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Recurring Dreams and Moving Images: The Cinematic Appropriation of Schumann's Op. 15,No. 7Author(s): Jeremy BarhamReviewed work(s):Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Spring 2011), pp. 271-301Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2011.34.3.271 .Accessed: 18/11/2011 09:55

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271

JEREMYBARHAMSchumann’sOp. 15, No. 7

19th-Century Music, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 271–301. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2011 by the Regents ofthe University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2011.34.3.211.

1Moving Picture World, 13 March 1909, cited in CharlesHofmann, Sounds for Silents (New York: DBS Publica-tions, 1970), p. 9.

I am grateful to Laura Tunbridge and the anonymous re-viewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions ofthis article. I also extend thanks to Reinhard Kapp, RufusHallmark, Annette Kreutziger-Herr, Arnfried Edler,Bernhard Appel, Beate Perrey, Janina Klassen, and DavidFerris for generously responding to various queries in rela-tion to Schumann, Clara, and Ludwig Rellstab.

Early Cinema andthe “Träumerei” Phenomenon

When audiences at Chicago’s Senate Theaterin 1909 heard Schumann’s “Träumerei” playedas part of the musical accompaniment to the“highly dramatic” Biograph film A Fool’s Re-

venge,1 they were witnessing not only an emer-gent trend in film presentation toward increas-ingly sophisticated and generically wide-rang-ing musical characterization, but also a signi-ficant stage in the deracination and mass com-moditizing of a familiar musical work. A re-porter from Moving Picture World describedhis response to this early manifestation of thepractice: “The film made a deep impression onthe audience. . . . A pleasant variation from the

My heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.—Wordsworth, 1802

You must not seek to addTo what you have, what you once had;

You have no right to shareWhat you are with what you were.

No one can have it all,That is forbidden.

You must learn to choose between.—Afanas’yev/Ramuz/Stravinsky, 1918

America only makes children’s pictures.—John Hurt, n.d.

Recurring Dreams and Moving Images:The Cinematic Appropriationof Schumann’s Op. 15, No. 7

JEREMY BARHAM

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eternal ragtime was a refined deliverance ofclassical music corresponding to the characterof the picture, including Schumann’s ‘Trau-merei’ [sic] and Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata.’The first time, indeed, we ever heard Beethovenin a five-cent theatre.”2 The history, mechan-ics, and aesthetic repercussions of such screenappropriation of “Träumerei” will concern mein this study (ex. 1).

Rick Altman has shown that conflictingforces were at work in these early years of filmmusic and film sound from ca. 1910. On theone hand, there was the polarization of filmgenre, class perceptions, and musical style inwhich “popular songs were limited to com-edies, while classical selections were reservedfor drama” and “arbiters of musical taste in-creasingly associated class and prestige exclu-sively with European (or European-sounding)music.”3 On the other hand, there was the rapidcommercial solidification of the signifying po-tential of an initially small number of familiarworks. Here “Träumerei” took its place along-side comparable Romantic mood snapshots byGounod, Mendelssohn, Rubinstein, Weber, Do-nizetti, Offenbach, Suppé, Verdi, and Wagner.4

It was not long, however, before these ge-neric and class distinctions became blurred,and the resources for screen accompaniment—whether performed on piano, organ, or by in-strumental ensembles of varying sizes—ex-panded beyond all previous recognition. CarliElinor’s compilation score for Griffith’s filmThe Clansman (1915) comprised commonlyused works by Beethoven, Bizet, Flotow, Mas-senet, Mozart, Offenbach, Rossini, Schubert,Suppé, Verdi, and Wagner played by an ensemble

of forty players plus vocal soloists and chorusduring its initial twenty-two-week run in LosAngeles.5 When the film reopened in New Yorklater that year under its more familiar title TheBirth of a Nation, Joseph Breil’s new compila-tion score plundered and adapted, alongsidetwenty-six popular tunes and songs, the worksof nine composers.6 Similarly, Frank Adams,the organist of the New York Rialto theater,together with conductor/arranger Hugo Riesen-feld, put together a score compiled from theworks of nineteen composers (including ex-cerpts from Schumann’s Symphony No. 4, op.120, and “Am Kamin” from Kinderszenen) fora 1922 presentation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde.7

Partly as a reflection of current practices,and partly to formalize and formularize thosepractices in prepackaged, ready-to-use, and com-mercially lucrative form, various publicationsemerged from the mid-1910s that acted to ce-ment even further a lexicon of musical seman-tics, which, though direct and efficient in its

2Ibid. Roger Manville and John Huntley cite the signifi-cant but frustratingly vague description by Cecil Hepworth,one of the United Kingdom’s first film pioneers, of histraveling exhibition from an even earlier time in the 1890s:“I remember one little series which always went downvery well indeed. It was called The Storm and consisted ofhalf a dozen slides and one forty-foot film. My sister Effiewas a very good pianist and she travelled with me on mostof these jaunts. The sequence opened with a calm andpeaceful picture of the sea and sky. Soft and gentle music(Schumann, I think)” (The Technique of Film Music [Lon-don: Hastings House, 1957], p. 20).3Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2004), p. 267.4Ibid., p. 313.

5Ibid., p. 292. Martin Marks lists the following: “The Clans-man” Overture by J. E. Nurnberger, “Semiramide” Over-ture by Rossini, “Tancredi” Overture by Rossini, “LightCavalry” Overture by F. V. Suppé,“Morning, Noon, andNight” Overture by F. V. Suppé, “Romantic” Overture byK. Bela, “Stradella” Overture by F. V. Flotow, “Marriage ofFigaro” Overture by W. A. Mozart, “Orphée aux Enfers”(Violin solo interpreted by Miss Elsa Grosser) by J.Offenbach, “Nabucodonozar” by G. Verdi, “Sinfonia,”Giovanna d’Arco by G. Verdi, “First Symphony” by L. V.Beethoven, “Unfinished Symphony” by F. Schubert, “LesHuguenots” by Meyerbeer, “Rienzi” by R. Wagner, “LeJongleur de Notre Dame” by J. Massenet, “L’Arlésienne”(Prelude and Carillon) by G. Bizet, “Silent Woe” and“Anathema” by A. V. Fielitz, “Americana” Suite by W.Thurban,“Incidental,” music selected by C. D. Elinor andL. Brown (Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and CaseStudies, 1895–1924 [New York: Oxford University Press,1997], p. 134).6Marks lists the following: Beethoven, Symphony No. 6(iv), Bellini, Norma (overture), Grieg, Peer Gynt Suite (“Inthe Hall of the Mountain King”), Hérold, Zampa Overture,Mozart, Twelfth Mass in G Major (“Gloria”), Suppé, LightCavalry Overture, Tchaikovsky, 1812 Overture, Wagner,Rienzi (overture) and “Ride of the Valkyries,” and Weber,Der Freischütz (overture) (ibid., pp. 208–09; see also pp.135–66 and 198–218 for further details of the score). I amgrateful to Martin Marks for clarifying the status of other,less accurate, accounts of the music used in the Elinor andBreil compilations.7See Altman, Silent Film Sound, pp. 337–39. Arthur Kleiner,musical director of the Film Department at the Museumof Modern Art from 1939, would later accompany presen-tations of Murnau’s Faust (1926) with selections fromSchumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (see Hofmann,Sounds for Silents, pp. 52–53).

273

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effect, risked being aesthetically limiting in itsreliance on, and purveying of, a narrowing setof assumptions and attributions and a relent-less impulse toward metonymical excerpting:for example, F.B. Haviland’s Moving PicturePianist’s Album (1911), Carl Fischer MovingPicture Folio (1912), Ernst Luz’s A.B.C. Dra-matic Set (1915–20) and A.B.C. Feature Photo-Play Edition (1917–19), John Zamecnik’s SamFox Moving Picture Music (1913–14) and SamFox Photoplay Edition (1919–22), and, last butnot least, Erno Rapée’s Motion Picture Moodsfor Pianists and Organists (1924). As an illus-

tration of Schumann’s clear presence in thecreative minds, practices, and printed collec-tions of this time, Luz’s A.B.C. Dramatic Set,no. 10, designed for a “Diabolical Scene,” com-prises a “Heavy Misterioso” composed by Luzand two pieces “adapted from Shumann’s [sic]Childhood Scenes,” which are in fact versionsof “Knecht Ruprecht” and “Volksliedchen”from Album für die Jugend, op. 68 (correctattribution and fidelity to authorial ownershipwere low priorities). As Max Winkler, managerof the Moving Picture Music Department ofCarl Fischer publishers and possible inventor

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of the cue sheet, later famously wrote in an oft-quoted passage: “We began to dismember thegreat masters . . . extracts from great sympho-nies and operas were hacked down to emergeagain as ‘Sinister Misterioso’. . . . If they wereto be used for happy endings we jazzed them upmercilessly. Finales from famous overtures . . .became gallops.”8 The operatic-soprano-turned-star-actress Geraldine Farrar9 compiled her ownlist of appropriate music for screen moods rang-ing from contentment (Debussy, Prélude à“L’Après-midi d’un faune”) to anger (Schubert,Erlkönig) and from despair (Leoncavallo, “Vestila giubba”) to delight (Schumann, Carneval[sic]),10 while the New York Dramatic Mirrorfilm-music columnist Montiville Morris Hans-ford recommended Schumann in his shortlistof keyboard composers whose music was par-ticularly suitable for film accompaniment.11

After listing a host of well-known popular tunesused for Irish films, tearjerkers, or war pictures,Bert Ennis (publicity assistant at the VitagraphStudios in New York and one of many whoclaimed to have invented the cue sheet) wrotethe following about his activities in 1910, im-plying that “Träumerei” had by this stage al-ready become staple household fare:

We showed our class by injecting at times the classi-cal and standard numbers—a few of them anyhow.“Hearts and Flowers,” “Melody in F,” “Träumerei,”“Souvenir,” “Pilgrims’ Chorus,”—they all helped togive helpless audiences a barrage of highbrow musicbefore the present day experts in the writing of mu-sic scores for films discovered Debussy, Beethoven,Schubert, Mozart, Wagner and other big leaguers ofthe classical field.12

In Rapée’s encyclopedic compilation, subtitled“A Rapid-Reference Collection of SelectedPieces Adapted to Fifty-Two Moods and Situa-tions,” Schumann is listed four times: under“Funeral” (“Andante Pathétique no. 1,” a key-board arrangement of the opening C-minor sec-tion of the second movement, “In Modo d’unaMarcia,” of the Piano Quintet, op. 44);13 “Hunt-ing” (“Jagdlied,” op. 82 and “Jägerliedchen” [op.68]); and, injecting a moral dimension (no doubtrooted in ready acceptance of childhood con-texts and legacies) into possible filmic charac-terizations through music, “Quietude and Pu-rity” (“Träumerei,” op. 15, no. 7).14 The num-ber of listings by Rapée of other composers is:Grieg (20), Mendelssohn (10), Beethoven andBizet (6), Johann Strauss (5), Schubert andChopin (4), Tchaikovsky (3), Delibes, Dvorák,Fibich, Rubinstein, Wagner (2), and Boccherini,Brahms, Elgar, Glazunov, Handel, Liadov,Massenet, Meyerbeer, Offenbach, Paderewski,and Sullivan (1).

Embedding standardized associative mean-ings for the film viewer through regular expo-sure to familiar musical repertoire in this waywas initially very effective, but already by 1915and 1918 Luz and the film-music columnistGeorge Beynon were respectively questioningthe extent to which this led to a kind of aes-thetic exhaustion and emotional desiccation.Luz, significantly, makes reference to the pieceunder investigation here: “We might call Schu-mann’s ‘Traumerei’ [sic] a number with a posi-tive pathetic appeal, and use it at all timeswhen screen action is of a pathetic character,could we hope that the audience would enjoyits third or fourth repetition in one hour?”15

Beynon comments in a general sense:

The orchestra opens the picture with a beautifulnumber. . . . The music changes. In a few minutesthe first selection is played again. It’s a nice number.Two or three short numbers intervene and you hear

8“The Origin of Film Music,” Films in Review 2/34 (Dec.1951), cited in Altman, Silent Film Sound, p. 361.9Farrar made her film debut as Carmen in Cecil B. DeMille’s1915 film of that name. According to the IMDb, whenacting, she “demanded a pianist and a violinist on the setto provide mood music, a string trio for especially dra-matic scenes” (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0268125/bio).10Curtis Dunham, “Musical Anaesthesia for Motion Pic-ture Audiences,” Metronome (Feb. 1921), 72, cited inAltman, Silent Film Sound, pp. 368–69.11“Preparing Music for Photoplay Accompaniments,” NewYork Dramatic Mirror (29 Sept. 1917), 9, cited in Altman,Silent Film Sound, p. 429.12Cited in Hofmann, Sounds for Silents, p. 15.

13Notably Clara Schumann had made a piano-duet arrange-ment of the op. 44 Quintet in 1858.14Erno Rapée, Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Or-ganists (New York: G. Schirmer 1924), pp. v, vi, and xi(my emphasis).15Luz, “Theme Playing as Used and Abused” in “Musicand the Picture,” Moving/Motion Picture News (14 Aug.1915), 130, cited in Altman, Silent Film Sound, p. 376.

