Le 30 juin 2017
de 16h00 à 16h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 4
Séance précomposée - Analyzing Mozart's Operas: External Stakes, Intrinsic Challenges
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Paul Sherrill
Taking the arias and small ensembles of Le nozze di Figaro as examples, this paper investigates how Mozart uses recitative as a musical topic imported into periodic concerted music. Although the trio “Cosa sento!” most memorably breaks down into a long passage of secco narration, many of the opera’s closed numbers involve fleeting intrusions of the recitative topic. Mozart’s use of recitative in these moments evinces a semiotic grammar in which topical signals reliably help to construct theatrical and expressive meaning.
The basis of that expressive grammar lies in the way that these topical borrowings pit two different formal systems against one another. As intrusions into concerted music, passages of recitative necessarily have a “contextual” formal function as, for instance, the beginning of a consequent. But the recitative gestures themselves impart an “intrinsic” formal function from the phrasal grammar of recitative discussed in Sherrill and Boyle (2015).
For instance, in the duet “Cinque… dieci…” the end of Figaro’s first phrase is delayed by the intrusion of a recitative cadence at the moment of an expected half cadence. As a topical intrusion, the recitative does not participate in the system of implication and realization that drives formal functions: instead of closing the phrase, it disrupts it. Attending to these moments suggests one way of building on topical analysis, for the recitative topic imports not just an allusion to another genre but aspects of that genre’s form-functional and theatrical language: although the notes construct the topic, the topic helps construe the notes.
