Essays on Literature and Music (1967–2004) (review)

It would be all too easy to underestimate the importance of the book under review. After all, only one of its twenty-nine essays has never been printed before. Moreover, these essays are presented in the two languages, English and German, in which they were originally published, and they appear with minimal revisions, without index, and without any attempt to coordinate them or to hide the occasions—conferences, Festschriften and the like—for which they were originally composed.

Yet as one reads through the volume as a whole, one recognizes it as a signal achievement. For Steven Paul Scher counts as the founder, and also the leading practitioner, of a subdiscipline within comparative literature that could be called word-and-music studies. Except for his earlier book, Verbal Music in German Literature (1968), the present volume contains nearly all his contributions to this field.

What immediately strikes the reader of the volume is the considerable intellectual range and also the precision with which Scher approaches his topic. Within music, Scher studies primarily two genres, opera and the Lied, though this collection includes two essays on works, notably, the Brecht/Weill/Balanchine Seven Deadly Sins, that combine text, music, and dance. Within literature, he is concerned with attempts, whether in fiction, poetry, or expository prose, to render musical effects in words.

The examples that Scher chooses range in time from the eighteenth century until the postmodern present. Yet certain authors and composers play especially large roles in Scher's inquiry. Thomas Mann, as one might expect, is central to two essays and appears briefly in a number of others.

The most ubiquitous figure within Scher's work, both in this volume and in his earlier one, is E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose multiplicity of careers (as composer, conductor, critic, and fiction writer) give him a natural role—seven essays altogether—within the intellectual parameters that Scher has established. Thus, such pieces as Hoffmann's celebrated analysis of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and his treatise "Der Dichter und der Komponist" are used to establish some key theoretical points in the relations of words and music. In an essay entitled "Hoffmann, Weber, Wagner: The Birth of Romantic Opera from the Spirit of Literature," Scher demonstrates how the theory that Hoffmann elaborated in "Der Dichter und der Komponist" becomes central to the theoretical underpinnings of later German opera. Scher also treats Hoffmann as a major historian of music who provided a model for future historians. Two of the essays analyze Hoffmann's own musical works, above all his much-neglected operas, which Scher situates within the context of German operatic production of the early nineteenth century. And in the final essay of this volume Scher shows how Ferruccio Busoni transformed Hoffmann's novella "Die Brautwahl" into his own first opera bearing the same title.

This book is notable, moreover, for being concerned at once with theory itself and with the practical applications of theory. Scher's interest in theory manifests itself as a contribution both to the history of theorizing about the interrelations of music and text and to the creation of his own theory regarding these relations. In charting the former he turns to a range of thinkers from the Enlightenment and thence to the German Romantics (most importantly, Hoffmann), and finally to Thomas Mann; as a result of his endeavors, one recognizes that the exploration of word-music relations has played a long and continuing role in the history of criticism.

Scher's theory of these relations is evident in two useful terms that continue throughout much of his work—"verbal music" and "composed reading." The first of these, part of his first book's title, refers to what he calls a "literary presentation (whether in poetry or prose) of existing or fictitious musical compositions: any poetic texture which has a piece of music as its 'theme'" (188). Applying this term, he is able to sketch out a...