Motives for allusion: context and content in nineteenth-century music 9780674010376

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Preface (page ix)
1 Definitions (page 1)
2 Transformations (page 23)
3 Assimilative Allusions (page 44)
4 Contrastive Allusions (page 68)
5 Texting (page 88)
6 Inspiration (page 101)
7 Naming (page 118)
8 Allusive Traditions and Audiences (page 140)
9 Motives for Allusion (page 162)
Abbreviations (page 185)
Notes (page 187)
Acknowledgments (page 217)
Index (page 219)

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Motives for Allusion

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CC Motives for Allusion

CONTEXT AND CONTENT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY MUSIC |

CLOG

Christopher Alan ‘Reynolds

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2003

Copyright © 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reynolds, Christopher Alan. Motives for allusion : context and content

in nineteenth-century music / ,

p. cm. |

Christopher Alan Reynolds.

Includes bibliographical references (p. _) and index. ISBN 0-674-01037-X 1. Quotation in music. 2. Music—19th century—History and criticism.

ML196.R45 2003 .

781.3—dce21 2002191301 Designed by Gwen Nefsky Frankfeldt

For my parents, William and Mary Jee‘Reynolds

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Contents

, Preface ix | 1 Definitions 1

, 2 Transformations 23 , 3 Assimilative Allusions 44

oe 4 Contrastive Allusions 68 5) Texting 88

6 Inspiration 101. ,

| , 7 Naming 118 | , 8 Allusive Traditions

, and Audiences 140 | 9 Motives for Allusion 162 Abbreviations 185

a , Notes 187

Acknowledgments 217

Index 219

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Preface

to associate melodies or motives one work with I 1sGerman not at allmusic unusual for musicians familiar with from nineteenth-century - similar ideas in another. This was dramatically demonstrated on the Internet in February 1996, when Theresa Muir asked the participants in the e-mail discussion group of the American Musicological Society if they could identify moments of Wagner’s Parsifal that sounded like passages from other operas. For two days the computer in my office beeped as new , references to Parsifal and other works by Wagner lit the screen. Not always

| sure of what to call the resemblances, writers cited “borrowings,” “in, fluences,” “allusions,” and “impulses” from Auber, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Spontini, Félicien David, Liszt, Verdi, Mahler, Puccini, and Berg. Some of the correspondences were harmonic, but most involved a motive or a partic-

ular harmonization. In more formal discussions of nineteenth-century music, such resemblances are often deemed coincidental or excused as “unconscious borrowings,” both because the number of notes in a scale is limited—and motivic resemblances are therefore inevitable—and because nineteenth-century composers rarely admitted to musical debts of any kind.

In contrast, musical borrowings in certain types of twentieth-century - tonal music—jazz and film music, especially—are not at all controversial, | despite composers’ use of the same limited scale, and despite the general absence of public acknowledgment. Musical borrowings in film scores range from relatively conventional typing of certain easily recognizable musical gestures to sophisticated allusions capable of conveying a textual meaning to those who recognize them. Among examples of the former, the primal

x o-~~ PREFACE pulsating chords from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring have inspired the music to

accompany chase scenes in numerous movies from the 1940s onward, including Night and the City (1950), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), and , Godfather, Part II (1974). More substantive musical references can be heard | in Nino Rota’s score for The Godfather (1972). Rota derived the theme associated with Don Vito Corleone from one of the main motives in his earlier score for Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960). Both films tell a tale of four brothers, with violent filial arguments escalating to murder. My focus in this book is on allusions in both music and text that occur in works from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I will discuss music

: not only of canonical composers from J. S. Bach to Richard Strauss, but also works by the many kleinmeister who long ago fell out of an active repertoire—figures such as Joseph Eybler, J. W. Kalliwoda, Niels Gade, P. E. Lange-Miiller, J. A. P. Schulz, and J. C. P. Schulz—as well as two composers who have recently enjoyed a revival, Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. I have included less successful composers in this study not because among their compositions are some remarkable works; rather, while works by lesser-known composers predictably contain some passages that clearly imitate something of Beethoven or Schumann, of more interest, they

also contain passages that provided inspiration for the composers whose works are still familiar. To examine allusions that Schumann made to Mendelssohn without considering relevant works by other composers is to limit severely the possibilities for understanding the contexts that gave allusions their force. This book is in some sense an attempt to explain how I have always listened to music. Allusions have interested me more or less continuously since 1984, when I gave a seminar on the Brahms Requiem at McGill University. In the years that followed, my ideas about allusion developed in a different repertoire altogether, that of fifteenth-century chansons and Masses. As I argued most fully in Papal Patronage and the Music of St. Peter’s, ca. 13801513 (Berkeley, 1995), musical allusions in the Renaissance can best be explained in terms of contemporaneous rhetorical thought. But if my scholarly interest in allusion began some fifteen years ago, my awareness of the possibility of discreet musical references between musical works dates from my childhood. When I was nine years old, my parents took me to an organ recital in Copenhagen. The only recollection that remains of this concert is that in the midst of some organ work by Dietrich Buxtehude, I plainly heard in one of the inner voices the opening motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Even then it was obvious to me that the resemblance was coincidental—that seventeenth-century Buxtehude was certainly not imitating nine-

PREFACE ——> xi teenth-century Beethoven, and that the fleeting moment in Buxtehude was

not likely to have inspired Beethoven, who doubtless didn’t know the work. | When years later I recalled this incident in the midst of my study of musical allusions, I saw it as relevant because it represents one extreme of a spec-

trum of plausibility for evaluating a connection between kindred motives in , different works. This spectrum ranges from the many completely improbable examples (hearing Beethoven in Buxtehude or vice versa) to the few in-

contestable ones (as when Fanny Mendelssohn writes Felix that she has cited one of his works in one of hers). At one end of the spectrum are two pieces by composers who did not know each other’s works; at the other, two ‘compositions written by siblings with a letter documenting the musical debt.

Most instances of musical allusion inevitably fall in between, involving works written by composers aware of one another but without written corroboration. In the absence of documentary evidence, arguments for plausi_ bility depend not just on circumstantial evidence linking two composers or two works; they also require a theoretical basis to explain how public statements attesting to creative originality are to be reconciled with private musi- | cal debts. If allusion simply involved matching pitches and rhythms, it would be dull sport indeed and of little consequence to furthering our understanding of how nineteenth-century composers worked. However, allusion touches

directly on several issues of central importance for nineteenth-century composition: notions of creativity, inspiration, and originality; the constraints of tradition and innovation; musical listening and the audience for allusion; _ the relationship between criticism and composition; and musical symbolism. In the chapters that follow I will raise these issues as I examine musical allusions that are also associated with a text, such as instrumental works that incorporate motives and themes from songs, or the reverse, songs that _ “text” a melody from a piano sonata or a symphony. To fuel the discussion I necessarily introduce numerous music examples. These examples serve two purposes: they are essential to establish allusion as a relatively normal compositional technique; and, because I take it as a given that few allusions can be agreed upon by a large majority of listeners, the quantity is important to create a pool of examples sufficiently large to | enhance the possibility that readers will find enough examples that they can accept. As large as this pool is, after nearly two decades of searching, I could | easily have tripled the number of examples. It is not just because of publication costs that I have restricted the allusions I discuss. If too few examples _

make it difficult to sustain an argument, too many can overwhelm whatever | point they illustrate, in much the same way that too many slides or videos of

xil o~~ PREFACE a summer trip squelch any chance of shared enthusiasm. Most of the allu-

sions presented here I have identified on my own, while some are well known from generations of commentary. But others I discovered myself and

then subsequently became aware that others had already made the same connection. I have tried to identify these instances, thinking that allusions which have two or more independent discoveries have added significance, and not only as an aspect of reception history. A generation ago musical allusion had to be understood against a conceptual background of opposites: programmatic music versus absolute, original musical ideas versus derived (or stolen, or borrowed), a notion of creativity that contrasted unconscious thought processes with conscious ones, and a view of composing as active and listening as passive. I hope in this book to show how more complex and nuanced views of these old dualisms lead to a fuller awareness of the richly expressive powers of musical allusion.

Motives for Allusion

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AS 1 e&D CHAPTER

Definitions

N HIS insightful treatise, A Theory of Art, Karol Berger asks: “How can / an instrumental voice appropriate the ‘speech’ of another voice?” He answers immediately: “This can happen only when what the instrument plays has been ‘said’ or played earlier, by someone or something else, in the same piece or in a different one, in or outside of music, that is, when the instrumental voice literally quotes from, or less-than-literally alludes to, someone else’s ‘speech.’” He adds, “The less literal the allusion, the more ambig-

uous its status.”!

Berger thus defines the strength of an allusion on the basis of its audibility, from the standpoint of the hearer actually listening to a performance. This

does not account for the role of those who, concerned with a work’s context, examine the musical score, even compare it to other musical works, closely inspecting the music for subtleties not necessarily audible without study. Context plays a key role in both the recognition and the interpreta- _ tion of an allusion, as it does with irony or humor. The problem with requiring an allusion to be as literal as possible is evident in an example that I shall

return to in Chapter 8. For generations, some musically literate observers have heard in two works of Beethoven the mournful theme that Bach had used in the St. John Passion to set the last words of Jesus in the aria “Es ist vollbracht” (It is fulfilled). In Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in Ab Major, op. 110, the Arioso dolente appears to follow Bach’s leaps and turns faithfully for ten notes; and in his op. 69 Cello Sonata this resemblance runs to twelve notes, where it shares the added detail of being written for cello, the nineteenth-century counterpart of the viola da gamba to which Bach had entrusted an obbligato solo in his aria. The stumbling block for most scholars

2 s~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

has been Beethoven’s apparent lack of contact with the St. John Passion, which was not published until 1830. Is the extent of the resemblances sufficient to compensate for the lack of documentary evidence that Beethoven knew the Bach aria? For most, the answer to this question has been no.

As a rule, musical allusions are indeed evaluated one by one on the strength of their musical similarities (of pitch, rhythm, orchestration, tempo, and so on). But it is wrong to replace the question “Do you think — that this motive (or theme) in Brahms alludes to this motive in Beethoven?” with “Do you think that this motive of Brahms sounds like this motive in Beethoven?” As the example of “Es ist vollbracht” demonstrates, it is possible to answer no to the former and yes to the latter; and, as we shall see, the

| reverse is also true: some allusions are not easy to hear. While the question of audibility must of course be raised, it needs to be posed in a way that allows for consideration of (1) the musical context of the allusion (what does the text or context of the earlier work contribute to the later work?); (2) the biographical context (did the later composer express his or her thoughts

about the earlier work?); (3) the audience (to whom is the allusion addressed?); and (4) the conventions of allusion (did the composer “frame” the allusion? Is the motive one that many composers incorporated—that is,

is it part of an allusive tradition?). |

In this book I aim to establish a context for understanding how allusions functioned semantically, for grasping what composers meant by incorporating the musical “speech” of another work, whether from an earlier composition of their own or from one by another composer. C&S WE CAN BEGIN with the uncontroversial assertion that nineteenthcentury composers could create a level of veiled meaning in their music by quoting from art songs, folksongs, arias, and chant. A musical motive or theme in a symphony could allude both to an earlier musical context and to an antecedent poetic text that was omitted from the symphony, a kind of musical-poetic interaction that is very clear when a chorale tune or a lieder motive is quoted exactly. But because most sightings of allusions involve motives that are not repeated literally, most arguments for motivic allusions have left many sensitive observers unpersuaded, for if Schumann alluded to texted works, then why didn’t he or Clara Schumann or Brahms describe this practice? No one disputes that Liszt, Wagner, and Richard Strauss used motives to refer to people and ideas, because they were more forthcoming about their symbolic use of motives. Yet, as I will attempt to demonstrate, the public motivic identities of programmatic composers could themselves be based on intertextual relationships that Liszt and his followers did not

Definitions —~ 3 publicly identify; moreover, these relationships may have been substantially

the same for composers like Schumann who did not provide public identities | for motives. Motives have histories. The later in the nineteenth century a composer worked, the longer the history, the richer the possibilities for associations, whether meaningful or coincidental. Already by the mid-nineteenth century there is ample evidence that musi-

cians and music lovers routinely made associations between motives and themes in different works, usually calling them “reminiscences.” This is clear from music journalism in Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna that complains— at times in impassioned tones—about this practice. In a caustic essay from

1848, “On Hunting Reminiscences,” published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, a writer identified only as “R.” lamented the popularity of searching for reminiscences, musical ideas that are “similar or only related”:

“The addiction to hunting for reminiscences has become so fashionable these days, belonging—so to speak—to bon ton, that the impartial observer has to wonder about the activity of such a refined fantasy, that such deceptive figures can produce.” As if composers might be encouraging these fan-

tasies, the writer included “a Law for Composers: Thou shalt not steal.” The writer defined musical ideas as not only motives, but also rhythmic patterns, harmonies, cadence formulas, and even keys. Subsequently, and with greater subtlety, others took up the cry in 1855. The composer and theory

teacher L. A. Zellner wrote “On Plagiarism” for the Viennese Blatter fir Musik, Theater und Kunst (which he also edited). “One hears no verdict,” he began, “especially about new compositions, more often than: this or that idea is borrowed or stolen from here or there.”* Ultimately he objects most to those who hear works “only as a mass of details” rather than as an inte-

grated work.* In defending Anton Rubenstein against charges of plagiarism from Eduard Hanslick, Zellner identified some other potential reminiscences, arguing that based “only on the homogeneity of the melodic idea,” the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s G-Minor Piano Concerto would constitute “a competent plagiarism of Grétry” and the finale would be no less indebted to Weber’s Konzertsttick. He then concluded that if “we proceed in this way ... musical literature would easily be reduced to a couple of dozen

original works.”° ,

Under the heading “On Plagiarism and Reminiscences,” an anonymous writer for the Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo discusses the practice in con-

junction with plagiarism, beginning by proclaiming: “Plagiarism is what one calls any learned theft.” According to this writer, those who consider all reminiscences to be plagiarism define “reminiscence” as “a noticeable similarity, which a musical phrase [Satz]—especially in a melodic connec-

4 o~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

tion—has with one that is already more or less known, above all with one written earlier.”” The writer goes on to argue that “this hunt for reminiscences that is sanctioned by many sides” places an enormous pressure on young composers, that is, those of Brahms’s generation.’ In demonstrating how melodic correspondences between works are to be found throughout music history, the author then produces an extraordinary list: One need only compare, for example Bach with Stradella, Lasso [!], etc., Gluck’s first operas. with Handel’s Italian operas, Handel with English folk mel-

odies, further Mozart (Idomeneo) with Gluck and especially with Cimarosa, ideas from Haydn with Styrian folksongs, ideas from Mozart with Haydn’s, Beethoven with Mozart and Haydn, Spohr with Mozart, Weber with Bohemia’s

and Hungary’s national songs, in his last period with Rossini, Rossini with Portuguese and Italian folksongs, Marschner with Weber, Mendelssohn with oriental [?] and Celtic melodies and with Weber, Wagner with Weber and

Spohr, etc., etc.” |

Although reminiscences are at one point termed “often unavoidable,” the author’s primary criticism is not that reminiscences are coincidental and therefore without significance, but, like Zellner, that reminiscence hunters focus unduly on isolated musical details and lose sight of the whole work. Instead, the editorial concludes with a law that applies to “ideas” —which, | given the argument that has preceded, must refer to melodies—and forms: “We want therefore to recognize the true context, the inner necessity of requisite ideas and forms as the one valid Law [Codex], according to which pla_ giarism and reminiscences are to be judged not only in the small but also the large, not only in the clumsily pasted on and exposed, but also the cleverly

concealed.” !®

While these articles are important for establishing “reminiscence hunting” as a common—if unwelcome—practice, none ever considers the possibility that these reminiscences carry meaning, that they are allusions. Was this because these writers rejected this possibility? Because it was understood to be self-evident in the term “reminiscence” and therefore not in need of discussion? Because they had no critical framework for discussing allusions? Concepts like “plagiarism” and “theft” are linked ideologically to “originality” and “genius,” and thus inhibit rather than promote the cultural legitimacy of influence. Even the term “borrowing,” in use in the nineteenth century and newly sanctioned with an important entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music (2nd edition), has its own ideological freight." If there is a type of musical analysis that is viewed with more suspicion than the investigation of motivic relationships between different composi-

Definitions —~> § tions, it is analysis that also attributes poetic meaning to those motivic similarities. Regarding the intertextual links of the string quartets of Brahms, the symphonies of Beethoven, and other works by non-programmatic composers, there are now at least three views (which I formulate initially without

less; |

recourse to nuance or qualification): |

(1) motivic and thematic resemblances are inevitable—since there are only seven pitches in a diatonic scale—and therefore are usually meaning-

(2) motivic and thematic resemblances, despite their inevitability, were often invested with symbolic meaning by means of allusion; and (3) motivic and thematic resemblances carry unintentional meaning because motives express basic psychological moods. The most detailed exposi-

tion of this last view is Deryck Cooke’s book, The Language of Music, in _ which he groups motives into families by mode, intervallic span, and direction (for example, an ascending major third).!2 I will not deal further with this view because it does not necessarily contradict either of the other two: in the first case because Cooke does not propose associations with specific texts, in the second because the existence of a basic psychological expressivity for a motive does not rule out the possibility that a composer could

have a personal and specific association for the same motive. oe The prevailing view today is without a doubt the first, according to which a resemblance between a motive or theme in a symphony by Schumann and

a cantata aria by Bach is coincidental, or at best, made unconsciously. Charles Rosen speaks for many when he observes that it is “only too easy to produce uninteresting triviality by finding similar or identical motifs in unrelated passages, particularly in tonal music,” because “in tonal music of the _ eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth . . . almost every theme outlines or implies the central tonic triad, and there are only three notes in a triad.”1}9

| - Countering this view are several writers who have proposed that in some cases at least, composers did use motives to refer to ideas, people, or other musical compositions by quoting vocal or instrumental melodies in instrumental works with varying degrees of exactitude.'* The studies which have to date most directly confronted issues raised by musical allusions are—tellingly—both about Brahms’s symphonies. Kenneth Hull attempts to specify the conditions for ascertaining the presence of an allusion in the course of his dissertation on Brahms’s Fourth Symphony; and Raymond Knapp examines the interactions of numerous resemblances between all of Brahms’s symphonies and those of his predecessors.'5 In discussing questions of influence and intentionality, Hull begins by defining allusion as “an intentional,

6 o~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

extra-compositional reference made by means of a resemblance.”!* Knapp, perhaps because he focused on instrumental allusions, is less concerned with interpreting individual allusions than with demonstrating that Brahms created “allusive webs,” complex amalgams of musical gestures based on isolated moments from earlier works, and showing how “the effect of Brahms’s allusion is grounded in long-range musical processes.” He objects to Hull’s emphasis on discerning a composer’s intention, since he considers intention “notoriously hard to prove and often spectacularly useless in providing analytical insight.” !7 My own definition of allusion differs only slightly from Hull’s: an allusion is an intentional reference to another work made by means of a resemblance that affects the meaning conveyed to those who recognize it. Intentionality

is an important element, however problematic it may be to determine. It matters less for what listeners hear than for how composers composed and for understanding the impact of allusions on questions of originality (discussed in Chapter 6). In describing the relationship between works, I generally avoid using the conditional and attribute authorial intentionality, not merely because the number of “might haves” necessary to qualify the examples I analyze would grow tedious, but because the practice requires the conscious agency of an author. The definition of allusion in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics begins from a premise of intentionality: “A poet’s deliberate incorporation of identifiable elements from other sources ...”!8 For reasons to be examined in Chapter 9, I omit Hull’s qualification of allusions as “extra-compositional” and add a clause to include the agency of an audience. An allusion requires four elements: a composer (author), the new composition, the old composition, and the audience. A composer creates a new work that refers to an existing work (or works) in order to imbue the new work with a meaning that someone will recognize and interpret. The composer, painter, or writer may of course imagine himself as the ideal audience, as James Joyce did, and create allusions that no one else could recognize. But it is also necessary to deal with the objection articulated in different ways by both Rosen and Berger. In discussing motivic or thematic resemblances, it is not fruitful to claim a meaningful connection on the strength of intervallic and rhythmic similarities alone. Similarities are of course bound to occur unintentionally because motivic possibilities are finite. Virtually any motive found in two nineteenth-century compositions is likely to be present in many more than the two being compared (an issue discussed in Chapter 4); this is especially true for a composer like Brahms, who used cer-

Definitions —~> 7 tain motives and themes throughout his career. But since greater degrees of

motivic resemblance do not necessarily correspond to greater probabilities of musical significance, it is unreasonable to demand that motives be | identical in every respect in order to talk about purposeful musical connections between them. The rhetoric of the age and the demand for originality usually required an artist, author, or composer to make alterations to the model. Quotations are neither more nor less meaningful than less exact references—only a different degree of artistic appropriation.

Motives, by means of allusion, could become symbols, not only with leitmotivs but with units as brief as Liszt’s Cross motive (the notes g-a-c) or the FAE motive used by Joseph Joachim, Brahms, and Schumann. A motivic association with a text that was reinforced by repetition was evidently | enough to allow motives to function as symbols.'!? Whether that text was the

chant “Crux fidelis” (as for Liszt), the personal motto of a friend (as for Brahms), or the examples presented below, repetition could occur between | works as well as within. As late as 1888 Brahms wrote Joachim that “for me f.a.e. [frei, aber einsam] has remained a symbol,” and Liszt throughout his life described his use of this “tonal symbol of the Cross” in his works.*° The

length or distinctiveness of a motive is irrelevant. | As a musical-poetic symbol, a motivic allusion was both a vehicle for expressing a particular meaning (for those who recognized the allusion) and also an element in the construction of a musical order. Like any Romantic

symbol, “it is and it signifies at the same time”;*! as Friedrich Schelling put | it, a symbol “exists independently of signification without losing its signification.”2* Romantic theories of symbolism saw symbols as signs that simultaneously represented an object while also being the object itself, as particulars through which the infinite was perceptible. It was common to see the symbol both as a fusion of the image and the object—in Goethe’s paradoxical formulation, “It is the thing itself, without being the thing, and yet the thing”—and in synecdochic terms, as expressed here by Coleridge: “by a symbol I mean .. . an actual and essential part of that, the whole which it

represents.”73 Whatever the inherent restrictions on motivic “originality,” there were | many fewer constraints on what any given motive could symbolize. That Schumann could employ a motive to represent a forest in which danger lurked unseen in no way suggests or requires that every occurrence of that motive carries this meaning. Few motives have had a more flexible and encompassing symbolic capability than Liszt’s symbol of the Cross, the rising three-note figure which he publicly admitted was inspired by the Grego-

8 o~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

rian hymn “Crux fidelis” and the incipit of a Magnificat chant. At various times Liszt evidently employed this motive to represent the Crucifixion, the will of God, the Holy Spirit, and other Christian themes.?* Different composers could of course use the same motive for different symbolic purposes or without symbolic meaning of any kind; or different composers could represent the same idea with different motives. The situation is no different in poetry or painting. Goethe employed the lily to symbolize various ideas, even contradictory ones: of chastity or incest, both in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjabre, and of permanence or transience in other contexts.*° Throughout the nineteenth century, nature could symbolize danger or the sublime, water could be life-giving or life-taking, a forest could be the scene of supernatural evil or the symbol of national pride. In this study I consider the use of motives to be symbolic rather than allegorical, despite the fact that allegory had its defenders in the nineteenth century, especially Schlegel. Goethe’s distinction between direct and indirect signification (and between allegory and symbol) captures the veiled meaning that motivic allusions convey: “The allegorical differs from the symbolic in that what the latter designates indirectly, the former designates directly.”76 Motives had an independent musical existence, which meant that they could be appreciated as entities in themselves apart from their referential meaning. Moreover, claims that symbols were linked to the eternal inevitably placed symbolism on a higher artistic plane than allegory, which made symbols more suitable for the poetic aspirations that Romantic composers had for their creations. By 1820 Goethe could exclaim, “How far behind [the symbolic] allegory remains, in contrast: it may be full of wit, but it is in most instances nonetheless rhetorical and conventional.”?’ It is entirely possible that the same musical event would have been understood as allegorical in one time (or by one observer) and symbolic in another. Bach may have understood his use of a three-sharp key in the St. John Passion as an allegorical representation of the Crucifixion (Kreuz in German meaning both sharp and

cross), but by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, most musicians would likely have viewed this as symbolic; conversely, Liszt’s “tonal symbol of the cross” would have been understood in Bach’s day (or later by

Schlegel) as an allegorical reference. |

The problem that composers from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries faced in giving symbolic meaning to music may be compared to that

of painters who wanted to imbue landscapes with profundity and poetic content. Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner have distinguished three tactics in _ the attempt of artists to “free the symbol from convention”: (1) the develop-

, Definitions —> 9 ment of a personal symbolism, “an idiosyncratic mythology belonging en- , tirely to the artist”; (2) the use of basic elements of traditional symbolism,

such as “the association of dark colors for sadness”; and (3) the identifica- , tion and exploitation of the symbols already present in nature, for example, “the coming of dawn as a new beginning.””® Although the focus of this book is the musical equivalent of the first strategy—the development of a personal musical symbolism—it is worth considering briefly other means composers had of expressing textual/poetic ideas in their music. Allusion is but one form of poetic/musical reference, along with topics, simple forms of borrowing such as theme and variation, and formal modeling. Nineteenth-century composers had inherited from their predecessors several means of conveying meaning, all of which could serve in the creation of a personal musical symbolism. Rosen and Zerner’s second tactic for creating symbols has obvious parallels in music: “basic elements

of traditional symbolism” would encompass the use of minor and major modes to depict sadness or happiness; various rhythmic patterns and tempos to suggest dancing, stasis, marching, or fear; and familiar associations of musical instruments to characterize people, activities, and even aspects of social interaction. By this I refer not only to conventional dramatic associations for individual instruments but to usages that arise out of different instrumental combinations, such as the interaction between a group and an individual inherent in many nineteenth-century concertos, or the conversa-

tion among equals implied in many string quartets from the same period, to , name just two.

Many of these examples belong to the “expressive vocabulary” of musical | topics, a world—Kofi Agawu has called it a “universe”—of musical types and styles that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers shared with their audiences.?? A very short list of topics includes dances (such as the sarabande and minuet), fanfares, hunting calls, learned style, national styles, pastoral ideals, meteorological effects, and Turkish music. By means of characteristic rhythms, melodic patterns, and instrumentation, a composer

could resort to any of these signs, confident that listeners would compre- , hend the non-musical associations. Topics relied on cultural conventions and mimesis to establish the expressive meaning of a sign. While some topics (march, fanfare) survived into the twentieth century, others such as the minuet and Turkish music vanished when the social context that gave rise to

the convention disappeared.

In the nineteenth century topics are understood to be partially eclipsed by symbols that did not derive their meaning from convention. As Agawu ob-.

10 s—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

serves, the preference among Romantic composers was for a more personal musical code, a preference that led to the “transformation of sign into symbol”:3° Musical symbols, such as Schumann’s league of composers, Wagner’s leitmotifs, and Mahler’s programs all challenge the universality of the sign by questioning the self-evident nature of the signified. One needs to consult a different kind of lexicon, itself a product of various biographical sources, or simply legendary titles or subtitles, in order to get at the meaning of the sign. The sign assumes symbolic status... . Whereas eighteenth-century music defamiliarizes “ordinary” materials such as fanfares, hunt-calls, brilliant-style effects, and so

on, therefore making them properly and self-consciously artistic, Romantic | music, without abandoning this gesture, often prefers a break with the outside world by entering into private biographical realms in which the cryptic sign holds the key to meaning in the musical work.?!

Allusion and topic could, of course, exist simultaneously. This is most easily demonstrated with a couple of examples. Elements of both are present in Schubert’s Credo from his Mass in G Major from 1815. As shown in Ex-

ample 1.1a, Schubert set the text “Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem” (I believe in one God, Father almighty) to a walking bass that is typical of many Credo beginnings, as for example in Bach’s Mass in B Minor. This type of walking bass is a topic for faith, resolve, and strength, whether in the sacred context of the Credo—the central statement of Christian belief—or in operatic scenes that portray the same traits. But in addition Schubert alluded to a passage in the Chorus of Prisoners in Beethoven’s Fidelio, the Finale of Act I. The first phrase of Schubert’s Credo paraphrases

the G-major theme with the text “Wir wollen mit Vertrauen auf Gottes Hilfe bauen” (We want to build with trust in God’s help) (Ex. 1.1b).°? The musical parallels are several: both are in the key of G; the melodies are very close, even in matters of rhythm; the harmonies and voice leading correspond—including the secondary dominant at the end of the second measure and the parallel thirds or sixths in the upper voices—as does the staccato walking bass; and Beethoven specifies Allegro, ma non troppo and piano,

Schubert Allegro moderato and pianissimo. The similarities between Schubert and Beethoven are so compelling that Schubert cannot merely have been employing a musical convention, but rather a specific theme that symbolized the steadfast faith of Beethoven’s political prisoners. And in this instance, the text of Beethoven’s prisoners’ chorus—“Wir wollen mit Vertrauen auf Gottes Hiilfe bauen”—may have a

(3S Se

, ‘Definitions —> 11 Allegro moderato

e388 $s eS i eo ote +8 tT

ee es

| Flute ( pa Ex. 1.1a Schubert, Mass in G Major, D. 167, Credo, mm. 1-8

Allegro ma non troppo

oboe | AQ—4-2————_ 4 -—s to = —e— ccm 9 —sene < rR

cere = pp |

bassoon -2— A etaiet te ee pt tree PRISONERS: Wir wollen mit Vertrauen auf Gottes Hiilfe bauen

Ex. 1.1b Beethoven, Fidelio, no. 10, Finale, mm. 74-81

model of its own: a passage in Mozart’s Die Entftihrung aus dem Serail, Belmonte’s aria “Ich baue ganz auf deine Starke, vertrau’, o Liebe.” Mozart arrived at a similar response for the accompaniment, with the tonic eé insistently reiterated for four measures on each quarter note. The notion of trust and building may have reminded Beethoven of Mozart’s bass line, or—I think more probable in this instance—it is a case of both opera composers drawing on a religious topic as a symbol of faith. Schubert composed his Mass in G in early March of 1815, nearly a year after the May 1814 revival of Fidelio, and half a year after Artaria had published a piano-vocal score in August 1814. Napoleon’s abdication in April 1814 was the background for the successful revival of Fidelio in May, and when the international Congress of Vienna convened in late September to settle terms of peace, the inaugural entertainment had included a performance of Fidelio.33 Since the - Congress was still in session in March, the anti-tyrannical message of the opera would have had renewed political relevance and perhaps also an audience capable of recognizing the musical allusion. | A similar conflation of allusion and topic exists in one of the most enduring dramatic gestures Haydn ever composed, God’s creation of light. In his oratorio The Creation (1798) Haydn had many opportunities for mimetic portrayals of textual images. None has proved so memorable and influential as his treatment of the text “and there was light,” which he depicted by

12 -~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

moving suddenly from soft and C minor (dark) to loud and C major (light).

His exploitation of the inherent properties of minor and major modes to suggest dark and light (or sad and happy) created a topic that spawned numerous nineteenth-century imitations. But Haydn may have been influenced himself by two important predecessors, and thus his musical depiction of the text can be said to allude to the earlier works.

Haydn is considered to have taken his motive from the analogous moment in Handel’s Samson, at the text “Let there be light” in the chorus “Oh first created beam,” where the same notes occur in unison and in major but without a shift from minor (Ex. 1.2a and b). He may have derived this har-

- monic idea from the oratorio Der sterbende Jesus by Franz Anton Rosler (Rosetti), published in Vienna by Artaria in 1786. Immediately after the death of Jesus at the text “Der Vorhang im Tempel zerriss,” when lightning tears the curtain of the temple from top to bottom, Rosler shifted abruptly from C minor to C major on the last syllable of “zerriss,” using the exact

motive (repeated g’s leaping up to c) that Haydn did for “and there was light” (Ex. 1.2c).%4

Haydn’s memorable juxtaposition of minor and major triads inspired several similar moments in the nineteenth century.?5 Mendelssohn alluded to it overtly when he came to set the same words, “Und es ward Licht,” in the Festgesang zur Jabrhundertfeier der Erfindung der Buchdruckerkunst (1840), his anniversary piece to celebrate Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. From the same year came a subtler evocation in his choral symphony Lobgesang, at the change from spiritual darkness to light.** The most famous and clangorous descendant came nearly a century after Haydn’s Creation, at the beginning of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. Having conceived the work in 1894, he composed it largely in 1896. In a sketchbook Strauss marked the famous opening C-G-C’ as the “Universe” and also as “the first sun theme.” He described the ensuing passage in the

following terms: “The sun rises. The individual enters the world or the world enters the individual.”?” Strauss prefaced the score with a passage by Nietzsche from Zarathustra’s Preamble: When Zarathustra was thirty years old... his heart was changed [Strauss was himself thirty when he began this project]—and one morning he arose with the dawn, stepped before the sun and addressed it thus: “You mighty star! What happiness would be yours if you did not have those for whom you shine?”

The hero then tells of his need to descend from the mountain top, to submerge himself, to “become a human being again.” However publicly Strauss acknowledged his philosophical and program-

mf | P Sf

S pt| ee eo aoe eer te oo oom a otrt A peje ee hr

B Pt or Er

aSe9 Aee ee ee ee he TEe ee ee oo OO Oo rr ES ES SS NNO SE SRS (EE ES OO ee esGeffes a fA |ee £20 aeeeee B ¢.. Wan) 2 UP eeUL Ge hc " 0ee © eeSe * Sasi b.«Se 2 es esSe ee Na AS AE EE — A PEER "OT AE DP” A OO SS ET — AN aE wee ne

and God said, Let there be light; and there was __ light.

ee eei Pe ee ee De ee es EGE ee

Ex.1.2a Haydn, The Creation, mm. 81-86

B Ss

A ayo «ss ¢ ) =

|i OOS ee ee Let there be light! Ex. 1.2b Handel, Samson, no. 14, m. 7

Vivace

—__— ——————————— SS Se ee aS

> aEaLU a SUNS (SOTERA ere nee ene Ee eee OT(SNE errr

9-4| Feels ay pkeetgee | Cs _ Vins eenees teers mee|=ho

ve StSES aeEe re SS| eS Se ee ee ee

oy — > i? eee? | Hrn, Trp.g; | -epee sees Sa a ee te et et to ee ee

Der Vor- hang im Tem - pel zer - friss : Fl, Ob,

be ee a ee ee Ee ee a es ee ee Sa Cee

Ex. 1.2c Franz Anton Rosler (Rosetti), Der sterbende Jesus: Ein Oratorium, Chorale, “Fallet nieder und dankt”

14 -—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

matic debt to Nietzsche, and however obvious the debt to Haydn, his musical depiction of the sun also had a more recent private musical and textual inspiration from the Danish composer Niels Gade. In his cantata FriihlingsPhantasie, Gade anticipated many features of Strauss’s opening section: the orchestration, tonality and modal mixture, textual idea, as well as the motive. As shown in Ex. 1.3, the two works have much in common: a lengthy tonic pedal begins on a pianissimo C sustained by percussion and keyboard

a

(Strauss with an organ, Gade a piano); the motive is an ascending triadic | arpeggiation that starts piano and includes both e& and e4; and Strauss announces the motive with a C-trumpet and Gade a C-horn. It is significant that Gade’s text also speaks of the sun that directs a noble hero: “But even when fog covers the sun, no darkness frightens the brave fighter, a star

shines for him and gives him escort.” ,

It makes little difference that Zarathustra’s sun is celestial and Gade’s is the very terrestrial “love of a friendly maiden”; nor that the first high e, a measure long in each piece, crescendos then diminuendos in Gade and the reverse in Strauss. Strauss adopts the meaning and the context of the solar symbol, the motive, the tonic pedal, and the orchestration. I have not found any specific reference in Strauss’s writings to this cantata, but he certainly knew and admired works by Gade, having conducted some in Weimar in the early 1890s. And after evaluating a symphony by another Dane, Emil Hartmann, Strauss wrote, “Very pretty, like all these Nordic things of Gade etc.”38 It is suggestive that, although Gade had first published the cantata four decades earlier in 1853, Breitkopf and Hartel brought out an arrange-

ae 659 ee Ee L'istesso tempo p dol. ——

Timp. SS oe Oe eo oe

on SS

No |e ee a a a ee L'istesso tempo

Ex. 1.3 Niels Gade, Frithlings-Phantasie, mvt. 2

Definitions —~> 15_ ment for two pianos and choir in 1894, the year when Strauss first planned the tone poem.*”

Cé> In THIS BOOK I will draw on several theoretical sources, including nineteenth-century views of symbolization, Johan Huizinga’s discussion of play, and writings by Mikhail Bakhtin and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among others. Also relevant, though not as prominently as one might expect, is Harold Bloom’s discussion of “misreading,” his word to describe how a writer adapts, subverts, or represses the unavoidable influence of earlier texts.4? Bloom’s notion of the “anxiety of influence” and his identification of

six categories of divergence between texts has been enormously influential for several studies of music, especially studies of works from the nineteenth century. No one has gone further in advocating Bloom’s utility for understanding musical influence than Kevin Korsyn, who analyzed how Brahms can be said to have misread Chopin in a virtuoso “inter-reading” of , Brahms’s Romanze, op. 118, no. 5, and Chopin’s Berceuse, op. 57.*1 Korsyn

applies each of Bloom’s six “revisionary ratios” and their corresponding rhetorical tropes and psychic defenses either to individual passages or to Brahms’s Romanze as a whole. Thus, for example, in his discussion of the opening phrases, Korsyn adopts Bloom’s first revisionary ratio, “clinamen” (an initial swerve away from the artistic precursor), as well as Bloom’s matching of clinamen with the trope of irony and the Freudian conception of reaction-formation. Korsyn finds musical irony in Brahms, arguing that because irony “is to say one thing and mean another,” Brahms created irony in the Romanze by placing his reminiscence of Chopin’s tonally stable Berceuse in a tonally unstable context.” Although in many instances Bloom is relevant for my study, I reject both the notion that all opening allusions must necessarily be ironic (to deal just with this one revisionary ratio) and also Bloom’s reliance on Freudian theory. While irony, especially Romantic irony, is indeed important to consider (and for interpreting Schumann, indispensable), many of the allusions I discuss came about because they offer a means of embracing a particular symbolic image or a way to honor an esteemed colleague, rather than a platform

for asserting oneself against an intimidating predecessor. As I indicate in Chapter 9, Bloom’s argument depends on comparisons of canonical authors and literature to an extent that renders it an ineffective tool for analyzing many types of allusion. Because he discusses only the towering pillars of the

canon, he can reasonably declare that “to live, the poet must misinterpret the father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is the re-writing of the father.”43 This may work for figures like Brahms and Berlioz, who acknowl-

16 s—~— MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

edged trembling in the footsteps of “the giant” Beethoven, but when allusions to minor contemporaries and to folksong are included, Bloom’s theory of anxiety is undermined. Schumann alluding to Clara Schumann or to J. W.

Kalliwoda, Felix Mendelssohn to his sister Fanny or to J. P. C. Schulz, or even Wagner to Schumann—these are not artistic or social relationships well-served by Bloom’s theory (or Freud’s). There are many motivations for allusion other than struggling against a domineering and all-capable father; there are strong reasons to create other than sublimation or wish fulfillment. Aside from Korsyn’s efforts, examinations of musical influence usually do not attempt to define the existence of different kinds of allusion; it is enough for most simply to show that allusion exists. Hull argues that in the finale to his Fourth Symphony, Brahms alluded ironically to the finale of Beethoven’s

Fifth, in order to create a tragic rather than a triumphant conclusion; and Knapp sees Brahms employing allusion as “a double-edged sword, with which he could either secure his generic orientation or, by reversing direction, challenge that orientation by introducing contrasting elements.”‘+ But literary theorists and critics commonly make such distinctions, as for example in studies that have specified four types of literary imitation in the Renaissance and two or three kinds of allusion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.* In this study I adopt a twofold categorization of Romantic allusions in order to describe the use of earlier material as either assimilative or contrastive; that is to say, an allusion can accept the meaning of the earlier text or use it to create another meaning, even a contrary meaning.*°

The distinction I intend bears comparison to that which Bakhtin discerned between two types of double-voiced discourse. His conception of

double-voiced discourse acknowledges that in any utterance or text, a speaker or author can use another’s “discourse for his own purposes, by in-

serting a new semantic intention into a discourse which already has, and which retains, an intention of its own.”*” One utterance thus contains two voices, with the voice of the speaker transmitting (and interpreting) the words of the other. Bakhtin classified double-voiced discourse as either pas-

sive or active, further dividing passive forms into discourse that was either “unidirectional” or “varidirectional.” In unidirectional passive doublevoiced discourse, the two voices share common aims: a speaker adopts the words of someone else with the same or similar point of view. In varidirectional discourse, in contrast, the two voices differ in meaning: a speaker adapts another’s words, using them in a way that conflicts with their original sense. Bakhtin focuses on parody (broadly defined) in this latter cate-

Definitions —~ 17 gory, but includes “any transmission of someone else’s words with a shift in accent,” such as irony.*8 As Morson and Emerson observed for “unidirectional” and “varidirectional” discourse, the distinction I make between assimilative and contrastive allusions needs to be understood as encompassing a broad spectrum of possible allusive relationships.*? While there are indeed many degrees of as-

| similation or contrast, I prefer the two encompassing categorizations of assimilation and contrast to schemas that attempt to specify more minute shadings, precisely because the possibilities for semantic variation are so numerous. It is therefore more fruitful to address the variable degrees of assimilation or contrast in examples individually. In the examples discussed below, the spectrum of allusive relationships is particularly apparent because rather than examining purely instrumental works for their possible links to songs and operas, I will discuss many texted allusions, comparing one work with a text to another (I include among texted works instrumental composi~ tions with programmatic associations). For the purpose of arguing the merits of individual allusions, the presence of textual associations in two works gives an added control in the attempt to relate two motives: there must be a correspondence not only between motives, but also between texts. The allusions of Haydn, Schubert, and Strauss that have already been discussed assimilate the dramatic and poetic meaning of their musical sources:

Schubert alluded to Fidelio because he wanted an association with Beethoven’s text and—given the popularity of anti-tyrannical ideals and the presence of the Congress of Vienna—with the political context of Fidelio. Haydn’s allusion to Handel is sufficiently exact in its motive and text that it

is virtually a quotation, one that assimilates the earlier meaning. And although Strauss takes more liberties in his appropriation of Gade’s passage, he accepts it as Gade had created it: a representation of the sun. The more complicated textual interaction created by contrastive allusions

can be demonstrated preliminarily by an example that cites Beethoven’s Fidelio (I discuss assimilative and contrastive allusions at length in Chapters | 3 and 4). No composer was more adept at contrastive allusions than Robert

Schumann; indeed, as I argue in Chapter 9, not only did this type of allusion allow Schumann to conceal meaning and distance himself from the | musical and poetic sources he drew upon, but contrastive allusions made it possible for him to introduce into music the degree of Romantic irony he

found so praiseworthy in the poetry of his time. In his lied “Frihlings Ankunft,” Schumann plays textually and musically with Florestan’s aria “In des Lebens Frihlingstagen,” sung at the outset of Act II of Fidelio as

18 s—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

Florestan awaited his execution (the texts are compared in Table 1.1).°° While Schumann maintained Beethoven’s register and tempo (note values are halved), he created contrast by altering the metric placement of Beethoven’s motive, omitting the grace note, and adding the contrapuntal accompaniment. The obvious textual echoes of “triiben Tagen” and “Frihlingstagen” reinforce the musical resemblances (Ex. 1.4a and b). Additionally, the second phrase, “zerrissne Wolken,” clearly echoes the notes of the mo-

tive that Florestan sings leading into this aria at his outburst “O schwere Priifung” (O difficult trial) (Ex. 1.4c and d). Together these two motives provide almost all of the motivic material in Schumann’s strophic lied, each being sung and then echoed in the piano, six times in all. The poem of Hoffman von Fallersleben chosen by Schumann contrasts more strongly with many elements of Beethoven’s text, completely reversing several images. One text is a preparation for life’s end, the other a celebration of new life. For Florestan, happiness flies away; for Schumann, it is “the sadness of the world” that flees, carried away by wisps of cloud. Both conclude with reference to their hearts, Beethoven with resignation (“The sweet comfort in my heart: I have done my duty”), Schumann with joy (“O heart, let that be your sign! Be glad and bold!”). The poem that Schumann set locates its tribulations in the past tense, as if encompassing Beethoven’s text. While Florestan had been imprisoned in his youth, “in the spring days of life,” at the time of the aria in Fidelio he was soon to be freed. His escape from the dungeon took him literally up from darkness to light, just as described in stanza 2 of “Spring’s Arrival” (“seed and bud struggle towards the light”). By setting this text to motives previously used by Florestan in his moment

of greatest despair, Schumann creates a strongly contrastive allusion between the poem of A. H. Hoffman von Fallersleben and Beethoven’s rescue drama. Nature imagery is cast in political terms, an interpretation perfectly in keeping with the well-known political viewpoints and personal history of the poet Hoffman von Fallersleben (who had been imprisoned for his political beliefs) and also with the very recent events in Schumann’s own life. Schumann wrote “Friihlings Ankunft” and the other twenty-seven songs of his Lieder-Album fiir die Jugend between 21 April and 13 May 1849, that

is, in the very weeks when civil war broke out in Dresden. This particular song evidently stems from the days immediately following his escape with Clara through the garden of their house in Dresden. Clara—more like Leonore than at any other time in her marriage—returned to embattled Dresden a day later to rescue the three children they had had to leave behind, perhaps able to cross barricades and brave the open rebellion precisely

FF

Definitions —> 19

Nicht schnell

4, Pf _

Nach die -_ sen trii - ben Ta-gen

rece .

Ex. 1.4a Robert Schumann, Lieder-Album fir die Jugend, op. 79, “Frihlings Ankunft,” mm. 1-2

2a eeeSeee|

Hlorestan (Oy? oo ee ee oe

Vn | ab 4 FS

In des Le - bens Frith - lings - ta-gen

Sn SRR ORI DE RE eS -—+—$—J

P Ex. 1.4b Beethoven, Fidelio, no. 11, Introduction and Aria, mm. 56-58

, zr 20 -~—SsriB - ne Wol - ken | , Ex. 1.4c Schumann, “Friihlings Ankunft,” mm. 5-6

O schwe - re Prii - fung | Ex. 1.4d Beethoven, Fidelio, no. 11, mm. 40-41

because she was seven months pregnant. Robert’s devotion to the Lieder-Al-

bum fir die Jugend at just this time has always been taken as a sign of his withdrawal from the world around him; yet when one reads this in light of the evident allusions to Fidelio, Robert may have turned to the symbolic lan-

guage he knew best to celebrate not so much his own personal escape as the

birth of a new republican order.*! | In contrasting the strength of Schumann’s musical allusion with that of |

20 s—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION | Table 1.1 Texts of Beethoven, “In des Lebens Friihlingstagen” and Schumann, “Frihlings Ankunft” Schumann, “Friihlings Ankunft,”

Beethoven, Fidelio, Act II, sc. 1 op. 79, no. 19 In des Lebens Frihlingstagen Nach diesen triiben Tagen, Ist das Gliick von mir gefloh’n. Wie ist so hell das Feld! Wahrheit wagt ich kiihn zu sagen, Zerrissne Wolken tragen Und die Ketten sind mein Lohn. Die Trauer aus der Welt.

Willig duld’ ich alle Schmerzen, | Ende schmalich meine Bahn; Und Keim und Knospe mihet Siisser Trost in meinem Herzen: Sich an das Licht hervor,

Meine Pflicht hab’ ich getan. Und manche Blume bliihet Zum Himmel still empor.

Ja auch sogar die Eichen Und Reben werden griin! O Herz, das sei dein Zeichen! Werde froh und kihn!

: —A.H. Hoffman von Fallersleben Beethoven, Fidelio, Act I, sc. 1 Schumann, “Spring’s Arrival”

In life’s springtime days, After these overcast days, Is happiness flown away from me. how bright is the field!

