ABSTRACT
The blurring of the ground tone produced by solving problems and emancipating dissonances, already observed in Heinrich Schenker's music, crosses a line at the end of Arnold Schoenberg's period of transformation. A more thorough harmonic, formal, and text-music analysis, drawing on Schoenberg's writings and paintings, shows that the altered fourth chord and the tonic triad that it nullifies in Ich darf nicht dankend are tied to the poet's and Schoenberg's desolation. This chapter first analyses the text; the second, Schoenberg's relation to the text; and the third, the music. Schoenberg's identification with the poet comprises a conceptual blend of his implicit self-understanding and his implicit understanding of the poet. Schoenberg connects the text and the music with respect to a heuristic notion of the ideal and the real as a generic space, extrapolated from his conception of the subject and the tone. The music solves the problem first of all by partially emancipating the spirit chord.
