Musical Expression of Text in the Songs of Robert Franz

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MUSICAL EXPRESSION OF TEXT

IN THE SONGS OF ROBERT FRANZ

by

Daniel Voss

Submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Hunter College of the City University of New York

Thesis sponsor:

Date L. Poundie Burstein

Date Philip Ewell

Second Reader



1

The celebrated German song composer Robert Franz (1815–1892) rejected Robert

Schumann’s use of the term Gedichte to describe sets of songs, feeling that it “brought

declamation too much into the foreground.”1 Indeed, even the most cursory comparison of songs

by Franz and Schumann will show that whereas Schumann’s style is relatively more

declamatory—he was “the first of the Germans who troubled about correct declamation,”

according to Arthur Komar 2 —Franz’s approach is far more lyrical. Edvard Grieg went so far as

to suggest that “with Schumann, the poetic conception plays the leading part to such an extent

that musical considerations technically important are subordinated, if not entirely neglected.”3

On the other hand, Franz himself stated in a letter to Franz Liszt that “the poet furnishes the key

to the appreciation of my works; my music is unintelligible without a close appreciation of the

sister-art: it merely illustrates the words, does not pretend to be much by itself.”4

The question arises, then, as to the nature of the relationship between music and text in

the preeminently lyrical song settings of Robert Franz. Which of Franz’s two views stated above

most informs his compositions? If it is not through declamation that Franz displays the meaning

of the poetry, how is the music-text connection apprehensible? If the poetry does not take

precedence, how can it render the music intelligible? Is the music self-sufficient, or at least

coequal with the text? In this paper I will attempt to show how musical events in the foreground

as well as at deeper structural levels of Franz’s songs clarify, intensify, and interpret the meaning

of the poems, at such a high degree of internal consistency as to demonstrate Liszt’s full

justification in transcribing the songs for solo piano.

1 Edward F. Kravitt, The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 297.2 Robert Schumann, Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score, Historical Background, Essays in Analysis, Views and

Comments, ed. Arthur Komar (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1971), 9.3 Ibid., 120.4 Debra Margaret Ollikkala, “Robert Franz, Robert Schumann: A Comparative Analysis of Their Settings of the

Same Poems” (master’s thesis, The University of Western Ontario, 1978), 9.



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Due to the ubiquity of comparisons between the two composers (which are not always

favorable to the lesser known), it will be beneficial to examine Franz’s songs in light of his

predecessor Schumann’s own settings of the same poems. I will discuss a number of songs, most

of which have texts by Heinrich Heine. Of course, analyses of Schumann’s settings, particularly

Dichterliebe, Op. 48, abound in the literature: those of Heinrich Schenker, Arthur Komar,

Charles Rosen, Deborah Stein, Elaine Brody and Robert A. Fowkes, and Joseph Kerman have

influenced my own view, to name a few.5 Analytical discussions of Franz’s music, however, are

much more limited. Nonetheless, some scholars have touched on Franz’s music. These include

L. Poundie Burstein, who is his essay “Their Paths, Her Ways: Comparison of Text Settings by

Clara Schumann and Other Composers,” compared some of Franz’s settings to those of Robert’s

wife, Clara.6

A single dissertation takes a look at the comparisons of Robert Schumann’s and

Franz’s Heine lieder settings by Komar, Stein, Rufus Hallmark, Eric Sams, and Henry Finck.7

Unlike these others, I offer an extended analytical discussion of Franz’s songs and their musical

expression of text in light of their similarities and differences to Schumann’s settings. In

addressing the work of this often overlooked composer, whose songs Schumann himself

described as belonging to the “new and noble category” of a “deeper, more artistic kind of lied”

5 Robert Schumann, Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score, Historical Background, Essays in Analysis, Views and

Comments, ed. Arthur Komar (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1971); Charles Rosen, The Romantic

Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Deborah Stein and Robert Spillman, Poetry intoSong: Performance and Analysis of Lieder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Elaine Brody and Robert A.

Fowkes, The German Lied and Its Poetry (New York: New York University Press, 1971); Joseph Kerman, “How

We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 2 (1980), 323-30.6 L. Poundie Burstein, “Their Paths, Her Ways: Comparison of Text Settings by Clara Schumann and Other

Composers,” Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 6 (2002): 11-26.7 Edward Hull, “A Study of Comparative Settings by Robert Franz and Robert Schumann Taken From Heinrich

Heine’s Buch der Lieder ” (DMA diss., Memphis State University, 1984). In Proquest Dissertations and Theses,

http://search.proquest.com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/pqdt/docview/303319562/abstract/1335A9610CE1EBE85

47/2?accountid=27495 (accessed November 30, 2011).



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which reflected “the new poetic spirit,”8

I hope to shed light not only on his craft, but also on

nineteenth-century song setting in general.

I will proceed by examining the selected Franz songs in terms of voice-leading,

harmony, structure, and motivic construction, in many cases comparing them to Schumann’s

better-known settings. I will seek to elucidate the relationship between the music and the text by

highlighting the apparatus that Franz uses to create musical meanings which parallel the themes

most common in Heine’s poetry. These include: irony, ambiguity, and pain/longing. Special

attention will also be given to the ways in which Franz musically illustrates other poetic symbols,

as well as to elements of unification implied by the text or required for musical coherence. In the

most general terms, my analysis will be guided by Edward Laufer’s argument that “if, in the art

of poetry, the formal structure and divisions of a poem, its manifold verbal techniques

(associative, rhythmic, prosodic, metric, or whatever), and the theme underlying the discourse

are all, each with the others, intrinsically one inseparable unity, one can ask first how a musical

setting may reflect this.”9

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai

Jocelyn Kolb has argued that “the essence of Heine’s poetry and thoughts lies in an

ambivalence that is irresolvable but not incomprehensible.”10

Particularly in the Buch der

8 Schumann, 129-30.9 Edward Laufer, “Symposium IV: Brahms, Song Op. 105, no. 1—A Schenkerian Approach” from Readings in

Schenker Analysis, ed. MauryYeston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 255.10 Jocelyn Kolb, “‘Die Puppenspiele meines Humors’: Heine and Romantic Irony,” Studies in Romanticism 26 (Fall

1987): 401.



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Lieder —from which most of the songs to be discussed in this paper are drawn—Heine’s poems

exhibit an ambiguity that results from an avoidance of any state of resolution. His thought is

fundamentally skeptical and disillusioned, particularly in regard to his Romantic predecessors

whom he acerbically criticized.11

Thus Heine seems to insist in his poetry on denying the reader

a sense of resolution or certainty, often through the techniques of Stimmungsbrechnung

(“breaking of mood”) and Verfremdungseffekt (“alienation effect”). The importance of ambiguity

extends far beyond Heine, of course, and it pervades the music and literature of the latter part of

the 19th

century.

