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Memories Spoken and Unspoken: Hearing the Narrative Voice in Dichterliebe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Abstract

The question of what happens when a composer alters a poet's poetic cycle haunts examinations of many song cycles and has proven especially problematic for Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe. The long-held view that Schumann crafted a clear plot from Heine's non-narrative Lyrisches Intermezzo has recently been questioned in favour of a view of the cycle as an incoherent fragment. Using the tools of narratology, this article argues that Dichterliebe is both a fragment and a coherent whole, a string of memories held together by a distinct narrative logic. Identifying two poetic voices illuminates the cycle's narrative strategy and also sheds light on problematic aspects of the music, including Schumann's deletion of four songs, the voice–piano relationship and the enigmatic final postlude. This article proposes answers to age-old questions about Dichterliebe while also offering a fresh approach to the study of song cycles.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at Case Western Reserve University on 7 October 2011; at Peabody Conservatory on 28 March 2012; at the Fall Meeting of the Capital Chapter of the American Musicological Society, University of Virginia, on 18 October 2014; and at the Eightieth Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Milwaukee, on 7 November 2014. For reading drafts and offering valuable comments, I am grateful to Berthold Hoeckner, James Parsons, Don Randel and Susan Youens.

References

1 Norbert Altenhofer, ‘Ästhetik des Arrangements: Zu Heines “Buch der Lieder”’, Text + Kritik, 18/19 (1982), 16–32. See also Beate Julia Perrey's excellent discussion of Heine's aesthetics in Schumann's Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics: Fragmentation of Desire (Cambridge, 2002), 71–107.

2 Rufus Hallmark, The Genesis of Schumann's Dichterliebe: A Source Study (Ann Arbor, MI, 1979), 110–23.

3 Ibid., 115.

4 Barbara Turchin, ‘Robert Schumann's Song Cycles in the Context of the Early Nineteenth-Century Liederkreis’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1981), 288–91; Christopher Lewis, ‘Text, Time, and Tonic: Aspects of Patterning in the Romantic Cycle’, Intégral, 2 (1988), 47–52. Another scholarly work in which the perceived plot of Dichterliebe plays an important role is Robert Samuels, ‘Narratives of Masculinity and Femininity: Two Schumann Song Cycles’, Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa (London, 2006), 135–45.

5 David Ferris, Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis and the Genre of the Romantic Cycle (Oxford, 2000). The scholarly studies of Schumann's song cycles to which Ferris primarily reacts are Arthur Komar, ‘The Music of Dichterliebe: The Whole and the Parts’, Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score, Historical Background, Essays in Analysis, Views and Comments, ed. Komar (New York and London, 1971), 63–94; David Neumeyer, ‘Organic Structure and the Song Cycle: Another Look at Schumann's Dichterliebe’, Music Theory Spectrum, 4 (1982), 92–105; Barbara Turchin, ‘Robert Schumann's Song Cycles: The Cycle within the Song’, 19th-Century Music, 8 (1984–5), 231–44; and Patrick McCreless, ‘Song Order in the Song Cycle: Schumann's Liederkreis, Op. 39’, Music Analysis, 6 (1986), 5–28.

6 My understanding of the Romantic fragment is most indebted to Ferris, Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis, esp. pp. 59–88. See also Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 41–115, and Perrey, Schumann's Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics, esp. pp. 26–32. Perrey presents many relevant passages from the Jena writers, but she filters them through the lens of modern commentators, including Theodor Adorno and Maurice Blanchot, to reach the conclusion that ‘the fragments themselves are essentially decentred’ (p. 32); she later admits that this idea of the absence of a centre, so crucial to her conception of the fragment, ‘remains unstated’ in the early nineteenth-century writings with which she engages (p. 38). Perrey thus takes a post-structuralist approach to the fragment, which, while appropriate for Heine's protomodernist poetry, is problematic when applied to Schumann's music; not only do her decentred, postmodern readings not accurately reflect the early Romantic poetics that ostensibly serve as her starting point, but her approach also ignores the rich and fruitful tension between Heine's and Schumann's aesthetics.

7 Ferris thus disagrees with other musicologists who have discussed the fragment in Romantic music, including John Daverio (‘Schumann's Systems of Musical Fragments and Witz’, in his Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology (New York, 1993), 49–88) and Rosen (The Romantic Generation, 51–8, 78–92, 212–18), who argue that the individual fragments add up to a unified whole.

