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‘In dunklen Träumen’: Schubert's Heine-Lieder

through the Psychoanalytical Prism

Xavier Hascher

Nineteenth-Century Music Review / Volume 5 / Issue 02 / November 2008, pp 43 - 70

DOI: 10.1017/S1479409800003360, Published online: 13 April 2011

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1479409800003360

How to cite this article:

Xavier Hascher (2008). ‘In dunklen Träumen’: Schubert's Heine-Lieder through the
Psychoanalytical Prism. Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 5, pp 43-70
doi:10.1017/S1479409800003360

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 ‘In dunklen Träumen’:
Schubert’s Heine-Lieder through the
Psychoanalytical Prism

Xavier Hascher
Université de Strasbourg

Why – one might be tempted to add: why again – the Heine-Lieder? And why
psychoanalysis? Like most of Schubert’s music and especially the late works,
yet with a distinctive nuance, Schubert’s set of six songs to texts from Heine’s
Buch der Lieder has been regularly discussed in the musicological literature of
the last decades. Among those writings, the articles by Harry Goldschmidt and
Richard Kramer, the collection of essays on Schwanengesang edited by Martin
Chusid, and the latter’s publication of the facsimile of the autograph and first
edition of the cycle are of particular interest to us here. The reason for it has
to do with the nuance referred to at the beginning of this paragraph. While
some authors are inclined to discuss Schubert’s understanding of the poetry
(notably in terms of the celebrated Heinesque ‘irony’), others choose to address
the set from another perspective, namely that of the order of the songs. Indeed,
the following questions inevitably arise in considering the Heine songs: Why
did Schubert alter the order of the poems from that in which they appear in

Preliminary versions of this essay have been presented first as a paper for the
Fourteenth International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music in Manchester in July
2006 and then as a guest lecture at the New England Conservatory in March 2007. I wish
to thank Jim Sobaskie, Pozzi Escot and Robert Cogan for their friendly support, as well as
all those who have shown an interest in this research or made constructive suggestions.

  Harry Goldschmidt, ‘Welches war die ursprüngliche Reihenfolge in Schuberts
Heine-Liedern’, Deutsches Jahrbuch der Musikwissenschaft für 1972 (Leipzig: Peters, 1974), 52–
62; Richard Kramer, Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Songs (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000); Martin Chusid, ed., A Companion to Schubert’s Schwanengesang:
History, Poets, Analysis, Performance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Martin
Chusid, ed., Franz Schubert: Schwanengesang. Facsimiles of the Autograph Score and Sketches,
and Reprint of the First Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

  See, for instance, Jack Stein, ‘Schubert’s Heine Songs’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 24 (1966): 559–66, and Charles S. Brauner, ‘Irony in the Heine Songs of Schubert and
Schumann’, The Musical Quarterly 67 (1981): 261–81. More often than not in the literature,
the terms ‘irony’ and ‘ironic’ are used as magic trump words to account for any passage
or detail which are either unusual, or felt to be so, thus resulting in weakened explicative
power. For a recent account of Heine and his relation to early German Romanticism in
the context of music, see Beate Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). No discussion of concepts such as irony,
the fragment and so forth can avoid reference to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc
Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip
Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 5/2 (2008): 43–70. Copyright © Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
44 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

Heine’s original collection, therefore (seemingly) destroying the logic of the

sequence? Did Schubert actually conceive the text as a sequence – that is to say,
a cycle? In dealing with those issues, Goldschmidt and Kramer have suggested
a provocative and radical solution, which consists in reordering the songs to
match the succession in Heine. This, of course, has occasioned much eyebrow-
raising in the musicological community, and has led to successive refutation and
counter-refutation.
In this article, I propose to re-examine the Heine songs in the light of an
approach combining literary and musical analysis, with – perhaps more
controversially – psychoanalysis. Although my objective is not to refute the
Kramer-Goldschmidt hypothesis point by point, the approach that I advocate
contradicts their main argument, following which the Heine songs, as they
stand, form a mere collection that needs to be rearranged according to the order
of the poems in Buch der Lieder for a proper narrative to emerge, and hence the
true cyclic nature of the set to be revealed. In my opinion, this view is erroneous
and misses crucial aspects of both Heine’s and Schubert’s work.
Before getting to the heart of the matter, though, I feel there is some need to
define the role of psychoanalysis and to justify its use in the present context. It is
impossible to ignore the fact that psychoanalysis, both as a theory of the mind and
as a treatment of mental disorders, has for some time been questioned, chiefly
in America, but to some extent in Britain and on the Continent. Accusations
against psychoanalysis are not novel. One of the main blows levelled at it in the
story of this long dispute has been Popper’s dismissal of psychoanalysis as an
experimental science. More recently, psychoanalysis has been under attack from
psychologists and psychiatrists, who challenged its position in the medical field;
it has also been contested by researchers in the neurosciences, who sought to


  See Louise Litterick, ‘Recycling Schubert: On Reading Richard Kramer’s “Distant
Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song”’, 19th-Century Music 20 (1996): 77–95, and
Kramer’s answer in ‘Against Recycling’, 19th-Century Music 20 (1996): 185–9.

  The application of psychoanalysis to art, and particularly music, dates from the
beginning of the psychoanalytic movement and the corresponding bibliography is ample.
Schubert, like other composers, has been the subject of several studies, often focusing
on his well-known (in Deutsch’s words) ‘allegoric narrative’ of 3 July 1822 entitled ‘My
Dream’. A classic approach to this text is that illustrated by Eduard Hitschmann in
‘Franz Schuberts Schmerz und Liebe’, Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse
3 (1915): 287–92; a far more radical point of view, which has raised considerable debate,
is exposed in Maynard Solomon, ‘Franz Schubert’s “My Dream”’, American Imago 38
(1981): 137–54. An – at times polemical – account of the relevant literature can be found in
Andreas Mayer, ‘Der psychoanalytischer Schubert’, Schubert durch die Brille 9 (1992): 7–31.
See also ‘Psychoanalyse’, in Schubert-Lexikon, ed. Ernst Hilmar and Margret Jestremski
(Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1997): 355–6. There are, moreover, several
allusions to Heine and the ‘Doppelgänger’ theme in Otto Rank’s The Double, trans. Harry
Tucker (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1971).
In contrast to the ‘psychobiographic’ orientation dominant in the literature, I have
attempted in this essay to draw my arguments from the analysis of Schubert’s music
rather than that of his life. I have discussed such an articulation between musical analysis
and psychoanalysis in a recent article (see Xavier Hascher, ‘Qu’est-ce que la psychanalyse
apporte à l’analyse musicale?’, filigrane 6 (2007): 29–58).

  Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
(London: Routledge, 1963): 45–6, 49–51. Popper’s attitude towards psychoanalysis is often
misrepresented: his rejection of it as an experimental science is not a denial of its interest
or significance, and Popper at times finds himself in agreement with Freud.
 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 45

pinpoint its weaknesses in the light of recent information about the organization
and functioning of the brain. It is obviously not my object here to enter in any
depth into the debate for or against psychoanalysis, especially from a therapeutic
point of view. Precursory signs of current misunderstandings cropped up in the
discussion of the question of ‘lay analysis’ that threatened to deeply divide the
psychoanalytic movement in the 1920s, and in Freud’s account of this discussion.
Although the core of the argument lay elsewhere, what is still interesting
nowadays is the positivist, clinical stance taken by the American practitioners in
contrast to the wider cultural approach afforded by the Europeans. In short, in
places where psychoanalysis has been incorporated into the humanities, Popper’s
decree against its scientific status has had limited impact, coinciding rather with
his observation that psychoanalysis was, for him, in a ‘metaphysical phase’. The
fact that psychoanalysis has historically neglected to update its neurological and
cognitive bases to keep up with advances in knowledge in those fields certainly
counts as one of its major shortcomings. However, this does not immediately
disqualify the bulk of its theoretical contribution, as psychoanalysis is more
concerned with questions of psychology than physiology.
My aim here is not to psychoanalyse either Schubert or Heine with a view, as
it were, to posthumously identifying the deep causes of whatever pathology they
may have suffered from. Even though psychoanalysis could probably offer an
interesting interpretative insight into certain traits of their personalities, it would
go against one of its underlying principles – namely that of the subject’s own free
associations – to undertake an analysis in the absence of the analysand. Yet, as my
approach has evidently no medical purpose, I instead consider psychoanalysis
as a body of theory and case descriptions that, even to this day, remains of
considerable scope and depth. Two aspects especially interest me with regard
to the remainder of this article. Firstly, I refer to Freud’s observations on nervous
behaviour and the clinical picture of neuroses he offers. These observations are
to a degree independent from their interpretation by psychoanalytical theory (be
it in terms of the libido or otherwise), while the classification of mental disorders
in psychiatry has long remained strongly indebted to Freud. Secondly, I am
concerned with Freud’s account of the dream, where neither science nor medicine
has any challenge to meet, as Freud’s decomposition of the mechanics of the dream
is akin to a form of rhetoric of the ‘language’ of dreams. While the first aspect will
be helpful in understanding and characterizing the narrator whose voice is heard
throughout the set, the second will be more fruitfully applied to comprehending
the complex structure of the songs in their succession. It could be said, then, that
in this context psychoanalysis provides a kind of hermeneutics, which is a priori
of no lesser value than philosophical or sociological discourse. By resorting to
psychoanalysis, I seek to present an interpretation of the music itself, which is
indeed not exclusive of other possible interpretations, but has the advantage of
relying on a firmly theorized and coherent model. However, readers with strong
reservations about Freudian psychoanalysis can rest assured that they will not be
required to subscribe to any of its main hypotheses to follow this essay.


  Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, trans. James Strachey (New York:
Norton, 1959).

  Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 370 n.

  The assimilation of the main dream figures to rhetorical tropes has been brilliantly
argued by Tzvetan Todorov in the chapter on ‘Freud’s Rhetoric and Symbolics’ of his Theories
of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982): 246–54.
46 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

My stance here is thus to analyse some of the irregular or striking formal

features of the Heine songs, starting with their particular ordering, in terms of
a dream-like structure and of the particular tropes and accidents which form
the texture of dreams. Meanwhile, we should note that, according to Freud, the
dream-work also parallels the processes that lie behind the manifestations of
nervous disorders. As a preliminary step, however, we need to ascertain that the
ordering of the songs effectively corresponds to what Schubert himself deemed
the definitive arrangement for the set. This will be the task of the first section of
this essay. Through this particular sequence, a number of relations are established
between the songs, and a particular form of narrative, or rather ‘non-narrative’,
is created. The second section will thus be devoted to a careful analysis of the
set from the point of view of the characters and the situations, in relation to
Heine’s original collection. In the third section, I will address music-analytical
issues and will introduce notions of tonal dualism that may be seen to possess
psychological overtones (or, in this case, ‘undertones’). Finally, the argument
that will be developed in the fourth section is that the cycle evidences in the
behaviour of its narrator – that is, the Poet – a number of cumulative traits that
present distinct analogy with the symptoms of neurosis as described by Freud.

1. Some Musicological Preliminaries

To clarify my position, which is at variance with some of the recent literature on

Schwanengesang, and the six Heine songs in particular, I shall summarize it in the
three following points:

1. The six Heine songs, in the order in which they were written down by Schubert
in his autograph and in which they were subsequently published by Tobias
Haslinger in 1829, constitute a cycle in the sense of an ensemble that can be
interpreted as such and not as a mere grouping of individual songs. This cycle
can be isolated for that purpose from the rest of Schwanengesang (as Schubert
himself suggested in his letter to Probst of October 1828 by offering the set
for publication independently from the Rellstab songs), although whether
the Heine songs constitute a subcycle within a larger cycle – or a second cycle
following a first one yet bearing little relation to it – and therefore whether
the entire Schwanengesang can be considered as a cycle, remains an open
issue. Musical or poetic connections can be drawn, however, between the
six last songs (leaving aside the posthumously added ‘Die Taubenpost’) and
some of the first seven songs such as ‘Kriegers Ahnung’ (no. 2), ‘Abschied’
(no. 7), and particularly ‘In der Ferne’ (no. 6). Otto Erich Deutsch, in his
commentary to the Schubert Documents, asserts that Schubert had indeed
envisaged putting the Heine and the Rellstab songs together as one cycle:


  On a document dated 17 December 1828, Ferdinand Schubert acknowledges his
transaction with Haslinger in the following terms: ‘Today, I have sold to the art dealer
[“Kunsthändler”], Herr Tobias Haslinger, the last thirteen songs … composed by my
brother Franz Schubert’. Ferdinand includes a list of the songs with the indications ‘poems
by Rellstab / poems by H. Heine’. There is still no question of ‘Die Taubenpost’ at this
stage, whereas the expression ‘last thirteen songs’ presages the title later to be given to the
cycle. See Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: Die Erinnerungen seiner Freunde (Leipzig: Breitkopf
& Härtel, 1957): 444.
 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 47

Schubert had already planned [i.e. by the time he wrote to Probst] to publish the
Rellstab songs – beginning with ‘Lebensmut’ (D. 537) which was finally
separated from the set – together with the Heine-Lieder as a song-cycle which
he intended to dedicate to his friends. The fact that he had renounced his
intention and was now offering the Heine songs for publication independently
was probably brought about through necessity.10

Yet Deutsch does not provide any evidence in support of this. Even if it
had been Schubert’s intention from early on to publish the songs together in
one collection (the autograph score of Schwanengesang can only show us that
it became his intention at some stage), this does not tell us how tightly
connected he considered them to be. Interestingly, the cyclic nature of the
whole 13 songs has never been seriously considered and this question is
therefore left hanging.
2. The group of Heine songs, in its original Schubertian order, presents dis-
tinctive tonal coherence, especially when interpreted against an appropriate
theoretical background. Although it should be stressed that harmonic unity
is not a requirement for any song cycle, it is a fact that groups of songs with-
in larger cycles – especially those that contain as many as 24 songs – tend to
organize themselves into harmonically consistent subcycles. The Heine set
being much shorter only renders that question more relevant. Moreover, I
aim to show that objections made to Schubert’s ordering on the basis of the
succession of keys, with their authors striving to suggest a better scheme,
miss that coherence.
3. The Heine songs, although they do form a genuine cycle, do not make up a
narrative, even a ‘poetic’ (i.e. loose) sort of narrative, in the sense that they
do not ‘tell a story’, at least one that unfolds logically in time in the manner
of a scenario. To look for such linearity is a misinterpretation of Romantic
poetics. On the contrary, my contention is that, by inverting the order in
which some of the texts appear in Die Heimkehr (the section in Heine’s Buch
der Lieder from which all the poems are taken), Schubert does better justice to
Heine, and shows a better understanding of his work, than if he had left the
order unchanged.

Independently from any specific line of argument, however, one cannot

dispense with an examination of Schubert’s autograph score. Two remarks must
be made concerning the latter: firstly that, owing to the structure of the fascicles,
the autograph is entirely unambiguous as to the way the songs follow each
other; and, secondly, that, in spite of showing a certain number of corrections in
Schubert’s hand, the autograph – again with the exception of ‘Die Taubenpost’
– amounts to nothing less than a ‘fair copy’ of the 13 Schwanengesang songs, in
Deutsch’s own words.11
Basing ourselves on the description given by Martin Chusid, the first part of
the Schwanengesang autograph, with songs 1–5, consists of two gatherings, each
made of a pair of nested bifolios originating from a single sheet, and representing
pages 1–8 and 9–16.12 There follows a third gathering of four bifolios, in the same

10
  Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: die Dokumente seines Leben (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf &
Härtel, 1996): 540–41.
11
  Otto Erich Deutsch, The Schubert Thematic Catalogue (New York: Norton, 1951): 472.
12
  Chusid, Franz Schubert: Schwanengesang, xi–xii. The page numbers have been pencilled
in subsequently to the addition of ‘Die Taubenpost’. They are not in Schubert’s hand.
48 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

paper, and in the same oblong format, with pages 17–32. Song no. 6, ‘In der
Ferne’, overlaps from the second gathering onto folio 9r of the third gathering
(p. 17), and carries on until the top of 9v (p. 18). ‘Abschied’, no. 7, and the last
of the Rellstab songs, occupies the bottom of 9v, extending onto 12v (p. 24). It is
on the next folio, 13r–13v, that Schubert started copying ‘Der Atlas’ (pp. 25–6),
with which song we now enter the Heine cycle. It is followed by ‘Ihr Bild’ on 14r
(p. 27), and by ‘Das Fischermädchen’ from 14v to 15v (pp. 28–30). The next song,
‘Die Stadt’, extends from 16r to the top half of the verso side of the same folio
(pp. 30–31), in the bottom half of which Schubert has copied the beginning of ‘Am
Meer’. As can be verified from Fig. 1, the order of the songs cannot be altered as
this would disrupt the continuity of ‘In der Ferne’ and ‘Abschied’, the last two
Rellstab songs, which occupy the left side of each bifolio of the gathering. The
fourth gathering consists of a single folio which contains the last bars of ‘Am
Meer’ at the top of 17r (p. 33). It is followed on the same page by the beginning of
‘Der Doppelgänger’, which ends on the verso side (p. 34). The bifolio containing
‘Die Taubenpost’, which is of a different sort of paper, was later pasted onto this
single folio at the firm of Tobias Haslinger.

