(Im)possibilities of Communication: Celan, Ruzicka, Dittrich

Abstract

(Im)possibilities of communication: celan, RUZICKA, DlTTRICH Axel Englund Paul Celan, indisputably one of the most important poets of the German language after the Second World War, took great interest in music, and music is frequently thematized inhis work. Correspondingly, the composers of the late Twentieth century have taken great interest in thiswork: well over a hundred of Celan's poems have been set tomusic, some of them inmany versions and often by prominent figures of the contemporary music scene, such asHarrison Birtwistle, Gyorgy Kurtag, and Luciano Berio.1 Although the vocal pieces are inmajority, there is a large number of instrumental works as well, and in this article I intend to discuss the interaction between poetry and music by using two such works as my examples: inspired by Celan's writings, Peter Ruzicka and Paul-Heinz Dittrich have written a string quartet and a string trio re spectively. These scores will be read in relation to their literary sources, 6 PerspectivesofNew Music with special attention directed toward the meanings conveyed by the musico-literary interaction. But the communication of meaning by works of art isnot only the focus ofmy interpretation, it is also an imp ortant meta-linguistic theme in the poems chosen by Ruzicka and Dittrich to accompany their pieces, a fact that has far-reaching impli cations for the understanding of these works. First of all, however, I shall comment on some theoretical premises for the argument to follow. 1. Musico-Literary Metaphoricity My discussion of the compositions will be guided by a working hypo thesis that I have found to be fertilewhen interpreting the interaction between literature and instrumental music. Its aim is the answer to three fundamental inquiries: where do music and literature intersect, how do they intersect, and what meanings does this intersection generate in the artifact? As to the "where," Gerard Genette (1997) has convincingly shown that the paratext?the information situated on the borderline between in-the-text and outside-the-text?exerts considerable influence on our understanding of a literarywork. Though Genette's primary concern is literature, the concept of paratexts might equally well be applied to music. Lawrence Kramer, for instance, has argued that textual "desig nators" such as tides, subtitles, and epigraphs can never be regarded as extraneous phenomena, but crucially inform our understanding of a piece ofmusic (1995, 68-69). In view of this, it can be maintained that inworks such as the ones discussed here?instrumental scores quoting poetic verses?the point of intersection between themusical text and the verbal paratext is an important locus for the generation ofmeaning. This brings us to the "how." A notion that, in different versions, has surfaced in recent intermediality research is the treatment of musico literary relations as metaphorical phenomena. Once again, Lawrence Kramer was one of the firstto suggest the fruitfulness of thisperspective (1995, 70-71), and larger studies applying similar methods have been written by the British musicologist Michael Spitzer and the American literary scholar Eric Prieto. To Prieto, who ismore convinced of the necessity of a definite disjunction between language and music than Kramer, metaphoricity is an inescapable consequence of the inherent differences between the media. Both scholars, however, have the merit of combining the study of structural analogies between words and music with sensitive interpretation of their consequences for the meaning of the works studied. Prieto claims that a large body of musico-literary (Im)possibilitiesofCommunication 7 criticism fails in the latter, since it focuses on judging the appropriate ness of themetaphor rather than on the interpretation of itsmeaning. A frequently asked question like "is it justified to label this textmusical?" is thus the wrong one to ask. Instead, he suggests, the musico-literary criticmust accept themetaphor forwhat it is and explicate its grounds inorder to shed light on its significance (2002, 16-18). This raises the need for a method for analyzing and interpreting metaphors applicable to intermedial relations, in order to get at the "what." Although he does not himself address intermedial issues,Max Black provides the basic outlines of such a method in his classic text "Metaphor" (1962). Black repudiates an Aristotelian view on metaphor, which he labels substitution view, since it conceives...