3 - Hearing Selves

Summary

‘Hearing Selves’ outlines the problem of the divided subject as manifested in philosophical discourse around the turn of the nineteenth century as well as in several of Schumann’s favourite authors such as Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Against this backdrop we may better understand Schumann’s creation of his alter egos Florestan and Eusebius and his whimsical questioning of subjective identity. Subsequently, this chapter delves more deeply into the musical features that make a sense of divided subjectivity palpable, examining the conflicting voices and sense of irony present in Schumann’s Lieder of 1840, above all his settings of Heine, alongside the split levels of discourse created in instrumental music through the use of tonal dualism, textural interleaving, and the use of metric dissonance to suggest a conception of the self as an agglomeration of diverse bodily rhythms subsisting through overlapping temporal processes.