Purple Schubert: Mapping the Uncanny in of the first movement of D. 960

            Ich wandle still, bin wenig froh,

            Und immer fragt der Seufzer, wo?

            Im Geisterhauch tönt's mir zurück,

            "Dort, wo du nicht bist, das Glück."

           I wander silently and am somewhat unhappy,

           And my sighs always ask "Where?"

           In a ghostly breath it calls back to me,

           "There, where you are not, is your happiness."

 Given the subject matter of many of his Lieder, it is perhaps unsurprising that Schubert scholarship is saturated with rhetoric of journey, isolation, and homecoming. The above quotation is from his Lied Ich komme vom Gebirge her,[1] the subject matter for variation in his Wanderer fantasy, from which can be gleaned the notion that Schubert was more than inclined to work the gestures—both dramatic and introspective—of his vocal writing into large-scale pianistic forms. Richard L. Cohn suggests how such rhetorics, when attached to Schubert's tertiary approach to tonality , have been used to apply negative value judgements to his music: one contemporary reviewer criticized the 1821 Maennerchor setting of Gesaeng der Geister ueber den Wassern as possessing "no sense, no order, no meaning. The composer... resembles a big waggoner ... who ... turns now to the right, now to the left, getting at one time out of the road ... without making any honest way”.[2] This hermeneutic reading of Schubert's tonal approaches adopts a musical ideology strikingly similar to that of Heinrich Schenker; one of unity, masculinity, and directional trajectory. The idea that Schubert is somehow “senseless” or “dishonest” is strongly cogent with Schubert's “so often gendered the ‘female’ partner of the ‘virile’ Beethoven”, a paradigm that goes “at least as far back as Schumann”.[3]

However, Nicholas Marston attributes Schubert's “femininity” to “Viennese Gemuetlichkeit”—the comfort of the domestic sphere in the wake of solidifying binary gender roles in post-1815 Vienna, where “the repressiveness of Metternich’s police state created a heightened sense of separation between public and private spheres of action and expression”.[4] This Gemuetlichkeit is mapped onto Schubert's “intuitive mastery” of the retransition; as James Webster writes, “he was returning home”.[5] But if this domesticity is held up against the “sensuousness” which Ernst Kuch hears as an almost hedonistic justification of the “isolating, destructive effect” that “problematic” progressions have on tonal organization, Schubert's femininity is not only constructed as a pathetic antecedent to Beethoven, but as a conflicted embodiment of a mother/whore dichotomy; paradoxically both a threat to masculinity and under its thumb.[6] A Neo-Riemannian approach to the first movement of D960 can not only provide a more explanatory lens through which to view Schubert's progressions (distancing it from the hierarchic paradigm of tonic-dominant), but provide a hermeneutic window through which to view Schubert's perceived transgressions and consolidate them.

A view of Schubert's tonal motion in D960i mapped onto Tonnetze can serve to interrogate Webster's assertion that Schubert “was an intuitive master of the retransition because that was the one place he could feel at ease relating dominant and tonic”. The bottom left corner of figure 1 demonstrates the development section's retransition in bars 172-215 from d minor to the tonic Bb. The two shared tones of D and F emphasise the A→Bb semitonal displacement of an L (leading-tone) exchange of the minor triad's fifth,[7] moving up a semitone to create the major triad's tonic.  As Cohn writes, a Tonnetz should be thought of “not as a travelling line but as triangles that invert and fold into one another”;[8] through one exchange of note, this materialist idea of triads “folding” in on one another across a shared minor third relationship creates the impression of closeness and sentimentality of the “dreamlike quiescence” of this section, about which Tovey “rhapsodized”.[9]

Figure 1: The Development Section (double circled pitches represent meeting points, where the Netz could fold around and touch itself; G is circled erroneously).

The Tonnetz's configuration of space in terms of sharing provides something of a commentary on Marston's domesticity, and while Cohn discourages doing so, it is hard not to conceive of the line of tonal motion's curvature from c# minor through remote keys to the far-removed tonic as anything other than a journey. Ironically, in light of this geographical metaphor, Cohn's “map of triads based on voice-leading efficiency” (figure 2) communicates neither of the above, instead providing an abstract network for categorising chords onto which it is hard to imagine tracing the movements of an actual piece of music.[10] Nevertheless, as Cohn points out, “what we are invited to notice and celebrate [during the retransition] is not the return of the tonic triad per se, but rather the reattainment of its region as represented by the d-minor triad”.[11] This conception of “region” is yet another articulation of sonority as domestic territory.

