Composer: Söderman, Johan August
Dates: 1832-1876
Song title: Lieb Liebchen, leg's Händchen aufs Herze mein = Min äskling, din hand på mitt hjärta lägg
Opus, no., etc.: Nr.2
Music collection title: Heidenröslein : Liederzyklus nach Heine
Imprint(s): Stockholm: Lundquist, 1859
Analysis: In the prelude a solo line of quiet eighth-note triplets rises dramatically to a sweeping dominant seventh arpeggio, followed by a dotted eighth-/sixteenth-/quarter-note figure (a", b-flat", a") symbolizing the "Zimmerman's" hammer-strokes. This rhythmic pattern is ubiquitous throughout the vocal line and the motif reappears at the postlude, where it is repeated three times, as if to nail the coffin shut. The first stanza comprises three vocal phrases, together forming a great arch. The first phrase, imploring the beloved to hear his heart, yearns upward through an octave and a third to "ach, hörst du, wie's pochet," and then descends a third, its urgency intensified throughout by repeated use of the "hammer-stroke" rhytmic pattern. From this point the vocal line falls an octave via two shorter phrases, the second one echoing the first a fifth lower, each characterized by descending fifths and fourths. The urgent rhythmic pattern is absent as well. All this together reflects both the poet's exhaustion and a symbolic descent into the coffin being built by the his capenter/heart. We are told this by harmonic means as well: the first phrase moves by standard root function chord progressions, but at its end the dominant's third is lowered, thereby weakening its function, and from there on several non-functional, and, in the context, rather spooky progressions happen by stepwise, often chromatic voice-leading. Underneath it all, however, the piano's complex rhythmic textures (syncopations, triplets, etc.) continually propel the song forward. Another eighth-note triplet figure sweeps upward and into the second stanza, where the texture is thinned slightly for four measures to allow for a jagged descending-triplet figure in the right hand at the beginning of each measure, perhaps representing the hammering and pounding about which the poet complains at this point. Some reverse symmetry is evident here, for the melodic profile of the phrases used in the first half of the second stanza very closely reflects that of the phrase used in the last half of the first stanza, although the repetition here stays in the same pitch range. Then the vocal part for the poem's last two lines, where the poet cries for the carpenter to stop, echoes the yearning opening phrase, only slightly modified, before the last line's text is repeated on a final resigned descent to the tonic. A tinge of the coloristic harmonies of the previous phrases is carried over into the second stanza for a few measures before functional progressions reassert themselves over pedal D's and G's.
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Copyright © 2000, Peter W. Shea