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8/2/2019 Musical Expression of Text in the Songs of Robert Franz
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MUSICAL EXPRESSION OF TEXT
IN THE SONGS OF ROBERT FRANZ
by
Daniel Voss
Submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Hunter College of the City University of New York
Thesis sponsor:
Date L. Poundie Burstein
Date Philip Ewell
Second Reader
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1
The celebrated German song composer Robert Franz (1815–1892) rejected Robert
Schumann’s use of the term Gedichte to describe sets of songs, feeling that it “brought
declamation too much into the foreground.”1 Indeed, even the most cursory comparison of songs
by Franz and Schumann will show that whereas Schumann’s style is relatively more
declamatory—he was “the first of the Germans who troubled about correct declamation,”
according to Arthur Komar 2 —Franz’s approach is far more lyrical. Edvard Grieg went so far as
to suggest that “with Schumann, the poetic conception plays the leading part to such an extent
that musical considerations technically important are subordinated, if not entirely neglected.”3
On the other hand, Franz himself stated in a letter to Franz Liszt that “the poet furnishes the key
to the appreciation of my works; my music is unintelligible without a close appreciation of the
sister-art: it merely illustrates the words, does not pretend to be much by itself.”4
The question arises, then, as to the nature of the relationship between music and text in
the preeminently lyrical song settings of Robert Franz. Which of Franz’s two views stated above
most informs his compositions? If it is not through declamation that Franz displays the meaning
of the poetry, how is the music-text connection apprehensible? If the poetry does not take
precedence, how can it render the music intelligible? Is the music self-sufficient, or at least
coequal with the text? In this paper I will attempt to show how musical events in the foreground
as well as at deeper structural levels of Franz’s songs clarify, intensify, and interpret the meaning
of the poems, at such a high degree of internal consistency as to demonstrate Liszt’s full
justification in transcribing the songs for solo piano.
1 Edward F. Kravitt, The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 297.2 Robert Schumann, Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score, Historical Background, Essays in Analysis, Views and
Comments, ed. Arthur Komar (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1971), 9.3 Ibid., 120.4 Debra Margaret Ollikkala, “Robert Franz, Robert Schumann: A Comparative Analysis of Their Settings of the
Same Poems” (master’s thesis, The University of Western Ontario, 1978), 9.
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Due to the ubiquity of comparisons between the two composers (which are not always
favorable to the lesser known), it will be beneficial to examine Franz’s songs in light of his
predecessor Schumann’s own settings of the same poems. I will discuss a number of songs, most
of which have texts by Heinrich Heine. Of course, analyses of Schumann’s settings, particularly
Dichterliebe, Op. 48, abound in the literature: those of Heinrich Schenker, Arthur Komar,
Charles Rosen, Deborah Stein, Elaine Brody and Robert A. Fowkes, and Joseph Kerman have
influenced my own view, to name a few.5 Analytical discussions of Franz’s music, however, are
much more limited. Nonetheless, some scholars have touched on Franz’s music. These include
L. Poundie Burstein, who is his essay “Their Paths, Her Ways: Comparison of Text Settings by
Clara Schumann and Other Composers,” compared some of Franz’s settings to those of Robert’s
wife, Clara.6
A single dissertation takes a look at the comparisons of Robert Schumann’s and
Franz’s Heine lieder settings by Komar, Stein, Rufus Hallmark, Eric Sams, and Henry Finck.7
Unlike these others, I offer an extended analytical discussion of Franz’s songs and their musical
expression of text in light of their similarities and differences to Schumann’s settings. In
addressing the work of this often overlooked composer, whose songs Schumann himself
described as belonging to the “new and noble category” of a “deeper, more artistic kind of lied”
5 Robert Schumann, Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score, Historical Background, Essays in Analysis, Views and
Comments, ed. Arthur Komar (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1971); Charles Rosen, The Romantic
Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Deborah Stein and Robert Spillman, Poetry intoSong: Performance and Analysis of Lieder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Elaine Brody and Robert A.
Fowkes, The German Lied and Its Poetry (New York: New York University Press, 1971); Joseph Kerman, “How
We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 2 (1980), 323-30.6 L. Poundie Burstein, “Their Paths, Her Ways: Comparison of Text Settings by Clara Schumann and Other
Composers,” Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 6 (2002): 11-26.7 Edward Hull, “A Study of Comparative Settings by Robert Franz and Robert Schumann Taken From Heinrich
Heine’s Buch der Lieder ” (DMA diss., Memphis State University, 1984). In Proquest Dissertations and Theses,
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/pqdt/docview/303319562/abstract/1335A9610CE1EBE85
47/2?accountid=27495 (accessed November 30, 2011).
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which reflected “the new poetic spirit,”8
I hope to shed light not only on his craft, but also on
nineteenth-century song setting in general.
I will proceed by examining the selected Franz songs in terms of voice-leading,
harmony, structure, and motivic construction, in many cases comparing them to Schumann’s
better-known settings. I will seek to elucidate the relationship between the music and the text by
highlighting the apparatus that Franz uses to create musical meanings which parallel the themes
most common in Heine’s poetry. These include: irony, ambiguity, and pain/longing. Special
attention will also be given to the ways in which Franz musically illustrates other poetic symbols,
as well as to elements of unification implied by the text or required for musical coherence. In the
most general terms, my analysis will be guided by Edward Laufer’s argument that “if, in the art
of poetry, the formal structure and divisions of a poem, its manifold verbal techniques
(associative, rhythmic, prosodic, metric, or whatever), and the theme underlying the discourse
are all, each with the others, intrinsically one inseparable unity, one can ask first how a musical
setting may reflect this.”9
Im wunderschönen Monat Mai
Jocelyn Kolb has argued that “the essence of Heine’s poetry and thoughts lies in an
ambivalence that is irresolvable but not incomprehensible.”10
Particularly in the Buch der
8 Schumann, 129-30.9 Edward Laufer, “Symposium IV: Brahms, Song Op. 105, no. 1—A Schenkerian Approach” from Readings in
Schenker Analysis, ed. MauryYeston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 255.10 Jocelyn Kolb, “‘Die Puppenspiele meines Humors’: Heine and Romantic Irony,” Studies in Romanticism 26 (Fall
1987): 401.
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Lieder —from which most of the songs to be discussed in this paper are drawn—Heine’s poems
exhibit an ambiguity that results from an avoidance of any state of resolution. His thought is
fundamentally skeptical and disillusioned, particularly in regard to his Romantic predecessors
whom he acerbically criticized.11
Thus Heine seems to insist in his poetry on denying the reader
a sense of resolution or certainty, often through the techniques of Stimmungsbrechnung
(“breaking of mood”) and Verfremdungseffekt (“alienation effect”). The importance of ambiguity
extends far beyond Heine, of course, and it pervades the music and literature of the latter part of
the 19th
century.
