Nineteenth-Century Music Review http://journals.cambridge.org/NCM Additional services for Nineteenth-Century Music Review: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here Brahms's Ascending Circle: Hölderlin, Schicksalslied and the Process of Recollection Nicole Grimes Nineteenth-Century Music Review / Volume 11 / Issue 01 / June 2014, pp 57 - 92 DOI: 10.1017/S1479409814000159, Published online: 05 August 2014 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1479409814000159 How to cite this article: Nicole Grimes (2014). Brahms's Ascending Circle: Hölderlin, Schicksalslied and the Process of Recollection. Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 11, pp 57-92 doi:10.1017/S1479409814000159 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/NCM, IP address: 137.43.146.71 on 05 Aug 2014 Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 11 (2014), pp 57–92. r Cambridge University Press, 2014 doi:10.1017/S1479409814000159 Brahms’s Ascending Circle: Ho¨lderlin, Schicksalslied and the Process of Recollection Nicole Grimes University College Dublin Email:
[email protected] The ending to Brahms’s Schicksalslied confounds scholars for two reasons: his setting of Ho¨lderlin’s ostensibly despairing poem ends with an orchestral section that evokes comfort and reconciliation, and the postlude transposes the material of the introduction down to C major, ending in a key other than its opening. This represents ‘a rare instance of a composer not merely placing an arbitrary interpretation on words but explicitly contradicting a poet’s statement’ (Petersen, 1983). Daverio (1993) and Reynolds (2012) hold similar views, seeing Ho¨lderlin’s poem as if divorced from the novel Hyperion.