The Unification of Poetry and Music in Lieder: A Study on Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf, Study notes of Poetry

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POETRY INTO SONG:

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d' 711 SELECI'Ep 19th CENTURY LIf;OER SETT:r,NGS ,1 1

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POETRY INTO SONG:

A COMPARATIVE Sl'UDY OF SELEcrED 19th CENTURY LIEDER SETTINGS OF TIIRI:E GOETHE POEMS-- "WANDERERS NACHTLIED", flHEI~S MICH NICHT RED~", AND "GANYMED"

by Jo-Ann.e Cheryl Bentley

A the'sis submitted in partial fulfillment of t~e r-equirements for the degree of Master of Musical Arta in

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McGill 1974 Un ive tsJ,ty• 0

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RESUME

Puisqu 'un po~m. pa~tiCUli~r, fo~ant un tout i [,;( seul, ~

est le facteur reconnu comme etant a l'origine de la composition d'un ~ chant en tunt qu'oeuvre d'art, c'est par consequent par la^ ,^ que doit " commencer tout examen^ h^ de la creation/^ finalc--d ,^ ou"^ le titre de cette " th~se--Des poèmes transposes en chant~--cc qui sous-entend une insistance particuliere^ , sur la fa~on ~~nt de nombreux compositeurs de Lieder du 19ème sieclè ont exprime des textes choisis. Apres un chapitre d'introductibn examinant" les ressemblances fondamentales et les differences^ "^ qui existent entre la poesie, et la musique, et indiquant'.^ les problemes,,, gencraux^ " ,^ et les possibilites--\ , " que f' la the se examine des chaats de Carl

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presente la combinaison des deux, , Friedrich Ze1ter (1758- 832), Carl Loewe^ (1796-1869)^ t^ Fran~^ schube;t---------^ ------ (1797-1828), Robert Schu ann (18l0-l85p), '\ Franz Liszt (1811-1886) et Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) fon és sur trois poemes de Goethe extr~mement contrastes--"Wanderers Nac tlied^ ~ II''. "Heiss mich nicht -reden", et "Ganymed". Chaqq,e chapitre\commeJilce par l'analyse d'un tant qu'oeuvre d'art autonom~, en ~tudiant des aspects

des,poemes en de la forme, comme le style, le m~tre et les effets acoustiques, et des aspects du fond, comme les images, le ton et le contenu conceptuel. Ensuite, la mise en musique par des compositeurs choisis dans le liste ci-dessù's,"

est examin:e en ,ce qui concernet.. la fa,on dont chaque chant exprime

(ou igRore) les elements essentiels du poeme.^ , Ainsi, cette fusion entre l'analys~ musicale et l'analyse littéraire permet d'isoler les traits qui constituent un chant particulier et d'~tablir leur interd'- pendance fonctionnelle, fourni8s:nt ainsi une concePti~~ b\en plus

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\ (^) f{ claire de la structure de l"oeuvre. Une comparaison de la facon &.. dont des compos t~urs de gcner~~io^ ,/^ .l.- 91ff~rentes ont traite le ~me texte

d~voile c rtains effets tûs au c angement ,des processus el'thftiques

et st yi! tiqu~s.

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lch fordere bel meinen Sachen nicht, das

aIle ~ie durch dasselbe Glas betrachten

sollen. Jèder mag daraus entnehmen, was

er darin findct, und dleses lst dann für

ihn das Wahre.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author .,rü;hes to express \ her sincere appreciation to aIl^ ~ those people who made possible the completlon of thls thesis. The author acknowledges^ ,^ with ..gratitude the constructive advice and undc~standing assistance of Professor Paul Marks,under whose supervision this work was undertaken and completed. She also wlshes to thank Professor J. W. Schmidt for his aid regard1ng the fine points of German prosody and r (^) poetic interpretation. " Finally the author i5 decply grateful ta her mother, Ethel Bentley, for her valuable éditorial advice and her man y long hours of typing \ and proof-readlng. ,

