Le 1er juillet 2017
de 9h00 à 9h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 5
Séance - Reconsidering Later Romanticism
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : John Koslovsky
Whether or not the Prelude to Richard Wagner’s 1859 music drama Tristan und Isolde is the most analyzed piece in the history of Western music, its ongoing canonical status behooves us to consider how it has affected the field of music analysis over the past 150 years. More than any other piece, Tristan is able to mediate the many conflicts that arise between analytical approaches: while it can demonstrate the limits of one particular approach vis-à-vis another, it may also reveal new potentialities that divergent analyses offer when seen from an intertextual and processual point of view.
Building on previous studies in analysis and intertextuality, this paper will position three contemporaneous analyses of the Tristan Prelude against one another: Horst Scharschuch’s post-Riemannian harmonic analysis of 1963; Jacques Chailley’s style-historical analysis of 1963; and William Mitchell’s Schenkerian analysis of 1967. Using these three authors as a comparative centerpiece, the paper will begin to sketch a broader historiographical and intertextual network surrounding the history of analyzing Tristan, with the goal of refocusing our analytical priorities around this work and penetrating the continuities and discontinuities between competing analyses. In the end, the paper aims to open up a further dialogic space in music analysis, both in our historical considerations as well as in the way we approach analysis as an intertext—that is, by traversing the fissures separating the reified verities of a “unified” analysis and the multiple interpretive transpositions underlying our deciphering of analytical texts.
