Death in Winterreise

Lauri Suurpää

Description

A Schenkerian approach to tragedy and joy in the final songs

Lauri Suurpää brings together two rigorous methodologies, Greimassian semiotics and Schenkerian analysis, to provide a unique perspective on the expressive power of Franz Schubert's song cycle. Focusing on the final songs, Suurpää deftly combines textual and tonal analysis to reveal death as a symbolic presence if not actual character in the musical narrative. Suurpää demonstrates the incongruities between semantic content and musical representation as it surfaces throughout the final songs. This close reading of the winter songs, coupled with creative applications of theory and a thorough history of the poetic and musical genesis of this work, brings new insights to the study of text-music relationships and the song cycle.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Note on the Translations of the Poems
Part I: Background
1. Genesis and Narrative of Winterreise
2. Winterreise in Context
3. Text-Music Relationships: Five Propositions
4. Musico-Poetic Associations: Principles of Analysis
Part II: Songs
5. The Emergence of Death as a Positive Option: "Der greise Kopf"
6. Death Contemplated: "Die Krähe"
7. From Hope for the Past to Hope for the Future: "Letzte Hoffnung"
8. Reflecting Lost Hope: "Im Dorfe," "Der stürmische Morgen," and "Täuschung"
9. Choosing Death: "Der Wegweiser"
10. Death Eludes the Wanderer: "Das Wirtshaus"
11. Reflecting on the Inability to Find Death: "Mut," "Die Nebensonnen," and "Der Leiermann"
Part III: Cycle
12. The Song Cycle as a Genre: Some Recent Views
13. Winterreise as a Cycle
14. Epilogue: The Meaning of Death in Winterreise
Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Culture musicale
• Histoire de la musique
• Styles
• Genres
• MUSIC
• Viaje de invierno
• Multiple signal classification
• Art music
• History of classical music traditions
• Classical
• Musique savante
• Winterreise
• Franz Schubert

