Hugo Wolfs Harmony as Weitzmannian Critique:

The Augmented Triad and its Hexatonic Shadows

Frederick Reece (Harvard University)
Video Transcript
Recorded at the University at Buffalo Music Grad Student Symposium, March 3, 2013
Abstract: Before abandoning his career as a critic in 1887, Hugo Wolf was active as one of the most voluble
proponents of New German Music in Viennas notoriously partisan concert press. Eduard Mrikes poem Abschied,
set by Wolf in 1888, reflects on this culture of polemic through the absurdist tale of a critic who falls victim to comic
violence. Examining Wolfs own critical career and his appeals to the authority of music theory in his personal
correspondence, this paper invokes Weitzmanns radical 1853 treatise on the augmented triad not only as a model
for Abschieds musical satire of aesthetic conservatism, but also as a source of insight into the role played by major
third relations in Wolfs broader harmonic practice.
The afterlife of Weitzmanns ideas concerning the augmented triad in neo-Riemannian theory is further considered
through application of contrasting visual models of the hexatonic system to modulations in Wolfs songs. In
particular, the extent to which neo-Riemannianism captures Weitzmanns conceptualization of the augmented triad
as a mediator between major-third-related keys is called into question. Arguing towards a synthesis of historicist and
presentist approaches to historical theories, a concluding analysis of Wolfs modulatory procedure in Das Stndchen
outlines points of tension and potential hybridity between Weitzmanns treatise and modern harmonic analysis.
Keywords: Hugo Wolf, Carl Friedrich Weitzmann, Der bermssige Dreiklang, Augmented Triad, Neo-Riemannian
Theory, Transformational Theory, Third Relations, Song Analysis, History of Music Theory

he poem Abschied, written by Eduard Mrike in 1838 and set by Hugo Wolf fifty years
later, recounts a humorous episode in the life of an artist that would undoubtedly have
touched a nerve with the composer. The lyric protagonist in this scenario is confronted
by a man who walks unannounced into his home, promptly declaring Ich habe die Ehr, Ihr
Rezensent zu sein! [I have the honor of being your critic!]. This unwanted visitor proceeds to
examine the artists physiognomy, severely upbraiding him, amongst other things, for the excessive size of his nose. Having had his fill of criticism, the protagonist soon takes leave of the
intruder by imparting a tremendous kick on his backside, thus sending the unhappy critic tumbling down the stairs in a scene that Wolf crowns with a raucously triumphant waltz.

[2]

While such a response may seem extreme, the invasive criticism described by the song offends
on a level beyond the absurdity that it is the artists nose under scrutiny. A crucial aspect of the
farce in Mrikes poem, which is reproduced in full on Page 1 of your handout, consists in a
more subtle detail of the critics behavior: without looking the subject of his aspersions in the face,
he instead takes a light in hand so as to cast the protagonists shadow on the wall, examining only
this abstract projection of his form. The songs optical metaphor, in illuminating the gulf between critical methods of gazing and objects of aesthetic critique themselves, cuts to the heart of

This paper was originally conceived as a final project for the seminar Quirks in the Major-Minor System: Theories of Harmony c. 18001935
taught by Suzannah Clark at Harvard University in the fall semester of 2012. I am indebted to Professor Clark and to Professor Alexander
Rehding for insightful comments on early drafts of the work presented here. Any errors in judgment or interpretation are my own.

Reece | Video Transcript | Hugo Wolfs Harmony as Weitzmannian Critique

regulative theorys ever-problematic relationship to artistic practice. In its remarkable sensitivity

to the musical connotations of Mrikes satire, Wolfs setting gives us apt pause to reflect on the
often fraught relationship between his vast corpus of songs and the brands of criticism and music
theory characteristic of his time and our own.
[3]

