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Poetic Rhythm and Musical Metre in Schubert's 'Winterreise' Author(s): Susan Youens Source: Music & Letters, Vol.

65, No. 1 (Jan., 1984), pp. 28-40 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/736335 . Accessed: 19/03/2011 09:58
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POETIC RHYTHM AND MUSICAL METRE IN SCHUBERT'S 'WINTERREISE'


BY SUSAN YOUENS NOT quite two years after the publication of the second volume of Wilhelm Muller's Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten,' the 29-year-old Heinrich Heine wrote to Muller, who was only three years his senior, acknowledging his indebtedness to him. I am not too proud to admit to you openly that my short 'Intermezzo' metre has a more than purely accidental similarity to your customary metre; indeed, it probably owes its most personal cadence to your songs, since it was the Muller songs of which I am most fond whose acquaintance I was making just at the time I was writing the 'Intermezzo'. At a very early age I was subject to the influence of German folk-song Later, when I was studying in Bonn, August Schlegel unlocked many metrical secrets to me, but I believe it was only in your songs that I found the pure tone and true simplicity that I always aspired to. How pure, how clear your songs are!-and they are folk-songs all of them. In my poems, on the other hand, only the form is to some extent folk-like; the content belongs to conventional society. Yes, I am not too proud to repeat positively-and you will sooner or later find it proclaimed publicly-that through the study of your 77 poems it became clear to me for the first time how out of the old stock of folk-song forms new forms can be created that are equally folk-like without the necessity of imitating the old linguistic clumsiness and awkwardness. In the second volume of your poems I found the form even purer, even more transparently clear . . . Significantly, Heine speaks only of rhythm, metre and form, and not of content, subject matter or tone. Muller's fondness for drinking songs, Wanderliederand rhyming epigrams was not shared by Heine, nor were Heine's frequent bitterness and mockery, his self-lacerating insistence on love's suffering, characteristic of Miller. The enigmatic or ecstatic poems in 'Lyrisches Intermezzo' have no real counterparts in Muller. Heine's fantasies and visions would be unlikely apparitions in Muller, more realistic and equable. Muller's wanderers, beggars, graveyards, ravens and crows seem at first to come from the stock Romantic arsenal, but there is nothing irreal or spectral about them. Significantly, too, Heine does not mention the works that brought Muller, the with their long lines, 'German Lord Byron', early fame, the sonorous Griechenlieder, rhetorical flourishes and their voices from ancient Athens and Asia addressing Biedermeier supporters of the nineteenth-century Greek war with Turkey. Rather, Heine found in Muller's simpler, un-Byronic poetry a kind of objective clarity of tone, free from the sentimental posturing of the 'dyspeptic consumptive poet' Heine parodied in his drama William Ratcliffe, that side of himself he both embodies
was Published in Dessau in 1824, the first edition of this second collection (which includes Winterreise) dedicated by the publisher, Christian Georg Ackermann, to Carl Maria von Weber, 'the master of German song . . . as a token of friendship and esteem'. (1827), was written in 1822-3 and 2 Heine's 'Lyrisches Intermezzo', later to form part of Das BuchderLieder Intermezzo. nebst einemlyrischen first published in the latter year in Tragodien Heine: Briefe, ed. Friedrich Hirth, i (Mainz, 1950), 169-71. No reply from 3Letter of 7 June 1826: Heinrich Miiller is known.