This is reflected in Robert Schumann’s setting of Heine’s “Im wunderschönen Monat

Mai,” the first song of the Dichterliebe cycle and a work often cited as a quintessential example

of musical ambiguity. The song’s juxtaposition of a cadentially unconfirmed A major with the

non-resolving V7

of F-sharp minor perfectly captures the poem’s ambiguous tone. Discussions in

the literature are profuse and thorough, but references to Robert Franz’s intriguing setting of the

same text are scarce. From his Op. 25 of roughly 1870, Franz’s “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai”

is also paradigmatic of the effectiveness of using tonal relations to create musical ambivalence.12

(The score can be found in the Appendix, pp. 44–5.)

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,

Als alle Knospen sprangen,

Da ist in meinem Herzen

Die Liebe aufgegangen.

In the beautiful month of May,

as all the buds were blooming,

there in my heart

love was rising.

11 Heinrich Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, ed. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York:

Continuum Publishing Company, 1985) .12 All translations are by the author.



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Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,

Als alle Vögel sangen,

Da hab’ ich ihr gestanden

Mein Sehnen und Verlangen.

In the beautiful month of May,

as all the birds were singing,

there I confessed to her

my yearning and longing.

The speaker’s confession to his love amidst the beautiful May flowers and singing birds

of feelings of “Sehnen und Verlangen” (“yearning and longing”) underlines the poem’s essential

mood of unresolved desire and the ambiguous play of love and pain. Franz reflects this tension

with an appoggiatura C over a bass D-flat promptly in the second measure. This D-flat, pregnant

with meaning, returns pivotally transformed at the end of the song. See Example 1.

EXAMPLE 1. Franz, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” mm.1–3.

The poem’s tone of longing is matched by Franz’s tonal deceptions and irresolution. The

first deceptive cadence comes in measure 3 on the word “Mai,” quickly foreshadowing the

poem’s underlying pessimism. In measure 6, a D-natural helps to tonicize C minor and a bass G



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clearly suggests V/III. As the vocal line rises pictorially on “aufgegangen,” the expectation of a

cadence on C minor is frustrated and the harmony moves deceptively back to A-flat major. That

unrequited expectation is further emphasized by the voice’s drop of a fifth back to the primary

tone of C. Ironically, the deceptive cadence in m. 10 erodes the feeling of conclusive

confirmation that we would normally expect with the return of the tonic. Instead of functioning

as a resolution, the tonic here functions as a deception, as is depicted in Example 2.

EXAMPLE 2, Franz, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” voice-leading graph, mm. 1–10.

Curiously, where Schumann’s song apophatically suggests the key of F-sharp minor, the

relative minor of the ostensible tonic A, Franz’s does the same with C-minor, the minor mediant

of tonic A-flat.

In the second strophe, the desire for V/III to resolve to C minor is doubly frustrated,

achieving neither C minor nor returning to A-flat, but sidetracking to a quasi-cadence on D-flat

major as the voice sings the word “Verlangen.” This D-flat major harmony is thick with



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ambiguity. Though it begins with the suggestion of a perfect cadence on D-flat, the A-flat pedal

supersedes the final bass D-flat and thus denies the possibility of a modulation to IV. When the

D-flat first arrives in measure 18 it is adjacent to the V/III, so it initially sounds like the Phrygian

II of C minor. But C minor never comes, and like the beginning of the second strophe we are

instead led back to A-flat minor. The IV–I movement therefore indicates a plagal cadence,

replete with all the emotional connotations of that less fulfilling cadential form. The tonal weight

of IV in measures 18–19 is very strong, however, where it even carries a 3–2–1 descent in the

vocal line, with the F–D-flat unfolding from the preceding C–E-flat ascent (see Example 3). This

is the only such descent in the whole song, and it is notable that it occurs on the subdominant

rather than the tonic harmony. A move to the subdominant is generally associated with a

lessening of tension in tonal music, and in Franz’s song it has Schubertian, dreamlike overtones.

As in the case of the deceptive cadence in m. 10, the tonic A-flat returns in m. 20 not with a

feeling of resolution, but of surprise. The voice finishes in measure 19 on the fourth scale degree,

in the middle of an overall stepwise ascent of the primary tone. Although technically resolved in

the next measure by the accompaniment to ensure proper voice-leading, the feeling of unresolved

musical tension matching Heine’s poetic mood is nonetheless powerfully achieved (Example 3).

Incidentally, note that the final D-flat to A-flat movement mirrors the initial A-flat to D-

flat of m. 1–2 (see Example 1), much as the 3–2–1 descent in measures 18–19 mirrors the bass

ascent of D-flat–E-flat–F in measures 2–3. Thus, the hopeful initial gesture of opening and rising

is less sanguinely closed, creating a kind of reversal that befits the poem’s text. This technique of

musical irony is often deployed by Franz and will be discussed further below.



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EXAMPLE 3, Franz, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” voice-leading graph, mm. 10–20.

In all, Franz’s harmonic illustration of the poem sense of longing is quite different from

Schumann’s. Where Schumann uses an implicit F-sharp minor tonality to contrast present loss

with past fulfillment, Franz’s deceptive, weak, and unstable tonic reflects the poem’s ironically

ambiguous mood and metaphors which prevent the listener from enjoying any comfortable

certainty regarding Heine’s message.

Lieb’ Liebchen

Lieb’ Liebchen, leg’s Händchen auf’s Herze mein;

Ach, hörst du, wie’s pochet im Kämmerlein?

Da hauset ein Zimmerman schlimm und arg,

Der zimmert mir einen Todtensarg.

Lovely darling, lay your hand on my heart;

O! do you hear the knocking in this little chamber?

There lives a carpenter, evil and bad,

who is building me a coffin.



9

Es hämmert und klopfet bei Tag und bei Nacht;

Es hat mich schon längst um den Schlaf gebracht.

Ach, sputet euch, Meister Zimmerman,

Damit ich balde schlafen kann.

He hammers and knocks by day and by night;

It has long interrupted my sleep.

O! hurry, Master Carpenter,

so that I might soon sleep.

“Lieb’ Liebchen” from Heine’s Buch der Lieder was also set by both Schumann and

Franz; the former composer’s Op. 24 setting and the latter’s Op. 17 were published roughly 20

years apart. Schumann’s song reflects the poem’s tone and central metaphor in the musical

foreground. Repetitive upbeat eighth notes in the piano allude to the metaphor of the narrator’s

love-struck heartbeat and the coffin-building carpenter’s hammer strokes, and the stark E minor

mood of despair is deepened by the tonicization of E-flat minor and ominously descending bass

accompanying the reference in the text to the “Zimmerman.” The narrator’s longing for repose is

granted as the voice finishes alone and unaccompanied.13

Franz’s song, on the other hand, creates a feeling of ambiguity that suggests that there is

an incongruity to the text, a duality of meanings, and a subtle irony. (For score, see Appendix,

pp. 46–7.) This ambiguity is apparent in the first three measures, where a tonic D minor is

suggested although structurally ambivalent. A voice-exchange in measures 1–2 seems to unfold

VII°, which has dominant function. The D in the piano left hand falls on the downbeat of

measure 2 but is registrally disinclined to act as a true bass note (see Example 4). Thus the first

two measures serve as a larger metric upbeat to the weightier downbeat on measure 3.

13 A notable analysis of Schumann’s “Lieb’ Liebchen” appears in Allan Cadwallader and David Gagné, Analysis of

Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 208.



