Metre and rhythm have received much greater attention from analysts in recent years, elbowing pitch analysis aside. In this vein, Yonatan Malin has brought a refreshing new look at German lieder by focusing his attention on rhythmic aspects. After a string of papers and articles,Footnote 1 he has now published a book on the subject. It is in many ways a culmination of Malin's work over the past decade and a significant contribution to analytical studies of the lied.

Malin undertakes nothing less than a taxonomy of the metrical settings of poetic lines in German lieder in his first chapter (‘The Rhythms of Poetry and Song’).Footnote 2 This enables him to match similar rhythmic settings of poetic lines in many different lieder to one another, to discern the most common patterns as well as those rhythmic settings that are unusual. It allows for the characterization of a composer's style of metrical text setting. This is the first stage of Malin's work. Basically he is arguing that the rhythms of the lied – on all levels – deserve as careful analysis as the pitch content and that he can offer us new tools with which to do this.

Malin has developed a shorthand to designate various ‘declamatory schemas’. In this shorthand brackets enclose poetic lines, numbers indicate strong beats in each measure that carry accented syllables, dashes show strong beats that do not carry accented syllables, and slashes stand for barlines. Thus a simple setting of an iambic tetrameter line (here with accented text syllables italicised), as in Schumann's ‘In der Fremde’ in 4/4 metre (op. 39/1, Eichendorff), is rendered as

and the next line, a trimeter line, becomes

The shorthand allows for tabulation of patterns, and Malin's tables therefore readily reveal the more and less common schemas. Further modifications allow the notation of subtleties; for example an ‘a’ indicates an accented syllable set to a weak beat.Footnote 3 The ‘database’ of differing declamatory schemas enables Malin to observe that some unusual schemas appear to be used for particular purposes. In a 3/4 setting of a tetrameter text, for example, the rare schema [3/1, 2 –/ 1] has a cadential function, as in Schumann's ‘Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’ (op. 48/4, Heine): ‘So muss ich/weinen bitter-/ lich’.

One caveat: Malin does not make clear what he considers a strong beat and what a weak beat, though the distinction is usually intuitively clear. Thus in 3/4, the third beat appears to constitute a strong beat, since he uses ‘3’ in his schemas in 3/4 metre songs to indicate an accented syllable on a strong beat. Yet in a 6/8 measure, the analogously positioned third and sixth eighth notes are considered weak and are designated with an ‘a’ when they carry an accented syllable. That is, the third beat in a 3/4 bar can be ‘strong’, but the third and sixth eighth notes in a 6/8 bar are always ‘weak’. This may seem intuitively correct, since one regards 6/8 primarily as a duple metre of two dotted quarters, yet an instance of an accented syllable set to one of these ‘weak’ notes calls that tacit assumption into question. This occurs, for example, in Schubert's ‘Wetterfahne’, from Winterreise (op. 89/2, Müller), in 6/8: ‘Da dacht’ ich schon in meinem/Wahne’, described by Malin as [ 1, 2 a/1 ] ). The question may be whether the placing of an accented syllable on a note in a conventionally ‘weak’ position invests that note with added ‘strength’. This in turn may suggest that in setting a text to music one does not entirely subjugate a poetic text to the stricter musical metre; the two may interact in a more permeable way.

Malin next proceeds to a discussion of ‘polyrhythm’ and the Romantic lied, based on an 1817 essay by composer-critic Hans Georg Nägeli (‘Die Liedkunst’, Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 45, pp. 765–66). Malin very helpfully introduces the ideas of this short aesthetic document, which has heretofore figured primarily in German-language discussions, into English discourse on the lied. Though it has been cited briefly in the work of Beate Julia Perrey, Marie-Agnes Dittrich, and Jon Finson (see Malin, footnote 30, p. 30), this appears to be the first extended presentation of its ideas. Nägeli's polyrhythms are those of the text, the voice, and the piano, and he argues that the integration of these is what constitute the ‘higher style’ of the new Romantic lied. Malin superimposes these three layers on Edward Cone's personae Footnote 4 as modified by Berthold HoecknerFootnote 5 – the poetic, the vocal, and the instrumental voices or personae. The various levels of rhythmic activity and their texture or interaction are major expressive elements in song. (The phrase in ‘Wetterfahne’ described above may illustrate a kind of polyrhythm of poetic text and vocal melody, the words being curiously resistant to the fettering of the musical metre.)