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which led literature and music Ito unite in the 19th century art song, was supported by nearly a century of aesthetic thought of which the last twenty- five years of the 18th century "were ,the most significant aS the beginning stage of the development of the romantic German Lied. ,,3 In particular, the men of the so-called Weimar fircle, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744- 1803), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), and Johann Christoph Fried- rieh Schiller (1759-1803), did a great deal of thinking and writing upon

the sub~ect of the reiationship between poetry and music. 4 'l'he fruits !.

of their efforts--the lyrical, inh~rently musical qualities of the poems of Goethe and Schiller, and the new focus of artists and philosophers upon the' Volkslied wh~ch can be mainly ascribed to the efforts of Herder (who was st imulated in this area by Johann Georg Hamann / I730-178S/) helped turn th~ attention of composers to the unification of poetry and music in solo song. Although the t~nslation of the aésthetic theories of the late 18th century into the compositional practi~es of the 19th centutr was by no means direct, the working re1atibnship between men of the Weimar Circle ~ (particularly Goethe) and the highly literate composers of the Second Berlin Song School, (particularly Johann Friedrich Reichardt and Carl

Friedrich Zelter), forms an important 11ason between speculation aqd

composition. ~-study of the copious correspondance between Goethe and

Zelter~ for example, reveals how much in accord the poet and, the composer

were with fegard to the way music and poetry should be lihked in song: The end result was envisioned as an artistic'form which would be more sig~ificant than a mere folk song, but which would at the same time, avoid the dramatic and/or operatic tendencics of the classlcal periode The insistence was upon r~tention of the poetic form through __ ~se of strophic construction and uporu avoidance of text repetition, together with a de-emphasis of tJhat might be tèrmed a "vocal1zation" ·concept of melody; The melody was to derive fr~m the poeric meter

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!tae!f^ ... and to be phrased as reguiarlY; at the ~ame time, the accompaniment was meant to provide mercly background harmonie support'6avoiding devices. co~pletely any symphonically-jpspired. inst~umental Fascination with the paptilar pa~til)le of text parody in which melodies ....ere ext racteJ;l from existing .... orks 'Çlnd coupled .... ith new texts or with modifi~d versions of the original texts or in which wor&less Junes were comb.1ncd r!th ne .... poems or .... ith words from other melodles ....as also indicative of the mutually benêfieial relationship thought to exist bet .... een music. and poetry. As Paul Mark's points out, "at^ l the end o~ the eighteentfi eentury and the bcginning of the nineteenth, parody was considered to be a legitimate means of perfccting vocal

music".7 One ,might add th~t parody .....as also val,ued, pqrticularly by

Goethe, as a way of expla.l:ing th'e prosodie qualities of poet ry. While Goethe and Zelter were fortunate enough to agree upon the approach whieh a composer should take when setting a poem to music,

. toeir collective vie .... that music was expected to do little more thah' provjde an appropriate melody, ,simply~harmoni~ed .... hich caught the basic mood o(~the poem and dld not destroy its 'design, was saoh to he challenged. J,^ t 'It i8 precisely the' changing P?tterns! ~f compositional approach

found in various 19th century settings of!t.e s~mê poet1c text which

are of ~eminal interest to this study •. ,n order to explore the val id- ity of ide as like Ivey' s that "the^10 idea of synthesis was not always , , seen from th~ same perspective in the omantic period. L~ut shows ~I gradual evolution from the' end of the ,ighteenth to the end of the 19th

century,"^ 8· representative^ composers a tivc durin,S -th!!~ ~arly (C$rl

Friedrich Zelter, 1758~l832; Carl Loe 1796-1869; Franz Peter Schubert,

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only by first dcloimit in~ those comman properties which the two

arts share. and examlnin~ the significant feit~res of their combination.