8 Ferris, Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis, 203–8.

9 Ibid., 205.

10 Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 208–10.

11 Berthold Hoeckner, ‘Paths through Dichterliebe’, 19th-Century Music, 30 (2006–7), 65–80.

12 Hoeckner's starting point is a table of key relationships in Gottfried Weber, Theory of Musical Composition, trans. James F. Warner (London, 1846), 320. He makes a number of significant changes to the table, including reorientating it horizontally rather than vertically, and also restacking the rows so that the minor keys are below the major keys. Because of Hoeckner's changes to the table, some may question to what extent his analysis has anything to do with Weber's treatise; this does not, however, undermine the tonal coherence he traces through the cycle.

13 Hoeckner, ‘Paths through Dichterliebe’, 67.

14 The idea of a narration that enacts the process of narration corresponds to Gérard Genette's third meaning of the term ‘narrative’: ‘the event that consists of someone recounting something: the act of narrating taken in itself’. Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY, 1980), 26. See also Wolf Schmid, ‘Die narrativen Ebenen “Geschehen”, “Geschichte”, “Erzählung” und “Präsentation der Erzählung”’, Wiener Slawischer Almanach, 9 (1982), 83–110, and especially Jeffrey Williams, Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition (Cambridge, 1998), which argues, from a post-structuralist perspective, that many narrative texts are about the process of narration and that elements typically dismissed as secondary frames, intrusions or digressions in fact constitute the primary material of the narrative. While I do not agree with all of Williams's claims, many of my ideas about narrative in the lied and song cycle mesh well with his, and I am indebted to his book for helping me think critically about traditional structuralist narratology.

15 Hoeckner's use of Weber's table was inspired by a similar analysis in Fred Lehrdahl, Tonal Pitch Space (Oxford, 2001), 138–9, though in Lehrdahl's analysis the tonal movement between Songs 12 and 13 consists of a jump to a completely different row on Weber's table (the E♭ minor position adjacent to E♭ major), instead of Hoeckner's plunge to a lower point on the same two-row axis. I find Hoeckner's interpretation more convincing than Lehrdahl's, as it better captures the expressive impact of this moment, as well as the emotional trajectory of the cycle.

16 Ferris has criticized Hoeckner's article for this very reason. See his afterword to John Daverio, ‘The Song Cycle: Journeys through a Romantic Landscape’, German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Rufus Hallmark, 2nd edn (New York, 2009), 363–404 (pp. 388–94, at pp. 391–4), in which he claims that Hoeckner's analysis ‘is far more dependent on the traditional paradigm of organic unity than it is on the Romantic paradigm of the fragment’ (p. 392).

17 Andrew H. Weaver, ‘Towards a Narratological Analysis of the Romantic Lied: Events, Voice, and Focalization in Nineteenth-Century German Poetry and Music’, Music and Letters, 95 (2014), 374–403.

18 Edward T. Cone, The Composer's Voice (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1974).

19 In the rare cases when musicologists have brought narratology to studies of the lied, they have done so in a purely negative manner, to prove the absence of narrative in the genre. See Ferris, Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis, 203–8, as well as Lawrence Kramer, ‘Musical Narratology: A Theoretical Outline’, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1995), 98–121.

20 Influential works in this regard include Peter Hühn and Jens Kiefer, The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies in English Poetry from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, trans. Alastair Matthews (Berlin, 2005); Jörg Schönert, Peter Hühn and Malte Stein, Lyrik und Narratologie: Text-Analysen zu deutschsprachigen Gedichte vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2007); Brian McHale, ‘Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry’, Narrative, 17 (2009), 11–27; and Peter Hühn, ‘Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry’, Literator, 31/3 (December 2010), 17–47.

21 My use of ‘text’ in this sentence refers to Mieke Bal's definition of the term as one of the three layers of which every narrative consists: ‘a finite, structured whole composed of signs […] in which an agent or subject conveys to an addressee (“tells” the reader) a story in a particular medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings, or a combination thereof’. Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 3rd edn (Toronto, 2009), 5.

22 Bal, Narratology. I use Bal as my starting point for a number of reasons. First, hers is the most recent, comprehensive, systematic theory of narrative available today, and it has already withstood criticism from many fronts. Second, her theory is much less jargon-laden than many traditional narratological methods, using terms that either are already well known or are easily comprehensible with little explanation. Finally and perhaps most importantly, Bal brings a post-structuralist perspective to her otherwise structuralist theory, drawing upon post-structuralist paradigms when appropriate and defending her reliance on structuralism with sound reasoning.