Malin rightly places the Nägeli as a cornerstone of his discussion of the role of rhythm in the lied. It must be said, however, that as pertinent as it assuredly is to his book as a whole, placing the more theoretical Nägeli discussion at the end of Chapter 1 is an awkward fit with Malin's more methodologically oriented presentation of declamatory schemas. It is clear that the treatment of Nägeli's ideas is too slight to constitute a chapter unto itself, but it proceeds unconvincingly from what precedes it, while admittedly paving the way for what is to follow. Maybe it should have been presented as an ‘interlude’. Furthermore, given that the Nägeli essay is relatively brief, I wish Malin had incorporated it in its entirety into the text or as an appendix, both in the original German and in English translation.

Chapter 2, ‘Theories of Musical Rhythm and Meter’, is a primer based on a huge spread of recent work by Richard Cohn, Harald Krebs, Fred Lerdahl, Joel Lester, William Rothstein, Frank Samarotto, Carl Schachter, Joseph Straus, Maury Yeston, and others, plus a number of psychological and perceptual studies.Footnote 6 Malin introduces and explains hypermetre, ‘shadow meter’, metric conflict or ‘metric dissonance’ (of two kinds: displacement/syncopation and grouping/hemiola), and discusses a number of songs in terms of these categories. One aim, for example, is to discern how the rhythm of poetic lines, musical phrase rhythm, metres and hypermetres either do or do not coincide; also to be able to pinpoint when, where, and what kinds of metric dissonance occur. Malin certainly finds a rich example of metric dissonance in Brahms's ‘Das Mädchen spricht’ (op. 107/3, Gruppe). The compounded experiences of hemiolaFootnote 7 and displaced downbeat, the latter of which combines with the sudden harmonic shift from A major to F major, are strong features of this song. Though this song is here to illustrate metric dissonance per se, which it does quite well, one wishes that Malin had offered us, as a bonus, his usually rich commentary on the expressive significance of these features in this instance. The rhythmic-harmonic energy of this song seems so at odds with the volkstümlich poetic text as to beg for explanation. (Disappointingly, he does not return to this lied in the chapter on Brahms.) This chapter begins to demonstrate Nägeli's polyrhythms and to show how the declamatory schemas operate in context.Footnote 8

Chapters 3 through 7 discuss the lieder of Fanny Hensel, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf and make a case for differentiating them stylistically in terms of their rhythmic qualities. In each chapter Malin provides detailed readings of a handful of lieder by each composer, with additional discussions of pertinent contextual issues.

There is much for the close reader to profit from in Malin's discussions. Each is a poetically sensitive, musically attuned, and insightful reading. And if one does not agree with every one of Malin's judgements, one's own alternative ideas will nevertheless have been provoked by his probing analysis. The reader will do well to read each chapter's introductory paragraphs closely and to reread them after finishing a chapter; it is there that Malin presents most pointedly his aperçus of the songs to be discussed in detail.

Chapter 3, ‘Hensel: Lyrical Expansions, Elisions, and Rhythmic Flow’, traces ‘a progression … from relatively simple settings to more complex and rhythmically varied ones’ (p. 93). Particularly nice is his discussion of Hensel's ‘Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass’ (op. 1/3, Heine), especially the attention he calls to the shifts of the two-measure hypermetre at important junctures and the coordination Hensel makes in the piano textures with the chiastic form of stanza 4 (line 1 corresponds with line 4, line 2 with line 3), upsetting the simpler couplet pattern in earlier stanzas. Malin shows how the piano figuration changes in step with the chiastic pattern. Or how it almost does. Here he is able to demonstrate a three-layered polyrhythm in this song: the poetic lines (in the voice) form one rhythm (2+4+2 bars+1 at rest), the piano figuration another rhythm (2+3+2+2) slightly mismatched with the voice, and the shifting hypermetre, coinciding now with the vocal phrases, now with the piano, but breaking into the middle of the fourth vocal phrase with its new beginning. This is all rather awkward and longwinded in words, but Malin's diagram (Ex. 3.5) of the poetic and musical syncopations says it all succinctly. (I disagree that bars 17 and 34 are the beginnings of a hypermeasure; because of the literal musical repetition I hear it rather as an extension by one bar of the preceding hypermeasure. I note, too, that bars 16–17 and 33–34 are the only places in the song which halt the piano bass motion with dotted half notes, a rhythmic feature on which Malin uncharacteristically makes no comment, but which contributes to my hearing of the repeated bars as belonging together and also, with their agogic motion on V, contributing to a cadential culmination.)

