The Musico-Poetics of the Flat Submediant in Schubert’s Songs

ABSTRACT

Composers’ increasing and increasingly evocative use of chromatic mediants during the first few decades of the nineteenth century is arguably a hallmark of early Romantic harmony. The apparent association in Schubert’s songs between ♭VI and the representation of utopia, fantasy, reverie, dreams and other positive, other-worldly states has been noted by many scholars. However, the fact that he also occasionally employed ♭VI to portray darker sentiments is rarely commented on and questions the degree to which the ♭VI harmony itself acts as a positive, other-worldly signifier. This article accounts for these various opposing uses and proposes that surface voice-leading details (ones that are often overlooked by Schenkerian and neo-Riemannian approaches) are key to understanding the musico-poetics of ♭VI in Schubert’s songs.

Notes

1 In this article ♭VI refers to the key or chord whose keynote or root lies a major third below the home keynote, regardless of the mode of the home key and any accidental required by the key signature (thus, for example, C major is ♭VI in relation to the keys of E major and E minor). Furthermore, this article is solely concerned with tonicizations of ♭VI and cases where a harmony is classed as ♭VI in relation to the home key, rather than with fleeting surface occurrences of ♭VI or instances where a harmony acts as ♭VI only in relation to a secondary key.

2 Richard Kramer, Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994), 186.

3 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), iii: The Nineteenth Century, chapter 34.

4 Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, iii, 69.

5 J. H. Thomas, ‘A Subconscious Metaphor?’, Music Review, 43 (1982), 225–35 (pp. 225–8); Susan McClary, ‘Pitches, Expression, Ideology: An Exercise in Mediation’, Enclitic, 7 (1983), 76–86 (pp. 79–80); Thomas Keith Nelson, ‘The Fantasy of Absolute Music’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1998), chapters 3–4; Christopher Wintle, ‘Franz Schubert, Ihr Bild (1828): A Response to Schenker’s Essay in Der Tonwille, Vol. 1’, Music Analysis, 19 (2000), 10–28 (p. 21); Brian Black, ‘Remembering a Dream: The Tragedy of Romantic Memory in the Modulatory Processes of Schubert’s Sonata Forms’, Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music / Intersections: Revue canadienne de musique, 25 (2005), 202–28 (p. 204). Nelson’s Ph.D. dissertation, which was supervised by McClary, discusses Schubert’s use of ♭VI in detail. However, in my opinion his definition of ♭VI is overly broad, with the result that he finds the harmony in a vast number of songs and with a multitude of poetic associations. Meanwhile, his analytical approach relies heavily on Roman-numeral harmonic analysis and pays insufficient attention to contrapuntal aspects and is thus, I would argue, unable to distinguish satisfactorily between this multitude of uses. Nevertheless, Nelson’s dissertation has influenced much of the work on ♭VI that has followed, including my own.

6 The core triadic transformations of neo-Riemannian theory are the ‘Parallel’ (P), ‘Relative’ (R) and ‘Leading-tone exchange’ (L). P transforms the mode of a triad by changing the third but keeping the root and fifth unchanged (for example, C major becomes C minor, and vice versa); R transforms a triad to its relative (for example, C major becomes A minor, and vice versa); and L substitutes the root of a major triad for its leading note, or the fifth of a minor triad for the note a semitone higher, while retaining the other two pitches (for example, C major becomes E minor, and vice versa). These transformations can be combined: for example, a PL transformation combines a P transformation and an L transformation in that order (for example, C major becomes A♭ major, but not vice versa). The P and L transformations are considered ‘maximally smooth’ as they involve minimal voice-leading work, requiring just one pitch class to move by a semitone. Hexatonic cycles are discussed in Richard Cohn, ‘Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Progressions’, Music Analysis, 15 (1996), 9–40, and in Cohn, Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad’s Second Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chapter 2.

7 The term ‘idealized voice-leading’ is said to have originated from Godfrey Winham. See Cohn, Audacious Euphony, 6, n. 7.

8 ‘Am Fenster’ (D.878), which is cast in F major, comes close to presenting a complete hexatonic cycle, departing from it only by substituting A♭ major (♭III) for the ‘hexatonic pole’, D♭ minor (♭vi). On hexatonic poles, see Cohn, ‘Maximally Smooth Cycles’, 19–20.

9   Nelson writes that the Rogue ♭VI ‘behaves as the vehicle of injecting a painful jab, a moment [of] anxiety into otherwise pleasant circumstances, or simply a recurring, even playful obstacle that blocks progress to conclusion’, but quickly concludes that ‘it would be difficult, and provide very little explanatory power, to construct a theoretical ideal type’. Nelson, ‘The Fantasy of Absolute Music’, 428–9.

