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Absent subjects and empty centres

Citation for published version:Taylor, B 2017, 'Absent subjects and empty centres: Eichendorff’s romantic phantasmagoria andSchumann’s Liederkreis Op. 39' 19th-Century Music, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 201-222. DOI:10.1525/ncm.2017.40.3.201

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Publisher Rights Statement:Published as Absent Subjects and Empty Centers: Eichendorff's Romantic Phantasmagoria and Schumann'sLiederkreis, Op. 39Benedict Taylor 19th-Century Music, Vol. 40 No. 3, Spring 2017; (pp. 201-222) DOI:10.1525/ncm.2017.40.3.201 © 2017 by University of California Press. Copying and permissions notice:Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. CopyrightLaw) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by University ofCalifornia Press for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee viaRightslink® or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center.

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BENEDICTTAYLORSchumann’sLiederkreis

19th-Century Music, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 201–222 ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2017 by the Regents ofthe University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2017.40.3.201.

BENEDICT TAYLOR

A Rose Garden. Nightingales are singing in the val-ley below. The confused murmur of brooklets babblemelodiously through the night and a breeze rustlesthrough the treetops. Beyond lies the old castle bathedin moonlight. Someone is awaiting a beloved. Butsomething is terribly wrong. For the castle is farfrom here; and she died many years ago. . . .

A heady summer night under starry southernskies. Our young hero, guitar in hand, walkingthrough the bewitching garden, sings softly to him-self. Trees are rustling; the flickering light of themoon illuminates the marble statue among the half-sunken walls. In the magical play of moonlight it isas if the ancient goddess has come alive to walk herenchanted realm once again . . .

Night. The soft tones of horns are welling up outof the distance, their siren sounds casting a spellover the depths of the forest. Autumn breezes playthrough the fading blooms of the garden and waftthrough the open windows of the castle into the

bedroom. A narrow shaft of moonlight illuminatesthe stately chamber. The knight looks down at hislover lying beside him. Her face has taken on astrange, unearthly pallor. She has turned to stone.As dawn breaks the next morning he rides hastilyaway. Innumerable birds are singing as the sun risesin splendor. Across the valley spring is blooming.The moss-covered remains of the castle lie in ruins,and a profuse jungle of weeds chokes the once mag-nificent gardens. No one has lived there for hun-dreds of years. . . .

He was standing once more on the beautiful hillsoverlooking the Neckar by Heidelberg. Night wasfalling. Over the mountains came an old and beauti-ful song from his past; he followed its tones over thesleeping landscape, lying silent and pale in the shim-mer of the moon, towards his childhood home. Step-ping over the inert body of the doorkeeper slumpedagainst the garden gate he entered the familiar gar-den; statues of gods slumbered on their pedestals. Inthe fitful moonlight he suddenly glimpsed the be-guiling figure of his sweetheart among the trees; butshe seemed to elude him as he approached, as if hewas chasing his own shadow. At last within thebushes he caught up with her and grasped her hand.And as she turned to meet his gaze he saw—to hishorror—his own face, grinning hideously back athim. The marble statues awaken; the doorkeeper isdead.

I would like to thank Walter Hinderer for first directingme toward Eichendorff’s prose works in a graduate semi-nar on German Romanticism at Princeton back in 2006 (aliterary realm that has gradually enticed me ever moreinto its deceptive depths), Sarah Hibberd for helpful dis-cussions on the phantasmagoric, and Ceri Owen and theother contributors to this issue for their thoughts and com-ments on this piece. All translations are my own unlessstated otherwise.

Absent Subjects and Empty Centers:Eichendorff’s Romantic Phantasmagoria andSchumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 39

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For those who know Schumann’s Liederkreis,op. 39, some of the scenes just described mightsound strangely familiar, if curiously estranged.The first, indeed, is a retelling of the poem setin the second of the two songs entitled “In derFremde” in Schumann’s collection (No. 8, “Ichhör’ die Bächlein rauschen”).1 But it could havebeen pretty much any of countless such epi-sodes from Eichendorff’s novels, novellas, orpoems. The images and phrases are the same:moonlight, nightingales, rustling woods, tin-kling streams and murmuring brooks, beguil-ing gardens, Romantic castles—we encountersuch tropes time and time again throughoutEichendorff’s work. Substitute a few details andwe could find ourselves in any of innumerablescenes from the 1815 novel Ahnung undGegenwart (Presentiment and Present) or thesatirical novella Viel Lärmen um Nichts (MuchAdo about Nothing), the original locations forfive of the poems in Schumann’s cycle. Thesecond might recall Schumann’s “SchöneFremde,” especially in the context of Eichen-dorff’s 1834 novel, Dichter und ihre Gesellen(Poets and Their Companions), where Fortunat,on his first evening in Rome, takes his guitarand asks the fantastic night what, in dreams, itis “confusedly trying to tell him” (“Wassprichtst du wirr, wie in Träumen, zu mir,phantastische Nacht?”). But it is actually takenfrom the author’s earlier novella Das Marmor-bild (The Marble Statue, 1819), where Florio,newly arrived in Lucca, picks up the instru-ment his friend Fortunato has left lying aroundand slips out to make his nocturnal perambula-tions. The theme of statues fantastically com-ing to life at night, of the dangerous entice-ment of the primeval goddess of love and theperils of unbridled Romantic fantasy, could eas-ily have come from a number of points else-where in Dichter und ihre Gesellen, though(the young poet Otto’s comparable experiencesin Rome, or his enticement in the “MelusinaGarden” later in book III), from the account ofthe eponymous protagonist’s arrival in Romein Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From theLife of a Good-For-Nothing), from the bewitched

island of Frau Venus in Eine Meerfahrt (A SeaJourney), or from several passing allusions inDie Entführung (The Abduction).2

The third example above, drawn from theearly novella Die Zauberei im Herbste (Magicin Autumn), finds no direct parallel inSchumann’s op. 39, but the attentive followerof Schumann might note a number of familiarsituations cropping up: the ruined castle, thefigure turned to stone, and strange temporaljuxtapositions creating a jarring dissonance—all characteristic of “Auf einer Burg,” while thewider theme of enticement in the depths of theforest and the undoing of a proud knight recalls“Waldesgespräch.”3 The attentive reader ofEichendorff would find the parallels almost lim-itless, starting perhaps with the attempted se-duction of Friedrich in Countess Romana’scastle in book II of Ahnung und Gegenwart.4And the final passage describes the nightmar-ish dream of Prince Romano from Viel Lärmenum Nichts, which recapitulates the motive ofthe beloved waiting in the garden from “In derFremde” and that of the soul taking wing onein altes, schönes Lied and flying nach Hauseacross a moonlit landscape, found in Schu-mann’s “Intermezzo” and “Mondnacht.” Theending, however, with its warning of Romanticself-infatuation and narcissism, is distinctlydarker than that of either of those two songsand approaches the psychological disturbanceof the former setting in Schumann’s cycle.5

What these examples clearly illustrate is theuse of a limited range of images, themes, char-acter names, and situations recurring through-out Eichendorff’s narrative prose and interpo-lated poetry. “There is scarcely another writerin the German language whose entire literaryproduction is so self-reminiscent as Eichen-

1Joseph von Eichendorff, Sämtliche Gedichte (Frankfurt:Insel, 2001), 173–74.

2Joseph von Eichendorff, Dichter und ihre Gesellen(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987), book II, chap. 15, 122–24; DasMarmorbild, in Sämtliche Erzählungen (Stuttgart: Reclam,1990), 35–38; cf. Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, chap.7 (Sämtliche Erzählungen, 143–44).3Eichendorff, Die Zauberei im Herbste, in Sämtliche Erzäh-lungen, 19–21.4Joseph von Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart (Stuttgart:Reclam, 1998), chap. 13, 165–71.5Eichendorff, Viel Lärmen um Nichts, in Sämtliche Erzäh-lungen, 211–12.

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dorff” claims Oskar Seidlin.6 These common-alities do not serve to impart a unity to thelarger body of work but if anything may have abewildering effect, reappearing in kaleidoscopicvariations throughout. Episodes appear almostinterchangeable; one scene could often be trans-posed directly into another. “Seldom in Eichen-dorff is a particular landscape linked with aparticular plot event or experience of a person”explains Richard Alewyn in a classic study ofthe poet. A scene “could be missing from itsposition without leaving behind a gap. It couldappear at a hundred other places in his work,and would be no less in place.”7 Also apparentis the downplaying of any clear sense of plot.The situations described above are largely sen-sory evocations of atmosphere and feeling; theyare dreamlike, fantastical, at once in motionbut strangely static.8 Image follows image withlittle causal link in evidence. What narrative oraction that there is appears elementary if notsimply confusing; any sense of dramatic ten-sion resides in a disparity between subjectiveperceptions and objective reality.

Something is often wrong at the heart ofthese scenes. For all the beautiful allure of theRomantic visions—moonlight, the garden ofred and white roses, glimmering statues of gods,nightingales—danger or deception lurks underthe surface. And yet, while the positive conno-tations a situation seems to promise may oftenprove deceptive, here and there an identicalscenario in another context may turn out forthe better. (Is the second scene, the enchantedItalian night, positive or negative? In virtuallyall instances in Eichendorff, this scenario signi-fies dangerous enticement through sensual loveand poetic fantasy, one to which the protago-nist may either succumb [Otto] or in somecases manage to escape [Florio in Marmorbild].