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it again. It’s a fair number. An agitato follows, it isrepeated and becomes a monotonous number. Thethird reel is being shown, and again you hear it. Youcannot understand why they play it so much. Itpalls. As the music continues, this poor little num-ber is dragged in by the heels . . . until your soulrebels and you hate that music forever.16

By the time cinema had taken hold of Schu-mann’s “Träumerei,” it was already too late forthis kind of musical typecasting to be counter-acted, for the long-standing nineteenth-centuryfashion for making and performing arrange-ments of this piece had also been reaching apeak, rendering its assumption into screen cul-ture something of an inevitability. KárolyCsipák and Reinhard Kapp reproduce the scoreof an arrangement for piano and harmoniumpublished by Carl Simon in Berlin (dating fromthe turn of the twentieth century), whose coverpage also lists a wide range of alternative pub-lished versions scored for the following combi-nations—a “Träumerei” package to suit all re-quirements:

Piano (two- and four-hand)Harmonium (or organ) soloFlute (violin or cello), harmonium and pianoFlute (or violin) and harmoniumFlute (or violin) and pianoCello (or viola) and harmoniumCello (or viola) and pianoTwo violins and pianoCornet à pistons in B� and pianoHarmonium (or organ) and string quintet (or quartet)Piano, harmonium and string quartetSalon orchestra (piano, violin (violin II or viola) cello,flute, cornet à pistons (harmonium ad lib.)Trio for piano, violin and celloPiano four-hands, violin and cello (flute, cornet andharmonium ad lib.)Violin and harmoniumViolin and pianoGrand organ (freely adapted by Karg-Elert)17

With a clear agenda that denigrates as kitschydistortion such (re)arrangement and its result-

ing challenges to the hallowed origins of themusical work, they write:

The history of “Träumerei”’s disfigurement . . . canbe traced in popular nineteenth-century arrange-ments. . . . In addition to the various salon- andcoffee-house re-workings, there also exist orches-tral, choral, song and vocalise versions of “Träu-merei.” Soviet balalaika ensembles have been heardto play it, and doubtless guitar, mouth-organ, andaccordion groups too. The effects of this practiceshould not be underestimated. . . . The interpretersare no longer playing the work but rather a rumourof it, its ubiquitous caricature.18

To some extent supporting this claim, the Mu-sical Times and its predecessor, the MusicalTimes and Singing Class Circular, list a sig-nificant number of performances (and, later,recordings) of the work in the United Kingdomand the United States (in isolation and in avariety of orchestral, string ensemble, solo vio-lin, and cello arrangements) in the 1880s and1890s, but then virtually none until the 1920sand 1930s.19 Could it have been that the inter-vening culture of silent screen appropriationhad helped to revitalize a then-waning tradi-tion of concert interest in the piece? With thiscombination of the renewal of a strong perfor-mance legacy stretching back to a period notlong after the composer’s death and an equallyrobust recent history of early-twentieth-cen-tury silent screen cultural absorption, it wasnot surprising that this work, described by Kappas having “determined the image of Schumannand the conception of [his] music for genera-tions,” should continue to have been calledupon in the world of the sound film. Neverthe-less, arrangements of the piece—the “succes-

16George Beynon, “Proper Presentation of Pictures Musi-cally: The Theme,” Moving Picture World (23 Feb. 1918),1093, cited in Altman, Silent Film Sound, p. 376.17“‘Träumerei’,” Musica 35/5 (Sept.-Oct. 1981), 438–43;quotation p. 441.

18Ibid., p. 442.19See vols. 22/465 (1 Nov. 1881), 570–71, 24/490 (1 Dec.1883), 663–64, 30/554 (1 Apr. 1889), 218, 32/586 (1 Dec.1891), 728, 33/592 (1 June 1892), 346, 33/598 (1 Dec. 1892),726–27, 35/614 (1 Apr. 1894), 240–41, 36/625 (1 Mar. 1895),184, 39/659 (1 Jan. 1898), 24–25, 51/807 (1 May 1910), 332,62/942 (1 Aug. 1921), 571, 73/1070 (1 Apr. 1932), 330–31,73/1073 (1 July 1932), 629. See also Eckhard John, “Musikund Konzentrationslager: Eine Annäherung,” Archiv fürMusikwissenschaft 48/1 (1991), 1–36, for reference to apoignant diary entry for 12 December 1943 by ArthurHaulot, a prisoner in the Dachau concentration camp, not-ing an afternoon concert that included a “deeply emo-tional” cello performance of “Träumerei.”

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sive new guises,” the “new clothes” that were“tailored according to those changing concep-tions”20—were one thing. But the kinds of ex-treme adaptation, fragmentation, recontextual-izing, and commercial exploitation of the work(and those of many other composers) that wereto take place in the era of sound cinema chal-lenged the terms of a conventional receptionhistory of music founded simply on concert orrecorded performance and its associated criti-cal apparatus.21 In the latter contexts, Kapp maybe correct to judge that “Träumerei” no longerretains its turn-of-the-century prominence, butin other creative arenas such as that of twenti-eth- and twenty-first-century screen repertoireit has attained something of a second—if argu-ably somewhat interpretatively depleted—life.This new existence poses many difficult ques-tions pertaining to aesthetic legitimacy, autho-rial presence, the culture of childhood, musicalintimations of meaning, and the very nature ofRomantic art and fantasy—questions whoseexploration may compel us to reevaluate ourrelationship with this music. Therefore my aimshere are to disentangle and interpret the knottyhistorical, cultural, and aesthetic encounter be-tween Schumannian Romanticism and later(primarily Anglo-American) mass-media screenentertainment, and thereby to shed light on thewider creative practice of employing preexis-tent music in screen contexts.

Schumann, Children’s Music,and Cultural Economies

Recourse by Luz, Adams, and Rapée to itemsfrom Schumann’s Album für die Jugend andKinderszenen for silent-film accompaniment issignificant, but not surprising. The early life ofthe medium, coupled with the cultural sensi-bilities of the time, required, among otherthings, the kind of direct and efficient simplic-

ity seemingly offered by this music in order tosupply the ostensibly clear-cut emotional anddramatic signification necessary for the masscommunication of ideas. The employment ofthis music for such purposes seemed largelyoblivious to the subtle qualitative distinctionbetween works composed for children and workscomposed “about” childhood, however muchSchumann’s own often-quoted differentiationbetween the two collections has been left un-challenged. (Purely technical demands aside, theadult craftsman hand of the composer is verymuch in evidence across these pieces.) Schu-mann, at least the publicly adopted Schumannof Kinderszenen, shared with certain dominantareas of earliest silent-film culture a Words-worthian acknowledgment of the pure, naïveyet earnest child that eternally exists within,and is variously reimagined by, every adult—autopian sentiment poeticized in the quotationcited at the head of this article. What mightappear to set Schumann apart from later film isa post–First-World-War sociocultural paradigmshift—intimated by the famous moral ofStravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale also cited above—toward the recognition that there were limitsto the viability of this psychological integra-tion, and that accordingly things could, and per-haps should, no longer be the same as they hadbeen before. This world seemed to have lostforever qualities of supposed innocence (or theability to connect with such qualities), whichinitially would be submerged by extremes ofExpressionist dystopia or absurd and cynicalhumor (for example, in Dada and Surrealist art,and populist screen cartoon genres with similaraesthetic agendas), and by the sophisticatedscreen works of the “new morality”:22

The differences between Sennett’s conception of com-edy [through Fatty Arbuckle] and Harold Lloyd’s, orbetween Mary Pickford’s embodiment of feminineidentity and Theda Bara’s, or between the value sys-tems of The Birth of a Nation (1915) and DeMille’sMale and Female (1919), suggest the dimensions ofthe change that had occurred within sectors of theAmerican public.

20Reinhard Kapp, “Schumann in His Time and Since,” inThe Cambridge Companion to Schumann, ed. Beate Perrey(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 223–51; quotations p. 248.21It is possible that Schumann’s music was used in thepresentation of live theatrical melodramas during the lat-ter part of the nineteenth century, and in so far as suchdramatic forms may be considered precursors to cinema itwould be worthwhile investigating evidence for this.

22See David A Cook, A History of Narrative Film (3rd edn.New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), pp. 214–25 for furtherdiscussion of this paradigm shift.

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An emphatic break with (and often critique of)the past and a self-conscious embrace of the moderncharacterized the post-war scene. . . . Post-war Eu-rope quickly defined the modern within an older,élitist, and highly intellectualized aesthetic sensi-bility. . . . But the modern as manifest in Americanmass culture . . . embodied democratic appeal, in-stant gratification, and seamless illusionism. . . .Hollywood’s modernism inhered in the industrial-ized creation of products driven by the project oftelling stories as efficiently and transparently as pos-sible . . . and the persistence throughout the west ofthe signifying practices associated with Hollywoodwould characterize the decades to come.23

That this shift was embedded in contexts oflate-Industrial-revolution economics neverthe-less masked a deeply repressed nostalgia—asense of brokenness that formed one of theessential foundations of the Freudian psycho-analytic project.24 After all, in the early post-war years there still existed a strong vein ofsentimentalized film melodrama and homespunromance that employed “the uncomplicatednarrative montage of Griffith’s prewar films,”25

and it could be argued that despite its diversify-ing developments in other technical and aes-thetic areas, mainstream cinema has never quiteoutgrown these tendencies. Whereas conflict-ing assessments of the make-up of early-twen-tieth-century vaudeville, nickelodeon, and pic-ture-palace clientele make it difficult to mapthese developments straightforwardly onto aclass-oriented “bourgeoisification of cinema”

at this time,26 it seems more certain that theforces of capitalism, spearheaded by spectacu-lar postwar American growth, tamed and ho-mogenized film spectatorship socioeconomi-cally within cultures of yearning for the pastand fear for the future, while also inevitably,but unwittingly, entrenching its other: the per-ception and jealous safeguarding of aesthetic-artistic differences and hierarchies. This appar-ent appeal to a social unity that paradoxicallymasks an irrevocable departure from that unityis intimated in Gerard Manley Hopkins’spointed inversion, and consequent subversion,of Wordsworth’s very same sociopolitically con-servative ideas in an otherwise trifling “triolet”written in the 1880s but not published until1918:

“The child is father to the man.”How can he be? The words are wild.Suck any sense from that who can:“The child is father to the man.”No; what the poet did write ran,“The man is father to the child.”“The child is father to the man!”How can he be? The words are wild.(“The Child is Father to the Man.”)

As may be inferred from Winkler, the cul-tural phenomenon of early film curiously com-bined two things: first, an extreme and poten-tially universalizing process of “high-art” mu-sic democratization and desacralization that wassocially progressive and yet almost entirely de-fined by commercial concerns; and second, aprocess of demotic narrowing of this music’ssignifying potential that was creatively noveland undeniably effective in mass-media con-texts but aesthetically prescriptive for its fu-ture consumption outside such contexts. With“Träumerei” this process developed from nine-teenth-century precedents set in the work’s in-creasingly bourgeois reception and consump-tion within salon and soirée contexts as well aspiano pedagogy. With the help of the meaningaccruing from these contexts and from the

23William Uricchio, “The First World War and the Crisisin Europe,” in The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed.Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1997), pp. 62–70; quotation p. 70.24That this same sentiment formed the basis of Adorno’sMahler critique is significant: “the late works embody aRomanticism of disillusionment . . . [Mahler’s] Utopia isworn out like the Nature Theater of Oklahoma” (Mahler:A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott [Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], pp. 148 and 150),a reference to the inconclusively redemptive final chapterof Kafka’s novel Amerika (publ. 1927), the story of a ban-ished European attempting to rescue himself in the magicof the American dream. Elsewhere I have argued thatMahler’s musical processes have been far more influentialon screen scoring practice than has generally been acknowl-edged (see “Plundering Cultural Archives and Transcend-ing Diegetics: Mahler’s Music as ‘Overscore’,” Music andthe Moving Image 3 [2010]).25Cook, A History of Narrative Film, p. 221.

26See Tom Gunning, “Early American Film,” in The Ox-ford Guide to Film Studies, ed. John Hill and PamelaChurch Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),pp. 255–71; quotation p. 265.

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piece’s title, such precedents quickly assumedthe nature of a tradition within film scoring.Aesthetic abstraction of a rich childhood topicbecomes the accompaniment of choice, whetherfor absurd purposes in slapstick cartoon (seebelow); or associated with the yearning for un-reachable prelapsarian states in golden-era Hol-lywood melodrama and romance; or “matur-ing” into the symbol of convenience for anentrenched sentimentality in film of the lastdecade. Already uncertain distinctions betweenart for children and art “about” childhood re-cede as “Child” and “Man,” or utopian vision,disillusionment, and nostalgia industry, discon-nect and reconnect in antagonistic yet sociallyand aesthetically homogenizing ways, pushingclaims of difference, hierarchy, and value judg-ment into the margins of a desperate conserva-tism itself restricted by its own brand of nostal-gia for the mythical pristine.

Here we can see a curious amalgam ofnineteenth- and early-twentieth-century trendsin literary approaches to the child topic.Wordsworth’s divine child of nature, symbol ofhope and organic human integration, cedes toMatthew Arnold’s “prematurely adult” child(“To a Gipsy Child,” 1849) suggesting “adultdespondency over a universe of fragmentationand pain”;27 and thence to Dickens’s explora-tion of deep childhood fears and guilt in GreatExpectations (1860–61), Manley Hopkins’s im-age of a child’s fall from innocent grace into adecaying world in “Spring and Fall: to a youngchild” (1880), and, in Jude the Obscure (1895),Hardy’s acts of negation through infanticideand child suicide, and the impossibility of Jude’sdesperate resistance to maturity: “If he onlycould prevent himself from growing up! He didnot want to be a man.”28

Virginia Woolf’s famous dictum from thepostwar perspective of 1923, “On or about De-cember 1910 human character changed,”29 hasbeen interpreted in different ways: as a cultural

elitist’s recognition of the rise of high-art mod-ernist sensibilities in the wake of the receptionof Chekov, Dostoyevsky, Wells, Butler, Freud’sclinical assault on childhood innocence, and,with hindsight, the coming of D. H. Lawrenceand Joyce; and as an indication of the widersociopolitical change brought about by the endof the Victorian and Edwardian eras (EdwardVII had died in May 1910). It should be remem-bered that this was also the time of the cult ofJ. M. Barrie, forged by Sentimental Tommy andMargaret Ogilvy (both 1896) and consummatedin Peter Pan (1904, novelized in 1911), a workthat onstage and in print captured the imagina-tion of a newly emerging mass entertainmentand literature marketplace and its taste for whatWoolf might have considered a regressive formof emotional escape. Early commentators onBarrie observed its lure: “hundreds and thou-sands of [adults] at all kinds of extraordinaryages, fell right into his open trap. . . . Theycouldn’t get away from it. And they, too, sud-denly, hated being grown up”; when the playwas performed “all the audience are children.”30

If the nineteenth century can justly be calledthe “century of the child,” a time when “child-hood was first recognized as a distinct and es-sential phase of human life,”31 then it is notsurprising that, as Isabel Eicker has observed,the century saw a flourishing of child-inspiredor child-oriented piano repertoire, among whichSchumann’s Kinderszenen, Album für die Ju-gend, and Drei Klaviersonaten für die Jugendplayed a prominent part in the search to recon-nect with a mythical purity of youth. The cov-eted ideal of childhood’s “capacity for fantasy”appeared to be a driving force for Schumannand others and invites us to consider its rela-tionship with the composer’s broader aestheticdevelopment and with the issue under discus-sion here.

27U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Mutations of the WordsworthianChild of Nature,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagina-tion, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 391–425;quotation p. 396.28Cited in Knoepflmacher, “Mutations,” p. 425.29From the essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” 1923, Col-lected Essays, vol. 3 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966).

30Denis Mackail, The Story of J. M. B. (Sir James Barrie,Bart., O.M.) (London: Peter Davies, 1941); Thomas Moult,Barrie (London: Cape, 1928), both cited in Peter Coveney,Poor Monkey: The Child in Literature (London: Rockliff,1957), p. 201.31Isabel Eicker, Kinderstücke: An Kinder adressierte undüber das Thema der Kindheit komponierte Alben in derKlavierliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts (Kassel: Gustav Bosse,1995), p. 20.