10 I consider a further example of the ‘Rogue ♭VI’ at length in David T. Bretherton, ‘The Shadow of Midnight in Schubert’s “Gondelfahrer” Settings’, Music and Letters, 92 (2011), 1–42.

11 Richard Capell, Schubert’s Songs (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1928; repr. 1957), 209.

12 Susan Youens, Schubert’s Late Lieder: Beyond the Song-Cycles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 90.

13 Here and throughout I give the register of vocal notes as they are written in the score, irrespective of the register in which they might be sung in performance.

14 The D.827a version of the song can be found in Franz Schubert, ‘“Nacht und Träume” (Erste Fassung)’, Neue Schubert-Ausgabe, ed. Walther Dürr (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1975), iv/2b, 267–8.

15 Heinrich Schenker, ‘Franz Schubert: “Ihr Bild” (Heine)’, Der Tonwille, 1 (Vienna: A. J. Gutmann, 1921), 46–9.

16 Martin Chusid, ‘Texts and Commentary’, A Companion to Schubert’s Schwanengesang: History, Poets, Analysis, Performance, ed. Chusid (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 90–155 (p. 130).

17 David Lewin, Studies in Music with Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chapter 6.

18 Wintle, ‘Franz Schubert, Ihr Bild (1828)’, 21.

19 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Schubert’, trans. Jonathan Dunsby and Beate Perrey, 19th-Century Music, 29 (2005–6), 3–14 (p. 10). Originally published as Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Schubert’, Die Musik, 21 (1928), 1–12.

20 Adorno, ‘Schubert’, trans. Dunsby and Perrey, 12.

21 Ibid., 13.

22 Carl Schachter, ‘Motive and Text in Four Schubert Songs’, Aspects of Schenkerian Theory, ed. David Beach (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 61–76 (p. 76).

23 Schubert uses the German augmented-sixth chord with relative frequency when modulating out of ♭VI, but in most cases it is placed in root position and resolves to a dominant-functioning tonic chord in second inversion, so that the bass outlines a motion ♭. Examples include ‘Der Flug der Zeit’ (D.515), ‘Der Neugierige’ (no. 6 from Die schöne Müllerin, D.795) (considered below), ‘Mein!’ (no. 11 from Die schöne Müllerin, D.795), ‘Bei dir allein’ (D.866, no. 2) and ‘Glaube, Hoffnung und Liebe’ (D.955).

24 Nelson, ‘The Fantasy of Absolute Music’, 496.

25 Deborah Stein and Robert Spillman, Poetry into Song: Performance and Analysis of Lieder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 127.

26 Like Stein and Spillman’s reading, David Beach’s, Lawrence Kramer’s and Youens’s interpretations of the potential ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers take their cue from the question at the end of the poem, ‘Does she love me?’, rather than the protagonist’s earlier stated intention to ask the stream if his heart has lied to him. See David Beach, ‘An Analysis of Schubert’s “Der Neugierige”: A Tribute to Greta Kraus’, Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes, 19 (1998), 69–80 (p. 75); Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 140–1; and Susan Youens, Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 42, 83.

27 Arnold Feil, ‘Two Analyses’, trans. Walter M. Frisch, Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Frisch (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 104–25 (p. 108; original emphasis).

28 Susan Youens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 255.

29 Ibid., 253.

30 Youens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey, 258.

31 Feil, ‘Two Analyses’, 112–15.

32 Ibid., 115.

33 Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, Schubert: Winterreise (Decca CD 466 382-2, 2000; recorded 1963).

34 Youens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey, 255.

35 Youens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey, 264.

36 E♭ major (I) is replaced by its parallel minor, E♭ minor, which moves to its own relative major, G♭ major, which in turn is treated as the dominant of C♭ major (♭VI).

37 Suzannah Clark has similarly argued (in relation to instrumental music) that one must be attentive to how the harmony is actually presented at the surface of Schubert’s music. See Clark, Analyzing Schubert (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 195.

38 Schenker, ‘Franz Schubert: “Ihr Bild”’, 49 fig. 9.

39 Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition, trans. and ed. Ernst Oster (New York: Pendragon Press, 1979), 132–3. See specifically § 310(a) and the commentary in § 310(d) on fig. 153, ex. 2.

40 Steven Laitz has made a similar observation about the ‘submediant complex’,  ♯   or –♭, which he finds to be prevalent in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions, but which is missed by traditional Schenkerian analysis. See Laitz, ‘Pitch-Class Motive in the Songs of Franz Schubert: The Submediant Complex’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1992), 113–19, 336–7.