth-CenturyPiano Music, ed. R. Larry Todd (New York: Schirmer, 1990), 258-315, at 295. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 112 Journalof the American Society Musicological Example7 RobertSchumann, Op. 17, firstmovement Fantasie, 295 Adagio 298 ritard. ritard In. ritard. 302 1 I Iflf e v • ~" L• I , 33 drrit. A-------3------ ---W--- 3 --3 p ----- quotationat the enined of the firstmovementof op. 17 is not extraneousto the rest of the music--is not embedded in musical quotation marks, so to speak, asis thequotation isthe fromPapillons in"Florestan" "Florestan" of Carnaval or the"Stimme quotation Papilons "Stimme as from in of or the Carnaval aus der Ferne" in the last Novellette.134 On the matter of thematic coherence, however, Newcomb concurs with Rosen, who maintained that "the reference becomes self-reference: the phrase from Beethoven seems as much to derive from what has preceded as to be the source. In fact, one cannot take the full measure of Schumann's accomplishment in this work without observing that the quotation from 134. Newcomb, "Schumann and the Marketplace,"295. R. LarryTodd echoes the cautionary attitude in his "On Quotation in Schumann's Music," in Schumannand His World, 80-112, at 93. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 113 An dieferneGeliebtesounds as if Schumann had written it."s35Indeed, most commentators have focused primarily on the reference in the coda as the source for the movement's thematic material. Can we break the impasse between Rosen's relianceon an oral tradition and Newcomb's insistence on further corroboration for this reference?'36 We might approach the problem from a different angle. When Schumann asked Clara to describe the images that the first movement of the Fantasie evoked in her, he appearsto seek confirmation (as with Henriette Voigt and Papillons)of the poetic vision that had inspired his music. The composer's query is not unlike the experiment he proposed in his review of Mendelssohn's SongswithoutWordsfor a song stripped of its text: to test the definiteness of musical expression by observing whether newly underlaid words match the original poem. Moreover, as we know from his review of the Symphoniefantastique,Schumann chided Berlioz for unfolding before the public a sentimental story by means of a program, though he eventually enjoyed how the story was "embodied in warm, living, sound."'"7Since we do have a hypothesis regarding what might have been the "text," or program, behind the Fantasie's first movement, let us pursue Schumann's experiment from the other end, by assuming that the composer's original poetic vision was indeed Beethoven's An dieferne Geliebte. The imagery of the first poem in Beethoven's cycle begins with the now familiar example of romantic "distance":the gaze into a blue, misty landscape: An dieferneGeliebte,no. 1 Auf dem Hiigel sitz ich spiihend In das blaueNebelland Nach den fernenTriftensehend, Wo ich dich Geliebtefand. 135. Rosen, TheRomanticGeneration,103. The thematic coherence of the firstmovement is affirmed by Daverio, "Schumann's 'Im Legendenton,'" 161 and 157; Gernot Gruber, "Robert Schumann: Fantasie op. 17, 1. Satz-Versuch einer Interpretation,"Musicologica austriaca4 (1984): 101-30; and Marston, Schumann:Fantasie, 61-67. 136. For other references to Beethoven's cycle in Schumann, see Anthony Newcomb, "Once More Between Absolute and Program Music: Schumann's Second Symphony," 19thCenturyMusic 7 (1984): 233-50. For Schubert see Kramer,Distant Cycles,8-9 and 96; for Brahms see Kenneth Ross Hull, "Brahms the Allusive: Extra-Compositional Reference in the InstrumentalMusic of Johannes Brahms"(Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1989), 6265. See also Christopher Reynolds, "An die ferne Geliebte," in Beethoven:Interpretationen seiner Werke, ed. Albrecht Riethmdiller, Alexander L. Ringer, and Carl Dahlhaus, 2 vols. (Laaber: Laaber, 1994), 2:99-108, esp. 105-8. Still unexplored is the connection between Schumann's Fantasie and Sterndale Bennett's Fantasie, Op. 16, dedicated to Schumann and published in 1837. Bennett arrivedin Leipzig for an eight-month stay in October 1836, during which he became a close friend of Schumann's. The main theme of Bennett's Fantasie (see esp. mm. 7-10) resonates strikingly with the passages in Schumann's Fantasie beginning at measures 41 and 65. 137. Schumann, GesammelteSchriften1:83-84. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 114 Journalof the American Society Musicological Weitbin ich von dir geschieden, Trennendliegen Bergund Thal Zwischenuns und unsermFrieden, UnsermGltickund unsrerQual. Ach den Blickkannstdu nichtsehen, Der zu dir so gliihendeilt, Und die Seufzer,sie verwehen In dem Raume,der uns teilt. Will denn nichtsmehrzu dir dringen, Nichts der LiebeBote sein? Singenwill ich Liedersingen, Die dir klagenmeinePein! Denn vor Liebesklangentweichet JederRaumund jede Zeit, Und ein liebendHerz erreichet, Wasein LiebendHerz geweiht! (On the hill I sit and gaze upon the blue,mistycountrytowardthe distant valleyswhere I found you, beloved.Far from you have I been separated, mountainand valleylie betweenus and our peace, our happinessand our suffering.Alas,you cannotsee my gaze that so ardentlyrushesto you, and my sighsdie awayin the spacethatlies betweenus. Is therenothingthatcan reachyou, nothingto be love'smessenger?I will sing, sing songswhichwill tellyou of my sorrows!Foralltimeandspacemustyieldto the soundof love, and a loving heartwill attainwhat a loving hearthasoffered.) The poem unfolds the topos of lament transformedinto song, which the male lover sends into the distance to overcome what separateshim from his beloved. But only in the last song of Beethoven's cycle, as the sun sets over a blue lake, will the beloved sing these songs. Only then, their "Liebesklang" has the effect of actio in distans:the spiritual communion of hearts bridging the gap between their physically distant "bodies." An dieferneGeliebte,no. 6 Nimm sie hin denn diese Lieder Die ich dir, Geliebtesang, Singesie dannAbendswieder Zu der LautestissemKlang. Wenndas Dlimmrungsrot dannziehet Nach dem stillenblauenSee, Und sein letzterStrahlverghihet HinterjenerBergesh6h; Und du singstwas ich gesungen, Wasmir ausder vollenBrust Ohne Kunstgepringerklungen, Nur der Sehnsuchtsich bewuit: This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 115 Dann vor diesenLiedernweichet, Wasgeschiedenuns so weit, Und ein liebendHerz erreichet Wasein LiebendHerz geweiht! (Take,then, these songs which I sangfor you, beloved;sing them againin theeveningto the sweetsoundof thelute.Then,asthe twilight'sglow moves towardthe still, bluelake,andthe lastraydies awaybehindthatmountaintop; andyou singwhatI havesung,the songsthatsprangfrommyfullbreast without artificialpomp, knowingonly longing:then these songs will overcomewhatseparatedus, anda lovingheartwill attainwhata lovinghearthas offered!) Thus the outer poems ofAn dieferne Geliebteframe the cycle with hopeful presentiment and anticipatedfulfillment. This may well have led Beethoven to begin the last song with a melodic variantof the first, while matching the actual textual return of "then these songs will overcome what divided us" with a literal return of the opening song in the passage beginning in measure 295 specially marked Ziemlich langsam und mit Ausdruck. Evidently Beethoven was struck fairly late in the compositional process by the ingenious idea of initiating this return, without text, in the accompaniment, which he squeezed into the autograph before the return of the voice.'38 Such a gesture would surely not have escaped Schumann'snotice. But did it also leave its mark on the composition of the Fantasie? It apparently did. The passage marked Ziemlichlangsam und mit Ausdruckseems to have been Schumann's source for the beginning of the second theme (see Ex. 8b).139But there is more: Schumann based almost the entire second theme on passages from the last song ofAn dieferne Geliebtein a way hitherto not recognized. Since his creative appropriation ranges from almost literal transfer to scarcely recognizable variation, an imaginary melodic line may 138. See Ludwig van Beethoven, An dieferne Geliebte:Faksimilenach dem im Besitz des Bonner Beethovenhauses BefindlichenOriginal (Munich: Henle, 1970); and Joseph Kerman, "An dieferneGeliebte,"in BeethovenStudies,ed. Alan Tyson (New York:W. W. Norton, 1973), 136-37. 139. For reasons that will become apparent later-the same key of Eb being the most obvious-the theme will be discussed in the following as it appears in the recapitulation beginning in measure 253. The passage beginning at measure 41 is sometimes interpretedas the onset of the second group, with measures 33-40 being the transition (Daverio, NineteenthCenturyMusic and the GermanRomanticIdeology,25). When texture and gesture as parameters of form aretaken into account, however, the sixteenth-note accompanimentplaces this section into a very long transitional process from the first to the second group. Only graduallydoes the opening accompaniment lose its momentum, ritarding via sextuplets (mm. 49-60) into the eighth-note rhythm of the second theme beginning in measure 61. Roesner labels the section beginning in measure 41 the second theme, but gives what follows after measure 60 the status of a "secondary"as opposed to a "principal"key area (Roesner, "Schumann'sParallel Forms," 274). Marston, Schumann:Fantasie, 54, considers measures41-81 as simply the B section, since the relatively independent origin of the movement as a "Phantasie"obviated the need for a sonata form (see also his "Im Legendenton," 230). This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Example 8 Schumann, Fantasie, Op. 17, second theme vs. Beethoven, An die Ferne Geliebte,Op. 98 * . (a) (a) * _ •-**--.... . (b) mX+V ++ m. 253 Schumann m.314 A v I 0 Beethoven m.295 m.299+ Beethoven h . m. 298267 Beethoven Fix . .... ....• .. h -'• .m.-2 Schumann. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions I t Example 8 continued m. 266 (c) Beethovenr-.A I Int IfIUm."260 7=3 Schumann BeethovenBeethoven PEPE o/I I. Beethoven (d) ritard. 2Be m. m._267 eove -:1:4 I . Adagio H1IF Beethoven 0 1, AN This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 118 Journalof the American Musicological Society in the helpto delineatesomeof thesong'sbasicmelodicshapesrecurring Fantasie(Ex.8a).Schumann drawshismaterial forthesecondthemefrom differentpartsof the song (seeEx. 8b). Whilehe beginswithalternating eighth notes, the analogouspendulumof sixteenth-notechords in Beethoven's songcameonlyafterthe vocalentry.Thechromatic passing notesin thelefthand(segmentw') alsoderivefroma laterpassagein the reverses Beethoven's distinct song (mm.44-45). In addition,Schumann melodicincipit,theascentfrombb' to eb"(segmentz), intoa descent(segmenty'), whichalsoappears laterin thesong.Whereas theZiemlich lang- sam und mitAusdruckpassage acceleratesbeginning at measure 301 (nach und nachgeschwinder),Schumann slows down to expand Beethoven's melodic line around the rise from Ab to C, thus turning the song's initial four-plus measures (punctuated by a half cadence and a full cadence at mm. 301 and 305) into an extended period of seven-plus-four measures (Fantasie, mm. 254-60 and 261-64). The lyrical expansion of his antecedent produces the very passage of which Schumann was so fond that he copied it into the letter to Clara (see above). As if in response to this expansion, Schumann condenses even more segments and elements from Beethoven's melody into his consequent (see Ex. 8c). It breaks down into two twomeasure variants of the characteristicdescent, leaping down from eb" to b6 ', which stemmed from the beginning of Beethoven's sixth song and recurs intact in Schumann's coda. Strikingly, as if to make up for the missing anacrusis,the bass line repeatsfour times the ascent from Bb to Eb from the incipit of Beethoven's first song (segment z), which, to recall, was recapitulated in the Ziemlich langsam und mit Ausdruck passage. What is more, an inner voice sings out the chromatic progression from B b through G that lent such a characteristicflavor to Beethoven's melody (segment w'). Finally, the triplets, with which Schumann created the second two-measure variant (Fantasie,mm. 263-64), seem to have spilled over from the source (Beethoven, mm. 317-18). At this point, the second theme of the Fantasie appearsto approach full closure, which, however, is denied. What follows disintegrates into a striking series of fragments that can be traced back, once again, to Beethoven. Set off by the tonic's turn into a dominant seventh, a series ofportato chords rises mostly chromaticallyto c" (mm. 265-66). Though initially unrelated to the song (its function in the Fantasie will become evident later), this ascent finally ruptures into an isolated b' and c", ritardando (see Ex. 8d). The gesture strongly evokes the magical moltoadagio measure with which Beethoven launched the transition from the second strophe to the third, beginning so suggestively "And you sing what I have sung." Indeed, the adagio passage that follows in the Fantasie is an eerily distant echo of Beethoven's melody. Laid bare in the left hand, it picks up the song's