The truth was I bold to say, Wisps of clouds bear away and chains are my reward. the sadness of the world. Gladly do I bear all pain,

shamefully I end my life; - And seed and bud struggle

The sweet comfort in my heart: towards the light, , I have done my duty. and many flowers blossom quietly up towards heaven. Yes also even the oaks and vines turn green! O heart, let that be your sign! Be glad and bold!

the poem he paired with Beethoven’s text, I want to call attention to an important difference between musical-textual allusions and strictly poetic allusions: because texted music has a textual and a musical component, the possibilities for assimilation or contrast are greater than they are for literary appropriations. Not only can the verbal meaning of the source be accepted or adapted to a new meaning, but so too can the musical character. Two

Definitions —~ 21 pairs of often cited instrumental allusions illustrate the distinction of character that I propose: the first five measures of Brahms’s Piano Sonata no. 1 can be said to assimilate the character of the motive that begins Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, keeping the same rhythm, dynamics, and tempo

(see Ex. 2.1a and b). This allusion differs from the opening gesture of Schumann’s Second Symphony, which makes a contrastive allusion to the beginning of Haydn’s 104th (see Ex. 2.13a and b). Schumann did not merely present anew the distinctive open fifths in Haydn’s musical context; rather, he modified the orchestration and rhythm, added a contrapuntal motive, and changed the meter, mode, key, and dynamics (pianissimo instead of fortissimo). Musical character and textual meaning need not both be assimilative or contrastive at the same time; that is, a composer could assimilate the meaning of an earlier text while creating a contrastive allusion to the musical character. The reverse is of course also possible: a motivic allusion with a contrastive meaning can assimilate the musical character.

Ce WHETHER assimilative or contrastive, musical or poetic, Romantic allusion was fundamentally a form of play. Both the English word “allude,” which comes directly from the Latin “alludere” (to play), and the German word “Anspiel,” which similarly derives from “spiel” (play), mean “to play on.” Allusion plays on words in literature, on images in art, and on any aspect of music, but especially motives, with or without text. In his inspired study of the human impulse to play, Homo ludens, Johan Huizinga

: referred to language when he asserted that “behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play on words.”>*? But as an activity based on the “imagination of reality (i.e., its conversion into images),” allusion is directly linked to symbolization, and thus an activity not only accessible to all arts, but common to all forms of communication.*? In this book notions of play figure most prominently in the discussions of how composers transformed motives to conceal relation-

ships (Chapter 2), how composers represented themselves and others by means of musical motives, such as B-A-C-H and G-A-D-E (Chapter 7), and why composers alluded and how they construed this act (Chapter 9). Allusion, like irony, provides multiple challenges for the artistic creator and the listener/reader. The intricate and complementary acts of concealment and interpretation bring artist and audience together in an intellectual game of symbolic hide-and-seek. In attempting to reconstruct this field of play a century or two after the fact, we need to inquire not only how composers composed but how listeners (and composers) listened, remembering the constraints each activity exerted on the other. As I suggest in the book’s

22 |

Se ———————————— Ex. 2.1b Brahms, Sonata for Piano, op. 1, mvt. 1, mm. 1-2

‘Transformations —> 25 Table 2.1 Comparison of Brahms op. 1 and Beethoven op. 53: Exposition of

mvt. 1, Key of C major

Beethoven Harmony Brahms 1st theme, m. 1 I 1st theme, m. 1 1st theme, m. 5 bVIT Ist theme, m. 9

descending scale on V, m. 11 I descending arpeggio on V, m. 16

1st theme varied, m. 14 i 1st theme varied, m. 17 1st theme varied, m. 18 ii 1st theme varied, m. 21 bridge, mm. 23-33 V of Il bridge, mm. 28-34

decrescendo to 2nd theme decrescendo to 2nd theme

2nd theme = dolce e molto ligato 2nd theme = dolce in middle and upper registers in middle and upper registers

late sonata by Beethoven (Mendelssohn’s early Bb-major Sonata was published posthumously as op. 106, a choice of opus number that, to Mendelssohn’s detriment, invites comparison with Beethoven’s sonata). For his Sonata op. 1, Brahms followed Czerny’s advice to the letter. His

first movement embraces the formal plan of the first movement of the Waldstein Sonata for much of the exposition (see Table 2.1). Virtually the same length, the exposition of the Waldstein requires eighty-five measures, Brahms’s eighty-seven; the first phrase repeats a step lower in Bb; where Bee-

| thoven has a descending scale on the dominant, Brahms substitutes a de- | scending arpeggio; the first phrase returns in C major in a varied format, , Beethoven’s with sixteenth notes, Brahms’s with imitation; both variants repeat four measures later, this time not a step down but up, in D minor; this quickly leads in both to a bridge that begins in B major functioning as the dominant of E; the second theme is preceded by a decrescendo; Beethoven marks the second theme “dolce e molto ligato” while Brahms specifies simply “dolce”; and both begin the second group in the middle and upper registers, with the left hand using a treble clef for precisely two measures. After the end of the first theme group, the similarities wane. The second theme group of each sonata has several pedals; and the developments move first to flat, then sharp keys. Having departed, Brahms does not rejoin the

Beethovenian fold in the first movement. The recapitulation is a studied avoidance of the Waldstein model (see Table 2.2), both in the type of musical event included in the recapitulation and in the harmonic plan. It is as if

Brahms initially adheres to the model only so that he can later reject it.¢ Given this consistent series of formal correspondences, it may be no coincidence that although in the rhythm and staccato articulation of his opening motive Brahms emulates Beethoven’s op. 106, in his choice of pitches he

26 s~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

Table 2.2. Comparison of Brahms op. 1 and Beethoven op. 53: Harmonic plan of recapitulation, mvt. 1, Key of C major

Musical Event Beethoven Brahms

1st theme I V7 of IV 1st theme, repeated bVII i, bI, I

scale descends to pauses on bVI, bVII no

1st theme varied : I no 1st theme varied il to noV of v bridge V of VI V of III

Allegro con brio Ex. 2.1c Beethoven, Sonata for Piano, op. 53, mvt. 1, mm. 1-3

Ex.2.1d Beethoven, op. 53,mvt.1, | mm. 1—3, metric reduction

borrowed from the Waldstein sonata (Ex. 2.1c and d). Whether he knew it or not, Brahms followed not only the model of Beethoven, but also of Beethoven’s own practices. As a young composer Beethoven had modeled the first movement of his Symphony no. 1 on Mozart’s last symphony, K. 551, including aspects of the harmonic plan and motives.’ Formal modelings can allude, but they do so with less specificity of meaning than is possible either with texted motivic allusions or with formal allu-

sions in poetry, as when a poet assumes a rhyme scheme from another poem.’ The allusive possibilities of formal modeling exist even if there are didactic reasons for a young composer to adapt the structural layout of an earlier work. Brahms’s decision to compose his First Piano Concerto on a Beethovenian model was a musical reference full of meaning, even if few others would recognize the source of the musical structure. As an unproven composer in the 1850s, his decision to reach back fifty years for elements of his musical inspiration communicates a great deal about his aesthetic ideals and his dedication to following Beethoven. Furthermore, formal modeling shares with motivic allusion the ability to be assimilative or contrastive. Brahms only modeled his op. 1 on Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata long enough to establish it as a point of departure. Beethoven left an early record of his approach to motivic and thematic transformation on a sketch leaf that he probably wrote in Bonn in late 1790

Transformations ——> 27 (Ex. 2.2). The leaf includes a six-measure phrase to which Beethoven affixed

a unique attribution: “this entire passage has been stolen from the Mozart symphony in C minor.” Beneath this passage he wrote a slightly varied form

that he immediately labeled as his own: “Beethowen ipse.”? Lewis Lockwood proposed three possible explanations for these self-conscious attributions: (1) after writing what he thought was his own theme, Beethoven realized that it was actually by Mozart and therefore altered it; (2) Beethoven deliberately tried to write in a Mozartean style while retaining “his own voice”; and related to this, (3) Beethoven acknowledged that for any theme or figuration he wrote, there was a possible Mozartean model.!° Whichever possibility may be true, it is remarkable how few changes—more of register and phrasing than pitches and harmonies—sufficed to make Mozart Beethoven in Beethoven’s eyes.

To familiar forms of motivic transformation involving changes in rhythm, meter, intervals, and the other obvious musical characteristics, I will add two others, motivic combination and octave displacement. Motivic combinations could occur in various ways: contrapuntally in two voices simultaneously, melodically in succession, or combined into one. Although con-

trapuntal pairings of themes that had been introduced independently had figured prominently in the finales of Mozart’s Symphony no. 41 and Beethoven’s Ninth, they seem especially popular in Schumann’s circle during the

1840s and 1850s. Schumann constructed the climax to the finale of his Piano Quintet in Eb (1842) by joining the main themes of the first and fourth movements in fugal counterpoint. In the same year Niels Gade devised sev-

eral ingenious combinations of B-A-C-H and G-A-D-E in his Drei kleine

re(aaa=pi 4ee —Y diese ganze Stelle ist gestohlen aus der Mozartschen Sinfonie in c wo das Andante in g tel aus den (?) Mineur

oo gree ae eae ener mitt fe — tk etd idee

Ee ce cee a a ee ee eee Beethowen ipse 1 * — | U)

Ex. 2.2 Beethoven’s adaptation of an unknown passage by Mozart, Kafka Sketchbook, fol. 88r

28 =~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION _ Clavierstiicke (1842), most directly in the third piece with Gade in the upper voice and Bach as a contrapuntal support (Ex. 2.3). Brahms and his friend Joseph Joachim evidently vied with each other to see who could concoct the most intricate motivic combinations. With amorous intent Joachim based several early works on contrapuntal and melodic

combinations of his motto F-A-E (frei, aber einsam) together with that which he had assigned his friend Gisela von Arnim, G# -E-A from ‘Gis’ (German for G# ), ‘e’, and ‘la’. Since one was an inversion of the other, Joachim

soon enough exhausted the combinatorial possibilities, including a canonic rendition.'! Brahms eagerly participated in this contrapuntal game from the outset of his career, most famously in his Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 9 (composed in 1854). The tenth variation juxtaposes a melody of Clara’s and one by Robert, to Clara’s great delight as she noted in her diary.!* Brahms repeated this musical union of motives representing the two Schumanns in the slow movement of his Piano Concerto no. 1, the movement he described as a portrait of Clara. As I have demonstrated in more detail elsewhere, Brahms fashioned the elegiac theme of the slow movement by spreading out the five-note motive that begins the concerto’s first movement and—between the first two notes, bb-f—interjecting a quarter-note motive that he associated with Clara from the finale of Fidelio (Ex. 2.4). Wagner

:a

\e Se ie ai Allegro risoluto |

Ex. 2.3 Niels Gade, Drei kleine Clavierstiicke, no. 3, Alla marcia, mm. 22-25

, Maestoso mm. 2-3 ~ ~ ;

Adagio mm. 1-5 :ree ! —~. OG 6p eg ee (QA) Eee P espress. en € legato aa Zto-4 o. See's +? eo o- Powe EOS NL |

mvts. 1 and 2

Ex. 2.4 Brahms, Piano Concerto no. 1, op. 15, comparison of motives beginning

Transformations ——> 29

also devised intricate combinations of motives, as many have noted and he himself admitted during his labors on Tristan: “Now I am quite happy: the transition has succeeded beyond expectation with a quite marvelous blend of two themes.” #3

The other transformative possibility is so basic that it is usually overlooked—that of octave displacement, the substitution of an ascending fifth for a descending fourth, a seventh for a second, and so on. Composers often made this transformation in imitative or fugal writing, to keep a voice or in-

strument from exceeding a comfortable range. But composers after Bach also inverted single intervals as a way of transforming a theme or motive, as

a series of German church composers did for settings of the hymn “Wie gross ist des Allmachtigen Giite!” Example 2.5 compares the opening motives of settings published in 1789, 1845, and 1873. By inverting either the first interval or the third, composers transformed not only the motive but the character of the hymn. Carl Maria von Weber employed the same technique with a similar motive in the aria “Und ob die Wolke sie verhiille”

in Der Freischiitz to derive the contrasting middle theme from the opening (Ex. 2.6). Weber achieved the contrast almost entirely by combining

notes. | | | |

transposition with an intervallic displacement between the second and third

By the middle of the century, the technique had become common.

Se Se

Schumann relies on it in Carnaval, op. 9, to create distinct motives from his three Sphinxes (Ex. 2.7) and in his transformations of the B-A-C-H motive

Ay Phrase 1 /N Phrase 2 ~

Ex.2.5a Setting of “Wie gross ist des Allmachtigen | Giite!”: Vierling, 1789 ,

jy Phrase | Om Ex.2.5b Setting of “Wie gross ist

, des Allmachtigen Giite!”: Freher, — 1845

ny Phrase 1 = Py Phrase 2 A

Gite!”: Jakob Richter, 1873 ,

Ex.2.5c Setting of “Wie gross ist des Allmachtigen

\f.

30 ~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

| TP, by Oh KE /_ 7 =». Jj M ¥, SS a ees Sa - eee 2 eee

Und ob die Wol - ke sie ver - hiil - le, Ex. 2.6a Carl Maria von Weber, Der Freischiitz, “Und ob die Wolke sie verhiille,” mm. 6-8

SeeTSa a as | a| 1 a aae a ed a tT 36

fp Pp —*} —@ | | —__. | _* #03} — © 0-9 — | | 0 >

Fir mich wird auch der Va-ter sor gen

Ex. 2.6b Weber, “Und ob die Wolke sie verhiille,” mm. 35-38

a| ae a a aaaneoeaeeo

Ex. 2.7a Schumann, Carnaval, op. 9:

D f) , : ° SSP ae aP - ASof VS og Et Sphinxes

Pierrot ex x Ox Arlequn yx x x awe | 6p Ff h6FCCUUU UT Of OT ig tp & 47. - LULL lm

f) f) a ee eef Ee

Florestan * * * Papillons * oe eee A? 3 ot ett ,—" 2. _, * 2 bss OS ASCH-SCHA Presto haa . .

SY ee f.. 0: et A _) 1 ee ee P leggierissimo

displacement . Estrella Pantalonet Colombine ob bay rt = —— tr ° ° °

Ex. 2.7b Schumann, Carnaval, op. 9: Beginnings without octave

If St

Valse Alemand ; Promenade . gb fs — 18-9 ob og

aeeee 1? (aesemprice ee eee ee (ae ee — 4° SY EE ed | ht AS 7 GE =| SOE OSES ES EE SEE ES ESO OO NEED PP

Ex. 2.7c Schumann, Carnaval, op. 9: Beginnings with octave displacement

‘Transformations ——> 31

Ex. 2.8 Schumann, Sechs Fugen iiber den Namen B-A-C-H, op. 60, no. 4, mm. 1-3

A)—

Ro. Fe Ex.2.9 Gade, Drei kleine Clavierstiicke, no. 3, Alla marcia, mm. 20-21

| O Tod, O Tod, wie bit - ter Ex.2.10a Brahms, Vier ernste Gesdnge, no. 3, mm. 1-3

Spy pe py , O Tod, O Tod, wie wohl oOo a ~~ °

Ex. 2.10b Brahms, Vier ernste Gesdnge, no. 3, mm. 31-34

| in the six organ fugues, op. 60 (Ex. 2.8). Gade distorts his own musical name in the same way (Ex. 2.9), and Mendelssohn transformed a rising third to a falling sixth in Elijah, taking the exclamation “My son reviveth” from the end of movement 8, repeating it in the orchestra to start movement 9, and then inverting it for the choral subject at “Blessed are the men who

fear Him.” Brahms takes this device to an extreme in the song “O Tod, o Tod, wie bitter,” replacing most thirds with sixths at the shift to major (Ex. 2.10). However useful octave displacements were within works, I sus-

pect that composers prized them more as a means of concealing connections to other works. One such example in which the relationship remains audible—thanks to identity of genre, key, tempo, and formal function—in- |

volves the opening motive of Schumann’s Eb-Major Piano Quintet and Mo- , zart’s Eb-Major Piano Quartet (Ex. 2.11). A review of Schumann’s sym-

32 cs~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

Allegro brilliante ~ se 9S me ee [_ yO ee ST eeeeeeserer

val> |= eee

Via |eee Ae? oF? . ep eS _ f |. fo gee fen Ve [EA Fh en I ep ;

rt Oo HH f

GE “© | A| he)? + OE 4 ——————

Piano 4,

,

0 -b —s d —o ———_ r ———— —— F

>>>

Ex.2.11a Schumann, Piano Quintet in Eb Major, op. 44, mvt. 1, mm. 1-3

Allegro 2 eS o_o VV6 i aa a”| Pa oe Vn |e? rH f *7 [| fF tT ll js). b> SC —e=» Via [HR EE es es ee Low | tts ees] VeoOo.| Qo454 o oO 6 ee a: nn nnn enn

Se Ap ee Oe ee ee St

A Allegro

Ex.2.11b Mozart, Piano Quartet in Eb Major, mvt. 1, mm. 1—5

phonic beginnings below suggests that Schumann intended this motivicgeneric link.

C&> For A MUSICAL allusion that is not an exact quotation to be recognizable, generally more than one aspect of the source must be present in the alluding composition, whether the rhythmic or intervallic patterns of a motive, the orchestration, a textual association, harmony, counterpoint, dynamics, key and mode, form or formal function, or genre. The extent to

‘Transformations ——> 33

which a composer wants to make a relationship to another work evident governs the degree of transformation of all of these musical parameters, not

just the intervallic pattern of a motive. Rarely does a musical gesture possess | sufficient force to be recognized on the strength of one feature alone. Per-

haps the most notorious and enduring example that achieves this is the opening rhythmic pattern of Beethoven’s Fifth. The motive retains its identity not only in other movements of the symphony itself—as when Beethoven applied this rhythm to a single note in the Scherzo—but also in works of other composers. Schumann complained about composers who attempted to emulate this particular rhythmic idea without an internal musical motiva-

- tion of comparable force to that present in Beethoven. Indeed, when Schumann objected to resemblances, he criticized them not

for the similarity in pitches, but because they did not also contain some poetic or intellectual justification. In his essay on Berlioz’s Symphonie fan- ©

tastique he referred to “those lame, boring symphony-makers who had the ability to imitate adequately the powdered wigs of Haydn and Mozart, but not the heads underneath them.” Already by 1835 Schumann had commented on the resemblance of Mendelssohn’s E-Major Piano Sonata, op. 6, to Beethoven’s op. 101, portraying the derivation positively: “yet this is not caused by weak unoriginality, but rather by intellectual relationship.”!6 And when Robert criticized Clara for beginning a work with open fifths, it was not simply that it was too reminiscent of the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth;

rather, her beginning lacked a deeper internal motivation to justify the resemblance.’ Most claims for allusions are made on the basis of rhythm and intervallic patterns, but other combinations such as rhythm and orchestration, or even rhythm and genre, can convey a musical debt as well. In the examples I present in this study, generally the alluding motive and the source composi- tion share at least three features. The ability of Eduard Hanslick and Max Kalbeck to recognize the beginning of Brahms’s Second Symphony as a rhythmic allusion to Beethoven’s Third stems only partially from the rhyth-

mic identity of the two subjects.'§ Despite having a completely different intervallic profile, this resemblance is audible as an allusion because it shares other features as well: most powerfully genre (symphony) and formal function (opening melody), but also meter. Brahms’s propensity to imitate rhyth-

mic gestures is also evident in his Third Symphony, which begins with the same rhythm as Schumann’s Third for the first six measures of the Schumann, three of Brahms;!? in addition to copying the rhythm, Brahms also imitates the bass line, reversing the direction to move up by half-step rather than down. As observed at the outset of this chapter, the power of

34 ~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION | rhythm in combination with genre also links Brahms’s Piano Sonata op. 1 and Mendelssohn’s op. post. 106 with Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, op. 106. For reasons both social and musical, genre highlights resemblances between works and shapes listeners’ expectations and responses. The social component derives from the inevitability that works with similar titles and musical forces performed under a restricted set of circumstances will be compared to each other. Daverio correctly observes that nineteenth-century critics exhibited “an intense genre consciousness,” even as some artists,

writers, and composers attempted to “dissolve the boundaries between genres.”*9 Musically, genre enhances the likelihood of resemblances and allusions at every stage of composition: the existence of models and exemplars to be emulated, challenged, and surpassed; the constraints that writing for a specific ensemble (large orchestra, string quartet, piano and voice) places on the interaction of instruments; and the impact that the size of the ensemble has on musical style. In his study of Brahms’s symphonies, Knapp discusses

numerous musical similarities, the vast majority of them with other symphonies, a circumstance that leads him to speak of “generic resonance.” AIthough he mostly identifies resemblances as allusions, Knapp acknowledges that his conception of generic resonance does not require resemblances to be allusive. After noting similarities between Brahms’s First and symphonies of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, he concludes: “Whether these served as actual models, or whether Brahms simply perceived and exploited the device they share, is of small import; in either case, generic resonance depends ultimately on the typicality of the device as much as on specific models.”7!

Beyond its impact on a composer, genre also shapes what listeners perceive. The power of genre to influence which resemblances are heard is nowhere more evident than in the fates of two offspring of a passage from Mozart’s Requiem. A reviewer for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung devoted a lengthy review in May 1826 to the new Requiem by Hofkapellmeister Joseph Eybler. After complimenting Eybler for avoiding any “collision” with the “unattainable model” by Mozart, he in fact calls attention to the “Quam olim Abrahae” fugue of Eybler. He aligns the two passages in order to show how the new setting is “familiar with the Mozart” (bei Mozart bekanntlich) and to praise Eybler’s improved declamation of the text © (Ex. 2.124 and b).22 From the standpoint of the intervallic patterns alone, these passages are no more similar than the beginnings of Schumann’s First and Schubert’s Ninth. But the pitches of a motive never exist in isolation. It matters that both passages occur in a Requiem with the same text and similar rhythms. In contrast, a much stronger identity of pitches and rhythm ina

Transformations ——> 35

different genre escaped public notice for nearly two centuries. With more than a little wit, Haydn, in The Seasons, transplanted Mozart’s motive about the seed of Abraham to a spring text about the sprouting harvest (Ex. 2.12c).23 The fugal texture served Haydn’s rhetorical purpose of illustrating abundance as well as Mozart’s. And because Haydn presumably knew that Mozart had derived his motive from the same text in the Requiem by his brother Michael Haydn, the motive had become emblematic of fecundity in more ways than one. The broad possibilities for motivic transformation in the mid-nineteenth century are easily detectable in Schumann’s symphonic beginnings. Though he never commented on his own motivic debts, we can glean his approach from advice that Schumann once gave to Brahms about how to begin a symphony (which he transmitted in a letter to their mutual friend Joseph

Joachim): “Is he still not allowing timpani and drums to resound? He should always keep the beginnings of the Beethoven symphonies in mind. He should try to make something similar.”** In fact, many observers have detected influences that span the entirety of the symphonic repertoire as Schumann knew it. As shown in Table 2.3, Beethovenian ideas—motivic and formal—animate movements in Schumann’s Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies. Schumann may have twice tried and ultimately rejected imitations of the Allegretto of Beethoven’s Seventh: in the youthful, unpublished G-Minor Symphony and the first version of the D-Minor Symphony.

Quam o- lim A-bra-hae pro-mi-sis-ti

Ex.2.12a Mozart, Requiem, K. 626, “Domine Jesu Christe,” mm. 44-45

Quam o - lim A-bra-hae pro-mi-sis-ti

Ex. 2.12b Joseph Eybler, Requiem, “Domine Jesu Christe,” mm. 60-61

, Uns sprie-sset U-ber-fluss, und dei-ner Gu - te Ex. 2.12c Haydn, The Seasons, no. 14, mm. 78-80

36 s—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION Table 2.3 Some previously observed influences on Schumann’s symphonies G-Minor Symphony (1832): Beethoven, Symphony 7, Allegretto! C-Minor Symphony (1840):? Haydn, Symphony 104

Symphony no. 1 in Bb Major: Schubert, Symphony 9?

D-Minor Symphony (first version of no. 4): , Beethoven, Symphony 7, first and second movements* D-Minor Symphony (first version of no. 4), Scherzo: J. W. Kalliwoda, Symphony 1, Menuetto

Symphony no. 2 in C Major: Haydn, Symphony 104;° Mendelssohn, Symphony 5 Symphony no. 2, Adagio Bach, Trio Sonata of the Musical Offering’ Symphony no. 2, Finale Beethoven, An die ferne Geliebte Symphony no. 3 in Eb Major: Beethoven, Symphony 38

Symphony no. 4 in D Minor, formal plan of the whole:

Beethoven, Symphony 5? ,

Note: Unless otherwise indicated, the movements are the first movements of the symphonies named. The sources cited in footnotes are not comprehensive. 1. Gerald Abraham, “Schumann’s Jugendsinfonie in G Minor,” MQ 37 (1951), 55; Bonds, After Beethoven, p. 116. 2. Finson, “The Sketches for Robert Schumann’s C-Minor Symphony,” JM 1 (1982), 395418; Edler, “Ton und Zyklus in der Symphonik Schumanns,” in Probleme, pp. 194-95. 3. Finson, Robert Schumann and the Study of Orchestral Composition: The Genesis of the First Symphony, Opus 38 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 36-38, 44-45, 56; Bonds, After Beethoven, pp. 117-18; Martin Geck, Von Beethoven bis Mahler, p. 114. 4. Geck, Von Beethoven bis Mahler, p. 114.

8. Ibid. ,

5. Todd, Schumann World, pp. 102-03. SO | 6. Newcomb, 19CM 7:240. 7. Geck, Von Beethoven bis Mahler, p. 115. |

9. Bonds, After Beethoven, pp. 120-33. ,

Schumann’s two most frequently cited motivic allusions at the beginning of his symphonies are to the last symphonies of Schubert and Haydn. His appropriation of Schubertian ideas in his First Symphony, recognized already in a review of the 1841 premiere, must have seemed to Schumann a

proprietary matter, since it was he who had “discovered” Schubert’s last

Transformations ——> 37

symphony in Vienna two years earlier. But the often-discussed allusion to Schubert at the start of the first movement, like the relation between the Eroica and Brahms’s Second, would never have attracted attention if reckoned in terms of intervals alone. Although the motives share only the lower third, Schumann introduces the motive with similar instrumentation in a common genre and formal function—namely, an idea that will introduce a

four-movement symphony. To begin his Second Symphony Schumann turned to Haydn, stretching Haydn’s open fifths out over four measures, modifying the orchestration and rhythm, adding a contrapuntal motive, and changing the meter, mode, and key. But the resemblance has attracted notice nevertheless (Ex. 2.13a and b). Again the opening function of the motive delimits the context of the comparison. As was characteristic of Schumann’s efforts to distance “his” ideas from his sources, he introduces his motives

with contrastive dynamic markings. Where Schubert had begun piano, Schumann starts forte; where Haydn prescribed fortissimo, Schumann had pianissimo. (Schumann’s impulse to imitate Haydn’s open fifths is still more evident in his unfinished C-Minor Symphony from 1840.) My point about Schumann’s motivic allusions is similar to one made long ago on more general stylistic grounds by Theodor Uhlig, who observed that “in spite of this affinity between Schumann and Beethoven, the former’s actual musical style is not rooted in Beethoven’s; indeed it seeks to counteract the latter’s revolu-

tionary daring.”*°

The beginning of the Second Symphony has been described by Anthony Newcomb as a clear and “courageous” allusion to the beginning of Haydn’s last Symphony, courageous because Schumann opened himself to inevitable comparison with the “overwhelmingly, even terrifyingly prestigious tradition of the Viennese Classical Symphony.”2¢ But in fact, Schumann was not the first to imitate Haydn so closely. By 1841 Mendelssohn may have shown Schumann his own more faithful allusion at the beginning of the Reformation Symphony, which had been composed and performed in 1832 but remained unpublished until 1868. Mendelssohn adapted Haydn’s opening not for the slow introduction, but for the main theme of the Allegro con fuoco that followed (Ex. 2.13c). Mendelssohn retained Haydn’s key, the loud tutti orchestration, and the exact double dotted rhythm; and his D-major slow introduction even begins with the same four pitches (in reverse order) and rhythm that Haydn used to start his D-major allegro. Mendelssohn simply

switched the sequence of motives and modes.

Schumann’s ability to transform an idea stands out clearly in a compari-

son of the musical debts that both he and Clara Schumann had to the Konzertstiick in F Minor by Carl Maria von Weber, a piece that Clara performed several times to Robert’s enthusiastic approval. Next to Robert’s

38 cs—~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

ha fp fe 4 rt rr Sostenuto assai

} osid da (Votes ee eT pee RE NT OR ROP Ex. 2.13a Schumann, Symphony no. 2, op. 61, mvt. 1, mm. 1-4

mm. 1-2 mim. 17-18 , Adagio O , Allegro Ex. 2.13b Haydn, Symphony no. 104, mvt. 1, mm. 1-2 and 17-18

a ae i mm. 1-2 mm. 42-45

Ay Andante Allegro con fuoco , ga,

Ex. 2.13c Mendelssohn, Reformation Symphony, op. 107, mvt. 1, mm. 1-2 and 42-45

Konzert-Allegro mit Introduktion, op. 134, the almost literal similarity between the beginning of Clara’s Sonata in G Minor and Weber’s beginning is striking (Ex. 2.14a, b, c).2” Robert varies the meter, the metric placement of

pitches, and the entire character of the beginning, keeping the essential pitches of the opening (both raised and lowered seventh degrees) and the harmonization, while Clara varies only the key, the tempo, and the harmonization of the last note. Even her second theme depends on Weber. But because Robert took an idea from a work in the same limited genre (concerto movement), he needed to veil his debt more than did Clara; moreover, because he had composed this work planning to dedicate it to Clara (he hadn’t yet met Brahms, the eventual dedicatee), Robert had two works from which to distance his. Among all of Schumann’s symphonic opening gestures, the most unashamedly Beethovenian is not found in a symphony at all but in the first chord of the Overture to his Scenen aus Goethes Faust, a late work from 1853. This D-Minor Overture commences with the unmistakable disso-

eT

| ‘[ransformations ——> 39

-?i P

P Learch! Melicert! Meine Séhne! getreue Gefahrten meines Ungliicks!

Ruht sanft, ihr zwei Unschuldigen! |

_ — ee = ; :

AOS SSS SS ees pf Xf —___|__-—_4 tg ag

Ne ee ——— ee See ets ete ee ies FE ””_—_—__ Saws ee. Ex. 3.2a J. EF Reichardt, Ino, mm. 92-99

: Andante . Solo . lest — ee et ee Se oD . aXe. - a = » D ; = le= + a) o < aia 5 5S 54 5o2 “| @IiS 8 SS 385 D

on

AS)

Gj oN = Ss oO 2a 8

a UO >, aD TOSsBSA 2 = ~

| Assimilative Allusions —> 51 youthful Mass in G (see Ex. 1.1). (That later examples become harder to find is indicative of the decline in Mass composition that began already in the 1830s, and then later the influence of Cecilian reforms, which evidently caused musical allusions in Masses to turn more exclusively to other sacred sources.) Although this list could be extended both earlier and later, it is sufficient to demonstrate how an allusion can assimilate a textual meaning and how that meaning can move in both directions—that is, the sacred text can be interpreted in light of the secular one or vice versa. In these instances each text can shape an interpretation of the other, regardless of which was composed first, especially for nineteenth-century followers who would have had no reliable way of determining chronological priority. Of particular interest are the two pairings that may have been conceived

at virtually the same time, so that even when autograph sources are available, it is not possible to say which was composed first. Schubert composed his lied “Der Doppelganger” in August 1828 and his Mass in Ab between July and September of the same year; this overlap exists as well for Weber’s aria from Der Freischiitz and his Mass in Eb, both begun in 1817. The influence may well have been mutual. Weber drafted the Mass in Eb as he worked on Der Freischiitz, giving the same melody to the Osanna and the prayerful cavatina for Agnes, “Und ob die Wolke sie verhiille” (for the latter, see Ex.

-2.6a). Agnes professes her faith in God, no matter how bleak her future seems: “And if the clouds should cover it, the sun remains in heaven’s dome; there a divine will is at work, blind chance does not govern the world.” The expression of faith in a God above is exactly that of the Osanna, which follows the Benedictus (“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”) with the exclamation “Hosanna in the highest.”®

Schubert’s allusion in his Mass in Ab creates a more involved dynamic between the two texts. His sacred text does not simply reiterate or affirm the secular; rather, the secular text describes a situation that gives particular dramatic force to the sacred text. Either several lines of Heine’s poem “Der Doppelganger” inspired Schubert to use this lied as the basis for personalizing the prayer for mercy of the Agnus Dei, or—if the order of composition was reversed—the Agnus Dei provided a suitable plea for deliverance from pain on which to base his lied. The second stanza reads: A man also stands there and stares at the heavens, and wrings his hands from the force of the pain; I am shocked when I see his face,— The moon shows me my own image.

$2 c~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

The song text tells us how to read the Agnus: not as the submissive plea of a kneeling penitent but as a cry of anguish from one in pain. Because Schubert

wrote the Mass at about the same time as the lied, the plea “O Lamb of God, have mercy” contributes as much to an interpretation of how Schubert envisioned the hand-wringing agony of Heine as it does to shaping a more autobiographical reading of the Mass. Chronology is unimportant. These examples of Schubert’s and Weber’s allusions demonstrate different degrees of assimilation. With Weber, one text seconds the other; one restates the other for a different audience. With Schubert, one text expands upon the

other, adding information not contained in the other. Their assimilative properties become all the more evident in a comparison with the allusions in two Masses of Haydn, allusions which build not from likeness but from difference. Haydn quoted an aria from The Creation in the Gloria of his socalled Creation Mass, devising a textual allusion that was noticed and—unusually—described in print by a friend. His biographer G. A. von Griesinger — offered this interpretation within a year of Haydn’s death: In the Mass which Haydn wrote in the year 1801, it occurred to him at the “Qui tollis” that weak mortals sinned mostly against moderation and chastity only. So he set the words “Qui tollis, peccata, peccata mundi” entirely from the

passage in The Creation, “Der thauende Morgen, o wie ermuntert er” [The dew in the morning, how keenly enliv’ning]. In order that this profane thought should not be too conspicuous, however, he let the “Miserere” enter right afterwards with the full chorus. In the copy of the Mass that he made for the Empress, he had to change this passage at her request.?

Haydn stretches the limits of assimilative allusion. According to Griesinger, Haydn quoted this section of The Creation (Ex. 3.3) to invoke its description of Adam and Eve under the apple tree (“This profane thought”) specifically in order to offer his own discrete gloss on the Mass text, “You

who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.” Haydn thus depicted a particular (original) sin in order to illustrate a text that referred only to sin in general. But while the plea for mercy in Schubert’s Agnus Dei was an appropriate response for Schubert’s anguished singer, the action depicted in The Creation is superficially unrelated to the liturgical text; the singers who are still only admiring the ripe fruit on the tree above have as yet done nothing requiring forgiveness. This allusion—which sets the somber Mass text to the spirited major-mode passage from The Creation—provides a greater challenge to its perceivers, requiring an extra leap to supply the next steps of the missing narrative and thereby motivate the plea for mercy. Griesinger reveals that Haydn had an audience capable of appreciating his wit by recounting the reaction of the Empress.

Assimilative Allusions —~ 53

eee ee Spcee poee| og

- 2Homs $y a Gi S — —————————————

in Eb el| BAnb ad 7B 9p pg Adam Der tau-en-de Mor-gen, O wie er - mun-tert er!

Ex. 3.3a Haydn, The Creation, “Holde Gathin,” mm. 72-79

, Allegro( .Fa i aa oe ee 2 Homs

in Fe | letebe, usEpiety a= 7 = Qui to - lispec-ca - ta, pec-ca - ta mun - di.

Ex. 3.3b Haydn, Creation Mass, Gloria, mm. 152-160 | _ Haydn indulged his wit to such an extent in his Missa Sancti Bernardi de Offida (1796) that the allusion is more contrastive than assimilative. At the Credo text “Et incarnatus est” (He was made man), Haydn incorporated a very secular canon that he had composed in 1792, humorously contrasting the godly with the human: “Gott im Herzen, ein Gut Weibchen im Arm, Jenes macht selig, dieses g’wifs warm” (God in the heart and a good little wife in arm, That one makes us holy, but this one warm). Here Haydn’s wit creates distance, not the distance of irony but its closely related aesthetic faculty, Witz (wit). According to Jean Paul, Witz fostered “relationships between incommensurable magnitudes, similarities between the physical and spiritual worlds” !°—thus the pairing of the incarnation of Jesus with the colloquialism separating the realms of God and man, or Haydn’s allusion to Mozart’s Requiem in his The Seasons, linking the seed of Abraham to an abundant harvest (see Ex. 2.12). Contrastive wit also motivates Haydn’s allusion to Gluck’s Orpheus in his 1791 opera Lanima del filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice (Ex. 3.4). Haydn has Euridice inquire “Dov’é ’| dolce amato sposo” (Where is my beloved husband?) to the very motive Gluck had written for Orpheus’s analogous question, “Che fard senza Euridice” (What shall I do without Euridice?), the most memorable motive of the entire opera.. Rather than building on similarity, Witz encourages the recognition of similarity existing in contrastive bodies or states. Early Romantics such as Schlegel, Jean Paul, and Novalis prized Witz along with humor and irony. It fell to Schumann, who knew the works of all three writers intimately, to de-

54 c—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION } , Orphen

Che fa - ro— sen-zaEu - ri - di - ce? ,

Ex. 3.4a Gluck, Orpheus and Euridice, “Che

faro senza Euridice,” mm. 6-8 : , Dovel dol - céa-ma-to spo - 80, Ex. 3.4b Haydn, L’anima del filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice, mvt. 40, recitative, mm. 5-6

velop contrastive allusion well beyond the witty oppositions of Haydn. Haydn certainly understood the difference between allusions that assimilate

and those that contrast. We have already encountered Haydn’s ability to create an assimilative allusion in The Creation, with the debt of “and there was light” to Handel and Rosetti (Ex. 1.2). But it is his wit that has led several critics to see in Haydn a musical brother of ironists such as Laurence Sterne and Jean Paul.!! Ce WAGNER’S SYSTEM of leitmotivs is now seen to have evolved out of techniques of motivic signification used by predecessors such as Weber, Spohr, and Reichardt. The possibility that at least some of his motives allude

as well as signify internally has been recognized by many, beginning with , some of his own followers. In the remainder of this chapter, I will discuss examples of Beethoven (whose use of allusion in Fidelio constitutes an important foreshadowing of allusion in Wagner), Liszt (who, like Wagner, developed programmatic identities for motives that were based on allusive content), and Wagner. Extensive use of assimilative allusions in opera may have begun in Fidelio, where Beethoven alluded on several occasions to Mozart, Haydn, and himself.12 Beethoven’s musical debts in Fidelio have attracted attention at least since Berlioz recognized in Marzelline’s first aria “the style of the best samples of Mozart.” In the twentieth century, Winton Dean specified a “striking rhythmic resemblance” between the Allegro con brio of Leonore’s “Ich folg’ dem innern Triebe” and a motive in Elektra’s first aria in Idomeneo, “Tutte nel cor vi sento”;'3 while several others have elaborated on Edward Dent’s opinion that Fidelio was “the natural sequel” to The Magic Flute. Philip Gossett observed links to Mozart and The Magic Flute, comparing Marzelline’s aria, as it began the 1805 version, to Tamino’s C-major aria in the Act I finale of the Mozart opera. This finding supplements a longer-standing

Assimilative Allusions ——> 55

awareness that Beethoven had also recalled The Magic Flute in the Act I trio, when Marzelline sang of the day when she and Fidelio would be a couple. At that moment Beethoven quotes the duo of Papageno and Papagena, thereby alluding with Haydnesque wit not only to an earlier operatic couple, but to a particularly unsophisticated couple. The image conveys his assessment of what sort of pair Marzelline and Fidelio would make."*

| Two passages in Fidelio are commonly recognized as thematic quotations of material from Beethoven’s early works; both assimilate drama as well as

music. One was from Vestas Feuer, the opera fragment to a libretto of Emanuel Schikaneder that he began and then discarded in 1803; the other was his remarkable work from Bonn, the Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II (WoO 87) from spring 1790. The dramatic ideas in Fidelio closely follow those of the earlier works. From Vestas Feuer Beethoven lightly reworked the G-major duet “Nie war ich so froh wie heute / niemals fihlt’ ich diese Freude!” (Never was I so happy as today, never have I felt such joy!) as his equally ecstatic G-major duet “O namen-, namenlose Freude!” Because of its length, this appropriation is a musical contrafact (one text replacing another with the same music) and not merely a motivic or thematic allusion. But the principle of assimilation remains the same: Beethoven found a musical source that expressed the same idea and mood for his new text. Similarly, at “O Gott, welch ein Augenblick,” the F-major, 3/4 section of the second finale quotes a melody from an aria with chorus in Beethoven’s early cantata. Many writers have recognized not only the musical significance but also the dramatic, noting that the aria text—“Da steigen die Menschen an’s Licht”—provided an ideal image for the moment of Florestan’s rescue from

the dark recesses of the dungeon.'® In a moment as reverent as any of the Mass citations discussed earlier, Beethoven alluded to Haydn in Leonore’s Act I aria, “Komm, Hoffnung,” by beginning with the theme of Haydn’s partsong, “Abendlied zu Gott.” Haydn had set the Gellert text about 1796, and then published it with three separate publishers in 1803 and 1804.!” According to the sketches, Beethoven composed Leonore’s aria soon afterwards in summer 1805.!8 His E-major Adagio assimilated the head motive of Haydn’s “Evening Song” and takes over aspects of the harmonization, such as the appoggiatura on the ninth (Ex. 3.5). In Haydn’s text the poet thanks God for life and for the undeserved loyalty that God has shown him this day. Beethoven evidently intended this as the background for Leonore’s aria, which is itself a prayer: “Come, hope, let the last star of the weary not fade, shed light on my goal.” An evening song to God of a different kind, it is a prayer that the audience

could assume with confidence would be answered. | Several apparent allusions in Fidelio depend on Mozart, including one

56 to the stars. / The world shall know that the lion now dies.” Lenz echoed A. B. Marx, who in 1859 also compared this passage to the dying words of a slain hero: “What is this? [i.e., the E-minor theme] It is one of the mysteries of the human heart, one of those enigmatic voices that occasionally penetrate the sphere of human affairs, like the words Brutus once heard whispered from the lips of Caesar as he lay slain.”3°6 Marx and Lenz may be pre-

sumed to have known Aléxandre Oulibicheff’s views (from 1857) and also , Wagner’s published interpretation of 1852, which described the drama as a heroism broadly defined rather than in specifically military terms. The first

-movement depicts, in his view, a young hero propelled by “Force” and “rushing toward a tragic crisis.”>” He did not, however, specify in print how he understood the E-minor theme. Yet his allusion in Tristan indicates that he shared with Marx and Lenz an association of this theme with a mortally

wounded hero. |

Tristan is by Wagner’s own admission the most symphonic of his music dramas. According to Cosima Wagner, her husband told her that “he had felt the urge to express himself symphonically for once, and that had led to Tristan.”38 That Wagner drew not only on symphonic models for some of his musical ideas but on the specific model of the Eroica is suggested by an

, Assimilative Allusions ——> 65 incident that occurred in August 1859, that is, a month after completing Act III of Tristan. On “a very hot August afternoon,” Wagner expounded to a musical house-guest, the young composer Felix Draeseke, about the “inexhaustible” melodic flow of the Eroica. According to Draeseke, Wagner “began to sing the first movement of the ‘Eroica.’ He fell into a violent passion, sang on and on, became very overheated, quite beside himself.”*? And to Cosima he specifically praised the development section of the Eroica first movement: “I know of nothing so perfect with regard to structure, the architecture of music. The way the themes intermingle, they are like garlands linked to each other.”4° _ These are but a few examples of Wagner alluding to his musical predecessors, although by examining motivic similarities that others have identified, by evaluating the allusive significance of what were once termed “wandering melodies,” it should be simple enough to identify others.*!

From Wagner’s standpoint his motivic assimilations would have been a strength rather than a weakness, because the allusions allowed Wagner to cast his music (no less than his poetry) both as a culmination—a fulfillment—of all German music that had come before and as a condensation of that music. By weaving reminiscences of earlier composers into his music dramas, Wagner placed that earlier music in the role of presaging his musical works, much as a leitmotiv introduced surreptitiously in one act (or music drama) served as a presentiment of later events. Grey’s suggestion that one could “view the opening sequence of musical-dramatic events of Act III of Tristan und Isolde as a Wagnerian ‘realization’ of the poetic intent ‘sketched’ in the opening movements of op. 131, as Wagner understood it,” expresses precisely this musical linkage.*2 In the early years of work on the Ring, Wagner acknowledged his debts to earlier composers (and writers) when he informed his supporters that he understood the power known as genius to depend on a composer’s digesting earlier works: ~ What works on this power [i.e., genius] so strongly that eventually it will always attain to full productiveness of its own accord must in fact be seen as the real creator and designer, the sole enabling condition of this power’s effectiveness. I am referring to the art already developed outside of this individual power, a universal substance formed from the art works of our forerunners and

contemporaries.*3

Motivic allusion contributed to the sense that Wagner’s music was prepared by earlier works because allusive motives—so long as they were as-

similative—functioned for Wagner the way his motives did within his _ own works, combining the three functions of presentiment, actualization,

66 ~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION and reminiscence (Ahnung, Vergegenwdartigung, and Errinerung). A motive would be introduced as orchestral melody (Ahnung), actualized or explained in the verse-melody of a singer (Vergegenwdrtigung), and recalled, full of meaning, in light of the actualization. As Wagner explained, “The life-giving core of the dramatic expression is the performer’s verse-melody: related to this, as a presentiment, is the preliminary absolute orchestral melody; from it is derived, as a reminiscence, the ‘thought’ of the orchestral motive.”44 These processes are also present in motivic allusions, at least for those who recognize them. By alluding to the “new theme” in the first movement of the Eroica, Wagner created an integral musical link to that work, casting Beethoven’s theme as a presentiment, an anticipation, of an idea that

| is actualized in Tristan. Those who recognize the allusion also recognize the reminiscence of the earlier work, which permits the interpretation of the allusion. Without an assimilative allusion—that is, without an allusion that endorsed the musical and poetic sense of the earlier passage—the motivic source could not anticipate Wagner’s actualization of the motive. The earlier work would not presage Wagner’s; Wagner’s music would be denied whatever element of predestination the allusion would contribute.

C&S THE assIMILATIVE allusions discussed in this chapter cross boundaries of genre, generation, and style. Whether for a Mass setting or an opera, a concerto or a trio, allusion provided composers with a source of musicaltextual symbols that imbued instrumental music with a poetic meaning and vocal music with a symbol that deepened meaning already present in the

text. There is no significant difference between the way that Weber and Schubert used allusions to vocal works to provide theological detail for their Masses and Wagner’s methods. Wagner, no less than Beethoven, assimilated both the musical character of the source motive and the textual idea. He appropriated from Schumann a motive that served him as a symbol of separation, from Weber a call to darkness, from Beethoven the symbol of a dying hero. If his Faustian debt to Liszt is more complex it is not because the musical relationship is vague, but rather because the allusions are not to a motive

with a specific text, but ostensibly to a programmatic symphony whose “text” was the most substantive poem of the century; in fact, the meaningful allusion is not so much to Faust as it was to Wagner’s privately expressed interpretation of Faust, very much as Berlioz alluded to his own interpretation of Beethoven’s op. 131 in composing L’Enfance du Christ (see Ex. 5.1). Since the late nineteenth century, critics and biographers have noted musical and textual similarities between Wagner and most of his German predecessors: Liszt, Schumann, Weber, Marschner, Spohr, Beethoven, and others.

Assimilative Allusions ——> 67 Usually these resemblances are accepted or rejected on the basis of musical similarities alone; but when musical similarities are supplemented not only by similarities of meaning but also actual wording, the assimilative habits of Wagner become more evident. This conclusion is all the more credible

because this method of composing is exactly that which we understand him to have followed in writing his texts. To this extent Wagner was like Schumann, in whom we also find a literary and musical consistency; however, Schumann often imposed a critical, contrastive distance between his work and the texts he cited.

C HAPTER

AD 4 ED ~ (ontrastive Allusions

The armed eye beholds the stars; the unarmed only sees fog and shadows. —ROBERT SCHUMANN (AS “FLORESTAN” )!