Then ft may bc shown how a ",pecific composer may have at tempted to fuse ~ords and music in his song. There arc fundaMental affinities between music and poetry discernible in both the tcchnical construction and subjective effects of the twa arts. As an elementary starting point, it should be remembered, for exarnple, that although music may be sornewhat more serial in its tcmporality than poetry, bath are temporal, auditory, and dynamic nrt forms as opposed ta the fine arts which are visual, spatial and static. 'Bath pôetry and music, when performed, require memqry and anticipntion from their audience, for, as Calvin Brown points but, "on1y by j uxtaposit ion of instants in t 1me can fOIm or meaning be built up "^11 Cl^ eant h^ B^ roo khis, t a em ne nt li^ terary sch 0 1 ar, goes sa far as to descrlbe poetry in tarros of musical images when he says "the structure of a poem resembles that of a '" musical composition. It is a pattern of ~esolution9 and balances and harmoniz-

ations, developed through a temporal scheme".^12

Technically bath poetry and music involve "sound of an extremely ;: 1 é'omplex nature, whose basis is the physical realities of t~me, pitch and force". 13 More specifically t~,e two arts share elements like meter, rhythm, melody (i.e. pitch-change) ànd the need for clear formal 8tructur~.^1 In poetry mcter is represented by stressed and unstressed verbàl syllables; in music by recurring beats or pulses. The rhythms of poetry are the flexible ones of speech. The rhythms of music are determined 1 by an abstract pattern and hence may be as flexible or <1<; élccpntu:tlly regular as the composer^ , whhes. Melody,

in poetry, i5 found in the pitch changes incurred by artistic declamation of the text, while in music it is a result of the arbitrary pitch and rhythm changes which the composer chooses to make. Finally, formaI structure in poetry is obviously the arrange- ment of the text into lines ~nd stanzas. In music it can take a multitude of shapes determined by a combinat ion of melodic and ~ harmonie elements. Thus, with respect to the technical aspects which music and poetry share, we can see that music has a greater range of choice in every case. (This fact will become increasingly significanf as we study the problems encountered in attempting to unite musLc and poet·ry in song.) In terms of subjective effect, music a1so has a less defined role than that of poetry. Although both deal, in Sorne form of analogy, with the 1nner world of man. '~ith the world of feelings

and the world of emotions in the best sense of those words,"^14

poetty (especially lyric poetry, which is the genre of interest ~n this study) because of its verbal, communicative nature creates a specifie emotional impact based upon articulate meaning whereas music, for aIl its effect, must dea1 in abstractions. These,differ- enees in ~he quality of expression Inherent in music and poetry a1so cont ribute to the nat ure of song as an amalgama,ted genre .ÇI, Now that some of the ~asic affinities between music and poetry have been briefly outlined, it seems logieal to examine the possib- ilities of combination regarding the two arts. Aecording to Donald

Ivey, if a song is to be successful as a synthesis of music and

poetry "the formaI elements of both must relinquish sorne of their

autonomy." 15 The reasons, for sueh a statement are many. For

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4 intention--gcncrally > trigger a musical response from the composer which attempts to complement the import of the words. M~ller-Blattau places this idea in an historical context when he says, "Nach der entscheidenden Wcnde um 1750 wird das Lied der Tr~ger des Verhtiltnisses von Wort und Ton ... In di eser seiner Eigenart t ritt nun das Lied in den Mittclpunkt der Betrachtung. Wort und Ton bilden natürliche Einheit.,,

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Thus, although modern aestheticians such as Suzanne Langer maintain that "when a composer puts a poem to music he annihilates the poem and makes a song,,,18 it can be argued that the poem has not been annihilated, but merely fused into an Einheit which can be ~-- greater than the sum of its parts. Nonetheless. the composer has been bound. to a certain cxtent, by the fact that his musical effects should not do violence to the ideas and mood of the original work. Scholars have long noted that poor poems have often become magnificent songs, and that excellent poems have often either been unsuccessfully set or have becn carefully avoided by song composers. \ In his article "Words for Hus'ic" Henry Raynor maintains that "the qualities which A make a poem suit able mate rial for a composer of songs are matters whieh it ls possible to iaolate; they remain more or less unehanging ln spitc of changes of fashlon and of style in

,,... .... both poetry anrl ~usic; they.are not primarily techniesl but aesthetic".^19

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T~e,lyric 1 since it expresses the subjective emotional experience of

an i;dividual, is the most common poetic genre employed in song After the dpfinite turning point which occuTr~~ around 1750 the ~ becomcs the vchiclc which embodies the relation between word and tone •.. Jn this, it~ unique ~uality, the ~ now steps into the centpT of attention. Word and tone fom ••• a natural unHy.

