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).

Hugo Wolf songs, Part 3

"Komm, Liebchen, komm!”   (Goethe Lieder no. 44). Design is ternary, where A is closed in the tonic key, B is extended and shifts keys several times, and A' is complete, where the voice line is often altered and the piano part is the same until the approach to the final cadence. A full page coda for the piano follows that cadence.

The A section is in two segments, the first closing with a PAC on V--see the cadence chord in bar 9 below. The set of circled notes in the piano, right hand, show steady step-wise progress upward from Eb5 to Ab5 in the cadence that closes the A section.

The voice part works quite differently. I have isolated it below. The Eb5 at (a) is the seventh in an F7 chord, dominant of Bb. It is touched on again and then resolves downward, first to D-nat5, then Db5, and we would expect the line to continue downward to C5, but instead the voice returns to Eb5 at (d) and the piano left hand takes over to resolve the Db (as seventh of Eb7)--see arrow. At (b) an inner voice moves up by step reaching A-nat4, which joins the upper Eb5 in an unfolded diminished fifth -- at (c1). This resolves as expected to a third at (c2); I have shown the upper note as Db5, but to match harmony in the strictest way it would have been D-nat5. In any case, as the upper voice Eb5 is recovered at (d), the lower voice moves on from Bb4 to the lower note of the unfolded fifth Ab4-Eb5 at (e), and cadential closure follows -- with that framing interval, Ab4-Eb5, intact (see final bar). (The two asterisks, btw, point to admittedly obvious register play.)

The detail in the discussion above is of interest because of the way Wolf rewrites the reprise of the A section. The first half, bars 59-67, is shown below. The piano carries its left-hand tenor melody again, and the voice winds its way within the interval frame Eb4-Ab4-Eb5. The cadence, however, is most easily approached from ^3, as shown beginning in bar 64.

The second half of the reprise suggests the possibility of the voice part moving onward from that ^3 (see bar 69) and steadily upward to the cadence on Ab5--see bars 77-79. The piano part goes even further, expanding its right-hand movement from earlier to move step-by-step to overtop the voice at ^3 (as C6).

Hugo Wolf songs, part 2

"Erschaffen und Beleben” (from the Goethe Lieder, no. 33) is in four quatrains, each set differently by Wolf in the voice, but throughout with a consistent left/right quarter-note alternating rhythm in the piano. At the outset, B4 (as written) is established as a focal tone:

The setting of the fourth quatrain recovers and prolongs that B and eventually leads to a ^5-^6-(^8)-^7-^8 ascending Urlinie in the major key.

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Hugo Wolf songs, part 1

In my rising lines table (link), songs by Hugo Wolf take an unexpectedly prominent place:

“Fussreise.”     (Mörike Lieder)
“Lieber alles.”   (Eichendorff Lieder);
           -- see Everett, Journal of Music Theory 48/1 (2004): 51-4
“Frech und Froh I.”   (Goethe Lieder);
           -- see Everett, Journal of Music Theory 48/1 (2004): 51-4
"Cophtisches Lied II.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Dank des Paria.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Erschaffen und Beleben.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Frech und Froh II.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Komm, Liebchen, komm!”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Nimmer will ich dich verlieren!”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Der Schäfer.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Die Spröde.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"St. Nepomuks Vorabend.”  (Goethe Lieder)
"Trunken müssen wir alle sein!”  (Goethe Lieder) 

From these I have chosen four as the material for a series of posts beginning today. Those are

"Cophtisches Lied II.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Erschaffen und Beleben.”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Komm, Liebchen, komm!”   (Goethe Lieder)
"Trunken müssen wir alle sein!”  (Goethe Lieder)

I have already written about "Der Schäfer" (Goethe Lieder no. 22) on the blog: see this post. In this song, the relation of a rising line to text is quite simple: a lazy shepherd suddenly perks up and becomes industrious when a romantic relationship blooms (or possibly when a nagging spouse gets him moving). The rising line -- and closing cadence -- mimics the new energy. Overall, one can hear a rising line from ^5:   -- see the earlier post for details of the reading --

"Trunken müssen wir alle sein!”  (Goethe Lieder no. 35; published in 1889). The poem is in two verses, each of which is six lines long, consisting of three rhymed couplets. An English translation of the first verse is here: link.

Not your average drinking song, this one is more forceful than exuberant and it is predominantly in a minor key, including in the ending. The initial F#5 (as written) is maintained throughout as a focal tone ^8. Its chromatic descent is marked with circles below. The box shows the first instance of a vigorous ascending figure that becomes more and more prominent as time goes on.

The second couplet goes the opposite direction, with a diatonic line upward from C#5 through D5 to close on E5. The piano interrupts with its ascending figure (boxed), here set in a wedge.

The third couplet offers a rare example of a ^5-^6-(^8)-^#7-^8 minor key ascending Urlinie, against which the left hand of the piano part offers another version of its rising octaves (boxed). The coda has still another one of those to end, this time as a simple minor key rising line through an octave.

