In 1988 Hugh Macdonald published an article in 19th-Century Music whose title consisted only of a key signature, G♭ major, and a time signature, 9/8 time.Footnote 1 Although he identified no nineteenth-century work that used both of these in combination, Macdonald contended that the increasing use of this key and this time signature, in their distance from C-major common time, represented the increasing complexity of Romanticism, the hand of the artist and virtuoso, a desire (perhaps) to distance the music from the simplicity of the Volkslied, and even a sort of otherworldly or sensual excess in its profligate number of flats. In terms of nineteenth-century style and topical analysis, G♭ 9/8 is an idealized topic in search of a repertory.
If we set aside the claims about metre to focus on key, one might observe that the idea of polarity to C major could be refined by considering a polarity in mode: that is, E♭ minor is a more perfect ‘opposite’ to C major than G♭ major is. As Macdonald and others have noted, E♭ minor came into use well before its relative major, and though full pieces in the key are rare, temporary excursions to E♭ minor (perhaps for illustrative or word-painting purposes) are far less rare even in the eighteenth century. This article will consider the affective significance of E♭ minor — one of profound melancholy — which is by no means diminished even when the key is only briefly touched upon. The set of E♭ minor examples through to about 1900 is both numerous enough and circumscribed enough to provide an excellent opportunity to see a key working as a ‘topic’ or style marker, a rare instance of long-term consistency of key affect. In fact, the use of E♭ minor seems to indicate melancholy immediately and directly, without the help of other style markers.
The Appendix shows a list of text-associated works with passages in E♭ minor.Footnote 2 In those passages, certain themes seem to dominate: death, lament, melancholy, night, and sublime encounters (either with overwhelming forces of nature or terrifying supernatural powers). Examples include Beethoven’s oratorio Christus am Ölberge, op. 85, settings of the gruesome ballads ‘Edward’ and ‘Lenore’, and Brahms’s ‘Schwermut’ [‘Melancholy’]. Instrumental works with programmatic titles or allusions present similar themes, as in Schubert’s Eine kleine Trauermusik or Schumann’s Byronic Manfred Overture. The textual associations of these E♭-minor works and passages can be sorted into four categories: 1) themes of depression, death, lament, and darkness, 2) ghosts, spirituality, and hell (i.e. ombra), 3) storms, especially sea storms, and 4) representations of Scotland and the North. These categories have clear interconnections — even the fourth, as ombra and sea-storm associations frequently came through literature such as the Ossianic tales and Scottish balladry. Many pieces fit more than one category. (A possible fifth association, exoticism, is not necessarily bound up with the other categories.) The four categories, along with some subthemes such as exile or lost youth, are bound together principally by the idea of melancholy, raising the question of why E♭ minor should so strongly and consistently represent this emotion. The reason for this consistent key affect would seem to be due in part to E♭ minor’s immediately apparent position on the circle of fifths, in part to its early rarity (such that its use was clearly ‘marked’ or unusual), and in part to the strong influence of the Swabians Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart and Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, who set out, respectively, the theory and practice of E♭ minor. An additional important factor comes from early repertory associations, such as operatic ombra scenes (for instance the underworld scene of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, with its brief passage in E♭ minor); these may have influenced the statements of key-affect theorists like Schubart. Recent scholars, such as Paul Ellison and John David Wilson, have found success in analysing repertory to identify the key-affect beliefs held by their composers (e.g. Beethoven); here, too, repertory analysis shows unmitigated support for the theoretical associations of E♭ minor.Footnote 3
E♭ Minor in Theory and Practice
The associations that are due to E♭ minor’s position on the circle of fifths have been clearly delineated in Rita Steblin’s study A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Footnote 4 She observes that key affect evolved away from possibly arbitrary associations towards a coherent bipolar sharp/flat system, which she calls the sharp–flat principle. This dualism brings with it ‘the psychological association of ever-increasing strength or brightness (or, conversely, weakness and sombreness) with the number of sharps or flats’.Footnote 5 The idea is that the circle of fifths is like a dial, and an increase of sharps represents an increase of brightness and cheerfulness (escalating to the point of mania in the realm of five, six, or seven sharps), whereas an increase of flats represents an increase of seriousness and sadness (progressing to melancholia in the realm of five to seven flats). Though the seven flats of A♭ minor are more extreme, its enharmonic equivalent comes closer to C, so the diametrically opposed keys of G♭ major/E♭ minor are ‘further’ from C in that sense. (Nevertheless, A♭ minor does seem to be reserved for boundary-breaking extremes of melancholy, as in Beethoven’s ‘Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un eroe’, movement 3 of the op. 26 Piano Sonata.)
Although the eighteenth century rarely used or discussed these extreme keys, the sharp–flat principle is visible even in key-affect lists which only go to four flats or sharps. For example, Francesco Galeazzi says of A♭ major that it is ‘not used much on account of its difficulty. It is a gloomy key, low, deep, fit to express horror, the silence of night, stillness, fear, terror.’Footnote 6 Schubart called it ‘the key of the grave’.Footnote 7 F minor and B♭ minor — the latter described by Schubart as ‘preparation for suicide’ — are also almost universally regarded as melancholy among key-affect theorists.Footnote 8 Flat minor keys were often considered as a group; contemporary writers considered them tender, touching, or pathetic.Footnote 9 One direct articulation of the sharp–flat principle (and the melancholic association of flat minor keys) was August Gathy’s, in 1835:
In general the keys that are formed via flats — through sinking down and lowering the pitches — have the character of sadness and falling mood; by contrast the sharp keys, arising from raised pitches, belong to a more cheerful, happy character, to a mood raised to a higher power. […] While the sharp side progresses in rising expression of life, according to the character of the piece, up to airy elfin dance or to wild impulsivity in B major, the other side sinks down towards the grave-song. […] The expression of deep pain which distinguishes the flat-side minor keys is by no means the property of the minor keys distinguished by sharps. […] It is inherent to the flat minor keys (E♭ minor, A♭ minor, etc.) to nourish only the deepest suffering, the greatest yearning for death.Footnote 10
As late as 1890, Hugo Riemann, in his analysis of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, noted that as keys travel further from C major, they become ‘more and more transcendent, distancing themselves from the narrow world of daily life and coming into the realm of ideal beings and feelings transported far from Earth’.Footnote 11 He viewed flat keys as more ‘subjective, more lost in thought’, whereas ‘minor keys with many flats are the most reserved, most (so to speak) philosophical (F minor, B♭ minor, E♭ minor)’.Footnote 12
It is true that there are some counterexamples to the sharp–flat principle; the sharp-side key of B minor, which Beethoven called ‘the black key’, could be thought of as gloomy.Footnote 13 These, combined with the chaos introduced by the highly individualized associations of many key-affect lists, have led many to feel that key affect is an interpretive quagmire not useful for analysis. Yet the consistency of E♭ minor suggests at least an undercurrent of support for its affective significance among composers.
The theory of key affect — that keys are appropriate to or represent different, identifiable emotions — owes something to the Greek idea of modal ethos, something to the unequal temperaments in use in the eighteenth century, something to the connotations of various instruments, which were constructed to play best in particular keys, and something to arbitrary or traditional associations generated either by the appearance of the key signature on the page or by prior usage of the key in notable works. Though key-affect theorists themselves often held strongly to one or another of these generating influences, the most recent scholarly consensus sees these as intermingled influences, and indeed it has even been suggested that pre-existent ideas of appropriate key affect influenced the system of temperament or the construction of instruments, rather than the other way around.Footnote 14 Key-affect theories died down as tuning progressed towards the equal temperament of the twentieth century — and even when key affect might have governed a composition, more practical considerations such as range often trumped it.Footnote 15 Yet there are theorists late in the common-practice period who believed in key distinctions and disbelieved in enharmonic equivalence, despite admitting equal temperament is in effect.Footnote 16 By contrast, twentieth-century scholars often dismissed key affect as mere individual preference.
