failed musical memory and intertextuality in brahms’s op
TRANSCRIPT
Failed Musical Memory and Intertextuality in Brahms’s Op. 83 Andante
AMS/SMT Annual Meeting, November 1-4, 2018San Antonio, TX
David Keep (Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester)
Example No. 1: Song Allusions in the Op. 83 Andante
a) Lerchengesang, Op. 70, No. 2 (1877), mm. 1-3
b) Todessehnen, Op. 86, No. 6 (1878), mm. 36-43
c) Piano Concerto in B-flat Major (1878-81), III. Andante, mm. 59-66
Texture
Melody
Example No. 2: Op. 83 Andante Form Diagram
1 17 23 25 35 50 55 59 71 75 78 86 94 99
Tutti Solo Solo + orch. Solo + orch. Coda (solo)
A B A’
Andante rit. in tempo rit. Più Adagio Tempo Primo rit. Più Adagio
(Arp.) (Arp.) (Arp.)
B♭ Major: I V i sequence i #V (F# Major) ———- I
PAC PAC PAC
Main Theme — - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Song Allusion Main Theme ——————
Form
Tempo
Themes
Orch.
Measure
KeyCadences
Dotted shapes=
Interpolations
(MT-based)
Most Significant Features
1. Interpolations in Ternary Form2. Emphasis on Main Theme
3. Emphasis on B-flat tonic, save for Song Allusion
Example No. 3: Piano’s Thematic Involvement with Main Theme
a) III. Andante, mm. 1-4 (orch.)
b) mm. 13-14 (orch.)
c) mm. 23-25 (piano and orch.)
d) mm. 36-37 (piano)
e) mm. 38-39 (piano)
Most Significant Features
1. Double-neighbor motive2. Starts on SD 3 or 5
3. Changes in affect/rhetoric4. Variation in rhythmic/motivic shape
Example No. 4: Arpeggio Interpolations
a) Interpolation No. 1, mm. 23-25 b) Interpolation No. 2, mm. 55-58
c) Interpolation No. 3, mm. 94-99
(Leads Directly to Song Allusion)
(Leads Directly to Variant of Main
Theme)
(Leads Directly to Recollection of 1st
Movement’s coda, see Ex. 5 )
Most Significant Features
1. Tempo reduction2. Enharmonic G-flat/F#
3. Two-note figures4. Exist on formal boundaries
5. Unlock past themes
Example No. 5: Conclusions from First and Third Movements of
Op. 83
a) I. Allegro non troppo, mm. 369-376 b) III. Andante, mm. 94-99
Example 6a: Texts and Translations
“Todessehnen,” Max von Schenkendorf
Ach, wer nimmt von meiner Seele
Die geheime, schwere Last,
Die, je mehr ich sie verhehle,
Immer mächtiger mich fasst?
Möchtest du nur endlich brechen,
Mein gequältes, banges Herz!
Findest hier mit deinen Schwächen,
Deiner Liebe, nichts als Schmerz.
Dort nur wirst du ganz genesen,
Wo der Sehnsucht nichts mehr fehlt,
Wo das schwesterliche Wesen
Deinem Wesen sich vermählt.
Hör es, Vater in der Höhe,
Aus der Fremde fleht dein Kind:
Gib, dass er mich bald umwehe,
Deines Todes Lebenswind.
Dass er zu dem Stern mich hebe,
Wo man keine Trennung kennt,
Wo die Geistersprache Leben
Mit der Liebe Namen nennt.
“Yearning for Death,” trans. Eric Sams
Ah, who will take from my soul
this secret heavy burden which,
the more I conceal it,
seizes me ever more powerfully?
If only you could break at last,
my tormented anxious heart!
All you find here, with your weaknesses
and your love, is nothing but grief.
There alone will you completely recover,
where your yearning lacks nothing,
where a sister-being is united
with your own being.
Hear me, Father on high,
your child pleads from this alien land;
grant that your life-giving wind of death
may soon blow around me.
Grant that it may lift me to the star
where parting is unknown,
where the language of spirits
calls life by the name of Love.
“Lerchengesang,” Karl Candidus
Ätherische ferne Stimmen,
Der Lerchen himmlische Grüsse,
Wie regt ihr mir so süsse
Die Brust, ihr lieblichen Stimmen!
Ich schliesse leis mein Auge,
Da ziehn Erinnerungen
In sänften Dämmerungen
Durchweht vom Frühlingshauche.
