Le 1er juillet 2017
de 11h00 à 11h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 6
Séance - Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Franck
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Benedict Taylor
This paper explores the rotational formal designs of Mendelssohn’s late chamber music, viewed as part of a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between theme, texture and timbre in his music of the later 1840s. Both the B-flat major Quintet (1845) and especially the F minor Quartet (1847) have been received as examples of a putative ‘late style’ (Krummacher 1978, 1992) in their downplaying of the organic thematic interconnection familiar from the works of Mendelssohn’s previous decade, violent juxtaposition of theme groups, and new focus on athemetic figuration, texture, and sonority. Focussing on the first and third movements of Op. 87 and outer movements of Op. 80, this paper examines the abrupt juxtaposition of thematic groups, the unmediated alternation of themes and figuration, the role of texture and timbre as formally articulatory device, and how these elements are drawn into the strongly rotational tendencies of these movements (Hepokoski 1993, Taylor 2011). If syntactic radicality and parametric non-congruence lie under the ostensibly smooth surface of Mendelssohn’s middle-period works (Horton 2016), the late examples examined in this paper openly flaunt such discontinuities, albeit still in the service of a larger teleology whereby the rotational cycling through an ordered series of opposed thematic events attains a tragic telos.
