Song Acts: Writings on Words and Music

484 Pages·2017·5.165 MB·English

by  Lawrence Kramer

Song Acts
<UN>
Word and Music Studies
Series Editors
Walter Bernhart
Michael Halliwell
Lawrence Kramer
Steven Paul Scher †
Werner Wolf
VOLUME 16
The book series WORD AND MUSIC STUDIES (wms) is the central organ of
the International Association for Word and Music Studies (wma), an associa-
tion founded in 1997 to promote transdisciplinary scholarly inquiry devoted to
the relations between literature/verbal texts/language and music. wma aims
to provide an international forum for musicologists and literary scholars with
an interest in intermediality studies and in crossing cultural as well as disci-
plinary boundaries.
WORD AND MUSIC STUDIES publishes, generally on an annual basis,
themeoriented volumes, documenting and critically assessing the scope,
theory, methodology, and the disciplinary and institutional dimensions and
prospects of the field on an international scale: conference proceedings, col-
lections of scholarly essays, and, occasionally, monographs on pertinent indi-
vidual topics.
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/wms
<UN>
Song Acts
Writings on Words and Music
By
Lawrence Kramer
Foreword by
Richard Leppert
Edited by
Walter Bernhart
LEIDEN | BOSTON
<UN>
Cover illustration: Thomas Eakins, “Singing a Pathetic Song” (1881). Corcoran Collection, National Gallery of
Art, Washington, d.c., usa.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kramer, Lawrence, 1946- author. | Leppert, Richard D. | Bernhart,
Walter.
Title: Song acts : writings on words and music / by Lawrence Kramer ;
foreword by Richard Leppert ; edited by Walter Bernhart.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill | Rodopi, [2017] | Series: Word and
music studies ; Volume 16 | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017012862 (print) | LCCN 2017015258 (ebook) | ISBN
9789004342132 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004342125 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Musical criticism. | Songs--History and criticism. | Opera. |
Music and literature
Classification: LCC ML3880 (ebook) | LCC ML3880 .K694 2017 (print) | DDC
782--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012862
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 1566-0958
isbn 978-90-04-34212-5 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-34213-2 (e-book)
Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and
Hotei Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided
that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite
910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
<UN>
Contents
Foreword VII
Preface XIII
Acknowledgments XVIII
1 Song [1984/2016] 1
2 The Schubert Lied: Romantic Form and Romantic Consciousness
[1986/2016] 52
3 Performance and Social Meaning in the Lied: Schubert’s Erster Verlust
[1994] 86
4 “Syringa”: John Ashbery and Elliott Carter [1980/1984] 105
5 Decadence and Desire: The Wilhelm Meister Songs of Wolf and
Schubert [1987] 126
6 Hugo Wolf: Subjectivity in the Fin-de-Siècle Lied [1996/2009] 146
7 Recognizing Schubert: Musical Subjectivity, Cultural Change, and
Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady [2002] 178
8 “Little Pearl Teardrops”: Schubert, Schumann, and the Tremulous
Body of Romantic Song [2002] 207
9 The Harem Threshold: Turkish Music and Greek Love in Beethoven’s
“Ode to Joy” [1998] 229
10 Like Falling Leaves: The Erotics of Mourning in Four Drum-Taps
Settings [2002] 248
11 Murderous Women in German Opera [2008] 269
12 “Longindyingcall”: of Music, Modernity, and the Sirens [2006] 283
13 Recalling the Sublime: The Logic of Creation in Haydn’s Creation
[2009] 304
<UN>
vi Contents
14 Wagner’s Gold Standard: Tannhäuser and the General Equivalent
[2010] 329
15 The Talking Wound and the Foolish Question: Symbolization in
Parsifal [2006] 353
16 The Great American Opera: Klinghoffer, Streetcar, and the Exception
[2007] 378
17 Modern Madrigalisms: Elliott Carter and the Aesthetics of Art Song
[2014] 394
Appendix
Unsung Words and Music
18 The Strange Case of Beethoven’s Coriolan: Romantic Aesthetics,
Modern Subjectivity, and the Cult of Shakespeare [1995] 405
19 Tolstoy’s Beethoven, Beethoven’s Tolstoy: The Kreutzer Sonata
[1997/2006] 429
20 Subjectivity Unbound: Music, Language, Culture [2003/2012] 451
<UN>
Foreword
The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
walter savage landor
…
Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.
john milton
⸪
“They’re playing our song,” so the line goes, usually in movies, and more often
than not said without irony but with some feeling. To play “our” song recalls
a personal, shared past in a personal, shared present. It tracks love requited
and anchored. It puts in the ears what love sounds like to the lover-auditors
and, vicariously, to us. Put differently, song is a form of remembrance of things
past—and, in this instance, happily still present. Our song plays to us and for
us; sonically, it is of us—so let this food of love play on.
So for starters, songs elide themselves with love, surely songs’ most common
trope. But love sometimes fails or remains unrequited. With love lost, or never
first gained, song is called upon to reflect on the situation, acutely experienced
as abjection. Love’s successes and failures (the latter more common than the
former) belong to song. We accept this actuality as a cultural given, just as we
implicitly understand that, with song, words and music accomplish something
that neither can do on its own. Lawrence Kramer points out that modernity
asked the love song to do something that modernity itself could not, which
was to stabilize the relationship of the modern subject to its sources of mean-
ing. “Both the Lied and the popular song foreground the exposure of the singer
as a vulnerable being. The songs serve a common end, which is to uphold the
power and authority of the wounded self.”1
Music turns heads and hearts with what Lord Bryon called “its voluptuous
swell.”2 Music, song especially, so says the cliché, fills the soundtrack of our
1 Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007), p. 118.