Ab major, descends to the c'-eb '-f' chord that omits Beethoven's bass note Ab, and rises back to c" over F minor (Ex. 8d). Here Schumann hears the This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumannand Romantic Distance 119 song'smelodyas a prolongationof the subdominant.Overan open pedal andagainstthe blurredbackgroundof the fadingadagiomeasures,the subdominantblendsinto a smallmelodicsegmentthat stood out as Beethoven'spenultimatecadencein the finalsong. Yet if both the song and the Fantasie'stheme returnto theirinitialel ", theirclosing gesturespoint in differentdirections.Beethovenresolvedhispianoleadingnote, prolonged by a fermata,into a metricallyweakbutfortetonic sixthchord,as if taking a breathbeforerushingtowardthe finalcadence(Ex. 8d). But Schumann's deceptivecadence,using an accenteddiminishedseventhon bt, leadsto a single eb":isolatedby threefermatas,it dies awayto apianissimo. To be sure,thereareotherfragmentsfromBeethoven'ssong in the first movementwhich arenot directlyrelatedto the referencein the coda, noon the sixthscale tablythe openingmelodythatbeginsso characteristically see since it is Ex. But 8b).140 degree(segmentw; preciselythis sixth scale that is in the Schumann insertedin the letterto degree exposed segment he did weave the most intricate web allusionsaroundwhat of Clara,why he consideredthe emotionalcenterof the movement?A possibleanswer lies in Schumann'sidiosyncraticcontributionto the romantic"poeticsof the remote":the wayin whichdistanceembracesotherromanticcategories of fragment,Witz, and arabesque. Giventhat the fragmentwas the romanticresponseto the classicalaestheticsof the whole,'141 the variousBeethovenfragmentsin the Fantasie, the one including alludingto the SeventhSymphonyin the thirdmovewould ment, appearas "ruins,"whose wholenesshas been lost. Indeed, Schumann'searlytitle of the Fantasie,Ruinen. Trophaeen. Palmen.Grofle d. r Denkmal Beethovens ("Ruins.Trophies.Palms.Grand Sonatef Pianoffi Sonatafor the Pianofortefor Beethoven'sMonument"),142 expressesa historicaldistanceto a musicalcultureinevitablygone. GiventhatSchumann's musicalruinsarereferences,historicaldistancemanifestsitselfas referential distance.Yethis secondthemebridgesthatdistanceto Beethoven'sAn die ferneGeliebteby recoveringthe cycle'slost wholenessin a filigreeof fragmentsframedby its beginningandend. Schumann'sthemebeginswith an allusionto the verypassagemarkedZiemlichlangsamundmitAusdruck that refersto the openingof Beethoven'scyclein the finalsong, andit endswith 140. See Rosen, The Romantic Generation,103-4. 141. Ibid., 48-58; and Daverio, Nineteenth-CenturyMusic and the GermanRomanticIdeology,49-86. 142. Schumann mentioned it in a letter of 19 December 1836 to his publisher Friedrich Kistner, to whom he also mentioned his use in the last movement of music from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. See Hermann Erler, Robert Schumann'sLeben aus seinen Briefengeschildert,2 vols. (Berlin: Ries and Erler, 1887), 1:102-3. Erler's added remark after the letter--"This intended allusion to Beethoven's 'Seventh' was later completely removed"- can be put to the test by comparing the passage beginning in Schumann's third movement at measure 30 with Beethoven's symphony as shown by Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 102-3. See also Marston, Schumann:Fantasie, 37. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 120 Journalof the AmericanMusicologicalSociety a cadential gesture from the end of that final song. In other words, the Fantasie's lyrical theme encapsulates the entire song cycle. Of course, later names of the Fantasie, among them Dichtungen (Poems), suggest that Schumann deliberately distanced the piece from its direct association with Beethoven.4" Yet if Schumann had veiled the "ruins"that he had preserved in his own way, his new motto by Schlegel encouraged his listeners to pursue their traces--if only in secret. This search for the Fantasie's secretly intertextual tone (as carried out above) ties into another, more conceptual, facet of distance: that of Romantic Witz (the German word for the Latin ingenium). Jean Paul defined Witz as "the ability to discover a distant similarity,"but he saw a contradiction in this traditional definition: if"distant" denotes "dissimilar,"Witz would detect a seemingly impossible "dissimilarsimilarity."'44To resolve the dilemma, Jean Paul drew on the distinction between wit and judgment, established in eighteenth-century aesthetics by John Locke and Edmund Burke. For Jean Paul, then, Witz "discovers the relation of similarity ... hidden beneath a greater dissimilarity,"while judgment, which he called acumen (ScharfSinn),"discoversthe relation of dissimilarity ... hidden beneath a greater similarity."145s Traditionally,wit (establishing resemblance) was regarded as creative and poetic, and judgment (establishing difference), as rational and prosaic.146But Jean Paul's ideal was the combination of the two, called "profundity"(Tiefiinn), which "seekssimilarityand unity of everything that wit connected by perception and that judgment separated by reason."'147 Profundity thus collapses the difference between wit and judgment (and the distance between similarity and dissimilarity) to arrive at the "highest" level of "knowledge" and "being": the identity of subject and object. Schumann seems to have had this profundity in mind when he referredin his diary to Jean Paul's "profound, brilliantwit" (tiefen, geistreichenWitz).148In this sense, we might understand Schumann's Jean Paulesque transformation of Beethoven's music in the Fantasie: his compositional wit creates a distant similaritywith the song cycle and thus plays 143. Marston, Schumann:Fantasie, 23-33, discusses the different titles and their generic implications. 144. Jean Paul, VorschulederAsthetik, 155 (emphasis added). Cf. Hale, Horn of Oberon, 120. For a study of JeanPaul'sconcept of Witz see WaltrautWietholter, WitzigeIllumination: Studien zur AsthetikJean Pauls (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1979). For an illuminating discussion of Witz in Schumann see Daverio, Nineteenth-CenturyMusic and the GermanRomanticIdeology,49-88, esp. 71-75. 145. See Jean Paul, Vorschuleder Asthetik, 157-58; cf. Hale, Horn of Oberon, 122. Wieth6lter, Witzige Illumination, 148-66. 146. For a discussion of the relation between wit and judgment in eighteenth-century aesthetics see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology:Image, Text, Ideology(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 121-25. 147. Jean Paul, Vorschule derAsthetik, 158; cf. Hale, Horn of Oberon,122. See Wiethdlter, Witzige Illumination, 105-21. 148. Schumann, Tagebicher 1:133. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 121 with our analyticaljudgment fixated on dissimilarity. Both wit and judgment, however, combine in the work's musical Tiefsinn. Distance, finally, embraces the third romantic category, the arabesque, which John Daverio suggested as a possible key to the formal function of the famous "Im Legendenton" section in the middle of the first movement.149 In the romantic master genre of the novel, the arabesque compares to the permanent "parabasis"(a multiplication of interlocking levels of narration through ongoing digressions), which Friedrich Schlegel regarded as typical of the novel's form.s50Thus "Im Legendenton" digresses from the main plot of the piece, even though it draws upon its material:the characteristicallysolemn opening stems from the syncopated inner melody of the transition between the first and the second groups (mm. 33-40); and the melody that prefigures the second theme in measures 41-48 reappearsin the remote tonal areaof Db, woven into a more thickly textured accompaniment (mm. 181-94). Containing music removed from its original context and placed in a new one, "Im Legendenton" is like an arabesque interpolation that manifests discursivedistance. Let us digress to discuss this discursive distance, for it will help us to understand Schumann's reference to Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebteby means of a yet unknown reference in "Im Legendenton" to his own distant beloved, Clara. Nicholas Marston has pointed out that in the autograph of the Fantasie, "Im Legendenton" was originally entitled "Romanza," a vocal genre "which narratesa tragic or amorous incident in a lyric verse form."15' He draws attention to Sterndale Bennett's 1837 Drei Romanzen, Op. 14 as an instrumental form of the genre.152 What has not been remarked is that Schumann had a model close at hand: Clara'sown Romancevaride,Op. 3. The Romancebegins with a short five-measure"Introduzione,"followed by a "Romanza,"whose theme (also attributed to Schumann himself) he had used in his Impromptusfiberein Thema von Clara Wieck.s 53The similarity between Clara's "Romanza" and "Im Legendenton" (formerly "Romanza") would seem remote (see Exx. 9a and b). But after a series of brillante variations and before the final virtuosic section, Clara brings back her "Romanza"theme in a C-minor adagio as a distant memory in a differentmelancholy--tone. Thus Clara'smeter, her key, her melody, and above all her formal procedure are either the same as or resemble Schumann'sclosely 149. Daverio, Nineteenth-CenturyMusic and the GermanRomanticIdeology,19-48. 150. Ibid., 28-34. 151. Heinrich Christoph Koch, MusikalischesLexikon (1802), translated by Marston in "'Im Legendenton,' " 230 and 236. The page of the autograph is reproduced as plate 2 in Marston, Schumann:Fantasie (before p. 33). 152. Marston, "'Im Legendenton,' " 231. 153. The theme may have originated with Schumann, since it appears in his diary for 28/29 September 1830, Schumann, Tagebficher1:321. See also Claudia Stevens Becker, "A New Look at Schumann's Impromptus," Musical Quarterly 67 (1981): 568-86. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Example 9 (a-c) Clara Wieck, Romancevaride,Op. 3; (d-e) Robert Schumann, Fantasie, Op. 17 ("I Moderato a piacere (a) Introduzione m. 1 (b) Moderato m.6 Romanza (c) Adagio m. 117 m. 140 [Im Legendenton] (e) m.201 sfz m.204 fff C F sf G This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions sf C Schumann andRomanticDistance 123 (Exx. 9b-d).154 In that sense, "Im Legendenton" might be another "Impromptu." Like Clara, Schumann also has a "brilliant"variation of his/her theme, using her techniques of the sustained melodic notes in the middle register (cf. Romancevaride,mm. 53-88, and Fantasie, mm. 195-203). It even appears that Schumann recalls at the ensuing climax the C-F-G-C, his famous counterpoint to Clara'stheme in his Impromptus:C is prolonged from measures 201-3 and then leads to F-G-C in measures 204-6 (see Ex. 9e). Schumann's appropriation of Clara's "Romanza" is hardly surprising, especially in light of the both amorous and melancholy circumstancesthat he associated with the composition of the Fantasie'sfirst movement.'55 But why did he replace the autograph's "Romanza"heading in the Stichvorlage first with "Legende"and then with the even more idiosyncratic "Erzahlend im Legendenton" (later stripped of the "ErzAhlend")?156 Perhaps he sought to veil the source: just as he had formerly eliminated the outdated advertisement of Beethoven in the title of the GrofleSonate, he concealed any hint of an amorous meaning. Is the "Legende"the "lament"mentioned in the letter to Clara? Indeed, as in Davidsbiindlertanze,the music from Clara's Romance "intrudes" into the composer's fantastic improvisation (mm. 33-40) before it becomes distant music recalled as a memory, finally dying away with a double echo (see Ex. 9e). And like the Aria (a movement), "Im Legendenton" (a movement within a movement) is a Song without Words, but one even more removed from the vocal genre from which it sprang. Yet if the Aria's tone was lyrical, the tone of "Im Legendenton" is "narrative"(erzfhlend). What does it "tell"? Marston (inspired by Carolyn Abbate) argued that "Im Legendenton" can only narrate,because music, in Abbate's words, does not "possess narrativitywithout the distanceengendered by discursive formulation," which becomes manifest only in a disjunction with the "music that constitutes its encircling milieu."'57 Given that Schumann's interpolation is a quasiphenomenal narrative song that digresses from the main body of the movement and evokes a distant time, his final choice for a heading, "Im Legendenton," would seem to speak eloquently to that distance. Strangely enough, though, it is not the narrative that is most telling, but a single 154. Example 9d shows the third appearance of the "Im Legendenton" theme, which inverts Clara'scharacteristicfourth, D-A. 155. Clara's"Romanza"seems to have held a special-amorous-connotation, resounding in Johannes Brahms's Variationeniiberein ThemavonRobertSchumann,Op. 9, where the "Romanza" melody appears as an inner voice at the end of the tenth variation. 156. The page is reproduced in Marston, "'Im Legendenton,' " 235. 157. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices:Opera and Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 26 and 29. See Marston, "'Im Legendenton,' " 237-38; and also Daverio, Nineteenth-CenturyMusic and the GermanRomanticIdeology, 29 and 32. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 124 Journalof the AmericanMusicologicalSociety moment that breaks it open (see Ex. 10). After an eruption stilled by a fermata, this passage rises like a "fatamorgana," one of the Fantasie's early titles that Schumann suggested to Breitkopf.l58 Here, Beethoven's cycle appearsas if compressed into its most cryptic cipher: the opening anacrusis of the last song combined with the downward-leaping sixth of the first--at their original pitch level. While the melody immediately vanishes when a sequential pattern draws it back into the body of the legend, it has flashed, however briefly, and exposed, like a print without negative, its source: Beethoven's song, written, as it were, in the air. The resulting icriture, distant and disappearing like a shooting star, is arguably the most "telling" event of "Im Legendenton"-not the disrupting narration, but the narration disrupted. This moment is not pastness--not the distant reminiscence of Clara's"Romanza"or the melody anticipating the second theme in D6 and A1 -but presence. This moment slits open the body of the narrative song as if to foretell urgently what we will learn only in the coda: that both "Im Legendenton" and the movement it disrupts grew out of improvisation, which itself grew out of song. Finally, this moment, now only a mirage, gestures tonally and motivically beyond the discursive distance of"Im Legendenton" toward the double ending of the movement. Here all the varieties of distance-distant mountains, distant events, and distant people --will coalesce into the message that distance--spatial and temporal--may be overcome. The first closure occurs with the end of the recapitulation of the second theme, which dies away into the distant landscape like the lover's song in the first poem ofAn dieferne Geliebte.If E is seen as a kind of "second" tonic folded into the movement, the recapitulation of the second theme in this key is much less surprising than its "absolutelyunclassical"appearance in the subdominant F major (if seen from C as the tonic).159 Since Schumann often composed at the piano, would he not have begun improvising on the final song of An die Ferne Geliebtein its original Eb-an improvisation eventually becoming the Fantasie'sfirst movement? Thus, in a sense quite different from the classical recapitulation, Schumann's reprise of the second theme would function-intertextually-as a "recapitulation"of Beethoven's music in its home key. Dying away with the adagio into the "space"opened by the lifted dampers (perhaps signified by the two horizontal lines in mm. 79 and 271), as if toward the distant mountains, the single Eb is the last note of Beethoven's song (assimilated by Schumann) heard at its original pitch level. Yet the diminished seventh leading to this Eb implies a resolution to C minor, deflected abruptly to the fortissimo 158. See Marston, Schumann:Fantasie, 23 and 32-33. 159. Rosen, TheRomanticGeneration,106. The Eb frame begins with a second statement of the first theme in measure 28 and is recapitulatedbeginning in measure 225. On this point see Roesner, "Schumann'sParallel Forms," 274. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann andRomanticDistance 125 Example10 RobertSchumann, Fantasie, Op. 17, firstmovement 154 ritard.--"-.- ff ,v " 1 1110| P / 157 ? Io • '• e, * i I1j - 04FI • w I?M ..i" v I.- • '.,,iIL - l• • f C-major chord that will lead to the second closure of the movement in the coda. The coda is marked by the first full appearanceof C major in the movement, resolving, at last, the dominant from its very beginning. Tonal closure coincides here with the revelation of the sonata's source: Schumann's theme or Beethoven's song. In the coda, Schumann's melody, repeated four times, stands exposed and resembles most closely--it is almost a literal quotation--the incipit of Beethoven's final song. This incipit complements (in reverse) the movement's passionate opening, which had begun, in medias res, with a later segment of Beethoven's melody (see Ex. 8b). In the coda, then, Schumann does not run the risk of revealing his source, because it sounds indeed as if he had composed it--as if it had grown out of improvisation and not been taken, fraudulently, from a song stripped of its text. But now Beethoven's song no longer needs words, since Schumann encoded their meaning into his music. To unlock this code, key signatures provide the key. If, as Linda Correll Roesner suggests, the "C"in the final C major stands for the first letter in Clara,160this is not the "C" minor of her sadly remembered--legendary--"Romanza." Instead, as in the associated line of the poem, "And you sing what I have sung," Clarafinally sings back in "her" key Beethoven's song, which, having broken through the Romanza's "tone" and become Schumann's song, had died away on Eb, that is, "Es,"for the first letter in Schumann.161The distance between E6 160. Roesner, "Schumann'sParallel Forms," 274. 161. The "S"/IE symbolism is corroborated by the "Sphinxes"and "A.S.C.H- S.C.H.A. Lettres dansantes"movements in Schumann's Carnaval, Op. 9. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 126 Journalof the American Musicological Society and C is mediated through that enigmatic ascent from E to C which stood out in the second theme. Now we may hear that ascent as a projection of Schumann's voice into the distant landscape, prolonging c" over the eerie adagio, but then dying away on e ". In the coda, however, this gesture is picked up as the ascent turns into similarly gestured portato chords first descending in the bass from C to E1 (mm. 299-300), and then, in the original register, from c"to e6 ', just before the very last, augmented, statement of Beethoven's melody.162 Superimposed, descent and ascent create a voice exchange between Eb and C (see Ex. 11) -as if Schumann'sdistant beloved had received the song and finally made his voice her own. But Schumann also made her voice his. In a letter of 6 February 1838 he described to her the Novelletten,Op. 21: Then I have composeda terriblelot in the last three weeks--humoristic things, storiesof Egmont, familysceneswith fathers,a wedding, in brief most lovelythings--andthe whole is calledNovellettenbecauseyour name is Claraand"Wiecketten" does not soundwell.... I havelivedwith you a long time, andthereis reallylittle differencebetweenhusbandandwife and us. I talkedlikeyou. ....163 Five days later Schumann wrote to Clara about the "Notturno" from her Soirtesmusicales,Op. 6: "Do you know what the most precious thing of yours is for me--Your Notturno in F major in six-eight time. What do you think about that? It is sufficiently melancholic, I believe. Then the Trio from the Toccatina."'64We know that Schumann used the beginning of the Notturno (whose melody resembles the Trio from the preceding Toccatina) in the last of his Novelletten, marking it explicitly in the score as "Stimme aus der Ferne" ("Voice from afar,"Ex. 12b). The last Novellette seems to have originated in a pair of Novelletten in D and Bb major, written between 11 March and 10 April,165which Schumann combined, later 162. In the reprise of the coda for the original ending of the Fantasie, Eb also appeared in the bass in the equivalent of measures 300 and 303. Marston, Schumann:Fantasie, 18-20; Rosen, TheRomanticGeneration,110. Perhaps Schumann deleted the original ending because he might have felt that it would not reconnect with the poetic vision of the first movement. 163. Letter of 6 February 1838, in Weissweiler,Briefivechsel1:90-91 (cf. idem, Complete Correspondence 1:91-92). On the relationship between Clara Wieck and "Wiecketten,"and Clara Novello and "Novelletten," see Hans Joachim K6hler, "Die Stichvorlagen zum Erstdruck von Opus 21-Assoziationen zu Schumanns Novelletten," Schumann Studien 3/4 (1994): 75-94, esp. 92-93. 164. Letter of 11 February 1838, in Weissweiler, Briefivechsel1:100 (cf. idem, Complete Correspondence 1:102). 165. ". . . wie im Himmel gelebt u. ein Seliger herumgewandelt--am 9ten en Brief v. m. Maidel-sonderbare Novelletten componirt in B Dur und in D Dur-geschwirmt-warme Frtihlingstage-ihr Bild" ("lived as if in heaven and walked around blissfully-on the 9th a letter from my girl-composed peculiar Novelletten in B , major and D major--daydreamt-warm spring days--her picture"). Robert Schumann, Tagebficher,vol. 2, 1836-54, ed. Gerd Nauhaus (Leipzig: VEB, 1987), 53. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Example 11 The voice exchange between "S"/E b and "C" m.266 rit L IpL "S" ritard. I-I p sf . ". PP ... ".. ..- m.302 ritardl I ME This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FI" 128 Journalof the AmericanMusicologicalSociety Example 12 (a) Clara Wieck, Soireesmusicales,Op. 6, no. 2 ("Notturno"); (b-d) Robert Schumann,Novelletten, Op. 21, no. 8 (a) Notturno m. 2 dlce m. 195 4 .4 m., S228 Fortsetzung Einfach undgesangsvoll (d) m.446 Pfz adding the F#-minor introduction (written in his own hand into the Stichvorlagethat was prepared by a copyist).166 The result is a series of interlocking Novelletten within a Novelette, setting up the "Voice from afar" in different tonal and expressive contexts. Indeed, what was originally the beginning of an independent piece is now the D-major Trio II. It opens with a section reminiscent of the more forceful D-minor middle part in Clara'sNotturno. Her piece would thus seem to have been turned inside out, since Schumann does not recall her opening melody until the Novellette has settled on a long D pedal, eventually giving way to an underlying accompaniment reminiscent of the Notturno (Ex. 12a). 166. See Kohler, "Die Stichvorlage zum Erstdruckvon Opus 21," 76. The eighth Novellette appears here in third place but is renumbered by Schumann as No. 4. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumann and Romantic Distance 129 Example 12 continued (c) According to JeffreyKallberg, audiences would have recognized Clara's emulation of Chopin, so that Schumann cherished her Notturno in part for its generic association with the feminine.'67 In the Novellette, however, Schumann removed most of the Notturno's Chopinesque embellishments and added some of his own touches, as if her voice should sound different, more simple, when heard from afar. Prepared by an added trill, the expressive octave anticipation, for example, is realigned to fall squarely on a downbeat (Notturno, m. 7, vs. Novellette, mm. 207-8); or the opening harmonization includes a C# that obscures Clara'saugmented triad. Schumann apparently felt entitled to appropriate his sources-a delicate situation with respect to his performing fiancee, who had her own ambitions as 167. JeffreyKallberg, "The Harmony of the Tea Table: Gender and Ideology in the Piano Nocturne," in his Chopinat theBoundaries:Sex, History,and Musical Genre(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 54. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 130 Journalof the American Society Musicological a composer.168 Yet if Schumann exerted creativecontrol over Clara'smusic, as he did over Beethoven's, he may have done so because they shared a "melancholic" quality he particularly cherished. Moreover, he seems to have ended the Novellettenwith a poetic vision complementary to the Fantasie: a voice exchange between lover and beloved. While arranging the Novelletten into a "cycle" of "coherent tales" (zusammenhtingendeGeschichten),Schumann realized only at a very late stage that the multiple closure of the composite Novellette in F#, D, and BbIcould be used for such a deeply poetic ending.169 Indeed, when the Stimme aus der Ferne fades away in a drawn-out descent, the work would seem to come to a close, since D major has been the key around which the Novellettenrevolve. But Schumann continues with what is labeled in the score as Fortsetzung(beginning in m. 228) and Fortsetzungund Schluff(beginning in m. 282).170 This could be a humorous reference to the practice of publishing novels in installments, but Schumann's vision seems to have been more serious. The first Fortsetzungevokes-again-Jean Paul's definition of the Romantic as the sound which, after having died away in the distance, continues to vibrate inwardly. If Schumann was drawn to Clara's Notturno for its "sufficientlymelancholic"mood, then, he sings out Clara's melody (even more than Beethoven's song in the Fantasie'ssecond theme) in a kind of continuous inner expansion, replaying her now ornamented octave leap three times before it closes again in D major (see Ex. 12c). Schumann may have had this first in mind when writ-inner--Fortsetzung to Hermann Hirschbach that the are "on Novelletten ing averagejoyful and for where I to the bottom."171As moments, upbeat, except particular got if the "voice from afar"and its inner transformation had suspended time and space and reached to the "bottom" of his heart, Schumann resumes with the cadential gesture that preceded the double interpolation, again settling on D major (Tempowie im vorigenStzick,mm. 255-81). 168. Ibid., 55-56. One might therefore distinguish between Schumann'screative appropriation of borrowed material for the sake of poetic allusion, and his "corrections"and "improvements" of works published under Clara'sname, for instance her much-discussed Trois Romancespour le piano, Op. 11. 