Hugo Wolf songs, Part 4

"Cophtisches Lied II" (Goethe Lieder no. 15) is written in the style of accompanied recitative (by Wolf's day largely indistinguishable from the music of vocal melodramas intended for recital or salon performance: see References for more information). The poem is in ten lines, two units of five lines each. The overall expressive trajectory is from the shifting figures, fragments of phrases, and chromaticism of the traditional (18th century) accompanied recitative to a steady march (in the piano coda marcato, fortissimo).

Emphasized pitches in the voice part at the beginning trace a line from ^5 to ^#7 in D minor, though the underlying harmony wanders far afield:

For the remaining lines of the first verse, the line sinks back through C-nat5 to the piano's pianissimo B3 (bar 13). I have not marked it but also notice an ancillary line bringing G4 (bar 8) through F4 (bars 9-11 in the piano, bar 11 in the voice) to E4 in the voice (bar 12; then repeated by the piano in the following bars). This register persists as an inner voice during the second verse.

For the second verse, the voice puts D: ^6 in the fifth octave (bar 17), then on a somewhat tortured path eventually finds it way to the structural cadence and D5 (bar 27). Given the shifting movements of the harmony, even in this march section, I hesitate to ascribe any particular figure to the voice's background shape, other than it rises overall.

References: The most important source is Sarah Hibberd, ed., Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama (Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). The scholar who has written most extensively about melodrama is Jacqueline Waeber. See her Musique dans le texte: Le mélodrame, de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris,  2005). Some examples of melodramas of the type I mention written by contemporaries of Wolf include Franz Liszt, Lenore, S.346 (1857–58); Carl Haslinger, Der Bettler vom Rialto, Op.124 (1868?); and Siegfried Ochs, Der Handschuh (1883).