Paths through Dichterliebe

Nineteenth Century Music

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 65-80

  Hoeckner, Berthold ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Dichterliebe; Gottfried Weber; Heine; Narrative; op. 48; Schumann; Tonal structure

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950133406     PISSN: 01482076     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2006.30.1.065     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. 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;
2. 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.
4. Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984);
5. Richard Kramer, Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
6. Patrick McCreless, "Song Order in the Song Cycle: Schumann's Liederkreis, op. 39," Music Analysis 5 (1986), 5-40.
7. Reinhold Brinkmann, Schumann und Eichendorff: Studien zum Liederkreis Opus 39 (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1997).
8. 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.
9. and David Neumeyer, "Organic Structure and the Song Cycle: Another Look at Schumann's 'Dichterliebe'," Music Theory Spectrum 4 (1982), 92-105.
10. Joseph Kerman, "How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out," Critical Inquiry 7 (1980), 311-31, see pp. 323-31.
11. 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.
12. Rufus Hallmark, The Genesis of Schumann's Dichterliebe: A Source Study (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979), pp. 123-27;
13. and Perrey, Schumann's Dichterliebe, pp. 116-21.
14. 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).
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. Theodor W. Adorno, "Die Wunde Heine, " in Noten Zur Literatur: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 95-100.
17. cf. Rosen, The Romantic Generation, pp. 51-57.
18. Perrey, Schumann's Dichterliebe, p. 224; see also p. 177.
19. Fred Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 138.
20. 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.
21. 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);
22. and Barbara Turchin, "Robert Schumann's Song Cycles: The Cycle within the Song," this journal 8 (1985), 231-44.
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space, p. 138.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. Slavoj Žižek, "Robert Schumann: The Romantic Anti-Humanist?" in The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), p. 204.