This is reflected in Robert Schumann’s setting of Heine’s “Im wunderschönen Monat
Mai,” the first song of the Dichterliebe cycle and a work often cited as a quintessential example
of musical ambiguity. The song’s juxtaposition of a cadentially unconfirmed A major with the
non-resolving V7
of F-sharp minor perfectly captures the poem’s ambiguous tone. Discussions in
the literature are profuse and thorough, but references to Robert Franz’s intriguing setting of the
same text are scarce. From his Op. 25 of roughly 1870, Franz’s “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai”
is also paradigmatic of the effectiveness of using tonal relations to create musical ambivalence.12
(The score can be found in the Appendix, pp. 44–5.)
Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,
Als alle Knospen sprangen,
Da ist in meinem Herzen
Die Liebe aufgegangen.
In the beautiful month of May,
as all the buds were blooming,
there in my heart
love was rising.
11 Heinrich Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, ed. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York:
Continuum Publishing Company, 1985) .12 All translations are by the author.
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Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,
Als alle Vögel sangen,
Da hab’ ich ihr gestanden
Mein Sehnen und Verlangen.
In the beautiful month of May,
as all the birds were singing,
there I confessed to her
my yearning and longing.
The speaker’s confession to his love amidst the beautiful May flowers and singing birds
of feelings of “Sehnen und Verlangen” (“yearning and longing”) underlines the poem’s essential
mood of unresolved desire and the ambiguous play of love and pain. Franz reflects this tension
with an appoggiatura C over a bass D-flat promptly in the second measure. This D-flat, pregnant
with meaning, returns pivotally transformed at the end of the song. See Example 1.
EXAMPLE 1. Franz, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” mm.1–3.
The poem’s tone of longing is matched by Franz’s tonal deceptions and irresolution. The
first deceptive cadence comes in measure 3 on the word “Mai,” quickly foreshadowing the
poem’s underlying pessimism. In measure 6, a D-natural helps to tonicize C minor and a bass G
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clearly suggests V/III. As the vocal line rises pictorially on “aufgegangen,” the expectation of a
cadence on C minor is frustrated and the harmony moves deceptively back to A-flat major. That
unrequited expectation is further emphasized by the voice’s drop of a fifth back to the primary
tone of C. Ironically, the deceptive cadence in m. 10 erodes the feeling of conclusive
confirmation that we would normally expect with the return of the tonic. Instead of functioning
as a resolution, the tonic here functions as a deception, as is depicted in Example 2.
EXAMPLE 2, Franz, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” voice-leading graph, mm. 1–10.
Curiously, where Schumann’s song apophatically suggests the key of F-sharp minor, the
relative minor of the ostensible tonic A, Franz’s does the same with C-minor, the minor mediant
of tonic A-flat.
In the second strophe, the desire for V/III to resolve to C minor is doubly frustrated,
achieving neither C minor nor returning to A-flat, but sidetracking to a quasi-cadence on D-flat
major as the voice sings the word “Verlangen.” This D-flat major harmony is thick with
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ambiguity. Though it begins with the suggestion of a perfect cadence on D-flat, the A-flat pedal
supersedes the final bass D-flat and thus denies the possibility of a modulation to IV. When the
D-flat first arrives in measure 18 it is adjacent to the V/III, so it initially sounds like the Phrygian
II of C minor. But C minor never comes, and like the beginning of the second strophe we are
instead led back to A-flat minor. The IV–I movement therefore indicates a plagal cadence,
replete with all the emotional connotations of that less fulfilling cadential form. The tonal weight
of IV in measures 18–19 is very strong, however, where it even carries a 3–2–1 descent in the
vocal line, with the F–D-flat unfolding from the preceding C–E-flat ascent (see Example 3). This
is the only such descent in the whole song, and it is notable that it occurs on the subdominant
rather than the tonic harmony. A move to the subdominant is generally associated with a
lessening of tension in tonal music, and in Franz’s song it has Schubertian, dreamlike overtones.
As in the case of the deceptive cadence in m. 10, the tonic A-flat returns in m. 20 not with a
feeling of resolution, but of surprise. The voice finishes in measure 19 on the fourth scale degree,
in the middle of an overall stepwise ascent of the primary tone. Although technically resolved in
the next measure by the accompaniment to ensure proper voice-leading, the feeling of unresolved
musical tension matching Heine’s poetic mood is nonetheless powerfully achieved (Example 3).
Incidentally, note that the final D-flat to A-flat movement mirrors the initial A-flat to D-
flat of m. 1–2 (see Example 1), much as the 3–2–1 descent in measures 18–19 mirrors the bass
ascent of D-flat–E-flat–F in measures 2–3. Thus, the hopeful initial gesture of opening and rising
is less sanguinely closed, creating a kind of reversal that befits the poem’s text. This technique of
musical irony is often deployed by Franz and will be discussed further below.
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EXAMPLE 3, Franz, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” voice-leading graph, mm. 10–20.
In all, Franz’s harmonic illustration of the poem sense of longing is quite different from
Schumann’s. Where Schumann uses an implicit F-sharp minor tonality to contrast present loss
with past fulfillment, Franz’s deceptive, weak, and unstable tonic reflects the poem’s ironically
ambiguous mood and metaphors which prevent the listener from enjoying any comfortable
certainty regarding Heine’s message.
Lieb’ Liebchen
Lieb’ Liebchen, leg’s Händchen auf’s Herze mein;
Ach, hörst du, wie’s pochet im Kämmerlein?
Da hauset ein Zimmerman schlimm und arg,
Der zimmert mir einen Todtensarg.
Lovely darling, lay your hand on my heart;
O! do you hear the knocking in this little chamber?
There lives a carpenter, evil and bad,
who is building me a coffin.
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Es hämmert und klopfet bei Tag und bei Nacht;
Es hat mich schon längst um den Schlaf gebracht.
Ach, sputet euch, Meister Zimmerman,
Damit ich balde schlafen kann.
He hammers and knocks by day and by night;
It has long interrupted my sleep.
O! hurry, Master Carpenter,
so that I might soon sleep.
“Lieb’ Liebchen” from Heine’s Buch der Lieder was also set by both Schumann and
Franz; the former composer’s Op. 24 setting and the latter’s Op. 17 were published roughly 20
years apart. Schumann’s song reflects the poem’s tone and central metaphor in the musical
foreground. Repetitive upbeat eighth notes in the piano allude to the metaphor of the narrator’s
love-struck heartbeat and the coffin-building carpenter’s hammer strokes, and the stark E minor
mood of despair is deepened by the tonicization of E-flat minor and ominously descending bass
accompanying the reference in the text to the “Zimmerman.” The narrator’s longing for repose is
granted as the voice finishes alone and unaccompanied.13
Franz’s song, on the other hand, creates a feeling of ambiguity that suggests that there is
an incongruity to the text, a duality of meanings, and a subtle irony. (For score, see Appendix,
pp. 46–7.) This ambiguity is apparent in the first three measures, where a tonic D minor is
suggested although structurally ambivalent. A voice-exchange in measures 1–2 seems to unfold
VII°, which has dominant function. The D in the piano left hand falls on the downbeat of
measure 2 but is registrally disinclined to act as a true bass note (see Example 4). Thus the first
two measures serve as a larger metric upbeat to the weightier downbeat on measure 3.
13 A notable analysis of Schumann’s “Lieb’ Liebchen” appears in Allan Cadwallader and David Gagné, Analysis of
Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 208.