Contributing to a sense of the inconsistency of key affect, the highly individual and chaotic colour associations of synaesthesia occasionally influence some of the contradictory tables of key affect available in Steblin’s study. E♭ minor is only occasionally described by synaesthetes; for example, Anton Gräffer described E♭ minor as ‘brick-red’, and Justus Johannes Heinrich Ribock, called it a ‘lesser B♭ major’, which in turn is ‘shiny, deep crimson, and smells of cloves’.Footnote 17 Interestingly, Ribock admitted that ‘this is no guarantee that I would not perhaps revoke my opinion of the more seldom-occurring keys, if I were to hear them more often’.Footnote 18 Indeed, a number of key-affect theorists claimed that they might alter their diagnoses if they heard more pieces in that key.Footnote 19 Even among synaesthetes, it is apparently the influence of prototypical pieces composed in that key that defines a key’s proper emotion (as well as, perhaps, theoretical ideas), rather than the impression taken from sitting down and noodling at a keyboard. The vanishing rarity of E♭ minor led to a lack of synaesthetic associations.
Despite the fact that temperaments could vary widely in the eighteenth century, they all (if centred on C) tended towards acoustical purity for the C–E major third and towards a very narrow minor third from E♭ to G♭. Owen Jorgensen’s 1991 practical survey of tuning, which proposes that the ‘coloration’ of any key is defined by its major thirds, suggests an acoustical explanation of Steblin’s sharp–flat principle.Footnote 20 In most eighteenth-century temperament systems, the thirds determining the keys at the ‘sides’ of the circle of fifths (A major and E♭ major) are closest to the equally tempered major thirds and thus represent ‘no special emotion or effect except that which was imagined by the composer or listener. Consequently, there was little agreement as to the meanings of these keys.’Footnote 21 By contrast, simple keys, such as C major, had small, pure-sounding major thirds with few ‘beats’, and difficult ones, such as G♭ major, were defined by large major thirds with many ‘beats’; not coincidentally, those were the ones on which there was more agreement in key-affect theories. Moreover, the large third from G♭ to B♭ created, in E♭ minor, a particularly small key-defining minor third from E♭ to G♭; Jorgensen notes that ‘the extremely depressed sounds of the middle notes of the E-flat minor, B-flat minor, and F-minor triads caused the tonalities of E-flat, B-flat, and F minor to be unusually expressive’, and indeed that a piece in E♭ minor or B♭ minor was, by common agreement, ‘the ultimate in mournfulness or depression’.Footnote 22 Despite the variety of temperaments in use, Jorgensen argues that they tended to have this affective result in common.Footnote 23 Nevertheless it remains unclear whether temperaments were chosen and centred to fit the desired affect, or whether the affect resulted from the use of the temperaments.Footnote 24
In 1761, the composer (and later astronomer) William Herschel lamented the rarity of extreme keys in letters to his composer brother, saying:
G♭ major/E♭ minor are just as good keys as C major/A minor and have just as much right to modulation as the latter. […] In the tuning of a clavier, however, one can only distribute the gap between them with confidence, as such paths in these days are still little travelled. I do hope that one in time will make a turn-pike road concerning it.Footnote 25
Though this puts Herschel somewhat in the avant-garde concerning the use of rare keys, it also confirms their rarity. (Herschel did write a Capriccio in E♭ Minor (no. 11, c. 1763) as a violin étude in which the key appears to be the featured difficulty (see Example 1); the flexible tuning of a solo violin does not provoke the tuning issues of a harpsichord.) Herschel’s writings, however, also suggest a fairly early articulation of the sharp–flat principle; he also claimed in 1761:
I believe that experience will confirm that the modulation and temporary excursions towards the sharp side have a different effect than those towards the flat side. There is certainly something cheerful in the Modulation from [tonic] major to the sharp major side and something rather rough or strong and severe in the Modulation from [tonic] minor towards the sharp major side. By contrast, in the Modulation from [tonic] major to the flat side lies something hard, cold, rough, sublime, and serious, etc.Footnote 26
William Herschel, Capriccio no. 11 (c. 1763). MS 791, Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Herschel’s belief in the value of all keys for modulation may have to do with the reading he had been doing of Robert Smith’s Harmonics, which proposes improved methods for a fully circulating temperament playable for all keys; his statement here perhaps has more to do with dominant versus plagal motion than number of sharps and flats.Footnote 27 Acoustical differences between the keys may not have been a factor, as sources suggest that neither Smith nor Herschel centred their tunings on C (which an acoustical defence of the sharp–flat principle’s effects would require).Footnote 28 Nevertheless, Herschel’s writings suggest that ideas about the affect of flat-side modulations may have preceded the practical use of the key of E♭ minor.
These intuitive understandings may explain why the eighteenth century adhered so strongly to key affect even when there are almost no prototypical associations in the repertory. Indeed, the haphazard early appearances of the key signature in print and manuscript underscore the rarity of the key: manuscripts of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Prelude viii in E♭ Minor (BWV 853) tend to repeat flats in the signature for clarification, making a signature of nine flats; some reveal some insecurity about where to place the flats (Example 2).Footnote 29 J. A. Eilenstein’s ‘Todesgedanken’, published in Bossler’s 1785 collection Blumenlese, mistakenly calls for F♭ rather than C♭ in the signature, again demonstrating a lack of placement conventions (Example 3).Footnote 30 Another haphazard (though perhaps intentionally comic) presentation of flats is the gruesome historical ballad ‘Eyn klegliche Mordgeschichte, von ey’n Herrn, der wz tot’ [‘A Pathetic Tale of Murder by a Dead Man’] from Friedrich Nicolai’s satirical folk-song book Eyn feyner kleyner Almanach (1777–78) (Example 4).Footnote 31 The exaggerated affect (seer kleglich unndt stönend, ‘very pitiful and moaning’) shows all the more clearly that E♭ minor is an extreme means of representing melancholy or gruesome subjects in the eighteenth century, beyond the pale of ordinary usage, and before almost any mention of the key in a key-affect list.
1733 MS, J. S. Bach Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 (1722), Prelude VIII, BWV 853, Anna Magdalena Bach (scribe). Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Mus.ms. Bach P 202, p. 24.
[J. A.] Eilenstein, ‘Todesgedanken’, in Blumenlese für Klavierliebhaber (1785). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, 1890842 2 Mus.pr. 1589-1785, 1, 2, p. 97.
[Friedrich Nicolai], ‘Eyn klegliche Mordgeschichte, von ey’n Herrn, der wz tot’, from Eyn feyner kleyner Almanach (1777), I, p. 120. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Res/P.o.germ. 1011 i-1.