Figure 2: Cohn's Map of Triads Based on Voice-Leading Efficiency

Amid these ideas of space, when the same motions in the same directions are made at different point in the piece—that is, in time—another hermeneutic window is opened. In the exposition, Cohn's A→Bb semitonal displacement is conspicuous in its absence (dotted arrow, figure 3). The d-minor tonality of bar 68 does not lead into a stable Bb major at the change of key in bar 70, but a floating one; the only iteration of the tonic is to be found at the height of the extremely high, lyrical, octave-doubled melody, the bass beneath it merely repeated D and F (the common tones) without anchoring the harmony with a root. Where Cohn hears a sonority “rhetorically poised to act cadentially and thereby to catalyze a return to the tonic” in the second half of bar 71, bar 72 ruptures into the distant diminished seventh on B (inverted and not grounded) which breaks out into E major.[12] This is a tritone away from the Bb tonic that was so close and yet so far a mere two bars earlier. This point of near-homecoming and rupture is illustrated by the dotted arrow in figure three, in the top right hand corner of which the chord progression's arrow resumes in E major.

 

Figure 3: Tonnetz of the Exposition.

This idea of near-home-coming, of “so close and yet so far”, is compellingly cogent with Martson's comparison of the uncanniness of Schubert's returning cycles and its overt textual and word-setting potency in his Lied der Doppelgänger.[13] In the text, the narrator gazes at his reflection in the window, and “quite apart from its literal evocation of a physical home ... figures home and unhomeliness more fundamentally in the narrator’s confrontation with his own double, wherein his very identity and selfhood are called into question”; the ghostly reflection of the homefold of  the A→Bb semitonal displacement at bar 70 in its uprooted inversion is not a homecoming but a Heimkehr. [14] What bolsters this uncanny reading is the fact that a parallel L motion from a minor to F major takes place in bars 74-80, following the E major rupture and supporting an increasingly louder, higher, and dramatic iteration of the second key area's antecedent melody. This material leads into a repetition of the exposition, ergo a move to Bb from the F now established. Schubert has established the tonic-dominant relationship and assimilated into the sonata paradigm, but only after a painful rupture—a snap in the Tonnetz's line, and a far removal in its space.

Similarly far-removed is what Cohn refers to as the “polar” tonality of the second subject area at bar 48. Being f# minor, it shares no common tones with Bb, semitonally displacing each of them (Bb down to A, D down to C#, and F up to F#). While Kurt describes this as “a magnificent display in sentiment and colour of genuine early Romantic magic”, Tovey exoticises and sensualises it further, characterising it as “purple” (a colour that carries symbolic connotations of both sex and death).[15] In an approach reminiscent of new musicology, particularly Ruth Solie's Musicology and Difference, Cohn seeks the term “polar relation” to “furnish a positive characterization” of this tonal gesture which has previously either been viewed with the wide-eyed voyeurism seen above or simply dismissed as “wrong”.[16] Rather than seek to assimilate it into an explaining-away framework or dismiss it, Cohn asserts positive difference over “alterity”.[17] The section's Lied-like texture of lone tenor falling melody below off-beat quavers and a cycling countermelody, alongside competing interpretations of the quality of the key have clearly made it a rich ground for hermeneutic reading. In particular, the enharmonic equivalence (shown by the long dotted arrow to the left of figure 3) yet major-minor permutation (rendered in red and blue respectively) of the first subject's warm Gb-major mid-section melody and the second subject's cold, sharpened, remote f-minor are similarly drawn upon by Marston as an harmonic uncanniness. He bolsters this reading by referring to the low, left-hand Gb trills occurring time and again in the movement as a portentous, rumbling threat. Furthermore, if the Gb-major and f#-minor triads were seen next to each other on the Tonnetz, they would reflect one another vertically along a Gb/F#--Db/C# pole of enharmonic equivalency, very much like the Schwanengesang Doppelgänger reflects the narrator's face.