Fig. 1 The disposition of the Heine songs in the autograph

Given these facts, it is obvious that the current ordering of the songs is no one
else’s than Schubert’s himself. Indeed, if he had intended a different succession,
one fails to see why he did not write the songs down in that order instead of what
he knew was an inadequate one. Kramer’s argument, that Schubert’s modification
of Heine’s order resulted from his wish to dismantle the cycle in favour of a mere
‘sequence’, does not stand to scrutiny. According to Kramer, ‘The rejection was
evidently provoked by a failure of nerve’ on the part of Schubert, who ‘backed
away’ from the idea of a cycle because of his realization that he had (in Kramer’s
view) ‘violated Heine’s text in a profound way’.13 While no nerve seems to be

13
  Kramer, Distant Cycles, 219.
 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 49

failing Kramer here, I do not share his sense of evidence, while I find Schubert’s
alleged scrupulousness in regard to the text exaggerated. When Schubert was
dissatisfied with a composition he was working at, he – as is well known – left
it incomplete. He did not, instead, turn it into some nonsensical hodgepodge.
From a general viewpoint, an artist who purposely undertakes to diminish the
interest of his or her work would seem at least a particularly odd, if not absurd,
case. But my disagreement also stems from specific reasons: the original order
cannot be re-established as Schubert did not select a series of contiguous poems.
Instead, he left gaps between nearly all of them, except for the adjacent ‘Ihr Bild’
and ‘Der Atlas’. Consequently, should we stick to that succession, the ‘narrative’
told by the poems can no more be that of Die Heimkehr. Indeed, that narrative
would be partly incoherent, as I will try to show below.
Yet the most disturbing point about the argument is not its theoretical
weakness, but that it presents us with the modern version of an old tale, namely
that according to which Schubert’s music is fine but too complicated, and would
be even finer, and more intelligible, if a well-meaning, understanding hand were
allowed to alter it discreetly – as, for instance, when the Impromptu D. 899 no. 3
in G was transposed into G by Tobias Haslinger, its first publisher. My position
is not to wish for Schubert to have done something other than he actually did.
It is, rather, to take what he has achieved and try to understand it. If the Heine
songs pose a problem to us, then it is certainly worth our while to aim to identify
the nature of that problem.

2. The Cycle as Non-Narrative

What motivated Schubert to rearrange the order of the poems – once he had
singled out from Heine’s collection the six he intended to set to music – is that he
did not want to start the cycle with ‘Das Fischermädchen’, no. 8 of Die Heimkehr.
As this is not the opening poem in Heine’s collection, it would have provided an
inadequate beginning to the cycle. Instead, Schubert chose to go back up from
‘Der Atlas’ (no. 24), now immediately followed by ‘Ihr Bild’ (no. 23) instead of
being preceded by it. The whole selection is in fact retrograded, with a further
inversion between ‘Das Fischermädchen’ and ‘Der Doppelgänger’, as can be
seen from Fig. 2.
In Heine, only the first part of Die Heimkehr deals with the initial Beloved, after
which, with poem no. 27 (‘Alas, my love itself, like vain breath, has dissolved!
You, old, lonely tear, must now dissolve, too!’), the Poet decides to dry his tears
and shift his interests elsewhere.14 The new object of his care is no one else than
the Beloved’s young sister, whose character is evoked in no. 6:

The young one resembles the Beloved,

especially when she laughs;
She has the same eyes
as those which made me so unhappy.15

14
  Heine’s Heimkehr no. 27 (‘Was will die einsame Träne’) was set to music by
Schumann as no. 21 of Myrten, Op. 25, in 1840.
15
  And so Heine himself, after his unrequited passion for his cousin Amalie, became
infatuated with her young sister Therese, and was equally unlucky. In spite of the many
autobiographical elements in Buch der Lieder and Die Heimkehr in particular, one should
at least be cautious in approaching the collection from that angle. Michael Perraudin –
50 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

Fig. 2 Schubert’s reordering of the poems

The Poet then but occasionally turns his thoughts back to his past love, as with
nos. 41–3. The beginning of no. 41:

In dream I saw the Beloved,

a worried, prostrate woman.
Withered and wilting
was her once blooming body.

is a striking instance of magic thought, by which the Poet believes his fantasies
to have the power to affect reality. The Beloved, who failed to return the Poet’s
love and chose instead to marry his rival, has thus been punished by fate. Now
her husband has deserted her and she is left, sick and poor, alone with her two
young children, so that the Poet can mercifully offer to help her.
The Poet here reveals his ambivalent feelings towards the Beloved. ‘In dream’
is an indication that should not be taken literally. It signifies that it is not the
real, physical person of the Beloved that the Poet wishes to maltreat, but instead
his internal, fantasized and deformed representation of her, her ‘imago’. The
sadistic motion directed at the Beloved shows a regression to an infantile mode
of thought where at times she is perceived as ‘good’, at other times as ‘bad’.
The marked depressive anxiety, the inability to renounce his attachment, and
the guilt expressed by the constant return of the tears motif (here at the end of
the poem) are further indications of the Poet’s characteristic psychic condition.

in Heinrich Heine: Poetry in Context. A Study of Buch der Lieder (Oxford: Berg, 1989): 267
– intelligently addresses the issue of the relation of poetry to Erlebnis, or life experience:
‘… what we are confronted with is an Erlebnisdichtung whose personal-emotional-
autobiographical substratum is not wholly absent, but where a more important element in
the experience is experience of poetry itself’.
 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 51

Fig. 3 A semiotic representation

These elements will serve us later in assessing the nature of that condition, as a
key to understanding the song cycle.
In extracting six poems from the series, Schubert eliminated a number of
redundant characters and locations – such as woods, thrushes and swallows,
the forest warden and his family, the daughters of an imaginary castle, and so on
– which Heine introduced with virtually every other poem. Thus, and especially
by eliminating everything relating to dry land besides the Town itself, Schubert
was able to reduce the situation to its essential components. The characters are
limited to three: the Poet, his Beloved, and the secondary figure of the Fisher-
Girl, who is to be considered as an emanation of the Sea. The locations are only
two: the Sea and the Town. Although not a narrative in the common sense, and
independently from the order of the songs, the cycle can still be analysed by
using some of the tools of semiotic theory. Figure 3 therefore introduces some
relevant formalizations, not to provide evidence of any kind, but to illuminate
my perception of the situation.
The figure, known as the ‘semiotic square’, represents some of the fundamental
relations at work between the characters and the places.

1. The main preoccupation of the Poet is with his Beloved; he is obsessed with
her. This is rendered by a reciprocal relation of presupposition between the
protagonists, as the Beloved only exists through the Poet’s vision of her, and
the Poet cannot subsist without the presence of the Beloved on his mind,
even if she is physically absent.16
2. The Town is where the Beloved used to live. Although she is gone, her house
still stands there as a representation of her, an extension of the Beloved’s
person, yet in a reified form. The Sea, on the other hand, is the domain
of the Poet. He is often driven to the shore at dusk by his melancholy
rumination, and, in ‘Am Meer’, compares his own heart, with its storms and
unfathomable depths, to the sea. The wild sea allows the Poet’s imagination
to soar freely. Sea and Poet, Beloved and Town, thus stand in a relation of

16
  Paul Peters – in ‘A Walk on the Wild Side: Heine’s Eroticism’, in A Companion to the
Works of Heinrich Heine, ed. Roger F. Cook (Rochester: Camden House, 2002): 58 – notes
that ‘paradoxically, the female subject of the Buch der Lieder is not, in the habitual sense,
a subject at all. For if, as Queen Victoria put it, “Mother is not a person,” neither is the
female beloved of Heine’s poetry.’
52 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

complementarity, while a secondary relation of presupposition can, as a

consequence, be drawn between Sea and Town.
3. Lastly, relations of contradiction obtain between Poet and Town, Sea and
Beloved. The Poet is not at ease in the town, he suffers from agoraphobia, as we
learn from Heimkehr no. 18 (although Schubert did not set this poem to music).
Characteristically, the Poet is gripped by a feeling of anguish at the narrowness
of the streets, and suffocates in fear of being crushed by the houses:

Ah, but the streets are so narrow,

and their cobbles are unbearable!
The houses are falling upon my head,
quick, I must hurry as much as I can!