From 1884 to 1887, Wolf, then a young musician living in Vienna, had earned money by
writing reviews of the citys concert life for the Sunday edition of the Wiener Salonblatt, a publication that Sandra McColl has described as not so much a newspaper as a womens magazine.1
Given the obvious musical glee that his setting of Abschied takes in the idea of a critic being
kicked down the stairs, we might be surprised to learn that Wild Wolf, as he came to be known,
took equal delight in savaging Johannes Brahms at the tip of his own razor-sharp pen, comparing
the composer to a chicken and asserting, in one 1884 review, that There is more intelligence
and sensitivity in a single cymbal crash in a work of Liszts than in all three of Brahmss symphonies, with the serenades thrown in for good measure.2
[4]

One would be forgiven for thinking that, having gone to such lengths to undermine what he
perceived as the book-bound pedantry of Hanslickian conservatism, Wolf would have rejected
harmony treatises outright as tools belonging exclusively to the Beckmessers of the Academy.
Like many of his contemporaries, however, Wolfs relationship to music theory was far more
complex and ambiguous than we might expect. Responding to critical commentary on the
Mrike Lieder in a letter to his friend Emil Kauffmann, for example, the composer writes: The
reproach [that I] commit successions of unresolved dissonances could do me no harm, for the
simple reason that I am in a position to demonstrate how each of my boldest discords can be
justified by the strictest rule of the theory of harmony [nach der strengsten Regel der Harmonielehre].3 Naturally Wolf does not go so far as to specify which theory of harmony he means; the
salient fact here is that, far from kicking his music theory treatises down the stairs, Wolf actively
appeals to the strictest rule of the theory of harmony as a means to underpin compositional
decisions.

1
Sandra McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna, 18961897: Critically Moving Forms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 18. Wolfs
association of Abschied with music criticism surely dates back to this period, as his deeply ironic invocation of Mrikes poem in one of his own
critical attacks on an unfortunate singer by the name of Darewski suggests. In an 1886 review mocking the tenors unintentionally comic
performance of Elzars fourth-act aria from Fromental Halvys opera La Juive, Wolf, as Henry Pleasants has pointed out, remarked on the
Gerumpel, Gepurzel und Getrampel of Darewskis attempts at coloratura. The alliterative phrase invokes Mrikes description of the critic
falling down the stairs in Abschied: Ward das ein Gerumpel, ein Gepurzel, ein Gehumpel! See Henry Pleasants ed. and trans., The Music
Criticism of Hugo Wolf (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978), 207.
2

Quoted in Pleasants ed. and trans., The Music Criticism of Hugo Wolf, 45. Brahmss 4th Symphony was first heard in concert a year later.

Hugo Wolf, Briefe an Emil Kauffmann, ed. Edmund von Hellmer (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1903), 8. In the context of their correspondence Wolf is responding specifically to Kauffmanns comments on the Mrike Lieder. While the possibility that Wolfs appeal to theory was
intended as an ironic gesture cannot be ruled out, his statement nonetheless demonstrates that the theoretical connotations of harmonic language
were part of his aesthetic frame of reference for the Mrike Lieder.

Mosaic: Journal of Music Research 3 (2014)

[5]

Reconciling the music of the future with the music theory of the present required considerable adaptation and revisionism on the part of sympathetic nineteenth-century theorists. Few
advocates of Zukunftsmusik could claim to be as dedicated to this project as Carl Friedrich
Weitzmann, a figure who has been subject to a renaissance over the last two decades primarily in
connection to his 1853 treatise Der bermssige Dreiklang [The Augmented Triad] and its implications for emerging neo-Riemannian theories of harmony. In contextualizing Wolfs appeal to
music theory, this treatise is instructive as a means of situating the songs in a system of harmony
developed explicitly to defend the works of Wolfs foremost influences, Liszt and Wagner,
against the conservative detractors poked fun at in the Abschied setting with which I began.4
[6]