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EXAMPLE 4, Franz, “Lieb’ Liebchen,” voice-leading graph, mm.1–3.

This harmonic ambiguity obtains throughout the song. While key signature and local

tonicization suggest D minor, that key is never confirmed by perfect authentic cadence with

direct V-I root movement, and the song ends on an A major triad. Indeed, the song is filled with

the sound of non-resolving or weakly resolving dominants. For instance: the D minor half-

cadence in m. 4 is never followed by an authentic-cadencing consequent as one might expect.

Thus, the initial four-measure phrase effectively sounds like a prolongation of A dominant. Also,

the C minor cadential six-four chord in measures 9–10 (heard as a cadential six-four thanks in

part to the preceding A-flat German augmented sixth chord) does not resolve to a root-position C

minor chord until the upbeat of measure 12, and only then after a deceptive ascent from B-flat

dominant seventh. Similarly, the B7

chord in measure 18 leads to a first inversion E minor chord.

This is followed by a half-cadence and immediate shift to D minor, without a key-confirming

authentic cadence in E minor. The D minor is also followed by a half-cadence in m. 22 and is

likewise unconfirmed by authentic cadence. This profusion of harmonic instability provides a

musical corollary to the ambiguity of the poem’s central contradiction: the narrator is in love yet

desires death.



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The result of this ambiguity is a song ostensibly in the key of D minor that can

nonetheless be heard as a prolongation of a structural A dominant. A Schenkerian reading of the

song as a prolongation of tonic D minor with a 5-4-3-2-1 Urlinie descent is possible, but would

too easily smooth over the very pertinent and poetically meaningful ambiguities highlighted by

my reading. See Example 5 below.

The primary tone A in the upper voice never completes an Urlinie descent, though there

is an inner voice motion that descends to D in measures 18–21. Rather, the primary tone is

transferred to the lower octave, roughly consistent with the octave fall in the bass note A. This

overall sonic drop succinctly represents the narrator’s morbid quest for death, and is related to

the descending melodic fourths heard throughout the song (in measures 4, 10, 16, 20, and 22).

The interval of a fourth is significant because it relates the song’s melodic and harmonic

tendencies: the key areas tonicized at different points in the song are C, D, and E, which, taken

with their intermediary keys of G and A, form a chain of fourths. Example 5 provides a voice-

leading graph.



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EXAMPLE 5, Franz, “Lieb’ Liebchen,” voice-leading graph.

Though the harmonies of Franz’s song are ambiguous, the harmonic mood is

unambiguously dark. The chromatic shift from D minor to B7

(and reverse) in measures 18 and

20–21 that initiates and bisects the narrator’s plea to the “Zimmerman” is a profoundly dark

sound. Also, in the first strophe, an omnibus progression with chromatically rising bass in

measures 7–10 references the traditional lament gesture. Notably, that progression leads to C

minor, which as the subdominant of the subdominant is crushingly dark. The D-sharp that

initiates the chromatic bass ascent in m. 7 is recaptured in m. 11 as an E-flat, where it

participates in the key area of C minor. This then leads through G minor back to D. In the second

strophe, D-sharp returns, this time serving as the leading tone to E minor in m. 19. Significantly,

the D-sharp accompanies references to the “Zimmerman” in both strophes. Franz’s symbolic use

of the raised tonic (D-sharp) perhaps suggests an homage, with a twist, to Schumann’s use of the

flattened tonic (E-flat) in his own earlier setting of “Lieb’ Liebchen.” Thus Franz’s song



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tonicizes C minor in the first part and E minor in the second, each key being a whole step from

the tonic D, thereby creating a type of mirror-image, much as what was seen in “Im

wunderschönen Monat Mai.” As can be seen in Example 5, the song’s structural bass also

exhibits a kind of mirror reflection: the inner bass note D descending to C and returning to D

(mm. 6, 12, 15) is inverted and subsumed by the outer bass motion from A to B and back (mm.

16, 20, 22).

Franz’s excursions into the two key areas paralleling the tonic D minor hint at the

duplicity of the poem’s meaning. The metaphor of the narrator’s beating heart as the hammer

blows constructing his own coffin creates a typically Romantic parallelism between love and

death. Where Schumann’s masterful if straightforward setting takes the text at face value,

Franz’s more ambiguous harmonic meanderings suggest that Heine’s view of his narrator’s pain

might be at least somewhat ironical.

In the two aforementioned songs, Franz implements certain compositional

techniques in order to musically represent the mood and meaning of their texts. These techniques

include: the incomplete Ursatz ; the incomplete vocal Urlinie; the deceptive, unconfirmed, or

uncertain tonic; and structural metaphor. Franz uses these tools in many of his songs to diverse

but related expressive ends.



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Incomplete Ursatz

Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’,

So schwindet all’ mein Leid und Weh;

Doch wenn ich küsse deinen Mund,

So werd’ ich ganz und gar gesund.

Wenn ich mich lehn’ an deine Brust,

Kommt’s über mich wie Himmelslust;

Doch wenn du sprichst:

“Ich liebe dich!”

So muss ich weinen bitterlich.

When I look in your eyes,

all of my sorrow and suffering disappear;

when I kiss your mouth,

I become well and truly healthy.

When I rest against your breast,

a heavenly delight comes over me;

yet when you speak:

“I love you!”

I must weep bitterly.

Besides “Lieb’ Liebchen,” only one other Franz song included in the present survey has

an incomplete Ursatz . Quite similarly to the former, Franz’s Op. 44, No. 5 setting of Heine’s

“Wenn ich in deine augen seh’” begins and ends on the dominant of the implicit tonality, D

minor. The piano figure in the first bar begins after a sixteenth-note rest, contributing an off-beat

rhythm to the off-tonic opening. Nowhere in the song is a perfect cadence on D minor to be

heard. The feeling of irresolution thus created is central to Franz’s expression of a musical

ambiguity which parallels Heine’s poetic contradictions. The relationship between irony and

ambiguity is clear: according to Kolb, irony “derives from the knowledge of unresolvable

contradictions.”14

Heine’s poetic techniques of Verfremdungseffekt and Stimmungsbrechnung

find their musical counterparts in Franz’s use of deceptive cadence, unexpected modulations,

unresolving dominants, and destabilized key centers, among other things.

14 Kolb, “‘Die Puppenspiele meines Humors’: Heine and Romantic Irony,” 402.



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Not unlike “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” “Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’” also

exploits the disarming sound of the deceptive cadence in order to realize the poem’s irony. The

superficially rejoicing but ultimately lamenting vocal phrases all descend in the first strophe,

reaching deceptive cadences followed by perfect authentic cadences on B-flat and then E-flat.

Since the implicit tonality of the song is D minor, these key areas represent an extreme venture

into the flat-key side and thus elicit a strong feeling of melancholy. The remoteness of these keys

as well as the authentic cadence on C minor in the prepenultimate measure of the song

emphasize the strangeness of the text, as though leaving the listener to finally ask how this point

was arrived at. The B-flat major and E-flat major of the first strophe foreshadow a transformation

to their relative minor keys, G minor and then C minor, respectively, at the end of the song, as

the narrator reveals that he must weep bitterly even when his beloved says, “I love you.”

