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From Literary Fiction to Music: Schumann and the Unreliable Narrative

From Literary Fiction to Music: Schumann and the Unreliable Narrative The theoretic model of the “unreliable narrative” in fiction took flight in the early 1960s; it has since become a key concept in narratology, and an indispensable one. Simply put, first-person unreliable narrators are ones about whom we as readers, in collusion with the author, learn more than they know about themselves. Romantic precursors of modernist experiments in fiction—incipient cases of narrative unreliability—arise in the works of, among others, Jean Paul Richter and Heinrich Heine, two of Robert Schumann's favorite writers. In his early solo piano cycle, Papillons, op. 2, Schumann draws inspiration from Jean Paul's novel Flegeljahre, surely capturing something of the author's unreliably quirky literary style, in part through the strategy of tonal pairing. Whereas Schumann ultimately played down the programmatic elements of Papillons that trace back to the unpredictable Jean Paul, a genuine instance of the unreliable narrator is Heine's troubled poet-persona in Schumann's Dichterliebe. Here the composer invites us to perceive a second persona through the voice of the piano—one that understands the poet better than he does, and whose music reveals from the outset that rejection in love lies ahead. The emergence of narrative unreliability in fiction may have served as an influence that drove experimentation not only for Schumann but also for some of his contemporaries and successors. Debates about musical narrativity might profit from considering the recent literary concept of a “feedback loop,” in which the author, the narrator (text), and the narratee (reader)—in our case, the composer, the performer, and the listener (including analysts, performers, and composers, who are also intensive listeners)—continually and recursively interact. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png 19th-Century Music University of California Press

From Literary Fiction to Music: Schumann and the Unreliable Narrative

Schmalfeldt, Janet
19th-Century Music , Volume 43 (3): 24 – Mar 1, 2020
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Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
© 2020 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions.
ISSN
0148-2076
eISSN
1533-8606
DOI
10.1525/ncm.2020.43.3.170
Publisher site
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Abstract

The theoretic model of the “unreliable narrative” in fiction took flight in the early 1960s; it has since become a key concept in narratology, and an indispensable one. Simply put, first-person unreliable narrators are ones about whom we as readers, in collusion with the author, learn more than they know about themselves. Romantic precursors of modernist experiments in fiction—incipient cases of narrative unreliability—arise in the works of, among others, Jean Paul Richter and Heinrich Heine, two of Robert Schumann's favorite writers. In his early solo piano cycle, Papillons, op. 2, Schumann draws inspiration from Jean Paul's novel Flegeljahre, surely capturing something of the author's unreliably quirky literary style, in part through the strategy of tonal pairing. Whereas Schumann ultimately played down the programmatic elements of Papillons that trace back to the unpredictable Jean Paul, a genuine instance of the unreliable narrator is Heine's troubled poet-persona in Schumann's Dichterliebe. Here the composer invites us to perceive a second persona through the voice of the piano—one that understands the poet better than he does, and whose music reveals from the outset that rejection in love lies ahead. The emergence of narrative unreliability in fiction may have served as an influence that drove experimentation not only for Schumann but also for some of his contemporaries and successors. Debates about musical narrativity might profit from considering the recent literary concept of a “feedback loop,” in which the author, the narrator (text), and the narratee (reader)—in our case, the composer, the performer, and the listener (including analysts, performers, and composers, who are also intensive listeners)—continually and recursively interact.

Journal

19th-Century Music – University of California Press

Published: Mar 1, 2020

Keywords: narrative literary theory; Jean Paul Richter; Heinrich Heine; Robert Schumann; Papillons, op. 2; Dichterliebe; tonal pairing

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