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EXAMPLE 4, Franz, “Lieb’ Liebchen,” voice-leading graph, mm.1–3.
This harmonic ambiguity obtains throughout the song. While key signature and local
tonicization suggest D minor, that key is never confirmed by perfect authentic cadence with
direct V-I root movement, and the song ends on an A major triad. Indeed, the song is filled with
the sound of non-resolving or weakly resolving dominants. For instance: the D minor half-
cadence in m. 4 is never followed by an authentic-cadencing consequent as one might expect.
Thus, the initial four-measure phrase effectively sounds like a prolongation of A dominant. Also,
the C minor cadential six-four chord in measures 9–10 (heard as a cadential six-four thanks in
part to the preceding A-flat German augmented sixth chord) does not resolve to a root-position C
minor chord until the upbeat of measure 12, and only then after a deceptive ascent from B-flat
dominant seventh. Similarly, the B7
chord in measure 18 leads to a first inversion E minor chord.
This is followed by a half-cadence and immediate shift to D minor, without a key-confirming
authentic cadence in E minor. The D minor is also followed by a half-cadence in m. 22 and is
likewise unconfirmed by authentic cadence. This profusion of harmonic instability provides a
musical corollary to the ambiguity of the poem’s central contradiction: the narrator is in love yet
desires death.
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The result of this ambiguity is a song ostensibly in the key of D minor that can
nonetheless be heard as a prolongation of a structural A dominant. A Schenkerian reading of the
song as a prolongation of tonic D minor with a 5-4-3-2-1 Urlinie descent is possible, but would
too easily smooth over the very pertinent and poetically meaningful ambiguities highlighted by
my reading. See Example 5 below.
The primary tone A in the upper voice never completes an Urlinie descent, though there
is an inner voice motion that descends to D in measures 18–21. Rather, the primary tone is
transferred to the lower octave, roughly consistent with the octave fall in the bass note A. This
overall sonic drop succinctly represents the narrator’s morbid quest for death, and is related to
the descending melodic fourths heard throughout the song (in measures 4, 10, 16, 20, and 22).
The interval of a fourth is significant because it relates the song’s melodic and harmonic
tendencies: the key areas tonicized at different points in the song are C, D, and E, which, taken
with their intermediary keys of G and A, form a chain of fourths. Example 5 provides a voice-
leading graph.
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EXAMPLE 5, Franz, “Lieb’ Liebchen,” voice-leading graph.
Though the harmonies of Franz’s song are ambiguous, the harmonic mood is
unambiguously dark. The chromatic shift from D minor to B7
(and reverse) in measures 18 and
20–21 that initiates and bisects the narrator’s plea to the “Zimmerman” is a profoundly dark
sound. Also, in the first strophe, an omnibus progression with chromatically rising bass in
measures 7–10 references the traditional lament gesture. Notably, that progression leads to C
minor, which as the subdominant of the subdominant is crushingly dark. The D-sharp that
initiates the chromatic bass ascent in m. 7 is recaptured in m. 11 as an E-flat, where it
participates in the key area of C minor. This then leads through G minor back to D. In the second
strophe, D-sharp returns, this time serving as the leading tone to E minor in m. 19. Significantly,
the D-sharp accompanies references to the “Zimmerman” in both strophes. Franz’s symbolic use
of the raised tonic (D-sharp) perhaps suggests an homage, with a twist, to Schumann’s use of the
flattened tonic (E-flat) in his own earlier setting of “Lieb’ Liebchen.” Thus Franz’s song
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tonicizes C minor in the first part and E minor in the second, each key being a whole step from
the tonic D, thereby creating a type of mirror-image, much as what was seen in “Im
wunderschönen Monat Mai.” As can be seen in Example 5, the song’s structural bass also
exhibits a kind of mirror reflection: the inner bass note D descending to C and returning to D
(mm. 6, 12, 15) is inverted and subsumed by the outer bass motion from A to B and back (mm.
16, 20, 22).
Franz’s excursions into the two key areas paralleling the tonic D minor hint at the
duplicity of the poem’s meaning. The metaphor of the narrator’s beating heart as the hammer
blows constructing his own coffin creates a typically Romantic parallelism between love and
death. Where Schumann’s masterful if straightforward setting takes the text at face value,
Franz’s more ambiguous harmonic meanderings suggest that Heine’s view of his narrator’s pain
might be at least somewhat ironical.
In the two aforementioned songs, Franz implements certain compositional
techniques in order to musically represent the mood and meaning of their texts. These techniques
include: the incomplete Ursatz ; the incomplete vocal Urlinie; the deceptive, unconfirmed, or
uncertain tonic; and structural metaphor. Franz uses these tools in many of his songs to diverse
but related expressive ends.
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Incomplete Ursatz
Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’,
So schwindet all’ mein Leid und Weh;
Doch wenn ich küsse deinen Mund,
So werd’ ich ganz und gar gesund.
Wenn ich mich lehn’ an deine Brust,
Kommt’s über mich wie Himmelslust;
Doch wenn du sprichst:
“Ich liebe dich!”
So muss ich weinen bitterlich.
When I look in your eyes,
all of my sorrow and suffering disappear;
when I kiss your mouth,
I become well and truly healthy.
When I rest against your breast,
a heavenly delight comes over me;
yet when you speak:
“I love you!”
I must weep bitterly.
Besides “Lieb’ Liebchen,” only one other Franz song included in the present survey has
an incomplete Ursatz . Quite similarly to the former, Franz’s Op. 44, No. 5 setting of Heine’s
“Wenn ich in deine augen seh’” begins and ends on the dominant of the implicit tonality, D
minor. The piano figure in the first bar begins after a sixteenth-note rest, contributing an off-beat
rhythm to the off-tonic opening. Nowhere in the song is a perfect cadence on D minor to be
heard. The feeling of irresolution thus created is central to Franz’s expression of a musical
ambiguity which parallels Heine’s poetic contradictions. The relationship between irony and
ambiguity is clear: according to Kolb, irony “derives from the knowledge of unresolvable
contradictions.”14
Heine’s poetic techniques of Verfremdungseffekt and Stimmungsbrechnung
find their musical counterparts in Franz’s use of deceptive cadence, unexpected modulations,
unresolving dominants, and destabilized key centers, among other things.
14 Kolb, “‘Die Puppenspiele meines Humors’: Heine and Romantic Irony,” 402.
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Not unlike “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” “Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’” also
exploits the disarming sound of the deceptive cadence in order to realize the poem’s irony. The
superficially rejoicing but ultimately lamenting vocal phrases all descend in the first strophe,
reaching deceptive cadences followed by perfect authentic cadences on B-flat and then E-flat.
Since the implicit tonality of the song is D minor, these key areas represent an extreme venture
into the flat-key side and thus elicit a strong feeling of melancholy. The remoteness of these keys
as well as the authentic cadence on C minor in the prepenultimate measure of the song
emphasize the strangeness of the text, as though leaving the listener to finally ask how this point
was arrived at. The B-flat major and E-flat major of the first strophe foreshadow a transformation
to their relative minor keys, G minor and then C minor, respectively, at the end of the song, as
the narrator reveals that he must weep bitterly even when his beloved says, “I love you.”
