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‘In dunklen Träumen’: Schubert's Heine-Lieder through the Psychoanalytical Prism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2011

Xavier Hascher
Xavier Hascher
Affiliation:
Université de Strasbourg
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Extract

Why – one might be tempted to add: why again – the Heine-Lieder? And why psychoanalysis? Like most of Schubert's music and especially the late works, yet with a distinctive nuance, Schubert's set of six songs to texts from Heine's Buch der Lieder has been regularly discussed in the musicological literature of the last decades. Among those writings, the articles by Harry Goldschmidt and Richard Kramer, the collection of essays on Schwanengesang edited by Martin Chusid, and the latter's publication of the facsimile of the autograph and first edition of the cycle are of particular interest to us here. The reason for it has to do with the nuance referred to at the beginning of this paragraph. While some authors are inclined to discuss Schubert's understanding of the poetry (notably in terms of the celebrated Heinesque ‘irony’), others choose to address the set from another perspective, namely that of the order of the songs. Indeed, the following questions inevitably arise in considering the Heine songs: Why did Schubert alter the order of the poems from that in which they appear in Heine's original collection, therefore (seemingly) destroying the logic of the sequence? Did Schubert actually conceive the text as a sequence – that is to say, a cycle? In dealing with those issues, Goldschmidt and Kramer have suggested a provocative and radical solution, which consists in reordering the songs to match the succession in Heine. This, of course, has occasioned much eyebrow-raising in the musicological community, and has led to successive refutation and counter-refutation.

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Articles
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , November 2008 , pp. 43 - 70
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Goldschmidt, Harry, ‘Welches war die ursprüngliche Reihenfolge in Schuberts Heine-Liedern’, Deutsches Jahrbuch der Musikwissenschaft für 1972 (Leipzig: Peters, 1974), 52–62;Google ScholarKramer, Richard, Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Songs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Chusid, Martin, ed., A Companion to Schubert's Schwanengesang: History, Poets, Analysis, Performance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Chusid, Martin, ed., Franz Schubert: Schwanengesang. Facsimiles of the Autograph Score and Sketches, and Reprint of the First Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

2 See, for instance, Stein, Jack, ‘Schubert's Heine Songs’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24 (1966): 559–66,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Brauner, Charles S., ‘Irony in the Heine Songs of Schubert and Schumann’, The Musical Quarterly 67 (1981): 261–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar More often than not in the literature, the terms ‘irony’ and ‘ironic’ are used as magic trump words to account for any passage or detail which are either unusual, or felt to be so, thus resulting in weakened explicative power. For a recent account of Heine and his relation to early German Romanticism in the context of music, see Perrey, Beate, Schumann's Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). No discussion of concepts such as irony, the fragment and so forth can avoid reference toGoogle ScholarLacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

3 See Litterick, Louise, ‘Recycling Schubert: On Reading Richard Kramer's “Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song”’, 19th-Century Music 20 (1996): 77–95,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Kramer's, answer in ‘Against Recycling’, 19th-Century Music 20 (1996): 185–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The application of psychoanalysis to art, and particularly music, dates from the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement and the corresponding bibliography is ample. Schubert, like other composers, has been the subject of several studies, often focusing on his well-known (in Deutsch's words) ‘allegoric narrative’ of 3 July 1822 entitled ‘My Dream’. A classic approach to this text is that illustrated by Hitschmann, Eduard in ‘Franz Schuberts Schmerz und Liebe’, Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse 3 (1915): 287–92;Google Scholar a far more radical point of view, which has raised considerable debate, is exposed in Solomon, Maynard, ‘Franz Schubert's “My Dream”’, American Imago 38 (1981): 137–54.Google Scholar An – at times polemical – account of the relevant literature can be found in Mayer, Andreas, ‘Der psychoanalytischer Schubert’, Schubert durch die Brille 9 (1992): 7–31. See alsoGoogle Scholar‘Psychoanalyse’, in Schubert-Lexikon, ed. Hilmar, Ernst and Jestremski, Margret (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1997): 355–6.Google Scholar There are, moreover, several allusions to Heine and the ‘Doppelgänger’ theme in Rank's, OttoThe Double, trans. Harry Tucker (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1971).Google Scholar In contrast to the ‘psychobiographic’ orientation dominant in the literature, I have attempted in this essay to draw my arguments from the analysis of Schubert's music rather than that of his life. I have discussed such an articulation between musical analysis and psychoanalysis in a recent article (see Xavier Hascher, ‘Qu’est-ce que la psychanalyse apporte à l’analyse musicale?’, filigrane 6 (2007): 29–58).