Malin's concept of a poem's ‘directional form’ leading strongly to a poem's conclusion is helpful; it is another way, in the case of Heine, of approaching this poet's famous Stimmungsbrechung. It is a familiar pattern: several (usually three) stanzas that are similar and that raise expectations, followed by a final one that breaks with the mood and diction of the others. By composing her song in an ABAB form, Hensel does not have new music for the fourth stanza, but Malin speculates, and I think he is right, that she composed the musical correspondences to chiastic stanza 4 into the B section even though they are not apt for stanza 2. She also underlines the last stanza by repeating the last line to the opening, refrain-like melody, ending the voice on the third degree and allowing the piano to trail off with an unaccompanied pianissimo ascending line. Malin hears Hensel's intense lyricism – ‘song for song's sake’ – as a precursor to that of Brahms.

The Schubert chapter, ‘Repetition, Motion, and Reflection’, takes up some very well-known songs (including three songs from Winterreise, plus ‘Wandrers Nachtlied I’, ‘Schäfers Klagelied’, and ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’), yet manages to add to our appreciation of them, showing how focusing on rhythm, declamation, hypermetre, etc., casts them in a new light. Malin demonstrates not only the recitative-like quality of the singer in the last stanza ‘Auf dem Flusse’ (from Winterreise, op. 89/7), something we knew, but also shows how the poetic lines are declaimed out of phase with the hypermetre of the piano music. In ‘Schäfers Klagelied’ Malin shows how Schubert elides line 2 of the first stanza into line 3, by adding an extra syllable to line 2 (hin- of hingebogen) and starting it a half measure ‘early’ in the middle of bar 4. (Schubert does the same thing with the return of this framing music for the last stanza.)Footnote 9 Malin suggests this shift allows Schubert to emphasize that the shepherd is bowed down on his staff. But it can also be understood to change the poetic line rhythm, causing line 3 to be heard as an adverbial modifier of the verb stehen (rather than as an appositional adjectival phrase modifying the subject ich) and thereby grammatically joining line 3 more closely to line 2. One other additional thought: this elision is in effect a performance direction to continue unhesitatingly through bar 4 and not to take a noticeable pause within it (as some singers do). In ‘Gretchen’Footnote 10 Malin argues persuasively that in the second, final climax of the song, we experience the first or at least the strongest sense of four-bar hypermetre (bars 101–112), held together by the unique linear motion at that point in dotted half notes in the bass (G–A–B♭–A/G–A–A–D/G–A–A–D). In fact we hear the first eight bars as one long phrase with a four-bar extension. Malin finds realism in Schubert's songs – ‘the representation of motion and reflective consciousness via poetic and musical rhythms’ (p. 93).

By the time one gets through the Schumann chapter, ‘Doubling and Reverberation’, one has begun to experience a bit of déjà vu, both the realization that some of the same analytical gambits have been illustrated earlier in the book and also the sense that we've read some of this in other analytical essays. Malin does not shrink from this implication, but acknowledges up front the shoulders on which he stands. For example, near the beginning of his discussion of piano doublings, anticipations, and echoes of the vocal line he cites the work of Reinhold Brinkmann, and later of David Ferris, about these very matters.Footnote 11 The point, I believe, is that while for earlier writers many of these things were isolated or separate style features, in Malin's conception they all contribute to the polyrhythmic texture of the lied and deserve to be brought together under this one roof.

Naturally enough, Malin focuses his discussion of ‘Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen’ (Dichterliebe, op. 48/10) on the displaced sounding of the melody in the piano's upper register. He meticulously discerns the multiple ways the piano's notes anticipate or echo the vocal line and calls attention to the canon at the lower octave following the upper voice at the interval of only a single sixteenth note in the postlude. This canon has not gone unnoticed before,Footnote 12 but Malin's treatment of it seems to imbue it with new expressiveness. His satisfying characterization of the song's postlude gives performers and listeners new food for thought: ‘[T]he postlude seems to enact the three stages of the poet's grief [as portrayed in the text]: memory of the song and beloved…, intense driving pain…, and release in tears….’ In this and other songs, Malin finds that the disjointed reverberation of the voice in the piano ‘creates effects of “solitary intimacy” (Barthes)’ and ‘an expansion and deepening of inwardness, a resonant space within the self’ (p. 123).