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composition. According to Raynor, the 'poetry that i9 not susceptible to music is "the poetry that moves beyond--or at any rate, away from, the presentation of an emotional state or situation". 20 Raynor further 'lndicates that poems which, by the use of a texture of symbols, convey a certain atmosphere are ready for a composcr's attentions, whi~e those that use imagery for purposes of compres9Lon, of creating explicit relationshlps or precise contrasts escape him in spite of their lyric structure and technical precision. To explore such a complex welter of emotions and ideas in music would take much longer than the length, of a solo song. Taking a more technical approach to the same problem, F. W. Schmidt has suggested that a poem belongs to one of three types in te~s of its capac!ty for illustration in music; either it i5 ~o~u~~~~~~s_ch, musikalisch or lledfern. The poem whlch ls ~~~~sJ_ka!}sch, havlng unlform met rIes and often resembllng the pattern of a folksong or ballad in ' Its use of repetition and refrain, Is the most likely type of poem to be set to music, and usually results in the least variance in rhythm and mood among musical setting of the same text. Poems labelled musikalisch contain () non-un~form metrics and utilize a more varied

system of assonance, alliteration 6jI and rhyme than the first type. As

such they tend to inspire grl!'ater differences in musIcal illustration. The third cate~ry, the most conceptua11y oriented of the three, bears the designation liedfern and ls the most problematic and least llkely to occasion a musi~al setting, since poems in this group are essent- ially didactic or philosophie. The composer, therefore, must exercise much discretion ln analysing the texts before setting them to, music.

ln Calvin Brown's'terminology, composers may approa~b a poetic text from either a literal or a dtamatic standpoint. That i9 they may chose to employ direct musical analogies for specifie words of the text, or they may consider the words in context and aim at suggesting or reinforcing the message of the total situation. LiteraI imitation is occasiona11Y used for this purpose, but never as an end in itself, only as an element of a larger purpose. Apart from melodie and rhythmic patterns which are meant as pietorializations of individual words, phrases or elements of the poem(word-paintlng), devices such as appogiaturas,
suspensions, and rhythmie syneopations are employed in literaI settings of poetry to emphasize specifie harmonie. rnelodic and rhythrnie imagery to render effective the poetry. The justific- ation for relianee upon harmony as -,8 vital tool for expression lies ,.' chiefly in its eapacity to projêtt. tRood. According to Ivey, "harmonie suggestion may appear as an intensification or even an olteration of poetic ernphasis, by giving an expressive direction that might not be readily apparent in a reading of the poem". 26 Similarly melodic and rhythm~c images may create in the accompaniment, "commenting motives" which provide a counterpoint of fresh insight, and an added dimension to the song text and'melody. content of the text but express it in any reasonable, comprehensible manne} he choo!"'r. 3) or he èan 1ay the emphasis upon the musical rendèring of the ernot ions contained ln the text: 4) or he can view the text only as a more or less incidenta! precipitate for the development of the music •

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Where accompaniment is frced from tts role as a Mere support for the vocal line, i t can deve10p Hs ~ commentary, offer Hs own interprctation of the textua1 iÎfijgery and thereby assume much of the expre?:+,ivc responsibility. At the sam~ time the voice 2' able ta take on a corresponding freedoml of declamation. Regard1ess of the rcsources a composer choses to use in his song creation, his approach will depend in part upon non-~efinable aspects, of the creative process. But it will a1so depend upon the varying forces . active in his artistic environment. For -".the^ 19th cent ury composers with. which this study i

concerned, the cha~ging aesthetic and ideological processes of

romanticism are bound to have affected their attitudes toward son& composition. Perhaps 'the following comparative analyses will ... J.l1I!fltrate this fact as well as providing a clearer conception of the anatomy of the songs involved.

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