Paths through Dichterliebe

Author(s): Berthold Hoeckner

Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Summer 2006), pp. 065-080
Published by: University of California Press
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 BERTHOLD
HOECKNER
Paths through
Dichterliebe

Paths through Dichterliebe

BERTHOLD HOECKNER

In memoriam John Daverio

ARMESÜNDERBLUM (At the cross-road will be buried

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the unpublished paper “The Dominant Relation as Meta-
phor in Schumann’s Dichterliebe,” which Jeff Nichols gave
at the 1993 annual meeting of the American Musicologi-
cal 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 ear-
lier versions of this article.
He who killed himself;
There grows a blue flower,
The Poor-Sinner’s Flower.
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 associ-
ates 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 vil-
lage. Since the blue Wegwarte (chicory) com-
monly 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 Univer- 65
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 19 TH poor sinner.”2 As a central symbol of Romanti-
CENTURY
MUSIC cism, 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-recogni-
tion.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 Armes-
ünderblum (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 glim-
mer 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 Arme-
sünderblum, 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
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 road-
side for her bridegroom who has been killed on the battle-
field. Another name is Verfluchte Jungfer (“cursed virgin”),
which originates with the legend of a virgin who 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 Ro-
mantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 197–324.
66
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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 re-
emerge from the coffin that cracks open. The
open ending of Dichterliebe, especially, has be-
come the opening of Pandora’s box in the ana-
lytical 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 formal-
ism. Still, the very claim to have found a coher-
4
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 Univer-
sity 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 Nine-
teenth Century and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-
versity 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 Brink-
mann, Schumann und Eichendorff: Studien zum Lieder-
kreis 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 as-
sumes that there is a secret to be solved and a
puzzle to be put together. This assumption
seems to ignore the premise of Romantic herme-
neutics that the meaning of an artwork cannot
be exhausted by a single interpretation or re-
duced 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 inspira-
tion 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 hermeneu-
tic analysis and performance involve feeling
and understanding; that both strive to be capti-
vating as well as plausible; and that interpre-
tive 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 composi-
tion than music making itself. If the close par-
allel 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
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.
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based on the ideology of organicism; (2) the BERTHOLD
HOECKNER
publishing history of the cycle suggests an open Paths through
concept of the work; and (3) the musical struc- Dichterliebe
ture 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, co-
herence 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 co-
here 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 indistinguish-
able 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 effec-
tively, but this does not mean that he has created a
unified tonal structure or a consistent narrative dis-
course. 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
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
 19 TH Suspicion about organic unity has been
CENTURY
MUSIC 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 vigi-
lance 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 coher-
ence is always already implicated in one’s mu-
sical training, which is itself already implicated
in one’s musical aesthetics. We should recog-
nize that there is no way out of this conun-
drum. 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 Be-
tween 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-in-
spired 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 Struc-
ture 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 Musi-
cal 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 11
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
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(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 “con-
vey 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 sum-
marize a similar argument by Perrey, who re-
lies 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 of-
fered “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 compo-
sitional 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 op-
posite 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 constel-
lation of fragments.
I find this assertion problematic. Schumann’s
10
For a facsimile of the autograph of the twenty-song ver-
sion 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).
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 consti-
tutes a compromise of his artistic vision, even
if the cuts might have been prompted by exter-
nal constraints.15 Although we should regard
each version of the cycle on its own terms, the
comparison between the two offers some ex-
planations for Schumann’s choices during the
publication process. I will discuss these choices
in greater detail later on, since Perrey’s argu-
ment against unity in Dichterliebe is less tex-
tual than aesthetic. Like Ferris, she holds that
the work exemplifies the idea of disunity, itself
based on the Romantic aesthetics of the frag-
ment. 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 indict-
ment 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 Schu-
mann: 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.
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tered the form of the folk song—its four-verse BERTHOLD
HOECKNER
stanzas with three-feet lines—in order to un- Paths through
mask how urban literati had fancied this Ur- Dichterliebe
melody as an authentic expression of the Ger-
man 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 Roman-
tische Schule (1833) not only contains a “mor-
dant pronouncement against Romanticism’s in-
tegrity,” 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 de-
vice of the Stimmungsbruch (the breaking of
mood), which Adorno described famously as
“Heine’s wound.”20 And this wound was self-
inflicted. 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 self-
destruction are symptoms of the poet’s ongo-
ing struggle to overcome his inability to mourn
the death of poetry at the crossroads of Roman-
ticism and modernism. The fruit of this struggle
is the Armesünderblum.
Such emphasis on Heine’s modernism is ul-
timately a critical intervention into the pre-
vailing 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 po-
etry. 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, identifica-
tion and intentionality, which deals with a cen-
tral subject and a single meaning. Instead, she
promotes a hermeneutics of alienation, con-
flict and difference, which deals in decentered
subjects and multiple meanings. Hence her fo-
cus 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.
20
Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Wunde Heine,” in Noten Zur
Literatur: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 95–100.
69
 19 TH her musicopoetic analyses seek to demonstrate
CENTURY
MUSIC that the songs of Dichterliebe are the very ex-
emplars of this fragmentation, irony, and re-
flection.
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 domi-
nant 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 uni-
verse precisely by the way it cuts itself off,”
Perrey faults him for holding on to the Roman-
tic ideal of aphoristic completeness and 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 incom-
pletion 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
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
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form of tonal coherence in Dichterliebe) with
the bathwater (the prevailing paradigm of mu-
sical analysis). In a response to Perrey’s analy-
sis 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 subli-
mates 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 re-
emerges 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 analy-
sis 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 ambigu-
ous 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 po-
etry does not offer an easy interpretation. At the
least, the stark “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” sig-
nals a change in mood that conforms to the crossing
from one fold to the next.25
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 Univer-
sity Press, 2001), p. 138.
 A f
C a A f
F
d
D
b
B
g BERTHOLD
HOECKNER
Paths through
D b F d D b B g
G
e
E
c Dichterliebe

