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Cyclical Elements in the Six Heine Settings of Franz Schubert

“Those who have nowhere to retreat from their traumatic experience, so

that they cannot even claim that, long after the trauma hit, they were

haunted by its specter: what remains is not the trauma’s specter, but the

trauma itself?”

Slavoj Žižek, from ‘Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject’

In his short essay on Schubert Adorno writes: ‘it is in Schubert’s finales that the

fragmentary character of his music becomes a material reality.’1 Especially putting the

emphasis on its ‘fragmentary’ quality, he positions Schubert’s music with that of

Beethoven. In the music of Beethoven, there is constant development, developing

variation and an almost ‘linear’ discourse whereas in Schubert principal element of form-

building is that of ‘dénouement’, a turn of events or a dramaturgical twist that in an

instant puts everything together. For example the coda of the last movement of the

Quintet in C-Major, D. 956 is an example of this. What we may call a ‘disjunctive’

ending2 also in one instance falsifies the atmosphere built before in the music and puts

everything into a new perspective. Therefore the music takes on an eschatological quality

-it is as if Schubert composes directly to that point- as this moment of delivering is

created as a rupture rather than a Beethovenian climax through accumulation.

1 Theodor W. Adorno, Schubert (1928), 19th Century Music, Vol. 29, No. 1, Summer 2005, 12. 2 John M. Gingerich, Rememberance and Consciousness in Schubert’s C-Major String Quintet, D. 956, Music Quarterly Vol. 84, No. 4, Winter 2000, 619.

The six Heine settings by Schubert is perhaps one of the clearest examples of this.

The cyclical nature (or lack thereof) of these songs have had quite a bit of theoretical

scrutiny; however, much of the effort seems center around extracting and/or sketching

out a ‘hovering’ plot or narrative to Schubert’s selection of these poems. While whether

Schubert had a clear idea of a narrative plot or not is beyond the scope of this paper, I

intend to look at the problem of cyclicism in this work from a point that takes into

account the specific dramatic trajectory together with the use of motivic and ‘sonoric’

function as well as key relationships. Similar to the D. 956 Quintet, my reading of the

Heine songs focuses on a ‘discursive rupture’, or perhaps an interruption of cyclicism for

the sake of its completion. I will first try to propose a framework form what a ‘cycle’ can

be, and then proceed on to analyze the Heine settings within this framework.

I.

If we go by the idea that a cycle implies a kind of organicism, a sort of particular

unity that gives its parts the freedom of extractability, but in their assemblage creating a

greater experience (whatever this experience may be) we may turn to the idea of

organicism as proposed by the Finnish Semiotician Eero Tarasti:

“... Music has to progress towards some goal or telos; music must

be directional. As a temporal art, all music has finality of course. But here

we do not mean the common temporality of music but temporality as

“marked” (cf. Hatten 1994). In organic music, musical time is organized

towards a certain goal.” (Italics and quotation marks by Tarasti.)3

3 Eero Tarasti, Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002, 95.

I would like to argue first that what constitutes cyclicism in a collection of songs

is not an archetypal key structure or mere referentiality through recurrence of motivic

content. Rather it is a very particular (and perhaps abnormal) use of these devices to

delineate a dramatic structure. In other words, what shapes a cycle is directionality

towards a ‘musical goal’ and the use of musical materials in a singular way in driving

towards this goal. Similarly, in the poetic content (and this is evident even from cycles

such as Winterreise) instead of a clear narrative, what creates the drive forward in the

cycle is a sort of ‘trajectory’4, or ‘narrativizing discourse’5. Therefore I would like to

replace the idea of ‘narrative’ in cycle with that of ‘trajectory’, a sort of abstract gesture

that defines the musical and poetic destiny of the cycle in its totality.

The idea of absence of narrative in cycles is also suggested by Richard Kramer;

however, his work mainly focuses on an abstraction based on the musical material

without clearly suggesting a ‘path’ in the cycle. What is perhaps missing is a sort of

necessity, implying that reshuffling (or even reordering) of the songs in this collection

will serve to create a vague narrative. Rather than a clear progression, according to

Kramer, the cyclical elements can result from just sharing of similar themes, as long as

there is musical justification such cyclicism (here in reference to Kosengarten settings):

4 Eero Tarasti, A Theory of Musical Semiotics, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994, 23.5 Richad Kramer, Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of the Song, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 10.

“The Kosengarten songs enjoy a common language, even a distinct

dialect. [...] Conversely, to speak here of incipient song cycle, stressing the

concept to its limits, means only to suggest that in his reading of

Kosengarten, Schubert caught in his music the accents of a poetic

dialect.”6

Also with regards to the Heine songs, he writes: “[...] it is how the poems play against

one another, individually and in all those various subsets and strata that together

constitute the lucid, dense texture of the collection.” 7

Against this position, I will try to establish that in what we may call Schubert’s Heine

cycle, the cyclical elements come about from a dramatic ordering of musical material and

the careful positioning of a poetic (and musical) rupture taking place in the last song, Der

Doppelgänger. Both ‘envelope’ of a tonal plan and the motivic recurrences, references

and manipulations, in one way or another correspond to this dramatic trajectory.