From the opening paragraphs of his treatise, Weitzmanns humanization of the augmented
triad is striking: he even goes so far as to refer to the chord as his Schtzling, which translates
roughly as fosterling or protg. The dissonant sonority, he begins,
has been regarded until now by all theorists and practical musicians as a sinister guest
[unheimlicher Gast], whom one believed one must get rid of as soon as possible. Its questionable lineage aroused distrust; its rough manner and apparent awkwardness were not
suited to winning it friends. The testimonial of our best older and newer theorists, which
either denied it any rights of a native or at best endured its fleeting passage, were not
suited to awakening interest in it.5
[7]

Adopting a quasi-political rhetoric of social inclusion, Weitzmann reacted against previous

generations of theorists in defense of the augmented triads prominence in the works of the New
German School.6 His contempt for the attitudes of his predecessors is evident in his introductory
survey of the chords place in historical treatises from Rameaus 1722 Trait de l'harmonie to A. B.
Marxs Allgemeine Musiklehre of 1850. Published a mere three years prior to Der bermssige
Dreiklang, Marxs book stands as one of the most influential theory treatises of the era and, as a
stark contrast to Weitzmanns theory, is offered as a point of departure from which to set his
radical project in relief.7
[8]

Having identified the major, minor, and diminished triads, Marx asserts that the sense of
these chords is best felt when one repeats them in succession, describing the character of rule-ofthe-octave-style examples for each in turn.8 Only once he has created what is effectively a de
4
Liszts relationship to Weitzmann and his adoption of ideas expressed in Der bermssige Dreiklang is discussed at length in R. Larry Todd,
The Unwelcome Guest Regaled: Franz Liszt and the Augmented Triad,19th-Century Music 12, no. 2 (Autumn 1988): 93115.
5

Carl Friedrich Weitzmann, The Augmented Triad, trans. Janna K. Saslaw, Theory and Practice 29 (2004): 145.

This agenda is perhaps at its clearest when Weitzmann states his aim as being to grant the often misunderstood and banished chord a
permanent place in the realm of tones. See Weitzmann, The Augmented Triad, 145.
7
It should be noted that, while Marxs treatise is a canonical text of speculative theory in this era, theorists of a more practical bent, such as Ernst
Richter, may have enjoyed a wider contemporary audience.
8
While the major variant is described as brightly-toned, vigorous, pure, strong, and tender [schreitet helltnend und rstig einher, kann rein
und zart, aber auch klingend stark werden], its truncated minor equivalent is considered to be darker and duller [trber und dumpfer] by

Reece | Video Transcript | Hugo Wolfs Harmony as Weitzmannian Critique

scending aesthetic hierarchy does Marx deign to introduce the augmented triad. In the discussion that follows I have, for clarity, followed Timothy McKinney in distinguished the four
enharmonically unique versions of the chord by adopting the shorthand Aug1, Aug2, Aug3, and
Aug4, where Arabic numerals indicate the inclusion of one of the four pitch classes ascending
from C to E-flat.9 Presenting readers with the example of a C major triad ascending chromatically through the first three of these four augmented triads, Marx provided Weitzmann with a
provocative point of departure by describing the sense of the chord as follows: If we return to
the major triad and raise the fifth, the shrill sound of the augmented triad confronts us. A
sequence of such triads has never (at least up to the present) been dared and we would not
know how to account for anyones motivation in doing so.10
[9]

Obsolescence is the unhappy but inevitable fate of any harmony treatise claiming that a
certain progression has never been dared. Sure enough, returning to Hugo Wolfs Abschied, we
find exactly such a progression beginning at bar 32. This is precisely the moment in which the
critic, having raised a light to the artists head, begins aggressively to chastise the youth for his
bodily defects: Nun, lieber junger Mann, sehen Sie doch geflligst mal Ihre Nas so von der Seite an!
Sie geben zu, dass das ein Auswuchs ist [See here, young man, try to view your own nose from the
side! You will agree with me that its enormous.]. Just as Weitzmann openly attacked anterior
theorists for treating the augmented triad as a sinister guest or mere transitory fugitive, so can
we hear Wolf the critic, in his setting of Mrikes scenario, railing against musical conservatism
and its wholesale rejection of dissonant progressions.
[10]