G e B g G e E c
C
a
A
f

C a E c C a A f
F
d
D
b

g
G
e

F d
A f F d D b B
B g
D b B g G e E c
C
a

F
e E c
G e E c C a A f
F
d

B g
A
C a A f F d D b B g

E c
D
F d D b B c

f

g G e E
A
B g G e E c C a A f

Figure 1: Regional journey in Schumann’s
Dichterliebe from Fred Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch E c C a A f F d D b
Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
p. 139, shadings added. A f F d D b B g G e

D b B g G e E c C a
Lerdahl’s hermeneutic restraint—or reluc-
tance to respond to Heine’s “elusive” poetry— Figure 2: Table of key relationships
leaves ample room for further exploration. reproduced from Gottfried Weber,
Lerdahl derives his regional journey of Theory of Musical Composition, trans. James
Dichterliebe from the conception of key rela- F. Warner (Boston: Wilkins, Carter, and
tionships in Gottfried Weber’s Versuch einer Company, 1846), p. 320, shaded box added.
geordneten Theorie der Tonkunst from 1817/
21 (see fig. 2). Schumann notes in his diaries
of my reproduction of Weber’s chart.
that he studied the Versuch, so he was cer-
Lerdahl’s graph deviates from Weber’s re-
tainly familiar with Weber’s diagram.26 Weber
gional map in a number of ways that I will
combines the vertical orientation of fifth rela-
address in due course. The most fundamental
tions in major and minor keys with the hori-
and important aspect of Lerdahl’s appropria-
zontal orientation of minor third relations, as-
tion of Weber is that the key sequence of
signing a node to each major and minor key.
Dichterliebe is not governed by a prolongational
The most prominent feature in the tonal struc-
hierarchy determined by a single tonic (which
ture of Dichterliebe is a double trajectory of
was the main premise of Komar’s Schenkerian
falling fifths through major keys and their rela-
tive minor keys, starting with A major and F

analysis). As a result, Schumann transforms
tonal space into event space, where discrete
minor in the first song. This double trajectory
events are connected in real and directed time,
appears as a shaded box in the second column
as in performance.27 This actual sequence of

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 Rob-
ert Schumanns (Sinzig: Studio, 2005), pp. 139–40.
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.