CHUMANN ENJOYED ambiguity in his aphoristic pronouncements no less than in his music. In this particular utterance by Schumann’s alterego, Florestan, we can derive some meaning without being able to identify Schumann’s specific referent: first, since Florestan was quite capable of

more precise explanation, Schumann’s ambiguity must be purposeful; the saying illustrates what it proclaims, by leaving some readers in thick fog and dark shadows, unable to divine which stars it is that Schumann has in mind. Second, Schumann acknowledges two groups of beholders, those armed and those unarmed; and because the surrounding aphorisms from this collection discuss the study of music and art, we can draw from this the axiomatic ob-

servation that art has more than one audience. Third, and no less obvious, there are stars to behold, whether or not all can see them. What Schumann expressed in militaristic terms, the painter Caspar David Friedrich explained as a matter of sensitivity: “Just as the reverent man prays without uttering words, and the Lord hears him, the sensitive painter paints, and the sensitive man understands and recognizes him, but even the more obtuse carry away something from his work.”2 Mozart said much the same in describing his latest piano concertos to his father: “here and there only connoisseurs can

Contrastive Allusions —> 69 find satisfaction, but in a way that non-connoisseurs will be satisfied, even if they don’t know why.”?

No composer has figured more prominently in studies of allusion than Schumann. John Daverio observed that “few nineteenth-century composers explored the possibilities of the allusive reference as thoroughly as he,” and in his discussion of the Schumann Fantasie, Nicholas Marston declared that “Schumann’s early piano works abound in allusion.”* Both observed as well

_ the literary nature of the allusions, Daverio linking this with the allusive practices of Jean Paul. The texted allusions I have found in Schumann’s lieder reveal a more nuanced literary sensibility than that evident in any of his contemporaries. They often create contrastive readings which pose one text as a commentary on a text set previously by another composer.*> Thomas Grey has observed the same trait in an early review of Schumann’s. In his reworking of an early hermeneutic interpretation of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Schumann purported to quote an earlier account when in fact his is,

in Grey’s words, a “thoroughly ironic transformation” of it.° Itis characteristic that Wagner misconstrued the ironic tone of Schumann’s review, criticizing it as if it were intended seriously. Wagner’s musical allusions generally eschew textual irony. In this chapter I introduce a series of examples that illustrate how several of Schumann’s allusions create varying levels of contrast with their musical

and textual sources. I will argue here and again in Chapter 9 that these contrastive allusions grow out of Schumann’s sympathy for irony, as irony began to be defined in philosophical terms starting with Friedrich Schlegel in 1797 and continuing with Tieck, Jean Paul, and others through the first halt of the nineteenth century. Schlegel distinguished between lower and higher uses of irony—ranging from parodistic to spiritually divine—and between various types. Describing irony as a form of paradox, Schlegel noted that “irony is the form that paradox takes. Everything that is at once good and great is paradoxical.” Irony provided a distance from which the artist could view his world and his work; indeed, Schlegel prized irony as a means of creative self-reflection: “by means of it one transcends oneself”;’ it is “the state of mind that oversees all and rises infinitely over all that is relative, including one’s own art, virtue, or genius.”® The artist creates and yet is conscious of his creative processes and therefore able to manipulate, to play with, his

own works of art. :

C&S In Cuapters 1 and 2,1 posited Schumann’s contrastive approach to his predecessors both in instrumental music (citing the difference between

70 c-—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

the beginning of his Second Symphony and Haydn’s 104th) and in music with texts (discussing one of Schumann’s lieder that alluded to Fidelio). I turn now to his song cycle Dichterliebe, which Schumann initially contemplated beginning with contrastive allusions to Fidelio and also to Mendelssohn for musical-poetic symbols of spring and pagan rites. The allusions I propose in no way contradict or compete with the convincing relationship that Marston has shown between the motives and formal structure of _ Dichterliebe and Beethoven’s C# -Minor String Quartet, op. 131. The first poem of the cycle, “Im wunderschénen Monat Mai,” has a remarkable debt of its own, which is worth reviewing because Schumann first sketched an allusive beginning that was also extremely close to its musical source. Heinrich Heine’s first line is essentially a quotation from a poem by Friedrich Rafsmann that had appeared in print shortly before he wrote his own poem. There is no question that Heine knew RafSmann’s poem because

he reviewed the collection a few months after it had been published. Rafsmann began:

Im wundersch6nen Monat Mai In the beautiful month of May

War ich in einer Biicherei I was in a library Gar tief vergraben Tag ftir Tag, Deeply buried day by day © So fern dem Nachtigallenschlag, So far from the nightingale’s song

So fern dem Blithenregen.'? So far from the rain of blossoms. Schumann’s initial plan for his setting of the first line called for a quotation nearly as blatant. His sketch for the song shows that he conceived a motive

that quotes Florestan’s aria from Fidelio, “Euch werde Lohn in bessren Welten” (Ex. 4.1a and b), the motive he later returned to in his untitled miniature in the Album fiir die Jugend, op. 68, no. 21 (Ex. 4.1c).1! Though the alterations he subsequently made to this motive make the association less apparent, the point of a Florestan motive at the outset may have been to cast himself, in his Florestan persona, as the lovesick poet. In this case Schumann the critic evidently overrode Schumann the composer: his decision to change his opening motive—effectively destroying any allusion to Florestan—may

acknowledge that the contrast between Florestan and the bitter poet of Dichterliebe was too great for an allusion to bridge.

More enduring are the internal phrases that Schumann adapted from Mendelssohn’s Faustian cantata, Die erste Walpurgisnacht. Composed initially in 1831-32 (revised 1842-43), the early version contains passages that Schumann found fitting for “Im wundersch6nen Monat Mai” and the penultimate song, “Aus alten Marchen.”!? Goethe’s poem tells of pagans and

Contrastive Allusions — 71

Im wun - der-sché-nen Mo-nat Mai als al - le Knos - pen sprang - en

Ex. 4.1a Schumann, sketch of “Im wundersch6nen Monat Mai”

Moderato ; ; | ~ Euch wer - de Lohn in __ bes - sern Wel-ten Ex. 4.1b Beethoven, Fidelio, no. 13, Trio, mm. 2—6 (transposed from A)

| , , Langsam — Ex. 4.1¢ Schumann, op. 68, no. 21, mm. 1-2

Druids celebrating spring in a remote area of the Harz mountains in order to pursue the ancient rites that Christians have prohibited. Fearing death, the Druids frighten the Christian forces with visions of hell, wearing masks, car-

rying pitchforks, and dancing wildly around the fire. Both verses of “Im wunderschonen Monat Mai” close with a rising sequence that resembles the similar sequence in the first movement of Mendelssohn’s cantata (Ex. 4.2a and b). Each half of both sequences ends on an appoggiatura in the voice,

the span of the phrases from top to bottom is a minor seventh, and they both include an enharmonic progression from B minor to G at the midpoint (G major in Mendelssohn, G minor in Schumann), so that the second half of the sequence begins harmonized a major third below the ending of the first; moreover, the phrases occupy the same formal position: they lead to similar transitional phrases. Schumann also derived the famous dominant seventh chord ending of this first song from Mendelssohn, who likewise ends this section on a dominant seventh of F#, moving to it with an upward arpeggiation in the bass. Despite all of the similarities, the musical character of the two pieces is strongly contrastive: what was fast, loud, and accompanied by block chords becomes slow, soft, and lyrically arpeggiated—exactly the degree of transformation evident in Schumann’s symphonies. ~ Schumann’s achievement in this transformation was to relate Heine’s text to Goethe’s, finding in Goethe a source of dramatic symbols for his interpretation of Heine. To enrich his setting of a love poem about “the beautiful month of May,” Schumann turned to a pagan ritual that took place in May

72 c~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

Ae gf —=_ ——

a ee aD ae ee ee See Se ee ee ee eee

et: pae ee eee ee te 7—— . da hab’ ich thr ge - stan - den mein Seh - nen und Ver -

A oF ge by 4 hh eg NN p=

. b ——p_ g° ,

Av of fF iN lan - gen. a-aA

NS Fa I NS ON NESE DS i HF tt p< __fe 4, |——__-f FF} | ltl gg

(oomiglar” lee, |e | DR te Pe Et 4 an”, a a SE 8 5 a ae SS SS aS: TS SS Scan neen naan Bl Reo.

Ex.4.2a “Im wunderschénen Monat Mai,” mm. 19-26

and to Goethe’s text which begins appropriately, “May is laughing” (“Es lacht der Mai”). At the sequential motives, Schumann chose a text that reverses a cause-and-effect relationship present in Goethe. The words that Mendelssohn set describe the “old ritual” that the Druids need to perform; they came “to praise the holy Father” (“Allvater dort zu loben”) in order for their hearts to be uplifted (“So wird das Herz erhoben”). Schumann’s poet, in contrast, performs a venerable secular ritual. His heart has already been uplifted by love (“Da ist in meinem Herzen Die Liebe aufgegangen”), and so

he declares not his praise but “his longing and desire” (“Da hab’ ich ihr | gestanden Mein Sehnen und Verlangen”). The contrast of functions motivates the contrasting musical accompaniments: hearts uplifted from praising the holy Father motivate the allegro rush to the dominant seventh of F%, while the loving heart filled with longing requires a gentler response. _ Another contrastive allusion of Schumann’s must be read against events in his life as well as an antecedent text. The complex allusive interaction that occurs in Schumann’s first mature song, “Schlufslied des Narren” (the text is

in Table 4.1) already indicates a considerable literary sophistication. Although this song was published much later as part of op. 127, Schumann

I, bY ee cresc. :

| Contrastive Allusions — 73

All - va - ter dort zu lo -_ ben,

poesia OS a oe ee rere ee ee eeeres ee ee

[(@. tO gg gg ge eg ee ee ee ee Ss

Fe ee ee ee os band NE RT a oat ddd apa ee SV ES eee eee eT ne TS eee eee eee eeeetee eee eee ee te nd All - va - ter dort zu lo - ben.

ee ee, es PEAS Sf eeu ene IE (Bee ee

No ga a Re. ot) # ee

, : Allegro vivace assai f —_-~~ 4 ; . _— Pe

H | V’ of F#

Ex. 4.2b Mendelssohn, Die erste Walpurgisnacht, op. 60, no. 1, mm. 73-86

dated the manuscript 1 February 1840; consequently, this setting of the song that concludes Shakespeare’s comedy about love intrigues, Twelfth Night, can be placed at a turning point in Schumann’s personal and musical life. Regarding the biographical significance of the text, I agree with Akio Mayeda’s assessment that the song celebrates the imminent conclusion to Schumann’s own love intrigue, the bitter court battle that Robert and Clara had waged against her father, Friedrich Wieck, in their attempt to gain court

permission to marry without her father’s consent.'* Indeed, just one week | earlier, the judge had thrown out all but one of the charges that Wieck had

74 o~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

leveled against Robert, allowing only that of “habitual drunkenness” to be investigated further. Moreover, Schumann’s song speaks both to the past struggle and to the improved prospects of his marriage. As indicated in Table 4.1, he set only three verses, omitting the second stanza, perhaps because it had no relevance to his situation, and also the fourth, which, given its reference to drunkenness, probably seemed all too relevant. The stanzas he set include the first, the third—with its focus on marriage—and the fifth. Schumann’s choice of his principal motive shapes an interpretation in unsuspected ways, for it apparently alludes to Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s “Erlkonig” (Ex. 4.3a and b). Although Schumann’s rhythm is dotted and

the mode altered, the triplet eighth notes and rapid tempo are present, and Schumann’s motive—like Schubert’s—returns sequentially higher. But

it is the textual parallels that make the musical similarities compelling: “Who rides so late through the night and wind? It is a father and his child.” Schumann casts his beginning as an ironic parody of Schubert’s: instead of a father and his doomed son riding a horse through night and wind, Schumann sets up a rocking-horse rhythm for the “winzig Biibchen” facing rain and wind.

Table 4.1 Schumann, “Schluflied des Narren” (Shakespeare), op. 127, no. 5

1. Und als ich ein winzig Biibchen war, When that I was and a little tiny boy, Hop heisa, hop heisa, bei Regen und Wind, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain

Da machten zweie eben ein Paar, A foolish thing was but a toy, Denn der Regen, der regnet jeglichen Tag. For the rain it raineth every day.

3. Und als ich, ach! Ein Weib that frein, But when I came, alas, to wive, Hop heisa, hop heisa, bei Regen und Wind, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, Da wollte der Miissiggehn nicht gedeihn; By swaggering could I never thrive, Denn der Regen, der regnet jeglichen Tag. For the rain it raineth every day.

[4.] [Und als der Wein mir steckt’ im Kopf, [But when I came into my beds, Hop heisa, hop heisa, bei Regen und Wind, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

, Da war ich ein armer betrunken Tropf; With toss-pots still had drunken heads, Den der Regen, der regnet jeglichen Tag. | For the rain it raineth every day.]

5. Die Welt steht schon Jahr ein, Jahr aus, A great while ago the world began, Hop heisa, hop heisa, bei Regen und Wind, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

Doch’s ist all Eins, das Stiick ist aus, But that’s all one, our play is done, Und so wolln wir gefalln euch jeglichen Tag. And we'll strive to please you every day. Schumann’s last two lines: Doch’s das Stiick ist aus, und ich wiinsch euch viel Heil, Und so wolln wir gefalln euch jeglichen Tag.

Se , Lebhaft _ |

Contrastive Allusions —~ 75

Og fy cme P| |te 4, ee Kf 8 ate 2 oe Und als ich ein win - zig Biib-chen war,

a ee ee ee no. 5, mm. 1-4

rn —— ee ee

a | ee eee

Ex. 4.3a Schumann, “SchluGlied des Narren aus Was ihr wollt,” op. 127, |

| Schnell

3

Ex. 4.3b Schubert, “Erlkonig,” op. 1, mm. 1-3 ,

In this musical and textual allusion, the dramatically significant image is that of a bewildered father clinging desperately, and ultimately unsuccessfully, to his child. Just as the father and child duo in Schubert’s song had

an invisible and ominous companion, so too did Robert and Clara. Yet Schumann did not—could not—adopt the symbolic significance of Schu- | -_bert’s motive literally. In this contrastive reading, Clara’s father has assumed the sinister role of the Erlkonig, and he—Robert—the role of the protector. At the time he composed the “Schluflied,” Schumann had no certainty that he would prevail in court. In the days before Robert wrote this song, that is, in the days immediately after the judge’s decision to allow Wieck to investi-

gate Robert’s drinking, Clara wrote Robert once that “It goes still really very badly for me and I can hardly hold my head up”; and again that “now I would like sometimes to lie down and die.”!5 It may also be relevant that twice in the preceding months Clara had written Robert to say that she had programmed “Erlkonig” on concerts.!¢

C&S THERE IS ANOTHER possibility for contrast with a musical/textual allusion: namely, an allusion which is stylistically contrastive within the new , composition but semantically assimilative of the old. In this type of allusion it is the presentation of the allusion that is made to contrast with the music which frames it, rather than with the musical-poetic source of the allusion.

76 s~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

Contrastive presentations often require a stylistic disjunction of a kind that is more apparent in the twentieth century—such as the incorporation of Bach’s chorale “Es ist genug” in Berg’s Violin Concerto—when the stylistic distance between contemporary music and the music of the inherited tradition had become unbridgeable, and indeed, something to exploit.

The next group of examples contains a multiple allusion that features a | common diatonic motive, 1-7-2-1-4-3. Elsewhere in this book I identify several instances in which a composer could allude to more than one work at a time, as for example in Brahms’s op. 1, which alludes to Beethoven’s op. 53 and op. 106. The more common the motive, the more likely are the possibilities for multiple allusion. Even a motive as ubiquitous and undistinguished as the ascending fourth in Haydn’s “and there was light” can, by virtue of its

accompanying text and its distinctive harmonic treatment, create well-defined allusions. Among the many possible instances of the motive 1-7-2-1-4-3,

Ex. 4.4 presents two settings from the first half of the nineteenth century: the chanson “Mon fils est la” with music by Pierre Joseph Guillaume

Zimmerman and a text by Eugéne Scribe, published in The Harmonicon in : July 1828; and the hunting chorus for men, “Snart er Natten svunden” (also called “King Valdemars Hunt”) by the Danish composer J. P. E. Hartmann, written for the play Syvsoverdag in honor of a royal wedding in 1840. Other examples include the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in E Minor, op. 59, no. 2 from 1806, and the hymn “Treuer Heiland, wir sind hier,”

aso, Fh oe

first published in 1838. Zimmerman’s French Romance about a mother

SS opt pp St eT Andante pateticamente .

So Ss SST:

Ex. 4.4a Pierre Joseph Guillaume Zimmerman, “Mon fils est la”

Ex.4.4b J. P. E. Hartmann, Syvsoverdag, “Snart er Natten svunden,” mm. 1-4

Contrastive Allusions —~> 77 grieving at her son’s grave, Hartmann’s hunting chorus, the untexted string quartet, and the hymn of thanks to the faithful Savior—these settings stand for others which could be used to make a necessary point: even common motives could be understood to carry symbolic significance. The motives in Ex. 4.4 represent the sort of musical background that composers routinely had to work with (or against) in order to create a context that included (or

excluded) a particular meaning. This same motive is the agent for an involved series of allusions, centering on Schumann’s “Vogel als Prophet,” from Waldszenen, op. 82. Schumann

largely composed the set of nine miniatures in the two weeks between Christmas 1848 and 6 January 1849.!” His title “Vogel als Prophet” and the somber mood suggest that Schumann was invoking the familiar trope of a songbird as a harbinger of death or a voice of lamentation, rather than the amusing cuckoo in Goethe’s poem “Frithling-Orakel” (this poem, which begins “Du prophet’scher Vogel du,” was set by Johann Friedrich Reichardt in an appropriately lighthearted way).!8 Indeed, a suppressed poetic verse for “Vogel als Prophet” and the music itself indicate that this reading, while not wrong, is too facile. Initially Schumann had supplied six of the movements of Waldszenen with a poetic motto, including the last line of Eichendorff’s “Zwielicht” for “Vogel als Prophet”: “Hiite dich, sei wach und munter!” (Be on your guard, be awake and alert!). On the basis of this textual association, Eric Jensen interpreted the prophecies of the bird as “forebodings of

warning and imminent danger.” Eichendorff’s text is indeed a warning _ about the harsh realities of life and death on earth, especially those at twilight and night (the text is in Table 4.2), but Schumann’s title inverts the direction of warning. While in Eichendorff’s poem a human voice admonishes

deer in the forest to beware of man (“Trau ihm nicht”), Schumann explicitly , reverses the roles of human and animal, though he does not put into words the nature of the bird’s prophecy. Schumann’s enigmatic title and the recovered verse of Eichendorff function as signals or clues for a hermeneutical interpretation.2° In this case they are significantly supplemented by a self-quotation in the contrastive middle section. Musically, the ornate bird-like figuration of the beginning and end of this movement acts as a frame for the internal section that repeats a single phrase first in G major, then abruptly and ethereally in E> major (Ex. 4.5). The harmonization is simple, with parallel sixths and a tonic _ pedal. Schumann introduces this passage as if it were a quotation, with a degree of musical disjunction between it and the outer frame—in character, figuration, and modality, as well as a complete pause—that Daverio has posed as a hallmark of Schumann’s piano quotations from the 1830s.?!

78 o~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

Table 4.2. Text of Eichendorff’s “Zwielicht” , Dammrung will die Fligel spreiten, Dusk wants to spread its wings, Schaurig riihren sich die Baume, The trees move with a shudder, Wolken ziehn wie schwere Traume— Clouds move like heavy dreams—

Was will dieses Graun bedeuten? What does this dread mean?

Hast ein Reh du lieb vor andern, If you love a deer above all others,

Lass es nicht alleine grasen, Do not let it graze alone;

Jager ziehn im Wald und blasen, Hunters move in the forest, blowing horns, Stimmen hin und wieder wandern. Voices wander here and there.

Hast du einem Freund hienieden, If you have a friend here below, | Trau ihm nicht zu dieser Stunde, Do not trust him in this hour, Freundlich wohl mit Aug’ und Munde, His eyes and mouth may smile, Sinnt er Krieg im tiick’schen Frieden. But he is thinking war in the guise of peace.

Was heut gehet miide unter, That which set tiredly today, Hebt sich morgen neu geboren. Rises reborn tomorrow, Manches geht* in Nacht verloren— Much goes missing in the night—

Hite dich, sei wach und munter! Be careful, be awake and alert!

oS OOS

* Schumann substituted “geht” for “bleibt.”

Cet le Sl e ~~ S Ex. 4.5 Schumann, Waldszenen, op. 82, “Vogel als Prophet,” mm. 18-20

There is no attempt to integrate the music of this interior section with that of the frame. Before writing “Vogel als Prophet,” Schumann had used the identical mo-

tive in his Scenen aus Goethes Faust, also with a tonic pedal and parallel sixths (Ex. 4.6). Though he did not complete this work until 1850 (and the Overture in 1853), he worked on the beginning of part III in the summer of 1844. In this section the Choir of the Holy Boys asks the Pater Seraphicus who they are. He answers: “Boys born of midnight, half awakened spirit and sense, lost immediately to the parents, won for the angels!” To this they respond with the phrase that Schumann used in “Vogel als Prophet,” here also over a tonic pedal, with the text: “Happy are we, for all, for all - existence is so pleasing . . .”22 But even as they sing these words, Pater

Contrastive Allusions — 79 , ———_—— —

Se = ee |ee Moreover, this is precisely how Schumann described his mentor in his review from 1837 of Mendelssohn’s oratorio St. Paul, where he urged his readers to “honor and love this Mendelssohn-Paul. He is the prophet of a glorious future.” Although the image of the “Vogel” would thus depict a composer as a songbird, in view of the Eichendorff quotation and the allusion to his earlier Faust setting, by early 1849 Schumann plainly had in mind a foreboding rather than a glorious message. Mendelssohn had died over a year earlier in November 1847, shortly before the revolutionary battles of 1848 broke out. Eichendorff’s warning “of war in the treacherous peace” and the motto to “Be on your guard,” on the one hand, and Goethe’s depiction of “the rough ways of the earth” that fill the holy children “with fright and dread,” on the other hand, | suggest that Schumann intended “Vogel als Prophet” as a musical commemoration of Mendelssohn’s death and the tumultuous events of 1848—a far cry from the rustic imagery of Mendelssohn’s lied. The two allusive texts serve different purposes, both of which affect the musical narrative: the Faust text identifies the message (as did the suppressed verses of Eichendorff), and the Mendelssohn text the speaker. On the basis of the allusion to the Faust text alone, the middle section of “Vogel als Prophet” would have to be understood as a new voice, one that responds

Contrastive Allusions —= 81 to the bird depicted in the musical frame. However, the allusion to Mendelssohn, like the title, reverses the direction of the message: the bird is still the speaker, the prophet. Thus the middle section must be interpreted not as a

new character, but as a mediating and anthropomorphic voice that translates the bird song of the musical frame into human song, anticipating Wagner’s translation of bird song in Siegfried. This mediator may well be a narrator, stepping in to explain the meaning of what the bird had prophesied in exactly the way that the Evangelist in the Gospel of St. Matthew inserts himself to translate Jesus’ last words (in Hebrew) into a language that his listen-

ers could understand (Greek, Latin, German, whatever): “‘Eli, eli, lama asabthani’; that is, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.’” In Bach’s musically dramatized setting of this passage, the translation of language is also accompanied by a difference in register (bass to tenor).?’ The stylistic contrast evident in Schumann’s allusions is completely absent in a subsequent allusion to Schumann’s “Vogel als Prophet.” Twenty years after Waldszenen, Max Bruch assimilated Schumann’s message in “Vogel als Prophet” in his cantata Normannenzug from 1869. Bruch quotes precisely this motive while the choir sings “You who are watched over by the gods, you green forest,” an evident allusion to Schumann’s Waldszenen (Ex. 4.8). The parallel sixths are also present, this time with a dominant pedal, and as in Schumann the motive repeats immediately. Moreover, Bruch is not simply presenting this motive emblematically to refer to forests. Although he would not have known the quotation of Eichendorff present in Schumann’s initial draft, he evidently knew Schumann’s Faust setting, because his poetic text strongly assimilates the sense of impending danger. His “griiner Wald” is no idyllic forest; on the contrary, the trees, and the homeland that they represent, are imperiled: “The axe is already swinging to fell you!””®

aPsa 2eeaaeeeCaee

pp 2 Oe eee

ype — ee

Du Got - ter-um - schweb- ter, du — gri - ner Wald,

MAES Batetecr| tox err] ceerceer) Co

Z gS 36 : 2 g:

Ex. 4.8 Max Bruch, Normannenzug, op. 32 (1869)

82 *~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

The appeal of a multiple allusion lies in the richness of the supporting textual associations. While in the nineteenth century composers certainly valued a motive for its intrinsic beauty, the “beauty” of a motive may also have been a factor of the depth of its poetic meaning. The more layers of textual

significance there were, both private and public, the greater the musicalpoetic value. This may be what Schumann meant in his defense of Berlioz’s

programmatic approach to composition: “The greater the number of elements cognate in music, which the thought or picture created in tones contains, the more poetic and plastic the expression of the composition.”2? In Waldszenen, Schumann likely quoted himself (thus alluding to Goethe’s Faust) and alluded to Mendelssohn; Bruch, in his turn, may have been aware of both Schumann’s self-quotation and his allusion to Mendelssohn. With his citation Bruch endorsed Schumann’s imagery, and in so doing, proved his own ability to decode Schumann’s poetic meaning.

C&S THE DISTINCTION between assimilative and contrastive allusions has important elements in common with two of Bakhtin’s modes of passive double-voiced discourse: unidirectional and varidirectional. As I described in Chapter 1, Bakhtin allows for the appropriation of another’s speech in a way that either supports the original meaning (unidirectional) or opposes it, chiefly through parody or irony (varidirectional). The examples I have discussed in this chapter and the preceding one demonstrate the range of options a composer had for embracing or distancing an allusion from the musical “speech” of the antecedent work. Bakhtin’s theories help to explain the difference between the ways in which Wagner and Schumann adapted the motives (“words”) of other composers. Where Wagner incorporated both motive and meaning, Schumann occasionally adopted motives but applied them to new semantic purposes. Schumann’s ability to distance himself from earlier texts shows an openness to Romantic irony that seems quite foreign to Wagner. Indeed, the examples of Wagner discussed in Chapter 3 show that he had no inclination to employ allusion as a way of contrasting one text with another. Wagner was certainly capable of irony, as Borchmeyer notes,*° but he did not esteem it the way that Goethe, Schumann, and others had. In A Communication to My Friends (1851), Wagner differentiates between form and content in art and faults irony for its inability to express the essence of content, “the roots hidden in life itself” :3! Irony is that form of Mirth which [Content] can never break out of to reveal its inner essence, to a vivid, individual exposition as a vital force. But the core that

Contrastive Allusions —-= 83 lies underneath the unnatural semblance of our public intercourse, that kernel which all Irony must necessarily leave unexplored, can at the same time never be reached by the power of Mirth, in its purest, most specific form.

In his denial of irony’s access to content, Wagner evidently followed Hegel, who, reacting against the great popularity of irony in the preceding generation of poets, had derided irony already in the 1830s: “This type of subjectivism not merely substitutes a void for the whole content of ethics, right, duties, and so is evil, in fact evil through and through and universally—but in addition its form is a subjective void, i.e. it knows itself as this contentless void and in this knowledge knows itself as absolute.”** Hegel objected especially to the Romantic subjectivity which underlies irony because of the egotistical approach to artistic creation that it fostered. Decades before Wagner railed against the egotism of modern poets who abandoned themselves to their “own self-will and absolute self-admiration,” Hegel had satirized the vanity of a subjective and ironic individual: “It is not the thing that is excellent, but I who am so; as the master of law and things alike, I simply play with them as with my caprice; my consciously ironical attitude lets the highest perish and I merely hug myself at the thought.”

We can get at an important difference between assimilative and contrastive allusions by adapting another concept from Bakhtin, namely, the distinction between authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse. According to Bakhtin, our “ideological becoming” depends on our selective assimilation of the words of others. He defines two types of discourse that can be assimilated, “authoritative” and “internally persuasive,” and relates these to the way school children are taught to appropriate and © transmit someone else’s words: “reciting by heart” (authoritative speech) and “retelling in one’s own words” (internally persuasive speech).*+ According to Bakhtin, the authoritative word “demands that we acknowledge it,

that we make it our own; . . . we encounter it with its authority already | fused to it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak the word of the fathers.” *5 The authoritative word stands apart from other speech and is often associated with religious or scientific truths or even “a currently fashionable book.”*¢ Bakhtin then describes the internally persuasive word as “tightly interwoven with ‘one’s own word,’” one that is “affirmed through assimilation.” The creative power of an internally persuasive word stems from its ability to

stimulate “new and independent words .. . and [the fact] that it does not remain in an isolated and static condition”; as a consequence, it is either

84 -— MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

“a contemporary word,” or one “that has been reclaimed for contemporaneity.”?” This capacity for becoming part of an individual’s own speech is in sharp contrast to authoritative discourse, which may organize around itself other types of discourses (which interpret it, praise

it, apply it in various ways), but the authoritative discourse itself does not merge with these (by means of, say, gradual transitions); it remains sharply de-

marcated, compact and inert: it demands, so to speak, not only quotation marks but a demarcation even more magisterial, a special script, for instance.*®

How might these concepts apply to distinctions between assimilative and contrastive allusions? Strictly understood, Bakhtin’s terms would require that both types of allusions be termed internally persuasive. Authoritative discourse is semantically closed and thus may only be transmitted, not represented. Therefore the “artistic representation of authoritative discourse [is] impossible.” Bakhtin cites an example from Tolstoy to demonstrate how an authoritative text in a novel remains “a dead quotation, something that falls out of the artistic context.”3? But if one applies Bakhtin’s distinctions more loosely, seizing on his acknowledgment that there are “different degrees of authoritativeness,”*° the concept of words that are either internalized or kept apart suggests a link between the way allusions are presented and their significance for the composers who use them. At the authoritative end of the continuum are those allusions which stand most apart from the framing musical context, those which are least altered by contact with the surrounding musical voices. The closest instance of an authoritative musical text remaining “a dead quotation” might be the verbatim citations of Gregorian chant in motets of Bruckner or Liszt. Otherwise, it is reasonable to assert that in general the greater the audibility of

the allusion, the more authoritative is the source, either to the composer personally or to the composer’s audience. Allusions that are clearly framed and approach the exactitude of quotations—such as Schumann’s “Vogel als Prophet,” or his An die ferne Geliebte allusion in the op. 17 Fantasie—replicate the musical character and poetic content that the motive possessed in

the original work. A contrastive frame provides the kind of demarcation that Bakhtin prescribed for authoritative discourse. In these two examples Schumann isolates motives which are the musical equivalent of “the word of the father,” setting them with a reverence which befits the commemorative intent of the two works. They are secular memorials for figures Schumann revered and are representatives of a type that includes the honorific examples of “naming” discussed in Chapter 7.

Musical equivalents also exist for two other kinds of authoritative dis-

—Contrastive Allusions —~ 85 course specified by Bakhtin: religious truths and references to “a currently fashionable book.” Analogues of the latter would include quotations from successful operas, such as Schubert’s near-quotation of Fidelio in his Mass in G Major (Ex. 1.1), but also allusions to any culturally prominent compo- |

sition, such as Berlioz’s allusion to Beethoven’s string quartet op. 131 in . L’Enfance du Christ (Ex. 5.1); and there are numerous examples of as, similative allusions drawn from religious sources such as chorale melodies, chant, and esteemed sacred works. These include quotations of a chorale in Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony, the chant citations in Liszt’s oratorios, and the more literal allusions to Bach’s aria “Es ist vollbracht” from the St. John Passion, discussed in Chapter 8. Self-quotations in Masses are problematic and must be evaluated individually, because in cases where the Mass was composed first, the allusion in a song to the sacred source is therefore potentially authoritative; moreover, the allusion may well re-inscribe a relationship with a favored and fashionable text rather than the composer’s earlier musical setting. (Other self-quotations, such as those of Schumann, -may mask a multiple allusion as in “Vogel als Prophet,” which is both a selfquotation and a prior allusion to Mendelssohn.)

This gets at the heart of why it is wrong to expect of allusions that they be plainly audible: it privileges that narrow class of allusions that enshrines a particular kind of relationship with other musical-poetic texts, a relationship that Bakhtin defines in terms of external authority. It excludes from consideration a complex range of allusive possibilities that can be understood as internally persuasive discourse, especially contrastive allusions. These are the allusions that have most obviously stimulated “new and independent words.” Schumann’s lifelong encounter with Fidelio spawned numerous works which answer or respond to—in Bakhtin’s currently authoritative word, dialogize—specific moments of Beethoven’s opera. Some, like his songs “Friihlings Ankunft” (Ex. 1.4) or “Siisser Freund, du blickest mich verwundert an,” reply with words that take Beethoven’s text in new directions.*! This openness to new meanings is for Bakhtin a crucial trait: “The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean.”* C&> To RETURN to Schumann: his penchant for allusions has as much to do with a valorization of hidden meanings, of vagueness and indirectness, as it does with the necessity to appear original. Meaning that is symbolic, allusive, Or ironic is indefinite meaning that requires an “armed eye” to behold, an insightful listener or reader or observer to interpret. Goethe’s view that

86 ~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION “if the symbolic points to something else beyond representation, it will always do so indirectly” accords with Schumann’s decision not to publish the Eichendorff verses for “Vogel als Prophet” and the other movements. The omission invites interpretation even as it makes that act less certain of attaining Schumann’s meaning. The allusion present in the middle section actually makes the Eichendorff verses redundant; had he retained them, Schumann would not have imparted new information, although he would have made that information more widely accessible. Expressing his distaste for published programs, Schumann cast this preference for circumspection as a national character trait: “the German, with his delicacy of feeling and his aversion to personal revelation, dislikes having his thoughts so rudely directed.”*4 Speaking of Wordsworth’s approach to allusion, Stein similarly detects a “desire to avoid pointing and so to internalize poetic speech.”*4 The decision of a composer or a writer to allude was a decision to draw a veil over a single meaning, to cede the power of interpretation to the listener or reader. But this made possible the creation of a work of art with more, not fewer, possibilities for meaning than was achievable through direct signification. In this respect what is usually understood as an obstacle to allusion—the commonality of motives—was actually a tremendous advantage composers had over other artists. Schumann may have understood his allusions simply as a way of introducing irony into music. He left no doubt about his appreciation of irony, as when he suggested that Beethoven had intended a passage in his Seventh ironically, and when he coined the word “Heinismus” to represent the degree of irony evident in Heine. In his evaluation of why lieder composition had improved in recent years, Schumann gave much of the credit to innovations in poetry: “To hasten this evolution, a new German school of poetry likewise came into being. .. . Thus arose that more artistic and imaginative type of lied which was, naturally, quite unknown to earlier generations, for it was only the new spirit of poetry that was reflected in the music.” That he considered irony to be a key element of this new poetic spirit is clear from the way in which he defended Berlioz’s parody of the “Dies irae” in the , Symphonie fantastique by linking Berlioz with Byron and Heine: And if we were to take umbrage at the Zeitgeist which tolerates a Dies irae as a burlesque, we would only be repeating what for years has been written about Byron, Heine, Victor Hugo, Grabbe, and others. For a few moments in an eternity, Poetry has veiled herself in irony in order to hide her grief-stricken counte-

--nance.*6 | Schumann’s texted allusions were not just devices of reference but agents of transcendence, allowing his musical settings of poetry to reach beyond

Contrastive Allusions —~> 87 their own finite worlds. Whether in his initial impulse to include Florestan in

the draft of “Im wunderschénen Monat Mai,” in fashioning the images of birth and renewal in “Frishlings Ankunft” as a contrastive response to Florestan’s gloom in “In des Lebens Frihlingstagen,” or in using a Shakespearean text to depict Clara’s father as a kind of Erlkonig, Schumann transcended the poems both by creating symbol-laden links to other musical and poetic texts, and also by using these contrastive texts to comment on people and events in his own life. Given the symbiotic relationship between Schumann’s life and his art, it is probable that, in equal measure, he saw his lieder as expressions of his life (Eusebius), and his life as a fulfillment of his musical-poetic world (Florestan).

C HAPTER

aS 5 GD ‘Texting

Why shouldn’t music be supplied with words, just as one has long supplied words with music? —ANDRE GRETRY!

RETRY’S QUESTION touches on a practice that I will call “texting,”

namely, the reuse of instrumental music as the basis of a song or choral work. The amount of music can vary from a motive or theme to an entire movement, and the treatment from exact repetition to moderate forms of transformation. While musical “naming” (Chapter 7) often epitomizes composition as a form of play, texting, as an act which proclaims “this text is appropriate for the character of this piece (or motive),” breaches the barriers between composition and criticism. Texting reverses what we might consider to be the usual relationship between a song and an instrumental work, in which a song, stripped of its words, is reworked in a sonata or symphony, for instance in the slow movements of piano sonatas by Schumann and Brahms discussed by Berthold Hoeckner and George Bozarth.? But if texting would therefore seem not to involve allusion at all, the practices have important aspects in common. In some cases the added words may be understood to allude either to the composer of the earlier work, or—as with Wagner’s texting of a motive from the Eroica Symphony (Ex. 3.11)—to traditional views about what that work means, as indicated

in criticism. ,

The texting of previously composed instrumental works is an extreme

Texting ——> 89

form of an association between text and music, one that will lead in Chapter 6 to questions about how composers viewed their own creative processes. Although texting occasionally involved an entire movement, such instances are usually considered peripheral to the act of composition. However distinguished the individuals who matched the slow movement of a sonata with a poem—A. B. Marx and Jérome-Joseph de Momigny were theorists, Johann

Friedrich Reichardt (a friend of Goethe) and André Grétry composers—they , had not composed the works they texted, and they had supplied their texts

after the works had been completed, at times long afterwards. Yet it is wrong to separate the impulses evident in criticism from the processes we imagine to shape the act of composition, particularly in an age when composers also functioned as critics. Mark Evan Bonds is certainly correct when he links the impulse to supply textual interpretations and the emergence of thematic elaboration as a musically significant technique.* That poetic readings of instrumental works began to occur more frequently after about 1780 is indicative of a new kind of thematicism evident from the 1770s

onward. And it is not likely coincidental that in the 1770s hermeneutics became a fully developed discipline, as Johann Gottfried Herder and Christoph Lichtenberg placed new emphasis on the interpretation of texts and an awareness of cultural and historical contexts.4 The impulse to discern dramatic narratives in music may relate to another late-eighteenth-century development noted by Terry Eagleton—the ability to understand an art work as a subject, even as a surrogate for a human subject: “What emerges from such familiar notions [of unity and integrity of the work of art] in the late eighteenth century is the curious idea of the work of art as a kind of

subject.”> |

In the nineteenth century amateur and professional musicians crossed the boundaries between texted and untexted music much more frequently, and ~ less self-consciously, than occurred with the canonical repertoire in much of the twentieth century. Songs could be performed in public without words, as when Brahms and Joseph Joachim transcribed a song by Schumann and performed it on violin and piano in a concert they gave, or as with Liszt’s many _ piano versions of Schubert lieder. Instrumental works were given poetic ti-

tles such as Ballade, Lieder ohne Worte, Romance (or with Kalkbrenner

Romances sans paroles), and even an entire Operetta ohne Worte by Schumann’s friend Ferdinand David. Brahms, Liszt, and others published sonatas and symphonies with poetic verses that indicate an underlying vocal conception.® Instrumental works of all sorts could be published or sung in public with a text, as happened with a C-minor Fantasia by C. P. E. Bach, as Chopin and Pauline Viardot-Garcia did with Mazurkas by Chopin, and as

90 -—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

the editor of the Hamburger Blatter fiir Musik did for several of Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte.’ Within a year of Haydn’s death, six of the slow movements from his last symphonies had been supplied with sacred and edi-

fying texts and issued by Breitkopf and Hartel as a cantata entitled Der VersOhnungstod—literally if inelegantly, “The Reconciliation-Death.”® And Cosima Wagner recorded instances of Wagner playing Bach fugues and preludes from the Well-Tempered Clavier, singing words he deemed appropri-

ate to the mood of the music, as when he sang “My will has been done” to the concluding measures of a fugue in D major. A few days later, during a visit of the pianist Joseph Rubenstein, Cosima recorded her husband’s re- , marks about a prelude in B minor: “The 24th Prelude he... would like to — . hear sung by someone like [Angelica] Catalani, with words—one would see

what an impression that would make. He advises Rubenstein always to bring out the melodic line very clearly and he says he almost feels like writing words for it himself. I observe that the text would have to be religious, a kind of offertory, and he agrees.”? It was not at all uncommon for slow movements of Beethoven sonatas

and symphonies to be given sacred and secular texts and performed as motets or choral songs, in the United States as well as in Europe; thus the choirmaster of Grace Church in New York set Psalm 30 (“O lord, thy mercy”) to the variation theme of Beethoven’s Sonata op. 26, and published

it in 1852, along with similar textings and retextings of works by Spohr, Mozart, Bellini, and others.!° This was hardly the first texting of the op. 26 variation theme. According to Franz Wegeler, Beethoven himself had asked him (Wegeler) to text it, because Beethoven was impressed with his previous texting of the Adagio from the Piano Sonata op. 2, no. 1.!! And Friedrich Silcher had also included a version of it with a text entitled “Sehnsucht” in his set Melodien aus Beethovens Sonaten und Sinfonien zu Liedern some-

time after 1829.'2 , , In the case of well-known instrumental works, the underlaid text could participate in whatever critical tradition existed for a work in books, articles, or letters. This is as true for individual motives as it is for entire works, as when Franz Liszt put words to the first-movement Allegro theme of Beethoven’s Third Symphony in the cantata he wrote for the 1870 centenary celebration in Weimar, Zur Sakularfeier Beethovens.'> Perhaps he decided against publishing it because Peter Cornelius had also texted the same theme in his “Beethoven-Lied,” also from 1870. The text, his own, adheres to the then well-established programmatic tradition for this movement of the symphony, although it adds a nationalistic voice to the warrior’s heroic struggle

for truth, love, and freedom.'* Beethoven’s opening motive appears three

Texting ——> 91

times at progressively higher intervals with the following verses (in italics), which conclude three separate stanzas: Kampf um Licht in ewigem Krieg, Fight for light in the eternal war, Sieg der Liebe, Freibeit dein Sieg! Triumph of love, freedom your victory! Schénheitsmacht aus gottlichem Drang, The power of beauty out of godly will, , Das war unsres Beethoven Sang! That was our Beethoven’s song! Deutsches Herz, du Sieger im Feld, German heart, you victor in the field, Deutsches Volk, du Fiihrer der Welt! German people, you leaders of the world!

Fuhr zur Freiheit Ost und West, Lead east and west to freedom, , Das sei dann dein Beethovenfest. May that be your Beethoven celebration. Sel’ge Zeit! dir strahlet das Licht, Blessed time! On you shines the light, Lieb’ und Freiheit Kronen dir flicht; Love and freedom weave your crowns; Deutscher Herzen gliihendster Schlag, | German hearts’ most glowing beat,

Griisse dich am Beethoventag! Greet you on Beethoven’s day! The dramatic or poetic idea associated with the instrumental work survives in exactly the same way as the text of a motive from a song or aria; that is to say, it exists on a latent level. This is no less the case when the original motive was altered before being used in a later composition, as in Schubert’s adaptation of the funeral march of the Eroica Symphony in his song

“Auf dem Strom,” written for the anniversary of Beethoven’s death (see Ex. 7.3). Another work of Beethoven’s that generated substantial critical commentary, Beethoven’s C#-Minor Quartet, op. 131, has already been discussed by others with regard to two very different vocal works that it inspired. Thomas Grey thinks it is “possible to hear a resonance of the opening movements of the op. 131 Quartet (and the “poetic idea” Wagner discerned there) in the musical-dramatic conception of the beginning of Act II] of Tristan.” And Nicholas Marston has shown a complex relationship be-

tween the harmonic plan of this quartet and the opening motive and the plan and closing motive of Schumann’s Dichterliebe.' : Berlioz also responded musically to Beethoven’s op. 131 Quartet to create a lengthy allusion in Part 2 of his oratorio L’Enfance du Christ (1854). _ Basing the imitative subject of the movement “L’Arrivée a Sais” on Beethoven’s first theme (Ex. 5.1), Berlioz extended the correspondence through ten notes. Although the intervallic differences are substantial, the most effective

contrastive element that Berlioz introduced to mask the debt is that of tempo—fast rather than slow. Otherwise Berlioz followed the contour of Beethoven’s line and supported the allusion with orchestration and key: the

92 s~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

iVol (cre| et ee ee A - Allegro non troppo.

Tenor

2 es ee ee ee oe es irene Oi Care owe 4. EE EEE TOO SES, 6 A, 6 TE RS AOR SERNA SONS a [NURS ennnneeS

ee ee ek pg 1 rt , me P| lg ee ee

rE en ew ae teed | th eh th ae ot eee et eet Os teaatDe eeSa ele+ Peg ht Eee eae i) SL Foe JE P Ex. 5.1a_ Berlioz, L’Enfance du Christ, op. 25, “LArrivée a Sais,” mm. 5-18

sat | | | | | Volt | 6p ee eeee eteo a eeeeee Vnla ey ttaee ee ee oe tO ee ot awe oe as Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo. .

vO

Ex. 5.1b Beethoven, String Quartet in C# Minor, op. 131, mvt. 1, mm. 1-8

movement is scored initially for string quartet and tenor in the ungainly— now as well as for nineteenth-century French string players—key of G# minor. Later, at the end of this aria, additional ties emerge. Berlioz copied Beethoven’s transition to the succeeding movement, writing a pulsating series of dynamic attacks (sf-diminuendo-piano) that lead directly to a triple meter movement with a tonal center a half step lower (which Beethoven begins with an eight-and-a-half-measure pedal and Berlioz nine). Through similarities of rhythm, instrumentation, and key, Berlioz made a private connection to a work of Beethoven’s that had come as a revelation nearly twenty-five years earlier. He recorded his impressions of the premiere of op. 131 on three different occasions: in his memoirs, in a review soon af-

ter the performance in the Correspondant, and in a personal letter from about the same time. Berlioz expressed himself in typically dramatic terms in the third installment of his biography of Beethoven (written in August

| Texting —> 93 1829, published the following October). Trying to define what sort of person was capable of understanding op. 131, Berlioz dismissed musical train-

ing as a mere preliminary: ,

Beyond this, it is necessary for one’s being to be capable of responding to that of the composer; it is necessary to have experienced the type of feelings de- picted in the music; it is necessary to know the ills described by Shakespeare: The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns , That patient merit of the unworthy takes.'¢

In the letter he wrote shortly after the premiere, Berlioz described the impact it made on the few who could grasp what they had heard: “There were

nearly three hundred there, and precisely six of us half dead with emotion .. . He soared into regions where one breathes with difficulty.”!” The images of this description are literally those of the text Berlioz set, which de-

scribes the physically arduous journey of Mary and Joseph through the desert into the city of Sais, of three days without water, burning sand, the death of their mule, and their own arrival “out of breath, near death” (haletants, presque mourants). Berlioz derived from Beethoven’s op. 131 the appropriate musical texture, and from his own reaction to that quartet, the symbolic meaning. Recognition of texting as an accepted source of vocal motives and melo-

dies provides the background necessary for understanding a resemblance that has long been recognized—by the select audience that knows both pieces—between the beautiful Danish song “Se, Natten er svanger med Vellugt fin” by P. E. Lange-Miller and the very similar melody in the Allegro

scherzando of Saint-Saéns’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in G Minor (Ex. 5.2). The Concerto dates from 1868, the song from the incidental music to “Der var engang,” a comedy that premiered in January 1887. For the theme of his Serenade, Lange-Miiller changed the tempo from fast to Andantino, the me-

ter from 6/8 to 12/8, and the key from Bb (at the entry of this theme) to D); | he also changed the approach to the upper seventh by leaping directly in the

| first phrase. From the moment the seventh is reached, the phrase proceeds identically, including the echo of the melody that begins on the seventh without the pickup. At the soloist’s second phrase Lange-Miiller is faithful to the beginning of Saint-Saéns’s theme—he reinserts the second scale degree (Bb)—but alters the ending. The likelihood that this is more than coincidence

94 4 = ume se re Ee

Chorus LE«=?—b-+5—8——— ——— ees FD HD

Male | Faye =p>= ee | Chorus [X*~> Ex.5.2b P. E. Lange-Miiller, Musik til Holger Drachmans AEventyrkomedie “Der var engang,” op. 25, no. 3, Serenade

stems from the interest that each composer had in the other’s country: Lange-Miiller served as a bridge between Danish Romantic styles and those of Delibes, Saint-Saéns, Bizet, and others,'!8 and Saint-Saéns had traveled to Denmark. The differences in tempo, key, meter, and genre are typical transformations. In cases such as this when a composer texts a lesser-known work without a public critical tradition, detection of a symbolic meaning is not possible. Fanny Mendelssohn confessed to Felix in 1829 that she had texted a melody from the Andante of his Fantasy (Sonata écossaise, op. 28) and explained it to him as a form of musical wit: “please don’t laugh over my naiveté in the three part lied [“Wiedersehn”]. I know very well where it originated and you do too, but that is precisely the joke. Is it my fault that you already had the idea last year?”!? If this suggests that texting could also be inspired by

| the kind of instinct for play evident in some musical sphinxes, Fanny’s justification may mask a more complex rationale, for this was not the only __ such texting of one of her brother’s works. A few weeks later Fanny composed another chorus, the four-voice lied “Nachtreigen,” beginning with the motive that Felix had used as the main melody for his String Quartet in ED

Texting ——> 95

Major, op. 12, which he had begun a half year earlier in January 1829. When the motive returns in the alto part—Fanny’s part—eight measures later, the resemblance is lengthened (Ex. 5.3).?° Among other examples, Clara Schumann began her setting of the Heine poem “Sie liebten sich beide” with the motive that she had previously composed in January 1842 for the Rondo finale of her Piano Sonata in G Minor (Ex. 5.4); and Brahms derived motives for at least two of his lieder from in-

| strumental compositions. He acknowledged but did not explain basing his song “Uniiberwindlich” on a motive from a Scarlatti sonata by marking it in the published score. From the same set, as I will show in Chapter 6, he derived more than a little inspiration for “Die Mainacht” from Chopin’s Impromptu no. 2.

