Conference Booklet - Music - National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Session 4.3 SCHWANENGESANG
David Ferris (Rice University)
Dissociation and Declamation in Schubert’s Heine Songs
The texts of ‗Der Atlas‘ and ‗Der Doppelgänger,‘ like many of the poems in Heine‘s Buch der
Lieder, are concerned with the themes of memory and loss. One unusual feature that these two
poems share is an unexpected shift in narrative perspective in the final stanza. In ‗Der Atlas‘ the
protagonist suddenly begins speaking to his heart, and in ‗Der Doppelgänger‘ he addresses a
ghostly figure who turns out to be himself. In both poems, Heine depicts an experience of
psychological dissociation in which his narrator no longer simply remembers the past, but feels
that he is actually observing his past self in the present moment.
This paper considers some of the ways in which Schubert responded to the narrative
peculiarity of these poems when he set them as the first and last of his Heine songs. First, both
songs are in the minor mode, but they modulate to #III, rather than the relative m ajor. In each
case the modulation coincides with the shift in narrative perspective. Second, Schubert takes an
uncharacteristic approach to musical texture. As the voice enters, it does not sing an
independent melody, but doubles either an inner voice, in ‗Der Doppelgänger,‘ or the bass line,
in ‗Der Atlas.‘ It is only as the narrator experiences a sense of dissociation that a true vocal
melody emerges. Finally, Schubert does not consistently employ any of Yonatan Malin‘s
‗declamatory schemas‘ – the conventional patterns that composers typically use to transform
poetic prosody into musical meter. His free treatment of declamation in these settings is unique
within Schwanengesang.
By analyzing Schubert‘s unusual approach to tonality, texture, and declamation in these
two songs, I will explain how he expresses musically the narrative and semantic levels of
meaning in Heine‘s poetry.
Benjamin Binder (Duquesne University, Pittsburgh)
On Schubert's ‘Lateness’: Disability, Self-Critique, and Failure in ‘Der Doppelgänger’
One commonly acknowledged indicator of "late style" in music is self-critique (e.g. Adorno's
account of late Beethoven). At the end of a long career, a composer subjects his or her musical
language to a rigorous deconstructive analysis, exposing its fundamental premises in order to
reassess its expressive validity. Recently, however, Joseph Straus (2008) has suggested that ‗latestyle‘
musical features are often more fruitfully interpreted as inscriptions of a composer's
physical or mental disability. Speaking of a retrospective, self-critical "late style" in Schubert's
case is potentially problematic since he was only 31 when he died. But there is general
consensus that Schubert's experience of his fatal illness (and the limitations it placed upon him)
left traces in his music.
This paper offers a reading of Schubert's ‗Der Doppelgänger‘ as a ‗late‘ work in both
respects. Schubert's artistic response to disability in this song takes the form of a reflective selfcritique:
his song stages the failure of his own psychological and compositional identity. First,
the protagonist unsuccessfully resists the gradual distortion of the song's four -bar ostinato,
which is to say that he struggles to maintain a unified identity. Schubert creates this effect by
invoking and then sabotaging an inflexible pattern of repetition, suggesting that his trademark
mastery of pliable repetitive designs has abandoned him. Next, the protagonist yields to the
shadowy figure of his former self with a fitful and ultimately aborted mazurka in D# minor.
Here Schubert portrays himself as too incapacitated to revisit his hedonistic past: he can't dance
anymore. Finally, in the protagonist's last vocal phrase, we hear a self-consciously performed
melody, a lurching lyrical effusion that desperately mimics Schubert's most prized natural