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and mocks in the 'Lyrisches Intermezzo'. No doubt he would eventually have found his own way to simpler forms and folk-like metres, to a more direct mode of expression; already among the more elaborate earlier poems there are shorter works in two, three or four simple quatrains. But Muller's model evidently hastened a process already in the making, what seemed for a time the way out of a poetic dilemma. Muller once wrote that the 'essential quality' of folk-song was 'the immediacy of its influence on life'.4 Intricate forms, 'noble' or 'elegaic' metres with classical or Shakespearean associations, and convoluted, complex syntax would all be barriers to the kind of directness that Muller wanted and achieved in works like Die schone Millerin and Winterreise: Muller's 'immediacy' would be impossible without poetic rhythms that fuse with all other sources of meaning. Any metrical changes, even in the simplest poems im Volkston, should ideally reflect shifts in mood and tone, intensification, a moment of illumination, a change from narrative to direct speech, a new image or insight, or a question. Muller was a master of significant alterations in deceptively simple metres: spondees within both iambic and trochaic metres, which slow down the tempo and reinforce effects of weight, gravity and seriousness; trisyllabic feet substituted for disyllabic (dactyls in the midst of trochees and anapaests among iambs), which act to lighten, hasten or enliven the poetic rhythms, to imitate galloping hoof-beats in Goethe's 'Erlkonig' or a dance-like lilt, as in Muller's 'Friihlingstraum'. An iamb inverted and altered to a trochee (one seldom finds the reverse) is a jolt that should be a rhythmic response to poetic necessity, one way to create a particular kind of stress and emphasis in poetry, as when Muller's winter wanderer goes dancing off in the wake of a will-o'-the-wisp in 'Tauschung': 'Ein Licht tanzt freundlich vor mir her, / Ich folg' ihm nach die Kreuz und Quer'-and then suddenly begins to lament: 'Ach! wer wie ich so elend ist'-immediacy indeed! Defining stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry is a matter of relativity and context, of placement and tempo in language. But when a poem is set to music, the rhythms become subject to something of a sea-change, since metrical stresses in verse and beats in music are not quite alike, even though both are governed by a perceptible pulse and a patterning of stronger and weaker units of measurement, syllables or pitches. In most songs, not only do the words last longer in time, unless the tempo is quite quick-music stretches a text; in addition, the tactus tends to be more regular and ordered than in speech. Even in the most strongly accentual languages, such as English or German, it is only certain types of ballads, dance songs, jingles and comic poems that one would read in an insistently regular rhythm. Otherwise, in a sensitive reading, whose inflections mirror shades of meaning and shifts of tone in the poem, the tactus fluctuates, if only very subtly. To hear 'Der Leiermann' read aloud in syllables of equal duration would be an unsettling experience, but Schubert sets each couplet of all but the last verse in precisely that fashion, in equal quavers, quasi-declamatory in a sense and yet unlike speech rhythms in a very basic way-and Schubert surely intended little or no rubato in a performance of this song. Furthermore, stressed syllables would ordinarily be set as higher pitches, weaker syllables as lower, but that is not always the case in 'Der Leiermann', where 'ein' and '(Lei)-er-(mann)' are set to higher
4Aloys Joseph Becker, Die Kunstanschauung WilhelmMillers, Leipzig, 1908, p. 52.

29

notes-but at rhythmically weaker places in the bar-than 'Steht' or the first and last syllables of 'Leiermann' (Ex. 1). Schubert can do what Muller can only suggest: sound a hurdy-gurdy dance melody, a chilled, slowed-down mazurka in the accompaniment. From the beginning of the song, the wanderer's vocal line takes on the inflections of the instrumental air, foreshadowing the fact that the wanderer and the beggar-musician will leave the town and the cycle together. The succession of equal note-values in a slowish tempo also reinforces a particular solemnity of mood.
Ex. I

?Kr.
MA&L'

k
V M # ,,

''

-'