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Let us recall that the “Romantic and revo-lutionary,” “socially utopian” aesthetics ofSchumann was built on the promotion of a po-etic music that stimulates imaginative re-sponses, and on a “rejection of the culture ofthe prosaic” whereby society “trivialized andcommercialized music by treating it as a com-modity, an entertainment medium.”32 But thisshould be seen in the context of another of thecomposer’s claims: that “philosophers can learndirectly from music that, even through the out-ward appearance of trifling childlike levity, itis possible to say the most profound thingsabout the world.”33 The question arises as towhether Schumann himself tapped into the cultof childhood as an act of nostalgia, as a meansof returning, via Clara (whom he knew first asa child), to an Eden of lost innocence (or ofreaching Clara via an Edenic path): “May yoube my last, most exalted goal, Clara, angel ofpurity and innocence, lead me back to child-hood,” as he wrote in his diary two years beforecompleting Kinderszenen.34 Or whether in em-bracing the childhood topic he was identifyingwith something already within him, the eter-nal infant as poetic muse: “In man there re-sides a tender genius that gently opens up forthe eternal child gateways to new worlds andcreations, and that, unnoticed and as if bychance, leads the youth in his first love to theblossoming spring with his beloved, unitingand revealing to each other their dreams.”35

There may well have been senses of both nos-talgia and self-identity wrapped up together inSchumann’s creative psyche and inhabiting re-constructed childhood worlds. Is it safe to as-sume, then, that in aesthetic terms he wouldlikely have greeted the cinematic appropria-tion of the fertile dream work at the center ofKinderszenen with a mixture of horror and res-

ignation? After all, not only is it called intocommercial service for the sake of entertain-ment, but also through an apparent depthlessrealism and confining of semantic models itsindustrialized reprocessing seems to elide thepoetic undecidedness and rhetorical question-ing so dear to his aesthetic outlook.36 Schumanntook Rellstab’s critique that the collection didnot conform to established norms of illustra-tive children’s music to be a complete miscon-ception: the “very considerable meticulousnessof the enterprise” standing in “opposition tothe title.” “Thus we can take the title ‘Kinders-cenen’ merely as an indication of the com-poser’s flight of fancy; but his work refers tochildren as little as a Pastorale would be writ-ten for shepherds.”37 It is also well known thatSchumann was critical of the kind of prescrip-tive and explicit program attached to a worksuch as Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique for“having his thoughts so rudely directed.” Heacknowledged that “chance influences and im-pressions from outside” can play importantfunctions for composers in the act of creation,and that such ideas can enhance the exactitudeof the listening experience. But the search forwhat we might now call music’s semiotic “ob-ject” or “signified” was something that, forSchumann, can be taken too far by listeners:“One is certainly mistaken if one believes thatcomposers take up pen and paper just with thepaltry idea of expressing, or describing, or paint-ing this or that.” In this regard, and with spe-

32Ulrich Tadday, “Life and Literature, Poetry and Philoso-phy: Robert Schumann’s Aesthetics of Music,” in Perrey,The Cambridge Companion, pp. 38–47; quotation p. 45.33Cited in Robert Schumann: Tagebücher: Bd. 1. 1827–1838, ed. Georg Eismann (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag fürMusik, VEB, 1971), p. 414.34Cited in Georges Starobinski, “Les Kinderszenen op. 15de Schumann: Composantes Littéraires et Biographiquesd’une Genèse,” Revue de Musicologie 88/2 (2002), 361–88;quotation p. 384.35Cited in Eismann, Robert Schumann, p. 105.

36See John Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music and theGerman Romantic Ideology (New York: Schirmer Books,1993), p. 87; Leon Botstein, “History, Rhetoric, and theSelf: Robert Schumann and Music Making in German-Speaking Europe, 1800–1860,” in Schumann and HisWorld, ed. R. Larry Todd (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1994), pp. 3–46, esp. pp. 29–30; and Laura Tunbridge,“Piano Works II: Afterimages,” in Perrey, The CambridgeCompanion, pp. 86–101, esp. pp. 93–94.37“Die so gar große Richtigkeit der ganzen Unternehmung,und der Widerspruch, in dem dieselbe mit dem Titel steht.”“So können wir denn den Titel ‘Kinderscenen’ nur füreinen halten, der den Phantasiegang des Componistenbezeichnen sollte., seine Schöpfung aber so wenig denKindern zuwieß, wie ein Pastorale für Hirten geschriebenist” (Iris im Gebiete der Tonkunst 10/32 [Berlin, 1839],126–27, cited in Bernhard R. Appel, “Ein productivesMißverständnis: Robert Schumanns ‘Kinderszenen’ op. 15in der Kritik Ludwig Rellstabs,” Die Musikforschung 40[1987], 109–15; quotation 109 and 110 [my trans.]).

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cial significance for the cinematic appropria-tion of music under discussion here, for good orill, Schumann admitted: “Once the eye hasbeen led to a given point, the ear no longerjudges independently.”38 If we are to believeSchumann, the compositional process of Kin-derszenen bore out his subtle aesthetic outlookin that, on the one hand, he did not crasslyplace children before him and “then search fortones accordingly,” asserting conversely that“the titles originated afterwards”39 (and in gen-eral titles for Schumann were “nothing butdelicate directions for execution and interpre-tation”40); but on the other hand, he concededthat “while composing, some children’s headswere hovering around me.”41

Even before composing Kinderszenen he rec-ognized the subtle element of fantasy playact-ing engaged in by certain music: “[which,] pre-tending to be a playing child with a brimfullheart that it is almost ashamed to reveal to thewise and learned . . . mischievously hides be-hind its tinkling musical figures . . . with won-derful sound-meanings which knock at everyhuman heart with the quiet question ‘Do youunderstand me?’, but are by no means under-stood by everyone.”42 The lurking elitism ofthis comment whereby only the privileged feware admitted into the secret world of illumina-tion might seem a strange bedfellow for child-like games. This Socratic dialogue intimates atension between the private and the public thatwould later lie at the heart of the experience of

film consumption,43 where there is potentiallyless concern for individual subtlety and enigma,however much the darkened atmosphere mightgive the impression of the opposite, as situa-tions and meanings are necessarily presentedand received communally. In such a contexteveryone is required to understand, and so itwould appear that the secret answer whose de-ferral, elusiveness, or abstruseness is the verymeaning of Schumannian Romanticism hasrather to be driven home in many areas of main-stream screen culture. At the behest of a twen-tieth- and twenty-first-century economic im-perative the searching artistic profundity of“childlike levity” is traded for the certainty ofinformation commodities in the belief that the“tinkling musical figures” are all there is. Again,in a bid to preserve putative origins, it is tempt-ing to lapse into a reassuring aristocracy ofaesthetic assumptions, and to conclude thatrich connotation may thus become narrow de-notation, dialogic interpretation may becomemonologic data-retrieval, and music may be-come fossilized and expedient lingua franca.Probing the nature of Schumann’s practical cre-ative life and the screen appropriation of hismusic may provide some insight into the valid-ity of this apparent polarity between a “richer”nineteenth-century Romantic poetics and a“poorer” twentieth-century mass-media culture.

First, as some have noted, like so many ofhis early-nineteenth-century, post-patronage-eracontemporaries, Schumann was compelled toconfront the bourgeois marketplace with all itsinherent restrictions and opportunities, particu-larly when as a young composer he felt theneed to demonstrate his credentials as Clara’sfuture husband, and even more intensely thanmost through his promotional activities as edi-tor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. AnthonyNewcomb has suggested that Kinderszenen of-fered the first, perhaps unintentional, example

38This and previous quotations from Schumann, “A Sym-phony by Berlioz,” trans. Edward Cone, in Hector Berlioz,Fantastic Symphony: An Authoritative Score: HistoricalBackground, Analysis, Views and Comments, ed. EdwardCone (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 220–48; quotationspp. 246–48. See also Fred Everett Maus, “Intersubjectivityand Analysis: Schumann’s Essay on the Fantastic Sym-phony,” in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed.Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),pp. 125–37, in which Maus says of Schumann’s comments:“This means that the program is irritating, but not that itscontent is false,” p. 132.39Cited in Appel, “Ein productives Mißverständnis,” p. 113(my trans.).40Cited in Thomas Alan Brown, The Aesthetics of RobertSchumann (New York: Philosophical Library, 1968), p. 178.41Cited in Appel, “Ein productives Mißverständnis,” p. 113(my trans.).42Cited in Brown, The Aesthetics of Robert Schumann, p.167.

43Home consumption of cinematic product, a result of thepost-1960s television and video age, admittedly lends adifferent perspective to the public-private distinction, butthe prevailing economics of big-screen production still de-termine that, apart from certain “straight-to-video/DVD”fare, the primary arena of reception is communal. Previewscreenings to large groups of people demonstrate a per-ceived need for consensual approval and understanding.

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of Schumann’s ability—as a musician “ex-tremely attentive and sensitive to publishedreactions to his work” and faced with Wieck’spatriarchal pressure—to produce marketable,accessible music. Opus 15 was certainly amonghis best-selling collections, reaching sales ofbetween 300 and 350 copies in the first sixmonths after its publication by Breitkopf andHärtel. More significantly, it bore the hallmarksof the peculiarly German phenomenon of ap-proachable, middle-class Hausmusik, whichwas on the point of enjoying a revival and cul-tural consolidation in the Vormärz years, andindeed continued to flourish after 1848, theperiod in which “Träumerei” began its steadymarch toward independent fame and assump-tion into general consciousness. This must beseen in the context of Clara’s populist plea toSchumann in 1839 for “something . . . easilyunderstandable . . . without titles . . . some-thing written for an audience,” and Schumann’sresponse to her similar request in the previousyear: “Clara. . . . You write that I should writequartets—but ‘please good and clear’—thatsounds indeed like something from the mouthof a Dresden Fräulein.”44 Thus Kinderszenenmight seem to have been in part the result ofartistic compromise and personal acquiescenceto the influence of a practical performing artistworking in the real world of public music con-sumption. As early as 1840, for example, Schu-mann would refer to the pieces condescend-ingly (though not without some justification)as “mere bagatelles” in comparison with other,more substantial works.45 And in a letter toCarl Koßmaly in 1843, he all but admitted theconcessions he had had to make to professionaland family demands: “when one has a wife andchildren it is completely different—one cer-tainly must think of the future, one also wantsto see the fruits of one’s labor, not the artisticbut the prosaic, which belong to life and only

increase one’s reputation.”46 Indeed, the degreeto which the collection, and especially“Träumerei,” successfully addressed the de-mands of the comfortable, intimate, familial-collective Hausmusik tradition, and the morechallenging, communal social-collective con-cert tradition, as well as the philosophical de-mands of early Romantic music aesthetics, issomething that screen appropriations compelus to reconsider in their recontextualizing andreimagining of the work’s signifying range andfunction.

Anomalies emerge from this process of mu-sical domestication engendered by Clara who,as an internationally renowned concert pianist,was not only already well versed in matters ofpublic musical commerce but also occupied atraditionally masculine social space in the part-nership. These circumstances may well havemagnified for Schumann the difficulty, evenfutility, of trying either to maintain (as a man)or fully to escape (as a Romantic artist) thekind of petit-bourgeois familial arrangements,taste, and outlook inherited from his parents.Although, as Michael Steinberg notes, such alegacy risked “transform[ing] the home intothe kleinbürgerlich nightmare from whichSchumann could never free himself,”47 the de-gree to which this shift overlapped with thekind of feminization of the composer’s creativepersonae suggested by Lawrence Kramer (viaNietzsche and Schumann’s own commentsfrom 1838) is open to debate.48 The central para-dox here is that on the one hand this seeminglyinescapable “intimacy and privacy”—forSteinberg ostensibly “split off from the publicand rhetorical”—nevertheless become markersof wider Biedermeier fashion, of what he calls“bourgeois essentialism and rigidity,”49 andhence another part of its climate of collectiveescapism to which Clara, as virtuoso performer,

46Cited in David Ferris, “Public Performance and PrivateUnderstanding: Clara Wieck’s Concerts in Berlin,” Journalof the American Musicological Society 56/2 (2003), 351–408; quotation 405.47Michael Steinberg, “Schumann’s Homelessness,” in Todd,Schumann and His World, pp. 47–79; quotation p. 76.48See Lawrence Kramer, “Rethinking Schumann’sCarnaval: Identity, Meaning, and the Social Order,” inKramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Ber-keley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 100–32.49“Schumann’s Homelessness,” p. 54.

44Newcomb, “Schumann and the Marketplace: From But-terflies to Hausmusik,” in R. Larry Todd, Nineteenth-Cen-tury Piano Music (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 258–315; quotations pp. 265 and 266.45Cited in Nancy B. Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artistand the Woman (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985), p. 109.

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was a prime contributor. On the other hand,Schumann’s earlier crusade against Philistinismwas couched in a belief that his music, ideas,and contributions to culture would inauguratea new generation of cognoscenti that would actas a buttress against the degradation of art andartistic standards: “An advance of our art wouldoccur first with an advance of artists towardsan aristocracy of the mind, the statutes of whichdo not merely demand knowledge of the baremechanics . . . in order to bring about an epochof a higher level of general musical culture.”50

History has shown that the first of thesepaths of transformation continued unabatedsince its first instantiation in Biedermeier cul-ture. It occurred initially through the wide-spread assumption of an uprooted “Träumerei,”and arrangements thereof, into public conscious-ness in post-Biedermeier German (and widerEuropean) society such that, according to viewsstretching across the last half-century, the workhas “achieved universal recognition,” “assumedan independent existence,” and “attained house-hold status.”51 This path then intensified anddiversified in the more rigidly bourgeois andincreasingly commercial patterns of consump-tion lying at the heart of the cinematic experi-ence in the early twentieth century (and later)—a process that was part of a larger shift in ten-sion between notions of high and low and com-munal vs. personal culture that Lawrence Levinecharts in turn-of-the-century America.52 Resem-bling Schumann’s adult perspective on child-hood topics in Kinderszenen, this consumptioncombined childlike wonderment, “a vacillationbetween belief and incredulity”53 at the novelty

and power of the medium, with unchildlikeawareness of the signifying properties of itsaudio-visual content. As the spectacular “cin-ema of attractions”54 gave way to narrative con-structions, as silent film turned to sound film,and as music’s function within these multime-dia complexes shifted between varied layers ofaesthetic dominance and subservience, practi-cality and semantic resonance, so in their re-sponses audiences veered between surrender-ing to purely sensory experience (as film music“recaptures the pleasure of the [infant’s] sono-rous envelope” and “primordial sonic space”55)and culturally identifying with music “as asignifying structure, and . . . as a form of repre-sentation and emotional expression,” some-times “foregrounded in order to further the . . .sense of structural unity or narrative coher-ence”56 or even to suggest dimensions of mean-ing supplementary or contrary to those of afilm’s other domains. This widespread histori-cal model of cinematic development is itselfpredicated on a Freudian metaphor that in turnowes much to Romantic theorizing about theimportance of childhood: “in Gunning’s sug-gestion that the cinema of attractions some-how survives (albeit in a suppressed way) in theprimarily narrative-driven classical cinema, wecan recognize the widely shared belief that child-hood traits continue to exist inside everyadult.”57 Keeping such developments in mind,we may now turn to the ways in which“Träumerei” has specifically figured and func-tioned in these conflicting spectacle- and story-oriented contexts of film’s history.

