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Allen Simpson
Should I start an academic paper with a question? The answer is not so black and white.
Doing so would be a rhetorical device, akin to ending a piece of music with a question, or a half
cadence. Clara Schumann does just this in her song Die Stille Lotosblume, a setting of Emanuel
Geibel’s poem. The finale of her 6 Lieder, op. 13, Lotosblume ends the entire collection of songs
on a half cadence. In this paper, I will show how Schumann is able to retroactively render an
answer to this question that ends the poem and the half cadence that ends the song. The
brilliance of the composer shines as she uses semi-tonal voice-leading and enharmonic
respelling of notes to pull it off. She marries these ideas with the already present imagery in the
Geibel poem, enhancing it and ultimately creating a clever and curious ending to this collection
of songs.
Beginning with a brief analysis of the text, I want to highlight the poem’s ending, an
other line rhyme within each stanza. Using imagery, the author evokes in the first three stanzas
a budding lotus flower, a moon pouring its light into the flower, and a swan singing to the
flower. Additionally, the imagery is supported by descriptions of colors: the pond is blue, the
flower and the swan are not just white, but the whitest, and the moon’s glow is golden. The
final stanza shifts from description to a question, as the swan (or something) asks the flower if it
can understand the song, which seemingly is unanswered. The flower is described as quiet or
silent, but one could expect a question at the beginning of a poem and an answer by the end. It
is worth noting that all of the objects in the poem are genderless, referred to as “it,” save one
example, when, according to the English translation, the moon refers to the flower as “her.” It
almost reads as a Freudian slip of the poem’s author, as if he was soliloquizing metaphorically
about a woman and accidentally let reality slip in for just a moment.
The composer’s setting of the song is semi-strophic; the first three stanzas are generally
set the same way, and, in particular, the first half of each are more or less musically identical.
The final stanza is an anomaly though, with the first half actually lumped in with the music of
the third stanza and the second half being a new phrase with new musical material. Because it
is so unexpected, the splitting up and re-composition of the final four lines are marked: the
grouping of the first half of the final stanza with the third stanza demands attention. Then, the
space between the first half and the second half of the stanza (three bars!) must be a sign that
points. Set to a new melody, Schumann isolates the only question in the song as it draws to a
close. The question has gone unanswered, and to reinforce the ending on a question,
Schumann ends the piece on a V7 chord. While this ending is not historically satisfying, it is
expected in a sense because the piece is filled with half cadences; in fact, this song doesn’t
appear to contain a single authentic cadence. The final half cadence is no different than any
other cadence in the song, but the isolation of the question must point to something. Perhaps
the question is not unanswered, but simply answered earlier in the song.
Towards the end of the song, the composer brings the key of C-flat major into play, a
chromatic mediant from the original A-flat major. See example 2 below.
In measure 29, Schumann jumps directly into C-flat major, an immediate call-to-attention. This
also happens to be the only part of the song where a line is repeated, “Er singt so Süß, so leise.”
C-flat eventually resolves down to B-flat (ii) which moves to E-flat, V in the original key,
providing the same motion found throughout the song at all the half cadences. The C-flat and
the immediately following isolation of the question at the end, as stated before, must point to
something. Again though, it doesn’t appear to be the final cadence because, though it is
unusual to end on V, it is identical to the other cadences in the work. Further, there would be
no need to isolate the question because ending a piece with a half cadence already elicits
Consider the number four and its metaphorical role in this composition; the poem has
four quatrains, the key has four flats, the song begins with a leap of a fourth, the question is
asked in the fourth line of the fourth stanza, and the answer is provided forty-four measures
from the end through semi-tonal voice-leading in measure 4. See example 3 below.
The persistent use of the number four is hard to dismiss; in retrospect, one could imagine the
amplification of the number four as a foreshadowing of the answer. The use of contrary voice-
leading here is clever in the first stanza because it describes a blossoming flower. Moving in
opposite directions, the piano and voice paint several chromatic moments. In particular, the B-
natural is important because it acts as a kind of tendency tone that wants to resolve up to C-
natural, which it does in the next measure. The B-natural here is a prefiguration of its
occurrence towards the end of the piece, only it is respelled as a C-flat there. In example 2, the
B-natural/C-flat is a marker that signifies the piece ending on a question; this is reflected as the
C-flat resolves down to B-flat, eventually moving to the half cadence. However, in example 3,
the B-natural/C-flat resolves up to C-natural, creating the third of the elusive tonic chord. The
question has been answered, but forty-four measures before it was even asked. Can the flower
understand the song? The question at the end is marked by C-flat, and the answer is given in
measures 4–5 as the C-flat, respelled as B-natural, rises to the third of the tonic chord; the tonic
is the goal of this one gesture, despite the rest of the song’s abundance of half cadences. The
Clara Schumann’s creativity is on display in Die Stille Lotosblume. She uses semi-tonal
voice-leading to add weight to an important section. This is eventually an answer the question
posed at the very end, but not until she uses enharmonic respelling to change the polarity of a
single important note. With these clever ideas at her disposal, she crafts a beautiful song that
enhances the allusion and imagery found in Geibel’s poem. Still, the audience is left to wonder
if the budding of the flower is an actual answer to the question. Furthermore, does the flower
truly understand the song, or is it simply nature, independent of the question entirely?