Incomplete Vocal Urlinie

Both “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” and “Lieb’ Liebchen” derive part of their

expressive power from an Urlinie that does not complete a full descent to the tonic. The result is

a feeling of frustration or inconclusiveness. “Der schwere Abend,” Franz’s Op. 37, No. 4 setting

of a poem by Nikolaus Lehnau, has an incomplete Urlinie that is similarly impactful. While

Schumann paints the oppressive stillness and heaviness of the night in the long, heavy chords of

the piano accompaniment, Franz’s running sixteenth and thirty-second notes capture the

speaker’s distress (“bekümmern.”) Franz does his own word-painting, albeit on a structural level,

with an octave descent on B in the voice from m. 2 to m. 14—the image of oppressive weight is



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clear enough. Even the bass descends, or over-descends, to the strophe-ending authentic cadence

on D major (III/V or VII) in m. 18. Example 6 illustrates the music; the text is given below.

Die dunklen Wolken hingen herab so bang und

schwer,

Wir beiden traurig gingen im Garten hin und her.

So heiss und stumm, so trübe und sternlos war die

Nacht,

So ganz wie unsre Liebe zu Thränen nur gemacht.

Und als ich musste scheiden, und gute Nacht dir bot,

Wünscht’ ich bekümmert beiden im Herzen uns den

Tod.

Darks clouds hung down so fearful and heavy,

we both walked sadly back and forth in the garden.

The night was so hot and silent, so dull and starless,

so much like our love that it brought us to tears.

And as I departed, and wished you good night,

in my distressed heart I wished death on us both.

EXAMPLE 6, Franz, “Der schwere Abend,” voice-leading graph.



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As can be seen in Example 6, the voice ends in m. 26 on scale step 4 over the dominant in

the accompaniment, just as the narrator is wishing for death. The song’s imagery of descent is

maintained here—the fourth scale degree must resolve down as the bass moves V7 –I. In the tonal

system, there could hardly be a stronger symbol of irreconcilability than a phrase-ending

dominant seventh chord, and the fact that the voice note is the dissonant seventh from the bass

exaggerates that feeling of tonal frustration to the point of anguish. The speaker, in his lonely

self-absorption, is left there in solitude as the piano alone finishes the full Urlinie descent. Thus

the song is structurally and tonally complete while still providing a strong sense of estrangement.

In Franz’s Op. 25, No. 3 setting of Heine’s “Ich hab’ in Traume geweinet,” the vocal

Urlinie also ends on the fourth scale step and the full descent to the tonic is completed only by

the accompaniment. (For score, see Appendix, pp. 48–49.) In this case, however, the fourth scale

degree is raised. The B-sharp is part of an inverted German augmented sixth predominant chord,

and its tritone relationship to the tonic heightens the expression of the narrator’s pain (see

Example 7). If there is any sonority in the tonal system that evokes a greater sense of longing

than the dominant, it might be the augmented sixth chord. It is also worth noting that

Schumann’s declamatory setting of this song ends the text on V6/5/IV. Both settings create a

strong sense of unfulfillment that is only later resolved by a piano accompaniment postlude.



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EXAMPLE 7, Franz, “Ich hab’ im Traume geweinet,” voice-leading graph.

The voice-exchange in m. 25, which can be seen in Example 7, is part of a voice-leading

procedure that underscores the irony of the poem, the text of which is given below.

Ich hab’ im Traume geweinet,

Mir träumte, du lägest im Grab.

Ich wachte auf, und die Thräne floss noch von der

Wange herab.


Mir träumt’, du verliessest mich.

Ich wachte auf, und ich weinte noch lange bitterlich.


Mir träumt’, du wärst mir noch gut.

Ich wachte auf, und noch immer strömt meiner

Thränenfluth.

In dreams I have wept,

I dreamt you lay in your grave.

I woke up, and the tears still streamed down my

cheeks.


I dreamt you had left me.

I woke up, and I continued to weep bitterly.


I dreamt you were still good to me.

I woke up, and even still my tears flowed.



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Like “Lieb’ Liebchen” and “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” “Ich hab’ im Traume

geweinet” also utilizes the technique of musical reversal to reinforce Heine’s irony. The poem’s

narrator awakens from three dreams: in the first, his beloved was dead and he awakens crying; in

the second, his beloved had left him, and he awakens crying; in the third, his beloved remained

good to him, and he nonetheless awakens crying. Franz musically reflects the reversal of

expectation embodied in the third strophe. The first two strophes end with ascending parallel

chromatic sixths in the bass and inner voice, approaching a V4/3 chord leading back to I. That the

first two strophes end not with cadential confirmation of the tonic F-sharp, but rather with a

neighbor V4/3, accentuates the dubious sense of foreboding in the text. Example 8 shows the

ascending parallel sixths, marked with brackets, as well as a preceding voice-exchange in m. 6.

EXAMPLE 8, Franz, “Ich hab’ im Traume geweinet,” mm. 1–10.

The third strophe, with its unpredictable turn in the text, is set with the parallel chromatic

sixths between the bass and the voice, now descending (marked in Example 9 with brackets).

Note that the ascending A-sharp–C-sharp–E arpeggio of m. 6 is also reversed to E–C-sharp–A in



20

m. 23. Finally, the 10–6 voice-exchange in m. 6 that initiates the parallel sixths ascent has also

been reversed to a 6–10 voice-exchange in mm. 24–25 that wraps up a parallel sixths descent .

Thus Franz’s reversal is sophisticated and thorough, and reflects Heine’s irony not on the

musical surface but on a deeper structural level.

EXAMPLE 9, Franz, “Ich hab’ im Traume geweinet,” mm. 10–30.

Structural Metaphor

The musical irony that Franz creates in “Lieb’ Liebchen” and “Im wunderschönen Monat

Mai” is evident in many of his other songs as well. Like the structural “mirror-images” discussed

above, Franz’s Op. 9, No. 4, “Allnächtlich im Traume” also contains a musical inversion that

reflects the reversal of expectation integral to Heine’s irony. (For score, see Appendix, pp. 50–2.)

In this song, a 3–2–1 Urlinie is inverted in the bass of the first two sections of the ternary form.

This is illustrated in Example 10.



21

EXAMPLE 10, Franz, “Allnächtlich im Traume,” voice-leading graph.

A true inversion, the voice ascends a seventh from G-flat to F as the bass descends a

seventh from E-flat to F. The bass then ascends a ninth to G-flat, and the voice ultimately

descends a ninth to E-flat with the completion of the Urlinie. The motion to an inner voice

accompanied by a deceptive cadence at the middle section marked “Innig” is notably wry,

playfully capturing the interiority of the narrator’s dream experience. In this song, the structural

mirror-image is something of a cipher, a closed loop that admits of death and loss while

nonetheless implying the inescapability of the narrator’s self-pitying solipsism.

Allnächtlich im Traume seh’ ich dich,

Und sehe dich freundlich grüssen,

Und laut aufweinend stürz’ ich mich

Zu deinen süssen Füssen.