50Cited in Brown, The Aesthetics of Robert Schumann, p.30.51Kathleen Dale, Nineteenth-Century Piano Music: AHandbook for Pianists (London: Oxford University Press,1954; rpt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 237; AlanWalker, Schumann (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), p. 48;Erika Reiman, Schumann’s Piano Cycles and the Novelsof Jean Paul (Rochester: University of Rochester Press,2004), p. 152.52Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergenceof Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1988).53Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: EarlyFilm and the (In)credulous Spectator,” in Film Theory andCriticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (5th edn.New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 818–32;quotation p. 823.

54Gunning’s term. See his “The Cinema of Attractions:Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-garde,” Wide Angle8 (1986), 63–70; “An Aesthetic of Astonishment”; and“Early American Film.”55Claudia Gorbman, “Film Music” in The Oxford Guideto Film Studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 43–50; quota-tion p. 47.56Jeff Smith, “Unheard Melodies? A Critique of Psycho-analytic Theories of Film Music,” in Post-Theory: Recon-structing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 230–47; quotations pp. 245 and 236.57Dimitris Eleftheriotis, “Early Cinema as Child: Histori-cal Metaphor and European Cinephilia in Lumière & Com-pany,” Screen 46/3 (2005), 315–28; quotation p. 317.

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The “Träumerei” Protocolin Sound Cinema

Animation. Resistance to the demotic trendsof popular cultural appropriation remainedstrong in some quarters. As late as 1927 thecomposer and regular Musical Times contribu-tor Alexander Brent-Smith, clinging to fadingconcepts of authorial presence, found it incon-ceivable for a work such as “Träumerei” to beplaced successfully in anything other than aserious context: “Try to imagine Schumannusing his ‘Träumerei’ or Schubert his ‘Litany’for the theme of the story of the sleeping prin-cess and the brawling knight! It is unthinkable.Those composers knew that their music wasbeautiful, and they prized it too highly to spoilit with humour.”58 Despite this, it is no acci-dent that in the first wave of its appropriationby sound cinema (1932–53) fourteen of the nine-teen instances I have been able to identify arefrom cartoons—the archetypal entertainmentmodel designed for adult-as-child viewing, ply-ing caricature and absurdity in its packaging ofsentiment (see Table 1).59 It should be notedthat before the advent of television adultsformed an essential part of the target demo-graphic of animated film and have come to doso again only in recent years.60 Thus the use ofculturally entrenched repertoire such as “Träu-merei” fulfilled a practical as well as a putativeaesthetic function in encouraging audiences totake pleasure in the recognition of the famil-iar—a practice that certainly stretched back to

live piano accompaniment in the 1910s61 andpossibly to even earlier stage practices.

The ironies of cartoon repertoire in its 1930s–50s “golden age” are manifold. First, the produc-tion of cartoons as unashamedly popular mass-entertainment nevertheless depended for itsimpact on levels of cultural and musical lit-eracy that cut across prevailing high-low/popu-lar-classical divisions and, in typically rapid-fire symbolic or iconic composite scores, tappedinto the “collective unconscious which . . .unknowingly makes the connection betweenthe few bars of the motif . . . and the plotdevelopment or idea put across on screen.”62

Second, as audiences quickly became moreadept at identifying, or identifying with, musi-cal numbers, and as composers and arrangerssuch as Carl Stalling became cleverer at com-piling mosaic scores, efficiency dictated boththat ever smaller excerpts were all that wereneeded to produce the desired effect, and that“the canon of classical film music . . . wasreduced by cartoons to an even more limitedset of works.” Third, despite this reliance onknowledge of classical repertoire, there was, asDaniel Goldmark has observed of Hollywoodcartoons of this era—a repertoire “never seenby the public as anything but pop culture”63—amarked leaning (implicit and often explicit) to-ward the comedic undermining of “high-art”pretensions. This multiform process of narrow-ing the focus of what constituted classical“high-art” music in the eyes of the cinemagoingpublic, of paring down content in forms of ex-treme synecdochical communication reminis-cent of the short cuts of everyday speech, andof subverting elitist aesthetic hierarchies, wasbut one part of the response to the nineteenth-century Anglo-American “sacralization of cul-ture” and of the subsequent renegotiations ofcultural space identified by Levine.64

58Alexander Brent-Smith, “Humour and Music,” MusicalTimes 68/1007 (1 Jan. 1927), 20–23; quotation 22.59Resources for this part of my research have centered onthe Internet Movie Database, various Schumann-, or“Träumerei”-related web searches, credit listings from Sight& Sound and film guides, the library of the BFI, London,and communication from other individuals. Schumann’smusic has been employed, either diegetically ornondiegetically, in at least fifty narrative feature films andshort films. Over half of these instances involve“Träumerei,” making it by far the most commonly usedwork of the composer within the cinematic repertoire.60See Kristin Thompson, “Implications of the Cel Anima-tion Technique,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresade Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1980), pp. 110–11; and Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for’Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 2005), p. 3.

61See Altman, “Early Film Themes: Roxy, Adorno and theProblem of Cultural Capital,” in Beyond the Soundtrack:Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark,Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 2007), pp. 205–24, esp. p. 217.62Will Friedwald, “Sublime Perversity: The Music of CarlStalling,” in The Cartoon Music Book, ed. Daniel Goldmarkand Yuval Taylor (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2002), pp.137–40; quotation p. 139.63Goldmark, Tunes for ’Toons, pp. 108, 130.64See n. 52 for citation.

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Table 1Sound films employing Schumann’s “Träumerei”

Title Director Studio Composer/ Use of “Träumerei”(* indicates an musical director (measuresanimated film) and duration)

Fiddling Around Walt Disney Walt Disney Unknown mm. 1–8; 17–24(aka Just Mickey) Productions/ (original music 1 min. 42 secs.(1930)* Columbia Pictures composed by Bert Lewis)

Three’s a Crowd Rudolf Ising Leon Schlesinger Frank Marsales mm. 1–8; 17–232; 24(1932)* Studios 44 secs.

Rhythm in the Bow Ben Hardaway Leon Schlesinger Norman Spencer mm.1–52; 24–34

(1934)* Studios (whistled)28 secs.

The Hot Cha Manny Gould Screen Gems Joe DeNat mm. 1–82; mm. 1–4,Melody (1935)* & 1–33, 243–4, 1–33, 243–4,

Ben Harrison 23.5–33, 243–4; mm. 1–33,243–4, 1–4, 1–33, 243–4,1–33, 243–4, 1–4, 1–33,243–4, 1–33, 243–4, 1–4,1–33, 243–4, 12–33, 243–4

(last note extended by4 beats) 25 secs. oforiginal on piano withstrings; 37 secs. of“Hotcha Melody” onpiano (with strings);1 min. 46 secs. of“Hotcha Melody”on radio

Break of Hearts Philip Moeller RKO Radio Max Steiner Complete (including(1935) Pictures repeat of mm. 1–8;

diegetic on pianomm. 1–42; after shortbreak taken upnondiegetically byensemble)2 min. 48.5 secs

We Went to Joseph Santley MGM William Axt unknownCollege (1936)

I Love to Singa Tex Avery Leon Schlesinger Norman Spencer mm. 1–23

(1936)* Studios 11 secs.

Porky’s Poultry Frank Tashlin Leon Schlesinger Carl Stalling mm. 1–42 (played inPlant (1936)* Studios 2/4, omitting beats 12

and 23)15.5 secs.

Porky’s Romance Frank Tashlin Leon Schlesinger Carl Stalling mm. 1–22

(1937)* Studios 7.5 secs.

Daffy Duck & Tex Avery Leon Schlesinger Carl Stalling mm.1–32.5

Egghead (1938)* Studios 11 secs.

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Table 1 (cont.)


A Slight Case of Lloyd Bacon Warner Bros. Adolph Deutsch, mm. 1–33, 234–241

Murder (1938) Howard Jackson & (last note changedHeinz Roemheld from D to F and

extended in length)21 secs.

Americaner Edgar Ulmer Fame Films Inc. Sam Morgenstern unknownShadchen (1940)

Tom Thumb in Chuck Jones Leon Schlesinger Carl Stalling mm. 1–44 (final CTrouble (1940)* Studios of measure omitted)

20 secs.

Malibu Beach Party Fritz Freleng Leon Schlesinger Carl Stalling mm. 1–143 (no repeat(1940)* Studios of mm. 1–8); short

pause then mm. 20–241 min., 11 secs.

Duck Soup to Nuts Fritz Freleng Warner Bros. Carl Stalling mm. 1–123 (no repeat(1944)* of mm. 1–8)

60 secs.

Hare Ribbin’ Robert Warner Bros. Carl Stalling mm. 1–7(1944)* Clampett 38 secs.

Träumerei (1944) Harald Braun UFA Werner Eisbrenner m. 1upbeat–1 usedseveral times inopening creditsmm. 1–8 (no repeat);9–123; 164–242

mm. 1–4mm. 1–4; 214–242 min. 35 secs.

The Old Grey Hare Robert Warner Bros. Carl Stalling mm. 1–8, 11–2

(1944)* Clampett 42 secs.

Song of Love (1947) Clarence MGM Laura Dubman & mm. 1–24 (no repeatBrown Bronislau Kaper of mm. 1–8)

1 min. 58 secs.

Big City (1948) Norman MGM Lothar Perl, mm. 17–24Taurog Albert Sendrey & 50 secs.

George Stoll

Hare Trimmed Fritz Freleng Warner Bros. Carl Stalling mm. 1–31

(1953)* 9 secs.

Ludwig (1972) Luchino Mega Film Franco Mannino mm. 1–11 (with repeatVisconti of mm. 1–8)

2 min. 7 secs.

Madame Sousatzka John Cineplex–Odeon Gerald Gouriet mm. 1–122.5 (no repeat(1988) Schlesinger Films of mm. 1–8)

57 secs.

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Table 1 (cont.)


The Loss of Sexual Mike Figgis Newmarket Mike Figgis Complete (includingInnocence (1999) Capital Group repeat of mm. 1–8)

2 min. 40.5 secs.

Tea with Mussolini Franco Cattleya Stefano Arnaldi & mm. 1–8 (melody only)(1999) Zeffirelli Alessio Vlad 39 secs.

Crush (2001) John McKay Film Council Kevin Sargent & mm. 11; short break,Dana Sano then mm. 1–51

20 secs.

Wasabi (2001) Gérard Europa Corp. Julien Schultheis & mm. 1–4, 21–24Krawczyk Eric Serra 49 secs.

Swing (2003) Martin Guigui Razor Digital Gennaro Cannelora Jazz arrangementEntertainment lasting 57 secs.

Only mm. 1–8 arerecognizable (these,with introduction,last 33 secs.)

Beyond Borders Martin Mandalay Pictures James Horner mm. 1–8, 21–24(2003) Campbell 1 min. 18 secs.

mm. 24–8, 21–233

(pause on last note)58 secs.mm. 83–4, 21–2432 secs.mm. 1–4, 21–2450 secs.

Bizan (2007) Isshin Inudô Bizan Seisaku Michiru Ohshima unknownlinkai, FujiTelevision Networket al.

Sometimes embedded in highly skillful andinventive compilation scores and at other timesforming a more extended section of “under-score,” “Träumerei” excerpts lasting between7.5 secs. and 1 min. 48 secs. generally fulfillthree differing levels of increasingly prominentand complex aesthetic and semantic function,which I term “reflective,” “active,” and “self-referential”—though these functions are some-what permeable—in the context of two interre-lated emotional situations as identified below.“Reflective” usage tends to be aesthetically andsemantically predictable in that a fragment or

portion of the piece is employed for the pur-poses of mirroring the scene’s instantaneous orshort-lived emotional conditions. Such usagerecruits the music’s immediate and unequivo-cal association with either romantic attach-ment or death/loss-related pathos (genuine ormock, depending on the general tenor of thestory), occasionally mediated through the toposof the dream. For example, in Porky’s PoultryPlant (1936) the music appears when a weepingPorky is surveying a wall of posters bearing thenames of (presumably dead) chickens that hadbeen kidnapped by a predatory hawk. In Porky’s

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Romance (1937) a suicidal and concussed Porkydreams that he is marrying his beloved, theirvows accompanied by an excerpt on violinsand harp. Similarly a cross-dressing Bugs Bunnytakes Yosemite Sam to the altar in HareTrimmed (1953) and a “diegetic” version isheard on the organ as they begin their vows.65

After several failed attempts to shoot Daffy(repeatedly accompanied by the William TellOverture fanfare at ever-rising pitches), Egg-head in Daffy Duck and Egghead (1938) isdressed by the condescending duck in darkglasses with a “Blind” placard around his neckto an orchestral snippet of the piece. In DuckSoup to Nuts and Hare Ribbin’ (both 1944) themusic accompanies outbursts of false and genu-ine grief respectively as Daffy and Bugs areeither on the point of being shot or thought tobe dying. Outside of any comedic context, TomThumb in Trouble (1940) generates large de-grees of pathos as Tom decides to go searchingin the cold winter night for the bird that earlierthat day had saved his life (but which Tom’sfather suspects of trying to kill his son). Thepathetic note left on his pillow: “the bird is myfriend, he saved me and I’m going to look forhim” is accompanied by a solo-violin versionfull of portamenti. Thus a first-level semanticsestablishes itself in these examples around ba-sic sentiments of sorrow and love, whetherplayed “straight” or associated with ridicule.The extent to which such readings drew onSchumann’s reputation as “suffering romantichero” forged by a devoted Clara (always dressedin the black attire of widowhood in public ap-

pearances and performances during the posthu-mous decades) is open to debate.

