Schumann's Schubert story

Robert Schumann's review of Opus 9 and 33 (D. 365 and D. 783), published in 1835, gives us another way to think about associations between D779n13 and dances in other collections. Schumann, by his own admission a Schubert "fanatic," imagines a meeting of the Davidsbund, a domestic musical evening that resembles an informal, small-scale Schubertiade.

Florestan is in rare form throughout. He first invokes an image of dancing, with the heavily ironic joke that "dance music makes one sad and languid while church music, on the other hand, makes one gay and active--at least myself." Then Zilia [Clara] pricks her finger on a rose and offers, mysteriously, that "Like these waltzes it has nothing to do with pain, but only with drops of blood, drawn forth by roses" (124). Burgeoning excitement caused by Zilia's playing produces a silly moment at the level of a parlor game, as they try to decide between Schubert and Chopin: "Florestan went into a corner remote from the piano, saying, 'Now if running toward the keyboard I manage to hit correctly the first chord of the last movement of the D Minor Symphony [Beethoven's Ninth], it shall be Schubert.' Of course he succeeded."

After this, "Zilia played the waltzes by heart." These waltzes were, first, Schubert's Opus 9, then the deutsche Tänze of Opus 33 (D. 783). Florestan insists that the latter is a tableau of characters and that a painter present that evening ought to sketch them quickly and project the results as magic lantern slides. Florestan leaves suddenly, and our author offers the apology that "Florestan, as I may explain, is in the habit of breaking off at the moment of highest enjoyment, perhaps to preserve its entire freshness and fulness in his memory" (126).

Here the story has an intrinsic interest for its narrative progress, its characters, their social interactions, and its description of a domestic evening among creative artists in the early 1830s. The music is certainly important as a plot element (motivation for the event and characters' behavior) and as a motif, but Schumann allows his review of the music to be nearly lost in the story. Of D. 365, he does say that they are

lovely little genii, floating above the earth at about the height of a flower--though I do not much like Le Désir [No. 2], in which hundreds of girls have drowned their sentiment, nor the last three aesthetic errors [nos. 34-36] which on the whole I cannot forgive their creator. There is much beauty in the way in which the rest circle round the Désir, entangling it more or less in their delicate threads, also in the dreamy thoughtlessness which pervades them all, so that we, too, when playing the last, believe that we are still in the first. (124)

(About Le Désir—Schumann is being disingenuous, as he himself valued it highly enough to write an (unfinished) set of variations on it.)

D. 783 is described in terms that clearly evoke Schumann's own character-piece cycles, as Florestan declares that No. 1 announces a masked ball and then calls out characters from the ball as each dance goes by: "No.2. A comic figure, scratching its ear, and whispering "Pst! pst!" Disappears. No.3. Harlequin with his hand on his hips; exit with a somersault. No.4. Two stiff, polite masks, dancing and conversing little with each other" (125). Etc.

These descriptions might provoke us to consider how the A Major Waltz might replace one of the dances in D. 783. Florestan describes only the first ten dances, not all sixteen, but from those he does describe, No. 7 would seem to fit well: "Two reapers waltzing together in a happy trance. He says softly, 'Are you she?' They recognize each other." (Schumann's original for "Are you she?" is "Bist du es?" which is easily mapped onto the dotted rhythms that open phrases or–more likely perhaps–onto the half-quarter pairs at the ends (as "Bist du's?") (Gesammelte Schriften 1:200).)

The Bb-major Deutscher in this position bears a number of similarities to the A Major Waltz: its first strain is the only one in D. 783 that does not end with a hypermetrically weak tonic, its overt chromaticisms are restricted to the opening of the second strain, and it relies on expressive suspension figures.

The first strain is the "happy trance" of the two dancers, the chromaticism a question, and the descent to the final cadence the mutual recognition. Each of these traits is easily transferred to the A Major Waltz: the soprano/alto pairs of the first strain and the more exuberant C#-major section; the question in the mysterious chromatic measures measures 29-30; and the moment of recognition in the sixth-octave registral climax.

As a final comment, I should add that David Gramit is only half-right when he claims that "Schumann's one extended discussion of Schubert's dances . . . effectively neutralizes the physical and potentially popular not by dismissing it, à la Hanslick, but by transferring it to the realm of the imaginary" (232). The physical--that is, the functional quality of dance--is certainly gone, as Zilia is seated at the piano throughout the evening; through her, the dances become domestic salon music: as Gramit puts it, they are "no longer functional music but rather evocative character pieces." The physical is transferred to Florestan, who is a vital, even hyperactive, presence throughout the story, but it by no means follows that "Schumann creates high art out of dance" (232).

The domestic musical evening, the salon, itself is a principal emblem of middle-class entertainment in the 1820s and 1830s, and often included dancing and parlor games. There is, furthermore, nothing "high-art" about the magic lantern (indeed, quite the reverse, if one recalls that magic lanterns and similar machines were later associated with photography, not painting). Gramit anachronistically imposes socially exclusionary high/popular art distinctions onto an era when such distinctions were far from fully formed, and thus he falsely turns Schumann the creative critic into Schumann the snob, the progressive Romantic into the reactionary Romantic that Schumann did indeed become after the democratic revolutions in 1848-49.