5 Popper, Karl, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1963): 45–6, 49–51.Google Scholar Popper's attitude towards psychoanalysis is often misrepresented: his rejection of it as an experimental science is not a denial of its interest or significance, and Popper at times finds himself in agreement with Freud.

6 Freud, Sigmund, The Question of Lay Analysis, trans. James Strachey (New York:Norton, 1959).Google Scholar

7 Popper, , Conjectures and Refutations, 370 n.Google Scholar

8 The assimilation of the main dream figures to rhetorical tropes has been brilliantly argued by Tzvetan Todorov in the chapter on ‘Freud's Rhetoric and Symbolics’ of his Theories of the Symbol, trans. Porter, Catherine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982): 246–54Google Scholar.

9 On a document dated 17 December 1828, Ferdinand Schubert acknowledges his transaction with Haslinger in the following terms: ‘Today, I have sold to the art dealer [“Kunsthändler”], Herr Tobias Haslinger, the last thirteen songs … composed by my brother Franz Schubert’. Ferdinand includes a list of the songs with the indications ‘poems by Rellstab / poems by H. Heine’. There is still no question of ‘Die Taubenpost’ at this stage, whereas the expression ‘last thirteen songs’ presages the title later to be given to the cycle. See Deutsch, Otto Erich, Schubert: Die Erinnerungen seiner Freunde (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1957): 444.Google Scholar

10 Deutsch, Otto Erich, Schubert: die Dokumente seines Leben (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1996): 540–41.Google Scholar

11 Deutsch, Otto Erich, The Schubert Thematic Catalogue (New York: Norton, 1951): 472.Google Scholar

12 Chusid, Franz Schubert: Schwanengesang, xi–xii. The page numbers have been pencilled in subsequently to the addition of ‘Die Taubenpost’. They are not in Schubert's hand.

13 Kramer, , Distant Cycles, 219.Google Scholar

14 Heine's Heimkehr no. 27 (‘Was will die einsame Träne’) was set to music by Schumann as no. 21 of Myrten, Op. 25, in 1840.

15 And so Heine himself, after his unrequited passion for his cousin Amalie, became infatuated with her young sister Therese, and was equally unlucky. In spite of the many autobiographical elements in Buch der Lieder and Die Heimkehr in particular, one should at least be cautious in approaching the collection from that angle. Perraudin, Michael – in Heinrich Heine: Poetry in Context. A Study of Buch der Lieder (Oxford: Berg, 1989): 267Google Scholar – intelligently addresses the issue of the relation of poetry to Erlebnis, or life experience: ‘… what we are confronted with is an Erlebnisdichtung whose personal-emotional-autobiographical substratum is not wholly absent, but where a more important element in the experience is experience of poetry itself’.

16 Peters, Paul – in ‘A Walk on the Wild Side: Heine's Eroticism’, in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine, ed. Cook, Roger F. (Rochester: Camden House, 2002): 58Google Scholar – notes that ‘paradoxically, the female subject of the Buch der Liederis not, in the habitual sense, a subject at all. For if, as Queen Victoria put it, “Mother is not a person,” neither is the female beloved of Heine's poetry.’

