Why – one might be tempted to add: why again – the Heine-Lieder? And why psychoanalysis? Like most of Schubert's music and especially the late works, yet with a distinctive nuance, Schubert's set of six songs to texts from Heine's Buch der Lieder has been regularly discussed in the musicological literature of the last decades. Among those writings, the articles by Harry Goldschmidt and Richard Kramer, the collection of essays on Schwanengesang edited by Martin Chusid, and the latter's publication of the facsimile of the autograph and first edition of the cycle are of particular interest to us here. The reason for it has to do with the nuance referred to at the beginning of this paragraph. While some authors are inclined to discuss Schubert's understanding of the poetry (notably in terms of the celebrated Heinesque ‘irony’), others choose to address the set from another perspective, namely that of the order of the songs. Indeed, the following questions inevitably arise in considering the Heine songs: Why did Schubert alter the order of the poems from that in which they appear in Heine's original collection, therefore (seemingly) destroying the logic of the sequence? Did Schubert actually conceive the text as a sequence – that is to say, a cycle? In dealing with those issues, Goldschmidt and Kramer have suggested a provocative and radical solution, which consists in reordering the songs to match the succession in Heine. This, of course, has occasioned much eyebrow-raising in the musicological community, and has led to successive refutation and counter-refutation.
x1290 pp. £60.00. 'Analyzing Schubert': a description, or a prescription? Is the purpose of the book to present an account of how Schubert's music is or has been analyzed, today or in the past, or is it to suggest how we perhaps should analyze it, thus providing a new approach to a repertoire which consistently seems to resist most consecrated analytic methodologies, yet which has elicited a considerable amount of attention from analysts, especially in recent years? The answer is: both, and although the most part of the book is devoted to a critical evaluation of existing analyses and how their choice of method may influence their result, it also proposes a way to overcome what is identified as their shortcomings. Clark herself summarizes her aims in these terms: 'instead of using music theory to analyze Schubert, [to] use Schubert to analyze music theory' (p. 54, a goal later recalled on pp. 207 and 269); 'to expose how an analyst's choice of music theory can shift hermeneutic windows' (p. 109); and, finally, 'not to replace existing theory with a new paradigm but rather to work towards a distinctly Schubertian paradigm' (p. 270). Other than Roman numeral figuring, the theories under scrutiny are mainly Schenkerian reductive analysis and neo-Riemannian transformational analysis; but Clark is also keen to examine 'how y music theory guides the musicological imagination' (p. 148), that is, how analysis can be used to support extra-musical readings. With the exception of Gottfried Wilhelm Fink's early nineteenth-century account of Ganymed, 1 Clark exclusively discusses contemporary analyses-the less recent dating from the late 1970s or early 1980s.
This essay considers the first movement of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony from the perspective of its narrative trajectory. In reference to the vocabulary introduced by Freud in his dream theory, it distinguishes between a ‘manifest’ narration on the surface and a deeper, hidden, ‘latent’ one that influences the former and accounts for the spectacular, violent outbursts that periodically interrupt its course. Whereas the surface narration seems to follow the narrative programme normally associated with sonata form, what is actually happening in the movement makes use of this unfolding to recount a different story, one that is entirely static, non-evolving and obsessional in nature. The manifest narrative trajectory is underlain by an anti-narration, a non-trajectory that distorts and dislocates it, so that the movement only progresses through a succession of crises and interruptions.
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