Clearly, Marxs Allgemeine Musiklehre is a poor candidate for the theory of harmony invoked
by Wolf in his correspondence with Kauffmann, especially given that the progression that
appears in Abschied is no isolated deviation. On the contrary, Timothy McKinney has demonstrated that the augmented triad series constitutes a recurring trope in Wolfs output, lending
credence to the idea that the composer interpolated the progression into Abschied as a means of
indexing his boldest discords elsewhere.11

comparison. The diminished triad, worse still, can only be placed in a chromatic sequence, which, as Marx puts it, writhes forth timidly and
awkwardly [windet sich ngstlich und peinlich fort]. See Adolf Bernhard Marx, Allgemeine Musiklehre (Berlin: Breitkopf und Hrtel, 1850), 30506.
9
See Timothy R. McKinney, Melodic Pitch Structure in Hugo Wolfs Augmented Triad Series, Indiana Theory Review 14, no. 1 (1993): 37
94.
10
Marx, Allgemeine Musiklehre, 30506. As the last quotation given in the chronological review of theoretical literature that begins Weitzmanns
treatise, Marxs statement is taken as representative of the conditions of exile into which Der bermssige Dreiklang intervenes on the triads behalf.
11

McKinney even identifies a number of songs - including Nimmersatte Liebe, Bei einer Trauung, Mignon II, Gutmann und Gutweib, Dank des
Paria, Grenzen der Menschheit, and Mein Liebster ist so klein - that go beyond Marxs example of the augmented triad progression, cycling through
all four unique variants of the chord. The two complete augmented triad series associated with ouroboros-like imagery (unendliche Kette and
ein kleiner Ring) in Grenzen der Menschheit are particularly compelling. See McKinney, Melodic Pitch Structure in Hugo Wolfs Augmented
Triad Series, 38.

Mosaic: Journal of Music Research 3 (2014)

[11]

Weitzmanns harmony treatise, on the other hand, would seem to be a much better fit for
Wolfs music.12 In contrast to Marx, Weitzmann favors a dualist approach that interprets, for
instance, the F minor triad as the nebenverwandt mirror image of the C major triad. The augmented triad, then, is both visually and conceptually central, formed from the tonic note C
flanked by a major third on either side. Significantly, Weitzmann interprets the notes belonging
to each keys nebenverwandt triadic partner as Nebentne or secondary tones to that key. The
flattened submediant of the major scale and the sharpened leading tone of the minor scale, he
tells us, serve as the most important Nebentne. The fact that these tones can be prepared in any
key by the insertion of an augmented triad sharing its two remaining tones with the unaltered
diatonic scale contributed significantly to Weitzmanns glowing appraisal of the chords efficacy
in achieving modulation.
[12]

There is a long history of commentary on Wolfs songs highlighting the augmented triad as a
key feature of his compositional language: Eric Samss exegetic study of 1961, which includes a
leitmotivic catalogue supplemented with hermeneutic commentary, is a case in point.13 Compellingly, of the 40 motifs that Sams identifies in Wolfs songs, motif 23, the augmented triad, is
unique in referring to a single chord rather than a rhythm or gesture. More interesting still is the
connection that Sams draws between the augmented triad and his motif 24, which he names
Light I, and describes as follows: This idea is motif 23 writ large. Instead of (say) the notes C,
E, G-sharp together, passages in the tonalities of C major, E major, [and] G-sharp major are
heard consecutively in ascending order. 14 In hearing sequential major third relations across
Wolfs songs in this way, Sams anticipates significant claims that neo-Riemannian theorists have
made about the perfectly even triads relationship to the hexatonic cycle.15
[13]

It is difficult to imagine a clearer or more beautiful example of this augmented triad writ
large than the morning glow [Morgenglanze] that Sams identifies in Wolfs 1890 setting of
Goethes Ganymed.16 As the harp-like triads that open the song melt first from D major to Fsharp major at the downbeat of bar 5, and then from F-sharp major to B-flat major at bar 8, the
shimmering eighth-note arpeggiations in the piano right hand crescendo to pregnant lacunae at