In a few instances, indications of a personal meaning exist because a texting is part of a multiple allusion, as for several other lieder by Brahms. In three cases Brahms texted a motive while also alluding to another work

with the same motive. Brahms begins his lied “Uber die See” (op. 69, no. 7) ] with a clear motivic and textual allusion to Robert Schumann’s “Hoch, hoch sind die Berge” (op. 138, no. 8). Brahms also maintains the moder- ~ ate tempo and triple meter (Ex. 5.5). These songs use the wide leaps of the opening motive mimetically to convey a sense of physical distance: for Schumann the leaping sixth symbolizes the height of the mountains, for Brahms it is the distance over the sea. In both songs this distance expresses

: Allegro moderato Sapa

———————— Es rau-schen die Baume

Ex. 5.3a Fanny Mendelssohn, “Nachtreigen,” m. 1 Allegro con tardante

Sf

Ex. 5.3b Felix Mendelssohn, String Quartet in Eb Major, op. 12, mvt. 1, mm. 17-21

Wir wan-deln und wal - te, wir wan - dein ‘ind

Ex. 5.3c “Nachtreigen,” mm. 9-10

7f) anaawa—|eeD i Se oo

96 s—~— MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION Nicht schnell

a

Sie

ot? ae oS He BE e918 1 Or te SOsSnnnEoa CCG CEG DT Ex. 5.4a Clara Schumann, “Sie liebten sich beide,” op. 13, no. 2, mm. 1-4

——————~ , aondo A+ [be |ee ==oe =—pe> ae - aa pe BaCn SS he Rond

et 8“gtrolie—gt4eghfff 9 aFtaaHh pg ZT Ex. 5.4b C. Schumann, Piano Sonata in G Minor (1842), mvt. 4, mm. 1-5 Andante

(5-4 oeSSFE A SE Aoe NS ES SOU8DEON EE ; U-ber die See, fern ii - ber die See

Ex. 5.5a Brahms, “Uber die See,” op. 69, no. 7, mm. 1—4

7A > a a . Se ee ee . Nicht geschwind

Hoch, hoch sind die Ber - ge und steil Ex. 5.5b R. Schumann, “Hoch, hoch sind die Berge,” op. 138, no. 8, mm. 3-5

po —-+9 eo WG EE TL SD AOS > a Rondo

Ex. 5.5c C. Schumann, Piano Sonata in G Minor, , Rondo Finale, second theme, mm. 55-57

‘Texting ——> 97

follow. ,

the same poetic end: abandoned women lament that their lovers have gone far away, crossing geographical barriers too substantial for the women to

It probably did not escape either Schumann or Brahms that Clara

Schumann had previously used this same motive in her Piano Sonata in G Minor (Ex. 5.5c). The second theme of the Rondo Finale is in a different key and in duple meter, but Robert and Clara both harmonize this motive over an e> pedal, and Brahms descends from the high g with steps down a sixth. This is the same Rondo that Clara had turned to for the theme of her song “Sie liebten sich beide.” Perhaps a much older Brahms had his debt to this song in mind when he admitted to Clara in 1891 that he had been inspired by her melodies many times in his life. Urging her not to suppress a composition of hers that was indebted to one of his, he argued: “if you do, I ought by rights to put against my best melodies ‘Really by Clara Schumann.’”?! - This is essentially the relationship between Brahms’s “Der Tod, das ist die kithle Nacht,” op. 96, no. 1, and the theme that begins the slow movement of Robert Schumann’s Piano Sonata, op. 22. But Schumann’s slow move-

ment is itself based on an early unpublished song that he had written in ,

Brahms set.?? | 1828. As William Horne has demonstrated convincingly, Schumann’s text “Im Herbste” is essentially “a hidden commentary” on the Heine poem that

Brahms composed a multiple allusion to a texted and an untexted work for his lied “Wehe, so willst du mich wieder,” op. 32, no. 5 (1864), which is _ based on a theme by Mendelssohn (Ex. 5.6). The melody for the entire first line of text virtually quotes the B-minor melody from Mendelssohn’s Andante cantabile e Presto agitato; moreover, the meter, the fast tempo, and details of the harmonization are also related. The bass line at the end is the same, otherwise the stepwise motion of the bass reverses direction. Moreover, the tritone harmonization with which Brahms begins is also found at the climactic presentation of the theme by Mendelssohn. But Brahms evidently also makes a second allusion to Mendelssohn in “Wehe, so willst du mich wieder,” namely to the arioso “Weh’ ihnen, dass sie von mir weichen!” (Woe unto them who forsake Him) in Elijah, an arioso that uses the same motive (Ex. 5.6c). This, in other words, was likely to have been understood by Brahms as an example of Mendelssohn adding text to a motive that he | had previously used in an instrumental context; and so Brahms, to signal his

recognition of the similarity, used the motive to set a verse that recalled Mendelssohn’s text. Mendelssohn composed the Andante cantabile e Presto

agitato in June 1838, shortly after he had received a draft libretto for Elijah. | A third appearance of this idea in one of Mendelssohn’s last works sug-

98 s~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

Presto agitato . OO 8 — aa ee a Oe ee Pe

Ex. 5.6a Felix Mendelssohn, Andante cantabile e Presto agitato (1838), Presto theme

Na ee PTE ee Cee Allegro

We - he, so willst du michwie-der hem-men de fes - sel um - fang - en

Ex. 5.6b Brahms, “Wehe, so willst du mich wieder,” op. 32, no. 5 (1864), mm. 2-6

Weh' ih-nen, dass sie von mir wei- chen Ex. 5.6c Mendelssohn, Elijah, no. 18, “Weh’ ihnen, dass sie von mir weichen!” , Allegro vivace assai

Ex. 5.6d Mendelssohn, String Quartet in F Minor, op. 80, mvt. 1, mm. 41-44

Presto agitato — Ex. 5.6e Mendelssohn, Andante cantabile e Presto agitato, Presto theme transposed

gests that it had a special significance for him. In the first movement of his String Quartet in F Minor, op. 80, a variant of this theme occurs midway through the exposition at the bridge (m. 41). Examples 5.6d and e compare this passage to a transposition of his Presto agitato theme. Although the movement is in duple meter, Mendelssohn in fact shifts to 12/8 by writing triplets on every beat of these measures. Many distinctive turns are present in both: the diminished fourth (ab-e4), the tritone (g-db), the ensuing arpeggiation up a third higher (to high c), and the half cadence on e4. The prominence that Mendelssohn accorded this theme by including it in three compo-

‘Texting —> 99

for his song. , | sitions in his last decade may have encouraged Brahms to use it as the basis

C&> IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY texting fell into disrepute. Popular songwriters of the 1930s and 1940s struck commercial gold by writing lyrics to the melodies of Chopin, Chaikovsky, and Rachmaninov (the popularity of Slavic composers continues, with the rock singer Sting borrowing a theme from Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kije Suite for his song “The Russians”).23 The most substantial scholarly exercise in texting has attracted its share of scorn. In 1936 Arnold Schering attempted with his book Beethoven und die Dichtung (Beethoven and Poetry) to prove that the melodies of Beethoven’s symphonies and sonatas were essentially dramatic works from which poetic texts had been removed. He then attempted to reunite specific texts of Goethe, Schiller, and others with specific compositions, matching individual notes and syllables. In this way the Third Symphony was “about” The Iliad, the Sixth about James Thomson’s The Seasons, and the Seventh Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Although Schering brought together literary and musical works that had been written over a century earlier, the principle he espoused—little did he know—had survived into his generation with Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. Berg’s secret program surfaced only because he took the trouble to copy out an autograph score with his private texts underlaid.”* The unstable, fluid mixture of criticism and composition evident in texting is not an artistic aberration; it is at the center of Romantic creativity. While criticism is often seen to be at the opposite end of the creative spectrum from composition, Romantic composition and criticism were linked

| by metaphor (as we will explore further in Chapter 9). The use of allusion evident in Berlioz’s “L’Arrivée a Sais” creates a metaphorical relationship between it and his reading of Beethoven’s op. 131 Quartet, as did Wagner in composing the beginning of Act III of Tristan to correspond both musically and dramatically to his interpretation of op. 131, and again in his texting of the Eroica “new theme” in Tristan. In the case of these allusions and many _ others, the metaphorical language with which critics described the meaning they perceived in specific works corresponds to the metaphorical level of meaning that composers achieved by means of allusion. In the persons of Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner, and several other nineteenth-century composers, critic and composer were one. Texting and allusion have much in common—much more than their obvious difference suggests. Wagner’s act of texting a motive from the Eroica in Tristan appears to be the opposite of Schumann’s allusion to An die ferne Geliebte in his Second Symphony. The one adds text to an instrumental mo-

100 -—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

tive; the other omits the text in its new instrumental setting. But this difference is misleading, on two grounds: first, any instrumental work potentially has dramatic or poetic associations. In the case of the Eroica these have always been a part of the work’s public identity; but in other cases, such as Brahms’s texting of Schumann’s Piano Sonata, op. 22, the composer may be aware of a private program or textual association, in this instance an early, unpublished Schumann song. Second, since most of the allusions discussed in this book involve an allusion of one texted work to another, it is reasonable to consider these allusions to be in some sense “retextings.” One text is substituted for another, either to assimilate a meaning or to create a contrastive meaning. This spectrum of substitutions ranges from short allusions to a well-known motive or theme (as with Schubert’s Mass in G and Fidelio) to lengthy retextings of a movement reworked from a work the composer had not published (as Beethoven did in Fidelio to Vestas Feuer). Both allusion and texting (of individual motives, not entire works) require a composer to incorporate ideas from another work. Both practices therefore raise questions about the nature of inspiration and originality, since they forced composers to be derivative in precisely that aspect of composition in which they were most expected to draw on their own imaginations— namely, the composition of motives and themes. In order to consider this question in some detail, I will focus now on an extended example of texting

by Brahms, a song that figures in one of the few recorded accounts of Brahms discussing his views of artistic inspiration and creativity.

, If ever any author deserved the name of an Original, it was Shakespear. ... The poetry of Shakespear was inspiration indeed: he is not so much an Imitator, as an Instrument of Nature; and ’tis not so just to say he speaks from her, as that she speaks through him.

—ALEXANDER POPE! , , Why does it happen that so many characters only display their originality after they have looked to others for support? Like the great Shakespeare himself, who, it is well known, found much of the material of his plays in novels and works of older writers. —ROBERT SCHUMANN (AS “EUSEBIUS”)?

LLUSION POSED a particular challenge to public perceptions of a © composer’s originality. With critics poised to raise the specter of “theft” or “plagiarism” about any reminiscence that was too faithful to its source, composers had ample reason to shield their allusions. Zellner’s Berlin review of Mendelssohn’s G-Minor Piano Concerto, in which he described “a plagiarism of Grétry” in the slow movement and one of Weber in the Finale, is not at all unusual. Kant addressed this peril when he described how one genius influences another. Having asserted that “originality must be [the] primary property” of genius, Kant reasoned that “the product of genius...is an example, not for imitation (for that would mean the loss of the element of genius, and just the very soul of the work), but to be followed by another genius—one whom it arouses to a sense of his own originality.”?

102 *~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

More self-consciously than in other eras, composers, writers, and artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were subject to what has been termed “the originality paradox,” a modernist tension between individual originality and the need to be a part of a cultural/national tradition.*

Those who aspired to greatness, to a reputation for genius, had to nurture their claims to originality. Were there not an equally strong desire to be lauded in comparison to the revered masters of preceding generations, to take a place alongside the predecessors in the tradition, originality would have been at once easier to attain and less prized. But as Pope’s and Schumann’s opposing views of Shakespeare’s creativity indicate, there were also those who acknowledged the limitations of originality. Although _ Wordsworth expressed the common view when he wrote that “genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe,” Novalis spoke for others in his dissent: “Ideas interest us either for their content... or their origins, their history, their circumstances. ... That which is new interests us less, for one sees that so much can be made out of the old.”° In Also sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche expressed the relationship of tradition and originality in teleological terms: the creator progressed through two stages, defined

first by the capacity to bear the weight of tradition—symbolized by the camel—and second by rebellion against the tradition—symbolized by the lion. Only then could the third and truly creative stage, that of the child, follow.®

Because of the accepted correlation between genius and originality, com__ posers since Mozart and Haydn have been quicker to deny than to acknowledge musical debts to predecessors and contemporaries. In some cases these denials are patently false. Beethoven, for example, after being asked in 1798 how frequently he attended operas by Mozart, reportedly demurred, “I do not know them and do not care to hear the music of others lest I forfeit some of my originality.” Yet already as a member of the orchestra for the Court Theater in Bonn, Beethoven had performed several operas by various composers, including three by Mozart: Die Entfiihrung aus dem Serail (1789 and 1791), Don Giovanni (1790), and Le Nozze di Figaro (1790).”? Moreover, after arriving in Vienna in search of Mozart’s spirit, he had written

variations on several of Mozart’s arias: “Se vuol ballare” (1793); “La ci darem la mano” (1796); and in 1798, the same year in which Beethoven revealed his anxiety about guarding his originality, he wrote his Variations on “Ein Madchen oder Weibchen” from The Magic Flute. At times there seemed to be no limit to what nineteenth-century composers and their friends could deny. One of Mendelssohn’s friends attempted to refute claims that Mendelssohn’s choral symphony, the Lobgesang, was indebted to Bee-

[nspiration —~ 103 thoven’s Ninth, a debt immediately recognized in the harshest terms by the first listeners. Wilhelm Adolf Lampadius, however, defended the symphony: “To me, the Lobgesang is one of the greatest and most ingenious of all Men~ delssohn’s works, . . . his entire individuality, free of any reliance on an existing model, is manifested in its purest and most pleasing manner.”® When a work by a composer considered to be a genius contained a passage that resembled a theme by another composer, it was (and still is) not uncommon for partisans to explain the likeness as an “unconscious borrowing,” as Wagner’s biographer William Ashton Ellis did for the resemblances to Liszt’s Faust-Symphonie in Die Walkiire (see Ex. 3.8). This explanation rests on the belief that works of originality and genius spring from a composer’s unconscious, while works of a lower caliber come from the conscious minds of more modest talents. Typically, Eduard Hanslick’s view of musical representation depends on his unidirectional notion of how a composer creates motives and melodies: The manner in which a creative act takes place in the mind of the composer of instrumental music gives us the most reliable insight into the nature of physical beauty. A musical idea simply turns up in the composer’s imagination; he elaborates it. It takes shape progressively, like a crystal, until imperceptibly the form of the completed product stands before him in its main outlines, and there remains only to realize it artistically, checking, measuring, revising. The composer of a piece of instrumental music does not have in mind the representation

ofa specific content.’ Accordingly, any association with a poem or story had to follow the musical creation, as Mahler and a host of others maintained. If musical ideas (motives, themes) simply “turn up” in a composer’s mind, it could hardly be otherwise. Again, Schumann offers another perspective, this in a review of Sterndale Bennett’s Sketches: “In which way... the Sketches arose, whether from inner to outer or the reverse, does not affect the matter and no one can decide. The composers usually do not know themselves; one says one thing and the other another; often an external picture takes the lead, often again this is called forth by a melodic phrase.”

The “either-or” approach to the conscious-unconscious duality, which | still informs many discussions of musical creativity, overlooks the rich and complex possibilities for two-way exchanges between conscious and unconscious creativity, exchanges that were already acknowledged in the nineteenth century. Composers’ letters and sketches show that the path from initial musical inception to finished published work often progressed through many stages over a span of years, including multiple drafts, informal perfor-

104 -—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

mances for friends, and pre-publication performances for larger audiences. For Brahms this process could stretch across decades. The opportunities for

a composer to get to know his own work in relationship to other works were therefore numerous, extended, and varied. However the ideas for a piece came to a composer—whether via a dream or through conscious allu-

sion to an earlier work—by the time a work was sent off for publication, the , composer had had time to recognize unintended musical similarities with other works and then to enhance, obscure, ignore, or remove them. Each of these responses has implications for the issue of intentionality. The composition of musical motives and themes was unquestionably held to be a deeply personal activity, the result of an inspired creative process beyond the understanding even of the composers themselves. While composers appropriated formal structures, harmonic vocabulary, and elements of or-

chestration, they were from the beginning of their careers encouraged to fashion their own motives and themes. When Carl Czerny advised novices in his School of Practical Composition to model their compositional structures on masterpieces, he cautioned them that “the ideas, melodies, and passages, must be entirely different from the chosen original.”!! When ideas were borrowed without alteration, the debt was often acknowledged publicly by calling attention to the source by means of titles (“Variations on a

theme by .. .”), by annotations in the score, or by blatant quotations of well-known chants, chorale melodies, or folksongs. Otherwise, as Arthur Schopenhauer had formulated it in The World as Will and Representation (1819), “The invention of melody, the revelation in it of all the deepest secrets of human desire and emotion, is the work of genius, whose impact is more immediately apparent here than anywhere else, genius that is so far removed from any reflection and conscious intention that it could be called in-

spiration.” With motives regarded as the musical equivalent of an idea and indivisibly linked to the presence of genius, composers—if they spoke of their musical creativity at all—invariably described the creation of a motive as the result of a mystical process. Brahms, in a conversation from 1876 later reported by his friend George Henschel, claimed a heavenly inspiration for his ideas:}3

“There is no real creating,” he said, “without hard work. That which you would call invention, that is to say, a thought, an idea, is simply an inspiration from above, for which I am not responsible, which is no merit of mine. Yea, it is a present, a gift, which I ought even to despise until I have made it my own by right of hard work. And there need be no hurry about that either. It is as with

[nspiration —> 105 the seed-corn; it germinates unconsciously and in spite of ourselves. When I, for

instance, have found the first phrase of a song, say, : [first phrase of Brahms, “Die Mainacht” (Ex. 6.1a)] I might shut the book there and then, go for a walk, do some other work, and perhaps not think of it again for months. Nothing, however, is lost. If afterward I approach the subject again, it is sure to have taken shape; J can now begin to really work at it.”

Composers’ accounts of their own creativity need to be accepted with caution, never more so than in the nineteenth century. This report is typical of how many Romantic composers, writers, and artists described their creative habits; it is particularly interesting because, despite his description of heaven-sent, self-germinating “seed-corn,” Brahms arguably derived the motives and structure of his song from Chopin’s Impromptu no. 2. C&S THE sTANDARD VIEWS Of creativity in the nineteenth century had in common the two elements identified by Brahms: inspiration and work, processes linked respectively with the unconscious and the conscious. This pair-

ing of opposing creative activities appeared in Friedrich Schlegel’s 1798 definition of Romanticism: “Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism.” !4 For some the moment of inspiration came in dreams or somnambulistic trances. Wagner was particularly vocal about having derived many musical ideas from dreams. Other inspired dreamers evidently included Schubert, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and— perhaps most important for Wagner—Arthur Schopenhauer. Schubert’s lieder-singing friend, Johann Michael Vogl] (d. 1840), reputedly claimed that “Schubert was in a somnambulistic state whenever he wrote music. This explains how, in this visionary condition, the scarcely educated boy could see

into the secrets of life, have the emotions, the knowledge.”!5 This sort of musical vision may have originated in Hoffmann’s 1813 essay “The Poet and the Composer,” where he expressed himself through the character Ludwig: “Iam willing to admit that my imagination may well be lively enough to devise several good subjects for an opera; indeed, especially when at night

a slight headache produces in me that dreamlike state halfway between sleeping and waking, I not only conceive quite good, genuinely romantic op-

, eras, but actually see them performed before me together with my music.” ! Although Wagner revealed a good deal about the poetic sources of his music dramas, he closed the public door on inquiries into the sources for his musical motives by his hearty endorsement of Romantic views that under-

106 s~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

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108 s—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

stood motives to spring from the dream-filled unconscious of light-sleeping geniuses. In remarks very much intended for public consumption, this is the process that Wagner described for his composition of Das Rheingold: hav-

ing fallen into “a kind of somnambulistic state,” he dreamed of “swiftly flowing water,” heard specific musical ideas, and then “with the feeling that the waves were now foaming high over me, I awoke in a sudden terror from

my half-sleep. I recognized at once that the overture to The Rheingold, which I had been carrying about, although I had been unable to find it ex~ actly, had risen up within me.”!” Wagner embellished on this description in 1879, generalizing the process of composing a motive. After drifting into a

, dream-like consideration of a character, the “dramatic composer” should sit in a twilight where he can see but the glance of [the character’s] eye: if it speak to him, the shape itself maybe now will begin to move, and that perhaps will scare him—but he must not mind; at last its lips will part, and a ghostly voice breathe something so real, so altogether seizable, and yet so never-heard—that it wakes him from his dream. Everything has vanished; but in his mental ear it still rings on: he has had an ‘inspiration,’ and it is a so-called musical ‘motive.’!®

Schopenhauer had set the tone for this denial of conscious and reasoned creativity in The World as Will and Representation (1819): “The composer reveals the innermost essence of the world and expresses the deepest wisdom in a language that his reason does not understand; in the same way a mesmerized somnambulist reveals truths of which he has no conception when awake.” !’

After Wagner, the claims for dream creation grew, as in the report of one of the many Americans who went to study in Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Edgar Stillman Kelley, who studied in Stuttgart during the 1870s and later taught music at Yale and in Berlin, made extravagant claims for his dreams. To quote a contemporaneous report by Rupert Hughes: “An interesting subject is suggested by Kelley’s experience in hunting out a good motif for the galloping horses of ‘Macbeth.’ He could find

nothing suitably representative of storm-hoofed chargers till his dreams came to the rescue with a genuinely inspired theme. Several other exquisite ideas have come to him in his sleep in this way. . .. On one occasion he even dreamed an original German poem and a fitting musical setting.”*°

For Brahms, however, inspiration came as an unexpected gift from heaven, a venerable view of creative genius voiced in the generations preceding Brahms by, among others, Kant, Goethe, and Beethoven, as well as by

the most widely published nineteenth-century writer on the unconscious, Eduard von Hartmann. In Table 6.1 I have divided Henschel’s recollection

[nspiration —~ 109 of Brahms into six clauses and compared them to a few of the writings or reported views of these four figures. The notion of “inspiration from above” in §II compares to Goethe’s reliance on “unexpected gifts from above.” The |

more mundane work then required to develop the inspiration (§III) follows , views expressed long before by Kant. Finally, Brahms’s faith in his memory and patience echoes Louis Schlosser’s famous account of Beethoven’s cre-

ative powers. , ,

Brahms’s recollection of how the motive for “Die Mainacht” came to him © is especially interesting because of numerous correspondences between “Die Mainacht” and Chopin’s Impromptu in F# Major, op. 36, no. 2. As indicated in Ex. 6.1a, the opening motives are very close. So too are the second and

fourth phrases of “Die Mainacht.” For phrase two Brahms makes a subtle alteration in verse three that exactly aligns the rhythms of the two motives. Here and at the change to B major for phrase four, Brahms grows ever closer in his choice of pitches. In addition to motive, both Chopin and Brahms use

Y 0 Eo = Te es —__

. A Sehr langsam und ausdrucksvoll

——————

Any Allegretto

Ex. 6.1a (top) Brahms, “Die Mainacht,” op. 43, no. 2, mm. 3-4, phrase one;

(bottom) Chopin, Impromptu no. 2, op. 36, , mm. 7-8

: eT ee ee a | A Verse 1 _ —_

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, Ex. 6.1b (top) Brahms, mm. 6-8, phrase two; , (middle) Chopin, mm. 13-15; (bottom) Brahms, mm. 36-38

110 «~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

Ex. 6.1c (top) Brahms, mm. 15-16, phrase four; (bottom) Chopin, mm. — 25-26

the same formal plan—ABA—and key scheme—the middle section of each is a major third lower: for Brahms it is Eb major to B major and back, for Chopin F# major to D major and back. And where Chopin proceeds with six-measure phrases in common time, Brahms’s phrases are three measures long in cut time.

In “Die Mainacht” as in the songs by Brahms discussed in Chapter 5, , there is something more than simple appropriation of an instrumental motive. With regard to the motives he texted from Schumann and Mendelssohn, he evidently recognized an instance when the earlier composer consciously texted a previously instrumental motive, and signaled his awareness

by alluding to both in a single composition. So how then are we to reconcile Brahms’s lieder references to works by Chopin, Mendelssohn, and the two Schumanns with the Brahms-Henschel account of motivic inspiration? Those who accept the inspirational process described by Henschel will want to interpret the resemblances in Brahms to the earlier works as coincidental, while those, like Harold Bloom, who understand the Henschel report as another instance of a nineteenth-century composer anxiously posturing, will interpret the resemblances as purposeful allusions, or even as the sort of analytical commentary on two earlier works that modern observers express instead in scholarly papers, using notes instead of words. But there may be a middle path that makes it possible to narrow the distance between these two familiar views.

C&D WHATEVER resemblance Brahms’s account of his creative habits bears to Goethe, there is a strong affinity to Eduard von Hartmann’s hugely popular theories of the unconscious, which he expounded in his Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten). First published in 1868, it expanded to two volumes for the seventh edition in 1876, the year that Henschel gives for his conversation with Brahms. The sixth edition (1877) was translated into French, the eighth (1879) into Spanish, and the ninth (1884) into English. Frequently reviewed in the popular press, Hartmann’s _

_ [nspiration —= 111 account of the unconscious mind ranks easily as the most widely disseminated before Freud.*! The section of most relevance for evaluating Brahms’s account is that on “The Unconscious in the Aesthetic Judgment and in Artistic Production.” Although Hartmann treats this topic at some length, the

ideas that Henschel attributed to Brahms all can be found within a few pages of each other and in the same sequence. In Table 6.1 segment Ila stresses the passive role of the artist at the moment of inspiration and de- _ scribes the thought as descending from above; $IIb continues in this vein, calling the thought a gift; §III states the responsibility of the artist to develop the gift; §IV identifies two important elements, “unconscious germination” and the traditional metaphor of seed-corn; §V acknowledges the importance of the initial idea; and § VI describes how the germination takes place over time. Several possible scenarios could account for the similarities: (1) Brahms had read Hartmann or some of the numerous reviews of

Hartmann’s work; (2) Henschel had read Hartmann and either attributed those views to Brahms or rephrased Brahms’s account in light of having read

Hartmann, perhaps years later; or more probably, (3) the views attributed to Brahms and the theory of Hartmann are so similar because they both espouse views that had already been circulating for generations throughout Europe. The strangest sentence in Henschel’s recollection of Brahms, and the sen-

tence which most indicates that Henschel is actually recording Brahms rather than attributing his own ideas to Brahms, is that in §IIb and III: “Yea, it is a present, a gift, which I ought even to despise until I have made it my own by right of hard work.” I understand this as the plight of any composer working in the latter half of the century, realizing that any idea, any motive, would have many predecessors and precedents, and thus many opportunities for allusion. As Schumann put it: a composer “must also know his con-

temporaries, from the first to the last. .. . He who omits to do this, must continually remain in uncertainty with regard to his own relationship to the present and with regard to the compass of his own powers.”””

If we take Brahms at his word, the following scenario is plausible: as Brahms contemplated setting the poem “Die Mainacht,” the opening motive popped into his head. Whether this sort of inspiration came from above (for Brahms) or from within (for Wagner), it came from somewhere other than the conscious intellect. The moment at which Brahms then felt moved to despise this gift was the moment when Brahms, now a conscious worker and critic, recognized this motive as having previously been used by Chopin. In the next phase of composition, Brahms began the process of making this musical seed-corn his own, through a combination of “unconscious germination” and conscious “hard work.”

112 ~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

The theories of Hartmann provide a contemporaneous basis for elaborating Henschel’s skeletal report. Hartmann built on the ideas of several predecessors when he described “all artistic activity as a constant interfusion of unconscious and conscious activity, in which each side is equally indispensable to the other.”23 Modern studies of creativity have developed this notion much further, specifying the contributions of several levels of consciousness and showing that conscious and unconscious processes contaminate each other.2+ By recognizing that musical composition involves an extended period of interaction between phases of “passive reception” and “active production,” it becomes possible to understand how a composer could have “an original idea” which was later recognized to have associations; conversely, even material consciously adapted from other composers could develop in a composer’s unconscious. What is particularly revealing about Brahms’s treatment of Chopin’s opening motive is that in making it “his own,” he did not abandon Chopin’s treatment of the motive; rather, the process is better described as a confrontation or a challenge that had Brahms deriving elements of structure, harmony, phrasing, and motive from Chopin, but doing so in a way that ended up bearing the unmistakable imprint of Brahms.

Two elements of Goethe’s views are relevant and complementary: his awareness of his debt to the past, and his opinion that creative thought involves a two-way traffic between conscious and unconscious thought processes. Having related the need to develop unconscious talent with artistic craft, Goethe continued, “Here begin the manifold relations between the conscious and unconscious. Take for example a talented musician, compos-

ing an important score: consciousness and unconsciousness will be like warp and weft.”* This traffic is supplemented (or confused) by another: __ that between the writer and other writers (or the composer and other composers). When sharp-eyed German critics discovered the same verses present in publications of Goethe and Schiller, Goethe reportedly responded with this unusually candid account of how closely the two friends worked: “We have made many distichs together; sometimes I gave the thought and Schiller made the verse; sometimes the contrary; sometimes he made one line, and I the other.” Goethe went on to say that “we owe our development | to a thousand influences of the great world, from which we appropriate what we can and what is suitable.”26 From Henschel’s account we have Brahms attributing his works to three sources: to inspiration “from above,” to unconscious gestation, and to conscious work. What he does not say here

about his debt to others can be gleaned from other comments, from his reverence for Schumann, Beethoven, Bach, and others, and above all, from his music. His appropriation of Chopin in “Die Mainacht” works much

[nspiration —~> 113 as Goethe described his relation with Schiller, with Chopin supplying the

thought and Brahms the execution. , We can observe a similar process in a work of Brahms based on an idea | ~ very much shaped by Mendelssohn and Schumann. In 1856 Brahms engaged in protracted counterpoint studies with Joseph Joachim, including many exercises in canonic writing.2” Among these were three movements of __ the work now known as the Missa canonica. Without telling Joachim of his source, Brahms chose as his subject for the Agnus Dei the same idea that Mendelssohn had treated in a four-voice choral fugue on a text that was little more than a Kyrie eleison translated into English and German (Ex. 6.2a). Mendelssohn had composed his “Lord Have Mercy Upon Us” in 1833 (Ex. 6.2b), with a theme that Schumann later chose for the slow movement of his D-Minor Trio, op. 63 (1847-1848) (Ex. 6.2c). In order to put a little dis-

py PF espressy lg Adagio

Andante |

| A - gnus De - i qui tol - lis pec - ca - ta mun - di Ex.6.2a Brahms, Missa canonica, Agnus Dei, mm. 1-7

p) oN Mm —— Ogee le ede fete.

| TT ee es a Se ee ce VV

Lord! Lord! Lord - have mer-cy have mer - cy u- pon us, Herr! Herr! Herr, - sei gnd-dig sei gna - dig un-serm’ Fleh'n

Ex. 6.2b Mendelssohn, Vocal-Chor zum Abendsegen (to the Evening Service)

115 Even Wagner, despite his obfuscatory comments quoted earlier, argued the necessity of conscious processes in a letter (1 January 1847) to one incapable of agreeing with him, namely Hanslick: “the unconsciously created work of art belongs to periods remote from our own: the work of art of the most advanced period of culture can be produced only by a process of conscious creation.”2? Exactly which earlier period Wagner had in mind is apparent in a later remark to Cosima in the course of explaining to her how his musical style was “predestined” by Bach’s: “In him you find all the seeds which later flourished in so fertile a soil as Beethoven’s imagination; much of what Bach wrote down was done unconsciously, as if in a dream; my ‘unending melody’ is predestined in it.”3° The metaphor of the seed in fertile

| soil, together with his admission in A Communication to My Friends that the power of genius depended on the inspiration of works by predecessors and contemporaries, indicate that whatever Wagner’s public pronouncements about dreams may have been, he and Brahms held similar views of

creativity and genius. The ability to understand creativity as a series of interactions between the two extremes of conscious and unconscious mental activity allows both for

a composer to have thought of a motive independently and later become aware of a connection to another work, and for a composer to begin with a

| conscious allusion and still permit that motive to be subjected to his own unconscious thought processes. While it goes without saying that a composer could not intend a relationship without being aware of it, the reverse situation is more complex: whether or not awareness leads to intentionality | depends on the composer’s response. If a motive came to Brahms as a gift from above (“out of the blue”), and if at some later stage he recognized a relationship with the same or a similar motive in another work, then intentionality may be said to exist (1) if he liked the association with the earlier work and strengthened the resemblance; (2) if he liked the association but let the motive stand unaltered; or even (3) if he liked the association but altered his motive to make it less recognizable.

Intentionality does not occur , (4) if Brahms did not like the association but let the motive remain because the similarity was irrelevant or less important than some other | association; or

116 «~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

resemblance. :

(5) if he did not like the association and altered the motive to lessen the

Perhaps the most frequent scenario is the fourth, given the inevitability of motivic duplications; and composers were well aware that any change in a motive invited other potential correspondences. Of these possibilities, the instances most susceptible to detection by analysis are either the first or the

fifth, even if alterations to lessen resemblance would require some form of documentary or anecdotal evidence, such as Mendelssohn’s purported in-

clination to change the opening motive of the aria “O Rest in the Lord” when a British listener remarked on its likeness to a Scottish folksong. After Otto Dessoff completed his String Quartet in E he realized that it contained a passage very reminiscent of a phrase in Brahms’s Second Symphony.

He wrote a confession to Brahms in the summer of 1878, saying that he planned to rewrite the phrase. Brahms begged him not to: “Don’t spoil it, leave it alone. ... Actually I would have said nothing and then simply have taken the free goods for myself. You must not change a single note. After all, you know that I too have stolen on this occasion, and much worse than you have done.” Dessoff then allowed the quartet to be published.3! This then is — an instance of a composer recognizing a resemblance which evidently origi- _ nated unconsciously but which was detected before publication and then allowed to stand. In the particular case of “Die Mainacht,” the motive may have originated as Brahms contended, but by strengthening and adding resemblances to Chopin, by the time the song was published he was fully responsible for the similarities. He intended them. Brahms’s achievement is to have incorporated a series of ideas from an earlier work by Chopin into a new work of his own that no one would mistake for Chopin. In Kant’s formulation, Chopin had aroused Brahms “to a

sense of his own originality.” The notion that the act of appropriating an idea (motive) could be a creative rather than an imitative act is expressed by Goethe in terms of an artist’s relation to nature: “When the artist takes hold of some natural object, then the object has ceased to belong to nature; indeed, one might say that the artist creates it in this moment, in that he brings out its significant, characteristic, interesting qualities, or rather in that he infuses it with a higher value that it had not possessed.”+? At the risk of redundancy, I will lightly paraphrase Goethe, primarily by substituting “motive”

for “natural object” and “earlier composition” for “nature”: When the composer takes hold of some motive, then the motive has ceased to belong to the earlier composition; indeed, one might say that the composer creates it in this moment, in that he brings out its significant, characteristic, interest-

[nspiration —> 117 ing qualities, or rather in that he infuses it with a higher value that it had not possessed. To account for the kinds of texted allusions I have discussed in other chapters, the paraphrase would more appropriately substitute “motivic symbol” for “natural object.” In Brahms’s “Die Mainacht” and “Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mihseligen,” as in his song “Wehe, so willst du mich wieder” (Ex. 5.6), the extensive allusions occur in works

that are so thoroughly Brahmsian that the musical debts to Chopin and Mendelssohn have not previously been noticed. The examples presented in this chapter have shown how a composer could actually strengthen a motivic similarity to an earlier work and still retain his own musical voice, bringing out “significant, characteristic, interesting qualities,” infusing it with “a value that it had not possessed.”

| C H aSA7 ED PT ER ‘Naming

Language allows [us] to distinguish, to establish, to state things; in short, to name them, and by naming them to raise them into the domain of the spirit. —JOHAN HUIZINGA!

Romantic poetry ... tries to. . . poeticize wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humor. —FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL?

N HIS sTUDY of play and its roles in culture, Huizinga quickly asserts that play is based on “a certain ‘imagination’ of reality,”* or the representation of reality by means of images. His purpose was to distance his study from the notion that play is “mere” fun or “just” the exercise of wit

and to prepare the way for discussions of “Play and Law” and “Play and War” (he dated his preface from Leyden in June 1938). But he also discerns the many elements shared by art and play, including the “profoundly aesthetic quality” of play and the contribution of play to religious rituals.* It would not be difficult, according to Huizinga’s broad definition, to argue that all musical composition is play—and even more so for allusion, which is by definition a play of words or images (an idea I will pursue in Chapter 9). Each facet of allusion could be used to demonstrate its aspect as play, but that connection is particularly evident in one of the most familiar types of musical symbols, those which composers devised to represent a person.

“Naming —> 119 “Naming,” as I will call this type of musical signification, ranges in intent from the humorous and witty use of ciphers to the profoundly serious composition of musical homages for deceased friends and relatives. Composers, no less than artists and writers, have employed various strategies for honor-

ing themselves, their patrons, friends, and loved ones. They did so with widely divergent aims, some of them clearly in the spirit of wit and ingenuity, others in a more serious sense of play. Examples of representations inspired by wit probably exist in all forms and eras of art. Two from the fif-

-teenth century demonstrate the potential for manipulating either text or music: Antoine Busnois’s insertion of his own name into the text of his motet “Anthoni usque limina” (and its final words “omnibus noys”), and _ Josquin des Prez honoring his patron Ercole I d’Este with a Mass based on a subject fashioned out of the syllables of “Hercules dux ferarriae.” Musical spellings of composers’ names date at least from the felicitous coincidence of the letters B-A-C-H with the notes of the German musical scale (B = Bb and H = Bs). This sort of musical cipher does not depend on allusion, although in several examples given below, ciphers assist in the creation of an allusion. In the twentieth century no composer has indulged arcane forms of musical

signification more than Alban Berg, who created numerical symbols for himself and his mistress. Yet, however familiar spellings were to composers in the nineteenth century, other possibilities for “naming” specific individuals existed as well: the honored person could simply be identified in the title of a work, or, in the case of works written to honor another composer, the new composition could quote from or allude to one of the composer’s own

works. |

Nineteenth-century musicians knew full well that Bach had a name that worked as a musical motive. Bach had created a subject from his own name in the final fugue of the Art of Fugue, providing a challenge for later generations of German composers. In the years after his death the most prominent composer to engage in this motivic artifice was his son C. P. E. Bach, who composed his setting of Psalm 148, “Preis sei Gotte Zebaoth,” over BACH in the bass. Because this setting is the forty-first of the collection, it is clear that he meant to name his father rather than himself, forty-one being the numerical signature of J. S. Bach.’ For his own name, C. P. E. Bach had a different motive, CFE BACH, contrived from the Italian version of his name, Carlo Filippo Emanuele.* Several BACH fugues existed by 1800, one by J. G. Albrechtsberger composed in 1753 and published in 1784; one in Bb major ascribed both to Bach and his son Johann Christian (but now attributed to Justin Heinrich Knecht) and published about 1799; and three by Georg Andreas Sorge, with manuscript copies now surviving in Vienna,

120 -~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

Table 7.1 Compositions with motives derived from names, c. 1820-1865

Composer Title and Op. no. Year Name Fanny Mendelssohn Ubungssttick in G Minor 1823 Bach

Fanny Mendelssohn Sonata o Capriccio in F Minor 1824 Bach

Fanny Mendelssohn Sonata in C Minor, mvt. 4 1824 Bach Beethoven Canon on B-A-C-H (WoO 191) 1825 Bach, Kuhlau Schumann Thema tiber den Namen Abegg, op.1 1830 (Meta) Abegg

Fanny Hensel Cantata Hiob 1831 Bach Fanny Hensel Oratorium nach Bildern der Bibel, 1831 Bach

op. 6 mvt. 12

Fanny Hensel String Quartet in Eb, mvt. 4 1834 Bach

Schumann Carnaval, op. 9 1835 Scha; Asch

Gade Drei kleine Clavierstiicke, op. 2 1842 Gade; Bach Gade Sonata fiir Pianoforte und Violin, 1842 Gade (+ edag)

op. 60

Schumann Piano Quintet in Eb, mvt.1,0p.44 1842 Bach

Fanny Hensel Allegro agitato in G Minor 1843 Bach

Fanny Hensel — “Im Herbst” 1844 Bach Schumann Sechs Fugen iiber den Namen Bach, 1845 Bach

Schumann Symphony no. 2, 2™ Trio, Finale, 1845 Bach ! — op. 61

Fanny Hensel “Schone Fremde,” op. 3, #2 1846 Bach

Fanny Hensel “Im Herbste,” op. 3, #3 1846 Bach

Mendelssohn String Quartet in F Minor, op. 80 1847 Bach Schumann “Nordisches Lied,” Album ftir die 1848 Gade Jugend, op. 68

London, and elsewhere.’ Beethoven’s friend, the composer and pianist Ferdinand Ries, may have known of these, because during at least one of his concerts in 1813 he played a fantasy and fugue on BACH, and in 1817 a

formed in Vienna.®

fugue on BACH was orchestrated by Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried and perSchumann termed this kind of signature motive a musical “sphinx,” in recognition of the enigmatic meaning that this kind of motive contained.

Perhaps he was also aware that his beloved Shakespeare had grouped sphinxes with music to define love in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a play that had been translated into German and published in 1825: “Subtill as Sphinx, as sweet and musical, As bright Apollo’s lute.”? Such sphinxes became more common after about 1830 (see Table 7.1), perhaps as a result of the rise in Bach’s popular stature that began at this time. In the latter part of 1824 Beethoven sketched the beginning idea for an Overture on BACH, in conjunc-

| ‘Naming ——> 121 Table 7.1 (continued)

Composer Title and Op. no. Year Name Gade Symphony no. 5, mvt. 1, op. 25 1852 Gade — Joachim Drei Stiicke fur Violine und Klavier, 1853 Gisela (von Arnim) op. 5

Grimm , -- Zukunfts-Brahmanen-Polka 1854 Bahs (= Brahms) Liszt — Phantasie und Fuge tiber das Thema 1855 Bach

| B-A-C-H

Brahms Cadenza for Beethoven’s Piano 1855 Bach

, , Concerto no. 4 ,

Joachim Variationen uber ein eigenes Thema, 1855 Gisela (von Arnim)

| op. 10

Joachim Overture to Shakespeare’s Henry IV 1855 Gisela (von Arnim) | Joachim Violin Konzert in ungarischer Weise, 1856 Gisela (von Arnim)

op. 11 7

Joachim Fugues, answers on B-A-C-H 1856 Bach Gade “Stille Tanker,” Fra Skizzenbogen, 1857 Gade no. 3 _

Joachim ~ Notturno for Violin and Orchestra, 1858 Gisela (von Arnim) op. 12

Joachim Overture in G Minor, op. 13 1858 Gisela (von Arnim)

| op. 44, #10 ~

Brahms “Und du gehest tiber den Kirchhof,” 1860 Agahe (= Agathe)

Brahms | String Sextet, mvt. 1, op. 36 1864 Agahe (= Agathe) Brahms Symphony no. 1, mvt. 1, op. 68 1876 BAS (= Brahms)* | * Brodbeck, Brahms: Symphony No. 1, p. 49.

tion with plans for a tenth symphony. The early appearance of BACH mo-

: tives in works by an adolescent Fanny Mendelssohn is a testament as much to her musicality as to the heightened awareness of Johann Sebastian and C. P. E. Bach that she and her brother gained through their Berlin relatives and their teacher Carl Zelter. Her many citations of BACH are discussed

later in this chapter.

Aside from his six organ sonatas on BACH, Schumann publicly acknowl-. edged his musical sphinxes on three occasions, first in his op. 1, the “Theme on the Name Abegg, Varied for Piano,” dedicated to “Mademoiselle Pauline Countess Abegg,” a grandiose designation for a fictitious friend of a friend, Meta Abegg. The second instance, both personally and musically of more consequence for Schumann, was the sphinxes of his Carnaval, op. 9, based on the musical letters of his own name, SCHA, and those representing the familial city of his friend, Ernestine von Fricken from Asch. And the third

122 c~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

sphinx occurred in “Nordisches Lied” from the Album fur die Jugend in honor of the Danish composer Niels Gade. It is this anagrammatic technique and impulse that generated Brahms’s “Agathe” themes (a-g-a-h-e) in his op. 36 String Sextet, and as an ostinato in his four-voice lied for women, “Jungbrunnen.”!! The composer other than the Bachs to be blessed with a completely musical name was the Dane Niels Gade, as Schumann observed in print: “Let no one ignore this little sign of higher favor.”!* Gade inserted his own sphinx into many of his works, sometimes in retrograde, as at the start of the slow movement of the Sonata for Violin and Piano (op. 6) that

he dedicated to Clara Schumann. In his Drei kleine Clavierstticke Gade combined his musical name in counterpoint with BACH, although this refers to his dedicatee, his friend Oluf Bachlin (see Ex. 2.3). Composers were not limited to identifying themselves or others by means of musical spellings of their names. The ways in which a motive could create a symbolic status for a person are no different from any other type of musi-

cally symbolic meaning, that is, by association with a text or a favorite piece. In the case of a motive (c# -e# -f# ) that Fanny Mendelssohn used to represent herself, we know nothing beyond the fact that she signed several let-

ters to Felix with it. In contrast, Brahms’s friend Joseph Joachim explicitly explained his motto; letters and compositions such as the FAE Sonata for Violin and Piano document how they and Schumann generated themes from the first letters of Joachim’s motto: “Frei, aber einsam” (free, but lonely). The documentation for Brahms’s motto “Frei, aber froh” (free, but happy) is less strong, although the motive FAF occurs frequently and conspicuously enough for it to be very plausible. Joachim clearly appreciated the added significance of his motto being the inversion of G# -E-A, or Gis-e-la—his motto for the woman he wanted to marry, Gisela von Arnim. By means of an allusion to Schumann’s Kreisleriana, both Brahms and - Joachim may have been able to depict Brahms’s strongly defined alter-ego, Johannes Kreisler, the musical character created by E. T. A. Hoffmann. His friends Joachim and Julius Grimm addressed him as “Kreisler,” and Brahms signed the autographs of his opp. 1, 5, 8, and 9 as “Kreisler,” “Kr,” or “Joh. Kreisler, jun.”!? The first and last movements of Schumann’s Kreisleriana

contain an energetic rising motive that spans an eleventh, a motive that Schumann also included in his First Symphony finale. Brahms first used it in

the finale of his Piano Concerto no. 1 and returned to it in several later pieces, including his Ein deutsches Requiem, the Piano Quartet in A, op. 26, the Magelone Romanzen song cycle, and the Vier Ernste Gesdnge."* It is rel-

evant that this motive also figures prominently in the finale of Joachim’s Hungarian Concerto for Violin, op. 11, a work dedicated to Brahms and

‘Naming —> 123 one with many parallels to the finale of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, as Donald Tovey long ago observed.!* Written in 1854, Joachim’s Concerto has not one but two motives from Schumann’s Kreisleriana. The finale combines the ascending eleventh motive from Schumann’s last movement with a repeated sixteenth-note figure also present in Brahms’s finale, and the slow movement starts with the main motive of Schumann’s Kreisleriana, no. 4. There are numerous questions about how far it is reasonable to pursue this type of musical naming, and indeed, with the exception of BACH citations, I will not dwell on personal musical symbols in this study because of my wish to focus on texted motivic allusions. Perhaps most notorious and contentious are the claims that a ubiquitous five-note motive (c-b-a-g# -a and transpositions) prominent in many principal themes of Schumann and Brahms represents Clara. These claims suggest that the motive builds on either the c-a-a present in “Clara” or the c-h-a-a found in Schumann’s nickname for her, “Chiara” (again, with h meaning bi in the German spelling).'¢ Are we to imagine that Schumann, Brahms, and Joachim would have had symbols for Ernestine von Fricken, Agatha Seybold, and Gisela von Arnim but not for Clara? Or that Brahms and Joachim, soon after coming into the Schumann orbit, would have symbols for each other but not for Schumann? Or that Brahms, who presented himself alternately as Kreisler and Brahms, would depict these two opposing sides of himself with one motive? The inability of Schumann (and later, Schoenberg) to spell his full name musically | did not prevent him from using the musical letters he had available to him.

