Le 1er juillet 2017
de 11h30 à 12h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3201
Séance - Schumann, Brahms, and Elgar
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Loretta Terrigno
This paper discusses the historical provenance and expressive tonal features of Brahms’s C-major folksong “Es steht ein Lind” (WoO 33, no. 41), published in 1894. Extending studies of Brahms’s folksongs by Virgina Hancock, Margit McCorkle, George Bozarth, and Heather Platt that 1) explore his engagement with the composer Friedrich Wilhelm Arnold (as evidenced in Brahms’s handwritten folksong collections from the 1850s through the 1890s, held at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde), and 2) interpret his expressive use of tonality in folksong accompaniments, I excavate potential historical influences on Brahms’s setting of “Es steht ein Lind” that have not been discussed.
I suggest that Brahms’s song alludes to a sixteenth-century Tenorlied by Caspar Othmayr that appears in the collection 68 deutsche, französische, lateinische mehrstimmige Lieder (published by Berg & Neuber in 1550 and digitized by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) and to a late-nineteenth-century setting by Wilhelm Tappert published c. 1870. By comparing variants of the text found in Othmayr’s and Tappert’s settings, I will show that Brahms uses Tappert’s text, which emphasizes nostalgia for the past, but musically alludes to Othmayr—a Meistersinger—as if symbolizing his own lament for the lost art of setting German folksong. I also claim that Brahms’s expressive harmonization of the pitch C within a melisma in the sixteenth-century melody depicts the linden tree, stream, and bird in Tappert’s text as animate beings. They seem to lament with the protagonist for a past that Brahms’s musical homage resurrects.