References:

Schumann, Robert. "The Literature of Dancing: First Waltzes, Opus 9, Book 1, German Dances, Opus 33." In Robert Schumann, ed. Konrad Wolff, tr. Paul Rosenfeld, On Music and Musicians, 123-6. New York: Pantheon, 1946.

Schumann, Robert. Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker. 3d ed. 2 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1883.

Gramit, David. "Between Täuschung and Seligkeit: Situating Schubert's Dances." Musical Quarterly 84/2 (2000): 221-37.

A first narrative reading (after Edward T. Cone)

This is in part a new reading, in part a postscript to the previous entry (on the unison ^5).

Using Cone's device of the "promissory note,” I ask how the kind of musical plotting he describes for the Ab-major Moment musical can be applied to D779n13. As the "note," I choose the downbeat of measure 3: its distinctive dissonance is as close as we will come to a marked pitch event in the first strain. With the leap upward in measure 3, one might have expected a brighter sonority, such as a triadic subdominant, yet the C# unequivocally signals a B-minor 6/3–it is the leap upward, the "brightness" that is disappointed by the incessant string of suspensions. Without the suspension, the B-minor chord might have been neutral: as the first two items in the graphic below show, the voice leading from this ii6 might carry F# up or down equally well. Ironically, IV would be less successful, as rising from F# threatens parallel fifths in the lower voices (third item in the graphic).

The F#, then, is (relatively) stable at the outset as a chord member of ii6 and as upper member of a tenth with the bass (see the beginning of the next graphic, which charts the narrative across the time line of the piece); it is also in an isolated, higher register, yet its "brightness" is undermined by the inner-voice suspension figure. The F# maintains its position, but at the end of the first phrase it appears to give in by mimicking the suspensions with a soft, 6-5, accented neighbor figure.

In the second phrase, this pattern is repeated but now the neighbor figure sounds like a proper 9-8 suspension, paired as it is with a true 4-3 suspension in the alto. But suddenly--out of nowhere--our initial expectation is fulfilled, albeit with the rough voice leading of the waltz ninth, as an F# passing tone rises to G# in the cadence. (On the "waltz ninth," see Neumeyer 1987, 292-293.)

This might have been the end of it, but Schubert writes the second strain as an ingeniously intensified variation of the progress of the first. The relation of F# to E is sharpened (literally) by converting F# to the seventh of a dominant (C# major: V) and E to its resolution on E# (as ^3 of C# major). This again would appear to be the end of it–F# can only descend–except that the memory of rising is preserved in the repetitions of the cadence figure from the first strain (now a major third higher). The pitch C#6 reached in these cadences is the excuse for a remarkable twist prepared in the mysterious measures 29-30, whose G-natural will fall to F#5 as C#6 leaps abruptly up another fourth to F#6. Even more remarkably, two bars later the upper register is abandoned again, an event we might interpret either as a retreat or as a satisfied return to place (since the cadence's waltz ninth is retained). In either case, it is obviously a denouement.

A thematic statement (summary) for this "promissory note" account is most readily tied to character and progress of the narrative. (On theme and thesis and their connection to the proto-backgrounds, see the MTS article and the three web publications listed under “References.”)

Scale degree ^6 is unstable because it is not a member of the tonic triad, but it is ambivalent in directionality. Although at first pulled down by the weight of suspension figures in the alto voice, ^6 takes advantage of the cliché of the waltz ninth to rise in the cadence of the first strain. This sequence of events is repeated, in more intense form, in the second strain, but a drop in register at the end suggests a reconciliation or 'synthesis' of the scale degree's rising and falling tendencies.

This rather wordy version, however, is little more than a character-based summary of the story. We might distill it down to something like "The ambivalent directionality of scale degree ^6 is expressed at several levels." (On this ambivalence, see Day-O-Connell.) If the sense of narrative–and most of the sense of anthropomorphic character–is lost in this bland description, that is all to the good. For any reading that suggests or imposes narrative, the thesis might be the following: we are asked to believe that the parallel between the linear chronology required for reading a story and listening to a piece of music means that story-like narratives can be productively imposed on musical compositions (another way to phrase it: we are asked to believe that the story/music parallel is a strong one that permits the creative hermeneutics of narrative-building).

References:

Cone, Edward T. "Schubert's Promissory Note." Nineteenth Century Music 5/3 (1982): 233-241.
Neumeyer, David. "The Ascending Urlinie." Journal of Music Theory 31/2 (1987): 275-303.
Day-O'Connell, Jeremy. "The Rise of ^6 in the Nineteenth Century." Music Theory Spectrum 24/1 (2002): 35-67.
Neumeyer, David. Proto-backgrounds. On Proto-backgrounds: Material gathered from my UT website (uts.cc . . .) and from the blog “Hearing Schubert D779n13” (on Google’s blogspot): PDF essay on Texas Scholar Works [link updated 10 June 2016].

Neumeyer, David. Theme and thesis (Rebecca). See entry above.
Neumeyer, David. Theme and thesis (Hadas, The Genre Clerk). See entry above.