2~~~~~~~~~~

DiU - ben hin -tenn Dor - fe

Steht

ein Lei - er - mann,

Und mit star - ren Fin - gem Dreht er, was er

kann

In other words, the choice of metre and rhythmic patterns in the musical setting is only partly conditioned by the poetic metre and otherwise serves the purpose both of poetic interpretation and of abstract musical elements, purely musical necessities. This is of course true of all of Schubert's songs, but Winterreiseis a particularly intriguing source to study precisely because it is not a single song but a cycle, and quite a lengthy one at that, in which considerations of unity and variety are crucial. In a setting of an isolated poem, the composer chooses a metre and a rhythmic pattern compatible with the poetic metre, for example 2/4 for iambic trimeters. But in Winterreisethere are nine poems in iambic trimeters; if they all shared the same basic rhythmic shapes, there would be a danger of tedium. Muller uses only a few simple folk-like metres and a limited range of forms, likewise simple, but in the song cycle poems in the same metre can be and are set in different time signatures, duple, triple or compound metres. Schubert moulds the poet's iambs, trochees and short lines into various rhythmic shapes and patterns, depending on the scene, the atmosphere, the images, onomatopoeic considerations, internal stresses and the like. Perhaps most intriguing of all, the poems of are full of onomatopoeia, both explicit-the cocks crowing and ravens Winterreise screeching in 'Friihlingstraum'-and implicit-the light, dry sound of the falling leaves in 'Letzte Hoffnung'. Schubert took immense delight in such onomatopoeia, which strongly affects the rhythmic declamation of the vocal line: the trochees in 'Irrlicht' become as inconstant and changeable as the will-o'-the-wisp itself (Ex. 2). The word 'In', technically the first or stressed beat of the initial trochee, is indeed set as the first beat of the bar, but, appropriately, 'tief-(sten)' and '(Felsen)-griun(de)' are prolonged more than the first syllable/word of the line, and the descent to a low B at '-griun-(de)' is still further emphasis. At the other extreme, Schubert dwells longer on the word 'Wie', also the stressed beat of the first trochaic foot in the line, than a reader might do. T he second of the rhythmic patterns of Ex. 2, furthermore, appears earlier in the cycle in 'Wasserflut', also in trochaic tetrameters, where the weaker or unstressed syllables at 'ist gefallen in den Schnee' (Ex. 3a) 'fall' downwards to the stressed syllables, related in turn to the line 'Fallt mit ihm die Hoffnung ab' in 'Letzte Hoffnung' (Ex. 3b)-metric and rhythmic unity and variety alike in a large cycle. almost half are written in iambic trimeters (Nos. Of the 24 poems in Winterreise, 30

Ex.2

*#

#S

l2.
2-

#1
-

1. In

die tief

sten

Fel - sen -grnn

de

2. Lock

te mich

ein Irr - ticht

hin:

T.ot I

41

aI
ei - nen

tZ

3. Wie

ich

Aus-gang fin - de?

