Le 1er juillet 2017
de 10h00 à 10h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3201
Séance - Schumann, Brahms, and Elgar
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Robert Snarrenberg
Brahms set over 150 stanzaic poems for solo voice and piano. Having advised Gustav Jenner to compose a strophic song whenever the text permits, it is no surprise that Brahms most often crafted units of musical structure congruent with individual stanzas. On the other hand, a lyric poem is a complex utterance that not only has a structural rhythm defined by poetic features (rhyme, meter, lineation, and stanzaic division) but also manifests structure in a variety of linguistic domains (syntax, phonology, semantics, discourse, and narrative). When friction arises between structural domains, the composer must choose which aspects of the poem to select for attention. Brahms composed twelve settings of stanzaic poems in which the musical architecture is clearly not congruent with the poem’s stanzaic structure. In this paper I am chiefly concerned how noncongruence is manifested in motivic design and tonal syntax, the latter understood in terms of a generative, Schenkerian model. After defining various forms of noncongruence, I examine the non-strophic designs of “Verrat” (105/5), “Eine gute, gute Nacht” (59/6), and two settings of “Nachklang” (WoO 23 and 59/4). Brahms’s noncongruent musical designs are shown to be correlated with such factors as the shifting grammatical moods of the poem’s verbs, changes in the persona’s attention, alternation between the lyric present and the persona’s past or future experience, as well as changes in semantic focus, discourse role, and narrative function.