I see you nightly in my dreams,

and I see you great me kindly,

and loudly crying out I fall

to your sweet feet.



22

Du siehst mich an wehmüthiglich,

Und schüttelst das blonde Köfchen;

Aus deinen Augen schleichen sich

Die Perlen Thränentröpfchen.

Du sagest mir Heimlich ein leises Wort,

Und giebst mir den Strauss von Cypressen.

Ich wache auf, und der Strauss ist fort,

Und das Wort hab’ ich vergessen.

You look at me wistfully,

and shake your blond head;

from your eyes slip

pearly teardrops.

You spoke to me secretly a quiet word,

and gave me a bunch of Cypress.

I wake up, and the Cypress is gone,

and I have forgotten that word.

Franz’s ironic touch in “Allnächtlich im Traume” is also clear from his use of a subtly

shrill and overwrought tone. As Charles S. Brauner points out, Heine’s poem is ridiculing

Romantic sentimentality.15

But Brauner thinks Franz’s dramatic, E-flat minor setting has missed

Heine’s irony, where Schumann’s playful, F-sharp major setting captures the ridiculousness of

the satire. To the contrary, Franz’s irony is simply very subtle: the use of recitative-like

declamation is so rare in Franz’s oeuvre that its appearance in this song requires special

attention. I would argue that it is up to the text to negate the mood of the poem—it is not the

song composer’s task to solve a riddle for the listener. In this case, rather, Franz’s recitative-like

declamation negates his own typical style in order to express the poem’s irony.16

A departure from the expected style also helps to highlight the irony of “Im Rhein, im

heiligen Strome” in Franz’s Op. 18, No. 2. (For score, see Appendix, pp. 53–54.) Where

Schumann illustrates the religious symbol of the Cologne cathedral by setting his song with oft-

mentioned Baroque-influenced polyphony, Franz abjures his usual polyphonic accompaniment in

15 Charles S. Brauner, “Irony in the Heine Lieder of Schubert and Schumann,” The Musical Quarterly 67 (April

1981): 266.16 “The poet negates the mood he has created as well as the tradition within which he writes, and this self-conscious

process of having and not-having is one of the most consistent features of Heine’s style.” Kolb, “‘Die Puppenspiele

meines Humors’: Heine and Romantic Irony,” 405.



23

favor of a homophonic, chant-like sound. The ternary form of Franz’s song is slightly less

unusual, though still not typical—he generally uses strophic forms. Perhaps he is conjuring a

trinitarian image.

Franz’s setting uses a stark leading-tone transformation directly from G major to B minor

to set up the final line of text containing the poem’s nearly sacrilegious “punch-line,” in which

the narrator compares his beloved to a portrait of the Virgin Mary. The expression is marked a

whispering leise, suggesting that the narrator is almost embarrassed at this assertion. At this point

in Schumann’s setting, on the other hand, the dynamic, tempo, and expression are unchanged.

This is not to imply that Schumann has missed the irony—rather, he has created a solemn mood

which is left to the text to break, much like Franz’s procedure in “Allnächtlich im Traume.” Jack

Stein finds this treatment to be earnest rather than ironic, but I would argue that Rufus Hallmark

correctly recognizes that the state of “expressive dissonance” between text and music actually

highlights “the blasphemous nature and irony of the conclusion of Heine’s poem.”17

Franz’s “Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!” Op. 34, No. 4 presents another example

of a song in which structural elements help to cultivate the mood and clarify the meaning of a

text. (For score, see Appendix, pp. 55–56.) In it, the narrator paces to and fro, impatiently

waiting to see his beloved, cursing the slowness of time’s passage and Fate’s malicious disregard

for the lover’s haste.

Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her! It drives me back and forth!

17 Rufus Hallmark, ed., German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), 174. Stein’s

discussion of Schumann’s Heine lieder is in Jack M. Stein, Poem and Music in the German Lied from Gluck to

Hugo Wolf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).



24

Noch wenige Stunden, dann soll ich schauen,

Sie selber, die schönste, der schönen Jungfrauen;

Du treues Herz, was pochst du so schwer?

Die Stunden sind aber ein faules Volk!

Schleppen sich hin behaglich träge,

Schleichen gähnend ihre Wege;

Tummle dich, du faules Volk!

Tobende Eile mich treibend erfasst!

Aber wohl niemals liebten die Horen;

Heimlich zum grausamen Bunde verschworen,

Spotten sie tückisch der Liebenden Hast.

Just a more few hours, then I shall see

her, the most beautiful of beautiful damsels;

faithful heart, why do you pound so hard?

The hours are such lazy folk!

Comfortably dragging on,

creeping along their way with a yawn;

get a move on, you lazy folk!

Demoniac urgency impulsively grabs me!

But the Hours have probably never loved;

secretly sworn to a dreadful conspiracy,

they scoff maliciously at love’s haste.

In Schumann’s setting, the 3/8 meter with “Sehr rasch” tempo and staccato off-beats in

the piano plainly illustrate this impatient desirousness. Franz’s setting, on the other hand, uses an

incessant arrangement of steps and thirds at multiple structural levels to express the narrator’s

tormented pacing. This appears first in the opening bars of the piano accompaniment, where the

stepwise descent melodically fills out a harmonic descent of parallel thirds. See Example 11.

EXAMPLE 11, Franz, “Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!” mm. 1–3.



25

The song then continues with a stepwise ascent in the bass that uses passing motion to fill

in the area between third-related keys: I, III, and V. Note also the recurrent 10–6 counterpoint in

Example 12; this “back-and-forth” figuration pervades the song (“hin und her”).

EXAMPLE 12, Franz, “Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!” voice-leading graph, mm. 4-9.

The harmony moves by thirds until it reaches D major (VII, or III/V) which is

appropriately one step from the tonic E. At the end of the first part, D major is transformed to a

tonicized D minor, as befits the frustrated lover’s anger over the laziness of the slowly passing

hours.

Unusually for a Franz song, “Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!” does not have a truly

strophic form—the second part is substantially different from, though related to, the first. The

phrase provided in Example 13 covers the same musical territory as the one in Example 12, yet

in fewer bars, perhaps alluding to the narrator’s increasing fervor. Indeed, he is so impatient to

see his beloved that the 10-6 counterpoint has skipped ahead, now placing the tenths on the

offbeat.



26

EXAMPLE 13, Franz, “Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!” voice-leading graph, mm. 24–27.

The speaker’s haste is so great that the vocal Urlinie finishes its descent four measures

before the accompaniment finally catches up. In the postlude, the piano’s descending stepwise

figure is an extended version of the introduction, perhaps suggesting that the lover’s increasing

impatience will only be met by an increasingly slower passage of time.

EXAMPLE 14, Franz, “Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!” mm. 30–35.



27

Franz’s songs are so filled with ambiguity and calculated misdirection that a song

seemingly lacking in these qualities requires special explanation. Heine’s poem, “Die Rose, Die

Lilie” appears to possess genuine sentiment rather than his characteristic biting irony. Like the

other poems at the very beginning of the Lyrisches Intermezzo, “Die Rose, Die Lilie” exhibits a

feeling of authentic love and youthful enthusiasm for the beloved. Only later in the cycle does

Heine portray the lover’s disillusionment, rejection, and bitterness.

Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne,

Die liebt’ ich einst alle in Liebeswonne.

Ich lieb sie nicht mehr, ich liebe alleine

Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine,

Sie selber, aller Liebe Bronne,

Ist Rose und Lilie, und Taube, und Sonne.

The rose, the lily, the dove, the sun—

once I loved them all blissfully.

I no longer love them, I love only

the little, the pretty, the pure, the one,

the source of all love, she herself

is rose and lily, and dove, and sun.

EXAMPLE 15, Franz, “Die Rose, die Lilie,” voice-leading graph.



28

Example 15 provides a graph of Franz’s Op. 34, No. 5 setting of “Die Rose, Die Lilie.”

(For score, see Appendix, pp. 57–58.) Here is a song with smooth and coherent voice-leading,

clear and cogent harmony, and a complete Ursatz . The brief but poignant move to the minor

submediant in m. 7 (“Ich lieb’ sie nicht mehr”) is gently referenced ten measures later when the

primary melody tone is heard a sixth above the bass as part of the II6/5 predominant. Likewise,

the melodic leap of a sixth in mm. 1–2 is reiterated and multiplied in mm. 9–11. At this point the

melody and bass are moving in a stepwise descent of parallel tenths, unified as such after the

inner voice descent of mm. 4–6 was followed by the bass ascent of mm. 6–9. Flowing, stepwise

voice-leading is heard throughout the song. Another instance of musical unification occurs when

the inner-voice F-sharp in m. 11 is reunited with the primary tone in m. 19 after a neighbor-note

prolongation. The song is unusually integrated and straightforward for a Franz piece, seamless

and without interruption. That unification serves precisely to communicate the content of the

poem—namely, the beloved unifies all of the lover’s various lesser loves (“the rose, the lily, the

dove, the sun…”) in her own image, thereby transcending them.

Long range voice-leading also provides a key to grasping Franz’s musical reflection of

the meanings of Heine’s meditation on the Romantic themes of pain and longing in the poem,

“Die Lotosblume.” Schumann’s slow, hypnotic piano quarter notes and deliberate declamation

contribute to the lush sensuality of his setting, as do the frequent appoggiaturas and modulation

to the flat mediant. In Franz’s Op. 25, No.1 setting of the poem, on the other hand, it is

middleground voice-leading procedures that brilliantly illustrate the foundational metaphors and

imagery of the text. (For score, see Appendix, pp. 59–61.)

Die Lotosblume ängstigt sich vor der Sonne Pracht, The lotus flower is frightened of the sun’s splendor,



29

Und mit gesenktem Haupte

Erwartet sie träumend die Nacht.

Der Mond, der ist ihr Buhle,

Erweckt sie mit seinem Licht,

Und ihm entschleichert sie freundlich

Ihr holdes Blumengesicht.

Sie blüht und glüht und leuchtet,

Und starret stumm in die Höh’;

Sie duftet und weinet und zittert

Vor Liebe und Liebesweh,

Vor Liebe und Liebesweh.

and with bowed head

dreamily awaits the night.

The moon, her lover,

awakens her with his light,

and she graciously unveils for him

her lovely flower-face.

She blooms and glows and gleams,

and gazes silently upwards;

she is fragrant and weeps and trembles

from love and the pain of love,

from love and the pain of love.

A symbol of beauty and sexual purity in Eastern mythologies, the lotus flower in Heine’s

poem suggests the apparently contradictory simultaneity of pleasure and pain that is associated

with desire. The poem’s lotus flower encounters her lover, the moon, for whom she blooms and

glows, and then cries and trembles “vor Liebe und Liebesweh.” The accented passing tones in

the opening bars of Franz’s setting, depicted in Example 16 on the first beat of measures 2 and 3,

establish the figuratively sexual feeling of tension.



30

EXAMPLE 16, Franz, “Die Lotosblume,” mm. 1–3.

Heine’s text is filled with images of binary opposition: rising/falling, sun/moon,

male/female, “Liebe”/“Liebesweh.” The lotus flower closes herself to the sun and opens to the

moon, and this rhythm of opening and closing is audibly reflected in Franz’s middleground

voice-leading. In Example 17, one can see three times the “opening and closing” unfoldings of

the primary tone D (marked with arrows on the graph).



31

EXAMPLE 17, Franz, “Die Lotosblume,” voice-leading graph.

The structural bass also “opens,” with an ascending G–B-flat–D arpeggiation, and

“closes,” with a descending inversion of that arpeggio, G–E-flat–B-flat (see Example 18).

Contrary motion between the top voice and bass obtains throughout—every time the structural

bass rises, the top voice falls, and vice versa. This sense of boundary-crossing is heightened in

mm. 19–24, which reveals four instances of voice-exchange. Significantly, this occurs as the text

describes the interaction between the lotus and the moon: “Sie blüht und glüht und leuchtet, und

starret stumm in die Höh; sie duftet und weinet und zittert…” These lines, as well as the

binarisms in both the music and text, can be interpreted as relating to the duality and

contradictions inherent in the sexual act, as well as a metaphor for the physical movements and

responses involved. A graph of a deeper middleground level depicts the dancing interplay

between the top voice and its motions into an inner voice, an apt musical metaphor for the sexual

union (see Example 18).



32

EXAMPLE 18, Franz, “Die Lotosblume,” middleground graph.

Note that the middle section of the song, mm. 19–25, is dominated by inner voice

elaborations (this is reminiscent of Franz’s treatment of the middle section of “Allnächtlich im

Traume.”) The tool of counterpoint that is available to music provides an ideal metaphorical

means for the unification and synthesis of opposing forces, and in “Die Lotosblume” Franz has

harnessed it toward an outcome of particular significance. Note also that, like several of the

songs discussed above, “Die Lotosblume” has no Urlinie descent to the tonic. Rather, the

primary tone D is maintained throughout the song in a kind of stasis. This state of changelessness

reflects the apparently eternal nature of the poem’s central symbol, love.

The theme of pain and suffering is parodied by Heine in his poem “Hör’ ich das Liedchen

klingen,” in which the tone is overwrought, and the pain described in it not great, but

“übergross.” Schumann’s setting evokes the “Liedchen” through a harp-like piano

accompaniment, but in Franz’s Op. 5, No. 11 setting, the “Liedchen” is Bachian. The piano

accompaniment resembles a Bach keyboard piece in its contrapuntal texture, and the E minor

song ends (fittingly, just as the speaker’s pain is “aufgelöst” in tears) with a Picardy third. Franz



33

subtly reveals Heine’s irony in describing the suffering the speaker experiences at hearing the

song his beloved once sang by harmonizing the words “wildem Schmerzendrang” and

“übergrosses Weh” with deceptive cadences when they first appear.