23 ‘Hier, meine Klara, leg ich Dir noch ein Liedchen bei; ich hab's eben gemacht. Lies erst den Text gut und gedenke dann Deines Roberts.’ Clara and Robert Schumann, Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Eva Weissweiler and Susanna Ludwig, 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1984–2001), iii, 933; trans. adapted from The Complete Correspondence of Clara and Robert Schumann, ed. Eva Weissweiler, trans. Hildegard Fritsch and Ronald L. Crawford, 3 vols. (New York, 1994–2002), iii, 94. I am grateful to Anna Brashears for bringing this letter and its potential meaning to my attention. If we are to believe that Schumann had literally ‘just made’ the lied, then it was probably ‘Der Nussbaum’ (Song 3 of Myrthen), the autograph of which is dated 16 February (date from Jon W. Finson, Robert Schumann: The Book of Songs (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 22). That the song was ‘Der Nussbaum’ is also supported by a letter dated 28 February in which Robert specifically asks Clara to send that piece back to him; see Clara and Robert Schumann, Briefwechsel, iii, 958, and The Complete Correspondence of Clara and Robert Schumann, iii, 118.

24 Studies that insist on interpreting Schumann's lieder in terms of his intentions and/or the events of his life invariably end up producing limited analyses that overlook important aspects of the works. Ferris, for instance, has critiqued scholars who have interpreted the Eichendorff Liederkreis as directly related to Schumann's impending marriage; see his Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis, 209–11.

25 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 64.

26 That is, the narrator is still speaking on the first level, but the character is speaking on the second level. See Bal, Narratology, 48–56.

27 For examples in the lied literature, see Weaver, ‘Towards a Narratological Analysis’, 387–90.

28 When capitalized, ‘Poet’ stands in for the proper name of the cycle's narrator-protagonist.

29 The voice of the flowers in Song 12 is easily interpreted as a figment of the protagonist's imagination, though Schumann does treat the flowers’ words as a distinct change in voice, with a distant modulation from B♭ major to G major. On distant modulations as indications of changes of voice, see Weaver, ‘Towards a Narratological Analysis’, 391–3. The numbering of the songs in this article follows that in Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score, ed. Komar, in which the two deleted songs after Song 4 are numbered 4a and 4b, and the two after Song 12 are numbered 12a and 12b. To distinguish clearly between the Lyrisches Intermezzo and Dichterliebe as poetic cycles, I will consistently refer to the individual poems of the former as ‘Poem 1’, ‘Poem 2’, etc., and to the poems of the latter as ‘Song 1’, ‘Song 2’, etc., even when I am discussing only the poetry.

30 Distinguishing between different types of time is common in narratology. For instance, Meir Sternberg has contrasted ‘communicative’ time (what I call ‘real’ or ‘narrating’ time) with ‘mimetic or iconic’ time (what I call ‘narrated’ time); see her ‘Telling in Time (I): Chronology and Narrative Theory’, Poetics Today, 11/4 (winter 1990), 901–48, repr. in Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Mieke Bal, 4 vols. (London and New York, 2004), ii, 93–137 (p. 94). See also the broad overview of narratological time distinctions in Michael Scheffel, Antonius Weixler and Lukas Werner, ‘Time’, The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al., <http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de> (accessed 16 June 2015), esp. section 3.2, paragraph 18.

31 A similar argument that the inner songs of Dichterliebe exist as flashbacks (complete with a change in voice from Song 1 to Song 2) is made in Nicholas Marston, ‘“Wie aus der Ferne”: Pastness and Presentness in the Lieder of Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann’, Schubert durch die Brille, 21 (1998), 136–9.

32 See, for instance, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago, IL, and London, 1968), 56–70. Smith discusses individual stanzaic poems whose first and last stanzas present the narrator's voice, but the same principle holds for lyric cycles. On narrative frames in other media, see Williams, Theory and the Novel, 99–145, and Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media, ed. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart (Amsterdam and New York, 2006), which includes an essay on Schumann's piano cycles: Walter Bernhart, ‘Narrative Framing in Schumann's Piano Pieces’, 449–76.