There are so few specific statements regarding E♭ minor, even through the mid-nineteenth century, that those extant weigh heavily in the assessment of its prevailing emotion. It is Schubart’s influence that is most crucial in defining the key’s character. His key affects are some of the most widely known and picturesque; moreover, his is very nearly the first list to address E♭ minor:Footnote 32
E-flat minor. Feelings of the anxiety of the soul’s deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depression, of the most gloomy condition of the soul. Every fear, every hesitation of the shuddering heart, breathes out of horrible E-flat minor. If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key.Footnote 33
A partial list of Schubart’s key characteristics was published in 1787; the complete list including E♭ minor was available in 1789, and the whole was widely disseminated in the posthumous Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1806), as well as frequently reproduced throughout the nineteenth century. Nearly all subsequent descriptions of E♭ minor adopt Schubart’s ethos for this key or make reference to it; most borrow his phraseology to some extent, and the statement itself is frequently reproduced (in those lists that do not still omit the key).Footnote 34 Schubart’s phrases are so picturesque that his influence over later descriptions is readily apparent. For instance, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1812 review of Christus am Ölberge uses the line ‘if ghosts could speak’; ‘the most gloomy condition of the soul’ appears in Henri Weikert’s (1827) and Gathy’s (1835) descriptions.Footnote 35 The words ‘anxiety’, ‘despair’, and ‘depression’, or their synonyms, are frequently repeated.Footnote 36 Even the later nineteenth century retains these melancholy theoretical associations; Alexander Ellis, in his 1885 translation of Helmholtz, calls E♭ minor the ‘darkest and most sombre key of all, rarely used’, and Lavignac (1896) called it ‘profondément triste’ [‘profoundly sad’].Footnote 37 Gustav Schilling, in the widely read Universal-Lexicon der Tonkunst (1835), borrows Schubart wholesale, as does Ferdinand Hand (1837), both incidentally making Schubart’s statement stand for D♯ as well as E♭ minor.Footnote 38
Schubart’s statement was republished for a wide readership by far more than those counted above.Footnote 39 For example, Peter Joseph Schneider reproduced it in his System einer medizinischen Musik (1835), a treatise that demonstrates his apparent belief that the keys, as in the old Affektenlehre or the much older Greek modal ethos, could operate on the body and thus on the health of a person.Footnote 40 Schneider further describes a case of a 19-year-old woman
who had suffered from a full-blown melancholy for the past two years. Various other attempts to cure her had been made by several doctors, but all without success […]. We found her in the condition known as melancholia attonita. Partly stupefied and partly sensible, mostly mute, she sat nearly the whole day on the sofa, staring straight ahead.Footnote 41
After some treatment with cold-water baths, she was given a musical cure via an obscure instrument:
The agreement was made thus: I would begin by improvising a prelude on the aeolodicon [wind harmonium], and then we would sing one of the four-voiced chorales that the patient had previously liked so much. […] She sat there mute, dumb as a fish, and immobile, just as in the beginning. I thus began to improvise in a key corresponding to the state of a soul sunk in deepest melancholy: E♭ minor (see [Schubart’s key list] Vol. 1 p. 288). Softly, and so, swelling to the strongest fortissimo, and then decreasing to a moderate piano, sometimes full-textured, sometimes simple, sustaining pure triads, and so on through the most varied voicings and progressions of the harmony. At the beginning of the third crescendo and immediately following fortissimo, Zober observed a deep intake of breath and a strong shudder; that is, a complete seizure of the full nervous system.Footnote 42
Subsequent modulation apparently produced a profound change in her condition; but the medical marvel is not so compelling for us as the use of E♭ minor as a key ‘corresponding to […] deepest melancholy’, for which the author actually cites Schubart.
The Influence of Ombra Style
In the early nineteenth century, Beethoven’s oratorio Christus am Ölberge was the most available example of the key; Hand cites it in 1837 as his only example, describing ‘what the single [E♭ minor] chord is able to do and how it makes the soul sink in terror of the holy one’.Footnote 43 Schilling’s spiritual distinction of E♭ minor against its enharmonic equivalent, associating it with ‘a certain heavenly mood, which speaks to the heart in a consoling and calming manner’, is also likely influenced by Beethoven’s oratorio.Footnote 44 Even in 1880, Hermann Mendel’s encyclopaedic Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon says that the key is ‘almost not at all in use as a key on its own’ on account of the risk of missing accidentals in performance;Footnote 45 the edition of 1883 corrects this by adding Christus am Ölberge as well as Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier prelude and the introduction section of Louis Spohr’s Overture to Jessonda to the list of known works.Footnote 46 Beethoven, too, seems to have feared the potential for missed accidentals; the first published scores all include cautionary accidentals on the G♭, even though it occurs in the very first bar.Footnote 47
Though Christus am Ölberge is indeed the most well-known and largest-scale piece to employ E♭ minor before 1850, it was by no means Beethoven’s first foray into the key. His Piano Quartet WoO 36 no. 1, whose agitated E♭-minor middle movement has Sturm und Drang or tempesta features (Example 5), is from 1785, too early to have been directly influenced by Schubart’s published key list. Nevertheless, Beethoven was indeed known to embrace Schubart’s descriptions, although Schindler hedged in saying how far:
[Beethoven] generally agreed about the minor keys […] but he disagreed about some of the major keys, or rather in vocal music he limited their psychical significance according to the tempo of the piece of music and the number of voices singing. As for instrumental music, especially quartets and orchestral works, Beethoven generally disregarded Schubart’s characterizations of the keys because many of them were ambiguous or impracticable. He did, however, accept them up to a point in his piano music and trios.Footnote 48
Beethoven, Piano Quartet, WoO 36 no. 1, movement 2 (1785/1828), bars 1–16.
That Beethoven was a general believer in key affect is demonstrated by Paul Ellison in The Key to Beethoven, in the examples he has collected and in Beethoven’s connections with other employers of key affect, such as Antonio Salieri and Johann Caspar Vogler.Footnote 49 (Ellison also identifies other Beethoven passages in E♭ minor, such as the Septet, op. 20, whose sixteen-bar introduction to the final movement is in a somewhat funereal E♭ minor.)Footnote 50
Hoffmann’s review of Christus am Ölberge discusses the E♭-minor opening in detail and clearly relates it to Schubart’s definition, as well as to the solemn, sublime holiness appropriate to the content:
The content of the work [is] Christ, just in that moment in which the resolution to offer himself up as sacrifice is by no means certain; but his human side, in the pressing nearness of the decisive moment, resists and shudders before death, and the shameful associations of this particular death; the battle of the divine and the human reaches its highest, and finally the divine gloriously overcomes. The composer had this and the darkness, sublimity, and holiness of this whole moment for the story of human redemption unequivocally in mind and heart, expressing them in a not-too-long overture. With truly solemn gravity he rebuked all the higher instruments into silence at the beginning, and allowed only the bassoon in its lowest octave, the horns, the tenor trombone, and the bass trombone (entering with the last crotchet), to play an arpeggio, all in unison — and that outlines the chord of the key of which Schubart remarked, in his vigorous speech, ‘if ghosts could speak, they must do it in this key, with their frigid breath-taking and shuddering tones’ — namely E♭ minor. [Opening arpeggio represented.] The effect of these few elements — the simplest notes — in performance is truly wonder-inducing and great; they urgently summon us to the solemn anticipation of something sublime and holy.Footnote 51
The E♭-minor instrumental opening (Example 6), which modulates towards a more normative E♭ major/C minor for the sung numbers, is a bold move for an oratorio, but appropriate for the seriousness of the conflict. It also involves features of the ombra style, which Hoffmann hints at in his description.
Beethoven, Christus am Ölberge, op. 85, Introduzione (1803–04/1811), bars 1–7.