For once, in “Schöne Fremde,” the aptly namedhero is indeed fortunate and does end up withhis beloved Fiametta at the end of the novel.Yet the literary depictions are indistinguish-able from each other.) As so often in Eichendorff,there is frequently a sense that time (and per-haps space too) is “out of joint.” Incompatibletemporal levels are superimposed: our belovedis waiting for us in the rose garden despitehaving died so many years ago; autumn passesto spring in a single night and years have passedsince the castle stood in full splendor. We havebeen lost to the world—or to ourselves—for anindeterminate time.

The operative word here is Verwirrung—con-fusion, bewilderment. “The word ‘wirr’ is oneof his favorites,” observed Theodor W. Adornoin a pioneering account of Eichendorff from1957. “It proclaims the suspension of the ego,its disclosure to a chaotic urging.”9 Eichendorff’sphantasmal images are at once ultra-Romanticand highly critical of Romanticism, of the en-ticements of nature, erotic love, and even theartistic imagination. Through such means, hecreates a vision of the world as profoundly am-biguous and confusing, where stable notions ofthe self are constantly imperiled and attemptsto make narrative sense of the succession ofexternal events and impose casual order on ourlives are often in doubt. It will doubtless nothave escaped the reader that such a worldviewresonates with what is surely the most cel-ebrated musical setting of Eichendorff’s work,and its problematized reception down to thepresent day.

Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis has longlain in the penumbra cast by its fellow cyclesfrom the composer’s famous “year of song” of1840, Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und Leben.It is not that anyone disputes the quality ofSchumann’s music: indeed this collection—awork which, as John Daverio claims, “in sheerbeauty and lyric intensity, is perhaps unsur-passed among Schumann’s cycles”—may wellbe one that many Schumannianer have secretly

6Oskar Seidlin, Versuche über Eichendorff (Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965), 260.7Richard Alewyn, “Eine Landschaft Eichendorffs,”Euphorion 51 (1957), reprinted in Probleme und Gestalten(Frankfurt: Insel, 1974), 206, 205.8Eichendorff’s dynamic landscapes, involving the exten-sive use of spatial prepositions, directional verbal prefixesand untypical employment of the accusative instead of thedative, are justifiably famous: see the studies by Alewyn,“Eine Landschaft Eichendorffs,” and Leo Spitzer, “Zu einerLandschaft Eichendorffs,” Euphorion 52 (1958): 142–52.

9Theodor W. Adorno, “Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs,” inNoten zur Literatur I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1958), 121(“es meldet die Suspension des Ichs, seine Preisgabe an einchaotisch Andrängendes an”).

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admired the most.10 The problem essentiallylies in the designation of the opus as a cycleand the precise type of coherence the twelvesongs are felt to possess.11 Views on the matterare divided. Some commentators purport to findan underlying story or at least a central unify-ing protagonist holding the set of twelve songstogether.12 More common is a concession thatthere is no clear narrative to the collection andpossibly no single persona behind it, either; asmost writers are aware, the poems are drawnfrom separate sources, and several were sungby different characters, both male and female,in their original prose context.

Even after professions of such justifiable cau-tion, however, some form of subjective and(broadly speaking) narrative continuity is al-most invariably smuggled in to such accounts.The Liederkreis, so it is claimed, traces a suc-cession of emotional or spiritual states, an ex-pressive trajectory, often split into two smallerhalf-cycles, finding its fulfillment in the lastsong, “Frühlingsnacht.” Coherence may befound in “general emotional movement”whereby “two balanced arches of emotion . . .transform the poetic mood from introvertedmelancholy to exuberant joy.”13 Apparently an

overriding narrative and central protagonisthave disappeared. But still, who is finding ful-fillment in the spring garden by night? Whoseis the consciousness that progresses from feel-ings of alienation through expectation andepiphany to joy (it is not merely the listener’sthat is meant)? A shadowy subject as the cen-tral manifold for these impressions, soul-states,or moods reemerges even as it is denied. Assoon as some larger course is traced across thesesongs, be it the love between man and woman,the increasing union with nature, or the pathto spiritual transcendence, some tacit form ofcausality and meaningful temporal progressionis introduced, one which implicates a humanprotagonist as necessary subject for the diverseemotions and sensory impressions foundthroughout the cycle.

This problematizing of narrative coherence,of a central protagonist, of a unified self assubject, is not merely incidental to the cycle, Icontend, but might profitably be viewed as es-sential to its meaning. Indeed, Schumann’swork, and its reception history, offers a reflec-tion of one of Eichendorff’s overriding themes,one to which the writer continually returnedin his fiction and poems—the search for deepermeaning amidst the confusing mass of experi-ences surrounding us. This article proposes ap-plying an Eichendorffian aesthetic to Schu-mann’s Liederkreis, seeing the recurring Ro-

10John Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a “New Po-etic Age” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 215.11The existence of two versions of op. 39—the 1842 edi-tion, starting with “Der frohe Wandersmann,” and a sec-ond edition from 1850, which replaced this song with thefirst “In der Fremde” setting (“Aus der Heimat hinter denBlitzen rot,” which appears to have been Schumann’s origi-nal conception)—has further complicated discussions ofthe work’s unity. In case any ambiguity arises the readermay assume that I am referring to the familiar secondedition in the following discussion.12See, for instance, Barbara Turchin, “Schumann’s SongCycles: The Cycle within the Song,” this journal 8/3 (1985):236–37, or Jon W. Finson, “The Intentional Tourist: Ro-mantic Irony in the Eichendorff Liederkreis of RobertSchumann,” in Schumann and His World, ed. R. LarryTodd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 160.More implicitly, the idea that there is a single protagonistbehind the moods and feelings described in the cycle issupported by Daverio (Robert Schumann, 214–15) and inJürgen Thym’s most recent account, “A Cycle in Flux:Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis,” in Of Poetry andSong: Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Lied (Roch-ester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010), 375.13The passage cited is from Karen A. Hindenlang,“Eichendorff’s Auf einer Burg and Schumann’s Liederkreis,Opus 39,” Journal of Musicology 8/4 (1990): 570, but com-parable formulations may be found throughout the litera-ture on op. 39. See Adorno, “Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs”

(“Coda: Schumanns Lieder”), 137; Jürgen Thym, The SoloSong Settings of Eichendorff’s Poems by Schumann andWolf (Ph.D. diss. Case Western Reserve University, 1974),219–20; Barbara Turchin, Robert Schumann’s Song-Cyclesin the Context of the Early Nineteenth-Century Liederkreis(Ph.D. diss. Columbia University, 1981), 272–83; PatrickMcCreless, “Song Order in the Song Cycle: Schumann’s‘Liederkreis,’ Op. 39,” Music Analysis 5/1 (1986): 25, andJon Finson, Robert Schumann: The Book of Songs (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 91–92. A simi-lar duality is even found in David Ferris’s important studySchumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis and the Genre of theRomantic Cycle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),probably the account most critical of earlier attempts atfinding unity in Schumann’s work. For Ferris, “there is nosingle narrator, nor even the hint of a plot” (208); yet,despite his well-founded skepticism about earlier narrativistor expressivist readings of coherence, the author still pro-poses that the work “symbolizes the inner growth of thelyric subject,” “an ongoing process of spiritual growth”culminating in transcendence (212).

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mantic images, absence of clear narrative or-der, temporal dislocation and sense of loss ofself, as profoundly reflecting the concerns ofEichendorff’s work. It is not that Schumann’scycle does possess a unified narrative and cen-tral protagonist, nor that it should simply beseen as disparate group of songs, but—some-what more dialectically—–that the tension be-tween the two alternatives is the most crucialfactor in coming to an aesthetic understandingof the work. Unity is problematized as an es-sential part of the cycle, both at the level of itsindividual songs and in attempts to trace anylarger causal progression or narrative across theset of twelve.14

“Who can intimate what the secretive mur-muring of the dreaming woods wish to pro-claim to me?—I hear the streams running be-low, and know not where they lead, I am so fullof shimmers and sounds and love, and yet knownot where my future sweetheart lives!”15 Theterm “phantasmagoria” is not commonplace inEichendorff circles but is nonetheless foundfrom time to time in scholarly discussion of hiswork. I am using it here to signify those re-peated images and verbal formulations that pos-sess an enticing yet often deceptive character,above all those associated with the night andits Romantic enchantments. These should bedistinguished from similar formulae—normallythose bound up with dawn, morning, and thearrival of God’s light—which appear invariablyto have a positive connotation for Eichendorff.16

To the extent that its songs designate a tempo-ral location, Schumann’s op. 39 appears to oc-

cupy a predominantly nocturnal, or at leastcrepuscular, realm.17

Phantasmagoria, originating in the namecoined for early-nineteenth-century illusory vi-sual displays, relies on visual imagery andsound; it creates the illusion of movement butoffers no narrative and is marked by a sense ofirreality and the capacity for provoking cogni-tive uncertainty or fear.18 The term appearstailor-made for describing Eichendorff’s noc-turnal evocations, with their dynamic quality,concentration on image and sound, frequentnarrative disjunction, and constant capacity tosuggest psychological disorientation. As schol-ars have also argued, music may be ideallysuited to producing phantasmagoric effects,powerful as it is in conveying mood and atmo-sphere, a sense of motion unallied with anyobvious physical object, and a comparativeweakness for imparting narrative.19 Schumann’smusic in particular has often been character-ized in analogous terms. This is a music that,in the words of Roland Barthes, “continuouslyrefers to concrete things: seasons, times of theday, landscapes, festivals, professions. But thisreality is threatened with disarticulation, dis-sociation, with movements . . . ceaselessly ‘mu-tant’: nothing lasts long, each movement inter-rupts the next: this is the realm of the inter-mezzo, a rather dizzying notion that extends toall of his music.”20 Schumann’s second “In derFremde” setting may stand as a prototypicalexample of such phantasmagoric Verwirrung atthe level of the individual song. Eichendorff’s

14To this extent, my account situates itself broadly in therecent tradition of “deconstructive” or “fragmentary” stud-ies of Schumann, such as the work of Ferris, or BeatePerrey, Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics: Frag-mentation of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2002), or Lawrence Kramer, “Rethinking Schu-mann’s Carnaval: Identity, Meaning, and the Social Or-der,” in Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Ber-keley: University of California Press, 2002), 100–32.15Eichendorff, Viel Lärmen um Nichts, 217. The passage,unexpectedly adopting an authorial voice, is evidently in-tended as a parody of the author’s own style and favoredimages.16For instance, Eichendorff’s favored word “Aurora,” thearchetypal closing phrase “die Sonne ging prächtig auf,” ormore neutral idioms such as “alle/unzählige Vögelnsangen.”

