Abstract
Of the many possible relationships between music and poetry, which are but a small subset of the possible relationships between music and text, I have chosen a still narrower focus for inquiry. I will investigate two independent, lyric poems whose musically poetic language and form was fully conceived without any expectation that a composer might use their texts as structural scaffolding and expressive inspiration for related, and emergent, musical and artistic ends. Two lyric poems by Goethe, each set by Schubert, will serve to illustrate the conflict between poetic and instrumental/vocal musics, in which the lyric poems inevitably concede something of their music to an appropriation by, and not merely a translation into, another artistic medium. Even when Schubert succeeds in exemplifying, or expanding upon, the symbolic richness of meaning embodied in the poem, we should consider the fate of overwritten meaning embodied in the musical language and form of the poem by itself.
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