A recurring theme in the reception of Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis is the question mark over its sense of narrative continuity and the presence (or otherwise) of a central protagonist. Up until now, however, scarcely any attempt has been made to view these features in the context of Eichendorff's wider literary production. This article proposes applying an Eichendorffian aesthetic to Schumann's op. 39, viewing its phantasmagoric interconnections, absence of clear narrative order, sense of temporal dislocation and persistent theme of the loss of self as profoundly reflecting the concerns of Eichendorff's prose fiction. Neither the view that Schumann's cycle does possess a unified narrative and central protagonist, nor the converse, that it should be seen as a disparate group of songs, is adequate. Instead, it is the tension between the two views that emerges as crucial in coming to an aesthetic understanding of the cycle. Schumann's procedure, in juxtaposing a number of poems drawn from disparate works, presents an extreme case whereby narrative and subjective identity are put to the test, and the listener is invited to fill the vacant space left by the withdrawal of a unifying subject with his or her own sense of subjectivity.

Mendelssohn's overture The Hebrides or Fingal's Cave is regularly considered the musical landscape (or seascape) painting par excellence . Scarcely another work has such an unerring capacity to suggest the wide horizons, delicate nuances of changing color and light, the ceaseless rolling of the ocean breakers and freedom of the sea. Nevertheless, despite the popularity of this idea of musical landscape since the early nineteenth century, it is far from clear analytically or phenomenologically how the predominantly aural and temporal experience of music might convey a sense of visual space that would appear central to the perception of landscape. This article explores Mendelssohn's archetypal example of the musical seascape in order to unravel these concerns. After briefly charting the philosophical reefs that encircle this issue, I examine how the aural may nevertheless translate to the visual, and thus how music might create its own, virtual landscape. Traveling beyond this, however, we reach the limits of mimesis and the visual for explaining Mendelssohn's overture, uncovering his music's implications for mythic-historical and personal memory, synaesthesia, and the embodied subject. Ultimately I argue for a more ecomusicological understanding of Mendelssohn's work as embodying a critical reading of a fragile human subjectivity within nature, an immersive projection of the wild, northern sublime.

The historical past played perhaps a more important role in Mendelssohn's music than in that of any other composer. This article approaches the work traditionally seen as his first major compositional achievement, the Octet in E♭♭ Major for Strings, op. 20 (1825), from the perspective of the composer's strong historical sense and takes up ideas of musical memory, history, and circular narrative journey as embodied in the cyclical structure of the piece. The Octet enacts a coming to self-consciousness of its own musical history, a process with close parallels in the writings of Goethe and Hegel, both of whom Mendelssohn knew personally. In its cyclical manipulations of musical time, Mendelssohn's Octet sets up a new formal and expressive paradigm for a musical work that would be of major significance for the instrumental music of the later nineteenth century.