II.

The first of the six songs, Der Atlas, is perhaps the most dynamic of all of these

settings. The second stanza, in which Schubert moves from the tonic G minor to major

key of the raised mediant, B major. This clear division of the two sections (also by means

of texture) is quite remarkable. At this point ‘Atlas’ addresses his heart (‘You proud

6 Ibid, 20.7 Ibid, 126.

heart’). The common phenomenon of the major interjection in minor context as a

remembrance of the past (or even a nostalgia for an imaginary past) is at play here. This

is the first presentation of the theme of the division of the self that will become more

apparent throughout the piece. Here the speaker talks directly to his heart in a kind of

almost naïve distance to his own misery, or ‘a satisfactorily heroic self-regard’8. The

music, in really creating a contrast between the first stanza and the second delineates this

idea of division. The recapitulation through the reduplication of the first stanza is, in my

opinion there to isolate even further this peculiar middle section.

In Ihr Bild, the gaze of the speaker shifts from his heart to ‘her portrait’. The two

non-functional B-flats that represent for Schenker a literal ‘Augenmusik’9, the eyes is a

musical device that in my opinion sheds light to what I will call ‘sonoric function’ in the

latter part of the cycle. These two notes not only introduce key but they stare at what is

coming after with their hollow echoes after the clearance of a majestic and tragically

resonant G-minor chord. Susan Youens’s lenghty explanation10 for this particular song

also continues the thread of self-division as the staring on the portrait really becomes a

staring on one’s own face (...Erglänzte ihr Augenpaar // Auch meine Tränen flossen ...).

Thus there is almost a logical continuation to the poet’s gaze from Der Atlas to Ihr Bild.

The idea of inspection is again amplified in the form as Schubert brings back the ‘eye-

figuration’ in full harmony (if we take the analogy further, the harmony becomes the

tears flowing down from the octave B-flats) and mirrors exactly the first section (leaving

8 Gingerich, 629-30.9 Heinrich Schenker, Schubert’s “Ihr Bild”, from Der Tonwille Vol. 1 (1921-23), trans. Robert Snarrenberg, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 4110 Susan Youens, Heinrich Heine and the Lied, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 22-34.

out the b section in the submediant), similar to the small-ternary construction of Der

Atlas. This formula is used in the next song, Das Fischermädchen, as well. This setting

follows basically every possible convention that is characteristic of Schubert, a flat(ter)

mediant key for the second section and an insistent recurring pattern in the piano part that

sort of echoes an aspect of the poetry (the undulating gondola-rhythm, or according to

Youens, a barcarolle). Within the context of Schubert’s output, there is nothing that is

remarkable about this song. Within the context of Heine songs, this particular piece sticks

out in its normative quality. According to Youens, a double-play on the part of Schubert

is in question here: “Is the song innocent or not? Sincere or mocking?”11 Schubert

definitely sets it in a very calm and peaceful texture with playful lines of the singer on top

of the small waves of the accompaniment. However, it is at the same time a very cold,

almost objective setting. According to Youens the speaker here is, like the music both

sincere and mocking. This is the double face of Janus, at once kind-hearted and ironic.

This also marks the end of the first half of the cycle. Poet’s gaze shifts from the

fishermaiden to the town in fog. Die Stadt opens with a repetitive figure of a diminished

seven chord. This is a diminished chord that never resolves the tension it embodies. It

purely fulfills a coloristic or ‘sonoric’ function, and more over it is rooted in the tonic key

of C of this song. Schubert’s indication of sustain pedal with this figure adds more to the

understanding this passage as a resonating gesture. It does not follow tonal syntax

because its presence is justified purely by its acoustical property in isolation. This is a

very common phenomenon in Schubert’s late style. Robert Hatten claims that in the

Piano Sonata in A-Major, D. 959, “resonance becomes an "idea" that is worked out in

11 Ibid, 46.

each movement, to varying degrees. [...] the grounding of resonance into its generative

source is thematically appropriate as a means of closing the thematic premise of overtone

resonance unique to this work.”12 Also the second movement of the Quintet in C-Major

features these long, radiant and resonant sonorities that “ [...] [promote] contemplation of

the pure string chord of the inner trio and, over a longer san of time, of Akkordfarben-of

the contrasts of modal color and function [...]”13 This idea of a non-syntactical sonoric

function becomes a development of the two B-flats of Ihr Bild and reaches its obsessive

climax (and integration into syntax) in Der Doppelgänger. It becomes also a

representation of the division of the self, the composer divided between the subject and

object of sound production. The auto-erotic gaze of Narcissus takes the form of a sonic

allegory in these contemplative, static ‘sound-masses’.

