Hugo Wolf's 'In Der Frühe':
A Case for a Schenkerian Reading and Its Narrative Implications

Scott Baker, University of Southern Mississippi

In this study I explore the extent to which Schenkerian theory is applicable to Hugo Wolf's "In Der Frühe" from Mörikelieder. I take, as a point of departure, two previous studies by Felix Salzer and Deborah Stein and then offer a third analysis that posits that the song has a more traditional Ursatz than the other two suggest. Salzer categorizes the song as a "contrapuntal structure" which most obviously differs from the "harmonic structures" of traditional tonal music in that it replaces the Urlinie with a 5-6-5 neighboring motion. Though the song is tonally closed, a lack of melodic descent would deny its inclusion in the tonal canon, as it would seem to be in direct contradiction with Schenker's idea of the fundamental structure stated in Der freie Satz: "To man is given the experience of ending, the cessation of all tensions and efforts. In this sense, we feel by nature that the fundamental line must lead downward until it reaches ^1, and that the bass must fall back to the fundamental." Though Stein's analysis beautifully elucidates the narrative implications of the succession of keys and the conflicting modalities of the two sections of this binary work, my reading evokes additional associations between the text and the tonal structure. I conclude by briefly examining two other songs from Mörikelieder that also approach the final tonic from a chromatic mediant key for the purpose of comparing three potential Ursatz models to accommodate this type of closure.