I could start with a definition of the uncanny according to Sigmund Freud, but he does a bang-up job himself early in his 1919 essay by that name:
The German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning “familiar,” “native,” “belonging to the home”; and we are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything which is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation cannot be inverted. We can only say that what is novel can easily become frightening and uncanny; some new things are frightening but not by any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar to make it uncanny. (1)
So what turns something from unfamiliar to unheimlich? In short, it’s a thread of familiarity, something repressed that tangles with our innermost dreams, desires and repulsions. Freud dedicates a good portion of his essay to fairytales, and there’s the sense that horror as well as wonder arises when the fantastical intrudes upon reality, those things we were meant to outgrow.
Arnold Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (The Book of Hanging Gardens), Op.15, is positively drenched in wonder and its dark relative Unheimlichkeit. Composed between 1908 and 1909, the cycle sets a portion of the German symbolist Stefan George’s collection of thirty-one poems by the same name, which depict the childhood, youth and ascendency, then subsequent ruination and abdication, of a poet-king. The fifteen pieces that make up Schoenberg’s Buch are an interlude of sexual awakening in the middle of George’s cycle, which the poet wrote in 1894 for Ida Coblenz, the woman he described as “[his] world”(2) and the object of his unrequited love. Meanwhile, Schoenberg wrote his treatment of the ripe, imagistic verses as his marriage was falling apart, his wife Mathilde having left him (and their children) for the painter Richard Gerstl, who had until then been a close friend of the couple. Spoiler alert: the journey into George and Schoenberg’s Garden [of Eden] does not end well.
Oskar Kokoschka, Flowers in a Garden (1907), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Schoenberg plunges us directly into a foreign world: the piano’s opening line is low, meandering and sparse, devoid of any right hand. The voice takes over the mysterious theme with its parlando opening, most appropriately, “under cover of dense leaf clusters” (“Unterm Schutz von dichten Blättergründen”). What follows in this and the next song is a long windup to set the scene: descriptions of plants, animals and architecture that evoke a lush but somewhat inscrutable “Paradiese.” In the second song, Schoenberg introduces a busier texture of sextuplets and triplets in the piano that mirrors the buzzy assonance of George’s rustling [ʃ] and [z] in descriptions like “schlanker Störche Schäbel kräuseln Teiche” (“slender stork bills ripple ponds”) and “Binsen säuseln” (“rushes rustle”), then broad, high chords, before cutting out this background noise for the last line of the poem. Finally, we get to the point: “but my dream follows only one”( “doch mein Traum verfolgt nur Eines”). Ah, this isn’t a fifteen-song opus about leaves and birds, of course!
Fig. 1: Noisy rustling, no. 2
The next three songs explore obsessive, but still hopeful, passion as we see our narrator taste and seek out the intoxicating liquor of his lover’s attention. In the third song, he compares himself to a religious “novice” (“ein Neuling”) entering her “enclosure” (“Gehege”) – at this point, the encircling garden is a heimlich one, attractive and full of deific grace (“Huld”) and salvation (“erbamender Geduld,” “forgiving patience”). Nonetheless, Schoenberg highlights the grotesque in this longing. He interrupts the chirpy, dotted motive that begins the song in both the piano and vocal lines with longer, rangier lines of sycophantic desire. When the first motive then returns throughout the song, it’s at odds with the long, reaching lines in the voice, rendering it clownish and almost sinister, like a broken jack-in-the-box. The song reaches its climax in large melodic leaps that paint the poet’s staggering (“straucheln”). But the thorny, surprising vocal line also highlights the foreignness of his path (“so fremde Stege”), accentuating weirdness to close the song.
Fig. 2: Dotted “Neuling” motive opening, no. 3
Fig. 3: An exact“Neuling” motive recurrence in the same song; the large vocal leaps and uncertain melody of “der noch strauchelt auf so fremdem Stege”
Paths are unsurprisingly a theme in all three of these [home]-seeking pieces. After the “fremde Stege,” we start the fourth song with our poet realizing for the first time where his feet have taken him (“beacht’ ich erst, wohin mein Fuß geriet”) – he’s unquestionably not the one in control here. We see him lowered more literally in the fifth song, in which he asks what paths she’s taken. But this isn’t just for the sake of following her. After much searching Sehnsucht in quarter notes tied over barlines, we get to the grotesque punchline: our poet wants to lay down his cheeks as a footstool beneath her soles (“daß ich meine Wange breite, Schemel unter ihrer Sohle”), which Schoenberg sets wryly with an obsequious descending portamento (“meine Wange”) and a plopping low A for the final syllable of “Sohle.” It’s an utterly delicious, masochistic twist on the trope of the flower dutifully and lovingly dying on the body of a beautiful maiden, à la Mozart’s “Das Veilchen” (Goethe) or Berlioz’s “Le Spectre de la rose” (Théophile Gautier) – rose and violets, by the way, are the two flowers also mentioned in George’s poem…
Fig. 4: Passionate masochism and Sehnsucht, no. 5
We move from unease to panic and desperation as the next set of songs depict trouble in paradise. In the sixth, the poet asserts that he’s now dead to all things apart from thoughts of his lover (“Jedem Werke bin ich fürder tot”). Schoenberg again makes use of a wide range and angular leaps in the vocal line to convey the distress and obsession of the text. A stark contrast then occurs when our narrator bemoans that his dreams fly away in the cold, harsh light of day, in which both the vocal and piano lines are pared down to a fleeting pianissimo (“Daß die Bilder immer fliehen”) and, finally, a low whole tone/semitone embroidery around an E (“wann der kalte, klare Morgen droht”) that paints the looming morning. We’ll hear more of this kind of snaking motive as we progress through an increasingly inhospitable Garden.