Ombra, which originated with spirit scenes in operas, is described by Leonard Ratner as a topic of ‘ghosts, gods, moral values, punishments […] feelings of awe and terror’, and is related to the high or elevated style (in Johann Adolf Scheibe’s sense) or to the sublime.Footnote 52 (The locus classicus is the penultimate scene of Don Giovanni, with the Commendatore’s statue, though any scene in the underworld or with ghosts provides opportunity for the style.) Ombra effects include those features calculated to induce religious or supernatural terror and awe: use of monotone ‘god-speak’; repeated notes like heartbeats, footsteps, or tolling bells; ostinatos; unison/octave writing; angular lines and wide leaps; dissonant intervals; stormy passages; and violent outbursts. Also typical are tonal instability, dissonant intervals, half-steps, and chromaticism or striking progressions. Any other features intended to surprise or astonish are also common, including sforzandos, dynamic contrasts, grand pauses, and syncopations. Standard ombra is always slow and measured, which separates it from the Sturm und Drang style used in Example 5, though both styles convey agitation, awe, and anxiety.Footnote 53
Beethoven’s use of E♭ minor for ombra was most likely influenced by passages like the ‘Misero giovane’ in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), which Beethoven would have known from the performance at the Bonn court in winter 1784/85.Footnote 54 Carl Heinrich Graun’s Der Tod Jesu (1755), a Holy Week staple which Beethoven might have known and whose content overlaps with his own oratorio, was possibly another influence.Footnote 55 Though none are set throughout in the key, E♭ minor does make a number of appearances as a transitional key in opera ombra scenes, as can be seen in Clive McClelland’s list of ombra scenes and their keys:Footnote 56 Niccolò Jommelli, the acknowledged father of Ombraszenen, preferred the keys of C minor, D minor, and E♭ major for such scenes; as some have noted, the major key is somewhat inexplicable.Footnote 57 The attraction of E♭ major as a key of majesty and elevated affect, however, is enhanced by its ability to slip into both C minor and the deeply melancholy parallel minor; both McClelland and Macdonald note that the eighteenth-century use of E♭ minor is primarily due to its accessibility from E♭ major.Footnote 58 Jommelli’s Andromaca (Act II, Scene 15), from 1741, appears to be the first use of the key of E♭ major for ombra, and perhaps not coincidentally also includes E♭ minor for the ghost of Pyrrhus.Footnote 59 Some reform-era and later operas use E♭ minor to illustrate the word ombra, such as Traetta’s Ifigenia in Tauride (1763), Act II, Scene 1, in which ‘Dormi Oreste’ slides into E♭ minor for the text ‘L’ombra mesta sdegnosa’ (Example 7), and Mozart’s Mitridate, re di Ponto (1770), Act III, Scene 4, bars 60–72, in the cavatina ‘Pallid’ ombre’ (Example 8). Other ombra scenes with E♭ minor include Philidor’s Tom Jones (1766), Act III, Scene 18, Piccinni’s Atys (1780), Act III, Scene 8, and Gazzaniga’s Don Giovanni (1787), Scene 24, whose classic ombra scene also accesses E♭ minor from the parallel major.Footnote 60 Of these, all but Don Giovanni predate Schubart’s memorable statement that ‘if ghosts could speak’, they would do it in ‘horrible E-flat minor’. Thus the use of E♭ minor for ombra may actually have influenced Schubart’s statement as much as the converse, and E♭ major’s early association with ombra may well be for its ability to be coloured by the melancholy parallel (as well as the relative) minor.
Traetta, Ifigenia in Tauride (1763), Act II, Scene 1, ‘Dormi Oreste’, bars 19–28. [Sad, disdainful shade, neglected by a mother…]
Mozart, Mitridate, re di Ponto (1770), Act III, Scene 4, ‘Pallid’ ombre’, bars 60–72. [Pale shades who see, from Elysium, my misery]
E♭ minor can carry its ombra associations into works of religious or funereal import, as in Beethoven’s oratorio. Haydn had also turned briefly to E♭ minor at relevant points of his two oratorios, The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801) (see Appendix). Beethoven’s 1790 Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II makes an E♭-minor cadence in the opening choral movement announcing the emperor’s death, in bars 84–88, as the work modulates from C minor to E♭ major; in 1798 Jozef Kozłowski composed a Requiem in E♭ Minor for the death of the Polish king Stanislaw August Poniatowski.Footnote 61 The Crucifixus of Haydn’s Heiligmesse, Hob. XXII/10 (1796) and the Crucifixus of Beethoven’s own Mass in C Major (1807) both touch on the key. Not only does E♭ minor suit the melancholy of the Crucifixus text, but text-setting conventions for the preceding ‘Et incarnatus est’ may well be relevant. As the three flats of E♭ major came to represent the Trinity, E♭ major might be employed for the depiction of the incarnation (which initiates the three-in-one concept of God within the Credo); Wilson also notes a ‘ceremonial, quasi-religious strain’ in E♭-major music after 1770 due to an association with Tugend, chivalrous virtue, and related to serious works.Footnote 62 In such a context the immediately succeeding Crucifixus might naturally darken to E♭ minor, as Haydn’s Heiligmesse does.Footnote 63 Such minor-mode colouration can also be seen in Cherubini’s Requiem in C Minor (1808), which turns to E♭ minor for ‘De poenis inferni’ [‘punishment of hell’] in the otherwise E♭-major context of the Offertorium. Thus there appears to be a continuous tradition of E♭ minor in religious works consistent with Beethoven’s use in his oratorio; moreover, examples of the religious sublime and ghostly ombra came together with Schubart’s statement to strengthen the melancholy convention of the key.
Balladry, Scotland, and Stormy Seascapes
Though ombra scenes may have influenced Schubart, the operatic examples were soon forgotten in favour of his compelling description of the key. Beethoven’s example and Schubart’s statement acquired an outsized influence in part because many of the other contemporary examples were obscure or, as with Schubert’s lieder, circulated in a limited way, if at all. Yet some of these obscure works may have solidified and expanded the character of E♭ minor.
Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg (1760–1802) is rarely cited by key-affect theorists, yet he seemed to adopt Schubart’s key associations deliberately, especially for E♭ minor.Footnote 64 Zumsteeg spent most of his life in Stuttgart, working closely with Schubart; indeed, when the latter died in 1791, his position at the court theatre devolved onto Zumsteeg. As a composer, Zumsteeg was influenced by Jommelli and his ombra scenes, and so he probably also had compositional models for the use of E♭ minor.Footnote 65 Although Zumsteeg wrote instrumental music and opera — often with magical, chivalric, and exotic subjects — he is best known for his melodramatic through-composed ballads; they have illustrative accompaniments that frequently shift key, tempo, and metre according to the required affect. Many are settings of Gottfried Bürger, and his setting of Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ (1798), shown in Example 9a, was his most famous work for years. This ghostly story, derived from Scottish ballads and published in 1773, is the very essence of ombra and was critical to eighteenth-century German poetry and Sturm und Drang. Footnote 66 Examples 9a and 9b show Zumsteeg’s combination of E♭ minor with other ghostly features in the most terrifying sections of his 950-bar work: the ominous open octaves on ‘Läßt uns den Leib begraben’ [‘Let us bury the corpse!’], clearly outlining E♭ minor, and the E♭-minor conclusion of the ballad with repeated-note ‘ghost-speak’ and open-octave accompaniment. (The ghostly choice of E♭ minor recurs in some later settings of ‘Lenore’, such as Václav Tomášek’s in 1801.)
Zumsteeg, ‘Lenore’ (1798), bars 585–94. [Hark the bells! Hark the death song: ‘Let us bury the corpse!’]
Zumsteeg, ‘Lenore’ (1798), bars 940–50. [Chorus of ghosts: Patience! Patience! Even if your heart is breaking, do not quarrel with God in heaven! Of the body you are rid; on the soul, God have mercy!]
Another seminal Sturm und Drang text set by Zumsteeg in this illustrative manner was ‘Colma: Ein Gesang Ossians’, a piece which touches on all four categories I outlined in the introduction (lament, ombra, storms, Scotland/North). Colma is a figure from Macpherson’s collection The Works of Ossian (1765), one of the most influential and melancholy literary works of the eighteenth century, presented as translations of the third-century Celtic bard Ossian. Artistically minded Germans found Colma’s lament to be incredibly moving; it provokes the crisis in Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, figures in several monodramas, and is one of the Ossianic texts most frequently set to music, existing in many German translations.Footnote 67
Colma’s plight mingles Sturm und Drang with the ombra encounter with death. McClelland, who suggests tempesta as a broader term for Sturm und Drang-type style features from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, notes the frequent overlap of ombra and tempest contexts and features, including flat minor keys.Footnote 68 Much as with other heroines of monodrama, such as Jiří (Georg) Benda’s Ariadne, the scene opens on Colma abandoned to the elements, awaiting her lover in a storm that seems to externalize her own roiling fears. As the storm subsides, her fears are substantiated: she finds her lover and her brother dead, having killed each other in a duel. Example 10 immediately follows Colma’s discovery of the corpses; E♭ minor is chosen to represent the moment that death is pronounced (‘Kalt wie die Erde ist ihr Busen’; in Macpherson’s original, ‘Cold are their breasts of clay’).