17 For Perraudin, Heinrich Heine: Poetry in Context, 56, the Fisher-Girl ‘is a nixie’, a personification of the living force of nature (as opposed to civilization), who is ‘not just able to commune with the spirits of nature around her, but is identical to them’. Perraudin identifies her presence throughout the sub-cycle of poems nos. 7–12 and 14 of Die Heimkehr, for which he considers Wilhelm Müller's own sea-poems of the Ländliche Lieder as Heine's literary source. Interestingly, Perraudin also observes that Müller's ‘nonnautical heroines’, too, possess the ‘bewitching qualities’ of sirens, mentioning especially the schöne Müllerin's character – a reflection worth noting in relation to Schubert. In The Feminine in Heine's Life and Oeuvre: Self and Other (New York: Peter Lang, 1997): 43–63, Diana Lynn Justis analyses Heine's dichotomized representation of woman as either ‘sphinx’ or ‘angel’. The nixie, of course, belongs to the former type: ‘Making her debut in Heine's poetry is the nixie (nymph, siren, or mermaid) a demonic, cannibalistic subhuman creature of myth, whose upper body – that of a beautiful maiden – delights and fatally lures its intended male victim as its lower extremity – a hideous, scaly tail – entwines and crushes him. Structurally, she epitomizes the fundamental split between man and nature, while, psychologically, she symbolizes … masculine sexual insecurity and paranoia’ (p. 52).

Nymphs, originally benevolent deities, are also remarkable for their sexual freedom and their insubordination to mortal males. For a popular treatment of the undine theme, see ‘Die Nixe im Teich’ (‘The Nix of the Mill-Pond’), in the Grimm Brothers’ collection of Children's and Household Tales.

18 Freud, Sigmund, Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, vols 2–3: Die Traumdeutung (London: Imago, 1942): 331–2.Google Scholar

19 In this instance, I am referring to the cycle of major and/or minor chords whose roots G, B and E form an augmented arpeggiation. Such a sequence may also be found in Schubert's sonata-form developments, where it serves to prolong one of the chords involved in the cycle. Each cycle may be understood as constituting a specific harmonic region, which stands in opposition to the regions defined by the other cycles.

20 I first developed the notions of ‘co-Leittonwechsel’ and ‘co-Relative’ in a paper given at the Dublin International Conference on Music Analysis in June 2005, later presented in an altered, expanded form at the Sorbonne in Paris (2006), and as a guest lecture at Harvard University (2007) under the title ‘Tonality as Formal Grammar: Functional Cycles, Equivalence, and Substitutions’. To put it simply, if B minor is the Leittonwechselklang (or LT) of G major, involving one semitonal displacement and two common notes, then their respective parallel chords, B major and G minor, stand in the co-Leittonwechsel (or CoLT) relation, with three semitonal displacements and no common note.

21 I disagree here with Schenker's choice of fundamental line which privileges the major descent. Although it is hard to identify a definitive winner in the conflict between the major cadence in the voice and the ensuing minor cadence in the piano, I am uncomfortable with any reading that minimizes the tragic ending of the poem and the formidable resonance thus generated in the accompaniment, which re-establishes the dominant depressed affect with a vengeance. The major cadence is fundamentally contradictory, undermined by despair, and cannot be taken as an unmixed expression of hope. As I have argued above, it rather signifies negation – of reality, but also of hope itself, if hope be a desire that may be transformed into reality. See Schenker, Heinrich, ‘Schubert's “Ihr Bild”’, in Der Tonwille, ed. Drabkin, William, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 41–3.Google Scholar David Lewin, in his beautiful and penetrating essay on the song, proposes a tenor Urlinie an octave higher than that shown in my own Ex. 3b. Although the inscription of the Urlinie in such a low register may present difficulty for the orthodox Schenkerian, it renders well in my opinion the deep inner voice which gradually comes to predominate, illustrating the fact that the Poet eventually becomes submerged by his affects. See Lewin, D., ‘Ihr Bild’, in Studies in Music with Text (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006):135–49.Google Scholar

22 Schenker, Heinrich, Free Composition, trans. Ernst Oster, vol. 2 (New York: Longman, 1979): 103.Google Scholar

23 See an analysis of the relation between major mediant and sharp minor mediant in that song and similar other relations, in Hascher, Xavier, Symbole et fantasme dans l’Adagio du Quintette à cordes de Schubert (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005): 154–5Google Scholar.