Tonic uncertainty

As stated above in the discussion of the incomplete Ursatz , musical ambiguity is an

essential tool when attempting to convey a Romantic sense of irony. The tonal system provides

an excellent foundation for creating tension and uncertainty through deviations from its

normative procedures. Franz’s Op. 25, No. 4 “Kommt feins Liebchen heut’?” uses several

different techniques to create a feeling of uncertainty and ambiguity. (For score, see Appendix,

pp. 62–63.) A deceptive motion, which has already been discussed in regard to other songs,

appears here in m. 3 of the first strophe and in the corresponding place in the second strophe at

m. 12. Specifically, a G-sharp dominant seventh moves not to the expected C-sharp minor but to

A major. In addition, the half cadence that ends the first strophe in m. 8 is a second inversion of

C-sharp minor, or a cadential six-four chord that doesn’t resolve, but rather ascends stepwise to

return to F-sharp minor (six-four!) in m. 10. There is also an absence of strong, V–I tonal

confirmation until the very end of the song. Furthermore, the deceptive cadence in m. 17 is

paired with a completed vocal Urlinie, giving the impression that the speaker’s emotions are

unrequited—the bass does not achieve structural closure until three measures later. These tonal

deviations contribute to the sense of uncertainty expressed by the poem’s narrator.



34

Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage:

Kommt feins Liebchen heut’?

Abends sink’ ich hin und klage:

Aus blieb sie auch heut’!

In der Nacht, mit meinen Kummer

Lieg’ ich schlaflos wach,

Träumend , wie im halben Schlummer,

Wandle ich bei Tag.

Every morning I arise and ask:

is my pretty love coming today?

Every night I lie down and lament:

again today she stayed away!

At night, I lie

sleeplessly awake with my grief;

dreaming, as though half-asleep,

I wander through the day.

EXAMPLE 19, Franz, “Kommt feins Liebchen heut’?” voice-leading graph.

Perhaps more than anything, the tonal instability in this song is a result of the auxiliary

cadences in mm. 1–5 and mm. 10–14. In retrospect it is clear that each strophe begins with a IV–

V–I cadence to the tonic C-sharp minor reached in the consequent portion of the phrase (see

Example 19). In the moment that it sounds, however, the F-sharp minor chord of the first bar is

heard as the tonic. (Neither F-sharp nor C-sharp is confirmed with an authentic cadence at this



35

point.) The result is an oscillation between the two keys that illustrates both the alternation of

images of day and night in the text as well as the speaker’s impatience. Both Franz and

Schumann use rhythm to reflect the narrator’s impatient fretting (running sixteenth notes and off-

beat eighth notes, respectively). But whereas Schumann’s modulating excursion through the

mediant, supertonic, and subdominant before returning to the tonic creates a feeling of fitful

wandering, Franz’s unstable harmonic oscillation more effectively captures the poem’s binary

metaphor and underlying contradiction: by night the speaker is sleepless, by day he is dreaming

and half-slumbering.

Harmonic instability and an ambiguously incomplete Urlinie are also put to use for poetic

effect in the Op. 48, No. 4 setting of Friedrich Rückert’s “Die Perle.” (For score, see Appendix,

pp. 64–66.) Example 20 provides a voice-leading graph; the text is presented below.

Der Himmel hat eine Thräne geweint,

Die hat sich in’s Meer zu verlieren gemeint.

Die Muschel kam und schloss sie ein:

Du sollst nun meine Perle sein.

Du sollst nicht vor den Wogen zagen,

Ich will hindurch dich ruhig tragen.

O du mein Schmerz, du meine Lust,

Du Himmelsthrän’ in meiner Brust!

Gieb Himmel, dass ich in reinem Gemüthe

Den reinsten deiner Tropfen hüte.

Heaven cried a tear

that she meant to lose in the sea.

A seashell came and shut it away:

“And so you shall be my pearl.

You need not fear the waves,

I will carry you calmly through them.

You are my pain, my desire—you, the heavenly tear

in my heart!

Heaven help me, with a pure heart, to watch over

your purest teardrop.



37

interiority and a hint at the most subterranean realms of the psyche.) The digression to G-sharp

minor belies the seashell’s naïve illusion about its relationship to the pearl as it soon

dematerializes into V7/III (which it does via V/V, hinting at the eventual turn to the dominant

that is yet to come). Again in m. 35 there is a suggestion of VII, this time as a passing six-four

chord on its way to V6-4. The modulations to C-sharp and G-sharp minor and the lack of

cadential confirmation for the dominant (the B anchors a passing six-four chord between the

mediant and the tonic) reveal the uncertain character of the pearl as well as the meandering drift

of the waves. Thus the harmonic ambiguity of the song’s middle section illustrates the

contradictions embodied by the poem’s central metaphor. Is it a teardrop, a symbol of pain and

sorrow, or a pearl, a symbol of joy? How can it be both?

As much as any song discussed here, Franz’s Op. 11, No. 2 setting of “Am leuchtenden

Sommermorgen” relies on harmonic uncertainty to convey the poem’s irony. (For score, see

Appendix, pp. 67–68.) Like Schumann’s song, Franz’s version begins in media res with a G

minor six-four chord that evokes the poem’s sense of directionless wandering. When the vocal

melody enters two measures later, the apparent key is B-flat major (Example 21).



38

EXAMPLE 21, Franz, “Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen,” mm. 1–3.

Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen

Geh’ ich im Garten herum.

Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen,

Ich aber, ich wandle stumm.

Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen

Und schauen mitleidig mich an:

Sei unsrer Schwester nicht böse,

Du trauriger, blaser Mann.

On a shining summer morning

I circle the garden.

The flowers whisper and speak,

but I wander mute.

The flowers whisper and speak

and look at me with pity:

don’t be angry with our sister,

you sad, miserable man.

The poem’s speaker says, “The flowers whisper and speak, but I wander mute”—the

loquaciousness of the flowers is represented in part by the pretty, rolling piano arpeggios, while

the speaker’s muteness finds expression in the song’s inert and unmoving primary tone, B-flat

(the Urlinie is finished only in the piano postlude). Regularly circling fourths illustrate the



39

narrator’s wanderings in the garden and occur in almost every measure of the song, in both the

bass and the voice.

EXAMPLE 22, Franz, “Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen,” voice-leading graph.

B-flat major is confirmed by perfect cadences in mm. 3 and 5, but G minor continues to

loom. Note that the bass descending third progression D–C–B-flat that occurs on beat in mm. 1–

3 has shifted off the beat in mm. 6–9, giving a certain preeminence to the descending fourth

progression G–F–E-flat–D. The strophe ends with a passing F-sharp and then a G minor six-four

chord in m. 9, seemingly anticipating a cadence in G minor, which however does not come. We

hear the music from the first measure again, and this time we wonder whether the first chord is

truly G minor six-four or B-flat-sixth with an appoggiatura G. The fermata on F7

in m. 20 would

seem to confirm our comfortable suspicion that the song’s key is indeed B-flat major. Then the

final two-measure piano postlude, like many of Schumann’s, sums up the meaning of the song. It

completes a cadence in G minor, and we are left with the speaker’s piteous sadness. This

harmonic epiphany (G minor, not B-flat major!) expertly captures the contrast of mood inherent



40

in the poem’s central contradiction—the speaker is filled with sadness and loss, despite being in

a summer garden surrounded by beautiful (and sympathetic [“mitleidig”]) flowers.