Incomplete Vocal Urlinie
Both “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” and “Lieb’ Liebchen” derive part of their
expressive power from an Urlinie that does not complete a full descent to the tonic. The result is
a feeling of frustration or inconclusiveness. “Der schwere Abend,” Franz’s Op. 37, No. 4 setting
of a poem by Nikolaus Lehnau, has an incomplete Urlinie that is similarly impactful. While
Schumann paints the oppressive stillness and heaviness of the night in the long, heavy chords of
the piano accompaniment, Franz’s running sixteenth and thirty-second notes capture the
speaker’s distress (“bekümmern.”) Franz does his own word-painting, albeit on a structural level,
with an octave descent on B in the voice from m. 2 to m. 14—the image of oppressive weight is
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clear enough. Even the bass descends, or over-descends, to the strophe-ending authentic cadence
on D major (III/V or VII) in m. 18. Example 6 illustrates the music; the text is given below.
Die dunklen Wolken hingen herab so bang und
schwer,
Wir beiden traurig gingen im Garten hin und her.
So heiss und stumm, so trübe und sternlos war die
Nacht,
So ganz wie unsre Liebe zu Thränen nur gemacht.
Und als ich musste scheiden, und gute Nacht dir bot,
Wünscht’ ich bekümmert beiden im Herzen uns den
Tod.
Darks clouds hung down so fearful and heavy,
we both walked sadly back and forth in the garden.
The night was so hot and silent, so dull and starless,
so much like our love that it brought us to tears.
And as I departed, and wished you good night,
in my distressed heart I wished death on us both.
EXAMPLE 6, Franz, “Der schwere Abend,” voice-leading graph.
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As can be seen in Example 6, the voice ends in m. 26 on scale step 4 over the dominant in
the accompaniment, just as the narrator is wishing for death. The song’s imagery of descent is
maintained here—the fourth scale degree must resolve down as the bass moves V7 –I. In the tonal
system, there could hardly be a stronger symbol of irreconcilability than a phrase-ending
dominant seventh chord, and the fact that the voice note is the dissonant seventh from the bass
exaggerates that feeling of tonal frustration to the point of anguish. The speaker, in his lonely
self-absorption, is left there in solitude as the piano alone finishes the full Urlinie descent. Thus
the song is structurally and tonally complete while still providing a strong sense of estrangement.
In Franz’s Op. 25, No. 3 setting of Heine’s “Ich hab’ in Traume geweinet,” the vocal
Urlinie also ends on the fourth scale step and the full descent to the tonic is completed only by
the accompaniment. (For score, see Appendix, pp. 48–49.) In this case, however, the fourth scale
degree is raised. The B-sharp is part of an inverted German augmented sixth predominant chord,
and its tritone relationship to the tonic heightens the expression of the narrator’s pain (see
Example 7). If there is any sonority in the tonal system that evokes a greater sense of longing
than the dominant, it might be the augmented sixth chord. It is also worth noting that
Schumann’s declamatory setting of this song ends the text on V6/5/IV. Both settings create a
strong sense of unfulfillment that is only later resolved by a piano accompaniment postlude.
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EXAMPLE 7, Franz, “Ich hab’ im Traume geweinet,” voice-leading graph.
The voice-exchange in m. 25, which can be seen in Example 7, is part of a voice-leading
procedure that underscores the irony of the poem, the text of which is given below.
Ich hab’ im Traume geweinet,
Mir träumte, du lägest im Grab.
Ich wachte auf, und die Thräne floss noch von der
Wange herab.
Ich hab’ im Traume geweinet,
Mir träumt’, du verliessest mich.
Ich wachte auf, und ich weinte noch lange bitterlich.
Ich hab’ im Traume geweinet,
Mir träumt’, du wärst mir noch gut.
Ich wachte auf, und noch immer strömt meiner
Thränenfluth.
In dreams I have wept,
I dreamt you lay in your grave.
I woke up, and the tears still streamed down my
cheeks.
In dreams I have wept,
I dreamt you had left me.
I woke up, and I continued to weep bitterly.
In dreams I have wept,
I dreamt you were still good to me.
I woke up, and even still my tears flowed.
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Like “Lieb’ Liebchen” and “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” “Ich hab’ im Traume
geweinet” also utilizes the technique of musical reversal to reinforce Heine’s irony. The poem’s
narrator awakens from three dreams: in the first, his beloved was dead and he awakens crying; in
the second, his beloved had left him, and he awakens crying; in the third, his beloved remained
good to him, and he nonetheless awakens crying. Franz musically reflects the reversal of
expectation embodied in the third strophe. The first two strophes end with ascending parallel
chromatic sixths in the bass and inner voice, approaching a V4/3 chord leading back to I. That the
first two strophes end not with cadential confirmation of the tonic F-sharp, but rather with a
neighbor V4/3, accentuates the dubious sense of foreboding in the text. Example 8 shows the
ascending parallel sixths, marked with brackets, as well as a preceding voice-exchange in m. 6.
EXAMPLE 8, Franz, “Ich hab’ im Traume geweinet,” mm. 1–10.
The third strophe, with its unpredictable turn in the text, is set with the parallel chromatic
sixths between the bass and the voice, now descending (marked in Example 9 with brackets).
Note that the ascending A-sharp–C-sharp–E arpeggio of m. 6 is also reversed to E–C-sharp–A in
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m. 23. Finally, the 10–6 voice-exchange in m. 6 that initiates the parallel sixths ascent has also
been reversed to a 6–10 voice-exchange in mm. 24–25 that wraps up a parallel sixths descent .
Thus Franz’s reversal is sophisticated and thorough, and reflects Heine’s irony not on the
musical surface but on a deeper structural level.
EXAMPLE 9, Franz, “Ich hab’ im Traume geweinet,” mm. 10–30.
Structural Metaphor
The musical irony that Franz creates in “Lieb’ Liebchen” and “Im wunderschönen Monat
Mai” is evident in many of his other songs as well. Like the structural “mirror-images” discussed
above, Franz’s Op. 9, No. 4, “Allnächtlich im Traume” also contains a musical inversion that
reflects the reversal of expectation integral to Heine’s irony. (For score, see Appendix, pp. 50–2.)
In this song, a 3–2–1 Urlinie is inverted in the bass of the first two sections of the ternary form.
This is illustrated in Example 10.
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EXAMPLE 10, Franz, “Allnächtlich im Traume,” voice-leading graph.
A true inversion, the voice ascends a seventh from G-flat to F as the bass descends a
seventh from E-flat to F. The bass then ascends a ninth to G-flat, and the voice ultimately
descends a ninth to E-flat with the completion of the Urlinie. The motion to an inner voice
accompanied by a deceptive cadence at the middle section marked “Innig” is notably wry,
playfully capturing the interiority of the narrator’s dream experience. In this song, the structural
mirror-image is something of a cipher, a closed loop that admits of death and loss while
nonetheless implying the inescapability of the narrator’s self-pitying solipsism.