33 The titles of the poems are ‘Der Dichter, als Prolog’ and ‘Der Dichter, als Epilog’. Texts and translations of the poems are in The Ring of Words: An Anthology of Song Texts, ed. Philip L. Miller (New York, 1973), 192–5, 230–3. See also Susan Youens's discussion of the poems in Schubert, Müller, and Die schöne Müllerin (Cambridge and New York, 1997), 164–9.

34 Finson briefly discusses this prologue in Robert Schumann, 61–2.

35 Heinrich Heine, Buch der Lieder (Hamburg, 1827), 109–11. All translations of poems from the German throughout the article are my own.

36 On perceptible versus non-perceptible narrators, see Bal, Narratology, 24–7.

37 As Helen Meredith Mustard has commented, ‘The last poem […] is an epilogue, referring to the “Intermezzo” as a whole and having no connection with the narrative sequence of the cycle.’ Mustard, The Lyric Cycle in German Literature (New York, 1946), 100.

38 Marston also makes this observation in ‘“Wie aus der Ferne”’, 136.

39 On the concept of ‘narrativity’, see Gerald Prince, ‘Revisiting Narrativity’, Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, ed. Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen, 1999), 43–51; repr. in Narrative Theory, ed. Bal, i, 11–19.

40 Marston, ‘“Wie aus der Ferne”’, 138.

41 The exuberance comes through in the almost exact repetition of the first line at the end of the poem (but with excessive serial ‘und's, which only add to the exuberance), and especially in the internal rhymes of line 4 (‘Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine’), which in almost any other context would seem ridiculous.

42 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 116. See also Bal, Narratology, 110–11.

43 The exact tense in which the Poet describes the kiss is ambiguous: ‘sie mir einst gegeben’ (line 7). Although expressed with a past participle (‘gegeben’), there is no auxiliary verb to clarify whether it is present or past perfect. The adverb ‘einst’ (‘once’) stands in for the auxiliary verb, which conveys a sense of finality, implying past perfect.

44 Heine, Buch der Lieder, 120.

45 On description in narration, see Philippe Hamon, ‘What is a Description?’, French Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge, 1982), 147–78, repr. in Narrative Theory, ed. Bal, i, 309–40; Bal, ‘Description as Narration’, On Story-Telling, ed. David Jobling (Sonoma, CA, 1991), 109–45; and Bal, Narratology, 35–48. The three basic motivations for description in a narrative text are that a character sees, talks about or performs an action upon the object being described. In the first and third instances, the description is uttered by the narrator; in order for the second instance to be convincingly motivated, there needs to be at least one other character present who has sufficient reason to listen to the description (which is not the case in Song 6 of Dichterliebe).

46 As Benjamin Binder has convincingly argued, the Stimmungsbruch of Song 4a can be interpreted as an insulting reproach of the beloved, but Schumann's music softens the cynicism, transforming Heine's insult into an expression of the Poet's fears of inadequacy. See Binder, ‘Robert, Clara and the Transformation of Poetic Irony in Schumann's Lieder: The Case of “Dein Angesicht”’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 10 (2013), 1–28.

47 Thus, even in the Actor's poems that seem to take place in a ‘narrating time’, that ‘narrating time’ occurs during the ‘narrated time’ that is subservient to the Narrator's own ‘narrating time’. Stated more simply, in poems such as Songs 4 and 4a, the Actor's narration is being quoted by the Narrator in direct speech and thus occurs on the second narrative level.

48 Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 219–20.

49 For a discussion of this song, see Weaver, ‘Towards a Narratological Analysis’, 383–4.

50 The insult of the beloved in Song 7, however, is a far cry from the many poems not set by Schumann in which the poet claims that she has no heart whatsoever (see, for instance, Poems 14 and 30). In fact, by convincing himself in Song 7 that the beloved is ‘miserable’ (‘elend’), the Actor admits that she is capable of feeling and still wants to be with him. See also the discussion of Song 4a in note 46 above.

51 These include Poems 10 (‘Die Lotosblume’, which Schumann previously set as the seventh song of Myrthen), 33, 42, 60, 62 and 63.

52 Heine, Buch der Lieder, 160.

53 It is also, like Song 4, an example of iterative narrative, since the Poet says in the first line that this dream happens ‘every night’.

54 For a discussion of this poem and musical settings of it, see Charles S. Brauner, ‘Irony in the Heine Lieder of Schubert and Schumann’, Musical Quarterly, 67 (1981), 263–9. See also Thomas Synofzik, Heinrich Heine – Robert Schumann: Musik und Ironie (Cologne, 2006), 31–2, 82–6.