17“Intermezzo” implicates no specific time of day; only“Auf einer Burg” involves a daytime setting without alsodescribing the coming of evening or night.18The term “phantasmagoria” was introduced in 1802 inreference to spectral illusions evoked by magic lanterns.By revealing the deceptive nature of human perception itafforded a subjectivization of vision and offered an explo-ration of the darker realm of the unconscious. See TerryCastle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and theMetaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry 15/1(1988): 26–61.19Thomas Grey, “Fingal’s Cave and Ossian’s Dream: Mu-sic, Image, and Phantasmagoric Audition,” in The ArtsEntwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Cen-tury, ed. Marsha L. Morton and Peter L. Schmunk (NewYork: Garland, 2000), 83.20Roland Barthes, “Loving Schumann,” in The Responsi-bility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Repre-sentation, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985),295.

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poem (one of the half dozen in op. 39 not origi-nally drawn from a larger prose work) is a modelof sensory blurring and confusion. In the recur-ring murmur of sounds and fantastical flickerof moonlight the protagonist knows neitherwhere nor when he is. Alienated from reality,from the bearings of space around him and thetime of the present, he becomes lost in hissubjunctive mood of fantasy.

Ich hör’ die Bächlein rauschenIm Walde her und hin,Im Walde in dem Rauschen,Ich weiß nicht, wo ich bin.

Die Nachtigallen schlagenHier in der Einsamkeit,Als wollten sie was sagenVon der alten, schönen Zeit.

Die Mondesschimmer fliegen,Als säh ich unter mirDas Schloß im Tale liegen,Und ist doch so weit von hier!

Als müßte in dem GartenVoll Rosen weiß und rot,Meine Liebste auf mich warten,Und ist doch [so] lange tot.21

(I hear the brooklets rushingIn the woods fro and to,In the woods in the rustling,I know not where I am.

The nightingales resoundHere in the solitude,As if they wished to tell somethingOf the beautiful times of old.

The shimmering moonbeams fly,As if I saw below meThe castle lying in the valley,And yet it is so far from here!

As if in the gardenFull of white and red roses,My darling must be waiting for me,And yet she is [so] long dead.)

Schumann’s setting responds to the poet’s be-witching vision by circling round and round on

itself in a dizzying ceaseless shimmer of six-teenth-note movement, tracing recurring har-monic cycles on multiple levels that forestallany larger sense of directed purpose (ex. 1). Aswith the preceding “Auf einer Burg,” Schumannsets Eichendorff’s four stanzas to two pairs ofmusical verses, creating a larger two-part AB|ABdesign, with a brief coda that threatens to cycleback to the opening material, as if the musicwould repeat indefinitely. On a smaller scalethe accompaniment alternates at one-measureintervals throughout, between a running legatofigure in octaves in the accompaniment (sug-gestive, perhaps, of the bewitching murmuringof brooklets running confusedly “fro and to” inthe woods around us) and a quicksilver har-monic texture broken between the two handsthat supports the detached vocal phrases. Inthe first and third stanzas the latter circlesthrough a recurring i–6

3 –iv–V cadential pattern,which in turn oscillates between tonic anddominant; the alternating stanzas trace sequen-tially descending Phrygian progressions slip-ping away to the illusory regions of the sub-dominant minor and relative major. Only inthe very last measures does the music breakfree of this incessant harmonic cycle, but evenhere, in a typically enigmatic moment ofSchumannesque understatement, the realiza-tion that his beloved is already dead seemsbarely to register on the protagonist. The phraseneeds to be repeated twice, each time withincreasing cadential definition, before the flowof sixteenth notes disperses in a distinctly un-easy plagal close.

As we have seen, Eichendorff’s formula isthe concatenation of alluring images withoutany necessary connection or narrative threadholding them together, often followed (as herein “In der Fremde”) by a dark twist or Stim-mungsbruch. The poems Schumann selectedfor his Liederkreis are particularly rich in ex-amples. In “Waldesgespräch,” for instance:

A hunter spies a beautiful woman alone in the forestand decides to lead her home. The hunter becomesthe hunted; he will never leave her forest home.

Or twofold in “Auf einer Burg”:

A knight stands watch in his castle tower; the knighthas been dead for hundreds of years. Down on the

21Eichendorff, Sämtliche Gedichte, 173–74; the word “so”was added by Schumann.

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Example 1 (continued)

Rhine a wedding party sails by, the musicians areplaying gaily; the beautiful bride is in tears.

Even in “Wehmut” we find a similar reversal:

I can often sing as though I were happy. Yet no onefeels the deep pain in the song.

In some instances the warning is directedagainst the dangers and deceptions that lurk inthe external world:

Be on guard, for your friend is plotting ill against you(“Zwielicht”).

Possibly it is nothing less than a loss of thesubject’s own sense of identity that is at stake

here, the “self-alienation of the ego” as Adornosays with reference to this song.22

One of the clearest illustrations of such dis-sociation of images, and the problematizationof the subject perceiving them, is the eleventhsong in the cycle, “Im Walde”:

A wedding procession passes by; the observer hearsbirds calling. A merry hunt flashes past, the riderssounding their horns. The sounds have already diedaway. Night descends. The subject feels an unac-countable fear.

For all the apparent cheerfulness of the openingimages (as so often, both visual and sonic) there

22Adorno, “Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs,” 121.

209


is a peculiarly disconcerting quality to the ac-count. How are the external impressions con-nected, and what is the relation of the per-ceiver to them? One can barely speak of narra-tive here. The events related are episodic innature, passing vignettes of outdoor life, whosetemporal succession appears chronologicallyconsistent yet strangely dissociated: we mightsuppose some time has elapsed between thewedding and the hunt, and certainly before theonset of evening, but all is compressed into afew lines without any causal link being offered.A first-person subject position is given inEichendorff’s second line (“Ich hörte die Vögelschlagen”), but nothing is known of the per-ceiver beyond the perception he (or she) has.

A succession of external impressions with-out any logical link passes over the subject.Before we know it, all has vanished. What re-mains? Suddenly the emptiness in the centerbecomes palpable: we feel afraid. Eichendorff’sconception might serve as a paradigmatic ex-pression of the nature of the modern self—theHumean “bundle of perceptions,” a series ofsense impressions in constant flux with nocausal links demonstrable among them, thevacant stage on which these phantasmagoricimages glide in and out. If, as Hume holds, “Inever catch myself without a perception, andnever observe anything but the perception,”how can one ever know one’s own self?23 Theanswer lies here in the fear that suddenly over-takes us, in feeling (Gefühl)—for the GermanRomantics the only way we can obtain unme-diated access to the self.24

The dissociation of scenes is already mani-fest in Eichendorff’s poem, but Schumann’s set-ting responds in kind through its continual har-monic slippage between harmonic centers anda corresponding fragmentation of the musical-poetic discourse. In harmonic layout the songis formed from the large-scale composing-outof an ^8–�^7–^6– ^7–^8 schema (ex. 2). Starting fromthe tonic A major, the successive images chart

a large-scale movement down via tonicizationsof �^7 (G major, leading plagally to D major), ^6 (F major) and back up to ^7 (G minor), prolongingthe dominant E for several measures before asomewhat indecisive return to A at the end(probably still heard in a plagal relation to E).Although the opening music is as merry ascould be wished (the 68 time signature and bounc-ing rhythm recall a hunting topic), the abruptshifts between tonal centers and constant am-biguity between tonic and dominant relationssplinter any sense of continuity and associa-tion across the successive images. No one har-monic shift is the same as another: A majorleads to G by abrupt shift down a tone (withcheerfully rustic parallels); D major to F bysingle-voice semitonal shift followed by com-mon-tone linkage; F to G minor via the pass-ing I—>ii modulation already present in theoriginal phrase; and G minor to E via aLeittonwechsel shift. And apart from the large-scale dominant prolongation near the end (per-haps compensatory, though as we have seeneven this dominant function is undercut), whatis conspicuous throughout is the complete ab-sence at a medium level of conventional domi-nant-tonic tonal articulation. The successiveepisodes are held together merely by an ab-stract linear thread.