Ce A MORE SOMBER form of naming exists in the works created to honor recently deceased composers. Although they were no longer called tombeaux as they were until the middle of the eighteenth century, composers continued to write these commemorative works through the nineteenth century, sometimes varying a short work by the composer (such as Stephen Heller’s Aux manes de Frédéric Chopin: Elégie et marche funébre), sometimes simply incorporating a motive from a composition by the composer

| being remembered. The rhetorical aims of these works vary as widely as any form of reference, from expressions of personal grief and homage to public mourning. To the extent that such works are public, the citations of motives and themes are necessarily little disguised and invariably assimilative. A

public function required them to be broadly recognizable in order to communicate a message to, or on behalf of, the audience they both addressed — and represented. Public memorials occasionally identified themselves as such in the title, as with the short piano piece that Schubert’s friend Anselm Hiittenbrenner

124 «~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

composed after Schubert’s death, the Nachruf an Schubert in Trauerténen am Pianoforte (1829), which is based on the opening motive of Schubert’s last Bb-Major Piano Sonata (Ex. 7.1). Three years later Mendelssohn composed a Nachruf (that is, an obituary) for his friend Eduard Rietz and inserted it as the Intermezzo in his op. 18 String Quintet. Far more substantial is Cherubini’s cantata for Haydn, his Chante sur la morte de Joseph Haydn, written already in 1805. When the widespread rumors of Haydn’s death proved premature, Cherubini expediently shelved his remarkable cantata until it became appropriate in 1809. Midway through, for the trio “Chantre ! divin,” Cherubini freely adapted Haydn’s aria “In native worth and honour clad” from The Creation. He took over elements of melody and bass line, orchestration (especially the divisi violas and second violins in the introduction, which replicate Haydn’s accompaniment almost exactly), and the key of C major. Haydn’s text, which praises man as worthy, noble, beautiful, strong, and courageous, provides the background for Cherubini’s portrayal of Haydn in Orphic terms as the “Divine singer.” !” Tributes from one composer to another were likely more often a private

matter. Since the nineteenth century writers have proposed that Mozart composed a memorial to his friend Johann Christian Bach at some point during the year after the “London” Bach died on 1 January 1782. The slow movement of Mozart’s A-Major Piano Concerto, K. 414, quotes with only minor alterations the first four measures of an Overture that J. C. Bach had written in 1763 for Baldassare Galuppi’s opera La Calamita dei cuori (this Overture was then published about 1770). Mozart’s sotto voce Andante maintains all four voices of Bach’s Andante grazioso (Ex. 7.2). Although

Mozart had previously composed one of a set of Menuets on the same

Ex. 7.1a Schubert, Piano Sonata in Bb Major, D. 960, mvt. 1, opening motive

bob hh | Ex. 7.1b Anselm Hittenbrenner, Nachruf an Schubert in Trauertonen am Pianoforte (1829)

, “Naming —> 125

ae : | = Andante

= yg tg 2 Hg eo = >t -s y | eo + ——— +3

ey —zp—| —_; J} |» —, tp og P| Ex. 7.2a Mozart, Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 414, mvt. 2, mm. 21-25 Andante grazioso

apS i 24 J a ite i | JE ee Ex. 7.2b J. C. Bach, Overture to La Calamita dei cuori, mm. 1-5

| phrase in 1779, this does not lessen its association with Bach in the year af| ter his death, especially since Mozart had written his father about another of the Menuets that he had “learned it from [J. C.] Bach” in London.'8 , No composer attracted more musical memorials than Beethoven. They began at his death, with textings of his own works for funeral music, and have continued with anniversary and commemorative works into the latter part of the twentieth century. The Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un Eroe from his Piano Sonata op. 26 probably received a vocal performance texted with a poem by Alois Jeitteles entitled “Beethoven’s Begrabnis!” Within the first year after Beethoven’s death, composers including Mendelssohn and Schubert wrote works that many have seen as deeply indebted to Beethoven. _ These include the last three Schubert Piano Sonatas, the Mendelssohn String Quartet op. 13 (with its question “Ist es wahr?”), and Louis Spohr’s Third

Symphony (finished in mid-March 1828 in time for the anniversary, with many Beethovenian features and motives). None of these was identified publicly as an homage, however, and none offers a reason to identify an allusion that names Beethoven in the way Cherubini did Haydn. Schubert paid tribute to Beethoven with his lied “Auf dem Strom,” for , tenor, piano, and horn. As Rufus Hallmark first noticed, Schubert composed “Auf dem Strom” for the concert on 27 March 1828 that he had organized on the anniversary of Beethoven’s death.!? The musical similarities include a strong melodic resemblance to the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony (Ex. 7.3). Schubert composed stanzas 2 and 4 as contrasting sec-

126 -~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

. sotto voce _ Ex. 7.3a Beethoven, Symphony no. 3 in Eb Major, op. 55, mvt.

2, mm. 1-4 ©

and 4 ,

Ex. 7.3b Schubert, “Auf dem Strom,” melody for stanzas 2

tions in C# minor, using a melody that Hallmark termed “a quotation” of the Beethoven march.”° At least at the outset, the fidelity of Schubert’s melody to Beethoven’s is sufficiently strong that it approaches the practice of texting instrumental motives discussed in Chapter 5. “Auf dem Strom” served a doubly commemorative purpose, remembering not only Beethoven, but also the memorials for Beethoven, hearkening back a year to the texted versions of Beethoven’s own music sung at the funeral service in Vienna. For

“Auf dem Strom” the horn served not only to enliven the poetic text, but also to recall the trombone accompaniment that had been played over and over in the texted versions of Beethoven’s Equale at the funeral. Given the anniversary date of the concert, the closeness of Schubert’s melody to Beethoven’s, and a text that is easily understood to be about death, no one in Schubert’s circle would have needed a dedicatory title to connect the work with Beethoven.

Schumann’s C-Major Fantasie, another anniversary work, is also generally understood to have two levels of meaning, public and private, as Schumann himself revealed. Publicly, it honored Beethoven on the tenth anniversary of his death. Schumann referred to it as his “Sonata fiir Beethoven,” appropriately since it included a motive from Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte and an allusion to the slow movement of the Seventh Symphony;7! privately, Schumann also confessed to Clara that he had written the work as “a deep lament” for her at a time when he feared losing her. Thus the allusion to Beethoven’s song cycle about separated lovers has a personal motivation, and the allusion is seemingly assimilative. But observers over the last century, informed by letters and diaries that Schumann’s contemporaries could not have known, have been blinded by the resonances of the private message to what Schumann’s musically literate contemporaries might have read into this allusion. The text of Beethoven’s song that Schumann cites suggests another more contrastive way to read the allusion. After five songs

‘Naming —> 127 about the separation of the poet from the woman he loves, the concluding “Nimm sie hin denn diese Lieder” directs the lover to sing the poet’s songs back to him as a way of uniting across the distances of time and space. By al- | luding to this motive in a work designed to honor Beethoven, Schumann may have fulfilled the instruction to sing the poet’s own song back to him as a way of achieving a musical—if not spiritual—union with Beethoven. In this public sense the allusion contains a message of lovers surmounting separation rather than longing. This is exactly the message in another of Schumann’s allusions to “Nimm sie hin denn diese Lieder.” As I will show in

Chapter 8, in “Singet nicht in Trauertonen” (Sing not in mournful tones) Schumann uses this motive to set a poem about lovers uniting. _ After Mendelssohn’s death, Schumann composed two works with allusions to him that can be understood as commemorative tributes, the piano

piece “Vogel als Prophet” (described in Chapter 4) and his Requiem, op. 148 (1852). Although Schumann set the Roman Mass for the dead—his duties in Diisseldorf included writing Catholic church music—he did not in-

corporate liturgical chants. On the contrary, at the beginning of the first movement and the end of the last are brief allusions to the opening phrase of the Lutheran chorale “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,” including virtually all the notes—except the first—of all voices from one of Bach’s four-voice harmonizations (Ex. 7.4). This chorale figures prominently in two works that were well-known in mid-century: it began the venerable oratorio Der

Tod Jesu (1755) by Carl Heinrich Graun, and it played a central role in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. The latter, of course, had a strong association with Mendelssohn because of his landmark performance of Bach’s Passion in 1829, but Mendelssohn had also quoted the chorale freely both in a cantata that he had composed and in his setting of Psalm 95. Furthermore, this chorale was performed at Mendelssohn’s funeral. Even if Schumann had not been present, he could have read accounts of the service in numerous journals, including the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. In using this chorale to begin his Requiem, Schumann honored Mendelssohn as Schubert had Beethoven, by alluding to a work associated with the deceased composer and his funeral. Schumann may also in some sense have understood this work as

a fulfillment of plans he had made in the previous year for composing a “German Requiem.” Schumann’s Requiem thus offered Brahms a precedent when Brahms came to write his Requiem.” While Mendelssohn was still alive, it is likely that Schumann designed his

lied “Er, der Herrlichste von allen” as a tribute to him, as if to proclaim Mendelssohn “the noblest of them all.” This depiction is in keeping with such comments of Schumann as “Mendelssohn is the one that I look up

. aATeeNN CD

128 ~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

aPOeeeeeeDeee a

a:

Ex. 7.4a Bach, harmonization of “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” from St. Matthew Passion, mm. 1-2

A x * x Se: *

: ———e —-

a ee 9 a a TST EUNE EERE, CO

| —_

oS ee ee eS ee ee, ae ee er

Ex. 7.4b Schumann, Requiem, mvt. 1, mm. 2-3

to, as if to a high mountain. He is a real God.”*? Shown in Ex. 7.5, the first four-measure phrase has extensive similarities with the closing theme of Mendelssohn’s op. 15, Phantasie tiber ein irlandisches Lied, “The Last Rose” (that is, the folksong “The Last Rose of Summer”). Over a repeated eighth-note accompaniment, the melodies begin on the fifth (B or Bs) and then move with a dotted rhythm up to the tonic, leaping down a seventh (Schumann’s more chromatic harmonization of this F also occurs in Mendelssohn at a later repeat); the next measures are equally close: scale degrees 2, 4, 5, coming to rest on 3. In his piano postlude Schumann also imitated Mendelssohn’s codetta (Ex. 7.5c and d). After arriving at the tonic for the cadence of the singer and doing so with the same notes in the piano, both immediately add a flatted seventh (V7 of IV) and then proceed down by half step in the inner voice (67, 6,46, 5) while the upper voice ascends. Schumann also emulates Mendelssohn’s ascending voice, from the tonic stepping up to

a

“Naming ——> 129

Innig, lebhaft. ————_——__—_——

9 — eee eee Jo ERSTE erereeee Er, der Herrlichste von al - en, wie sO

Bed. P #, a be ,

mil - de, wie so gut!

—__ s,

Ex. 7.5a Schumann, “Er, der Herrlichste von allen,” mm. 1-5

Andante con et moto. 2 ee a po ff—_— OE

tego fs ts lgee2 2) | «A: a 2 ee es ee section. |

Ex. 7.5b Mendelssohn, Phantasie tiber ein irlandisches Lied, theme of final

sures. ,

the seventh in an inner part that crosses from the left hand to the right (marked with brackets). Both end on a 7-8 appoggiatura in the final mea-

Mendelssohn’s work has an honorific intent of its own. Although it begins with the Irish folksong about a lone rose, the concluding Andante con moto theme that impressed Schumann follows another rose song altogether, that by Johann Philipp Christian Schulz, “Die Rose bliht, der Liebe siisse Blume” published about 1810 as part of his Sechs deutsche Gedichte von Schiller, Fouqué u. m. fiir eine Singstimme (Ex. 7.5e).24 Schulz was director of the Leipzig Singakademie and of the Gewandhaus Concerts, as well as director

of music at the University of Leipzig. Since Mendelssohn composed this work about 1827, it is probable that he wrote his Phantasie in honor of Schulz, who died on 30 January 1827. But as Joscelyn Godwin realized, several passages earlier in the Phantasie recall Beethoven. Godwin singled out

hy $i Dm

130 cs~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

= ae SS pop cs rl ss KS Le LO’. 9 7-8 _ no PO one-- _ _—50VWVVhKVBacN0.0O—2-.———

Mut, wie SO mil - de,wie so gut!

imi ee ee eee a a be = BNL Ee et eo P 7 6 (#5 = 66)

N===S t= abe? ba | ii. SN

, vitard,. - ~" = = Je Se ie

b6 5 P

AE 9 A SS Pe Be he RS 1s CY A RE 3 Ex. 7.5c Schumann, “Er, der Herrlichste von allen,” conclusion

p# Ht, 1 le | pe a er fl ee af it er ee ote eet ere fret LA Se ‘eee, ee Be eee et eee — ee ee |

aSe ad re oe ee ' = A ‘ ad Ld Ae 7. ON ee ee ee Ct & | te [ee TT Eee Dee 7 6 46 5 ee

ee ee

S.ritard - -'- - - - - - - - = - ~-b i

Ex. 7.5d Mendelssohn, Phantasie, conclusion

Die Ro- se _ bliiht, der Lie-be siis-se Blu - me, _ sie blickt mich

SSF a a A A __—— ——— S B

an mit hol - der Zart - lich -_ keit |

Ex. 7.5e J. P. C. Schulz, “Die Rose bliiht,” mm. 1-4

the two late Piano Sonatas, opp. 109 and 110, one because of a distinctive sixteenth-note figuration, the other because of its use of recitative passages and diminished seventh chords.25 The text of Thomas Moore’s poem “The Last Rose of Summer” reads easily as a tribute to Beethoven, who died two months after Schulz. It speaks of loneliness (“’Tis the last rose of summer, left blooming alone”), death (“Thus kindly I scatter Thy leaves o’er the bed”), and the resolve of the poet to follow the deceased (““Oh! Who would inhabit This bleak world alone?”). Mendelssohn thus evidently created his

‘Naming ——=> 131

Phantasie as a tribute to two recently departed composers. On the basis of its allusion to Schulz as well as to Beethoven, Mendelssohn almost certainly wrote this work in 1827. Ce MENDELSSOHN hada particular predilection for musical commemorations. The likelihood that he wrote his String Quartet, op. 13, and his Phantasie tiber ein irlandisches Lied to mark the deaths of musicians and people close to him suggests a personal practice also evident in an allusion first detected by Eric Werner: namely, Werner proposed that the slow movement theme of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony alludes to Zelter’s lied “Es war ein K6nig in Thule” in response to the recent death of his teacher.”® Further, as noted earlier, the Intermezzo of his op. 18 Quintet from 1832 is a Nachruf for his friend Eduard Rietz. But by far the most poignant memorial

that Mendelssohn composed was to his sister Fanny Hensel, shortly after her death in May 1847. His tribute comes in the form of a BACH citation embedded in the counterpoint of his late String Quartet in F Minor, op. 80. At the end of the exposition of the first movement, the first violin has a fourmeasure phrase that transposes BACH down a half step, beginning it on Bh (Ex. 7.6a). When this phrase returns in the recapitulation it is completely altered, omitting the BACH figure altogether. This citation can be recognized

Vol | Lob ee ey eee JT rs reer eres ee Gs Ss An ll “Se i eee ee eee 1 BRE i pf Allegro vivace assai

Vn D i ge ES rr iced a a Ge

Va | Abe ee

P Ex. 7.6a Felix Mendelssohn, String Quartet in F Minor, op. 80, mvt. 1, mim. 81-86

f\ ‘ eefititte © le « P

31-35 | Presto

Fe | ddd 2

rr; nt ED TE NOOR SK OTE ES (UO

Ex. 7.6b Fanny Mendelssohn, Sonata in C Minor (1824), mvt. 3, mm.

132 ~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

as a memorial to Mendelssohn’s sister not because it appears in the context of a tragic work composed in the short six-month period between the unexpected death of his beloved sister and his own, but because it alludes to

a nearly identical moment in an early work of hers. In 1824 at the age of eighteen, Fanny had composed her Sonata in C Minor while her younger brother traveled for the first time in Scotland. Evidently as a surprise for Felix, she dedicated it to him with a note at the very end of the Sonata: “For Felix in his absence.”?’ Early in the last movement Fanny included her own BACH figure, not a half step below as Felix did, but higher, beginning on C , a half step above (Ex. 7.6b). In the Sonata Fanny places the BACH motive in

the alto voice, appropriately since she was herself an alto. Felix derived much of the context of his citation from Fanny: all voices but one drop out and the remaining voice begins the figure at the octave above middle C; the figure begins with a whole note tied across the barline; and the other voices enter one measure later, harmonizing this note as the seventh of the chord (dominant or diminished).

Thus with the BACH sphinx Mendelssohn alluded to an unpublished work that his sister had written for him in his absence nearly twenty years earlier, as if, with this private symbol—this musical Nachruf—to respond to the dedication Fanny had penned at the end of her Sonata. In comparison to her use of the figure, his flatted citation carries a sense of tragedy and negation. A symbol of Bach was a highly appropriate memorial for his sister, whom Felix as a youth had called “the cantor with the thick eyebrows,” a probable reference to Bach. As an adult Fanny had lived and composed un-

der the spell of Bach at least as much as Felix had, even naming her son Sebastian. The several cantatas she wrote in the early 1830s make little attempt to modernize Bach’s contrapuntal style. It was appropriate symbolism also because Fanny Mendelssohn had composed BACH into her works throughout her life. Her wit, so evident in let-

ters, also emerges in clues that she supplied to the symbolic meaning of two of her BACH citations: she placed a citation a step low in her G-minor Allegro agitato (1843) in measure fourteen, Bach’s number based on the gematria of BACH (Ex. 7.7a); and in her otherwise somber song “Im Herbst” (1844) she surreptitiously included a BACH figure a step high (Ex.

7.7b) to set the line that begins “Die Bachlein . . .” (the brooklet). When these notes return in the third strophe, they set a text about a distant love: “Noch einmal griiss ich aus der Ferne wieder, was ich nur Liebes hab” (Once more I greet again from afar that alone which I love).** In “Schone Fremde” (1846) the BACH motive also accompanies a text that speaks of distance (Ex. 7.7c): “es redet die Ferne von kiinftigem, grossem Gliick” (the

Allegro agitato

be (e427 -*, SS __ 3828 * nw Ooeeret Aa? _ pases 8 ?__ 27 9 6+96 —_C_ 4 3888 ee ee eeee ee

|333J33

. —_ _ aa | | | ed = P| ul wi er | . le 7. OE SE eee =e) eee ed ih eei> eee2 eee sk LA fyPt Aeee|all _f2 eee i> ee6

. XA oP, ; *

_-polDp se ot @oett,ws?- tf OO UUhLpLUm™LULm™€.L Lee

Ex. 7.7a Fanny Hensel, Allegro agitato in G Minor (1843), mm. 13-15

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Allusive Traditions and Audiences ——> 161 Table 8.3 Appearances of the “Es ist vollbracht” theme for cello or in octaves in the bass register of a work for piano

Composer Title and Op. no. Date

C. P. E. Bach Concerto for Cello, mvt. 1 c. 1750

Beethoven Sonata for Cello and Piano, op. 69, mvt. 1 1807-08 Fanny Mendelssohn Capriccio in G Minor for Piano and Cello 1829

Robert Schumann Draft for a Symphony in G Minor, mvt. 2 1831

Fanny Hensel “Januar: Ein Traum” from Das Jabr 1841

Robert Schumann Piano Quintet in E, op. 44, mvts. 1-2 1842

Felix Mendelssohn “Es ist genug,” Elijah 1846 blance between Bach’s “Es ist vollbracht” and Beethoven’s Arioso dolente in

print. On the contrary, as Schumann admitted to a friend, he explicitly avoided discussing the St. John Passion: Do you know Bach’s Passion According to St. John, the so-called little one? I am sure you do! But don’t you think it is much bolder, more powerful and poetical than the Passion According to St. Matthew? .. . I think it [i.e., the St. Matthew] contains some shallow parts and is inordinately long. But the other— ~ how condensed, how full of genius, especially the choruses. And what consummate art! ... But nobody writes about it... That’s how it is and always will be. But some pieces must be left for the minority, for the few widely scattered, truly artistic minds.*°

| What could not be said in print could be shared orally among those who needed—or, perhaps, deserved—to know. Although the extent to which hermeneutical interpretations circulated in conversation is little examined, early in his career Schumann had recommended this as the preferred route for such information. In his review of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, he had first of all disparaged the necessity for Berlioz’s detailed accompanying program: “All of Germany can do without it: such signposts always have

something unworthy and charlatanlike. At any rate the five main titles would have sufficed; the more exact circumstances . .. would already have spread by oral tradition.”?”? Schumann’s distinction between levels of audience, degrees of understanding, and means of communication is fundamen-

_ tal for symbolism and irony as well as allusion.

C HAPTER

A> 9 CD

Motives for Allusion

CF OR ALLUSIONS to become more widely acknowledged, a theoretical background against which a motivic resemblance can be understood to have an aesthetic significance must exist both in the culture of the period and in that of our own time. In preceding chapters different kinds of allusion have provided opportunities to introduce issues of play (Chapter 7), criticism (Chapter 5), creativity and originality (Chapter 6), symbolism (Chapters 1 and 4), levels of audience (Chapters 4 and 8), tradition and secrecy (Chapters 4 and 8). It remains to show how these component issues, which exist in any age, interacted in support of allusive composition to the extent that I have suggested. Even with Schumann’s recommendation to consign poetic interpretations to the realm of oral tradition and his refusal to write about the St. John Passion, even with his various recommendations to seek ideas by studying the works of others, the absence of more explicit commentary from him and others about allusion still remains a hurdle for many today. The lack of theoretical support might appear either as a kind of long-standing conspiracy of silence or as evidence that most instances of allusion are in fact purely coincidental. It does not help that several of the aesthetic goals that could be attained by allusion depended on authorial silence, especially two that were complementary, if not actually conflicting: a positive desire to guard individual

freedom to interpret, and, balancing this, a more negative wish to protect one’s reputation as original and divinely inspired. As the carrot and stick of

nineteenth-century artistic creation, these two desires worked in tandem and supported many of the other issues identified in the course of this book.

The former motivation encouraged composers to respect the interpretive

Motives for Allusion —~ 163 abilities of the educated audience, to create veiled and symbolic meaning by means of motivic allusions and topics, and to build on the traditions of their predecessors; the latter led easily to artistic posturing, exaggerated claims of originality, the cult of the genius, and, in our day, to theories of anxiety. Serving both ends were an elevated sense of play, metaphorical criti-

cism, and motivic transformation (which Schumann called concealment). Working together, these fostered private symbolism while protecting a composer’s reputation for originality. — C&S THE imporTANCce of the link between allusion and play is fundamental in any era. Among the examples discussed in preceding chapters, the spirit of play is particularly evident in Fanny’s taunting of Felix with motives instead of words in her letters; Gade mixing the musical letters GADE and BACH and Joachim his motto FAE with G#-E-A, the musical motto of his fiancée; and Brahms declaring in a discussion of a variation set that what he

does with the melodies, from “which I build my stories,” is “only playing around [Spielerei].” A similar spirit informed Mozart’s enjoyment of intricate musical games and Beethoven’s well-known fondness for puns, but _ these are seldom considered to have any relevance to their creative, “serious” endeavors. Hull’s treatment of Brahms is an exception. Hull compiled instances that “show Brahms as a game-player, who enjoyed encoding cryptic musical messages for friends, and who also used verbal allusion to test the puzzle-solving ability of his correspondents,” because he recognized the link between a predilection for double meaning in one form of communication with that in another.! Typically, when Brahms sent his friend Theodore Billroth a copy of his newly composed G-major Violin Sonata, he did not directly point out the allusion in the finale, a quotation to his setting of Klaus

Groth’s “Regenlied”; rather, he sent the playful directive that the finale needed “a nice, soft, rainy evening to give the proper mood.”? Billroth even-

tually rose to the challenge: “The recurring motif in the last movement seems familiar to me. First I thought of Klaus Groth’s song, Heimat, and then at last it dawned on me that it was Regenlied. Now, for the first time I understand your sentence about a rainy evening, for I had taken that remark as completely innocuous without realizing that it pointed toward the leading motif [Leitmotiv]. You rogue!”? But as Huizinga argued, all allusions, not just those that can be construed as humorous or witty, are a form of play, one that affects all the participants in an allusion: those planting and those detecting. Not the least of the gamelike qualities of allusion is the element of challenge it poses to its creator and perceivers alike. For the composer, the way in which a texted allusion asso-

164 ~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION ciates two or more musical lines and texts with each other, creating a metaphorical understanding that draws on multiple texts, has much in common with counterpoint, the play of one musical line against another. To write invertible counterpoint at the tenth, a canon al rovescio, or a double fugue is to create a degree of musical complexity that is beyond the ability of many listeners to apprehend during a performance. Successful counterpoint must satisfy two criteria: it must be intellectually sound and musically beautiful. It creates an entity that is greater than the sum of the independent lines, subsuming them into a collaborative whole. The game is in making something difficult and intellectual sound natural, beautiful, and effortless. It is not a coincidence that Brahms, the greatest contrapuntalist of the nineteenth century, was also one of the most adroit fashioners of allusions. Concealment is part of the game. Although he was speaking of musical

transformations of a motive within a composition, Schumann discussed transformation as a form of concealment, implicitly linking this process with the inclusion of poetic and dramatic content. Writing in 1832 of sonatas, symphonies, and concertos, he acknowledged that a composer “no longer persisted in developing a thematic idea within only one movement; one concealed this idea in other shapes and modifications in subsequent movements as well. In short, one wanted to integrate historical interest into

the whole .. . and as the age became more poetic, dramatic interest as well.”* A contemporary reviewer of Schumann’s Second Symphony detected a secret, concealed meaning in the theme of the slow movement, while offering the opinion that reviews were not the appropriate forum for disclosing secrets: And so the whole is carried out with great melodic sweep, and yet one thing is missing that I cannot name—it actually does not belong in the critique! But why not also imply the secret here, even what one cannot account for? It seems to me that the melody, like in many earlier ones of our Robert, even in this lyrical area has more of a question than answer, more longing than fulfillment in it. It is a veiled heaven, where one hopes to find an open one.”

Gadamer’s notion that “the symbolic in general, and especially the symbolic in art, rests upon an intricate interplay of showing and concealing” accords easily with nineteenth-century German trust in the audience to find its own meanings.¢ In discussing Romantic irony, Lilian Furst also notes a paradoxical mix of the desires to communicate and to conceal: “Balancing transpar-

ency and opacity, irony is like a game of hide and seek in which the object , should not be too readily spotted nor so thoroughly hidden as to be irre- — trievable. Part of the attraction of irony lies in this playful aspect; it is an intellectual sport.”7

| Motives for Allusion —~ 165 The deeper level of ironic or allusive meaning must be signaled by clues that test the reader’s ingenuity. Both text and context can provide signals. Schumann’s titles “Vogel als Prophet” and “Friihlings Ankunft” are textual clues; so too are the kind of invisible musical quotation marks that set off the internal section of “Vogel als Prophet,” the change in texture that “announces” the BACH figures in Fanny Mendelssohn’s youthful sonata or the F Minor String Quartet that Felix wrote after she died, the cello instrumentation of many “Es ist vollbracht” allusions, and so on. Among the contextual clues, the associations of genre and the links that bind a multimovement work are well known. In terms of its ability to signal musical relationships, the genre of the symphony exerts an influence over individual symphonies comparable to that which a particular symphony has over the individual movements that it comprises. Listeners are invited to look for relationships between movements, between works. Analysts have always been quick to spot motivic transformations between movements, and it was not unusual for generic allusions such as those discussed in Chapter 2 to be noticed by critics reviewing a first performance. Allusions between genres are deprived of—or liberated from—this contextual security. But the principal contextual clue discussed in this book is biography, far richer than genre as

a source of concealed meaning. |

Poetic and motivic concealment are related parts of an aesthetic that valued the independent and individual fantasy of the listener. To Schumann this subtlety was a Germanic trait; tellingly, he made his assertion about Germanic “delicacy of feeling” and “aversion to personal revelation” in his review of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.® Several years earlier—indeed, before Berlioz and before the French discovery of Beethoven—A. B. Marx had

criticized the French as unable to appreciate music without overt extramusical associations.? Schumann’s stance is not a rejection of programmatic | content, but rather of the loss of personal freedom that occurs when those programs are made public. Schumann’s sense of the listener’s personal contribution emerges in his review of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony: “And the heavenly length of the symphony [is] like that of a thick novel in four volumes like one by Jean Paul, who also could never reach an end, and for the best of reasons; namely, to let the reader work it out for himself.”!° This rationale had been expressed previously by Hoffmann as a desire to achieve a

state of yearning and fantasy: |

Nothing is more repugnant to me than when in a tale or a novel the stage on , which the fantastic world moved about, in the end is swept so clean by the historical broom that no speck of dust remains, when one goes home completely satisfied, without any yearning to look behind the curtains once more. Many a

166 ~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION fragment of a witty tale, by contrast, touches me deeply and provides a long-

lasting enjoyment, because now fantasy deploys its own wings.) , Gadamer would have expressed this respect for German listeners in terms of audience performance: “the participant belongs to the play.”!2 Yet from our vantage point a century after Brahms’s death, listeners at a concert have a very different relationship to the works which came to constitute a canon.

They remain most of what we hear and study (early and contemporary repertoires aside). In the mid-nineteenth century, when the symphonies of Schumann were first performed, these not-yet-canonical works were heard

in the context of many other works which were not (and would never become) canonical. Although an audience today hears the same notes of Schumann’s Third Symphony that an audience heard in his lifetime, the frame of reference has changed substantially. Today the Third Symphony (or any other) is heard against a background of other well-known works by well-known composers, rather than in a context that included Kalliwoda, Moscheles, Gade, and others. To change the frame of reference is—to extend Huizinga’s analysis—tantamount to changing the field of play; to change the field of play is to change the game. The effect on our ability to perceive allusive references has been great, because, as the examples I have discussed indicate, the music of Reichardt, Fanny Hensel, J. A. P. Schulz, and the like are part of the field of reference in which allusions would have struck “reminiscence hunters” and other knowledgeable contemporaries. To fix a canon is to limit the repertoire; an inevitable consequence of limiting the repertoire is the exploration of individual components of the canon in ever-greater detail. If interpretations of musical meaning date from the 1780s, it was not until the canon began to be recognized as such around 1830 that hermeneutical analyses began to proliferate. Indeed, the establishment of a canon fostered intensive study of a few works. A. B. Marx promoted a canon of Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn specifically so that the full depth of meaning of select “masterworks” could be plumbed." After a century and a half of exploring the canonically limited field of play, our view of the motivation for musical resemblances between works has become distorted. Bloom’s theories of anxiety and misreading do not adequately account for the intertextual processes I have described. There is no question that composers after Beethoven labored in his intimidating shadow as Beethoven had in Mozart’s, and that Beethoven borrowed from Mozart even as he asserted himself against Mozart. But studies that invoke Bloom’s theories of misread-

ing generally deal only with canonical works, relating one work (and its

Motives for Allusion —~> 167 composer/author) to another canonical work or works.'* The kind of symbolic use of motives that I contend was common to many composers of the nineteenth century could involve great composers appropriating from the less great, from folk music, or from chorale tunes in a way that has little to do with personal psychology, at least insofar as that psychology pertains to relations between composers. But neither can Bloom be completely dismissed. Judith Ryan and Cynthia Chase are only partially correct to claim that allusive relationships between works such as those I have discussed

are more a matter of rhetorical strategy than personal struggle.!5 Once Schumann and the Mendelssohns concluded that Beethoven had alluded in his compositions (to Bach, Handel, Mozart, or Haydn), allusion became not solely a rhetorical strategy but a demonstration of mastery over the received repertoire, the canon. One’s allusive ingenuity, like one’s contrapuntal finesse, could be measured against predecessors. When the canon was young, the most avid students of it were composers. At Beethoven’s death in 1827 the musical canon was short—extending back some fifty years, only as far as Mozart’s last decade, more or less to 1780— and broad—including many composers like Spohr and Cherubini whose works faded as the canon lengthened and narrowed. By Schumann’s death

in 1856 the canon had been enriched by the discovery of Schubert and stretched to include Bach and Handel, so that it then embraced well over.a century of music. It is no wonder that composers could allude to a motive in another work that was itself an allusion, as when Mendelssohn included the BACH figure in his F Minor String Quartet in a way that embraced the Piano Sonata Fanny had written for him (see Ex. 7.6). Progressing from the al_ lusions that Mozart made to those of Brahms, one can observe the same thickening of texture and complexity that affected harmony, form, orchestration, and other aspects of music in the nineteenth century. For literature, references and allusions to works by earlier writers have been held to be a hallmark of German Romantic culture, a characteristic that became more pronounced as the body of canonical works expanded.'¢ By the time the historically astute Brahms reached his early maturity, allusions, like the motives they depended on, could be combined ingeniously in a counterpoint of texts. Five examples have demonstrated Brahms’s penchant for multiple allusion: his first Piano Sonata, combining a rhythmic

motive from Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata with the form of the Waldstein (Ex. 2.1); the slow-movement theme of his first Piano Concerto, intertwining a motive from Fidelio with the motive he had used to begin the

first movement (Ex. 2.4); his motet, “Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mihseligen,” drawing on the slow movement of Schumann’s Trio in D

168 s~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

Minor and Mendelssohn’s Vocal-Chor zum Abendsegen (Ex. 6.2); his lied “Uber die See,” taking elements from Robert Schumann’s “Hoch, hoch sind

die Berge” and Clara’s Piano Sonata in G Minor (Ex. 5.5); and his lied “Wehe, so willst du mich wieder,” joining a motive from Mendelssohn’s Andante cantabile e presto agitato and a textual allusion to an arioso from Eli-

jab (Ex. 5.6)."”

Several Romantic composers fulfilled another function of play by creating elite audiences, communities of the initiated, who were privy to musical secrets. Huizinga describes the sense in a play community of “sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and re-

jecting the usual norms” as so powerful that the community inevitably outlasts the game.!8 Gadamer sees this as an activity common to nineteenthcentury artists in general: “Every [Romantic] artist lived with the knowledge that he could no longer presuppose the former unproblematic communication between himself and those among whom he lived and for whom he cre-

ated. The nineteenth-century artist does not live within a community, but creates for himself a community.” Of all musical brotherhoods the most famous is Schumann’s fictitious Davidsbindler, doubtless modeled on such groups as the Seraphinenorden and Serapionsabende created by Hoffmann in Berlin. Schumann formed his imaginary band of musicians to do artistic battle against the “Philistines” of his world. Such a group possesses the additional traits of communal secrecy,

of a person “playing” or “becoming” another person or persons, of mixing “mystic fantasy and sacred awe.”*° To conceal the real musicians he enrolled as members of his brotherhood, Schumann devised nicknames, such as “Felix Meritis” for Mendelssohn and “Knif” for Fink (a retrograde spelling that matches musical instances of “hcab” for Bach and “edag” for Gade). His own alter-egos played a prominent role in the criticism he wrote for his Neue Zeitschrift fiir Musik, and indeed in his life with Clara. As he

later admitted, “In order to express contrasting points of view about art, it seemed not unfitting to invent antithetical artistic characters, of which Florestan and Eusebius were the most important. .. . This ‘Davidsbiindler’ idea runs like a red thread through the paper, humorously combining ‘Wahrheit’ and ‘Dichtung.’”?! Schumann ends this description of his play community with a pointed al-

lusion to Goethe’s autobiography, Wahrheit und Dichtung (Truth and Poetry). The interplay of fictional personae and “real” life worked in two directions. The ethos of Romanticism enabled writers both to draw on their

own lives or those of friends for inspiration, and also to fashion their own , lives around fictional characters, to break down “the barrier between art

, Motives for Allusion —~ 169 and life.”?? Artists, writers, and composers were as apt to create on the basis of their own life experiences as they were to be unforthcoming—Berlioz excepted—about this content. I have when possible related biography to mu-

- sic, even if these were attempts that most Romantic writers, who held that works of art should speak for themselves, would not condone. Yet an interest in understanding as far as possible the circumstances that influenced a -composer during the creation of a specific work is one that August Wilhelm Schlegel acknowledged in a 1797 review: “It is certain that one does not

work.”

have the authority to judge until one completely understands an artwork, until one has penetrated deep into the sense of that artwork and that of its creator.” Extrinsic information of all kinds affects our responses to the Composers were no more or less vocal about their debts and biographical tendencies than writers of the period, and literary critics long ago realized © that despite the fact that nineteenth-century writers said nothing of their allusions, and neither interpreted their symbolism nor discussed their use of irony, these writers alluded, developed personal symbols, and wrote ironi-

cally. Among British writers of the period even Wordsworth, who proclaimed the value of originality in unequivocal terms, is now seen to be a - compulsive spinner of echoes and allusions, using the literary tradition he inherited to establish a continuity with the past but also to adapt it to new purposes.2* When Heine began the first poem of his collection Lyrisches Intermezzo with the line “Im wundersch6nen Monat Mai,” he revealed nothing about taking this line from the beginning of a poem by Friedrich Rafmann, yet this debt is discussed prominently in the most authoritative edition of Heine’s work.*5 In contrast, although it has been known for over twenty years that Schumann intended to begin his setting of this song with an equally literal quotation of Florestan’s aria “Euch werde Lohn in bessren —

Welten” from Fidelio (Ex. 4.1), no one has offered an interpretation about what this could mean for a cycle composed by someone who fashioned himself as Florestan.

In the particular case of Schumann and Fidelio, such extrinsic data as Schumann’s identification with Florestan and a note in his diary from 1837—“Fidelio tiber Alles”—are relevant to the musical debts discussed here because they document an affinity with a work that is deep enough to generate numerous musical responses. Schumann’s many readings of Fidelio are as evident in his music and life as they are in his prose. Not only did he sign reviews as Florestan, but he was addressed as Florestan in letters from

| his friend Stephen Heller, and he portrayed himself as such in one letter to | Clara, even as he urged her to emulate Leonore.*6 Schumann’s use of the

170 s—~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

Florestan motive that he sketched for Dichterliebe appeared finally in his untitled miniature for piano in Album fiir die Jugend, op. 68, no. 21. One of three pieces in this set to be designated with three asterisks rather than a title, this short work has been recognized as an improvisation on “Euch werde Lohn in bessren Welten.”2” When Brahms, some twenty years later, | adapted a motive from Schumann’s Kreisleriana to represent his fictional identity Johannes Kreisler, he merely replicated Schumann’s form of musical naming. Irony as well as allusion depends on play, on concealment, and on an au-

dience of the initiated. Like allusion, irony is a “device of reference,” but one which “turns away from obvious (i.e., descriptive) meaning,” in order to communicate a level of meaning that transcends the immediate context to an elite audience capable of recognizing the ironic voice and deriving a personal interpretation.22 When Jean Paul or Heine used irony they ceded the power of interpretation to the educated reader, who might well discover a meaning the writer had not intended. Irony was thus a means of creating a text with more, not fewer, possibilities of meaning than could be achieved with direct signification. Missing the sense of satire in Don Quixote, Romantic critics misread the work, investing it “with a symbolism that reflected their own ideology, aesthetics and sensibility.”2° In music criticism the most famous counterpart to this, Schumann’s review of Mendelssohn’s “Scottish Symphony,” involves not irony but allusion and topics. Mistaking which folk voice he heard, Schumann interpreted the work under the impression that it represented Italy. As a composer, Schumann developed a

contrastive application of allusion to achieve ends Friedrich Schlegel as- | cribed to irony: “In true irony not only striving for the infinite but possession of the infinite must be present, linked with micrological thoroughness to philosophy and poetry.”*° Allusions, as symbols, were a principal link between Schumann’s compositions and other poetic and musical worlds; allusions not only allowed him to celebrate or lament events in his life, they transformed those events into a musical language he thought to be at once

universal and inscrutable.

With his emphasis on transcendence and the infinite, A. W. Schlegel invokes a vocabulary that he also used to discuss symbolism: “How can the infinite be drawn to the surface, be made to appear? Only symbolically, in , images and signs. .. . Making poetry (in the broadest sense of the poetic that is at the root of all the arts) is nothing other than an eternal symbolizing.” >! Because a symbol is also an object itself, its representative meaning would not necessarily reveal itself immediately or to everyone—a condition symbolism shared with irony. The responsibility for individual interpretation

Motives for Allusion —~ 171 was all the greater because there were no limits on what could serve as a symbol. Goethe and Novalis agreed on the ability of symbols to be found anywhere, Goethe proclaiming that “everything that happens is a symbol,” and Novalis that “everything can be a symbol of something else.” **

Symbols evolve. In the nineteenth century, as the canon expanded both forward and backward in time, musical symbols evolved in two directions. Once a symbol was recognized as meaningful, inevitably that meaning could

be applied retrospectively. Charles Rosen is hardly alone in arguing that, because he can find the five-note motive that Brahms and Robert Schumann may have used to represent Clara Schumann in a much earlier composition by Mozart, this and earlier instances negate the possibility of meaningful symbolic usage in later works. But old symbols are always susceptible to reinterpretation in light of new ones. Theologians since the Middle Ages, following the teachings of St. Paul, have routinely read New Testament symbolism into Old Testament texts. When nineteenth-century pianists played Bach on the piano—with crescendos, pedals, and other nineteenth-century ~commonplaces—they played Bach in the wake of Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms, Thalberg, and others. A menacing or a joyous performance of a Bach keyboard work on piano or in a transcription for orchestra is a performance in which nineteenth-century values have been read into eighteenth-century | music. If one of those values is also a symbolic reading of motives, the differ-

ence is slight. Robert Schumann reading a private symbol for Clara into a Mozart sonata or Liszt seeing “his” Cross motive in the finale to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony would have been no less unusual! than Liszt playing Bach with scale passages in octaves or Brahms performing the Bach Chaconne for

violin on the piano. ) i Whether for these works, for a reading of Schubert’s Faust with knowl-

edge of Liszt’s symphonic poem, or for any of the other works discussed in this book, chronological priority was not a determinant to reading an allusive relationship. Bloom’s theory that poets could assume a style that appears earlier than the work they are imitating, so that it seems as if “they are being imitated by their ancestors,” aptly explains the way in which the sim-

plicity of Mendelssohn’s “Es ist genug” appears to anticipate Bach’s more ornate “Es ist vollbracht.”33 As a metaphor, an allusion makes possible “two-way transfers of meaning between its constituent terms.”3+ Because Elijah was a prophet for Jesus, Mendelssohn created Elijah as a musical prophecy of Bach’s St. John Passion, so that Bach’s work appears to be theologically and musically a successor to Mendelssohn’s.

The extensive repertoire of musical references that German Romantic composers had in common constituted a large and culturally unified source

172 cs~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION of allusions for composers and musically literate listeners alike. Allusion to motives in folksongs and works already composed may actually have been understood by composers as a way of participating in the creation of a German musical mythology. By the 1840s the national political consciousness had developed to the point that much of the vast German vocal literature could be considered music of the “folk.” In his foreword to the vocal collection The Musical House Treasure of the Germans (1842), G. W. Fink could proclaim: “But everything that we give is genuine German, of the people [deutschvolkstiimlich]. We understand however by ‘people’ what we in Ger-

many should always have understood under this concept, not the uneducated or brute masses alone, but rather the entire German alliance, from the - princes down to the countrymen, from the highest to the lowest ranks.” ° If writers and artists could answer the call for a new mythology by turning to the old or to nature; this is not an avenue that composers could follow with the same depth of images. For Wagner and his assimilative approach

to allusion, the derivation of motives and plot and wording from earlier | sources was not simply a source of musical and poetic ideas but a means of ensuring the national pedigree of his artistic creations. Schelling had described literal signification in 1802~—1803 as a requirement for mythology: “Each figure in mythology is to be taken for what it is, for it is precisely in

this way that it will be taken for what it signifies. The signifying here is at the same time the being itself, it has passed into the object, being one with it.”%¢

Because Goethe, Schlegel, Hegel, and many others discussed aspects of symbolism and irony at length during the period I have dealt with, composers—especially literary composers like Schumann, Berlioz, and Wagner— would have had no need to develop an independent theoretical framework for allusion. Allusion was, after all, a rhetorical technique they employed not for its own sake but to create symbolism and irony. Furthermore, from the standpoint of a composer, irony and symbolism were subordinate to poetry and the poetic, about which Schumann wrote a great deal. His most important acknowledgment of this aspect of composition may be in his designation of certain composers as tone-poets, a designation Brahms and others retained.*”

But if composers remained silent about the meaning of their own works, Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner did express themselves about the poetic ideas of other composers, speculating about the meaning of Beethoven symphonies and string quartets. Their interpretations depend on a metaphorical mode of understanding that is now thought to be only the domain of criticism.38 In an era when composers were often critics, whether formally as

| , Motives for Allusion —= 173 Schumann and Berlioz were or informally with friends and students, the attraction of motivic allusions and symbols would have been the ability of this

technique to imbue their works with the level of imagery they understood to | exist in Beethoven and others. Liszt understood the connection between composition and criticism and expressed it precisely in terms of Beethoven reception: The attempts to comment on Beethoven’s symphonies, quartets, and sonatas, and to explain and fix in poetic and philosophical treatments the impressions they give us, the pictures they stir within us, have become more and more fre-

, quent during the past fifteen years or so. These attempts show how great is the need to see the guiding ideas of great instrumental works designated precisely.*?