The category of “active” usage presents adifferent level of aesthetically provocative scor-ing, in which the music intervenes to embody,drive, or affect the narrative and scenario ratherthan merely supplying emotional “corrobora-tion.” Fiddling Around (also known as JustMickey, 1930) provides an early example of thecomic deflation of high-art pretensions dis-cussed above. It thematizes the very act of solovirtuoso performance by having Mickey Mousegive an onstage violin recital that is precededby pratfalls and breaking strings and ends withthe instrument snapping apart under the strainof the William Tell Overture, or Overture Will-iam To Hell, as it is introduced here. After animpossibly fast rendition of Brahms’s Hungar-ian Dance No. 5, a spotlight is trained on Mic-key, casting his shadow on the stage curtainbehind and suggesting a more intimate and ear-nest setting for the next work, which is anextremely labored “Träumerei” played with ri-diculously excessive portamenti. So forcefullyemotive is the performance that, drawing onthe same pathos topic, the cartoon soon hasMickey reduced to tears, griefstricken, moan-ing (on or near a sustained F), interrupting him-self by having to blow his nose, and finallyexiting the stage, unable to complete the work.The ensuing rapturous applause seems to re-spond as much to the artistic involvement, de-votion, and resulting “justifiable” breakdownas it does to the expressive feeling of what isactually played—indeed the two are perhapsinseparable here. What seems to be lampoonedis the overly affected manner of classical artis-tic self-sacrifice to the demands of “great art.”Schumann’s piece, short enough for a good pro-portion of it to fit into the cartoon’s timescale,is evidently held to be both an ideal vehicle,undoubtedly because of its real-world histori-cal susceptibility to over-sentimentalized per-formance styles, and a universal emblem ofcultural hierarchies on account of its widespreadfamiliarity to audiences.

Three’s a Crowd (1932) offers an interestingmixture of highbrow and lowbrow cultural al-lusions. Here a dance-orchestra version of thepiece with additional countermelodies and linksbetween phrases, is rhythmically regularized

65Although I have not conducted a comprehensive and sys-tematic survey, it is worth noting that organ arrangementsof “Träumerei” were included in Melodious Melodies Ar-ranged for the Organ or Harmonium by John Owen (Lon-don: C. Jefferys, 1875) (see The Musical Times and SingingClass Circular 17/391 [1 Sept. 1875], 197); Selected Move-ments from the Works of the Great Masters for the Ameri-can Organ or Harmonium, ed. J. S. Anderson (London:Bayley & Ferguson, 1904) (see Musical Times 45/732 [1 Feb.1904], 138); Ten Easy and Useful Transcriptions for Organby Edward Shippen Barnes (New York: G. Schirmer, 1921);The Organist Recital Series (London: Gould & Bolttler,1928) (see Musical Times 69/1029 [1 Nov. 1928], 1046); andThe Anthology of Organ Music (London: W. Paxton, 1930).Evidence also exists of “Träumerei” being performed as arecital item by various organists in early-twentieth-cen-tury America, in New Music Review and Church MusicReview (1906), 278, 457, and 561, and (1912), 42.

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(at a tempo not far off from Schumann’s recom-mended quarter note = 100) to fit sonicallywith a ticking and chiming clock and visuallywith the rocking-chair movement and haltingstep of an old man who, at the beginning of thecartoon, gets up from his chair, extinguishes acandle and retires to bed, thus setting off achain of fantasy events (book characters com-ing to life) that by implication are the productsof his dream, since he has just been readingAlice in Wonderland. A roll call of popularliterary classics appears along with their char-acters and others from legend and history:Robinson Crusoe, Rip Van Winkle, The ThreeMusketeers, an unidentified volume by OmarKhayam (most likely The Rubáiyát), UncleTom’s Cabin, Tarzan, and the figure of RobinHood, together with a biography of Napoleon,Chic Sale’s 1929 The Specialist,66 Shakespeare’sHenry VIII and Antony and Cleopatra, and Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Characters sing and danceto the title song (by Harry Warren, Al Dubinand Irving Kahal from the 1932 film Tip TapToe), mock-Arabian music, Stephen Foster’s“Old Black Joe” and “Got the South in MySoul” (Ned Washington, Victor Young, and LeeWiley, 1932), and process to Chopin’s “FuneralMarch” as the evil Mr. Hyde, who has attemptedto kidnap Alice, is dumped into the wastepaperbin.67 All takes place in a gleeful, childlike at-mosphere whose apparent inclusivity could betaken as a gentle throwback to a nineteenth-century America in which, as Levine observes,even the works of Shakespeare enjoyed a greaterdegree of “simultaneously high cultural statusand mass popularity.”68 Or it could be that thisfilm, along with many others of its kind madein the burgeoning era of true mass entertain-ment, finally debunks the utopian myth of cul-tural uniformity and tries to rescue notions ofartistic value for the determinedly accessibleand popular.

In Rhythm in the Bow (1934) the music is

employed in a surrounding popular music con-text containing Cliff Hess’s title song, HarryWarren’s “Shuffle off to Buffalo,” “KingdomComing” (also known as “The Year of Jubilo”)by Henry Clay Work, and “Singin’ in the Bath-tub” by Michael Cleary, Herb Magidson, andNed Washington. Invoking the pathos topic ina similar way to Fiddling Around, “Träumerei”is played diegetically by a wandering fiddler totransform an aggressive barking dog into howl-ing and crying subservience, as if to invest theemotional content locked up in music of thiskind with the power of a form of weaponry thatmanipulates and subjugates its innocent, im-pressionable victims: a neat summation of whatsome might describe as the function of musicin the real-world context of golden-age Holly-wood film consumption. Notably as the doglater attempts to get its revenge but becomestrapped in the path of an onrushing train, thefiddler relents, saves its life, and the two fig-ures are reconciled, albeit as master (purveyorof popular and classic culture) and faithful ser-vant (consumer of the same).

I Love to Singa (1936), a parody of Al Jolson’sThe Jazz Singer using a song from the Jolsonfilm The Singing Kid (1936), plays more bla-tantly on the high-low cultural distinction, in amarkedly Yiddish context of family interac-tions and vocabulary. It employs “Träumerei”diegetically as archetype of highbrow classicalmusic when an owl hatchling immediatelystrikes up the tune on his violin to the approvalof his strict music-teacher father (Prof. FritzOwl) who has banned jazz from the house.Hailed by the father as “a Fritz Kreisler,” thehatchling is preceded by an operatic siblingsinging an aria from Donizetti’s Lucia diLammermoor and followed by another playingMendelssohn’s “Frühlingslied” on the flute, re-spectively greeted as “a Caruso” and “a Men-delssohn.” By the end of the narrative this pa-rental musical prejudice is finally overturnedon the basis of the commercial success of thepopular music style practiced by a fourth, ren-egade, hatchling vocalist named Owl Jolson,and through the father’s eventual willingnessto sacrifice “high” aesthetic principles for thesake of familial unity. In other words, socialcohesion is portrayed as dependent on the em-bracing of popular culture and on becoming

66The comic story of the builder Lem Putt who specializedin building outdoor “privvies.” Chic Sale (1885–1936) wasa well–known stage comedian and film actor.67Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starringFredric March, had been released in 1931. Interestingly itfeatured a diegetic performance of Schumann’s “Auf-schwung” from Fantasiestücke, op. 12.68Highbrow/Lowbrow, p. 233.

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part of a mass consumer marketplace, in thiscase represented by Owl Jolson’s success onthe radio. The question remains as to whetherthe abandonment of “old world” values in thisintergenerational conflict should be interpretedas exacerbating or negating what by the turn ofthe century, Levine suggests, was an already“exaggerated antithesis . . . between the aes-thetic and the Philistine, the worthy and theunworthy, the pure and the tainted.”69 Takinginto account the significant historical contextof the film being parodied here, the program ofmusic on display was almost certainly intendedto echo, and perhaps also to celebrate, crucialevents in the advent of film sound that hadoccurred a decade before the cartoon’s release,and whose epoch-making repercussions wouldstill have been felt by audiences. In 1926, ayear before the appearance of Jolson’s film TheJazz Singer, Warner Bros. gave the first publicdemonstration of their Vitaphone sound-on-discsystem in New York. The program featured aseries of shorts containing musical perfor-mances of well-known classics and vaudevilleitems: Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture (NewYork Philharmonic), Dvorák’s Humoresque(Mischa Elman, violin), Verdi’s aria “Caronome” from Rigoletto (Marion Talley, soprano),popular and vaudeville numbers by a Russiantroupe of dancers, the guitarist Roy Smeck andthe singer Anna Case, variations on Beethoven’s“Kreutzer” Sonata (Efrem Zimbalist, violin),and Leoncavallo’s aria “Vesti la giubba” fromPagliacci (Giovanni Martinelli, tenor).70 Anotheraccount of the program even lists Fritz Kreisleramong the artists, as well as Jolson himselfperforming “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a DixieMelody” in a filmed vaudeville sequence called“A Plantation Act.”71 The path toward cinema’ssubsumption and collective popularization ofthe cultural spectrum had begun to be trod.

The host of the radio talent show featured inI Love to Singa, on which Owl Jolson achievesfame, is named Jack Bunny in obvious homageto one of America’s best-loved comedians, JackBenny. By the end of the 1930s Benny was anestablished radio star, with programs for CBSand NBC that would last into the mid-1950s(and beyond in repeat broadcasts). His miserly,self-satisfied comic persona was in large partbuilt on an early vaudeville career (ca. 1911–21)as a violinist in a duo act at one time called“From Grand Opera to Ragtime.” He wouldsubsequently gain considerable comic mileagefrom mocking his own classical training throughpretentious claims of talent or simply by play-ing extremely badly. He thus contributed to asignificant strand of comedy performance thatpersisted in various guises well into the latetwentieth century, and indeed was a funda-mental aspect of early film-music practice.72

One of the most gratuitous attempts in golden-age animated film finally to demolish high artpretensions is made in the Jack Benny spoofMalibu Beach Party (1940), in which the come-dian entertains Hollywood greats at his houseonly to ruin the party and force guests to leavewith his own “diegetic,” “soured” violin-and-piano version of “Träumerei” with excruciat-ingly bad tuning. The very power of emotiveRomantic repertoire to subjugate—a power soclosely associated with this piece—is pilloriedhere, as the wretchedness of the performancedebilitates the music, making it necessary forthe Jack Benny character to pin down his min-strel-like black servant Winchester to the floor:“Someone’s going to listen to this. Isn’t thisnumber beautiful, Winchester?,” to which Win-chester replies “under the circumstances, yes.”The blackface of Jolson and the entire history

69Highbrow/Lowbrow, p. 232.70See James Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History (New York:Routledge, 2009), p. 91.71Michael Freedland, “You ain’t heard nothing’ yet: Howone sentence uttered by Al Jolson changed the movie in-dustry,” The Independent, Friday, 28 September 2007,http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/you-aint-heard-nothing-yet-how-one-sentence-ut-tered-by-al - jo lson-changed-the-movie- industry-464743.html, accessed September 2010.

72In the work of, for example, Dame Florence Foster Jenkins,Victor Borge, Peter Schickele as P. D. Q. Bach, and in theUnited Kingdom, Les Dawson, the Portsmouth Sinfonia,and Morecombe and Wise. Victor Borge ends one of thestage performances from the latter part of his career with arendition of “Träumerei,” complete with comic interjec-tions, the occasional added chromaticism, and an extraconcluding flourish (viewable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdmEg5DCawU&p=D4ADD2E6D162E095&playnext=1&index=17). Winkler describes the practice ofplaying well-known wedding music out of tune for scenesof marital conflict or divorce as “souring up the aisle”(cited in Altman, Silent Film Sound, p. 361).

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of minstrelsy echo through the Winchester char-acter and lend a problematic racial dimensionto the notions of subjugation and acquiescence,which would resurface only in the most recentusage of the Schumann piece in Beyond Bor-ders (2003), discussed below. But perhaps thereis yet another level of cultural meaning presenthere. If already in 1915 Ernst Luz was question-ing the effectiveness of multiple repetitions of“Träumerei” in film accompaniment, then by1940 the piece was, at least partially, shiftingin public perception from being a well-lovedclassic to becoming hackneyed and clichéd.Through the cynical lens of its Benny charac-ter, Malibu Beach Party is as much deridingthe music’s status as over-used and thus en-feebled formula in screen media, as it is attack-ing the posturing of the classical music aes-thetic it might represent. The problem of affec-tive fatigue in the use of the music intensifiedduring the course of the twentieth century,though, as we have seen and as discussed be-low, certain types of usage nevertheless suc-ceeded in releasing the considerable potentialcultural energy stored up within music as cliché.

Into the “self-referential” category fall twoexamples that, in their different ways, encap-sulate the complexity of the aesthetic, cultural,and historical situation I have been discussingso far. The Old Grey Hare (1944) has BugsBunny and Elmer Fudd transported to the year2000 where, in old age, their relationship con-tinues unchanged and from which perspectivethey reminisce about their first encounter asbabies, when the antagonism began. In thishistorically synoptic account, the composer/compiler of the score, Carl Stalling, portraysSchumann’s “Träumerei” as having becomedeeply ingrained in the lives of these charactersand, by extension, in the putative world of thecartoon in the year 2000. The hapless ElmerFudd (virtuosically voiced by Mel Blanc), whohas yet again been fooled by Bugs into thinkinghe has mortally wounded his nemesis, sobs atthe “result” of his action (while Bugs starts todig his own grave) in a way that precisely tracesthe melodic contours of the string version of“Träumerei” faintly accompanying at this point.As soon as Bugs has managed to trick Elmerinto entering the grave instead, the musicswitches back to the familiar raglike, brassy,

syncopated “Merrie Melodies” music. The tra-versal of diegetic boundaries, penetrating psy-chological areas of a character (however ab-surdly slapstick), is significant. The vocaliza-tion is internal to Elmer’s psyche. But it alsopoints externally both to the underscore of thisspecific narrative cartoon and to the wider his-tory of cartoon practice in which use of themusic had by this time become associated withacts of roguish emotional deception as humor(compare with Duck Soup to Nuts and HareRibbin’ from the same year, and Hare Trimmedfrom 1953). The plot’s chronological projectionssuggest a degree of self-reflexiveness on thepart of the genre in relation to its history, whichis enhanced by the headlines of the newspaperElmer reads from the year 2000: “Bing Crosby’sHorse Hasn’t Come In Yet!” (a topical jibe atCrosby’s knack at the time of backing poorracehorses), “Smellevision Replaces Television!Carl Stalling sez, ‘It will never work!’” (a dig atthe then potential emergence of home viewingas a rival to cinema).