Allnächtlich im Traume seh’ ich dich,
Und sehe dich freundlich grüssen,
Und laut aufweinend stürz’ ich mich
Zu deinen süssen Füssen.
I see you nightly in my dreams,
and I see you great me kindly,
and loudly crying out I fall
to your sweet feet.
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Du siehst mich an wehmüthiglich,
Und schüttelst das blonde Köfchen;
Aus deinen Augen schleichen sich
Die Perlen Thränentröpfchen.
Du sagest mir Heimlich ein leises Wort,
Und giebst mir den Strauss von Cypressen.
Ich wache auf, und der Strauss ist fort,
Und das Wort hab’ ich vergessen.
You look at me wistfully,
and shake your blond head;
from your eyes slip
pearly teardrops.
You spoke to me secretly a quiet word,
and gave me a bunch of Cypress.
I wake up, and the Cypress is gone,
and I have forgotten that word.
Franz’s ironic touch in “Allnächtlich im Traume” is also clear from his use of a subtly
shrill and overwrought tone. As Charles S. Brauner points out, Heine’s poem is ridiculing
Romantic sentimentality.15
But Brauner thinks Franz’s dramatic, E-flat minor setting has missed
Heine’s irony, where Schumann’s playful, F-sharp major setting captures the ridiculousness of
the satire. To the contrary, Franz’s irony is simply very subtle: the use of recitative-like
declamation is so rare in Franz’s oeuvre that its appearance in this song requires special
attention. I would argue that it is up to the text to negate the mood of the poem—it is not the
song composer’s task to solve a riddle for the listener. In this case, rather, Franz’s recitative-like
declamation negates his own typical style in order to express the poem’s irony.16
A departure from the expected style also helps to highlight the irony of “Im Rhein, im
heiligen Strome” in Franz’s Op. 18, No. 2. (For score, see Appendix, pp. 53–54.) Where
Schumann illustrates the religious symbol of the Cologne cathedral by setting his song with oft-
mentioned Baroque-influenced polyphony, Franz abjures his usual polyphonic accompaniment in
15 Charles S. Brauner, “Irony in the Heine Lieder of Schubert and Schumann,” The Musical Quarterly 67 (April
1981): 266.16 “The poet negates the mood he has created as well as the tradition within which he writes, and this self-conscious
process of having and not-having is one of the most consistent features of Heine’s style.” Kolb, “‘Die Puppenspiele
meines Humors’: Heine and Romantic Irony,” 405.
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favor of a homophonic, chant-like sound. The ternary form of Franz’s song is slightly less
unusual, though still not typical—he generally uses strophic forms. Perhaps he is conjuring a
trinitarian image.
Franz’s setting uses a stark leading-tone transformation directly from G major to B minor
to set up the final line of text containing the poem’s nearly sacrilegious “punch-line,” in which
the narrator compares his beloved to a portrait of the Virgin Mary. The expression is marked a
whispering leise, suggesting that the narrator is almost embarrassed at this assertion. At this point
in Schumann’s setting, on the other hand, the dynamic, tempo, and expression are unchanged.
This is not to imply that Schumann has missed the irony—rather, he has created a solemn mood
which is left to the text to break, much like Franz’s procedure in “Allnächtlich im Traume.” Jack
Stein finds this treatment to be earnest rather than ironic, but I would argue that Rufus Hallmark
correctly recognizes that the state of “expressive dissonance” between text and music actually
highlights “the blasphemous nature and irony of the conclusion of Heine’s poem.”17
Franz’s “Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!” Op. 34, No. 4 presents another example
of a song in which structural elements help to cultivate the mood and clarify the meaning of a
text. (For score, see Appendix, pp. 55–56.) In it, the narrator paces to and fro, impatiently
waiting to see his beloved, cursing the slowness of time’s passage and Fate’s malicious disregard
for the lover’s haste.
Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her! It drives me back and forth!
17 Rufus Hallmark, ed., German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), 174. Stein’s
discussion of Schumann’s Heine lieder is in Jack M. Stein, Poem and Music in the German Lied from Gluck to
Hugo Wolf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
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Noch wenige Stunden, dann soll ich schauen,
Sie selber, die schönste, der schönen Jungfrauen;
Du treues Herz, was pochst du so schwer?
Die Stunden sind aber ein faules Volk!
Schleppen sich hin behaglich träge,
Schleichen gähnend ihre Wege;
Tummle dich, du faules Volk!
Tobende Eile mich treibend erfasst!
Aber wohl niemals liebten die Horen;
Heimlich zum grausamen Bunde verschworen,
Spotten sie tückisch der Liebenden Hast.
Just a more few hours, then I shall see
her, the most beautiful of beautiful damsels;
faithful heart, why do you pound so hard?
The hours are such lazy folk!
Comfortably dragging on,
creeping along their way with a yawn;
get a move on, you lazy folk!
Demoniac urgency impulsively grabs me!
But the Hours have probably never loved;
secretly sworn to a dreadful conspiracy,
they scoff maliciously at love’s haste.
In Schumann’s setting, the 3/8 meter with “Sehr rasch” tempo and staccato off-beats in
the piano plainly illustrate this impatient desirousness. Franz’s setting, on the other hand, uses an
incessant arrangement of steps and thirds at multiple structural levels to express the narrator’s
tormented pacing. This appears first in the opening bars of the piano accompaniment, where the
stepwise descent melodically fills out a harmonic descent of parallel thirds. See Example 11.
EXAMPLE 11, Franz, “Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!” mm. 1–3.
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The song then continues with a stepwise ascent in the bass that uses passing motion to fill
in the area between third-related keys: I, III, and V. Note also the recurrent 10–6 counterpoint in
Example 12; this “back-and-forth” figuration pervades the song (“hin und her”).
EXAMPLE 12, Franz, “Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!” voice-leading graph, mm. 4-9.
The harmony moves by thirds until it reaches D major (VII, or III/V) which is
appropriately one step from the tonic E. At the end of the first part, D major is transformed to a
tonicized D minor, as befits the frustrated lover’s anger over the laziness of the slowly passing
hours.
Unusually for a Franz song, “Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!” does not have a truly
strophic form—the second part is substantially different from, though related to, the first. The
phrase provided in Example 13 covers the same musical territory as the one in Example 12, yet
in fewer bars, perhaps alluding to the narrator’s increasing fervor. Indeed, he is so impatient to
see his beloved that the 10-6 counterpoint has skipped ahead, now placing the tenths on the
offbeat.
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EXAMPLE 13, Franz, “Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!” voice-leading graph, mm. 24–27.
The speaker’s haste is so great that the vocal Urlinie finishes its descent four measures
before the accompaniment finally catches up. In the postlude, the piano’s descending stepwise
figure is an extended version of the introduction, perhaps suggesting that the lover’s increasing
impatience will only be met by an increasingly slower passage of time.
EXAMPLE 14, Franz, “Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!” mm. 30–35.
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Franz’s songs are so filled with ambiguity and calculated misdirection that a song
seemingly lacking in these qualities requires special explanation. Heine’s poem, “Die Rose, Die
Lilie” appears to possess genuine sentiment rather than his characteristic biting irony. Like the
other poems at the very beginning of the Lyrisches Intermezzo, “Die Rose, Die Lilie” exhibits a
feeling of authentic love and youthful enthusiasm for the beloved. Only later in the cycle does
Heine portray the lover’s disillusionment, rejection, and bitterness.
Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne,
Die liebt’ ich einst alle in Liebeswonne.
Ich lieb sie nicht mehr, ich liebe alleine
Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine,
Sie selber, aller Liebe Bronne,
Ist Rose und Lilie, und Taube, und Sonne.
The rose, the lily, the dove, the sun—
once I loved them all blissfully.
I no longer love them, I love only
the little, the pretty, the pure, the one,
the source of all love, she herself
is rose and lily, and dove, and sun.
EXAMPLE 15, Franz, “Die Rose, die Lilie,” voice-leading graph.
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Example 15 provides a graph of Franz’s Op. 34, No. 5 setting of “Die Rose, Die Lilie.”
(For score, see Appendix, pp. 57–58.) Here is a song with smooth and coherent voice-leading,
clear and cogent harmony, and a complete Ursatz . The brief but poignant move to the minor
submediant in m. 7 (“Ich lieb’ sie nicht mehr”) is gently referenced ten measures later when the
primary melody tone is heard a sixth above the bass as part of the II6/5 predominant. Likewise,
the melodic leap of a sixth in mm. 1–2 is reiterated and multiplied in mm. 9–11. At this point the
melody and bass are moving in a stepwise descent of parallel tenths, unified as such after the
inner voice descent of mm. 4–6 was followed by the bass ascent of mm. 6–9. Flowing, stepwise
voice-leading is heard throughout the song. Another instance of musical unification occurs when
the inner-voice F-sharp in m. 11 is reunited with the primary tone in m. 19 after a neighbor-note
prolongation. The song is unusually integrated and straightforward for a Franz piece, seamless
and without interruption. That unification serves precisely to communicate the content of the
poem—namely, the beloved unifies all of the lover’s various lesser loves (“the rose, the lily, the
dove, the sun…”) in her own image, thereby transcending them.
Long range voice-leading also provides a key to grasping Franz’s musical reflection of
the meanings of Heine’s meditation on the Romantic themes of pain and longing in the poem,
“Die Lotosblume.” Schumann’s slow, hypnotic piano quarter notes and deliberate declamation
contribute to the lush sensuality of his setting, as do the frequent appoggiaturas and modulation
to the flat mediant. In Franz’s Op. 25, No.1 setting of the poem, on the other hand, it is
middleground voice-leading procedures that brilliantly illustrate the foundational metaphors and
imagery of the text. (For score, see Appendix, pp. 59–61.)
Die Lotosblume ängstigt sich vor der Sonne Pracht, The lotus flower is frightened of the sun’s splendor,
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Und mit gesenktem Haupte
Erwartet sie träumend die Nacht.
Der Mond, der ist ihr Buhle,
Erweckt sie mit seinem Licht,
Und ihm entschleichert sie freundlich
Ihr holdes Blumengesicht.
Sie blüht und glüht und leuchtet,
Und starret stumm in die Höh’;
Sie duftet und weinet und zittert
Vor Liebe und Liebesweh,
Vor Liebe und Liebesweh.
and with bowed head
dreamily awaits the night.
The moon, her lover,
awakens her with his light,
and she graciously unveils for him
her lovely flower-face.
She blooms and glows and gleams,
and gazes silently upwards;
she is fragrant and weeps and trembles
from love and the pain of love,
from love and the pain of love.
A symbol of beauty and sexual purity in Eastern mythologies, the lotus flower in Heine’s
poem suggests the apparently contradictory simultaneity of pleasure and pain that is associated
with desire. The poem’s lotus flower encounters her lover, the moon, for whom she blooms and
glows, and then cries and trembles “vor Liebe und Liebesweh.” The accented passing tones in
the opening bars of Franz’s setting, depicted in Example 16 on the first beat of measures 2 and 3,
establish the figuratively sexual feeling of tension.
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EXAMPLE 16, Franz, “Die Lotosblume,” mm. 1–3.
Heine’s text is filled with images of binary opposition: rising/falling, sun/moon,
male/female, “Liebe”/“Liebesweh.” The lotus flower closes herself to the sun and opens to the
moon, and this rhythm of opening and closing is audibly reflected in Franz’s middleground
voice-leading. In Example 17, one can see three times the “opening and closing” unfoldings of
the primary tone D (marked with arrows on the graph).
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EXAMPLE 17, Franz, “Die Lotosblume,” voice-leading graph.
The structural bass also “opens,” with an ascending G–B-flat–D arpeggiation, and
“closes,” with a descending inversion of that arpeggio, G–E-flat–B-flat (see Example 18).
Contrary motion between the top voice and bass obtains throughout—every time the structural
bass rises, the top voice falls, and vice versa. This sense of boundary-crossing is heightened in
mm. 19–24, which reveals four instances of voice-exchange. Significantly, this occurs as the text
describes the interaction between the lotus and the moon: “Sie blüht und glüht und leuchtet, und
starret stumm in die Höh; sie duftet und weinet und zittert…” These lines, as well as the
binarisms in both the music and text, can be interpreted as relating to the duality and
contradictions inherent in the sexual act, as well as a metaphor for the physical movements and
responses involved. A graph of a deeper middleground level depicts the dancing interplay
between the top voice and its motions into an inner voice, an apt musical metaphor for the sexual
union (see Example 18).
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EXAMPLE 18, Franz, “Die Lotosblume,” middleground graph.
Note that the middle section of the song, mm. 19–25, is dominated by inner voice
elaborations (this is reminiscent of Franz’s treatment of the middle section of “Allnächtlich im
Traume.”) The tool of counterpoint that is available to music provides an ideal metaphorical
means for the unification and synthesis of opposing forces, and in “Die Lotosblume” Franz has
harnessed it toward an outcome of particular significance. Note also that, like several of the
songs discussed above, “Die Lotosblume” has no Urlinie descent to the tonic. Rather, the
primary tone D is maintained throughout the song in a kind of stasis. This state of changelessness
reflects the apparently eternal nature of the poem’s central symbol, love.
The theme of pain and suffering is parodied by Heine in his poem “Hör’ ich das Liedchen
klingen,” in which the tone is overwrought, and the pain described in it not great, but
“übergross.” Schumann’s setting evokes the “Liedchen” through a harp-like piano
accompaniment, but in Franz’s Op. 5, No. 11 setting, the “Liedchen” is Bachian. The piano
accompaniment resembles a Bach keyboard piece in its contrapuntal texture, and the E minor
song ends (fittingly, just as the speaker’s pain is “aufgelöst” in tears) with a Picardy third. Franz
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subtly reveals Heine’s irony in describing the suffering the speaker experiences at hearing the
song his beloved once sang by harmonizing the words “wildem Schmerzendrang” and
“übergrosses Weh” with deceptive cadences when they first appear.