~~
4. Liegt

nicht schwer mir in

~-

dem Sinn,

Ai
5. Liegt nicht schwer mir in

~~~~~~~3L
dem Sinn.

Ex. 3

(a)

Ist (b)

ge - fal - len

in

den

Schnee

Fallt mit ihm die Hoff - nung

ab

1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, 12, 18 and 21), usually with alternating feminine and masculine endings: Am Bruinnenvor dem Thor'e Da steht eln Lindenbaium, Ich traiumt'ln se'in'em Scha'tt'en So mainchensussen Tnraum. The metre in this first verse of 'Der Linderbaum' seems-in one sense, indeed, is-absolutely regular, with none of the iambs inverted or replaced by anapaests, although the strong syllables of course vary in the degree of stress: 'Brun-(nen)' and 'Tho-(re)' are weightier than 'vor', and 'traumt' and 'Schat-(ten)' demand more stress than 'sei-(nem)', while the initial and supposedly weaker syllable of the third line, 'Ich', as the subject of the statement, the poetic persona speaking, would in speech require more stress. But Schubert dwells throughout the song on the stressed second syllable of the first iamb and sets the second iamb in equal (short) note-values or sometimes as a triplet quaver figure (Ex. 4). This has the effect of placing a discernible and poignant emphasis on certain words and imbues the 31

entire song with an elegaic quality from its very beginning, the first prolonged syllable on the dark vowel sound of 'Brunnen': 'So manchen siissen Traum', 'So manches liebe Wort', 'Ich musst' auch heute wandern', 'Komm her zu mir, Geselle / Hierfind'st du deine Ruh'. The crux of the entire cycle, the wanderer's decision not to turn back to the past or to die (Muller is deliberately ambiguous about the precise meaning), is set to this same rhythmic pattern, the verb and its negation in 'Ich wendete mich nicht' prolonged, the weaker syllables in shorter note-values. And yet 'Erstarrung', the song before 'Der Lindenbaum', also in iambic trimeters, is set in duple metre, with the stressed syllables on the strong beats and the unstressed on the weaker second and fourth beats of the bar. Unless, as in 'Der Lindenbaum', a stressed syllable is prolonged beyond the rhythmic value assigned to most of the other stronger syllables, iambic trimeters lend themselves naturally to duple metre, ? in the slower 'Gefror'ne Thrainen', 4/4 in the quicker 'Erstarrung'.
Ex. 4 3
C)#$"pir I 2SI J i

Am Brun - nen vor dem

Tho - re

Da

steht ein Lin - den - baum

Six other poems are in iambic tetrameters (Nos. 2, 8, 13, 17, 19 and 23), and two of those in quatrain form have alternating iambic tetrameters and iambic trimeters, or ballad stanza (Nos. 10 and 14), although the subject matter of both 'Rast' and 'Der greise Kopf is far from balladesque. Five are in trochaic tetrameters (Nos. 6, 9, 15, 16 and 20), one is in alternate trochaic tetrameters and trochaic trimeters (No. 22) and one-the last poem, 'Der Leiermann'-in trochaic trimeters. There are no poems in the dactylic and anapaestic trisyllabic metres, inherently lighter and quicker, although Muller uses anapaests and dactyls within the prevailing iambic and trochaic metres. The latter are less frequent than iambic in Winterreise(as in German verse in general), providing yet another reason for the special impact of 'Der Leiermann'. The starkness and power of the final poem are due in part to the brevity of the lines and the strong first-beat accents: Driubenhinter'm Dorfe Steht ein Leiermann, Und mit starren Fingern Dreht er, was er kann. Here too the metre seems regular and even throughout, with no dactyls replacing the trochaic feet, but the caesuras at different places in the line impose slight but perceptible rhythmic changes in the poetic metre. In 'Dreht er, was er kann' the caesura separates the first and second feet, each with the same word 'er' in the weaker second position; in 'Dreht, und seiner Leier', despite the same initial word, the caesura occurs in the middle of the poetic foot, briefly slowing down the pace of the line. Furthermore, four lines begin with the word 'und', not normally a strong beat. not this often in a single poem-on placed-certainly There are thus only four poetic metres in Winterreise-iambic trimeters, iambic tetrameters, trochaic tetrameters and (once) trochaic trimeters. Schubert's sensitivity to the varying inflections and changes of rhythm, caesura and stress from one verse to the next resulted in the predominant use of varied strophic forms 32

in the cycle; where the form is literally strophic, there is an occasional, possibly unavoidable, awkwardness. In the trochaic metre of 'Wasserflut' the first word/poetic foot, 'Manche', would receive less accent than the noun it qualifies, 'Thran", and Schubert accordingly sets 'tears' as a higher, more sustained pitch, a beautiful translation of metrics in poetry to a musical plane. With the beginning of the third verse, when that same music returns, the initial line starts with a broken or interrupted trochee, 'Schnee, du weisst . . .', and the accommodation of the arpeggiated triplet figure to a different metrical and rhythmic pattern is not entirely successful (Ex. 5).
Ex. 5 A

M~~~~i
Man - che Thran

Plnrin^
aus

Schnee,du weisst von

mei - nem Seh - nen

mei - nen Au - gen

This is an exception, however, in Winterreise, where musical metre and rhythm correspond closely to the poetic declamation. Where Schubert greatly alters Muller's rhythms, it is for expressive purposes, as when he changes the iambic metre of the line 'Die Fiisse frugen nicht nach Rast' in the tenth song, 'Rast'. The intermediate iambs, the second and third feet, become in Schubert's setting a pyrrhic foot followed by an iamb, the syllables set as equal semiquavers, with the word 'nicht' on a higher pitch in added emphasis. 'My feet demanded no rest', so Schubert hastens the forward pace and the impetus within the line.5 But in the next line ('It was too cold to stand still') he prolongs the stressed syllables, as if they 'stood still' for an instant (Ex. 6). In other examples he changes Muller's metrics in order to slow down the musical motion. In 'Gefror'ne Thrainen' and 'Erstarrung', both in iambic trimeters, he tends to set unstressed or weaker syllables as a pair of quavers, which provides impetus to the next foot, and, in 'Gefror'ne Thrainen', to set the ends of lines as if they were terminal spondees: '. . . Wangen ab', '(ge)-weinet hab" (Ex. 7).
Ex. 6 9 tE k I k k k k z I I t I
.L.

I 11

Die

Fu - se fru- gen nichtnach Rast,

Es

y v war zu kalt zum ste -hen

An unexpected reversal in the poetic rhythm, when skilfully done, implies an intensification of poetic address, a moment of discovery or illumination, a new tone, a statement of special significance. Muller begins Winterreise with a jolt in the poetic metre before the iambic trimeters of 'Gute Nacht' are even established: Fremd bin ich eingezogen, Fremd zieh' ich wieder aus, Der Mai war mir gewogen... In reading the poem aloud, one simply makes allowance for the metrical discrepancy, stressing the word 'Fremd' because that is what sense and accent both require. In music, matters are not so easy. Iambs are usually set as anacruses or
Muller uses a substituted pyrrhic foot, with its inherent lightness and rapidity, only once in the entire cycle, in 'Die Post' when the wanderer's heart leaps in quick response to the sound of the mail coach, 'Was hit es, dass es s6 h6ch aifsprfngt'.
'

33

Ex.7
I L

o"~

r ~ ~ ~
Ge - fror' - ne