The Hot Cha Melody of 1935 is yet morehistorically trenchant in its unique invocationof the ghost of the composer.73 Krazy Kat is aTin Pan Alley music hack instructed by thedevil figure that emanates from inside his ownhead to steal Schumann’s “Träumerei,” jazz itup after the manner of Al Jolson and GeorgeGershwin, and make a hit out of it.74 Mischie-vously, the devil then awakens the composer’s

73I am very grateful to Ivan Raykoff for bringing this car-toon to my attention, and to Daniel Goldmark for supply-ing me with a copy.74As a precedent for this, and a possible stimulus for themaking of the cartoon, in a 1911 Broadway revue entitledLa Belle Paree Al Jolson sang a number called “That Lovin’Traumerei” whose chorus adapts the last eight measuresof the Schumann original (omitting the shift to G minorin the last two measures, as is the case with The Hot ChaMelody and Break of Hearts—see below). This song wasrecorded the following year by Jolson (Victor Record 17119-B) and is available to hear on YouTube at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HhQkeTOKO_c. Gershwin’sfirst-known composition, dating from 1912 or 1913, wasentitled “Ragging the Traumerei” and adapts the first eightmeasures of Schumann’s original (with typical syncopa-tions and vamping bass) for the B sections of its ABAB(plus intro and coda) structure (see Howard Pollack, GeorgeGershwin: His Life and Work [Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 2007], p. 219). A recording has been made byPaul Bisaccia on The Great American Piano Revisited(Towerhill, TH-72027, 2010).

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ghost from a statue, which desperately screams“My music!,” storms into Krazy’s room anddestroys numerous radios that are churning outversions of the song by various star singers(including Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, the Bos-well Sisters, and Kate Smith). Krazy is finallychased inside the piano by Schumann who pum-mels him with the hammers by playing an-other tune, which the Kat, though literally be-ing beaten by the tools of his own trade, even-tually also declares a hit. In the end, then, thereis no escape for Schumann from the appropria-tion of his music. At a very early stage in itshistory the cartoon industry is here unasham-edly acknowledging and sending up its ownemerging practices and those of the previoussilent-film tradition, that is, of raiding the clas-sics and playing what purists might see as themorally questionable game of appropriation andaesthetically reductive manipulation. Moreover,The Hot Cha Melody presents this within thecontext of a conveyor-belt music industry inwhich songwriters are under pressure to pro-duce material and think nothing of stealingeach other’s ideas. The solution to creativeblockage, dreamt up by the musician’s ownmental demons, proves uncontrollable andcomes back to haunt its very progenitor.

There is, however, a highly significant, iffleeting, moment of ambiguity in the cartoon(at 5:19), when Schumann’s ghost is standingbelow Krazy’s window in the middle of TinPan Alley surrounded by neon advertisementsfor the “Hot Cha Melody” hit version of hispiece. A series of radio performances from well-known popular singers has just been heard. Af-ter the last of them by a scat-singing blackfaceminstrel, the composer can be seen briefly mov-ing rhythmically to and almost conducting themusic despite himself, momentarily dancingto the tune of the devil’s commercial machina-tions, as it were, before clambering into Krazy’sroom, accusing him repeatedly: “You stole mymelody, you stole my melody.” Furthermore,the music that Schumann ends up playing as aphysical punishment of Krazy is distinctlyraglike with its four-square syncopated melodyand vamping bass: a turning of the tablesthrough a return act of theft, perhaps, or else asurrender to the still-dominant paradigm.

Although it is dangerous to speculate ana-

chronistically, we are entitled to questionwhether any attempt to correlate early Roman-tic Schumannesque categories of humour, irony,or wit with the kind of comedy on display herewould be fruitful. Let us recall that masquer-ade, role-playing, and adoption of personae werefundamental elements in Schumann’s Roman-tic carnevalesque aesthetic whose process ofdissembling both cloaked and intensified deeperrealities of meaning. The twin roles of aEusebian tendency toward sentimentality anda Florestanesque tendency toward mischievousirony in his music—the “melancholy magicalallusions” of emotions that the latter then“roguishly hides”75—are also striking charac-teristics of the screen use of “Träumerei” as itveers between maudlin and mocking, ingenu-ous and cynical polarities. Cartoon absurdityderived from caricature and stereotype playswith clichés of sentimentality. Its slapstickcomic context may seem somewhat blunterthan Jean Paul’s “learned satire,” Heine’s ma-nipulation of cliché, or the sophisticated, anar-chic legacy of Sternian language and narrativegames. Yet it would nevertheless be illuminat-ing to contextualize Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck,Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Krazy Kat, MickeyMouse, Owl Jolson, Jack Benny, and the char-acters from Three’s a Crowd—some fictional,some real—in terms of a latter-day Commediadell’Arte corpus of figures of the kind that,along with actual people, Schumann called uponin literary-critical contexts and musically “ani-mated” in richly allusive fashion in Carnaval.

At first sight it might seem that in the car-toon repertoire discussed above we are con-fronted with a newly intensified poetics of thevulgar—a perversely romanticized mass eco-nomics of instant gratification and indulgencethat grinds down and fragments the alreadyminiature—rather than a vanguard culture withexalted revolutionary goals and challengingmethods that might see the world in a grain ofsand. However, Schumann himself may wellhave experienced some form of nineteenth-cen-tury precursor to “low” humor in the 1840s

75Eismann, Robert Schumann: Tagebücher, p. 414, citedin Heinz J. Dill, “Romantic Irony in the Works of RobertSchumann,” Musical Quarterly 73 (1989), 192.

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fashion for vaudeville theater modeled onFrench comedies with popular musical accom-paniments, and representative of the less ex-alted end of what Biedermeier culture had tooffer. Furthermore, his imaginary formation ofthe “Davidsbund” was both a product and asubversion of Biedermeier culture and society.Schumann was aware that, as in many otherAustro-German cities in the Vormärz years,the activities of any new association in Leipzigwould excite the interest of political censors.Conditions were somewhat more relaxed inLeipzig than in Metternich’s Vienna, adding allthe more to expectations of controversy: “Formany the mystery of the whole thing held aspecial attraction, and above all—as with any-thing that is disguised—a particular power,” asSchumann noted of the “Davidsbund,” whichhad become “something of a sensation” inLeipzig.76 One of his most significant targetswas superficiality and empty showmanship inthe form of the traveling virtuoso. Through itsown, lowlier “smile at the trivialities of life,”77

animated film of the early twentieth century(to whose plotlines masking through “dressingup” and disguise is endemic) took this sameimpulse and subject matter to iconoclastic lev-els, forcing audiences to think anew about en-trenched popular classics and encouraging themto laugh in the face of ostentatious classicalpyrotechnics, in a context that had a mixedpotential for sociocultural and aesthetic pro-gressiveness as well as its opposite. Whetherthe specific kind of souring of “Träumerei” inMalibu Beach Party or the musical and cul-tural parody of Fiddling Around could ulti-mately be said to stand for the extreme end of aspectrum of general cinematic flattening of thekind of poetic legacy that Schumann wished tobequeath in his music and writings is a ques-tion on which the use of the music in therather differently constituted aesthetic of live-action cinema may be able to shed further light.

Live action. Live-action repertoire partially over-laps with cartoon in the function and contextsof its use of “Träumerei,” but also offers dis-tinct dimensions in its scoring practice. Be-tween 1935 and 1948 at least seven featurefilms made use of the piece, including twowhose subject matter was the composer him-self. Four predate the Schumann biopicsTräumerei (1944) and Song of Love (1947). Morewill be said of Break of Hearts (1935) below,but the rest, the comedy-romances We Went toCollege (1936) and Americaner Shadchen (1940),include relatively straightforward diegetic ar-rangements of the piece with romantic sym-bolism in the contexts of a college reunion anda wedding. In a reflection of its recent cartoonheritage, the comedy-crime-caper A Slight Caseof Murder (1938) employs a comic orchestralversion for trombone and strings nondiegeti-cally, as the former gangster Edward G. Robin-son checks that his rough orphan-boy ward isasleep and engages in mock-serious dialogueabout the “halo” around the boy’s head. Thusfamiliar topics of romantic attachment anddream, presented both “straight” and ironically,were present at an early stage in live-actionusage.

Produced under the auspices of the thenNazi-controlled UFA (Universum Film Aktien-gesellschaft), Harald Braun’s Träumerei is nev-ertheless an entirely nonpropagandist biographi-cal account of the composer and his relation-ship with Clara.78 Compared with its Americancounterpart, it is historically more accurate andmarkedly free of sentimentality and melodrama,particularly in its treatment of Schumann’smental breakdown. Indeed it displays a depthand seriousness of aesthetic reflection that setsit apart from much contemporaneous Holly-wood output. Through the power of Schumann’smusic, Clara’s performances, and their relation-ship, an initially intransigent Wieck is com-

76Letters by Schumann (the first quotation from a letter toZuccalmaglio), cited in Bernhard Appel, “SchumannsDavidsbund: Geistes- und sozialgeschichtliche Vorausset-zungen einer romantischen Idee,” Archiv für Musikwissen-schaft 38/1 (1981), 1–23; quotation 17.77Schumann on Heine, cited in Friedrich Schnapp andTheodore Baker, “Robert Schumann and Heinrich Heine,”Musical Quarterly 11 (1925), 599–616; quotation 606.

78Träumerei appears to have had limited distribution inthe United States in 1953, but has not been released onvideo or DVD and is not held in the BFI archives. I con-sulted a 35mm copy held in the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv,Berlin. I am grateful to Jutta Albert and David Parrett forfacilitating this viewing. According to David Cook, onlyabout 25 percent of the feature films produced in Ger-many between 1933 and 1945 contain overt propagandistmaterial (see A History of Narrative Film, p. 352).

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pelled to rethink his outlook. Near the begin-ning of the film he peruses and criticizes“Träumerei,” the score of which Schumannhas just presented to Clara, and which Wieckoverhears her playing for the first time.Schumann asks him for Clara’s hand, to whichWieck responds: “Life admits of no dreams.”“But art thrives on dreams . . . it is dream”replies Schumann; Wieck: “Art and life are en-emies . . . forget your dreams.” By the narrativeconclusion, after Schumann’s death, Wieck hasrelented: “Art is greater than life” and, mirror-ing Schumann’s sentiments earlier expressedto Brahms (“Music is solace and dream”), hecontinues: “it is our solace and our duty.”

Opus 15, no. 7 is imaginatively woven intothe film’s opening orchestral credit sequenceby the music editor Werner Eisbrenner. Its open-ing melodic fourth is used several times as afamiliar “hook” and as the departure point fornewly composed material. The first two mea-sures of the melody later return to round offthe sequence. Unlike Song of Love, but in com-mon with almost all other screen usage of thepiece (diegetic or nondiegetic), here Clara’s per-formances are incomplete (Table 1). For what-ever reason, the statement in B� shifting to therelative minor (mm. 13–16) is omitted on firsthearing. At the very end of the film the agedClara receives a standing ovation before de-scribing Schumann as “the star of my life,”sitting down at the piano, stating simply“Träumerei,” and playing the first four and lastfour measures, as a kind of compressed coda orperoratio to the narrative. Just as the openingcredit sequence drew us into the world of thefilm through its adaptations of the melody, sohere underscored strings join the last phrase toframe our exit from the diegesis. The histori-cal, personal, and creative are blended sensi-tively by Braun. Clara first dreams she is play-ing the piece to an audience at one of her up-coming Parisian concerts: “Mesdames et Mes-sieurs, I will play the ‘Träumerei’ by Herr Rob-ert Schumann” she announces, curtseying infront of the piano. At the sanatorium, his mindgone, Schumann presents a scrawled manuscriptto Clara with the same announcement, where-upon mm. 1–4 can momentarily be heard on anon- or meta-diegetic piano, perhaps “projected”from his or her imagination. The overturning

of Wieck’s judgment is aestheticized as the over-coming of a passionless, unimaginative ratio-nalism. If for Wieck Schumann’s music is “lack-ing in rigour and form . . . his talent is ob-scure,” these very qualities are celebrated bySchumann’s generation as the work of “revolu-tionaries,” in the words of the composer him-self. Out of this tiny piece, or fragments of it,emerges an entire aesthetic of musical roman-ticism as dream-expression, which, as evenWieck is ultimately compelled to admit, tran-scends pain and happiness.

As its credits acknowledge, the AmericanSchumann biopic Song of Love (1947) plays fastand loose with factual accuracy regarding thecomposer’s relationship with Clara and hermusical activities. Nonetheless “Träumerei,”presented completely free of irony, interest-ingly provides entrance to and exit from thehighly sentimentalized narrative. At the begin-ning, after finishing her performance of Liszt’sPiano Concerto No. 1 in a public concert, sheasks her father in the wings if she can play“Träumerei” as the encore, but Wieck insiststhat the encore will be “La Campanella.” Claranevertheless goes ahead and plays her choice,announces it as the work of a “new” composer,and afterwards explains defiantly to her father(who, significantly, accuses her of childishness)that she did it for Robert (who was in the audi-ence) because of her love for him. Toward theend of the film, an ailing Schumann starts toplay the piece for Clara in the sanatorium,claiming that he had just composed it for her.The sentiment of the performance is notablyaugmented by the seemingly intentional repeatof the bass G at the end of m. 7, lending extrapoignancy to the diminished-seventh chordabove. Schumann is unable to complete thepiece, however, and falls on to a harsh disso-nance, an act that signifies his death. Despitethe unsurprisingly hagiographic nature of thefilm’s conventional plot, “Träumerei,” whichsignificantly is heard complete and fragmented,thus encompasses an extended range of seman-tic levels. It supports an ambiguous adult-childemotional axis in the reaction of Clara’s fatherand that of the juvenile Prince in the concertaudience who takes a special interest in thepiece and the player. It encapsulates the bliss ofthe burgeoning personal relationship between

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Clara and Robert—as a kind of bulwark againstparental and social disapproval. It is held torepresent the simplicity and directness of a“new” kind of music set against the emptydisplay and drama of the Liszt Concerto (how-ever historically misconceived). It acts as a fo-cus of individual inwardness in a public arenathat has just been treated to a virtuosic exhibi-tion, thus more closely matching the conflictbetween the collective and the private experi-ence inherent to cinematic consumption. Itembodies nostalgia and its inverse in loss ofmemory, at the end of the composer’s life,through recognition of the music’s significanceand that of the tragic inability to complete it.Finally it symbolizes a gateway to death, thelast gesture of a dying man more poignant thanany verbal farewell.

For all its excesses, inaccuracies and trite-ness—for example, Clara only ever performedKinderszenen in private gatherings in the 1830sand early 1840s79—and with obvious regard toits status as Schumann biopic, Song of Loveinvokes signifying possibilities that would cer-tainly fall within the “active” category out-lined above, and that have a surprisingly highdegree of complexity and subtlety within thefilm’s romanticized narrative orbit. Since thefilm operates on the clear terms of romantichero worship, the exalted but fragile nature ofartistic creativity, and the biography of thework’s very creator, it would be wrong to com-pare it baldly with the cartoon repertoire previ-ously discussed. In general sentiment it is per-haps closest to Tom Thumb in Trouble, butwhat it gains in straightforward “respect” forthe piece it loses in its lack of the kind of tersecontemporary social critique allied to otherrepertoire’s fields of manipulative irony throughradical fragmentation, recontextualizing, andreductio ad absurdum.