Nighttime doesn’t remain a source of respite and home for long, however: it’s the playground of anxiety and hope (“Angst und Hoffen”) in the very next song. This seventh piece in the cycle is completely devoid of grounding from a bassline or a left hand piano part, floating anxiously and flitting erratically between thoughts. After an initially adrenaline-fueled, faster tempo full of sixteenth notes, the song winds down progressively and mournfully to Sehr langsam as the poet comes down and quietens to a hopelessness that seeks no more friendly comfort (“Daß ich keines Freundes Trost begehre”).
But wait! A final kick of adrenaline, now at a dizzying Rasch tempo in cut time teeming with eighth- and sixteenth-notes (if you don’t want to do the math, it’s fast), as the poet expresses his soul-ripping – yes, “the thread of my soul will rip like too-taut sinew” (“wird der Faden meiner Seele reißen wie zu sehr gespannte Sehne”) – desperation to touch his lover’s body again. Unfortunately for him, he seems to have fallen from grace, and leans swaying outside (“wankend draußen lehn”), rendered by Schoenberg with syncopation over a sort of demented Vienese waltz in the piano.
We’ve reached the expulsion, dissolution and desolation phase of the saga. The ninth song, Langsam, starts with the first piano prelude we’ve heard since the very opening of the cycle – the vocal line starts immediately in songs two through eight. Schoenberg has evidently felt the need to set the scene markedly. The Garden is now a singed, pale wasteland (“gesengter, bleicher Oede”), interrupted only briefly by hiccuping octave displacements in the static chords: reprieves as useless and frustrating as a short kiss in the “harsh and brittle joy” now shared by the couple (“Streng ist uns das Glück und spröde, was vermocht ein kurzer Kuß?”). Ironically, some of the most simply beautiful chords of the cycle – jazzy nods to Schoenberg’s cabaret music – fleetingly accompany this first vocal line, but they prove as ephemeral as every other comfort.
And irony is l’ordre du jour in the next song, one final “lush” vision of the Garden, festering with bitterness and danger. This luxuriance contains more violence than the initial, uneasy, versions of the landscape. This is the text which most overtly links sex and [female] genitalia with danger and foreboding, conjuring images of vagina dentata: “The beautiful flowerbed… is fenced in with purple-black thorns” (“Das schöne Beet… ist umzäunt mit purpurnschwarzen Dorne”), “inside calyces loom with speckled spurs” (“drin ragen Kelche mit gefleckten Sporne”), etc… As with the dreaded morning of the sixth song, Schoenberg again utilizes a serpentine around E, rendering a “water-green and round fluffy bunch of flowers'' (''Flokkenbüschel, wassergrün und rund”), innocuous or arguably downright cute per se, far more sinister. Our Garden is a full Freudian horrorshow.
Fig. 5: “Flokkenbüschel, wassergrün und rund” serpentine, no. 10
Fig. 6: “Wann der kalte, klare Morgen droht” serpentine, no. 6
Which is not to say that it’s unworthy of nostalgia and Heimweh (homesickness) in the final stretch of songs, which continue the theme of the ruined garden and introduce memory and distance. In the eleventh song, the poet asks: “Did we get the bliss we had imagined behind the flowered gate?” (“Hinter dem beblümte Tore… warden uns erdachte Seligkeit?”). In the next, he longs for happy memories in the meadows (“Matten”) rather than contemplating the threat and desolation closing in on him: the shapeless shadows on the walls [of the Garden] (“der ungestalten Schatten an der Wand”) and that “outside the city, the white sand is ready to slurp our warm blood” (“daß vor der Stadt der weiße Sand bereit ist, unser warmes Blut zu schlürfen”).
Even the poet’s pathos and patheticness – once so overwrought and erratic – grows simpler and more desolate over the course of the cycle. The vocal range in these last five songs is far more limited and lower, seldom touching the top of the staff. Our poet is tired, defeated. In the thirteenth song, he merely watches his lover on the shore, alone in the boat he couldn’t convince her to get into with him (“Ich bin im Boot… in das ich dich vergeblich lud zu steigen…”). He makes no comment about the scene. In the next, he can’t even bear the refuge of memory, no longer wanting to hear about the Garden’s natural wonders and the literal and symbolic changes of seasons, forcefully described as “the steps of the destroyers late in the year” (“von den Tritten der Vernichter spät im Jahr”). The last word of the song, “wandelbar” (“changeable”) summarizes his experience: her affection has proven impermanent, as has the Garden and his fate.
In the last song, the longest of the cycle, the Garden has none of the rich wonder that it originally held. “Tall flowers fade or break,” and the poet, lost as ever, “stray[s] in the rotting grass” (“Hohe Blumen blassen oder brechen… und ich trete fehl im morschen Gras”). In the only overt mention of Eden, its walls are “wan” and surrounded by masses of withered leaves, moved by the “invisible hands” of the wind (“Mürber Blätter zischendes Gewühl jagen ruckweis unsichtbare Hände draußen um das Edens fahle Wände”). The piano plays a low, slow postlude that evokes and inverts the opening of the song cycle, and the dream Garden sinks ignominiously back into the depths. You can’t go home again, and why would you want to. George, and to a greater degree Schoenberg, have rendered it dangerous and unheimlich, then something arguably worse: pallid and pathetic. Schoenberg would push his exploration of the uncanny, the grotesque and the pathetic even further three years later in his most famous work of free atonality for voice, Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21.
Fig. 7: first piano prelude, no. 1
Fig. 8: Final piano postlude, no. 15
Notes:
Freud, Sigmund, David McLintock, and Hugh Haughton. 2003. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin Books.
Metzger, M., & Metzger, E. 1972. Stefan George. New York: Twayne.