~~~~~~p
Trop-fen fal - len Von

I
mei - nen Wan-gen ab:

=F

-p rrI

Ob esmir denn ent -

gan

gen, Dass

ich

ge

wei - net

hab'?

Dass

ich

ge

wei - net

hab'?

upbeats, but 'Fremd' is not an iamb and furthermore occurs twice in two lines. As Hans Gal points out,6 Schubert solves the problem by setting the stressed first word each time as an anacrusis but on a higher pitch than the succeeding word on the strong beat of the next bar. Both the second and third poems are also written in iambic metres, tetrameters in 'Die Wetterfahne' and trimeters once again in 'Gefror'ne Thrainen'. There is nothing particularly unusual about the poetic rhythms in 'Die Wetterfahne' beyond the occasional anapaest; the musical metre is unusual, however. Schubert, translating iambs and a couple of anapaests into the rushing motion of the wind, sets the poem in 6/8 metre, in which the stressed syllables are set to two quavers and the unstressed to one. Because of the possibility of triple division of the beat in compound metre, he can elide a line with a feminine ending with the next and set the two unstressed syllables of an anapaest as the second and third or fifth and sixth (weaker) beats in 6/8. The often higher pitch on the second of two notes for the stronger syllables seems a deliberate depiction of the gusts of wind that buffet the weathervane (Ex. 8).
Ex. 8

?$
*)v

I
be - mer

-i

.i

NI

Hau

'

rf

J ge

jF steck

r tes Schild

tt-

Er

hatt'

es

e - her

ken sol - len

Des

ses

auf

For Muller's four poetic metres, with iambs predominating, Schubert uses six time signatures, spaced throughout the cycle for maximum variety. Comparing the poetic and musical metres, one realizes that he only twice pairs songs in the same metre (see Table I). In both instances, the successive songs with the same time Lindenbaum' and 'Wasserflut', in 3/4, and the last two songs, signature-'Der 'Die Nebensonnen' and 'Der Leiermann', also in 3/4- do not share the same poetic metre. With the third poem, 'Gefror'ne Thranen', Muller returns to the iambic trimeters of the first poem and, somewhat like 'Gute Nacht', changes the metre in one place, but not at the beginning this time. As in the first song, the altered metre is a way of calling attention to something of special significance in that line-in 'Gute Nacht' the wanderer's perception that he is a perpetual stranger to others and to himself, in 'Gefror'ne Thranen' the strange fact that he has been weeping unawares. The first two lines in uninterrupted trimeters are followed by a line that
"Schubert and the Essenceof Melody, London, 1974, p. 94.

34

TABLE I 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Gute Nacht Die Wetterfahne Gefror'ne Thranen Erstarrung Der Lindenbaum Wasserflut Aufdem Flusse Riuckblick Irrlicht Rast Friihlingstraum Einsamkeit Die Post Der greise Kopf Die Krahe Letzte Hoffnung Im Dorfe Der stiirmische Morgen Tauschung Der Wegweiser Das Wirtshaus Mut Die Nebensonnen Der Leiermann iambic 3 iambic 4 iambic 3 iambic 3 iambic 3 trochaic 4 iambic 3 iambic 4 trochaic 4 iambic 3 & 4 iambic 3 iambic 3 iambic 4 iambic 4 & 3 trochaic 4 trochaic 4 iambic 4 iambic 3 iambic 4 trochaic 4 iambic 3 trochaic 3 & 4 iambic 4 trochaic 3 2/4 6/8 C 3/4 3/4 2/4 3/4 3/8 2/4 6/8 & 2/4 2/4 6/8 3/4 2/4 3/4 12/8 C 6/8 2/4 C 2/4 3/4 3/4

