Studies in Music with Text

Abstract

The author of this text explored for over four decades how composers in the German tradition set poetry and drama to music. The book is a unified collection, reproducing papers on music by Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, Schoenberg, and Babbitt, many of which have become classics in the fields of music theory and historical musicology. It includes new analytical essays on Mozart, Wagner, and Schubert, and provides fresh readings of selected songs by Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms. The analyses collected here focus on how the music, from its small details to its large formal schemes, engages the poetic and dramatic dynamics of the works at hand, and how music and text enact each other reciprocally. A recurrent topic is the theatricality of texted music for the concert as well as operatic stage, and the author's perspectives offer many interpretive insights and conceptual perspectives for the musical performer. A methodological eclectic, he cultivated a magisterial command of historical theories and thought deeply about how those theories could inform contemporary understanding. Analytical models by Zarlino, Schenker, Riemann, Rameau, and Babbitt are brought into play, and the range of poetic and dramatic questions that emerge are explored, concerning inter alia psychological and social identity, the relation of psychological inner worlds to phenomenal reality, and the narrowly biographical and broadly historical conditions of artistic creation.

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