“Larks’ Song,” trans. Eric Sams
Ethereal distant voices
of the larks’ heavenly greetings,
how sweetly you move my heart,
you dear voices!
I gently close my eyes,
and memories pass by
in soft haft-lights
pervaded by the breath of springtime.
Example 6b: Texts and Translations
Example 7: Todessehnen, Op. 86, No. 6,
Variation of phrase endings used to underscore gradual psychological transformation
A
B 4
7
11
15
19
23
27
Variation begins (compare with m. 5)
1. Stanza
2. Stanza
3. Stanza
Subphrase is varied (compare with m. 22, b. 3)
Example 7 cont’d
C
31
36
42
47
52
58
63
69
74
79
4. Stanza
5. Stanza
Variation begins (compare with m. 46)
Passage Re-used in Op. 83
Example 8: Lerchengesang, Op. 70, No. 2,
Variation of stanza beginnings used for subtle recontextualization
4
7
10
13
16
20
24
Prelude
InterludeStanza 1
Stanza 2 (varied)
fixed conclusionto stanza
(compare with mm. 33-34)
Example 8 cont’d
28
31
35
39
Postlude
fixed conclusion
Example 9: Excerpts from Walter Benjamin,Regarding Memory and the “Folded Fan”
“Most people probably will have had the following experience: if you are in love, or even just intensely preoccupied with someone else, then you will find the other person’s portrait in nearly every book. Indeed, the beloved will appear as both protagonist and antagonist. In tales, novels and novellas you will encounter [the beloved] in ever new metamorphoses. Thus it follows from this that the faculty of imagination is the gift of making interpolations into infinitely small spaces, of conceiving every intensity as an extensiveness, thereby discovering in it a newly compressed fullness – in short, of receiving every image as if it were that of a folded fan that only in unfolding draws breath and presents, by way of its new expanse, the features of the beloved object within.”
John Daverio’s translation (Crossing Paths, pp. 127-128) of Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4-i, ed. Tilman Rexroth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 117.
“He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments. No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside – that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance progresses from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier.”
John Daverio’s translation (Crossing Paths, p. 128) of Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle (1932), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927-1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999): 597.
“It is through photography that we first discover the existence of [the] optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. Details of structure, cellular tissue, [things] with which technology and medicine are normally concerned – all this is, in its origins, more native to the camera than the atmospheric landscape or the soulful portrait. Yet, at the same time, photography reveals in [these] material physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things – meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams.”
John Daverio’s translation (Crossing Paths, 129), of Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), in Walter Benjamin, vol. 2, 510-512.
Example No. 10: Form as Poetic Rendering with Benjamin’s Fan Metaphor
Interpolations into infinitely small spaces
Interpolations into infinitely small spaces
Interpolations into infinitely small spaces
Intensity conceived as an extensiveness
Atemporal cyclic interpolations, folds of the fan open
Song interpolation marks most significant temporal expansion, perhaps longest contemplation of
memory
(A B A’)
No image satisfies, continual interpolations search the mind’s memory, which result in various triggers to other ideas/thoughts/images. After each, the fan closes, return from memory back to present.
“Only in the fan’s folds does the truth reside.”
Select Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. 1932. A Berlin Chronicle. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927-1934, translated by Rodney Livingstone and others, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
Berry, Paul. 2007. “Memory, Inspiration, and Compositional Process in the Solo Songs of Johannes Brahms.” PhD diss., Yale University.
Bockmaier, Claus and Siegfried Mauser. 2013. Johannes Brahms Interpretationen seiner Werke. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag.
Daverio, John. 2002. Crossing Paths: Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. New York: Oxford University Press.
Davis, Andrew. 2017. Sonata Fragments: Romantic Narratives in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Frisch, Walter. 1984. Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Horton, Julian. 2017. Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 83: Analytical and Contextual Studies. Leuven: Peeters.
Klein, Michael L. 2005. Intertextuality in Western Art Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Parmer, Dillon. 1995. “Brahms the Programmatic.” 19th-Century Music 19: 161-190.
Reynolds, Christopher. 2003. Motives for A"usion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rosen, Charles. 1980. “Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration.” 19th-Century Music 4, 2: 87-100.
Sams, Eric. 2000. The Songs of Johannes Brahms. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sholes, Jacquelyn. 2018. A"usion as Narrative Premise in Brahms’s Instrumental Music.Bloomington: Indiana University Press.