55 Bal, Narratology, 5. Bal also adds a third layer: the text itself (ibid., 5–10).

56 These terms were popularized in Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY, 1978).

57 This has indeed been one of the primary criticisms levelled against traditional structuralist narratology. See, for instance, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories’, On Narrative, ed. William John Thomas Mitchell (Chicago, IL, and London, 1980), 209–32, and Jonathan Culler, ‘Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative’, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, 2nd edn (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 169–87, both repr. in Narrative Theory, i, ed. Bal, 95–116 and 117–31 respectively.

58 As Bal points out, ‘The fabula is really the result of the mental activity of reading, the interpretation by the reader, an interpretation influenced both by the initial encounter with the text and by the manipulations of the story’ (Narratology, 10). See also Bal's extensive defence of the fabula, ibid., 181–9.

59 This is the approach taken in Weaver, ‘Towards a Narratological Analysis’.

60 The title of Schumann's cycle, which refers to the Poet in the third person, can be considered an external, non-perceptible narrator, thereby creating the frame within which we can understand the Narrator's speech as occurring in ‘narrated time’. Bal discusses a short story in which the title serves as the narrator (Narratology, 66–8). See also Williams, Theory and the Novel, esp. pp. 24–50.

61 As Hoeckner puts it, it is the ‘coherent tonal structure of the cycle through which Schumann creates a meaningful narrative’ (‘Paths through Dichterliebe’, 66).

62 On embedded fabulas, see Bal, Narratology, 56–71.

63 Ibid., 57–8.

64 For a narratological interpretation of the poem, see Weaver, ‘Towards a Narratological Analysis’, 393–5.

65 Heine's Loreley poem is another matter, since the identity of the narrator is entirely unknown. Sanna Iitti and I have suggested that Clara Schumann's setting of the poem may in fact conflate the Loreley herself with the narrator. See Iitti, The Feminine in German Song (New York, 2006), 125, and Weaver, ‘Towards a Narratological Analysis’, 396–7.

66 Bal, Narratology, 83–5.

67 Ibid., 191–4.

68 Ferris, Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis, 205.

69 Of course, as discussed in the previous paragraph, we cannot know exactly when these events happen, but it certainly seems significant that Song 6 is preceded by a song in which the Actor discusses the beloved's kiss as a past event that seems unlikely to recur and is followed by one in which he denounces the beloved for breaking his heart. Song 9, even if it does not correspond temporally to the moment of the beloved's marriage in the Actor's fabula, is the only moment in the cycle when we learn of this important functional event.

70 On distance as a Romantic concept, see Berthold Hoeckner, ‘Schumann and Romantic Distance’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 50 (1997), 55–132.

71 For details on the process described here, see Hallmark, The Genesis of Schumann's Dichterliebe, 113–15, 121–2.

72 The only Narrator song that follows Heine's ordering is Song 12a (Poem 47), which immediately follows Song 12 (Poem 46) in the Lyrisches Intermezzo.

73 Hoeckner, ‘Paths through Dichterliebe’, 74.

74 Nicholas Marston, ‘Schumann's Monument to Beethoven’, 19th-Century Music, 14 (1990–1), 247–64 (p. 255).

75 It is perhaps significant that the emotional plunge results in the parallel minor of Song 11. This draws a tonal connection between the ostensibly ‘objective’ story told in Song 11 and the most emotionally charged moment in the cycle, thereby belying the efficacy of the Narrator's coping strategy. I am grateful to Daniel Noone for sharing this observation with me.

76 Hoeckner, ‘Paths through Dichterliebe’, 74–6.

77 Ibid., 76; see also Hoeckner's diagram of these songs on the tonal path on this page.

78 Ferris, Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis, 35–8.

79 For a diagram of Songs 4a and 4b on the tonal path, see Hoeckner, ‘Paths through Dichterliebe’, 75.

80 Cone, The Composer's Voice, 9–40.

81 Edward T. Cone, ‘Poet's Love or Composer's Love?’, Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge, 1992), 177–92 (p. 182).

82 Berthold Hoeckner, ‘Poet's Love and Composer's Love’, Music Theory Online, 7/5 (October 2001), <http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.5/mto.01.7.5.hoeckner.html> (accessed 13 June 2015), section 2.9.

