Lyrik als Klangkunst. Klanggestaltung in Goethes Nachtliedern und ihren Vertonungen von Reichardt bis Wolf by Von Anne Holzmüller (review)

In this impressive, innovative, and clearly written volume, Anne Holzmüller sets out to develop an account of the sound(s) of language as vital for both the reading of poetry and the analysis of musical settings; the elements she subsumes under Sprachklang include not only “der gesamte Bereich der Phonemik, Strukturelemente wie Reim, Metro-Rhythmik, Vers- und Strophenbau” but also structures such as “Syntax, Rhetorik, Wortwahl” and even “visuelle Repräsentation des Klanglichen in Buchstabenschrift und Textbild” (17). This expansive conception raises two questions: first, what is the relation between Klang (or material in general) and form or structure, and, second, can one still speak of Klang or sound when the phenomena under discussion seem to exceed the territory of the acoustic? Holzmüller does not answer either question directly, but both her list of elements and her opening description of Klang as “poetisch[e] Inszenierung des Sprachmaterials als eines sinnlich Erfahrbaren” (9) imply a greater focus on material in general than on the acoustic in particular, while her critiques of formalism (in I.3.1.1) and her own readings break down any structure/material dichotomy in ways that prove productive for considering the poetic deployment of language. Her conception of Klang thus overcomes stalled media-theoretical debates about whether voice or writing (“Stimme” or “Schrift”) is more subversive, irreducible, or primary, as her discussion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century theorizations of linguistic material (I.3) demonstrates.

After a brief introduction outlining recent contributions to the growing field of “sound studies,” Holzmüller sketches what she describes as the marginalization of Sprachklang from two sides. In the first, so-called “logocentric” strain, linguistic material is at best functionalized or semanticized in the service of a hermeneutic interpretation of meaning. In the second, which Holzmüller tags as “romantic,” the specifically linguistic nature of Sprachklang is discarded in the privileging of sound that brings attempts to assimilate language—especially poetry—to music. The two poles of this dichotomy are represented in the first section by Hegel (I.1) and (the early) Nietzsche (I.2); Holzmüller analyzes each philosopher’s discussion of the relation between language, music, and sound. Holzmüller herself acknowledges the oversimplification that results from reading Hegel and Nietzsche as models for contrasting positions (20). In particular, despite the extensive space in the volume devoted to Hegel and Nietzsche, there is no mention of either thinker’s own treatments of elements such as prosody and rhyme, which might have added nuance to the schematic account of marginalization Holzmüller uses them to establish. Instead, Hegel and Nietzsche appear as exegetes of a hierarchy whose terms are reversed from one thinker to the other and then ultimately left behind in Nietzsche’s “sprachkritische Wende” (63). Holzmüller argues that Nietzsche’s later understanding of linguistic material frees such material both from logocentric semanticization and from musical-metaphysical assimilation to pure will, feeling, or expression, enabling for the first time an adequate account of the aesthetic powers of Sprachklang.

Despite the somewhat reductive depictions of both Hegel and Nietzsche from which Holzmüller develops this account of linguistic material, the notion itself is productive, particularly as she elaborates it in a meticulous and sophisticated treatment of “Klang in Sprach- und Literaturtheorie des 20. Jahrhunderts” (I.3). Holzmüller offers a masterful overview of the development of what she calls a “neues Material-bewusstsein” in the work of (among others) David Wellbery, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, (briefly) Roman Jakobson, Jacques Derrida, and Garrett Stewart; in a discussion of Klang and performativity, she adds J.L. Austin, Wolfgang Iser, Sybille Krämer, and others. From this dizzying catalogue of names Holzmüller produces a coherent outline of the complex positions the authors represent (often in clearer prose than the originals) and derives from those positions five premises that guide her subsequent analyses: “Sprachklang,” she asserts...