Sehnsucht

As Printed on a Score

Rarely printed as the bare noun: as a direction it appears as mit Sehnsucht, sehnsüchtig or sehnsuchtsvoll, applying to the passage it marks. Far more often it is a title — Schubert and Brahms both wrote songs called Sehnsucht — so on a page it is usually a heading, not an instruction.

How Composers Use It

Sehnsucht is the quintessential Romantic emotion — an ache for something unreachable. When a German composer writes "mit Sehnsucht" or "sehnsüchtig," the music should have that quality of reaching toward something it can never quite grasp.

Example

Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Prelude, headed “Langsam und schmachtend”: its opening phrase, often called the longing (Sehnsucht) motif, rises chromatically over the Tristan chord and comes to rest on an unresolved dominant seventh.

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