As the music progresses and the afternoonturns without warning to evening, the dynamiclevel drops to pianissimo, the boisterous re-peated rhythmic figure in the accompanimentattenuates into a single inner voice, and majorturns to minor. Most curiously of all,Schumann’s setting of Eichendorff’s final line(“Und mich schauert im Herzensgrunde”) con-veys little of the dread that might be expectedfrom the words. As with other examples inSchumann (the Heine settings from the sameyear, for instance), the disjunction cannot beunintentional. Perhaps the amelioration of thepoem’s disconcerting tone is made to smooththe emotional progression to the joy of thefinal “Frühlingsnacht” in Schumann’s cycle.Or, informed by Eichendorff’s narrative prac-tice, one could point to the hymnlike tone ofthese closing measures as seeking the only so-lace from loss of self in religion. In Eichendorff’sstories it is often an appeal to God or a pioussong sung by a voice in the distance that saves

23David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A.Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 252.24See Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: FromKant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress, 2003), esp. 69–101.

210

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC � 68 � � � � ��

Es zog ei - ne Hoch - zeit den Berg ent - lang,

� 68 � �� 68 � � � � � � � ��

�

�

��

� � � � � �� ich hör - te die Vö - gel schla - gen;

� ��

��

� � � � � � �� da blitz - ten viel Rei - ter, das Wald - horn klang, das

� ��

��

�

� � �

�

�

� � � � � � � �� war ein lu - sti - ges Ja - gen!

� ��

� � ��

��

� � � � �� Und eh’ ich’s ge - dacht, war al - les ver -hallt.

� ��

� ��

� � ��

7

13

18

23

Ziemlich lebendig ritard.

ritard. Im Tempo

ritard.

ritard. Im Tempo�

ritard.Im Tempo

ritard.

Example 2: Schumann: “Im Walde,” Liederkreis, op. 39, no. 11.

211


�

� � � � � �� Die Nacht be - de - cket die Run - de, nur von den

� ��

�

�

�

� � �� Ber - gen noch rau - schet der Wald, und mich schau - ert’s im Her - zens -

� � ��

� � � �� grun - de, und mich schau - ert’s im Her - zens - grun - de.

� � ��

� � � � � � � � � � � ��

��

28

34

40

ritard.

ritard. Im Tempo

�

Example 2 (continued)

25For instance, the song Florio hears sung by Fortunatooutside Venus’s palace in Marmorbild and his inner pleafor God not to let him go astray in the world, which causeher enchantment to crumble (60–61), or the NachtliedFriedrich hears sung by the voice of Leontin outsideRomana’s castle in Ahnung und Gegenwart (chap. 13, 170–71).

the erring protagonist from utter ruin.25 Nei-ther reading offered here strikes me as entirelyconvincing. Here, as so often, the song remainsfittingly enigmatic.

The conjunction of disparate episodes wit-nessed here in “Im Walde”—their running onwithout measure of temporal succession—points to the problem of the constitution oftime for the modern subject. Elsewhere in thecycle, Eichendorff creates yet more jarring dis-

sonances between temporal levels by juxtapos-ing historical layers without offering any ex-planatory mediation or a consistent subject po-sition. Foremost among such examples is “Aufeiner Burg.” Schumann’s response to this poemis justly celebrated as one of the most extraor-dinary songs in the cycle, with its bare, archaicimitative writing, the endless question markover its tonality (is it in A minor as the keysignature suggests, or rather in E minor as thegreater part of the music implies?), and grind-ing diatonic dissonances that scar its seem-ingly imperturbable course. The term “time-less” is often encountered in descriptions ofthis song, but it might be more apt to read thedisorientating effect as resulting from a senseof time being “out of joint,” created by the

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overlapping and clashing between incommen-surable timescales.

These features reach their apex at the end ofthe second stanza (mm. 14–18)—coinciding withthe only attempted confirmation of the nomi-nal A-minor tonic in the song. But they are setup in the harmonic and metric dissonancesinstigated by the opening of this verse. Havingmoved to C major, from m. 9, both the vocalpart and accompaniment trace a sequentiallyascending pattern in two-measure units (the ^5–^1–^6 of the vocal line reworking the contour ofthe opening verse). But the two processes arehalf a measure out of phase, the piano initiat-ing its cycles a half note too early, in an ex-ample of what Harald Krebs would call metric“displacement dissonance.”26 The effect maybe shown by rewriting the passage in ex. 3a asgiven in ex. 3b, where the reworked overlap-ping of linear processes results merely in mildpassing dissonances between a consonant start-ing and end point.

The result of Schumann’s temporal misalign-ment is an increasing buildup of diatonicallydissonant chords arising purely from the linearlogic and holding no functional explanation—first sevenths (mm. 103–113), then three-noteclusters embedded within triads. The momen-tary relief of a pure A-minor triad on the firstbeat of m. 14 is deceptive, as the melodic peakin the second half of the measure and metricdownbeat of the piano’s displaced phrase cyclescoincide with the most dissonant sonority inthe piece—a chord composed of four adjacenttones [C, D, E, F]. There is a sense of inevitabil-ity to this dissonance that is partially mislead-ing, in that the piano part has at this momentbroken out from the previous linear model infavor of a functional cadential approach; theoutlandish [C, D, E, F] cluster is rationalizablein quite conventional tonal terms as a 9–8 sus-pension, doubled in sixths, over a pre-domi-nant ii6. But perhaps this is the irony: left un-touched, the sequence would have led to a con-sonant F-major triad on this beat. Forcing func-tional behavior upon the music creates more

dissonance than if time had been left to run itscourse. Without this imposition the sequencecould have carried on indefinitely without everfinding its way to the supposed tonic of A mi-nor.

Just as powerful is the grating dissonance atthe cadence in m. 17, the bass line resolvingprematurely to the tonic while the harmoniesand melodic line remain fixed to the V4–3 sus-pension and continue with utter disregard ofthe process taking place beneath. This momenthas been created from the unexpected elonga-tion of the vocal part in the preceding measuresand the stalling of the cadential progression. Inall seven earlier instances Schumann has fittedthe four trochaic feet of Eichendorff’s line intotwo measures. Here, though, the final four syl-lables (“Stil-len Klau-se”) are stretched out fromone to three measures, while the harmonic ap-proach to the tonic is already in danger of beingretarded by the start of the line at m. 15 andbecomes yet more so with the cadentially su-perfluous move to vii7/V for the second half ofthe measure. If anywhere music is able to showtime “out of joint,” falling to ruin before ourears, it is surely here.

“Do you see the mountain range over there?” hesaid, pointing to the distant mountains. “There liesa much more beautiful land . . . do you hear, as now,amidst the wide silence the streams and brooks mur-muring and enticing you wondrously on? If I goyonder into the mountains, I would go onwards andever onwards, you would become old in the mean-time and the castle would also crumble and thegarden long lie deserted and in waste.”—With thesewords I recalled my dream once again. . . . A fear Ihad never felt before overcame me.27

Eichendorff’s fiction constantly points to deepermeanings hidden under the surface, latent con-nections between characters and events, an un-derlying identity ever on the verge of articula-tion. Something about Leontin remindsFriedrich of his elder brother, Rudolf, who wasenticed as a youth into the more beautiful land

26Harald Krebs, Fantasy Pieces: Metrical Dissonance inthe Music of Robert Schumann (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1999), 33–45.

27Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart, chap. 5, 50;Friedrich is revealing his innermost self in confiding hischildhood memories of his long-lost brother Rudolf; Rosais falling asleep.

213

BENEDICTTAYLORSchumann’sLiederkreis� ! � ��

Ein - ge - schla - fen auf der Lau - er o - ben ist der al - te Rit - ter, drü - ben ge - hen Re - gen-schau - er

� ! " � � � � � � �� #

� ! � � � � �� " � ��

�

�

� � �� und der Wald rauscht durch das Git - ter. Ein - ge-wach - sen Bart und Haa - re und ver - stei - nert Brust und Krau - se,

� � � � � � � � � " � �� " � � " � ��

� � �� # � � �sitzt er vie - le hun - dert Jah - re o - ben in der stil - len Klau - se.

� " � �� "" � � � � � �� "" ��

� " � ��

��

7

13

Adagio

"

"

a. first and second stanzas, mm. 1–21.

� � �� Ein - ge - wach - sen Bart und Haa - re und ver - stei - nert Brust und Krau - se, sitzt er vie - le hun - dert Jah - re

� � � " " " " "" � � � � � � � � � �� " " " " " "� � � � � � � � � � � � ��

9

( )(delayed)

b. rewritten second stanza, mm. 9–14.

Example 3: Schumann: “Auf einer Burg,” Liederkreis, op. 39, no. 7.

214

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

beyond the mountains and has never been seenagain. (We read the entire novel expecting therevelation that Leontin is this brother, only tobe disappointed. A disillusioned and jadedRudolf turns up late in book three. But maybethere was another brother. . . . We never learn.)Characters shudder with unexplained fear onhearing news; on first seeing him Rosa dreamsthat she has known Friedrich for a long time;the girl in the painting reminds Friedrich ofsomeone from his childhood; the landscape isstrangely familiar, as if he had encountered itlong ago in his past or in a dream.28 Sometimesthese tantalizing hints have narrative conse-quences and are linked at a deeper level. (Thegirl in the painting is the daughter of his brotherand their childhood playmate Angelina andnone other than Erwin, the supposed “youth”who has attached himself to Friedrich; this isthe castle and picturesque surroundings whereFriedrich grew up.) Sometimes, however, theydo not: the promise of meaning is deceptive,the image phantasmagoric.

