Musical Poetics

In 1965, Paul Celan published as a limited folio a collection of twenty-two poems under the title "Atemkristall" ["Breath Crystal"] that also included etchings by his wife, Giséle Celan-Lestrange. Two years later the same poems were included as the first book in the collection _Atemwende_ ["Breath turn"]. The poems can be seen as a sustained meditation on the relationship between humanity and nature--or perhaps humanity and inhumanity--and, moreover, they bear striking resemblance to Wilhelm Müller and Franz Schubert's 1827 _Winterreise_. Thematic connections in both works evoke a barren landscape of ice and snow, both feature the prominent image of walking and traversing a northern landscape, and both ponder the relationship of their subjects to an often-antagonistic humanity.


I propose, however, that the connections are not merely thematic, but also material. Imprints of Celan's extensive knowledge of the musical canon are found throughout his work, as in his "Anabasis," which contains a textual quotation from Mozart's Exsultate Jubilate. My reading of "Atemkristall" finds tangible traces of Schubert's _Winterreise_, reported by Celan's son to be one of his favorite works, embedded throughout the collection. At key moments the fragments of _Winterreise_ burst through the surface of Celan's poems, notable especially in the poem "In der Flüßen" (Celan, "In the rivers") and the song "Auf dem Flusse" (Schubert/Müller, "On the river"). Rhythmic similarities coupled with the testimony of his son suggest that Celan's model was Schubert, and not Müller, though he would have had an intimate knowledge of both. I posit, then, that "Atemkristall" was written over the surface of _Winterreise_ such that it remains concealed save for a few points where, like the geological fault mentioned in the poem "Harnischstriemen," it emerges with utter clarity.


This paper asks two competing questions at the intersection of these two works. First, in what way does knowledge of the material source (_Winterreise_) for Celan's poems aid in an interpretation of those poems? Second, how might we see Celan's poems as a performative interpretation of _Winterreise_ and might Celan's _Winterreise_ provoke novel musicological and theoretical interpretations of Schubert's work.

Anton Webern is pervasively valued as an agent and representative of European musical modernism. His compositional career is commonly portrayed as a narrative from youthful beginnings in the creation of a musical avant-garde under the mentorship of Schoenberg, which was followed by his distinctive ventures with the twelve-tone method that carried him to compositional maturity. This narrative, however, is incomplete because it omits the decisive impact of Webern's interactions with and settings of poetry by Hildegard Jone in his late vocal works.


In these works, Webern set only texts by a single author, his contemporary, Hildegard Jone (1891-1963), a female poet and painter who was known in Vienna at the time, but has been neglected in the historiography of Austrian literature and marginalized in much of the scholarly literature on Webern (e.g., Kolneder, 1974; Rognoni, 1977; Bailey, 1991). Webern developed a close personal alliance with the poet that was rooted in mutually held aesthetic values associated with Viennese modernism and Christian existentialism. He discovered features in Jone's poetry that resonated with his broad artistic beliefs and his commitment to the twelve-tone method. For her part, Jone found in Webern a kindred spirit who shared her philosophical interest in the transcendent act of creation, devotional aspects of modernism, and connections between the arts. Their relationship was truly a creative partnership.


The cherished bond between the two artists enriched the lives and artistic work of both. With a brief examination of selections from Webern's Jone settings, this paper reveals expressive synergies of music and text in terms of metaphor, imagery, and rhetoric that illuminate Webern's sensitive response to Jone's texts. The paper concludes with three reflections: on the manner in which we build biographical narratives; on the nature of creative partnerships; and on the impact of this creative partnership on the narrative of Webern in the context of musical modernism.

The appropriation of musical climax as an act of subversion has become a frequent claim in feminist analysis of music by women composers. Goal-oriented narratives of tonal classical music imply a linear and teleological development; this myopic focus on the tension and release of climax has been called out by feminist music scholars, most notably McClary, as overtly masculine and even violent. Some scholars have argued that when women composers approach musical climax differently than their male counterparts, it is based on gender-specific differences, or differences in sexual experience, and is inherently subversive. Macarthur contends that musical climaxes falling at the divine ratio are not representative of female sexual experience. Hisama, who discusses climax within the framework of feminist double-voiced discourse, demonstrates how even a conventional musical climax can be subversive. In this paper, I argue that perceived differences in Alma Mahler's musical climax are not based in gender as much as they are a product of her commitment to expressing poetic text and composing in a late-tonal style.
In order to understand if musical climax is gendered in the work of Mahler, I first identify where the climaxes fall in her published songs and consider the musical climaxes in relation to textual climaxes. By measuring and analyzing this data, I challenge the assertion that she subverts tradition and expectation with "top-heavy" climaxes. Additionally, by measuring climaxes in the contemporaneous work of her composition teacher Alexander Zemlinsky, I investigate whether the timing and number of climaxes should be considered gender-specific or related to the extended chromaticism and formal diversity of late nineteenth century Lieder.
Scholars and performers increasingly champion Mahler's works and provide interesting ways to reconsider them. It is important to investigate the accuracy of claims made about the composer's intent; the assertion that Mahler deliberately subverted gender and genre norms is problematic. She composed songs within an established and admittedly masculine tradition and hoped for them to flourish within it. Normalizing forces of genre, canon, and tradition are evident in her Lieder, and unruly elements may be better understood as expressive, and not subversive.

The Beloved of early-Romantic lieder goes by many names and none. One name that appears time and again, however, is "Laura", the famous muse of Petrarch. While there had been a steady circulation of Petrarch's work in German-speaking lands from the late-sixteenth century on, Laura's name began to feature frequently in many German poems in the 1780s. Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich von Matthisson in particular each contributed their own contrasting re-imaginings of the beloved Laura, attracting settings by a host of composers over the next 40 years. In nearly all these poems Laura is positioned as a mediator of the noumenal, placed in the liminal space between subject and object, through whom the poetic persona can glimpse the heavens. Both poets conceptualize this moment of mediation musically, with references to angel's harps (Matthisson) or to Laura's piano performance (Schiller). Such musical sounds are often expressed topically by composers, particularly in the use of the learned style at the invocation of the beyond. 


After outlining the reception history of Petrarch's _Canzoniere_ in late-eighteenth-century Germany, this paper begins by examining Laura's particular network of historical, religious and gendered associations for poets and composers in the decades around 1800. I adopt Siskin and Warner's understanding of mediation in _This Is Enlightenment_ (2010) in order to contextualize Laura's distinctive liminality in these texts. In this frame, the figure of Laura can be understood to enable a channel between the poetic subject and an otherworldly space. This becomes the basis for a comparative analysis of settings of Matthisson's Laura poem "Die Betende" (published in 1781), many of which feature passages in the learned style. The learned style here, as often indexical of strict compositional practices and the noumenal, has a similar mediating function. This paper thus shows how the use of the learned style does more than signify religiosity in settings of this poem; rather, composers use it to perform in music the processes of sonic mediation central to the German re-imaging of Laura.