169. Letter of 3 April 1838 to Joseph Fischof, in Erler,RobertSchumann'sLebenausseinen Briefengeschildert1:151. Schumann himself used the term cyclein a letter to Clara on 1 December 1839 (Weissweiler,Briefiwechsel 2:809; and idem, CompleteCorrespondence 2:495). For a discussion of the whole opus see Daverio, Nineteenth-CenturyMusic and the GermanRomantic Ideology,75-86. 170. In light of the early order of the cycle, the puzzling numbers for the Fortsetzung(5) and the Fortsetzungund Schlufi (6) make perfect sense. Cf. K6hler, "Die Stichvorlage zum Erstdruckvon Opus 21," 79-80. 171. Letter of 30 June 1839: "Von mir sind jetzt vier Hefte Novelletten erschienen, innig zusammenhingend und mit grofer Lust geschrieben, im Durchschnitt heiter und obenhin, bis auf einzelnes, wo ich auf den Grund gekommen." Erler,RobertSchumann'sLebenausseinen Briefengeschildert1:206. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Schumannand Romantic Distance 131 Once again, the piece seems to have come to an end. But when the Fortsetzung und Schlufl strike a new tone, a "new" Novellette opens another narrativelevel. As in Schlegel's novelistic "parabasis,"Schumann accumulates arabesque-likeframes that culminate in the climax, not merely of the last Novellette, but of the entire cycle. As if responding to the melancholic introversion before, he now passionately plays back the "Voice from afar" with utmost extroversion (see Ex. 12d). Here Clara'smusic appears at its original pitch level, her melody so amplified that it could be heard far away and "suggest a symbolic reunion with Clara."'72As in the Fantasie, there is a striking conjunction between the main tonic and music from "outside" in the flat mediant, though their order is reversed and not connected to a symbolism between keys and name initials. Still, Clara'sconspicuous move from "her" tonic F major to its relative minor in the middle part of the Notturno may have inspired Schumann to hear a bridge to "his" tonic D major, where, after the quick close of the Bb-major digression, the Novelletten end exuberantly. Complementing the poetic vision of the Fantasie, Schumann, hearing the voice of his beloved from afar, finally sang himself "what you have sung." The "voice exchange"between Robert and Clara,then, constitutes a rare case where analysisand criticism work together in a way that seems to undo the "distance"between them; it also seems to close the gap between a historically distant composition and its modern commentary. This, one might say, takes place when, on the one hand, the - poetic - expression "exchanging voices" assumes a precise technical meaning, and, on the other, the technical-prosaic-term "voice exchange" regains its original metaphorical quality. Collapsing the difference between technical and nontechnical language, analysis and criticism exchange voices themselves, capturing Schumann's "profound" attempt (in Jean Paul's sense) to overcome in his music the distance between the similar and the dissimilar, artwork and reality, lover and beloved. In that sense, his Fantasie, especially, is romantic actioin distans.Stripping Beethoven's tune of its text, Schumann folded its logosinto the musical logic of the Fantasie'sfirstmovement. He thus turned music "literally"into a language, where sounding letters metamorphose into singing lovers, whose musical dia-logoscreates the otherwise impossible event of understanding: when they exchange the tonic of a single song. Epilogue The noblemansoon took a greatlikingto him, althoughhe often confessed thathe feltratheruncomfortable in his presence,andthatice-coldshiversran 172. Todd, "OnQuotationin Schumann's Music,"102. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 132 Journalof the American Musicological Society throughhimwheneverthe stranger,overa fullcupof wine,spokeofthemany distantand unknownlandsand strangemen and beastshe had become acquaintedwith duringhis far-flungtravels.At suchtimeshis speechfadedinto a [miraculoussound], in which he wordlesslyrenderedobscureand mysteriousthingscomprehensible.173 However accidental the connection to this passage from E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Johannes Kreisler's Certificate of Apprenticeship," the poet in Schumann's Kinderszenenbegins his stories similarly with "Von fremden Lindern und Menschen." And at the end, in "Der Dichter spricht," his musical language, like that of Hoffmann's stranger, dies away when the chorale graduallytransformsinto free melody-- absolute music. Other than in Novalis's definition, however, prose is not surrounded by poetry, but poetry by prose that abruptly returns to secure closure. In "Der Dichter spricht," Schumann seems to remind us that making music of language is romantic utopia. The poet-composer may transformprose into poetry, but may not easily exchange poetry for prose again without re-creating between them the difference that distance has made. Usually, the poet as well as the critic speak. Sometimes they sing. Abstract The poetic trope and aesthetic category of "distance"is central to Novalis's and Jean Paul Richter's definition of the Romantic, as embodied in dying sound and distant music. In the "young poetic future" proposed by the composer and critic Robert Schumann in the 1830s, romantic distance figures prominently, exemplified by the relationship between the endings of Jean Paul'sFlegeljahreand Schumann'sPapillons,Op. 2. Distance also provides the key for a new understanding of the relationship between analysis and poetic criticism in Schumann's review of Schubert's Great C-Major Symphony; between texted and untexted music in his Piano Sonata, Op. 11; between music and landscape in Davidsbiindlertfinze,Op. 6; and between the composer and his distant beloved in the Fantasie, Op. 17 and the Novelletten,Op. 21. The article presents new evidence of Schumann's reference to Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebteand Clara Wieck's Romance varide,Op. 3 in the Fantasie, and to Clara's Valsesromantiques,Op. 4 in Davidsb;indlertfinze. 173. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Sfmtliche Werke.HistorischKritischeAusgabe, 2d ed., ed. Carl Georg von Maassen, vol. 1 (Munich: Miller, 1912), 428-29; translation from E. T. A. Hoffinann'sMusical Writings:"Kreisleriana,""ThePoet and the Composer,"Music Criticism,ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 160-61; emphases added. This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Thu, 01 Oct 2015 01:59:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 

BERTHOLD HOECKNER Paths through Dichterliebe Paths through Dichterliebe BERTHOLD HOECKNER In memoriam John Daverio (At the cross-road will be buried He who killed himself; There grows a blue flower, The Poor-Sinner’s Flower. ARMESÜNDERBLUM Contemplate poem no. 62 from Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo, the collection from which Schumann selected the poems of Dichterliebe: Am Kreuzweg wird begraben Wer selber brachte sich um; Dort wächst eine blaue Blume, Die Armesünderblum. Am Kreuzweg stand ich und seufzte; Die Nacht war kalt und stumm. Im Mondenschein bewegte sich langsam Die Armesünderblum. My thoughts about the relationship between the narrative and tonal structure of Dichterliebe were first inspired by the unpublished paper “The Dominant Relation as Metaphor in Schumann’s Dichterliebe,” which Jeff Nichols gave at the 1993 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Montreal, and whose basic idea has been percolating for almost a decade of my teaching the cycle in the classroom. Special thanks to Jeff Nichols, Richard Cohn, Rufus Hallmark, Richard Kurth, and audiences at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Oslo, and the University of British Columbia for comments on earlier versions of this article. I stood at the cross-road and sighed The night was cold and mute. By the light of the moon moved slowly The Poor-Sinner’s Flower.)1 Heine laments. Heine provokes. He associates the Armesünderblum with the Ur-symbol of early Romanticism—the blue flower. It was customary to bury those who took their own life at the crossroads on the outskirts of a village. Since the blue Wegwarte (chicory) commonly grows at the roadside in the temperate European climate, it became the “flower of the 1 Translation adapted from Beate Julia Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics: Fragmentation of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 88; and Heine’s Book of Songs, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland (Philadelphia: F. Leypoldt, 1864), pp. 104–05. 19th-Century Music, XXX/1, pp. 65–80. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2006 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. 65 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC poor sinner.”2 As a central symbol of Romanticism, the blue flower became the archetype of Romantic longing. In Novalis’s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen the protagonist sees the flower in a dream and sets out to find it, and this search leads him onto the road of self-recognition.3 Heine’s Armesünderblum adds a bitter taste to that quest. His second stanza casts a morbid chill on the Romantic love affair with the time between dusk and dawn, about which Novalis sings so wonderfully in his Hymns to the Night. If Romantic wandering can also end badly, as in Schubert’s and Müller’s Winterreise, Heine goes a step further, toward death and suicide. Worse: his poor sinner is no less than the Romantic poet himself. Heine even takes pleasure in digging poetry’s grave with poetry’s help. He drops the “e” at the end of Armesünderblum (instead of -blume) so that the word not only echoes the act of killing oneself (brachte sich um), but also mimics the gesture of falling silent (bewegte sich stumm). Amid such a bleak outlook, there is a glimmer of hope. Heine’s suicidal fantasy feeds upon what it seeks to destroy. The last line of the poem may stand for the death of Romantic poetry, but it also becomes living proof of how poetry may still grow from its own grave. This paradox survives, as it were, within the Armesünderblum, as the most poetic word of the poem. 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: no longer stumm, but -blum (as in “bloom”). The Armesünderblum may symbolize the death of Romantic poetry, but it is also a sign of its soul still stirring. As such it holds the promise of poetry’s resurrection. I will argue in this article that Schumann must have been fascinated by this paradox, which crystallizes in the last songs of the Heine Liederkreis, op. 24 and Dichterliebe, op. 48.4 Both cycles end with the wish to lay their Lieder to rest, either by sealing them in a book (in op. 24) or by sinking them into the depths of the sea (in op. 48). But both cycles also refuse to close this way. The Lieder come alive again for the reader who picks up the book; they reemerge from the coffin that cracks open. The open ending of Dichterliebe, especially, has become the opening of Pandora’s box in the analytical reception of the cycle. At stake is no less than the issue of the music’s organic unity as a premise for formal, or formalist, analysis. Since the notion of unity in Dichterliebe has been laid to rest in two recent studies by David Ferris and Beate Perrey, I feel compelled to revive it and advance a new case for a coherent tonal structure of the cycle, through which Schumann creates a meaningful narrative.5 I do not intend to vindicate the aesthetics of organicism or reinstate the paradigm of formalism. Still, the very claim to have found a coher- 4 2 In German folklore, the Wegwarte (“ward at the way”) is a symbol of fidelity and trust. It refers to the story of a bride who turned into a flower while waiting at the roadside for her bridegroom who has been killed on the battlefield. Another name is Verfluchte Jungfer (“cursed virgin”), which originates with the legend of a virgin who suffers the same fate after having rudely rejected Jesus at her doorstep. The two tales explain the contrary associations of 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, Andreas Heusler, and Rudolf Hübner, Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer (4th edn. Leipzig: Dieterich, 1899), vol. 2, p. 327. 3 On the circuitous journey as a mode of thought and a mode of narration, see sections 4 and 5 in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 197–324. 66 For the Heine-Liederkreis, op. 24, see my “Poet’s Love and Composer’s Love,” Music Theory Online 7.5 (2001). 5 David Ferris, Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis and the Genre of the Romantic Cycle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe. Milestones in the practice of close integration of music and poetry include: Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974); Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); Richard Kramer, Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Patrick McCreless, “Song Order in the Song Cycle: Schumann’s Liederkreis, op. 39,” Music Analysis 5 (1986), 5–40. Reinhold Brinkmann, Schumann und Eichendorff: Studien zum Liederkreis Opus 39 (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1997). Cone turned his attention to Dichterliebe in his “Poet’s Love or Composer’s Love?” in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven P. Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 177–92. ent musicopoetic structure in Dichterliebe assumes that there is a secret to be solved and a puzzle to be put together. This assumption seems to ignore the premise of Romantic hermeneutics that the meaning of an artwork cannot be exhausted by a single interpretation or reduced to the author’s intention. Worse, such an assumption would retreat from a modern hermeneutics of suspicion that unmasks the formation of meaning as driven by readers’ (or listeners’) agendas. In light of such caveats, I find it prudent to turn for advice and inspiration to Schumann himself, for he was a highly self-conscious critic, whose writings reflect his experience as a composer and his knowledge of performance. Since Schumann worried that the dissection of musical compositions would turn them into dead bodies, he sought to reconcile his respect for the living artwork with his keen interest in compositional structure.6 In his criticism, he combined analytical and poetic modes in order to remain close to the condition of making music. As the first major modern writer about music, Schumann knew that both hermeneutic analysis and performance involve feeling and understanding; that both strive to be captivating as well as plausible; and that interpretive conviction is more likely to persuade an audience than interpretive coercion. Hence I acknowledge that demonstrations of structural coherence, invocations of authorial intentions, or connections to historical and social contexts have no greater (and also no lesser) claim on communicating some truth about a composition than music making itself. If the close parallel between analysis and Aufführung informs my interpretation of Dichterliebe, it is because the cycle is as much a story about love as it is about telling that story through song. Fragment and Whole David Ferris and Beate Perrey construct their case against unity in Dichterliebe on three counts: (1) previous analyses of the cycle were based on the ideology of organicism; (2) the publishing history of the cycle suggests an open concept of the work; and (3) the musical structure embodies the Romantic aesthetics of the fragment. Ferris ties these three points together in passage from the introduction to his book: [John] Daverio’s list of the three possible types of cyclic coherence—narrative, tonal structure, and motivic recurrence—encompasses the definitions of virtually all the scholars who have written on the song cycle in recent decades. In all three cases, coherence is understood as something that Schumann has consciously and deliberately created, which is immanent to the cycle in a definite form. According to this model, our role as analysts is to uncover the relationships that make the songs of the cycle cohere and explain how the cycle is a complete whole, and it is for this reason that studies that are based on the premise of coherence are largely indistinguishable from those based on organic unity. I believe that the notion of such definitive coherence in the song cycle is chimerical and that any coherence that we do perceive is more the result of the inevitable relationships and similarities that we would expect in a group of songs that set the same poet’s texts and were composed at the same time. There is evidence that as Schumann arranged groups of songs into cycles he carefully considered how to emphasize the relationships among them. Schumann sometimes spent more time deciding on the order and even on the contents of a cycle than he spent composing the songs in the first place. But the fact that he typically began the process of arranging the songs into a cycle after he finished composing them and, even more important, so often changed his mind as he engaged in this process makes it clear how mutable the order and contents of his song cycles are. The order of the songs in a published cycle reflects the aesthetic choices that Schumann made as he considered how to convey the various levels of poetic and musical meaning most effectively, but this does not mean that he has created a unified tonal structure or a consistent narrative discourse. On the contrary, the complete cycle is as fragmentary and open-ended as the individual songs of which it is comprised, and its ultimate coherence and meaning are re-created anew by each individual listener. Perhaps this is why the attempt to define the genre of the song cycle has been so maddening.7 6 On Schumann’s struggle with an aesthetics of musical criticism and analysis, see Leon Plantinga, Schumann as Critic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 59– 78. 7 Ferris, Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis, pp. 23–24; see also pp. 166–67. In his second chapter, Ferris deals with the problems of an organicist reception of Dichterliebe, 67 BERTHOLD HOECKNER Paths through Dichterliebe 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC Suspicion about organic unity has been around in musicology for a while. Joseph Kerman argued this point a quarter of a century ago precisely in regard to Schenker’s analysis of the second song of Dichterliebe.8 There is certainly nothing wrong with any ongoing vigilance against musical analysis that finds unity because it looks only for unity; and that looks for unity because it assumes that unity is there. To be sure: the perception of musical coherence is always already implicated in one’s musical training, which is itself already implicated in one’s musical aesthetics. We should recognize that there is no way out of this conundrum. Yet Ferris feels the need to explain how we can account for relationships that we do hear in Schumann’s song cycles, not because we are looking for relationships, but because these are jumping out at us. Ferris explains the “inevitable relationships” in these cycles as the result of the composer setting poems by a single poet often in a matter of days. Moreover, Schumann continued to make what Ferris calls “aesthetic choices” (what I take to be the composer’s intentions), and the most striking of these choices were made as Dichterliebe made it into print.9 Between 24 May and 1 June of the Liederjahr 1840, Schumann selected and set twenty songs from Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo. The next day he offered them to Bote & Bock as Gedichte von Heinrich Heine: 20 Lieder und Gesänge aus dem lyrischen Intermezzo im Buche der Lieder für eine Singstimme und das Pianoforte responding in particular to Arthur Komar’s Schenker-inspired analysis in “The Music of Dichterliebe: The Whole and Its Parts,” in Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score; Historical Background; Essays in Analysis; Views and Comments, ed. Arthur Komar (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 63–94; and David Neumeyer, “Organic Structure and the Song Cycle: Another Look at Schumann’s ‘Dichterliebe’,” Music Theory Spectrum 4 (1982), 92–105. 8 Joseph Kerman, “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980), 311–31, see pp. 323– 31. Recently the debate has flared up again, stirred by Robert Morgan’s article “The Concept of Unity and Musical Analysis,” Music Analysis 22 (2003), 7–50, which was met with a host of responses in the second and third (double) issue of vol. 23 of Music Analysis. 9 Rufus Hallmark, The Genesis of Schumann’s Dichterliebe: A Source Study (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979), pp. 123–27; and Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, pp. 116– 21. 68 (henceforth 20 Lieder und Gesänge).10 After the publisher turned him down, Schumann waited until 1843 to make another effort with Breitkopf & Härtel, and then with Böhme & Peters, who accepted. At this point he took out four songs and added the title Dichterliebe, which appeared in 1844 as op. 48. If Schumann, by eliminating four songs, made an aesthetic choice to “convey the various levels of poetic and musical meaning most effectively,” why does Ferris deny that the composer “created a unified tonal structure 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 the publication history of op. 48. In the letter to Bote & Bock from 2 June 1840, Schumann wrote that he wanted “to see the collection, which forms a whole, appear unseparated.”11 And in a letter to Breitkopf from 6 August 1843, he offered “a cycle of 20 songs, which form a whole, but each of which is also self-contained.”12 In light of Schumann’s insistence on publishing all twenty songs, Perrey maintains that “the relation of a presumably authoritative score and its substantially divergent sketches may, rather, be thought of as indicative of a compositional procedure that opposes, rather than aims to achieve, systematic unity. The learned urge to systematize, which seems so prevalent in most enquiries into Dichterliebe, exhibits a general and possibly excessive solicitude for harmoniousness and, above all, coherence.”13 As Perrey puts it succinctly, “Dichterliebe can be viewed, I believe, as demonstrating the opposite of wholeness and still be aesthetically entirely convincing.”14 Moreover, for Perrey, the fact that Schumann cut four songs shows that the original version was already a constellation of fragments. I find this assertion problematic. Schumann’s 10 For a facsimile of the autograph of the twenty-song version with title page, see Robert Schumann, Dichterliebe Opus 48: Liederkreis aus Heinrich Heines Buch Der Lieder: Faksimile nach dem Autograph in der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz, ed. Elisabeth Schmierer (Laaber: Laaber, 2006). 11 Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, p. 117. 12 Ibid., p. 119. 13 Ibid., p. 121. 14 Ibid. letters certainly confirm that the 20 Lieder und Gesänge are a viable version. Yet it does not follow that the edition letzter Hand constitutes a compromise of his artistic vision, even if the cuts might have been prompted by external constraints.15 Although we should regard each version of the cycle on its own terms, the comparison between the two offers some explanations for Schumann’s choices during the publication process. I will discuss these choices in greater detail later on, since Perrey’s argument against unity in Dichterliebe is less textual than aesthetic. Like Ferris, she holds that the work exemplifies the idea of disunity, itself based on the Romantic aesthetics of the fragment. Both authors find disunity because they look for disunity, and they look for disunity because they assume that disunity is there. Most compelling in this respect is Perrey’s reading of Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo as a “signature of modernity.”16 Heine debunked the romanticizing view of Romanticism in favor of its modernist traits. His critique reached back to the roots of Romanticism, turning such lines from Goethe’s Sesenheimer Lieder as “In deinen Küssen welche Wonne!” into “In den Küssen welche Lüge!”17 Such ironic twists questioned the aesthetic premise of Erlebnislyrik as an authentic expression of human experience. Heine distrusted any claims on poetic truth as a way of life and as a way of apprehending the world. His parodies were not only an indictment of Romantic poetry but also aimed at its very core—the Volkston. While Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano had collected the folk songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805) “[to] heal the great rupture of the world,” Heine’s monumental Buch der Lieder (1827) sought to reopen this very rupture.18 He mas- 15 For a recent assessment of the different versions, see Gerd Nauhaus, “‘Dichterliebe’—Und Kein Ende,” in “Das letzte Wort der Kunst”: Heinrich Heine und Robert Schumann: zum 150. Todesjahr, ed. Joseph A. Kruse (Stuttgart and Kassel: Metzler and Bärenreiter, 2006), pp. 193–206. 16 Part II of Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, pp. 69–107, is entitled “Heine’s Signature of Modernity: The Lyrisches Intermezzo.” 17 Ibid., p. 85. 