The first and second couplets of the second verse are set to even more vigorous music, eventually reaching an interval frame E#5-C#5 with a third line at the PAC—end of the example below.

The third and final couplet of the second verse offers an expanded version of the minor-key ascending Urlinie. Note, incidentally, that the two unfolded thirds, D5-F#5, E#5-C#5, expose the minor key problem in an even more obvious way than did the end of the first verse: D5 moves to C#5 and has to be reconceived in order to be heard as moving upward (against the grain of the voice leading) to E#5. A familiar Schenkerian dodge has to be called into play to make this happen: the device Allen Forte called overlapping (and which is one species of upward register transfer or Übergreifen). In a sequence, a note may be obliged to resolve downward, but another voice may overlap it, and still a third overlap that--and the resulting "line" going up may nevertheless be regarded as a unitary figure. In this case, ^6 resolves down to ^5 and is overlapped by ^8, which also moves down. There is no ^9 to overlap again: ^8-^7 just repeats itself.

Here is the entire texture. The piano hammers away at the rising figure -- see the box in bar 2 -- and finally bursts out in an extended chromatic run (boxed in the second and third systems). Both voice and piano, then, provide an ascending line to ^8 in this structural cadence. (The final bars look like they might be a reprise (see at "Wie zu Anfang"), but they are in fact a fairly brief recall acting as a coda.)

Minor key series, part 9 (Wolf; Brahms; Duparc)

I had intended this post to show a later 19th century treatment of figure g in Hugo Wolf's setting of Goethe's satirical "peasant" poem "Der Schäfer." Two things happened, however. First, I realized on examining the piece more closely that figure g is not the model; instead, it is a convoluted or distorted version of figure c. More on that below. Second, I remembered that I had just written about a minor-key Brahms song in the essay Rising Gestures, Text Expression, and the Background as Theme (published on Texas Scholar Works: link). Then, looking at the work materials for that essay, I found another Brahms song and also one by Henri Duparc (both are mentioned in Walter Everett's article that was the starting point for my Rising Gestures essay).

Neither Brahms song (they are, btw, Op59n1 and Op69n7) nor the Duparc "Lamento" uses figure g, so the end result is that this post may perhaps be best regarded as an excursus in the minor key series. The nineteenth-century theme will continue, however, in the following post, where I look at the opening of the Tristan Prelude in connection with figure i. After that, I'll finally introduce figures k-n, which as it happens lack examples in the repertoire, and two interesting cases—Beethoven's 32 Variations in C minor, WoO80, which ought to have a rising line based on its harmonic plan, but doesn't—and a movement-length partimento by Durante. The last entries in the series will form a longish appendix on 17th century Dorian-mode pieces.

In brief, Goethe's poem "Der Schäfer" is about a shepherd who is lazy and neglects his work but who suddenly perks up and becomes energetic and responsible when a woman accepts him. This turn happens in the final lines, and is set by Wolf with a rising line.  The first structural tone of the melody is unclear, largely because of the contortions in line and harmony—see the score below—but also because neither ^8 nor ^5 is confirmed in the subsequent passage.

At the end, on the other hand, the motion from ^5 is very clear, if also very chromatic in the voice and oddly chromatic in the harmony:

I have removed the text and isolated the harmonies in this reduction. Also note the labeling of local harmonies and functions.

A further reduction shows more plainly that the entire passage, excepting the final tonic, involves prolongation of the dominant.

The end result, then, is that "Der Schäfer" uses figure c (below), not figure g.

Brahms, op. 59n1, is another Goethe setting, "Dämmrung senkt sich von oben," a nature poem that Brahms sets in four verses, the first two in G minor, where the second is a slight variant of the first, the third is a "B-section" contrast that begins in Eb major, and the fourth in G major builds on material of the second half of verse 1. It is the last verse that concerns us here.

The ^5 I have marked at the beginning is without reference to anything earlier in the song. Whether the whole piece should be read from an abstract ^3 (Bb) or ^5 is an open question: I would favor the former in the early verses but the latter in the final two. Regardless, the motion from ^5 and the elongated dominant are unmistakable in verse 4.

Considerable attention is given the subdominant throughout the verse, including the approach to the cadence (see both IV and iv below). The close, then, uses figure c, where ^5, ^6, and ^7 are all over V -- but note that the alternatives for the voice lay bare the simple and ancient opening wedge of counterpoint where the ascent ^5-^6-^7-^8 is balanced by a descent from ^3 to ^1.

Nevertheless, Brahms does here what Schubert did in pieces we examined early in this series (link): he actually avoids the problem of the minor key by switching at the end to the major.

Part 9 continues in the next post: Brahms, Op. 69n7, and Duparc "Lamento."

Reference: Everett, Walter. 2004. "Deep-Level Portrayals of Directed and Misdirected Motions in Nineteenth-Century Lyric Song." Journal of Music Theory 48/1 (2004): 25-58.