Schubert still sticks to the idea of a tripartite form here again, and the opening

gesture here constructs the setting for the second stanza. Here the vocal line composes-

out the same diminished-seventh chord, without going anywhere. The first and the third

stanzas are set in C-minor, without any logical connection with this auxiliary diminished

figuration. The ending of Die Stadt, a long held C, provides the pedal for the penultimate

song. The opening of Am Meer features an augmented sixth chord moving directly to the

tonic chord, alluding both to the opening and the concluding song of the set. This is yet

another asyntactical figuration that implies a sonoric function. The song extends the

tripartite form with replicating the second stanza also in the fourth one. Am Meer

establishes the suspicious key center C of Die Stadt firmly. At the end Schubert brings

12 Robert S. Hatten, Schubert the Progressive: The Role of Resonance and Gesture in the Piano Sonata in A, D. 959, Intégral, Vol. 7, 1993, 44.13 Gingerich, 621.

back the framing upper neighbor appogiatura figure (augmented sixth to tonic

progression). This gesture is also represented in a greater level as the key of these two

pieces becomes an upper-neighbor (as a long-term gesture) to the B-minor of the last

song of the set.

Der Doppelgänger is by all means an antithesis of Western concert music. Its

tormenting patience is the logical extreme of what I have been calling the sonoric

function. Although they are included in the syntax, most of these are just two note

verticalities that insistently come back to themselves. Lawrence Kramer suggests that this

repetition is emblematic of the narrator in these songs: “The speakers in the Heine poems

that Schubert set in 1828 are victims of compulsive repetition who return endlessly to the

scene of their worst loss.”14 Aside from the remnants of this repetitive progression, there

is nothing here: no counterpoint, no sectional division just the basic elements, almost a

‘specter’ of music rather than an actual musical utterance.

This is the moment of the rupture. Der Doppelgänger does not embody any

contrast in form, and in this regard it rejects the idea of dialectic structure that is a

fundamental trait in Western music. This is the only poem in the set that does not deal

with the division of the self, even though it explicitly refers to seeing oneself. The ghostly

double is not the narrator, it is not a division of the self, but a division from it. This is

almost an out of body experience in which the past is not represented by a different key

or mode (e.g. major) but is incorporated constantly in the implied chord progression (i-

14 Lawrence Kramer, The Schubert Lied: Romantic Form and Romantic Consciousness, in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

V6-III-V64). This reversal is reflected in the music in two explicit events in reference to

the other songs.

The first offsetting is in reference to the framing gesture of Am Meer and takes

place in the reprise of the introduction at the very end of Der Doppelgänger. The spacing

of the chords is exactly the same, with the only difference being the C-B motion:

Figure 1: Am Meer, mm. 44-45.

Figure 2: Der Doppelgänger, mm. 57-63.

The same harmonic motion of Am Meer that refers to both Der Atlas and Der

Doppelgänger is the next example, and one that hints at a possible reversal of trajectory

in the cycle:

Figure 3: Der Atlas, mm. 49-52.

Here the flat-2 is established and then resolved quickly both in the voice and the

piano part. This root Neapolitan chord, while being not uncommon to Schubert’s

vocabulary, still appears out of nowhere in this instance as a quick disruption and in an

instant it is brought back to an immediate release.

Figure 4: Der Doppelgänger, mm. 39-41.

Here we have a very similar progression from tonic to a root position Neapolitan

and back. The only difference is, here the established dissonance (the G in the vocal line)

is not resolved and left howling. While both the piano part’s completion of the same line

and a registral resolution that occurs ten bars later may explain the situation theoretically,

the immediate effect of this resonating high G is without doubt quite remarkable. In

contrast with Der Atlas, Schubert creates an unresolved dissonance that sets off the song

yet again from the whole cycle. The rupture in the tonal logic in the voice leading serves

as a metaphor for poetic rupture.

According to John Gingerich, what constitutes the cycle in the Heine settings is

‘the loss of innocence’ that comes through facing the ‘ghostly double’ as a

‘representation of the inevitably divided self of self-consciousness, of what happens when

we return to ourselves’15 I would like to argue here that the rupture comes out of the

deliverance is even more dramatic. The last gaze of the poet is on him-self. The

neologism is necessary for the separation of the self as this is no longer a division of the

same self, but as mentioned before it is a transcendental experience through which one

comes to the extreme of self-consciousness, realization of a new, now unrecognizable

self. In the form, the absence of the dialectic counterpart is an evidence of this: Self-

regard through gazing on external and internal reality that was a thread throughout the

cycle (the heart/himself-her portrait/himself-the fishermaiden-the town in fog-the

sea/poisonous tears of the beloved) transforms into an ontological paradox.

To bring back Adorno’s formulation of the finale’s role as putting the fragmentary

sections into a totality, we can understand why the Heine settings do not form an

immediate cycle, or why there really isn’t an inevitability or necessity to the specific

ordering of the inner movements (although there is a logical pattern to the specific

ordering). These fragmentary gazes are put into context only in the dénouement, and with

15 Gingerich, 630.

this deliverance we are made aware of a problem set forth by Der Atlas left unresolved by

Der Doppelgänger. This final instance brings the whole set into a new perspective. In the

same article with the epigram, Slavoj Žižek claims that “After the trauma, ANOTHER

subject emerges, we are talking to a stranger.” This new subject outside of dialectic, ‘who

continues to live after its psychic death’ is the post-traumatic, who is beyond

consciousness16. Here, instead of a division of the self, we are dealing with a duplication

of it.

16 Slavoj Žižek, Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject, Filozofski vestnik Vol. 29, No. 2, 2008, 23.