Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics by Stephen Rumph (review)

Stephen Rumph’s important new book is stimulated by a desire to revise and reformulate semiotic discourse on eighteenth-century music. Discussion of musical topics in the Classical era, originating in Leonard Ratner’s pioneering post-war work, has been developed over the last three decades by scholars such as Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Kofi Agawu, Elaine Sisman, Raymond Monelle, David Lidov, and Robert Hatten. But Rumph’s approach to semiotics is broader and deeper than those of his twentieth-and early twenty-first-century predecessors, firmly rooted in eighteenth-century intellectual history pertaining above all to Enlightenment sign theory. Whether read primarily as a book about Mozart, or about convergences between eighteenth-century theory and Mozart’s music, or about meaning in music, Rumph has produced a first-rate work of scholarship.

The introduction, six chapters, and epilogue are impressive both in breadth of musical coverage and in sophistication of historical and analytical method. Rumph sets out his stall in the introduction, signalling an intention to provide ‘a “historically informed” semiotics of eighteenth-century music’ (p. 3), cosmopolitan in orientation to reflect intellectual life of the period, with Mozart’s music at its core. Chapter 1, ‘From Rhetoric to Semiotics’, traces a paradigmatic shift away from the neoclassical rhetorical tradition towards a more flexible framework for musical meaning rooted in eighteenth-century French discussion of language, sign theory, and verbal syntax, and manifest in Cherubino’s aria ‘Non so piú’ from Le nozze di Figaro and the first movement of the G minor Symphony K. 550. Chapter 2 brings to bear on Don Giovanni pan-European discourse on the senses, especially touch, providing in the process new critical perspectives on Zerlina’s aria ‘Vedrai carino’, the duet ‘Lá ci darem la mano’, and the Act II finale. Chapter 3, ‘Topics in Context’, more self-consciously linked to twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholarship than discussion in chapters 1 and 2, identifies a need for fluid semantic interpretation of topics beyond what has been witnessed thus far, explaining that ‘eighteenth-century writings lend little encouragement’ to codifying a Toposlehre (p. 84). An interpretation of the opening duettino between Figaro and Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, stimulated by the writings of Giambattista Vico to explore an as yet uncharted ‘twilight region between syntax and semantics’ (p. 89), highlights the importance of figurae as non signifying elements in topical terms, as functional signs ‘in relation to kinesthetic-emotional experience’ (p. 96), and as illuminators of ‘a deep structure that . . . [explains] how topics are generated and transformed’ (p. 97). Chapter 4, ‘Mozart and Marxism’, uses Adam Smith’s work on the imagination, on language, and on instrumental music to gauge the distinct and indistinct nature of agents in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 15 in B flat, K. 450. Chapter 5, ‘A Dubious Credo’, turns attention to Mozart’s ‘Credo’ masses K. 192 and K. 257 as well as the ‘Coronation’ Mass, K. 317, allowing writings on language, irony, and dissociation to help illuminate fundamental differences in the messages conveyed by each work. Finally, ‘Archaic Endings’ contrasts the Cum Sancto Spiritu fugue from the C minor Mass, K. 427, satisfactorily explained in the context of neoclassical rhetoric, with movements and ensembles that communicate Mozart’s more typically complex, sometimes contradictory semiotic messages. Informed by Enlightenment language theory that is ambivalent regarding method, the Piano Concerto No. 14 in E flat K. 449 and the Act II quartet from Die Entführung aus dem Serail are shown respectively to encapsulate ‘a dialogue between heterogeneous, indeed, contradictory methods [analytic and inductive versus synthetic and deductive]’ (p. 183), and a ‘[stepping] out of one system and into another’ whereby Mozart’s ‘glowing utopia exposes a fundamental schism in Enlightenment thought’ (pp. 205–6).

The organic rather than cosmetic connections forged between eighteenth-century intellectual history and Mozart’s music is one of the notable strengths of Rumph’s book. Many of his forays...