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.

Recomposition as a polka

As a postscript to Wednesday and Thursday's entries, I have followed a habit common in American sheet music of the mid-nineteenth century, according to which a waltz or other 3/4 meter dance is recast as a polka in the form of an appendix. In the graphic below, I have changed the meter from triple to duple, converting the A Major Waltz into a polka. This waltz works surprisingly well because its eighth-note groups switching between the hands allow one to make very characteristic polka rhythms in the melody (the two eighths plus four sixteenths in bar 3; the two eighths and a quarter in bar 4).

The model for this recomposition is the "Adelaide" polka by D. T. Haraden, published in Boston in 1848. A facsimile of Haraden's polka is available on the Library of Congress American Memory website in the 1820-1860 section: Adelaide.

Eco and Culler on Interpretation

To the proliferation of interpretations (readings, hearings) in this blog:

Umberto Eco illustrates a point about the "difference between interpreting and using a text" by listing ways in which a poem by Wordsworth might be appropriated: "for parody, for showing how a text can be read in relation to different cultural frameworks, or for strictly personal ends (I can read a text to get inspiration for my own musing)," but Eco separates these uses from the special category of interpretation: "if I want to interpret Wordsworth's text I must respect his cultural and linguistic background" (1992, 68-69; his emphasis). Eco regards interpretation as a process of constructing or reconstructing the text at hand, but in a particular way: "The initiative of the reader basically consists in making a conjecture about the text's intention," or, to put it slightly differently, "a text is a device conceived in order to produce its model reader" (64).

Interpretation, then, is an active process of trying to find out what a text is about. "Use" is a default category that includes what is not interpretation, what is not – or what is more than – the reader's "conjecture about the text's intent": it leads out of the text rather than into it, as a thesis leads out of a text to the rhetoric of the interpreter/reader.

Eco's goal is to make a clear distinction between interpretation and overinterpretation, but for Jonathan Culler there is a direct parallel between originality in a text and overinterpretation in criticism: "Interpretation itself needs no defence; it is with us always, but like most intellectual activities, interpretation is interesting only when it is extreme. Moderate interpretation, which articulates a consensus, though it may have value in some circumstances, is of little interest" (1992, 110).

What Culler means by "extreme" is not merely associations that push well beyond the plausible, which he says are worth exploring even if most may be "judged unpersuasive or redundant or irrelevant or boring" (110): he especially extols an attitude that shows objective distance (the critic's analogue to defamiliarization in the artwork), that aims past the simple giving and receiving of information, that acknowledges that, for example, "it is useful from time to time to stand back and ask why someone said some perfectly straightforward thing such as, 'Lovely day, isn't it?'" (113). Culler concludes that "what Eco calls overinterpretation may in fact be a practice of asking precisely those questions which are not necessary for normal communication but which enable us to reflect on its functioning" (113-4; his emphasis); for the practice of interpretation of texts his point might be translated as "What questions does the text forget to ask?" (Culler's position is consistent with late post-structuralism; he was writing in the early 1990s.)

If Culler does highlight the fact that an unbridgeable gap between texts and their possible contexts enables the proliferation of interpretations (but also the weakness of its endlessness), he does not thereby succeed in undermining the strengths of certain priorities in interpretive practice as Eco describes them: focusing on textual intent rather than authorial intent, on economy in evidence for interpretation, on doublechecking interpretations against textual coherence, and on respect for "cultural and linguistic background."

In other words, each author wins a point or two here, but the tensions between text and context are not erased by merely asserting the priority of one or the other.

References:

Eco, Umberto, ed. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Culler, Jonathan. "In Defence of Overinterpretation." In Eco 1992, 109-24.

Recomposition as analysis

Kofi Agawu rebuts Joseph Kerman's critique of "formalist" analysis and call to replace it with a model based on (literary) criticism and belles lettres by pointing to the affinities of music analysis not only with criticism but, as importantly, with music performance and composition. Of the latter, Agawu says: "composition as the art of making, of putting together, shares with analysis the speaking of music as a language" (280). That is to say, "when analysis is realigned with composition, we restore to it a measure of improvisation, liberate it from the requirement of making propositional statements, and reconfigure its epistemological requirements to privilege play. In short, the link with composition encourages more thinking in music about music" (279).

Agawu describes recompositions (perhaps the simplest and most obvious way in which analysis can be carried out as composition) as "fictions" and reminds us that such "imaginary constructions [are] designed to persuade, titillate, amuse, entertain, lead in a certain musical direction or mislead" (279). When he says that "we need an ethical attitude towards constructing these fictions," his argument can be said to apply more broadly to any kind of analytical construction, any interpretation, any "fiction," and it aligns well with a self-conscious practice of (musical) interpretation but also with David Lewin's warning about rewriting theoretical models indiscriminately (when he says that we should "think long and hard before subjecting a received theoretical discourse to fundamental modification" (91)).

Along these lines, I rethink the waltz by adding a new trio (below). This addition suggests a process by which the hierarchy of design is upended -- or at least unexpectedly influenced -- and a background can be shaped or "colored" by the middleground, in this case the principal melodic tone as "engineered" by a newly-composed Trio.