Tonic uncertainty
As stated above in the discussion of the incomplete Ursatz , musical ambiguity is an
essential tool when attempting to convey a Romantic sense of irony. The tonal system provides
an excellent foundation for creating tension and uncertainty through deviations from its
normative procedures. Franz’s Op. 25, No. 4 “Kommt feins Liebchen heut’?” uses several
different techniques to create a feeling of uncertainty and ambiguity. (For score, see Appendix,
pp. 62–63.) A deceptive motion, which has already been discussed in regard to other songs,
appears here in m. 3 of the first strophe and in the corresponding place in the second strophe at
m. 12. Specifically, a G-sharp dominant seventh moves not to the expected C-sharp minor but to
A major. In addition, the half cadence that ends the first strophe in m. 8 is a second inversion of
C-sharp minor, or a cadential six-four chord that doesn’t resolve, but rather ascends stepwise to
return to F-sharp minor (six-four!) in m. 10. There is also an absence of strong, V–I tonal
confirmation until the very end of the song. Furthermore, the deceptive cadence in m. 17 is
paired with a completed vocal Urlinie, giving the impression that the speaker’s emotions are
unrequited—the bass does not achieve structural closure until three measures later. These tonal
deviations contribute to the sense of uncertainty expressed by the poem’s narrator.
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Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage:
Kommt feins Liebchen heut’?
Abends sink’ ich hin und klage:
Aus blieb sie auch heut’!
In der Nacht, mit meinen Kummer
Lieg’ ich schlaflos wach,
Träumend , wie im halben Schlummer,
Wandle ich bei Tag.
Every morning I arise and ask:
is my pretty love coming today?
Every night I lie down and lament:
again today she stayed away!
At night, I lie
sleeplessly awake with my grief;
dreaming, as though half-asleep,
I wander through the day.
EXAMPLE 19, Franz, “Kommt feins Liebchen heut’?” voice-leading graph.
Perhaps more than anything, the tonal instability in this song is a result of the auxiliary
cadences in mm. 1–5 and mm. 10–14. In retrospect it is clear that each strophe begins with a IV–
V–I cadence to the tonic C-sharp minor reached in the consequent portion of the phrase (see
Example 19). In the moment that it sounds, however, the F-sharp minor chord of the first bar is
heard as the tonic. (Neither F-sharp nor C-sharp is confirmed with an authentic cadence at this
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point.) The result is an oscillation between the two keys that illustrates both the alternation of
images of day and night in the text as well as the speaker’s impatience. Both Franz and
Schumann use rhythm to reflect the narrator’s impatient fretting (running sixteenth notes and off-
beat eighth notes, respectively). But whereas Schumann’s modulating excursion through the
mediant, supertonic, and subdominant before returning to the tonic creates a feeling of fitful
wandering, Franz’s unstable harmonic oscillation more effectively captures the poem’s binary
metaphor and underlying contradiction: by night the speaker is sleepless, by day he is dreaming
and half-slumbering.
Harmonic instability and an ambiguously incomplete Urlinie are also put to use for poetic
effect in the Op. 48, No. 4 setting of Friedrich Rückert’s “Die Perle.” (For score, see Appendix,
pp. 64–66.) Example 20 provides a voice-leading graph; the text is presented below.
Der Himmel hat eine Thräne geweint,
Die hat sich in’s Meer zu verlieren gemeint.
Die Muschel kam und schloss sie ein:
Du sollst nun meine Perle sein.
Du sollst nicht vor den Wogen zagen,
Ich will hindurch dich ruhig tragen.
O du mein Schmerz, du meine Lust,
Du Himmelsthrän’ in meiner Brust!
Gieb Himmel, dass ich in reinem Gemüthe
Den reinsten deiner Tropfen hüte.
Heaven cried a tear
that she meant to lose in the sea.
A seashell came and shut it away:
“And so you shall be my pearl.
You need not fear the waves,
I will carry you calmly through them.
You are my pain, my desire—you, the heavenly tear
in my heart!
Heaven help me, with a pure heart, to watch over
your purest teardrop.
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interiority and a hint at the most subterranean realms of the psyche.) The digression to G-sharp
minor belies the seashell’s naïve illusion about its relationship to the pearl as it soon
dematerializes into V7/III (which it does via V/V, hinting at the eventual turn to the dominant
that is yet to come). Again in m. 35 there is a suggestion of VII, this time as a passing six-four
chord on its way to V6-4. The modulations to C-sharp and G-sharp minor and the lack of
cadential confirmation for the dominant (the B anchors a passing six-four chord between the
mediant and the tonic) reveal the uncertain character of the pearl as well as the meandering drift
of the waves. Thus the harmonic ambiguity of the song’s middle section illustrates the
contradictions embodied by the poem’s central metaphor. Is it a teardrop, a symbol of pain and
sorrow, or a pearl, a symbol of joy? How can it be both?
As much as any song discussed here, Franz’s Op. 11, No. 2 setting of “Am leuchtenden
Sommermorgen” relies on harmonic uncertainty to convey the poem’s irony. (For score, see
Appendix, pp. 67–68.) Like Schumann’s song, Franz’s version begins in media res with a G
minor six-four chord that evokes the poem’s sense of directionless wandering. When the vocal
melody enters two measures later, the apparent key is B-flat major (Example 21).
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EXAMPLE 21, Franz, “Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen,” mm. 1–3.
Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen
Geh’ ich im Garten herum.
Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen,
Ich aber, ich wandle stumm.
Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen
Und schauen mitleidig mich an:
Sei unsrer Schwester nicht böse,
Du trauriger, blaser Mann.
On a shining summer morning
I circle the garden.
The flowers whisper and speak,
but I wander mute.
The flowers whisper and speak
and look at me with pity:
don’t be angry with our sister,
you sad, miserable man.
The poem’s speaker says, “The flowers whisper and speak, but I wander mute”—the
loquaciousness of the flowers is represented in part by the pretty, rolling piano arpeggios, while
the speaker’s muteness finds expression in the song’s inert and unmoving primary tone, B-flat
(the Urlinie is finished only in the piano postlude). Regularly circling fourths illustrate the
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narrator’s wanderings in the garden and occur in almost every measure of the song, in both the
bass and the voice.
EXAMPLE 22, Franz, “Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen,” voice-leading graph.
B-flat major is confirmed by perfect cadences in mm. 3 and 5, but G minor continues to
loom. Note that the bass descending third progression D–C–B-flat that occurs on beat in mm. 1–
3 has shifted off the beat in mm. 6–9, giving a certain preeminence to the descending fourth
progression G–F–E-flat–D. The strophe ends with a passing F-sharp and then a G minor six-four
chord in m. 9, seemingly anticipating a cadence in G minor, which however does not come. We
hear the music from the first measure again, and this time we wonder whether the first chord is
truly G minor six-four or B-flat-sixth with an appoggiatura G. The fermata on F7
in m. 20 would
seem to confirm our comfortable suspicion that the song’s key is indeed B-flat major. Then the
final two-measure piano postlude, like many of Schumann’s, sums up the meaning of the song. It
completes a cadence in G minor, and we are left with the speaker’s piteous sadness. This
harmonic epiphany (G minor, not B-flat major!) expertly captures the contrast of mood inherent
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in the poem’s central contradiction—the speaker is filled with sadness and loss, despite being in
a summer garden surrounded by beautiful (and sympathetic [“mitleidig”]) flowers.
