Rufus Hallmark's book explores Robert Schumann's beloved yet controversial song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben and the poems of Adelbert von Chamisso on which it is based, setting them in the context of ...the challenges and social expectations faced by women in early nineteenth-century Germany. Hallmark provides the most extensive English-language study of Chamisso, a poet little known today outside Germany, including a biographical sketch and excerpts from his other poetry. He examines a range of poems about women, by Chamisso and others, and discusses the reception of the poetic and musical cycles, including illustrated editions, contemporary reviews, and other musical settings. Based on new studies of Schumann's manuscript sources and on comparative analyses of his songs and settings by Carl Loewe, Heinrich Marschner, Franz Lachner and others, Hallmark provides fresh musical and interpretive insights into each song.
The several editions of Schumann's diaries refer us to at least two drinking styles in his university years, both of them with a flavour of "wine, women and song" fraternities. He plunged headlong ...into all this for a start, finding it elevating and then considering it self-medicating. He drank to excess for a while but he stopped short, unable to go further to the bitter end because he could not develop a tolerance and mostly because he was afraid of madness.
This article argues that Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms gave their music a blurry, Romantic quality by distorting well-known harmonic progressions. After identifying the basic progression that ...underpins the music, the analyses discuss the rhythmic dislocations that cause chords to overlap and merge together. The essay bridges a gap between an important aspect of the Romantic aesthetic and our theoretical understanding of Schumann's and Brahms's harmonic vocabulary.
Four of Schumann's great masterpieces of the 1830s - Carnaval, Fantasiestucke, Kreisleriana and Nachtstucke - are connected to the fiction of E. T. A. Hoffmann. In this book, John MacAuslan traces ...Schumann's stylistic shifts during this period to offer insights into the expressive musical patterns that give shape, energy and individuality to each work. MacAuslan also relates the works to Schumann's reception of Bach, Beethoven, Novalis and Jean Paul, and focuses on primary sources in his wide-ranging discussion of the broader intellectual and aesthetic contexts. Uncovering lines of influence from Schumann's reading to his writings, and reflecting on how the aesthetic concepts involved might be used today, this book transforms the way Schumann's music and its literary connections can be understood and will be essential reading for musicologists, performers and listeners with an interest in Schumann, early nineteenth-century music and German Romantic culture.
In this article, I posit and develop the principle of tonal ebb to account for breaches of harmonic syntax in the normative tonal flow of common practice era music, with special reference to V going ...to II. Though typically forbidden, V—II progressions occasionally arise in a handful of special cases. Rarely, one may encounter a
sunken II chord
: this is my term for an apparent, diatonic II chord that arises from contrapuntal motion within V in major keys. To ground this rather abstract contrapuntal artifact and highlight its unique affective properties, I develop a conceptual model for the apparent V—II—V tonal formation that draws on an analogy to a folding technique from origami. Owing to its voice leading properties, the sunken II chord is particularly well-suited to conveying a sense of “that which lies within” in musical terms. I argue that Robert Schumann was sensitive to this effect—consciously or unconsciously—and that he employed it in his songs to underscore moments of inwardness, introspection, or heightened subjectivity in the poetry. I proceed to investigate three Schumann songs from 1840 that feature a text-music correspondence involving a prominent sunken II chord and some manner of inward turn in the text.
Four of Schumann's great masterpieces of the 1830s are connected to the fiction of E. T. A. Hoffmann. John MacAuslan explores these works' musical patterns, stylistic developments and literary ...connections. Essential reading for musicologists, performers and listeners with an interest in Schumann and early nineteenth-century music.
InSonata Fragments, Andrew Davis argues that the Romantic sonata is firmly rooted, both formally and expressively, in its Classical forebears, using Classical conventions in order to convey a broad ...constellation of Romantic aesthetic values. This claim runs contrary to conventional theories of the Romantic sonata that place this nineteenth-century musical form squarely outside inherited Classical sonata procedures. Building on Sonata Theory, Davis examines moments of fracture and fragmentation that disrupt the cohesive and linear temporality in piano sonatas by Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann. These disruptions in the sonata form are a narrative technique that signify temporal shifts during which we move from the outer action to the inner thoughts of a musical agent, or we move from the story as it unfolds to a flashback or flash-forward. Through an interpretation of Romantic sonatas as temporally multi-dimensional works in which portions of the music in any given piece can lie inside or outside of what Sonata Theory would define as the sonata-space proper, Davis reads into these ruptures a narrative of expressive features that mark these sonatas as uniquely Romantic.
PDF