In Schumann’s critical praise of other composers we can detect his own goals; thus, his admiration for Beethoven’s ability to “translate every life circumstance into the language of tone” reveals his own artistic aspirations.*? As a few final examples will demonstrate, motivic allusion bridged composition and criticism by providing musical tones with access to specific verbal and symbolic meanings. After arguing that “the reliance of much nineteenth-century criticism on poeticizing, metaphorical modes of description

is often assumed to stem from the unavailability of adequate analyticaltools at the time,” Grey discerns a visual and a verbal mode in the metaphorical | descriptions, modes which are interrelated: “the ‘story’ conveyed by an instrumental work might . .. have more in common with the kind of story conveyed by a series of images.”*! He goes on to demonstrate this with several mid-nineteenth-century interpretations of Beethoven’s Seventh. Wagner expressed himself several times, publicly in print and privately to Cosima,

on the character of the Seventh. Most renowned is his “apotheosis of | dance” commentary in The Artwork of the Future, in which he calls Beethoven a second Prometheus for his ability to create characters in tone: All tumult, all yearning and storming of the heart become here the blissful inso-

lence of joy, which snatches us away with bacchanalian might and bears us through the roomy space of Nature, through all the streams and seas of Life, _

shouting in glad self-consciousness as we tread throughout the Universe the | _ daring measures of this human sphere-dance. This symphony is the Apotheosis of Dance herself: it is Dance in her highest aspect, as it were the loftiest Deed of bodily motion incorporated in an ideal mold of tone.*#

As much as he expounds here on dance, Wagner elsewhere emphasized the Greek aspects of Beethoven’s Seventh. On several occasions to Cosima he revealed that “for me this work is a complete portrait of a Dionysian festi-

174 *-~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

val,” introduced by “herald and tibia players.” The Allegretto “is the trag-

edy, the sacrifice of the god, the memories of Zagreus, ‘you, too, have suffered,’ then the rustic celebrations, the vinegrowers and other country people with their thyrsi, and to end with, the bacchanale.”* In his essay “On Poetry and Composition,” Wagner described the symphony as the celebration of a “Dionysian festival” “as only according to our most ideal assumptions can the Greeks have ever celebrated.” He tells of a masquerade in which appear “the same figures that presented themselves to the blind Homer in the movement of the hero’s dance.” Wagner’s metaphorical analysis may have a very particular musical impetus in a series of striking motivic, rhythmic, and harmonic similarities between Beethoven’s Seventh and Gluck’s opera on the Greek tale Armide (1777), a work that Wagner had conducted. The points of comparison are substantial and are evident in motives, in obsessive rhythmic figures, and in the prominence of the keys of A, K and C major in both works. The motivic resemblances are detailed in Example 9.1. These include the main theme of Gluck’s overture, with its off-beat syncopations (Ex. 9.1a and b) and insistent repetitions (fifteen times in the first eleven measures of Gluck, eighteen

ed Allegro, | , ly rvs vs yoy h oy a aa

mf! oS of of , of

Ex. 9.1la C. W. von Gluck, Armide, Overture, beginning of Allegro, mm. 25-27

ry Allegro con brio ——~~

— ff f f

Ex.9.1b Beethoven, Symphony no. 7, op. 92, mvt. 4, mm. 5-9

Ex. 9.1c Armide, Overture, mm. 29-31

i — = i, = =

Ex. 9.1d Symphony no. 7, mvt. 4, mm. 17-20

Motives for Allusion —> 175 in the first twenty-four measures of Beethoven). In each of these opening statements the motive descends sequentially into a cadence (Ex. 9.1c and d); and, more strikingly, both composers return to the last four notes of this motive in a context that enhances the accented appoggiatura with a cross relation, G4 and G# in Gluck, B4 and B# in Beethoven (Ex. 9.1e and f). These | remarkable passages share several elements: aside from the motive and cross relation, the motives are repeated at length over a pedal, and both passages

are approached with several measures that rock back and forth between a diminished seventh and its triadic resolution. Beyond these similarities is a culminating contrapuntal phrase from Beethoven’s slow movement and the same notes in Armide to the text “Each heart must be unhappy” (Ex. 9.1g and h); more general similarities include the many instances of raucous grace-note attacks and the notorious rhythmic drive. Also potentially significant in this context are two dramatic elements: the idea in Armide of masquerade in the service of love may be the source for many images in the whole critical tradition traced by Grey. Furthermore, at the conclusion of his remarks in The Artwork of the Future, Wagner describes Beethoven’s progress from the drama of the Seventh to his achievement in the Ninth with an almost literal summary of Rinaldo’s sea journey in Armide: From the shore of Dance he cast himself once more upon that endless sea, from

which he had previously found a refuge on this shore; the sea of unceasing heart-yearning. But it was in a stoutly built and giant bolted ship that he embarked on the stormy voyage; with firmly clenched fist he grasped the mighty helm: he knew the journey’s goal, and was determined to attain it.*

Although it is relevant to note that Beethoven owned a piano-vocal score of Armide (now in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek), my point here has to do not with Beethoven’s actions but with Wagner’s perceptions of those actions, and the way in which he expressed his musical insights as metaphorical criticism. Earlier, in my discussions of texting and of Schumann’s lieder, I

indicated the ways in which allusive composition allowed composers to ac- , knowledge textual relations they had perceived in their own readings of poetry, to bring different poetic texts into some form of metaphoric relationship with each other, be it assimilative or contrastive. Thus the starting point for “Vogel als Prophet” might not have been motivic at all, but poetic. In this scenario, Schumann recognized in his reading of an Eichendorff text that he had set years earlier a dramatic spirit that he also found in a segment

of Goethe’s Faust, and he marked this resemblance for himself by quot-

176 ~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

r ry r ry vy ry ry r pid FS OS Oe OS OS OO OE Dm eee eee ee eee. ee ee. eee ee eee. eee ee. ee eee. eee eee

OE ute | of f ow oo ee Oe P

ee | yeeseee v ’- |’KES ‘ v YE Y ’SEs . ' .SS’ Ay Sy

| ff —_-____._4 Jl ih. P__q@ _}| ________-4 EP". da SP" Eee = ee p_@

Ex.9.1le Armide, Overture

py tf & ie _¢ ie _¢ ¢ ¢ § 6 ie ¢ ile _¢ ¢ ¢ —

‘pute oss le|spSS ple p 5SSS sls 6 5 6 Oboe rat 3 rf tf : : ie ie ,

0b | Cbf OT, f sf

pat1ppp Pe PS EeeSE epfor teeeeeee Pee PES Viotin | petra eee Penne| cl Viola 44ttectresessettes ee a ee —tepsteey tte —

Bass o ofES ee ee ee ee ee

f of of wee ‘f 7 i a; — GS

Fl 0 ————————— ———————————————————

Vall | yt ee Via | pe EE : oe ag eo — SET ee Oe

Ex. 9.1f Symphony no. 7, mvt. 4, mm. 17-20

Motives for Allusion —> 177 , 5 Andante

Ah! quun - coeur de -_ vient mal - heu - reux Je - des Herz muss un -_ giiick- lich — sein

SS SS

Ex. 9.1g Armide, act I, sc. 2, mm. 85-88 Allegretto

Ex. 9.1h Symphony no. 7, mvt. 2,mm. 158-61

ing his previous setting. The text that he read against “Erlkonig” in his “Schlu&lied” was the narrative of his own life, celebrating a victory in his fight with Friedrich Wieck for Clara. There are several grounds for viewing music and exterior texts as interdependent: 1. Even if a performance cannot convey the composer’s precise textual as-

| sociation of a work, it is clear from nineteenth-century criticism and letters that listeners created their own dramatic scenarios for works; moreover, for any aspect of a musical work that requires a performer’s interpretation— tempo, dynamics, phrasing, and so forth—there is no precise way of know-

ing the composer’s own interpretation. How loud is mezzo piano? How much ritardando? How fast is allegro or allegretto? Critics and performers routinely overlooked Beethoven’s tempo designation for the Seventh Symphony, calling it an Andante or even Adagio instead of an Allegretto. 2. As Lydia Goehr has argued, a composition “is both an aesthetic and a historical entity,” and these two realms influence each other: “That we can move from the aesthetic to the historical or the other way around can alter our entire picture of the distinction between them. It has the potential to remove the traditional lopsidedness because it no longer deems one side essential and the other contingent.”*¢ A work’s context affects understanding re-

| gardless of whether the work is perceived to be abstract, allusive, mimetic, or humorous. 3. If composition involved the symbolic use of motives, then the choice of symbols directly affected the music in a way that for a composer could not be separated. According to nineteenth-century conceptions of symbolism, a symbol is what it represents. The choice of a symbol could therefore have determined the motive, rather than a purely aesthetic preference for a particular sequence of intervals. The motivic symbols of Schumann and others

178 s~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION | that I have discussed were not arbitrary; they have meanings that are motivated by a text in a pre-existing composition (or a relation to a person or place by virtue of a musical spelling).

C&S Water WiorA attempted in 1963 to define a kind of Romantic music that occupies a middle ground “between absolute and program music.” According to Wiora, “in the nineteenth century a principal type of instrumental work (both small and large) is that which, strengthened by sound symbols, gives expression to psychological-dramatic events.”*” Since then others have found the phrase “between absolute and program music” useful for studies of German Romantic symphonies. Wiora’s title expresses an idea that is essential for getting beyond what Finscher called the “terrible simplification of absolute and program music.”*® If it is no longer necessary to demonstrate the shortcomings of the polarized view of the musical world propounded by Hanslick and his enemies, one of my aims has been to show common ground in the musical symbolism of composers who were perceived by their contemporaries as adhering to competing musical ideologies. For Schumann and Brahms, allusions undermine claims to self-referentiality; for Liszt, Wagner, and Strauss the intertextual references provide a layer of private symbolism that, while it enriches the public symbolism, exists despite published programs. The practice I describe is common to Schumann and Liszt, in texted and untexted music, and as such is not so much “between” as “beyond” the familiar opposition. Perceptions of programmatic meaning, on the one hand, and of selfreferential formal patterns, on the other, occur independently of intertextual links. Much of the music I have discussed is properly outside the debate about programmatic versus absolute composition, either because the music _ is texted and therefore neither absolute nor programmatic, or because it was composed before the polarization took place.*? This debate was actually of less consequence to the evolution of allusive techniques than was the evolving importance of motivic composition, which by 1860 permitted a much denser concentration of motives than was possible in 1800. The study of motives and their symbolic associations has much to tell us about how nineteenth-century composers composed. To eschew investiga-

tions of motives because there are a limited number of notes in a scale underestimates the musical and textual means composers had to attach themselves to or detach themselves from particular associations; it also }

overestimates the verbal and artistic means available to poets and artists with the same allusive impulses. Just as rhythm, meter, key, harmony, dynamics, expressive markings, instrumentation, and formal function greatly

Motives for Allusion —-> 179 increase the range of possibilities a composer had to create motivic dependence and independence, so literary conventions restricted the options of writers. Despite the thousands of words available to poets, there are limitations on the number of words with symbolic import in any culture, on the use of words in syntactically proper and stylistically appropriate combinations, and on such combinations that function with the desired symbolic meaning in the constraining contexts of rhyme and meter. Questions of public or private symbolism affected more than choice of title; the choice had an impact on the liberty a composer had to develop motives and themes. Composers perceived as non-programmatic were free to transform motives beyond the limits of what an audience would be expected to recognize. Thus a public stance as a composer of absolute music carried with it distinct stylistic repercussions, contrapuntal as well as formal. Composers who kept their symbolism private required listeners to create their own personal programs. On the other hand, composers such as Berlioz and Liszt who made public their programs imposed on their audiences a symbol-

ism that could cross cultural and linguistic boundaries. | Whether for Caspar David Friedrich or Schumann or Goethe, Romantic symbolism conveyed a meaning that “can never be entirely separated from its symbolic representation: the image can never be reduced to a word.”*° Interpretation is not translation. This idea has been aptly expressed by many

in one way or another: by Gadamer when he cautioned that “the work speaks to us as a work and not as the bearer of a message”; and, I think, by Strauss when he disavowed program music (“so-called program music has absolutely no existence” ).5! However, when Dahlhaus asserts that “Goethe’s Faust is not the content of Liszt’s ‘Faust’ Symphony but merely its subject,” he is one step removed from the process I have been describing.°? If Liszt based his symphonic poem on a series of motivic allusions that for him represent aspects of Goethe’s Faust, then for him, those motives function as a symbolic content for the music. The act of composition can be understood to trace the same trajectory from particular to general and back to a particular that Goethe understood late in his life as the essence of symbolic art: “The use of symbols transforms the phenomenon into an idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea still remains infinitely active and inaccessible in the image so that, even expressed in all languages, it remains inexpressible.”} In light of the allusive practices I have chronicled, I understand Goethe’s progression to mean that a composer would start with some aspect of his or her life to express (for example, longing, an event, a person); then would devise an abstract representation of that phenomenon, a motive (an idea) based on po-

180 s~—~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

etic and musical texts; and from that representation would compose a work that incorporates this motive. The finished allusion is both an image of the earlier texts (now “infinitely active and inaccessible”) and a new entity of its own. Schumann, wanting to honor Felix Mendelssohn, adapts a motive from a song of Mendelssohn’s whose poetic text allows him to express his thoughts about Mendelssohn, and then places that motive in a setting (the central portion of “Vogel als Prophet”) that expresses musically the appropriate image. Or Brahms, seeking to compose a portrait of Clara (as he told Clara he did in the slow movement of his First Piano Concerto), chooses a motivic idea by which to represent her (a motive associated with Leonore in Fidelio), and from that fashions an image, a new theme that has its own identity which his listeners would enjoy on its own merits. Hanslick’s view builds on Goethe’s: Music is play [Spiel] but not frivolity [Spielerei]. Thoughts and feelings run like blood in the arteries of the harmonious body of beautiful sounds. They are not

that body; they are not perceivable, but they animate it. The composer composes and thinks. He composes and thinks, however, at a remove from all objective reality, in tones .. . the tones themselves are the untranslatable, ultimate language.>**

Brahms could have endorsed this view, but from the standpoint of his hearers—or rather, because of the distinction between levels of audience, some of his hearers. The debate over programmatic versus absolute was as much over modes of listening as styles of composing. The two positions are cap-

, tured in a diary entry in which Cosima Wagner contrasted her mode of listening to music with her husband’s: I tell R. that with regard to myself the curious thing has always been that from the moment music begins to sound, all images, concepts, the whole world of appearances and of the intellect, disappear. He says that he has always sought out the mystical significance of things; for example, in the introduction of [Beethoven’s] A Major Symphony he always thinks of the passage in Faust: “Passing gold buckets to each other, how heavenly powers ascend, descend!”

The symbolic aesthetic made possible by allusion is not only beyond antagonistic considerations of absolute or programmatic, it is beyond the related dualism of “musical” and “extramusical” meaning. Berger correctly observes that “while what a quotation or allusion refers to may be by itself

outside the world of the work, the quotation or allusion induct it, so to speak, into the world of the work.”°® My study is thus not an appeal for a consideration of music’s extramusical content; rather it is an attempt to

Motives for Allusion —~ 181 show how for Schumann, Liszt, and others, allusive motives would have been the very essence of music: a symbolic language. Like the Romantic view of nature as a symbolic language “not yet understood,” music was a language of symbols—a few open to the large audience of Liebhaber, but many more closed and concealed.5” As searches for musical unity are valid for music created in a time that valorized organicism, the interpretation of textual and symbolic meaning is justified for an era that understood the po-

tential for meaning to exist in all things. | | CES AMONG THE QUESTIONS that remain to be asked are the following: What makes a successful allusion? Is success determined by audibility? Is _ Berlioz’s quotation of “Dies irae” more successful than his allusion to Beethoven’s op. 131 in L’Enfance du Christ? Or than Brahms’s allusion to a song by Clara, a song still unknown to most devotees of Brahms? Put another way: Does an allusion need to be recognized by anyone to be musically successful? I think not, but before elaborating, I would like to pursuea _ related question that can be drawn from a remark of Berger’s that I have just quoted in abbreviated form: “While what a quotation or allusion refers to may be by itself outside the world of the work, the quotation or allusion induct it, so to speak, into the world of the work. If in interpreting this world we do not notice, or disregard, the quotation or allusion, we miss a feature of the world we interpret, not something external to it.”*8 But if we miss this feature, do we miss something that in any way hinders __ our enjoyment of the work? Are those who know An die ferne Geliebte

and those who know about Robert’s personal separation from Clara at the | time he wrote his Fantasie more likely to be moved by the Fantasie than those who hear only the notes of this composition? Surely this question has musical partisans on both sides. In my experience there are many listeners

this. ,

for whom biographical information is important; there are also those for whom it is completely irrelevant. Schumann needed to be both Florestan and Eusebius so that he could come down on both sides of questions like One fundamental criterion of a successful allusion is that its presence in

| the new composition be musically successful. The arrival at the allusion to An die ferne Geliebte at the end of the first movement of the Fantasie is | above all a moment of musical arrival—it makes musical sense, it satisfies _ ~ not primarily because it alludes but because Schumann prepared the moment well. Another significant function of allusions has already been discussed: allusions are a source of musical ideas for a composer, ideas to play with or play against. They are a spur to creativity, even originality (properly

182 *~~ MOTIVES FOR ALLUSION

understood). Any musical motive contains possibilities beyond what can be explored in one work. Fanny Mendelssohn could choose a particular motive in order to further develop musical possibilities that Beethoven and Bach had left untouched, and Brahms could respond to Chopin phrase by phrase. Allusions are therefore more important for how music is made than for how it is heard. Yet for those who care about musical content and contexts, the play of allusions is enormously satisfying to hear.

Abbreviations - Notes - Acknowledgments - Index

BLANK PAGE

Abbreviations

AmZ | Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung

BF Beethoven Forum

BJ Beethoven-Jahbrbuch Brahms Studies Brahms Studies 1, 2, and 3, ed. David Brodbeck (Lincoln, Neb., 1994, 1998, 2001)

Cosima Wagner Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, ed. M. Gregor-Dellin and D.

, Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton, 2 vols. (New York and _ London, 1978-1980)

JAMS Journal of the American Musicological Society

JM The Journal of Musicology Kongress Bayreuth Bericht tiber den Internationalen Musikwissen-

schaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981, ed. Christoph- | , Hellmut Mahling and Sigrid Wiesmann (Kassel, 1984)

Mendelssohn World Mendelssohn and His World, ed. R. Larry Todd, trans. Susan Gillespie (Princeton, 1991)

MeL Music & Letters MLO Modern Language Quarterly

MOQ The Musical Quarterly Music and Text — Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher

, (Cambridge, 1992)

186 cs—~ ABBREVIATIONS

NG2 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, , 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie, 29 vols. (London, 2001)

NZ{M Neue Zeitschrift fiir Musik 19CM Nineteenth-Century Music Probleme Probleme der symphonische Tradition im 19. Jahrhundert. Internationales Musikwissenschaftliches Colloquium, Bonn 1989, ed. Siegfried Kross and Marie Luise Maintz (Tutzing, 1990)

SchumannGS Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften tiber Musik und Musiker, Sth ed., 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1914)

Schumann, On Music Robert Schumann On Music and Musicians, ed. Konrad Wolff, trans. Paul Rosenfeld (New York, 1969)

Schumanns Briefe Robert Schumanns Briefe. Neue Folge, 2nd rev. ed., ed. F. Gustav Jansen (Leipzig, 1904)

Schumann World Schumann and His World, ed. R. Larry Todd (Princeton, 1994)

Thayer-Forbes Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Thayer’s Life of Beetho- — ven, rev. and ed. Elliot Forbes (rev. ed., Princeton, 1969)

Wagner Companion The Wagner Companion, ed. Peter Burbidge and Richard Sutton (Cambridge, 1979)

WagnerGS Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen von Richard Wagner, 10 vols. (Leipzig, 1871-1883)

Wagner Prose Wks Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London, 1893-1899)

Z/M Zeitschrift fiir Musik

“Notes

1. Definitions 1. Karol Berger, A Theory of Art (New York, 2000), p. 177. 2. R., “Ueber Reminiscenzenjagerei,” AmZ 49 (1847), cols. 561-66. “Die Sucht, nach Reminiscenzen zu jagen, ist heut zu Tage so Mode geworden, gehort gewissermassen zum guten Tone, das der Unbefangene die Thatigkeit einer so ausgebildeten Phantasie bewundern muss, die solche Truggestalten erzeugen kann” (col. 561). The translation is by Anthony Newcomb. 3. L. A. Zellner, “Ueber Plagiate,” Blatter fiir Musik, Theater und Kunst 1, no. 86 (27 November 1855): “Keinen Auspruch hort man, besonders ber neue Compositionen, haufiger als: der und der Gedanke is daher und dorther entlehnt, gestohlen.” Iam most grateful to Anthony Newcomb for calling my attention to the articles by Zellner and those from Berlin and Vienna quoted subsequently. 4. Ibid. “Wohin bringt nun jene Weise, musikalische Kunstwerke zu betrachten? _ Das Publikum zu der Gewohnheit, Compositionen zerstreut, nur in ihren Einzelnheiten—nur als eine Masse von Einzelnheiten aufzunehmen, deren Verbindung eine ausserliche, deren Entwicklung an einander eine zufallige sei...” 5. L. A. Zellner, in Blatter fiir Musik, Theater und Kunst 1, no. 18 (3 March 1855), pp. 69-70: “Wenn man von Reminiscenzen spricht, kann doch wohl nur die Homogenie des melodischen Gedankens, nicht die der Harmonie gemeint sein. . .. Wollte man von diesem Gesichtspunkte ausgeben, so miisste, um nur ein Beispiel anzufiihren, Mendelssohn’s E-dur-Andante aus dem G-moll-Klavierkonzerte als ein tiichtiges Plagiat Gretry’s, das Finale derselben Komposition als greifbare Anlehnung an Weber’s Konzertstiick angesehen werden. Gehen wir auf diese Weise in’s kritische Gericht, so wiirde sich die musikalische Literatur bequem auf ein paar Dutzend Originalwerke reduziren lassen.” 6. “Plagiat nennt man jeden gelehrten Diebstahl,” Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo 5, no. 7 (18 February 1855), pp. 49-51 and 58-60; p. 49.

188 s~——~ NOTES TO PAGES 4-5

7. Ibid. “Eine auffallende Aehnlichkeit, welcher ein musikalischer Satz, besonders in melodischer Beziehung, mit einem schon mehr oder minder bekannten, tiber-

haupt schon friher verfassten, hat.” ,

8. Ibid., p. 50. “Diese vielseitig sanctionirte Reminiscenzjagerei hat manchem auf-

keimenden Talente das Leben recht schwer gemacht, ja dasselbe wohl entmuthigt, ermattet, erstickt.” 9. Ibid. The reference to Haydn and “steierischen Volksliedern” may be to the

Central European and Balkan folksong known as the “Night Watchman’s Song,” which he used in several works; see Geoffrey Chew, “The Night-Watchman’s Song Quoted by Haydn and Its Implications,” Haydn-Studien 3 (197374), 106-24. 10. Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo 5, no. 7, p. 59. “Die wahren Zusammenhang, die innere Nothwendigkeit der gebotenen Ideen und Formen wollen wir daher als einzig rechtsgiiltigen Codex anerkennen, nach welchem Plagiate und Reminiscenzen nicht nur in Kleinen, sondern auch in Grossen, nicht nur die ungeschickt aufgeklebten und blossgestellten, sondern auch die schlauverborgenen zu richten sind.” 11. J. Peter Burkholder, “Borrowing,” NG2, vol. 4, pp. 5-41. 12. Deryck Cooke, The Language of Music (Oxford, 1959; rprt. 1989). Cooke’s argument is weakened by not considering motives that set discrepant texts. Although this is especially problematic for his motives from before 1600, there are many examples after 1800. Hanslick and Rousseau argued that an effective melody could carry any text; see especially Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution Towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis, 1986), pp. 16-18. 13. Charles Rosen, The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (New York, 1994), p. 92. I do not mean to claim that Rosen is opposed to all attempts to discuss motivic relationships between works. Among several allusions or quotations he has identified or interpreted, his treatment of Am die ferne Geliebte and Schumann’s Fantasie deserves special mention; see his The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 100-12. 14. This note and the following one include only some of the many studies that deal in one way or another with allusion. See the articles in NG2 by Burkholder, “Allusion,” vol. 1, pp. 408-09, and “Modelling,” vol. 16, pp. 860-62, in addition to that on “Borrowing” already cited. See also studies by Kevin Korsyn, most recently “Beyond Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Influence, and Dialogue,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford, 1999), pp. 55-72; Berthold Hoeckner, “Schumann and Romantic Distance,” JAMS 50 (1997), 55-132; Constantin Floros, Johannes Brahms: “Frei, aber einsam” (Zurich and Hamburg, 1997), pp. 17-31; Dillon Parmer, “Brahms, Song Quota-

- tion, and Secret Programs,” 19CM 19 (1995), 161-90; R. Larry Todd, “On Quotation in Schumann’s Music,” in Schumann World, pp. 80-112; of the several important studies by David Brodbeck, see Brahms: Symphony no. 1 (Cambridge, 1997), and “Brahms’s Mendelssohn,” Brahms Studies 2:209-31; John Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology (New

NOTES TO PAGES 5-7 ~~ 189 York, 1993); Nicholas Marston, Schumann: ‘Fantasie,’ Op. 17 (Cambridge,

1992); Linda Correll Roesner, “Tonal Strategy and Poetic Content in Schumann’s C-Major Symphony, Op. 61,” in Probleme, pp. 295-306; Reynolds, “A Choral Symphony by Brahms?” 19CM 9 (1984), 3-25, and “Florestan Reading Fidelio,” BF 4 (1995), 135-64.

Studies of allusion and motivic indebtedness in the twentieth century are no less numerous. For an extensive listing see the searchable database that Burkholder, Andreas Giger, and David Birchler maintain on “Musical Borrowing: An Annotated Bibliography” at www.music.indiana.edu/borrowing/. And although the book is not “about” allusion, discussions of Stravinsky’s musical sources and his manipulation of them are a central theme throughout Richard Taruskin’s Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through “Mavra” (Berkeley, 1996). 15. Kenneth Hull, “Brahms the Allusive: Extra-Compositional Reference in the Instrumental Music of Johannes Brahms” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1989), and “Allusive Irony in Brahms’s Fourth Symphony,” Brahms Studies

2:135-68; Raymond Knapp, Brahms and the Challenge of the Symphony (Stuyvestant, N.Y., 1997), especially chapter 4, “Allusive Webs, Generic Resonance, and the Synthesis of Tradition”; see also Knapp, “Brahms and the Anxi-

, ety of Allusion,” Journal of Musicological Research 18 (1998), 1-30, and “Utopian Agendas: Variation, Allusion, and Referential Meaning in Brahms’s Symphonies,” Brahms Studies 3:129-89.

16. Hull, “Brahms the Allusive,” p. 7. 17. Knapp, Brahms and the Challenge, p. 134; and Brahms Studies 3:173-74. Although it is not theorized as such, Knapp’s approach seems best approached as an application of Julia Kristeva’s theories of intertextuality, with the texts he is reading (Brahms’s symphonies) understood as a patchwork of allusions and quotations. Unlike Kristeva, however, Knapp occasionally discusses the allusions as if they were intended. See Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” and “The Bounded Text,” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Léon S. Roudiez, trans. T. Gora, A. Jardine, and L. Roudiez (New York, 1970). 18. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and

T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton, 1993), pp. 38-40. I am less interested in talking about intentionless meaning. Regarding intentionality, see the arguments of Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in “Against Theory” (and the series of essays and responses generated by it), in Against Theory: Literary Studies and

the New Pragmatism, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago, 1985), pp. 11-30. See also Hull’s extended treatment of intentionality in “Brahms the Allusive,”

| pp. 40-53.

19. Daverio’s discussion of the roles of symbol and allegory within individual operas by Weber stresses the importance of recurrence for establishing a motive or any other musical gesture as a symbol; Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music, pp. 97-101.

20. Johannes Brahms, Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel, 19 vols. (Berlin, 1907-

190 s~~ NOTES TO PAGES 7-12 1995), vol. 6, p. 245; for Liszt, see the note published at the end of his Sz. Eliza-

beth. For discussions of both, see Floros, Johannes Brahms: “Frei, aber einsam,” pp. 17-31; and Paul Merrick, Revolution and Religion in the Music of

Liszt (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 283-95. ,

1982), p. 206. | 22. Ibid., p. 209. |

21. Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.,

23. I quote Goethe from Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, p. 203; and Coleridge from Nicholas Halmi, “An Anthropological Approach to the Romantic Symbol,” European Romantic Review 4 (1993), 15. Todorov describes the conflicting views of Goethe, Schelling, Schlegel, and others toward symbols and the

relation of symbol to allegory on pp. 199-219. Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music, pp. 98-126, follows Schlegel’s idiosyncratic views in analyzing Weber’s Euryanthe. 24. Floros has traced the legacy of this motive through works of Bruckner, Chaikovsky, and Wagner; see Floros, “Uber den Motivbegriff in der Musikwissenschaft,” in Studien zur Systematischen Musikwissenschaft, ed. C. Floros et al. (Laaber, 1986), Hamburger Jahrbuch fiir Musikwissenschaft, 9, pp. 209-21.

25. Ilse Graham, Goethe: Portrait of the Artist (Berlin and New York, 1977), pp. 86, 161, 205, and 208. 26. “Uber die Gegenstande der bildenden Kunst,” as quoted in Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, p. 199. 27. Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, p. 203. 28. Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of

Nineteenth-Century Art (New York, 1984), p. 61. | 29. On topics, see Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago, 1983); Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, 1991); Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York, 1980); and James Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in His Instrumental Music (Cam-

p. 30. |

bridge, 1991), pp. 125-26. I quote here from Allanbrook, p. 2, and Agawu,

30. Agawu, Playing with Signs, p. 137.

31. Ibid., pp. 137-38. |

32. David Cairns has independently and long ago noticed this appropriation by Schubert of Beethoven; see Cairns, “Schubert: Promise and Fulfilment,” in his , Responses: Musical Essays and Reviews (London, 1973), p. 200.

33. Thayer-Forbes, pp. 594-97. , (Wolfenbittel, 1991), pp. 90-92. ,

34. Mozart owned a copy of the 1786 publication; see Ulrich Konrad and Martin Staehelin, Allzeit ein Buch: Die Bibliothek Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts

35. See A. Peter Brown, “The Creation and The Seasons: Some Allusions, Quotations, and Models from Handel to Mendelssohn,” Current Musicology 51 (1993), 26-58. 36. Mark Evan Bonds, After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Sym-

NOTES TO PAGES 12-17 — > 191

, phony (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 89-90. 37. Willi Schuh, Richard Strauss: A Chronicle of the Early Years 1864-1898, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1982), p. 420; and John Williamson, Strauss: ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 34 and 57. 38. Walter Thomas, Richard Strauss und seine Zeitgenossen (Munich and Vienna, 1964), p. 124. See also Schuh, Richard Strauss: Jugend und friihe Meisterjabre Lebenschronik 1864-1898 (Zurich, 1976), p. 256. 39. Breitkopf and Hartel had previously published this cantata in 1853, in 1874, and in English in 1875. See Dan Fog, N. W. Gade-Katalog: En Fortegnelse over Niels W. Gades Trykte Kompositioner (Copenhagen, 1986), p. 26. 40. Among Harold Bloom’s many works, see especially The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London, 1973), and A Map of Misreading (Oxford, 1975). 41. Kevin Korsyn, “Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence,” Music Analysis 10 (1991), 3-72. On Bloom’s influence in musicological scholarship of the early 1990s (in retrospect these years loom as the heyday of his influence), see Richard Taruskin’s review “Revising Revision,” JAMS 46 (1993), 114-38.

42. Korsyn, “Towards a New Poetics,” 34-35. Korsyn’s argument is based on a Schenkerian voice-leading hierarchy, in which a “dissonance at one level can be-

come consonant at the next” (p. 34). Thus, although the D-major section that concerns Korsyn is locally stable tonally, globally it is unstable because it is framed by two F-major sections. 43. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 19.

44, Hull, “Brahms the Allusive,” pp. 97-114, and Brahms Studies 2:145-49; Knapp, Brahms and the Challenge, pp. 109-110. Elsewhere Knapp portrays Brahms as playing with genre and generic traditions both “to achieve a link with

the supporting traditions while at the same time departing materially from them” (p. 103). Reinhold Brinkmann’s impressive study of the contrastive debt

, of Brahms’s Second Symphony to Beethoven’s Third is especially noteworthy; see his Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). 45. Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982); Edwin Stein, Wordsworth’s Art of Allusion (University Park, Penn., 1988); Allan Pasco, Allusion: A Literary Graft (Toronto, 1994); and Judith Ryan, “Dead Poets’ Voices: Rilke’s ‘Lost From the Outset’ and the Originality Effect,” MLO 53 (1992), 227-45. On multiple allusions, see Pasco’s chapter on allusive complexes, pp. 77—97.

46. I adopt Judith Ryan’s modification of Edwin Stein’s twofold scheme of as-

similative and comparative allusions. 47. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, intro. Wayne C. Booth (Minneapolis, 1984), p. 189; see also Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, 1990), pp. 14954. 48. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, pp. 193-99. But Bakhtin’s prose-

oriented theories, which he developed especially with regard to the novel, are , difficult to apply rigidly to many of the musical genres I discuss. 49. Morson and Emerson, Creation of a Prosaics, p. 150.

192 ~~ NOTES TO PAGES 18-24 50. On the composition of “In des Lebens Frihlingstagen,” see Michael C. Tusa, “The Unknown Florestan: The 1805 Version of ‘In des Lebens Friihlingstagen,’” JAMS 46 (1993), 175-220. 51. It is conventional to contrast Robert Schumann’s apparent disconnection from the rebellion with Wagner’s embrace of it. See, for example, Robert Schauffler, Florestan: The Life and Work of Robert Schumann (London, 1945), pp. 21113: Robert was “so deep in his growing introversion that he paid but slight heed

to the violent rush of events” (p. 211). ,

52. Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London, 1949), p. 4. 53. Ibid., p. 4.

2. Transformations | 1. Letter of February 1869 to Adolf Schubring; Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel, vol. 8, ed. Max Kalbeck (Berlin, 1915), pp. 217-18. Elaine Sisman discusses this passage in “Brahms and the Variation Canon,” 19CM 14 (1990), 134. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt, 1969-1971), vol. 15, p. 186. Although they agree on melodic variation as play, Brahms and Hegel appear to disagree over the issue of content. While Brahms used the melodic games to “build my stories,” Hegel specifically denies this possibility: “musical variation or development is not the same thing as the variation or development of a feeling or the representation of a thought or an individual figure” (p. 186). On this passage, see Thomas Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge, 1995), p. 44. Brahms’s description of his variations as “stories” is particularly suggestive in the context of a letter to Schubring, whose hermeneutical analyses of works by Brahms, Schumann, and Beethoven had by then appeared for many years. 2. SchumannG§, vol. 1, p. 59. I discuss the significance of concealment to symbolization and games in Chapter 9. 3. Carl Czerny, School of Practical Composition, op. 600, trans. John Bishop, 3

vols. (London: Robert Cocks, 1849), I, 93. , 4. Reicha’s treatise was published by Diabelli in Vienna. Czerny’s essay, “Uber die Formen und den Bau jedes Tonstiickes,” has been published in Musiktheorie 1

(1986), 261-76. The plan and discussion of Beethoven’s op. 53 are also included in Ian Bent, ed., Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1: Fugue, Form and Style (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 184-96. For a discussion of

Czerny’s essay, see Peter Cahn, “Carl Czernys erste Beschreibung der Sonatenform (1832),” Musiktheorie 1 (1986), 277-79. Regarding the date of Czerny’s School of Practical Composition, see William S. Newman, “Communication,” [AMS 20 (1967), 513-15.

5. See Charles Rosen, “Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration,” 19CM 4 (1980), 87-100; and Reynolds, 19CM 9:3-25. Brahms’s deference to Beethoven extends even to the opus number, which he surely realized belonged to Beethoven’s First

NOTES TO PAGES 25-33 ~~ 193 Piano Concerto. On the Horn Trio’s parallels with Beethoven, see Constantin Floros, Johannes Brahms, pp. 80-83. 6. In his finale Brahms also turned back to Beethoven, to the finale of the C#-Minor

, Sonata, op. 27, no. 2; see Reynolds, BF 4:135-64.

7. See Carl Schachter, “Mozart’s Last and Beethoven’s First: Echoes of K. 551 in the First Movement of Opus 21,” in Mozart Studies, ed. Cliff Eisen (Oxford, 1991), pp. 227-51. Of course mature composers also found inspiration in Beethoven. Critics have long heard echoes of Beethoven in compositions written during the one year that Schubert survived Beethoven. Rosen, for example,

, detects “numerous reminiscences of Beethoven’s opus 28 and opus 31 in the last three piano sonatas.” Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms (New York, 1980), p. 286; see also Richard Rosenberg, Die Klaviersonaten Ludwig van Beethovens: Studien tiber Form und Vortrag, 2 vols. (Olten and Lausanne, 1957); on modeling see Elaine Sisman, ““The Spirit of Mozart from Beethoven’s Hands’: Beethoven’s Musical Inheritance,” The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven, ed. Glenn Stanley (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 45-63; Lewis Lockwood, “Beethoven Before 1800: The Mozart Legacy,” BF 3 (1994), 39-52; Jeremy Yudkin, “Beethoven’s Mozart Quartet,” JAMS 45 (1992), 30-74; Beth Shamgar, “Three Missing Months in Schubert’s Biography: A Further Consideration of Beetho, ven’s Influence on Schubert,” MO 73 (1989), 417-34; and the valuable contri-

: bution of Edward Cone, “Schubert’s Beethoven,” MO 56 (1970), 779-93.

, 8. The New Princeton Encyclopedia, p. 39. ,

9. Joseph Kerman, ed., Autograph Miscellany from circa 1786 to 1799: British Museum Additional Manuscript 29801, ff. 39-162 (The Kafka Sketchbook), 2 vols. (London, 1970), I (facs.) fol. 88r; II (transcription), pp. 228 and 293;

Lockwood, BF 3:39-40.

10. Lockwood, BF 3:40.

11. Brahms spurred Joachim to treat F-A-E and Gis-e-la in canon by inversion. See the letters of 25 and 27 April 1856, and David Brodbeck, “The Brahms-Joachim , - Counterpoint Exchange; or, Robert, Clara, and the ‘Best Harmony between Jos. and Joh.,’” Brahms Studies 1:30-80. In Joachim’s early works see especially his

Drei Stiicke fiir Violine und Pianoforte, op. 5, and the Variationen iiber ein eigenes Thema, op. 10, a theme that begins with the Gisela motto.

12. On the musical debts of Brahms to the Schumanns, see Constantin Floros, Brahms und Bruckner: Studien zur musikalischen Exegetik (Wiesbaden, 1980), pp. 115-43. 13. Letter of 9 May 1859 to Mathilde Wesendonck. In discussing Wagner’s motivic style in Tristan, Dahlhaus comments, “Not only are motives related to one another . . . but they also blend into one another and are finally lost in shapeless intangibility.” Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 62-63. For my earlier discussion of Ex. 2.4, see Reynolds, 19CM 9:3-25.

14. Bonds, After Beethoven, p. 114. ,

15. From 10 March 1840; SchumannGS I, 461. ,

194 -—— NOTES TO PAGES 33-40 16. Translation from Robert Schumann, Music and Musicians: Essays and Criticism, 2nd series, trans. and ed. Fanny Raymond Ritter (4th ed., London, n.d.),

p. 253. | 17. Bonds, After Beethoven, p. 113. ,

18. Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, rev. ed., 4 vols. in 8 (Berlin, 1915-1921), vol.

, 3, pp. 213-15, states that Hanslick had already noticed this. And Reinhold Brinkmann, in Late Idyll, pp. 27-28, pursues the connection with the Eroica further, noting similarities of instrumentation, form, and internal motivic detail. 19. Schauffler, Florestan, p. 411, observed this rhythmic identity for the first two measures of the Brahms. 20. Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 131.

21. Knapp, Brahms and the Challenge, pp. 103-04. On the ability of a composer to manipulate aspects of genre to shape musical meaning, see Vera Micznik, “Mahler and ‘The Power of Genre,’” JM 12 (1994), 117-51, and the bibliogra-

phy that she cites. , ,

22. The review appeared in the AmZ 27 (1826), cols. 312-13 and 321-31; the example appears on col. 326. 23. This allusion has been detected independently by me and by Brown, in Current Musicology 51:26-58. 24. “Laf&t er noch keine Pauken und Drommeten erschallen? Er soll sich immer an die Anfange der Beethovenschen Symphonien errinern; er soll etwas Ahnliches zu machen suchen.” Schumanns Briefe, p. 390, letter of 6 January 1854. 25. Uhlig, Musikalische Schriften, ed. Ludwig Frankenstein (Regensburg, 1913), p. 244; I quote from Klaus Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven: Richard Wagner’s Reception of Beethoven, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, 1991), p. 165. 26. Newcomb, “Once More ‘Between Absolute and Program Music’: Schumann’s Second Symphony,” 19CM 7 (1984), 240. 27. The resemblance between the works of Weber and Robert Schumann was noted by Todd, Schumann World, pp. 96-97; and also Michael Struck, “Dramatisch— poetisch—programmatisch? Zur Relation von Struktur, Ideenhintergrund und Rezeption des Klavier-Konzertstiickes op. 79 von Carl Maria von Weber,” in Weber—lJenseits des “Freischiitz,” ed. F Krummacher and H. W. Schwab (Kassel, 1989), Kieler Schriften zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 32, pp. 137-66. Gerd Nauhaus commented on the resemblance between Weber and Clara Schumann in the foreword to his edition; Clara Schumann, Sonate fiir Klavier, g

moll (Wiesbaden and Leipzig: Breitkopf and Hartel, 1991), p. [7]. , 28. Wagner, “Beethoven’s Choral Symphony at Dresden, Programme,” in Wagner ProseWks, vol. 2, pp. 247-55. Giinther Spies also sees the Ninth Symphony slow movement as an influence on the Adagio of Schumann’s String Quartet, op. 41, no. 1; Spies, Robert Schumann (Stuttgart, 1997), p. 216. 29. Thomas Grey terms these scales the feature that “most intrigued early critics of the work, almost without exception”; see Grey, “Metaphorical Modes in Nine- | teenth-Century Music Criticism: Image, Narrative, and Idea,” in Music and Text, p. 103. 30. Grey, Music and Text, pp. 100-10, summarizes A. W. Ambros’s review of interpretations up until about 1860 (p. 100).

NOTES TO PAGES 41-52 ~~ 195 31. Geck suggests the influence of the opening Largo of the Sonata sopr’il soggetto

reale, in Von Beethoven bis Mahler: Die Musik des deutschen Idealismus (Stuttgart and Weimar, 1993), p. 115, as does also Roesner reporting Brahms, in Probleme, p. 299, n. 9. For Brahms’s observation, see Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms: Briefe aus den Jahren 1853-1896, ed. Berthold Litzmann,

Appel. ,

2 vols. (Leipzig, 1927), vol. 1, p. 158. Roesner independently suggests the sim1larity with “Seufzer, Tranen, Kummer, Noth,” observed also by Dr. Bernhard

32. See Todd, Schumann World, pp. 102-03. 33. The Marriage Diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann, ed. Gerd Nauhaus, trans.

with a preface by Peter Ostwald (London, 1994), p. 8. ,

3. Assimilative Allusions 1. Sulzer, “Instrumentalmusik,” Allgemeine Theorie der schénen Kiinste, rev. 2nd

ed. (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1792), II, 678: “Einigermafen hat man auch bey Ouvertiiren und Symphonien die zum Eingang eines Schauspiels dienen, noch etwas vor sich, worauf die Erfindung sich griinden kann.” 2. The symphonies include, with varying degrees of certainty, symphonies 53, 59, 60, 62-65, 67, and 73; Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, pp. 232 and 240; Elaine Sisman, “Haydn’s Theater Symphonies,” JAMS 43 (1990), 292352; Daniel Heartz, “Haydn und Gluck im Burgtheater um 1760: Der neue krumme Teufel, Le Diable 4 quatre und die Sinfonie ‘Le soir,” in Kongress Bay-

reuth, pp. 120-35. ,

3. Mozart’s use of recurring motives in Idomeneo is discussed in Julian Rushton, “Ta vittima é Idamante’: Did Mozart Have a Motive?” Cambridge Opera Jour-

nal 3 (1991), 1-21; and Reynolds, BF 4:152-54. 7 | 4. “. . . und fiir jede Leidenschaft, fiir jeden Haupttheil der Leidenschaft, ein. Thema auszufiihren, um so mehr Einheit ins Ganze zu bringen.” Musikalisches

| Kunstmagazin (1782), I, 86. See Rolf Propper, Die Biihnenwerke Johann

| Friedrich Reichardts (1752-1814), 2 vols. (Bonn, 1965), I, 213. , 5. Wagner, “On the Application of Music to Drama,” WagnerGS, vol. 10, p. 185.

Wagner wrote his essay in 1879. |

6. Edgar Istel, Die Entstehung des deutschen Melodramas (Berlin and Leipzig, 1906), p. 76. These scenes are present in the piano-vocal score. 7. The Letters of Beethoven, trans. and ed. with an intro. by Emily Anderson, 3 vols. (New York, 1961), letter no. 633, 22 February 1816. 8. In our own era, Andrew Lloyd Webber set the Osanna of his Requiem to this motive. Although Weber may have assimilated the meaning and motives of a _ hymn that had appeared in a collection published in 1789, “Wie grof is des Allmdchtigen Gite,” this hymn appeared more frequently with the text “Es ging der Mann voll Gnad und Segen.” The collection is Choralbuch auf Vier Stimmen zum Gebrauch bey dem 6ffentlichen- und Privat-Gottesdienst . . ., ed. Johann Gottfried Vierling (Kassel: Waisenhaus-Buchdruckerey, 1789),

no. 44. ,

9. Quoted in H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: The Late Years, 1801-1809 (Lon-

196 *-~—~ NOTES TO PAGES 53-57 don, 1977), p. 201; from G. A. von Griesinger, Biographische Notizen iiber Joseph Haydn (Leipzig, 1810; new ed., Vienna, 1954). Robbins Landon corrects Griesinger’s mistaken identification of the Agnus Dei rather than the Qui tollis. 10. Jean Paul, Vorschule in Werke, 5 vols. (Munich, 1959-1963), vol. 5, p. 172. I , take the translation from Daverio, Nineteenth Century Music, p. 242, n. 76. On Witz, see Daverio’s comments on pp. 71-75. 11. Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, p. 125; Gretchen A. Wheelock, “Wit, Humor, and the Instrumental Music of Joseph Haydn” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1979); Howard Irving, “Haydn and Laurence Sterne: Similarities in Eighteenth-Century Literary and Musical Wit,” Current Musicology 40 (1985), — 34-49.

12. The motives in Fidelio have often been discussed, both for their connections with other works and for evidence of how Beethoven used motives in support of drama; see Ernst Biicken, Der heroische Stil in der Oper (Leipzig, 1924); Winton Dean, “Beethoven and Opera,” in The Beethoven Companion, ed. D. Arnold and N. Fortune (London, 1971), pp. 353-57 and 373-81; Erich Schenk, “Uber Tonsymbole in Beethovens Fidelio,” in Beethoven-Studien, ed. Erich Schenk (Vienna, 1970), pp. 223-52; Philip Gossett, “The Arias of Marzelline: Beethoven as a Composer of Opera,” BJ 10 (1978/1981), 141-83, esp. pp. 174-

78; Carl Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, trans. , Mary Whittall (Oxford, 1991), pp. 188-93; Reynolds, BF 4:135-64. 13. Dean, “Beethoven and Opera,” p. 380. 14. Hector Berlioz, A Critical Study of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies, with a Few Words on His Trios and Sonatas, a Criticism of Fidelio, and an Introductory Essay on Music, trans. Edwin Evans (London, [1913]), p. 141; Edward J. Dent, Introduction to his translation of Fidelio, or Wedded Love (London, 1938), p. xiv; this passage is quoted in Dean, “Beethoven and Opera,” p. 379; Gossett, BJ 10:174—78; Mark Brunswick, “Beethoven’s Tribute to Mozart in Fidelio,” MO 31 (1945), 29-32. 15. For musical examples and a brief discussion see Dean, “Beethoven and Opera,” pp. 354-55. 16. Ludwig Schiedermair, Der junge Beethoven (Leipzig, 1925), pp. 398-410; Willi Hess, Beethovens Oper Fidelio und ihre frei Fassungen (Zurich, 1953), pp. 158-

64; Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (New York, 1977), p. 49. This passage would later interest Brahms as he wrote his First Piano Concerto (see above, pp. 28-29). 17. It was issued in 1803 by Breitkopf and Hartel and in 1804 by both Artaria and André; see Anthony van Hoboken, Joseph Haydn Thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis (Mainz, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 236-37. 18. The sketches are at the end of the sketchbook known as Mendelssohn 15; see Douglas Johnson, Alan Tyson, and Robert Winter, The Beethoven Sketchbooks:

History, Reconstruction, Inventory, ed. D. Johnson (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 150-51. 19. Dorothea Redepenning, who independently observed this resemblance, consid-

NOTES TO PAGES 57-62 —> 197 ers Schubert’s beginning to be “uniiberhorbar als Vorbild” for Liszt; see her _ Franz Liszt, Faust-Symphonie (Munich, 1988), pp. 11-12.

20. “Hast du zum Zauberwerk alles Nothge bereit?” “Ja” “Gift, und Dolch, das Blut vom wilden Eber, was die Nacht uns gebar, und die Beute der Graber?”

21. Liszt, who had made sketches in the 1840s, composed Faust-Symphonie between 2 August and 19 October 1854, while Wagner wrote the first draft of Die Walkiire between 28 June and 27 December 1854. Rena Charnin Mueller has detected among the sketches from the 1840s “a clear outline of the primary theme.” See her “Sketches, Drafts and Revisions: Liszt at Work,” in Die Projekte der Liszt-Forschung, ed. Detlef Altenburg and Gerhard Winkler (Eisen-

, stadt, 1991), p. 34, n. 18, Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten aus dem Burgenland (WAB), vol. 87. See also Redepenning, Franz Liszt, Faust-Symphonie, pp. 1214, and Barry Millington, “Operas,” in The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music, ed. B. Millington (London, 1992), p. 290. 22. William Ashton Ellis, Life of Richard Wagner, 6 vols. (London, 1900-1908), vol. 4, pp. 406-11; Curt von Westernhagen, The Forging of the “Ring”: Richard Wagner’s Composition Sketches for “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” trans. A. —

| and M. Whittall (Cambridge, 1976), p. 100. Unaware of Liszt’s earlier sketches or of Schubert’s lied, Ellis tries to prove that Wagner did not know the Liszt piece, even arguing that Liszt might have gotten the idea from Wagner. Ellis also

in Bb. a

‘proposes that both were independently inspired by Schubert’s Piano Sonata 23. Dahlhaus, “Issues in Composition,” in his Between Romanticism and Modern-

ism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, trans. M. Whittall (Berkeley, 1980), p. 51.