The recurring images and themes acrossEichendorff’s works, and especially the fitfulsuggestions of (perhaps illusory) deeper con-nections within them, offer a novel perspectiveon the relationship between the songs inSchumann’s cycle. Beyond the numerous re-curring poetic motives (night-time, moonlight,woods, birds, castles, dreams), a feature of op.39 familiar to many listeners is how here andthere unexpected connections between the in-dividual songs crop up—a motivic shape heldin common, an analogous harmonic scheme, asalient repeated progression.

One of the most readily apparent of suchlinks is found between “Auf einer Burg” andthe adjacent “In der Fremde,” whose melodicline clearly reworks the falling fifth and filled-out rising third of the preceding song; the tonalambiguity between E and A minor in the formersetting, and the uneasy close on E as an appar-ent dominant, is likewise confirmed in the clear

A minor of the second song. Similarly, despitesome surface differences, the harmonic tem-plate initiating each of the three verses in“Frühlingsnacht” (I–ii–iii–ii [F –g –a –g ]) re-verses the larger tonal arch we witnessed in thepreceding “Im Walde” (I–�VII–VI– vii [A–G–F –g ]). And throughout the cycle there are numer-ous passing hints of thematic interconnections.Sometimes one appears to stumble into an-other song for a moment: toward the end of“Im Walde” (mm. 32–38), we suddenly run intothe ascending sequence from the second stanzaof “Auf einer Burg” for no evident reason (com-pare ex. 2 and ex. 3a; the reference is quiteunmistakable; whether it means anything isless clear). The approach to the final cadence in“Waldesgespräch” (mm. 60–61) conjures up thefamous repose toward the tonic seventh thatreleases the enormous dominant prolongationof “Mondnacht”; both songs are in E major,and they share a similar vocal line at this point.Just as with Eichendorff’s repeated scenes andsituations, we might easily slip from one pieceinto the other here. Most frequently theorizedis a motivic cell consisting of a rising fourth orfifth, which appears at the opening of “In derFremde” (mm. 9–10) and may be perceived toreemerge in many of the following settings. Itsmotivic transformations across the larger spanof the cycle are often presented as ensuring notmerely musical linkage but also logical growthand progression.29

Many analysts have seized on these featuresto argue for the work as constituting a unifiedcycle: in the absence of an obvious externalnarrative, coherence and logical continuity arecreated by musical means (by implication, per-haps, a deeper, more satisfactory unity). Skep-tics, on the other hand, could argue that such

28For an account of these features, see Detlev W. Schumann,“Rätsel um Eichendorffs Ahnung und Gegenwart:Spekulationen,” in Ansichten zu Eichendorff: Beiträge derForschung 1958 bis 1988, ed. Alfred Riemen (Sigmaringen:Thorbecke, 1988), 206–38, who teases out many plot con-tradictions, red herrings, and enigmatic moments inEichendorff’s early novel.

29For a range of accounts outlining motivic connectionswithin the cycle, see Herwig Knaus, Musiksprache undWerkstruktur in Robert Schumanns Liederkreis (Munich:Emil Katzbichler, 1974), 5–12; Thym, “The Solo Song Set-tings,” 215–17; Turchin, “Schumann’s Song Cycles,” 240–43; McCreless, “Song Order in the Song Cycle,” 14–17;Daverio, Robert Schumann, 215–16; and Margaret ElaineHenry, Motivic Cross References in Schumann’s“Liederkreis,” Op. 39 (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester,2000). Ferris also points to “recompositional pairings” of“Frühlingsnacht” and “Intermezzo,” and “Mondnacht” and“Schöne Fremde” (Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis,141–67).

215


similarities might well arise from the nature oftonal grammar, or reflect aspects of Schumann’spersonal style, especially given that the com-poser wrote these songs in a flurry of activitywithin a few weeks of May 1840. For hermeneu-tists, the cross-reference clearly has some poeticmeaning: it might denote irony, for instance, orsignify transfiguration; witness how the evadedapproach to the tonic in “Waldesgespräch,” inwhich the protagonist is condemned never toleave the Lorelei’s forest home, is transformedinto a benign, spiritual home in “Mondnacht.”30

Understood within the Eichendorffian aestheticproposed here, the matter is deliberately leftuncertain. Schumann’s inter-song relationshipsseem to invite an interpretation which may notbe intended, which may or may not have deepermeaning. There are links between numbers, butthese are tantalizing stimuli to uncovering awider-ranging, deeper unity that possibly “isn’tthere” in the music, but merely created by theperceiver. This ambiguity is part of the enig-matic quality of the work, part of the worldviewexpressed by Eichendorff, and a quality longassociated with Schumann’s Romantic aesthet-ics.31

The urge to find deeper meanings and hid-den connections between songs finds its peakin attempts to find a larger narrative courseacross the work as a whole. The commonlyheld belief that the Liederkreis traces a redemp-tive course to a joyful conclusion seems to bebased to a considerable degree on the fact thatthe last song is to all appearances happy. Thepreceding five have not been, but by offeringjust one song in a strategic place, Schumannhas invited a larger interpretation that simplyis not warranted by the balance of expressivemoods and would be hard to justify as the logi-cal outcome of the stages that precede it. Andat this stage, too, another question must really

be posed: just how positive is the message of“Frühlingsnacht”? It would be hard to denythat Schumann’s song is one of the most ec-statically joyous outpourings in Romantic mu-sic; but deeper knowledge of Eichendorff’s im-agery, and indeed the previous setbacks in thecycle, would cause at least a tiny note of con-cern to creep in—not enough to diminish theeffect of the song when we are in the midst ofits performance, but sufficient to give us pausefor thought after its sounds have died away.

In Eichendorff, romantic love seldom solvesmuch. Some stories have a happy end, but manydo not, and when they do it is never with alover alone in a garden at night.32 Most worry-ing on this matter is the imagery Eichendorffdraws upon in this poem. Night, moonlight,nightingales, rustling groves, the garden in thebloom of spring: the scene is entrancing, but sooften dangerous. We are in the perilous realmof Venus.33 Barely concealed, too, is a tendencytoward Romantic solipsism, a fantasizing imagi-nation that perceives inanimate objects speak-ing to oneself, corroborating the love of a womanwho is conspicuously never actually present.For amidst all the romantic elation, where isthe beloved? Love scenes generally involve twopeople: here the ecstatic swelling of subjectiveemotion is in danger of overshadowing the iden-tity of the woman who the moon and the starsand the dreaming woods tell the protagonist ishis.34 Given the history throughout the cycle of

30On the latter setting, see especially the analysis by JanetSchmalfeldt, “Coming Home,” Music Theory Online 10/1(2004) http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.04.10.1/mto.04.10.1.schmalfeldt.html.31See John Daverio, “Schumann’s Systems of Musical Frag-ments and Witz,” in Nineteenth-Century Music and theGerman Romantic Ideology (New York: Schirmer, 1993),49–86; David Ferris, “‘Was will dieses Grau’n bedeuten?’:Schumann’s ‘Zwielicht’ and Daverio’s ‘Incomprehensibil-ity Topos,’” Journal of Musicology 22/1 (2005): 131–53.

32Closest to any putative narrative of Schumann’s cyclemight be Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (1826), whoselovable, bumbling musician hero wins his beloved Flora atthe end. This novella, widely read in Schumann’s day, andthe source for “Der frohe Wandersmann,” which appearsvirtually at the start, is the only narrative by Eichendorffthat ends in romantic fulfillment at night. (Times of dayare immensely important for Eichendorff: almost invari-ably, he prefers mornings for the concluding point of astory.) The protagonist is not alone, however, but amidst ahappy group of friends.33A point noted by Knaus, Musiksprache und Werkstruktur,88. For Eichendorff, the pagan forces of erotic love andspring are in eternal conflict with the higher spiritual truthof Christianity, an idea expressed at the end of DasMarmorbild and in Romana’s long recitation in chapter 12of Ahnung und Gegenwart.34One might think here of the fevered dreams of Otto inchapter 23 of Dichter und ihre Gesellen, alone in the moon-lit garden, surrounded by lilac blossoms and nightingales,and fantasizing that an imaginary beautiful woman livingin the deserted residence is enamored of him. At the end

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undercutting such moments of apparent fulfill-ment, can we fully believe she is really hisnow? Und ist doch lange tot: just think back tothe miraculous day of 18 May 1840, on whichSchumann not only wrote this “Frühlings-nacht” and the setting of “Wehmut,” but alsocomposed the second “In der Fremde.”35 In thespring garden of one, the beloved is strangelyabsent; in the other, the figure waiting in thegarden of red and white roses was long sincedead.