12
To be sure, there is insufficient biographical evidence to prove that Wolf read Weitzmanns work. Yet the fact that the composer showed a
strong interest in contemporary harmonic theory in his correspondence, coupled with Wolfs highly literate engagement with the aesthetics of
New German music, provides substantial ground to believe that he would have been curious about the circulation of such ideas, many of which
were common currency in the theoretical discourse of the late nineteenth century.
13
The augmented triad, motif 23, is said, for example, to illustrate both pathos and bathos, depending on its context. See Eric Sams, The
Songs of Hugo Wolf (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1961), 30.
14
Sams, The Songs of Hugo Wolf , 30. To be sure, major third relations were a point of interest for theorists long before the publication of Samss
book; what interests me is his explicit assertion that they constitute large-scale expressions of the augmented triad in Wolfs songs, albeit for
different reasons than those cited by neo-Riemannian theorists.
15
Adopting a modified Schenkerian approach, Mark Anson-Cartwright has advanced similar claims about the function of the augmented triad in
Wagners Siegfried Idyll. See Mark Anson-Cartwright, Chord as Motive: The Augmented-Triad Matrix in Wagners Siegfried Idyll, Music
Analysis 15, no. 1 (March 1996): 5771.
16

For a partial list of such progressions in Wolfs music see Sams, The Songs of Hugo Wolf, 3031.

Reece | Video Transcript | Hugo Wolfs Harmony as Weitzmannian Critique

each transformation. Wolfs harmony adorns Goethes richly homoerotic text with moments of
breathless transcendence wholly in keeping with neo-Riemannian theorys characterization of the
LP progression as semantically associated with experiences of the supernatural and ecstatic.17
Clearly, such a passage could hardly lend itself more readily to a hexatonic analytical approach.
Yet the legitimacy of the connection that Sams is so keen to make between motifs 23 and 24 in
his analyses the augmented triad of Abschied and the augmented triad writ large of Ganymed
raises serious questions pertaining to neo-Riemannian theory and its shifting relationship to
Weitzmanns treatise.
[14]

In the year 2000 Richard Cohn published an article in Music Theory Spectrum commenting
on some striking points of similarity between ideas expressed in Der bermssige Dreiklang on the
one hand, and the hexatonic system the he had outlined in Music Analysis four years earlier on
the other.18 The 2000 article effectively reengineers Weitzmanns illustration of the six parsimonious resolutions of augmented triads in order to demonstrate a connection between Cohns
hexatonic graph and Weitzmanns table. This figure/ground reversal, as the author refers to it,
starts from example 5: a direct citation from Weitzmanns treatise, where the four augmented
triads are presented on staff notation annotated with letters representing the six consonant triads
or Klnge to which they are related by single- or double-semitone displacement.19 Renaming
each of these four groups of six Klnge a Weitzmann Region, Cohn, in his example six, removes the notated augmented triads, bracketing and abstracting them as stems from which the
consonant triads of each region branch out to one another. Reimagining this graph once more,
he groups the three major triads of each region with the three minor triads of its neighbor and
vice versa. This final twist creates the Northern, Eastern, Western, and Southern regions of the
hyper hexatonic system, effectively wiping the augmented triad off the map.
[15]

Back in the year 2000, this reversal of figure and ground isolated the consonant near even
resolutions of augmented triads from the perfectly even chords that generate them in Weitzmanns treatise.20 The very triad that Weitzmann boldly argued in 1853 to be a natural fellow
of our society of sonorities was cast ever further into the shadows of the neo-Riemannian

17

See for example Richard Cohn, Audacious Euphony (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1921.