24. Ernest Hutcheson, A Musical Guide to the Ring of the Nibelung (New York,

1940), p. 66. ,

25. Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre, trans. Stewart

, Spencer (Oxford, 1991), p. 40. 26. These are from Wagner’s essay “Actors and Singers” of 1872 as quoted in Robert Gutman, Richard Wagner, The Man, His Mind, and His Music (New York,

1968), p. 449. For an association of elements of the Ring with Faust, see Hermann Unger, “Richard Wagner als Dichter in Goethes Spuren,” ZfM 99 (1932), 203-06. More broadly see Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, pp. 40-47; and John Deathridge, “Richard Wagners Kompositionen zu Goethe’s Faust,” in» Jahrbuch der Bayerischen Staatsoper 5 (1982), 90-99. 27. Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. Stewart Spencer and B. Millington (London, 1987), pp. 382-83; and commentary in Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, p. 42. See also Letters of Richard Wagner: The Burrell Collection, ed. John N.

Burk (New York, 1950), p. 370.

28. Wagner, quoted from Burk, Letters of Richard Wagner, pp. 370-71. 29. Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, trans. M. Whittall (Cambridge, 1979), p. 62. 30. John Warrack, “The Musical Background,” in Wagner Companion, p. 110; Ed-

198 -~~ NOTES TO PAGES 62-65 ward Lippman, The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Music (Lincoln, Neb., 1999), pp. 205-06. 31. Many sources are identified in Herbert Huber, Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen: nach seinem mythologischen, theologischen und philosophischen Gebhalt Vers fur Vers erklart (Weinheim, 1988), see esp. pp. 329-37; Wolfgang Schadewelt, “Richard Wagner und die Griechen,” in Wieland Wagner, ed., Richard Wagner und das neue Bayreuth (Munich, 1962), p. 167. Stanley R. Hauer, “Wagner and the Volospa,” 19CM 15 (1991), 52-63, focuses on Wagner’s particular debt to the Poetic Edda; and Elizabeth Magee briefly summarizes the literary sources in her “In Pursuit of the ‘Ring’ and Its Medieval Sources,” Wagner’s ‘Ring of the Nibelung’: A Companion, trans. Stewart Spencer, commentaries by B. Millington et al. ([London], 1993), pp. 29-32. 32. Die Gétterdammerung, Act I, sc. 3, ll. 7567ff; see the edition by Herbert Huber, Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen, pp. 105 and 290. 33. Die Walkiire, Act TU, sc. 2, ll. 3649ff; see Huber, Richard Wagner, Der Ring, pp. 53 and 218. For an example of lines in Tristan derived from Goethe’s Faust, see Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, p. 363. 34. John Warrack, Carl Maria von Weber (London, 1968), pp. 295-98.

35. “Ich hab’ gelebt, ich fiihl’s, fiir alle Zeiten /Und an die Sterne kniipft’ ich meinen Ruhm./ Die Welt soll’s wissen, dass der Lowe stirbt.” Wilhelm von Lenz, Beethoven: Eine Kunst-Studie, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Hamburg, 1860), p. 293. See Scott Burnham, “On the Programmatic Reception of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony,” BF 1 (1992), 10. 36. Adolph Bernhard Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen, 2 vols. in 1 (Berlin, 1859), vol. 1, p. 196. I quote the translation from Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose, p. 68. 37. Aléxandre Oulibicheff, Beethoven, ses critiques, ses glossateurs (Leipzig, 1857);

Wagner, “Beethoven’s ‘Heroic’ Symphony,” in Wagner ProseWks, vol. 3, _ pp. 221-24. Wagner’s essay originally appeared in the NZfM (15 October 1852). 38. Cosima Wagner, vol. 2, p. 225 (11 December 1878); this passage and others like

it are quoted in Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, p. 116. See also Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose, p. 347. 39. Quoted from Lewis Lockwood, “Eroica Perspectives: Strategy and Design in the First Movement,” in his Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 121. 40. Cosima Wagner, vol. 2, p. 922 (4 October 1882). 41. Among the many studies which identify motivic resemblances and debts between Wagner’s music and that of his predecessors, see Biicken, Der heroische Stil; Karl Worner, “Beitrage zur Geschichte des Leitmotivs in der Oper,” Zeitschrift fiir Musikwissenschaft, 14 (1931-32), pp. 151-72; Robert T. Laudon, Sources of the Wagnerian Synthesis: A Study of the Franco-German Tradition in 19. Century Opera (Salzburg, 1979); and John Warrack, in Wagner Companion, pp. 85-114. On “wandering melodies,” see Wilhelm Tappert, Wandernde

, NOTES TO PAGES 65-70 — = 199 Melodien. Eine musikalische Studie, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1889); and Roderich von Mojfifovics, “Die Veranderungen der Ausdrucksfahigkeit einer Melodie bei ‘wandernden’ Themen,” ZfM 8 (1932), 664-72. 42. Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose, p. 125. 43. Wagner, A Communication to My Friends (WagnerGS, IV, 248); as quoted in - Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven, p. 166. 44. WagnerGS, vol. 4, p. 190. I quote from the translation in Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven, p. 146. In his explication of this Trinitarian motivic system, Kropfinger identifies Tristan as the first music drama in which Wagner has fully developed this principle.

4. Contrastive Allusions 1. “Das bewaffnete Auge sieht Sterne, wo das unbewaffnete nur Nebelschatten.” SchumannG§, vol. 1, p. 25. I quote from Schumann, “From Master Raro’s, Florestan’s and Eusebius’ Journal of Poetry and Thought,” in Schumann, Ox Music, p. 44. 2. Rosen and Zerner, Romanticism and Realism, p. 63. 3. Letter of 10 April 1782: “Hie und da—k6nnen auch kenner allein satisfaction ~ erhalten—doch so—daf dis nicht kenner damit zufrieden seyn miissen, ohne zu wissen warum.” 4. Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 59; Marston, Schumann: ‘Fantasie,’ p. 34. 5. Jon Finson has detected the same mode in several of the Eichendorff texts that Schumann set in the Liederkreis, op. 39; see Finson, “The Intentional Tourist:

Romantic Irony in the Eichendorff Liederkreis of Robert Schumann,” in SchumannWorld, pp. 156-70; and see Reynolds, BF 4:135-64, for other exam-

ples. 6. The review is in the third of his “Schwarmbriefe an Chiara,” discussed by Grey in Music and Text, pp. 99-100.

7. Lilian Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 27; Schlegel, Lyceneumsfragment, nos. 42 and 108, in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-

Ausgabe, vol. 2, ed. E. Behler, J. Anstett, and H. Eichner (Paderborn, 1967), pp. 153 and 160. 8. Schlegel, Lyceneumsfragment, no. 42, p. 152; I quote from Christine Cochrane Moraal, “The Life and Afterlife of Johannes Kreisler: Affinities Between E. T. A. Hoffmann and Carl Maria von Weber, Hector Berlioz, and Robert Schumann” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1994), p. 5S. 9. Nicholas Marston, “Schumann’s Monument to Beethoven,” 19CM 14 (1991), _ 247-64. Marston identifies a debt that is particularly strong in the outer songs, but also evident in the connections between adjacent movements and songs, the

transformation of ideas from the first movement or song in the last, the harmonic arch centering on middle movements in A minor, and the C# -minor conclusion.

200 -—~ NOTES TO PAGES 70-77 10. Rafsmann published his poem in the Rheinisch-westfallischen Musenalmanach auf das Jahr 1821. For a discussion of this poem, its intertextual debts, and its relation to Heine, see Heinrich Heine: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr, commentary by Pierre Grappin (Dusseldorf, 1975), vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 773-75. 11. The sketch is in Zwickau, the Robert-Schumann-Museum, manuscript Sch.-

Mus. nr. 12321-A1; see Rufus Hallmark, “The Sketches for Dichterliebe,” 19CM 1 (1977), 110-36. Hallmark also notes that Schumann included this motive in another Heine song, “Abends am Strand,” op. 45, no. 3 (p. 113, n. 20). Others have noted Schumann’s allusion in Ex. 4.1c: see my discussion on p. 170, esp. n. 27. 12. The manuscript of this early version is in Leipzig, Musikbibliothek der Stadt Leipzig, MS PM 143. 13. Mendelssohn’s first movement also provided Schumann with a motive for the penultimate song of Dichterliebe. “Aus alten Marchen,” more than any poem that Schumann included, reads like a description of the Walpurgis Night ritual: “Out of the old fairy tales .../ There are singing and dancing / From a magic country .../ And hazy images rise up / from the earth / And dance airy revels / in a mystical chorus; / And blue sparks burn / on every leaf and twig, / And red lights rush about / in confused, fantastic circles.” Schumann set seven of twentyeight lines to a variant of one of Mendelssohn’s principal motives, also using the same harmonization with parallel thirds reinforced in octaves. In this instance the motive, when it first appears with the lines “And green trees sing / ancient melodies; / The breezes sound peacefully, / and the birds warble there,” assimilates the meaning and imagery of the verses that Mendelssohn had set: “[the forest is free] from ice and hanging branches” and “The snow is gone, in the green world [songs of joy resound].” But the local assimilation of this musical symbol occurs in a contrastive context: if Heine’s poet and Goethe’s Druids share a fantastical world of revelry, for the poet this is an illusory dream world which vanishes “like mere foam” when the sun rises.

: 14. Akio Mayeda, Robert Schumanns Weg zur Symphonie (Zurich and Mainz, 1992), pp. 246-48; see also Jon Finson, “Schumann and Shakespeare,” in Mendelssohn and Schumann: Essays on Their Music and Its Context, ed. Jon W. Finson and R. Larry Todd (Durham, N.C., 1984), pp. 125-36.

15. Robert and Clara Schumann, Briefe einer Liebe, ed. Hanns-Josef Ortheil (Konigstein, 1982), pp. 248-49 (letters of 28 and 31 January). 16. Robert and Clara Schumann, Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2, 1839, ed. Eva Weissweiler (Frankfurt, 1994), pp. 792 and 803, letters of 19 and 26 November, about concerts on 21 November and in mid-December.

17. Robert Schumann, Tagebiicher, vol. 3, Haushaltbiicher (Teil 1: 1837-1847; Teil , 2: 1847 bis 1856), ed. Gerd Nauhaus (Leipzig, 1982), pp. 479-81. The compositional chronology of Waldszenen is carefully examined in Eric Frederick Jensen, “A New Manuscript of Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen Op. 82,” JM 3 (1984), 69-89; see also Peter Jost, Robert Schumanns “Waldszenen” op. 82: Zum Thema “Wald” in der romantischen Klaviermusik (Saarbriicken, 1989), Saarbricker Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, neue Folge, 3, pp. 134-58.

NOTES TO PAGES 77-79 — 201 18. On bird symbolism in German folksong texts, see Werner Danckert, Symbol, Metapher, Allegorie im Lied der Volker, ed. H. Vogel, 4 vols. (Bonn, 1976— 1978), IV, 1315-30. Hoffmann was just one of Schumann’s predecessors to use birds as harbingers of death; see E. T: A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: ‘Kreisleriana,’ “The Poet and the Composer,’ Music Criticism, ed. with an introduction by David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge, 1989), p. 38. For a modern edition of Reichardt’s lied, which first appeared in 1809, see Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752-1814): Goethes Lieder, Oden, Balladen und Romanzen mit Musik, ed. Walter Salmen, 4 vols. in 2 (Munich, 1964), Das Erbe

, deutscher Musik, 58-59, vol. 58, p. 50.

19. Jensen, JM 3:83-84. Schumann evidently followed the same practice in his first symphony, taking particular inspiration from the final line of a poem by Adolf

, Bottger.

20. Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 68-71, uses the term “designator” for an agent that “implicitly or explicitly identifies what is being represented.” According to Carmela Perri and Ziva Ben-Porat, “markers” are signals for allusions, but they may also be the allusion itself. See Perri, “On Alluding,” Poetics 7 (1978), 289-307; and BenPorat, “The Poetics of Literary Allusion,” PTL: A Journal for the Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1 (1976), 105-28. Hull, who discusses both of their positions in “Brahms the Allusive,” pp. 55-60, argues that “there is no device which corresponds to quotation marks in musical notation” (pp. 59-60). Yet as he recognizes for Brahms, and as I contend here for Schumann, composers could imply the musical equivalent of quotation marks in passages like that in “Vogel als Prophet.” 21. Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music, pp. 59-61; see also his “Schumann’s ‘Im Legendenton’ and Friedrich Schlegel’s Arabeske,” 19CM 11 (1987), 150-63. Since Daverio’s observation it has become common to discuss the musical equivalents of quotation marks. With a concern for musical narrative, Karol Berger has discussed various ways in which composers could create a musical frame for contrasting sections in “Diegesis and Mimesis: The Poetic Modes and the Mat- __

ter of Artistic Presentation,” JM 12 (1994), 428-30; see also Berger, A Theory | | of Art, p. 181. R. Larry Todd also notes that Schumann’s self-quotations are “set off or articulated in the formal process”; see Schumann World, p. 104. And Rosen, discussing Schumann’s Carnaval, describes the appearance of the theme

from Papillons as occurring “with the same effect of quotation marks”; see his Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), p. 97. 22. “Knaben, Mitternachts gebor’ne, halb erschlossen Geist und Sinn, fiir die Eltern gleich Verlor’ne, fiir die Engel zum Gewinn!” And the response: “Gliicklich sind

wir, Allen, Allen ist das Dasein so gelind .. .” :

23. “Dass ein Liebender zugegen, fiihlt ihr wohl; so naht euch nur, doch von schroffen Erdewegen, Gliickliche, habt ihr keine Spur!” And then from Pater Seraphicus: “Das sind Baume, das sind Felsen, Wasserstrom der abestiirzt ...”

24. “Das ist machtig anzuschau’n; doch zu diister ist der Ort, schiittelt uns mit Schreck und Grau’n, Edler, Guter, lass uns fort!”

202 s—~ NOTES TO PAGES 80-86 25. Martin Staehelin, “Elijah, Johann Sebastian Bach, and the New Covenant: On the Aria ‘Es ist genug’ in Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s Oratorio Elijah,” in Mendelssohn World, pp. 121-36. 26. SchumannGS, I, 324: “Lafst uns diesen Mendelssohn-‘Paulus’ hochachten und lieben, er ist der Prophet einer sch6nen Zukunft.” I quote from his review, “Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn,” in Schumann, On Music, p. 199. As Jon Finson pointed out to me, this review contrasts Mendelssohn’s genius with Meyerbeer’s banality. Schumann was doubtless aware at the time of composing “Vogel als Prophet” that Meyerbeer’s long-touted opera Le Prophéte was finally about to

be staged. :

27. In Berger’s terms, this example becomes an instance in untexted music of a hierarchical distinction between_a fictional world and a narrator as well as a “presented world mediated by the narrator’s voice.” See Berger, JM 12:421. 28. “Du Gétterumschwebter, du griiner Wald, Schon blitzt die Axt, dich zu fallen!” 29. Schumann, On Music, p. 181. 30. Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre, pp. 43-45. 31. I have adapted the translation of W. A. Ellis in Wagner, A Communication to My Friends, in Wagner Prose Wks, I, 331-32. 32. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie, Samtliche Werke, VII, 219. I quote from the translation of T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1942), pp. 102—03; I am indebted to the discussion of Hegel’s views in Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, pp. 31-35.

33. Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future, in Wagner ProseWks, I, 143; Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie, VII, 219. The translation is from Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, p. 32. 34. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Mi-

chael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), p. 341. 35. Ibid., p. 342. 36. Ibid., p. 343. 37. Ibid., pp. 345-46. 38. Ibid., p. 343. 39. Ibid., p. 344. 40. Ibid., p. 343. 41. For my discussion of this lied, see Reynolds, BF 4:135-64. 42. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” p. 346. 43. Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, p. 199. 44, Schumann, “A Symphony by Berlioz,” in Hector Berlioz, Fantastic Symphony: An Authoritative Score, Historical Background, Analysis, Views and Comments, ed. and trans. Edward Cone (New York, 1971), p. 246. 45. Stein, Wordsworth’s Art of Allusion, p. 118. Tom Stoppard provides a contemporary rationale when he says, simply, that “grown-up art is art that withholds information,” understanding “information” not as details of narrative but as “possible meanings of the narrative.” See his “Pragmatic Theater,” in The New York Review of Books, 23 September 1999, p. 10.

, NOTES TO PAGES 86-90 ~~ 203 46..SchumannGS I, p. [after 69]; I have altered the translation given in Schumann,

On Music, p. 182.

5. Texting | |

1. I quote from the contemporaneous German translation of Grétry’s treatise, Grétry’s Versuch tiber die Musik. Im Auszuge und mit kritischen und historischen Zusdtzen, trans. Karl Spazier (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Hartel, 1800), p. 187: “warum soll man nicht die Musik eben so in Worte bringen, als man seit lange schon Worte in Musik gesetzt hat?” 2. Berthold Hoeckner, “Schumann and Romantic Distance,” JAMS 50 (1997), 55132; George Bozarth, “Brahms’s Lieder Ohne Worte: The ‘Poetic’ Andantes of the Piano Sonatas,” in Brahms Studies: Analytical and Historical Perspectives, ed. George Bozarth (Oxford, 1990), pp. 345-78. 3. Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 169-70. 4. See Robert S. Leventhal, “The Emergence of Philological Discourse in the German States, 1770-1810,” Isis 77 (1986), 243-60. 5. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), p. 4. 6. See Bozarth, in Brahms Studies, ed. Bozarth, pp. 345-78, and Parmer, 19CM

19:161-90. ,

7. Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric, p. 173. Regarding various associations of texts, programs, and narratives with instrumental music in the nineteenth century, see pp. 169-76. On Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte, see John Michael Cooper, “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and the ‘Italian’ Symphony: Historical, Musical, and Extramusical Perspectives” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1994), pp. 25859; and R. Larry Todd, “‘Gerade das Lied wie es dasteht’: On Text and Meaning in Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte,” in Musical Humanism and Its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Claude V. Palisca, ed. Nancy Kavaleff Baker and Barbara Russano Hanning (Stuyvestant, N.Y., 1992), pp. 355-79. 8. This and a subsequent cantata were arranged by one J. A. Schulze, not to be ~ confused with J. A. P. Schultz, in 1809 and 1810. 9. Cosima Wagner, II, 231, 235-36. 10. William A. King, New York Grace Church Collection of Sacred Music Selected and Arranged from the Classical and Sacred Works of Great Composers and

Adapted to the Psalms and Hymns of the Protestant Episcopal Church (New York: Thos. N. Stanford, 1852), pp. 10-11. 11. Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric, p. 173. See also Todd, in Musical Humanism and Its Legacy, pp. 355-79.

12. See Paul Mies, “Friedrich Silchers Liedbearbeitungen Beethovenscher Melodien,” BJ 3 (1957-58), 111-26. I concur with W. A. Ellis and Klaus Kropfinger that this same variation theme lies behind the first theme of Wagner’s “Wesendonck” Sonata; see Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven, pp. 183-84. 13. We know of this texting through the dismissive entry that his daughter Cosima

204 s~~ NOTES TO PAGES 90-101 wrote in her diary a month later (30 June 1870): “My father’s ‘Beethoven Can-

tata,’ unfortunately rendered unenjoyable by its text, and anyway its whole form (the Eroica theme is sung!), is disagreeable.” Cosima Wagner, I, 240.

14. Regarding hermeneutical interpretations of the Third Symphony in the nineteenth century, see Scott Burnham, BF 1:1-24; and Martin Geck and Peter Schleuning, “Geschrieben auf Bonaparte” Beethoven’s “Eroica”: Revolution, Reaktion, Rezeption (Hamburg, 1989). 15. Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose, p. 116; Nicholas Marston, 19CM 14:247-64. 16. Berlioz, in Revue musicale, 6 October 1829, p. 252. 17. The translation is from David Cairns, Berlioz (London, 1989), p. 288. He elaborates on the physicality of his response in Le Correspondant, 6 October 1829, p. 251: “Peu a peu je sentis un poids affreux oppresser ma poitrine comme horrible cauchemar, je sentis mes cheveux se hérisser, mes dents se serrer avec force,

tous mes muscles se contracter et enfin a l’apparition d’une phrase du final, rendue avec la derniére violence par l’archet énergique de Baillot, des larmes froides, des larmes de l’angoisse et de la terreur, se firent péniblement jour 4 travers mes paupiéres et vinrent mettre le comble a cette cruelle emotion.” 18. Kai Aage Bruun, Dansk Musiks Historie, 2 vols. (Copenhagen, 1969), II, 244. Bruun discusses the resemblance with Saint-Saéns on p. 269. 19. Letter of 10 June 1829, The Letters of Fanny Hensel to Felix Mendelssohn, ed. and trans. Marcia J. Citron (Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1987), p. 49. 20. She composed “Nachtreigen” on 29 June 1829.

21. Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, 1853-1896, 2 vols., ed. Berthold Litzmann (New York, 1927), II, 200. Hull discusses this letter in “Brahms the Allusive,” p. 228. 22. William Horne, “Brahms’ Heine Lieder,” in Brahms als Liedkomponist, ed. Pe-

my attention. | ter Jost (Stuttgart, 1992), pp. 93-115, p. 108. ,

23. I would like to thank my student Paul Christiansen for bringing this example to 24. George Perle, “The Secret Program of the Lyric Suite,” The Alban Berg Newsletter 5 (1977), 4-12.

6. Inspiration | 1. Alexander Pope, Preface to Works of Shakespeare, in The Works of Alexander Pope (London, 1778), III, 270-72. This passage is discussed in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New

York, 1958), p. 188. ,

2. SchumannG§, I, 125; Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, p. 51. 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1911), pp. 168 and 181. These passages are discussed in Peter Kivy, The Possessor and the Possessed: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and the Idea of Musical Genius (New Haven, 2001), pp. 108-09. Regarding genius and musical creativity, see also Carl Dahlhaus, Esthetics of Music, trans. W. Austin (Cam-

, NOTES TO PAGES 102-108 ~~ 205 bridge, 1982), chap. 6, “Genius, Enthusiasm, Technique”; Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven, pp. 50-52, 166-69. ~ 4, See Thomas McFarland, Originality and Imagination (Baltimore, 1985), espe-

, cially chap. 1, “The Originality Paradox,” pp. 1-30. |

5. “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” in The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, new rev. ed., Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1969), p. 750; Novalis, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Hildburg and Werner Kohlschmidt (Gutersloh, 1967), p. 427. I quote here from Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric, p. 168.

6. On the three metamorphoses (or transformations), see Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (New — Haven, 1986), pp. 19 and 32-35. 7. For the operas that Beethoven played, see the lists in Thayer-Forbes, pp. 97-98. 8. I quote from Bonds, After Beethoven, p. 79. 9. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, p. 35. 10. SchumannGS, I, 368. I quote from Lippman, The Philosophy and Aesthetics of

Music, p. 161. :

11. Carl Czerny, School of Practical Composition, I, 93. Although his treatise was first published in 1848, Czerny had begun to write it in the mid-1830s. _ 12. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in Samtliche Werke, ed.

a Wolfgang Freiherr von Lohneysen, 5 vols. (Stuttgart, 1960-1965), I, 363. I quote from the translation in Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early- _ Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Peter le Huray and James Day (Cambridge, 1981),

p. 327.

pp. 22-23.

13. George Henschel, Personal Recollections of Johannes Brabms (Boston, 1907), 14. Published as Fragment no. 116 in his magazine the Athenaeum. See Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and The Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis,

, 1971), p. 175. _

15. Vogl’s widow, Kunigunde Vogl, is quoted in Alessandra Comini, The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking (New York, 1987), p. 126; Joseph Wechsberg, Schubert: His Life, His Work, His Time (New York, 1977), p. 80. 16. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: “Kreisleriana,” “The Poet and the Composer,” Music Criticism, ed. with an intro. by David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 192-93. 17. Richard Wagner, My Life, 2 vols. (New York, 1911), II, 602-03; L. J. Rather, The Dream of Self-Destruction: Wagner’s Ring and the Modern World (Baton Rouge, 1979), pp. 135-36. 18. Wagner Prose Wks, VI, 170. 19. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 1, p. 363, as translated in Music and Aesthetics, p. 327. Because it is the same word in German, I have _ - substituted the word “somnambulist” for “sleepwalker” in this translation.

20. Rupert Hughes and Arthur Elson, American Composers (Boston, 1914), pp. 61-62. The passage continues: “Dr. Wm. A. Hammond, in his book on ‘Sleep and Its Derangements,’ is inclined to scout [doubt?] the possibility of

206 s~—~ NOTES TO PAGES 111-119 , a real valuable inspiration in sleep. He finds no satisfactory explanation for Tartini’s famous ‘Devil’s Sonata’ or Coleridge’[s] proverbial ‘Kubla Khan.’ He takes refuge in saying that at least the result could not be equal to the dreamer’s capabilities when awake; but Kelley’s ‘Macbeth’ music was certainly an improvement on what he could invent out of the land of Nod.” 21. For a summary of von Hartmann’s work, see Dennis N. Kennedy Darnoi, The Unconscious and Eduard von Hartmann: A Historico-critical Monograph (The Hague, 1967); and Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud (New

York, 1978), pp. 163-66. ,

22. Quoted from Schumann, On Music and Musicians, p. 76. 23. Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious (London, 1931), p. 282. 24. Studies of genius and creativity have developed rapidly in recent decades. See,

for instance, The Creativity Question, ed. Albert Rothenburg and Carl R. Hausman (Durham, N.C., 1976); H. J. Eysenck, Genius: The Natural History of Creativity (Cambridge, 1995); Dean Keith Simonton, Genius and Creativity: Selected Papers (Greenwich, Conn., 1997), and Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity (New York, 1999); Genius and the Mind: Studies of Creativity and Temperament, ed. Andrew Steptoe (Oxford, 1998). 25. This is from a letter to W. von Humboldt written five days before Goethe’s death in 1832; quoted in Whyte, The Unconscious, pp. 128-29. 26. 16 December 1828. J]. W. Goethe: Conversations with Eckermann, 1823-1832,

trans. John Oxenford (San Francisco, 1984), p. 229. 27. These are detailed in Brodbeck, Brahms Studies 1 (1994), 30-80.

28. Letter of 13 April 1838. Quoted from Schumann, On Music and Musicians, p. 260. 29. Quoted in Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven, p. 166. 30. Cosima Wagner, vol. 2, p. 200 (14 November 1878). 31. This passage is discussed in Brodbeck, Brahms Studies 3:226—-30; and also in his “Brahms,” in The Nineteenth-Century Symphony, ed. D. Kern Holoman (New York, 1996), pp. 237-38. 32. Goethe, from “Einleitung in die Propylaen,” as quoted in Benjamin Bennett, Goethe’s Theory of Poetry: “Faust” and the Regeneration of Language (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), p. 43.

7. Naming 1. Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens, p. 4. 2. Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and The Fragments, p. 176. 3. Huizinga, Homo ludens, p. 4. 4. Ibid., p. 2; see also Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” in his The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. N. Walker, ed. with an intro. by Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge, 1986), p. 22. 5. This signature is derived from gematria, according to which each letter of the alphabet has a musical equivalent (A = 1,B = 2,C =3...; the letters I and J are considered to be the same, and K is omitted). C. P. E. Bach set forty-two Psalms

NOTES TO PAGES 119-122 ~~ 207 in the collection Herrn Doctor Cramers tibersetzte Psalmen mit melodien zum singen bey dem Clavier, 1773-1774, Wot. 196. 6. He composed a fughetta on this subject in 1784 (H. 285). Transpositions of CF-E-bb-a begin several movements, especially in his keyboard sonatas but also in the central aria “Wende dich zu meinem Schmerze” of his Passion cantata Die letzten Leiden des Erldsers (1769). The text begins with a first-person statement, “Wende dich zu meinem Schmerze, Gott der Huld!” as do two songs that begin with this motive, “Osterlied” (“Jesus lebt, mit ihm auch ich”) and “Was ist’s, dafs ich mich quale.” The instrumental movements that begin with transpositions of CFEB or CFEBA are Wot. 69 (Andante); Wot. 65/22 (Allegro); and

, Wot. 65/44 (Larghetto). 7. Regarding Albrechtsberger’s fugue, see Martin Zenck, Die Bach-Rezeption des | spdten Beethoven (Stuttgart, 1986), p. 80; the others are listed in Wolfgang Schmieder, Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs, 2nd rev. ed. (Wiesbaden, 1990) as Anh. II 45 and Anh. II 107, 108, and

110. Of the last three, there are separate copies in Vienna at both the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek.

8. The concert in Stockholm on 14 April 1813 was reviewed in the AmZ 15 (1813), col. 321. After several orchestral works, Ries gave “eine freye Phantasie auf den Pianof[orte], zu welcher er verschiedene Themata bekommen hatte, und

darunter auch [musical example of B-A-C-H] etc. (BACH) woraus er denn einen, zwar kurzen, aber sch6nen Fugensatz bildete.” On this and the performance of Seyfried’s fugue, see Zenck, Die Bach-Rezeption, pp. 110-11. 9. Act 4, sc. 3, 1. 342. The German translation is in Der Liebe Muh’ umsonst, trans. Ferdinand Mayerhofer (Vienna: J. P. Sollinger, 1825), William Shakspeare’s saemmtliche dramatische Werke, XXII, 55: “Schlau wie die Sphinx, voll siifSer Harmonie, / Wie Phébus Lei’r, mit seinem Haar bespannt. / Wenn

Liebe spricht, lullt aller Gotter Sang/Die Himmel selbst in Ruh durch

- Harmonie.” ,

10. On nineteenth- and twentieth-century compositions on B-A-C-H, see Paul Mies,

“B-A-C-H (Stilistiches und Statistiches),” NZfM 92 (1925), 142-48. On the date, see Robert Winter, “Noch Einmal: Wo sind Beethoven’s Skizzen zur

zehnten Symphonie?” BJ, ser. 2, vol. 9 (1977), 531-52. 11. The citation in the lied (op. 44, no. 10) was first proposed by Hans Gal, Johannes Brahms: His Work and Personality, trans. J. Stein (London, 1963), pp. 65-66. On both see Floros, Johannes Brahms, pp. 84-88. 12. Schumann, “Niels W. Gade,” as translated in Schumann, On Music, pp. 24546.

13. See Siegfried Kross, “Brahms and E. T. A. Hoffmann,” 19CM 6 (1982), 193200. 14. I have also argued that the retrograde version that begins the Third Symphony linked with FAF is a Kreisler reference; see Reynolds, 19CM 9:3-25. On the likelihood that a retrograde form also figures in Rinaldo, see Carol A. Hess, _ “Als wahres volles Menschenbild’: Brahms’s Rinaldo and Autobiographical Allusion,” in Brahms Studies, 2:63—90. Georges Bozarth, “Brahms’s First Piano

208 s~~ NOTES TO PAGES 123-131 Concerto op. 15: Genesis and Meaning,” in Beitrdge zur Geschichte des Kon-

zerts: Festschrift Siegfried Kross zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. R. Emans und M. Wendt (Bonn, 1990), pp. 211-47, disputes that a motive could be introduced in

retrograde. But retrograde treatments of FAE and GADE indicate that this transformation may have been permissible for personal musical symbols. 15. Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, vol. 3: Concertos (London, 1936), pp. 114-20. 16. For the latter derivation, see Constantin Floros, Alban Berg: Musik als Autobiographie (Wiesbaden, 1992), p. 113. Recent studies to accept the Clara motive include Elaine Sisman, 19CM 14:132-53, p. 149; Dillon Parmer, 19CM

19:185-86; and David Brodbeck, Brahms: Symphony No. 1 (Cambridge, 1997), especially pp. 39-42.

17. This allusion was first mentioned in R. Hohenemser, Luigi Cherubini: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig, 1913), p. 292. 18. The letter is dated 5 December 1780 from Munich. In it he states that the Trio of Menuet K. 315g, no. 8, was one that “ich vom Bach gelernt, mit ihm wacken spielen.”

19. The manuscript is dated March 1828; Rufus Hallmark, “Schubert’s ‘Auf dem Strom,’” in Schubert Studies: Problems of Style and Chronology, ed. E. BaduraSkoda and P. Branscombe (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 25-46. Alfred Einstein recognized long ago that both Rellstab’s poem and Schubert’s setting strongly recall Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte; Einstein, Schubert: A Musical Portrait (New York, 1951), pp. 302-03. 20. Hallmark, “Schubert’s ‘Auf dem Strom,’” p. 41.

21. Schumann, Tagebiicher, Il, 25, 30; Rosen, The Romantic Generation, pp. 101-03.

22. See the critical commentary in Robert Schumann, Requiem, op. 148, ed. Bernhard Appel (Mainz, 1993), Neue Ausgabe sémmtliche Werke, Series IV, Group 3, vol. 3, p. 129. A connection with Schumann is the basis for identifying “Freu dich sehr” rather than “Wer nur den lieben Gott lat walten” as the chorale melody to which Brahms alluded in Ein deutsches Requiem; see Reynolds, 19CM 9:3-25. 23. Letter to Therese Schumann, 1 April 1836: “Mendelssohn ist der, an den ich hinanblicke, wie zu einem hohen Gebirge. Ein wahrer Gott ist er.” Briefe und Notizen Robert und Clara Schumanns, 2nd rev. ed., ed. Siegfried Kross (Bonn, 1982), Bonner Beitrage zur Bibliotheks- und Bucherkunde, 27, p. 46. 24. From Sechs deutsche Gedichte von Schiller, Fouqué, Schmidt u. m. Fiir eine Singstimme (Leipzig: Friedrich Hofmeister, c. 1810), no. 2. 25. Joscelyn Godwin, “Early Mendelssohn and Late Beethoven,” MeL 55 (1974), 272-85. Another possible allusion is to a more grandiose fantasy, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, op. 80, whose melody adumbrates the Ode to Joy. Mendelssohn inverts the voices (top voice becomes inner), maintains the constant eighthnote rhythm, and modulates to Beethoven’s key for this phrase. 26. Eric Werner, Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Composer and His Age, trans. Dika Newlin (New York, 1963), pp. 267-68; Werner, Mendelssohn: Leben und

, NOTES TO PAGES 132-141 ~~ 209 Werk in neuer Sicht (Zurich, 1980), p. 290; and most recently, Cooper, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and the “Italian” Symphony, pp. 299-300. 27. “Fir Felix / In seiner Abwesenheit.” The first publication of the sonata was the modern edition by Judith Radell (Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Hildegard Publishing Co.,

1992).

28. The second strophe omits this musical phrase. The climax to the finale of her String Quartet in Eb (1834) also has a BACH motive on the same pitches. 29. This BACH figure is in Artaria 197, p. 62, and was first noted in the catalogue

by Hans-Giinter Klein, Ludwig van Beethoven: Autographe und Abschriften (Berlin, 1975), p. 197. Among more recent citations, see especially William Drabkin, “The Agnus Dei of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis: The Growth of Its

Form,” in Beethoven’s Compositional Process, ed. William Kinderman (Lin- , coln, Neb., 1991), pp. 131-59, and Drabkin, “The Sketches and Autographs for the Later Movements of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis,” BF 2 (1993), 97-132, with a transcription on p. 122. In “The Agnus Dei” Drabkin includes this figure in his table of eleven “‘Programmatic’ Remarks in the Sketches for the Agnus Dei.” I am grateful to Professor Drabkin for calling this sketch to my attention. 30. Drabkin, BF 2:120-21. 31. J. W. Ritter, Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physiker, ein Taschenbuch fiir Freunde der Natur (Heidelberg, 1810). I quote from the translation by

. ~ Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, p. 59. , , 32. “Durch all Tone ténet / Im bunten Erdentraum / Ein leise Ton gezogen / Fiir den der heimlich lauschet.” 33. Berger, A Theory of Art, p. 180.

34. Drabkin, “The Agnus Dei,” pp. 133-37. ,

$8. Allusive Traditions and Audiences 1. Gerber, “Eine freundliche Vorstellung uber gearbeitete Instrumentalmusik, besonder iiber Symphonien,” AmZ 15 (1812-13), col. 475; I quote the translation from Webster, Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony, p. 180.

2. See Webster, Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony, pp. 238-47; Daniel Heartz, in Kongress Bayreuth, pp. 120-35; Geoffrey Chew, Haydn-Studien 3:106-24.

3. “Lieder melodien . . . miissen in der einfachsten Folge der Tone, in der bestimtesten Bewegung, in der genauesten Uebereinstimmung der Einschnitte und Abschnitte u.s.w. gerade die Weise . . . des Liedes so treffen, daf$ man die _- Melodie, weifs man sie einmal, nicht ohne die Worte, die Worte nicht ohne die ~ Melodie mehr denken kann; daf$ die Melodie fiir die Worte alles, nichts fiir sich allein seyn soll.” Reichardt, Musikalisches Kunstmagazin (Berlin, 1782), p. 4: “Noch ein Wort von Volksliedern. Sie sind wahrlich das, worauf der wahre Kiinstler, der die Irrwege seiner Kunst zu ahnden anfangt, wie der Seeman auf den Polarstern achtet, und woher er am meisten fiir seinen Gewinn beobachtet.” 4. Letter of 28 October 1821; see Marcia Citron, ed., The Letters of Fanny Hensel

to Felix Mendelssohn, p. 1. ,

210 =~ NOTES TO PAGES 141-152 5. Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: Ein Kiinstlerleben nach Tagebiichern und , Briefen, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1910-1912), I, 19. 6. Ellis, Life of Wagner, vol. 4, p. 406; Merrick, Revolution and Religion in the Music of Liszt, pp. 286-87.

7. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Robert Schumann, Words and Music: The Vocal Compositions, trans. Reinhard G. Pauly (Portland, 1988), p. 163, notes the resemblance but considers it “probably unintentional.” I discuss this and other allusions in Reynolds, “An die Ferne Geliebte, op. 98,” in Beethoven: Interpretationen seiner Werke, ed. C. Dahlhaus, A. Riethmiiller, and A. Ringer, 2 vols. (Laaber, 1994), II, 99-108. 8. Fanny Hensel’s movement was also part of her cycle Das Jahr, entitled “September: Am Flusse.” 9. AmZ 23 (1821), col. 378. Burkholder quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it,” in NG2 4:28. 10. See the hymn and brief commentary in Das katolische deutsche Kirchenlied in seinem Singweisen von der friihesten Zeiten bis gegen Ende des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Wilhelm Baumker et al., 4 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1883-

1911), I, 218-19. |

11. Among those who have discussed the connection of Beethoven’s themes to Bach’s, see William Kinderman, “Bachian Affinities in Beethoven,” in Bach Perspectives, 3: Creative Responses to Bach from Mozart to Hindemith, ed. M. Marissen (Lincoln, Neb., 1998), p. 88; Peter Schleuning, “Cellosonate ADur, op. 69,” in Beethoven: Interpretationen, I, 519-21; Martin Geck, Johann Sebastian Bach: Johannespassion BWV 245 (Munich, 1991), p. 93; Wilfred Mellers, Beethoven and the Voice of God (New York, 1983), pp. 299-302; and Denis Matthews, Beethoven (London, 1985). Schleuning argues that Beethoven

must have known the St. John Passion. |

12. It is worth observing that in compiling these tables of BACH and “Es ist vollbracht” motives, I have been able to examine only a small percentage of her works. 13. Martin Staehelin, in Mendelssohn World, pp. 121-36; this article first appeared as “Elias, Johann Sebastian Bach und der Neue Bund. Zur Arie Es ist genug in Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys Oratorium Elias,” in Beitrage zur Geschichte des Oratoriums seit Handel: Festschrift Gunther Massenkeil zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Rainer Cadenbach and Helmut Loos (Bonn, 1986), pp. 283-96. 14. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 141. See also Judith Ryan, MLO 53:227.

| 15. Donald Mintz, “The Sketches and Drafts of Three of Felix Mendelssohn’s Major Works” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1960), p. 39; Arntrud KurzhalsReuter, Die Oratorien Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys: Untersuchung zur Quellenlage, Entstehung, Gestaltung und Uberlieferung (Tutzing, 1978), Mainzer Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 12, p. 186.

16. Friedrich Smend, “Die Johannes-Passion von Bach: auf ihren Bau untersucht,” BJ 23 (1926), 115; Alfred Diirr, Die Jobannes-Passion von Johann Sebastian Bach: Entstehung, Uberlieferung, Werkeinfiibrung (Kassel, 1988), p. 97.

NOTES TO PAGES 153-161 —~= 211 17. Staehelin, in Mendelssohn World, p. 123. 18. At just this time Mendelssohn described to a friend his enthusiasm for op. 130 and op. 131; quoted in Friedhelm Krummacher, Mendelssohn—der Komponist: Studien zur Kammermusik fiir Streicher (Munich, 1978), pp. 71ff. Friedrich Kuhlau composed his String Quartet in A Minor, op. 122, in 1831, very much in the style of late Beethoven; see Reinhold Brinkmann, “Wirkungen Beethovens in der Kammermusik,” Beitrdge zur Beethovens Kammermusik: Symposion Bonn

, 1984 (Bonn, 1987), pp. 80-81. 19. Martin Geck, Johann Sebastian Bach: Johannespassion, p. 102, considers the sources of the Passion to have been “gut zuganglich” at that time. 20. Franz K6rndle makes this argument in “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Carl Friedrich Zelter und ‘die musikalische Malerey,’” Annuario 54 (1999), 185201. 21. Dating from 1770, it incorporates much of the music from C. P. E. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion of 1769, now lost. In addition to some twenty-one manuscript copies (not counting fragments), and nearly as many text books, an early print was made in 1789. Stephen Lewis Clark, “The Occasional Choral Works of C. P. E. Bach” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1984), p. 73. 22. Wilhelm Altmann considers the version for cello to be original; see the preface to his Eulenberg Miniature Score edition (New York, 1954). Leta Miller has ar-

gued for the priority of the version for flute, in “C. P. E. Bach’s Instrumental Recompositions: Revisions or Alternatives?” Current Musicology 59 (1995), 5— 47. 23. Hans-Werner Kiithen, ed., Beethoven Werke, ser. III, vol. 2, Klavierkonzerte I: Kritischer Bericht (Munich, 1984), p. 43. Leon Plantinga proposes a later date of “summer-autumn 1802” in his Beethoven’s Concertos: History, Style, Performance (New York, 1999), p. 135; see the discussions of dating on pp. 130-35 and 150-58. Barry Cooper offers strong support for the earlier dating in his cri-

tique of Plantinga’s book, “Beethoven’s Concertos as Show and Text,” BF 9

(2002), 123-32, especially pp. 131-32.

24. See Plantinga, Beethoven’s Concertos, pp. 115-16; and Kithen, Klavierkonzerte I: Kritischer Bericht, pp. 43-45. 25. Agawu, Playing with Signs, pp. 137-38. More broadly, Todorov describes a process in which “signs are constantly being changed into symbols,” in Theories of the Symbol, pp. 222-23.

26. Letter to D. G. Otten, 2 April 1851; Schumann, On Music, p. 92; Robert Schumanns Leben aus seinen Briefen, ed. Hermann Erler, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1886), II, 73. He made this comment after all the works listed in Table 8.1 had been composed.

27. SchumannGS I, 83: “Ganz Deutschland schenkt es ihm: solche Wegweiser haben immer etwas Unwiirdiges und Charlatanmdafiges. Jedenfalls hatten die finf Hauptiiberschriften geniigt; die genaueren Umstande . . . wiirden sich

, schon durch miindliche Tradition fortgepflanzt haben.” Wagner expressed the same sentiments when he criticized Richard Pohl for betraying his confidence: “There is much that we freely admit among ourselves, for instance that since my acquaintance with Liszt’s works I’ve become quite another person harmonically

212 *~—~ NOTES TO PAGES 163-167 to what I used to be. But if friend Pohl blabs this secret to the whole world as a summary review of the Tristan Prelude, that’s at the very least simply indiscreet, and I can’t concede that he was authorized to such an indiscretion.” Wagner, Briefe an Hans von Bilow (Jena, 1916), pp. 125-26. I have altered Warrack’s | translation in Wagner Companion, p. 96.

9. Motives for Allusion ) 1. Hull, “Brahms the Allusive,” p. 11. 2. Otto Gottlieb Billroth, ed., Billroth und Brahms im Briefwechsel (Berlin, 1935), p. 283; Parmer, 19CM 19:161-90. 3. Parmer, ibid.; O. G. Billroth, Billroth und Brabms, p. 284. 4. My emphasis. SchumannGS I, p. 59; quoted from Bonds, After Beethoven, p. 121.

5. Review by E. Kriiger, AmZ 50 (1840), col. 369: “Und so ist das Ganze schwungsvoll melodisch durchgefiihrt, und doch fehlt mir Eins, was ich nicht nennen kann—es gehort also eigentlich nicht in die Kritik! Doch warum nicht auch hier Geheimes andeuten, selbst was man nicht verantworten kann? Die

Melodie hat mir, wie manche frihere unseres Robert, eben auf diese schwadrmerischen Gebiete, mehr Frage als Antwort, mehr Sehnen als Sattigung

in sich; es ist ein verschleierter Himmel, wo man hofft den ge6ffneten zu finden.” My emphasis. 6. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 33. 7. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, p. 14. 8. Schumann, “A Symphony by Berlioz,” in Hector Berlioz, Fantastic Symphony, ed. and trans. Edward Cone, p. 246. See the discussion of this citation above on

p. 86.

9. A. B. Marx, “Olympia, grofse Oper in drei Akten,” Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 3 (1826), 366. This review and others of Marx are discussed in Sanna Pederson, “A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity,” 19CM 18 (1994), 87-107. 10. SchumannGS I, 460: “Und diese himmlische Lange der Sinfonie, wie ein dicker Roman in vier Banden etwa von Jean Paul, der auch niemals endigen kann und aus den besten Griinden zwar, um auch den Leser hinterher nachschaffen zu lassen.” 11. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Der Dichter und der Komponist,” Serapionsbriider, p. 355. This passage is discussed in Moraal, The Life and Afterlife of Johannes Kreisler,

pp. 183-85.

12. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 26.

13. Pederson, 19CM 18:102-03. ,

14. Judith Ryan, MLO 53:243-44, makes a similar point regarding literary studies. 15. Ibid., p. 227; Cynthia Chase, “‘Viewless Wings’: Intertextual Interpretation of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva HoSek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), p. 213.

| ~ NOTES TO PAGES 167-171 —~ 213 16. Herman Meyer, The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel, trans. Theodore and Yetta Ziolkowski (Princeton, 1968), pp. 6, 8-9, and 128-29. 17. Knapp also identified “a frequent feature of Brahms’s allusions: the fusion of several allusions into a single musical idea”; Brahms and the Challenge, p. 91, and Brahms Studies 3:144.

18. Huizinga, Homo ludens, p. 12.

19. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 7. 20. Huizinga, Homo ludens, pp. 12-13. On the communities of Weber, Berlioz, and Schumann, see Moraal, The Life and Afterlife of Johannes Kreisler, passim. 21. Quoted from Schauffler, Florestan, p. 78. 22. Rosen and Zerner, Romanticism and Realism, p. 118. 23. “Es ist gewiss, man ist nicht eher befugt zu richten, bis man ein Kunstwerk ganz versteht, bis man tief in seinem und seines Urhebers Sinn eingedrungen ist.” This quote is taken from a review of Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen and is quoted in Ralph W. Ewton, The Literary Theories of August Wilhelm Schlegel (The Hague, 1972), p. 83. On the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic information and their contributions to a dialogic reading of a text, see Michael Steig, Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding (Baltimore, 1989), p. xiv. 24. Edwin Stein, Wordsworth’s Art of Allusion (University Park, Pa., 1988). 25. For a discussion of this poem, see Chapter 4, and especially n. 10. 26. The diary entry is from March 1837, the same year as his admonition to Clara to be like Leonore; see Schumann, Tagebiicher, II, 1836-1854, ed. G. Nauhaus (Leipzig, 1987), p. 32. 27. Regarding this association, see Reynolds, BF 4. It was noted in the Kalmus edition of this piece published sometime during the 1940s: Robert Schumann, AIbum II for Piano, ed. Clara Schumann, rev. ed. Alexander Lipsky (New York: E. E Kalmus, [n.d.]); and in Robert Schumann, Jugend-Album, opus 68. Faksimile nach der im Besitz des Robert Schumann-Museums Zwickau befindlichen Urschrift, notes by Georg Eismann (Leipzig: Peters, 1956), p. 4: “Das Stiick ist eine Paraphrase iiber das Thema ‘Euch werde Lohn in bessren Welten.’” In Paris at the end of the century, Paul Taffanel used the same aria as the basis for the slow movement of his Woodwind Quintet in G Minor.