83 Mieke Bal, ‘Narration and Focalization’, On Story-Telling, ed. Jobling, 75–108, and Bal, Narratology, 145–65. For a critique of Bal's theory, see William Nelles, ‘Getting Focalization into Focus’, Poetics Today, 11 (1990), 365–82. For focalization in the lied, see Weaver, ‘Towards a Narratological Analysis’, 390–402.

84 The tonal conflict between voice and piano, which so overwhelms one's impression of the song, also helps establish this as an utterance by the Narrator, even though the song otherwise does not contain the sarcasm present in the Narrator's other poems.

85 Ferris, Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis, 41–2.

86 Thus, in this song, the Actor has become the focalized object, viewed through the lens of the Narrator.

87 Marston has pointed out that ‘the opening of Song 9 grows audibly from the closing measures of Song 8’ (‘Schumann's Monument to Beethoven’, 254). This musical connection strengthens the idea that the postlude of the former song belongs not to the Actor but to the Narrator (who utters Song 9).

88 Weaver, ‘Towards a Narratological Analysis’, 378–87. Hühn introduces the concept of the poetic discourse event in ‘Plotting the Lyric’, 38–44.

89 This remains the case even if one considers the flowers as a separate voice from the Actor, and even if one hears the postlude as a continuation of the flowers’ voice rather than as emanating from the Actor. Although the distant modulation to G major in bar 17 creates the effect of an actual change in voice, the constancy of the piano's accompanimental figure suggests that the Actor continues to serve as focalizer throughout the song.

90 For me, Song 12 is not about forgiveness but about the Poet's inability to reconcile with the beloved.

91 While the decision certainly comes across as resolute and defiant in the text alone, as well as in the stylized accompaniment of much of the song, the music begins to belie the Narrator's assertion already in the setting of the last stanza, beginning in bar 44, as the texture in the accompaniment changes drastically and the solid tonic resolution of bar 43 is weakened by the transformation of the C♯ minor tonic to a secondary dominant. Another indicator of the Narrator's weakening resolve is the final vocal cadence in bar 51, in which the voice descends a third instead of the falling fifth that concludes every other stanza. While I would not go so far as to say that the focalization shifts from Narrator to Actor in bar 44, the music of this stanza nevertheless sets the stage for the shift of focalization at the key change in bar 53. Like the ambiguous voice of Song 14, this stanza occupies a liminal space, in which we can perhaps witness the gradual emergence of the Actor as focalizer. Another indication of the Actor's gradual emergence may be the allusion, noted by Marston, to bars 12–14 of Song 2 in the vocal line of Song 16 at bars 48–9 (Marston, ‘Schumann's Monument to Beethoven’, 258).

92 In this regard I agree with Rosen, who states: ‘We must not think of the postlude as a return of the twelfth song itself, and the words of that song are irrelevant to the end of the cycle. The melody that returns as a coda was already a postlude to the twelfth song, a new theme not motivically related to the main body of the piece.’ Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 208.

93 Hoeckner, ‘Paths through Dichterliebe’, 77.

94 Ibid., 79–80.

95 Edward F. Kravitt, ‘The Lied in Nineteenth-Century Concert Life’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 18 (1965), 208–11; Kravitt, The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism (New Haven, CT, 1996), 17–18.

96 See, for instance, David Ferris, ‘Public Performance and Private Understanding: Clara Wieck's Concerts in Berlin’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56 (2003), 351–408, which argues that the Schumanns considered private performances for audiences of Kenner to be the most appropriate venue for Robert's piano music. On 19 March 1838, Robert wrote to Clara (regarding his solo piano music), ‘You have done well not to play my pieces – they do not suit the public – and it would be lame if I later wanted to complain that they had not understood something that was not intended for applause’ (quoted ibid., 382).

97 See, for instance, Barbara Turchin, ‘Schumann's Conversion to Vocal Music: A Reconsideration’, Musical Quarterly, 67 (1981), 392–404, and Finson, Robert Schumann, 18–20.

98 The Complete Correspondence of Clara and Robert Schumann, iii, 141; original German in Clara and Robert Schumann, Briefwechsel, iii, 982. Clara was probably commenting on the Heine Liederkreis, as Robert had just sent her the published cycle in a letter dated 13 March 1840 (Briefwechsel, iii, 978–9; The Complete Correspondence, iii, 137).

99 For a discussion of this moment in ‘Florestan’, see Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 98–100.