The Lyric Impulse: Musicological and Methodological Contexts

Abstract

Chapter 1 focuses on the concept of ’the lyric’, considering various definitions of the term from literary criticism (the lyric mode in poetry), philosophy (via Hegel and Adorno), and musicology. It argues that the lyric mode’s professed ’unitary nature’ is offset by a distinctly sectional and disjunctive musical setting (via Marx’s Liedsatz), and illustrates this critical tension through an analysis of Schubert’s ’Ihr Bild’. Second, it examines Felix Salzer’s account of lyricism in Schubert’s sonatas, isolating the questions raised by this regarding the potentiality of lyrical themes and their will to repetition in contrast to the sonata’s imperative to develop. Third, it presents Schubert’s lyric parataxis (Mak, Adorno) as a viable alternative to the ’dramatic-dialectic’ model of sonata form exemplified in Beethoven’s music and explores the implications of this for the temporal unfolding of the music and the sense of directionality it articulates. In Part II, the chapter lays out three central propositions for a definition of lyric form and explains the book’s analytical methodology, placing it into the context of recent developments in the field of the new Formenlehre.