18 Ibid., p. 81, citing Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, “Von Volksliedern,” in Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Heinz Rölleke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987), p. 403. tered the form of the folk song—its four-verse stanzas with three-feet lines—in order to unmask how urban literati had fancied this Urmelody as an authentic expression of the German language and soul. Heine had to embrace the tone and the lore of the folk in order to shun its romanticizing appropriation. According to Perrey, Heine’s Die Romantische Schule (1833) not only contains a “mordant pronouncement against Romanticism’s integrity,” but also “discloses at the same time an affinity, and even an identification, with a movement that he polemically rejects.”19 The poet did this most effectively through his device of the Stimmungsbruch (the breaking of mood), which Adorno described famously as “Heine’s wound.”20 And this wound was selfinflicted. The blows Heine thrust at poetry hit home, heavily. As a result of this division, the poet’s métier became a melancholic pastime. In Freud’s sense, Heine’s self-hatred and selfdestruction are symptoms of the poet’s ongoing struggle to overcome his inability to mourn the death of poetry at the crossroads of Romanticism and modernism. The fruit of this struggle is the Armesünderblum. Such emphasis on Heine’s modernism is ultimately a critical intervention into the prevailing musicology of the Lied. It inflicts, as it were, a wound upon the traditional reception of Dichterliebe as a paradigm of Romantic song, in which music shapes the meaning of the poetry. Instead of reading Heine in terms of Schumann, we are asked to listen to Schumann in terms of Heine. This inversion precipitates the shift from a Romantic hermeneutics to a modern one. Perrey is no longer interested in the hermeneutics of congeniality, identification and intentionality, which deals with a central subject and a single meaning. Instead, she promotes a hermeneutics of alienation, conflict and difference, which deals in decentered subjects and multiple meanings. Hence her focus on the modernist seeds in those categories of Romantic aesthetics that speak of disunity: fragmentation, irony, and reflection. And hence 19 Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, p. 87. Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Wunde Heine,” in Noten Zur Literatur: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 95–100. 20 69 BERTHOLD HOECKNER Paths through Dichterliebe 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC her musicopoetic analyses seek to demonstrate that the songs of Dichterliebe are the very exemplars of this fragmentation, irony, and reflection. Symptomatic of this approach is Perrey’s take on the first song of Dichterliebe (“Im wunderschönen Monat Mai”), which begins and ends on the unresolved seventh of the dominant seventh of F ♯ minor, but cadences twice to A major in the middle. Charles Rosen takes this as a perfect example of Friedrich Schlegel’s famous definition of the fragment as “a little work of art, complete in itself and separated from the rest of the universe like a hedgehog.”21 Although Rosen suggests that the fragment points beyond itself and “projects into the universe precisely by the way it cuts itself off,” Perrey faults him for holding on to the Romantic ideal of aphoristic completeness and organic coherence. Instead she champions Maurice Blanchot’s idea that fragments are “destined partly to the blank that separates them,” thus “causing them to persist on account of their incompletion.”22 This insistence on incompletion inspires Perrey to argue that “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” does not have a tonal center and that this lack is symptomatic for the lack of tonal coherence in Dichterliebe as a whole: “Sehnen und Verlangen” as a sentiment paramount to Romanticism has been seized structurally in its purest manifestation—through lack itself—in the first song of Dichterliebe. Without a tonal centre and by forgoing formal closure, it widens the “wounded agony” sensed in Heine’s “Sehnen” by virtue of its fragmentary form. . . . Song 1 does not, as has been assumed in previous studies, provide a stable basis on which all other songs can rely, nor is it forcibly connected to Song 2. Instead, it opens up the structure of Dichterliebe into a constellation of phantasmal dialogues.23 But the rejection of organicist approaches need not lead to throwing out the baby (some form of tonal coherence in Dichterliebe) with the bathwater (the prevailing paradigm of musical analysis). In a response to Perrey’s analysis of “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” Yonatan Malin has suggested that “the repeated A-major cadences present at least an illusion of stability.” For Malin, this illusion is in fact “a wonderful example of what Perrey herself calls the ‘fragmentation of desire.’ The poet sublimates his desire in images of springtime, in what seems to be a stable A major. Desire then destabilizes the key and creates fragmentation, in the song and in the poetic self, as it reemerges at the end of each stanza.”24 The song, in other words, fluctuates between the illusion of fulfillment and actual fragmentation. I will now try to show how this pertains to the entire cycle. Tonal and Narrative Paths My point of departure is Fred Lerdahl’s analysis of Dichterliebe in his book Tonal Pitch Space. Lerdahl offers a graph of a “regional journey” through the song cycle (see fig. 1), which he describes as follows: The unit of analysis is the tonic of each song, and there is no attempt to organize the sequence into a prolongational hierarchy. Beginning in f ♯ (the first song, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” is ambiguous between prolonging V/f ♯ and I/A), the circle moves back and forth within one fold of the space. The sequence gradually descends down the fifth axis until, at “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet,” it crosses the seam to the adjacent fold [see shaded arrow in fig. 1] and then continues to descend until c ♯ is reached [see arrow in fig. 1]. The cycle has come full circle and in a sense could begin again, with the I of the D ♭ coda, pivoting as V/f ♯ [see the shaded boxes around A and f ♯]. It is tempting to ascribe narrative significance to this pattern, but Heine’s elusive poetry does not offer an easy interpretation. At the least, the stark “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” signals a change in mood that conforms to the crossing from one fold to the next.25 21 See Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, p. 174, citing Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 48, citing Schlegel’s fragment no. 206 from the journal Athenaeum. 22 As cited in Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, p. 177; cf. Rosen, The Romantic Generation, pp. 51–57. 23 Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, p. 224; see also p. 177. 70 24 Yonatan Malin, “Review of Beate Julia Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics: Fragmentation of Desire,” Music Theory Spectrum 28.2 (2006), 302. 25 Fred Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 138. F♯ B E A A f♯ C a A f♯ F♯ D b F d D b B G e B♭ g G e E C a c C a A f♯ F d B♭ f F d D b B g b♭ B♭ g G e E c C a A f♯ f F d D b B b♭ B♭ g G e E c C a A f♯ f F d D b b♭ B♭ g G e c C a e♭ E♭ c♯ D♭ g♯ f♯ c A♭ Figure 1: Regional journey in Schumann’s Dichterliebe from Fred Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 139, shadings added. E♭ A♭ D♭ G♭ C♭ F♭ B E A D Lerdahl’s hermeneutic restraint—or reluctance to respond to Heine’s “elusive” poetry— leaves ample room for further exploration. Lerdahl derives his regional journey of Dichterliebe from the conception of key relationships in Gottfried Weber’s Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonkunst from 1817/ 21 (see fig. 2). Schumann notes in his diaries that he studied the Versuch, so he was certainly familiar with Weber’s diagram.26 Weber combines the vertical orientation of fifth relations in major and minor keys with the horizontal orientation of minor third relations, assigning a node to each major and minor key. The most prominent feature in the tonal structure of Dichterliebe is a double trajectory of falling fifths through major keys and their relative minor keys, starting with A major and F ♯ minor in the first song. This double trajectory appears as a shaded box in the second column 26 For further evidence of Schumann’s engagement with Weber, see Bodo Bischoff, Monument für Beethoven: Die Entwicklung der Beethoven-Rezeption Robert Schumanns (Köln-Rheinkassel: C. Dohr, 1994), pp. 369–93; see also Hubert Moßburger, Poetische Harmonik in der Musik Robert Schumanns (Sinzig: Studio, 2005), pp. 139–40. e♭ a♭ d♭ g♭ c♭ f♭ b E♭ A♭ D♭ G♭ C♭ F♭ B e♭ a♭ d♭ g♭ E♭ A♭ D♭ G♭ d♯ D♯ b♯ B♯ g c♯ C♯ a♯ A♯ f g♯ e♭ G♯ F♯ E♭ e♯ E♯ c d♯ D♯ b♯ c♯ C♯ a♯ g♯ G♯ F♯ e♯ d♯ g♯ c♯ Figure 2: Table of key relationships reproduced from Gottfried Weber, Theory of Musical Composition, trans. James F. Warner (Boston: Wilkins, Carter, and Company, 1846), p. 320, shaded box added. of my reproduction of Weber’s chart. Lerdahl’s graph deviates from Weber’s regional map in a number of ways that I will address in due course. The most fundamental and important aspect of Lerdahl’s appropriation of Weber is that the key sequence of Dichterliebe is not governed by a prolongational hierarchy determined by a single tonic (which was the main premise of Komar’s Schenkerian analysis). As a result, Schumann transforms tonal space into event space, where discrete events are connected in real and directed time, as in performance.27 This actual sequence of 27 Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space, chap. 3 and p. 140. About the relationship between tonal and event space, see also Patrick McCreless, “Syntagmatics and Paradigmatics: Some Implications for the Analysis of Chromaticism in Tonal Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 13 (1991), 147–78. 71 BERTHOLD HOECKNER Paths through Dichterliebe 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC A D G C F f♯ B♭ E♭ A♭ b e a d g c f D♭ b♭ G♭ e♭ C♭ a♭ F♭ d♭ B g♭ Figure 3: Horizontal orientation of the double trajectory. events transforms the abstract relations of the tonal space into the palpable progression of a journey, whose processes, patterns, and relationships create the tonal and narrative paths through Dichterliebe. These paths share two essential properties: (1) the wavering between two emotional states; and (2) the experience of a growing spatial and temporal distance that must be overcome. Of course, taking the tonic of a song as a primary unit of analysis results in a relatively global perspective on the cycle, but the larger structure does relate to details within the songs, some of which I will include in my analysis. Lerdahl follows the top-down orientation in Weber’s grid, which suggests a spatial sense of falling or descending through successive fifths. While the image of falling comes with a host of powerful associations, I have changed this orientation from left to right and put the relative minor keys below the major keys (see fig. 3). This change of orientation offers additional metaphorical possibilities, or in cognitive terms, a different source for cross-domain mapping.28 The most important gain is the intuitive link between the horizontal orientation and the passing of time. This sense of temporal unfolding helps to explore how the tonal progression of the songs along the double trajectory might have narrative significance. One of the questions often raised about Dichterliebe is whether the cycle constitutes a linear story or a nonlinear constellation of changing emotional states, that is, whether the order of songs follows the logic of the timeline or the impulses of free association. What speaks for a nonlinear constellation is the fortuitous way in which memory can take recourse to past events, often confusing them with the 28 For an exemplary analysis of conceptual blending in a single Lied, see Lawrence Zbikowski, “The Blossoms of ‘Trockne Blumen’: Music and Text in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Music Analysis 18 (1999), 307–45. 