On the other hand, the Beloved will not follow the Poet to his sea-world,
as he fails to attract her there. In Heine, waters in general are populated
by various female creatures, as dangerous as they are alluring: the Lorelei
(no. 2), the water-fairy (no. 12), or mermaids (no. 9).

The Fisher-Girl, then, is not the Beloved, and it would be a misinterpretation to

take her for the latter. In Die Heimkehr, the Fisher-Girl appears after no. 7, where
the Poet one evening sits on the beach with some young women, letting their
imagination loose as they watch a ship sail away into the falling night:

We sat by the fisherman’s hut,

and gazed at the sea;
There came the evening clouds,
gathering up in the air.

As it happens regularly in the collection, a digression is suggested by association,

and it is thus that the Fisher-Girl emerges from the windy sea in the Poet’s fantasy.
It is symbolically significant that she actually arrives from the sea, and that it is
the Poet who invites her to join him on the shore (‘Bring your boat to the land’).
Schubert was right, then, not to start with ‘Das Fischermädchen’, both to
avoid introducing her as the main female protagonist, and to preserve Heine’s
discontinuity of thoughts. Yet, what is striking here, and revealing about the
Poet’s unstable state of mind, is the confusion between reality and fantasy. The
Fisher-Girl is an apparition, an ephemeral character brought about by the Poet’s
whim. The co-existence of those two planes contributes to the undermining of
any idea of a narrative.
Who, in turn, is the mysterious lover from ‘Am Meer’? In all likelihood,
none other than the Fisher-Girl herself. Because the song still pertains to the
context of the Sea, it would be a mistake to confuse her here again with the
Beloved. Indeed, in Heine, the corresponding poem (no. 14) concludes the series
associated with the Sea. Moreover, the Poet never refers to the Beloved in such
discourteous terms as ‘that ill-fated woman’. The allusion to the fisherman’s hut,
in the first verse, recalls the beginning of Heimkehr no. 7, while the cries of the
seagulls are reminiscent of no. 10 (where they signify ill omen), and of no. 12,
which introduces the character of the Water-Fairy. As the latter – who, like the
Fisher-Girl, has appeared from the Sea – takes the Poet in her arms and presses
him against her, her heart beats wildly and she starts to weep. The situation thus
partly resembles that of ‘Am Meer’, with its equivalent shedding of tears and its
swelling waves. The Water-Fairy is another of those imaginary female creatures
 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 53

who dwell in the Poet’s sea-world, while she, the Fisher-Girl, and the mysterious
lover from ‘Am Meer’ ultimately stand for the same character – a water nymph.
Indeed, what we learn from no. 9 is that the Fisher-Girl, too, comes from the
bottom of the Sea, as she reveals after a nocturnal love scene on the strand with
the Poet:

This is not the howling of the wind,

it is the song of the mermaids,
They who are my sisters,
whom the sea once swallowed.

Like the Lorelei, the mermaids are fatal beings. They attract their victims only to
devour them, or destroy them by engulfing them in water. Psychologically, they
represent the fear of returning into the womb, of being absorbed by the maternal
vagina, there to be annihilated in a regressive birth. In Homer, the sirens are
still bird-like creatures with the head of a woman, who formerly were funeral
demons. Their fish-tale was later appended by Christianity, as a reminiscence
of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, to symbolize carnal love, love that is not
sanctified by marriage, as a deadly sin. The Fisher-Girl, therefore, stands as the
opposite of the ethereal figure of the Beloved.17
Let us now take a look at the sequence of poems in the order in which they appear
in Schubert’s cycle. This sequence is represented in Fig. 4. ‘Das Fischermädchen’
(no. 3) and ‘Am Meer’ (no. 5) can be parenthesized as fantastical digressions, or
interpolations, brought in by association. In ‘Ihr Bild’ (no. 2), the poet looks – or
rather remembers looking – at the Beloved’s portrait, and, as he hallucinates that
she is smiling at him, he realizes that he has lost her forever. ‘Das Fischermädchen’
follows as an imaginary consolation, a dreamlike fulfilment of his desire: if only
the Beloved was the Fisher-Girl, she could understand the torments of his heart,
he fantasizes. Similarly, in ‘Am Meer’, the Poet, who approaches from the sea the
Town which he already knows his Beloved has deserted, compensates his loss by
fantasizing a strange love-scene where his melancholy, tearful and guilty mood
is projected on the other protagonist.

17
  For Perraudin, Heinrich Heine: Poetry in Context, 56, the Fisher-Girl ‘is a nixie’,
a personification of the living force of nature (as opposed to civilization), who is ‘not
just able to commune with the spirits of nature around her, but is identical to them’.
Perraudin identifies her presence throughout the sub-cycle of poems nos. 7–12 and 14 of
Die Heimkehr, for which he considers Wilhelm Müller’s own sea-poems of the Ländliche
Lieder as Heine’s literary source. Interestingly, Perraudin also observes that Müller’s ‘non-
nautical heroines’, too, possess the ‘bewitching qualities’ of sirens, mentioning especially
the schöne Müllerin’s character – a reflection worth noting in relation to Schubert. In The
Feminine in Heine’s Life and Oeuvre: Self and Other (New York: Peter Lang, 1997): 43–63,
Diana Lynn Justis analyses Heine’s dichotomized representation of woman as either
‘sphinx’ or ‘angel’. The nixie, of course, belongs to the former type: ‘Making her debut in
Heine’s poetry is the nixie (nymph, siren, or mermaid) a demonic, cannibalistic subhuman
creature of myth, whose upper body – that of a beautiful maiden – delights and fatally
lures its intended male victim as its lower extremity – a hideous, scaly tail – entwines and
crushes him. Structurally, she epitomizes the fundamental split between man and nature,
while, psychologically, she symbolizes … masculine sexual insecurity and paranoia’ (p. 52).
Nymphs, originally benevolent deities, are also remarkable for their sexual freedom
and their insubordination to mortal males. For a popular treatment of the undine theme,
see ‘Die Nixe im Teich’ (‘The Nix of the Mill-Pond’), in the Grimm Brothers’ collection of
Children’s and Household Tales.
54 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

Fig. 4 The song-sequence

In Heine, ‘Der Atlas’ (no. 24) follows ‘Ihr Bild’ as an expression of despair
consequent upon the Poet’s realization of the irreparable loss of the Beloved. Often
in Die Heimkehr two consecutive poems function as a thematically related pair. As
mentioned above, ‘Ihr Bild’ and ‘Der Atlas’ are particular in the song cycle in that
they are the only such pair that Schubert preserved. As the hallucinated vision
of ‘Ihr Bild’ recesses, the Poet is thrown back into the world, a world from which
the Beloved is absent: ‘Alas, I cannot believe it, that I have lost you forever’, he
exclaims, although the major-key setting reveals that something within himself
refuses that conclusion. This incongruity is a beautiful instance of how Freud
believes the dream to express ‘contradiction, contrast, the “no”’. For Freud,

inversion, or transformation into the opposite … is one of the most frequent and
versatile means of representation available to the dream-work. It serves, first, to al-
low the wish-fulfilment to prevail against a specific element of the dream thoughts.
‘If only things were the other way around’! Such is often the best expression for the
reaction of the ego to an unpleasant recollection.18

The vision of the Beloved, her smile, her tears, and most of all the fact that she
comes out of the past (the other incongruity in the poem being the opposition
between the past tense of its opening – ‘I stood’ – and the present tense of the
last verse) are all part of the Poet’s fantasized wish for her to be there, and return
his affection. Yet, the piano’s final, deformed echo of the cadence from the end
of the first verse epitomizes the conflict between outer reality – from which the
Poet averts himself – and his inner desire, a desire which cannot be conquered
by reason, nor weakened by the passing of time (see Ex. 1a–b).
‘Der Atlas’ actualizes that conflict and allows it to be acted out in a scene of
rare intensity. Schubert’s choice to place ‘Der Atlas’ at the outset of the series
provides the cycle with an extremely powerful, dramatic opening, which none
of the other songs could have done. Its spectacular despair remains inexplicable,
though, only for the listener to understand it in retrospect. The consequence is
put before the cause, thus obfuscating their relationship, but not destroying it.
This, for Freud, is another characteristic of the dream, where such inversion is
a common means of distortion. Yet what in Heine is an abreaction – a way out
of the Poet’s situation through catharsis – no longer fulfils that role in Schubert
because of the altered placement of the song. And the Poet seems condemned

18
  Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, vols 2–3: Die Traumdeutung
(London: Imago, 1942): 331–2.
 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 55

Ex. 1 ‘Ihr Bild’

(a) Bars 11–14

(b) Bars 33–36

to compulsively re-enact his memories, as indeed the middle part of ‘Der Atlas’
plunges back into an obscure, distant past:

My arrogant heart, is that not how you wished it?

you wished to be happy, unendingly happy,
Or else, my arrogant heart, unendingly miserable:
So now you are miserable.