Though less varied in its semantic palette,the use of “Träumerei” in Break of Hearts (1935)gives an early example of the screen medium’sawareness of the multifunctional potential of asingle, moderately extended, music cue. Thisfilm has a narrative similar in many respects to

that of Song of Love: Katharine Hepburn (whoalso went on to play Clara in the later film) is astruggling young composer-pianist who falls forand marries an eminent but somewhat rakishorchestral conductor. Problems ensue, but“Träumerei” is the music that underpins theall-important initial sealing of the relationship.In just under three minutes of screen time themood progresses from lighthearted awkward-ness to declared and fulfilled passion, and it isthe treatment of the music that allows thisprogression to be accepted as natural. AfterHepburn’s character plays the opening fourmeasures for her soon-to-be lover—this wasthe first piece she ever performed in public, weare told—a nondiegetic string arrangement withubiquitous portamenti takes over with the nextphrase, and he slips into reverie: “I can pictureyou . . . your feet hardly touching the pedals.”They move closer and the intimacy developswith glowing close-ups of her face and initialphysical contact. Then follow three dissolveswithout dialogue but smoothed over by thecontinuing underscore: to the inside of a taxi,to a shot of their feet walking up the steps ofher apartment, and to the unlocking of her doorwhich, after touching her hand, he does him-self. Inside the apartment they briefly kiss anddeclare their love. Significantly, the kiss takesplace just after the beginning of the third phrasefrom the end (m. 17, the return of the openingmelody), whereupon two passing chromaticismsare added to the part-writing in order to providea “sweetening” effect typical of Hollywood andto strengthen the anchoring in the tonic (pass-ing C to D in the move to the subdominantchord, m. 18, and passing G to A in the moveto tonic in second inversion, mm. 18–19).Whether mundanely for purely practical pur-poses of fitting the score to the cutting, orsubtly to cement the sense of unalloyed unionand interim closure, the part of the final phrasecomprising the momentarily diverting chro-maticized move to the supertonic G minor (mm.23–24) is omitted.80

Music, particularly nineteenth-century mu-sic, is the subject of this film in more waysthan one. Its predominantly compiled score in-

79See Ferris, “Public Performance and Private Understand-ing.” 80An identical cut is made in Three’s a Crowd.

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cludes excerpts from Schubert’s Symphony No.8, Dvorák’s Symphony No. 9, Tchaikovsky’sSymphony No. 5, Mendelssohn’s WeddingMarch, Brahms’s Symphony No. 1, a romanti-cized orchestral version of Bach’s Toccata andFugue in D Minor, and the popular song inwaltz style written in 1894 by Charles Lawlor,The Sidewalks of New York. The Hepburn cha-racter’s own “composition” (presumably writ-ten by Max Steiner, in the style of a turn-of-the-century popular “classic”), which brings thecouple together, permeates the rest of the scor-ing. It is used as a conduit for the conductor’smental recovery and a symbol of Hepburn’sdevotion to him at the end of the film. In thebar where he languishes in a drunken stupor,she plays it with rising intensity (accompaniedby swelling nondiegetic orchestra) on thepianola that had previously been churning outa feverish ragtime. The piece opens with a ris-ing fourth as if it will continue as “Träumerei,”but unfolds in a different direction, more akinto the lightly chromaticized romantic style ofHollywood film scoring that became standardpractice in the 1930s. Together with the film’swider musical repertoire, “Träumerei” suppliesthe context for the burgeoning narrative of hu-man relationships, and, both diegetically andnondiegetically, it provides emotive contours,“aesthetic sealant”81 for visual shifts in timeand place, and perhaps most important of all acatalyst for romantic attachment and devotion.As a nineteenth-century fragment that “just is,like a single gesture of the hand,”82 “Träumerei”is curiously subject to a degree of both restric-tion and “enhancement” in the scene in whichit is used: the former aesthetically and seman-tically through sentimentality, emotive anchor-ing, and formal cuts; and the latter throughextraneous musical material and through beinginvested with a temporality that, with the helpof harmonic additives, draws more of a sense oflinear architecture from the work than its cy-clic, repetitive phrase openings would other-wise suggest. As Altman notes: “in order toassure its film future, music had to abandon its

first principles” of internal logic.83 What hasreplaced that logic in this instance is a speci-fied emotional narrative to which the unfold-ing of the music is assigned as carefully alignedpractical (diegetic) entry point, ambient(nondiegetic) mood and aesthetic backdrop ex-tending over changes of location and theprogress of romance, and repository of levels ofpassion depicted and felt by characters and au-dience. We, the couple, and the music melt asthe longed-for kiss takes place—a consumma-tion that causes, as much as it is reflected by,the chromatic alterations to the harmony.

For those who subscribe to a strict Schopen-hauerian view of the noumenal nature of mu-sic, the repercussions of this are potentiallyvast: nothing less than an overturning of theidea of Romantic musical transcendence, a de-bunking of the myth of the metaphysics ofabsolute music and the primacy of instrumen-tal music, and a denial of music’s “domain ofthe infinite” and “nameless longing” accessedthrough disinterested contemplation of its au-tonomous nature. While film might be accusedof dealing in, indeed relying upon, the com-plete contingency of music, for adherents toprogrammatic thinking or a belief in music’sthorough sociocultural entailment and medi-ated nature, this very contingency is what givesmusic its power and significance. The cinematicuse of “Träumerei” would in this case offeranother, albeit more explicit and determined,kind of fanciful, inventive engagement withmusic’s expressive meaning, general mood, oratmosphere: “Unconsciously along with themusical image an idea continues to operatealong with the ear, the eye; and this, the everactive organ, perceives among the sounds andtones certain contours which may solidify andassume the shape of clear cut figures,” as Schu-mann explained the compositional process,whose aesthetic points ahead to the multiplemodalities of cinematic perception.84 In thissense, film merely supplies sets of associationsequivalent in kind to, though not necessarilyprecisely matching, the imaginative responses

81Smith, “Unheard Melodies?,” p. 237.82Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 90.

83Silent Film Sound, p. 243.84Schumann, cited in Brown, The Aesthetics of RobertSchumann, p. 163.

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the composer considered a natural and legiti-mate part of the music-listening experience,especially in the case of Charakterstücke suchas those that make up Kinderszenen. The onlyquestions that remain are, if through force ofexposure we predominantly or only perceivethe films’ images whenever we encounter themusic, does this amount to a degradation of thelatter’s aesthetic properties? And if film is “put-ting words into our mouths” by putting theminto the “mouth” of the music, does this di-minish the depth and latitude of our free-float-ing imaginations? We may be in a better posi-tion to address these questions after the cur-rent examination of “Träumerei” in cinema ispursued to more recent manifestations of thepractice.

On the back of Song of Love, M-G-M pro-duced Big City the following year (1948), adeeply sentimental forerunner of Three Menand a Baby in which the great German sopranoand recent star at the New York MetropolitanOpera, Lotte Lehmann, plays a sweet-naturedJewish grandmother figure helping to nurturean abandoned baby. Having sung a version ofBrahms’s Lullaby to the child in the early partof the film, she later sings along wordlessly toan arrangement of “Träumerei” for piano, cello,and concertina played during a brief musicalsoirée by the three men who had first stumbledacross the foundling. By this stage in the filmthe child in question has reached the age oftwelve, and various layers of allusion and hom-age in the performance may be inferred: from anoted German émigré, then resident in SantaBarbara, to her European cultural heritage; tothe late-nineteenth-century Hausmusik legacyof chamber-ensemble arrangements of the workevidenced by the Simon publication cited above,and destined for intimate musical occasionssuch as that depicted here; from the caringfemale character to her past role as the “mater-familias” in bringing up the lost child; and tothe unifying power of music and childhoodembedded in the work, which transcends thereligious and cultural differences between theJewish, Protestant, and Catholic protagonists.The piece is sampled (only the first and lastphrases of the piece are heard), while the cam-erawork poignantly shifts ever closer to Leh-mann during the scene from a wide general

shot of all, to a medium shot of the three fe-male characters (Lehmann, child, and the loveinterest of one of the men), to a close-up ofLehmann’s earnest face. The scene’s prioritiz-ing of music as emotive cipher over the preser-vation of its work-centered structural integrityprovides yet further substantiation of Altman’sclaims.

Interest in “Träumerei” waned somewhat inlater postwar years, and after 1953 it does notseem to have been used again until 1972 and isthereafter present in only seven more films.Perhaps it was a sign that exhaustion of themusic’s first-level aesthetic and semantic capa-bilities had finally set in: “Träumerei” couldnot escape the identity it had assumed as cliché,and even the power invested in this cliché wasdiminishing. Its absence may also have resultedfrom the rise of the specially composed filmscore during the Hollywood golden era, as wellas subsequent decreasing interest in Europeanclassical music as both stylistic model and pre-existent score in favor of popular music stylesand repertoire during the post-studio system—all of which pushed film music in differentdirections. The art-film circuit may have cho-sen to steer clear of its hackneyed associations,and where it does appear, its use is often nomore than a pale imitation of earlier conven-tions. For example, Visconti’s Ludwig (1972)places “Träumerei” within a predominantlyWagnerian score in a passage near the begin-ning of the film with other movements fromop. 15. The troubled Ludwig is walking at nightthrough a snowbound Bavarian park with hiscousin Sissi, with whom he appears to be inlove. “Träumerei” steals in when the conversa-tion begins to get personal, but the performance,though on piano, is strangely altered: the melodyis stripped of some of its arpeggiation, and al-terations are made to the melodic contour inmm. 6, 7, 10, and 11. Some of these changesintroduce Schumann-like appoggiaturas, forexample, a 4–3 (F–E) over chord C6

4 in m. 73, a4–3 (C–B�) over chord Gm in m. 111, and a 9–8(A–G) over chord Gm6

4 in m. 113—which serveall the more to highlight the relatively subduedlevels of dissonance in the original. The perfor-mance is rhythmically very erratic, as if impro-vised, and the overall effect is oddly detached,as if Schumann’s music were little more than

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an unremarkable, absentmindedly doodled andembroidered salon piece for the aristocraticclasses, which has a degree of historical verac-ity for the 1860s–80s period of the film’s set-ting. Schumann’s piece accompanies the onsetof possible courtship and is set against Wagner’smusic, which is employed for the “real” pas-sion, drama, and tragedy of subsequent events.Such aesthetic distinctions are not particularlyfavorable to Schumann, but given the film’ssubject matter it could perhaps hardly havebeen otherwise.

Because they partake in modes and contextsof usage very similar to those of the repertoirepreviously discussed (a fact significant in it-self), most of the remaining live-action filmsmay be dealt with briefly. Madame Sousatzka(1988) is a reworking of the struggling musi-cian story in which the young pianist strikesup “Träumerei” at a dinner party to the raptattention of his entourage. It acts as confirma-tion of the budding musician’s artistic depthand value. Schumann’s Piano Concerto alsomarks the musician’s controversial public de-but against the wishes of his eccentric and over-bearing teacher. Tea with Mussolini (1999) fol-lows the grief and mourning theme by havingthe piece played on solo violin during a cer-emony of remembrance at the tomb of Eliza-beth Barrett Browning in Florence. This hap-pens while the eccentric art lover played byJudi Dench flamboyantly recites one of her po-ems, and the scene is intercut with shots of theunwanted child at the heart of the story. Re-course to the music in a 1930s European set-ting such as this reflects a degree of historicalaccuracy regarding the piece’s reception his-tory both in the real world of that time and infilms made during that period, enacting a kindof double homage. Moreover, the style and moodof the much-heard principal theme of the com-posed score by Stefano Arnaldi and Alessio Vlad,mostly used to symbolize the high-art culture,art, and spirit of the city, are clearly modeledon the Schumann piece. Mike Figgis’s frag-mented, parablelike The Loss of Sexual Inno-cence (1999) plays obliquely on the theme ofchildhood, and, taking the realist tendency toits logical conclusion, it uses the original pianoversion for an extended shot of new-born twinswriggling and twitching on a bed. The scene

shifts to the courtyard of an Italian maternitycenter run by nuns, with images of parentscradling children, and finally to the opening ofa storyline that will concern the chance meet-ing of two identical twins, now adults, whowere separated at birth. The destruction of na-ivete and innocence is a strong theme in thisfilm, manifested in primeval scenes of Edenand the subsequent brutal humiliation andshaming of the Adam and Eve figures. “Träu-merei” thus adopts its inherited role of serenecradle song and the embodiment of purity—harking back to Big City and further to the1924 Rapée compilation—within the disjointed,collagelike narrative. Crush (2001) trades oninfancy, dream topics, and an identical come-dic aesthetic to that of much previous cartoonusage, by using a fragment of the piece to ac-company a brief flashback to a daydreamingmoment of one of the young, single, femaleprotagonists during which she wistfully fondlesbaby clothes in a shop. In the face of the pos-sible decline in the piece’s force as cliché, it isinteresting that even after a long history ofexposure, its sudden interjection and abruptdismissal within a suitably ironic setting re-tain the ability to draw on the Eusebian-Florestanesque dialectic. With its diegeticswing-band version of “Träumerei”—a mani-festation of the long-practiced popularizing aes-thetic—Swing (2003) echoes Gershwin, Jolson,The Hot Cha Melody, and the early 1940s big-band practice of performing arrangements ofthe classics.85 The film also invokes the dreamtopic, in that the music is embedded within acurious semifantasy tale of a young man’s dancetutelage under a mysterious guardian angel froma previous era. Finally, Wasabi (2001) simplycalls on the piece as emblem of classic, late-night dinner music underpinning connotationsof a relationship that either once was or couldnever be, all amid ostensibly alien contexts ofhigh-octane cop action, though its use carriesfaint traces of the piece’s long-held connota-tions of romantic attachment.

85Both Claude Thornhill (1941) and Glenn Miller (ca. 1940)recorded big-band arrangements of “Träumerei.”