The Liederkreis has an absence at its verycenter—perhaps even a double absence, as thesubject often appears distracted or missing. Thecycle is filled with Romantic images of night-ingales and moonlit castles, of dreaming woods,rustling streams, and the sound of distant hunt-ing horns. But it is also shot through with un-easy images of loss, passing, absence, and phan-tasmagoric illusion. Figures are often missing,and joy can quickly turn to emptiness. Onlyonce in all of the thirteen songs is the object ofthe protagonist’s desire actually present; forthis one moment we even hear her voice. Andhere she turns out to be the Lorelei—and thesubject is lost.36

This is not to say that the close of“Frühlingsnacht” is not a happy end; just thatby the end of the cycle there is sufficient doubtcreated through the continual reversals to makeus wonder whether (to paraphrase Eichendorff’sTaugenichts) “all, all will be well!”37 We are

not sure, and this is the point. In Eichendorff,the same beauteous image may be redemptiveor fatally enticing; the problem his work con-tinually struggles with is how the “irdische”and “überirdische” melody running through-out the world can so often appear to be thesame.38

“‘My God!’ he exclaimed, ‘Count Leontin—from Ahnung und Gegenwart!’ ‘He is immedi-ately recognizable by the guitar’ added the ro-tund figure of Faber.”39 In his influential ac-count of Schumann’s cycle, Adorno adumbratesa number of features that most later commen-tators would follow him in observing, con-sciously or otherwise: these include the sym-metrical key scheme of the familiar 1850 ver-sion, moving from the F minor of the openingsong to F major at the end; the merging of thissuccession of tonalities with “a modulatorypath from melancholy to ecstasy”; and the di-vision of the cycle into two parts with a cae-sura after No. 6, “Schöne Fremde.” “This ar-chitectonic relationship expresses a poetic one,”Adorno adds: “The sixth song ends with theutopia of future great happiness, with presenti-ment [Ahnung]; the last, the Frühlingsnachtwith rejoicing: ‘Sie ist Deine, sie ist dein’, withthe present [Gegenwart].”40 Clearly, Adorno’sphrasing forms an allusion to the title ofEichendorff’s novel, a work mentioned severaltimes in his preceding discussion. But what arewe to make of this?

There have been some suggestions in theliterature that Schumann may have been allud-ing in his cycle’s succession of songs to the plotof Eichendorff’s novel, which provided thesource for four of its poems and is related indi-rectly to a fifth.41 Or, more accurately, some

of the chapter, in a strangely moving scene, the poet is ledby an orphaned child (perhaps a vision of himself) “nachHause,” to the “stille Zeit” in the “Waldeinsamkeit,” fromwhich this weary “Wandersmann” never wakes again. Theresonance with other songs in Schumann’s cycle shouldbe evident.35The autograph score reveals that the order committed topaper was “In der Fremde,” “Wehmut” (which Schumannappears to have partly conceived on the preceding day),and “Frühlingsnacht.” Moreover, he followed this songwith the unnerving setting of “Zwielicht” the next day,perhaps the darkest song in the cycle. A facsimile is repro-duced as an appendix to Knaus, Musiksprache undWerkstruktur.36This song might in any case be interpreted as one inwhich the “persona” is speaking in role, retelling a ballad(as in the original appearance of the poem in chapter 15 ofAhnung und Gegenwart, where its performance is sharedbetween Leontin and one of the young hunters [Romana]).37Eichendorff, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, 183. Abiographical explanation would obviously read the absent

beloved and purported happy ending as reflecting Robert’slove for Clara, from whom he was still separated, espe-cially in the work he claimed “contained much of her.”38Lawrence Radner, Eichendorff: The Spiritual Geometer(Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Studies, 1970), 2.39Eichendorff, Viel Lärmen um Nichts, 189: Prince Romanoencounters two characters from an earlier novel up tomischief in his own story.40Adorno, “Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs,” 136–37.41The opening “In der Fremde” is sung in Viel Lärmen umNichts by Julie, one of three characters from Ahnung undGegenwart to reappear (albeit in an ironic light) in thelater novella.

217


scholars have suggested that other scholars—namely Adorno and Herwig Knaus—have sug-gested Schumann may have been alluding tothe plot of Eichendorff’s novel.42 We can maketwo larger claims here.

First, it is extremely improbable thatSchumann selected his poems to correspond tothe plot of Ahnung und Gegenwart. Indeed, tothe extent that the Liederkreis does suggestsome overarching plot, one can safely say thatit is the complete reverse of what happens inthis novel. The disputed protagonist ofSchumann’s cycle ends up in a spring garden inthe ecstatic belief that his beloved is his. “Sieist mein!” he cried out to himself, “sie istmein!” So exclaims Friedrich thinking of hisbeloved Rosa in Ahnung und Gegenwart.43 Butthis is virtually at the start of the novel, inchapter 3; the love story gradually goes down-hill from this point on. Rosa, seduced by worldlyblandishments, is more or less raped in theforest by the philandering Prince at the close ofbook II (the scene foretold in the veiled warn-ing of “Zwielicht”), and at the end of the novelFriedrich turns his back on the world and theconfused present time that he feels to be so outof joint, and finds repose sequestered in thecloister. And to be fair, both Adorno and Knausare unlikely to have been implying the strongernarrative view attributed to them.44

But—far more significantly for this discus-sion—even if the poems had come from a singlework, the effect would not be much different:which is to say that the attempt to trace a clearnarrative thread through either of Eichendorff’snovels or most of his novellas is nearly as con-fusing as finding one in Schumann’s Liederkreis.And I would like to suggest that this quality—this affinity which may quite possibly be acci-dental—is nonetheless aesthetically fundamen-tal to an understanding of both artists’ works.What Schumann is doing, yoking together dif-ferent poems in such a way as to hold out thepossibility of a narrative order that perhaps isnever there, is homologous to the presentationof Eichendorff’s favorite themes of confusionand phantasmagoric enticement.

Let us take Ahnung und Gegenwart, Eichen-dorff’s longest and most important prose narra-tive and one which we have seen to be linkedin at least some ways to Schumann’s cycle. Alarge number of poems are interspersed through-out the novel—fifty-two, scattered across thetwenty-four chapters. Even by nineteenth-cen-tury standards this number was considered un-usually large.45 The poems are sung by a rangeof characters and are normally reported as be-ing overheard by another figure, even when thelatter is quite some distance away on anothermountain top; characters are remarkably adeptat discerning the words to a song in Eichen-dorff—perhaps because they are themselves al-ways breaking into song.

Of the four poems used in Schumann’sLiederkreis, two are sung by the youth Erwin(who after his death turns out to have been agirl, though the reader doesn’t know this untilthen), one is shared between Leontin and amysterious hunter (who is also revealed at thispoint to have been a woman, the seductive

42For instance, Barbara Turchin dismisses Knaus’s “inter-esting, but highly speculative” view that Schumann’s se-quence corresponds to the plot of Ahnung und Gegenwart(“Robert Schumann’s Song-Cycles,” 277–78); Ferris que-ries whether Adorno was intending to imply some narra-tive order by this reading (Schumann’s EichendorffLiederkreis, 256, n. 36).43Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart, chap. 3, 25. Thereis also a familiar image from the later poem “Mondnacht”that occurs in chap. 12: recognizing Rosa in the beautifulfigure before him, Friedrich feels that the moonlit eveningoutside “was to him the dawn [Aurora] of a future, wide,glorious life and his entire soul flew as with great wingsout into the wonderful prospect” (136–37). Again, the joyproves deceptive in the larger context of the novel.44As his earlier discussion of Eichendorff reveals, Adornoknew full well that this novel does not end in theprotagonist’s marriage (“Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs,”117)—at least of Friedrich’s. (It does end in the marriage ofthe secondary figure of Leontin, whose wife, Julie, latersings the song that opens the 1850 cycle. But this wouldagain imply a reversed temporal order.) Adorno’s allusionto the title (suggested to Eichendorff by Dorothea Schlegel)remains enigmatic: possibly it is no more than a literaryconceit. It is unclear what point Knaus is trying to make

by asserting that selection of four songs from Ahnung undGegenwart corresponds to the plot of the novel(Musiksprache und Werkstruktur, 14, an admittedly weakargument); one senses he wishes to strengthen the case forinterpreting individual songs in light of their original nar-rative context. But he does later explicitly claim thatSchumann’s eventual order across the whole cycle was“not based on any novelistic plot” and is “without pro-gression of external events” (17).45Witness the review in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,February 1819 (reprinted in the appendix to Ahnung undGegenwart, 368–69).

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Romana), and one is sung by a disembodiedvoice in the forest that may be Romana (butequally may not; Eichendorff loves insinuatingconnections that may well turn out to be de-ceptive or at least are never confirmed).46 Thepoems are all linked through being heard by asingle protagonist, in this case the novel’s cen-tral figure, Friedrich (we might say that thelistener is invited to occupy his subject posi-tion), though he often appears to be little morethan empty stage over which these assortedimpressions flit. Even if Schumann had set allfifty or so poems in their original order, therewould still be well-nigh no narrative continu-ity discernible in the resulting collection; theoverall effect would be no more coherent thanthe cycle he actually wrote.