Interestingly, the key for that section of the song is B major, which then veers
towards E minor for the end of the verse to accompany the Poet’s gradual return
to the present and to reality. The B-major chord, in spite of being connected to
the G-minor tonic via the major-third cycle, shares no common notes with it.19 It
stands in maximum opposition of content to it as its ‘co-Leittonwechselklang’,
or CoLT-transform.20 However, B is also the key of ‘Der Doppelgänger’, which,

19
  In this instance, I am referring to the cycle of major and/or minor chords whose
roots G, B and E form an augmented arpeggiation. Such a sequence may also be found
in Schubert’s sonata-form developments, where it serves to prolong one of the chords
involved in the cycle. Each cycle may be understood as constituting a specific harmonic
region, which stands in opposition to the regions defined by the other cycles.
20
  I first developed the notions of ‘co-Leittonwechsel’ and ‘co-Relative’ in a paper given
at the Dublin International Conference on Music Analysis in June 2005, later presented
in an altered, expanded form at the Sorbonne in Paris (2006), and as a guest lecture at
Harvard University (2007) under the title ‘Tonality as Formal Grammar: Functional Cycles,
56 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

although it is set in the minor, concludes with the same plagal succession as
the middle part of ‘Der Atlas’, a succession highlighted by a similar melodic
transformation of the supertonic C into C (Ex. 2a–b). The positioning of ‘Der
Atlas’ and ‘Der Doppelgänger’ at the extremes of the cycle receives increased
significance in view of this tonal recall.

Ex. 2a ‘Der Atlas’, bars 29–32

Ex. 2b ‘Der Doppelgänger’, bars 54–63

Though Schubert undoes the logical connection between the first two songs
of the cycle by reversing their order, he retains it between ‘Die Stadt’ and ‘Der
Doppelgänger’. In Heine, the corresponding poems, Heimkehr nos. 16 and 20,
frame a relatively coherent sequence of no fewer than five poems, which show
the poet enter the gates of the Town after approaching it from the sea at dusk.
As he then walks through the lonely streets, he is fatally drawn to the house of
the Beloved. Yet, in Schubert, the connection between the two songs is weakened
by the interpolation of ‘Am Meer’, while new, distorted relations are established,
underlining the contrast between the warm parallel sixths and thirds between
piano and voice in ‘Am Meer’, which suggest the amorous presence of the sea-
creature, and the stark solitude of ‘Der Doppelgänger’, with its bleak, empty

Equivalence, and Substitutions’. To put it simply, if B minor is the Leittonwechselklang (or

LT) of G major, involving one semitonal displacement and two common notes, then their
respective parallel chords, B major and G minor, stand in the co-Leittonwechsel (or CoLT)
relation, with three semitonal displacements and no common note.
 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 57

chords. As in ‘Der Atlas’ and ‘Ihr Bild’, modulation into the major is related to
memories of the past and hallucinations, avoidance of reality, and fantasies.
Interestingly, ‘Das Fischermädchen’ and ‘Am Meer’ are the only two songs to be
set in a major key. ‘Am Meer’, then, not just by its title, does certainly belong to
the world of the Sea, and constitutes a last escape into dream before confronting
the Town. The characteristic Schubertian inversion of values between major and
minor whereby it is the latter which stands for outer reality and not, as is usual, for
subjective expression, is another instance of dream-like incongruity. It involves
a psychic conflict where substitutive fantasizing is preferred to adaptation to the
necessities of the real world.
In the new succession, therefore, as the Poet’s unhappy fate appears as a
chastisement for his original boldness (alluded to in the B-major section of ‘Der
Atlas’), logic becomes superseded by magic. Like small children, but also like
patients suffering from obsessive disorders (we shall examine later on how the
Poet’s demeanour may be characterized in terms of Freud’s obsessional neurosis),
the Poet attributes to his thoughts the capacity to act on the world, and hence to
provoke his own downfall.
Breaking up of logical continuity, interpolations, associations, reversal of
temporal order, mixing up of elements and characters taken from reality with
highly fantasized ones: although the underlying events in Die Heimkehr may
have their origin in Heine’s own life, his particular relation of these events, their
literary treatment, and their further condensation by Schubert confer on the song
sequence all the distinctive features which, following Freud, characterize the
dream, or the daytime reverie – as witnessed by the ‘dunklen Träumen’ referred
to in the first line of ‘Ihr Bild’. Moreover, through the confusion of past and
present, the temporal outlines of the cycle seem strangely blurred, while adult
love is curiously mixed with the fairy-tale images of childhood, discovered at the
age when one forges his or her symbolic imagery.

3. The Cycle as Musically Coherent

Although Ex. 3a–f provides linear reductions for each song of the cycle, I shall
for the sake of space keep my comments to a minimum here.
Among the salient aspects of ‘Der Atlas’ are the semitones between F and G,
G and G/A, which are particularly marked in the bass, but are also prominent
in the upper part. Equally striking is the modulation to B major in the context
of the main key of G minor. One can hear an echo of that key in the G middle
section of ‘Ihr Bild’ (particularly in bar 20, where the chromatic succession of
major and minor subdominant evokes the reversed succession of ‘Der Atlas’).
The reduction makes clear the co-existence, in ‘Ihr Bild’, between a ‘phantom’,
major-key fundamental line, related to the apparition of the Beloved, and the
actual, minor-key line in the tenor part, symbolically written out as an ‘inner
voice’, a voice from within which conveys the Poet’s depressed psychic state.21

21
  I disagree here with Schenker’s choice of fundamental line which privileges
the major descent. Although it is hard to identify a definitive winner in the conflict
between the major cadence in the voice and the ensuing minor cadence in the piano, I
am uncomfortable with any reading that minimizes the tragic ending of the poem and
the formidable resonance thus generated in the accompaniment, which re-establishes
the dominant depressed affect with a vengeance. The major cadence is fundamentally
contradictory, undermined by despair, and cannot be taken as an unmixed expression
58 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

Ex. 3 Linear reductions of the Heine-songs

(a) ‘Der Atlas’

(b) ‘Ihr Bild‘

 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 59

Ex. 3 continued

(c) ‘Das Fischermädchen’

(d) ‘Die Stadt’

(e) Am Meer’

continued overleaf
60 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

Ex. 3 concluded

(f) ‘Der Doppelgänger’

The key of B major, respelled enharmonically as C, also features importantly

as the key of the middle verse in ‘Das Fischermädchen’, where it highlights the
moment in the Poet’s reverie when the Fisher-Girl comes amorously into contact
with him. The modulation is announced by the rise of the voice to the top G at
the end of the first verse, later repeated at the close of the song.
Paradoxically, the most memorable sonority of ‘Die Stadt’, the diminished
chord which opens and concludes the song, is entirely absent from Schenker’s
own reduction.22 In the one I provide here, it shows as a chord of neighbouring
notes around the C-minor tonic. The diminished chord, which appears nowhere
in the functional organisation of the song, is also a symbolic ‘nowhere’,
being neither major nor minor, and essentially unstable. ‘Die Stadt’ figures a
transition, a suspension, as the Poet leaves the world of the Sea, populated by
the sensual creatures of his unconscious, and is about to enter the Town. It is this
particular journey which constitutes the ‘return’ referred to by Heine’s title. It is,
significantly, a journey backward in time, to correspond with the Poet’s constant
preoccupation with the past, and his inability to live the present and, even less,
to project himself in the future.
Although the opening chord of ‘Am Meer’ occupies no more space on the
reduction than the diminished chord of ‘Die Stadt’ (and it, too, could be omitted),
it operates on a different level. Its purpose is to frame the song, to set it as a fantasy
belonging to another plane. The chord itself (C–A–D–F) is a deformation of
the diminished chord of ‘Die Stadt’ (C–A–E–F), which it somehow allows to
resolve on the following C-major tonic in the second half of the initial bar of
‘Am Meer’, as shown in Ex. 4. The sonority of this opening chord is reminiscent
of the similarly inverted augmented-sixth chord that precedes the return to the