Zumsteeg, ‘Colma: Ein Gesang Ossians’ (1793), bars 392–408. [Original English: But alas! they are silent; silent for ever! Cold are their breasts of clay.]
So many Ossianic works in the nineteenth century included E♭-minor passages that James Porter, in Beyond Fingal’s Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination, notes that E♭ minor ‘might be termed the tonality of “Ossianic distance”’.Footnote 69 Ossianic tales such as ‘Colma’ were the primary representative of northern literature in the decades before 1800, supplemented by the widely translated and imitated Scottish ballads in Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (which make up a good many of the texts of British origin in Herder’s Volkslieder).Footnote 70 These, alongside circulation of Sir Walter Scott’s novels in the 1820s, ensured that until at least the 1840s the European North was represented by Scotland — and was seen as an uncanny, ghostly, and melancholic place. Example 11 shows an E♭-minor appearance in the Zumsteeg ballad ‘Richard und Mathilde’, another northern poem, translated from ‘Lucy and Colin’ in Percy’s Reliques. Footnote 71 (It is also related to ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William’ and thus is a cousin of Bürger’s ‘Lenore’.) In the English source ballads, a man chooses to marry someone other than his true love; the true love then dies and her ghost or memory disrupts the marriage, leading to the man’s demise. As with his setting of ‘Colma’, Zumsteeg marks the uncanny death of the true love (Mathilda) by a full cadence in E♭ minor.Footnote 72
Zumsteeg, ‘Richard und Mathilde’ (1800), bars 96–115. [‘Then, false one! Then shall you and your love behold Mathilda’s terrifying spectre! Bear me, friends! bear my corpse past the bridegroom, the gaily decked-out hypocrite, in faithful winding-sheet.’ She died.]
One of Zumsteeg’s successors in ballad composition was Carl Loewe. In 1824 Loewe published his Opus 1, famously including a setting of ‘Erlkönig’, but also (every bit as famously at the time) a setting of the Scottish ballad ‘Edward, Edward’ in Herder’s translation (later set by Schubert as ‘Eine altschottische Ballade’, D. 923). The ‘Edward’ ballad was a widely circulated representative of Scottish or northern melancholy, first published in Percy’s Reliques as an old Scots ballad, then gaining wide currency via inclusion in Herder’s Volkslieder and in Ursinus’s Balladen und Lieder altenglischer und altschottischer Dichtart (1777), a source for many lied composers. In this dialogue ballad, Edward’s mother asks innocent-sounding questions and receives evasive answers:
Under further questioning, Edward explodes with the revelation that he has killed his father. This ballad has a double revelation, however; the real twist is that the mother knew very well what her son had done and in fact seems to have put him up to it, causing the reader to reinterpret her questions as the nagging of a conspirator.
As Brahms later does to some extent in his Piano Ballade, op. 10 no. 1 ‘Nach der schottischen Ballade “Edward”’, Loewe allows the double cataclysm (the revelation of patricide and of his mother’s conspiracy in it) to determine the large-scale form, while the dialogic form is visible at the phrase level (Example 12). The choice of E♭ minor (ornamented with the flat ^2) is appropriate to the melancholy northern mood; it removes us from the simple Volkslied, indicating instead a complex ballad handed down by trained musician-poets, as the Celtic bards were believed to have been. The Agitato affect is reminiscent of Beethoven’s WoO 36 movement and the agitation of ‘Colma’, and Edward’s replies ring out with ombra-style octaves and an insistent tolling pitch. Edward’s patricide revelation breaks the strophic structure and initiates a key change; this ‘revelation’ music returns in a stormy and unredeemed E♭ minor for Edward’s second revelation cursing his mother.
Loewe, ‘Edward’, op. 1 no. 1 (1818), bars 1–18. [Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (orthography modernized): Why does your brand [sword] so drip with blood, Edward, Edward? Why does your brand so drip with blood, and why so sad gang ye, O? O, I have killed my hawk so good (… my red-roan steed … my father dear), mother, mother; O, I have killed my hawk so good, and I had no more but he, O.]
Apart from ‘Edward’, Loewe uses E♭ minor almost exclusively for See-balladen, or sea-storm ballads. Examples include his op. 103 ‘Gruß vom Meere’ (Example 13) and op. 115 ‘Der gefangene Admiral’, both with typically arpeggiated accompaniments representing a sea storm. A more surprising use of E♭ minor for a sea-storm ballad is by Carl Friedrich Zelter, who is otherwise generally conservative with keys. His 1812 setting of ‘Die Braut am Gestade’ (Example 14) is a through-composed setting faintly reminiscent of ‘Colma’, using E♭ minor to represent a woman lamenting on the seashore. Similarly, Example 15 shows how in ‘Am Strande’ Clara Schumann used the melancholy key and an arpeggiated sea-storm accompaniment to set the Scottish poet Robert Burns’s text ‘Musing on the Roaring Ocean’.
Loewe, ‘Gruß vom Meere’, op. 103 (1844), bars 1–6. [Greetings to you in your splendour, blackly dark sea!]
Zelter, ‘Die Braut am Gestade’ (pub. 1812), bars 1–26. [Dark as night, ocean, you rage.]
Clara Schumann, ‘Am Strande’ (1840), bars 1–8. [Robert Burns: Musing on the roaring ocean which divides my love and me.]
Both ballads and storms, especially sea storms, were strongly associated with Scotland in the early nineteenth century — the sea-storm connection influenced by literature but also, of course, the real seascape surrounding Scotland. The treacherous navigation of the Hebrides was known to readers of travelogues well before Mendelssohn’s 1829 visit that resulted in his op. 26 Hebrides overture. Even as mass tourism came to Scotland in the early nineteenth century, the chances remained at least 50 per cent that a tour to Staffa (i.e. the Ossianically named Fingal’s Cave) would be cancelled due to the weather.Footnote 74 (Indeed, Scotland’s stormy association is part of why Wagner originally planned to set Der fliegende Holländer in Scotland, changing to the North Sea and Scandinavia only at the eleventh hour.)Footnote 75 The gloomy weather and rocky coasts of the country were also strongly promoted by the Ossian stories (which centre on the Hebrides and the west coast of Scotland), and the element of the uncanny in the image of Scotland increased the association between ghostly ombra, storms, and seascapes.Footnote 76 In sum, the relationship between ombra, sea storms, and the North is not a distant one, and Scotland as a manifestation of a northern melancholy expressed via ombra and storm topics is entirely consistent with the prominence and character of Scottish representations in the period, making the melancholy E♭ minor appropriate for northern imagery.Footnote 77
Not only Loewe but also Schubert was heir to Zumsteeg’s ballad tradition, which, given the strong effect of Zumsteeg’s through-composed ballads on the young Schubert, may also have served as a conduit for the practical application of Schubart’s key affects (though Schubart’s list was so widely published that this is not necessary to posit). When Schubert’s friend Josef von Spaun reported that Zumsteeg’s songs ‘moved [Schubert] profoundly’ in 1811, he specifically mentioned the ‘Colma’ setting:
At the end of March 1811 my fate took me back to Vienna. I found my young friend grown-up and in good spirits. […] He had several of Zumsteeg’s songs in front of him and told me that these songs moved him profoundly. ‘Listen’, he said once, ‘to the song I have here’, and with a voice already half breaking he sang ‘[C]olma’; then he showed me ‘Erwartung’, [‘Maria Stuart’], ‘Ritter Toggenburg’, etc. He said he could revel in these songs for days on end. And to this youthful predilection of his we probably owe the direction Schubert took.Footnote 78
Many of Schubert’s experiments with the use of E♭ minor were unpublished at first and thus were unavailable to other composers or key-affect theorists. His early wind nonet Eine kleine Trauermusik, D. 79 (1813/1889), shows that he viewed the key as funereal. Several lament texts, including ‘Klage um Ali Bey’, D. 140 (1815/1850) and the second version of ‘Am Grabe Anselmos’, D. 504b (1860/1970), rely heavily on the key, while ‘Bertas Lied in der Nacht’, D. 653 (1819/1842), in six flats, has a clearly ombra-style open-octave opening to depict the night.