18

See Richard Cohn, Weitzmanns Regions, My Cycles, and Douthetts Dancing Cubes, Music Theory Spectrum 22, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 89
103 and Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Progressions, Music Analysis 15, no. 1
(March 1996): 940.
19
Weitzmanns chart initiates a subtle but significant figure/ground reversal. Conceptual priority is conferred not on the consonant Klnge from
whose unison the augmented triad is born, but rather on the dissonant harmony that serves implicitly as the source of those Klnge which
semitonally displace it. Cohn, Weitzmanns Regions, My Cycles, and Douthetts Dancing Cubes, 93.
20
In his prose, Weitzmann explains the table reproduced in Cohns figure 5 as follows: From the following augmented triadsarise [entstehe]
the [consonant] triads indicated by the letters next to them In suggesting that the dissonant sonorities generate the consonant ones this
account of the diagram epitomizes the figure/ground reversal discussed above. Significantly, Cohn clarifies in Audacious Euphony that he considers
this moment an inversion on Weitzmanns part not only of conventional theoretical wisdom, but also of the account of the augmented triads
origins to which Weitzmann himself subscribes elsewhere in Der bermssige Dreiklang (i.e. that the dissonant sonority arises from consonant
chords to which it must ultimately resolve, not the other way around). See Cohn, Audacious Euphony, 5658.

Mosaic: Journal of Music Research 3 (2014)

kingdom of tones precisely because of the symmetry for which our historical theorist prized it so
highly.21
[16]

More than a decade after this initial invocation of the Weitzmannian augmented triad,
however, the 1853 treatise is being reappraised by neo-Riemannians in an altogether more
historicist light.22 Compare, for example, Cohns Weitzmann Graph introduced in 2000 with
the modified version that appears in 2012s Audacious Euphony. The pitch classes of the four
augmented triads have been unbracketed in the new model, which shows the hexatonic systems
as pools overlapping with but distinct from the four Weitzmann Water Bugs, as Cohn calls
them. Crucially, the hexatonic systems here cohabit the same space as the Weitzmann graph,
rather than supplanting it: the very figure that once served as a missing link between Weitzmanns graph and Cohns has, twelve years on, been foregrounded as a hybrid system with
which to map motion between two coextensive models of tonal space.
[17]

Jack Douthetts Cube Dance, like Cohns revised Water Bug graph, follows the sense of
Weitzmanns treatise in modeling major-third-related keys as tethered to augmented triads.23 In
striking congruence with Douthetts conception of the augmented triads role in facilitating
modulations by third, Weitzmann even provides a figure illustrating the capacity of Aug1 to
resolve to each of the major triads built on its constituent tones by single semitone displacement.24
[18]

Wolfs Das Stndchen, the text and score of which are reproduced on pages 2 through 5 of
your handout, demonstrates how a single augmented triad can mediate between major-thirdrelated keys following Weitzmanns and Douthetts figures.25 The four stanzas of Eichendorffs
poem, each of which states the Aug3 triad on the musical foreground, correspond to a sequential
modulation through D major, F-sharp major, and B-flat major, with the final stanza returning to
D to conclude the piece. This wistful drift through major-third-related keys is evocative of the
reveries of the poems protagonist: upon hearing a student serenading his sweetheart in the street,

21
ein natrliches Mitglied der Gesellschaft unserer Zusammenklnge See Carl Friedrich Weitzmann, Der bermssige Dreiklang (Berlin:
Trautwein, 1853), 1.
22
I draw here on the juxtaposition between presentist and historicist perspectives on the history of music theory expounded in Thomas
Christensen, Music Theory and its Histories, Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, ed. Christopher Hatch and David W. Bernstein
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 939.
23
See Jack Douthett and Peter Steinbach, Parsimonious Graphs: A Study of Parsimony, Contextual Transformations, and Modes of Limited
Transposition, Journal of Music Theory 42, no. 2 (Autumn 1998): 25354.
24

See Weitzmann, Der bermssige Dreiklang, 15.