24 Edward Cone (‘Repetition and Correspondence’, in Chusid, A Companion to Schubert'sSchwanengesang, 74) rightly establishes correspondences between these motifs and the vocal line in the remainder of the songs, especially where it rises from the tonic to the mediant and falls back to the tonic via the leading note, possibly reached through one or two interpolated notes. These resemblances may well have been uncalculated on Schubert's part – they are nevertheless present in the music and tend to show that the conception of the Heine songs stemmed from a single compositional impulse. Rather than a unifying theme in the sense of nineteenth-century cyclic musical form, the return of the same material in changing contexts is better understood as a common element such as, for Freud, allows the dream to create associations and analogies.

25 Freud, Sigmund, Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, vol. 12: Das Unheimliche (London: Imago, 1947): 236–7 and 259.Google Scholar

26 I have repeatedly witnessed this ‘apparition’ on my 1914 Broadwood baby grand. As I imagine is the case with most ghost manifestations, this one was completely unsolicited, but nevertheless quite striking. Readers unable to recreate the experience on their own piano should accept my apologies, but not doubt the veracity of this testimony.

27 See Oettingen, Arthur von, Harmoniesystem in dualer Entwicklung (Dorpat-Leipzig: Gläser, 1886)Google Scholar; Riemann, Hugo, Skizze einer neuen Methode der Harmonielehre (Leipzig:Breitkopf & Härtel, 1880).Google Scholar The term ‘dual’ to designate a tonal system whose triads are considered from an upper root is first used by Lewin, David in ‘A Formal Theory of Generalized Tonal Functions’, Journal of Music Theory 26 (1982): 23–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The theory has a long history behind it. Goethe, for instance, in his correspondence with Schlosser, presents a conception of the major triad as a ‘monad’ which expands outwards and upwards, in opposition to the minor triad's contraction inwards and downwards. Both motions are physiologically and, more importantly, psychologically related. See Werke, Goethes IV, . Abtheilung: Briefe, vol. 25 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1901): 311Google Scholar.

28 While this is a characteristic of mental trouble, it is also what happens to every one of us in dreams, daydreams, and other occasions of everyday life, except that we normally come back to reality.

29 See Schubert, G.H., Die Symbolik des Traumes (Bamberg: Kunz, 1814).Google Scholar

30 Novalis, , Schriften: die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Samuel, Richard, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1968): 572.Google Scholar Italics original.

31 Freud, Sigmund, Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, vol. 6: Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (London: Imago, 1940): 198.Google Scholar

32 See Freud, Sigmund, ‘Obsessions et phobies’ and ‘Neue Bemerkungen über die Abwehrneuropsychosen’, in Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, vol. 1 (London: Imago, 1952): 343–53 and 377–403.Google Scholar

33 See Freud, Sigmund, ‘Über die Berechtigung, von der Neurasthenie einen bestimmen Symptomenkomplex als “Angstneurose” abzutrennen’ and ‘Zur Kritik der “Angstneurose”’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, 313–42 and 355–76.Google Scholar

34 McKay, Elizabeth Norman, Franz Schubert: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996): 139.Google Scholar

35 There is, for instance, no doubt for Rank (The Double, 42) that Heine suffered from neurosis. Peters (‘A Walk on the Wild Side’, 61) observes that ‘Heine's path remains the obverse of the successful, “well-adjusted” path of socialization, be it in poetry or in life: namely, acceptance of the system, or renunciation and deferment’. For Peters, referring to the conventions of bourgeois society, ‘there is in fact to be no fulfilment at all within the existing system. For it finally and cruelly shows itself to be a system of … endless canalizations, banishments, constraints, and sublimations’ (61) – or, as Freud would put it, repression of the sexual instinct.

36 Freud, Sigmund, Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, vol. 9: Totem und Tabu (London: Imago, 1948): 91.Google Scholar

37 See Freud, Sigmund, ‘Der Realitätsverlust bei Neurose und Psychose’, in Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, vol. 13 (London: Imago, 1940): 363–8.Google Scholar

38 Deutsch, , Erinnerungen, 47.Google Scholar