e;

starts on a stressed syllable and an anapaestic foot, basically a change from iambic to trochaic metre: Gefr6r'ne Tr6pfen fallen Von meinen Wangen ab: Ob es mlr denn entgangen ... The stress placed in speech on the word 'Ob' should probably be somewhat less than the emphasis on 'Fremd' at the beginning of 'Gute Nacht', although the matter is different in a musical setting where a precise rhythmic value has to be assigned to each syllable. Schubert prepares for the metrically irregular third line by setting the unstressed syllables and words in the opening lines to pairs of quavers (see Ex. 7 above) and by an anticipation of the vocal line of bar 12 in the piano part, like a substitute anacrusis, filling in for the intial beat of an iambic foot. In two poems, 'Friihlingstraum' and 'Im Dorfe', Muller substitutes anapaests for iambs or spondees for iambs more frequently than anywhere else, special instances in the cycle. In the 'dream' verses (stanzas I and IV) of'Friihlingstraum' the iambic trimeters are filled with anapaests, placed in an unpredictable pattern with the anapaestic feet at the start and at the ends of lines: I Ich traumte von bunten Blumen. So wie sie wohl bluhen im Mai; Ich traumte von grunen Wiesen, Von lustigem Vogelgeschrei. 35

IV

Ich traumte von Lieb um Liebe, Von einer schonen Maid, Von Herzen und von Kiussen, Von Wonne und Seligkeit. The anapaestic foot at the end of the fourth line of the first verse, 'Von lustigem Vogelgeschrei', is a metric pulse for 'birdsong' (in the eighteenth century the substitution of trisyllabic feet for disyllabic was less usual, but by the early nineteenth century it was a metrical convention). The anapaestic feet give an extra buoyancy to the delicate dance rhythms, which Schubert turns into dotted rhythms in the vocal line against a background of even quavers in the accompaniment. The second and fifth verses, in which the wanderer is rudely awakened from his blissful dream, are more direct, with no anapaestic feet until the last line of the stanza in each instance; there the anapaests also become dotted figures in the vocal line, a link with the previous verse, but to very different effect, sharply emphatic rather than buoyant. In the last verse, set in 2/4 rather than 6/8 (the waking state metrically differentiated from the dream world), there are no anapaests until the wanderer's two questions at the end: 'Wann grunt ihr Blatter am Fenster?' and 'Wann halt ich mein Liebchen im Arm?'. The first two sleepy, wistful lines, 'Die Augen schliess ich wieder, / Noch schlagt das Herz so warm', are without the lightness of added emphasis of anapaests, while the questions, though rhetorical, both begin with a partially stressed syllable, 'Wann', and include first one anapaest then two. 'Im Dorfe' is even more irregular in its poetic rhythms: the basic metre, established in the first two lines, consists of iambic tetrameters with several anapaestic feet, but the third and fourth lines must be scanned as one or more dactyls followed by trochees: Es bellen d'e Huinde,es rasseln die Ketten, Es schla'fendle Menschen in ihren Betten, Traiumensich mainches,wa'ssie nicht haiben, Thuin slch 'm Guiten und Argen erlaben Matters become more complex later when the caesura is no longer placed at the midpoint in the line. 'Je nun, sie haben ihr Theil genossen, / Und hoffen, was sie noch iibrig liessen . . .' can of course be scanned as iambic tetrameters with an anapaestic foot in each line, but the caesura in the latter instance cuts through the anapaest. The imperatives that follow, when the wanderer bids the dogs to keep barking so that he might stay awake, are once again written mostly as dactyls and trochees, although the first 'trochee' is unusual in that the stressed syllable and unstressed syllable are separated syntactically by a comma and belong to different second poetic foot is more accurately described as a spondee, clauses-the although Schubert does not set it that way; he treats 'ihr' as an anacrusis to 'wa- (chen) ': Bellt mich nur fort, ihr wachen Hunde, Lasst mich nicht ruh'n, in der Schlummerstunde! 36

