Le 1er juillet 2017
de 9h30 à 10h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 5
Séance - Reconsidering Later Romanticism
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Sam Bivens
Despite the overwhelming primary and secondary literatures on Wagnerian studies, discussions of Wagner’s temporal organizations are decidedly rare. In this paper I aim to remedy this imbalance by combining Schenkerian analysis and time-span networks to reveal recursive temporal structures in Act II of Die Walküre. First, I focus on a particular harmonic device—the enharmonic equivalence of the dominant seventh and German augmented sixth—that occurs three times throughout the Todesverkündigung in Act II, Scene 4. These resolutions create a large-scale motivic parallelism whose time points are then used to create temporal networks that show a nested symmetry of highly organized and nearly isomorphic hierarchies throughout the excerpt. Connections to the drama offer clear explanations for the increasing fuzziness of these isomorphisms. I then connect my temporal networks to Lewin’s own pitch-class GIS of this excerpt, suggesting that the excerpt’s tonal and temporal material are inseparably linked. Following the completion of this Act II, Scene 4 analysis, I then proceed with a similar analysis of all of Act II, Scene 5, wherein the temporal and narrative process just discussed is reversed, ultimately concluding at the precise moment of Siegmund’s death. I connect this work to prior Wagnerian research, with special emphasis on the formal analyses of Lorenz (1924) and the notion of orchestral control of BaileyShea (2007). I conclude by creating time-span networks of several leading recordings of the excerpts to consider how well they match the aforementioned symmetries.
