Le 1er juillet 2017
de 11h00 à 11h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3202
Séance - Contemporary Musical Horizons (II)
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Frankie Perry
Aribert Reimann’s Mignon (1995) is described on its title page as ‘a compilation and transcription for soprano and string quartet’ of four of Schubert’s numerous Mignon songs for voice and piano, written between 1815 and 1821: ‘Sehnsucht’ D.481 (‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’), ‘Mignon I’ D.726 (‘Heiss mich nicht reden’), ‘Sehnsucht’ D.310 (‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’), and ‘Mignon II’ D.727 (‘So lasst mich scheinen’). The songs unfold consecutively, all in their original keys; Reimann links them with short interludes and bookends the work with an introduction and postlude in E major, thus situating the pre-existing songs within a new structural and harmonic narrative. Unlike highly distorted Schubert re-imaginings by composers such as Zender and Berio, Reimann preserves the basic musical parameters of the original songs, and his textural expansion of their piano parts is often idiomatically Schubertian, evoking his later string quartets. I examine the interactions of sonata and strophic principles that emerge through Reimann’s positioning of the two melodically-similar settings of ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’, and of the rhetorically-similar B minor settings of ‘Heiss mich nicht reden’ and ‘So lasst mich scheinen’; I suggest that Mignon’s emergent form is indebted, among other factors, to the various peculiarities of the early D.310 ‘Sehnsucht’. I then broaden my perspective to consider how the Schubert-Reimann Mignon fits into the long, songful afterlife of Goethe’s elusive character, and address aspects of the authorial, generic, and human transformations that Schubert’s songs undergo in Reimann’s late twentieth century construction.