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 19 TH A D G C F B E
CENTURY
f

MUSIC
b e a d g c
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 rela-
tionships 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 ori-
entation 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 pass-
ing 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
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A D G C F B
f b e a d g
present. This confusion is symptomatic of the
mental condition of the speaker, who is dis-
traught with the loss of his beloved. But since a
performance of the cycle places the songs them-
selves 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 tell-
ing 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 guid-
ing principle. Such a guideline will be useful
precisely because the poet telling the story and
its protagonist are the same person, and it of-
ten 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 si-
multaneously 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 exuber-
ant 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 D
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 bit-
terly” because he realizes that she is not telling
the truth.30 Despite the break, the initial posi-
tive 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 re-
members 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 tem-
poral 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 cathe-
dral 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 state-
ments 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 out-
30
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.
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G C BERTHOLD
HOECKNER
Paths through
Dichterliebe
b e a
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 mi-
nor 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 heartbreak-
ing 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 per-
petual circling torments the poet, but the move-
ment 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 cri-
sis, the sequence of three songs in minor (a–d–
g) appears as the negative correlate of the ini-
tial 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: Se-
lected 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 A D G C
CENTURY
MUSIC
f
b e a d
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 at-
tempt 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 ca-
dence in the postlude strains to leave the whole
affair behind. The poet’s second attempt to dis-
tance 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 tak-
ing 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 strat-
egy for coping with the situation: not through
angry accusation (as in no. 7) or sarcastic bit-
terness (as in no. 11), but through forgiveness.
Details from the interior of the song support
this qualitative change, notably the magic mo-
ment where the flowers speak to the poet and
admonish him “not to be angry with their sis-
ter”—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). Strik-
ingly, the very line in that song that cites the
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Tritone
1/2A 3D 4G 7C [F] 12B
 11E

g


1f 5b 6e 8a 9d g
10
[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 mo-
ment 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 some-
thing 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 embed-
ded 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, fear-
ful 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 plan-
ning that will once and for all settle the mean-
ing of a work. Nevertheless, evidence of
Schumann’s compositional choices in creating
a sensible succession of songs can enrich, rather
 Reversal BERTHOLD
HOECKNER

1/2 A 3D 4G 7C F 12B
 11E
 A D G C F B
Paths through
Dichterliebe

b e a d g
1f 5b 6e 8a 9d 10g c f

Figure 8: Reversal on the tonal path.

     
 
 
 
wenn ich in dei ne Au - gen seh

  
 
  
  
sei uns - rer Schwes - ter nicht bö - se

Figure 9: Song no. 4 and the flowers’ “song” in no. 12.

4a

1/2 A 3D 4G 7C F B 11 E A D G C F B

b e a d g
1f 5b 6e 8a 9d 10g c f

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 recog-
nizes 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 be-
loved 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 rein-
force 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 sub-
dued. The staccato chords that rip through the
arpeggios sharpen the contrast between illu-
sion and reality, while the long postlude ech-
oes the drawn-out ending of no. 12.
Thus the four omitted songs were unques-
tionably part of an intricate overall tonal de-
sign and narrative plan. By taking them out,
Schumann may have wanted to avoid the du-

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 19 TH 12b
CENTURY
MUSIC
1/2 A 3D 4G 7C F B 11 E
 A D G C F B

b e a d g
1f 5b 6e 8a 9d 10g c f

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
 11 E
 A D G C F B

b  a d g
1f 5b 6e 8a 9d 10g c f 13e
collapse

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 pro-
gression.
The tonal and narrative function of the extra
songs in the original conception of the cycle
contributes to our understanding of what fol-
lows in both the 20 Lieder und Gesänge and
Dichterliebe. Since daydreams tend to dissi-
pate 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
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  mi-
nor expresses a qualitative change, but we do
not have to conceptualize this change as a move
across the seam. Assuming that the poet can-
not get past the gap of the missing F-major
song and is thrown back in the opposite direc-
tion, 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 de-
pression 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 succes-
sive 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 analy-
sis 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 sta-
tions on the minor trajectory into one, the third
33
Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space, p. 138.

