Repetition as Structure in the German Lied: The Ghazal

Abstract

N CONTRAST TO most folk songs and popular songs, such as those discussed by Mark Booth in his monograph The Experience of Songs, art songs set pre-existing poems. It is therefore understandable that when we examine text-music relationships in the German Lied, we often analyze the settings as responses to, or even as imitations of, the poems that are their subjects and programs. Although we do not necessarily declare a setting to be aesthetically inferior if it does not follow the poem closely, establishing the extent of parallelism is a standard part of stylistic analysis. But what, exactly, are the elements of a text to which a composer may choose to respond? Customarily, analysts look for how a song interprets, expresses, or enacts the sense of its text--how, for example, it renders an expressed emotion, or whether it responds to an ironic current of meaning. Much less systematic are the investigations of the other levels of a poem to which a composer's attention may turn, in particular its metric, rhythmic, and formal dimensions. Indeed, one might question whether a composer can respond to such dimensions, or whether rhythm and structure do not simply overpower their more delicate textual counterparts. In addition, one might ask how one can isolate the formal features of a text decisively enough to assert that a setting corresponds to them rather than to the ideas or syntax of the text, or to some purely musical consideration. Our goal here is to find a means of approaching such questions. In order to focus attention on poetic form in Lied settings we have chosen examples of an unusual and highly patterned structure: the Persian ghazal in its German realizations. By examining a variety of ghazals, and by comparing their settings, we hope to demonstrate that a poetic form can indeed reach through a poet's text, exerting influence on the 33