, 28. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 81. Iam indebted to

Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, especially pp. 1-21. , 29. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, p. 20; Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to “Don Quixote” (Cambridge, 1978). 30. Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 1797-1801, ed. H. Eichner (Toronto, 1957), no. 500, p. 64. Quoted in Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, p. 26. 31. A. W. Schlegel, Die Kunstlehre, p. 82; quoted from Todorov, Theories of the

Symbol, p. 198. ,

32. Goethe’s letter to K. E. Schubarth, 27 April 1818, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gesprdache, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich, 1948-1966), vol. 21, p. 286; Novalis, Werke, Tagebiicher und Briefe, ed. Richard Samuel and Hans-Joachim ,

214 215 in John Williamson, Strauss: “Also sprach Zarathustra” (Cambridge, 1993), p. 6. 52. Dahlhaus, The Esthetics of Music, p. 59. 53. Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, p. 205. 54. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, p. 82. 55. Cosima Wagner, I, 804 (16 November 1874). 56. Berger, A Theory of Art, p. 180. 57. In his poem “Sendschreiben” (1774) Goethe described Nature “as a living book whose meaning is not understood, yet not impossible to understand” (Sieh, so ist Natur ein Buch lebendig, Unverstanden, doch nicht unverstandlich). Halmi discusses this idea and the resonance of this view in the succeeding generations, in European Romantic Review 4:16-21. My thoughts about the inappropriateness of continuing to view allusions as “extra-musical” are influenced by Lydia

Goehr, History and Theory 31:194-95, and n. 26; and by Parmer, 19CM 19:189-90. 58. Berger, A Theory of Art, p. 180.

a BLANK PAGE /

| Acknowledgments

This book has benefited greatly from the financial support of the Humboldt Stiftung, which provided me with the means to spend a year at the University of Heidelberg in 1991-92; and from the University of California, Davis, both for publication subventions provided by the Office of the Vice-Chancellor of Research, Barry Klein, and the Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies, Elizabeth Langland, and for years of generous grants from the Committee on Research. I profited as well from a residency as a Visiting Fellow at the Villa I Tatti in Florence in the fall of 1996, where my ideas devel-

~ oped while working on a study about allusion in the Missa Hercules dux ferrariae by Josquin des Prez.

Earlier versions of portions of this book have previously appeared as “Florestan Reading Fidelio,” Beethoven Forum 4 (1995), 135-64; “From Berlioz’s Fugitive to Godard’s Terrorist: Artistic Responses to Beethoven’s Late Quartets,” Beethoven Forum 8 (2000), 147-63; and “Beethoven’s Arioso dolente und die Frage seiner motivischen Erbschaft,” in Beethoven und

| die Rezeption der alten Musik, ed. Hans-Werner Kiithen (Bonn: Beethoven- | Haus, 2002), pp. 217-41. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the help and support of many friends and colleagues, who either have read chapters and early drafts or have challenged, helped, inspired, or otherwise supported me. These include Emily Albu and Alan Taylor, Reinhold Brinkmann, David Brodbeck, Ses and Stig Bulow, J. Peter Burkholder, David Cairns, John Daverio, William Drabkin, Gail Finney and Bob Sheetz, Ludwig Finscher, Patricia Flowers, Stephen Hinton, D. Kern Holoman, Kenneth Hull, Bernhard Janz and Beatrice

218 s—~ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Donin-Janz, William Kinderman, Hans-Werner Kiithen, Lewis Lockwood, Robert Morgan, Anthony Newcomb, David and Helen Nutter, Pablo Ortiz and Ana Pelufo, Ewa and Zbyszek Stachniak, Martin Staehelin, James Webster, Lorenz Welker, and Susan Youens. Specific debts are acknowledged in the notes. Iam especially grateful to my colleague Anna Maria Busse Berger

and to Karol Berger for comments, advice, and friendship. I owe many thanks to the patient and professional staff of the music library of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich: Matthias Herrmann, Susanna Peteler, Elfriede Witte, and Ulrich Hein, who for eight months in 1997 brought me score after score. This project evolved in part from arguments tested in graduate seminars on allusion that I have taught at McGill University, Yale University, and most of all the University of California, Davis. Among the students in those classes, or those who have helped me as re-

search assistants, are Liani Asercion-Moore, Mark Brill, Luciano Chessa, Paul Christiansen, Matthew Daines, Melissa DeGraaf, Sarah Eyerly, Carol Hess, John Lutterman, John Palmer, Marica Tacconi, Lise Viens, and Drew Wheeler. And to Joél Lindhaimer and especially Drew Wheeler I am indebted for copying and preparing all of the music examples for publication. In the final stages of writing, I have benefited greatly from the sharp eye of Mary Ellen Geer, whose sensitive editing improved many details of this book. Finally, I am delighted, after years of discussing this project with her, to be able to work with Peg Fulton and to have earned a place in her personal library. For their love and encouragement I depend on my mother, Mary Lee, and

my siblings and extended family: Joel, Ellen, Anne Marie, Susan, Martha

and their families, and my in-laws Donald and Jorun Johns, Karl and Andreas. For Alessa and Gabriel and the life we build together, I am enduringly thankful. Davis/Gottingen October 2002

Index

Page numbers in boldface indicate compositions included in music examples. All entries such as “Bach, and Beethoven,” and “Mendelssohn, and Brahms” refer to discussions of one of the

composers citing, or being cited by, the other.

Agawu, Kofi, 9-10, 159 Play; in poetry, 6, 20, 26, 70, 169, | Albrechtsberger, J. G., 119, 207n.7 179; and texting, 99-100; andtwo- | Allegory, 8, 189n.19. See also Signs; way transfers of meaning, 51-52, 97,

Symbol , 151-52, 171; as Wagnerian ac-

Allusion: assimilative, 16-17, 20, 44— tualization, 65-66. See also Allusive —

67, 75, 79-85, 123-24, 172, tradition; Audience for allusion; For200n.13; audibility of, 1-2, 41-42, mal modeling; Hermeneutical signals; 45, 84-85, 181; biographical context Irony; Opus number; Quotation; of, 2, 11, 18-19, 48, 60-61, 72-75, Reminiscences; Self-quotation; Symbol; 80, 87, 92-93, 126, 127-30, 132, — entries under individual composers 168-70; composers’ acknowledgment _Allusive tradition, 77-82, 97-99, 113-

, of, 60, 97, 116, 142; composers’ si- 14, 131-37, 145-61; importance of lence about, 2, 97, 140, 141-43, 161, first allusion for, 145, 159-60, — 162, 169, 211n.27; and composition, 210n.9. See also Allusion, multiple 6, 100, 115-16, 163-64, 181-82; Anxiety of influence. See Bloom, Harold contrastive, see Contrastive allusion; Arnim, Gisela von, 28, 121, 122 definition of, 1-3, 5-6, 21, 44—-45;in | Audience for allusion, 2, 6, 52, 123, film music, x; and intentionality, 5-6, 142, 145, 166; interpretive responsi-

104, 114, 115-16, 134; multiple, 6, bility of, 21-22, 86, 162, 163-65, 12-14, 25-26, 28, 35, 37, 39, 57-58, 170-71; levels of, 68-69, 142-43,

76, 82, 95-99, 113-14, 129-31, 161, 168, 170, 181 167-68, 213n.17; and narrative, 8081; negative views of, 3-5, 101,103; Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 89, 119, to people, see Naming; as play, see 121, 159, 160; and Bach, J. S.,

220 c—~—~ INDEX

Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel (continued) Well-Tempered Clavier, 90; and 155-57, 160-61; Concerto in A Mi- Zelter, 155. See also B-A-C-H

nor for Cello (or Harpsichord or B-A-C-H, 120-21, 131-36, 138-39, Flute), H. 430-432, 155-56, 157, 159, 163, 207n.8; by Beethoven, 160-61, 211n.21; Dank-Hymne der 120-21, 134-35, 136, 138-39, Freundschaft, 155-56, 160; Duet for 209n.29; in fugues, 29, 31, 119, Flute and Violin, H. 598, 160; Die 207n.8; by Gade, 27-28; by Hensel, letzten Leiden des Erlosers, see Pas- Fanny, 120-21, 131-32, 133-34, sions-Cantate; and Mozart, 156-57; 135, 138-39, 149, 165, 209n.28; by

“Osterlied,” 207n.6; Passions- Mendelssohn, 131-32, 134, 136, _ Cantate, H. 776, 155-56, 160, 139, 165, 167; by Schumann, 29, 31, 207n.6, 211n.21; “Preis sei Gotte 154 Zebaoth,” 119; Sonata for Cembalo, — Bachlin, Oluf, 122 H. 38, 160; Sonata for Clavier, H. 63, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 15, 191n.48; authori160; “Was ist’s, daf$ ich mich quale,” tative discourse, 83-85; double-

207n.6 voiced discourse, 16—17, 82; interBach, Johann Christian, 119; and Mo- nally persuasive discourse, 83-85 zart, 124-25, 208n.18; Overture to Beethoven, 16, 17-21, 24, 48, 102,

La Calamita dei cuori, 124-25 107, 108-09, 115, 163, 166-67; An Bach, Johann Sebastian, 4, 115, 167, die ferne Geliebte, 36, 44, 84, 99, 171; Art of Fugue, 119; authority of, 126-27, 141, 143-45, 188n.13, 80, 138, 159; and Bach, C. P. E., 208n.19; and Bach, J. S., 1-2, 120155-57, 160-61; and Beethoven, 1- 21, 147-48, 156-59, 160-61; and 2, 120-21, 147-48, 156-59, 160-61; Berlioz, 44, 91-93; and Brahms, 16,

and Berg, 76; and Brahms, 121; 21, 24-26, 33-34, 43, 121, 138, Chaconne in D Minor for Violin, 193n.6; Canon on B-A-C-H, 120; 171; “Es ist genug,” 76; “Es ist Cantata on the Death of Emperor Jovollbracht” (St. John Passion), 1-2, seph II, 55; Choral Fantasy, op. 80, 85, 147-48, 149-51, 152-61, 165, 208n.25; Christ on the Mount of Ol171; “Es ist vollbracht,” as develop- ives, 159; Concerto for Piano no. 3 in ment theme, 149, 154, 156-59, 160; C Minor, op. 15, 24, 43, 156-58, and Louis Ferdinand, Prince, 157-58, 159, 160; Concerto for Violin in D 160; and Hensel, Fanny, 120-21, Major, op. 61, 145; and Cornelius, 149-50, 161; and Joachim, 121; and 90-91; Equale, 126; Fidelio, see Liszt, 121; Mass in B Minor, 10; and Fidelio; and Gluck, 174-77; and Mendelssohn, 149—54, 161; and Mo- Haydn, 4, 55-56; Heiligenstadt Teszart, 156-60; The Musical Offering, tament, 159; and Hensel, Fanny, 134, 36, 41; St. John Passion, 2, 8, 148, 149-50; Lieder von Gellert, op. 48, 153, 155-56, 161, 171, 211n.19; St. 145; and Liszt, 204n.13; and MenMatthew Passion, 81, 127-28, 161; delssohn, 25, 33-34, 102-03, 125, and Schumann, R., 36, 41, 120-21, 129-31, 134, 153, 208n.25; Missa 153-54, 161; “Seufzer, Thranen, Solemnis, 134, 136, 138, 209n.29;

Kummer, Noth,” 41; “Von den and Mozart, 4, 10-11, 26-27, 54-57, Stricken” (St. John Passion), 151-53; 102, 156-59; Overture on B-A-C-H

INDEX —7 221 (sketched), 120-21; reception of, 64—- Taffanel, 213n.27; Trio for Piano and

65, 92-93, 159, 172—75; and Strings (“Archduke”), op. 97, 46-47, Reichardt, 46-48; and Schubert, 10- 48; Variations and Fugue on an Orig11, 17, 44, 91, 125-26, 193n.7; and inal Theme (“Prometheus”), op. 35,

Schumann, R., 17-20, 35-41, 44, 39, 144; Variation sets on themes by 70-71, 91, 126-27, 143-45, 154, Mozart, 102; Vestas Feuer, 55; and

194n.28; Sonata for Cello and Piano Wagner, 63-66, 91 ,

in A Major, op. 69, 1, 147-48, 149- Bennett, William Sterndale, 103

450, 153-54, 156, 159-61; Sonata for Ben-Porat, Ziva,201n.20 Piano in F Minor, op. 2, no. 1, 90; Berg, Alban, 99, 119; and Bach, 76 Sonata for Piano in D Major, op. 10, Berger, Karol, 1,6, 138,180-81, | no. 3, 24; Sonata for Piano in Ab Ma- 201n.21, 202n.27 jor, op. 26, 90, 125; Sonata for Piano _ Berlioz, Hector, 15, 82, 172-73, 179,

, in C# Minor, op. 27, no. 2, 193n.6; 2.04n.17; and Beethoven, 44, 91-93; Sonata for Piano in C Major, op. 53, as critic, 54, 92-93; La damnation de 24-26, 43, 167; Sonata for Piano in Faust, 57; L’Enfance du Christ, 44, A Major, op. 101, 33; Sonata for Pi- 85, 91-92, 93, 99, 181; and Liszt, 57; ano in Bb Major, op. 106, 21, 24, 25, Symphonie fantastique, 33, 86, 161,

34, 167; Sonata for Piano in E Major, 165, 181; and Wagner, 57 , op. 109, 130; Sonata for Piano in Ab Billroth, Theodore, 163 Major, op. 110, 1, 130, 147-48, 149, Bloom, Harold, 15-16, 41-42, 110,

159, 161; Sonata for Piano in C Mi- 1S0-52,166-67,171 ,

nor, op. 111, 134-35, 139; and Bonaparte, Napoleon, 11 Spohr, 125; String Quartets, op. 18, Bonds, Mark Evan, 89, 203n.7 144; String Quartet in E Minor, op. Borchmeyer, Dieter, 82 59 no. 2, 76-77; String Quartet in F Borrowing, 3, 4; unconscious, 103 Minor, op. 95, 153; String Quartet in Bottger, Adolf, 201n.19 Bb Major, op. 130, 153, 211n.18; Bozarth, George, 88, 207n.14 String Quartet in C# Minor, op. 131, Brahms, Johannes, 5, 7, 15, 35, 38, 41,

44, 70, 85, 91-92, 93, 99, 181, | 88, 89, 142, 163, 167-68, 172, 178; , 199n.9, 211n.18; String Quartet in A and Bach, 121; Balladen, op. 10, 147; Minor, op. 132, 153; String Quartet and Beethoven, 16, 21, 24-26, 33in F Major, op. 135, 153; Symphony 34, 43, 121, 138, 193n.6; Cadenza sketch, 27; Symphony no. 3 in Eb Ma- for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4,

jor (“Eroica”), 33, 36, 63-64, 65-66, 121; and Chopin, 15, 109-10; Con88, 90-91, 99-100, 125-26, 136, certo for Piano no. 1 in D Minor, op. 159, 194n.18, 204n.13; Symphony 15, 24, 28, 43, 122-23, 138, 167, no. 5 in C Minor, 16, 33, 36; Sym- 180; creativity, views on, 104-11, phony no. 6 in F Major, 99; Sym- 115, 180, 192n.1; and Dessoff, Otto, phony no. 7 in A Major, 35-36, 40- 116; Ein deutsches Requiem, 122,

41, 43, 69, 86, 99, 126, 173-74, 127, 208n.22; and Hensel, Fanny, : 175-176, 177, 180; Symphony no. 9 144-45; and Joachim, 122-23; in D Minor, 27, 33, 39, 43, 194n.28; “Jungbrunnen,” 122; as Kreisler, Symphony no. 10 (planned), 121; and 122-23, 170, 207n.14;

222 c~—~ INDEX Brahms, Johannes (continued) Catalani, Angelica, 90 Magelone Romanzen, 122; “Die Chaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 190n.24 Mainacht,” 95, 105, 107, 109-10, Chase, Cynthia, 167 111-13, 114, 116; and Mendelssohn, Chelard, André-Hippolite: and Liszt,

34, 97-99, 113-14; Missa canonica, 57-58; Macbeth, 57-58 113-14; Quartet for Piano and Cherubini, Luigi, 49-50, 145-46, 167; Strings in A Major, op. 26, 122; and Haydn, 124; Pater noster, 145— “Regenlied,” 163; Rinaldo, 207n.14; 46; and Spohr, 145-46 Romanze, op. 118, no. 5, 15; and Chézy, Wilhelmine von, 149 Scarlatti, 95; and Schumann, C., 28, Chopin, Frédéric, 24, 89; Berceuse, op.

96-97; and Schumann, R., 28, 33, 57, 15; and Brahms, 15, 109-10; and 95-97, 113-14, 122-23; Sonata for Heller, 123; Impromptu no. 2 in F# Piano in C Major, op. 1, 21, 24-26, Major, 95, 109-10, 111-13, 114, 116

34, 43, 167, 193n.6; Sonata for Piano Chorale. See Hymns and chorales | in F# Minor, op. 2, 144-45; Sonata Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 7 for Violin and Piano in G Major, 23, Conricealment, 4, 21, 23, 41-43, 134, 163; String Sextet no. 1 in Bb Major, 137, 164-65, 202n.45. See also op. 18, 144; String Sextet no. 2 in G Transformation Major, op. 36, 121, 122; Symphony Contrastive allusion: 17-20, 68-87, no. 1 in C Minor, 34, 121; Symphony 114, 144, 150-52, 170, 200n.13; deno 2 in D Major, 33, 116, 194n.18; fined, 16-17, 21, 69; in instrumental

Symphony no. 3 in F Minor, 33, music, 16, 21, 25, 37-40, 126-27, 207n.14; Symphony no. 4 in E Mi- 147, 191n.44, 194 n.18; in literature, nor, 5, 16; “Der Tod, das ist die kitihle - 16-17; musical context of, 75-76,

Nacht,” 97, 100; Trio for Piano, 77-78, 80-81, 84, 165; precursors of, Cello, and Horn, op. 40, 24; “Uber 53-54. See also Bakhtin; Irony

die See,” 95-96, 97, 168; “Und du Cooke, Deryck, 5, 188n.12 | gehest iiber den Kirchhof,” 121; Cooper, Barry, 156 “Uniiberwindlich,” 95; Variations on Cornelius, Peter: and Beethoven, 90-91 a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 9, Creativity: as one-way progression from

28, 141; Vier ernste Gesdnge, 31, unconscious to conscious, 103-05, 122; “Warum ist das Licht gegeben,” 106-07, 108, 111; priority of con-

113-14, 167; “Wehe, so willst du scious processes in, 114-15; as two-

mich wieder,” 97-98, 168 way mix of conscious and unconBrinkmann, Reinhold, 191n.44, scious processes, 103-04, 112, 115-

194n.18 : 16. See also Brahms; Genius; Goethe;

Bruch, Max, 82; Normannenzug, op. Inspiration; Originality 32, 81; and Schumann, R., 81-82 Criticism, 88, 99, 172-73. See also Met-

Bruckner, Anton, 84, 190n.24 aphorical criticism Burkholder, J. Peter, 189n.14, 210n.9 Czerny, Carl, 23-25, 104, 156 Busnois, Antoine, 119

Byron, George Gordon Lord, 86 Dahlhaus, Carl, 61, 179, 193n.13 Daverio, John, 34, 69, 77, 189n.19,

Canon, musical or literary, 15, 166-67, 201n.21

171 David, Ferdinand, 89

INDEX —> 223

Dean, Winton, 54 Frithlings-Phantasie, 14-15, 17, 44; Dent, Edward, 54 and Schumann, R., 120, 136; Sonata des Prez, Josquin, 119 for Violin and Piano no. 1 in A Ma-

Dessoff, Otto: and Brahms, 116 jor, op. 6, 120, 122; “Stille Tanker,” Drabkin, William, 134, 138, 209n.29 see Fra Skizzenbogen; Symphony no.

Draeseke, Felix, 63 5 in D Minor, 121; and Strauss, 14, Diirr, Alfred, 152 17, 44. See also Motive, G-A-D-E Geck, Martin, 195n.31, 211n.19

Eagleton, Terry, 89 Gellert, Christian Fiurchtegott, 55 Eichendorff, Joseph, Freiherr von, 77— Genius, 4, 101-04, 142, 163; Wagner’s

80, 86, 175, 199n.5 view of, 65, 115. See also Creativity; Einstein, Alfred, 208n.19 Inspiration; Originality Ellis, William Ashton, 103, 197n.22, Genre, 32, 33-35, 165; and perception

203n.12 of allusion, 34-35, 37-38, 42-43

Emerson, Caryl, 17 Gerber, Ernst Ludwig, 140

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 210n.9 Gluck, Christoph Willibald von, 45; , Eybler, Joseph: Requiem, 34-35; and Armide, 174-75, 176-77; and Bee-

Mozart, 34-35 thoven, 174-77; and Handel, 4; and Haydn, 45-46, 53-54, 140; and Mo-

| Fidelio, 28, 54-55, 85, 138, 167, 169, zart, 4; Orpheus, 53-54 180, 196n.12; Act I, trio, 56-57; Godwin, Joscelyn, 129-30 Chorus of Prisoners, 10-11, 44-45, Goehr, Lydia, 177 49-50, 85; “Euch werde Lohn,” 70- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 77, 80, 71, 169-70, 213n.27; “In des Lebens 82, 99, 144, 155, 168, 200n.13; on

Friihlingstagen,” 17-19, 20, 85; creativity, 106, 108-09, 110, 112,

“Komm, Hoffnung,” 55-56 116-17, 179-80; Faust, 39, 60-61, Fink, Gottfried Wilhelm, 168, 172 66, 70-72, 175, 179, 180; on sym-

Finscher, Ludwig, 178 bolism, 7-8, 85-86, 170, 172, Finson, Jon, 199n.5, 202n.26 215n.57 Floros, Constantin, 190n.24 Graun, Carl Heinrich, 127

Folksong, 116, 141, 171; as source of | - Gregorian chant, 7-8, 45, 84, 86, 140,

allusion, 4, 140 142

Forkel, Johann Nikolaus, 138 Grétry, André, 3, 88, 89; and MendelsFormal modeling, 23-26, 109-10, 152- sohn, 3, 101

53 Grey, Thomas, 65, 69, 91, 173, 175,

Freud, Sigmund, 15, 111 194n.29

Fricken, Ernestine von, 121 Griesinger, Georg August von, 52,

Friedrich, Caspar David, 68, 179 140

Furst, Lilian, 164 Grimm, Julius Otto, 121, 122 Groth, Klaus, 163 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 15, 164, 166,

168, 179 Hallmark, Rufus, 126, 200n.11

Gade, Niels, 122, 163; Drei kleine Handel, George Frideric, 167; and Clavierstiicke, 27-28, 31, 120, 122; Gluck, 4; and Haydn, 12-13, 17, 54;

Fra Skizzenbogen, 121, 136; , Samson, 12-13, 17

224 c*~—~ INDEX

Hanslick, Eduard, 3, 33, 103,115,178, Herbste,” 120; Das Jahr, 149-50,

180, 188n.12 161; knowledge of Bach, 121, 148,

Hartmann, Eduard von, 106-07, 108, 154-55; Lieder fiir das Pianoforte,

110-12 op. 2, 144-45; and Mendelssohn, Fe-

Hartmann, Emil, 14 _ lix, 94-95, 131-34, 136;

Hartmann, Johan Peter Emilius: “Nachtreigen,” 94-95; Oratorium

Syvsoverdag, 76-77 nach Bildern der Bibel, 120, 134-35;

Haydn, Joseph, 14, 45, 90, 140, 166; “Schone Fremde,” 120, 132-33; So“Abendlied zu Gott,” 55-56; L’anima nata for Piano in C Minor, 120, 131del filosofo, 53-54, 157-58, 160; and 132, 134, 136, 165, 167; Sonata o

, Beethoven, 4, 55-56; and Cherubini, Capriccio for Piano in F Minor, 120, 124; The Creation, 11-12, 13, 17, 134-35; String Quartet in Eb Major, 50, 52-53, 54, 124; and folksong, 4; 120, 134-35, 209n.28; Ubungsstiick and Gluck, 45-46, 53-54, 140; “Gott in G Minor, 120, 134; “Wiedersehn,”

im Herzen,” 50, 53; and Handel, 12- 94 13, 17, 54; Mass in C Major (“Cre- Herder, Johann Gottfried, 89, 147 ation”), 50, 52-53, 140; and Men- Hermeneutical signals, 77, 143, 163, 165,

delssohn, 12, 37-38; Missa Sancti 201n.20. See also Opus number; Play Bernardi, 50, 53; and Mozart, 4, 35, Hermeneutics, 89, 166. See also, Meta-

53, 140; and Rosler, 12-13, 54; and phorical criticism Schumann, R., 21, 36-38; The Sea- Hiller, Ferdinand: and Spohr, 146-47; sons, 35, 53, 140; Symphony no. 8 in Die Zersto6rung Jerusalems, 146-47

G Major (“Le soir”), 45-46, 140; Hoeckner, Berthold, 88 Symphony no. 26 in D Minor, 140; Hoffmann, E. T. A., 105, 165-66, 168 Symphony no. 30 in C Major, 140; Hoffman von Fallersleben, A. H., 18,

Symphony no. 104 in D Major, 21, 20 36-38, 43; and Witz, 35, 52-54 Hughes, Rupert, 108 Haydn, Michael, 35; and Mozart, 35 Huizinga, Johan, 15, 21, 118, 137, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 23, 83, 163-64, 166, 168

192n.1 , Hull, Kenneth, 5-6, 16, 163, 201n.20

Heine, Heinrich, 70-71, 86, 95, 97, Hiittenbrenner, Anslem: Nachruf an

169, 170, 200n.13 Schubert in Trauertonen, 124; and

Heller, Stephen, 169; and Chopin, 123 Schubert, 123-24, 136 Hellwig, Carl Friedrich Ludwig, 155 Hymns and chorales: “Ein feste Burg,” Henschel, George, 104-05, 106-07, 45; “Freu dich sehr,” 208n.22; “O

~ 108, 110-12 Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,” 127Hensel, Fanny Mendelssohn, 16, 122, 128, 136; “Treuer Heiland,” 76-77; 138-39, 141, 157, 166; Allegro agi- “Vater unser” (1555), 146; “Vom tato for Piano in G Minor, 120, 132- Himmel hoch,” 149; “Wer nur den 33; and Bach, J. S., 120-21, 149-50, lieben Gott lafst walten,” 208n.22; 161; and Beethoven, 134, 149-50; “Wie gross ist des Allmachtigen

“Beharre,” 149-50; and Brahms, Gite,” 29, 195n.8 144-45; Capriccio for Cello and Pi-

ano, 149-50, 161; Hiob, 120, 134- Inspiration, 101-17; in dreams, 105, 35; “Im Herbst,” 120, 132-33; “Im 108, 115, 205n.20; as “heaven-sent,”

INDEX — 225 104-05, 106, 108-09, 111. See also Kuhlau, Friedrich, 120 Creativity; Genius; Originality; Wag- | Kiithen, Hans-Werner, 156 ner

Intentionality. See Allusion, and Lampadius, Wilhelm Adolf, 102-03

intentionality Lange-Miiller, Peter Erasmus: Musik til

Interdependence of intrinsic and extrin- “Der var engang,” 93-94; and Saint-

sic texts, 177-79, 180-81, 213n.23 Saéns, 93-94 Irony, 15, 17, 53, 69, 74, 172; negative §_ Leitmotiv. See Motive, leitmotiv

views of, 82—83; relation of to allu- Lenz, Wilhelm von, 64 sion, 21-22, 164-65, 170. See also Lichtenberg, Christoph, 89

Contrastive allusion; Haydn, and Lippman, Edward, 61

Witz Liszt, Franz, 84-85, 89, 90, 173, 178,

179; and Bach, 121; and Beethoven, |

Jean Paul. See Richter, Jean Paul 204n.13; and Berlioz, 57; and

Jeitteles, Alois, 125, 144 Chelard, 57-58; “Cross motive,” 7—

Jensen, Eric, 77 8, 142; Eine Faust-Symphonie, 57Joachim, Joseph, 7, 28, 35, 89, 113, 58, 59-61, 66, 103, 142, 159, 171,

122, 163; and Bach, 121; and 197n.21; Phantasie und Fuge iiber Brahms, 122-23; Concerto for Violin das Thema B-A-C-H, 121; and Schu-

(“in ungarischer Weise”), op. 11, bert, 57-58; and Wagner, 57-61, 66, 121, 122-23; Drei Stiicke fiir Violine 103, 142, 211n.27 und Klavier, op. 5, 121; Fugues, an- Lockwood, Lewis, 27 swers on B-A-C-H, 121; Notturno for Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia,

Violin and Piano, op. 12, 121; Over- 157-58; and Bach, 157, 160; Grosses ture to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, 121; Trio in Eb Major, 157-58 Overture in G Minor, op. 13, 121; and Schumann, 122-23; Variationen |§ Mahler, Gustav, 103

uber ein eigenes Thema, op. 10, 121 Marschner, Heinrich August: Hans Heiling, 61-62; and Wagner, 61-62;

Kalbeck, Max, 33 and Weber, 4 ,

Kalkbrenner, Friedrich Wilhelm Mi- Marston, Nicholas, 69, 70, 91, 199n.9

chael, 89 Marx, Adolf Bernhard, 64, 89, 165,

Kalliwoda, Johann Wenzel, 16; “In der 166

| Ferne,” op. 98, 145; and Schumann, Mayeda, Akio, 73 R., 36, 42; Symphony no. 1, 42 Mendelssohn, Fanny. See Hensel, Fanny Kant, Immanuel, 101, 105, 108-09, 116 | Mendelssohn, Felix, 3, 16,42, 127,

Kelley, Edgar Stillman, 108 141, 157, 167, 168, 180, 202n.26, Knapp, Raymond, 5-6, 16, 34, 211n.18; Andante cantabile e.Presto 189n.17, 191n.44, 213n.17 agitato, 97-98, 168; and Bach, J. S., Knecht, Justin Heinrich, 119 149-54, 161; and Beethoven, 25, 33Korsyn, Kevin, 15-16, 191n.42 34, 102-03, 125, 129-31, 134, 153,

Kramer, Lawrence, 201n.20 208n.25; and Brahms, 34, 97-99, Kristeva, Julia, 189n.17 © 113-14; Concerto for Piano in G MiKropfinger, Klaus, 199n.44, 203n.12 nor, 3, 101; Die erste Krummacher, Friedrich Wilhelm, 151 Walpurgisnacht, 70-73,

226 c—~—~ INDEX

Mendelssohn, Felix (continued) Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 202n.26 146-47, 200n.13; Elijah, 31, 80,116, Miller, Leta, 211n.21 171; “Es ist genug” (Elijah), 149-51, | Momigny, Jérome-Joseph de, 89

152-53, 161, 171; Festgesang (for the Moore, Thomas, 130 ,

Gutenberg Festival), 12; and Grétry, Morson, Gary Saul, 17 : 3, 101; and Haydn, 12, 37-38; and Moscheles, Ignaz: and Schumann, R., 42 Hensel, Fanny, 94-95, 131-34, 136; Motive: A-B-E-G-G, 120; A-S-C-H, 30, “Im Walde,” 79-80, 81-82, 85; “Ist 120, 136; B-A-H-S, 121; B-A-S, 121;

es wahr?” 141, 153; knowledge of C-F-E-B-A-C-H, 119, 207n.6; Bach, 121, 148, 153, 154-55; Lieder “Clara”, 123, 171; “Cross” (Liszt), ohne Worte, 90; Lobgesang, see Sym- 7-8, 171, 190n.24; F-A-E, 7, 28, 122,

phony no. 2; Phantasie tiber ein 163, 193n.11; F-A-F 122, 136, irlandisches Lied, op. 15, 128-29, 207n.14; G-A-D-E, 27-28, 120~22, 130-31, 136; as prophet, 80, 151; 136, 163; “Gis-e-la”, 28, 121, 122, and Rietz, Eduard, 124, 131; St. 163, 193n.11; leitmotiv, 46, 54, 59Paul, 80; and Schulz, J. P. C., 129-31; 60, 61; personal, 7—8, 28, 30-31,

and Schumann, R., 36-38, 70-73, 119-123, 132-36, 160-70, 207n.14; 79-82, 113-14, 127-31, 153-54, as product of unconscious, 103, 108, 200n.13; Sonata for Piano in E Ma- 110; rhythmic, 33-34, 37-38, 57-58, jor, op. 6, 33; Sonata for Piano 91-92, 109, 131-32, 134, 174-76; S(“écossaise”), op. 28, 94; Sonata for C-H-A, 30, 120; as sphinx, 120-22; Piano in Bb Major, op. 106, 25, 34; unintentional resemblances, 5, 27, and Spohr, 146-47; String Quartet in 76-77, 97, 116. See also B-A-C-H; Eb Major, op. 12, 94-95; String Quar- Concealment; Naming; Reministet no. 2 in A Minor, op. 13, 125, cences; Symbol; Transformation, 131, 141, 149, 153; String Quartet in motivic F Minor, op. 80, 98-99, 120, 131- Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 4, 24, 6832, 134, 136, 139, 165, 167; String 69, 163, 166, 167; Quintet, op. 18, 124, 131, 144; Sym- “Abendempfindung,” 56; and Bach,

phony no. 2 in Bb Major C. P. E., 156-57; and Bach, J. C., (“Lobgesang”), 12, 102-03; Sym- 124-25; and Bach, J. S., 156-60; and phony no. 3 in A Minor (“Scottish”), Beethoven, 4, 10-11, 26-27, 54-57, 170; Symphony no. 4 in A Major 102, 156-59; Concerto for Horn in (“Italian”), 131; Symphony no. 5 in EL Major, K. 495, 156-58, 160; ConD Major (“Reformation”), 23, 36- certo for Piano in A Major, K. 414,

38, 45, 85; Vocal-Chor zum 46, 124-25; Concerto for Piano in A Abendsegen, 113-14, 168; and Major, K. 488, 48-49; Concerto for Weber, 3, 4; “Weh’ ihnen, dass sie Piano in C Minor, K. 491, 156-57; von mir weichen!” (Elijah), 97-98, Die Entfiihrung aus dem Serail, 11;

151-53, 168; and Zelter, 131 and Eybler, 34-35; and Gluck, 4; and Metaphor, relation of allusion to, 21, Haydn, J., 4, 35, 53, 140; and

99, 163-64, 171, 214n.34 Haydn, M., 35; Idomeneo, 4, 46, 54, Metaphorical criticism, 39, 40-41, 64, 195n.3; The Magic Flute, 54-55, 69, 86, 89, 92—93, 100, 172-75, 140; The Marriage of Figaro, 50;

192n.1, 204n.14 Mass in C Major, K. 317, 49-50;

INDEX —7 227 Quartet for Piano and Strings in Eb Pohl, Richard, 211n.27 Major, K. 493, 31-32; and Reichardt, Pope, Alexander, 101-02 _ 46, 48-49; Requiem, 34-35, 53; and Programmatic music, 2-3, 12, 14, 45, Schumann, R., 31-32, 42; Sonata for 57, 142, 165, 178-79, 180, 209n.29 Piano in C Minor, K. 457, 156-57, Prokofiev, Sergei: and Sting, 99 160; and Spohr, 4; String Quartets

(“Prussian”), 144; Symphony (un- Quotation, 7, 17, 23, 49, 62, 83-85, known), 27; Symphony no. 40 in G 123-26, 138, 140, 201nn.20,21. See

Minor, 42; Symphony no. 41 in C also Self-quotation , Major, 27, 171

Mueller, Rena Charnin, 197n.21 RafSmann, Friedrich, 70, 169

Mythology, 62, 172, 173-75 Redepenning, Dorothea, 196n.19 Reicha, Anton, 24

Naming, 28, 118-39, 168-70; with ci- Reichardt, Johann Friedrich, 54, 77, 89,

phers, 21, 27-28, 30-31, 119-23; 140, 166; and Beethoven, 46-48; Ino, definition of, 118-19, 122, 138; as 46-47, 48-49; and Mozart, 46, 48homage to the living, 27-28, 119-23, 49 127-30; as memorial of deceased, 80, Reminiscences, 41, 45, 46, 195n.3;

84, 123-32; and transposition of a hunters of, 3—4, 142, 166 second, 131, 132, 134, 136,155.See Richter, Jean Paul, 53-54, 69, 141, 165,

also B-A-C-H; Motive 170

Nauhaus, Gerd, 194n.27 Ries, Ferdinand, 120, 207n.8 Newcomb, Anthony, 37 Rietz, Eduard: and Mendelssohn, 124, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 14, 102 131

Novalis, 53, 102, 171 Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 137

Roesner, Linda Correll, 195n.31

| Opus number, allusive significance of, Rosen, Charles, 5, 6, 8-9, 171,

144-45, 192n.5 188n.13, 193n.7, 201n.21

Originality, 4, 7, 101-04, 142, 162- Rosler (Rosetti), Franz Anton: and 63; and awareness of works by oth- Haydn, 12—13, 54; Der sterbende Je-

ers, 65, 101-02, 111, 112, 115-16. sus, 12-13 |

See also Creativity; Genius; Inspira- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 188n.12

tion Rubenstein, Anton, 3

Oulibicheff, Aléxandre, 64 Rubenstein, Joseph, 90

Perri, Carmela, 201n.20 Ryan, Judith, 167, 191n.46

Plagiarism. See Allusion, negative views Saint-Saéns, Camille: Concerto for Pi-

of ano no. 2 in G Major, op. 22, 93-94;

Plantinga, Leon, 156 Concerto for Violin, op. 61, 145; and Play, 94, 137, 166, 168, 180, 192n.1; Lange-Miiller, 93-94; Variations on a allusion as, 21, 118, 163-65; com- Theme by Beethoven, op. 35, 144 posers’ sense of, 23, 132, 163; be- Scarlatti, Domenico: and Brahms, 95 tween Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, — Schelling, Friedrich, 7, 172

94-95, 122, 141, 163. See also Schering, Arnold, 99

Hermeneutical signals; Naming Schikaneder, Emanuel, 55

228 c-~~ INDEX

Schiller, Friedrich, 112 120-21, 153-54, 161; and BeethoSchlegel, August Wilhelm, 169, 170 ven, 17-20, 35-41, 44, 70-71, 91, Schlegel, Friedrich, 8, 53, 69, 105, 118, 126-27, 143-45, 154, 194n.28; and

137, 170 Brahms, 28, 33, 95-97, 113-14,

Schleuning, Peter, 210n.11 122-23; and Bruch, 81-82; Carnaval, Schlosser, Louis, 107, 109 29-30, 120-21, 201n.21; composiSchoenberg, Arnold, 123 tion and creativity, views on, 23, 33, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 104, 105, 108 82, 101-02, 103, 114, 164; as critic,

Schubert, Franz, 105; “Auf dem 40, 68-69, 80, 122, 161, 165, 168,

Strom,” 91, 125-26, 136, 208n.19; 170, 172-73, 202n.26; and Beethoven, 10-11, 17, 44, 91, Davidsbiindlertanze, op. 6, 144;

125-26, 193n.7; “Der Dichterliebe, 70-71, 72, 91, 169-70,

Doppelganger,” 50-52; “Erlkonig,” 199n.9; “Er, der Herrlichste von , 74-75, 177; and Hiittenbrenner, 123- allen,” 127-29, 130, 136, 138; 24; and Liszt, 57-58; Mass in G Ma- Fantasie in C Major, 44, 69, 84, 126—

jor, D. 167, 10-11, 17, 44-45, 49- 27, 137, 188n.13; “Frithlings 51, 85; Mass in Ab Major, D. 678, Ankunft,” 17-19, 20, 165; and Gade, 49-52; and Schumann, R., 34, 36, 120, 136; and Haydn, 21, 36-38; 74-75; Sonata for Piano in Bb Major, “Hoch, hoch sind die Berge,” 95-96, D. 960, 124; Symphony no. 9 in C 97, 168; “Im Herbste,” 97; ImMajor, 34, 36-37, 165; “Szene aus promptus sur une romance de Clara

Goethes Faust,” 57-58, 171 Wieck, op. 5, 39; and irony, 15, 53-

Schubring, Adolf, 192n.1 54, 82, 86; and Joachim, 122-23;

Schulz, Johann Abraham Peter, 203n.8 and Kalliwoda, 36, 42; knowledge of Schulz, Johann Philipp Christian, 16; Bach’s music, 41, 148; Konzert-Alleand Mendelssohn, 129-30, 131; “Die gro mit Introduktion, 38-39, 43;

Rose bliiht,” 129-30 Kreisleriana, 122-23, 170;

Schulze, J. A., 203n.8 Liederalbum, op. 79, 144; Lieder-AlSchumann, Clara, 16, 42, 114, 122; and bum fiir die Jugend, 18-19; Lieder Brahms, 28, 96—97; as composer, 33, und Gesdnge aus Goethes Wilhelm 41, 144; life events of, 18-19, 73-75, Meister, op. 98a, 143-44; life events 141, 169, 177; musical representa- of, 18-19, 72-75, 141; and Mendels-

tions of, 73-75, 123, 138, 171; and sohn, 36-38, 70-73, 79-82, 113-14, Schumann, R., 38-39, 96-97, 144; 127-31, 153-54, 200n.13; and “Sie liebten sich beide,” 95-96, 97; Moscheles, 42; and Mozart, 31-32, Soirées musicales, op. 6, 144; Sonata 42; Overture, Scherzo, and Finale, for Piano in G Minor, 38-39, 95-96, op. 52, 42; Quintet for Piano and

97, 168; and Weber, 37-39 Strings in Eb Major, op. 44, 27, 31Schumann, Robert, 7, 10, 16, 67, 88, 32, 120, 149, 153-54, 156, 161; Re-

123, 157, 171, 178, 192 n.51; quiem, op. 148, 127-28, 136; Re“Abends am Strand,” 200n.11; quiem ftir Mignon aus Goethes Wil“Abschied vom Walde,” 62—63; Al- helm Meister, op. 98b, 144; Scenen bum fiir die Jugend, 70-71, 120, 122, aus Goethes Faust, 38-39, 43, 78-79,

136, 170; alter-egos, 70, 87, 168, 80-82; “Schlufslied des Narren,” 72169, 213n.26; and Bach, 36, 41, 75, 177; and Schubert, 34, 36, 74-

INDEX ~~ 229 75; and Schumann, C., 38-39, 96— Somnambulism. See Inspiration

97, 144; Sechs Fugen tiber den Sorge, Georg Andreas, 119-20 ‘Namen B-A-C-H, 31, 120-21; Spies, Giinther, 194n.28 , “Singet nicht in Trauert6nen,” op. Spohr, Louis, 54, 90, 159, 167; and Bee98a, 127, 143-44; Sonata for Piano, thoven, 125; and Cherubini, 145-46; op. 22, 97, 100; Sonata for Violin and Hiller, 146-47; and Mendelsand Piano no. 2 in D Minor, 147; So- sohn, 146-47; and Mozart, 4; and nata for Violin and Piano on ‘F-A-F’, Schumann, R., 147; Vater unser, 146;

122; and Spohr, 147; String Quartet and Wagner, 4 | in A Minor, op. 41, no. 1, 194n.28; Staehelin, Martin, 80, 151, 152. “Susser Freund,” 85;Symphony inG — Stein, Edwin, 86, 191n.46

Minor, 35-36, 149, 153-54, 161; Sterne, Laurence, 54 Symphony in C Minor, 36, 37; Sym- Sting: and Prokofiev, 99 phony no. 1 in Bb Major, 34, 36,122; Stoppard, Tom, 202n.45 Symphony no. 2 in C Major, 21,35-— = Strauss, Richard, 178, 179; Also sprach

, 38, 40-41, 43, 99, 120, 143-44, 164; Zarathustra, 12, 14-15, 17, 44; and

, Symphony no. 3 in Eb Major, 33, 35- Gade, 14, 17, 44 36, 40, 166; Symphony no. 4 in D Sulzer, Johann Georg, 45, 140 Minor, 35-36, 42; Thema tuber den Symbol, 7-10, 14, 85, 136-39, 145-47, Namen Abegg, op. 1, 120-21; Trio 149, 153, 159, 172, 211n.25; and for Piano and Strings in D Minor, op. composition, 177-79; definition of,

63, 113-14, 167-68; “Vogel als 7-8, 21, 171; indirectness of, 8, 86, Prophet,” see Waldszenen; and Wag- 164, 179-81, 215n.57; and the ner, 62—63; Waldszenen, 77-78, 79- infinite, 7-8, 137, 170-71; number, 82, 84-86, 127, 136, 159,165,175, | 132, 206n.5. See also Allegory; 177, 180; and Weber, 37-39. See also Naming; Signs Contrastive allusion

Scribe, Eugéne, 76 , Taffanel, Paul: and Beethoven, 213n.27 Self-quotation, 85; by Beethoven, 55; by Taruskin, Richard, 189n.14 Brahms, 23, 163; by Cherubini, 50; Texting, 88-100, 109-10; as memorial,

, by Haydn, 50, 52~53; in Masses, 49- 90-91, 125-26 53; by Mendelssohn, 97-99, 141; by Theft. See Allusion, negative views of Mozart, 50; by Schubert, 50-52; by Tieck, Ludwig, 69 Schumann, C., 95-97; by Schumann, Todd, R. Larry, 194n.27, 201n.21

R., 77-81, 97, 141, 201n.21; by Tolstoy, Leo, 84 , Spohr, 146; by Wagner, 142; by Topics, 9-14, 148, 157,170. See also —

Weber, 50-51. See also Quotation Signs |

Seybold, Agathe, 121, 122 Tovey, Donald, 123

Seyfried, Ignaz Ritter von, 120 Transformation, motivic, 23-43, 136— | Shakespeare, William, 73-74, 93, 101- 37, 164; by change of genre, 42-43;

02, 120 | by combination, 27-29, 193n.13,

Signs, 7~8, 9-10, 138, 159, 211n.25. 213n.17; by inversion, 28, 122, See also Allegory; Symbol; Topics 193n.11; by octave displacement, 27,

Silcher, Friedrich, 90 29-32, 40-41, 134-35, 155; by retroSmend, Friedrich, 152 grade, 37-38, 122, 168, 207n.14;

230 ~~ INDEX : Transformation, motivic (continued) . 29, 63-64, 65-66, 88, 91, 99, 142, variable necessity of, 38, 41-43, 141. 193n.13, 199n.44, 211n.27; Die

See also Concealment; Genre Walkiire, 57, 59-61, 62-63, 66, 103, 142, 197n.21; and Weber, 4, 63. See

Uhlig, Theodore, 37 also Motive, leitmotiv Warrack, John, 61, 63

Viardot-Garcia, Pauline, 89 Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 195n.8

Vogl, Johann Michael, 105 Weber, Carl Maria von, 54, 189n.19; | Euryanthe, 63; Der Freischiitz, 29,

Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 30, 50-52; Konzertstiick, 3, 37-39,

213n.23 43; and Marschner, 4; Mass in Eb MaWagner, Cosima, 64-65, 90, 115, 173, jor, 49-52; and Mendelssohn, 3, 4; 180, 203n.13 and Schumann, C., 37-39; and Wagner, Richard, 10, 16, 27-28, 46, 54, Schumann, R., 37-39; and Wagner, 4,

67, 172, 178, 180, 190n.24, 192n.51; 63 on Bach, 90, 115; and Beethoven, Wegeler, Franz, 90 63-66, 91; and Berlioz, 57; creativity | Werner, Eric, 131 and inspiration, views on, 105, 108, Wesendonck, Mathilde, 60

115, 211n.27; as critic, 39, 60, 66, Wieck, Friedrich, 73-75, 177 69, 82-83, 173-75; dependence on Wiora, Walter, 178 assimilative allusion, 65-66, 82; lack | Wordsworth, William, 86, 102, 169 of musical irony in, 61, 69, 82-83; literary sources of, 62; and Liszt,57— = Zellner, Leopold Alexander, 3-4, 101

61, 66, 103, 142, 211n.27; and Zelter, Carl, 121, 155, 158; and Bach, Marschner, 61-62; Die Meistersinger, 155; and Mendelssohn, 131 142; Parsifal, 142; Das Rheingold, Zerner, Henri, 8—9 108; Der Ring des Nibelungen, 65; Zimmerman, Pierre Joseph Guillaume: and Schumann, R., 62-63; Siegfried, “Mon fils est la,” 76-77 81; and Spohr, 4; Tristan und Isolde,