¹ John Daverio discussed, at a general level, the prevailing juxtaposition of ‘esoteric’ and ‘accessible’ qualities in Schumann's music at the time he composed ‘Meine Rose’ and the Fantasiestücke – qualities that address Kenner and Liebhaber, respectively. Daverio emphasized, however, that this juxtaposition is aesthetically far from straightforward; see his Robert Schumann, Herald of a ‘New Poetic Age’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 392–5Google Scholar.

² Kirnberger, Johann Philipp, The Art of Strict Musical Composition, trans. of Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik, 1771–1779, by Beach, David and Thym, Jurgen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982): 135Google Scholar.

³ Koch, Heinrich Christoph, Introductory Essay on Composition, trans. of Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, 1782–1793, by Baker, Nancy Kovaleff (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983): 1Google Scholar.

⁴ Reicha, Anton, Treatise on Melody, trans. of Traité de melodie, 1814, by Landey, Peter M. (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2000): 16Google Scholar (italics original).

⁵ Kofi Agawu has made a distinction between ‘functional’ and ‘locational’ endings; the former refers to resolution of structural tensions, usually through cadences, while the latter merely states that the unit reaches its ending, even when the structural tensions remain unresolved. See Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009): 52–4Google Scholar. If we follow this distinction, each of the formal units of the fourth piece of Kreisleriana features a locational ending but no functional ending.

⁶ Daverio, John, Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993): 52Google Scholar.

⁷ In the published literature, the harmonic indeterminacy of the fourth piece of Kreisleriana has received a considerable amount of discussion. David Kopp refers to ‘a softening of the hierarchical boundaries between chords and keys’, and reads connections between the tonics of apparent keys whose tonic chords never arrive; at a more general level Charles Rosen writes of tonal ambiguity throughout the piece. See Kopp, , ‘Intermediate States of Keys in Schumann’, in Rethinking Schumann, ed. Kok, Roe-Min and Tunbridge, Laura (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011): 315–22Google Scholar; and Rosen, , The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995): 674–6Google Scholar. I have approached the piece from a Schenkerian perspective, interpreting a prolongational structure which does not, however, consist of a prolongation of the tonic triad; see Suurpää, Lauri, ‘The Fourth Piece of Schumann's Kreisleriana, Op. 16, as a Musical Fragment: Discontinuity and Unity Intertwined’, Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale 19/1 (2013): 7–24Google Scholar.

⁸ The score excerpts follow the complete edition of Schumann's works published in the nineteenth century by Breitkopf & Härtel and edited by Clara Schumann. Bar numbers and analytical annotations have been added.

⁹ Harald Krebs has shown that in the A section there is a subtle metrical grouping dissonance: the six quavers of the 6/8 bars are subdivided in the piano part's left hand as 3+3, while the thematic material mostly subdivides bars into 2+2+2. At the hypermetrical level, Krebs reads a displacement dissonance in the A section, starting with bar 3 representing in the piano accompaniment the third bar of a hypermeasure and in the vocal part the fourth bar (a kind of hypermetrical upbeat) of a conflicting hypermeasure. Some of Krebs's metrical interpretations are quite provocative. See ‘Meter and Expression in Robert Schumann's Op. 90’, in Rethinking Schumann, 187–90.

¹⁰ In Schumann's song and instrumental cycles, inconclusive endings of individual movements are often related to the cyclical organization; clear instances can be found in the endings of ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’ in Dichterliebe Op. 48 or ‘Florestan’ in Carnaval Op. 9. Discussion of the cyclical role of the two works that I consider here is beyond the scope of this essay.

¹¹ The translation is from The Fischer-Dieskau Book of Lieder, trans. George Bird and Richard Stokes (London: Victor Gollancz, 1991): 298. I have slightly modified the translation. Bird and Stokes follow Lenau's original poem, while I have included in Figure 1 the two words that Schumann added: ‘dunklem’ (dark) in line 6 and ‘freudig’ (joyously) in line 14.

¹² Another way to interpret the poem would be to read the second stanza as a reference to a beloved person, not to the speaker's inner sentiments. The pairing of outer reality and inner sentiments is suggested to me primarily by the romantic pairing of nature and self, a pairing discussed in more detail below.

¹³ Friedrich von Schiller, Naive & Sentimental Poetry; On the Sublime , trans. of Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, 1795 and Über das Erhabene, 1801, by Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966): 85 (italics original).

¹⁴ Schlegel, Friedrich, Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Firchow, Peter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971): 49Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Schneider, Helmut J., ‘Nature’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume V: Romanticism, ed. Brown, Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 104Google Scholar. For further discussion of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in Schelling's philosophy, as well as on Schelling's position in German aesthetics, see Hammermeister, Kai, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Hoffmann, E.T.A., E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. Charlton, David, trans. Clarke, Martyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 236Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Hoffmann, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, 238.

¹⁸ Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, 175.

¹⁹ For a discussion of thematic introductions, see Caplin, William, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 15Google Scholar. In the analysis of the Fantasiestück I will use Caplin's terminology also more generally. For a discussion on elongated upbeats, see Rothstein, William, Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1989): 56–7Google Scholar.

²⁰ The V⁷ at the end of bar 5 is contrapuntal elaboration within a modified Prinner schema, with the bass descending stepwise to the tonic and the top voice moving in upper tenths. William Caplin uses the term ‘Prinner cadence’ when referring to such V⁷–I progressions, which do not constitute proper, functional authentic cadences: see Caplin, ‘Harmony and Cadence in Gjerdingen's “Prinner”’, in What is a Cadence: Theoretical and Analytical Perspectives on Cadences in the Classical Repertory, ed. Markus Neuwirth and Pieter Bergé (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015): 30–31.

²¹ For a thorough discussion on the role of context in assessing the function of individual musical events, see Lewin, David, ‘Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception’, Music Perception 3/4 (1986): 327–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Closing a cadential progression, towards the end of a movement, in a tonic chord with an added seventh is a technique that already the classical composers used, both in works in the major (see, for example, bars 80–81 in the Adagio of Haydn's Symphony No. 98) and those in the minor (see, for example, bars 173–174 in the Adagio sostenuto of Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op. 106). The situation in Schumann differs from that in Haydn and Beethoven, however. The I⁷ in the two classical works represents a modification of the Galant schema Quiescenza, which confirms a preceding cadence and the tonic; on Quiescenza, see Gjerdingen, Robert O., Music in The Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007): 181–95Google Scholar. In Schumann, by contrast, D minor is briefly tonicized; thus, as a local V⁷ of D minor, the I⁷ challenges the tonic rather than confirms it. For a Schumann work in which a I⁷ (or actually a I⁹) functions as an unequivocal tonic, see the ending of the finale of the Piano Trio Op. 80 (1847).

²³ In the autograph, the clarinet repeats in bars 64–67 a G#–A progression, but in the publication an F–E progression replaces this motion. The change is significant; the avoidance of a repeated melodic motion aiming at the tonic pitch challenges the sense of finality. At the same time, the F–E progression recalls the E–F motion of bar 1, the first element in the piece that challenged the stability of the tonic.

²⁴ Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, 175.

²⁵ Translation from Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries, abridged edition, ed. le Huray, Peter and Day, James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 374Google Scholar.