Indeed, one can go further and say that eventhe prose narrative in Eichendorff can often beas episodic, bewildering and disconnected asthe extracted succession of poems found within.“Nothing much happens in Ahnung undGegenwart” asserts Egon Schwarz. “The maincharacters are always on the move, but hardlydo anything that would reveal personality ornarrative purpose.” “There is no firmly delin-eated plot, the characters are psychologicallyundeveloped,” and the succession of scenes ishighly episodic.47 “Usually a new chapter startswith a change in scenery or shift in perspec-tive, [being] devoted to a new character or writ-ten in another key.”48 Walther Killy likewise

speaks of the “addition of episodes” in Eichen-dorff’s novel, the “mere succession of eventsand situations that drive towards no goal.” “Inthe chance succession of life’s situations andthe incomprehensibility of their connection theenigmatic character of existence becomes evermore enigmatic.”49 And it is not simply thattwentieth-century critics have misunderstoodnineteenth-century standards of narrative con-tinuity. Contemporary reviews of the first pub-lication spoke of a “confusing mass of appear-ances” and noted that characters “were notpresented as finished personalities but hoveredin a half-light, to such extent that readers werein danger of losing themselves.” “The entirenovel has so suspended a stance; figures appearbathed in the breeze of Romanticism, and areessentially so far removed from real life thatany indication of time and place might betterhave been avoided.”50 Even the author seemedaware of this quality. “Your novel certainlycontains too many unsolved and enigmaticfigures, apparitions, and strange little incidents,that only make the reader uneasy” wrote Eich-endorff’s friend Count Loeben to the author—to which the latter noted “very true” twice inthe margins of the letter.51

We must be clear that this feature is notsimply the result of bad or faulty technique in ayouthful literary production. Eichendorff’s sec-ond and last novel, Dichter und ihre Gesellen,is at once more controlled and yet more kalei-doscopic in its teeming multiplicity; it is hardlyclear in this work who the central protagonistis.52 Eichendorff even appears to satirize this

46Women are always dressing up as men in Ahnung undGegenwart: Rosa does the same in the ill-fated hunt thatcloses book II. A point worth making here in the contextof whether Schumann’s cycle is better sung by a male orfemale voice is how often the gender of singing voices isunclear or indistinguishable for other characters inEichendorff (even when this would seem distinctly un-likely in a real-world scenario). In a sense, gender distinc-tions don’t matter; a soprano can vocally imitate a man inEichendorff’s fictional world. The idea that “Die Stille”and “Wehmut” are songs from a woman’s subject positionshould also not be fetishized: in context, these are songsthat are sung by a male character, Erwin (even if the “nureiner” of the former is slightly enigmatic, much about thischaracter is likewise). It is not until long afterward thatwe realize “he” was a “she” (and Friedrich’s niece, too).47Egon Schwarz, “Joseph von Eichendorff: Ahnung undGegenwart (1815),” reprinted in Ansichten zu Eichendorff:Beiträge der Forschung 1958 bis 1988, ed. Alfred Riemen(Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1988), 345, translation modifiedfrom a related English version of the discussion in Josephvon Eichendorff (New York: Twayne, 1972), 26, 25.48Schwarz, Joseph von Eichendorff, 30.

49Walther Killy, “Der Roman als romantisches Buch: ÜberEichendorffs Ahnung und Gegenwart,” in Wirklichkeit undKunstcharakter: Neun Romane des 19. Jahrhunderts(Munich: Beck, 1963), 46, 44.50Review in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, February 1819,Ahnung und Gegenwart, 368, 367, 368.51Cited by Schumann, “Rätsel um Eichendorffs Ahnungund Gegenwart,” 209.52It would seem to be Fortunat, but the figure of Victorbecomes gradually more important by the end. As theplural of the title might imply, one should probably notseek a single central subject in this novel. See furtherErnst L. Offermanns, “Eichendorffs Roman Dichter undihre Gesellen,” reprinted in Ansichten zu Eichendorff:Beiträge der Forschung 1958 bis 1988, ed. Alfred Riemen(Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1988), 151–69, who context-ualizes the novel through the teatro mundi trope ofEichendorff’s admired Calderón.

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aspect of his style in Viel Lärmen um Nichts(1832), the author having to step in as a charac-ter in his own novella to sort out the endlessconfusion. So what is the purpose of thisVerwirrung? What might this obscurity mean?

The ever-returning themes and images, theintimations of “hidden meanings behind a sur-feit of improbabilities,” the bewildering vari-ety of barely connected scenes—all instantiatea crucial aspect of the work’s message.53 Amongthe episodic succession of moods, feelings,scenes, and impressions the protagonist—andthe reader—attempts to piece together someorder and sense from the events around them.Narrative continuity and subjective identity arethe problems of the work, and they are notgiven but must be sought. There is plainly nodirect connection in plot between Ahnung undGegenwart and Schumann’s EichendorffLiederkreis: one should hardly expect there tobe one. Paradoxically, however, it is in the veryabsence of a clear plot—but with the continualinsinuation that there might be one, or shouldbe one, and that a meaningful narrative coher-ence is what the characters, and the reader orlistener, are struggling to find—that Schumann’swork approaches Eichendorff’s wider aesthetic,as realized in the particular style of this noveland throughout his writing by the phantasma-goric confusion of repeated images, scenes, se-cretive connections, and narrative dead ends.54

It is uncertain—and disputed—to what ex-tent Schumann might have known the novelsand novellas of Eichendorff. The immediatesource for op. 39 must have been the 1837 firstedition of Gedichter, as Knaus has shown, andthe only Eichendorff volume remaining in theSchumanns’ library today is an 1850 edition ofthe poems given to Clara by Brahms long after-ward.55 On one side, proponents of a link pointto the fact that from his earliest years,Schumann, the son of a bookseller, was wellread and had a developed literary taste, and was

thus extremely likely to have been acquaintedwith the well-known prose works of one of thepoets he idolized. (Eichendorff was as famousfor the novellas Taugenichts and Marmorbildas for his poetry during the 1830s.) Often, theysuggest, knowledge of the novelistic contextsheds light on the nature of Schumann’s set-ting.56 Skeptics, on the other hand, dismiss thisdiscussion as just speculation. The circumstan-tial evidence is inconclusive.57

I would like to think that the composer wasat least familiar with Eichendorff’s more popu-lar works at the time he wrote his Liederkreis,but admit there are no hard facts that willallow us either to affirm or deny this. What canat least be claimed is that if Schumann haddipped into Eichendorff’s fiction he would haveencountered a richly phantasmagorical and en-ticing confusion of images, events, and charac-ters, a worldview on the one hand distinct fromthat of Jean Paul or E. T. A. Hoffmann in itshighly critical attitude taken toward Romanti-cism, but nevertheless highly congruent withthe Romantic themes of those authors. Thatworldview would have surely resonated withthe artist who gave the world the kaleidoscopic“decentering of the subject” of his piano cyclesnot long before.58

In one important respect, however, Schu-mann and Eichendorff differ. For the RomanCatholic Eichendorff, it is only in religion thatcan one find a stable sense of self, a true home-coming in which one may attain peace in this

53The phrase is Schwarz’s (Joseph von Eichendorff, 34).54This reasoning may seem to some readers to be a case ofthe dark night in which all cows are black; I would rathersee it as the moonlit night in which all nightingales arebrown.55Knaus, Musiksprache und Werkstruktur, 95.

56See, for instance, Knause, Musiksprache und Werkstruk-tur; Reinhold Brinkmann, Schumann und Eichendorff:Studien zum Liederkreis Opus 39 (Munich: EditionText+Kritik, 1997), 70; Eric Sams, The Songs of RobertSchumann (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 93; GrahamJohnson, accompanying booklet to The Songs of RobertSchumann, vol. 10, Hyperion CDJ33110 (2007).57For instance, Schumann used a number of quotationsfrom the author as epigrams to the Neue Zeitschrift fürMusik, but these are from poems and all date from theyears following the composition of the Liederkreis.Christiane Tewinkel suggests that Schumann’s use ofEichendorff here largely corresponds to the image of thepious poet of nature and religion (Vom Rauschen singen:Robert Schumanns Liederkreis op. 39 nach Gedichten vonJoseph von Eichendorff [Würzburg: Königshausen &Neumann, 2003], 114).58The phrase is Roland Barthes’s, referring to Carnaval(“Loving Schumann,” 296).

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perplexing and often deceptive world. AsSchwarz explains, the purpose of the author’scritique of Romanticism’s seductive dangers isto give the impression “that human existenceis incomplete and confused if lived without aclear religious consciousness, and that a deepertruth lurks behind the surface appearances. Itis precisely this tormented quest for clarifica-tion . . . that impels the main figures towardtheir self-fulfillment.”59 Here Schumann andEichendorff part company. Schumann’s cycledoes not propose religion as a solution, butends in the personal ecstasy of the promise ofromantic love. Rather than the path to God,Schumann chooses love and subjective feel-ing—the way of young Otto, not Victor, of theworld-weary, disappointed Rudolf, not the de-vout Friedrich. It may end well, but may wellnot. Schumann’s protagonist(s) are condemnedto wander through the Romantic realm of thephantasmagoric, a world of beauty and enchant-ment, but one fraught with the attendant dan-gers of enticement and loss of self.

Schumann leaves us in the forest, as duskdescends and horn calls resound confusedlythrough the trees. So without a path we pressever onward; and the forest, and the night, maybe unending.

Here he suddenly stopped, inwardly alarmed; onecould hear singing deep in the garden; in the breezethat wafted towards them they could clearly makeout the following words:

Hear you not the trees rustling . . . enticing youdown . . . where many brooklets run wondrously inthe moonlight, and silent castles look down from onhigh? . . .

“That is the song!” cried Otto, and hurried to-tally bewildered up the mountain. But from belowthe song came anew:

Know you not the erring songs, from the beauti-ful times of old. . . .60

Subjective identity and the narrative orderon which it is supported and which it in turnsupports is a problem, foregrounded by the workof Eichendorff, that has accompanied

Schumann’s op. 39 throughout the latter’s re-cent reception history. The paradox of Schu-mann’s cycle, as Jon Finson observes, lies in“its various pairings and juxtapositions,” which“constantly invite a wanderer’s narrative whichdoes not exist, a coherence that never material-izes, an implied causality without effect.”61 Yetnearly all recent commentators, Finson (andmyself) included, resort at some level to char-acterizing the cycle in terms which cannot avoidimplying an underlying subject or “persona,”in such a way that at least some episodes areseen as standing in a meaningful causal rela-tion to each other. In other words a protosubjectand the beginnings of a narrative thread aresurreptitiously introduced.62 And this is entirelynatural.