of hope. As I have argued above, it rather signifies negation – of reality, but also of hope
itself, if hope be a desire that may be transformed into reality. See Heinrich Schenker,
‘Schubert’s “Ihr Bild”’, in Der Tonwille, ed. William Drabkin, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004): 41–3.
David Lewin, in his beautiful and penetrating essay on the song, proposes a tenor
Urlinie an octave higher than that shown in my own Ex. 3b. Although the inscription of
the Urlinie in such a low register may present difficulty for the orthodox Schenkerian, it
renders well in my opinion the deep inner voice which gradually comes to predominate,
illustrating the fact that the Poet eventually becomes submerged by his affects. See D. Lewin,
‘Ihr Bild’, in Studies in Music with Text (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006): 135–49.
22
  Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition, trans. Ernst Oster, vol. 2 (New York: Longman,
1979): 103.
 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 61

main key in ‘Ihr Bild’ at bar 23 (Ex. 3b). The F (together with the D) also serves
to prepare the abrupt succession from the last chord of ‘Am Meer’ to the initial
chord of ‘Der Doppelgänger’. There is a striking continuity of register between
the end of ‘Die Stadt’ and the beginning of ‘Am Meer’, and between the end
of that song and the beginning of ‘Der Doppelgänger’ (Ex. 4a–d). In the latter
song, the apparition of the double is beautifully brought about by a motion from
an inner voice supported by the mediant’s own ‘double’, the sharp mediant,
tragically referring back to ‘Der Atlas’ as the Poet’s psyche becomes split. As in
‘Ihr Bild’, the vision is a projection from within.23

Ex. 4 Registral continuity in the succession from ‘Die Stadt’ to ‘Am Meer’, and ‘Am
Meer’ to ‘Der Doppelgänger’

(a) ‘Die Stadt’, bars 39–40 (b) ‘Am Meer’, bar 1

(c) ‘Am Meer’, bar 45 (d) ‘Doppelgänger’, bar 1

Other particularities do not stand out easily from the reductions, and I shall
only enumerate some of the most significant here:

1. The augmented triad introduced by Schubert in ‘Der Atlas’ affords only three
possible resolutions into a perfect chord via a single, ascending semitonal
displacement: these are all minor chords, namely G, B and E (D) minor.
Conversely, the triad resolves into three major chords via a single, descending
semitonal displacement. These chords are D, F and B (A) major – in other
words, the respective dominant of each minor chord. Example 5 provides
a table of those resolutions. The functional and tonal ambivalence of the
augmented triad (the modulation is first directed to B minor, before being
confirmed as B major) implies not only the central modulation of ‘Der Atlas’,
but also the key of ‘Der Doppelgänger’, the middle part of ‘Ihr Bild’ as well
as the E minor colour of its conclusion, and, more crucially, the modulation
to D minor for the apparition of the Poet’s double in ‘Der Doppelgänger’.

23
  See an analysis of the relation between major mediant and sharp minor mediant in
that song and similar other relations, in Xavier Hascher, Symbole et fantasme dans l’Adagio
du Quintette à cordes de Schubert (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005): 154–5.
62 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

Ex. 5 Resolutions of the augmented triad from ‘Der Atlas’

2. In ‘Der Doppelgänger’, the obsessional motif of the accompaniment is

directly related to the bass B–F–G motif that underlies the augmented
triad in ‘Der Atlas’. Just as G and B minor stand in equivalent relation to
the augmented triad, so is the motif of the last song the retrograde of that of
the first song.24 Punishment (the Poet’s obsessive thoughts) is consequent
on the fault – the boldness referred to in the middle verse of ‘Der Atlas’,
where the bass motif is equally present (Ex. 6). The augmented triad,
which exceeds the boundaries of the perfect chord, may thus be taken to
symbolize the Poet’s sense of having exceeded some secret moral boundaries.

Ex. 6 The ‘Atlas’ motif and its retrograde in ‘Der Doppelgänger’

(a) ‘Der Atlas’, bars 1–2

(b) ‘Der Atlas’, bars 22–23 (c) ‘Der Doppelgänger’, bars 1–5

3. In ‘Ihr Bild’, at bars 10–11 (repeated at bars 32–33), the harmony shows a
characteristic retrogression from the F-major dominant to the C-minor
supertonic (Ex. 7). Arrival on the latter chord coincides with the word
‘heimlich’, which signifies not only ‘secretly’, ‘mysteriously’, in a hidden
– perhaps magical – way, but also ‘familiarly’. Freud, in his famous essay on

24
  Edward Cone (‘Repetition and Correspondence’, in Chusid, A Companion to
Schubert’s Schwanengesang, 74) rightly establishes correspondences between these motifs
and the vocal line in the remainder of the songs, especially where it rises from the tonic
to the mediant and falls back to the tonic via the leading note, possibly reached through
one or two interpolated notes. These resemblances may well have been uncalculated on
Schubert’s part – they are nevertheless present in the music and tend to show that the
conception of the Heine songs stemmed from a single compositional impulse. Rather than
a unifying theme in the sense of nineteenth-century cyclic musical form, the return of the
same material in changing contexts is better understood as a common element such as, for
Freud, allows the dream to create associations and analogies.
 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 63

Ex. 7 ‘Ihr Bild’, bars 9–12

the ‘Unheimliche’, notes that, in addition, it can mean ‘eluding knowledge,

unconscious’, and, by extension, even the same as its opposite, ‘unheimlich’,
‘unfamiliar’ – which Freud then interprets as ‘“heimlich” that has been
subjected to repression’.25 The situation of the Poet resonates well with this
semantic richness, implying that the retrogression happens primarily in the
Poet’s psyche. He does not need to physically stand in front of the Beloved’s
portrait, as she wears him down by permanently weighing on his thoughts,
be it consciously or unconsciously.
4. Bars 5–6 of ‘Ihr Bild’ present an interesting exploitation of the resonance of
the piano. As the accompaniment rests on pitches FF and F in the bass at
the beginning of bar 6, even in the pianissimo nuance, a chord of overtones
made of pitches f, c, f′, a′, c′ can be heard before the right hand of the piano re-
enters on the same pitches (save the doublings of the fundamental F) so that
the chord – actually the first chord in the song – sounds as if it had already
been there. This ‘ghost’ chord goes along with the phantasmal evocation of
the Beloved, and the ensuing repetition of the material of bar 5 one octave
lower in the piano alone confirms that the Poet’s mind is only receptive to what
comes from within itself, while being closed to external perception (Ex. 8).26

Ex. 8 The ‘ghost’ chord in ‘Ihr Bild’, bars 6–8

25
  Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, vol. 12: Das Unheimliche
(London: Imago, 1947): 236–7 and 259.
26
  I have repeatedly witnessed this ‘apparition’ on my 1914 Broadwood baby
grand. As I imagine is the case with most ghost manifestations, this one was completely
unsolicited, but nevertheless quite striking. Readers unable to recreate the experience on
their own piano should accept my apologies, but not doubt the veracity of this testimony.
64 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

5. As suggested above, the piano in ‘Am Meer’ creates the illusion of a phan-
tom voice – that of the Poet’s fantasized lover – singing in parallel thirds with
the actual voice of the singer. As a feminine voice, it lies above the singer’s.
A simple doubling at the third would not have sufficed to achieve this effect:
the added voice is reinforced in the lower octave, while both upper parts are
set into resonance by the left hand of the piano, transforming the solo song
into a fantasized love duet (Ex. 9).