Schubert also employs the northern association of the key in ‘Blondel zu Marien’, D. 626 (1818/1842) (Example 16) (Blondel is a bard associated with Richard the Lionheart). The piece begins in bardic manner, with a harp-like accompaniment, but leaves the melancholy E♭ minor behind when the text brightens. Berlioz’s use of the key in ‘Le Montagnard exilé’ (1823) is similarly related to bardic intent. The northern association, then, is not entirely subsumed in the sea-storm accompaniment but can also be associated with a bardic style. Bruch’s use of E♭ minor for the opening of the Scottish Fantasy, op. 46 (1880) is, I would argue, a locus classicus for the direct association of Scotland with E♭ minor, using elements of what Janice Dickensheets called ‘bardic style’ but which could also be called Ossianic style or northern dialect: a Grave, funereal brass chorale opening with double dotting, harp accompaniment, and a declamatory or narrating violin line (Example 17).Footnote 79 Thus it is clear that the associations between melancholy and the primarily bardic image of Scotland are strong enough that E♭ minor can directly contribute to a northern, Ossianic, or bardic style without being refracted through Scotland’s ombra or tempesta/sea-storm associations.
Schubert, ‘Blondel zu Marien’, D. 626 (1818/1842), bars 1–10. [In gloomy night, when sorrow envelops my sensing heart]
Bruch, Fantasie für die Violine mit Orchester und Harfe unter freier Benutzung schottischer Volksmelodien, op. 46 (1880), bars 1–14.
Broader Applications: Later Nineteenth-Century and Instrumental Music
By the mid-nineteenth century, a sort of ‘critical mass’ of previous usage allows the association between E♭ minor and melancholy to continue without need for further commentary or reference to anything except the model of previous works and, occasionally, Schubart’s statement. Even as unusual keys prevail more widely, equal temperament is approached, and many keys lose their traditional associations, E♭ minor continues to represent deep melancholy in text-associated works after 1850, often in those of a spiritual or supernatural, though not specifically religious, turn. An example is Schumann’s overture to Manfred. The text by Lord Byron involves calling on the spirit world, self-exile, and suicidal impulses, and invites the E♭ minor of the introduction. Deep melancholy is also conveyed by Schumann’s ‘Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet’, no. 13 from the op. 48 Dichterliebe, with a funereal rhythm and an unaccompanied opening (Example 18). Brahms’s ‘Schwermut’ (Example 19) also seems to be a most apposite example, with clear ‘ghost-speak’ or repeated note, narrow-ranged melodies, expressing the speaker’s constricted focus and ebbing life. Brahms’s ‘Steig auf, geliebter Schatten’, op. 94 no. 2, combines ombra (to call on spirits) with lonely abandonment.Footnote 80
Robert Schumann, ‘Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet’, Dichterliebe, op. 48 no. 13 (1840), bars 1–6. [I wept while dreaming; I dreamed you lay in the grave.]
Brahms, ‘Schwermut’, op. 58 no. 5 (1871), bars 1–14. [My heart weighs so heavily, it seems to me that I want to weep for pain!]
The melancholy associations of E♭ minor can be applied to hermeneutic analysis of the modulatory schemes of late-Romantic works. Gustav Mahler’s ‘Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer’ from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen [Songs of a Wayfarer] employs progressive tonality, beginning in D minor but ratcheting up to E♭ minor to conclude with the line ‘Ich wollt’, ich läg auf der schwarzen Bahr’, Könnt’ nimmer, nimmer die Augen aufmachen!’ [‘Would that I lay on the black bier, that I could never, never more open my eyes!’] — thus simultaneously becoming more intense and more associated with death and suicide. Wagner’s Ring operas are clearly sensitive to key associations, and the segments in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung identified by Alfred Lorenz as dominated by E♭ minor show the key used both as a darkened version of E♭ major and as a foil to C major.Footnote 81
A number of intertextual examples involving E♭ minor and melancholy also cite the Dies irae from the Requiem mass. The Brahms Intermezzo, op. 118 no. 6 (1893), which famously quotes a highly altered version of the Dies irae, also uses the tempo indication ‘Largo e mesto’, associated with deep melancholy since Beethoven’s use of the indication in his op. 10 no. 3 sonata. Charles-Valentin Alkan used the Dies irae more explicitly in Trois morceaux dans le genre pathétique, op. 15 no. 3, ‘Morte’ (1837) (Example 20), stating a lengthy portion of the theme in empty octaves in E♭ minor over an E♭/B♭ pedal.Footnote 82 The use of E♭ minor for the Dies irae is clearly a deliberate melancholy choice, as D minor would seem to be the default (the original chant is in the Dorian mode) and Berlioz’s prototypical Symphonie fantastique quotation is in C minor.
Charles-Valentin Alkan, Trois morceaux dans le genre pathétique, op. 15 no. 3, ‘Morte’ (1837), bars 1–12.
Whether E♭ minor implies melancholy in instrumental works with few or no intertextual references is an open question. Some of these instrumental pieces have associations with melancholy that strongly depend on biographical details for substantiation: for instance, Dussek’s Sonata in E♭, ‘The Farewell’ (from 1800, titled by the composer), has a minor-mode introduction meant to convey melancholy on leaving his friend Clementi (Example 21). Yet there is musical substantiation as well; the E♭ minor in Dussek’s sonata is in a Grave introduction similar to that of Beethoven’s op. 13 Sonata ‘Pathétique’ of two years earlier (and, completing the circle, E♭ minor is briefly touched on via inflection from E♭ major in movement 1 of Beethoven’s own farewell sonata, ‘Les Adieux’, op. 81a (1809–10)). Similarly, Brahms’s op. 40 Horn Trio (with a slow movement in E♭ minor), from 1865, can be supposed to be related to the death of his mother in that year; the melancholia is musically substantiated by an ‘Adagio mesto’ indication, again casting back to Beethoven’s melancholy ‘Largo e mesto’.
Dussek, Introduzione from The Farewell: A New Grand Sonata, op. 44 (1800), bars 1–13.
