Le 1er juillet 2017
de 11h30 à 12h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 5
Séance - Reconsidering Later Romanticism
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Emily X. X. Tan
Richard Strauss completed his ‘study for twenty-three solo strings’ Metamorphosen (TrV 290) on 12 April 1945, a time of ‘no consolation and […] no hope’ (Strauss writing to Willi Schuh in 1943). Aside from Timothy L. Jackson’s 1992 analysis of the work’s compositional sketches and his Schenkerian reading of its form, recent scholarship has focussed mainly on extra-musical considerations: Strauss’s personal situation at the time of composition, the influence of Goethe, the meaning of its inscription ‘IN MEMORIAM!’, and the context of war-time Germany. In both popular and scholarly reception the piece is viewed as a work of excessive pessimism, nostalgia, and mourning.
This paper proposes an analytical reading of Metamorphosen that challenges both the pessimism of the work’s reception history and the conclusions of Jackson’s analysis, while also suggesting that the contradictions arising from analytical versus reception history approaches are constructive in understanding the political dimension of Strauss’s musical aesthetic. Using Hepokoski’s and Darcy’s sonata theory to examine Metamorphosen’s complex relationship to sonata form—and in particular the idea of a ‘structure of promise’—I will consider how the work generates meaning through the negotiation and ultimate rejection of sonata form’s utopian ‘promise’. Considering the work’s formal structure in conjunction with Nietzsche’s idea of ‘Dionysian pessimism’ I aim to demonstrate how Metamorphosen can be viewed not only as a nihilist indulgence, but also as an expression of radical, perhaps even modernist hope.
