Murder, Trauma, and the Half-Diminished Seventh Chord in Schoenberg’s “Song of the Wood Dove”

Abstract

This article takes the notion of trauma as a starting point for an analytic and hermeneutic study of the tonal-harmonic organization of the “Song of the Wood Dove” from Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder. It argues that the song’s opening sonority (the “Wood Dove Chord”) represents the Wood Dove’s trauma through its dual tonal identity: while on the one hand, the chord constitutes a long-range dominant of the song’s eventual tonic B♭ minor, this function competes with its role as a “traumatized tonic,” i.e., a distorted version of, or a dissonant substitute for, a pre-existing, more standard tonic-functioning sonority, namely the E♭ that governs the first nine songs of Gurre-Lieder. This double-functional interpretation of the “Wood Dove Chord” helps elucidate both the song’s internal tonal organization and its role within the larger plan of Gurre-Lieder’s Part 1.

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