“The
Heaviest Weight”: Circularity and Repetition in Hugo Wolfís 'Mühvoll
komm ich und beladen'”
The music of Hugo Wolf
has continued to vex music analysts for many years. Among reasons for this is
the complexity of his tonal expression; traditional tonal conventions often interact
with complex chromatic processes, often necessitating an uncomfortable mix of
contrasting theoretical and analytical tools. This paper analyzes a particularly
intricate case: “Mühvoll komm ich und beladen” from the Spanisches
Liederbuch. This song creates a complex path of tonal relationships that ultimately
reinforces an obsessive sense of repetition and circularity—issues that are
explicit in the songís text. The analysis models an approach in which the song
is viewed from the perspective of various external, interpretive lenses, all of
which relate to the songís principal theme: musical circularity as a representation
of weight and spiritual burden. This broad, intertextual approach engages a number
of diverse aspects of the songís structure, including its formal circularity,
the role of hexatonic poles, issues of voice-leading, and the rather idiosyncratic
use of directional tonality. Each of these issues is considered in the service
of a larger, overriding goal: to expose the ways that Wolf characterizes sin and
spiritual torment through techniques of repetition and musical circularity.
“Night
Phantoms Begone! Pervasive Fluency in Wolf's 'In der Frühe'”
A
central issue in the analysis of late nineteenth-century music has been whether
Schenkerian theory can account for its chromatic character or whether it truly
represents a "second practice," separate and apart from classical tonality.
While Schenkerian theory can be shown to address much chromatic music, its diatonic
bias prompts questions about its applicability to later tonal styles. A different
approach is offered by neo-Riemannian theory, which formalizes the group-theoretic
properties of various chordal transformations (involving minimal or "parsimonious"
voice leading) in twelve-tone pitch-class space. But neo-Riemannian theory offers
no meaningful hierarchical description of the music it models, and can account
for only a small number of harmonic successions. As a third option, this paper
introduces an analytical methodology that speaks to the intersection of diatonic
and chromatic realms in nineteenth-century tonality. A detailed analysis of Hugo
Wolf's 1888 song "In der Frühe," from Gedichte von Eduard Mörike,
will illustrate this mode of analysis and will highlight several important issues
of interpretation. In a characteristic synthesis of darkness and light, and evoking
"night phantoms" at the song's midpoint, Wolf first cycles down by perfect
fourths in minor keys, then up by successive minor thirds in major keys—recalling
ascending third cycles with similar textual associations in his earlier song "Morgenstimmung"
and in "Isolde's Transfiguration" from Wagner's Tristan. Although the
unique tonal design of the song resists a traditional Schenkerian reading, a new
approach to voice leading in chromatic harmony makes a hierarchical interpretation
possible. Wolf's song is given such an interpretation, based on a paradigm of
voice leading termed "pervasive fluency," which affords a leveled interpretation
of tonal structure in chromatic music.