Cohn writes of the “subtlety” of treatment which the A→Bb displacement receives in comparison to the F→Gb displacement “that is so frequently paraded out to hog the movement's main stage”.[18] The attention which he draws to it is justified for the reasons traced above, neither to mention bar 59, where A major is immediately undermined by a Bb in the bass on the downbeat, nor the fact that the establishment of Gb major at all requires semitonal displacements (F-Gb, D-Db) directly analogous to  A→Bb.[19] Yet in accusing the Gb relation of “hogging”, Cohn alienates the listener somewhat, underestimating the affective power of the low trill, which always falls at structurally significant points: under a suspended chord V in  bar 8 after the first iteration of the melody, where it works together with a tense silence to disrupt what would have been a perfect cadence; heralding in Gb major in bar 19; alone and directly before the recapitulation in bar 213; six bars before the end where it corrupts the final cadence. Furthermore, it plays a pivotal role in the recapitulation, where, for the second time, the  A→Bb displacement fails.

Figure 4: Tonnetz of the Recapitulation.

Figure 4 shows a Tonnetz with seven fewer triads than the development section, yet even more enharmonic equivalencies. If they are read as a tension, they are largely unresolved in this movement. For a listener and a piano—an equal temperament machine—this largely makes sense. Viewing enharmonicism as a voice leading function as it does, Neo-Riemannian theory (particularly when laid out on a Tonnetz) views enharmonic change not as rupture but as switch; a new path becoming available, or another way of getting somewhere. In a section which pivots between keys (as demonstrated by the figure 4's sparsity and the triangles' being joined only at corners) via relations of one common tone only, Gb provides a crucial linkage back to the tonic. Marston might write that it is our way home—perhaps even a real home and not an uncanny one.

The uncanny home is reached first in bar 257 after a long protraction of A major, which in turn is reached via a triple semitonal displacement from f minor. Although the A is not part of d minor this time, its 14-bar tonicised pedal prolongation makes its bass semitone movement up to Bb in bar 254 a moment of considerable drama. However, as soon as a tonic cadence has been made in bar 257, the bass continues to drop by semitone and it is made clear the this moment of Bb major was just another uncanny flash of recognition; a trick of the light. A starkly written A flat/G sharp enharmonic shift in bar 264 echoes the respective bar 46 of the exposition and signals a move to b minor for the second subject's recapitulation. This is Schubert's stabilization of f#/Gb; no longer given the weight of the tonic, it becomes the dominant and a linkage back to the first subject's middle-section. But most importantly from a Neo-Riemannian perspective, it provides a common tone link back to the tonic in the form of D (dotted arch-line in figure 4), allowing for B and F# to shift down a semitone and resolve.

A Tonnetz can act as a canvas for multifarious hermeneutic readings, but in order for those readings to make sense alongside it, they must take into account the relationships, codependencies, and ruptures which it makes explicit. In its presentation of these relationships in a space, physically touching one another, the effect which it has on hermeneutic readings is arguably a softening one; where nineteenth century analysis makes Schubert strange and Others him, neo-Riemannian theory embraces his “purpleness”, shows its linkages, and throws his music's “sensuality” into comprehensible, material relief.

Bibliography

Richard Cohn: ‘Introduction to Neo-Riemannian Theory: A Survey and Historical Perspective’, Journal of Music Theory, Vol. 42/2, Neo-Riemannian Theory (Autumn 1998), pp. 167-180.

Richard Cohn: ‘As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert’, 19th-Century Music, Vol. 22/3 (Spring 1999), pp. 213-232.

David Lewin. Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Nicholas Marston: ‘Schubert’s Homecoming’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 125/2 (2000), pp. 248-270

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[1] Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck, trans. Paul Hindemith.

[2]Cohn 1999, 213-214.

[3]Marston 2000, 249.

[4]Ibid, 248.

[5]James Webster, ‘Schubert’s Sonata Form and Brahms’s First Maturity’, 19th century Music, ‘2 (1958-9). 18-39 (p. ‘26), cited in ibid, 248.

[6]Ernst Kurth, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagner's 'Tristan' (Berlin, 1920), pp. 239-56. Partial translation in Ernst Kurth: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Lee A. Rothfarb (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 119-29; cited in Cohn 1999, 214.

[7]Lewin 1987.

[8]Cohn 1998, 172.

[9]Cohn 1999, 226.

[10]Ibid, 216.

[11]Ibid, 226

[12]Cohn 1999, 222.

[13]Marston 2000, 269.

[14]Ibid, 269.

[15]Cohn 1999, 218.

[16]Ibid, 218.

[17]Ibid, 218.

[18]Cohn 1999, 219.

[19]Ibid, 224.