Hans Christian Andersen and Robert Schumann, Der Soldat, op. 40 n. 3: The musical realization of an elliptic narrative

Abstract

The text of Der Soldat, by Andersen, describes in four strophes the drama of a soldier obli­ged to shoot his best friend. The first three stanzas are written in the present tense, but the fourth, the shooting itself, in the past tense, as if the poet refused to admit its reality. Schumann realizes this peculiarity of the text in an extremely subtle way, by the arrangement of tonalites, of the sforzandi and of the metre, in a subtle dramaturgy which prefigures that of op. 40 as a whole.