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Belying potential signs of fatigue in themusic’s recycling and emergent over-determi-nation, the scoring tradition has continued mostrecently in the quasi-political romantic-epic,Beyond Borders—a film that suggests that theviability of the aesthetic, narrative, and seman-tic screen legacy of “Träumerei” may not beeasy to sustain.86 As within the wider historyof cinema, the piece runs like a silver threadthrough a narrative that in this case teetersdangerously close to the edge of exploiting third-world suffering, and culminates in an emotiverendering of the child-as-embodiment-of-lost-innocence/idealism topic. The heroine (playedby Angelina Jolie) plays it diegetically (but, asin some previous examples, always as incom-plete excerpts from the first and last phrases)both in her London home and, implausibly (likeJuliette Binoche’s famous Bach playing inMinghella’s film The English Patient), in themiddle of war-torn Ethiopia. It underpins herearnest voiceovers about “self-discovery,” “des-tiny,” and ethical concern for the state of theworld—admirable qualities countered in thefilm’s narrative by a tendency toward spoon-feeding in the delivery of ideas and in the dra-matic presentation. The piece catalyses her re-lationship with a passionate humanitarian(played by Clive Owen), whom she followsaround the world’s troubled regions dispensingsalvation. Recalling the potentially problem-atic sociopolitical implications of Malibu BeachParty’s comedic ending, Beyond Borders makescertain awkward presumptions about the cul-turally and ethically superior white, middle-class European redemption of, in this case, anAfrica represented as chaotic, corrupt, and vio-lent. “Träumerei” is heavily invested with allthe serenity, civilized refinement, and puritythat the target country lacks, and at the sametime retains its common usages as signifier ofromance and childhood, a multiple freighting

of specifics and universals that contributes tothe narrative’s strain to convince and to escapesociocultural stereotyping.

At the end of the film, for example, after themurder of Jolie’s character in Chechnya, Owen’scharacter seeks out their child daughter whomhe has never seen, only to find her playing thepiece on the same piano, with some texturalsimplification of the already simple in defer-ence to her physical limitations,87 but morestrikingly with impeccable, improbable matu-rity of phrasing, touch, and expression, far inadvance of her mother’s performances. Thusthe child appears to ventriloquize the dead par-ent, as if both mirroring Schumann’s own cre-ative regression: “I’ve put on my frilly dressand composed thirty cute little things fromwhich I’ve selected about twelve and calledthem ‘Scenes from Childhood’,”88 and chimingwith the composer’s belief that “in every childthere is a marvellous profundity.”89 But follow-ing the imperative of narrative completion, inthis scene, the child, as surviving relic of thedead parent, appears to realize, more than topromise, “unlimited potentiality,”90 becominga “prematurely adult” child born of a failedgrown-up world—perhaps a “precocious fruit”that “will not be long in rotting.”91 Can thesame ultimately be said of the cinematic repro-cessing of “Träumerei” as well?

86“Träumerei” has since been used in the Japanese filmBizan (2007), which I have been unable to consult. Thestory involves the reconciliation, through shared memo-ries, of a daughter with her terminally ill mother—sug-gesting that moments of tender affection, nostalgia, loss,or images of childhood are likely opportunities for its useof the music.

87Some large spans are avoided and inner parts omitted inm. 3 (left-hand Cs, right-hand E beats 2–3, left-hand F–Gbeat 4, right-hand E last eighth note), and m. 4 (right-handF first eighth note), m. 22 (left-hand low G and B).88A comment from 1838, cited in Kramer, “RethinkingSchumann’s Carnaval,” p. 106.89Cited in Starobinski, “Les Kinderszenen,” p. 361.90“Grenzenlosen Bestimmbarkeit”; Schiller, “Naive andSentimental Poetry” (1795–96), cited in Linda M. Austin,“Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the RomanticLegacy,” Studies in Romanticism 42/1 (2003), accessedonline, August 2010 at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb297/is_1_42/ai_n29025321/91“Nature wants children to be children before being men.If we want to pervert this order, we shall produce preco-cious fruits which will be immature and insipid and willnot be long in rotting. . . . Childhood has its own ways ofseeing, thinking, and feeling which are proper to it. Noth-ing is less sensible than to want to substitute ours fortheirs” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or, On Education[1762], ed. and trans. Allan Bloom [New York: Basic Books,1979], p. 90).

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Conclusions: Cultural Pessimismand Its Discontents

During its cinematic life, then, “Träumerei”seems not to have become “the music of thespecific movie scene rather than the piece onemay have known before,” as Claudia Gorbmandescribes the fate of the preexistent music inKubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.92 Nor doesthe piece revel in the postmodern “pleasures ofambiguity,” as Mike Cormack characterizes theuse of classical music in general in film.93 In-stead, in a kind of reverse hermeneutics it seemsto be conscripted by cinema primarily as clichédfragment to fulfill a limited, predetermined se-mantic duty; to be enlisted to “channel thefilm’s narrative and expressive elements into asafe harbour of meaning” (the function of allmusic in classical film according to Gorbman94);and to serve an unchallenged and unchallengingneed for disambiguation. Not needing to beable, equipped, or concerned to see potentiallya “whole world of aspiration” contained withinthe work’s small frame,95 commercial filmthrough its very nature has tended to act asdomineering foster parent to this piece: fromdifferent perspectives both a confirmation anda denial of Schumann’s belief that the culturalphenomenon of music, unlike the more con-crete fields of science and poetry, is “the or-phan whose father and mother no one can de-termine.”96

Part of the unavoidable nature of its assump-tion into collective, multimedia consciousnessis that “Träumerei” has thereby been compelledto travel the path from intimate, well-formed,and semantically free-floating miniature at the

center of an integrated collection, to segregated,mostly abridged or fragmented, object of massexposure and semantically determined con-sumption. Through a literalistic and narrowlymetonymical conception of the function oftitles,97 the music’s subtle structural-aestheticqualities as a small physical whole with poten-tially expansive horizons of meaning have usu-ally been asked to bear the weight of prescrip-tive, shorthand associations. This might at leasttoy with the kind of debasement of music’spower that Schumann feared, and as consum-ers we have been asked, and have largely agreed,to acquiesce. Not unlike the Adagietto fromMahler’s Fifth Symphony, “Träumerei” has at-tained a public profile and a cemented identityof seemingly irreversible common currency thatextend even to the aridity of state occasions:brass arrangements were played in Red Squareat the funerals of Breshnev (1982) and Molotov(1986), for example, and with a possible note ofirony Margaret Thatcher was “welcomed” byit on a state visit to Moscow during the 1980s.To this day instrumental and vocal recordingsof the piece are continually played at thePiskaryov Memorial in St. Petersburg and thehuge Mamayev Hill Memorial to the Battle ofStalingrad in Volgograd, near to the eternalflame and during ceremonies of the changing ofthe guard, harking back to the widespread adop-tion of “Träumerei” in Russia as a theme ofdignified suffering upon the surrender of Ger-many in 1945.98 On the work’s 150th anniver-sary Werner Klüppelholz felt compelled to sug-gest: “This piece was a protest against the emptynoise of virtuosity; the expression of a poetrythat was only graspable in music; a fruitfulappropriation of Bachian polyphony; never, how-

92Claudia Gorbman, “Ears Wide Open: Kubrick’s Music,”in Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film,ed. Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (Aldershot: Ashgate,2006), pp. 3–18; quotation p. 4.93See Mike Cormack, “The Pleasures of Ambiguity: UsingClassical Music in Film,” in Powrie and Stilwell, Chang-ing Tunes, pp. 19–30, esp. pp. 19, 20, and 29.94Gorbman, “Ears Wide Open,” p. 4.95Joan Chissell, Schumann Piano Music (London: BBC,1972), p. 48.96Cited in Lydia Goehr, “‘Music Has No Meaning to Speakof’: On the Politics of Musical Interpretation,” in The In-terpretation of Music: Philosophical Essays, ed. MichaelKrausz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 177–90; quota-tion p. 180.

97As Neil Strauss points out, Carl Stalling “employed mu-sical puns by using popular songs [and classical numbers]whose titles fit on-screen gags, sometimes for no morethan four seconds” (“Tunes for Toons: A Cartoon MusicPrimer,” in The Cartoon Music Book, pp. 5–13; quotationp. 8).98Excerpts of these events can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHvdJxQZxpl, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtVLfbAJY9M and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRNfaf4wLNQ. The emotion-ally charged performance of “Träumerei” as an encore inVladimir Horowitz’s first recital in Russia (1986) after manyyears of exile gives further indication of the piece’s signifi-cance for this nation.

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ever, a sweet little panorama of the Biedermeiernuclear family. Burdened with kitsch vulgaritylike a lead weight, ‘Träumerei’ has plungedever deeper into the mire of the music of at-tractions.”99 Schumann’s musical subjectivity“of solitary intimacy,” of the “imprisoned soulthat speaks to itself”100 is from one point ofview especially vulnerable to coagulationthrough the placement of a piece such as“Träumerei” in the mass culture and carnivaleconomy of the cinema. Taking this line ofargument further, the Romantic ideal ofthe “child’s” voice, protected and moralizedthrough adult eyes, may consequently becomehardened or demoralized through a prematureself-sufficiency it is not equipped for. As a re-sult the rare kind of innocence attained throughmaturity discussed by Barthes, the intricatemode of “studied naivety” described by Da-verio,101 may be lost or submerged. Accordingto Barthes in the late 1970s, during the fallowperiod of cinematic usage, “loving Schumann. . . is in a way to assume a philosophy ofNostalgia or . . . Untimeliness.”102 Cinematicappropriation may be just the latest manifesta-tion of a merchandising trend that began in thenineteenth-century Hausmusik tradition, butthe former has been apportioning Schumann’smusic through the channels of a twentieth-and twenty-first-century globalized economyfor considerably longer and with substantiallymore vigor than the latter. Timeliness thusenforced occurs at its own kind of expense andproduces its own kind of nostalgia too. Indeed,wherever the remnants of comfortable Bieder-meier sensibility and sensationalist late-Roman-tic myth-making combine with safe culturaland financial economies of screen industries,and the creative results that employ this musicmarginalize a culturally progressive, profound,and hard-won naivete of the sort embodied by

Alfred Brendel—who among other things in-sisted that the piece can only be adequatelyinterpreted through artistic maturity103—thenwe might concur that “the hour of ‘Träumerei’’sbirth, a propitious moment of inspired genius”can indeed always be seen to have marked “atthe same time the beginning of its deathagony.”104

But now let us awake from this nightmare.Does the recurring dream of film’s use of“Träumerei,” which seems to have reached aplateau since the time of Barthes’s statement,present, like the repeat offending of long-cor-rupted youth, an insurmountable obstacle torehabilitation? Is this very question the wrongone to ask? Are we not doing a disservice to theworld of cinema that will more often than notfall short if judged by the fin-de-siècle aestheticyardsticks that articulate the high/low, pure/impure antithesis that has “unquestionably col-ored our view of culture ever since.”105 Yes, theendless repeatability of film’s mechanical re-production certainly makes it difficult to resistthe conditioning and congealing imposed by itsfrozen epic retelling. Yet if this does not pre-clude, but may even engender, the desire toaccept and seek different kinds of historicalremembrance and meaning that might recon-nect more intimately with music’s past andreinvest the structural processes and aestheticqualities, even of a miniature like “Träumerei,”with the rich philosophical illumination at theheart of Schumann’s aesthetic program, thensurely this is all to the good. Indeed we mightdo well to bear this in mind in the noncinematiccontexts of repeated concert or audio recordingconsumption, which carry their own risks ofmusical stagnation. If, as one of the animatedgenre’s most convincing advocates admits, thecollage scoring technique of Stalling can belabeled “postmodern” because “by necessity[it] leaches much of the historical significanceout of a given piece,”106 it is also true that sucha musical universe “achieves a special inti-99“Reise um die Welt in 32 Takten,” Die Zeit 8 (19 Feb.

1988), 41, accessed in August 2008 at http://www.zeit.de/1988/08/Reise-um-die-Welt-in-32-Takten.100Roland Barthes, “Loving Schumann,” in The Responsi-bility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Repre-sentation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill andWang, [1979] 1985), pp. 293–98; quotations pp. 293 and294.101Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 67.102Barthes, “Loving Schumann,” p. 298.

103See Alfred Brendel, “Der Interpret muß erwachsen sein:Zu Schumann’s ‘Kinderszenen’,” Musica 35/5 (Sept.-Oct.1981), 429–33.104Klüppelholz, “Reise um die Welt in 32 Takten,” p. 2.105Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, p. 232.106Goldmark, Tunes for ’Toons, p. 108.

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macy with the listener who can name a tuneand get the thematic reference . . . like Ives’s,[this musical universe] is expansive: high andlow culture, the abstract and the concrete, arebrought together as part of the shared experi-ence of composer and listeners.”107 From bothperspectives we are inexorably led toward dif-ferent modes of understanding. Among thesemight be the desire to recapture something ofthe history that appears to have been compro-mised, or to relocate meaning in other ways, todissolve cultural hierarchies by seeing one setof assumed values through the lens of its“other.”

The “recitative” passages in the final move-ment of Kinderszenen represent an extrememoment of that mute eloquence in which, typi-cally of much Romantic repertoire, instrumen-tal music strains to transcend its nonverbalframe. As Michel Chion suggests, “Romanticmusic for piano, particularly that of Chopin,Schumann, and Liszt, is, in fact, often similarto the voice of someone humming a poem or amelody with mouth closed: a melody with un-heard words.”108 Whether actually vocalized, asin the strikingly dissimilar cases of Elmer Fuddand Lotte Lehmann, or whether remaining non-

vocal, cinema’s “Träumerei” thwarts some av-enues while revealing new ones, only to reopenthe previously expected in an ongoing cat-and-mouse game of reception, deception, and re-conception. While the same may not be claimedfor every example of onscreen preexistent mu-sic, one is nonetheless conceivably faced witha vast set of unexplored musicocultural trajec-tories that might well have equallymoving stories to tell.

Abstract.Schumann’s music took its place alongside that ofmany other nineteenth-century composers in thelexicon of silent-film accompaniment. Evidence ofearly-twentieth-century scoring practices indicatesthat “Träumerei” quickly proved to be an especiallypopular choice for scenes of pathos and romance.This appropriation is viewed in the context of thepiece’s general reception history and the tradition ofits concert performance in isolation from the rest ofop. 15 (and in any number of instrumental arrange-ments) that had come to a peak at this time. Theassumption of “Träumerei” into the world of film isexplored with reference to the aesthetics and chang-ing cultural economies of Schumann’s own compo-sitional activities, the nineteenth-century Bieder-meier Hausmusik tradition, and the “child” topos.The emergence of a “Träumerei” protocol in filmscoring is uncovered in an examination of its contin-ued appearance in animated and live-action soundcinema from the 1930s to the present day. The risksof semantic impoverishment of the music throughclichéd film usage are assessed. Keywords: Schu-mann, Kinderszenen, “Träumerei,” cinema, preex-istent music

107Kevin Whitehead, “Carl Stalling, Improviser, and BillLava, Acme Minimalist,” in The Cartoon Music Book, pp.141–50; quotation p. 145.108Michel Chion, “Mute Music: Polanski’s The Pianist andCampion’s The Piano,” in Beyond the Soundtrack, pp. 86–96; quotation p. 90.

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recurring dreams and moving images: the cinematic ... · 120, and “am kamin” from kinderszenen)...

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