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 06 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253011084
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Death in Winterreise
MUSICAL MEANING AND INTERPRETATION Robert S. Hatten, editor
LAURI SUURP
Death in Winterreise
Musico-Poetic Associations in Schubert s Song Cycle
This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 2014 by Lauri Suurp All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-01100-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-01108-4 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
To Tiina, Susanna, and Iiris
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on the Translations of the Poems
Part 1. Background
1. Genesis and Narrative of Winterreise
2. Winterreise in Context
3. Text-Music Relationships: Five Propositions
4. Musico-Poetic Associations: Principles of Analysis
Part 2. Songs
5. The Emergence of Death as a Positive Option: Der greise Kopf
6. Death Contemplated: Die Kr he
7. From Hope for the Past to Hope for the Future: Letzte Hoffnung
8. Reflecting Lost Hope: Im Dorfe, Der st rmische Morgen, and T uschung
9. Choosing Death: Der Wegweiser
10. Death Eludes the Wanderer: Das Wirtshaus
11. Reflecting on the Inability to Find Death: Mut, Die Nebensonnen, and Der Leiermann
Part 3. Cycle
12. The Song Cycle as a Genre: Some Recent Views
13. Winterreise as a Cycle
14. Epilogue: The Meaning of Death in Winterreise
Notes
References
Index
Preface
Franz Schubert s Winterreise provides a wealth of material for examining interactions between words and music. Indeed, the song cycle s deep, many-sided, and often unpredictable quality has produced a wide-ranging body of literature on its text-music relations. Yet the existing literature has far from exhausted Winterreise; there is still much that has not been studied or that merits new interpretations. By examining in detail most of the second part of Winterreise , songs 14-24, this book attempts to complement the picture, incomplete though it will remain. The choice of songs to be studied is based on the cycle s poetic organization. My intention is to illuminate one narrowly defined area of the musico-poetic aspects of Winterreise , namely, how the notion of death occurs in the poems of the cycle s second part and how this theme is reflected in the music. The protagonist s attitude to death changes as the cycle proceeds. Initially, in Der Lindenbaum (no. 5) he wishes to avoid death, but ultimately, in the songs that I will discuss (nos. 14-24), death becomes a tempting, even longed-for possibility: death would provide the lonely wanderer an escape from his painful life. It is on this positive view of death that I will concentrate, hence, the discussion of songs 14-24 only. In the poems the desire for death is often contrasted with lost love, the starting point of the wanderer s desolate winter journey, and I will also elucidate the relationships between lost love and death.
Past love and future death can be seen as combined into one larger subject: they both represent longing, the Sehnsucht characteristic of early German Romantic literature. But to understand the overall unfolding of Winterreise , it is important to keep in mind that the wanderer longs for two objects, not just one: the beloved in the cycle s first part and death in the second. That neither yearning can be satisfied makes the cycle all the more tragic. The longing for unobtainable love and death is directly related, at a more general level, to a theme that pervades the entire cycle of Winterreise: the juxtaposition of illusion and reality. This juxtaposition affects the course of the cycle in numerous ways, so the examination of death (and its relation to lost love) provides a chance to discuss one facet of this broader theme.
The shift from looking back (to the love of the past) to abandoning hope of regaining the beloved and beginning to look ahead (to a death ultimately desired) is the foundation on which I base my interpretation of Winterreise s underlying narrative. In short, longing remains the central topic, but the object of the longing changes. The change is not instantaneous, however. Rather, it moves through various stages of uncertainty, hope, determination, and frustration. These phases carry the underlying narrative to the cycle s ending, a conclusion, however, that brings no consolation or peace.
In writing this study I have three aims; the first two are directly related to Schubert s cycle, while the third is more general. The first is to provide close readings of songs 14-24 with a concentration on Schenkerian voice leading and expression. In this way, the study attempts to fill a clear void; although there is much general literature on Winterreise , there are surprisingly few detailed musical analyses of its individual songs. Second, I discuss the cyclical aspects and underlying narrative in part 2 of Winterreise and thereby challenge the quite widely accepted view that there is no goal-oriented trajectory in the cycle. Third, I present new methodological perspectives on the musico-poetic associations both in individual Lieder and in song cycles. Text-music relationships are discussed in separate songs at three levels: imitation, emotions, and structural relationships. Most important, this study introduces one way of examining structural relationships between music and text without suggesting that music directly represents the semantic content of a text. With song cycles, in turn, the study introduces novel methodological ways of elucidating poetic narrative, harmonic unity, and musical cross-references.
* * *
This book is divided into three parts. Part 1 ( chapters 1 - 4 ) provides background. The first two chapters are mainly historical. Chapter 1 discusses the genesis of both the text and the music of Winterreise and provides a tentative view of the cycle s poetic narrative. Chapter 2 briefly charts the historical environment in which the cycle was composed, discussing early nineteenth-century views of the Lied, song cycles, and the notion of death. Chapters 3 - 4 supply theoretical background for analyzing the music, the text, and musico-poetic aspects. While chapter 3 offers five fundamental propositions on which the discussion of the relationships between music and text will be based, chapter 4 introduces some principles of Greimassian semiotics and Schenkerian analysis that will be applied in examining the poetic and musical structures, respectively. This pairing of Greimassian and Schenkerian theories provides a novel means for discussing structural musico-poetic associations.
Part 2 ( chapters 5 - 11 ) offers analyses of songs 14-24. Each analysis proceeds in three stages: first, the music and the text are discussed independently; thereafter, the discussion of the musico-poetic associations is based on these. In addition to poetic and musical structures (which are elucidated, as noted above, through Greimassian and Schenkerian theories), the analyses take into account textual and musical expression as well as musical imitation. Each song is studied as a closed entity, with only a few passing references made to the overall course of the cycle.
Part 3 ( chapters 12 - 14 ) concentrates on the cyclical aspects. Chapter 12 reviews some methodologically oriented literature on song cycles, concluding that the discussions of any cycle s unity are often based on three interrelated and interlinked factors: textual unity (either a narrative or a recurring poetic theme), musical cross-references (often motivic connections), and harmonic relationships (associations between the keys of a cycle s individual songs). Furthermore, some studies challenge the very concept of the unity of song cycles. Chapter 13 then discusses these issues vis- -vis Winterreise and suggests a novel approach to all three areas of connections: the discussion of the poetic trajectory draws on narratological ideas of Roland Barthes, musical cross-references are understood to cover a wide variety of musical elements (not only motivic connections), and the large-scale harmonic logic is examined through principles of neo-Riemannian theory. Finally, chapter 14 , the epilogue, suggests a rather precise meaning for the notion of death in Winterreise .
The three parts differ from each other in their orientation. The first and third are quite general, mostly requiring no specific music-theoretical knowledge. The second, by contrast, consists of detailed analyses of songs 14-24, and here the reader should have knowledge of the principles of Schenkerian analysis. At the end of each analytical chapter in part 2 , I have added a short paragraph summing up the poetic situation in the song just examined. Those readers who do not want to read the detailed musical analyses may read these paragraphs only, as they should provide sufficient information for following the discussion of the cyclical aspects of Winterreise in part 3 .
Acknowledgments
This study has been greatly influenced by many people, including colleagues who have commented on various drafts and analyses, as well as scholars whose ideas have influenced my way of thinking. It is not possible to mention all of the individuals who have, either directly or indirectly, molded my musical views generally