72 present. This confusion is symptomatic of the mental 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 will be useful to distinguish between the story and the telling of the story, or the narrative.29 While the events of the failed love affair belong to the past that may be accessed at random, the telling of the story takes place in the present through the performance of each song, one by one. This timeline of storytelling is essential for my analysis and will serve as its main guiding principle. Such a guideline will be useful precisely because the poet telling the story and its protagonist are the same person, and it often appears as if the narrator is reliving and reenacting the events of the past in the present. In fact, this slippage between story and storytelling in performance is a salient feature of Dichterliebe’s alluring complexity. Let us begin, then, with the group of the first four songs, starting with “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” whose oft-noted tonal ambiguity reflects how the poet’s feelings for his beloved fluctuate between his hope for acceptance and his fear of rejection. The cycle thus opens simultaneously on both strands of the major and minor trajectory (as shown by the double-headed arrow in fig. 4). The fear voiced in the first song resolves in the second song, which ends on a hopeful note in A major. Indeed, in the exuberant third song, “Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne,” everything seems well as the poet exults in the carefree confession that he no longer loves the rose, lily, dove, and sun, but 29 Ferris, Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis, pp. 204–08, reviews this narratological distinction and takes issue with analyses along those lines by Christopher Lewis, “Text, Time, and Tonic: Aspects of Patterning in the Romantic Cycle,” Intégral: The Journal of Applied Musical Thought 2 (1988), 37–73 (at 47–50); and Barbara Turchin, “Robert Schumann’s Song Cycles: The Cycle within the Song,” this journal 8 (1985), 231–44. A D G f♯ Figure 4: The first four songs. only the little, dainty, and pure one—his love. And yet, the happiest moment in Dichterliebe is also the shortest. The fourth song, “Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’,” ends with a paradigmatic case of Heine’s Stimmungsbruch: when the beloved tells the poet that she loves him, he “must weep bitterly” because he realizes that she is not telling the truth.30 Despite the break, the initial positive feeling is reason enough to place the song within the opening progression through major keys: A–D–G. The first change to a song with a minor tonic comes in the fifth song, “Ich will meine Seele tauchen,” in which the poet remembers kissing his beloved in the past (“einst”). This indicates that the relationship is over and the memory of the kiss is tinged with a lament for her loss. While no. 5 invokes temporal distance, the sixth song (in E minor) dwells on the experience of spatial distance. The poet describes how the image of Cologne Cathedral is reflected in the waters of the Rhine, from which his imagination moves inside the cathedral to a painting of the Virgin Mary, whose features remind him of his beloved. Because of this sorrowful sense of temporal and spatial distance, these two songs pick up the strand of minor keys on the double trajectory implied in the opening song of Dichterliebe. The return to the trajectory of major keys takes place with the seventh song, “Ich grolle nicht,” in C major. This is an attempt by the poet to convince himself that he does not hold a grudge. But Edward Cone pointed out long ago that Schumann amplifies the two statements of “Ich grolle nicht” in Heine’s poem by repeating them six times in his song—a sure sign that the poet can barely control his out30 These tears are qualitatively different than those in the second song, which I read as the tears of potential—not actual—disappointment. For an analysis of the way Schumann deals with the Stimmungsbruch, see V. Kofi Agawu, “Structural ‘Highpoints’ in Schumann’s Dichterliebe,” Music Analysis 3 (1984), 159–80. D G C b e a BERTHOLD HOECKNER Paths through Dichterliebe Figure 5: Multiple crossings between major and minor trajectories as symptom of an emotional crisis. rage.31 This inner struggle is indicative of a growing emotional crisis, which is reflected in multiple crossings between the major and minor strands of the double trajectory, starting after no. 4 and ending with the drop down to no. 8 (see fig. 5).32 The poet is now consumed by his angry and sad feelings, which push him deeper into despair along the line of minor keys: in A minor, D minor, and G minor. The eighth song, “Und wüssten’s die Blumen,” bemoans the beloved’s ignorance about her heartbreaking behavior and illustrates the actual breaking of the heart in the last stanza. Here the nervous fluttering of thirty-second notes in the piano ruptures, leading to an outburst in the postlude, whose wildly angular sixteenth-note triplets are reminiscent of the frantic opening of Kreisleriana. The ninth song, “Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen,” picks up on the maddening drive of these triplets as they turn into the poet’s recall of the distorted dance music from the beloved’s wedding to another man. The perpetual circling torments the poet, but the movement eventually runs its course and leads to the remembrance of the beloved’s song, whose memory triggers great grief in the tenth song, “Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen.” Thus, after the three crossings during the moment of crisis, the sequence of three songs in minor (a–d– g) appears as the negative correlate of the initial series of songs in major (A–D–G), both with respect to the mode change and to the narra- 31 Edward T. Cone, “Words into Music: The Composer’s Approach to the Text,” in Music, a View from Delft: Selected Essays, ed. Robert P. Morgan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 121–22. The essay appeared first as chap. 1 of Sound and Poetry, ed. Northrup Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), pp. 3–15. The passage pertaining to Schumann is reprinted in Komar, Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score, pp. 117–18. 32 Turchin sees the onset of a crisis only with no. 7. See n. 29 above. 73 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC A f♯ D b G e C a Tritone d 3D 4G 7C [F] 12B ♯ 5b 6e 8a 9d 10 g Figure 6: Three songs in minor counteract three songs in major. tive position on the double trajectory (see fig. 6). What seemed well in the beginning has now been effectively undone. As the poet relates his story, he descends further into depression, prompting a new attempt to pull himself out. In the eleventh song, “Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen,” he changes for the first time to the third person to tell the story of unrequited love as an “old story” that happens all the time—even though it is clear from the last stanza that it has “just” happened to him. The jaunty rhythm appears to put a good face on the tale, and the boisterous cadence in the postlude strains to leave the whole affair behind. The poet’s second attempt to distance himself from his own experience occurs in the trajectory of major keys exactly a tritone away from the opening A major (see fig. 7). What is more, this tonal distance appears to facilitate a change in direction, leading in the twelfth song to the first ending of the cycle. Against the downward thrust of deepening despair, the twelfth song, “Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen,” marks a decisive turn by taking one step up the circle of fifths, from E ♭ major to B ♭ major (see fig. 8). This reversal marks a qualitative change in the poet’s strategy for coping with the situation: not through angry accusation (as in no. 7) or sarcastic bitterness (as in no. 11), but through forgiveness. Details from the interior of the song support this qualitative change, notably the magic moment where the flowers speak to the poet and admonish him “not to be angry with their sister”—that is, with his beloved. The haunting shift to G major for this “song” within the song (mm. 17–18) refers back to no. 4, not just in key but also in gesture. Fittingly, the flowers ask for forgiveness by invoking the very song where trust was broken for the first time. Their recitation on B (with a characteristic leap up to D) cites the opening of no. 4 (see fig. 9). Strikingly, the very line in that song that cites the 74 1/2A 1f g ♭ 11E ♭ [c] Figure 7: Tritone distance between no. 1 and no. 11. beloved saying “ich liebe dich” also touches on B on the first syllable of “lie-be.” The flowers’ allusion has a bittersweet taste. For the G major is soon inflected toward G minor, and then, via the German sixth, to the dominant that sustains the drawn-out postlude before it reaches the tonic B ♭ major. Hence the sense of closure in the postlude has an air of ambivalence. On the one hand, it is a peaceful response to the agonizing postlude of no. 10 in G minor (its immediate neighbor on the strand of minor keys). On the other hand, its way of weaving a melody into soft arpeggios harps back to the first song of the cycle. Indeed, the moment of reprieve proposed by the flowers and the lingering sense of return and reconciliation in the postlude turn out to be an illusion, for Dichterliebe does not end here. There is something unreal about the way the song approaches B♭ from without (the reversal on the major track) and 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 merely springs from the poet’s imagination. Closure is wishful thinking, a daydream. I will digress here in order to consider the original 20 Lieder und Gesänge and speculate why Schumann may have taken out four songs. To be sure, invoking conscious choices by an authorial subject has routinely raised red flags in poststructural theories of interpretation, fearful of reducing an artwork’s meaning to the deliberate portion of its design. And of course one does not have to appeal to the composer’s intentions to validate the analysis, or use the analysis to prove some pre-compositional planning that will once and for all settle the meaning of a work. Nevertheless, evidence of Schumann’s compositional choices in creating a sensible succession of songs can enrich, rather BERTHOLD HOECKNER Paths through Dichterliebe Reversal 1/2 A 3D 4G 7C F 12B ♯ 5b 6e 8a 9d 10g 1f ♭ 11E ♭ c A♭ D♭ G♭ C♭ F♭ B f b♭ e♭ a♭ d♭ g♭ Figure 8: Reversal on the tonal path.  ♯    wenn ich ♭  ♭ ♮ sei   in dei  uns   ne Au - rer gen seh     -    Schwes - ter nicht   bö - se Figure 9: Song no. 4 and the flowers’ “song” in no. 12. 1/2 A 3D 4G 7C F ♯ 5b 6e 8a 9d 1f B♭ 10g 4a 11 E♭ A♭ D♭ G♭ C♭ F♭ B c f b♭ e♭ a♭ d♭ g♭ 4b Figure 10: The place of no. 4a “Dein Angesicht” (E ♭) and 4b “Lehn’ Deine Wang’” (g–V/g) on the tonal path. than delimit, the dramatic dimension of the performance of both versions. This is because these four songs stood originally at the two main nodes of the narrative. Songs 4a and 4b came after the song in which the poet recognizes that “I love you” is a lie. And songs 12a and 12b had their place after the first ending of the cycle. Tonally, the first pair—“Dein Angesicht” (no. 4a in E ♭ major) and “Lehn’ Deine Wang’” (no. 4b in G minor)—jumps ahead to the second node (see fig. 10). As a result, these two songs anticipate the keys of nos. 10 and 11 as their poems conjure up of a vision of the dead beloved and anticipate the poet’s 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 the tonal path would have continued by dropping down to the relative minor of “Ich will meine Seele tauchen.” The second pair—“Es leuchtet meine Liebe” (no. 12a in G minor) and “Mein Wagen rollet langsam” (no. 12b in B ♭ major)—also creates a loop. But this time the two keys hover around the same node (see fig. 11). Both songs reinforce the sense of finality and the desire to reach closure expressed in “Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen.” The first song, “Es leuchtet meine Liebe,” looks at the unhappy affair through the lens of allegory and fairy tale, and its ending in the tonic major (with the third, B, in the top register) clearly points back to the flower song in no. 12. The second song, “Mein Wagen rollet langsam,” picks up on the falling arpeggios of no. 12, but the mood is more subdued. The staccato chords that rip through the arpeggios sharpen the contrast between illusion and reality, while the long postlude echoes the drawn-out ending of no. 12. Thus the four omitted songs were unquestionably part of an intricate overall tonal design and narrative plan. By taking them out, Schumann may have wanted to avoid the du75 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC 12b 1/2 A 3D 4G 7C F B♭ 11 E ♯ 5b 6e 8a 9d 10g c 1f ♭ A♭ D♭ G♭ C♭ F♭ B f b♭ e♭ a♭ d♭ g♭ 12a Figure 11: The place of no. 12a “Es leuchet meine Liebe” (g/G) and 12b “Mein Wagen rollet langsam” (B ♭) on the tonal path. gap 1/2 A 3D 4G 7C F 12B ♯ 5b 6e 8a 9d 10g 1f ♭ 11 E ♭ c A♭ D♭ f b♭ collapse G♭ C♭ F♭ B ♭ a♭ d♭ g♭ 13e Figure 12: Gap and collapse. plication of keys and poetic motifs. He also bypassed the early appearance of stronger moods and eliminated the drastic specter of the dead beloved. During the process of revision, Schumann may have been concerned that the greater complexity of the 20 Lieder und Gesänge was more confusing. His changes streamlined the tonal path and tightened the narrative progression. The tonal and narrative function of the extra songs in the original conception of the cycle contributes to our understanding of what follows in both the 20 Lieder und Gesänge and Dichterliebe. Since daydreams tend to dissipate in the face of reality, the poet’s desire to reach closure at the end of no. 12 turns out to be delusive. There is no way he can climb up the circle of fifths beyond B ♭. The fact that there is no song in F major suggests a gap that cannot be crossed, like an abyss without a bridge. Hovering around B ♭ with songs 12a and 12b after the first ending conveys very well how the poet gets stuck after hitting a wall. This realization has a disastrous effect on his narrative, turning daydreams into nightmares. Indeed, no. 13, “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet,” in the starkly somber E ♭ minor, is the most devastating song of Dichterliebe and perhaps all of Schumann. At this point in Lerdahl’s 76 regional journey, the progression of keys “crosses the seam to the adjacent fold and then continues to descent until c ♯ is reached.”33 Here I part ways with Lerdahl. True, E ♭ minor expresses a qualitative change, but we do not have to conceptualize this change as a move across the seam. Assuming that the poet cannot get past the gap of the missing F-major song and is thrown back in the opposite direction, he appears to land on E ♭ minor by falling back on the minor trajectory and skipping over three steps as shown in fig. 12. The failed first ending only precipitates the descent into depression and results in a tumble down the circle of fifths. This fall is a “collapse” in the truest sense. It constitutes the first move, in successive songs, of