Ex. 9 ‘Am Meer’, bars 3–5

Looking at present at the sequence of keys in the overall reduction of

the cycle given in Ex. 10, and assuming that G minor, the key of ‘Der Atlas’,
represents the tonic of the entire cycle, the main feature is the plagal relation
of ‘Die Stadt’ and ‘Am Meer’ – respectively in C minor and C major – to this
tonic. The major subdominant entails a shift towards the major tonic, here
represented synecdochically by the B minor of ‘Der Doppelgänger’, the key of
the raised tonic third. By referring to this particular figure of rhetoric, I mean that
a signifying part of the chord, that which defines its species – in other words, the
third – stands alone to represent the whole of the chord. The substitution by a
minor key of an implicit major tonic combines well with the elusive status of the
song which hovers between fantasy and reality.
On the other hand, the B minor of ‘Ihr Bild’ implies the depression not only
of the third, B, but also of the tonic fifth, D, which is lowered to D, thus creating
a dissonance which is left unresolved, unless we read the cycle backwards.
Nevertheless, a strong element of ambiguity remains as the song hesitates
between major and minor. Finally, the key of ‘Das Fischermädchen’, A major,
can be understood as a consonant skip of a major third to the following C minor,
thus leading into the subdominant region. Like that of ‘Am Meer’, the key of

Ex. 10 Overall linear reduction of the cycle

 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 65

‘Das Fischermädchen’ stands at a greater distance from the tonic, in accordance

with the parenthetical function of those songs. Moreover, the complex relation
of the poems to each other is reflected in the indirect character of the harmonic
relations between the songs – a Schubertian feature in itself. Equally noticeable on
the reduction are the top notes of the vocal part which in all the songs, except the
symmetrically disposed ‘Ihr Bild’ and ‘Am Meer’, show an alternation between
F (or G) and G as if, by uniting the higher register as a single line, a long-range
reading of the cycle could be confirmed.
There is no theory of how a sequence of movements, or songs, should be
organized tonally, and the Schenkerian fundamental structure gives us no answer
here as it cannot be replicated at a higher level than that of the individual piece.
Thus the structure of the cycle, with its strongly plagal orientation, is neither
standard nor non-standard. But it is interesting, and, in my opinion, revealing.
If we now consider the minor in the light of a plagal, ‘dual’ tonal system
inspired by the theories of the inverse minor mode developed by Oettingen and
Riemann, where chords are constructed downwards from an upper fundamental,
then, in that system, the bass degrees would also be numbered downwards from
the tonic, and the normative functional order become the succession T–D–S
instead of the authentic, ‘antedual’ T–S–D of the major.27 This would, I believe,
allow for a richer, more coherent reading of Schubert’s cycle at the tonal as well
as the symbolic level.
Example 11 develops this reading of the Heine songs in the context of a
larger cyclic progression, beginning with the G-minor harmony of ‘Der Atlas’
and eventually returning to it. As C major and B minor, the keys of the two
last songs, introduce a gradual shift to the major mode, I hypothesize an
authentic cadence in that mode. Yet the succession from C major to B minor is a
characteristic retrogression, which is still better construed in the realm of dual
tonality. The second system of the example shows the return journey from major
to minor, ending with a plagal cadence. It is interesting here to compare the
status of A major in relation to C minor to that of F minor in relation to D major,
especially when hearing the A chord downwards from its higher fundamental,
E. In both progressions, the first chord then takes the third of its successor as
its fundamental, by which it reveals its subordination to the latter, functionally
more important chord.
As the normal, tonal order of a musical phrase points towards the dominant
where the phrase culminates, the move to the subdominant (or ‘dual dominant’)
reverses that order. What, in one case, is a meaningful statement directed to the
outside world, involving communication, action, forward motion, is transformed
in the other case into retirement from the world, regression into the ego, a
melancholy backward look onto a past from which one is incapable of separating
oneself – a situation very much akin to that depicted by the poems, of which the

27
  See Arthur von Oettingen, Harmoniesystem in dualer Entwicklung (Dorpat-Leipzig:
Gläser, 1886); Hugo Riemann, Skizze einer neuen Methode der Harmonielehre (Leipzig:
Breitkopf & Härtel, 1880). The term ‘dual’ to designate a tonal system whose triads are
considered from an upper root is first used by David Lewin in ‘A Formal Theory of
Generalized Tonal Functions’, Journal of Music Theory 26 (1982): 23–60. The theory has a
long history behind it. Goethe, for instance, in his correspondence with Schlosser, presents
a conception of the major triad as a ‘monad’ which expands outwards and upwards, in
opposition to the minor triad’s contraction inwards and downwards. Both motions are
physiologically and, more importantly, psychologically related. See Goethes Werke, IV.
Abtheilung: Briefe, vol. 25 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1901): 311.
66 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

Ex. 11 A cyclic journey from minor to major, and back

main theme is precisely the return home, to the place of the Poet’s childhood.
From a Freudian point of view, one harmonic direction – that according to
which ordinary musical statements are formed – may be equated with the
reality principle, which supports the individual’s social tendencies. The other
direction, in contrast, stands for introversion, motion towards the unconscious.
Mental equilibrium requires for Freud a balance between the ego instincts and
the libido, the principle of reality and the pleasure principle, the objective of the
former being the conservation of the ego and its adaptation to the outside world.
If the sexual instincts come to predominate, then the subject withdraws from
social life and progressively lets his psychic world take over the real one, which
is precisely what may be said to happen to the Poet here.28
As we develop the view of the cycle as an essentially fantastical expression,
the link to the unconscious at the symbolical level of the choice of keys seems
particularly pertinent. On the other hand, the affinity between Romantic poetry
and the dream is a commonplace observation in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century aesthetic literature, as in the writings of the Jena school, and those of
another Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich, whose book on The Symbolism of Dreams
presages Freud’s own study on the Interpretation of Dreams.29 Thus, Novalis’s call
for ‘narrations, without coherence, yet with associations, like dreams’ seems to
have been heard by Schubert as he compressed Heine’s already nonlinear poetic
organisation.30

28
  While this is a characteristic of mental trouble, it is also what happens to every one
of us in dreams, daydreams, and other occasions of everyday life, except that we normally
come back to reality.
29
  See G.H. Schubert, Die Symbolik des Traumes (Bamberg: Kunz, 1814).
30
  Novalis, Schriften: die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Richard Samuel, vol. 3
(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1968): 572. Italics original.
 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 67

4. The Cycle as Clinical Picture of Neurosis

That the Beloved has left the town is not a discovery for the Poet. We learn of her
marriage in the first part of Buch der Lieder, and of her giving birth in no. 6 of Die
Heimkehr. Indeed, it is her rejection of the Poet and her choice to marry someone
else that led him to leave. The dominant mood in Heine is sadness, chronic
melancholy (today one would call it ‘depression’), with outbursts of anguish and
a desire to die. Yet the Poet manages to keep his emotions under control until he
comes back to the Beloved’s house. The ‘Heimkehr’ (literally, the ‘homecoming’)
is a return to his own painful past, perhaps in an attempt to ward off his psychic
pain, but more certainly undertaken under the influence of compulsion. The
result, however, is a crisis of uncontrollable anguish, accompanied by lugubrious
fantasies of the Poet, as a ghost, appearing to the Beloved in her sleep to carry her
to his grave (Heimkehr nos. 21–2, which immediately precede the ‘Ihr Bild’ poem
and cast a particularly sombre light on the nature of the ‘dunklen Träumen’
alluded to at its beginning).
In Schubert, due to the retrograde ordering of the poems, the cycle begins
with this violent crisis, to which the following numbers then provide a posteriori
explanation. The moment is the most spectacular in the set, almost a hysteric
fit judging by the disproportionate movements in the piano part. Given the
excessiveness of the Poet’s mental state and reactions, though, from the point
of view of psychoanalysis, the unfortunate love affair is merely an ‘agent
provocateur’, an ‘actual factor’ of which the role is to reactivate a deeper,
unconscious factor which lies behind it.
‘Der Atlas’ is of course not about ancient mythology. It is a cry of pain, but
the megalomaniac mode in which it is expressed betrays in fact the opposite
situation. Far from carrying the world on his shoulders, the Poet is incapable
of enduring his own life any more, and realizes this inability. ‘I have to bear
the unbearable’, he admits, as the bass moves up a semitone from G and the
minor tonic chord transforms into a diminished seventh on G at bar 17. Whereas
in Heine it is possible to read the poem with a certain amount of self-derision,
Schubert has no choice but to set the text literally, except to give clues of its
excessiveness. The wide intervals and dotted rhythms give the song its heroic
character, while the hammered augmented chords point out the fact that the
Poet is actually out of his mind. As in the analysis of dreams, the augmented
chord is an incongruous detail which suggests that the meaning of the situation
should be reversed. Moreover, the octaves between the voice and the bass, which
is doubled in the lower register, is a powerful indication that the Poet’s mind is
in the grip of his unconscious. For Freud,

The essence of irony consists in stating the opposite of what is intended, yet, at the
same time, enabling the listener to make an economy of the contradiction by means
of intonation, accompanying gestures, small stylistic clues … through which it can
be understood that what is meant is, in fact, the opposite of what is said.31

Although the music of ‘Der Atlas’ probably fits this definition, its irony is not
immediately perceptible and can only be understood in the context of the entire