25

Cohn himself mentions Das Stndchen in relation to Schenkers analysis of the piece in Der freie Satz (1935, Figure 100, 6c), which seems
paradoxically to imply that a series of major thirds outlining a dissonant augmented triad can act as a prolongation; Cohn, Audacious Euphony,
45n4. See also David Kopps discussion of this graph in Chromatic Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge, 2002), 113, 229231.
Suggestions as to how Schenkers analysis of Das Stndchen might be reconciled with a more conventional understanding of prolongation may be
found in Deborah Stein, Hugo Wolfs Lieder and Extensions of Tonality (UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985), 9397.

Reece | Video Transcript | Hugo Wolfs Harmony as Weitzmannian Critique

this listener ruminates, through the songs successive stanzas, on his own youthful serenades to a
beloved now forever lost to him.
[19]

After the young musician tunes the strings of his lute in a short piano introduction, the first
stanza of the song passes, in its D-major description of the student, through an Aug3 triad on its
way to F-sharp major. Remarking that the sounds of the street recall those of former, happy
times, this stanza again highlights the Aug3 triad before modulating to B-flat major. Here the
protagonist describes his own youthful serenades on the lute, striking the Aug3 triad once more
on his route home to D major where, woken from his reveries, he poignantly remarks that his
beloved has been borne away to her rest, urging the merry youth to sing on eternally.
[20]

With each statement of the Aug3 triad, Wolf introduces Weitzmanns all-important Nebenton on the flattened submediant, ready to become the third of the subsequent keys tonic triad.
The third of the present key is simultaneously highlighted to become the root of the tonic chord
in the subsequent stanza: Wolf picks it out through repetitious intonations in the piano part,
mimicking the characteristic strumming of the students lute. Appropriately in a metasong
reflecting on the power of musical sound to transport us into realms of distant memory, it is
precisely the monotone intonations of this serenading lute that, emanating from the song within
the song, pull ineluctably towards the root of the subsequent stanza. Cadential tonicization may
not occur for several bars, but when it does Wolfs preparatory thematic treatment of the lute
tone and its attendant augmented triad have sufficiently fixed the new tonic chord in the listeners ear to effect a seamless modulation.
[21]

While the augmented triads in this example might, ten years ago, have attracted little attention from hexatonic analysts as mere passing dissonances, historicist readings of Weitzmanns
treatise have increasingly led theorists to consider the augmented triads role as a foreground
sonority. Wolfs modulatory procedure in Das Stndchen is just one example from the repertoire
suggesting the utility of such a Weitzmannian twist on transformational theory. In light of the
increasing reluctance of many theorists to align themselves with neo-Riemannianism by that
name, and the extent to which Der bermssige Dreiklang has been drawn on as a nineteenthcentury source independent from the towering figure of Hugo Riemann, an awareness of the
tensions between Weitzmanns theory and our own is of vital importance.26 While the augmented triad, like the overgrown nose that it underscores in Abschied, has too often been considered
purely in terms of the shadows that it projects, Weitzmanns treatise, as a historical text, is itself
also necessarily regarded through the interpretative lens of the theoretical present. As transformational theorists reflect on ever more diverse nineteenth-century sources, the light in which we

26
In his introduction to Audacious Euphony, Cohn clarifies his disavowal of the label neo-Riemannian by stating that, with respect to the
nineteenth century ideas most at the heart of the book, Riemann was more of a transmitter than a generator. See Cohn, Audacious Euphony, xiii.

Mosaic: Journal of Music Research 3 (2014)

read this material needs constantly to be refocused and adjusted, even if dissonances between our
methods of gazing at musical works and those of our predecessors must remain, ultimately,
unresolved.

About the Author

Frederick Reece holds a first-class BA in Music from Oxford University and an Associate Diploma in
Viola Performance from Trinity College, London. He is currently a third-year PhD candidate in Music
Theory at Harvard University, where he is completing a dissertation that explores analytical epistemologies of style and authorship through the reception of twentieth-century musical forgeries. Other research
interests include the history of tonal theory, media-theoretic approaches to musical transcription, and
hermeneutic issues in the study of nineteenth-century texted music.