more than one position. As such, it is a cornerstone of my analysis, a central piece in the puzzle of the interlocking tonal and narrative paths. Take it away and the analysis itself will collapse. As a consequence of the collapse, “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” plunges to the lowest point yet on the strand of minor keys. Since the tumble elides (literally: collapses) four stations on the minor trajectory into one, the third 33 Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space, p. 138. return 14B 15E g♯ 16c ♯ 1/2 A 3D 4G 7C F 12B ♯ 5b 6e 8a 9d 10g 1f ♭ 11 E ♭ c A♭ D♭ f b♭ G♭ C♭ F♭ B ♭ a♭ d♭ g♭ 13e BERTHOLD HOECKNER Paths through Dichterliebe Figure 13: Return to the time before the beginning. E♭ C b e a d g c C♭ f b♭ e♭ collapse first effort second effort third effort Figure 14: Three efforts to deal with a deepening depression. effort of the poet to pull out of his depression by getting away from the strand of minor keys is also the most spectacular. In utter contrast to the devastation in no. 13, the two songs that follow (“Allnächtlich im Traume” and “Aus alten Märchen winkt es”) speak of dreams and fairy lands in a lighthearted, almost nonchalant, manner. If Lerdahl had strictly adhered to the spelling in Weber’s map, the keys of these songs would have been C ♭ and F ♭, but he uses their enharmonic equivalents instead (compare figs. 1 and 2). However, if we accept Schumann’s notation 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 trajectory of major keys, then their relationship to no. 13 changes dramatically, opening up very different hermeneutic prospects. In fig. 13, the substitution of C♭ and F ♭ with B and E takes us to a place before the beginning. Figure 14 suggests an explanation. It shows a pattern whereby the poet’s ongoing efforts to pull out of his deepening depression respond to growing stretches on the strand of minor keys. Once we include the three keys elided by the collapse to measure the depth of the fall, we can see why the third effort to pull away from the strand of minor keys has to be qualitatively different: the precipitous fall prompts the poet’s most astonishing attempt to cope with his loss. No longer merely suppressing his anger or resorting to sarcastic mockery, as before, he now lands himself deeply on the sharp side of the circle of fifths. Now, ostensibly intending to assuage his sorrow by moving up a major third to the next major key in the cycle, C ♭, the poet in fact leaps to the enharmonic equivalent of this key, B, to the place and time of dream and wonderland, at the utmost remove from the earlier (or, vis-à-vis the first song, later) troubles of his broken heart. Other factors support this hearing. A small but momentous detail is the change from B ♮ in no. 12 (mm. 17–18) to C ♭ in no. 13 (m. 2), which seems to foreshadow the enharmonic move. Recall that B is the recitation tone of the flower song in the poet’s daydreams, and that C ♭ is the flat sixth that articulates the sighs over the painful visitations of the beloved in no. 13. In relation to B ♭, the former lifts up; the latter pulls down. A bird’s-eye view of the enharmonic transfer reveals a striking symmetry on the trajectory of major keys around the missing song in F major. When counting the keys elided by the collapse on the major strand of the trajectory, C ♭ and B are exactly a tritone away from F major. Since the F-major gap proved to be an obstacle for a stepwise ascent through 77 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC B E A D G C tritone B♭ F E♭ collapse A♭ D♭ G♭ C♭ collapse tritone gap Figure 15: Jumping over the gap of the absent song in F major. These two moments are pivotal in the poet’s telling of his story. The former relates the on- 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 a dream in no. 13. Initially, she says “I love you” but doesn’t mean it; later she appears to mean well, but it is not real. This uncanny similarity and dissimilarity between the two songs may well be expressed through the relationship between their tonics, G major and E ♭ minor, which form a hexatonic pole in neo-Riemannian terms.35 In both songs, the Stimmungsbruch exposes the fault line between appearance and reality, leading to a break in the poet’s narrative. Put differently, no. 4 is the end of the beginning; no. 13 is the beginning of the end. If we hear no. 13 as the point of departure for the return to a time before the beginning of the cycle, fig. 16 shows how the two songs flank the ending and the beginning of the cycle from both sides. Seen this way, they are equidistant from the very seam through which one could connect the last song with the first through the dominant relation. Here lies the crux of Dichterliebe. Is this V–I relation between the last and the first songs real or not? The last song begins in C ♯ minor to summon with greatest resolve the most imposing forces and resources—giants and huge coffins—to bury the Lieder of the unhappy story once and for all. But the grandeur of the project and grandiloquence of its announcement are effectively undone in one of Schumann’s most ingenious compositional moves: the recapitulation of the postlude from the twelfth song. At the end of the last song, the poet harks back to that first effort to climb up the circle of fifths 34 35 the circle of fifths, fig. 15 illustrates how it appears as if the distance of the tritone makes it possible for the poet to “jump” over the very gap that prevented his earlier return to the beginning. The enharmonic transfer from C ♭ to B also throws into relief the two endings of Dichterliebe, the postlude that concludes no. 12 and the recapitulation of that postlude at the 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 a strong 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. 4 Doch wenn du sprichst: Ich liebe dich So muss ich weinen bitterlich. (but when you say: I love you! then I must weep bitterly.) Ending of Song No. 13 Ich hab im Traum geweinet, Mir träumte, du wärst mir noch gut. Ich wachte auf und noch immer Strömt meine Thränenfluth. (I cried in my dream, I dreamed that you still loved me. I woke up, and still the flood of my tears is streaming.) In 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 preparatory states, so that the devastating break comes with a big unresolved climax in the third of the three stanzas. 78 For a suggestive association between hexatonic polarity and Freud’s concept of the uncanny, see Richard Cohn, “Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57 (2004), 285–323. Beginning of End e♭ B E c ♯/D ♭ A/f ♯ End of Beginning A D G diatonic polarity hexatonic polarity Figure 16: Hexatonic and diatonic polarities around the beginning and end. with the hope of forgiveness and consolation. But now this beautiful song without words seems to put the poet in the position to start all over again. The simple fact that the D ♭5 that ends the last song can “become” the C ♯5 that begins the first is the strongest argument for Dichterliebe as a tonal unity, governed by a tonal center. If the concluding D ♭ tonic turns into the dominant of one of the two implied tonics of the first song, F ♯ minor, fig. 17 goes even further by suggesting that the E major of song 15 might also “resolve” to the other implied tonic of the first song, A major. This twofold link would reconnect both strands of the double trajectory, driven by both Bangen and Hoffen, fear and hope. Yet if the last discharge of tonal tension through falling fifths would return us this way to the beginning, why did Schumann change the key of the postlude from C♯ major to D ♭ major?36 Schumann’s preference may be just a notational convenience, but the alteration does invite more hermeneutic speculation. Heard in D ♭, the postlude (whose renotated meter of 64 time suggests a more measured and reflective tempo) takes the poet to a very different place on the tonal path of Dichterliebe. In Lerdahl’s graph, this D ♭ major is located on the strand of major keys, a location that results from the crossing of the fold to E ♭ minor at no. 13 and crossing back later (see fig. 1). A different sce- 36 Already in the twenty-song autograph Schumann noted that in a marginal note: “?NB: Hier ist besser Des Dur vorzuzeichnen” (?NB: D♭ major is preferable here). See Hallmark, The Genesis of Dichterliebe, p. 110. E A c♯ f♯ BERTHOLD HOECKNER Paths through Dichterliebe Figure 17: Connecting the end and beginning of the double trajectory. 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 the enharmonic move from C♯ to D ♭ as a return to the equivalent place at the other end of the double trajectory. In fact, Weber’s map suggests the closeness of parallel keys on a given double trajectory by lining them up across each fold, without which they would merge into a single tonic. Support for this view of the modal mixture in no. 16 comes through song no. 9, which starts out in D minor but ends in D major. Hence the enharmonic change from C♯ to D ♭ in the final song moves us exactly to the point low in the double trajectory, from whence the cycle could start over again in B ♭♭ major and G ♭ minor, the enharmonic equivalents of the first song (see fig. 18). This return suggests that the attempt to go back to a time before the cycle was illusory, like the dreams and fairy tales conjured up in song nos. 14 and 15. As the last line of no. 15 has it, the illusion evaporates like “empty foam.” The return to D ♭ is a return to reality, which only makes obvious that the poet cannot turn the clock back. To conclude, then, I submit that the ending of Dichterliebe is about dimming the difference between dream and reality. This slippage emerges from the way the poet continues with his story after the first ending in no. 12. After the collapse, his narrative takes place in both real and imaginary space. The poet stages a return to the beginning and at the same time continues along a path that descends. Being in two places at once reflects on the poet’s mental condition in the face of his loss. His daydreams are an expression of his despair. After the first ending, his depression continues in the form of a regression, yet the regression only leads deeper into depression. As return and nonreturn, the two enharmonic moves pronounce the meaning of Dichterliebe (and the 20 Lieder und Gesänge) as one that fluctuates between closed circle and open cycle, between Classical and 79 illusory return 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC 14B 15E g♯ 16c ♯ 16C 1/2 A 3D 4G 7C F 12B ♯ 5b 6e 8a 9d 10 g 1f ♭ 11 E c ♭ A♭ D♭ f b♭ G♭ C♭ F♭ B ♭ a♭ d♭ g♭ 13e ♯ 16 D ♭ return to reality Figure 18: Illusory return and return to reality. Romantic form, and between whole and fragment. This meaning resonates with the way ˇ ˇ Slavoj Zizek imagines how absent melodies in Schumann’s music exemplify modern subjectivity: “The modern subject emerges when its objectal counterpart (in this case, a melody) disappears, but remains present (efficient) in its very absence: in short, the subject is correlative to an ‘impossible’ object whose existence is purely ‘virtual’.”37 This paradox might explain the impossible, but efficacious, simultaneity of the enharmonic return and nonreturn. The question whether Dichterliebe reaches closure remains impossible to answer. We don’t know whether the poet returns to A major and F ♯ 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 what Freud called compulsory repetition and the possibility of working through the trauma of loss, or between melancholia (whose fixation on the lost object hinders healing) and mourning (which leaves the lost object behind). While the closed circle prevents healing, the openended cycle fosters forgetting and forgiveness. ˇ ˇ Slavoj Zizek, “Robert Schumann: The Romantic AntiHumanist?” in The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), p. 204. 37 80 As an expression of Heine’s wound, the tonal disposition of Dichterliebe puts the poet on the fence between the two. When the conception of different keys on a tonal map clashes with the perception of their sameness in sound, the composer can convey his poet’s paradoxical double experience of wholeness and fragmentation. This is how Schumann knew the irony of Heine’s poetic suicide at the crossroads of Romanticism and modernism. He knew that there grows the Armesünderblum. l Abstract. The article advances a new case for a coherent tonal and narrative structure of Schumann’s Dichterliebe, op. 48. Based on a map of key relations by Gottfried Weber, the hermeneutic analysis follows Dichterliebe’s tonal path along a double trajectory of major keys and their relative minor keys, whose progression through tonal space is understood as occurrences in event space. A comparison between Dichterliebe and its original version, 20 Lieder und Gesänge, shows how the tonal and narrative paths pertain to both. The hermeneutic analysis demonstrates a slippage between story and narrative as well as reality and illusion, whereby Schumann responds to Heine’s irony, creating a tonal and narrative structure that is both circular and cyclical, both whole and fragment. Key words: Schumann, Dichterliebe, op. 48, Heine, tonal structure, narrative, Gottfried Weber