Schumann's Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics
Fragmentation of Desire

This book employs Romantic poetics as well as more recent critical thought to examine Schumann's Dichterliebe of 1840.

Beate Julia Perrey (Author)

9780521042451, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 September 2007

264 pages, 5 b/w illus. 36 music examples
24.4 x 17 x 1.5 cm, 0.428 kg

"Including wide-ranging discussions of the aesthetic potentials of the interrelations of musical and written languages, this book will best serve specialists." Choice

This book offers a theory of Romantic song by re-evaluating Schumann's Dichterliebe of 1840, one of the most enigmatic works of the repertoire. It investigates the poetics of Early Romanticism in order to understand the mysterious magnetism and singular imaginative energy that imbues Schumann's musical language. The Romantics rejected the ideal of a coherent and organic whole and cherished the suggestive openness of the Romantic fragment, the disconcerting tone of Romantic irony and the endlessness of Romantic reflection - thereby realizing an aesthetic of fragmentation. Close readings of many songs from Dichterliebe show the singer's intense involvement with the piano's voice, suggesting a 'split Self' and the presence of the 'Other'. Seeing Schumann as the 'second poet of the poem' - here of Heine's famous Lyrisches Intermezzo - this book considers essential issues of musico-poetic intertextuality, introducing into musicology a hermeneutic that seeks to synthesize philosophical, literary-critical, music-analytical and psycho-analytical modes of thought.

List of illustrations
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I. Early Romantic Forms of Difference: 1. Introduction
2. The Romantic fragment
3. Romantic irony
4. Reflection, language and music
5. Theories of song: Schumann's 'higher sphere of art'
Part II. Heine's Signature of Modernity: The Lyrisches Intermezzo: 6. Introduction
7. Heine, the Romantics and disenchantment
8. Endings, cuts, cyclicity
9. Heine's imago of a woman
10. The genesis of the Buch der Lieder
Part III. The Poetics of Dichterliebe: 11. Introduction
12. Schumann's reception of Heine and the Buch der Lieder
13. Musico-poetic analysis
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups [AVH]