Considering only Schenkerian readings, I hear the waltz by itself very readily and convincingly as a three-part ursatz with a rising upper line from ^5 (post forthcoming), but Carl Schachter’s reading from ^3 (see this entry) becomes stronger in combination with this new trio, as it very unambiguously highlights ^3 in the upper voice with the cover tone ^5 appearing only in subordinate formal positions: that is to say, the trio follows convincingly the path into which Schachter cannot very easily force the waltz itself, and it influences us to hear the waltz in the same way (during the reprise at least, if not during the initial presentation).

All of this is straightforward enough: it merely reflects the fact that, whatever we may think about the priorities of hierarchies, the local can influence the general -- a decision may be made about large-scale features based on an influential nuance (at the abstract level of the background, a newly added trio is a nuance). This is always the danger of the "promissory note" -- that it may not merely act as an expressive marker but insist on its own influence over design, and the hierarchy may be flattened out (to something like a network) or even inverted.

I have added another element to make this point even more blatantly: an intertextual reference that draws the waltz out of Vienna, indeed out of Europe altogether: my bogus trio is a version of one of the most famous nineteenth-century American songs, written by a man who opened a music publishing company in one of the most prosperous cities of the old Northwest Territories, Chicago: the composer was George Root, the song is “The Battle Cry of Freedom," and my reason for including it is the resonance it still has thanks to a plaintive rendering heard several times in Ken Burns's video documentary of the American Civil War. We could explore the binaries generated for quite a long time -- Schubert and Root, Vienna and Chicago, old Europe and young America, the urban and the wilderness, Metternich and the democratic authors of the Northwest Ordinance, the revolutions of 1848 and the secessions of 1861, etc.

My point, however, is simply to show how powerful an intertextual reference can be -- made all the more obvious here because an association was deliberately manufactured. And -- perhaps my greater point -- the "creative analysis" of arrangement or recomposition can manage these kinds of shifts with ease.

References:
Agawu, Kofi. "How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back in Again." Music Analysis 23/ii-iii (2004): 267-86.

Lewin, David. "Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception." In Lewin, Studies in Music with Text, 53-108. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

D779n13 in Ab major

From my Music Analysis review-article, 215:

It is even possible that the A major Waltz was originally in Ab major, as are the first thirteen numbers in D. 365; the waltz that immediately follows in D. 365 (No. 14 in Db major) displays a similarly abrupt chromatic shift (I– bVI) that is "corrected" by means of an augmented-sixth chord (the same pattern also appears on a smaller scale in No. 2, the famous Trauerwalzer).

The version here is in 16 bars, not 38; it's the "preliminary" version for improvisation cited in this post: sixteen bars and embedded in the "suite" put together for yesterday's blog entry.

The embedding of this version of D779n13 in D. 365 is easily justified, as the total time elapsed is no more than 5-6 years and there is substantial overlap -- that is, the earliest versions of a number of waltzes in D. 779 are contemporary with (and chronologically prior to the publication of) D. 365. I think one can assert with confidence that these waltzes--or versions of them, at any rate--were played alongside one another in late evening sessions where Schubert played for dancing.

As promised in at least one earlier entry, I will write about Kofi Agawu's views on recomposition as analysis in a subsequent post. For now, the citation is "How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back in Again." Music Analysis 23/ii-iii (2004): 267-86.

D779n13 embedded in D. 365

Instead of imagining performance conditions in which D779n13 might have acted as a trio to n12 (see trio), we can take the opposite tack and construct a new "suite" of waltzes by inserting the simplified 16-bar version into D. 365, to take the place of the waltz of which it may well be a variant.

In the graphic at the end of this post, I have assembled an excerpt from a "false" Opus 9: the actual waltzes, nos. 4 & 5, then the 16-bar recomposition of the A Major Waltz (transposed down to Ab major), then number 6, and the beginning of number 7. The recomposition fits comfortably in the set I am constructing, as all of the Ab major waltzes in D. 365 are in the most basic 8+8 design, with brief (or no) pickups.

The earliest extant manuscript for D365n4 (from 1817) is an incipit in A major, not Ab. The Trauerwalzer (D365n2), also in A, is included in that set of incipits, and it is only in several Albumblatt-style copies from the following year that this waltz is transposed down to Ab (to make it more "traurig," perhaps?); then, a manuscript from later the same year or early in 1819 has D. 365 nos. 1-4, all in Ab, as they were finally published in 1821 (Brown, 228, 230-31, 291-2).

Postscript: After Schott reissued the Trauerwalzer under Beethoven's name and with the title "Sehnsuchtswalzer" (Kinsky, 727), the little piece's fate was sealed, and it was republished any number of times throughout the nineteenth century. As we saw in another post, Schumann knew it in 1835 as Le Désir (it was also called Mon Désir in some editions). Already by 1831, it had acquired English words (under the title "The Maid of Elsmere"). By 1870, American publishers had attributed as many as seventy waltzes to Beethoven; a very small number were actually his, including WoO11n7, a Ländler that was Americanized as the "Cactus Waltz" (Kinkeldey, 245-46).

In the musical example below, n1=D365n4; n2 = D365n5; n3 = D779n13 (16-bar version in Ab); n4 = D365n6; and n5 = D365n7.

References:

Brown, Maurice. Essays on Schubert. London: Macmillan, 1966.

Kinkeldey, Otto. "The Beginnings of Beethoven in America." Musical Quarterly 13/2 (1927): 217-48.

Kinsky, Georg. Hans Halm, ed. Das Werk Beethovens: Thematisch-Bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner Sämtlichen Vollendeten Kompositionen. Munich-Duisburg: Henle, 1955.