I think he used it because the words rhyme. At least he didn’t use that synonym for a female dog.
Matthias von Collin was a contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and his poem “The Dwarf” is as fantastic as the Ancient Mariner. It’s Stephen King filtered through a morbid German sensibility. Schubert set this little masterpiece about ritual murder to music at age 25.
This video has Japanese subtitles, so I’ll supply the English lyrics and commentary.
It begins in A minor with the fate motif’s rhythm of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the left hand.
In the dim light the mountains already fade;
The ship drifts on the sea’s smooth swell.
With the queen and her dwarf on board.
She gazes up at the high arching vault.
At the blue distance, interwoven with light,
Streaked with the pale Milky Way.
Frannie ratchets up the tension by modulating to C minor. The queen decides that her horoscope says she is to die now, and she’s not going to fight the stars.
”Stars, never yet have you lied to me,”
She cries out, “Soon now I shall be no more.
You tell me so; yet in truth I shall die gladly.”
The dwarf’s verses shift down to B minor and then back to C minor, ending with a triumphal C Major leading to A minor. The Beethoven Fifth motif is openly stated in the left hand.
Then the dwarf comes up to the queen, begins
To tie the cord of red silk about her neck,
And weeps, as if he would soon go blind with grief.
He speaks: “You are yourself to blame for this suffering,
Because you have forsaken me for the king;
Now your death alone can revive joy within me.
”Though I shall forever hate myself
For having brought you death by this hand,
Yet now you must grow pale for an early grave.”
Schubert plays his trump card, a shift from A minor to a sickening A Major, as he peers into the queen’s deranged mind. Only the great composers can pull this off. Master and servant are reversed. The queen pleads, but yet the major key indicates a masochistic longing for death.
She lays her hand on her heart, so full of youthful life,
And heavy tears flow from her eyes
Which she would raise to heaven in prayer.
At the words, “She says,” the cord is pulled tight, and the dwarf strangles her. At the end of this verse, the Beethoven fate motif is very obvious.
”May you reap no sorrow from my death!”
She says – then the dwarf kisses her pale cheeks,
Whereupon her senses fade.
It ends in a bleak A minor.
The dwarf looks upon the lady in the grip of death:
He lowers her with his own hands deep into the sea.
His heart burns with such longing for her,
He will never again land on any shore.
This is Waltraud Meier accompanied by Joseph Breinl.