At one point in his discussion of Schumann's late style, Malin refers to his remarks on a song as ‘analytical notes’ (p. 142). This is good to bear in mind, for the author seldom presents what one might consider a full-blown or exhaustive treatment of any given lied. It is helpful to be reminded that we should not expect this from his book, but rather pay attention to the particular point of view and analytical techniques that Malin espouses as tools, whose usefulness he is demonstrating. Sometimes Malin does examine the ‘motion’ through a whole song; sometimes he does not, as for example, in his discussion of ‘Einsamkeit’ (op. 90/5, Lenau), where it is enough to look at half the song to perceive how in Schumann's later style ‘parallelisms and periodicities at multiple levels are set up and simultaneously undone….[R]egular periodicities are present at particular moments, but they are no longer assumed’ (p. 144).

The Brahms chapter, ‘Metric Cycles and Performative Time’, immediately acknowledges the ubiquity and variety of the escapes from rhythmic regularity one encounters in Brahms's songs. Malin hears these as contributing to Brahms's ‘musical performance of a poetic reading’ as contrasted with Schumann's ‘musical setting of the poetic text’ (p. 146). His first example is the younger composer's setting of Eichendorff's ‘In der Fremde’ (op. 3/5). Malin says one might be inclined to regard this as ‘an early song that shows great potential but not the kind of mastery that Schumann achieved’ (p. 149), as I did years ago when I performed both the Schumann and Brahms settings in a recital. Malin, however, goes on to demonstrate how masterfully Brahms treats the enjambment in the second stanza of the poem in his musical performance of the poem, an enjambment that Schumann's musical setting of the text obscures. Malin goes on to argue in his discussion of four more songs – including a folk-like dramatic song (a ‘Rollengedicht’ by Reinick), two asclepiadic odes by Hölty, and a poem by Daumer – that Brahms cultivated a new ‘control of temporal flow to reflect an “in-time” reading of poetry’ (p. 151). Malin's discussion goes against the grain of standard criticism of Brahms for faulty declamation as compared (most commonly) with Wolf. If there is an occasional declamatory awkwardness, says Malin, it reflects the fact that Brahms's performance of the poetic reading is, after all, a musical one, making use of rhythmic motives, metric disturbance, and so forth, when they are ‘aspects of expression closely related to the poem’ (p. 154).

In the last chapter, on Wolf, ‘Syncopation and the Rhythms of Speech’, Malin characterises the distinction between Brahms and Wolf, both of whom are extremely attentive to rhythm and text, by saying that ‘rhythm for Wolf is about performative speech, whereas for Brahms it is about embodied motion’ (p. 178). Malin challenges the notion of the perfection of Wolf's declamation. He demonstrates in the opening lines of Goethe's ‘Ganymed’ how the text setting is in fact more lyrical than declamatory, and yet responsive to the words; also, how the fluidity of the vocal line plays off against the regularity of the ‘piano substrate’ (another example of Nägeli's polyrhythms). Malin examines all the pentameter poems in the Italienisches Liederbuch and discovers that Wolf follows a convention of fitting the five accented syllables of each line to eight beats: one beat of rest, three feet of one beat each, and two feet expanded to two beats each (e.g., in 4/4 [− 2, 3 − / 1, 2, 3 −] for ‘Auch klein-e Ding-e können uns ent-zü-cken’). Because the lengthened accented syllables migrate to various places in a line, the melodic declamation again has an ebb and flow that contrasts with regular rhythmic patterns in the piano. The principle of Wolf's pentameter settings is thus one of expansion, as compared the more common compression principle at work in the majority of Schubert's and many other composers’ songs on pentameter texts. As in other chapters, Malin acknowledges that many of the individual points he makes have been observed by other analysts; but his work points up the commonality of the rhythmic impulses.

A point that is implicit, I believe, in Malin's discussion of rhythmic motion in songs is that it need not always be interpreted as bearing directly on the text in some easily discernible way. In this he follows the suggestion of Kofi Agawu that analysis should examine text and music independently of one another and not constantly use the one to find meaning or justification for the other.Footnote 13 A song, following Nägeli, achieves a ‘higher artistic whole’, and perhaps some of its meaning remains ineffable. In the polyrhythm of text, voice, and piano each part can be appreciated in its own right; some elements of the text or music remain expressive within their respective domains without crossing over to another. This assumption is made explicit in Malin's epilogue, ‘Song Analysis and Musical Pleasure’, when he, citing poet and critic John Ciardi, distinguishes between the ultimate unknowableness of exactly ‘what’ a poem or song means and the understandability and pleasure in discovery of just ‘how’ it means it.Footnote 14