Yet there may be additional reasons for choosing the key besides affect; for instance, cycles that employ every key, such as the Well-Tempered Clavier and Chopin’s op. 28 Preludes, may do so merely to complete the cycle.Footnote 83 Nevertheless, both those examples demonstrate an affectively appropriate prelude in the key; Bach’s (Example 2) has been cited as having ‘the character of a Tombeau’, and there is speculation that it is associated with the death of his first wife,Footnote 84 whereas Chopin’s (Example 22) seems to express the same stormy impressions as Clara Schumann’s and Loewe’s sea-storm ballads, as it is entirely in low-register open octaves and with a roiling triplet perpetual motion.Footnote 85 Indeed, in Der Charakter der Tonarten (1948), Paul Mies analysed cycles of works in all the keys and identified two strains or ‘root characters’ in E♭ minor: one of deep melancholy and a second, more passionate strain which I would identify with the sea-storm influence, under which he classifies works of ‘fast tempos, simple metre, and turbulent accompaniment’, including Chopin’s op. 28 Prelude but also works by Clementi, Stephen Heller (‘Leidenschaftlich’), and Ignaz Moscheles (‘Allegro agitato’).Footnote 86 Many instrumental examples have the markings agitato, appassionato, or leidenschaftlich, all identifying them with Mies’s ‘impassioned’ root character, if not explicitly the sea-storm character noted above.Footnote 87
Chopin, Prelude in E♭ Minor, op. 28 no. 14 (1839), bars 1–3.
There may also be technical reasons for choosing E♭ minor from among the ‘difficult’ keys that supersede the affective ones. For a pianist, the number of black keys employed in this tonality might even be an asset in virtuosic pieces, as being somewhat easier to play than a more even mix of black and white keys; this may account for many quick-tempo piano pieces such as Rachmaninoff’s Prelude, op. 23 no. 9 (1901), his Moments musicaux, op. 16 no. 2 (1896), and Brahms’s op. 4 Scherzo (1851).Footnote 88 Ease of playing and of reading is as important as affective association in choosing E♭ minor with respect to its enharmonic equivalent, as aforementioned. Certainly pentatonic keyboard pieces are easy to play in E♭ minor; a story was circulated by Robert Burns that a non-musician had composed the pentatonic tune ‘Ye Banks and Braes of Bonny Doon’ simply by keeping to the black keys of the harpsichord.Footnote 89 This seems to make Johann Baptist Cramer’s Schottisches Lied (Example 23), printed in Vienna in 1818, less a deliberate invocation of Scotland or exoticism via E♭ minor than, perhaps, an experiment in black-key pentatonicism, though it may have been received in Vienna as appropriate for either reason.Footnote 90
Cramer, Schottisches Lied (1818), published in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf den österreichischen Kaiserstaat, 2.5, Beylage no. 1. ANNO/Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.
A few examples do have an intertextual association that indicates a possible exotic function for E♭ minor. The overture to Spohr’s Jessonda from 1823 has both a clearly funereal and a slightly exotic interpretation of the key, appropriate to the setting of an Indian funeral. Schubert’s ‘Klage um Ali Bey’ has exotic features such as accented ‘drone’ pitches; the key may be meant to amplify this association. It is unclear, however, whether the exotic association would be due to the rarity of the key or due to the connection with black-key pentatonicism, as with the Schottisches Lied. Footnote 91 Though Jessonda and ‘Klage um Ali Bey’ are also examples of melancholy, there are untexted examples, such as Dvořák’s Humoresque, op. 101 no. 1 (1894), that seem to retain the slightly exotic flavour without any obvious association to melancholy themes.
The Romantic trend for unusual keys, noted by Macdonald in ‘[G-Flat Major]’, may also be responsible for a number of late nineteenth-century instrumental works in E♭ minor (particularly for piano) that have no apparent or particular reference to melancholy. Nevertheless, strongly appropriate instances of the key still occur as long as keys are used at all; Shostakovich’s last string quartet in 1974 (no. 15, op. 147) in E♭ minor has six movements, all adagio, including an Elegy, a Nocturne, and a Funeral March; Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 6, op. 111 (1945–47), is meant to be a postwar elegy. Arnold Bax said about his E♭-minor work The Tale the Pine-Trees Knew (1931) that ‘I was thinking of […] Norway and the West of Scotland […], of the Norse sagas and of the wild traditional legends of the Highland Celt’.Footnote 92
***
Given the strong association shown in texted examples, the employment of E♭ minor, even in the absence of other signals of style or programmatic intent, should generally be considered a marker of melancholy throughout the common-practice tonal period. The early use of E♭ major and its parallel minor for ombra scenes, the influence of Schubart’s description, and the perpetuation of these influences in works like Beethoven’s oratorio demonstrate a distinct subtopic focused on death and ombra, whereas a tendency towards representation of the sea storm seems influenced by a connection between northernness, Sturm und Drang, and melancholy. Despite prominent and influential statements and repertory, however, the feature most responsible for the continuity of this key’s symbolism may be one anybody could observe: its symbolic placement as the polar opposite of simple, cheerful C major.
Appendix: Text-Associated Works Involving E♭ Minor
| Composed [published] | Composer, Work, Location of Key | Associated Text Elements |
|---|---|---|
| 1741 | Jommelli, Andromaca, Act II, Scene 15 | Ombra scene, ghost of Pyrrhus |
| 1755 | Graun, Der Tod Jesu
‘Nun klingen Waffen’, bars 30–32 ‘Ihr weichgeschaffnen Seelen’, bars 15–17 |
e♭: Peter ‘weinet bitterlich’ [weeps bitterly] e♭: text-painting on ‘Schmerz’ [pain] |
| 1762 | Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice, Act II, Scene 1 | e♭: ‘Misero giovane’ [chorus of Furies: Miserable youth] |
| 1763 | Traetta, Ifigenia in Tauride, Act II, Scene 1, ‘Dormi Oreste’, bars 19–26 | e♭: ‘L’ombra mesta sdegnosa’ [chorus of Furies: The sad neglected shade] |
| 1766 | Philidor, Tom Jones, Act III, Scene 18 | g ⇒ e♭: ombra scene |
| 1770 | Mozart, Mitridate, re di Ponto, Act III, Scene 4, bars 60–72 | e♭: ‘Pallid’ ombre’ [pale shades] |
| 1775 | Benda, Medea, bars 563–67 | e♭: ‘Fern von euch werd’ ich sterben’ [Far from you will I die] |
| 1777–78 | Nicolai, ‘Eyn klegliche Mordgeschichte, von ey’n Herrn, der wz tot’ | ‘seer kleglich unndt stönend’ [very pitiful and moaning] |
| 1780 | Piccinni, Atys, Act III, Scene 8 | e♭: ‘O spectacle funeste’ [lament] |
| 1784 | Paisiello, Il re Teodoro in Venezia, Act II, Scene 12, ‘Sogno di Teodoro’ | Ombra scene, e♭ after ‘spettro terribile’ [terrifying spectre] |
