Handbuch Literatur & Musik ed. by Nicola Gess, Alexander Honold (review)

The Handbuch Literatur & Musik is in fact a handbook of European literature and music; a majority of the articles approach their topics from German (or German-language) literature, art music, and music history, with frequent forays into French, Italian, and Anglo-American works and occasional gestures in the direction of Spain and Russia. The addition of the word “European” to the title would have avoided implying the negligibility of Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America; and as a handbook of European music and literature, it is on the whole a useful and successful volume whose strengths outweigh its drawbacks. In particular, the volume updates canonical works on inter-art or intermedial topics and keeps questions of social practice and performance more firmly in view than literary studies is wont to do. The variety of topics covered and the diversity of approaches are likewise a virtue. On the negative side, the bibliographic material leaves much to be desired: the “Auswahlbibliographie” includes only secondary scholarship, and even then does not list all the works cited by the individual entries. A full bibliography of all works of literature about music, of works of music influenced by literature, or any of the other combinations of the volume’s two main quantities would, of course, be longer than the volume itself, but bibliographies of the literary and musical works discussed in the essays ought to be included.

The bibliography’s emphasis on secondary scholarship is somewhat symptomatic of the volume as a whole: it often analyzes writing about writing about music, as the editors acknowledge in their introduction (Section I) when they position themselves on the literary or cultural studies side of the music/literature relationship (or divide). The introduction updates the terminology of Steven Paul Scher’s canonical approach to literature and music in literary studies with the terminology of intermediality (4–5) and notes shared interests with several other disciplines, including “die historische Anthropologie, die Wissens-/Wissenschaftsgeschichte, die Medien- und Technikgeschichte [ . . . ] die Emotionsforschung” (13). It also introduces the volume’s main sections, “Gegenstandsbereiche und Konzepte” (Section II) and “Exemplarische Analysen im historischen Kontext” (Section III). I will focus primarily on the second section and its subsections, as the topics of the individual examples in the third section are relatively transparent from their titles. Section II.1, “Grundfragen und Ausgangspunkte” considers the relations between language and music (Gunnar Hindrichs, II.1.1) and textuality and Klanglichkeit (Previsǐć, II.1.2); Hindrichs employs the successful strategy of tracing different categories of boundaries or differentiations between literature and music, while Previsǐć, faced with a topic that does not lend itself well to the handbook format, gives a rapid overview of multiple theoretical perspectives only to arrive at the obvious conclusion that neither music nor text is entirely optical/textual nor acoustic/sound-based.

Section II.2, “Systematik: Kombinationen – Transformationen” analyzes different combinations and interrelations of music and text/literature; Arne Stollberg’s contribution (II.2.1: “Kombination von Literatur und Musik”) unites a particularly strong historical sense with systematicity in analyzing ways in which music and literature can be put together, which he sees as located on a continuum between the poles of complete independence and complete merging. The next two essays (Christine Lubkoll, II.2.2: “Musik in Literatur: Telling” and Werner Wolf, II.2.3: “Musik in Literatur: Showing”) use concepts from narratology to differentiate types of presentations of musical works in literature; Wolf’s essay is especially good at demonstrating how various forms of “showing” musical works in literature serve specific functions in the programs or problems of the authors and epochs discussed, although it would have been helpful to hear more about such functions beyond the modernist works he discusses. Matthias Schmidt’s essay (II.2.4: “Literatur in (Instrumental-) Musik”) raises and gets entangled in problems of “fictionality” as debated in theories of the lyric that are not helpful for discussions of music; he also fails to take significant...