Le 1er juillet 2017
de 11h00 à 11h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3201
Séance - Schumann, Brahms, and Elgar
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Diego Cubero
Brahms’s twilight style has long been heard as embodying the decay of common-practice tonality. But why does Brahms’s music sound so weary? This paper argues that if the leading tone is, as Ernst Kurth and August Halm theorized, the vital force of tonality, the muting of leading-tone energies is in part what lends Brahms’s music its frail evening glow. Proceeding from Kurth’s observation that major thirds and upward chromatic inflections manifest leading-tone energy in that they demand upward half-step resolutions, this paper discusses a number of Brahms’s songs in which leading-tone energies are muted as the sun sinks in the horizon, casting the music under an unmistakable Brahmsian twilight. The analyses expand on Frank Samarotto’s concept of “sublimation” in order to describe the reversal of the upward melodic drive not only of scale-degree sharp-4, as discussed by Samarotto, but of other scale-degrees as well. In each song, the sublimation of leading-tone energies causes the melody to change its overall trajectory, slow down, and become diffused. In arguing that the sublimation of upward melodic impulses gives these songs their characteristic twilight quality, this paper bridges a gap between the analysis of Brahms’s music and a prevailing aspect of its reception history. The study concludes that by depicting the sunset as a welcome relief from the toil of existence, these songs invite us to hear the muting of leading-tone energies in Brahms’s works as freeing tonality from its constant exertion, at once embodying and embracing its lost vitality.