This use of mixed metre continues throughout the poem-even the last line is yet another and different example of changing poetic rhythms within a single line: it can be read as an iambic tetrameter with one anapaest, but it is more in accord with the poetic content to interpret the line as beginning with spondees followed by a dactyl and two trochees: 'Was will ich uinter den Schlafern saumen?'. 'Im Dorfe' is also, notably, one of the few poems in the cycle that is not in quatrains ('Gute Nacht', 'Die Post' and 'Die Nebensonnen' are the others, the first two strophic, the latter two single-stanza poems) but is instead divided into an octave and a quatrain, the octave containing the wanderer's thoughts about the sleeping townspeople and the quatrain his subsequent resolutions to renounce dreams and to leave the town-'Why should I linger here among the sleepers?'. The odd form, neither a truncated sonnet nor a strophic form, and the metrical shifts are all outgrowths of the content. For example, the opening two lines in mixed iambic-anapaestic metre are scene-setting-the dogs, the rattling chains and the sleeping townspeople-while the third and fourth, with their dactyls and trochees, are about the villagers' dreams of possessions and deeds they do not and never will have or accomplish. With the fifth line and the sombre realization 'And by tomorrow morning all is vanished' the iambs return, with only one anapaestic foot towards the end. The quatrain begins with two lines that start with stressed imperatives-'Bellt ... lasst . . .'-set as dotted crotchets, while the last line of the poem begins with an iamb and ends with a dactyl and two trochees: 'Was will ich unter den Schlifern saumen?'. The internal shifts in focus and tone are reflected in the metrical variations. And Schubert's setting is remarkable: the rattling chains (measured bass trill) and dogs' barking (repeated chords in the right-hand part) cease altogether, as if the intensity of the wanderer's self-questioning had momentarily blocked out all awareness of the night-time noises of the external world. In 'Im Dorfe', more so than in any other poem in Winterreise, the metre fluctuates in a way that presents problems to the composer: how is he to preserve a unitary rhythmic pattern throughout the setting and yet account for the changes in poetic metre? Schubert chose to set the poem in 12/8 (the only song in the cycle in that metre), in which the longer lines and metrical changes can all be accommodated. The stressed syllables can then be set either as dotted crotchets or as crotchets or even as a dotted crotchet tied to a crotchet for ironic emphasis: 'Es schlafen die Menschen in ihren Betten'. The two weaker or unstressed syllables in an anapaestic or dactylic foot become unequal in value, a crotchet or a quaver (Ex. 9). As usual, where Schubert changes the poetic metre within the broad framework and long bars of 12/8 time it is for expressive purposes, as in his setting of the fifth line, 'Und morgen friih ist alles zerflossen'. The word 'und' would normally be set as the first and unstressed syllable in an iambic foot, musically as an anacrusis, and it would have been quite easy to do so here, but instead Schubert treats it as a stressed syllable-a dotted crotchet-to emphasize the abrupt shift from vainglorious dreams to their disappearance with the morning.
Ex. 9

I f

S. v-,;
Es bel
-

i
len die Hun
-

i'
de, Es ras - seln

I
die

J _
Ket

- ten

37

Both Nos. 15 and 16, 'Die Kraihe'and 'Letzte Hoffnung', are written in trochaic tetrameters, but Schubert converts the trochees into rhythmic patterns that are alike only in the standard trochaic beginning on accented beats. In 'Die Krahe' the wanderer hopes that the crow circling about his head is an omen of death. Schubert translates the motion of the crow's flight into smooth and incessant circling figures in the accompaniment with a melody that at first consists mostly of even musical rhythmic values rather than uneven, setting both stressed and unstressed syllables and words as equal quavers. Because the masculine ending of the first line occurs in mid-phrase, he sets it as a crotchet, a stressed word, although the melodic line continues on its gliding downward path without a break or a breath (Ex. 10). But in the second verse, when the wanderer speaks to the crow-'Krahe, wunderliches Tier'-the rhythmic inflection changes. The last three syllables of the word 'wunderliches' are all weaker than the first, something Schubert takes into account in his rhythmicization, along with the pause or rest after the word 'Kraihe'(see Ex. 11 below).
Ex. 10

P# 0__ JsV l

^ wI '

