Relatively little attention has been paid to the 1842 chamber music of Robert Schumann in the scholarly analytical literature. Instead Schumann is often criticized as attempting and failing to live up to the quality found in the chamber works of Beethoven and Haydn. While Schumann might have used Beethoven and Haydn as his models, he also wanted to create an identity of his own in the genre. This identity was surely influenced by his love of Romantic literature, which makes his music especially suitable for narrative analysis. Although Anthony Newcomb has done some initial work in this area with the String Quartet in A Major, Op. 41 No. 3, Schumann's chamber music repertoire has not yet been fully examined with respect to structural and narrative analysis.

This paper explores the manner in which structural and expressive musical devices contribute to narrative in Schumann's chamber music, using the second movement of Schumann's Piano Quintet in E-Flat Major, Op. 44 as a case study. I will seek to reveal significant connections between music and meaning by following the narratological approach of Byron Almén and by drawing upon the semiotic approach of Robert Hatten. In addition to using structural support to trace musical oppositions-including oppositions in topic, style, key, motive, hypermeter, and texture-in order to support my narrative reading, I will also explore how oppositions in foreground voice leading can be mapped onto expressive oppositions, and how this can enhance narrative interpretations. An examination of In Modo d'una Marcia reveals that, while this movement contains many of the topical features one associates with tragedy-the most prominent tragic topical feature in this movement is the refrain's minor-key funeral march-Schumann presents a formal problem that complicates the narrative reading and results in a failed tragic-to-transcendent narrative trajectory.