As many philosophers have argued, narra-tive continuity is fundamental to the modernnotion of the self. Self and narrative appearmutually dependent: the modern subject “canonly find an identity in self-narration.” “Weexperience and interpret our present experiencesnot as isolated moments but as part of an ongo-ing story.”63 “The unity of a human life,” asAlasdair MacIntyre puts it, “is the unity of anarrative quest.”64 Even among those who dis-

59Schwarz, Joseph von Eichendorff, 35.60Eichendorff, Dichter und ihre Gesellen, chap. 9, 76, poemcontracted.

61Finson, Robert Schumann, 91.62I am using the term “narrative” here in quite a broadsense (indebted to the work of Paul Ricoeur), to denoteany attempt to connect temporally separated events into acoherent and seemingly causal chain—the temporal “story”we tell about them in order to give them meaning. Thuswe need not trace the story of a particular human subject(e.g., the protagonist of a Wanderlieder cycle) inSchumann’s Liederkreis to speak of narrative: even a the-matic process of growth and culmination across the songsis a type of narrative, one which treats the music as asurrogate organic life-form obeying familiar Aristotelianprinciples of entelechy. Indeed, the sense of narrative maywell be stronger in a formalist reading than in one whichsees the Liederkreis as a succession of soul-states, in whichthe implied subject becomes the necessary—though con-tested—point of continuity (a distinction which maps ontothe customary division between narrative and character).On this idea of Romanic music as a series of “soul-states,”see further Anthony Newcomb, “Once More ‘Between Ab-solute and Program Music’: Schumann’s Second Sym-phony,” this journal 7/3 (1984): 233–50.63Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of theModern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1989), 288; Marya Schechtman, “The Narrative Self,”in The Oxford Handbook of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 398.64Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 219.

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pute the reality of the self, there is neverthelessa widespread belief that the self is narrative instructure, albeit a fiction.65 We might see whatboth Eichendorff’s and Schumann’s works aredoing as, in the words of Paul Ricoeur, “puttingnarrative identity to the test,” via an “unset-tling case of narrativity” which exposes selfhood“by taking away the support of sameness.”66

As I have emphasized, there is often littlesense of a clear plot in Eichendorff’s episodic,phantasmagoric narrative prose, and even lessin Schumann’s assortment of seemingly dis-connected scenes. Neither, however, is theremuch of a superordinate sense of character toprovide the self-constancy of a coherent sub-ject. Eichendorff’s principal characters are eversearching for identity, but strangely have littleof their own. Poised precariously between thetwo poles of ipse and idem identity, the charac-ters experience diverse life experiences pass overthem and yet they continually seek identitiesalready given to them (knowledge of concealedbirth relations, the recovery of a childhood state,a higher truth glimpsed through anamnesis).67

Even more plainly, there is no consistent sub-ject or persona across Schumann’s songs, atleast on the surface. So what is left? It mightseem to be nothing—and those who resist hear-ing any sense of a consistent subject inSchumann’s cycle, or who reject Eichendorff’swriting as just another instance of undisciplinedRomantic incoherence, would be bearing outthis view by their reaction. But perhaps, asmost responses to the cycle suggest, there issomething that remains, something that is cru-cial to how we attempt to understand our lives.

The reception of Schumann’s Liederkreis re-veals how much the desire for coherence isingrained in our expectations of narrative and

psychological identity. Twelve lyrical episodesare set forth in succession, the majority of whichimplicate a subject or subject position, and weattempt to join the dots to make a coherentpicture.68 Like the sense of an enduring selfacross time, like the self problematized in suchsongs as “Im Walde,” the identity is created,perhaps just a regulative fiction; “the ‘subject’,”as the disbelieving Nietzsche puts it, “is notsomething given; it is something added andinvented and projected behind what there is.”69

We want to find a coherent underlying “story”—whether the action of conventional narrative, asuccession of moods and soul-states that couldbe imputed to a single implied subject, or anorganic process of thematic interconnections—and clutch at those brief and tantalizing hintsthat are present, making them into somethingbigger yet more uncertain. Inverting the propo-sition that the term “Kreis suggests the pres-ence of a thematic center from which the po-ems radiate,” we might say that Schumann’sLiederkreis suggests the absence of a center, anempty space into which we project our ownneed for an aesthetic subject—one which ex-pands to encompass a circle of songs around it,which we connect by means of narrative conti-nuity.70

This is one way of understanding the power-ful sense of subjectivity felt acting inSchumann’s music. As Lawrence Kramer pro-poses, the purpose of Romantic music “is notto express subjectivity, no matter how expres-sive of feeling or ‘musical personality’ some ofit may be. Its primary action is to invite subjec-tivity: to address itself to a subject position.”71

65See, for instance, Daniel Dennett, “The Self as a Centerof Narrative Gravity,” in Self and Consciousness: Mul-tiple Perspectives, ed. Frank S. Kessel, Pamela M. Cole,and Dale L. Johnson (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum,1992), 103–15.66Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 149.67The distinction between ipse and idem identity—the onestanding for self-constancy across change and mutability,the other for a numerical sameness and permanence—isagain that of Ricoeur, ibid., 2–3.

68Only “Auf einer Burg” contains no real subject position;that of “Zwielicht” is implicit from the imperative moodadopted, though here it is the apparent addressee that be-comes the real subject, rather than the utterer, whose iden-tity is shrouded in mystery.69Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885–7,7 [60], in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and MazzinoMontinari, 15 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), XII, 315;trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale from TheWill to Power (New York: Vintage, 1967), 267.70The characterization is Wilhelm Müller’s, as expressedby Turchin, “Robert Schumann’s Song-Cycles,” 276–77.71Lawrence Kramer, “The Mysteries of Animation: His-tory, Analysis and Musical Subjectivity,” Music Analysis20/2 (2001): 157.

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The narrative and subjective unity of Schu-mann’s cycle is given to the work by us: it is acreative act of the perceiver, an aesthetic act.Through this act we are doing the work ofsubjectivity, the work that we constantly carryout in order to tell ourselves that our own livesare coherent and have meaning. And this is aprocess which finds no end, but is constitutedfrom the continual search for itself.72

Schumann’s cycle spirals round a center that isnever there but which we populate with ourown desire, a match for the fictional subject’slonging for the beloved who is never present.

Our repeated attempts at making sense ofthe work by imposing, however covertly, aquasi-narrative order or coherence on some-thing which continually flees from our attemptto grasp it is, in a deeper sense, one of the mostRomantic qualities of the work Schumann con-sidered his “most Romantic.”73 In the enticinghalf-light that flickers over the EichendorffLiederkreis, the search for a fictive narrativeand fugitive unifying subject may often—likethe uncanny dream of Romano in Viel Lärmenum Nichts—seem to be a case of our findingmerely ourselves. And in this, we have beenenticed into the phantasmagoric world offeredby Eichendorff and Schumann, to the extentthat we no longer recognize the distinction be-

72German Idealist and Romantic thought insists that thesubject is not a thing but an act, and one that is nevercompleted but rather takes part in an infinite process.Eichendorff’s religious sensibility departs from this read-ing; for him, a character may find fulfillment and comple-tion in God.73“Der Eichendorffsche Zyklus ist wohl mein allerRomantischstes”: letter to Clara Wieck, 22 May 1840, inRobert Schumann in seinen Schriften und Briefen, ed.Wolfgang Boetticher (Berlin: Hahnefeld, 1942), 340.

74The final line of the poem inscribed by Eichendorff inthe Schumanns’ album in 1847 during a visit to Vienna.The poems runs: “Each and every heart dreams / Of thedistant land of beauty; / Thither through joy and pain / Afairy swings from wonderful tones / many a bridge— / Osweet bewitchment!” The original is given in Briefe undGedichte aus dem Album Robert und Clara Schumanns,ed. Wolfgang Boetticher (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag fürMusik, 1979), 50.

tween what really lies before us and oursubjective desire.—O holde Zauberei!74

Abstract.A recurring theme in the reception of Schumann’sEichendorff Liederkreis is the question mark overits sense of narrative continuity and the presence (orotherwise) of a central protagonist. Up until now,however, scarcely any attempt has been made toview these features in the context of Eichendorff’swider literary production. This article proposes ap-plying an Eichendorffian aesthetic to Schumann’sop. 39, viewing its phantasmagoric interconnections,absence of clear narrative order, sense of temporaldislocation and persistent theme of the loss of self asprofoundly reflecting the concerns of Eichendorff’sprose fiction. Neither the view that Schumann’s cycledoes possess a unified narrative and central protago-nist, nor the converse, that it should be seen as adisparate group of songs, is adequate. Instead, it isthe tension between the two views that emerges ascrucial in coming to an aesthetic understanding ofthe cycle. Schumann’s procedure, in juxtaposing anumber of poems drawn from disparate works, pre-sents an extreme case whereby narrative and subjec-tive identity are put to the test, and the listener isinvited to fill the vacant space left by the with-drawal of a unifying subject with his or her ownsense of subjectivity. Keywords: Joseph von Eichen-dorff, Robert Schumann, Liederkreis, op. 39, subjec-tivity, personal identity

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