"
Ei - ne Krii- he

r.v I
war mit mir Aus der Stadt ge zo
-

gen

With the third line of the same verse we find, not for the first time in the cycle, evidence of compromise between purely musical concerns and the demands of declamation. Musically the verse is a sequential structure, the last two lines a varied repetition of the first two, transposed a whole tone higher. But the internal poetic rhythms of the first and third lines are not alike. The third trochee is not stressed in the opening phrase, 'Kraihe,wunderliches Tier', but it is the very crux and climax of the line in the third, 'Meinst wohl, bald als Beutehier'. If the melody and rhythmic pattern of the beginning of the stanza were transposed literally, the declamation would be ludicrous. Accordingly, Schubert adapts the melodic
configuration and the rhythms in such a way that the second trochee, '. . .bald als. . .', is treated as an anacrusis in equal note-values to the crucial word 'Beute'

(Ex. 11). Someone reading the line aloud would probably not give the word 'bald' such short shrift, but here the slight distortion serves the expressive purpose of providing an upbeat to the principal word in the line.
Ex. 11

A~~~~~~~~~~~
Kra - he, wun-der-li - ches Tier, Willst mich nicht ver - las - sen?

h -'i Pr r

Meinstwohl

bald als

Beu

te hier

38

The next song, 'Letzte Hoffnung', is also in trochaic tetrameters, but the musical rhythms are quite different from those of 'Die Krahe'. As in 'Der Lindenbaum', Schubert dwells slightly on the stressed syllable of two out of four trochees in three of four lines in the first verse, most notably at the words 'blei-(be)'-the pitch too, like the wanderer, fixed in place for a moment-and '(Ge)-danken steh'n'. In graphic illustration of the wanderer standing still, lost in thought before the trees, the musical motion slows, and the penultimate trochee is rhythmically augmented, prolonging the phrase for an extra bar (Ex. 12a). Throughout the second verse Schubert again places an extra durational stress on the second trochee, but the placement within the bar is changed, the first trochee set as an anacrusis, in effect changing a trochee into an anapaest at the beginning of each line (Ex. 12b). The cross-rhythms in the accompaniment throughout the first and second verses, particularly the deliberate rhythmic disjunction between the vocal line and the piano part, reflect both the light, swirling, skittering motion of the leaves in the wind and the wanderer's panic-stricken, chaotic state of mind.
Ex. 12 (a)

+E Z
Und ich

IlI
blei
-

Ml

Ii
W)2
r

11;

W~M a

D1t IJI
-

be

vor den

Bau - men

Oft - mals in Ge

dan

ken

steh'n

(b)

Schau -e

nach

dem

ei-nen

Blat - te,

Han - ge mei - ne Hoff-nung dran

Later in the same song, Schubert varies the trochaic patterns in other ways, turning them into funereal dotted rhythms at the words 'Faillt mit ihm die Hoffnung ab' ('Falt' set to the lowest pitch in the vocal part-see Ex. 3b above) and, in the last line, repeating the first word and dwelling on it. And when the entire last line (including the repetition of its initial word, 'Wein") is repeated, the second and third trochees are rhythmically augmented, the music broadening towards the close (Ex. 13).
Ex. 13

Wein',
W> . h ,y

wein'_
-

auf

mei - ner Hoff - nung Grab,

I-,

I-

Wein',

wein'_

auf

mei - ner

Hoff

nung Grab.

On -8 October 1815 Muller recorded in his diary (begun the day before, on his 21st birthday): 39

I can neither sing nor play [an instrument], yet when I compose poetry I am both singing and playing as well. If I could myself give the tunes to the world, my songs would please more than they do at present. But never mind-surely a kindred spirit can be found who will listen for the melody in the words and give it back to me.7 He died in October 1827, perhaps as Schubert was working on the composition of the second half of the cycle, and never knew that he had indeed found for his Winterreise one of the greatest of all 'kindred spirits', in part because Schubert was responsive as few song composers have been to metrics and rhythm in poetry, transforming them into metrical and rhythmic patterns in music that do more than heighten meaning and become an integral part of it.

ed. MiLller, Philip Schuyler Allen & James Taft Hatfield, Chicago, 1903, p. 5. of 7Diary and Letters Wilhelm

40

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