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 return BERTHOLD
HOECKNER
Paths through
Dichterliebe
14B 15E 1/2 A 3D 4G 7C F 12B
 11 E
 A D G C F B

g
16c


1f


5b 6e 8a 9d 10g c f b 13e
 a d g

Figure 13: Return to the time before the beginning.

C E C

b e a d g 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 noncha-
lant, 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 tra-
jectory 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 re-
sorting 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 tra-
jectory, 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

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 19 TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
B E A D G C
tritone
Figure 15: Jumping over the gap of the absent song in F major.
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 be-
ginning.
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.)
These two moments are pivotal in the poet’s
telling of his story. The former relates the on-
34
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
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collapse
F B E A D G C
collapse
gap tritone
set of his weeping; the latter speaks of his on-
going flood of tears. While his beloved is physi-
cally 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 be-
tween 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 narra-
tive. 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 impos-
ing forces and resources—giants and huge cof-
fins—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 recapitu-
lation 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
35
For a suggestive association between hexatonic polarity
and Freud’s concept of the uncanny, see Richard Cohn,
“Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freud-
ian Age,” Journal of the American Musicological Society
57 (2004), 285–323.
Beginning
of
End Beginning
e B E c
/D  A/f
A D
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 im-
plied 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 dis-
charge 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 nota-
tional convenience, but the alteration does in-
vite 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 Hall-
mark, The Genesis of Dichterliebe, p. 110.
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End E A BERTHOLD
HOECKNER
of
c
f

Paths through
Dichterliebe
G 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 sug-
gests 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 differ-
ence 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 mean-
ing of Dichterliebe (and the 20 Lieder und
Gesänge) as one that fluctuates between closed
circle and open cycle, between Classical and
79
 19 TH illusory return
CENTURY
MUSIC

14B 15E 1/2 A 3D 4G 7C F 12B

 11 E
 A D G C F B

g
16c


1f


5b 6e 8a 9d 10 g c f b 13e
 a d g


16C 16 D

return to reality

Figure 18: Illusory return and return to reality.

Romantic form, and between whole and frag-
ment. This meaning resonates with the way
ˇ ˇ
Slavoj Zizek imagines how absent melodies in
Schumann’s music exemplify modern subjec-
tivity: “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 correla-
tive to an ‘impossible’ object whose existence
is purely ‘virtual’.”37 This paradox might ex-
plain the impossible, but efficacious, simulta-
neity of the enharmonic return and nonreturn.
The question whether Dichterliebe reaches clo-
sure remains impossible to answer. We 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 pos-
sibility 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 open-
ended cycle fosters forgetting and forgiveness.
37 ˇ ˇ
Slavoj Zizek, “Robert Schumann: The Romantic Anti-
Humanist?” in The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso,
1997), p. 204.
As an expression of Heine’s wound, the tonal
disposition of Dichterliebe puts the poet on
the fence between the two. When the concep-
tion of different keys on a tonal map clashes
with the perception of their sameness in sound,
the composer can convey his poet’s paradoxi-
cal double experience of wholeness and frag-
mentation. This is how Schumann knew the
irony of Heine’s poetic suicide at the cross-
roads 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 Dichter-
liebe’s tonal path along a double trajectory of major
keys and their relative minor keys, whose progres-
sion through tonal space is understood as occur-
rences in event space. A comparison between Dich-
terliebe and its original version, 20 Lieder und
Gesänge, shows how the tonal and narrative paths
pertain to both. The hermeneutic analysis demon-
strates a slippage between story and narrative as
well as reality and illusion, whereby Schumann re-
sponds to Heine’s irony, creating a tonal and narra-
tive structure that is both circular and cyclical, both
whole and fragment.
Key words: Schumann, Dichterliebe, op. 48, Heine,
tonal structure, narrative, Gottfried Weber

80

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