| 1785 | Eilenstein, ‘Todesgedanken’ | ‘Thoughts of death’ |
| 1787 | Gazzaniga, Don Giovanni, Scene 24 | ombra scene |
| 1790 | Beethoven, Cantata auf den Tod Kaiser Joseph des Zweiten, movement 1, bars 84–89 | e♭: ‘[Joseph] ist todt! [Joseph is dead!] |
| 1793 | Zumsteeg, ‘Colma: Ein Gesang Ossians’, bars 392–408 | e♭: ‘Kalt wie die Erde ist ihr Busen’ [Cold are their breasts of clay] |
| 1796 | Haydn, Heiligmesse in B♭, Hob. XXII/10 | e♭: ‘Crucifixus’ |
| 1798 | Haydn, The Creation; Prelude bars 34–36 II. 28 ‘Zu dir, o Herr, blickt alles auf’ |
Part of ‘Representation of Chaos’ e♭: ‘Du wendest ab dein Angesicht’ [You [the Lord] turn away your face (striking us with mortal terror)] |
| 1798 | Kozłowski, Requiem in E♭ Minor | Requiem aeternam movements |
| 1798 | Zumsteeg, ‘Lenore’, bars 585–94, 940–50 | e♭: ‘Läßt uns den Leib begraben! [Let us bury the corpse!] e♭: Concluding chorus of ghosts |
| 1800 | Dussek, Sonata in E♭, ‘Introduzione’, bars 1–13 | Titled ‘The Farewell’, marked Grave |
| 1800 | Zumsteeg, ‘Richard und Mathilde’, bars 107–15 | e♭: Mathilde threatens that her ghost will haunt her former lover and then dies |
| 1801 | Haydn, The Seasons, Winter, 38: Aria, ‘Erblicke hier, betörter Mensch’, bars 29–97, passim | Winter reflections on death: e♭: ‘Where are they now, your lofty plans’ |
| 1801 | Tomášek, ‘Lenore’, op. 12 | e♭: opening overture |
| 1803/4 [1811] | Beethoven, Christus am Ölberge, Introduzione | Anxiety of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane |
| 1808 | Cherubini, Requiem in C Minor, Offertorium | e♭: ‘De poenis inferni’ [pains of hell] |
| 1812 | Zelter, ‘Die Braut am Gestade’ | [Newlyweds drowning in a sea storm] |
| 1813 | Schubert, Eine kleine Trauermusik, D. 79 | Funeral music, Grave con espressione |
| 1815 | Schubert, ‘Luisens Antwort’, D. 319, bars 15–22 | b♭ ⇒ e♭: ‘Gestorben allen Freuden, leb’ ich fortan den Leiden’ [‘All joys are dead; henceforth I live in suffering.’] |
| 1816 | Schubert, ‘Am Grabe Anselmos’, D. 504a–b | [Graveside lament] |
| 1816 | Schubert, ‘Klage um Ali Bey’, D. 496a | [Lamenting an Egyptian revolutionary hero] |
| 1818 | Cramer, Schottisches Lied | Imitation Scottish song |
| 1818 [1824] | Loewe, ‘Edward’, op. 1 | Scottish ballad; theme of patricide and exile |
| 1818 [1842] | Schubert, ‘Blondel zu Marien’, D. 626 | e♭: ‘In düstrer Nacht’ [In gloomy night] |
| 1819 [1842] | Schubert, ‘Bertas Lied in der Nacht’, D. 653 | e♭: ‘Nacht umhüllt mit wehendem Flügel’ [Night veils with drifting wings] |
| 1823 | Berlioz, ‘Le Montagnard exilé: Chant élégaique’ | e♭: ‘Ainsi Mandel, loin de la rive où coulèrent ses premiers jours, soupirait romance plaintive’ [Thus Mandel, in exile from his native land, sighs his plaintive romance] |
| 1823 | Spohr, Jessonda Overture, WoO 53, introduction | Funeral of a rajah |
| 1827 | Schubert, ‘Die Post’, Winterreise, D. 915/13 | Major context turns to minor when the post bears no letter from the absent beloved |
| 1828 | Schubert, ‘Geistes-Gruß’, D. 142 version a | A ghost on a tower greets a passing ship with memories of his lost strength |
| 1829 [1890] | Berlioz, La Mort de Cléopâtre, H. 36, bars 151–66 | e♭: ‘Grands Pharaons…’, Cleopatra’s request to the dead to enter their realm; ombra style |
| 1837 | Alkan, Trois morceaux dans le genre pathétique, op. 15 no. 3, Morte [Death] | Dies irae reference |
| 1838 | Henselt, Douze études caractéristiques, op. 2 no. 8, [Allegro agitato ed appassionato] | Motto: ‘Tu m’attires, m’entraînes, m’engloutis!’ [You entice me, ensnare me, engulf me!] |
| 1840 | C. Schumann, ‘Am Strande’ (R. Burns) | ‘Musing on the roaring ocean’; absent beloved |
| 1840 | R. Schumann, ‘Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet’, Dichterliebe, op. 48 no. 13 | ‘I wept while dreaming’; absent beloved |
| 1840 | R. Schumann, ‘Lust der Sturmnacht’, 12 Gedichte von Justinius Kerner, op. 35 no. 1 | Desire for a stormy night |
| 1844 | Loewe, ‘Gruß vom Meere’, op. 103 | Dark, black, crashing sea; absent beloved |
| 1847 | Alkan, ‘Chanson de la folle au bord de la mer’, op. 31 no. 8 | Low register; ‘waves’; major/minor alternation conveying instability; hints of suicide |
| 1848 | Loewe, ‘Der gefangene Admiral’, op. 115 | Imprisoned admiral mourns the sea’s absence |
| 1848–49 [1853] | R. Schumann, Manfred Overture, op. 115 (Byron) | Invocation of supernatural, themes of suicide/alienation; im leidenschaftlichen tempo |
| 1853 | Brahms, ‘Liebestreue’, op. 3 no. 1 | Sea-storm imagery mirroring internal turmoil |
| 1856–58 | Berlioz, Les Troyens
[Cassandra’s prophecy], no. 10 (Act I) [Dido’s speech], no. 19 (Act III) [Dido’s lament], no. 47 (Act V, Scene 2) |
e♭: [Allegro assai agitato] ‘Non, je ne verrai pas’ [Cassandra’s prophetic misgivings] e♭: Air: ‘Chers Tyriens’ e♭: ‘Je vais mourir’ [Dido’s lament] |
| 1862 | Brahms, ‘Marias Kirchgang’, op. 22 no. 2 | Sea, heartbreak imagery; religious solemnity |
| 1863 | Bizet, Les Pêcheurs de perles, Act III, Scene 2 | e♭: Heroine fears for her lover and asks for him to be spared so that she can die bravely |
| 1864 | Brahms, ‘Wie bist du, meine Königin’, op. 32 no. 9 | e♭: ‘Durch tote Wüsten wandle hin’ [Through dead wastes I wander] |
| 1871 | Brahms, ‘Schwermut’, op. 58 no. 5 | ‘Melancholy’: world-weary, anticipating death |
| 1874 | Musorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition, ‘Gnomus’ | Low register, grotesque |
| 1876 | Wagner, Götterdämmerung, Prologue Act I, Scene 2, bars 539–92 Act II, Scene 4, bars 1010–38 |
e♭: The World-Ash Tree and its withering e♭: Hagen’s Watch [also contrasts C major] e♭: Brunnhilde names Siegfried traitor |
| 1880 | Bruch, Scottish Fantasy, op. 46, introduction | Ossianic melancholy |
| [1880] | Rheinberger, Organ Sonata, op. 119, movement 3 | Marcia religiosa, Dies irae reference |
| 1882 | Wagner, Parsifal, Act II, bars 123–36 | Kundry summoned [ombra scene] |
| 1883 | Brahms, ‘Steig auf’, geliebter Schatten’, op. 94 no. 2 | ‘Rise, beloved shade, before me in the dead night’ |
| 1883–85 [1896] | G. Mahler, ‘Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer’, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen no. 3 | e♭: ‘Ich wollt’, ich läg auf der schwarzen Bahr’, Könnt’ nimmer, nimmer die Augen aufmachen!’ [Would that I lay on the black bier, that I could never, never wake!] |
| 1884 [1902] | Duparc, ‘La Vie antérieure’ (Baudelaire) | Conclusion of lost youth; exotic text elements |
| 1885 | Bordier, Un Rêve d’Ossian, bars 267–70 | e♭: ‘he will awake our ghosts; he will say what gravestones cover these remnants?’ |
| 1892 | Fauré, ‘Prison’, op. 83 no. 1 (Verlaine) | Concluding theme of weeping and lost youth |
| 1906–07 | G. Mahler, Symphony no. 8 (Schlußszene aus Faust) | e♭: intro, closely pressing rocks, forests, waves; Pater profundis: rocky abysses, torrents |
| 1913 | E. Smyth, ‘Before the Squall’, Three Moods of the Sea, no. 2, bars 63–68 | e♭: ‘and drifts to death among the dusty sand’ |
