Schubert's Lieder and the Philosophy of Early German Romanticism by Feurzeig Lisa;

Author:Feurzeig, Lisa;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Texture is always significant in this song, and the altered mood of this passage owes a great deal to its new texture. The left and right hands first play in unison (mm. 18–19), then in quasi-parallel motion: both hands continue to arpeggiate the same chords, but polyphonically, demonstrating the idea that the river’s waters are “twisted like a serpent.” The vocal line moves in a lower range than before, and emphasizes stepwise motion in place of the earlier floating arpeggios. The river seems to have narrowed and is flowing faster, sometimes divided by a rock in midstream. These measures convey both language and nature: Schlegel’s syntax and the river’s current.

If we consider its melody, this passage can be tied to the very opening of the song. The opening melody descends (D# — C# — B); here, the line ascends (B — C# — D♮). These two motives create what would be a palindrome except that its accuracy is distorted by the shift from D# to D$. They resemble the local palindrome heard in m. 3 and m. 7, but with the two halves now separated so that the parallelism stretches across a long duration. The important difference, of course, is that the ascent is not a literal reversal of the descent, and this captures Schlegel’s point that a reflection is never an exact copy of the original. I believe that this connection to the poem explains Schubert’s choice of D major as the contrasting key. When the downward melody “finds itself again” in its ascending form, the half-step shift makes it sufficiently different so that the listener is “newly delighted.” All this is very subtly woven together, like an encoded message that most passersby will not notice; but Schubert has marked it for us with all those other changes which distinguish this intently focused musical moment from the music before and after.

This modulation and slightly altered melodic reflection return for the fourth stanza, the part of the poem that most explicitly states the idea that reflection is inexact by using words such as “shimmer” and “outline” to describe the way a memory is preserved. This correspondence suggests that “Der Fluβ” is one of those songs in which Schubert wrote the music more for a later stanza than for the opening.

After this pivotal moment, the song seems freed to enter into an ecstatic, long-breathed final stage. Released back into the tonic key, it returns to the expansive and highly decorated texture of the beginning, with many subtleties of ornamentation, enharmonic respellings, and other delights. For the final vocal phrase (mm. 28–32), the piano texture of the introduction returns, and since the singer is present as well, we hear two simultaneous melodies in the voice and right hand (see Example 4.11). Within four bars, they move in oblique, contrary, and parallel motion; the lines are sensuously intertwined, all within the context of a slow harmonic rhythm that revives the sense of expansiveness from the song’s beginning. The song ends on a chord that spans six octaves, ample to encompass the river’s bed and the highest star it mirrors.

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