31
  Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, vol. 6: Der Witz und seine
Beziehung zum Unbewussten (London: Imago, 1940): 198.
68 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

cycle. As a dreamlike structure, in spite of its seeming incoherence, each of its

episodes needs to be interpreted in relation to the whole.
At the other end of the cycle, the accompaniment in ‘Der Doppelgänger’
proceeds in bare parallel blocks as if to signify that the Poet’s psyche is
completely under the control of his obsessions, with no room for other thoughts.
The repetition of the same formula in the piano hints at the Poet’s imprisonment
in his obsessive mania. The plagal ending of the song, the distortion of the major
second between C and B into the semitonal C–B interval in the bass, which also
relates to the higher level succession from the C-major key of ‘Am Meer’ to the B
minor of ‘Der Doppelgänger’, might be read in the light of the tonal structure of
the whole cycle as inclining towards the interior of the psyche. Symbolically, the
walk through the streets of the Town at night might be understood as the Poet’s
meanderings around the convolutions of his own mind, a path through the maze
of his memory. It is significant in this context that the confrontation is with the
Poet’s older self, and not the Beloved. The Poet is mentally imprisoned in his
past, which he is unable to overcome in order to face the present.
Taking into account all the symptoms observed so far, starting with the Poet’s
estrangement from human society, we are presented with a clinical picture that
strongly brings to mind Freud’s Zwangs­neurose, ‘obsessional neurosis’, of which
the characteristics are:
– obsessive representations or ideas;
– obsessive affects, notably periodic melancholy (originating in repressed self-
reproach); and
– an associated emotional state, consisting in anguish, doubt, remorse, or anger.32

As is often the case, obsessional neurosis combines with other forms of neurosis
and especially with anxiety neurosis, which is manifested by:
– excitability, insomnia;
– anxious expectation, morbid imagination, pessimism;
– outbursts of anguish;
– agoraphobia, vertigo; and,
– in certain cases, hallucinations (also in paranoia).33

Certain symptoms are common to both forms of neurosis, such as self-doubt,

ruminations, and other protective measures taken by the subject against his or
her obsessions, including dipsomania (alcoholism).
By that, I am not implying that Heine or Schubert themselves necessarily
suffered from neurosis, though it may well have been the case, especially when
we look at the last years of Schubert’s life. This period seems to show an alteration
of his personality, which, although conjecturally, has been stressed by Elizabeth
Norman McKay in her biography of the composer. According to McKay,

After he [Schubert] contracted syphilis at the end of 1822, problems with his
general health and changed habits seem to have increased the usual modest rate of

32
  See Sigmund Freud, ‘Obsessions et phobies’ and ‘Neue Bemerkungen über die
Abwehrneuropsychosen’, in Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, vol. 1 (London:
Imago, 1952): 343–53 and 377–403.
33
  See Sigmund Freud, ‘Über die Berechtigung, von der Neurasthenie einen
bestimmen Symptomenkomplex als “Angstneurose” abzutrennen’ and ‘Zur Kritik der
“Angstneurose”’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, 313–42 and 355–76.
 Hascher: ‘In dunklen Träumen’ 69

degeneration to more acute and longer episodes of mental disturbance and shorter
periods of normality. For Schubert, affected by syphilis, both alcohol and nicotine
abuse may have been manifestations of his cyclothymia, hastening the deterioration
in his mental health: a vicious circle of cause and effect. It is even possible that, by
the time of his death, Schubert’s condition had already deteriorated into a more
severe form of manic depression.34

With creative artists, however, the development of mental illness is normally

prevented by their activity, which provides them with a means of returning to
reality and to a form of social life – so that hasty conclusions should carefully
be avoided. No simple inferences about a creator can ever be drawn from the
structure of his or her creation. In the case of Schubert and Heine, the dream-
like structure may well have been a conscious recreation, standing, for Heine,
in complex and somewhat parodic relation to Romantic literary aesthetics. On
the other hand, Heine, the Jew, and Schubert, the freelance composer whose
compositions the world had but very little use for, were both in their ways social
misfits who could not succeed in making a position for themselves in their home
town or country, thus possibly preventing the process of sublimation from
completely achieving its goal.35
As an expression of the deeper regions of the psyche, the work of art can be
treated as a conversion of the fantastical world of its creator into specific external
action, hence Freud’s description of the work of art as ‘a form of hysteria’.36 It
is perhaps illuminating to note that for Freud, the hysteric fit, like the dream,
but also like the work of art, proceeds from a reworking and a disguise of the
unconscious material, and that amongst the procedures used by the censorship
to obscure the meaning of the material, is the reversal of the course of events,
whereby the hysteric scene or the dream should be read backwards, from the
end to the beginning.
Two remarks, by way of conclusion:

1. Neurosis induces a loss of reality, which can amount to complete flight from
real life – here the Poet’s original escape from the town of the Beloved.37
The subject attempts to replace the fragment of reality which is judged
undesirable with his or her own fantastical world, regressing into a more
satisfactory past. So does ‘Ihr Bild’ depict the refusal to admit the reality of
the loss of the Beloved. Although he knows that she is married to someone
else, the Poet still fantasizes that she is, like him, grieved by their separation,
and attributes to her image his own tears. In ‘Die Stadt’, the diminished chord
34
  Elizabeth Norman McKay, Franz Schubert: A Biography (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996): 139.
35
  There is, for instance, no doubt for Rank (The Double, 42) that Heine suffered from
neurosis. Peters (‘A Walk on the Wild Side’, 61) observes that ‘Heine’s path remains the
obverse of the successful, “well-adjusted” path of socialization, be it in poetry or in life:
namely, acceptance of the system, or renunciation and deferment’. For Peters, referring
to the conventions of bourgeois society, ‘there is in fact to be no fulfilment at all within
the existing system. For it finally and cruelly shows itself to be a system of … endless
canalizations, banishments, constraints, and sublimations’ (61) – or, as Freud would put it,
repression of the sexual instinct.
36
  Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, vol. 9: Totem und Tabu
(London: Imago, 1948): 91.
37
  See Sigmund Freud, ‘Der Realitätsverlust bei Neurose und Psychose’, in Gesammelte
Werke chronologisch geordnet, vol. 13 (London: Imago, 1940): 363–8.
70 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

(neither major nor minor, but less-than-minor) may be taken to symbolize a

retreat from the real world into a non-physical, but psychical, space. The two
‘fantasy’ pieces, ‘Das Fischermädchen’ and ‘Am Meer’, would thus replace
the deserted reality with the rich imaginary world of the Sea, which is that
of the Poet’s unconscious desires and their imaginary fulfilment.
2. Temporal perception of the present can be affected by mental disorders such
as neurosis, in relation to the subject’s withdrawal of cathexis from the outside
world. As the subject no longer projects him- or herself into effective, goal-
directed action, he or she loses the sense of duration. ‘Der Doppelgänger’
thus corresponds to the termination of the process – that is, the schizoid
loss of relation to external time, and the submersion of the psyche with its
own circular obsessions. Time is abolished as the past emerges on the same
plane as the present, indeed absorbing the present altogether. That way, the
whole cycle of the Heine songs can be read in the light of the dissolution of
the perception of time by the Poet, which ‘Die Stadt’ and ‘Der Doppelgänger’
render by the substitution of spatial displacement within the Poet’s fantastical
world. If Schubert could so easily swap beginning and end, it may be because
beginning and end coincide in time. The Heine songs would definitely, then,
constitute a ‘cycle’ in the proper sense, yet in no way a narrative.

A Post-scriptum on Mermaids and Poison

On 31 October 1828, two months following the completion of the autograph

score of the Schwanengesang songs, as he was dining at an inn in the suburban
district of the Himmelpfortgrund where he was born, Schubert ordered a dish
of fish. ‘After eating the first mouthful’, recalls Ferdinand Schubert, ‘he dropped
his knife and fork on the plate, and explained that the fish made him feel so
badly sick that it was just as if he had taken poison’.38 Without neglecting the
physiological symptoms of Schubert’s last illness and their evident gravity, some
psychological remarks may not be out of place here.
The association of fish and poison, of course, reminds us of ‘Am Meer’ and
the ‘poisonous’ tears of the Poet’s sea-lover. Mermaids stand for the dangers of
love outside the bounds of marriage, of forbidden love, love that is not approved
by society. At the end of 1828, the poison was indeed in Schubert’s body as, he
could feel, a punishment for his sexual errancy. The songs themselves display
the affective split which is so typical of certain neurotic dispositions, and the
maladjustment that such a split betrays between desire and reality: on the one
hand, ideal or celestial love, where sexual instincts are repressed and sublimated;
on the other hand, carnal or terrestrial love, which satisfies the instincts,
but is proscribed by society and condemned by the individual’s introjected
representation of its conventions and requirements. The subject, thus, is left with
no other choice than to hover endlessly between frustration and guilt.

38
  Deutsch, Erinnerungen, 47.