Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz

Abstract

Few aspects of Berlioz's style are more idiosyncratic than his handling of musical form. This book, the first devoted solely to the topic, explores how his formal strategies are related to the poetic and dramatic sentiments that were his very reason for being. Rodgers draws upon Berlioz's ideas about musical representation and on the ideas that would have influenced him, arguing that the relationship between musical and extra-musical narrative in Berlioz's music is best construed as metaphorical rather than literal - 'intimate' but 'indirect' in Berlioz's words. Focusing on a type of varied-repetitive form that Berlioz used to evoke poetic ideas such as mania, obsession, and meditation, the book shows how, far from disregarding form when pushing the limits of musical evocation, Berlioz harnessed its powers to convey these ideas even more vividly.

Apparent Type 2 Sonatas and Reversed Recapitulations in the Nineteenth Century

“…The nineteenth‐century type 2 also has its proponents. My analysis of Le Carnaval romain was written as an amicable response to Stephen Rodgers, who in his 2009 book on Berlioz had analysed that same overture as a mixture of sonata and strophic form which he compares to ‘what Hepokoski and Darcy have called a “Type 2 Sonata”’ (Rodgers 2009, p. 65), whilst Andrew Davis has fully embraced the type 2 model in his analysis of the opening movement of Frédéric Chopin's Piano Sonata in B minor, Op. 58 (Davis 2014).…”

In Search of Romantic Form

“…The publication of Janet Schmalfeldt's award‐winning book In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth‐Century Music might therefore be considered a major breakthrough in the young history of the new Formenlehre . This is all the more the case since the book appeared in close chronological proximity to two valuable studies by younger scholars who tackle the topic of what could be called ‘Romantic form’ head‐on: Stephen Rodgers's Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz () and Benedict Taylor's Mendelssohn, Time and Memory (), even though the latter largely stands apart from the new Formenlehre.…”