Exploring Musical Narratology: The Romeo and Juliet Myth in Music by Małgorzata Pawłowska

Abstract

Reviewed by: Exploring Musical Narratology: The Romeo and Juliet Myth in Music by Małgorzata Pawłowska Peng Liu Exploring Musical Narratology: The Romeo and Juliet Myth in Music. By Małgorzata Pawłowska. Translated by Marta Robson. (Interplay: Music in Interdisciplinary Dialogue, no. 12.) Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2018. [viii, 356 p. ISBN 9781576473108 (paperback), $62.] Appendixes, literature, index. The narratological analysis of music has undergone “three waves” of scholarly engagement, from the initial adoption of literary narratology tools in music analysis in the 1980s, through the contested discourse on the validity of musical narrativity in the 1990s, to the newly developed narrative approaches and their applications to a broader repertory beyond the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century instrumental music (Russell Millard, “Telling Tales: A Survey of Narratological Approaches to Music,” Current Musicology 103 [Fall 2018]: 5–44). An English translation of her extensively revised doctoral dissertation, Polish scholar Małgorzata Pawłowska’s Exploring Musical Narratology engages compellingly with the “three waves” of musical narratology through a narratological analysis of nine musical works that are all based on the story of Romeo and Juliet. Inspired by the theories of Vera Micznik and Byron Almén, Pawłowska employs a three-level analytical method for a narrative interpretation of musical works: story level, discourse level, and deep narrative level. With careful [End Page 413] applications of selected narrative theories and tools, Pawłowska’s analysis of nine works across different genres and historical periods demonstrates the viability of analyzing musical works from the narratological perspective and provides rich examples of both narrative mimesis (showing and representing a story) and diegesis (telling a story as a narrator) in music. Since the scope of narrative has been considerably expanded over time and become accordingly too capacious for effective discussion, Pawłowska starts the book with a chapter responding to a fundamental yet imperative question: “What is narrative?” In analyzing the use of narrative in various contexts and discourses, she identifies two basic discrepancies: the nature of narrative as a “literary” or “pre-media” phenomenon, and the scope of narrative as exclusively “epic” or “a broader category, comprising both epic and drama” (p. 5). Pawłowska treats narrative as both a pre-media phenomenon and a broader category (involving both epic and drama). The former allows her to “read off the narrative elements” in the musical works inspired by Shakespeare’s drama from musical structures instead of seeing these works as “carriers of literary narrative on the theme of Romeo and Juliet” (p. 8). The latter justifies music’s ability to at once represent and tell a story, which supports one of the author’s major arguments in the book: the fact that music can use both mimetic and diegetic narrations. Following the conceptual clarification of narrative, Pawłowska discusses the dynamic relations between two divisions of general narratology—classical and postclassical—and major narratological approaches to music analysis. The second chapter, “Narratology as a Research Perspective,” not only unravels the complex methodological development and debates of narratology in both musical and nonmusical disciplines but also serves to familiarize readers with some significant theoretical concepts and analytical tools in the scholarship of narratology (for example, Algirdas J. Greimas’s semiotic square and Almén’s transvaluation), many of which the author will apply to her analysis of nine selected works in later chapters. While comparing musical and literary narratives at the end of this chapter, Pawłowska reiterates her major arguments about music’s capability to present a narrative, though not necessarily as specifically and completely as literature does. She argues that the two principal literary modalities of the “narrative how”—i.e., narrative mimesis and narrative diegesis— can both be present in music, with or without a literary program (pp. 58–59). The second section of the book shifts the focus from the theoretical discourse of narratology to “the Romeo and Juliet myth.” Treating Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as an archetypical narrative, Pawłowska first traces the pre-Shakespearean literature that informed his play, from the Legend of Pyramus and Thisbe in 1 CE to Arthur Brooke’s poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet in 1562. Then, the author...