Of Poetry and Song: Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Lied (review)

Four authors are represented in this important and engaging collection of essays: two musicologists specializing in German song, Rufus Hallmark and Jürgen Thym, and two scholars of German literature, Harry E. Seelig and the late Ann C. Fehn. In his preface, Thym refers to the members of this well-balanced interdisciplinary ensemble as ‘the quartet’ (the term is used as if the ‘q’ were capitalized); together, they have raised, explored, and answered fundamental questions about text–music relations in the nineteenth-century lied.

Compiled here are highlights from their prolific careers. In both the book’s preface and the ‘origin stories’ accompanying each chapter, the reader is given biographical information about the four authors—where the Quartet studied (and under whom), how they met, how they collaborated, and how they set about producing, mostly independently, an influential body of original but complementary scholarship on song. This historical backdrop is important, for it sets the scene: academia in the United States; sometime after the pioneering work of Thrasybulos G. Georgiades (an influence repeatedly acknowledged throughout the collection); and sometime before New Musicology changed the way much song analysis, and analysis in general, was done.

Most essays are products of the 1980s and early 1990s, and though nearly all have appeared in print before, about half are lifted from sources that are probably difficult for users of medium-sized music libraries to access. Others are translated into English for the first time. The University of Rochester Press has newly formatted the texts, outfitting them with a generous number of clean and polished music examples; their refurbished appearances here make this compilation both attractive and convenient.

The Quartet’s approach to song is structuralist (‘unashamedly’, Thym stresses). Meaning derives from content, so the four authors collectively argue, and they make their case by poring over the elements of poetry (every internal rhyme, enjambment, and trochee), the elements of rhetoric (every aside and antithesis), and the elements of German grammar and syntax (here they are fearless: concessive subjunctives and appositive adjectival clauses are identified, explained, and interpreted).

Analyses of this sort are dense and labour-intensive, and the active reader should expect to do much syllable counting to keep up. But delivered in the skilful prose of Fehn, Hallmark, Seelig, and Thym, even the most arcane of poetical details is woven into an engaging and illuminating analytical tale. This is the case, for instance, when Thym hones in on syntactical fragmentation, unexpected shifts in verb tense, and a misused accusative case found in the fourth stanza of Eichendorff’s poem ‘Frühlingsfahrt’. As Thym argues, the disintegration of language here contributes to the poem’s image of ‘buhlenden Wogen’ crashing into a haunted abyss (p. 73). A less patient, less trained, less fluent reader might gloss over such poetical details—but Thym effectively makes the case for their importance to the poem’s expressivity and meaning.

From poem to poem, such textual features— poetical, rhetorical, grammatical, and syntactical—are scrutinized. Of limited interest is a poem’s history or a poet’s biography (the work of Goethe appears in the majority of chapters, but with few exceptions we learn little about him). Of even less concern is a poem’s cultural resonance (the authors tend to read the poems for the stories that they literally tell, little more). Of central importance, in the words of Seelig, is the ‘intensification or heightening of literary elements by musical means’ (p. 54)—that is, the ways in which composers find logical musical devices to correspond with a poem’s textual features.

In studying these ‘intensifications’, we are boldly positioned close to the act of song composition itself, as if peering over a composer’s shoulder as he or she struggles to account for a text’s complex rhyme scheme or a verb’s separable prefix. Many such intensifications are straightforward: a poetic enjambment corresponds well with the...