2 George Gordon Noel Byron, Lord Bryon, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), canto3,
stanza 21.
<UN>
viii Foreword
lives: “We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”3 All mu-
sic embeds more than what first meets the ears—what sets a foot tapping, trig-
gers goose-flesh, or otherwise makes for an emotional response. Just why this
is so, beyond, say, some sort of “natural” or biological response mechanism, is
worth thinking about, which is a reasonable explanation for why human be-
ings have been writing and thinking about music and what it does to us since
as far back as written records exist. Music needs figuring out, not least because
its impact on us is often so profound. The power of song to move us, and to
reflect deeply on our experiences (love or otherwise) is second to none.
Most of the music that Kramer writes about in what follows is anchored
within the Western aesthetic canon of the past two centuries: German Lieder,
single songs, song cycles, songs embedded in operas and an oratorio. (Many of
the texts ponder love.) The composers of his concern are a Who’s Who of the
(mostly) standard repertory, as are the operas and oratorio; most of the poets
who provided the song texts are esteemed literary figures.4 A good deal has
been written by others about some of this music, but even in these instances
Kramer leads his reader well beyond established (and sometimes ossified)
understandings, in the end rendering the music’s meanings very considerably
richer and more complex.
I first encountered Kramer’s work with the publication in 1990 of his Music
as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900, surely among the most influential musicologi-
cal monographs of the last thirty years. “The subject of this book,” he noted
at the start, “is the much-disputed idea that music means something, or bet-
ter yet, something we can talk about.”5 Were that sentence drafted today, it
would appropriately be accused of belaboring the entirely obvious. In 1990,
obvious it was not. Indeed, Kramer’s assertion that music meant something—
beyond the then generally accepted, profoundly confining principles articulat-
ed by Hanslick in the mid-nineteenth century—was in some circles greeted as
aesthetic- semantic heresy. For others, the book opened the door to productive
forms of inquiry that heretofore had little place in musicological scholarship.
3 Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy (1844–1881), “We Are the Music-Makers,” in Music and
Moonlight (1874), lines 1–2.
4 Composers: John Adams, Beethoven, Berg, Carter, Haydn, Janáček, Mendelssohn, Mozart,
Previn, Ravel, Rorem, Schoenberg, Schumann, Schubert, Strauss, Wagner, Wolf, and Vaughan
Williams; poets: Ashbery, Eichendorf, Eliot, Goethe, James, Kafka, Mallarmé, Milton, Mörike,
Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Whitman; operas: Death of Klinghoffer, Parsifal, Das Rheingold, Sa-
lome, A Streetcar Named Desire, Tannhäuser; and oratorio: The Creation.
5 Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), p. xi.
<UN>
Foreword ix
In this early work, as in the near dozen books and hundred-plus essays that
have since appeared, Kramer worked his way through musical texts by extend-
ing practices of close reading then more familiar to literary than to musical
scholars. He analyzed, but for new purposes, guiding his practice by a few key
principles. Foremost among these is the insight that in engaging time—as
Adorno smartly pointed out, music has time as its problem—music necessarily
interrogates history.6 The matter hinges not on the obvious point that every-
thing human, music included, is part of history and time-bound, but on the
formerly less obvious point that music is a practice, a discourse, an event, and
a thing that is always already part of the making of history. Music is not only
a mirror of history (old news in musicological scholarship) but also an agent
in history (not so old news). The “but also” identifies Kramer’s commitment
to music’s significance beyond itself and the immediate pleasures it provides.
Music establishes its specific relationship to time through pointedly musical
means (how else?), and these means (gestures, conventions, anti- conventions,
etc.) engage (affirm, attack, mediate) an experience of time that is both of
and about history—the same history that makes human subjects and their
subjectivities. Music, enacted through time and in tension with time’s cul-
tural givenness, remakes our experience of time-as-history, both by “showing”
time-history for what it has become, and, conversely, showing what it might
otherwise be. Time and history, both social constructs, don’t stand still. Mu-
sic, literally fashioned to present itself as a certain formulation—and, perhaps
more important, reformulation—of the experience of time, itself interprets
time (and history) through form and performance, which are in turn prod-
ucts of the time and histories they engage, directly or indirectly, consciously
or unconsciously. The questions of how this happens, and what meaningfully
results, form the core of Kramer’s concerns.
Music’s referential non-referentiality challenges meaningfulness while be-
ing insistently meaningful; further, music’s meanings often (usually? always?)
remain slippery and uncertain, even when words are attached to them in song,
opera, and oratorio. But for Kramer the slipperiness defines not music’s lack or
shortcoming; rather it constitutes a source of music’s ability to act on us—to
make us feel, but also to make us think. Artworks generally, and perhaps music
above all, in the end retain what Adorno identified an “enigmatical” character.
6 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Some Relationships between Music and Painting,” trans. Susan Gil-
lespie, Musical Quarterly 79 no. 1 (Spring 1995), p. 66: “The self-evident, that music is a tem-
poral art, that it unfolds in time, means, in the dual sense, that time is not self-evident for
[music], that [music] has time as its problem.... It itself must act upon time, not lose itself to
it; must stem itself against the empty flood.”
<UN>