Heine’s “Was will die einsame Thräne” takes on another quintessential Romantic theme:

memory. Charles Rosen writes, “Romantic memories are often those of absence, of that which

never was … Their irrelevance to the present gives them a new power, out of place as well as out

of time. These memories do not cause the past to live again; they make us feel its death.”18

This

conception of memory is important for understanding Heine’s sardonic irony and critical for

grasping the meaning of the many deceptions and leadings-astray, the ambiguity and

incompleteness of Franz’s songs. The effect of his music is invariably familiar yet unsettling, as

is the Romantic memory, and a profound psychological pain is communicated in his songs.

Franz’s Op. 34, No. 1 setting of “Was will die einsame Thräne” uses harmonic relations

through time to approximate the experience of memory. (For score, see Appendix, pp. 69–71.)

After modulating to the dominant, G minor, and on its way back to the tonic, the harmony

modulates to the subdominant. The darkness of the F minor is apropos as the voice sings about

the lonely tear’s many glowing sisters that have all since melted away. It returns recontextualized

at the end of the piece.

Was will die einsame Thräne?

Sie trübt mir ja den Blick.

Sie blieb aus alten Zeiten

In meinem Auge zurück.

Sie hatte viel’ leuchtende Schwestern,

What does this lonely teardrop want?

It blurs my vision.

It has lingered in my eye

from old times.

It had many gleaming sisters,

18 Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995): 175.



41

Die alle zerflossen sind,

Mit meinen Qualen und Freuden

Zerflossen in Nacht und Wind.

Wie Nebel sind auch zerflossen

Die blauen Sternelein,

Die mir jene Freuden und Qualen

Gelächelt in’s herz hinein.

Ach, meine Liebe selber

Zerfloss wie eitel Hauch!

Du alte, einsame Thräne,

Zerfliesse jetz und der auch.

that have all melted away—

with my torments and my joys,

melted away in the night and wind.

Also melted away like fog

are the blue starlets

that smiled those joys and torments

into my heart.

O! my love herself

melted away like a vain breeze!

You old, lonely teardrop,

melt away now too.

Example 23 provides a voice-leading graph of “Was will die einsame Thräne.” The final

descent of the vocal Urlinie in m. 37 is matched with the familiar deceptive cadence to the

submediant with all its attendant sense of incompleteness and loss. Appropriately, the harmony

descends again to the subdominant on the way back to the tonic with major third. The F minor

here serves as an echo of the same chord that happened earlier in m. 15. It returns as a memory

of prior events, just as the single tear in the narrator’s eye reminds him of past pain and lost love,

but remains and will not dissolve away. Schumann’s juxtaposition of the dominant E over a

pedal point A in the bass at m. 10 of his setting has a similar disorienting, dichotomous effect.



42

EXAMPLE 23, Franz, “Was will die einsame Thräne,” voice-leading graph.

Conclusion

I have attempted to demonstrate in the course of this paper that Franz’s songs exhibit

high levels of coherence, both within the music and, perhaps more significantly, between the

music and the text. Indeed, Franz “maintained that any good text (his emphasis) has a seed from

which everything grows, so that an adequate setting of it will need to have a basic motif which

similarly unifies the song.”19

Franz’s deft manipulation of deep harmony, voice-leading, higher

level motives, and other techniques contributes to the goal of musically representing a poem’s

underlying unity—or, as is often the case with Heine, its contradictions and essential irony.

It has not been the goal of this paper to demonstrate the superiority of Franz’s subtle,

hierarchically structured approach to text setting over Schumann’s, though Franz himself may

19 J. W. Smeed, German Song and its Poetry: 1740–1900 (New York: Croom Helm, 1987): 122-23.



43

have suggested as much.20

Rather, I have shown that Franz was able to diverge from his

forebear’s influence to create an original style that used musical events beneath the surface in

close coordination with the text to great psychological effect. Thus, Franz’s music does not

“merely illustrate” the words of a poem, as he is quoted as saying above—instead, his music

deeply, adroitly, and sophisticatedly illustrates the words. While they may be “chaste,” ascetic,

or reserved in their avoidance of overt sensuality,21

Franz’s songs are nonetheless rich in

technically rendered meanings which can often be discovered only below their musical surfaces.

20 Jack M. Stein, Poem and Music in the German Lied From Gluck to Hugo Wolf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1971): 173.21 Hallmark, German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century, 174.



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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alderich, Richard. “Robert Franz on Schubert and Others.” The Musical Quarterly 14 (October 1928): 486-94.

Brauner, Charles S. “Irony in the Heine Lieder of Schubert and Schumann.” The Musical

Quarterly 67 (April 1981): 261-81.

Brody, Elaine and Robert A. Fowkes. The German Lied and Its Poetry. New York: New York

University Press, 1971.

Burstein, L. Poundie. “Their Paths, Her Ways: Comparison of Text Settings by Clara Schumann

and Other Composers.” Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 6 (2002): 11-

26.

Cadwallader, Allan and David Gagné. Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach. New

York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Duncan, Barbara. “Some Letters of Robert Franz.” Bulletin of the American Musicological

Society, no. 2 (June 1937): 17-18.

Hallmark, Rufus, ed. German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Schirmer Books,

1996.

Heine, Heinrich. The Romantic School and Other Essays. Edited by Jost Hermand and Robert C.

Holub. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1985.

Hueffner, Franz. Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future. Freeport, NY: Books for

Libraries Press, 1874/1971.



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Kerman, Joseph. “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 2

(1980): 311-31.

Kleeman, Hans and Frank Lester. “Robert Franz (June, 28 1815–October 24, 1892).” The

Musical Quarterly 1 (October 1915): 497-518.

Kolb, Jocelyn. “‘Die Puppenspiele meines Humors’: Heine and Romantic Irony.” Studies in

Romanticism 26 (Fall 1987): 399-419.

Kravitt, Edward F. The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press,

1996.

Niecks, Frederick. “Modern Song Writers: I. Robert Franz.” The Musical Times and Singing

Class Circular 25 (January 1884): 5-10.

Ollikkala, Debra Margaret. “Robert Franz, Robert Schumann: A Comparative Analysis of Their

Settings of the Same Poems.” Master’s thesis, The University of Western Ontario, 1978.

Porter, Ernest. “The Songs of Robert Franz.” The Musical Times 104 (July 1963): 477-9.

Rosen, Charles. The Romantic Generation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Schumann, Robert. Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score, Historical Background, Essays in

Analysis, Views and Comments. Edited by Arthur Komar. New York: W.W. Norton &

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Smeed, J. W. German Song and its Poetry: 1740–1900. New York: Croom Helm, 1987.

Squire, William Barclay and Robert Franz. “Letters of Robert Franz.” The Musical Quarterly 7

(April 1921): 278-83.



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Stein, Deborah and Robert Spillman. Poetry into Song: Performance and Analysis of Lieder .

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Stein, Jack M. Poem and Music in the German Lied From Gluck to Hugo Wolf . Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1971.

Yeston, Maury, ed. Readings in Schenker Analysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

Musical Expression of Text in the Songs of Robert Franz

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