Heine’s “Was will die einsame Thräne” takes on another quintessential Romantic theme:
memory. Charles Rosen writes, “Romantic memories are often those of absence, of that which
never was … Their irrelevance to the present gives them a new power, out of place as well as out
of time. These memories do not cause the past to live again; they make us feel its death.”18
This
conception of memory is important for understanding Heine’s sardonic irony and critical for
grasping the meaning of the many deceptions and leadings-astray, the ambiguity and
incompleteness of Franz’s songs. The effect of his music is invariably familiar yet unsettling, as
is the Romantic memory, and a profound psychological pain is communicated in his songs.
Franz’s Op. 34, No. 1 setting of “Was will die einsame Thräne” uses harmonic relations
through time to approximate the experience of memory. (For score, see Appendix, pp. 69–71.)
After modulating to the dominant, G minor, and on its way back to the tonic, the harmony
modulates to the subdominant. The darkness of the F minor is apropos as the voice sings about
the lonely tear’s many glowing sisters that have all since melted away. It returns recontextualized
at the end of the piece.
Was will die einsame Thräne?
Sie trübt mir ja den Blick.
Sie blieb aus alten Zeiten
In meinem Auge zurück.
Sie hatte viel’ leuchtende Schwestern,
What does this lonely teardrop want?
It blurs my vision.
It has lingered in my eye
from old times.
It had many gleaming sisters,
18 Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995): 175.
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Die alle zerflossen sind,
Mit meinen Qualen und Freuden
Zerflossen in Nacht und Wind.
Wie Nebel sind auch zerflossen
Die blauen Sternelein,
Die mir jene Freuden und Qualen
Gelächelt in’s herz hinein.
Ach, meine Liebe selber
Zerfloss wie eitel Hauch!
Du alte, einsame Thräne,
Zerfliesse jetz und der auch.
that have all melted away—
with my torments and my joys,
melted away in the night and wind.
Also melted away like fog
are the blue starlets
that smiled those joys and torments
into my heart.
O! my love herself
melted away like a vain breeze!
You old, lonely teardrop,
melt away now too.
Example 23 provides a voice-leading graph of “Was will die einsame Thräne.” The final
descent of the vocal Urlinie in m. 37 is matched with the familiar deceptive cadence to the
submediant with all its attendant sense of incompleteness and loss. Appropriately, the harmony
descends again to the subdominant on the way back to the tonic with major third. The F minor
here serves as an echo of the same chord that happened earlier in m. 15. It returns as a memory
of prior events, just as the single tear in the narrator’s eye reminds him of past pain and lost love,
but remains and will not dissolve away. Schumann’s juxtaposition of the dominant E over a
pedal point A in the bass at m. 10 of his setting has a similar disorienting, dichotomous effect.
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EXAMPLE 23, Franz, “Was will die einsame Thräne,” voice-leading graph.
Conclusion
I have attempted to demonstrate in the course of this paper that Franz’s songs exhibit
high levels of coherence, both within the music and, perhaps more significantly, between the
music and the text. Indeed, Franz “maintained that any good text (his emphasis) has a seed from
which everything grows, so that an adequate setting of it will need to have a basic motif which
similarly unifies the song.”19
Franz’s deft manipulation of deep harmony, voice-leading, higher
level motives, and other techniques contributes to the goal of musically representing a poem’s
underlying unity—or, as is often the case with Heine, its contradictions and essential irony.
It has not been the goal of this paper to demonstrate the superiority of Franz’s subtle,
hierarchically structured approach to text setting over Schumann’s, though Franz himself may
19 J. W. Smeed, German Song and its Poetry: 1740–1900 (New York: Croom Helm, 1987): 122-23.
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have suggested as much.20
Rather, I have shown that Franz was able to diverge from his
forebear’s influence to create an original style that used musical events beneath the surface in
close coordination with the text to great psychological effect. Thus, Franz’s music does not
“merely illustrate” the words of a poem, as he is quoted as saying above—instead, his music
deeply, adroitly, and sophisticatedly illustrates the words. While they may be “chaste,” ascetic,
or reserved in their avoidance of overt sensuality,21
Franz’s songs are nonetheless rich in
technically rendered meanings which can often be discovered only below their musical surfaces.
20 Jack M. Stein, Poem and Music in the German Lied From Gluck to Hugo Wolf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1971): 173.21 Hallmark, German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century, 174.
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APPENDIX OF SELECTED SCORES
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alderich, Richard. “Robert Franz on Schubert and Others.” The Musical Quarterly 14 (October 1928): 486-94.
Brauner, Charles S. “Irony in the Heine Lieder of Schubert and Schumann.” The Musical
Quarterly 67 (April 1981): 261-81.
Brody, Elaine and Robert A. Fowkes. The German Lied and Its Poetry. New York: New York
University Press, 1971.
Burstein, L. Poundie. “Their Paths, Her Ways: Comparison of Text Settings by Clara Schumann
and Other Composers.” Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 6 (2002): 11-
26.
Cadwallader, Allan and David Gagné. Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Duncan, Barbara. “Some Letters of Robert Franz.” Bulletin of the American Musicological
Society, no. 2 (June 1937): 17-18.
Hallmark, Rufus, ed. German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Schirmer Books,
1996.
Heine, Heinrich. The Romantic School and Other Essays. Edited by Jost Hermand and Robert C.
Holub. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1985.
Hueffner, Franz. Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future. Freeport, NY: Books for
Libraries Press, 1874/1971.
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Kerman, Joseph. “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 2
(1980): 311-31.
Kleeman, Hans and Frank Lester. “Robert Franz (June, 28 1815–October 24, 1892).” The
Musical Quarterly 1 (October 1915): 497-518.
Kolb, Jocelyn. “‘Die Puppenspiele meines Humors’: Heine and Romantic Irony.” Studies in
Romanticism 26 (Fall 1987): 399-419.
Kravitt, Edward F. The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1996.
Niecks, Frederick. “Modern Song Writers: I. Robert Franz.” The Musical Times and Singing
Class Circular 25 (January 1884): 5-10.
Ollikkala, Debra Margaret. “Robert Franz, Robert Schumann: A Comparative Analysis of Their
Settings of the Same Poems.” Master’s thesis, The University of Western Ontario, 1978.
Porter, Ernest. “The Songs of Robert Franz.” The Musical Times 104 (July 1963): 477-9.
Rosen, Charles. The Romantic Generation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Schumann, Robert. Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score, Historical Background, Essays in
Analysis, Views and Comments. Edited by Arthur Komar. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc., 1971.
Smeed, J. W. German Song and its Poetry: 1740–1900. New York: Croom Helm, 1987.
Squire, William Barclay and Robert Franz. “Letters of Robert Franz.” The Musical Quarterly 7
(April 1921): 278-83.
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Stein, Deborah and Robert Spillman. Poetry into Song: Performance and Analysis of Lieder .
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Stein, Jack M. Poem and Music in the German Lied From Gluck to Hugo Wolf . Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1971.
Yeston, Maury, ed. Readings in Schenker Analysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
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